I won’t have any excuses for man’s ignorance of China; however, I lived there with my American wife from 2006 — 2009 (people always ask if your wife is Asian if you live there for any amount of time for work, or if your Mandarin is “okay” from studying at a Chinese university, in China, for a semester).

But I will say that it is difficult to memorize all of the Chinese Dynasties, and that I don’t believe very much of what I read about China IN China, since there’s only Xinhua, the one government approved news organization.

I’ve also had the great good fortune to have a good friend in Taiwan, who disagrees with most anything China writes about China. And I visited Taiwan’s National Museum, which contains everything Chang Kai Shek’s Nationalists could carry out of China’s Forbidden City after losing China to Chairman Mao’s Communists, in 1949.

I ask my Taiwanese friend, but you have Democratic elections here in Taiwan, right? Right, she says. But aren’t you part of China? (China certainly says so, and militarily controls international waters around Taiwan & Hong Kong). She said, we say, no, not part of China and of course we elect our leaders by voting. But we cannot say these things loudly, only whisper. Because China will crush this little island? Yes! She answered, they are too big, we are very small.

Her opinion of everything you’ve read about mainland China differs from what foreigners are taught on mainland China, which differs from what the Chinese are taught there, and what people who speak the fifty non-Mandarin languages may teach in their schools (there is no way to know that without going and spending several years in such a village). So, yes, I do believe all Westerners should memorize an official chart about the Dynasties such as this one:

And then I believe everyone should read River Town, by Peter Hessler, then Wild Swans, by Jung Chang, and then the long, Mao, The Unknown Story, by that same Chang and her American husband, Jon Halliday. One more MUST-read: Factory Girls, by a different author named Chang: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0385520182/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1470926199&sr=8–3&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=book%2C+Factory+Girls&dpPl=1&dpID=5151DEwpWhL&ref=plSrch

Those are FASCINATING, fabulous books. If you took them in reverse, you’d be hooked reading a Factory Girls, From Village to City in a Changing China, written in the 2010s, just a few years ago. But if you went and started at the other end of my list with Wild Swans, which is semi-autobiographical, about Jung Chang and her mother and grandmother, you would also be hooked like a river carp, too.

I also visited The Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Great Wall (10 times — all our visitors had to go there!), and my sentimental favorite, the Shanghai Art Museum.

We lived in Hangzhou, which used to be the capital city, during the Southern Song Dynasty, from around 1100–1200, C.E. It is not well known in the USA, but it is like Disneyland to the Chinese people; its on the back of their one dollar bill…three little pagodas…okay I have to stop here, I’m going crazy if I tell you this. The three little pagodas in West Lake (in Hangzhou, ps everyone in China, if you say Hanzhou, they automatically answer, West Lake, or “Xi Hu”. The pagodas on the lake & on the Bach of the one dollar bill are called, san tan yin yue, or Three Pools Mirroring the Moon, because, as is written in English on the island there in West Lake, reached only by boat, amid thousands of blooming lotus flowers, the moon strikes the lake, and the combination of the moon’s light, and its reflection in the water, and candlelight from the small pagodas creates the beautiful scene known as Three Pools Mirroring the Moon.

You can never know China. They won’t tell us about it. All my Chinese friends talk about anything with me, about The Cultural Revolution when millions died of starvation in the 1960s, because Mao made them all smelt raw iron in their gardens instead of grow food. There’s no WWII, in China! Did you know that? No, it is only known by one name, and there is a fabulously gory memorial museum you may visit in Nanjing about it (I did). What we call World War II, and I’m pretty sure this name is agreed upon by all nations on earth, isn’t it? In China it’s called The War Against Japanese Aggression.

On my final night in Hangzhou as we were moving back home to the United States after our three year assignment ended, I ran all the way from my hotel, past an edge of West Lake, at ten pm, and up a circuitous pathway with cobblestones, and sets of stone stairways to Baochu Pagoda, and I took a selfy. We didn’t take selfies with phones, in China, in 2009. I set the timer on my camera. My shirt was soaking wet (it’s tropical, your clothes get wet from sweat hot, in the summer there). And I cried.

We had climbed and hiked all the trails around Baochu. My daughter and I wrote haiku about Baochu, and made each other laugh. It had taken my mother, and on separate trip’s my wife’s mother, and her father, and other visitors a long time to climb the stairs and hike the pathways up around Baochu, but my aging mother loved it so much, she wanted to do it again. It’s like Disneyland up there, except made from the earth and the rocks! There are places, trails where I took my daughter & her boyfriend, they were in their twenties, where I couldn’t take my mother, too dangerous, just steep places with tiny steps hewn from the rock face, where my daughter felt afraid. Note: if your Chinese friends at work ask you if you want to go on a walk, or a scenic hike, on Saturday, you will be doing things like…walking for eight hours, up and down a mountain, over hanging bridges, and on steps set on pitons hammered into rock. But every time I grocery shopped for three years, we walked. We didn’t buy cases of Diet Coke! We had to carry that shit home! So I really was used to hiking the good hike.

I miss China so badly, but it is a very complicated set of feelings. They make fake stuff so well that every power tool my wife’s company made came out the same day with a Chinese name — I’m at the point, the Xi’an Terra Cotta Warriors archeological dig…? I visited that, of course, and the magnificent biggest dam on earth, Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. I doubt the authenticity of the Xi’an site.

It could be real. But, I also know they could build another one that looked just exactly like it down to the minutest detail, anywhere in China, in a week. PS. Be careful — Peter Hessler wrote River Town in 1997. He never made it home; he lives in Beijing now. Once you speak a little Chinese, and are practicing, learning how to read & write 3,000 really fascinating set of Chinese characters that are necessary in order to read the Xinhua newspaper, once you get that glimpse into this ultimately inscrutable country, you may not make it home. If your company offers you a multi year contract there, you will be given “cultural training”, before moving, to decrease the Culture Shock. But they don’t give you any fucking Going Home training! Around 2012, my wife said, we’ve been back in the U.S. Three years, as long as we were there — do you think we’re really back now?

I guess so. But the person who returns is never the same as the one who left.