From the Rockin’ Republic of the People

A Travelogue

I went to teach in China a few years back. Here are my reflections on the country based on some touring I did with my son.

From the Rockin’ Republic of the People

So, still very cloudy, although the rain has stopped, but also still humid. I was up at 5 again, studying Mandarin (to what avail?) and Alex rose late after watching Torquemeda beat Anne Frank in the World Cup. We went to old Shanghai. Wild. Architecturally very different from the controlled classicism of Imperial Beijing, but quite beautiful and very, very Chinese. The streets are out of control, in a surprisingly controlled way. Imagine a combination of the souk in the Moslem quarter of Jerusalem, with streets almost that narrow, but with constant car and motorcycle and bike traffic that literally doesn’t care if it wipes you out, with downtown Manhattan’s Chinatown (with shops at best at quarter scale), seemingly millions of your best friends wandering around, and a deafening roar, including people accosting you every three minutes to sell “antiques,” and “genuine” fancy watches, all reminiscent of old photos of the Lower East Side when it was ours if we had been Chinese. It’s awesome fun, and a stunning display of humanity.

To escape, we went to one of the finest classical Chinese gardens (and residences) in the country, over two acres, walled off from the hoopla. Absolutely magnificent, middle Qing Dynasty (about 1750), quiet, reflective, and brilliantly done. Twenty years just to do the landscaping. Then to shop. Retail is an unknown concept in Shanghai, even at mall stores (I had to go to a mall upon arrival on Saturday because I needed the shirts I forgot to pack in Beijing, leaving me to look like a Chinese teenager in order to keep the cost down). In a simple negotiation, conducted through smiles, frowns, and calculator, I bought a pink silk dress and slippers for Ba. Started at 400 RMB. I countered at 70. Bought at 100 and overpaid at that! It’s so much fun. If you want something, and they want to sell (and they all do), you will buy it at a price that will make you happy.

Dinner last night — 7 courses (Alex worked hard). Wonderful. Lunch today at an incredible dumpling place in old Shanghai. (Oh, and by the way, you know the restaurants are good because all the customers are Chinese!) Dinner tonight with a classmate of Deng’s (a friend at Beida), who it turns out did a Fulbright 3 years ago with us at GW Law. Small world.

It continues to amaze me that nobody speaks English. On the other hand, if you lived here, why would you care? After all, this is the Middle Kingdom, and they know it.

Tomorrow we have a guide to take us to the ancient silk city of Suzhou (more for my daughter) and the canal town of Zhouzhang. (Did you know China had a grand canal from Shanghai to Beijing)? Then off to the ultimate Chinese craziness of Expo on Wednesday. Alex is lying on the bed watching French cartoons on Chinese tv. Some world.

Exhaustedly, but feeling among my people (honestly, if I were 25 years younger. . . .)

Paddyshack

OK. So. Contemplate leaving a city of 20 million people, with all of the modernity of any city in the world, driving about 30 miles out of town, and seeing barefoot men and women working the rice paddies by hand. Amazing. And, in its own way, quite beautiful (as is the countryside). Suzhou, the city Marco Polo (himself no stranger to canals) called the Venice of the East. And the Grand Canal (from Shanghai to Beijing) was built almost 2,000 years ago and dwarfs the Erie and C&O).

Suzhou itself is a 2,300 year old city, with buildings standing before the west was born, surrounded by a modern city bigger than Philadelphia. Green, magnificent, genius in its fortifications. And, like everything the Chinese do, even the most rudimentary military defenses are done with grace and beauty. The ancient gardens, mostly Ming dynasty (contrasted with the later Qing dynasty gardens of Shanghai), and which are really elaborate residences with multiple outbuildings (no, not that kind), ponds, waterfalls and stone gardens, grottos, plantings, etc., are pure magnificence and built for the serenity one still feels inside their walls. Suzhou also boasts the top silk cultivation, and at the first Chinese silk factory we saw every step of the process, from live silkworms to finished product. Amazing, although the technology is little changed, and I can now easily understand the difference between top quality and lesser silk (as will Dalia, Ba, and Alex, when they sleep in their new silk bedding, and Ba when she puts on the magnificent princess’s dress I bought her). Needless to say, the factory tour ended in a huge sales outlet, but what the heck, you see the quality as its being made, and the prices, while not cheap, are waaaay less than home. We did refrain from buying the pillows filled with silkworm dung that are said to be good for your health.

