#beijing2013

There are walls around entire villages on the fringe of Beijing. They are cinder blocks thick and taller than any of her citizens. Banners hang from the long gray barriers that describe new projects, construction in harmony with the people. They announce the current lap of China’s frenzied race. Behind the walls, entire communities are wiped out and “relocated” (or not), and replaced with hastily constructed skyscrapers and service buildings. The brick walls are meant to hide the country’s ugly in-between. They shield the population from having to suffer the trade-off. According to the government, these walls represent a richer Beijing, the goal of the people. Two families beg to differ.

            We get of the bus on the side of a busy road. Cars honk as they blow past a group of confused looking waiguoren. Our professor, Lu Laoshī, is a tall American in a sunhat with a chin strap and a short sleeve button up. He has lived in China for 12 years, and still stands out just as much as the rest of us. This is something I have learned. No matter how much Chinese you know, no matter how adept you become at using chopsticks and adopting the mannerisms and culture of China, if you look different, people will stare.

            People were definitely staring at us as we walked halfway across a road bridge to peer over one of Beijing’s most recently constructed blinders. On one side of the wall was a busy city with cars and bikes and shops. On the other side of the wall was almost nothing. A village of several hundred people had been reduced to a sea of red bricks and trash. Just two houses stood in the wreckage with a bulldozer and a lonely dirt road suspended between them. From each roof flew the two red flags of communist China. The houses are called ‘nail houses.’ In Chinese urban growth, the government doesn’t give its people much of an option when it decides it desires property. Its “get out” or ‘’get out” for the people who reside upon land the State wants. The families in nail houses are families who have refused to leave. As the rest of village is torn down around them, nail houses remain. Lu LoashĪ turned to us.

            “If a few people want to go inside, we can try getting closer,” he said, “But I want you to know that we may not be welcome.”  

            “What’s the worst that can happen?” someone asked.

            “The cops could show up and tell us to get the hell out,” he answered. While an altercation with the Chinese police wasn’t a priority for anyone, we were curious, both about the house and the danger it presented. Twenty-two students and four teachers inched along the wall until there we got to the entrance. We turned onto a dirt road and walked toward the houses.

            A woman stood behind the bulldozer with gloves on, sorting through the waste.

            As we got closer, we could make out a thin spiral of barbed wire around the roofs. Music began to scream through the windows of the house on the right and a man appeared in the doorway. Lu Laoshī explained our presence to him and began asking him questions in Mandarin. He translated the answer back to English.

            “The government told them they were part of a restoration project in which they would move everyone out, tear down the village, rebuild it, and the villagers would be able to return within three years. But they didn’t have anything on paper, they were just promises. And you saw outside, the banner says this property is going to be used by Beijing University. Anyone can read that.” Lu Laoshī turned to the man again, asked a question, waited for the answer, and said to us, “The rest of the villagers, they did not have a very good education, so they didn’t know enough not to trust the government or ask for contracts, so they left.”

The man was clearly on edge. His golden retriever wove between our legs as he glanced back at the road. The music coming from his house continued to scream.

A student asked, “How long did they have?”

The answer: “They told everyone they had to move out and the next day the construction crews came.  They do this so people don’t have time to think. But he says he lived here from when he was a child, and he knew enough not to leave without a contract.”

 “There was a third house until a few days ago,” we learned. “But the construction crew hired thugs to get them out. They climbed in through the windows and beat the family up. Then they pushed them outside and the bulldozer smashed it wile they looked on.”

“Are you safe?” we asked. “I am okay,” he answered. “We just make sure someone is in the house at all times. We have been like this for four months, but just yesterday they shut off our water. We called the water company to ask them why our water was shut off and they apologized and said they’d look into it.”  It was clear this was a funny mistake. It exposed vulnerability in the menace of the government.

“I would be fine with leaving,” the man concludes through Lu Laoshī. “If they gave me enough money. But I know we will not be able to come back here, and we need a bigger payout for giving up our house.”

More money in exchange for the rights to his house. More money in exchange for rights to clean water. More money in exchange for culture. More money in exchange for clean air. More money in exchange for dialects. More money in exchange for natural resources. When does money lose its buying power with the Chinese people? When all the resources are gone, there will be nothing to spend money on.

My time in China has raised ten questions for every answer. Just when I think I understand a facet of this complex country, another event comes to turn my conclusion on its head. They say most of the body's tissue cells are replaced every seven years as new cells are born and old cells die. As far as I can tell, Beijing is like every one of the humans that live here: it is under contrant destruction and regrowth, always changing. Building are built and torn down again, the city's membrane shifts, rises, compresses and stretches all the time. And here I am, standing in a razed village, talking to a man who watched his village disappear, his friends and family scattered to an ever changing city of 20.8 million. 

  Zhège yǒu wèntí

Let’s talk about living in a silent world.

  Because that’s what a language barrier is. Without a roman alphabet, the advertisements, the instructions, the labels yearning to be read fade into static. Conversations hum as ambient and melodic tonal noise.

Because choosing the conversations in which you engage is life changing. Because refusing communication with a billboard is liberating.

Because a even a phonetic alphabet demands to be pronounced; but Mandarin only asks for glances.

Because in a city of several million people, I’m only sure of several.

  A city of several million should be loud. I’m not talking about car horns. I’m talking about messages. But the messages fall on these deaf ears.

