Sometime last summer, I turned to Jason and said, “I wonder what you would look like with a beard.” “Terrible,” He promised. Somehow this conversation led to the decision that both of us would take part in that timeless college tradition, No Shave November. My participation was mostly for solidarity reasons—I’m lazy enough to know what my legs look like when I don’t shave for a while.
November ended tragically, with Jason assuming the role his scruffy red beard suggested, drinking beer in bed in a worn-out undershirt. Pictures are on Facebook, if you’re brave enough to find them.
Last year’s curiosity satiated, I stumbled upon a new challenge for us to undertake this November. It’s a little less passive, and a bigger challenge than kissing an extremely itchy face (gross.)
Between November 1st and 30th, we’re each going to attempt to write a 50,000-word novel as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a tradition in its eleventh year that I just stumbled upon last week in an email newsletter.
It works like this: You spend your days and nights writing, and at the end of the month you upload your work to the NaNoWriMo website. If you’ve reached 50,000 words, you can download a PDF certificate stating that you “won.” The novels don’t go anywhere, and aren’t necessarily read by anyone, although some projects started during this month have been published—one was a #1 New York Times bestseller.
At this point I can’t tell you much about either novel, except that Jason’s writing satire and my novel is set entirely in a kitchen. This may be all I’ll ever tell you, so use your imagination!
If it seems crazy to you, you’re probably right. But we’re significantly under-employed and we love to write. As the NaNoWriMo folks declare on their FAQ page, “Writing a novel in a month is both exhilarating and stupid, and we would all do well to invite a little more spontaneous stupidity into our lives.”
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
This Morning
The weight of my blankets pressures me to stay in bed. I know the tiled floor is frigid, so I drop my hand to scoop up socks before moving another muscle. The steam from my water boiler fogs up the kitchen windows, trying to escape to the deceptively warm-looking sun.
My cell phone reveals the millionth message from David, our persistent, needy high school friend. “Hi Whitney. Weather is turning colder and colder. You must take care.” Maybe it’s all the Hollywood movies, but the Chinese refuse to believe that I’ve experienced cold before. I’m met with looks of pitying disbelief when I tell people that my home in Iowa is, in fact, colder than here. At least it was. Now it’s warmer. Tomorrow it will probably be colder again. Chengde’s weather is on some sort of steady axis I’ve never experienced. Once a warm temperature drops away, it won’t be reached again. If anything, it’s easier to deal with.
After breakfast I layer on the sweats and venture outside. The path inside the apartment wall is lined with the vegetable of the day, harvested from some hidden garden—last week it was leeks, this week it’s arugula. The wall, the windows, the stairs—everywhere, arugula.
I’ve never lived in a city that I didn’t prefer in the morning. I walk past the school, where parents and grandparents mill outside the gate, watching their kids meet up with friends or form rigid, green-uniformed lines to listen to the morning’s announcements. I laugh out loud at a small dog strolling by in a leopard-print suit with rhinestones.
On the corner of a busy intersection, men have an impromptu birds-and-cards gathering. They come out early in the morning carrying two wooden birdcages, connected by a board slung over their shoulders. Six or eight birds are lined up in their cages by the street, while the men play mahjong, chess or cards on a cardboard box. I don’t know why this is the meeting spot. Maybe it used to be something else—everything here was something else just a few short years ago—maybe the busy intersection was a park, and old men don’t care for change. When I walk past in an hour, they’ll be gone. The noise of the high-rise going up behind their post replaces the birds.
I’m pretty great at crossing the street now. The trick is, as I’ve suspected all along, to understand that your life is not as important as getting to your destination quickly. I step into traffic, preferably sandwiching myself between old people or small children, because drivers really don’t want to hit them. I shrug at horns and sing aloud whatever my iPod releases into my ears.
Across the street, fortunetellers on small stools line the sidewalk, the yin-yang that was emblematic of friendship necklaces in my childhood printed carefully on the posters in front of them, holding untold secrets. I don’t know if there’s a reason they congregate in front of the city hospital, but from my ear-plugged and ignorant American viewpoint, it sure does look like preying on the vulnerable. Occasionally I see them working, an elderly man squatting in front of a stool and extending a wrinkled palm to be deciphered.
