Coming Home Crazy?

A typical American single-family dwelling; or, as we like to call it, “Home Sweet Home.” Remarkably, this 1800 square foot, three-bedroom home is considered “modest” by American standards. It includes central heating, air-conditioning, underground sprinklers, and one bathroom with a western-style flush toilet and bathtub.

As I write this, it is over two weeks since returning from Hohhot. For the last week, I've been--for some mysterious reason--telling people that I "just came home about a week ago," as if the proximity of one week (but no longer than that) would explain to them that I was still in the grips of China. People already don't care. The "I just returned from China" conversation usually ends after a "Wow," a pause, and then a shift to another topic. Most Americans, I find, don't really want to talk about China. This is even true about academics and scholars, who I supposed would at least be curious. I found this out at a conference in Boise "about one week" after returning home, which, given my new deceitful calculations, was actually closer to two weeks.

Why the lies? I guess I want people to know just how close I am still to China. I am holding on to, even cultivating, this sense of "reverse culture shock," worried that all my changed perceptions of the world--my new ideas about food, exercise, wealth and poverty, globalization, family and community--are fading from me quickly.

In fact, the most shocking thing initially about returning home was that everything seemed so familiar. Was I in danger of slipping back into my old world without even a short phase of awkward contemplation? Had the trip been a failure? I kept telling people that it was "life-changing" but perhaps it was not life-changing in the way that travel is when you're young. I remember returning home to Seattle in 1988 after my youthful backpacking trip around Europe and Turkey and seeing the world through different eyes. Were my eyes different now?

It didn't seem like it. Coming into Bellingham (our first stop in the US) was familiar. The awesome power and beauty of nature on the Pacific Northwest Coast was a striking contrast to Hohhot and Beijing, but the culture shock was not serious at first. We hung out at my Dad's house. I rode my Dad's bike around town. The city seemed empty but also normal. People driving, jogging, sipping on coffee.

I really wanted to "come home crazy" like Bill Holm did in the 1980s. By the end of his year teaching in Xian, "the ancient Tang capital grown into a grimy cement industrial city," he was beaten down by China:

"The lying, the fawning, the false smiles, the categorical no, the stifled anger, have worn me down. The call that never connects on the half-dead phone, the enervating heat, the army of flies, the endless bargaining over small potatoes, the chorus of "mei you" (not have) that sings out in reply to every request, whether for canned tomatoes, cold beer, or train tickets, has finished me off. I am exhausted and ready to go. I do not need a second opinion."

My China, of course, was totally different than Holm's. I wasn't beaten down by stone-walling bureaucrats or consumer deprivation. My China included western conveniences, the internet, and even a Starbucks smack in the heart of Holm's "cement industrial city" of Xian. Unlike Western travelers to China in the 1980s and before, I didn't have to conjure up an imaginary America that served as an idealized (other word?) antidote to China. In Holm's words, "The old China hands who came in the thirties invented a bourgeois monster, and the foreign expert of the eighties invents a republic of pizza, good bourbon, T-bones, Chevrolets, and clerks who are happy to finger your credit card."

My China had come a long way since the 1980s. All of Holm's longings could be found even in Inner Mongolia by 2008. Maybe my experience was a degraded one--like going to a Chinese theme park rather than China itself. Those first days had me questioning the value of my experience and grasping onto to every hint of reverse culture shock, as if to validate my experience.

Most things seemed so familiar they didn't seem strange--like the Interstate 5 heading south. I've driven down it so many times over the years it seemed like an old friend. But I was amazed by the big cars, the big people, and the lack of multifarious modes of transportation (no donkey-carts, no three-wheeled flat-bed pick-ups with two stroke engines spewing noise and plumes of black smoke). The freeways in America are fast and orderly--a monotonous procession of shiny cars and well-fed drivers.

I went to Target on my first night back in town and encountered bright alienating fluorescent lights, wide aisles, and even wider people. A few hulking forms wandered through the store. The employees seemed drugged. There was something disturbingly degraded about the environment. A lack of human energy, vitality, beauty, aesthetics.

For days I was not able to write anything more than simple words and phrases. The first week back in the USA was total chaos. We were jet lagged. We were overwhelmed and underwhelmed all at the same time: overwhelmed by the magic of modern air travel and the tricks of the international date line and underwhelmed by the bland familiarity of everything. I had no energy. All I could do was scratch down some ideas that would later help me to reconstruct my first thoughts upon re-entry:

pedestrian right of way
water out of tap
toilets/shower in barefeet
poop discussions
space--to move around
greenery
birds--bald eagles, fields of swans

relationship with weight and food--obsessed with food and with losing weight
mondo government buildings (China) vs. mondo pick-up trucks and SUVs (US)
ability to get goods anytime
disposable society
lack of culture shock: things at home aren't different but maybe outlook is different?
1st bike ride in US--in jeans not lycra tights
self-serve gas and other labor saving devices
dilapidated barns: abandoned peasant villages?
woman in behemoth truck with "Got Jesus?" sticker

The first part of the list suggests just how much we take for granted in the good ole USA. A pedestrian right of way? I mean--cars actually yielding to pedestrians! This is something that only happens in China when pedestrians finally muster the numbers to push forward and overwhelm the momentum of the automobiles. I was shocked the first time a car stopped just to let me--one lone solitary individual--cross the street.

