beijing day one

I looked back through my journals about London, the first couple days I landed there, to see if I might have experienced the same kind of waiting sensation there that I experienced for the first couple days in Beijing. I don’t have a record of it anywhere. I remember London—smelled like hot metal and tarmac the first day I was there, and when I surfaced from the underground bits of dust and lint got caught on my greasy face and in my eyelashes and people looked at me like I was a sewer monster as I hauled my luggage first half a mile in the complete wrong direction, and then back after consulting my map for another mile. It felt real. It felt like a whole new world.

Maybe because we hear so much about how the East is different, I expected to feel like I was in outer space or something. So for a while, when there was more greenery around than I had expected, and when the sun was whiter than I’d expected, when the air was cleaner than I’d expected—I kept waiting to feel like I was in China. I was still isolated at this point, like a little Western virus caught up in quarantine, on the tour bus. I couldn’t wait to step out.

The first stop was a restaurant where we climbed up to the second floor and, next to a window display full of dried-out Peking Ducks, ate dim sum. I have no idea what is in that loaf thing but I ate some and then someone at the same table decided that there was fish in it. I thought, great, we’ve only been off the plane for an hour. (I would later eat fried fish/eel thinking that it was fried mushroom…but we didn’t get a lot of help distinguishing what was what. Also, for those of you reading who didn’t know, I’ve been a vegetarian for a while now, since about half-way through high school.) 

dim sum for breakfast: morning 1 :')

After breakfast we took the bus back to the hotel. It wasn’t too hot yet; I’d already fooled myself into thinking that the weather wouldn’t be as bad as they’d warned me, and this delusion persisted for the first few days. 

mysterious mushroom buildings

I don’t know what these little mushroom-looking buildings are, but you can see them from really far away if the air is clear. Beijing is full of high-rise apartments—not as many as Shanghai—but enough so that early views of Beijing reminded me of the first views of London from the surface-level areas of the underground. For some reason I cannot feel as romantically about Beijing as I felt about London.  

Below is the view from our hotel window. We stayed at the Taishan Hotel for the duration of our Beijing stay; my roommate “A” and I were on the fifth floor. Because she attended an optional event that I did not attend on the first morning, I checked in to the room alone and was left to explore all its strange plugs and devices on my own. Unsurprisingly it took me five whole minutes of pressing the light switches to realize that there’s a slot near the door where you have to insert your room key for the power to even come on. After I figured this out I turned the air down as low as it would go which was still too hot, around 28C—I think A came back later and figured out how to get it to go lower than that. 

Our bathroom was really nice, but one whole wall was made of window. I could see there was a blind but I couldn’t reach it. At this point there were two hours left until we left the hotel for lunch and I’d just been on a long international flight and I wanted to shower, so I just undressed and showered with the window open. We were on the fifth floor. Hello, Beijing…

view from hotel window

Later, after lunch (Peking Duck, which I heard was good), we went to the Temple of Heaven. Thinking back about it, this is still one of my favorite stops that we made in Beijing. Flocks of tourists, of course, but there’s also a lower level where a bunch of locals gather to play chess and blast music out of boom-boxes (yes!). Some people’s game stations appeared to be permanent—some chairs were chained to the ground… I liked walking at ground level. I didn’t like being part of a tour. I’ve had the feeling before about other things but I feel kind of …fake? For being interested in these cultures to which I have no real claim other than my own interest…walking around with a tour wearing bright yellow tags did nothing to assuage these feelings. I took mine off after a while and held it in my hand. 