If I brought 10 kuai with me, I could easily spend it on this 10-minute walk. Without splurging for an unintelligible palm reading, I could buy a whole, steamed-on-the-spot sweet potato or ear or corn, fruits both recognizable and exotic, toys dancing their way out of green plastic bags, socks, slippers and nail clippers laid out on strips of fabric. There are tiny caramel apples lined up on a stick, a fall delicacy, next to newspapers, magazines, and the omnipresent, vehement beggars—the same three every day.
No one else uses the gym in the morning. The gym is hilarious, and I love it. Every wall is adorned with cheap posters of (American) body builders, even though the only other patrons I’ve encountered are middle-aged women. When I walk down the stairs, a black man with bulging muscles grimaces at me. Upstairs, it’s Baywatch girls on steroids. Lots of steroids.
I run by natural light and the glow of the treadmill, pondering the billboard that hangs inside the retail building just across the alley. A grossly anglicized Chinese couple stands in sailing attire, ala Ralph Lauren or Tommy Hilfiger, and raises their eyes to the front of their yacht. Near the billboard, a Chinese flag whips in the wind. Above it all, some other community’s arugula is laid out on the roof.
My cell phone reveals the millionth message from David, our persistent, needy high school friend. “Hi Whitney. Weather is turning colder and colder. You must take care.” Maybe it’s all the Hollywood movies, but the Chinese refuse to believe that I’ve experienced cold before. I’m met with looks of pitying disbelief when I tell people that my home in Iowa is, in fact, colder than here. At least it was. Now it’s warmer. Tomorrow it will probably be colder again. Chengde’s weather is on some sort of steady axis I’ve never experienced. Once a warm temperature drops away, it won’t be reached again. If anything, it’s easier to deal with.
After breakfast I layer on the sweats and venture outside. The path inside the apartment wall is lined with the vegetable of the day, harvested from some hidden garden—last week it was leeks, this week it’s arugula. The wall, the windows, the stairs—everywhere, arugula.
I’ve never lived in a city that I didn’t prefer in the morning. I walk past the school, where parents and grandparents mill outside the gate, watching their kids meet up with friends or form rigid, green-uniformed lines to listen to the morning’s announcements. I laugh out loud at a small dog strolling by in a leopard-print suit with rhinestones.
On the corner of a busy intersection, men have an impromptu birds-and-cards gathering. They come out early in the morning carrying two wooden birdcages, connected by a board slung over their shoulders. Six or eight birds are lined up in their cages by the street, while the men play mahjong, chess or cards on a cardboard box. I don’t know why this is the meeting spot. Maybe it used to be something else—everything here was something else just a few short years ago—maybe the busy intersection was a park, and old men don’t care for change. When I walk past in an hour, they’ll be gone. The noise of the high-rise going up behind their post replaces the birds.
I’m pretty great at crossing the street now. The trick is, as I’ve suspected all along, to understand that your life is not as important as getting to your destination quickly. I step into traffic, preferably sandwiching myself between old people or small children, because drivers really don’t want to hit them. I shrug at horns and sing aloud whatever my iPod releases into my ears.
Across the street, fortunetellers on small stools line the sidewalk, the yin-yang that was emblematic of friendship necklaces in my childhood printed carefully on the posters in front of them, holding untold secrets. I don’t know if there’s a reason they congregate in front of the city hospital, but from my ear-plugged and ignorant American viewpoint, it sure does look like preying on the vulnerable. Occasionally I see them working, an elderly man squatting in front of a stool and extending a wrinkled palm to be deciphered.
If I brought 10 kuai with me, I could easily spend it on this 10-minute walk. Without splurging for an unintelligible palm reading, I could buy a whole, steamed-on-the-spot sweet potato or ear or corn, fruits both recognizable and exotic, toys dancing their way out of green plastic bags, socks, slippers and nail clippers laid out on strips of fabric. There are tiny caramel apples lined up on a stick, a fall delicacy, next to newspapers, magazines, and the omnipresent, vehement beggars—the same three every day.