Water out of the tap? It's obvious how much we take this for granted. After being told to brush their teeth on our first evening back, Samuel walked into the living room and told Arienne, "Mom, there is no water in our cups. How can we brush our teeth?" Arienne said, "Just turn on the faucet and fill up your cups!" They had forgotten what a luxury it is to trust that your faucet will not poison you. We were completely thrilled to walk into bathrooms and showers without our rubber slippers, which for seven months had protected our feet from the terminally wet and dirty bathroom floor. It was also nice not to have the sewer stench emanating upwards through our bathroom drain. So our Chinese bathroom culture was gone forever, and happily. The only thing that remained was continued family discussions about stool. Those would also disappear as soon as our bodies settled back into life and food in America.

We were now luxuriating in space. My dad's house is spacious, carpeted, and clean. It is also situated in the bluffs above Bellingham Bay in what seemed to us a living postcard of natural beauty. I took the kids to the park on our first day and we watched a large bald eagle hover overhead.

Bill Holm describes the Chinese environment as "ruined" by human use and occupation. "Every inch of Chinese soil," he says, has been "remodeled, refertilized, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, rebuilt again, dense with six thousand or so years of corpses, ruins, tries, failures, secrets, catastrophes, treasures." He flies from Shanghai to San Francisco and encounters the city--the one he used to view as "big, exciting, corrupt, polluted"--as "instead, a cultivated garden surrounded by almost empty nature."

We had a similar experience flying from Beijing to Vancouver, B.C. The landscape was sparkling. The air was translucent. We saw three bald eagles on the way home from the Vancouver airport. Flocks of Canadian geese. Wooded hillsides, mountains, forests, bays, sailboats. We were overwhelmed by the physical beauty of it all.

The “green, green grass of home.” Pictured here are two travelers who did not “come home crazy.” This photo is taken in front of the Peace Arch at the US/Canada border. Even after nearly twenty-four hours of travel, Sam and Grace were dizzy with euphoria. They took the first opportunity available to them to pile out of the car and run on grass and not worry about anyone yelling at them (most of the grass in China is strictly “keep off!”).

Ok, so the Northwest Coast is one of the most beautiful places in the world. It is awe-inspiring to arrive there from the brown deserts of eastern Washington, not to mention the degraded grasslands of Hohhot. The Northwest Coast is a lush inhabited wilderness that underscores just how degraded the Chinese environment really is.

But I also wondered what Vancouver or Bellingham or Seattle would have looked like in the 1890s when sawmills still lined the shores pumping smoke and noise into the skies and denuding the surrounding hillsides at an alarming pace? Is the industrializing American West of a century ago a fairer comparison to the industrializing Chinese West of today? Both are characterized by vast labor migrations, largely unregulated capitalism, and environmental devastation.

Certainly America of a century ago was not filled with overweight people with fat cheeks, sunken eyes, and double chins. Nor were the streets so somnolent. I imagine more activity, more vendors, more pedestrians, more carts, much like the China I just left. Modern America seemed to have fallen into a high-calorie, low-exercise coma. I missed the activity of the streets, the walkers, the bikers, the fruit stands, the street food. Everything here felt comfortable, prosperous, lush, lethargic, and dead.

And yet, the landscape alone made us feel as if we had arrived in the most beautiful country in the world. We didn't begin singing "America the beautiful" in the car as we left the airport to drive to my dad's house (partly because we were still in Canada), but that's how we felt.

It was not until we pulled into the Tri-Cities some days later that we began to encounter profound reverse culture shock, suggested by the phrases in the second half of the list above, beginning with America's pathological relationship to food and eating. We were glad to be home, but our little hometown--in contrast to bustling Hohhot--appeared to be a desiccated landscape of broad streets, big people, and even bigger cars. As if to force myself to continue to acknowledge the striking differences between the Tri-Cities and Hohhot, I kept asking aloud, "Where are the bikers, the pedestrians, the vendors?"

G-Way (George Washington Way) is, no kidding, the busiest street in Richland, and this photo is taken, no kidding, just after 5pm (rush hour) on a Thursday evening. Notice the empty sidewalk, the absence of bike lanes, bikers, and street vendors. Also notice the parking lots on the other side of G-Way which front the stores in the Uptown Shopping Center. American cities and towns are laid out with preeminent regard for parking automobiles.

