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A shadow hello from Dunhuang
When we moved to the US in 2001, one of the things that most baffled my family and I was the sudden change of scale. Everything in the States is larger than life, cars, houses, cups of soda and people come in monstrous proportions that had us feeling for a long while like we suddenly shrank.
China, too, messes with your conception of size, but in a completely different way. Like in the US, the distances here are unfathomably vast, but China isn’t only big, China is thick. Unlike Florida, stretching forever in airy suburbs with houses that never touch each other (God forbid!) China manages to pack twenty million people into a city you’ve never heard of. China is huge, enormous, infinite, but when you’re in a city it never seems to feel that way because your own little chunk of it has so many others pushing against it and into it. Dunhuang was a break from that, and that is only one of the reasons that I liked it so much.
It took me 26 hours of buses, minibuses, private cars, taxis and a train to get from Xiahe to Dunhuang. The distance that I traveled to get between two towns in the same province would have taken me from Paris to Naples. And it might as well have, because I was in a completely different country.
Where Xiahe was a cold town in the mountains, its life revolving around a monastery full of red robed Tibetan monks, Dunhuang was a world apart, an oasis hidden within the sandy dunes of the Gobi desert. On the same day that I arrived, I took a trip to the dunes in a small camel caravan. Riding past fields full of cotton, and fat purple grapes ready to be picked, we slowly made our way through a traditional cemetery and into the sand dunes of the desert. On my way back, long past nightfall, as I rode with guide on a four wheeler, a sky exploding with stars, the Milky Way brighter than the Shanghai skyline, it was hard to believe that I was in the same country where I’d gotten used to smog so thick you can hardly see the building across the street.
The dunes were without a doubt one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited, perhaps especially striking because they were so unlike anything I had seen before. Larger than I can possibly describe (they are the Singing Sand Mountains in Chinese), they reach towards the sky in sensuous curves that look too perfect to be the work of nature.
The monotony of the landscape makes it impossible to have any sense of scale; there are no cues to indicate just how far you are from the top. So, as you climb and climb the camels get smaller behind you but the summit looks the same distance as it did when you started. The sand is impossibly soft, and as you step, it slides from under your feet, and sometimes you slide with it, causing you to walk for several steps in the same location. As it slides down the slope, the sand is fluid like water. Playing with it felt as foreign and exciting as playing with the mercury of a broken thermometer when I was a kid (but was hopefully less dangerous).
I can understand why people go insane in the desert.
In addition to the desert, and the peaches and grapes I stole straight from the trees, Dunhuang had the Mogao caves, a big complex of Buddhist “chapels” that silk road travelers built over thousands of years. That, too, was spectacular, and I was very lucky to get the English guide all to myself because no one else showed up (you can only see the cave complex with a guide).
Anyway, I could wax poetic about this place for days, but that’s no fun to anyone, so here are some pictures of this awesome Silk Road post.
Me, fearless camel-rider!
A very strange cemetery that we crossed to get into the desert[/caption]
He’s a good boy
Camel footprints
Our caravan, as we got ready to start climbing the dune
This is how small the camels look, and I’m only half way up the dune (and never managed to make it to the top!)
The view was spectacular
Corn drying
Delicious grapes, and the dunes of the desert in the back
I really do love the contrast of the fields and the sand in the back.
The part of the dunes preferred by Chinese tourists appears to have a very small loop for a camel ride that I can only imagine feels a bit like riding a carousel. Hey, but it’s long enough to take a picture! I hope you can see it in the picture.
This is the road to leads to my hostel. Almost like a little farm, a place hidden in trees and plants next to the dunes. Trees! can you believe it?
I’d never seen peaches on the tree before this
Just a love tap, I’m sure
This is the most visible part of the caves (no photography allowed inside). There is a Buddha statue as big as that whole facade in there!
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“I’ve never been to China, and you?” he asked me earnestly by the side of the dusty road as I tried to stuff my jacket into my backpack. I knew better than to point out the fallacy within that statement. “Yes,” I replied, “I was in Beijing for six months studying Chinese.”
We were, of course, both standing in Chinese territory that very moment, in a small town in the mountains of the Gansu province. Xiahe, or Labrang, in Tibetan, is a town that revolves around the largest Lamasery (a monastery for Tibetan monks) outside of Tibet. I had expected some ethnic tension, of course, but not this level of denial.
Chodak continued to talk gregariously, as two other monks, a bit younger than him, with the same long deep red robes wrapped diagonally across their bodies and short cropped hair fiddled with the gears and bell of the red mountain bike I had rented minutes earlier. I was on my way to the Sanke Grasslands, 14 km north of town, and had stopped to fix my bag and take off a layer. He had approached me immediately and started to speak to me in English. He had been teaching himself for years, he said, but rarely had the opportunity to practice. His grammar and vocabulary were impressive, but I understood about as much of what he said as I would have if he had been speaking Chinese. I could see the problem with learning a language completely on your own, his pronunciation was atrocious.
After a few minutes of small talk, he asked me if I would be willing to get dinner with him when I got back to town. His round face lit up when I said yes and he dug through his robes to pull out a flip phone and take down my number. He warned me that Sangke was not worth a visit, and promised he’d call at five. I put away the bizarre feeling of having just arranged a date with a priest, and got on my way.
He was right about Sangke, of course. The way there should have been a pleasant ride through a valley that would take me to what was once pastures used by nomads for their herds of yaks and, according to the Lonely Planet, was today a sort of tourist circus complete with fake nomad tents, Chinese tour buses, and hawkers offering rides on tired old horses. Instead, it was a miserable two hour ordeal on an uncomfortable bike over a dusty road in the process of being paved. Every passing car raised a cloud of dust and asphalt particles that found their way deep into my eyes and lungs. When I finally made it to the “grasslands” there were fake nomad tents for sure, but no tourists and no one to cater to them, and thus no lunch to be had anywhere. There were also no yaks and nothing to do but to ride right back as it was getting quite cold and the emptiness in my stomach was starting to hurt.
Although these are not yaks, it looks beautiful and idyllic, right?
Wrong. Wrong when you realize that this is what I was breathing the whole way there.
At four thirty, Chodak’s excitement got the best of him and he called half an hour early. We arranged to meet in the Nomad restaurant. As I looked through the menu, he dismissed everything I showed an interest in until I settled for noodles with yak meat. As we talked over our green tea, I got better at deciphering his bizarre pronunciation and slowly began to understand that he was talking about Chinese leaders, not “letters” and justice, not “juice tease.”
He took out a notebook, pushed back the sleeve of his robe, and began to copy a list of words that he had written with pen on his wrist. He pushed it towards me to read out loud so he could finally know how to pronounce them: sympathy, conscience, incredible, spiritual. He took notes in the curly and elegant Tibetan script to remind himself how to say each of them after I was gone.
Next to the vocab written on his wrist, he had a small tattoo. It was a black swastika. I know, of course, that that was a Buddhist symbol long before being tarnished by the Nazis, but it has never stopped startling me. I asked him what the tattoo was about, and he told that when he joined the monastery at age sixty (he meant sixteen) he and his friends had seen on television how people wrote on their bodies by injecting themselves with ink, and they decided to try it. “But we didn’t know it would hurt so much!” he laughed.
As time passed the conversation got increasingly serious. He talked about self-immolating monks and the way they were ridiculed by the Chinese press as being simply people that had gone crazy, and not people that had become so desperate for freedom they had nothing left to lose. He told me that the police in the town wanted to make it illegal for the monks to use the Internet so they wouldn’t get in touch with troublesome foreigners. I shifted on my seat, paranoid, and looked around for Chinese informants that could make sure I never got my visa renewed.
He told me that he had once had a foreign friend who tried to help him move to the US, but after a month of bureaucracy, his efforts had been thwarted when a female police officer demanded ¥5000 RMB to process the document with the required seals, even as he saw Han Chinese on the same line getting the documents done for free. He paid the money, and came back two weeks later to find that the passport was not available and never would be.
Later, another American woman, Rachel, who really liked to talk to him about Jesus, had asked him for ¥7000 to help get him the passport and eventually disappeared without a trace. He assured me that he didn’t have anger in his heart, as he diligently wrote down and tested the pronunciation of the new words I taught him: scam, trick.
As we talked, I learned about life in the monastery, and I understood why some monks walked around playing with their iPhones while others seemed destitute. The Chinese government pays them, he said. Upon further probing I discovered that it was not some sort of government subsidy of religion, which would have been very surprising, but individual officials that, needing all the support they can get for their projects, pay the monks to pray for them. This sort of spiritual bribery seemed especially Chinese, but it reminded me of Medellin’s sicarios, the paid assassins that wore Virgin Mary’s face on a chain around their neck as they set out to kill.
Chodak paid for dinner, and invited me as we left the restaurant to come to his house. I had toured the grand, lavish halls of the monastery, housing enormous golden statues of Buddha and filled with the smell of burning incense. I was dying to see the human side of this big God enterprise but as I stood in the street I thought of the tea scam I was a victim of in my first week in Beijing and felt afraid of following a man alone through the labyrinthine and quickly darkening streets of this town in the middle of nowhere, red robe or no red robe. I considered leaving my bag at the hotel first so I’d have nothing worth stealing, but the thought of the missed photo opportunities inside the private quarters of a Tibetan monk changed my mind, and I decided to trust my gut and follow the man with swastika tattoo into a dark alleyway. (doesn’t it sound terrifying when I put it that way?)
