The China Travels of Richard Mueller (3)

The following is the China trip diary as written by Zoonauts author Richard Mueller

The China Travels: SEVEN
“Shanghai Surprise”
Tian Hang Hotel, HuangZhou … October 15 2003

We wanted to take the MagLev Supertrain from the airport back to Shanghai, a journey of 70 minutes by car. A ride on the MagLev costs about $8.75 and makes the run in 8 minutes, but it only runs on weekends, so we rode back in a taxi and watched the MagLev speed by, empty. Maybe they were testing it. Or just being perverse.

The Shanghai Flea Market is something else, row on row of tiny shops selling everything from Mao wristwatches that wave to fine silk goods. I guess we bought a little of each. Kim and David matched the bargaining skills of China vs. those of New York and we all did quite well. I spent most of my time people-watching. There were a lot of foreigners there shopping in the market and I heard English, Japanese, Russian, Spanish and German spoken, as well as the local version of the trade-tongue: "Hey, Mister, you buy scarf? (shirt, dress, jeans, etc.)," "Hey, Horrywoo, you look, yes," and the ever present phrase heard 40 times a minute in the crowd, "You want watch? DVD? DVD?" It was a good place to spend a small amount of cash to buy a good deal. We broke to eat lunch at Pizza Italia, and then plunged back into the fray. By dusk we were returning to Pu Dong Airport—more empty MagLev trains going by—to meet the illusive Sheldon, who finally arrived at 2145, five days late but here at last. Now we were to drive to HuangZhou.

If you’ve never flown through German flak in a B-17, you can get the feel for the experience by riding on a Chinese provincial highway at night. When they put in a bridge, link two strips of asphalt or patch a hole, they don’t smooth it down. It’s all random bumps. How any vehicle survives this buffeting is a mystery to me. I almost didn’t. We arrived in HuangZhou at midnight and immediately found that the 2 star hotel we were booked into (complete with roaring Kara-0K bar) was full. This turned out to be a good thing as we had to reroute to the Tian Hang Hotel (4 stars—**** —hot water and rickety computer) where I would be able to get my first hot shower in two days and a chance to reconnect via email with my loved ones back home. I slept well that night. Little did I realize but we had crested a hump in our journey.

The China Travels: Eight
“West Lake”
Tian Hang Hotel, HuangZhou … October 15 2003

In the morning we had a pretty good Chinese breakfast, I guess (Sorry, I’m still a bacon and eggs kinda guy) and embarked upon another of those days where you see a lot but get no rest or relaxation. At least I don’t and I know why. I’m a writer. I work alone, go to see friends for as long as I like, go among crowds for, at most, 5 hours at the open mic shows I run, and generally self-regulate my time. One of the longest stretches I’ve been with one person for some time was with an ex-girlfriend last year: 28 hours, and that included doing laundry together, but it was very nice. This is a group.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Kim is lovely and Sheldon—archaeologist, publisher, entrepreneur—is as much fun as Kim said he would be. Even David is entertaining in his New York sort of way. We’re here to sell a book I wrote to the Chinese, which we may have done today, but there is much to do and much to say and—not speaking Chinese—I’ve become sort of a smiling and nodding figurehead. Plus, with a schedule like this what little writing I get to do is generally confined to these screeds.

But my hosts are undoubtedly kind, fair and generous and our meeting with the Zhenjiang Juvenile and Children’s Publishing House went very well indeed (with the possible of comments about bringing me back to China—while the next place I want to visit is Alaska or Ireland or any other place they ‘speeka da inglis good.’ New Zealand, the Falkland Islands, I don’t care, but I need to talk to people.) Then the President of the above-mentioned publishing house, Mr. Chen Chunyue, took us to see HuangZhou’s premier attraction, and is it a wow!

West Lake is a thousand-year-old man-made lake with history, tradition, myth, legend and beauty in abundance, but the best thing is that the people and government of HuangZhou have kept it that way. Restricting cars and modern buildings, the lake is a clean and verdant showplace. Causeways, some with ancient bridges, cross the water; delicate walkways meander among slim, straight pines, and airy pagodas, some original and some copies, rise above the surrounding hills. Any new buildings must be scrupulous copies of these antiquities. It’s a park with a minimum of tacky modernities and junk. And it’s open to the public and free.

I couldn’t live in this land of strange language forms, but this would be worth coming back to see.

The China Travels: Nine
“An Attack of Historicity”
Tian Hang Hotel, HuangZhou … October 16 2003

Another Chinese breakfast and now an interminable wait for two meetings while I could be going to the post office or sending email or just covering some ground. I read, I write, I look at TV with the sound off. The big news is that a Chinese astronaut, their first, is circling the Earth, but down here no one seems all that concerned. I guess that after enduring the Mongols, the Foreign Devils, the Japanese and Mao, this is no big thing. I can already hear the souvenirs being made.

David drops by, certain that I have the shirt he bought. I check. No, it’s mine. Then we pack and we’re off to the Silk Road Market for more shopping.

