Tag Archives: china

My China piece for Travel Weekly has hit the web

I remember now why I loved China so much–sometimes it’s good to write things down for my favorite travel industry magazine. This G Adventures tour actually was hands-down, unquestionably an adventure. See G Adventures High-Energy Itinerary here.

Space required that they cut my tea story so I will upload it here soon. Tea is always a travel highlight. (Except, maybe, in Italy.)

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What the Hell Just Happened?

I am barreling across China on the Xi’an-Beijing bullet train, watching it all go by—cities, countryside, farmland, and, among the grasses near Zheng Zhou, an awfully close cluster of nuclear reactors. It is day 11 in this most mysterious land; in one day I’ll be on a plane bound for home. I’ve taken pages of notes, snapped a ludicrous number of iPhone photos, talked to strangers and to the eight other travel writers on the trip, listened to our guides, even read about the history, and I’m still not entirely sure of what had happened.

 

Well, I have an idea.

 

I have finally visited a foreign country. I have visited a place so thoroughly of itself and to itself and for itself that even as it takes on the trappings of the capitalist west, its true orientation (had to) is revealed in every gesture, every step. This is a world that kept itself to itself, that has erected great walls literally and figuratively over and over again. Here I am a curiosity, and not a terribly interesting one.

 

Once in a while it really is the trip of a lifetime.

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Taking Pictures of Poor People (in China)

The act of representing others almost always involves violence to the subject of representation.

–Edward Said, Orientalism

 

At one point on the broiling afternoon of the first of August, while wandering alone in Xi’an’s Muslim Market, I realized I’d taken a lot of pictures of poor people.

Ah, how picturesque is poverty! So quaint, so very foreign!

I don’t like it, but that’s what happened on this China trip. Old men slicing slabs of meat, old ladies collecting cans, and the lady here, who ran the yurt where I stayed in Inner Mongolia. (I suspect she has a lot of money, as the family owns coal-rich land in mining country, but she doesn’t look like it.) For almost two weeks my subjects (now there’s a word with a darkly double meaning) have been engaged in such charmingly archaic acts as carrying water, herding sheep or riding a bike. Some activity that ensures all who see my snapshots that I’ve gone far, far away.

It is a desperate need to feel superior? Is it a lazy woman’s means of proving the literal and symbolic mileage? These definitely don’t seem like people who will (or can) retaliate if I steal a photo of them. And I probably won’t be judged by others for taking the shot. (Again, the language of photography strikes me as aggressive.)

Back in New York, I’d never take a photo of a woman collecting empty plastic bottles.

In my defense, I’m no photographer and the poor people are the easy shots. Maybe if I had a better camera I could zoom in on a face that revealed its foreignness, its utter un-Americanness despite the jeans-and-tee uniform, the whole-bodied embrace of 20th century consumer fetishism. But I only had a phone camera.

China, forgive me: They were everywhere.

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The Great Wall of China and Robert Frost

Huh?

But this week following my visit to the Great Wall, my determined (grimly, in part) walk to station 23–the last stop on the Beijing portion of the wall where tourists are technically allowed–I’m thinking about Robert Frost’s poem, “The Mending Wall.” So I’ll copy it here and leave it at that, for now.

Mending Wall

By Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”