Flurry of Trainings

Disclaimer: this will me scrambled. A sketchbook of reflections and recent memories.

I find myself in a place where few people give me their real, birth-given names.

“Call me Z,” someone says.

This statement means: you cannot pronounce my real name because it is too exotic for your tongue.

But I find myself meeting more numbers than people.

Statistics, statistics, statistics. Over fifty percent of the women in the US who are infected with HIV/AIDS are African American Women. Thirteen percent of the US population identifies itself as African American. The leading mode of transmission for HIV in African American men is sex with other men, followed by drug injection. For African American women, the virus is most often transmitted during heterosexual activity.

The ability to conceptualize and think abstractly develops, for most of us, in late adolescence. How are you piecing together this information? How do demographics occupy a visual space in your head? Do you see a pie graph? Do you see circles with stems sprouting more circles, extending into a web to limn the idea of epidemic?

Men having sex with men and then having sex with their wives—women who think they are in a safe, monogamous relationship with no reason to protect themselves. Men raving at those wives who dare to pull out a condom, to imply that they’re—the husbands—are cheating. A wall of blackness because the complexity of human behavior perplexes in its resistance to generality.

In a video I watched at the UN Women’s Tribunal on Poverty (hosted by the Feminist Task Force and the Global Campaign Against Poverty), a young activist painted a grim portrait of the future where a museum exhibit consists of wax figures of people of African descent. “What’s that?” Someone will ask. “Oh. That’s a black person. They went extinct thousands of years ago from AIDS.”

This is the first time I have seriously contemplated HIV/AIDS since I was a kid—since being approached with heavy-handed anti-drug messages. This is the first time I have been exposed to the first-hand anger and frustration of women of color who are fighting to teach prevention to high-risk communities (NYC is above the national average for people infected with the virus); a simultaneous battle with racism and violence against women.

At the Public Health Library on 1^st Ave, an elderly woman who reminded us that she is not an expert, showed pictures of communities she has visited all over the world. During the question and answer session, litanies of misdirected hostility paradoxically united the theater of people. A black woman acknowledged the good intentions of the presenter before berating her for not stepping aside to let women of color help women of color, to research women of color, to explicate and unpack the correlations, to highlight the ways in which we must tackle and abolish racism, poverty, sexism . . .

Yes. The white women nodded their heads. We agree. Why do we get the funding? Why do we get jobs in Brooklyn and the Bronx? Why do we travel the world and give other communities the tools they need to tackle the problems they have largely because we created those very problems for them?

Yes. From behind the podium, the woman, whose signs of age were seemingly vaporized under the stage lights, nodded. This woman, a contemporary Mary Henrietta Kingsley.

I am spending a year of relative privilege by serving a community I am not yet familiar with and that did not previously and directly contribute to my growth and development. I have multiple justifications for my decision: it is important to embrace diversity, it is important to stand up for the disenfranchised who represent no part of my personal identity, but contain the same palpitating viscera . . .

It is important to constantly question my motivations. It is important to defend myself against an existential crisis and the crushing carapace of cynicism.

Another training. Another cheesy certificate in a cheap, plastic frame.

“Latin American and African American men are the least likely to get liver transplants.”

“Why?”

Wide, dark-circled, intimidating eyes steer my way, “Racism.”

This word is said with an intonation of condescension: “Racism, of course. I know you want to cover your face from this issue, but you cannot ignore it.”

However, in the midst of discussing public health, breaking it down into specific demographics, confronting racism as a major cause of gross disparities in health care, there are intersperses of another kind of fear of confrontation, one that is not immediately recognized.

“Our young women today don’t know how to stand up for themselves. To be independent. To believe that they can be happy without a man constantly in their lives. They have a problem saying, ‘no’—articulating precisely what they want when they want it. We need to counsel them in better self-esteem.”

Another consensus. The nodding of heads.

“A woman needs to know when to be subservient to a man. She has to let him be the provider. She needs to take care of herself—to be the source of her own happiness—but she needs to know when to say when. She needs to be the woman and she needs to let the man be the man. Only then can she be a True Woman.”

Gender and race issues have been colliding in inextricable ways all around me. The main point: inextricability. These things cannot be prioritized; they must be addressed simultaneously.