This is a much more leisurely shopping experience than the Shanghai Flea Market and it’s all silk and cotton, blocks of small stalls, well-appointed, low pressure with overhanging trees and the usual traffic—slower, sparser, but still tricky. Kim and Sheldon but hundreds of dollars worth of silk for their Shangri-La Gifts shop in Ithaca, NY, and I buy gifts, planning to throw away my dirty underwear if it becomes a matter of fitting them in. It is a great joy to but things for my friends and at these prices I can hardly exist, as cheap as I am. A Mongolian cashmere shawl for $3.00. A beautiful embroidered woman’s jacket for $15.00. My borrowed suitcase will perform yeoman service for my purchases.

Then I have an experience I’ve had before; at Gettysburg, at Manassas, on the deck of the battleship MISSOURI and now in HuangZhou; an attack of historicity. I look down the leafy narrow street with the strolling crowds backed by older buildings, and I hear the engines, hundreds of them, Mitsubishi radials in the cool, clear air. I see the Japanese planes coming over in leisurely waves. The people look up and there’s a moment of expectation, of wonder. They have never seen so many planes at once. There is no whistling, no sounds but the engines and then the first bomb hits at the end of the street. With cries of panic people are fleeing, while others stand stunned, rooted, as the bombs walk closer. And then the moment passes.

This is no hallucination, but a visitation to the mind’s eye and ear, as history seeps up through the ground and the soft soles of my moccasins. People died here, and it is this history that we must remember to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. I reverence the moment, and then go to find my friends.

My mid-afternoon we learn that Lieutenant Colonel Yang has returned safely to Earth and we are off to Beijing. Provided that we can talk Air China into carrying all our bags of course.

The China Travels: Ten
“The East is Still Red”
Tienamen Square, Beijing … October 17 2003

And so are my feet, as I can’t seem to keep them from hurting. My shoes just aren’t ready for China I guess, and I have to climb around on the Great Wall this afternoon…

And so is my face. As I sit here in the sun, a cool breeze blowing up a perfect early winter’s day—though it is still October—I am an object of polite yet enthusiastic curiosity. School kids throw their arms around me so their friends can take pictures. Teenaged soldiers in oversized uniforms read over my shoulder. Lots of luck. I can barely read my own scrawl.

After a meeting and contract signing for a magazine deal that Sheldon and Kim are arranging, we had raced to the HuangZhou Airport, driven by a fabulous young girl at the wheel of a speeding VW Santana 2000 taxi. We’d made the flight with minutes to spare and shot through the night to Beijing. Outside of a comic opera affection for uniforms of all sorts, the people of HuangZhou had not seemed much different from the people of Shanghai, or Los Angeles for that matter. Beijing is very different. The traffic here is managed and regulated, the city is gigantic and planned (L.A. seems like a provincial town in comparison) and they have a love affair with electric lights of all kinds that makes the Disneyland Main Street Electrical Parade look like a candlelight vigil.

You drive past miles of buildings, monster edifices of stone and glass and landscaping. Subways burrow through the earth and freeways slam out toward the suburbs, expanding out from the Forbidden City in encircling ring roads. At nights the streets are quiet, waiting to catch a breath for the next day’s work. And here, unlike in other cities, there is no shyness about Communism. Red flags, red stars, Red Army bases and Mao’s pictures are everywhere. Sheldon, of Shangri-La Publications, says that they have been running full tilt boogie for ten years to build the most modern and energetic state in Asia, an economic powerhouse designed with new forms of capitalism in mind. They’ve spread their wares at irresistible prices, coiling their power like a great spring. And when that spring is released, in two years or five or ten, and Chinese supply has set the hook of demand, there’ll be no stopping them.

The American Empire will not be brought down by carrier battle-groups or terrorists. It will fall to an increasing standard of foreign excellence and all of the bluster by Bush and the other dinosaurs will not delay that fall by a day. If you’re one of these jerks who makes a hobby of hating the U.N. and United Europe, you’re really going to go batshit over the next act.

If I could find a way to charge money for being a photo-model, I could really clean up here. I buy a bottle of water and write on. These are a sweet people and they take delight in the sun, their own history, and the photogenic foreigner in their midst, scrawling away. Click, click. “Thank you.”

CONTINUE to Part IV

(Last night we went to Tony’s Bar, a quiet country and western joint and drank beer with a Chinese TV star and her husband. Checkered tablecloths and cheese fries, and I got even more tired of Kenny Rodgers than usual but the beer was local and smooth. After a good night’s sleep at the Chinese Hall of Science and Technology Hotel, a government-run outfit with soldiers guarding the parking lot, I rode the subway to Tienamen West and here I sit, my ass on the brass step of history and my wind-burned face pointed north. From across the street Chairman Mao smiles down benevolently. Here the crowds mill and surge and take pictures. There are a lot of people here and a lot of money, and we ignore this fact at our peril.)



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