please be well seated and always make yourself safe

we woke up Tuesday morning to the news of the massacre at Virginia Tech which had happened while we were all sleeping on the other side of the world. I got up about 6:30 for the reportedly beautiful view coming into Hong Kong. Here’s what I saw:



Eventually it cleared a little:



and Dean Mike came on the loudspeaker to announce that the diplomatic briefing would be preceded by a few words and a moment of silence for the victims at Virginia Tech. I didn’t know what he was talking about. Normally, I stake out a seat in the Union for mandatory meetings (including the diplomatic briefing) but our flight to Beijing left early and our group was assigned a satellite classroom to gather. It was rather surreal, we all had our stuff, excited to be headed into mainland China. Marvel -- one of the mental health folks on board -- read the statement from the University President, which at that time still said 22 victims. And then the Archbishop spoke and brought us all to tears. There are three Virginia Tech students aboard and many more, of course, with friends there. One of those students sat crying on the floor in front of me. She had no information and was getting on a plane to go to Beijing for 5 days. Her friends promised her they’d help her find an Internet café. They canceled the diplomatic briefing in the end because there was no way to change course and go on with that, and then we left for Beijing. All I saw of Hong Kong was the hazy skyline coming into port and the road to the airport.

I’m sure you are all watching news coverage around the clock, the same frightening stories over and over and over. Most of what we learned came from the English language newspaper, China Daily and what we eventually saw on CNN International once we got to the hotel. The shooting has been the top story in China Daily each day also. The first story had used the passive phrase, the shooter "was killed" but never indicated if this meant shot by the police or whether he killed himself. At first I thought this was maybe some cultural commentary on suicide. But maybe they just didn’t know at the time of this first article. All the other articles did say he shot himself. And there was much commentary about America’s obsession with guns. China Daily quoted an Italian paper saying the shooting was "as American as apple pie".

The plane ride to Beijing was worth writing about. 3 -- count them, three -- rounds of the beverage cart, and a full meal (though not good), and a Hagen-Dazs ice-cream dixie cup. And little television screens where we got to watch us take off and land, as if we were looking out the front windows in the cockpit. Way cool. We arrived in time for dinner (despite the meal on the plane) which was at a place that is famous for Peking Duck. The meal was duck, duck, and more duck. The appetizers were all different parts of the duck. And then dinner was duck. I like duck, but it was a lot of duck! After dinner, I walked back to the hotel with a couple of students for the opportunity to walk through Tiananmen Square at night. All lit up. The vastness of the square takes your breath away. It’s mammoth. To think about all those people -- all those students -- in the square when the tanks pulled in and opened fire. Takes your breath away. Back at the Rex Hotel in Saigon that night with everyone telling Vietnam stories, I said my first real political memory was watching the Iran hostages come home. I remember very clearly watching them get off the airplane. I was 9 then. But Tiananmen Square was a different kind of experience. It was June of my senior year in high school. I was excited about going to college. Those students were not much older than I. I had been to D.C. a number of times in high school for protests -- to get the U.S. out of Nicaragua, to loosen immigration policies for Jews trying to get out of the Soviet Union ... I’m sure they were comparatively small protests, they felt like a lot of people. I wasn’t a hard-core activist, but I had been a student protesting like these students were protesting. The night was a beautiful night, the portrait of Chairman Mao at the one end and buildings of mammoth scale forming the square around. It took my breath away and struck me hard.





Day 2. The next day, we woke up early and headed to the Great Wall. There are several places around Beijing where tourists can climb. The part we were at did not at all match the image I had in my head. First off, Beijing is perpetually hazy from pollution and so we didn’t even see the mountains until we were right there at their feet. There are a ton of stairs up to the top as it climbs up the mountain, but the wall itself isn’t all that high off the ground. If you measured the length from the ground up at any point. That surprised me. I made it up to what we called the "first top" -- there were other tops, but I was perfectly pleased with where I got.