So then, after the first bad Chinese food I’ve had in China (what do you expect from a tourist restaurant?), we drove to Zhouzhang, one of the famous “water cities”of China, through farms, lakes, and paddies. Beautiful villas beside humble farms, some with nothing more than a rice paddy as a modest back yard. Zhouzhang, also an ancient city and even more Venetian than Suzhou, is magnificent too, although since the “rediscovery” of the city 30 years ago it is, like Venice, lined with shops trying to take your money. (Think of the Rialto and extrapolate it to a town.) Yes, of course we gave them some. After all, they’re entitled to make a living, and they sell nice stuff (alongside the drek. I hope Dalia likes the black freshwater pearls from the adjacent lake). Anyway, it was great. I’ll email some photos after we finish downloading the almost 400 Alex has already taken, many of which are very good (including his photographs of almost every dish of food he’s eaten)! And yes, I know there’s a lot of trayf, but the food is irresistibly wonderful, as is the tea. And the Mao Tai — I don’t know what the proof is but I can’t count that high.

It was nice to be in the countryside after the constant din of Chinese cities, and good preparation for what I expect to be the complete madness of Expo tomorrow. And tonight to a good Cantonese place to cleanse the palate from lunch (and Pop, I hate to disappoint you, but they listen to the government. I’ve literally seen no spitting in the streets since I arrived in the country, although three years ago you could slide down the street on it. Yes, gross, but I lack the elegance of the Chinese). I shall now join Alex in laughing at over-the-top Chinese tv.

The Dao of Expo

Fact: Attendance yesterday was about 500K. I have no reason to believe it was less today. That means the entire population of DC or San Francisco waiting to enter pavilions with exhibition space of no more than about 2 square miles, if that. And remember, it’s the rainy season. Cloudy all day, with occasional heavy showers. Nobody cared, not even if they poked your eye out with their umbrella.

Also, for the few of you, who, like me, remember the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the Belgian Pavilion continues to sell Belgian waffles. We didn’t get them, although I think Alex was a bit disappointed.

Now, here’s how it’s done:

You arrive before the 9 am opening time (of course with advance purchase tickets), and find yourself on a line that will take about 45 minutes to get through. Not terrible — because there are like a hundred stalls at each entry gate! By the time you enter and find a pavilion you like (ok, maybe for the most indecisive traveling pair in the world, it takes more time than for most), the wait to get in is an hour or two, although not a single sign gives you an approximate waiting time — you just figure it out. By the time Alex decided on Japan and we saw the line, we realized we would be in Tokyo far faster than we would be in the pavilion. So you choose a pavilion you expect to be less popular with the Chinese, say, for example, the Israeli Pavilion (which you also go to out of loyalty in the expectation that in the current world political environment, nobody else will go). You’re mistaken. You wait precisely (because you time it while checking your email because what else can you do?), 70 minutes. At the entrance, you exchange pleasantries in pidgin Hebrew with the attendants who are very nice. You are told by the young Sabra who looks like Alex (curly hair, beard, etc.): “What kind of a Jew are you for waiting? There’s a VIP entrance for Jews and Israelis.” Oy! I know my grandmothers, o’laim shalom, would have figured this out, or at least had the sechel to ask. You then sit and see a 10 minute movie about the brilliance of Israeli scientists and their contributions to the world, pitched perfectly to the Chinese as “we’re smart, you’re smart, we are the world.” Then you leave. Baruch Ha’Shem.

