Week 4, Kunming: Trip to Shilin

We went to Shilin a few days ago, where I spent hours walking through rock formations that radiated a cathedral-like reverence. Although the core of the park is tourist-ridden, my hike around the perimeter trails was undisturbed, allowing me to wind in and out of the rocks with a feeling similar to walking through the red slot canyons of Utah.

There's a story about how the Shilin, the stone forest, came to be as it is. It begins with two lovers, Yi people, happy, with words of marriage tentatively hiding behind their cheeks. And this was all a long time ago--an early rendition on the great theme of love, the kind that comes in deep grooves, like the bark of certain old trees. So now enter the landlord, an older man, bald, hunchback, sure, and there's greed there, a powerful greed. Every day he sees her, you know the one, with steps as light as grasshopper wings, movements brisk like a leaf in the wind, and looking at her is like feeling the amber breath of sunlight after heavy rain. And the landlord, he licks his lips, he thinks, ah, he thinks, she, mine. She, that, yes, that's mine.

Time yields, all but collapses to the events that follow. And look, quick now or you’ll miss it, here comes the wedding announcement, here comes the parents blessing because the landlord is, after all, a landlord! And then the night before the great misery, two lovers kiss their palms, and with palms kiss the doorway wood that almost says no, no, this is your home, no. And as newborn ghosts, they disappear into the forest.

The landlord's face curdles with rage. MINE! he screams where palms had lingered the night before. MINE! he screams at the men of the Yi village, throwing off his newly tailored wedding cloak. MINE! he screams, riding his horse with the men of the town behind him, because the landlord is, after all, a landlord, and she is, after all, his wife-to-be. Be it said that a landlord is no stranger to ownership.

They are caught in a grove of limber pines, where the story again resembles a rendition of a great theme, an archetype of severance. And the landlord declares theifhood, and a punishment of death, and a wedding soon to follow. And now the two halves hold their hands together so tightly, condensing each scrap and swatch of their love into the tiniest ball, gripped like a heart between the ribs of their fingers. When they are pulled apart, it has taken twenty-three men. When they are pulled apart, the pine trees shudder. When they are pulled apart, the sun dims, the soil stiffens, and a great wind gouges its way through the grove. The men are pressed to the ground, hands protecting their eyes from the clawing of an invisible beast. And later, much later, when eyes open, cautiously, they open to a forest of stone, with two stone pillars standing in the middle of it all.

There's another story about Shilin, about how the limestone rocks had eroded over thousands of years by the acidic combination of water and carbon dioxide, creating the strange formations seen today.

Science, you're great and all, but sometimes... I mean, c'mon.

-S

p.s. Again, I'm way behind in posts. Workin' on it.

Week 3, Kunming: Trip to Xiao Shujing

For a second I thought that I had gotten away from Jesus Christ. "Goodbye for now, mega-churches!" I had thought to myself last time I left school, cruising past the suburbia-entrenched mall-sized Christ behemoths that hover outside Colorado Springs. And then again, a few months later, I had waved so long to the other side of American religious life, found in Seattle's myriad of spiritual (or decidely un-spiritual, if you subscribe to the thriving Atheist community) factions, all living together in harmony, believing whatever they want--that is, unless it's politically incorrect and/or offensive to the other religious communities, and/or if you make fun of the Unitarian pastor. That makes a big family of everything from Questionable Satanism ("Demonic... or Demonic Hoax?") to the followers of, yes, that same white-robed maybe/maybe-not-son-of-God who adornes the Jumbo-Trons of Colorado Springs' faith stadiums...


...as well as the church of a small Miao minority town by the name of Xiao Shujing.

But really, it shouldn't be a surprise to find the cross in China, where the tally of both registered and estimated unregistered Christians reaches the tune of maybe 40 million (no doubt a significant number, but still something of a drop in the pan for China's population). But big pictures aside, here is Xiao Shujing, a small village tucked into the creases and folds of the crop-studded hills outside Kunming, where most of the houses are made of stone and mud, where cows and chickens and pigs and oxen watch from their tethers and pens, and where people go to sing in church on Sundays.
And they sing well. They sing so well, in fact, that their choirs have gathered enough national acclaim to earn a gift from the government: inside each house you can catch the flicker and whine of a television. And then there are the cellphone towers, three lanky metal skeletons looming over the town, just beyond the hillside.

You know, I don't think the past ever quite saw the future coming.

-S

Week 3, Kunming: Railroad

There's an alleyway by our dormitory where street vendors conjure up bowls of noodles, rice, mushrooms, onions, tofu, pork. Quick hands pinch and toss an alchemy of ground peppers and MSG. There are fruit carts too: pyramids of green-blushed tangerines, pomelos hacked open to prove ripeness. And don't forget the skewered hotdogs, textured with slices down their length so as to appear more like exotic, rubbery flowers, or at least anything more exciting than simply, well, a hotdog.

Past the sorcerers and hotdog birds-of-paradise, the alley extends past an empty and rubble-filled lot. I've been told that they're going to turn the place into a park, but until that happens, sometimes you can see old men holding kite strings to their stomachs like umbilical chords, watching paper dragons swerve around in the sky.

