To China, With Love

Journalists like to talk about "time pegs," by which we mean periods during which the general public might suddenly be interested in a particular subject. Anniversaries are good ones, as are seasons, festivals, and big cultural events. Like, oh, the Olympics, for example. I'd like to throw down the gauntlet and solicit stories of, or reflections on, China (or Chinatown, perhaps?) from my fellow M&M writers. Let's all exploit this time peg.

The short woman in the passenger seat of the green minivan kept talking as we narrowly avoided colliding with a VW taxi. The traffic rushing past on the Beijing highway was, oddly, an ideal accompaniment to the barrage that was coming out of her mouth. For the uninitiated (like myself), Mandarin sounds like a four-car-pileup of syllables, rather than a language. Nonplussed by either her verbal onslaught or the motorcycle that had almost taken a chunk out of our bumper, the tall, balding man behind the wheel just grunted, and drove faster. Outside, neon signs advertising everything from canned tuna to digital cameras lit the night sky.

Leon, my British traveling buddy, looked over at me and remarked, "You know, Beijing is the same size as Belgium." A statement which did very little to reduce my sense of panicky awe at the whole situation, even though later research revealed he was wrong: Beijing is smaller and has more residents.

And this was only the ride from the airport to the hotel. This was only the beginning.

Way back in 2005, I told someone that I wanted to stand on the Great Wall of China on my birthday. It was an offhand statement, without much thought behind it save the grand An Affair to Remember romance of the idea. But the idea lodged in my brain and sat there gathering steam for months until I took a week's vacation from my job teaching English in rural Japan and boarded a plane to Beijing with a tourist visa and a three-word Mandarin vocabulary (none of which I could pronounce correctly).

This week, as the world turns its gaze to the Olympic-rings bedecked Middle Kingdom, I find myself thinking often of my own Chinese odyssey three years ago. My time in Japan, I remember, formed a strange, clever little buffer zone between life in the U.S. and travel in Asia. Japan, in many ways, is Diet China. Without my experiences there, things like illiteracy and squalid squat toilets and the wide range of animals available for dinner would have been unimaginably foreign.

But I was ready: I can talk with my hands, I carry my own toilet paper, and Leon, could be counted on to eat anything I found too utterly repulsive. Still, full-calorie original China exceeded my expectations. It raised the "I can deal with anything big-city Asia can dish out" bar to new and dizzying heights. Our attempts at Mandarin resulted in nothing a cabdriver could even recognize as language, the menus offered swallow gizzards and carp heads, and you really don't even want to know about the toilets.

A Chinese proverb says, "The past must depart in order for the future to arrive." But Beijing seems to be balancing between the two, caught up somewhere between pride in its history and the dream of a shiny capitalist future. The man selling Chairman Mao-bedecked watches beneath the huge countdown-to-the-Olympics billboard hung outside the National Art Gallery made that much clear.

Yet only ten minutes' walk away from all that well-swept civic grandeur, an old woman was squatting in the doorway of her dirt-floored house and chatting with a strawberry vendor, who was peddling his pale-red wares up and down the narrow street from a wooden cart that looked as if it had been in daily use long before the Cultural Revolution. It seems that the future is arriving in China, but the past has yet to depart.

Like the good cultural tourists that we are, Leon and I took in the quintessential sights of Beijing: the Summer Palace, an evening of Chinese opera, and Tiennamen Square (largest city square in the world, though of course that's not why anyone remembers it). There was a much-anticipated plate of Peking Duck, and a tour of the Forbidden City with Roger Moore murmuring facts and historical tidbits into our ears—definitely the best audio guide narrator ever.

"Look at this ceiling," 007 instructed me at one point. "Isn't it fabulous?"

"Oh Roger," I gushed. "Tell me Moore."

(Leon groaned, and walked faster.)

What I remember about the city, however, are things that Roger Moore and Lonely Planet don’t mention. There is always a rush of acute observation that accompanies any new place or situation. It's something that fades with time and experience as we begin to know what to expect, and soon only take note when those expectations are challenged. But during those first few days in a new place—and as a traveler, it seems you are always just arriving or just departing—the richness of detail swallows me up. Nowhere is this more true than in China, where there is always something, and usually too much all at once, going on.

Tune in next week for a Great Wall adventure and Part 2 of this column.