My Time as a Human

Having just written a less encouraging view of China, I want to follow immediately with a discussion of one of the things that makes me so eager to go back.

The number one reason to spend time in China is something that cannot easily be put into words. I’d love to find some foreign word that we don’t have in English like, “Fahrvergnügen” or even “Je ne sais quoi” (ironically) that perfectly describes it, but I want something that fits a little better, something that gives a real sense of the buzzing, buoying energy of the place, that magical charge that infects some foreigners for life.

Huángshān

Years ago my friend Vince Zappa and his wife (Americans) spent the first half of their honeymoon visiting some fellow Americans who were teaching in a small village in China. She had a decent time, but when the second half of the honeymoon arrived she was ready to head down to the resort in the Philippines. He was, however, entranced and had no interest in leaving a dirty little town to go to a fancy resort. Vince couldn’t get enough of just being in China. He got ripped off at a restaurant he liked and decided he didn’t care enough to stop going, that instead he’d just be more careful. He was willing to put up with hardships in this weird new place because something captured his heart.

When I first visited China many years ago, it was only for a few weeks but that was enough to trap me. Before we went I liked spending time around my Chinese friends in college and being around Weíshí’s parents and relatives. Weíshí’s second aunt taught me how to play Májiàng and I learned the numbers and directions. I liked the sound of the language, the beautiful characters, and the endless (and I do mean endless) “old Chinese sayings”. But something different happened when I arrived in Běijīng and later visited Xī’ān and Huángshān. I was hooked. I couldn’t get enough of the beautiful mountains, the scrappy street venders, the peach orchards, and above all the endlessly chaotic nature of everything around me. The magic hook is somewhere in that chaos and the way that people are so energized to make things happen. The Chinese people of today don’t bother with safety or laws or aesthetics: they charge ahead and build and make and haul and try.

When Weíshí and I visited the Great Wall we walked the whole length of the top of the restored wall. As we reached the far end, we heard grunting and whispers somewhere on the other side of the large stones that surrounded us. The sounds continued and got closer. The section of wall we stood on was a huge distance from the ground. We walked over just in time to see a hand grasp for the top. I leaned over and saw a series of people standing on each others’ shoulders and the person on top struggling to pull themselves up. Mystified, I grabbed onto his arm and helped him over the wall. He breathed heavily for a moment, then reached inside his jacket as a few more people pulled themselves up behind him. He fumbled a bit more and then, like a magician pulling flags from his sleeve, began heaving out pile after pile of “Great Wall” t-shirts. He immediately tried to sell me one. Apparently there was a fee to sell things on the wall, and they were either too poor or too scrappy and cheap to pay it.

Of course in the midst of this scrappiness and chaos there is still a swirling undercurrent of ancient history spinning through the signs, bricks, buildings, language and culture. It’s all still there, like the old tent that holds the circus. Something in the beauty of this whole mess is the China magic, the magic that entrances, lures, and captures the hearts of people like me.

Chinese people absolutely adore sappy, sweet, sad love songs and movies and if you ask any Chinese person for their favorite movie you’ll almost always get the same response: “Titanic“. Yes, the big cheesy American film. One of my Chinese kung fu brothers has watched this movie more times than he can count.

But the image of two young lovers leaning into the wind isn’t what stuck with me about my experience. Walking through China I felt like I was climbing on board the Titanic as the nose was plunging into the dark ocean. Every person I talked to was running past me, trying desperately to find a way off the boat. There I was, strolling around with my head up and an inflatable life boat under my arm asking, “hey, where’s this great band I’ve heard about”?

I asked about wéi qí (Go) playing. Some people had heard about it, but almost no one knew how to play. Traditional music? Maybe I could try the big theater in town. Kung Fu? I am training with an absolute treasure of China. Master Lǚ has incredible skills earned over a lifetime of intense practice and he’s one of the only heirs to a fascinating branch of Kung Fu. These skills can only be passed down orally and through direct instruction. The small group of people I train with, the people who will carry this knowledge to the next generation if it is to survive at all, are almost all foreigners: American, Canadian, French and Japanese students. His old Chinese students, from a time when his school was huge, are running businesses now. No one in China has any time to mess around with anything that doesn’t make money. They are running for the lifeboats.

It disappointed me greatly, but I can’t blame the Chinese people. Their lives have been wrecked by revolution, violence and starvation for decades. Now that they have a chance to get out, the air is thick with poison and the food and water are equally questionable. Money is the life boat that can literally save the lives of their family and they will stop at nothing to get it.

Fairness

But pollution and poisonous food aren’t the only reasons people want to escape. Even more so is the sense that there is a complete lack of fairness. No matter how hard you work, if you don’t have the right connections it means nothing. The people I talked to felt that in Germany, Canada or the US they would have a fair chance to earn a living through hard work without having to be related to someone in power. They felt like the laws would be fair. They felt like things that weren’t working could be fixed because they could gather with people and make change.

