Wuhai and Yinchuan

Hey! I haven't posted in weeks and neither of you even complained! Don't you care anymore? Don't you want to know what I'm seeing, what I'm thinking?

To punish you for your unforgivable silence, I'm posting below my complete travel journal--uncensored, unedited for length--from my recent trip to Wuhai and Yinchuan. It is travel writing at its best (travel-writing meaning the genre where an illiterate foreigner goes to places he knows nothing about and makes definitive observations based on the scantiest of evidence and nary a whisp of comprehension).

I have titled my travel narrative thusly:

"Thoughts and Observations on Wuhai, Inner Mongolia, and Yinchuan, Ningxia Province, and Surrounding Regions, especially Concerning their Native Peoples, Flora and Fauna, Social Structure, Industrial Development, Transportation Systems, and Cultural Characteristics, and including Personal Testimony on the Conditions of Actual Residents thereof, and also Reflections on Television, Parks, and Cuisine"

February 11:

I decided to travel to Wuhai, about eight hours due West from Hohhot, to visit my student Leon (Hao Bin). Wuhai is a town of about 500,000, moderate to small by Chinese standards. It sits on what is called the Ordos Loop of the Yellow River. In a report about the Yellow River for NPR, reporter Rob Gifford followed the waterway from its source on the Tibetan Plateau to the Chinese Coast. In the west of China, the river bends far to the north and, in his words, "passes through grimy, industrial places that few people outside of China have heard of." Wuhai is one of those grimy, industrial places. In his report, he refers to it simply as the "smoggy city of Wuhai."

It's a good time to go. Hohhot is paralyzed by a post-New Years lethargy. No street vendors. All the small restaurants and shops are closed. The energy of the streets is gone. Even the buses--usually packed to the gills--are empty. Hohhot looks like a mid-size American city. Where is everyone?

And yet, I'm not too excited to go. I know it will be a great experience to go west from Hohhot and see what's out there, but I'm tired. We're all tired. It is frigid cold here--highs around 10 Fahrenheit and lows in the negative teens. We've all been sick in the past week. Everyone is homesick. Our small apartment is crowding in on us. I'm feeling really, really unadventurous. I don't want to have to deal with people trying to talk to me. I don't want to deal with Chinese authorities in unknown cities, with weird food, with Leon and his family who will want to smother me with hospitality. Do I need to register with the Public Security Bureau? Foreigners are supposed to do that when they arrive in a new city. Usually hotels do that for you, but I won't be staying at a hotel.

I go to the station at 11:30am. If I lived in China for ten years, I don't think I'd ever get used to the crowds at Chinese train stations. Waiting in the terminal for the 2635, Hohhot to Lanzhou train, I stand in the midst of hundreds (thousands?) of people expectantly waiting to board the train. Every couple minutes I am pressed forward into the crowd. There are no "lines," just a mob of people waiting for the gates to open. I have no concerns about finding the train--I will be pulled along in the midst of the horde (is it politically correct to say "horde"?). A short bearded man pushes through the crowd--is he a Uighur bound for Lanzhou and then Urumqi? He gets some sideways sneers from bystanders. A woman in a navy-blue uniform shouts at the crowd through a megaphone. Everyone picks up their bags and pushes forward. I grope for my ticket and check for my wallet. Moments later we squeeze through the gates and the throng scrambles towards the platform. Lines form at each car. An old woman pushes past me.

I'm traveling by hard sleeper. In communist China there are no "first class" or "second class" designations--those categories only exist in the capitalist West where we have "classes." Here there are only descriptive terms: "soft sleeper" (first class), "hard sleeper" (second class), and "hard seats" (third class). Hard sleepers are quite comfortable. No one travels soft-sleepers unless they are foreigners or filthy rich. I'm sharing a compartment with a couple and their small boy. Some well dressed men and women inhabit the next compartment. The women have designer jeans, high heels, and froofy hairdos (cascading "perms" reminiscent of 1980s American styles). Like me, they've brought instant noodles and before the train leaves the station they've already poured hot water into their styrofoam bowls and begun to eat. They're using plastic forks. I've brought chopsticks for my instant noodles.

It's a beautiful day to be going west. It's a day when you might argue that China's air pollution problems are overstated. The air is crystalline. You can see the jagged outline of the mountains to the north. I look forward to seeing the city disappear and the land open up. It can be claustrophobic living in a crowded Chinese city with no car, no way to hit the open road.