Waiting at a stoplight near my house, all three cars around me contain large people eating. I watch an overweight woman in a Ford Explorer finishing-off an ice cream cone. It is 9:30am. Arienne encourages me. "Remember, we experienced culture shock when we came here from Los Angeles." It's true. American cities are actually slimmer and healthier than the suburbs, the exurbs and the countryside. They reflect a modern inversion of the age-old relationship between wealth and weight. In today's America, for the first time in world history, the urban bourgeois are thin and "in shape" while rural and exurban people tend often to be overweight. This was not true for my grandmother's generation. She was a poor farm-wife in Walla Walla. Her family's diet was filled with meat, grease, bread, butter, and potatoes. But they also worked their butts off--quite literally. This was true for most Americans before the 1970s and it is true for most Chinese today: they eat real food rather than packaged food and they exercise a lot. (Go rent "Jaws" and watch the beach scenes in Amityville--are those skinny Americans or did all the extras come from Europe?)

By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the only people eating "real food"--meaning, in Michal Pollan's formulation, unprocessed food that would be recognizable to our great-grandparents--were educated, high-salaried urban folk and some alternative rural foodies. Because, ironically, "real food" in America is often more expensive than manufactured food and because "exercise" seems to be largely the province of the middle and upper classes, only those Americans who can afford it are skinny (or alternatively, those working poor who are "lucky" enough to be manual laborers--migrant workers tend not to be overweight!). Generally speaking the American poor and working classes are fat. They don't "buy organic." They don't read the plethora of modern bourgeois books about real food and food production. They are buffeted about in a world filled with job insecurity, reality television, and cheap, fattening, fast-food. We really are a fast-food nation. The same trend is occurring in China, but most Chinese today still live and eat like Americans did before the 1950s when we became the richest nation on earth and our chain supermarkets became filled with convenience foods. In China, peasants are still skinny and party officials tend to be the chubby ones.

As I stand in line at my bank at mid-day, I count ten other people waiting, none of whom look physically healthy. They are all overweight to varying degrees. They have sallow skin and pot bellies. No one sports rosy cheeks or a thin mid-section. They all have poor postures. I wonder how we have become THE global superpower and how long it can last. Can these flabby bodies continue to hold up the greatest modern empire the world has ever seen? I think of those skinny, dignified, healthy (and poor) Chinese women clad in their boots and long winter coats walking with perfect postures or biking through the city streets, their baskets filled with fresh vegetables from the market.

Michael Pollan's new book about food came out while we were in China. His recipe for good health is simple: "eat food, not so much, mostly plants." He might have called it the Hohhot diet. There is no mysterious secret to good health. The Chinese have largely mastered it: a lot of vegetables with rice or noodles, a little meat, a lot of walking and biking. The irony, of course, is that as the Chinese grow richer as a society, as they give up their long mid-day lunch breaks for greater worker productivity, as American and Chinese fast-food becomes an increasing part of China's food landscape, as more food becomes produced and manufactured in distant locations, they will begin to look more and more like Americans. They will drive cars instead of riding bikes. They will eat more fat and sugar. Wealth will destroy health in the long run. Another irony: a middle-class American (myself) who enjoys all the benefits of living in a wealthy, well-structured and prosperous society, is romanticizing the health benefits of relative poverty.

Later that week we travel to Walla Walla and have lunch with my 91-year-old grandmother and my mom. My grandmother has made good-ole American food: turkey, potato salad, and jello salad. We follow the main course with candy. I have a terrible craving for rice. After lunch, we recline in the living room watching television. I fall into a heavy, lethargic trance. Later we stagger around filling our car with junk. My mom has given the kids a bunch of Chinese-made plastic toys. The car is stuffed with crap. We are stuffed with crap. We drive home and promptly fill our giant plastic garbage can with crap. We knew this time, however, that Mrs. He would not be sorting through our waste. Welcome back to America--the disposable society. I knew I was really home when an overweight woman in a large truck sped past us with a "Got Jesus?" sticker on her rear bumper. In America, even religion can be reduced to an advertising jingle.

The biggest reverse culture shock, however, comes upon re-entering an American college classroom less than a week after coming home (this time actually truly "less than a week"). For seven months I have taught students who have been socialized into submission by teachers, parents, and the larger currents of Chinese culture, which places much value on respect for authority, especially in the classroom. My students may have been playing porky-pig cartoons in their heads, but if they were, they didn't let on. They sat quiet, attentive, and upright as they awaited my next command. I was shocked. I remember the first time a tardy student waited outside my classroom doorway until I "invited" him to come into the classroom. "John, are you going to come in?" "May I?" he asked. "I'm so sorry to be late. I apologize, teacher."

This didn't happen often. I can count on two hands the times that any of my 150 students were late or absent over the course of the entire semester. In America, I'm already counting toes on the second day of class. As I've mentioned before, my Chinese students moved through campus, and college-life generally, as "classes" not as individuals. They arrived and left class en masse. When I arrived for class five minutes early, there they were--"Travel 1" or "HR3"--in their seats and waiting. "Hello Teacher!"