Chodak kept smiling and laughing at everything I said, a slightly flamboyant child of 32. After a few twists and turns through unpaved streets, we entered a garden, then went through a door into a large single room with two beds, two nightstands, and a makeshift kitchen on one end. The room was poorly lit by a single flickering yellow bulb, and the dirty walls were decorated with a strange combination of posters: a hand drawn pencil portrait of the Dalai Lama, a poster of a Chinese teen pop band, a famous Tibetan poem with a picture of the author, a Chinese calendar with a roaring dragon on top. On one of the beds, two young monks sat in their red robes sharing a book, reading aloud a long list of English vocabulary to each other. They kept practicing unconcerned as Chodak and I sat on the other bed.
Soon, one of the studying monks left and was replaced by another, a charismatic man with big ears that stuck out of his shaved head like two little satellite dishes. English Vocab monk went to the kitchen to prepare dinner, and he hand stretched long flat noodles as Satellite Dish monk launched Chodak and I into a two-language profound conversation about the meaning of religion.
As the night advanced, he explained how all humans are the same regardless of the language that they speak or the color of their skin, and that everyone should investigate and experiment with many religions before choosing the one that truly speaks to them. I struggled with Chodak’s English as Satellite Dish went on poetically in Tibetan, sitting on the bed in with his legs crossed, moving his hands emphatically as I nodded. “The heart is faster than the body,” “we must awaken the sensitive mind,” and then, completely oblivious to how this contrasted with all of the previous messages of peace and love and equality in humanity “Chinese people have very small hearts. They don’t have a sensitive mind.”
After my second bowl of delicious noodles of the night, and a good amount of tea and further philosophizing, the three monks walked me all the way to my hotel to bid me farewell. Chodak has no email address and no mailing address where I could send him the photos we took together, and when he asked hopefully when I’d be back in Labrang, although I couldn’t give him a satisfying answer, I promised to tell any friends that came this way to give him a call so they could have some tea together.
So whenever you visit Xiahe and you want to have a truly fantastic experience and make a friend, give Chodak a call. Email me for his number.
Note: Because I am not sure exactly how intense the Chinese government is about combing the internet for evidence of Tibetans getting a little too close to foreigners, I have changed the monk’s name and did not publish photos of him. For pictures of him and his house, click here. Unfortunately, you will only be able to see them if you are my Facebook friend.
To make up for it, more pictures of wonderful Xiahe:
The only yaks I saw were on their way somewhere…
One of the bad things about traveling with such a small bag is not being able to buy things like fresh Tibetan honey...
One of the dozens of temples in Labrang, with their beautiful windows and deep warm colors
Hey, monks need to get around too!
Cellphones are monks’ favorite activity. I didn’t get to write about it, but during the main ceremony of the day, when hundreds of not thousands of monks sit on the floor chanting in what was for a few seconds a very spiritual-seeming experience, I caught a few of them texting, which really kind of ruined the moment.
I swear, even trash is hilarious in China
A woman cleaning a temple.
There is a pah around the monastery, the Kora, that Tibetan pilgrims follow, spinning hundreds of prayer wheels and praying as they go.
Monks walk the Kora too. In the mountain, the tiny little huts are for some monks to go into meditation and isolation during some specific festivals in the year. They are tiny.
Are these girls gorgeous or what?
These are the prayer wheels that the pilgrims make spin as they walk around the monastery. There are hundreds and hundreds of them, and when I attempted to go for a few minutes spinning them I got so dizzy I had to stop.
Some monks are sent into the monastery at a very very young age. These are playing with a little toy car, as the adult monks congregate for the biggest ceremony of the day, around noon.
The older monks, after the ceremony.
High in the mountain behind the monastery, pilgrims tie prayer flags
More adventures in transportation (and by adventures, I mean whining)
I complained earlier about how crowded the Beijing West Railway station when I started my trip. I had seen nothing.
I wish I could say there was a long line when I arrived at the Xi’an railway station, but of course, this is China and lines here are for suckers. Instead, a dense human mass was standing outside the station, extending in every direction. Every few minutes the mind of the mass would decide that it was probably time to get going, and despite the fact that the gates were not letting any more people get in, everyone would start moving and slowly making the crowd denser, denser, denser. And I could smell them better.
I can smell them all
Lying along the sides of shops were men, women, trash, and those cheap plastic “suitcases” that are the staple of migrant workers everywhere. Already sleeping on mattresses, newspapers, or whatever would separate them from the filthy floor, they were ready for the night. I felt like I was part of a great refugee migration. I kept my eyes open for the UN workers handing out grain so I could get there first.
Outside the station, ready for the night.
People waiting to board the train inside the station. Please notice amount of trash on the floor.
As I waited in the chaotic station to get into my train to Lanzhou, all I could think about was the fact that I had not yet been able to buy a ticket for the following leg of my trip, from Lanzhou to Dunhuang. I had tried in Beijing, and it was sold out. The woman at the counter told me to try again later because agents sometimes buy them all up and return them if they are not able to sell them. I tried in Xi’an, and again no luck. There were no sleeper seats left, and since I can’t afford to fly I was faced with the unfortunate mental calculus of the cheap young traveler: to give up comfort, or to give up time.
I could take the sleeper bus, which has beds, for “17-24 hours” or I could suck it up and take a third class, hard seat ticket for 14 hours. That would mean not only sitting upright all night and part of the day, but also going in the same compartment as everyone with standing tickets, that is, people smoking, spitting, and staring the whole way. I was leaning towards the sitting situation until the “line” in Xi’an. The minute I climbed into my little hard sleeper bed, even though someone had clearly been sleeping in my sheets before I got there, my mind was made. I was going to be busing it up for an entire day. I need what little space I can get.
When I arrived in Lanzhou I decided to give the ticket-buying one more chance. Imagine my joy when, after fighting my way to the front of the line and being cut half a dozen times, the lady said there was a bed available. I made her repeat it three times, just to make sure my poor Chinese was not deceiving me. That was the happiest I’ve been this trip, better than any terracotta army or Muslim street food. As I fought my way out of the line, clearly the only successful buyer of the day, people attacked me with questions trying to figure out the location of this mythical place that tickets were still available for.
Lanzhou seemed deceptively pretty when I got out of the train
The line had a good deal of Uighurs, a Chinese minority that lives in the North Western part of the country. They are muslim and from an entirely different ethnic group. They speak their own language, and don’t look Han or East Asian at all. They are Turkic, and I’ve been often told I could pass for one of them. They seemed to think so too, because they all talked to me in Uighur as I tried to make my way out of the line, completely confused, and a little frustrated that after six months of studying Chinese, I seemed to be once again at square one.
According to the Lonely Planet and what I was able to see during the couple of hours when I was there, Lanzhou is a large, bland, ugly city with little to see. However, it is the home of the famous Lanzhou pulled noodles, and since I had a few hours before my next bus trip to Xiahe, I went to a small noodle restaurant my Chinese friend had recommended.
When she described it as being next to a river I idiotically pictured a beautiful boardwalk lined with restaurants, almost Seine-like. She forgot to mention that the river was dry, and the water had been replaced with mounds and mounds of trash, and that the whole place smelled like a Beijing hutong toilet.
The restaurant, which closes at noon, was full of people waiting in long lines. For ¥5, less than one dollar, I got a steamy bowl of noodles that had been made by stretching a ball of dough over and over right in front of my eyes. With a big heap of cilantro and green onions, and a ladleful of hot chili oil, the thing was well worth the side trip.
And this is how you make fresh Lanzhou beef pulled noodles! (Niu rou la mian)
Spiciest breakfast I’ve ever had. I am NOT complaining.
After I made it out of the restaurant, I took for the bus station, where I was thrilled to find out that there was a bus leaving in 15 minutes, at 9:30, and I didn’t have to wait another five hours with my huge bag over my back as I had originally anticipated. Second lucky win of the day.
As I sat on the bus for the four hours it took to get to Xiahe, I saw a China I hadn’t yet seen roll past out my window seat. In small town after small town, signs of religion began to appear. In Beijing, temples are more tourist attractions and historical curiosities, but in the Gansu countryside I saw tall beautiful mosques in small villages, Buddhist monks in deep red robes walking along the side of the road, and Muslim women wearing colorful veils embroidered with stones. People dressed differently and looked differently, and in one of our roadway stops an older woman got on the bus and sat on the empty seat next to me. She was short and stout, with two thick long braids on the sides of her head, a fedora-like hat, and a long black skirt with details in gold and bright colors. She could easily pass for an indigenous Peruvian woman.
I tried to tell her how beautiful I found her jewelry, and she just did what I’ve done so many times, nodded and smiled. She couldn’t understand a word I said.
Unfortunately, I can’t speak Tibetan.
