le lotus bleu

so, i went to china for 10 days during spring break here in japan, and it was an interesting trip. i definitely learned a lot, and possibly grew a lot as well. in some ways this trip was very much unlike past trips to china, and possibly unlike past trips to anywhere. it was the first time i travelled in a country that i could pass off relatively well for a local– and it led to many interactions and conversations that i probably would not have been able to pull off in any other country. i also went with two foreigners who had exoticised ideals about china and it helped to feed off their enthusiasm for things that had ceased to be wonderful or different to me. i don’t really want to go into a linear account of the whole trip, so i’ve gleaned a list of things that stuck out to me in the trip and are (mostly) things that i want to remember about those 10 days.

the weird, the wonderful, and the occasionally woeful

1) beijing was a place of strange and serendipitous meetings. after we landed and waited (for a very long time for our baggage to be spat out onto the conveyor belt) we spied a little japanese boy reading his itinerary. the logo printed on it was the same travel company that tsuchiya-san had bought our tickets from. because we paid a bit more for our tickets than we would have liked, we immediately started murmuring about accosting the small thing and asking him how much he had paid, but it came to naught as we were sidetracked by our baggage. so we put the little boy out of our minds and went on with our trip. on the 2nd day of the trip, we were traipsing towards tiananmen square and grabbing lunch along the way in a dinky little chinese canteen (like a zha cai fan stall). so we sit down and eat our various meals and who should walk in but the japanese boy! only d recognised him at first though, b and i were initially sceptical, but after we saw the boy miming out what he wanted and resorting to writing kanji in the air, we were convinced he was the boy. and he was. and what a fascinating boy he was. firstly, his name was asuto– the kanji of which is 飛人. yes– that does mean ‘flying man’. then it transpires that it’s because his father is a bit of a science and space geek, and names him after the katakana word for ‘astronaut’ (i.e. asutoronotto). which is pretty awesome in itself. and then, he goes on to mention that during the space race in the cold war, the americans were astronauts and the soviets called their space travellers ‘cosmonauts’. so his father goes on to name his sister kozumi (i.e. kozumonotto). her kanji is (fortunately, for her,) much more normal and you wouldn’t have realised anything was amiss unless taken in conjuction with her brother’s name.

so there you go. a little boy named ‘flying man’.

there are other adorable little details about him; how he confides in us that he just broke up with his girlfriend (who’s his junior from high school. he’s currently a sophomore in college); how he’s swinging by akihabara to buy some models for himself and his otaku father, and when pressed, embarrassedly refuses to elaborate on what sort of model figurine he wants to buy; how he really wants to go to germany, but everyone told him to aim for somewhere less ambitious, like China, where he can at least read and write if not speak. we took him around with us and aided and abetted his underage (in japan, not in china, so it wasn’t illegal) drinking.

2) that same day that we met our little space otaku friend, we had all just toured the forbidden city (exhausting) and d wanted to head up to the hilly park just behind called jingfeng park to get an aerial view of the palace. so we traipse up 330m above sea level to the top of the park, where a little pagoda sits on a flattened peak. as b takes photos of the palace, a notice a chinese policeman staring at her. worried that he might accost her (or arrest her) i stare at him staring at her– this goes on for awhile, till he seems to tire of waiting for b to adjust her focus and moves on. as he eases past b, he turns around and looks squarely into my face. and i stifle a scream.

IT’S THE POLICEMAN FROM THAT MAD ABOUT ENGLISH DOCUMENTARY BY PEK SIOK LIAN. the one who can speak many languages, and do various accents, including the new york one? the one who hilariously sounds like he learnt his new york accent from nypd blue? THAT ONE.

of course we took a photo with him. he coerced a tout in taking it for us. for free. hnah. i also have his namecard, if anyone’s interested in emailing him.

3) i think my first experience crossing a junction in beijing might have taken a few years off my life. and that was when there was a green man, mind you.

4) i think when i think back, i’m constantly amazed by our luck with taxi drivers. we were pressed for time to get to the station for our overnight train to shanghai (we boarded with less than 5 minutes to spare. pretty much every gantry we passed, the ticket staff shouted at us to run. fast.) but the taxi driver we got was really good about getting us there. he was concerned for us and repeatedly checked the time on his mobile phone and told me to take care as we sprinted away from his cab towards the station. we made the train, but i think that took a few more years from my life. my goodness, chinese train stations are like mazes. not straight-forward at all like english train stations. there are waiting rooms to go into, baggage scans to undergo, and countless gantries and passages before you even get to your platform.