No one else uses the gym in the morning. The gym is hilarious, and I love it. Every wall is adorned with cheap posters of (American) body builders, even though the only other patrons I’ve encountered are middle-aged women. When I walk down the stairs, a black man with bulging muscles grimaces at me. Upstairs, it’s Baywatch girls on steroids. Lots of steroids.
I run by natural light and the glow of the treadmill, pondering the billboard that hangs inside the retail building just across the alley. A grossly anglicized Chinese couple stands in sailing attire, ala Ralph Lauren or Tommy Hilfiger, and raises their eyes to the front of their yacht. Near the billboard, a Chinese flag whips in the wind. Above it all, some other community’s arugula is laid out on the roof.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
More Ups Than Downs
Some families claim closeness via metaphorical bodily references. “You’re in my heart,” “It runs in our blood,” or, “It’s in our bones.” A beautiful gift from our mother, my sisters* and I have something better, something tangible. It’s this lump in the back of our throats. You might have one too, although it’s unlikely that you’re as in touch with yours as we are. It takes practice. It takes a lot of crying. About everything, from the mildly frustrating to the truly elating, wherever it hits you—work, the grocery store, or, in the luckiest of situations, your own living room. Almost always unsuccessfully resisted, the lump wells up and burns in our throats, constricting and threatening to explode. One thing makes it burst every time: acknowledgement.
After a particularly challenging week, I should have seen it coming in my sister’s email. “Forgive me for noticing, but I could tell you were a bit... down.” Once acknowledged, it bursts, flooding the eyes and nose—often the saline just streams out of the pores at the eyebrows, the ducts too overwhelmed by the flood to direct everything properly. Of course she noticed. For those of you not connected to the express line to my emotions, I suppose full discloser is only fair: Sometimes, this is hard. Sometimes, I am down. Often, even when I am happiest, there is a lump in the back of my throat, daring challenge to present itself.
But so many things are not hard, and maybe I don’t give them enough attention. Everyone we meet, and even some we don’t meet, couldn’t be more excited to help us out. This week, Jason forgot his bag on the bus. The person who found it opened it, found a phone number for Jason’s student, and brought the bag to her at our campus the next morning so she could give it back to him. I know some places where this might have happened in America, but I’m also aware of many places where the story would’ve ended with Jason buying a new bag, not even bothering to hope for a kind stranger.
Genuine friendships are born daily, as we share lunch with students or as we walk into the street to get lunch (The street food vendors really want to talk to us now, and honestly I’m more motivated to learn the language because of this.) A student approached me in the hallway weeks ago to ask if I would help her practice English, and now we share meals almost daily. Her favorite exclamation, “Of course!” punctuates our Chinglish (heavy on the –glish) conversations.
The other foreigners in town know what it’s like to be parachuted into The Land That Keeps You On Your Toes. “I just feel like every day presents some simple task that I can’t accomplish,” I whined to an American friend who’s been here for years. I called her because I couldn’t find curry or oatmeal at the grocery store. “I still feel like that,” she replied honestly. It’s ok to feel like that. The day before, I enlisted her help filling out my gym membership forms because I couldn’t read them.
Every evening we finish teaching at 5:40 pm, just as the sun is setting behind the mountains that surround our campus. Darkness settles as the bus nears the city, and Chengde’s buildings glow with sporadically affixed neon lights that chase, blink, and sparkle—a display that is arguably a bit flashy for a town this small, but is at least aesthetically interesting. The building project under the river has progressed, and most nights there’s enough water in the formerly parched riverbed to reflect a neon glow from the bedazzled bridges.
My toilet works, my electricity is usually on, and even on the hardest days I couldn’t be happier.
*I don’t mean to exclude my brother from this profession of sibling camaraderie. He just has the good fortune of having inherited less estrogen.