Each class had a student monitor and a Chinese teacher as an advisor. Absences and misbehavior (which I rarely experienced) were reported. Bernie, of "Software 1," was my most problematic student in China. He was a radical--a hiphop dancer with blue-eyes, thanks to colored contact lenses. He wore his hair in the chaotic entropic style that is so popular among hip Chinese boys. He missed a few classes. He sometimes didn't have a pencil. His mind wandered. He Qing, his Chinese class advisor, and I had many conversations about how to deal effectively with poor, faltering, inattentive Bernie. I didn't have the heart to tell her that most my students in the States were Bernie-esque: quietly disengaged but not actively disruptive. I could tolerate his kind in spades--he never talked, whispered, or challenged my authority in the classroom.

It was thus a shock when I entered my colleague's modern American history class and found a room full of Bernies punctuated by a few actively disruptive students. It is generally-speaking not cool in America--at least at our community college--to be inspired by school, so most of the students strike a pose of disengagement. Some go beyond passive disengagement and sport the sullen look--resistant, resentful, and distracted. Some of them lie with their heads on their desks. Some of them stare off into space. Many whisper. A few fiddle with cell phones. Examining them from the front of the class, they are an unruly bunch, not nearly so neat and conformist as my Chinese students.

I look at them and wonder why they even come to class. My students in China were compelled to by many layers of social control and authority, but these students are gloriously free. I want to give them their freedom. I don't want to be an agent of oppression. In fact, I liberate two of them before class ends. One is a girl who is obsessed with her cell phone, on the one hand (her left), and her boyfriend, on the other hand (her right). I encourage both of them to leave. "You know, I'm not taking roll today. There is nothing keeping you here," I say. She snarls at me and says, "We were actually just about to leave!" "Great!" I say, "Enjoy your freedom." It was the first time I had to ask a student to leave my classroom in a very long time.

In defense of American students--and in particular our students at CBC--many of them are great: open-minded, eager to question, argue and laugh. Their willingness to talk (once you get them going) is a refreshing contrast to my shy, reticent Chinese students. I remember how great American students can be in my colleague's Cultural Geography class. What a contrast. They were eager to ask questions and discuss. They were curious and engaged. If we could only combine their lack of inhibition, individualism, and creativity with the respect for authority, discipline, and work-ethic of my Chinese students. (Wait! We can build a master-race of students!)

I come home from CBC and, in keeping with my Chinese habits, decide to ride my bicycle to Safeway for groceries (ok--for beer). I rode my bike everywhere in Hohhot and I was always joined by thousands of comrades. But this was a lonely and alienating ride. I was the only rider. Big cars and SUVs blazed down G-Way, sparing precious little room for bikers. There were no bike lanes. There was no bike lady at Safeway ready to watch my bike (and a thousand others) in exchange for 3 jiao (about 4 cents). Just an empty steel bike rack near the electric doors. Perhaps even more alienating: it took me nearly fifteen minutes to suit up for my short ride. I put on a helmet, sunglasses, gloves, biking shoes, a velcro strap on my ankle, and a reflective vest. So much for my Chinese habits of riding with no helmet or "gear."

The next morning I wake up at 4:30am and walk out into the darkness down to the edge of the Columbia River. I stand there totally entranced by the force of nature. There is a wide gash in the clouds revealing bright stars which dribble their light across the river. I feel an overwhelming sense of patriotism, as defined by love of the land and a desire to save it all from destruction, war, and degradation.

That evening Samuel, Grace and I walk down the river to Howard Amon Park. In Hohhot nature was so muted. We marvel at the clouds and the mirror-calm river which is dappled by the occasional trail of a duck or goose. In Hohhot, the city was so chaotic. Here the solitude is overwhelming. No one else is walking along the river at dusk on this Monday night in early March. We can see the blue-flickering light of televisions pulsing from homes along the river. The kids are giddy with freedom and wide-open spaces. They run down the path with flashlights, they race across grass, they tumble down to the river's edge to examine rocks.

The path along the Columbia River just one block from our house, or, as we like to call it, “Paradise.” Notice the absence of humanity. (Not that I’m complaining about it.)

We are not so far away from strip malls and busy streets, but the Columbia provides a natural refuge and we have it all to ourselves. I am exhilarated by the solitude and beauty of it all. But I also get this weird sense of how solitude, on the fringes of the city in modern America, can become isolation and alienation. Where was the web of humanity that placed you in your proper social role? Where were the people with whom you were supposed to share the world--the vegetable lady, the meat lady, the tofu lady, the bikers, the pedestrians, the street vendors? Where was the shared sense of struggle and humanity? Where was everyone? At home, in their cars, at the mall, at McDonalds, living out their lives of quiet desperation in isolation and solitude.

I am having these over-dramatized thoughts as I walk towards home along the river. Arienne had picked up the kids at the park and I was walking alone. All of the sudden I emerge from my "Death of a Salesman" reverie and begin to feel very vulnerable in a way that I never felt in China. I walk past a large truck idling on the edge of the river. A lone bearded man in a baseball hat is listening to the radio. He had that loner, woodsman, Unabomber look, the gun-rack type, outwardly confident to the point of belligerence; fiercely independent, but dependent upon weapons to ease the creeping paranoia.