The stairs were really uneven. Some were so shallow you almost wanted to skip one, but others were crazy deep you had to haul yourself up. Going down was almost as difficult as going up. The views from above were very hazy but beautiful nonetheless. I sat up there above and watched China below before climbing back down. There were a billion tourists speaking a million different languages and it was fun to watch how the grunts and groans of exhaustion are pretty universal regardless of language. At lunch there was the requisite shopping and I bought a jacket I like a lot. Not formal (more like work-clothes) but something that would work well enough with a Chico’s skirt for the Ambassador’s Ball (more on this below). I got more than $50 off with the negotiation skills I’ve been perfecting as we travel round the world. After lunch was a tour of the Summer Palace. Lonely Planet describes it as "the playground of the royal court." There is a beautiful lake and amazing gardens and elaborate buildings and a crazy marble boat. The original plan was dinner on our own and shopping/roaming, but an optional acrobatic theater performance was offered to us. After much debate, we decided to go. I was afraid it’d be high on the hokey-quotient and high on the touristy-quotient. But it was quite enjoyable. Crazy what people can do with their bodies. There were a ton of people everywhere all day and someone joked that we saw 1 million of the 15 million people that live in Beijing in our travels just that one day. Beijing has twice the population of New York City. It’s crazy big and traffic reflects it. We spent a lot of our time in traffic. Just keeping up with our tour guide and trying not to lose our group in the crowd was a lot of work!

Day 3. Today was the organized trip to Tiananmen Square. Our guide told us all about the celebrations held there. Especially the day they announced that Beijing would host the 2008 Olympics. There is much Olympic prep going on here. They are building arenas like mad and hotels like mad and planting trees to help curb pollution (as if that will solve their problems before next summer). They are clearly very excited about the spotlight the world will be putting on this city next year. The guide told us about the crowds in the Square on the day of the announcement and he told us all about how he used to rollerskate in the Square as a kid. That the Square is "a place of celebration." He said nothing about the massacre until one of the professors on the bus finally asked if he would "speak about the events of 1989". He said yes, that things were very "complicated" then. That there were a lot of corrupt politicians and that students were protesting the corruptness and that what happened was "inevitable". He used that word multiple times: inevitable. He said the government couldn’t control it and so they made "some mistakes". That was really all he said, ending it all again with "it was very complicated" but not elaborating at all as to why or how. Our guide was pretty informative throughout our time in Beijing, but he gave us a number of vague non-answers to most of the political questions we asked during the trip. During Global Studies we had seen a clip of "Tank Man", a documentary about Tiananmen Square and we learned that China basically whitewashed all evidence of the massacre in their textbooks and their political storytelling. The interport student (from Hong Kong, incidentally, not mainland China) got up after the video clip and said he hoped that we wouldn’t just think of what happened in 1989 when we think of China. That China has so much more to offer than those days in 1989. I think we were all surprised how western-looking a city Beijing is. We knew that of Hong Kong, but Beijing is incredibly big and built up with skyscrapers and evidence of commercialism and corporate logos and neon and wide boulevards and all things we associate in our minds as western. After Tiananmen Square, we walked to the Forbidden City and toured the immense palace, with again about a million of our best tourist-friends. Built in the 15th century, it is called the "Forbidden City" because it was off limits to the general population for 500 years. Two dynasties of emperors lived there. After a not-so-great lunch, we toured the Temple of Heaven which was beautiful and peaceful with Beijing residents playing cards and hacky-sack and singing and hanging out together. And then we got on a plane to Xi'an. The English signs in Beijing were plentiful, but oftentimes oddly worded. On the shuttle bus to the plane, I found the title of this post. Please be well seated and always make yourself safe. Which may be my new slogan for this whole whirlwind trip around the world.

On the bus-ride to the hotel from the airport in Xi'an, the tour guide pointed out a square where people were dancing. I took a walk over there after we checked in. I had understood it to be some kind of performance but it was really just a public dance floor on a piece of cement underneath the highway overpass. I stood there and watched fascinated for an hour. There were couples of all ages though most were retired. Some were dancing-dancing (swirling and twirling) and others were just walking in wide circles swaying and talking. There were many females couples and, unless Xi'an has a huge out gay population (hard to imagine), women-friends must just do this too. Music was coming from a loudspeaker. I was the only white person there for the first bit and I attracted some attention. I had my camera. Some folks wanted to see their photos on my screen, but most just passed me by smiling. I got pretty far on my only 2 words of Chinese (hello and thank you) and later with the help of a very nice elderly man who spoke English pretty well. Eventually, two other white women showed up with their cameras also. "Your friends", my new Chinese friend said to me. Turned out they were French and so we couldn’t really communicate either. But they started dancing with a few Chinese men in the crowd and I went quietly back to semi-anonymously watching from the perimeter. It was lovely. It was a really nice night and the dancing and the love and the neon and the complete un-self-consciousness of the people dancing nearly brought me to tears.