Audre Lorde walked to the neighborhood in Harlem where I currently live to buy comic books with her sisters. She tasted women in the Lower East Side. She pondered the layers of oppression that accompany blackness, a body-quivering love for women, as well as being generally female. She thought about her blackness in lesbian bars in the Village.

We continue to have these conversations over half a century later—conversations about intersecting, complex identities. But, it seems to me, most people don’t have these conversations: it crosses their mind, their eyes glaze, they are afraid to be caught in a snare . . .

A transgendered woman, male to female, handed out a survey.

How long have you known that you are heterosexual? Would you like to seek therapy to change that?

“How can people expect me not to judge them, when they are confused about their own sexuality?”

“Men who have sex with men are gay. How could they be anything else?”

If the transgendered woman, male to female, loved women, she would be a lesbian.

“Things are just so complicated now.”

But, really, things have always been like this.

In the training on adolescent sexuality, the quick sand topic was sexual orientation. Three men sat in the audience—the largest number ever recorded. Three men dominated the conversation; interrupted the presentations.

In the training about HIV/AIDS education and prevention, the focus became spirituality

“He had a plan. He made us in a particular way. There is no reason for a baby to be born HIV positive. A baby sheds its mother’s immune system. Someone is looking out for us.”

In the training that wasn’t about older women and sexuality:

The grandmother, the Corinthians love-message pusher:

“The condom was stuck inside me. I couldn’t get it out. I tugged and pulled. I cried. And then, the next night, I was lying in my bed and it just shot out—without me having to do anything.”

Art and Text

My time has been split between attending literary events and public health workshops. I’m trying to catch up my blog with all of these happenings. One thing at a time. Written installments that try frantically to keep pace with my life. Always writing in past tense. Always speaking in fragments when the objective is to make connections; create holistic meaning.

Recently I traipsed through the American Folk Art Museum to catch the last day of a Henry Darger exhibit. The exhibit showcased the work of Darger and a handful of artists he has influenced. Amy Cutler’s paintings corralled the majority of my attention (I had seen one of her paintings over a year ago at the Brooklyn Museum, but had forgotten about her until this recent rediscovery).

From far away the girls in Cutler’s pieces look nearly identical, but upon closer scrutiny, each face and expression denotes distinct personality. I appreciated Cutler’s prompt to look closely and to ponder the little mysteries of her work. Domestic spaces and quaintly attired female figures provoke curiosity through absurdities such as people being rolled into Persian rugs, girls’ hair seamlessly braided together, and/or strange crafts being conducted with women’s hair. The coils of hair providing a life line between and providing a resource for the arts and crafts of these depicted characters offers a nesting doll dialogue about folk art that comments on itself, that captures the act of crafting in a landscape of folk costumes with a heavy dose of surrealist, fairy tale intrigue. Adding to the quiet, wintry provocation of the paintings is the negative space: white consumes much of the work, sometimes providing little, if any, sense of space and horizon. Cutler also demonstrates a fascination with private, small spaces—a child-like whimsy akin to setting up a personal headquarters in a closet or investigating and cherishing all of the components and compartments of a doll house (as in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Doll House,” and Kezia’s love of the little lamp).

A contemporary Chinese-American artist was also featured in the exhibit: Yun-Fei Ji. His cramped and interesting work can be viewed here. Exploring the juxtaposition of text and image (Darger provided illustrations for his novels), the exhibit nodded to traditional Chinese art--fusing word and image in flowing, thick, black-tipped brushstrokes.

Earlier, I was reading an interview with Lynda Barry (a self-taught artist, and in many ways, connected to this idea of American “folk arts”) who discussed the link between text and picture, as well as its roots in Chinese art. For Barry, art is a response to compulsion and necessity, and thought projects images into the theater of the mind. Barry would have been a nice addition to this exhibit, adding to the discourse with contributions by graphic novelists—as “outsider” artists, as celebrating the marriage of illustration and written language, etc.

However, it is clear that the marriage of text and the visual arts is not to explicate. Despite Darger’s outpour of narrative, ambiguity chokes his precise message and vision. Little girls infest battlegrounds with flaccid penises . . . What more can be said? It is a worthy image of analytical debate that leaves me pensive and fearful of loquacity. It is a jolting mascot for an adolescent-like awkwardness that never fully departs after crossing the hazy threshold into adulthood.