I suddenly realized I was less comfortable in the US than in China. All those conversations with Chinese friends came rushing back. "Does everyone carry a gun in America?" "Is it safe in America?"

I would scoff at those naive questions. "You've been watching too many American movies. America is very safe. Not that many people have guns, and most who do use them for hunting, sport, or self-defense."

But now I realize how much guns matter. Anyone might have a gun here. No so in China (thanks to the state-controlled monopoly of force). If you are a protester or a Tibetan Buddhist Monk you might not feel safe in China, but most everyone else can rest easy. Not even the police carry guns. I used to tell my Chinese friends that I had never seen a "fight" in my hometown (where I've lived for nearly ten years), but in a few months in China I'd already seen a number of conflagrations. I would say this to undercut the stereotype that America is dangerous and China is peaceful. Upon reflection, however, I began to realize that I never felt personally threatened even while witnessing a fight in China. I knew that no one would pull out a gun. I once watched a melee on the sidewalk involving about ten people, including women in high heels and a man with a long two-by-four. As far as melees go, I thought it was almost quaint. I felt like I could have waded through it without getting much more than a couple bruises (about four people were holding the two-by-four so the guy never really had a chance to swing it). But now I was wondering if the guy in the big truck had a gun.

As I passed the boat launch, a white sedan filled with young rowdies screeched into the parking lot. They were playing music loud and hollering. They stopped so their lights shone directly on me. I hurried across the parking lot to the river path and they idled in my direction. Was I going to get beat up? I started looking for rocks to hurl and thinking about exit strategies. I remembered the time I was riding my bike along the river further south at Columbia Point and some teenagers screamed profanities at me. It angered me and I stormed up to them and began lecturing (yelling at) them about being more respectful to strangers, etc..., when one of them pulled a gun out of his coat. He didn't point it at me and it was probably just a pellet gun, but it was enough to get me moving. And yet, I had never ONCE felt threatened even when pedaling my bike through the worst of Hohhot's slums--the types of neighborhoods a guy like me wouldn't dare enter in Chicago or Los Angeles. Now I was feeling vulnerable just blocks from my home.

Wow, "first week" back. The other side of paradise: isolation, alienation, fear and loathing. Guns and weirdos with trucker hats and big beards.

Add to these feelings the paranoia emanating from the American news media. The panic. The fear of disorder. I lived for seven months with nothing but good news from the Communist Party. Things were getting better. President Hu's Scientific Development Plan is working! China is balancing high growth with environmental stewardship! Good news! Good news! On the day of the riots in Tibet, while Western papers reported the violent eruptions in Llasa, the People's Daily beamed "China posts double-digit growth in LPG import in 2007." No mention of the trouble. It was startling to go from that happy censorship to American news reports filled everywhere with signs of the apocalypse. Senseless violence. America's slide into recession. I could not even bear to read the morning paper. I was scared. I started to have visions of a road-warrior-esque post-apocalyptic landscape. I started to think about getting a gun so I could defend my family when things got bad. In China, fear was so predictable--it was used by the state to enforce conformity and submission and, as a foreigner, I had less to fear than the common Chinese person. But in America fear was more unpredictable. It came from all quarters--from terrorists, from students, from your next-door neighbor, even the psychotic mother across the street.

As soon as we came home I began paying close attention to the news from China and about China. The week we arrived back there was an uproar over the growth of the Chinese military--a topic which seemed to me patently hypocritical, given that the US military budget is bigger than the next four nations combined, including China. There were stories, as usual, on the safety of Chinese imports, which also seemed hypocritical given that American corporations and consumers had driven the growth of China's cheap-labor unregulated export economy. There were stories about air-pollution in Beijing, which I also found hypocritical, given that, here again, American consumption and corporate flight had facilitated not only the exporting of our manufacturing economy to China, but along with it, our pollution. I wondered how it was that a free and democratic press gives you nearly as much nationalist cant as a state controlled press like China's. The whole chicken and egg question of press coverage--does the press simply report on the news or does it actually shape and even manufacture the news in the service of powerful interests--seemed no less relevant in America than in China.

And then came the protests (or "riots," depending on your perspective) in Tibet, which, like a swift blow across my forehead with a bamboo shoot, knocked me out of my panda-hugging trance and reminded me of my deeply ambivalent feelings about China. The Chinese government cracked down harshly on Tibetan Buddhist protesters, lied about it, and then locked down Tibet--a territory nearly as large as western Europe--denying access to western reporters and controlling press coverage through Xinhua, its state-controlled news agency. The BBC and other Western news agencies reported causalities and deaths numbering close to one hundred, while Xinhua put the number at around ten "innocent people [who] were burnt to horrid piles of scorched flesh and skeletons by the mob, who resorted to nothing near peaceful protests, as the Dalai clique asserted." According to Xinhua, no rioters were killed by PLA troops, which the Chinese government claimed had not even fired a shot. The Chinese government, through Xinhua, blamed the riot on "rogues and ruffians" who "smashed windows, robbed shops and set cars ablaze...in a plotted sabotage in the regional capital." The state-controlled news agency claimed that "Hard evidence, mounted by the Chinese government, tells that the Dalai clique was the hand behind the bloody Lhasa riot." The People's Daily quoted Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang who said, "We have ample evidence to prove that the Lhasa riot was organized, premeditated, masterminded and incited by the Dalai Lama clique."