We're finally underway. My cabin has filled up. Sitting on the bottom bunk on my side are a middle-aged woman and her 21 year-old son who looks at me and pats the bunk to his right, gesturing that I should have a seat. I've been standing in the aisle opposite the bunks gazing out the window. Leaving Hohhot, here is what I see: rows and rows of old battered apartment buildings--drab, square, faceless; smokestacks spewing coal smoke; factories--drab, square, faceless; more apartments; more smokestacks; more factories; a hulking government building; a new road--broad and smooth, fronted by some new bright orange buildings; fields; more apartments; more smokestacks; more factories. I see more billowing smokestacks leaving Hohhot than I've seen my entire life in the postindustrial American West, where smokestack industries have given way to the service-sector economy and tourism--the so-called "New American West."

A view from the train: the natural and built environment. Actually, most of the factories and coal-fired power plants between Hohhot and Baotou (“The Steel City of the Grasslands”) are not as modern-looking or colorful as the one pictured here.

We pass what appears to be a new university, or a very large middle school (which, in China, can be as big as small universities), with brightly colored buildings, a stadium, a large library. Now more fields with the mountains looming behind. Some neat rows of trees, no doubt planted as part of the government program to keep the hungry desert from eating up all the arable land in Inner Mongolia. Desertification is one of a handful of pressing environmental problems that afflict northern China, along with water shortages, erosion, and air and water pollution.

As we pass through the outskirts of Hohhot there are villages with brick-colored tile roofs above drab brick walls. Now they are enlivened with the ubiquitous red banners of the New Year: "Good Fortune!" "Wealth!" "Prosperity!" More villages. More farms. Haystacks. Sheep. A shepherd. The countryside does not look like the American countryside, with little farmhouses dotting the landscape. Instead, the Chinese countryside is inscribed with the agricultural policies implemented by the Communists over the last sixty years. These policies--like collectivization--are changing. Just last year, the government passed a law allowing peasants to own their own land. But the layout of the countryside still bears the markings of earlier policies: small, crowded villages surrounded by vast tracts of common land.

I laugh at myself. I realize that I haven't been in China long enough to look out a train window and see a familiar landscape. Instead I'm always making comparisons or drawing generalizations and conclusions from very little evidence. When you've been in China less than a year, even the most common things--a village, an apartment building, a row of trees, become freighted with meaning. I remember showing a Chinese friend some pictures from our first trip to Beijing. I had taken a photo of a cart filled with cabbages. She smiled. "You find even the most ordinary things interesting." Now I was examining the countryside from a speeding train and drawing more conclusions: every peasant shack became emblematic of a "way of life;" every exchange indicative of a "mindset."

More villages, more fields, more smokestacks, another factory. There is a soothing regularity to the countryside. We stop at our first stop since Hohhot, Cha Su Qi. We've been traveling all of 30 minutes and I've made at least that many generalizations. I open my pack and begin eating smelly foreign food: homemade bread and cheese. The young man sitting with his mother watches me closely. He invites me again to come and sit down beside him. We have a quasi-conversation in broken Chinese. He claims to speak no English, but he is going to university in Harbin, so he must know some English. He is engineering major. We use my phrase book to communicate.

We pass another small city. Rows of old apartments. Factories. Coal yards. Small brick apartments. Some new apartments. Now more fields. Old yellow cornstalks. More sheep. Hay. Another village.

We roll along paralleling the mountains which are brown and red, rugged and treeless like those in the arid American West. We also parallel a busy highway which carries mostly buses and large cargo trucks. More fields. More hay. More villages. Another factory. Another coal yard. More dilapidated brick apartments.

We reach the outskirts of Baotou--the "Steel City of the Grasslands." It is the bleakest landscape I have yet seen, even glimmering in the mid-day sun. Factory after factory. Smokestack after smokestack. Row after row of apartments--drab, square, faceless. Dickensian. We roll by miles and miles of neighborhoods with low brick apartments and dirt streets. There are frozen streams running down the dirt streets. The streams and the streets are piled with garbage. I see a man throw a bucket of garbage into a frozen stream. I see kids playing on the railroad tracks. I see a girl squatting behind a brick wall taking a pee. Bleak.

The student next to me looks tired. I get up and gesture that he should lie down on his bunk. He does. I walk down the aisle to the bathroom. I go pee and watch it disappear down a metal tube to the tracks below. Chinese trains are fast and modern and comfortable. But the bathrooms still excrete human waste onto the tracks. I wonder what new generalization I can draw about Chinese society from this fact. I think about the kids playing on the tracks.