Day 4. We started at the Tang Dynasty Art Museum and the Wild Goose Pagoda. The Pagoda was constructed in 648 AD, built to house the Buddhist scriptures brought back from India. A very early library. From there, we went to the Shaanxi Museum which was nice as museums go but mostly served to teach us something about the various Chinese dynasties. Which, believe me, was much in need. After lunch in a place that Sue started dubbing "bustaurants" -- a place where bus-loads of tourists are taken and fed in 40 minutes, huge tables with spinning lazy susans in the middle and tons of various Chinese dishes (this one at least had really good noodles!), we went to the Terracotta Warriors Museum. I loved this. Barbie’s pictures from the summer voyage don’t come close to representing the enormity of the excavation site or the life-sized-ness of the warriors, as I’m sure my pictures won’t either. The expression of power and expense and the size of the excavation/preservation endeavor are incredible. The warriors are 2000 years old and were unearthed only in 1974 when a farmer was digging a well. They face east in battle formation and they are each different, holding spears and daggers and axes. There are also horses and chariots. There will be more pictures up eventually. As with the previous blogs, only a few now to get this post up speedily.







The evening was scheduled to be a "spectacular Tang dynasty show and dinner". I was fried and had a headache and couldn’t bear another bustaurant and a billion people (no offense truly, that’s the only way to do this efficiently and affordably for 69 participants but I just couldn’t do it). After originally thinking I was the only one bailing, Bianca and Sue and David and Phoebe and I opted for dinner on our own. We had a five-star dinner at the Shangri-La Hotel with beautiful and amazingly delicious Chinese food. There will be pictures of this too eventually! It was exactly what I needed: calm and relaxed, quiet and slow. And then I bought a jacket in the store that actually is dressy enough for the Ambassador’s Ball. It’s red and silk and has Chinese characters on it. $70. The clincher was when Bianca (a fellow Chico’s shopper) said, you’d pay $125 at Chico’s at home for something like that & this you are getting in CHINA! So, I’ll wear it with a shell and a black Chico’s skirt and I’m set (minus the heels, but I don’t have much hope for them). Also, in an odd conversation, Bianca persuaded me to wear it buttoned. I never where jackets buttoned, I don’t know why … It has the Chinese buttons you think of, long cords across the divide. So now I can officially stop obsessing about Ball attire …

Day 5. I didn’t sleep well overnight and so I bailed on the optional calligraphy lesson and hung out in the room watching CNN. I think I was watching Larry King and Anderson Cooper live -- 12 hours ahead of the East Coast. Kind of odd to realize. Both were about Virginia Tech so I learned a few more of the details and considered myself grateful that I wasn’t hearing these stories 24x7 like I’m sure you are all. I also heard the tape of Alec Baldwin yelling at his kid and realized that I’m not missing CNN all that much. In the 2 ½ hours that I watched the "news", I heard not one thing about Iraq. I joined the group for lunch at a rotating restaurant overlooking that city. Except that it didn’t rotate. We never learned what was up with that. After lunch, we went to the Han Dynasty tombs which is also an active excavation site as well as a museum. They have only opened one tomb there, for an emperor and an empress. Found gold and ceramics of people and animals and pots, etc. They gave us funny plastic bags to wear to cover our shoes and we walked on glass platforms, underneath which was the open tomb. It was incredibly cool! It was a really interesting way to see all the artifacts. Good museum. Dinner and another airport flight to meet up with the ship which had sailed in our absence to Qingdao. Xi’an has 7-8 million people, about the size of New York City, but it’s considered in China to be a "medium developing city". It was the capital of China for over 2000 years and so contains much much history. There is some pretty amazing stuff to see. There was much less English signage here than in Beijing, but the Coke logo and the Pepsi logo and the McDonald’s logo and the Microsoft logo are all immediately identifiable on billboards no matter what script they are written in. Again, crazy globalization and hard to reconcile with the socialist/communist government.