And from my window seat I spy… religion!
And as a bonus: the sit-down toilet of shame! This is a rest stop along the road. All of the stalls have squat toilets, but for people too old or handicapped to use them, they have the one sit down toilet… and it’s a special seat, all right, with a great view.
I hate guided tours, I really do.
Yet, perhaps because I thought I’d be able to enjoy one of the world’s most famous historical finds if I could understand it better, or perhaps because I was feeling a little scared about figuring out the public transportation to get there on my own, I decided to take a tour organized by my hostel to see the Terracotta Army, as well as some nearby mausoleum that sounded interesting and I made the mistake of not investigating beforehand.
And that’s how I ended up with a busload of Germans, an unintelligible and overeager guide, and, strangely enough, a now headless terracotta general of my own to carry around China for the next few months.
I won’t go into too much detail about the tour, except to say that the general was a gift from my tour guide, who sneakily held me back behind the tour and handed me a red plastic bag wrapped around something slightly larger than one of my shoes. “It’s a gift for you. But don’t tell the others!”
As it turns out, when she became a tour guide the first people she ever led were a Colombian family. They were so nice that she has been grateful for years, and since I’m the only Colombian she has ever seen since that day, I was the lucky receiver of the karmic rewards they accumulated so long ago. Thanks, anonymous Colombian family, for a thoughtful, beautiful, and wholly inconvenient gift that I’ve already managed to decapitate in my bag as I find my way around this country.
In addition to my poor General, I was also introduced to what is possibly the biggest tourist trap in the entire world, right next to the famous Terracotta Army. The army was protecting a tomb, and the tomb itself, an underground city with rivers of mercury and jewels, and 3000 buried concubines lies just a few kilometers from the site. I know you’re thinking that that sounds awesome, and it does. Except that, according to my guide, the many traps that the slightly insane emperor that first unified China set up to protect the tomb 23 centuries ago are still considered too dangerous for the currently available technology. Oh, and besides, the Chinese think it would be “bad luck” to open what sounds like the most awesome archeological site of all of history. Sigh.
So when you visit, expect to see a very green hill in the distance, covered in some nice pine trees and totally devoid of rivers of mercury or concubine skeletons or anything worth getting out of bed for, at all.
As for the Terracotta Army itself, I really loved it. The site is crazy crowded, as is to be expected, and the absolute majority of the warriors are in tiny pieces that will allegedly take another 70 years to be pieced back together. However, the sheer magnitude of the site, and the insanity of the undertaking of building this underground army was impressive enough to make it worth it for me. I know some of the people I was with were underwhelmed, but such is life.
To not do:
Waste time seeing Emperor Qin ShiHuang ‘s “mausoleum”
Put a terracotta figurine in your backpack
Get a guided tour to go see the Terracotta Army. It’s really easy to go on your own.
To eat:
Rou Jia Mo, the Chinese hamburger, a sort of juicy sloppy joe between toasted English muffins. One of my favorite things to have in China
Lamb paomo, a noodle dish with pieces of flatbread in it.
ALL of the street food.
This is the handsome general whose replica I was given as an inconvenient gift
Can you believe that after this many centuries you can still see his perfect fingernails?
The world’s lamest tourist attraction, the emperor’s mausoleum, with some accompanying Germans
So many tourists!
“Warrior statue personalized”. Really. Why didn’t I get one of these?
At least now he’s more authentic?
It’s only the first day and I can already see that a travel blog is a lot less fun than a living somewhere blog. Instead of writing only about things that really catch my attention, I end up writing a fifth grade report of my summer vacation, daily. I’m sorry about that.
Because of logistical issues I ended up going out to explore past noon, but I don’t feel that terrible because today was not the greatest for being outside. The smog was unbearable, and the weather alternated between drizzle and actual rain all day. Besides, there seemed to be an even greater amount of e-bikes of death on the sidewalks than in Beijing, and I swear I nearly got to meet my maker several times when they’d sneak up behind me at full speed.
Xi’an is an ancient city, once the political capital of China as well as the beginning (or the end) of the Silk Road. It is also a big, noisy, and unbearably crowded modern Chinese city. That being said, there are a few redeeming factors, like a 14 km wall all around the center of the city that, unlike Beijing’s, is still standing and one can ride a bike on top of. I was too cheap to get the bike, of course, but I walked for a good while until the rain scared me away.
There were a few impressive sights, like the Wild Goose Pagoda, and a few very Chinese ones in the non-historical way, like a dinosaur themed mall and a fake apple store, hilariously named the “Smart S ore” since the T fell off the sign. In general, the attractions seemed too similar to Beijing’s to really shake me, except for the snack market.
In the Muslim Quarter, there are several streets full of people and persimmons and chesnuts and bikes and cars and pots and screaming and little restaurants and food stalls and I just walked around eating a bit of everything. The chaos was right up my alley, and the food was exceptionally good. I tried several things I had never eaten before, including the best lamb kebob I’ve ever had, and I’ve had dozens of them in Beijing. (They are called Chuan’r 串 in Chinese—it’s my favorite character since it looks exactly like what it is. If only they were all so easy!). I also stupidly bought some spices that I now have to carry around for the rest of my trip.
Anyway, I am so exhausted I fell asleep on the bus and nearly missed my stop. Here are some pictures. I apologize to all real photographers out there for my infatuation with cheesy filters.
I haven’t escaped the traffic and smog in Beijing yet, but at least there’s the wonderful city wall in the background?
The Chinese people I asked to take this picture of me were very confused. Strange foreigners, embarrassing themselves.
From the city wall, a Chinese pastime
Something’s cookin’!
Dried dates, delicious
Friendliest Chuan’r seller ever!
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After an unfinished blog makeover and with a long list of tasks still uncrossed from my very long to-do list, here I am again. This post is being written from the middle of three bunks in a hard bed (second class sleeping compartment) of a train headed for Xi’an.
After a tumultuous but unforgettable affair, I have said goodbye to Beijing, at least for now. I finished my daily Chinese classes, having now reached a very comfortable level of Chinese that lets me accompany my vigorous pointing with grunts that are occasionally understood. I had a small round of goodbye parties with Chinese friends, which included new thrills like eating pig ears and wrapping dumplings. I said goodbye to my wonderful roommates with a heavy heart, and to the smog and traffic with a glad one, and I put all of my stuff in a suitcase I abandoned in my old apartment to be picked up at some undefined point in the future. My house is now on my back, in a very lime green backpack that my yuppie of a boyfriend insists makes me look like a “homeless pothead.”
Like many a lost soul in American literature, I am heading West, at least at first. But unlike California, my west will include terracotta warriors, Tibetan villages, a grape-growing oasis and massive sand dunes where I hope to hitch a camel ride. I will visit the provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu and Xinjiang, in a mini sampling of the ancient Silk Road. From there, I will fly to Shanghai, visit the water town of Suzhou then head to Wuhan to visit my high school friend Erin who just moved to China about a week ago. The trip goes on after that, but I don’t want to spoil the surprises all at once.
But here’s the really crazy part: I’m going alone. Just me and my anxieties and my gross bitten nails and my propensity to forget everything and my awful sense of direction. Just me, one person. Sometimes, fans of going on tours of the flag-chasing variety will tell me how brave and/or stupid I am. I won’t argue with the latter, but I’ll tell you for sure that there’s not a single thing brave about me right now. I am absolutely petrified.
So what do I do to make myself go through with it anyway? Well, it’s easy. The first thing I do is talk to travelers, preferably backpacker types. When women start telling me about their trips solo across South America for six months not speaking a word of Spanish and going on intense hikes in the Andes I start feeling a little silly about freaking out about going to cities that, although the majority of you have possibly never heard of them, which I hope scores me major travel hipster points, are actually huge domestic travel destinations and on the very well-beaten path of Chinese tour buses. If grandma Zhao can do it, why can’t I? When that isn’t enough, I just read a few travel blogs, those are good for making me feel like a wimp.
Besides, I’m going on the Silk Road for god’s sake. People have been taking that path for thousands of years, before the Lonely Planet, and Hostel World reviews and the Internet. I think of it as something like the process giving birth. It sounds anatomically impossible, much less believable than a stork or any alternative explanation, but, guys, everybody’s mom has done it! It HAS to be doable, right?
The other game I play with myself is a game I’m calling: “What’s the worst thing that can happen? (within reasonable limits).” This means that in an act of effective self-deception, I discount all possibilities of physical aggression, natural disasters, illness and civil unrest as “unreasonable”. I am left with the not-that-terrifying options of getting my stuff stolen (sucks, but things are things, presumably one day I’ll have a job and I’ll be able to replace them) OR getting into some sort of accident, which I dismiss as the kind of calamity that would happen whether I had ever left Beijing or not, an act of destiny. Besides, Bogota, where I’d likely be living if my life hadn’t taken so many wild turns in the last 11 years, has a higher probability of both the reasonable and unreasonable risks that I just mentioned than any city in China. Perfect logic, right?