I crawl up into my middle bunk. Lying down I have to crane my head sideways in order to see out the window. I do. I see, to the south, a massive industrial plant with four huge smokestacks of the variety that you see only at nuclear complexes in America. To the north, I see rows of uniform row houses backed by even more factories and more smokestacks. The family with the small boy is now eating: I hope my food does not smell as bad to them as theirs does to me.

Five hours west of Hohhot, the land opens up even further. The mountains fall away, leaving a vast unbroken plain. I see a woman squatting in a clay privy with walls that only reach her waist. It might be ten degrees Fahrenheit outside. We stop at Lin He at sundown. In the gloaming, the city is soft and almost picturesque, even though it is by far the grittiest place I have seen yet. Everything is brown and grey. Rows of apartments are old, dilapidated, drab, and square. Smokestacks are billowing. I try to think of synonyms for "billowing," "drab," "gritty," and "bleak." I think I'm going to need them.

I get this text message from Leon: "Hi Mr. David. I think food on train always not very good. My parents have prepared supper for you." My text to Arienne: "The sunset here is pretty, but the cities are pretty gritty." I have a conversation with two female conductors who have taken a seat in the aisle by my compartment. I've had a lot of these conversations in rudimentary Chinese so I have practiced answers their questions: Where am I from? How long will I stay in China? Do I like it? How many children do I have? What are their ages? How much do I get paid?

As we get closer to the Yellow River (called the "mother river" of China), there are some orchards. I feel a long way from home, but I squint my eyes and it looks like the Columbia Basin until we pass a series of billowing smokestacks (I haven't found a synonym yet). When night falls, I feel even more homesick. There are no farm houses emanating the soft yellow light of domesticity; no McMansions; no bright little towns. There are very few lights in the Chinese countryside. Even many neighborhoods in towns and cities do not have street lights. With its power grid already taxed to the maximum, an industrializing China cannot afford the luxury of street lights, except in its large modern cities.

When we arrive at Wuhai station, Leon and his father are waiting for me on the platform. We walk from the station along a dark alleyway that parallels the tracks. We pass under the tracks in a small dark tunnel and then turn right and walk down a dark, dirt alleyway until we reach Leon's apartment, which sits right next to the train tracks, directly across from the station. Leon's Dad--Old Hao--is a train engineer who works the Baotou to Lanzhou line. These apartments are designated for the families of railroad workers. Leon's family's apartment is small and spare: one bedroom (where Leon will sleep with his Mom and Dad while I am visiting); another single bed in the family room (where I will sleep). There is no hot running water. The bathroom is a standard-variety hole-in-the floor squatter with a manual fill-up-the-bucket flushing system. There is an air-conditioner/heater unit on wall in the family room which they run for my benefit, but every time they turn it on there is either a smell of burning wires or the power shuts down. I keep my coat on. Even with my coat and wool long underwear I am freezing. But the apartment is also clean and bright, with pink tile floors and lacey curtains and doilies.

The family room at Leon’s apartment. We ate at the coffee table and I slept on the bed pictured.

Dinner warms me up. We drink tea and Mrs. Yang--Leon's mother--makes jiaozi. The dumplings are steaming and very good. We sit around the coffee table, eat, and watch T.V. They've never had a foreigner in their household. Leon tells me he has seen only four foreigners in Wuhai his entire life. He's 21. Mrs. Yang has questions about America: "Is everyone better off in America than people in China?" (Television had given Mrs. Yang the impression that everyone in America is very wealthy.) "Who was the greatest American President?" (Mrs. Yang has the impression that Kennedy was the greatest because he "wanted equality between blacks and whites." She has also heard that he was killed by someone in the American government--even in China, Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories abound. I go with Lincoln, the mid-nineteenth century Republican, FDR, the mid-twentieth century Democrat, and Jefferson, the early-nineteenth century Democratic-Republican.)

I ask them who the greatest Chinese leader was. They immediately agree that Deng Xiaoping was the greatest, much greater than Mao, who "didn't understand economics" and whose Cultural Revolution was a disaster: "It set back the country from developing for ten years," said Leon. I said that America, like China, has good and bad leaders, but that Americans are free to criticize the bad ones. Mrs. Yang, the most outspoken of the family, said that the Chinese can also criticize their leaders now in private but they can't broadcast those criticisms publicly. She then asked about Iraq: "Were the Muslims there the same as the Muslims in China?" I said that the religion was the same "but that there were more extremists in Middle East while China's Muslims were more moderate." She agrees. She tells me that Muslims work well together: "They share and cooperate and have good family values."

