The Mysterious Powerful Allure of China
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.
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: “
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.
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. 
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.