But anyway, enough of that. Today, I am traveling by train for the second time in my life, and in a sleeping compartment for the first. It rained on the way to the station, and I had to walk well over a mile with my heavier-than expected bags in the rain (it’s hour three and I already want to light my bag on fire. No wonder backpackers smell so bad, they just carry the one shirt they’re wearing).
The station was like a beehive, not that I should ever expect anything different in China. Once on the train, I sat outside of my compartment, contemplating the six beds arranged in stacks of threes that made me feel more like I was being put in storage than going to sleep. I waited until someone else climbed first so I could figure out how to get up there. This is second class, and the space above the bed is not tall enough to sit up, and the mattress is very hard, but it’s an awesome way to travel. And instead of thinking of the people on the nice soft beds, I think of the ones that got standing room in this 12 hour train, and the tiny stools that they sell in the entrance to the station. What a luxury being able to stretch out in my own little shelf! I wish airplanes had these!
The station. Why is everything always this crowded?
Here we goooo!
This is where I’m being stored for the night.
Earlier, the compartment next door played a loud card game, the old lady in the bunk under mine played an awful radio that produced extremely loud static interspersed with what sounded like Chinese children’s songs (old people here don’t believe in headphones), and my compartment mates ate vacuum-packed, black, fermented chicken eggs. Now everything is quiet, and I should go to sleep like everybody else, I have a long day ahead tomorrow.
I will arrive in Xi’an in the morning, from where I will post this as soon as I have internet access. I hope to update often during the trip. Although I have a completely unreasonable travel itinerary, I plan to replace nightlife with blog-writing, so I hope I’ll have some time.
——
Quick update as I post, now safely arrived in Xi’an
I only put my hostel directions in my phone, which of course, died overnight. I spent the first hour in Xi’an finding an internet cafe. I made the mistake of choosing the “cheap option” (never do this in China, for anything) and ended up waiting a half hour for my email to load. When that happened, I realized that, had I booked it a day earlier, the hostel would have provided FREE TRANSPORTATION.
I got to the hostel and my jeans ripped. Yes, the ONLY PAIR of jeans that I brought. So much for frugal packing.
It all starts with a tuxedoed dwarf that welcomes you at the door. Then a throne, hanging red velvet curtains, and a giant portrait of Napoleon at the height of his glory. Then, as you start your descent into the underground atop a long gold escalator, a swirl of Versaillesque paintings with ornate gilded frames floats above you in unexplainable disarray. It’s only midnight and you already feel like Alice entering Wonderland. You remind yourself you’re not high at all, just in Beijing.
(Read the rest of this post on a this new website I’m blogging for here)
This, ladies and gentlemen, is a video of a Chinese man, IN CHINA, saying I just made the best fried rice he’s ever had. This seems like such an accomplishment that I had to post some proof.
And here, more for my future recollection than for anyone else to try at home, is the recipe that I made up. It is Chinese style, of course, with no measurements at all.
Ingredients:
Cold cooked rice
Garlic, minced
Ginger, minced
Black mushrooms (mini portobello), diced very finely
Ham, diced very finely
Two eggs
Spring onions, finely chopped
Baby bok choy, finely chopped
Soy sauce
Chinese cooking wine
Vegetable oil
Sesame oil
White pepper
About two tablespoons of chicken stock
1. Pour about a tablespoon of oil in a wok over high heat and swirl it all around until the surface is coated in a light film. Beat the eggs, and add them to the wok, moving it around as if making the world’s thinnest pancake. When it’s solid enough turn it around and cook the other side. Remove from wok and chop in small pieces.
2. Add a bit more oil and add the garlic and ginger. When the oil is fragrant, add the mushrooms and stir for about a minute. Add ham, soy sauce, chicken stock, sesame oil, white pepper and wine. Add spring onions and bok choy last, so they won’t over-cook and will stay green. Add a bit of salt.
3. Add the rice and egg, and break up the clumps so everything is well mixed. Serve hot.
I have spent the past 2 hours trying to upload some photos here. I give up. This is a total time-suck, and I have so many more posts that I have to write and so many half-finished projects of all sorts (how will I ever have time for a job? I have zero obligations, and I feel like I’m running around from the minute I wake up til I collapse into my bed at midnight)
So, I give up on crappy, awful Tumblr, and will just post a link to a Google album, which is so much more beautiful and collaborative, and so easy to upload directly from Picasa, which I highly recommend for anyone looking for a good way to organize their photos. At this rate, I might change blog platforms soon, maybe it’s time for this blog to grow up.
Background on the photos: I took my camera out yesterday, and these are all from my walk from school to home. They all have captions, which don’t show up if you view them in slideshow mode, FYI.
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For the last five elections, Family Circle magazine has asked spouses of the candidates to share their favorite cookie recipes. Readers then do their patriotic duty: Bake, taste, vote. Only once has the cookie test not accurately predicted which leading lady has gone on to call the White House home.
This was tragic news to me, it was likely to throw off my entire life plan! I couldn't fall in the Hilary trap and offend half the country by ridiculing the whole thing, so, not being one to be discouraged so easily by competitive tests of democratic domesticity, I got to work. I have now baked banana bread successfully twice, and I made toll house cookies that actually looked like cookies. I can’t say they’re anywhere close to my cousin Angelica’s creations, but they were at least enjoyably edible.
Baking, you see, is deceptively simple. You get a list of carefully measured ingredients and step by step instructions that tell you what to do. Easy. Except not, because baking violates what seems like a simple mathematical rule, that if you put a bunch of delicious stuff together, it should add up something extra delicious. Instead, it’s full of obscure rules that I don’t understand, and when my cakes turn out flat and dense like bricks, I never know if it was the fact that it was raining, or that I beat the eggs too much, or that I mistook one white powder for another with almost the same name. Baking just leaves no room for my creativity [read: total disregard for rules]. I guess I’m just not that cookie cutter kind of cook (why do all of my puns always fail? Robb, help me!).
But today was raining for about the hundredth consecutive day in Beijing, and the only thing in my fridge was eggs and a big fat carrot, so I decided to make carrot cake. I trusted the Google algorithm to pick the most delicious option, and made the first one that popped up. Knowing full well that this was a recipe for disaster, I substituted ingredients, halved measurements, and did a half-baked job of following the instructions (I am a rebel: I added the cinnamon last, replaced part of the white sugar with brown, ignored the call for pecans, and even forgot to pre-heat the oven while I baked!)
No one was more surprised than I when a delicious, moist, not-too-sweet thing that actually looked like a cake emerged from my toaster oven. It was the best carrot cake I’ve ever had.
Just when you thought my blog couldn’t get any more boring, I bring to you America’s desperate housewife favorite pastime: a pictures of crap I made that you can’t actually taste, and a recipe you’ll never try. In future editions, expect pictures of the salad I had for lunch, my kitten (I’ll get one for the occasion), and in the distant future an awkward and overly Photoshopped engagement photo shoot with lots of blurry backgrounds. Oh, and look for me on Pinterest, I’ll put anything I knit on there too.
PS. When the presidential race begins, someone please remind me to delete this blog post before pundits get their hands on it and use it against our campaign, or my adventurously manipulated cookie recipe.
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Ingredients
· 2 eggs
· ¾ cup vegetable oil
· ½ cup white sugar
· ½ cup brown sugar
· 1 teaspoons vanilla extract
· 1 cup all-purpose flour
· 1 teaspoons baking soda
· 1 teaspoons baking powder
· ¼ teaspoon salt
· 1 teaspoons ground cinnamon
· 1 ½ cups grated carrots (I used the big grating side, because I’m lazy)
· 1 cup chopped pecans
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour a 8x11 inch pan.
In a large bowl, beat together eggs, oil, sugar and vanilla. Mix in flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. Stir in carrots.Fold in pecans. Pour into prepared pan.
Bake in the preheated oven for 40 to 50 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. Let cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack and cool completely.
The original recipe has a cream cheese frosting recipe. I don’t love frosting and didn’t have cream cheese, so if you want to try it, just do what they say.
Be our guest, be our guest! Put our service to the test!
A few days ago a Chinese friend invited me over to her family’s house for dinner. The evening was such a delightful night of overwhelming hospitality, such a celebration of cultural stereotypes and missed connections that I can’t help telling you about it.
The incredible collection of food the Wangs cooked for me, so I could try “real Chinese food”
My friend, who I’ll just call Pegasus in order not to reveal her identity but keeping in the mythical spirit of her real English name, assumed that I was too inept to take public transportation so she just wrote down her address in a piece of paper and told me to show it to a taxi driver. At peak hour, I started the herculean task of trying to flag down a Beijing cab. Add traffic to that equation, and the fact that Pegasus’s estimate of how long it would take there had been wildly optimistic, and you get a very late Laura at a dinner party organized in her honor. It would have taken 20 minutes on the subway.
I had asked Pegasus the previous day if she had any siblings, a question that made her laugh and reply in her best elementary school teacher voice that China has a one child policy (which I knew, of course, but several Chinese people I know have managed to evade it either through loopholes or by paying a fine, so it didn’t seem like such a stupid thing to ask). However, when she came to meet me outside her building she introduced me to her two younger brothers. Confused, I asked why she said no when I had asked her if she had brothers or sisters. “Oh, no, you asked me if I had siblings!” she laughed. “And I don’t.” At that point in the night we were still speaking English and I was already totally confused.
