jinlai, jinlai.

I'm back home. Seattle. Walking around here I've been saturated with feelings of familiarity, obscurity, and the sense that I have just awoken from a dream.

For my last week in China, Beijing worked as a good finale. The Great Wall, the Summer Palace, Tienanmen Square, the largest mall in Asia, and the forbidden city were among the destinations hit in a surgical strike of touristic glory. I'm glad I saw them.

I'm a little overwhelmed by the world right now. Final musings on the trip will come later, but for now here's some pictures.


The Forbidden City

The flag raising at Tienanmen Square at dawn (it was very, VERY cold)

outside beijing

near tienanmen

Characters written in water and frozen into ice beside the lake

Great Wall

Powerlines

Troops

at the Summer Palace

Mao and me: BFF 4EVR

-s

Travel Anxiety (Final Blog-Off entry)

It's December. Soon I will climb into a sterile and pressurized flying box, doing away with space and time by sitting down for 22 hours or so--over a distance that would take me perhaps years to swim.

It makes me think back to Zhongdian, when I took a day hike up an odd dirt path into the mountains. I had originally set out for one particularly beautiful peak, but once I got close enough to see the chair-lift arching up its' side, I chose to take a route up to a nearby ridge, one with nothing but a small dirt path. Why? Sam, are you trying to play the lofty purist? The chairlift was right there, and you could've probably seen everything from up atop that peak...

But that's not the point. The meaning of what is beautiful, and great, and magic, is not to seize it. You cannot control beauty. You cannot pick it apart, understand it, replicate it, morph it to your ease--and that's why it is what it is. The reason why I first saw that peak and thought it beautiful was because it was something of its own wonder, something that could've never been made by me, or any other human. It was beautiful because it was real, and because it represented more than the small world of society that we've all been raised in. There's more out there--there's always more out there. There's always things that are greater than us; there's always things that will be just beyond our comprehension.

To hike up onto a mountain is to see, smell, touch, feel, and yes, in the air (or if you happen to trip) you taste it as well. The elevation changes the very pressure and level of oxygen in your blood. The sun permeates your skin, and gets to know you beneath it. As does the cold, and the snow. And to climb a mountain is never to "conquer" it--to believe so is to be seduced into an illusion. To climb a mountain is to be a visiter, and, more importantly, a communicator, an understander.

But to take a chairlift is nothing like this. It's like cutting to the end of a book without reading the rest of it. It's like forgoing the journey to reach the destination. It's like getting your pay and rest at the end of the day without arising from your couch for hours. There's a reason why work, effort, trying even, feels good and right. And when you take that away, you may think you're getting your exciting conclusion, your paycheck, your great view at the top of the peak--when really the reward you've received has been stripped of its very essence.

And so I think back to the plane ride that comes ahead, and how it doesn't seem right. Sure, I'm not going to get all righteous and idealistic and start paddling across the pacific--but all this makes me wonder. How great are we, to have defeated time and distance, to have sliced through the fat to get at the good meat, to have eliminated so much discomfort. But what else have we defeated in the process? What gets ground up beneath the wheels of cars? What gets ripped to shreads in the turbines of a 747?

To tell the truth, it drives me into insanity. An insanity that grips me by my rib cage, and shakes my very heart out from its comfortable nook, so that it pounds up against the walls of my skin as if to strike me as hard as it can in the direction of what is real in this world. And I know I cannot escape all of the architecture of society and civilization and culture--nor would I want to, I think, for it is that which keeps me together--but god damn me if I don't get out into the world and feel it, breathe it in, taste it, wherever I can find it, be it good or bad, exciting or mundane, beautiful or beautiful in its ugliness. I want life. I want time, distance, and place, and the love of everything that comes with them. And when it comes, I will want death too. And it will be just fine. In fact, it just might be great. And I hear that there's no chairlift that goes there.



-s

p.s. and so ends the blog-off. I'm sure I'll post more, but this is it for the day-after-day challange. Many thanks to Katelyn and her wonderful blogging.

So a Chinese hipster walks into a bar... (blog-off entry #6)

The other night a couple friends from my program and I were walking to a book-commons/bar around 9 or so, when most of the little shops and such have closed down for the night. On this one particular stretch of street, all of the stalls were closed except for one at the end, glowing brightly with a gaggle of young folk hanging around outside the door.
"I guess that's where the cool kids hang out."
"Yeah, it's a hair salon."
"What?"
Yes, the hair salons of Chinese cities, where all the hip young gunslingers pall around into the wee hours of the night.

And why not? If you wanted to be cool, y'know, like when you were in middle school and your older brother's friend Mikey was just the COOLEST guy: frosted tips, offspring concert t-shirts, Abercrombie & Fitch visors, y'know what I'm talking about. And you wanted to be just as cool as him. This, in a sense, is what the urban Chinese youth is going through. First off, you've got the clothing styles rocked by western pop stars and celebrities. Next you've got the quickly budding car culture (despite the face that there's no room for China to have a car culture), there's the music, etc...etc... the list goes on, and somewhere on there is hair. Hair styles, that is, lifted from (in my opinion) Japanese anime and American hipsters.

Yes, I had thought that I had escaped the American hipster, but no, their presence is felt even here in the staggered-hair-over-one-eye and the peacock-spikes that have invaded the high schools and indie rock concerts of Seattle and elsewhere. But the great irony about the Chinese urban youth, who are appearing more and more like the irony-steeped American hipsters, is that they looooove bands like Sum 41 and Avril Lavinge--aka, hipster-rat-poison.

After all of these observations, I hold this to heart: just like after you left middle school, and realized that actually Mickey wasn't really all that hot shit, and that really, coolness is all about what's in the individual, all that unique and beautiful stuff that you choose to bring out of yourself--not the coolest bands, or slang, or hairstyles. So maybe someday the urban youth of China will realize this, and revel in their uniqueness.

...or maybe they'll just take on the mantle of mindless pop-culture supremacy, while American youth cross their arms at rock concerts and have parties where they do nothing but name off as many obscure indie bands as they and gossip about each other's hip t-shirt collections.

They're sorta the same thing, if you think about it.
-s

p.s. I am generalizing, I realize. While the "Chinese hipster" fashon is rampant in the city, there's also plenty of other ways the youth present themselves. Just like the US.

Extra, Extra! (blog-off entry #5)

Yeah, so it's been a long day, and I think I'm going to cop out of writing a full entry of substance by putting up some links of recommended reading on the interwebs. I do this because I've recently come to the realization that a laptop is the new newspaper. So much information, so many new stories, updating all the time. It's really worth it sometimes to take a look around...

Great article on the current state of Chinese pollution @ Mother Jones

As if they weren't good enough: discovery that blueberries reverse memory loss

In 1518 almost 400 people died from... a dancing plague?

"Most remote (inhabited) place on Earth", where I would go if I ever wanted to disappear

In case you were looking for pictures of Swedish dance bands from the 70's?

Yes, the internet is a... strange, strange thing.

-s

p.s. if it looks like I'm writing these entries at odd hours, its because the site is recording times in Seattle, not China. I'll get around to changing it.