When the talking was over, we share family photographs and then Leon fills a wash basin with hot water for me. I wash my face, brush my teeth, and show Leon how to use tooth floss, which he has never seen before. Leon, Old Hao, and Mrs. Yang retire to their bedroom and I lay down on the bed in the family room. It is nearly 1am. I have two layers of clothing and two layers of blankets but I'm still cold. The trains run right by the apartment building, whistling and rattling everything. I feel like I'm in one of those weird noir movies--a dark industrial city filled with grim alienating apartments alongside the railroad tracks. I know that poverty is a relative thing--"poor" people in the U.S. have cars, televisions, DVD players, and free public education, while middle-class people in China sometimes do not have flush toilets, rarely own cars, and usually have to pay to send their children to school. But if, for the sake of argument, poverty is NOT a relative thing but rather an objective material reality, then I would have to argue that the "poor" in the U.S. are in reality not poor. Leon's family is without a doubt middle-class: only better-off families have the money to send their child to university. And yet they are living (with dignity) in a dilapidated apartment (without hot running water, a shower, a flush toilet) that would objectively be considered a slum in America. I lay there feeling claustrophobic and fragile and unadventurous. I concentrate on my breathing and finally fall into a restless sleep.

February 12:

I feel better after sleeping. The day is bright. Trains blow their whistles with more optimism. Large trucks--huge trucks--rumble through Wuhai on a wide, smooth, brand-new highway that runs all the way to Lanzhou further west. The Chinese government has been pouring money into the remote provinces as part of its economic vision of a unified and prosperous China. We eat breakfast and walk down to the Yellow River.

The view from the family room window looking at train tracks and train station.

Leon in the alley in front of his apartment building.

The pollution in Wuhai is palpable. Sometimes "air pollution" and "water pollution" can seem abstract and hard to locate. If you've had a good rest and nice meal, the sky and the water seem alright. But in Wuhai pollution is neither abstract nor hard to locate. The streets, at least in Leon's neighborhood, are literally piled with heaps of garbage. In so many ways, China does not feel like a communist society: there is so much commerce, so much "freedom." But here in Wuhai the physical world is as I used to imagine communist society: grim faceless apartments with rusty pipes, peeling paint, wires hanging from holes in the plasterboard, light bulbs hanging from the ceiling on threadbare and fraying cords. In Leon's apartment, the cheap lace doilies and a few posters of Japanese video game characters, instead of sprucing the place up, only serve to highlight the dilapidation.

And yet, the TV is bright and warm (no wonder TV is so popular), and Leon and his family are not dour and bleak: they are warm, happy, individuals with designer jeans, sophisticated cell phones, MP3 players, and Sony video games. It's really a warm and nice family situation--and I'm entirely too caught up in the physical surroundings. And I'm way too much of a wimp. And I'm way too cold, cold, and cold.

Anyway, the three of us walked down to the Yellow River, across the new highway and through a vacant stretch of new developments that consist of wide empty streets, bulldozed earth, fences, billboards, and a few unfinished apartment husks that look to be built from concrete and recycled bricks. Leon tells me the entire area used to be trees. Billboards advertise the brave new world to come, with picturesque names for housing complexes similar to those in exurban America. "Xingtai Riverview," says one, "is worth the watershore which anticipated constructing."

New construction along the banks of the Yellow River.

The Yellow River reminds me of the Columbia River. We take pictures and stroll through an unfinished park before taking more pictures and walking home. It is so cold. The river is partially covered in ice and now my feet feel like the river. I don't take my coat off back at Leon's apartment; not for lunch (which consisted of two delicious dishes of stir-fried vegetables and pork with steaming bowls of rice); not for an afternoon nap in the bedroom under two blankets.

Mom (Mrs. Yang), Leon (Hao Bin), and Dad (Old Hao), along the banks of the Yellow River.

During lunch we discuss the interconnections of the American and Chinese economies. The only reason that Leon is able to attend university is that Mrs. Yang took the family's savings and invested it on the Shanghai stock market. The risk has so far paid off, but Mrs. Yang is constantly worried about the economic instability of both China and America. She tells me that she heard Bush on the Chinese news saying that the U.S. economy will grow and I kid her that if Bush said it then the economy will likely falter. We all laugh. Leon added that "America is spending all of its money on Iraq." Beijing is one of Washington D.C.'s allies in the "War on Terror," largely for self-serving reasons. China has been able to crack down on Uighur nationalists in Xinjiang Province by rationalizing its actions as part of the global struggle against Islamic terrorists, even though the Uighur's are peaceful, moderate Muslims who denounce radical Islam. Beijing may have signed onto the "War on Terror" but I have yet to meet a Chinese person who supports the war in Iraq.