But there is more beyond the park-in-waiting, more beyond the brick wall tattooed with a graffiti ROCK AND ROLL, there is the railway. Compared to the clogged and churning streets of Kunming, this railroad feels tame, nondescript, burdened more with the foot-traffic of students going to and from their dorms and the warm-colored noodle joints that crop up around here. For me, it's the most direct path to reach the big market, but that's another story. This moment is for the railway, tucked away into the folds of dirty buildings, a length of space good for walking, balancing one step over the other on a long strip of steel until it almost feels like predestination. But then it never really is. You always end up turning onto this alley or that street, free to amble or bike or drive on to wherever you need to be. Unless you're the train, that is.

-S

p.s. I'm behind on posts. Too many things that I need to get around to writing about here. Hope to saddle many more words and pictures to this thing very soon.

Week 2, Kunming: Huang Cheng

"They threw me in jail because I was baptized. That and I had too many connections to foreigners, Americans especially, from the war. But to them, baptism was a crime. They told me 'This is your chance! Renounce Christianity!', and to them I said 'But why? Christianity is just about loving people. That's all. That's all.' Then they hit me in the mouth with their rifle butt. These teeth are dentures! Haha!"

Most afternoons we have scheduled lectures. This week they've all circulated around history and religion. Buddhism, Tai Chi Quen, PBS movies about contemporary Chinese history. Today the schedule just said "Oral History Lecture". Enter Huang Cheng, a small man of 90 years, born at the end of the first world war, with a face creased as much by age as his smiles and laughter. An interpreter for the US army during WW2, an English teacher, a middle-school principal, a prisoner for 10 years under Mao Zedong's cultural revolution. From the final years of Sun Yat Sen to the aftermath of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. He experienced the reign of Mao, the Great Leap Foreward, the aforementioned Cultural Revolution, the Tiannmen Square Massacre.

I'm asking my laoshi (teacher) to help set up a meeting with him. If I can, I'm going to have him talk, and write down as much as I can.

Arg, so much to write about, but too much Mandarin to study. More soon.



-S

Week 1: First Impressions

你好，云南。 Hello, Yunnan. Hello, dusty highways marked with cars, small trucks laden with vegetables, heads of lettuce piled high and clinging for dear beheaded life in the open air. Hello, Kunming, city of eternal springtime, streets chattering with cars, scooters, bicycles, people, older apartments gathering grime, new apartments lurching out of the earth, restaurant stalls warm with conversation and smacking mouths. And then to Tonghai, smaller, but not without a scattershot of western-style shops, Backstreet Boys mingling with Chinese pop, while Buddhist temples peek from the outskirts, relatively still, focused on something. Go inside the town, wind through the alleyways. A local primary school just got out, so there are smiles--hidden behind palms, but still smiles--and giggles for your escort to the Daoist temple, tucked into the folds of the town (unlike the Buddhists, who are still looking down from their quiet hillsides) and filled with old men smoking tobacco from their water-bongs and slapping down mahjong tiles, as if both well aware and oblivious to the ancient stone drums lining the wall beside them. But go! A moment for thousand-year-old things, and then go. The local Mongolians have made a feast, with rice and beef and eel and fried crickets. They sing songs that have traveled through long leagues of time and space, they give you tiny cups of baijiu for toasting. The local Han city officials will do the same, but you have to sing too--an exchange of falcetto-encrusted Chinese opera for a two-verse rendition of Yellow Submarine works fine. Hello, last swatch of a people, the old ladies (but to be more respectful, say they have a high age) who bind their feet, who dance with flutes and swords while their grand-children (great-grand-children?) bicycle by in Calvin Klein jeans. Hello highway back to Kunming, flanked by neatly-partitioned farmlands, bent backs over terraced greens, and checkpoints (is that a sickle and hammer?) all along the way, and then, Kunming, hello again.

To be more clear, I guess, it has been quite the first week. The flight was long, but we've been treated incredibly well since arrival. My program-mates are all great people, and also make for a wide-array of folks. Likewise, the English-language major students that we've met have been really friendly, albeit a little shy, and I've been repeatedly told that they think I'm funny because I smile so much. I can't help it though, because I'm just too excited: living here, learning here, everything. But the single most thing I'm looking foreward to is the ISP (independent study project), when I will get to go off on my own and study what I want to. Right now I'd really like to study the intersection of traditional music and religion in the Naxi minority, OR study the vegetarian cooking techniques and beliefs surrounding them in a Buddhist monestary, OR find a communinity where I can study a specific strain of shamanism.

There is much to do.

To sum up the first week of being here: I am humbled, and there is a lot of adapting. Stripped of using English (my security blanket language, my comfort language), I have to push myself, re-arrange myself, rebuild myself with hand gestures, facial expressions, and a slowly growing set of basic phrases. Changes and mechanisms are going off like crazy beneath my surface, and I feel that I am only aware of a small fraction of them.

-S

more pictures soon.