The Temple of Heaven was built in the 15th century, and was the site of heaven worship, the place where Ming and Qing emperors would come to pray for good harvests. There’s the temple, but then there’s also a park around it. I’ve experienced the feeling before in Europe, but more here: how strange that it’s places like these and the things that happened here a long time ago that shaped the culture of the domestic tourists who were coming to visit them… Americans don’t know what it’s like to live in a country where there’s a cultural rule of any kind—our culture is freedom of speech and back-porch barbecues, cheap fast-food and football season’s extravagant chex-mix-filled parties….Southern California is about healthy living, clean seafood, being in the water as much as you can, being bronzed and happy…. But those are all things of right now, we don’t have anything to look back on. And I think it’s why we can feel a little lost sometimes, just as a generation, especially us millennials, for whom the internet has so compressed space and time that we might as well have not been born into anything at all… 

The first person who asked to take a picture with me asked while we were at the Temple of Heaven. I thought I heard him wrong. But I wasn’t wrong. This continued to punctuate my experiences in China…something I’ve been struggling to think of fondly rather than as too strange to enjoy in memory. Just another bit of culture shock…more on this later. 

The sun set on us in Beijing after a long, long day. I kept thinking about “Concerning the Wild Goose Pagoda” by Han Dong on the bus ride back to the hotel. When we reached the hotel A, my roommate, figured out how to use all the things that I had failed to, including how to lower the blind on the bathroom wall…

I discovered the poetry of Han Dong this last Spring, just picked up a book at random in the library and it wouldn’t leave me alone, haunted me… I’m still in the process of writing up a paper about Han Dong’s poems. I sent my dad a few of his poems after we watched a documentary called “Wild China” a few months ago; Han Dong is a contemporary poet, and I started to think a lot about contemporary vs. ancient China. I wrote this:

• This came to mind while we were watching the "Wild China" series last night...I think that a lot of Western understanding of Eastern Asian culture(s) is rooted in an understanding of the "Ancient" Chinese or ancient Korean or ancient Japanese. It's true that a lot of this ancient culture has, because of the culture's age as a whole, managed to dominate even parts of modernized culture, but I like reading these "contemporary" poems as a comment on contemporary Chinese life. I think in a culture as old as the Chinese culture, a perspective on contemporary life probably isn't possible or meaningful without a comparison to the culture's history. I hadn't thought about what you said about the peaceful tone I perceived in the poems before you put it the way you did; that culture and life have just existed in certain ways that have persisted for thousands of years; and now that I'm reading again through them, I'm reading the poems less as a comparison of old and emergent, but as the ways in which an ancient culture reforms itself to fit the current era...it reappears in forms that are familiar and strange, but it's all part of the same, ancient cycle. "Concerning the Wild Goose Pagoda" draws the most noticeable parallels between the past and present; even in a place of so much history, how much can we really know about it just by being alive there today? It's something I experienced in England, when I was amazed by the buildings and how old the streets were, and people just went around living because life changes even if landscape doesn't. SO the poem reframes bravery as the ability to enact vision or to respond to desire and not to disappear into life as though you hadn't climbed to the top of the ancient building at all.

Despite the obvious dark tones (which went over my head the first time I read this poem), I love this piece. It may just be Han Dong’s writing in particular, but reading Chinese poetry often leaves me feeling peaceful, but awakened. It haunts you for a while afterward, too; from the first time I read “Full Moon” by Du Fu last year I haven’t been able to think of the moon without thinking of it (not yet flawed, it drifts...). I can’t go to China, therefore, without thinking of Han Dong… This piece caused quite a stir when it was first published in 1982. 

From Eight Contemporary Chinese Poets by Tao and Prince from Wild Peony Press in 2006:

“Concerning the Wild Goose Pagoda” (Han Dong) 

Concerning the Wild Goose Pagoda

How much can we really know

Many people rush here from far away

To climb to the top

And be a hero for once

Or in some cases twice

Or even more

The frustrated and the disconsolate

The plump and the prosperous

All climb to the top

Play the hero

And then come down

Walk into the street

And immediately vanish

Some work up the courage to jump

And leave a red flower on the steps

That's the way to be a real hero

A hero for the modern age

Of the Wild Goose Pagoda

How much can we really know

We climb to the top

Gaze around at the scenery

And then come down again