We go out in the afternoon to see Wuhai, which undoubtedly looks like two hundred other Chinese cities: blocky buildings fronted with stores bearing flat, colorful signs. In the main shopping district there are food vendors, multistory department stores, and, just as in every other shopping district I've visited in China, loud music blaring from large black speakers on the sidewalk, providing a static-rich pop soundtrack for our window shopping.

One of Wuhai’s main streets.

We walk to the park and see animals--birds, monkeys, and deer--living much like Wuhai humans in concrete-block enclosures with no flush toilets. But humans have it far better in Wuhai. The monkey cages are so bleak, so terrible, that there is no doubt in my mind it is animal cruelty.

Coming to the park had initially lifted my spirits. The path through the trees, the skating pond, the pagodas, the kids playing--all of these left me feeling hopeful. Here was a landscape that wasn't dehumanized or commercialized (at least once you had navigated through the carnival arcade). But the animal cages had left me feeling bleak again. As I've explained in a previous blog, Rob Gifford, in his book "China Road," argues that since Deng Xiaoping's policy of "Reform and Opening," Chinese people have left their bird cages for, if not true freedom, at least a more expansive aviary. But these animals still occupy Mao-era cages. The animals clearly have not yet experienced their own Reform and Opening.

Monkeys at park.

I become more and more negative about my inability to transcend my physical surroundings. I feel like a narrow-minded bourgeois wimp. I should be evaluating a society by its people, not by its garbage heaps. By that measure, the Chinese have it all over us Americans. They constantly triumph over their surroundings, infusing even the bleakest of environments with humanity. They are resilient, hospitable, and tough as hell. And I'm a wimp, freezing cold even in my fur hat. I don't see anyone else even wearing a hat. I worked on commercial fishing boats and canneries in Alaska for 15 summers. I was a varsity rower in college. I've run a marathon. But now I'm reduced to despair after less than 24 hours without central heating, hot running water, flush toilets, and fresh towels. The interrogators at Guantanamo wouldn't have to resort to waterboarding with me. Just turn down the temperature in my "bleak" cell for a few hours and apparently I'd be a blubbering idiot. The upside? I realize that, in my weakened state, simple pleasures can take me from despair to ecstasy faster than the express elevator at the Bonaventure Hotel. Mrs. Yang's dinner that night is euphoric. Seriously, I've never had a better meal than her pai gu (braised pork with garlic and potatoes) over a steaming bowl of rice accompanied by a can of beer.

February 13

I was dreaming when Leon woke me up at 5am. At the end of a short restless sleep (where I actually got hot and had to shed a layer of thermals), I had finally fallen into a deep sleep and, oddly, after nearly seven months in China, was having my first dream with my new Chinese friends. Some of us were gathered in a dormitory room at Shi Da to watch a Seahawks game. Seattle was losing but one of their players was doing exceptionally well. I called Wu Yunna, the Vice-Dean, to invite her to watch the game with us. She declined but told me that "It was proper of me to ask." I then told her about the dismal performance of the Seahawks generally with the exception of the one outstanding player. I was about to make an important deduction from this fact--"This could mean only one of two things, either..."--when Samuel interrupted me. He was in the middle of our chaotic street surrounded by racing cars, bikes, and carts. I yelled, "Samuel, be careful!" All was commotion as he disappeared from view. Then I could hear his voice calling, "Samuel, where's Samuel?" I began yelling "You're Samuel, you're Samuel!" when Leon woke me up.

Not to be too dramatic about it, but walking out of Leon's apartment at 5:00am on a winter morning feels like time-traveling, like walking out of a south side Chicago apartment house in 1890. Down the dark stairs and into the dark, dirt alleyway. There are no lights. The air is clear but with the deep resonance of coal smoke. A smokestack pours forth into the starry cold morning. We walk past heaps of garbage and the dim hulking outlines of brick apartment buildings. We descend through the dark tunnel under the train tracks. We smell coal. We hear train whistles.

To board a Yinchuan-bound train in Wuhai at 5:30am one week after the Chinese New Year is also quite a thing. We have tickets for "hard seats." We can sit wherever we find a place, but the train is packed with migrants returning to their workplaces after the spring festival holiday. Again I feel like I'm witnessing something that I might have seen in nineteenth-century America: large-scale migrations of immigrant laborers pouring into industrial cities.