Clemmy's Memories of War

Clytemnestra, performed by the Martha Graham Dance Company, Skirball Center of Performing Arts

It didn’t matter that silence helped to puncture the chest of Clytemnestra as her son, Orestes, stabbed her in the heart. The lack of soundtrack amplified the dancers’ breathing. Waif-like Clytemnestra gasped for air. Percussion was maintained when the dancers smacked their thighs and stomped on the ground. The audience held its breath—shocked by the silence and the seamless intensity of emotion and movement on stage. Intermittent static: the soundtrack returned, stopped, returned again with an obnoxious presence that ruled out any notion that these pauses were intended. The technical malfunction provided an avenue for chatter as those on nervous trysts exited the venue, relieved to have a conversational prompt.

Writhing and contractions—those are the movements I imagine when I think of Martha Graham. Clytemnestra did not disappoint. The set was stark with blanched, abstract forms, like the melted debris you might find in a Dali painting. The costumes were flowing and “primitive”—adhering to the modern mode of “primitivism” when global, indigenous designs added exotic turbulence to Eurocentric standards of art. The props were sparse and awkward, including a weapon that looked too bulbous to be a threat. Characters effectively horrified the audience with contorted facial expressions at the culmination of rape, betrayal, and murder.

Watch a video of one of the rehearsals for the dance—this is the character Cassandra prophesying death and destruction:

(I discovered this video on The Clytemnestra Project website)

Perplexed

At my job I continue to feel displaced. My position and its duties are still hazy. Mainly I have been getting to know the other people in the program (most of whom fit my profile: young, female, twenty-something, eventual graduate school plans--although most of my co-workers plan on going to medical school or something else public health-related). Our first few weeks were full of team building activities, brimming with the usual orientation agenda: meditation, scavenger hunts, and tear shedding.

We also did a community service project, working in a soup kitchen. Passing out bread in a church, I was told plenty of jokes I didn't quite get. I had to wait for facial cues to communicate that the punch line had been delivered so I could force a chuckle. One man made his jokes at the expense of the horrible piano player in the church—“He doesn’t know more than three chords! I can’t take any more of this!” Others, very seriously, asked us for certain flavors of bagels and outright dismissed some of the morsels we offered (which made us smile, jokes made to ourselves). I saw no children and few women. Plenty of men in all sizes and colors: some bearded, some in suits, some a little bloodied, some young and cavalier (in a hipster or punk rock transient version of gallant).

In the Bronx, I impressed a gaggle of children with my ability to blow giant soap bubbles, successfully distracting them from bothering their parents who were being lectured on preventing these same kids’ asthma-related emergency room visits. Attention-starved erratics talked to me about nothing because they didn’t want me to stop listening.

Medical meetings. An early morning of elevated vocabulary and pink and purple slides that reminded me of fruit stripe gum (the zebra gum I loved as a kid). A pathologist was showing the residents and doctors the effects of asthma on a small child, the microscopic story. I munched on a free bagel (any kind is fine with me) and sipped on some cold coffee while squinting my eyes, hard (as if that would make the slides more intelligible to me).

Disgruntled social workers. Well, a disgruntled social worker berated a man showing a slide of his son tied up to a respirator--as if this man was truly an insouciant corporate head who was defending the NYC transportation department by posing as an activist for cleaner air solutions. The disgruntled have a question for everything: if the breakfast is free, does that mean don’t count on eggs and bacon? If you are researching a Dominican population, is your survey in Spanish? If I clap my hands to punctuate my diatribe, will you better understand how meticulous and passionate my insights?

At a different meeting, conducted by a group of faith-based community organizers, I extemporized a presentation on a program I studied on the cab ride to the site. Preachers trying to out-preach each other. It was a long meeting. One man in a red hat, brown blazer, and pink pants and shoes interrupted the scheduled presentations to openly reflect on religious tolerance—a nearly obsolete point in a room comprised of Jewish, Muslim, and multi-denominational Christians. Perhaps because I am inundated with radical forms of various religions in the media I was impressed with how engaged these people were in their communities with no hidden agenda of proselytizing (or so it seems). Subsequently, I was disappointed in myself for being so cynical.

