April 29, 2011
Plan B or is it C now?
Plan B or is it C now?
We had planned to get up this morning and walk down to the park where we saw hundreds of people doing their morning Tai Chi. Thought it might make a nice photo op and also a visual for the brain. However, we looked out our window and it looked incredibly polluted. When we got downstairs we realized that the wind was blowing strongly and had blown in the dust off the steppes. We had an inkling of this yesterday when we saw people with large brooms sweeping dust off ledges and stairways. Little did we know that is normal at the time. The others decided to take a free pass on the walk so I went down by myself. Instead of the crowd, there were eight people exercising. I filmed, but didn’t get too close. I didn’t want to invade their space, and besides they were all wielding swords. Many of the people held their noses to avoid the dust in their nose. Hey, you gotta breathe. If you’re holding your nose then the dust goes into mouth and lungs. I figured that’s why god put all those hairs in your nose to trap all that gunk. She knows what she’s doing. Many others wore masks over their noses and mouths – those surgical masks that you often see Japanese tourists wearing, but which Americans wouldn’t be caught dead wearing outside the O.R. My favorite was a young woman who painted a cat’s face on hers, complete with mouth, nose and whiskers.
We were on our way to the small city of Xiahe. At about 9,000 feet in altitude and a population of just 20,000, we thought it would make a really nice break from the big city life we’ve experienced so far. We were going to visit a very famous Tibetan Buddhist monastery. One of the six greatest Buddhist sites in China. Xiahe is a Tibetan town and I was really looking forward to it. It was an important stopover place on the Silk Road. Caravans would rest there, gather supplies, wait for the weather to clear and probably dozens of other reasons about which I have no clue.
On the way we climbed out of the valley and into the mountains. The road was bumpy and dusty, which combined with the dust blowing in really made for a nasty ride even inside a nice coach. The hills were devoid of vegetation. The tilted fault blocks were crumbling from the millennia of erosion and small rocks dotted the ground. The hills were steep and gullies of washed out soil went straight down to the bottom. Houses were mud buildings and single level. They may have been brick covered over but I couldn’t see that. It looked very poor and it’s pretty obvious that it’s an area where you only live if they have to do so. Every once in a while you would see a patch of earth which was being cultivated, sometimes on slopes so steep and in soil so poor you wondered how they ever worked the soil much less ever got anything out of them. The little plots were all covered in plastic. No weed is going to suck up water needed for the actual edible plants. People watered their plants with a tea kettle. Water goes only to the plant. None is wasted.
After an hour of this we leveled out on the plateau and the plots got bigger and the soil seemingly more fertile. An actual river wove its way down the plateau and the mud huts changed to actual brick multi-storied structures. We even saw a building of about seven stories. Clusters of houses marked some sort of organizational structure. Minarets appeared and Buddhist stupas as well. Then Ben announced that there was a change of plans. As it was explained, and details are very sketchy, somebody appointed a new living Buddha (Dalai Lama?) and there was great “Excitement” in the Tibetan areas. Because of this “Excitement” we weren’t allowed to go to Xiahe and spend our two nights there. Instead, we detoured to the city of Linxia. A dirty, heavily polluted city of 250,000 which has no redeeming connection to the Silk Road. The only thing we did here was to visit a mosque. So, as I write, plans are fluid, shall we say. They’ve changed several times in the afternoon and I’ll just have to wait.
This is the real China to my mind. They can gussy up their cities and have fancy shops where smart looking women and businessmen walk the street and flash their fat wallets and drive fancy cars. But here the air literally sucks, the shops look like they’re full of second hand goods, the streams are open sewers and smell like it, and it’s this reality for untold millions of people who really know nothing of the “New China.” Their lives remain untouched by all the glitz and glamour of Shanghai and Xi’an.
Carol and I walked around town and took pictures of infants, toddlers, school kids, old women and anybody else who had an interesting face and didn’t object to us filming. The city is 52 % Muslim and so it is colorful. Women wear pink hats that look like a chef’s hat cut in two and they’ve thrown away the bottom. We were greeted by smiles, usually, or disdain, sometimes, depending on the person, but we didn’t intrude on anybody’s space. At one point there were three 50-ish women sitting on steps outside a shop and I looked at them and they gave me a warm smile and pointed to my baseball hat with the Zambian flag on it and the word “Zambia.” I pointed my camera at them and gestured to see if it was okay to film. They smiled in return and so I did. I took off my hat and put it on one of their heads and she just got the biggest smile on her face, and I got a digital with Carol’s camera that I could show to her. Carol sat in the middle of them and more photos were taken. Another group of women stopped for photos and one of them grabbed Carol’s arm and pulled her into the photo.
There was an animated game of Chinese Chess with fat coaster-sized playing pieces, each painted with Konji symbols playing on a board that looked nothing like a chess board, but that’s what Ben told us it was. We filmed their game for a while, and these guys were “Excited” in the sense of the word as we know it. These moments made for a pleasant afternoon despite sucking all kinds of crap into our lungs that I don’t even want to think about. It really makes you wonder about people and their lives. How can they live with this day in and day out. Most don’t have options for anything else I’m sure but it would be tough, no matter what your cultural bias might be.
The bottom line on our change of plans is that what the Chinese call “Excitement,” we would call civil unrest, and either they don’t want us to see it or don’t want us to see their repression of it, or to come away with any impression of the “Semi Autonomous Regions” that doesn’t fit their P.R. output.`
More when I understand what the whole deal is about
Carol and Jim