Speaking of history, on the train Leon tells me that one of his history teachers at the Number 1 Middle School in Wuhai said that if America had won the Vietnam War, the US would have used Vietnam as a launching pad for an attack in China. We also talk about Taiwan and Leon tells me that "All the Chinese people want Taiwan to be reunited with the mainland." He says, "We share the same blood with the people in Taiwan. We are all Chinese." Leon feels sure that most people in Taiwan also desire reunification, which could happen within a year, he believes, if foreign countries don't intervene. I ask him if the Chinese also share the same blood with the people of Tibet. He considers for a moment and then says something about the Tibetans having "their own religion" and distinctive clothing (especially funny hats "that look like a chicken"). But he concludes that "we're the same."

"What about the Chinese and the Uighur people from Xinjiang?" I ask. "Are they also the same?"

Even though my Chinese map in Hohhot calls Xinjiang the "Uygur Autonomous Region," Leon has never heard the term "Uighur" (pronounced wee-gur). Instead he uses the term Xinjiang Ren, which means "Xinjiang people," or "people from Xinjiang." He considers for a moment and then decides that "We are not the same." "They have round eyes," he says. "They are very beautiful." Indeed, later that day we eat at a Xinjiang restaurant and I stand next to a Xinjiang Ren who is cooking lamb kebabs. We both have round brown eyes. If I had a little more hair we could be brothers. I feel some kind of strange "we're both foreigners" kinship with him, despite the fact that he is, technically, "Chinese." I say out loud in English, mostly to myself, "I wonder how you say 'Thank you' in Uighur?" He looks at me and, with a smile, says "Thank you" in perfectly accented English.

Uighur kebab-guy in Yinchuan.

I am pleasantly surprised with Yinchuan. Despite miles and miles of neighborhoods that Joseph Stalin would be proud of--broad boulevards lined with faceless rows of drab concrete-slab apartment buildings and towering government complexes--the "Old City" of Yinchuan is quite charming. Some ancient buildings are still standing. Everything old has not been obliterated, as in so many other places, including Beijing. In contrast to Hohhot, whose downtown is crowded and growing vertically, Yinchuan is lower, cleaner, tree-lined, and less frenetic. There is a pedestrian mall. There are nice parks. And there is also an interesting ethnic mix in Yinchuan. In Hohhot, there is a large Mongolian presence and also a pretty sizeable Hui population situated around the Muslim Quarter. Here there are even more Hui people, since Yinchuan is the capital of Ningxia Province, which is also called the Hui Autonomous Region. I want to eat Hui food, but we end up eating at a Sichuan restaurant and later at a Xinjiang place. I also relax for a while at a tea house while Leon goes to a store to get his video game fixed.

Leon in one of Yinchuan’s city squares with southern gate and Mao.

On the two-hour bus ride back to Wuhai later that evening, Leon sleeps and I gaze out the window squinting my eyes and seeing the Columbia Basin. I just can't get over the similarities. Except when we pass through heavy industrial sections, the landscape could be south-central Washington State: rugged treeless mountains, sage brush, colorless winter prairies. We cross over the Yellow River and then up a hill. Coming into Wuhai from this direction is so much like coming into the Tri-Cities from the northwest: you cross over the Columbia at the Vernita Bridge, go up a large sage-brush covered hill, and through the Hanford Nuclear Reservation to Richland. The primary difference is the built environment. We are traveling on the equivalent of a modern highway. In America you could expect some convenience stores, some gas stations, some fast-food restaurants, but here there is very little sign of a consumer economy in the countryside. No oasis McDonalds or KFCs, just heavy industrial plants. I try to imagine myself living here, driving up into the hills to go for a hike or a bike ride as I would at home, but I can't imagine gazing down into the valley at the smokestacks and the smog below. America has outsourced its industrial economy and its industrial pollution to places like Wuhai.

We get off the bus at the train station in Wuhai--the garbage, the gritty city, the cold. I'm longing for a hot shower, a hotel. Wimp. We walk down the alleyway toward Leon's apartment where, moments after we arrive, the electricity fails. Grim. Hotel! Wimp. But there was no way out. And I'm glad. Less than thirty minutes later, the lights come back on and Mrs. Yang and Old Hao collaborate to make steaming bowls of bai mian--Yinchuan-style noodles--that are truly transcendent, the best noodles I've had in China by far. We pile la jiao (hot sauce), dofu, xihongshi chao jidan (stir fried eggs and tomatoes) atop the noodles, mix everything together, and experience noodle nirvana. Mrs. Yang asks if we make our noodles by hand in America and I have to tell her about the sorry-state of noodle affairs that currently afflicts my homeland. She shakes her head and cringes at the thought of eating dried noodles. "Bu hao" she says--"Not good."

At dinner with Mrs. Yang and Leon.