Xinhua trotted out denunciations from Tibet's regional government as well as from Chinese-appointed Buddhist lamas, like the 11th Panchen Lama and Dazhag Dainzin Geleg, vice-president of the Tibetan Branch of the Buddhist Association of China, who claimed that the violence was orchestrated by "A handful of Buddhist monks [who] didn't study the scriptures, didn't follow our religious canon, but echoed the Dalai clique in splittist efforts to undermine the stability in Tibet and destroy the order of the Tibetan Buddhism." The news agency quoted Dawa Toinzhub, president of Lhasa-based Dashi Group, who claimed that "The rioters' evil acts have not only hurt our businesses, but also brought negative influence on regional economic development." And, in case the Western reader didn't get that Xinhua was simply trumpeting the party line, it quoted Lhazom Zhoigar, vice-chairwoman of the regional Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, who said, "I am a witness of old and new Tibet. Before the peaceful liberation in 1959, poor Tibetans lived worse than beasts of burden. The new Tibet, especially since the national reform and opening up in 1978, experienced rapid development in all fields of politics, economy and culture. It's the common aspiration of the Tibetan people to maintain national unity, ethnic solidarity and social harmony. The attempts of [the] Dalai clique to undermine the normal life and harmony in Tibet is doomed to failure. Tibet's development and progress can never be held back by any reactionary force." The most vicious rhetoric came from Tibet's Communist party secretary, Zhang Qingli, who called the Dalai Lama "a wolf in monk's robes, a devil with a human face but the heart of a beast."

Xinhua's reporting went beyond the wildest propagandistic rantings of Fox news. No reports from the perspective of the protesters themselves. No concern for the root causes, the motivations, the possibility that government policies themselves might have contributed to the unrest--the kinds of topics that one encountered in the American press even in the stunned and nationalistic aftermath of 9/11.

So here I was at the end of my journey, faced with the same deeply ambivalent feelings about China, a rich, diverse country populated by nearly 1.5 billion people who are warm, hospitable, honest, and generous. And yet, those same people continue to make a devil's bargain with the Chinese government, a bargain that allows them their relative freedom in exchange for uncritical acquiescence to the party line. And the Chinese government, this one-party state that does not even come close to resembling Orwell's totalitarian regimes, that seems in fact to barely control Chinese society, is nonetheless able to--when it wants--enforce conformity and submission to its will. It is able to control information (even in this globalizing world), to monopolize political and military power, to stir up nationalist zeal among the people, and to wield propaganda so effectively that the whole thing appears to work.

So upon my return I had found Orwell, both in reports from the "People's Republic" about Tibet and from the U.S. about our own endless war, "Operation Enduring Freedom." Rob Gifford talks about "panda huggers" and "dragon slayers." Where do I stand? Perhaps somewhere in the grey netherland of confusion.

Ok, so maybe I have come home crazy. What a relief!

Antidote to craziness: Tom and Grace tucked in and ready for bed.

Chewing up our Last Days in Hohhot

This is probably going to be my last post in Hohhot. Things are coming down to the wire here and our calendar is filled with lunch and dinner dates along with last-minute errands and packing.

This last week has been spent mainly going out to eat with friends, colleagues, and students and our remaining days hold out more of the same. Eating is the primary lubricant of Chinese social life and it seems like before we go everyone wants to take us out to eat. Today we'll be eating lunch with the deans and teachers of the International Exchange College. Yesterday we had lunch with Sharon's relatives (Sharon is the wife of my colleague, Yongsheng), last night it was dinner with Carol and Leon, and two nights ago Delai and Emi took us out to meng mian (a noodle dish which might be my favorite food in Hohhot). In the next days, we'll be eating with more students and colleagues, including the English Department, which is taking us to dinner on Thursday night. Suffice it say, we haven't had to cook much lately. We're not generally the kind of people who eat out much, but we are enjoying a last binge of local cuisine before we return to our former monastic ways of eating in nearly every night.

Last week Samuel and I went to hot-pot with Catherine, one of my students at IMNU. Catherine hopes to be an English translator. She is a great student, of the type that you might rarely find in America: she's a front row sitter; attentive to the point of being rapt. Very smart and funny. Any teacher cannot help but like her. But of course, she is also modest to a fault: she thinks she is probably not smart enough to be a translator; she deflects any compliments that come her way. She handed me a gift: a five-page-long essay on Confucius that she had meticulously copied in beautiful handwriting from one of her textbooks. "Because I remembered that you are interested in Confucius and Confucianism."