Day 6. We got back to the ship around 11:30 the night before and I had an all day trip planned for day 6 that I thought about bailing on, but I knew if I slept late, I’d never get out. Like the energizer bunny, I just had to keep going going going while I had momentum. We started at a Taoist temple which (despite all the tourists) was omigod beautiful. Built into the side of a mountain overlooking the sea. I want to be a monk in my next life and I want to live here (minus all the tourists of course). Mountains and water all at once. The sound of bamboo crackling all around as the wind (very cool here) moved through the trees.



Then we headed to a Buddhist Temple which was very pretty (I’ve seen a LOT of Buddhist temples by now!) The best part of the tour was at the beginning when the guide explained the history of Buddhism in China. He talked about how Buddhism came to China from India and was active there until the "liberation" in 1949. After the liberation, the government said that the Chinese "couldn’t believe in Buddha anymore, they had to believe in Karl Marx." And so, they believed in Karl Marx for many years … "but now they don’t know what to believe" so many people are coming back to Buddhism. They are coming to the Temple again and laying out their problems before the Buddha. My first question was whether (and how) they laid out their problems before to Karl Marx … hmmm … The whole narrative made me laugh.

Then we went to a Catholic church. The Germans colonized Qingdao interestingly enough and so this was a Gothic cathedral that looked very much like other Gothic cathedrals. The best part was the signage. The tourism focus is clearly not catering to a western (Christian) audience, it caters to Taoists and Buddhists. So the signs don’t tell you about the architectural structure, they tell you about Christianity. I’ll get up photos up eventually, but they say things like:

The Altar and the Lecturn are placed in dominant places in the church because of their important roles in the Eucharist Celebration.

and:

Mary was the Mother of Jesus, the Savior of the world. She was an ordinary Jewish girl engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The angel Gabriel was sent to God to ask her to be the mother of Jesus, the Son of God. She agreed to do God’s will and became pregnant. According to Church tradition, her body and soul went to heaven after her death.

I found it refreshing to be in a place that didn’t presume that everybody was Christian and would know these things.

Dawn and I walked back to the ship with a few life-long-learners and got to see a little bit of Qingdao on my one and only day there. And thus begins the email-checking/blogging/photo-uploading activities …

I didn’t really know what to expect from China. It wasn’t on my top 10 places to visit. But, as with the other Asian countries we’ve traveled to, it totally blew me away. It’s huge and really more populous than it is possible to wrap your brain around. The buildings in Beijing are not only high, but they are wide. They are built (as is Tiananmen Square) on a scale that is just immense. The modern looking buildings are immense. The Forbidden City is immense. The scale of the country is truly hard to comprehend. It takes your breath away.

Despite the enormity, all three cities we saw were so much more internally focused than any of our big cities. There were lots of Chinese tourists but not so many international tourists. There was not the urban feeling that exists in our large cities. The cities feel provincial despite their size. In Qingdao, folks reported that they had a really hard time finding ATMs and that no one accepted credit cards (or those other than Bank of China). Even at the Walmart. There was a Walmart in town but it didn’t take international credit cards. U.S. corporate enterprise in China … but not. Globalization … but not. International tourism … but not. Sharing their history … but not. Sharing only the parts that they want. China seems to want all that they want all at once, but it’s hard to see how they can move into the global economy without becoming part of global history and global politics. Especially with the Olympic spotlight soon to arrive. There is so much more I want to tell you about China, but this post is already much too long. We arrive in Japan in 2 days and I know there won’t be enough time to get it all in.

One of the things this trip has accomplished for me is to give me a sense of other places I need to go in my life. I definitely need to go to Thailand and I need to go to Cambodia and I need to see other parts of China. The Chinese man at the dancing kept inquiring: Beijing, Xi'an, Shanghai? And I kept answering, Beijing, Xi'an. And he would return with: Beijing, Xi'an, Shanghai? .. Shanghai? … This trip has definitely made the Asian countries more accessible in my mind. Bringing the world closer together. Which I guess (hope?) is what happens when you seat yourself well and try to make yourself safe in the world. Much love to all those sharing in the grief at Virginia Tech.