After a particularly challenging week, I should have seen it coming in my sister’s email. “Forgive me for noticing, but I could tell you were a bit... down.” Once acknowledged, it bursts, flooding the eyes and nose—often the saline just streams out of the pores at the eyebrows, the ducts too overwhelmed by the flood to direct everything properly. Of course she noticed. For those of you not connected to the express line to my emotions, I suppose full discloser is only fair: Sometimes, this is hard. Sometimes, I am down. Often, even when I am happiest, there is a lump in the back of my throat, daring challenge to present itself.
But so many things are not hard, and maybe I don’t give them enough attention. Everyone we meet, and even some we don’t meet, couldn’t be more excited to help us out. This week, Jason forgot his bag on the bus. The person who found it opened it, found a phone number for Jason’s student, and brought the bag to her at our campus the next morning so she could give it back to him. I know some places where this might have happened in America, but I’m also aware of many places where the story would’ve ended with Jason buying a new bag, not even bothering to hope for a kind stranger.
Genuine friendships are born daily, as we share lunch with students or as we walk into the street to get lunch (The street food vendors really want to talk to us now, and honestly I’m more motivated to learn the language because of this.) A student approached me in the hallway weeks ago to ask if I would help her practice English, and now we share meals almost daily. Her favorite exclamation, “Of course!” punctuates our Chinglish (heavy on the –glish) conversations.
The other foreigners in town know what it’s like to be parachuted into The Land That Keeps You On Your Toes. “I just feel like every day presents some simple task that I can’t accomplish,” I whined to an American friend who’s been here for years. I called her because I couldn’t find curry or oatmeal at the grocery store. “I still feel like that,” she replied honestly. It’s ok to feel like that. The day before, I enlisted her help filling out my gym membership forms because I couldn’t read them.
Every evening we finish teaching at 5:40 pm, just as the sun is setting behind the mountains that surround our campus. Darkness settles as the bus nears the city, and Chengde’s buildings glow with sporadically affixed neon lights that chase, blink, and sparkle—a display that is arguably a bit flashy for a town this small, but is at least aesthetically interesting. The building project under the river has progressed, and most nights there’s enough water in the formerly parched riverbed to reflect a neon glow from the bedazzled bridges.
My toilet works, my electricity is usually on, and even on the hardest days I couldn’t be happier.
*I don’t mean to exclude my brother from this profession of sibling camaraderie. He just has the good fortune of having inherited less estrogen.
Am I in the Wrong Classroom?
I’m getting better at this. Some days, I even know which classroom to go to and which students will be there when I arrive. On the best of days, I walk away feeling like we all learned something.
Other days, professors approach me and try to remember their college English—which they haven’t used in years—while their students harass them from the hallway.
“Speak English, teacher!”
The professor stammers until I offer, “Am I in the wrong classroom?”
“Yes!”
So I leave, because he seems older and wiser than I am. His students file in, while mine begin to gather around me in the hallway, and we all stare in expectantly.
“Is there a problem?” the professor asks, finally.
“Yes, I’m pretty sure this is actually our classroom.”
“Oh, we’ll go somewhere else, then.”
He files out as his classroom full of boys snickers and trails behind.
It seems this one was on me. I should have asked someone, “Some of my classes haven’t met yet. Do you suppose someone else has been using our classroom in the interim?”
Still other days are like hide and seek, or lost and found. My students aren’t in classroom 4, because some kids are “having a meeting.” So I look first in 5, where we sometimes meet, and then in 2, where we met once. I find them in 3, where I’ve never been.
Someone could have mentioned that nothing is static; that your students will be in the general area of the fourth floor, wherever they can find space. Someone also could have mentioned that Friday is a special class, a blend of students from earlier classes who come for extra practice—a reality that involves planning a second lesson, or quick improv. Yes, someone could have mentioned it. But, more importantly, I should have asked.
I should have asked more questions from the very beginning. The questions are basic, and I can’t believe I’ve just caught on.
Number one: “How will my day be different than the schedule claimed it would be?”
Number two: “How will today be different from yesterday?”
Number three, if anyone can think this far ahead: “How will tomorrow be different from today?”