  I’m not sure I’m saying this right. The media, the media, the media. The media that shapes our thoughts, pervades our interactions, tells us what to do and how think, where to spend our money, and answers every question, is gone.

  What a visual space I’m living in. I must learn by looking, and I must accept that sometimes I won’t learn. I may never know which company does its business inside that one skyscraper. I may never learn what’s in the food I bought. I live inside my head.

  I have a lot of time to myself in here. The people on the subway talk and I don’t have to tune them out. I can’t read everything I come across. I spend my time thinking, analyzing, and allowing myself to wonder.

  Yet sometimes, I cannot be content without an answer. I have mastered zhe ga shi shen ma? What is this? I have to ask the waiter, every single time. When I cannot be silent, I am forced to communicate with a soul who can communicate back. My learning is no longer a one-way wonder, research, conclude. It requires pluck.

  There is no way to unlearn a language. I know my time in quiet is limited. When I go back I will have to adapt again to the interruption of my train of thought. I will no longer be able to mentally compose in the privacy of a public square.

  But for just a second, let’s talk about living in a silent world, because this silent world demands it.

Ni ke yi bang wo ma?

It’s Monday morning. Last night we drove to the Northwest corner of Beijing to a “nature park” called Fènghùang Lîng, where we stayed the night in a small bed & breakfast. We were fed a simple Chinese dinner and had a “marshmallow BBQ,” which was arranged by our Italian laoshī Elena, who had never had s’mores before but planned the event for the benefit of our homesick American peers. The owners of the bed and breakfast played Mah Jongg in the corner of the room, their stacks of Yuan and cigarette cartons growing and shrinking as we laughed and explained the art of sliding a marshmallow off a stick with a cookie.

   A slight drizzle falls from the sky with the silence of the snow back home. It is 7 am as we load into the golf carts, but the concept of time has become somewhat mercurial since my arrival in Beijing. The pollution can slide between sunrise and sunset, turning the sky perpetually gray, and the fog in Fenghuang Ling has done the same. We pile into little green golf-cart shuttles that are waiting for us outside the bed and breakfast, and begin to wind through the streets of the village at the base of the mountain. Several members of our group sing the Indiana Jones theme song and it isn’t hard to imagine having to trek through the foliage on our own.

  When we get to the base of Phoenix Mountain, it is still raining. Lu Laoshī, who has been up the mountain many times, tells us that we will shoot for a Taoist temple about one third of the way up, and see if the rain ceases before we continue up the trail. The swish of our raincoats and slick crunch of gravel between the stone stairs and our tennis shoes marks the beginning of our hike.

  It’s hard to believe that less an hour away stands the great achievement of Beijing- one of the largest cities in the world, essentially built in the last thirty years. Below us, people are being stuffed onto overcrowded subways, working on the 20th floor of an office building they aren’t sure will stand, wearing English tee shirts, and roasting food on spits cut directly into the outside walls of concrete houses.

  A thin wall of mist blocks all this from the view of the traditional curved roof under which we take cover. Its yellow shingles roll upward in a happy salute; each red, blue, and turquoise beam boasts a different painting in traditional Chinese style. Intricate pictures of birds, waterfalls, rocks, and flowers are protected from the perpetual rain and mist. The Taoist temple can be seen from this pagoda, and though we first assume the master has slept in from the rain, he steps onto his porch and we call out a simple conversation.

  In the city, it’s easy to believe that the structures are preserved for the benefit of the income they provide and the tourists they attract. When laowai come to China, they want to take pictures that fulfill their preconceived notions of Asian culture. They want temples, laterns, dragons, and drums. In fact, the government has an uncanny tendency to protect only the areas that are beloved by tourists, and demolish the real villages of people who have lived in the same place since birth.

  But here, up on this lonely mountain, money means nothing. Structures like this one impossibly dot the massive rocks that shoot like solid waterfalls from the mountain face; tiny temples peek out from its thick green canopy. It is a timeless scene of nature and harmony that turns a deaf ear to its flimsy propagandist counterpart.

  According to Southern Chinese superstition, if you wedge a stick between the ground and the side of a boulder, your effort to help the rock will bring you lessened back pain later in life. You lift the burden of the boulder, the universe lifts a burden from your back. It doesn’t matter that a twig can’t possibly hold a thousand pounds of force. It doesn’t matter.

  We pass a rock like this soon after we decide to complete the hike. The rain is not so bad and the scenery is worth it, although the trail is almost entirely paved in smooth marble stones that are slick with rain. The boulder is at least ten feet in diameter, surrounded at the base by a nest of twigs that is apparently human made. All around me, students are shouting, laughing, cracking jokes off the side of the mountain walls, but the noise gives way to focused breathing as the path gets steeper. The line of people stretches and contracts around the stone switchbacks, occasionally expelling a collective breath-- an old fashioned accordion humming with contentment. Being under the fog is like the hush of whispering under a blanket late at night: soft, sacred, and vaguely defiant. I settle into a pocket of silence, and the fog settles on the mountain under my feet. I can see nothing above me, nothing below. Nothing but each step. Up. Up. Up.

  In a way, this hike is like today’s China. It is difficult to see such a drastically different past, and what lies ahead is a mystery. No one can see the top of the mountain, the end of the trail, but we know from the climb there is a long way to fall.