Particularly reassuring was the support this group—mostly men—gave to a woman, a survivor of a violent relationship, who was abandoned by her preacher during her struggle. Despite abandonment by her religious leader, she still maintained her faith. This community stressed the importance of ending violence against women and called out the fallacies of forcing women to stay in monogamous situations if the union is dangerous for the woman and her children.

Last note: I hate Sarah Palin. The entire campaign horrifies me. My job denies me from being publicly political, but, anonymously, I must express my anxiety over this upcoming election and future of this country. Unfortunately, the absurdity of everything that is happening right now leaves me flummoxed. Nonplussed. . . . only capable of finding different words for “baffled.”

First Few City Fragments

My first few weeks in NYC consisted of all the things one could hope for in a first encounter with a diverse, globally-connected city:

I saw two girls mugging another girl (wrists held against a cast-iron fence with hip thrusting and uppercuts—stabbing?—to the lower abdomen—curses barked—conspicuous under a lamp post—a man calling from the window, aloofly, “Call the police.” “Shut the fuck up.”)

On the way to meeting a friend at his work, my route was obstructed by an Indian Parade (an event that seemed to consist mainly of floats advertising phone rates to and from India. Sampled: good veggie samosas and pakora)

Viewed a performance by a Washington Square regular—a caped man who cuts oranges, mid-air, with a wooden sword, and who films himself doing so (he is also a poet, dabbling in miracles: “The cure for AIDS is equal parts AIDS to vinegar.”).

Was shat on by a pigeon and had to clean myself up in a public restroom before continuing to the David Byrne "Playing the House" at the Battery Maritime Building.

Played an organ that was connected to pipes, radiators, and devices that clanged on pillars and windows in a nearly vacated warehouse (this was accompanied by extemporized dance routines, walking into people’s pictures, and listening to a bunch of racket as many first-time composers tried to master an unmasterable instrument). See this NPR article.

Eating lots of cupcakes. Babycakes is where I contemplate the feasibility of my participation in the “freegan” movement. Certainly I would go dumpster diving for clothing and furniture if I wasn’t so damn paranoid about bed bugs.

Started going to Bikram Yoga (“hot” yoga)—I keep returning because I want to know if pleasure can eventually be found in drowning in the puddle I make on my purple yoga mat.

Lost my phone in a Rite Aid and had to ask some strangers (who were discussing Obama's campaign) if I could borrow their phone to call my own and find in which aisle I inadvertently placed it.

Met Donald Green--"New York Times Published Author"--who composed a poem for a friend named Donald--not a NYTimes published author--and who mentioned, in the poem he composed--this is Donald Green we are talking about, published author--God--although he is not religious--and he, Donald Green mentioned--again, the NYTimes published poet--his friend who directed Sister Act and Sister Act II--"and he used to be from the East-East Village"--and he, Donald Green, who will soon, he claims, be working in television, and who once appeared on Columbia University's radio program, talked to us for three hours as I shifted my weight, scratched my nose, and thought about cutting him off if such an action wouldn't have absolutely broken my heart.

Went to a friend’s birthday party with a celebrity guest (someone from TV. Someone in fashion. That is all I will say).

In Brooklyn, I went to a poetry reading—the spotlight was on Philip Levine (scatological: comparing prose poems to turds and lines about cat shit. It all spoke to my inner crotchety old man. Humor is a good tool for engaging audiences, readers—and it eases the tension in a cynical personality. Such a thing certainly deserves the showcasing it received. Before Levine: lulling voices, striking commands of language, and a lacking—a lacking of the ability to “take off the top of my head”—to speak to my inner curmudgeon).

Finished this blog in a coffee shop on a miserable rainy day; the city's bowels grumbling at my feet.

New Introduction

This new blog was supposed to host an archive of old writings: from Europe, from China, the various news articles and internet videos I found appealing, intellectually stimulating or infuriating from a feminist perspective, etc. However, an irrevocable error occurred: after I thought I copied and pasted former posts successfully (posts I foolishly did not back up before deleting), I discovered that nothing showed up on this web page except a list of titles (titles which will remain here as micro-mementos). What I wrote about my Yunnan experience is the only thing salvaged.