Now that that’s over, you find a shorter line at the much more elaborate (and quite impressive) Indonesian Pavilion. You pass quickly through the line. If you know what you’re doing, the moment you enter, you turn on your video camera and proceed at a quick pace throughout the entire pavilion without lowering it from your eyes. (The entrance sign says it’s a 45 minute viewing but seems to take 15 minutes.) If you lack a video camera, you simply raise your digital camera as high as you can, snapping photos at an alarming speed as you proceed through the pavilion and threatening the uninitiated with epileptic seizures thanks to the strobe-like reflections of flashbulbs off glass-covered cases, dulled only by the handprints that cover most of them. You obviously don’t stop to read a thing about the exhibits: who has the time? You also don’t hesitate to push people out of your way, whether you are 9 or 90 (more on that later). Towards the end, the line splits in two, and you go on the longer, far more congested, line, so you can get your Expo “passport” stamped which, after all, seems to be the sole purpose of waiting on line for two hours in the first place. Don’t worry — we didn’t even know what an Expo passport was when we entered, so we took the short line in time to get Alex his meat on a stick.

Most of the pavilions, at least the ones you’re willing to wait for, are architecturally stimulating on the outside, and incomprehensible on the inside. (The Spanish Pavilion starts with a silly five minute movie including a really attractive live dancer who gives you two minutes of a modern interpretation of Flamenco and concludes, with nothing in-between, with a gigantic — I mean GIGANTIC — very creepy, robotic baby wearing the Spanish soccer scarf and smiling at you while blinking its eyes. Perhaps it was a vague reference to Spanish surrealism, but Chien Andalou was really less disturbing. Alex will send pictures on request. What was it about, after two hours? Who knows? Maybe the Chinese — -they seemed to have loved it. But, then again, they applauded for the Israeli movie.)

Nobody tells you in advance that you need reservations to get into the Chinese, Macao, and Hong Kong Pavilions. So you don’t.

A word on waiting. Forget the niceties of Western behavior. By the time you’ve waited to enter a single pavilion, you’ll be qualified to be an NFL linebacker. The Chinese have no problem pushing you out of their way — I mean really pushing you — cutting you on line, putting you off balance, and otherwise violating all of the norms of western accepted behavior. But you can’t really blame them. In a concentration of people of that proportion in that small a space, it’s survival of the fittest. They’re not the least bit rude about it, and they don’t get offended if you reciprocate. (Trust me, after a while, I did.) It’s just a matter of survival, everybody gets it, and the patience the Chinese display on line would defy even the most saintly of westerners (my beloved father wouldn’t last five minutes). You’d all be proud of me, as I think Alex will agree, that I did not lose even the slightest patience for a moment. In fact I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience, although I was exhausted after about 7 hours.

It fascinates me (although probably purely from ignorance), that during the entire day, we saw no more than 20 westerners — by which I mean 20 non-Chinese, other than the workers at the non-Chinese pavilions. And they were the only people who had any English. So at the same time that the world was here in Shanghai, it seems so much more important to the Chinese, most of whom one thinks never have left the country, to see what the world has to offer or at least to represent as offering, and they seem quite appreciative at that. Indeed the world cares too, since most of the pavilions focused on how the Chinese benefit from the offerings of each country.

I, of course, could care less about the pavilions and exhibits (although Alex who, for obvious reasons, missed the great ‘64 Fair, did), but went for the cultural experience. I wasn’t disappointed. I love the Chinese (much as I wish I could be tackled a bit less by 9 and 90 year olds), and their unbelievable desire to know about the rest of the world of which they now are an integral part.

We’re both exhausted. I think we may go back tomorrow.

Finding my Inner Mao

Today’s episode will be a bit shorter, perhaps, because it was for us a quieter day. (O.K., the Battle of Stalingrad was a quieter day than yesterday). Or it may be longer, because the day’s events made me more reflective.

I spent a good part of the afternoon trying to find an adjective adequate to describe my emotions upon standing at a small table in a small room opposite the place where, on July 23, 1921, Mao, surrounded by 12 other delegates, stood and announced the creation of the Chinese Communist Party. I think I’ve settled upon awesome, in its literal, non-normative sense. I certainly know that I went back to the room and stood there more than once.

Yes, I know that there are many places in which history was made. But so few by one person, or such a small number of people. I agree with Tolstoy, for example, that battles are won by soldiers (and accident), not by generals. And there are of course places of treaty-making, constitution signing, assassinations, and the like. But rarely does one find a single physical place where, in light of the contemporaneous smallness of the event combined with the magnitude of its world-altering consequences, one can feel the tectonic shift of history beneath one’s feet. Salisbury Plain maybe? Independence Hall? But both of these were obvious in their magnitude at the time, even if ultimate success was uncertain. Marx’s study? Perhaps. In any event, while not unique in its power, powerful it was.