I grew up in a place where I’ve been taught to believe that if I don’t like something I can work to change it. That ideas is deeply, deeply ingrained in me. It’s still difficult for me to think about being completely paralyzed, as many feel they are in China. I’m not talking about petitioning a Senator to make big change, I’m talking about feeling like a street is dangerous and should have a stop sign, and knowing that I can get the community together to get that fixed. Or that I can get a group together and get some land to start a small community garden. If you can’t talk to the people in power (or they don’t have to listen) and you can’t form or gather in groups, there is nothing you can do that won’t get you shot or imprisoned.

In the end, I don’t think China will sink. Many will die in the icy water. The fortunate few will escape to western countries and live out the last days of prosperity there before those places sink. Ultimately China, like the US before it, will slowly make efforts to clean up the disastrous mess they’ve made while building the empire. In a couple of generations, the children or grandchildren of the people who escaped will be looking for a way to get back on board. If I’m still alive I’ll be happy to teach them all of the culture, kung fu, and wéiqí I’ve been saving for when they are ready.

I remember the moment clearly. I was standing with my beautiful little friend Juliett on a bridge on a farm in east Texas. Someone had just discovered that she was going to Italy. “Wow,” she said, “that’s so exciting! Are you moving there?!” Juliett paused and thought about it for a minute, looking slightly puzzled. “Well,” she said, “I have a one way ticket and I’m bringing everything I own. Is that moving?”

People often ask me where I’m from. I tell them, “Austin, Texas”. But I grew up outside of Chicago. Some would say I was “from” Chicago. But of course, I was born in Hamburg, Germany, even though I only lived there for a year. I suppose most accurately I’m “from” my parents.

Both of these questions seek to quickly know a person. When someone asks me, “where are you from,” the core of the question is about understanding what shaped me, what kind of person I am, if I can recommend good restaurants there, and if I might know their brother in law. It’s a conversation piece (in terms of restaurants and brothers in law) but also a way of putting me into a convenient box, the “midwestern” box or the “hippie” box. It’s for this reason that I use Austin as their reference point. Despite traveling all over the world, Austin, like no other place, felt like home the minute I arrived. As a box, it fits well enough. I like natural food and hippie things like yoga, but I also like to throw on a cowboy hat and work hard building things in the sun. The suburb where I went to high school has fewer of those things, and wouldn’t stand a chance at giving someone that visual.

Despite the fact that I’ve spent the last few nights sleeping in a basement in Chicago, and the nights before that in D.C., people still refer to me as “living” in China. It certainly best defines my headspace at the moment. I’m taking a break here to recover, but I have a long way to go learning Chinese and extra pairs of underwear in a garage in Fuzhou. If I really thought about it, I’m not sure I’d say I live anywhere at the moment.

I do believe that places shape us as well as represent us. In all of this talk about “moving”, “living”, and being “from” places it’s interesting to think about what list of places would best give someone a sense of me. If I were going to get a list of places tattooed down my ankle, that would define me to someone who found me sleeping, what would they be? Through my parents I’ve been heavily influenced, and defined, by places I’d never been in Europe. I would have listed China long before I began “living” there these last nine months. Austin and St. Charles would have to be on the list along with the Punjab in India.

What would your list be? Do you wish there were more places on it?

I used to be like most Americans. I wore a jacket in the rain and thought umbrellas were for the weak. When I arrived in China the sun was shining, it was 90 F, and every woman on the street was under a decorated umbrella of some kind. Some carried their own; some had boys to do it for them.

Over time I discovered that it wasn’t just a weird fashion statement. In the U.S., women are obsessed with finding new ways to burn themselves like rotisserie chickens: not too much, just the right amount of brown. They spend their hard earned money on places that will let them sit inside, in artificial sunlight, and rotate and cook just long enough to look like they’ve been outside.

In China, the aesthetic of choice is the whitest possible skin. The sunscreen (although most people don’t use it) actually makes your skin lighter with bleaching chemicals. The umbrellas protect the carefully preserved skin from the ultraviolet and… there’s more. As I started to walk around with girls, as I am wont to do, I found myself underneath their little protective domes. Mysteriously, I noticed that every time I was walking around with a girl, life was more pleasant. It was ten degrees F cooler! Not only that, but when it rained instead of wrapping my body inside a jacket, trapping more of the 90 degree heat, I was nice and cool and dry.

It took a few months to break down a lifetime of American hipness training, but I finally picked up an umbrella and never looked back.

In fairness, I have to point out that Ray Jardine, ultralight backpacking freak and guru, was the first. He’s not one to fear fashion risks, to say the least, and in Beyond Backpacking: Ray Jardine’s Guide to Lightweight Hiking he talks about how much he loves umbrellas on the trail. I thought it was one of his freakier ideas when I read it years ago and had forgotten about it. Now I’m sold. Despite carrying as little as possible when I travel, I keep a little friend called the “Happy Rain” that I picked up in Taiwan tucked into my backpack and it’s a permanent part of my ultralight travel collection.