I have let it go: rebelling against loss. When I was moving, I was disgusted by my attachment to useless, material stuff. It is quite a different compulsion to cling to something that takes up virtual space—writings that still inhabit the mysterious depths of the internet, beyond my access. Somewhere in the folds of my mind these written recollections stick, but they are scrambled distortions when forced to the surface of my consciousness.

Before I lost all of the blogging I did, I had read through it and was surprised at what I nearly forgot. When I was younger, I was proud of my memory, claiming that I recalled some fuzzy moments of my second birthday. Once a psychology student told me that my claims were bogus. We can’t recollect things from such early ages: what we think we remember is constructed from looking at old photographs or hearing stories from our family. Journaling is a way to rebel against the claims of a collective memory—a compromised memory formed by a group, permitting a single perspective to be the “true” one. Which isn’t to say that family stories or memories are not fluid; variation persists.

Lately I have been struck by the nebulous quality of my memories. When I traveled, I kept notes about what things were experienced on each day of the journey because I knew that later, without these notes, I would confuse chronology and forget small details—names, colors, foreign vocabulary . . . The more eventful my life becomes, the more cluttered my mind feels—the more eager I am to disregard sensory details and the emotions connected to past occurrences.

My grandma recently gave me her “personal history” to edit for her. Prior to this assignment, I read the autobiographical writings of my grandfather—recollections primarily of his childhood on his family’s ranch in New Mexico before the Depression. As I read these things, things of little interest to people who have no personal or familial tie to my grandparents (as my grandfather’s apologia states in the beginning of his text), I wondered about my grandparents forgotten memories. The entirety of our lives, counting every lived second to the present, expands away from us like a string of stars expanding into the ever-growing universe. What survives of the narrative of my grandparents’ lives is the evidence of how they prioritized their memories. I judge that civility was the crutch of my grandparents long marriage, and as I read their separate narratives, civility dominated. Their writing strikes me as polite and hesitant to investigate any hurt, shame, scandal, or anger. Tragedy and emotion are not absent from their recollections, but I feel as if they purposely concealed a lot of information. Perhaps they deemed these things irrelevant long ago, and all that they truly recall takes up twenty to eighty pages of 12 pt Courier type. Should I be afraid or comforted by the idea that when I am eighty years old my entire life to date could take up no more than twenty pages?

There is so much I could say in response to the contrast in my grandparents’ writing—in terms of style and content. My grandfather recalls the most minute of details. As a former highway engineer, he exhibited brilliance in retaining the technical details of any process: from watching how roads were built when he was a boy, to herding and milking cattle, to building a pig pen in shop class--including all of the dimensions and measurements involved in any of these tasks. The highlight of my grandmother’s life was certainly her life after marriage, and she describes the courtship, marriage, and honeymoon to my grandfather in greater detail than he allows in his writing.

How did the Panama Canal first strike my grandfather when he went there, during World War II, denied from joining more direct military efforts as a pilot, because his engineering commission in Central America was seen as helping the war efforts? How did he feel as a new father, holding a baby by his first wife, before my grandmother, a daughter estranged from the family that I know and love? What ran through my grandmother’s head as she delivered her first child, when she carried my mother and uncles and aunts inside her body? When she had her nervous breakdown during high school? Their memories feel stale, not freshly bursting with three hundred and sixty degrees of sensory perception.

Since I moved to Harlem (or, more specifically, Hamilton Heights) nearly ten days ago, I already feel the fullness of my experience narrowing, blurring. It feels like I have been here for a weekend, or, contradictorily, that I never left from my visit in the spring, although there was a whole interval where I returned to China, traveled to Vancouver, and rested in Denver before this new, semi-permanent move. I plan to write as much as I can, as an aid to my memory—or simply to tune out the sound of the vibrating beats of Latino hip hop as beer bottle caps are thrown at my window.