As the culture shock begins to fade away, the burden of personal accountability is increasingly clear. When I am walking down the street and I hear the ominous collecting of throat mucus behind me, it is not that guy’s responsibility to avoid spitting on me. It is my responsibility to stay out of his way if I don’t want to get spit on today. When I am walking toward a parent steadying her toddler so he can pee by the sidewalk, that parent has her hands full. It is up to me and only me to walk around the stream if I don’t want to get peed on today.
I expected—and still expect—to learn an enormous amount by living in a foreign environment. Somehow, I didn’t expect China to be a nation that would teach me so much about independence and personal accountability. The most exciting thing about residing in a different culture is anticipating the myriad of things I’ll eventually be wrong about.
Other days, professors approach me and try to remember their college English—which they haven’t used in years—while their students harass them from the hallway.
“Speak English, teacher!”
The professor stammers until I offer, “Am I in the wrong classroom?”
“Yes!”
So I leave, because he seems older and wiser than I am. His students file in, while mine begin to gather around me in the hallway, and we all stare in expectantly.
“Is there a problem?” the professor asks, finally.
“Yes, I’m pretty sure this is actually our classroom.”
“Oh, we’ll go somewhere else, then.”
He files out as his classroom full of boys snickers and trails behind.
It seems this one was on me. I should have asked someone, “Some of my classes haven’t met yet. Do you suppose someone else has been using our classroom in the interim?”
Still other days are like hide and seek, or lost and found. My students aren’t in classroom 4, because some kids are “having a meeting.” So I look first in 5, where we sometimes meet, and then in 2, where we met once. I find them in 3, where I’ve never been.
Someone could have mentioned that nothing is static; that your students will be in the general area of the fourth floor, wherever they can find space. Someone also could have mentioned that Friday is a special class, a blend of students from earlier classes who come for extra practice—a reality that involves planning a second lesson, or quick improv. Yes, someone could have mentioned it. But, more importantly, I should have asked.
I should have asked more questions from the very beginning. The questions are basic, and I can’t believe I’ve just caught on.
Number one: “How will my day be different than the schedule claimed it would be?”
Number two: “How will today be different from yesterday?”
Number three, if anyone can think this far ahead: “How will tomorrow be different from today?”
As the culture shock begins to fade away, the burden of personal accountability is increasingly clear. When I am walking down the street and I hear the ominous collecting of throat mucus behind me, it is not that guy’s responsibility to avoid spitting on me. It is my responsibility to stay out of his way if I don’t want to get spit on today. When I am walking toward a parent steadying her toddler so he can pee by the sidewalk, that parent has her hands full. It is up to me and only me to walk around the stream if I don’t want to get peed on today.
I expected—and still expect—to learn an enormous amount by living in a foreign environment. Somehow, I didn’t expect China to be a nation that would teach me so much about independence and personal accountability. The most exciting thing about residing in a different culture is anticipating the myriad of things I’ll eventually be wrong about.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Iowa Photography
While the government ‘round here continues to be utterly indifferent to my communication needs (like they have billions of people to govern or something), I would like to give due credit to a wonderful friend who is channeling my writing to you. The lovely Nicole Jobst, fellow Drake journalism grad and therefore sympathetic to the cause of uncensored communication, has offered to be my personal proxy.
In addition to being a superb friend and empathetic journalist, Niki is also an outstanding photographer. She recently opened a shop on etsy.com, iowaphotography.etsy.com, where nature- and Iowa-lovers can find one-of-a-kind shots of the home state I dearly miss. As a side note, I didn’t know about etsy.com at all until she opened this shop, and it’s a really great site for finding handcrafted goods from around the world. And maybe if you consider yourself crafty, there’s a business venture in it for you, too. Definitely worth a look.
Take-home message: Niki is pretty great for helping me out, and in turn I would like you to help her out by checking out her photo shop and sharing it with anyone you think might be interested in an attractive slice of Iowa’s backyard.
On the photography note, I’ve established a flickr account to share some of my photos. I can’t post too many because they are huge and there are monthly upload limits. I’ll try to establish some sort of rotation. For now, my ID is whitneyd2009. You can check out photos of Shijiazhuang, Chengde and my apartment.