In her note at the end of her transcription, she wrote:

"I'm very happy to be your student. You are an excellent teacher. You are not only my English teacher, but also my good friend!"

Catherine (Xiao Min), myself, Grace, and Sam after lunch.

What will I miss about China? Certainly the food; the friends; the bikes; the hospitality....but I think I'll miss my students here more than anything. Not just for the syrupy notes (which are thankfully few and far between for me in the US), but just for the fact that they really seem to appreciate my efforts. Somehow here I always feel like I'm "making a difference" in some student's life, a phenomenon that is not always so apparent in the US.

We were talking about what I would do during my last week in Hohhot. I mentioned that I still had not eaten Hui food (Hui people are one of the 57 minority nationality groups in China--they are Muslim and live primarily in the north and west of China).

It happens that Catherine, although herself Han Chinese, grew up in the Muslim quarter of Hohhot and went to "Hui Middle School." "I can take you to a Hui Restaurant this week!" she said.

Two days later Grace and I met Catherine in front of the Muslim Market. Catherine had brought her best friend from Hui Middle School, Nanny (Chan Wen), who aspires to be an English teacher. Nanny is Hui and she was determined to show me as much as she could of Hui culture during the afternoon.

We walked from the Muslim Market across a canal and into the heart of the Muslim section of Hohhot. At lunch we ate some hallmark Hui foods: mutton and noodles; steamed dumplings with mutton; a sweet dish with dates, rice, and sugar.

At lunch with Catherine, left, and Nanny, right.

During lunch I talked with Nanny about Hui culture. I assumed that the Hui--like other ethnic groups in China--had their own language.

"It is Arabic," she said, "But not everyone speaks it." She told me that she knew only a few words and her parents didn't know any. "They do not teach it in the schools here, but you can learn it at the Mosque."

She told me that she wants to learn Arabic someday and travel to the Middle East.

I asked her about the relationship between the Hui and the Uighur people who are also Muslim and live further west.

"We come from the same place and we have the same religion," she said, "but we are not the same."

She was surprised to hear that there were some Uighur communities in the United States. "But I'm not sure about Hui communities," I said.

I tried diplomatically to raise the subject of Uighur nationalism, telling her that most of the Uighurs in America had gotten there by gaining political asylum: "They are allowed to stay because they tell the US government that they are being persecuted by the Chinese government. Are there any Hui people who feel the same way?"

Nanny had never heard anything about Uighur nationalism or government persecution in Xinjiang Province and was certain that "there is nothing like that here."

I learned very early on here that political conversations usually fall flat. I've become very good at suppressing my natural inclinations to discuss politics and history (which is really hard because that's what I do!), but sometimes I forget. But I always remember again during the awkward silence that normally follows a politically sensitive question.

After lunch we visited Catherine's Grandmother and “sister” nearby. The one-child policy does not allow most children to have brothers and sisters, so my students generally refer to their cousins as “brothers” and “sisters.” What is going to happen in the next generation when no one has cousins?

Then it was off for a tour of some Hui cultural sites. We first visited Hui Middle School where both Catherine and Nanny went to school. A beautiful school with a John Denver song that serves as the "bell" for classes.

At Hui Middle School: Catherine, Grace, and Nanny in front of Tolstoy. Catherine and Nanny showered Grace with affection the entire afternoon, each of them holding one of Grace’s hands as they stewarded her through the Muslim Quarter.

Afterwards we visited Xiao Si (the Small Mosque), where Nanny worships every week. She took us to a store within the Mosque complex that sells beautiful Hui clothing--especially dresses and head coverings. Then we visited the Mosque itself where I felt sacrilegious snapping pictures, but it didn't seem to bother Nanny at all.

Walking towards Xiao Si (with green domes).

From there we walked to Da Si (the Great Mosque), where we saw Muslim families eating specially prepared foods in the canteen and older women studying Arabic in classrooms on the upper floor. Nanny felt no compunctions at all about banging on the classroom door, asking if we could watch the class, and then encouraging me to take pictures.

Teaching Arabic class at Da Si

Learning Arabic at Da Si

Afterwards to the Muslim Market and then finally home. It was a fascinating glimpse into the Hui world here in Hohhot--and into the complexity of ethnic minority groups within this predominantly Han Chinese culture.

Da Si (The Great Mosque)

We had gained another kind of glimpse into the world of ethnicity--from a different perspective--a few nights earlier at dinner with Nancy and her friends.