Yunnan

Kunming, the capitol of Yunnan Province, China

 

Yunnan is the province in China that boasts the most varied population of ethnic minorities.  Considering that 91.5% of the billion+ population of China is Han Chinese (stats from the CIA World Fact Book), getting the opportunity to see the everyday life of some non-Han Chinese was an interesting way to conclude my first, long experience in China.  My perceptions about this country and its population were in constant flux, as culture is not a static, isolated thing.  Certainly, I will never possess a clear idea of what China—or any country—really “is” in every nuanced and dynamic socio-cultural capacity, but my minor investigation would have been quite lacking without this trip to Yunnan.  Furthermore, Yunnan is a place where ecologists and botanists run amok because of its copious ecosystems and plant life.  Appropriately, varied ecological and social systems go hand in hand in Yunnan, hanging together in a delicate balance.

 

My trip began in Kunming—a city of gardens and other things of typical Chinese city criteria:  pollution, KFCs, and bustling shopping centers selling ubiquitous globally recognized brands.  Kunming has been transformed over the last few decades from industrialization and globalization, but it is different from cities like Shanghai and Beijing in the way it caters to those searching for cultural diversity.  The city exploited local color to the point where I could recognize the distinction of this place from the other places I had been in China, but I did not get the feeling that I had my finger on the pulsating and elusive artery of “authentic” and oh-so ethnic culture.  Of course, what I observed was by no means “fake” or “unreal;” things just felt more performed, and the aim of the performance was to fulfill an expectation, among both the Han Chinese and foreign tourists, of what Chinese ethnic minority cultures are supposed to be like:  colorful!  Exotic!  Tantalizing!  As cute and collectible as the Beijing Olympic mascots!

 

 Needless to say, as much as I enjoy taking pictures of urban spots of construction and dilapidation, I was eager to get out of Kunming and visit rural areas. 

 

The first time I went to a McDonald’s in China, but not the first time I did an ice-cream handout

 

However, I didn’t leave Kunming without buckling to the pervasive McDonaldization by going directly to McDonald’s.  I’m sorry, but I wanted some cheap coffee.  Plus, in a McD’s in China you can get taro pie—high calorie and delicious.  On my way into the first MacDonald’s I had been in for I don’t know how long, some dirt-smeared beggar children shot me a familiar glossy-eyed look.  I later exited the McDonald’s with my guilty-pleasure coffee in one fist and three cones of ice cream in the other.  I should have known better, but really, what solution is better when dealing with poverty so immediate and unsettling?  However, my minor action started a wrestling match between two little boys who lunged for a cone, crushed it in their collision, and lapped the oozing ice cream off each other’s hands. 

 

Bird and plant markets

 

Puppies, bunnies, kittens, grubs, beetles, squirrels, pigs, hamsters, birds, puppies, birds, puppies . . . Adorable things packed into cages, looking sad, hungry, and too weak to go into hysterics for affection and freedom.

 

Another experience at a cultural “theme park”

 

On a boat cruising the Dian Chi Lake (a highly polluted lake with a famous Chinese tobacco company along its perimeter—linked to the stifling pollution?  I think so . . . ), I met a Chinese couple:  Zhiguo and Liyan.  Liyan is a heart doctor and chain-smoker, and Zhiguo is the boyfriend who taught his sweetheart how to smoke.  Early in our encounter we had a misunderstanding:  when this couple told me they were going to a “cun” (which means “village” in Chinese), I didn’t realize they meant a cultural “theme park,” much like the Cambodian “Cultural Village” I went to in Siem Reap.  Wrongfully assuming that these fellow travelers had set an interesting itinerary for themselves, I leached onto their day trip.

 

At the village-attraction, I tried to mask my disappointment.  Five minutes into a live elephant show had me seething with guilt and regret, and I left the park immediately.  Who could be entertained by sad-eyed elephants performing tricks on lacerated knees that had been hit with hooked rods? 

 

Please note:

 

Throughout this post I am writing how “I” did this or “I” did that, but I really mean “we.”  As usual, I was traveling with Linda.  However, if I bring her out as a more dominant character in this narrative, remembered frustrations and dealings with passive-aggression will sidetrack me.  Linda is a good travel buddy, and she convinced me to do some great things on this trip that I would not have planned for myself, but she is also hyper-critical and tends to over-generalize people and culture in a way that makes me uneasy.  At this point, the narrative is turning collective—“we” means “Linda and I.” 