Eating the best noodles I’ve ever had (with my coat on).

Mrs. Yang asks me a bunch of other cross-cultural questions: "Do Americans eat rice?" (When I said yes she was surprised and wanted to know if it was grown in America or China.) "How much do houses in America cost?" "Do we use bath soap and shampoo?" "Do we have salty pink tofu?"

Then we have a bit of a cross-cultural tussle. Old Hao--because of his train-station connections, has managed to get me a train ticket back to Hohhot, a really hard thing to acquire in the midst of the post-Spring Festival travel chaos. Obviously I want to pay him for the ticket, but he insists on simply giving me the ticket. Leon tries to convince me that this is Chinese custom, to pay the passage home for visiting guests. But I just can't accept this largesse and insist that they let me pay, even though it violates customary practice. They give in, for my sake. It's a no-win situation. I would have felt terrible had he paid for my 125 RMB ticket. It was enough that he went to the trouble of buying it for me. But now I felt bad for violating the rules of Chinese hospitality. I felt pretty damn crass when I didn't have exact change and Old Hao had to search his wallet for 25 RMB. Is there anything more impersonal and alienating than a cash transaction between a guest and a host? I had made my host into my cashier.

But balance was restored in front of the television, where we spent the remainder of the evening watching sports, popular comedy skits ("xiaopin," a genre similar to the "Carol Burnette Show"), and a lot of minority nationality peoples in traditional costumes singing--also widespread on Chinese television. Leon pointed to a beautiful Miao woman in full regalia and noted that the Miao people "wear funny hats and sing really good." His simple comment seemed to encapsulate the generalized Han Chinese view of ethnic groups in the People's Republic, an overly simplistic perspective that is continually reinforced by minority pageantry on television. The same could be said, of course, for mainstream American views of Native Americans.

February 14:

This morning Leon, Mrs. Yang, and I huddled around the television watching this great movie, "Warriors of Heaven and Earth," starring Jiang Wen, about a small band of embattled Tang dynasty soldiers who are besieged by Turkic raiders in the far west of the empire. The movie is filmed in the Gobi desert in Xinjiang province and it strikes me how both China and America have in large part built their civilizations and self-identities by battling against "barbarian" nomads to the west. The continental designs of both countries have come at the cost of nomadic lifestyles, first in nineteenth-century America and today in China, where government policy is pushing Mongolians, Tibetans, and Uighurs to become sedentary and Sinocized as China seeks to consolidate its own western frontier. We often think of China and America as vastly different--and they are--but they are also remarkably similar: two insular, continental nations who believe they stand at the center of civilization and who must extend their civilization to "savage" tribes in the west.

After the movie, we take a taxi to another part of town where we meet my friend "Pegaleg" at her apartment for lunch. Pegaleg is a graduate student at Shi Da who "persevered" through my teacher seminars on American history and education. Her apartment does not look like much from the outside, but it is a little more "high end" than Leon's place: three bedrooms; high ceilings; mahogany-like wood trim and doors; a large bathroom with a western-style flush toilet.

She is thirty years old and her husband is thirty-three. She's a teacher and he is an x-ray technician at a hospital in Wuhai. They have a five-year-old boy who does not live with them. He is being raised entirely by Grandparents, which is common in China. For lunch she has invited three of her former middle-school teaching colleagues. I don't catch everyone's name, except for Will, a chemistry teacher who is an English autodidact and has brought his fourteen year-old son to meet me. He wants me to give his son an English name. I name him Sam, my own son's name, which harmonizes with his surname Shi. Everyone is happy.

At lunch with Pegaleg (immediately to my right in purple sweater) and friends.

At lunch I talk mostly with another of Pegaleg's thirty-something friends, a young man who has left teaching to join the Communist Party (pictured above immediately to my left—red sweater). He is one of the most direct people I've spoken to about politics in China. He asks me immediately about Taiwan which will shortly be having a popular vote on independence. China, for its part, has passed a law (called something like the Taiwanese Anti-Separation Act) that commits China to respond forcefully to any Taiwanese assertion of independence. Tensions are high, as usual, and the Chinese are extremely sensitive to American meddling. "What do Americans think about Taiwan?" he asks.

I try to explain that the average American probably can't even locate Taiwan on a map and probably doesn't understand the historic relationship between China, Taiwan, and America. "The US government," I say, "has its long-held position on defending Taiwanese self-determination, but likely does not want to actually have to defend Taiwan from Chinese aggression." US officials, I tell him, would like the situation to be resolved peacefully. "They probably hope the independence vote in Taiwan will fail," I say.