Also, while I can’t sign in to blogger or facebook to respond to your comments, please keep posting them if you have them, and hopefully I will re-enter virtual society sometime soon.
Thanks for reading!
In addition to being a superb friend and empathetic journalist, Niki is also an outstanding photographer. She recently opened a shop on etsy.com, iowaphotography.etsy.com, where nature- and Iowa-lovers can find one-of-a-kind shots of the home state I dearly miss. As a side note, I didn’t know about etsy.com at all until she opened this shop, and it’s a really great site for finding handcrafted goods from around the world. And maybe if you consider yourself crafty, there’s a business venture in it for you, too. Definitely worth a look.
Take-home message: Niki is pretty great for helping me out, and in turn I would like you to help her out by checking out her photo shop and sharing it with anyone you think might be interested in an attractive slice of Iowa’s backyard.
On the photography note, I’ve established a flickr account to share some of my photos. I can’t post too many because they are huge and there are monthly upload limits. I’ll try to establish some sort of rotation. For now, my ID is whitneyd2009. You can check out photos of Shijiazhuang, Chengde and my apartment.
Also, while I can’t sign in to blogger or facebook to respond to your comments, please keep posting them if you have them, and hopefully I will re-enter virtual society sometime soon.
Thanks for reading!
The Great Wall
There is an athletic complex across the street from my apartment. The reasons why I did not know it was there until just a few days ago are complicated. China is complicated.
Today I found the hidden passageway that leads to its fence, only to realize there was no easily discernable way in. My Chinese sucks, so I approached a boy on the coveted inner portion of the barrier, pointed to a clearly locked gate, looked pleadingly at him and said, “Nar?” Where? “Wo pao ma?” Can I run? Or maybe it’s “Do I run?” Or even, “Where’s the nearest grocery store?” Like I said, my Chinese sucks.
He conveyed the obvious, “Not here,” then pointed to an inaccessible building across the track. I could draw the next hour into an excruciatingly long anecdote about me circling the entire Chengde city block and finding no way to access the building, inquiring after a million security guards in the interim—in increasingly whiney Chinese—Naaarrrr!? Wo pao maaaa??—but the important lesson for folks at home is that some days are exceedingly ridiculous. Sometimes I feel like I’m at the whims of China’s unique blend of perpetually changing fate. And sometimes I’m fairly certain I’m just an idiot.
October 2nd, for example. I passed my twenty-third birthday with wonderful friends who made me—and China!—delicious cakes, sang Karaoke past midnight, and then went to the bar until an hour embarrassingly and inconveniently close to the hour we were to depart for a day at the Great Wall with eleven freshmen (yeah.) and the school’s foreign affairs directors.
Now, around 4 a.m., when I for the second time began to suggest, “Guys, I have to climb the Great Wall in five hours, perhaps I should go home and aspire to be sober by 7,” I allowed an Englishman named Richard to tell me, “It’s only ten steps! You sit in the bus for an hour, walk up ten steps, and Bam! You’re on the great wall. Now have another beer!”
I appreciate citizens of the United Kingdom for this reason: You can get into the liveliest debates and, as long as no one’s mother is insulted, still be good friends in the morning. So I would like the record to reflect that when Richard sent a text message at 4 p.m. that read, “Just woke up, thanks for a great night guys! Good shit.”—after I had spent many breathtakingly beautiful but deliriously exhausted hours hiking on slippery stairs that at their most difficult require the climber to scramble on hands and knees—I was not angry. Not at all.
We visited the Jin Shan Ling portion of the wall. It’s not the wide, majestic corridor you see in pictures—that part is near Beijing, recently renovated and chronically teeming with tourists. Jin Shan Ling is less than an hour away from Chengde, and only the entrance is restored. The rest is full of the narrowest passageways and crumbling watchtowers.
The crowds thin out and then nearly fade away the further you walk from the entrance. Bright colors look so out of place against the majestic stone wall that I, in my old purple t-ball jersey with “Houghton” scrawled in bright pink across the chest, look photo-shopped into all of my pictures, an altogether unlikely addition.