 

Food we ate in Kunming:

 

Cold noodles from street vendors—limejuice, crushed peanuts, chili flakes, vinegar, and some other dark liquids that I couldn’t identify were spooned hastily into my bowl

 

Papa Roti Malaysian bread—an aromatic (from the hazelnut) buttery bun that actually reminded me of a Sally Lunn bun from Bath (a famous bun in England)

 

Pumpkin crepe-cake things

 

Glutinous rice glob soup-stuff

 

Dali

 

On the shuttle that took us from our boarding gate to the airplane flying to Dali, a girl passed out in the crowd.  A tourist, maybe American, who drank too much the night before was propped up against a friend’s legs and fed milk tea. 

 

The flight was quick.  In Dali, we shared a cab into the city with two other English teachers.  Then, as soon as we got settled into a hostel, we sought out a place to rent bikes.  Our plan was to cycle around the Erhai Lake, but we ended up limiting our exploration to the west side of the massive place.  We cycled past the Three Pagodas; past rice paddy fields; past crops and markets of all kinds.  This story is best told in pictures.  So little language took place as we rode around looking at things.  (I indeed took plenty of photos). 

 

Noisy streets.  Tour buses.  Horse-drawn carriages.  Bells on the horses jingling.  Tractors.  Smells of shit.  A tower of manure.  Cow.  Horse.  Pig.

 

Eventually we rode to a ship port and put our bikes on a giant boat filled with Chinese tourists 

 

Pastel-colored umbrellas popped open in every direction as the sun emerged from behind a sheet of clouds.  One woman was wearing long gold-colored gloves that ran up the entire length of her arm.  My face was reddening under the sun, and as I darkened, Chinese women continued to pay me compliments on my “fairness.”    

 

I watched a woman in traditional Bai costume lather the head of another woman in the ship’s hair salon while listening to a horrible duet being sung in the KTV room next door.

 

The first dock the boat made was at a big white temple or palace.  I couldn’t pay much attention; I was too tired.  Linda and I found a gazebo and took a nap.  Soon, the whistle on the boat raged through our ear canals, and we ran back to make the final boarding call.

 

That night we ate in the “Old City” at a restaurant called The Happy Panda.  We listened to a family seated behind us debate about which meat dishes to order.  The food they had this time was superior to the food they had sampled the previous night.  The know-it-all young son in the family recounted what he had learned about Chinese iconography and tea from the day’s adventures:  the dragon is a symbol for man, the phoenix is a symbol for woman.  A dragon on top of a phoenix signifies a marriage.  Lychee tea (red tea) is good for the stomach.  Flower tea is good for the eyes. 

 

In one of the Old City markets, the people in the streets offered me marijuana.  I bought an impractical hat.  I bought some Yunnan coffee beans.  I tried to buy another hat, but the “hat” turned out to be a towel a woman had skillfully tied around her head. 

 

In a coffee shop run by the hearing-impaired, we watched a British couple talk loudly to the servers in English.  This couple didn’t notice the conspicuous signs about the deafness of the employees and made fools of their selves as they tried to ask for “the breakfast menu.”

 

Food tried in Dali:

 

Something similar to the cold noodle dish only, instead of noodles, I ate sliced homemade cheese on a bed of radish.

 

At the Happy Panda, we feasted on a white fish and egg pancake, Bai-style eggplant, and sesame tofu with green vegetables.

 

Baba (a kind of fried bread) with spicy, spreadable cheese.

 

Lijiang

 

It is a three-hour bus ride from Dali to Lijiang.  Views.  Bumps.  Hitting myself in the face with my camera as I try to take pictures.  Cows.  Goats.  Yellow wildflowers.  Purple.  Mountains.  Blue sky.  Farms.  Winding road.  No KTV on this bus (thank God).  Local music making me relax.  

 

I’ve never felt sick from a bumpy ride before, but this ride was not the worse to come.

 

Settled into a new hostel in a new city.  Took a car to a Naxi village outside of the city.  Watched women wander around in black clothing and blue aprons.  “Dongba” (the last pictorial writing system in use) decorated the walls of the houses.  Cowboy hats.  Hay.  The “East” feeling so “Wild West.”  Ate lunch at a table decorated with a vase of wildflowers.  The female “laoban” (boss) gave us some complimentary peaches after the meal. 