It was also interesting to see the manner in which the state presents the history of 20th century revolution in China and, in particular, its effects on Shanghai. Not the least bit doctrinaire. Indeed, missing entirely was the caricatured language of communist double-speak or the muscular phrases spurring on the proletariat with which one is so familiar. Measured, well-curated, interesting and, really, quite objective. That, in itself, is fascinating to a Westerner accustomed to reading the talk of communist leaders and their critics as translated and quoted in American newspapers and magazines. Indeed, it helped me understand that, while things had gone terribly wrong here for a while, and hardly have been put to right, Sun Yat Sen, followed by Chiang and Mao, liberated China from over two millenia of foreign domination, only to dominate the people in other ways. It also shows, in really quite non-normative language, how badly the Western powers mucked things up here in the late 19th century. (I know that’s hardly unique to China.) So, to put it mildly, I was impressed.

On the other hand, neither does one find talk of the peoples’ millenia of oppression in the Forbidden City where, the picture of Mao over Tian’anmen nothwithstanding, the most impressive palace and most tangible expression of overwhelming power I have ever seen (perhaps with the exception of St. Peter’s) is treated by the state as a celebration of the beauty and elegance of traditional Chinese culture and history (especially if you avoid the little disturbing exhibit about the eunuchs). It all is so terribly normal that one can easily lose sight of where one is politically in the world. And of course people are people everywhere, and the infectious charm of the Chinese helps to obliterate any remaining feeling that things might be different.

I am sure I am hardly the first person to note these ironies, but the building in which the first Party meeting took place sits along a beautiful, leafy lane in the former French Concession, surrounded by low buildings (like it) of simple, geometric, but nonetheless elegant architecture, constructed in typical gray Chinese brick, only three blocks’ walk from the Aston -Martin dealership. Across the street is the elegant Shanghai Tang, and since you all know how much I love clothes, you’ll also appreciate my restraint in refraining from buying some of the magnificent modern interpretations of Chinese clothing I know I’d never wear at home. (Actually, I will.)

In any event, after the hoopla of Expo yesterday, we found peace and greenery in Shanghai, in a clearly wealthy neighborhood of elegant shops, perfectly manicured parks, lovely restaurants, and well-dressed professionals, punctuated by new, but stylishly retro-modern high rises built (and sold) at clearly great expense. While the look was not the same, it felt to me like a combination of the blocks along lower Fifth Avenue approaching Washington Square, Gramercy Park, a little bit of St. Germain, and maybe a touch of the Via Veneto thrown in for good measure. Yes, a true worker’s paradise, if the workers could afford to live here. Instead, the workers live just a few blocks away, over the stalls populated with live fish and chickens, small hot restaurants with stoves outside and a few tables within, and the stench of frying stinky dofu (don’t even ask) pervading everything over the narrow streets with laundry hanging everywhere, and men and women in pajamas sitting on plastic stools sorting crayfish or opening oysters or gutting something or other and tossing the offal into the streets.

But that is a few blocks and a lovely park away. Nothing to disturb the memories of the liberators of the proletariat as the wealthy young Shanghainese eat, drink, and be merry.

Alex may want to go to Expo again tomorrow. Pray for me.

Of White Monkeys and What One Child Policy?

Today really will be brief. Although it’s been rainy and cloudy all week, today was the worst we’ve had in Shanghai. So what do you do when it’s raining — I mean really, almost tropically, pouring? Something indoors, preferably (although not entirely, as noted below). We’ve already seen the best museums here, and Expo hardly is an indoor experience so, why not the Shanghai Ocean Life Aquarium, just a fifteen minute walk from the hotel, set along the bank of the Huangpo and rated, according to the guidebooks, as one of the best in the world.

