The Middle Kingdom at Middle Distance

My old friend Leon and I had come to Beijing on a pilgrimage: I was determined to stand on the Great Wall on my birthday. But while exploring this caught- between- past- and- future country, I found myself caught between other extremes. My own divide was between distance and detail, a problem of perspective that assaults me in any new place.

If I looked too closely, the sheer number of faces and smells and textures and motions and details, each worth exploring more fully, was overwhelming. My brain started to fizzle, watching a stream of people on bicycles passing and wondering about each one's family and ambitions and destination and history.

But if I mentally backed up too far, the thickness of all those layers of meaning made it hard to see individual humanity clearly. The people on bicycles became merely obstacles to dodge while attempting to cross the street, all the while wondering how many well-meaning tourists had met their demise that way.

I did make it to the Great Wall as promised. Two days early, in fact. After all that talk and thought, it was a bit strange to be there at last. We hear so much about the Great Wall of China—that famous thing about being able to see it from space, and the tales of its construction and defense all those centuries ago. (The part we visited was so impossibly steep that I couldn't help but wonder how many unfortunate Chinese soldiers had broken their legs or backs running around on it in the dark.) With the weight of all these stories surrounding it, the actual physical fact of the wall is a hard thing to get your mind around. From far off, the long pale line of it snaking over those dry, empty hills seemed too delicate a thing to have withstood all those years and all that history weighing down. Up close, it was merely stone and angles, strong and pedantic and weathered.

The importance of the place seemed to live in the middle distance, somewhere between its legend and the swarms of sneaker-clad tourists scrambling along it on that particular dusty, windy afternoon. For me, standing there was an acknowledgment of a dream realized, and one more entry for my list of traveler's bragging-rights. But it was also a symbolic place, where the lesson that China taught me was made suddenly clear.

Finding that observational middle distance is always a challenge for a traveler, and never more so than in the Middle Kingdom. Attempts at objectivity fail, and rightly so. All we can really do is compare the place we're discovering to the places we know, and discover something about both of them in the process. Carrying home the space between, that elusive middle distance, is as a good reason to go traveling as any I know.

I stood still for a long moment with those famous stones under my feet, watching a small dark-eyed girl and her brother playing tag between the lookout towers and feeling the wind move through my hair. Then Leon said, "Let's go get some dumplings." So we turned, and started the long climb back down.