She lives in a beautiful modern complex in central Beijing, and when we walked into the apartment it was clear that several generations of the Wang family had been waiting for me for over an hour. It was also clear that Pegasus was the only person in the room whose English was better than my Chinese, so my newly acquired baby Chinese skills would be put to the test all night. Thankfully that week I had learned about five different ways to apologize depending on the situation, but since I couldn’t remember which one applied to this particular case I recited them all in quick succession: “Zhen duibuqi, zhen baoqian, zhen buhaoyisi, qing yuanliang…!” This endeared me enough in their eyes that they didn’t seem pissed at all that the food had gotten cold.
I was introduced to a couple more sisters, that I eventually figured were actually daughters of “aunties” and thus indeed not siblings but cousins, and the sibling mystery was solved. Pegasus announced that I’d gone to Harvard, and I could feel the magical word -“hafo” in Chinese- echo through the room like a spell. In China, this is a really big deal.
At the table, a gorgeous array of food was already waiting for me. At this point I can say with all honesty that all of the food was delicious, but I’m glad that I’m both an extremely adventurous eater and that I’ve spent a while in China already, because it might have been an uncomfortable night otherwise. I was smothered in attention, my glass refilled before I’d gotten past half, the whole family watching me eat and barely touching their plates. The menu included eleven different dishes, most notably chicken stomachs, a whole fish with its dead eyes staring blankly in my direction, full shrimp head and all, and sea cucumbers. My hostess kept using her own chopsticks to fill my bowl with generous portions of the sea cucumbers, an expensive and, um, slimy delicacy that I suppose I’m glad to have tried but wouldn’t order elsewhere.
This is a sea cucumber (although a much larger version than the one I ate). Doesn’t it look just yummy?
Unwittingly becoming the judge of a cooking competition whose existence I wasn’t aware of, I was asked which dish I found most delicious. I made the mistake of actually answering, I picked the whole fish, and a loud round of cheering and booing ensued as one of the identical looking and rotund great aunts gloated in her victory. At first I felt bad for the other two that I had inadvertently dissed, and then I felt bad for myself, as no one else touched the chosen dish all night and generous portions of it would appear on my plate as soon as I managed to finish the previous one.
One of the most fabulous things about Chinese people is that their minimal expectations for foreigners mean that you get credit for absolutely everything. “Will she be able to eat with chopsticks?” asks Pegasus’s mom with concern. “Of course,” I reply directly to her, in Chinese. Their glee is double, that I can not only eat with their instrument of choice, but also talk about it in their language. You’d think after five months here the expectations would be higher than knowing the name of the sticks I use to eat every single day, but every time I open my mouth to say “thank you” they marvel at the level of my Chinese.
Through the dinner, the parents of the 12-year-old engaged in the nation’s favorite sport: a lively round of shame-your-kid-by-comparing-him-to-the-Harvard-grad. First they smack him on the head, telling him to practice his English with me. “Ask her how long she’s been studying Chinese!” says the dad. “Sister,” he’ll start tentatively (I am now one of them too), then he’ll pause to look for the words, which he clearly doesn’t remember. I answer before he can translate. “Four months?! You’ve been studying English for four years and her Chinese is already better!” will yell the dad. “Ask her how many hours she studies every day, see if you can go to Harvard too!”
Check out highexpectationsasianfather.tumblr.com
When the kid finally gathers the words to ask me a question, he says “how many hours do you play with your iPad?” I don’t have one, and I tell him so. He is flabbergasted. In his twelve year old universe, a young, allegedly successful person without an iPad is inconceivable. This, of course, is more fuel for his parents who suggest that maybe if he didn’t have one he would have more time to study.
The kid’s dad is the person in the family who is making the biggest efforts at having a conversation. He will speak to me in whale Chinese, stretching every word in comical slowness, as if my handicap were a mental and not a linguistic one. (If you don’t understand what whale Chinese is, please do yourself a favor and go watch Finding Nemo’s Dory speaking whale RIGHT NOW).
But aside from speaking ridiculously slowly, he will make no effort to simplify his language, and every five seconds I have to ask Pegasus to translate a word for me, which will inevitably be something I had no way of knowing like “consequence” or “boundary.” He tries to get political but I win the family favor by assuring him enthusiastically that I am in no way afraid that China will attack the United States.
The usual foreigner questions come my way. “Did you know how to eat with chopsticks before coming to China?” (Yes.) “What do you think of Beijing?” (It’s beautiful) “Is it true that westerners eat bread every meal?” (No.) “Do you usually get ripped off for being foreign?” (Sometimes.) At one point, the kid’s dad looks at me quizzically and asks me my favorite question of the night, this time in shaky English: “You don’t look American. Are you a half-blood Arabic?”
After a few hours, it’s time to leave, and the whole family walks me to the door, as is usual in China. I make an elaborate statement about how delicious everything was and how happy I was to be invited that I had spent several minutes constructing in my head to make sure it was grammatically correct. As soon as I finish, the grandma repeats every word I said, and my Chinese might not be very advanced but I can tell she is mocking my accent, word by word. The room erupts in laughter. I laugh along with them, having no better choice, and tell her, in Chinese, that next time will be her turn to try to speak some English.
Look, they just showed the Prime Minister of Britain, Cameron Diaz!
My wonderful Chinese roommate, without whom watching the Olympics would be so dull.
Un día cualquiera, cuando entraba a la casa de mi abuela, lo encontraba ahí. Como Gandalf, se aparecía en la Comarca pereirana sin avisar, con la barba blanca y larga, con los brazos como cuero oscuro por el sol de los Llanos Orientales. Como un hobbit yo lo perseguía casi con idolatría, tratando de robarme un vistazo de su magia, empapándome en sus cuentos y con los ojos clavados por horas en el último artilugio que se estuviera inventando, casi esperando que explotara. Lo perseguía a él y a su voz calmada, hasta que otro día cualquiera decidía que se había hartado de la ciudad y volvía a desaparecer, hasta la próxima.
Cada vez que me veía llegar extendía la mano para saludarme. Era fuerte y casi áspero, y era cinturón negro en Judo. Yo sabía lo que me esperaba, y sabía que no había nada que hacer. Los años sólo lo habían endurecido, y me apretaba la mano hasta que me hacía retorcer de dolor y rogarle con chillidos agudos que me soltara. “Estos mucharejos de hoy en día” decía. “¡Debiluchos!”
Jose Carlos Jaramillo Jaramillo era mi tío abuelo, y hace dos noches, después de setenta y cinco años de una vida digna de su propia novela de García Márquez, nos dejó aquí tirados en el mundo de los mortales. Ésta es su historia como yo me la sé, no tengo ni idea cuales partes sí pasaron. Su vida mezcla el hecho y la leyenda, pero importa poco porque, como todas las historias en mi familia, al final del día todo lo que queda es la verdad, aunque nunca haya sucedido.
Mi bisabuelo, don José Jaramillo, se casó con Adela Jaramillo al principio del siglo pasado. Tuvieron trece hijos, y seguramente de puro agotamiento después de tantos partos, la pobre Adela se murió en los años treinta, dejando a su marido un viudo joven e inútil con una tropa de bocas que alimentar. Tal vez por inspiración bíblica, o tal vez porque nadie más se anotaría para la tarea apoteósica de criar a trece huérfanos ajenos, Marina Jaramillo, hermana menor de Adela y bisabuela mía, se casó con don José y tomó las riendas del enorme clan Jaramillo Jaramillo.
En septiembre 17 de 1937, llegó al mundo el primero de sus once hijos, y le pusieron Jose Carlos. A los ocho años a Jose Carlos lo mandaron a un seminario jesuita. Como seguro de vida eterna para el resto de lo que parece haber sido una familia intensamente católica, Jose tendría que sumarse a varias hermanas medias que ya estaban enclaustradas en conventos y volverse un hombre de Dios sin haberlo escogido.
Incluso en esa época ya empezaba a demostrar talentos extraordinarios. Mi abuela, la segunda de la tanda de Doña Marina, me contó una vez que a los nueve años José Carlos ya había inventado un tipo de carbón que, hecho de una pasta de carbón y alguna sustancia altamente combustible, prendía sin ningún esfuerzo eliminando los rituales de soplar y rezar que normalmente precedían un asado. Pasarían décadas antes de que alguien más pusiera un producto así en los corredores de los supermercados gringos.
A mi me gusta imaginarme que la curiosidad inagotable de Jose y su total indiferencia hacia las reglas ajenas le sacaron canas verdes a los acartonados curas españoles del seminario, pero realmente sé muy poco sobre esa parte de su vida. He visto fotos de su ordenación, antes de los años de sol y cuchillas de afeitar rechazadas, cuando, como diría mi abuela, era un “lulo” desarmador. Solo puedo imaginarme que con esa personalidad magnética, con esa cara pulida de artista hollywoodense, y con el encanto adicional de ser un hombre prohibido en uniforme, esos votos de castidad dejaron más de un corazón en pedazos en una banca de iglesia.