Yes . . . well. What do millions of Chinese tourists, not to mention Shanghainese parents going out of their minds during the rainy season, elect to do on a really bad day? What do day camps do when outdoors is not an option? Yup. The Shanghai Ocean Life Aquarium. Hours later, I haven’t quite gotten my hearing back, and still am shaking a bit, but l loved it. Alex was a bit crankier, although for the most part handled it well. And the guidebooks were right, at least as far as my aquarium experiences go — truly first rate.

Based on the groupings of children and adults we saw, it does not appear that the one child policy is very seriously enforced anymore. In fact, the number of children (compared with adults) would lead you to think that the Chinese had been converted by the Chasidim! It was bedlam. Not the controlled bedlam of Expo, but pure, unadulterated bedlam. And let me assure you that Chinese children are at least every bit as spoiled and undisciplined as Jewish kids, or at least my Jewish kids. But how could you avoid smiling? The kids evidently were having so much fun. Particularly cute was the camp group with their orange sunvisors and shirts that numbered well into the tens. The only problem with them was their counselor who insisted upon blowing her whistle in three note phrases every two of three minutes, piercing the ears already thankfully numbed by the high-pitched din of little voices. This, again unlike Expo, in an indoor space. And, even better, the aquarium features a 500 foot long underwater tunnel (which is really cool but completely unavoidable because it’s the only way to the exit), with a diameter of no more than ten feet. Behavior was not changed to accommodate the space.

Prior to entering the tunnel, I stopped to rest on an elevated section of floor designed to resemble rock. Sorry for me, I didn’t notice the fake tree rising out of it, nor the model of a monkey perched above my head. Hesitantly, at first, a tiny girl of no more than eight years stopped with the ubiquitous camera, shyly aimed, and shot. I smiled. Then several more. Then a pair of slightly older girls noticed Alex sitting in a simian-free corner (simian free, that is, except for Alex). They each took a picture of him. Then each took a picture of the other standing with Alex. They repeated the process with me. By the time they had finished, an alarmingly large group of camera-armed young children began surrounding us and snapping, in some cases egged on by their parents. It makes a guy a bit self-conscious, at least if that guy isn’t Brad Pitt, ‘cause you know you’re neither famous nor good-looking. You are, however, the white monkey. And it is entirely plausible given our experiences in the cities that, especially, the tourist children from the hinterlands had never seen one in the flesh. Especially one like the long curly-haired one. The only way we could end their detour to the zoo was by smiling, nodding, and gently edging our way toward the next exhibit. As we did so, a young girl smiled at me and I told her, in Mandarin, that I could not speak the language. She smiled broadly and, in an innocently patronizing way (and in perfect English) said, “very good!” I laughed.

Like any other capitalist attraction of its type, one exits through the gift shop. I looked for something for Ba, but the stuff was even too drecky for her tastes. So we got out, sat while Alex had ice cream, and figured out what to do next. We had planned a cruise on the Huangpo, so we wandered down to the docks. By the time we arrived, we weren’t thoroughly soaked, but we were respectably wet. After contemplating an hour on a rainy river in what undoubtedly would be a smelly cabin with gold-tinted windows so that Alex might get a decent picture of the Bund, we punted on that one. Instead, he inveigled me into a walk along the lovely park that abuts the river. Half an hour later, by the time he got his photos, I was drenched and my shoes were thoroughly sogged. A quick cab ride back, a nice trip down to the steam room, and that’s it for today. That, except for a scotch and another wonderful Shanghainese feast.

Back to Beijing early tomorrow, with the Great Wall planned for Sunday. More on that after the event. You’ll likely be grateful to know that these missives will likely start to fall off, as I start teaching Monday.