5) God was also really good at providing us with people that gave us good, valuable advice. and this advice always came in pairs so you knew it was sound. in hangzhou i’d forgotten to take the wikitravel printouts i had, so we were pretty much wandering around blind. after a few fumbling attempts to find the bus, in the bus queue, a little hangzhou auntie strikes up a conversation with me, despite my initial misgivings, she seems to be sincere and helps us squeeze onto the bus, gives me smaller notes in exchange for my 100 yuan note (all the while reminding me to count twice to make sure she gave me the right amount), and outlines this detailed walking tour of the west lake area. after we get off the bus to change buses, another hangzhou lady accosts me and delivers nearly identical advice and walks us through the first leg of the trip and leads us to a longjing tea farmer that she herself buys from and we buy some tea (grown from the same plantatons emperor qianlong owned all those years ago). my only regret is that we had not enough ready case with us, and they couldn’t take my foreign credit card so it deeply limited the amount of tea i could buy and i think made the lady lose face, cos the business she brought couldn’t deliver. still the anger and disappointment were never directed at us, merely at the credit card machine so i think things were still pleasant and cordial. but that was a great shame.

i would definitely recommend taking that trip out to the tea fields around the west lake. it’s wonderfully serene and very picturesque, and the path crosses 9 springs and a waterfall. it’s definitely less trafficked than the city bordering parts of the west lake.

later at suzhou we had another problem where we were booked into a hotel in suzhou itself, and i had thought that our domestic flight to xian from shanghai would leave from hongqiao (being the domestic airport), but instead it was leaving from pudong (we didn’t know this till we got the tickets in shanghai). the flight took off at 8.15 in the morning, meaning that we had to get there by 7. but how to get to shanghai that early in the morning? the two taxi drivers we had in suzhou were super helpful with their advice and they really, really helped us think through all the options. in the end we took a taxi all the way from suzhou (because the less expensive options were just not working out; like the early train to shanghai having only standing tickets), but it worked out to only 560 yuan– which is 30 sing dollars-ish per person. and we also came in with good advice on how much the trip would cost.

6) that taxi ride from suzhou to shanghai pudong was another example of provision– because at 4am in the morning, night shifters do not want to take a 3hour trip to the airport in shanghai. but our hotel got rejected by many cabbies before the bellboy got hold of a cabbie who knew another cabbie who would just be starting his shift and would be willing to take us into shanghai. we were really lucky to have gotten that.

7) interestingly, nearly all the chinese people we interacted with– taxi drivers, hotel staff, boatmen, friendly aunties– thought i was a mainland chinese person bringing around some foreign folk. i was usually thought to be their local colleague or their personal tourguide. i guess china’s so big there’s room for all sorts of accents, so even an accent like mine must exist somewhere in this sprawl. i usually got associated with the biggest city around though, so if we were in hangzhou, i’d be thought to be from shanghai; in xian they thought i was from nanjing. it was a pretty big confidence boost to my mandarin, though it’s still not quite as fluent as i’d like it to be.

it was really nice to be treated like an insider for once, after a year and a half of living in japan– you get information or perks or even just a friendlier disposition from people much easily. a really young taxi driver (he looked 18! though i am sure he had to be older) in xian gave me his number and told me to call him if we needed a ride to the airport, he was willing to charge 20 yuan cheaper than the market asking price. but after a while, it got tiring and i hated being duplicitous and/or vague and uncommitted in my answers that i really felt like i had to leave china. it’s a nasty feeling straddling both sides and knowing that you don’t really fall into either– and that any moment now, someone might catch onto that.

8) this was also the first trip i’d been on where relationships had gotten really strained– but somehow we rode that out, and it was, i suppose, a learning experience, if little else.

9) but i’m proud i learnt how to handle touts, vendors, waiters and taxi drivers by myself. i often let my parents do the bargaining and snubbing in china, and it wasn’t as terrifying as i’d thought it to be– or perhaps by now it’s less of a learning curve than it was a few years ago.

10) i thought i’d round it off to 10 since 9 seems a bit abortive. one of the greatest things i took back from china was perhaps an appreciation for chinese poetry. especially this little gem i rediscovered (i’d heard the teresa teng song before and loved it, but it had receded into the recesses of my head for a long time)

明月几时有？把酒问青天。
不知天上宫阙，今夕是何年？
我欲乘风归去，又恐琼楼玉宇，高处不胜寒。
起舞弄清影，何似在人间？

转朱阁，低绮户，照无眠。
不应有恨，何事长向别时圆？
人有悲欢离合，月有阴晴圆缺，此事古难全。
但愿人长久，千里共婵娟。

it’s the perfect poem for this time, particularly the last two lines. there’s always parting and meetings, just as the moon waxes and wanes– nothing has ever been perfect. these are the last 3 months i have here in japan, after that another round of goodbyes, and friends scattered across the world. but we all look upon the same moon, and i suppose there is some comfort to be had in that.