The peak for me, despite the exhaustion (which, to be honest, was for most of the day overrun by the adrenaline rush that accompanies interacting with such an omnipresent historical icon), was in the moments before we turned around to hike back to the gate. I climbed up an especially lofty, steep incline to one final watchtower, then noticed one more set of stairs, piled inconspicuously behind a wall. Up those stairs, I found myself completely alone on a square roof, wall stretching endlessly to the east and west with mountains on every side.
Some days I think I could write a novel about China’s challenges, and others I’m certain I’m just a fool with no grasp on anything. But every now and then I’m lying on my own stretch of the Great Wall of China, and I realize I’m so fleeting here that it hardly matters one way or another.
Today I found the hidden passageway that leads to its fence, only to realize there was no easily discernable way in. My Chinese sucks, so I approached a boy on the coveted inner portion of the barrier, pointed to a clearly locked gate, looked pleadingly at him and said, “Nar?” Where? “Wo pao ma?” Can I run? Or maybe it’s “Do I run?” Or even, “Where’s the nearest grocery store?” Like I said, my Chinese sucks.
He conveyed the obvious, “Not here,” then pointed to an inaccessible building across the track. I could draw the next hour into an excruciatingly long anecdote about me circling the entire Chengde city block and finding no way to access the building, inquiring after a million security guards in the interim—in increasingly whiney Chinese—Naaarrrr!? Wo pao maaaa??—but the important lesson for folks at home is that some days are exceedingly ridiculous. Sometimes I feel like I’m at the whims of China’s unique blend of perpetually changing fate. And sometimes I’m fairly certain I’m just an idiot.
October 2nd, for example. I passed my twenty-third birthday with wonderful friends who made me—and China!—delicious cakes, sang Karaoke past midnight, and then went to the bar until an hour embarrassingly and inconveniently close to the hour we were to depart for a day at the Great Wall with eleven freshmen (yeah.) and the school’s foreign affairs directors.
Now, around 4 a.m., when I for the second time began to suggest, “Guys, I have to climb the Great Wall in five hours, perhaps I should go home and aspire to be sober by 7,” I allowed an Englishman named Richard to tell me, “It’s only ten steps! You sit in the bus for an hour, walk up ten steps, and Bam! You’re on the great wall. Now have another beer!”
I appreciate citizens of the United Kingdom for this reason: You can get into the liveliest debates and, as long as no one’s mother is insulted, still be good friends in the morning. So I would like the record to reflect that when Richard sent a text message at 4 p.m. that read, “Just woke up, thanks for a great night guys! Good shit.”—after I had spent many breathtakingly beautiful but deliriously exhausted hours hiking on slippery stairs that at their most difficult require the climber to scramble on hands and knees—I was not angry. Not at all.
We visited the Jin Shan Ling portion of the wall. It’s not the wide, majestic corridor you see in pictures—that part is near Beijing, recently renovated and chronically teeming with tourists. Jin Shan Ling is less than an hour away from Chengde, and only the entrance is restored. The rest is full of the narrowest passageways and crumbling watchtowers.
The crowds thin out and then nearly fade away the further you walk from the entrance. Bright colors look so out of place against the majestic stone wall that I, in my old purple t-ball jersey with “Houghton” scrawled in bright pink across the chest, look photo-shopped into all of my pictures, an altogether unlikely addition.
The peak for me, despite the exhaustion (which, to be honest, was for most of the day overrun by the adrenaline rush that accompanies interacting with such an omnipresent historical icon), was in the moments before we turned around to hike back to the gate. I climbed up an especially lofty, steep incline to one final watchtower, then noticed one more set of stairs, piled inconspicuously behind a wall. Up those stairs, I found myself completely alone on a square roof, wall stretching endlessly to the east and west with mountains on every side.
Some days I think I could write a novel about China’s challenges, and others I’m certain I’m just a fool with no grasp on anything. But every now and then I’m lying on my own stretch of the Great Wall of China, and I realize I’m so fleeting here that it hardly matters one way or another.
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