Mind Games

Today was a remarkably quiet day, due largely to our exhaustion. We stayed out a bit late last night, dining at a truly fantastic, colonial Shanghai-style restaurant on the Bund (who knew Mapo Dofu could be transforming?), overlooking the lights of Pudong which can only be described as “Wall Street Goes Vegas.” Then an after-dinner walk so that Alex could take pictures of this garish and beautiful scene, made even more sparkling by the soaked streets and bobbling river from the recently-ended deluge. But we had a very early flight to Beijing, came back to the apartment, and Alex (who regrettably is getting sick) lay down while I braved a Chinese supermarket to stock up on things for him. We had lunch in a little Bao house (take that, Gropius!), where there was simply no English — not on the menus, not in the room — and no pictures. No English — ok. No pictures — ok. No English and no pictures? Yikes! So we underlined random Chinese phrases on the menu and did fine, although I really don’t want to know what those things in aspic were. We then proceeded up a few blocks to hang among the small shops (and big mall) with the students from Tsinghua University across the street and Beida, down the road. I returned home, concluding that the state of studenthood was universal to all who pass through it, and that I was glad to be out of it.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the university. As soon as we had gotten into the cab and began driving the now-familiar tree-lined freeway from the airport into town, I felt at home. Not just like I had come home. But at home, in the same way a peaceful feeling just slides down you when you walk into the door after a long time away. And it didn’t diminish, not even after we had entered the apartment we had occupied for all of 2 days and dropped our suitcases on the floor.

Now, in the first place, I have no right to feel this way. Half of my nuclear family (really 60% in an important sense) remains in Washington, and I miss them very much. Second, I have only been in Beijing twice in my life, the first time for ten days almost three years ago, and the second for the two days Alex and I were being feted before leaving for Shanghai. Who has the right to call that home? But that is precisely what it was.

I don’t know how to explain it. Is it just the visceral distinction between the familiar and the unfamiliar? That can’t really be it, or at least all of it, because by the end of a week, we were pretty familiar with Shanghai and comfortable getting around. Was it the simple fact of returning from a hotel to an apartment in Beijing, where I could finally ditch my Chinese-teenager shirts for the welcome ones I left back here a week ago? That hardly seems plausible, either. (I kind of liked the new look!) And while it is true that our first two nights in Beijing were something of a homecoming, with hugs from old friends and eager greetings from new ones, it was hardly like walking into a reunion with the best friends of your youth (and increasing age).

I’m not sure of the answer, but here’s a try that I know I will rethink. It goes something like this. When one is so far away from one’s comfort zone, from the back-of-your hand type places, from the people you love, from the language you speak, from the mere subconscious sensation of the physical environment that is yours, one grasps at anything even remotely familiar with the same sense of rightness, of possession, of peace, that one feels in the most familiar places. I feel it walking down 21st St in Washington, I feel it on random streetcorners in the West Village or the Upper West Side, I feel it driving onto Route 2 in Williamstown, I even feel it walking across the University Yard. And today I feel it in Beijing.

Is it real or simply a mind game? Honestly, I don’t know. It would be far simpler to figure out were it intellectual rather than visceral. But the strange thing is that, while I’ve traveled plenty before, and been back to many of the same places, I’ve never quite had this feeling. Familiarity, yes. Happiness at being back, yes. But home? Never. Not even in Israel where I felt at home, but in a very different way that triggered very different and much more turbulent emotions. Peace? Nope.

Ah, but wait for tomorrow. After the perils of climbing the Great Wall and the madness of the crowds (oh and another banquet tomorrow night), I’ll be screaming to come home.

Hao Han

There is an ancient saying, that he who has not climbed the Great Wall cannot be a real man (hap han). That saying has modernly been re-interpreted (one suspects since 1949), as one who has not climbed the Great Wall cannot be a hero. Those of you who are fluent in Mandarin will have noted that the term hap han, translated as real man, is interesting, because the Mandarin word for man is nan ren, and for adult people more generally, ren. Han is the word for the Han race. So in both of its iterations, it reflects the interesting ethnocentricity of the Chinese.

Today we climbed the Great Wall. Our charming guides, who (as is common in my experience with the hospitality of Chinese academics) were not nan ren, but were decidedly han, became hap han. Alex and I became hao (good) white monkeys.

Had the Mongols seen the parking lot at Badaling on a brilliant Sunday noon during the school vacation season, there would have been no reason to build a great wall. They would have fled back to their yurts, wherever they had last left them, and considered themselves to be the better for it. They lacked that opportunity, resulting in what really has to be, hype notwithstanding, one of the truly great structures created by mankind. Hence the two mile walk to the entrance, leaving our driver to fend for himself to find someplace to park for a few hours between the lines of people shouting at him to eat in their “famous” (and expensive) restaurants. Entrepreneurs in Chinese tourist sites could have taught P.T. Barnum a thing or two.