Escaló rápidamente las filas de la Iglesia, trabajando principalmente con los programas de juventud. Pero en algún momento, esa vida que no había escogido empezó a sentirla tan vacía que decidió renunciar. Seguía siendo un hombre profundamente espiritual, rechazaba las ciudades y le gustaba decir que estaban llenas de gente yendo a toda para ninguna parte. Empezó a seguir una enseñanza religiosa que llamaba “El Camino,” guiado por un maestro que según parecía en la foto que Jose mantenía junto a su cama, era algún tipo de gurú de la India.
En una de sus cortas visitas a la casa de mi abuela, sacó un aparato pequeño, como del tamaño de un radio de celador, y me pidió que tocara una pequeña parte metálica con la punta del dedo. El aparato emitió un pito insoportablemente agudo. “Laurita, trate de que se calle”, me dijo. Al principio no le entendí, entonces me preguntó si me gustaba algún niño del colegio, y el pitido se tornó más agudo e intenso. La maquinita esa sabía lo que me ponía la mente a mil. “Sáquese todo de la cabeza, y verá que va a dejar de sonar”. Ese día lo intenté, por horas. Me senté con el detector de mentiras hechizo, tratando de controlar los impulsos eléctricos que me fluían por los dedos lo suficiente para calmar el ruido. Mientras más pensaba en no pensar, más pitaba.
Mis primeros esfuerzos en meditación fueron un fracaso rotundo. Acusé a Jose de haberme dicho mentiras, le dije que no era posible, y él solo sonreía una sonrisa cayada y me decía que lo siguiera intentando. Cuando con el cerebro cansado de tratar de no ser usado finalmente me rendí, puso su dedo en la placa de metal, y el chillido de calló de inmediato.
Jose estaba lleno de habilidades extrañas, y como yo lo perseguía como uno de sus chandosos recogidos, la meditación y el auto control no fueron las últimas destrezas que trató de pasarme. Él practicaba una ciencia (¿o arte?¿o brujería?) que llamaba iridología, y aseguraba que estudiando las manchas, los huecos y las lesiones del iris de una persona se podía aprender importante información sobre su estado general de salud y cualquier parte específica del cuerpo. Me hizo fotocopias de un libro, y trató de enseñarme a reconocer los patrones en los ojos de las personas. Hoy en día, como una universitaria recién graduada e indoctrinada en el método científico, tiendo a descartar sin pensarlo, el arte de Jose Carlos, pero todavía recuerdo como llevaba a alguien hacia la luz natural de una ventana, le miraba los ojos, y le decía sin falla cual hueso se había roto en el pasado y que con qué órgano interno tenía una pelea médica montada. La leyenda familiar es que él fue el primero en predecir el nacimiento de mi mamá, después de mirarle por un segundo el café de los ojos a mi abuelita Inés.
También podía leer la personalidad de alguien por la letra con que escribía, y en las palmas de las manos leía no el futuro sino los secretos del carácter de una persona, basados en los creces pliegues de la piel, el largo de los dedos, y la fuerza que tuviera en los músculos de las manos. Pero lo vagamente esotérico no era su único talento, y a pesar de no tener ninguna formación técnica, Jose Carlos era un ingeniero intuitivo con un par de manos prodigiosas, que podían construir todo lo que a su cerebro se le ocurriera.
Hace unos quince años, cuando ya pasaba los sesenta, Jose, o “el cura” como le decía todo el mundo, decidió que necesitaba poder volar sobre la llanura y conectar su pedacito del mundo con el resto de la civilización. Compró un avión ultraliviano en uno de sus viajes a la ciudad y aprendió a pilotearlo. Uno de mis recuerdos más vívidos del Cura es en el patio de ropa de mi casa, donde, después de un accidente en que una de las hélices del avión se partió en dos, reconstruyó la parte con sus propias manos. Durante días enteros trabajó bajo las tejas plásticas con madera, fibra de vidrio y las herramientas de mi papá, hasta que armó una hélice en la que confiaba lo suficiente para ponerla a volar en su propio avión.
Cerca de su finca, en los Llanos, había fundado una escuela de un solo salón para los hijos de los campesinos locales, donde les enseñaba todas las materias a unos dieciocho niños de todas las edades. Con más educación y una perspectiva más amplia del mundo que la mayoría de los locales, era un importante pilar de la comunidad. Pero también era un hombre con un par de cuadras de tierra, una moto vieja y un avión, y se volvió blanco de la guerrilla de la zona. Empezó a recibir visitas en la que trataban de extorsionarlo e intimidarlo por sus tendencias “oligarcas,” hasta que se vio obligado a vender su tierra por un precio casi cómico y buscar la protección de la ciudad.
Por un tiempo vivió con mi abuela, que lo quería mucho pero le hizo afeitar la barba y se volvía loca con su vegetarianismo y excentricidades varias. Jose se sentía enjaulado en el apartamento, y finalmente sus hermanos lo acomodaron en un lote cerca de Pereira, donde en dos contenedores se construyó un híbrido de casa y laboratorio de científico loco, lleno de alambres, tarros de pintura y herramientas de todo tipo. Allá fue donde lo encontré cuando regresé a Colombia en 2008, después de años sin ir al país, y finalmente lo conocí en su propio ambiente.
Trabajaba en todo tipo de proyectos (recuerdo en particular una alarma de robo para motos que estaba inventando un día que fui de visita). Lo perseguía a todas partes un zoológico que llenaría de envidia a Blanca Nieves. Un grupo de gansos blancos andaba detrás él, y un séquito de perros chandosos que había ido rescatando de la calle, incluyendo a Cora, su favorita, una hembra pastor alemán casi ciega que compartía su disposición calmada y sus movimientos lentos y calculados. Alimentaba un arco iris de pájaros tropicales, que confiaban en él lo suficiente para comer de sus manos.
Como su gran último proyecto, empezó a estudiar colibríes, su psicología y sus hábitos alimenticios, hasta que creó un alimentador que diseñó con cuidado en resina roja y amarilla. El alimentador atraía una nube de colibríes que Jose me aseguró incluía quince especies diferentes. Los pajaritos, en tonos intensos de rojo, verde y azul, flotaban a su alrededor como un enjambre de abejas de colores. El espectáculo era casi irreal, y empezó a atraer una fila constante de observadores de aves aficionados, académicos, y ocasionalmente un canal de televisión regional. Jose se sentaba con un cigarrillo y casi no se movía, riéndose con gusto cuando lo colibríes se atacaban violentamente por el derecho a pegar el pico de una de las flores plásticas que los llevaban al agua azucarada. Les conocía a todos la personalidad, al pícaro macho de la cresta azul, o el rojito descarado que no dejaba acercar a los otros.
Jose observaba el mundo a su alrededor más que nadie que yo haya conocido, y vivió una vida aislada de las presiones y ambiciones que empujan a los demás. Nunca se casó y nunca tuvo un trabajo tradicional desde el día que dejó la iglesia. Era un hombre hecho a pulso, un inventor, un filántropo y un artista. Solamente lo vi una vez en mi vida de mal humor, hace unos seis meses, cuando fue operado del corazón y lo internaron en un hospital público. Le mentí al guarda, que no me quería dejar pasar, y me metí a las malas a la unidad de cuidados intensivos donde lo vi llorar lágrimas de rabia e indignación, por la manera en que la sociedad trata a los enfermos y los que están muriendo.
Cuando logró salir de allá, volvió a vivir solo, con sus perros y sus pajaritos, hasta el último día. Murió rápidamente y nunca tuvo que volver a la unidad de cuidados intensivos donde lo vi llorar. Por eso, doy gracias a Dios.
Jose nunca se quedaba atrás, y hace un par de años se compró un computador portátil y un módem de USB para poder navegar en la red desde su finquita. Desde allá hacía investigación sobre colibríes, jugaba con fotografía digital, y diseñaba volantes para darle a los curiosos que venían a ver los pájaros. También abrió una cuenta de Facebook, donde describió “superviviencia en el planeta tierra” como su ocupación, y en educación puso “la de la vida, que es la mejor”.
Puede que Jose ya haya terminado su trabajo en supervivencia terrestre, pero las cosas que me enseñó, se quedarán en mí por por siempre.
My relationship with China is a wild love-hate affair. There are no complex mixed feelings here, no lukewarm moments of indecision. At any given moment, I either passionately love China, or I could get on a plane that very minute and never see the place again.
Anyone that has spent time here as a foreigner can tell you that there are good China days, when you congratulate yourself on the great cultural adventure you have embarked on, when you walk through hutongs and admire the lace-like beauty of Chinese characters, when you savor the layers of delight of a cheap Yunnanese meal in a little neighborhood restaurant. And then, there are bad China days.
Everyone in the world has bad days, but these are different. They are Bad China Days, capitalized. Bad China Days, Trademark. They are a special kind of day in which the country in its entirety seems to conspire against your sanity, in which the forces of nature sabotage you, and your own intellect abandons you so that your stupid mistakes can add another layer of psychological abuse. Saturday, I had the worst Bad China Day™ yet, and there I was naively telling myself I was starting to get the hang of this place. I’m really sorry for how long this post is, but I had to write it all down, even if just as a form of therapy. Here it goes.