Jong Shu Hui (Nancy), who is Han Chinese, invited us to eat a "traditional Mongolian dinner." She took us to a place with horses, yurts, and Mongolian employees who sing, dance, and wear traditional regalia. Each dinner party sits in its own yurt drinking Mongolian milk tea and eating mutton. It would be the equivalent of dining in a "traditional Native American village," where non-Indians sit cross-legged in teepees chewing on venison while being waited on by pretty Native women in bright robes. There are no rides, but it kind of has that Disneyland feel, where you go to the bathroom and you pass some costumed employees smoking cigarettes on their break. There is always that cutting edge between cultural celebration and cultural exploitation--and, further, the question of who is being exploited, the customer or the employee?

As our van pulled into the parking lot, Nancy pointed to a Mongolian employee in traditional clothing and said, "Look, there is a typical Mongolian!" Nancy teaches an entire class full of Mongolians at IMNU so, although she is Han, she is somewhat of an expert on this topic. In one of our faculty seminars last fall, we got into a compelling discussion of minority issues in China and Nancy took the lead, informing me that "It is national policy to take care of the weak, so Mongolians have even more opportunities and privileges than everyone else." She also told me that "Mongolians have very good character. They have good hearts, they are kind, friendly, brave, and straightforward. They also show a lot of respect for their families. But they are not very ambitious and do not study hard."

If Americans have learned anything in their four hundred years of racial strife, slavery, legal discrimination, social segregation, and racial stereotyping, it is how to talk about race in ways that are mostly "politically correct." PC is a term I should not touch. It is used derisively by conservatives in their critiques of academic thought-police. PC can be taken to an extreme by doctrinaire multiculturalists at universities who implement speech codes and the like, and yet it also reflects, at a very basic level, a degree of racial sensitivity among Americans that does not always exist in more homogenous cultures. You don't have to be a radical multiculturalist on a college-campus to recognize that there are certain words and topics that are off-bounds. In other words, most Americans have learned over time how to keep their blatantly racist thoughts private and talk publicly about race in ways that are not always insulting.

This is not always the case in China, where 93% of the population is Han Chinese, where the other 7% are Asian peoples who look very similar to Han Chinese, and where there is an entirely different discourse on issues of race and ethnicity than in the self-identified "multicultural" USA. I still remember when Diana, a teacher in the Foreign Language Institute, asked me if I could "tell Chinese people apart?" "I can't tell foreigners apart," she said. "They all look exactly the same to me."

I couldn't help laughing. This is not something that an American university professor would say even if she thought it. In fact, it's so cliché it is used as a sarcastic punch line among "enlightened" folk when mocking American racists: "They all look the same to me!"

We had actually been taken to this same restaurant--a tourist rite of passage--in the fall. The food is excellent, if somewhat expensive. This night we dined on one of my favorite Mongolian dishes: yogurt with millet and sugar. The yogurt was cold and fresh. The millet was slightly toasted and crunchy. The sugar was, well, sweet. We also ate various kinds of mutton: on kebabs with spices; on a carcass with dipping sauce.

I sat next to three middle-school aged boys (sons of Nancy and her friends) who were eager to practice their English. The topics were familiar after seven months in China: American movies; Yao Ming; the Olympics; "Do all Americans own guns?"

At dinner with Nancy and her son (far left), his two friends, myself and Arienne. Photo Credit: Mr. Jong

The conversation got even more interesting part way through the meal when Mr. Jong (no relation to Nancy), who lives in Qingdao and was visiting Hohhot on a business trip (his company manufactures coal-mining machinery), stood up and declared that he "likes Karl Marx" and is still a devoted Marxist. "I am a Marxist!" he proclaimed.

Nancy was kind of surprised. "Are you a member of the Communist Party?" she asked.

It turns out Mr. Jong is indeed a Communist Party member and he asked me if I thought China was a Communist society. I've been here long enough to know that the Chinese, even Party members, relish in pointing out to Americans that China's economy is mostly capitalist now. So that's what I said: "It seems to me that China's government is Communist but its economy is even more capitalist than America's. Everyone is buying and selling." Everyone laughed and we toasted Karl Marx.

I told them that actually many Americans lean towards socialism in terms of education, health care, and social services.

Nancy said, "But isn't your government totally opposed to socialism?"

"A lot of the way we think about socialism is rhetorical," I said. "Americans are taught from a young age to hate socialism just as the Chinese are taught to hate capitalism. But talk to most American students and they want to help the poor, they want workers to make good wages, they want free education and health care."

"It seems to me that the same is true with the Chinese," I said. "They say they are socialist but they want a capitalist economy."

We all agreed that the best political system would combine the good parts of both socialism and capitalism.

I said, "Marx understood that capitalism by itself generates a lot of wealth, but also inequality. On the other hand, socialism by itself has the capacity to enforce equality but not generate wealth. If you combine both systems, maybe you can have both wealth and equality."

I've made this speech before and it always seems to get good reviews. It worked one more time and I'll probably be using it again this week if needed.

So I guess it is farewell to Hohhot and all our friends here. Just a few more twenty-course banquets and we'll be headed home. It is bittersweet to leave a place that is only now beginning to feel like “home.” But we’re also looking forward to returning to our real home, in the good ole’ USA.

Cheers,

Dave

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 !"