Now I have talked about crowds, and the patience of the Chinese, so I won’t belabor that too much (well, a bit, because it is informative both of the national character and the culture). Just accept that you’ve never seen a crowd like that (unless you’ve been to Expo).

The amazing thing was that the crowd had gathered under a sun shooting out 40 degree celsius heat (for those of you who don’t want to bother with the conversion, that’s damn hot). And it is especially hot when you are walking on the wall with, minimally, tens of thousands of your best friends with no shade except the occasional (blissfully cool and breezy) guard tower, and the thousands of umbrellas Chinese women carry in an unfortunate racially misguided attempt to keep their skin as white as possible (pace Michael Jackson). Indeed, when one is attempting to climb up or down near-vertical stairs, or doing one’s best to avoid a bottom slide down a tenth of a mile smooth stone downgrade at about 30 degrees, those umbrellas are downright lethal weapons. Dark skin is beautiful. And if they don’t like it, here’s a huge opportunity for an American sunscreen company. Save your skin and other people’s eyes — it’s got Madison Avenue written all over it.

The area around Badaling is mountainous and beautiful. Not just mountainous, but the sharp-peaked, steep angled, distinct and separate mountainous of Chinese classical painting. It would be stupid for me to muse on what it took to build the wall that follows that terrain at about a 40 foot height (at least), or how they possibly did it, so I won’t. Some things are best left to imagination rather than analysis, and so I choose to leave the wall.

But it is stunning. No more than 12 feet across at the top (that’s about 4 meters to you and me), it literally goes up and down mountains, snaking along with the terrain for as far as the eye can see, sometimes curving gently, sometimes making hairpin turns like the one that leads down from Route 2 into North Adams into Williamstown (which I remember taking once en route back from Mt. Holyoke of a winter’s early morning in neutral, with no gas, and with too much beer — God protects idiots, orphans, and college students). There are rarely any flat stretches. Sometimes the angle is 20 degrees, sometimes it’s close to 80 degrees (judging by eye), and the allocation appears to be random between stairs of different height risers and smooth stone passages. What I do know is that there is no point at which the view is other than breathtaking (other, that is, once you get past the huge “One World, One People” sign left over from the 2008 Olympics that Dalia and I had the pleasure of seeing in 2007.)

As I said, don’t even try to think of how it was built. Just don’t — your imagination isn’t that good. But do note that, on this unbelievably hot and sunny day, up to at least a point (beyond which we proceeded), Chinese tourists, either desiring to become hou han or at a minimum proud of their national heritage, walked cheek to jowl up and down, and down and up. Young and younger. Old and older. Seriously, children as young as about 5 (and more than a few, not to mention the babies who were carried), and men and women well into their dotage, kept up on a topography that left me, after the last long up-stairs, with my lungs hanging out of my mouth. Hard to imagine the tourists chomping down corn-dogs on the DC Mall in the same season even contemplating the walk to the entrance, rather than a work-out that left my young, strong, but asthmatic son about ready to call it quits (and periodically scolding me that I was exhausting our comely young guides). National pride in a Chinese way — risk your life to see your national treasures. Pretty cool.

Now back to the white monkeys. Alex was the star this time, being chosen for a photo shoot, one by one, with a group of Chinese young men hanging around on a flat stretch. (Face it — he does bear a resemblance to Charlton Heston in The Planet of the Apes.) But I was the linguistic star. For some time, we walked beside (or among) a group of 10-12 year old Chinese schoolboys out on a frolic. At one point, a young man mustered the courage to say to me: “Hi, how are you?” His friends stopped, stunned by the idea that he would take such a risk. I responded (I’m proud to say) in fluent Mandarin: “You speak English very well.” The boys stopped again, in what appeared to be nothing less than shock. But this young hou han was not to be outdone. For he replied in Mandarin, without hesitation: “You must have worked very hard to be able to say that so well.”

The word for old man in Mandarin is lao ren. This lao ren, while laughing, thought the best solution for him would be to creep back into his monkey cage. And so I shall.

Tomorrow I start teaching. Help me.