I wake up. After hitting snooze half a dozen times, I drag myself out of bed and the cool bubble of my bedroom and enter my un-air conditioned living room, where the hot, moist air of the Beijing summer feels like drinking a beer that’s forgotten in the sun for an hour or three. I’m running late, and when I go to fill my coffee cup after a lightning shower I realize I never put water in the machine. It’s too late to start over, so I step outside, dangerously uncaffeinated.
The dirty hallway outside my third floor apartment is empty. It’s too empty. My bike is gone from its usual parking spot outside my door. Somebody has gone up several flights of stairs to steal The Little Grape, the fourth-hand, rattly, little basketed wonder that bravely shared all of my Beijing adventures. My heart breaks a little, I loved my purple little bike, but I don’t have a lot of time to mourn the loss because now I have to walk instead of biking to the station, and I’m running even later.
When I get to the street a layer of smog so dense covers the city that you could slice it with a butter knife (but your knife might melt in the process, so I wouldn’t recommend it). It smells like lung cancer (if you don’t know what cancer smells like, you have not yet been to Beijing.) I am going to my Chinese painting teacher’s house, and as I start the walk to the subway station I decide to text to let him know I’ll be a little late. Except I forgot my phone. I sigh and walk back home, and it’s only getting later.
The cabbie is an aggressive driver, as usual, and there is no seatbelt, also as usual. Soon, it’s not a problem because we’re stuck in traffic so we can’t move anyway. To deal with the stress of the unmoving cars, he pulls out a cigarette, and the sweet aroma of the second-hand tobacco nicely compliments the pollution outside. I stop the breathing exercises I was practicing to get my annoyance under control.
I don’t know my teacher’s address because I always take the subway, so I have the taxi drop me off at the subway station. 40 kuai! That’s almost four lunches! That’s 2000% what I had intended to spend on transportation there! I remind myself that 40 RMB are about six dollars, and a Boston cabbie would not let me wash his car for that much. See? China is not so bad after all! I just went across the whole city for six bucks! And I even understood some of the words in the radio on the way there! (They said London, and Olympics, and the words “very happy”) I need to stop whining so much, this is good!
At the station, I stop by the McDonalds to get some caffeine. No ice coffee here, but no problem, I am so effin’ Zen I can deal with anything. I walk outside and it’s raining, but I have my umbrella in my bag, first win of the day. I struggle to open and it’s stuck, so I push a little harder. It opens with a snap, spilling my coffee all over my dress. Yes. I can’t make this stuff up.
My hair, which I straightened the night before for the first time in a year, has poofed into a giant ball of black cotton candy around my head, but it’s okay because when I make it to Wang Laoshi’s house, China finally gives me a short break. She’s a manipulative lover, you see. She abuses you and denigrates you and tries to crush your soul, but when you’re fed up and about to walk out on her, she turns on the charm. Abuse and seduce, abuse and seduce.
Teacher Wang and I paint beautiful hummingbirds. He’s usually demanding like a good stereotype of an Asian father, but today he tells me this is my best work yet. He gives me the special rice paper to paint on for the first time, today’s work is a keeper. His wife invites me to go with them on a trip to the mountains next weekend. My Chinese is good, our conversations are flowing, we understand each other. She gives me a ride back to a station much closer to my house. Seduction. I’m in love with China again, how could I have thought all of those awful things just a few minutes earlier? This place is paradise.
When it rains, it pours, says the old adage. And pour it did. By the time I finish a quick lunch, the streets are under three inches of water, and I have no choice but to waddle through the puddles on the way home. This time, it’s not a toddler but a full grown man peeing that I have to dodge on my way. The rain ruins the edges of my hummingbird painting. I walk into my house and my favorite necklace snaps for no reason and makes a little heap when it falls on the floor. The tragedy starts becoming comical. I decide to start documenting this absurd day so I take a picture. “Bring it on, Beijing!” I think, suicidally. “See how absurd you can make the blog post I’ll write about this!” (Ominous hint: NEVER THINK THIS. EVER. CHINA WILL WIN.)
I’m going to the other side of town again, this time to teach a class, and I miraculously find a cab in the rain right away. When I’m on my way there, I glance at my phone and see a text message from earlier in the day letting me know that the rain is so bad that it’s okay if I don’t go to class today. Too late, damn it. I sigh. This cab driver is not smoking, but he’s periodically rolling down the window to perform amazing feats of Olympic spitting. Once we arrive, I get out of the cab, open the umbrella I stole from my roommate when I stopped at home since mine was now useless, and the wind just snaps it back over itself the minute I try to open it. It’s the second broken umbrella of the day, and it’s too funny to get mad. I take my phone out in the rain and snap a photo. I nearly swim across the street, covering myself with the flaccid half of the umbrella that still sort of works. Surprisingly, no one jumps out of a corner and yells “Punk’d!”
After class I have an event in Caochangdi, the new art district. I am out in the boonies, in an abandoned suburb north of the fourth ring road where there are no public transportation options and cabs disappear when it rains. I wait for 30 minutes and a car drops someone off. I get on, say where I’m going and immediately get the Boo Arm Wave. He’s going home, and it’s too far away. “Bu bu bu bu bu!”, he says. “Boo you, asshole” I say in my head (I stop being a lady in my head when I’m that worked up). I recite a new mantra to myself: I’m a grown woman, I’m not going to cry; I’m a grown woman, I’m not going to cry; I’m a grown woman, I’m not growing to cry. My throat hurts, and I can’t tell if I’m crying or not because there’s so much water on my face.
Twenty minutes later, another cab drops someone off on the opposite side of the block. I sprint and catch it before he has time to leave, and he agrees to take me to the art district. I am now over an hour late, but the conference hasn’t started so there’s hope. I show him a map on my phone. This driver doesn’t spit and he doesn’t smoke, but when we are getting closer, he asks to see the map again. I have left my phone unlocked and accidentally deleted the map. I am sure I did something awful in my previous life.
We are in the right area, and when I see foreigners my heart jumps with joy. I guess correctly that they are going to the same event, so I follow them and find the place map-lessly. The conference starts an hour and a half late, I don’t miss a thing. I am so lucky, after all. Except the storm is so loud over the old factory building’s roof that I can’t hear a word of three of the four presentations. After the last one, it’s raining too hard to go home, but someone proposes crashing a party in a building next door. China has been cruel, and it’s time for some serious seduction.
The party is in another old factory building that is now a woman’s house, but feels like an art gallery. I follow the people deeper into the party, and walk into a large room with exposed brick walls and a spectacular sculpture in the middle, at least two stories tall. It’s made of hundreds of Forever brand bikes, delicately balanced, and I ignore the cosmic irony of my own Forever stolen bike, and gape in wonder. The sculpture is amazing, and word at the party is that the work is Ai Weiwei’s.
There are three entire lambs being roasted. There is squid, and salad, and GUACAMOLE. There are incredible ginger cocktails, and fascinating people. China throws an Ai Weiwei and three sheep at me and here I am again wagging my tail, delighted, full of forgiveness and love and amazement. You are too good to me, China, where else could I be? Where could I possibly go? This is love, pure love, undying love, I’m never leaving!
And now it’s time to leave (the party, that is). There is a chartered bus taking people back to town (see? She’s so giving and so kind!) As I’m about to walk out, I realize I have been a victim of theft for the second time in the same day, as someone has shamelessly grabbed my ravaged umbrella out of the bucket by the door. Here comes the abuse again, worse than ever. We get to the highway and the picture is apocalyptic, like an evacuation scene in an end-of-the-world Hollywood movie. There are parked cars as far as the eye can see. A driver tells us he’s been in the same spot for an hour and a half. The bus is nowhere to be seen, and cab drivers give us the Boo Arm Wave before we even get a chance to ask.
The streets are flooded, and the people I’m following don’t know where the mythical bus is supposed to be, and I really have to pee, and everyone keeps walking and walking in the rain, and I don’t know where we’re going, and I really really have to pee. I realize I hadn’t closed the zipper on my purse, and my kindle is wet, and my journal is wet, and my pride is feeling pretty wet too. I convince one girl to walk back to the party with me, and I still really have to pee, and on the way there we run into some people that know where the bus is, so we get on the bus, and I really have to pee.
The girl that walked back with me becomes my new best friend, and we laugh maniacally on the bus to keep from crying. After a while, the bus driver informs us that the way is blocked, so he’ll drop us off at a subway station. My new best friend tells me a story about a time where she was stuck on the subway for hours because it was flooded, and I’m terrified, but China’s done with being cruel for the day. I spring down the station’s stairs, and find a bathroom. It’s an appallingly dirty squat toilet in the subway station, but it’s open and it’s there, and after that, I no longer have to pee. The Bad China Day has come to an end.
An hour and a subway transfer later, I am home. Soaked, and abused, and exhausted, I am home with one more ridiculous story to tell. And after all, isn’t that what I came to China for? She has delivered again, the sly fox. Just the thing she knows I want.