The Chinese like to position themselves as "diplomatic" on international issues. Even though they have been investing billions in modernizing their military, Chinese foreign policy in Asia has become known as "smile diplomacy" because of its emphasis on "soft power," stability, and negotiation rather than military solutions. These days, the Chinese like to think of themselves as approaching foreign policy issues in a distinctly un-American way (or maybe we should say un-Bush way), with nonmilitary options always trumping force. Given this self-identity as the peaceful negotiator (although people in Tibet or Xinjiang might have a different view), I expected that he also hoped that the Taiwanese independence vote would fail so that push would not come to shove in the Taiwan Strait. He surprised me. "The Chinese government and many Chinese people hope that the Taiwan independence vote will pass so that China can use military force to finish the matter for good."

I didn't want to make waves. I said what most Chinese people would like to hear from the US government: "Well, whatever happens, it is a Chinese matter." And yet, I was a little shocked. I was also surprised to feel a visceral democratic spirit welling up inside my All-American breast. Shouldn't the desires of the Taiwanese (or the Tibetans or the Uighurs) matter? Should national unification and national pride come at the price of Taiwanese self-determination? I was beginning to understand the American view on Taiwan. I mean, if the tables were turned, would Americans really demand unification by force if one part of the union wanted to strike out on its own?

Ok--so there is some historical inconsistency with the American position. If China does not have the right to use military force to ensure that Taiwan stays within the fold, it is also hard to defend Lincoln's use of force against the Confederacy during the Civil War, which after all was preeminently a war of national unification and only secondarily a war of liberation. And yet, putting aside historical consistency for the moment, I still hope that the Chinese government will not resort to force to settle matters with Taiwan.

After lunch, Leon and I take a walk through Wuhai Middle School No. 1 (which is really what we would call a High School), his old stomping grounds. And then back to his apartment for a nap and dinner. Pegaleg and her friends had invited us to dinner, but Mrs. Yang's cooking was too good to skip. Leon and I agreed to meet them after dinner at a Wuhai tea house.

Leon at his old stomping grounds: Wuhai No. 1 Middle School

Later that night Leon, Old Hao, and Mrs. Yang walk me to the train station. My train leaves at 11:20pm and all three of them are standing on the platform outside my cabin window and waving as it pulls from the station. The final goodbye was really heart-tugging stuff. First some last-minute questions by Mrs. Yang: "Are there this many people at train stations in America?" Then they gave me two bags of gifts and we all exchanged handshakes and smiles and a few choice words. "Next time," Mrs. Yang said, "We will all go to Lanzhou together." "Thank you for being Leon's teacher."

By the time I left Wuhai, I felt a particularly strong affection for Mrs. Yang. On the way to the train station she had laughed at me (again) and said I "walked like a foreigner, not like the common Chinese people." How can you describe a person who makes you feel warm inside even when she is laughing at you? Mrs. Yang is one of these middle-aged Chinese women who are sturdy, commanding, and beautiful all at the same time. She is the captain of the household--cooking, barking orders to her men, and laughing at the silly foreigner while she pulls up one of my pant legs and checks the thickness of my long johns. She laughed at me almost continually (especially when I wore my fur hat), saying "Laoshi" (teacher) this and "Laoshi" that. She was always checking to see if Laoshi needed anything, if Laoshi was warm enough. She looked at me with such warmth as she admonished me to wear thicker long johns. She cooked me the best meals I've eaten in China. She sat with me for hours on the couch watching TV, gauging my reaction to the punch lines of the xiaopin skits. She told me I should be staying longer, and, as the time grew short, I really wanted to. She--and Leon and Old Hao--had transformed my Dickensian nightmare into a kind of fairytale visit.

After less than an hour on the train, I receive this text message from Leon:

"David, hope you will have good night on the train. My parents and I will miss you so much, you know, TAKE CARE!"

February 15

I arrive home this morning and get this email from Pegaleg:

"Dear David:

How are you these days? I have sent you at least three messages since you left, but they failed to reach you. So I write to you.

Do you still remember the happist time in WuHai? All my friends liked you so much that they sang high praise of you. They were attracted by your standard American English and your kind manners. I am really proud of you!

Because I have to take part in my computer examination , I have to stop here. Please send me our photos if convenient. I will keep in touch with you by e-mail.

I miss you! You have a happy family and you've realized some of your dreams in China. This is the way that I like best.Say Hello to your Ari (sorry,I cannot spell her whole name) and Samuel and Grace.You are the most harmonious family that I have met as a foreign family.

See you !"