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.