[NOTE: After finishing this post I found out the magnitude of the storm that hit Beijing this weekend. While I was foolishly trying to crisscross the city four times in the same day, Beijing was hit by the worst storm in 60 years, receiving in a few hours as much rain as it normally gets in six months. 37 people died, including 25 drowned, six crushed in collapsing homes, five electrocuted and one struck by lightning. There were billions in damages. My post, of course, is tongue-in-cheek account of a series of accumulated silly instances of bad luck, but this is a sobering reminder of what actual tragedy looks like.]
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I’d walk into my grandmother’s apartment, and there he’d be. Like Gandalf, he’d show up to the Shire that’s Pereira unannounced, his beard white and long, his arms dark and leathery from the sun of the Eastern Plains. Like the curious hobbits I’d follow him adoringly until he left, hoping to catch a glimpse of his magic, drinking in his stories and staring for hours at whatever new contraption he was tinkering with, half hoping it would explode. I’d follow him and listen to his soft, calm voice until he decided he’d had enough of the city and disappeared again, until next time.
When he saw me he’d extend a hand for me to shake. He was hard and wiry, and a Judo black belt. I knew what was coming, and I knew I had no choice. Getting older had only made him stronger, and he squeezed my hand until he made me writhe in pain and beg him to stop in a high pitched wail. “Kids these days,” he’d say. “Debiluchos.” Weaklings.
If anyone had a right to call me a weakling, I suppose he’d earned it well. He was well into his sixties, and for decades he had lived alone in the Colombian Eastern Plains, a tropical grassland east of the Andes that spent half the year as an enormous swamp and the rest in total drought. He was hours by motorbike over endless unpaved paths from the nearest little township, so he grew all of his own food, and only ever spent money on two small indulgences of civilization: salt and cigarettes. The few that ever made it out to visit came back full of wild tales of anacondas, and solitude, and heat.
Jose Carlos Jaramillo Jaramillo was my great uncle and two nights ago, after 75 years of a life fit for its own Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, he passed away. This is his story as I know it, but I’m not sure which parts actually happened. His life blends legend and fact, but it matters very little because as far as I’m concerned, it is all true.
On September 17, 1937, the first of her own eleven children was born, and she named him Jose Carlos. At the age of eight Jose Carlos was sent away to a Jesuit seminary. As after-life insurance for the rest of what must have been a deeply catholic family, he was to join several of his already cloistered older half-sisters, and become a man of God though no choice of his own.
Even then he had already shown signs of extraordinary talents. My grandmother, the second of the batch, told me once that at the age of nine Jose Carlos had already invented little blocks of self-lighting charcoal bricks that, made of a paste that mixed the coal with some highly flammable substance, did away with the blowing and praying ritual of getting a grille going for a barbecue. It would be decades before someone else put that same product in supermarket aisles, she said.
I like to think that Jose’s inexhaustible intellectual curiosity and total disregard for other people’s rules drove a few stiff Spanish priests insane while in seminary, but I know very little of what that part of his life was like. I’ve seen pictures of his ordainment, he was devastatingly handsome at the time, before the years of sun and shunned razors, and I can only guess that with his magnetic personality, with those looks, and with the added allure of being an unattainable man in uniform, those vows of celibacy must have broken more than one young churchgoer’s heart.
He rose quickly in the ranks of the Church, working with the youth ministries. But at some point, that life he had not chosen felt empty enough that he decided to quit. He was still a deeply spiritual man, he shunned cities and liked to say they were full of people moving really fast going nowhere, and he started following a religious teaching that he called “the path,” led by a master that from the looks of the picture in Jose Carlos’s room, was some sort of Indian guru.
In one of those short visits to my grandmother’s house, he brought out a small little device, about the size of a pocket radio, and told me to touch a small metal part with the tip of my finger. The little machine emitted an annoying shrill beep. “Try to make it quiet,” he said. I didn’t understand. He asked me if there were any boys I liked in school, and the beeping got louder and more high pitched. The thing knew what sent my mind racing. “Clear your mind, and it’ll stop.” I tried that day, for hours. I sat down, with the little makeshift polygraph, trying to control the electrical impulses flowing through my finger enough to calm the darn beeping down. My attempts at meditation were a resounding failure. I accused Jose of lying, I said it wasn’t possible, and he’d smile a quiet smile, and tell me to keep trying. When I finally gave up, he put his own finger to the metal, and the beeping quieted down right away.
Jose was full of bizarre abilities, and since I followed him like a puppy, meditation and self control were not the last skill he tried unsuccessfully to pass on to me. He practiced an art (or science? or witchcraft?) called iridology that claimed that by studying the ridges, patches and lesions of a person’s iris one could learn important information about the state of health of any part of the body. He photocopied a book for me and tried to teach me to recognize the patterns in people’s eyes. As a now college-educated woman indoctrinated in the ways of the scientific method I am of course inclined to dismiss Jose’s art off hand, but I still remember how he would lead someone to the natural light next to a window, take a look at their eyes, and tell them without fail which leg they had broken in the past, or which internal organ they were struggling to get to work as it should. It was uncanny. Family legend has it that he was the first to inform my grandmother that she was expecting her first child, after looking for a second into her brown iris.
He also could tell a person’s personality from their handwriting, and believed in a kind of palm reading that read not the future but someone’s character based on the folds of their skin, the length of their fingers and the strength of the muscles of their palms. But the vaguely esoteric was not his only talent, and despite no technical education, Jose Carlos was an instinctive engineer and had a capable pair of hands that could build just about anything that his brain could think up.
About fifteen years ago, at the age of sixty, Jose, or “el cura,” (the priest) as everyone knew him, decided that he needed to be able fly over the empty grasslands and connect his little homestead to the rest of the world. He bought an ultralight airplane on one of his trips to the city and learned how to pilot the thing. One of my most vivid memories of el Cura places him in my house’s laundry room, where, after a flying accident in which one of the plane propellers had snapped in two, he rebuilt the part. For days, using wood, and fiber glass, and my father’s power tools, he worked on the piece until he had built from scratch a new propeller he trusted enough to fly on his own plane.
Near his farm, he had started a one room school for the local peasants’ kids, where he taught for free about eighteen of them in grades k-11. With more education and a broader view of the world than anyone around, he was an important pillar of the small community. But as a man with a little bit of land, an old motorcycle, and a plane, he soon became the target of guerrillas, who started to drop by to intimidate him and extort him for his “oligarchic” tendencies, until he was forced to sell his land for a risibly small sum and leave for the safety of the city.
For a while he lived with my grandmother, who loved him very much but made him shave his beard and rolled her eyes at his vegetarianism and various eccentricities. Jose felt trapped in the apartment until his brothers set him up in a little plot of land, not far from Pereira, where in two large shipping containers he built himself simple living quarters and a mad scientist’s workshop, full of twisted wires, and tools, and cans full of paint. That’s where I found him when I returned to Colombia in 2008, after years of being away, and I finally saw him in his own environment.
He worked on various projects (I remember, in particular, a theft alarm for a motorcycle that he was building when I visited one day). He had a zoo of adoring animals that would have made Snow White jealous. A group of big white geese followed him around, as well as various stray dogs he had rescued, including his favorite, Cora, an old German Shepard that was nearly blind. He fed a wild array of tropical birds that trusted him enough to sit over his shoulders or eat out of his hands.
As his last big project, he started studying hummingbirds, their psychology and eating habits, until he created a feeder that he lovingly designed in red and yellow plastic resin. The feeder attracted a cloud of hummingbirds that Jose assured me included 15 different species. The tiny little birds, in wild shades of green and red and blue, buzzed around him like jeweled bees. The display of color and life was surreal, and it started attracting a steady stream of bird watching aficionados and scholars, and even occasionally a regional TV show. Jose would sit and hardly move, staring at them, laughing with delight when they’d viciously fight each other for the right to one of the little sprouts that led to the sugary water, and pointing out the personality of that one shy blue male, or the evil little red one with the big white crest.
Jose observed the world around more carefully than anyone I’ve ever met, and he lived isolated from all the pressures and ambitions that drive the rest of us. He never married, and never had a traditional job since the day he stepped away from the Church. He was a self-made man, an inventor, a philanthropist, and an artist. I only ever saw him angry once, about six months ago, after he had a heart attack and was hospitalized in a public hospital. I lied to the security guard, who would not let me go in to see him, and snuck into the intensive care unit where I saw him cry tears of rage and indignation at the way that our society treats the sick and dying. After he made it out of there, he went back to living on his own, with his dogs and his hummingbirds, until the last day. He died quickly and never had to go back to the IC unit where I saw him cry. For that, I am thankful.
A couple of years ago, not ever being one to be left behind, Jose bought himself a computer and a USB modem so he could get access the internet from his little farm. From there, he researched about hummingbirds, played with digital photography, and designed beautiful flyers to give the curious that came to see his little birds. He also opened up a Facebook account, where he listed “survival on planet earth” as his occupation, and under education, he wrote “life’s, which is the best kind.” He may now be done with his planet earth survival job, but the things he taught me will stick around a little longer.