 

The Naxi are matrilineal, but not matriarchal like the Naxi branch of the Mosu people—the last surviving matriarch in the world. The Mosu inhabit an area by the Lupu Lake—which, from Lijiang, is a seven-hour bus ride.  Due to the time we had to travel and the nature of these bumpy, mountainous rides in Yunnan, I missed the opportunity to check out the Mosu village.  However, Yupu has been overrun by tourism, and as eager as I was to sit at a campfire with the Mosu, I had a feeling that I would have been disappointed.  The Mosu are the most wealthy minority in Yunnan and not without reason:  many male tourists (especially Chinese men) flock to Lupu in order to partake in a Mosu “zou hun” (“walking marriage”).  Mosu women do not practice marriage or co-habitation; a Mosu woman’s lover visits her at night but returns to his mother’s house in the morning.

 

“Old Town” Lijiang was dizzying.  Labyrinthine. 

 

Linda lost her camera.  She blamed the hostel staff.  More feelings of shame and embarrassment on another’s behalf (much like watching those British people scream at the deaf Dali people) as a hostile tone was taken in a place where signs stating “not responsible for lost or stolen items” abound.  As Linda searched for her camera, two quiet German men smiled at us shyly.

Food in Lijiang:

 

Naxi Baba

 

Liang Fei—blue, jelly-like stuff that is usually fried and which does not possess a strong flavor

 

Raspberry smoothie made with yak yogurt

 

Tiger Leaping Gorge

 

The Tiger Leaping Gorge trail starts in the town of Qiaotou.  We shared our mini bus from Lijiang to Qiaotou with a family of Californians, one of whom was an environmentalist working in India. 

 

The bus stopped at a temple on the side of the highway.  In the temple, some monks grabbed me and handed me a piece of yellow paper with some red characters stamped on it.  The monks had me hold the paper between my pressed palms and blow on it three times.  Then they ushered me into a small room where a monk with big bifocals and missing teeth tried to talk with me in Chinese.  He put a necklace of large, heavy prayer beads around my neck, put his hand on my head, and prayed for me while ringing a little bell.  Afterwards, it was apparent that the monk was asking me for a donation, but I had no money so I pretended that I didn’t understand Mandarin very well.  After he put a wooden bead bracelet on my wrist, I told him that I didn’t want it and that I had no money. However, the bracelet was a gift and so I couldn’t refuse.  Back in the bus I realized I was the only one given a small token from the monks. 

 

In Qiaotou we dropped off our stuff at Jane’s Guest House.  Most travelers hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge leave stuff at Jane’s before departing on a two-day trek on foot.  Jane is thus quite famous among travelers and everyone wants to know:  what do you think Jane is?  Is she a manly woman or a womanly man?  Jane, with her feminine name and regal and feminine voice has bulging biceps and a moustache.  My pronoun for her is “she,” and she was a most obliging and helpful hostess. 

 

We started on the trail.  It was sunny and cool.  An hour into the hike we stopped to eat at the Naxi Family Guesthouse.  After the meal, we soon found ourselves lost. We walked past a house with a ferocious-seeming black dog that growled at us, and I had to talk Linda out of her impulse to fight it.  She took up a stick but before she got too aggressive, I told her it was best to walk by slowly and not make eye-contact (I learned how to handle angry stray dogs while living in Nevada, Missouri where I was chased more than once by some pugnacious creature).  This dog was our first obstacle on the trail.  I joked with Linda that it was symbolic—that our success against the black animal was an auspice for great things to come.

 

We met up with a group of eclectic boys who were temporarily traveling together as they had all met in Lijiang and discovered that they were headed on the same route.  Neil, a young British man who just graduated with a degree in business, took to Linda immediately—she with her MBA and their shared love for surfing.  I chatted with a longhaired guy from Spain who had moved to Ireland to teach himself English.  He occasionally works at a restaurant in Ireland only for as long as it takes him to procure a satisfactory allotment for traveling.  As we chatted, we got lost again and had to do some backtracking, but we arrived at the Half-Way Guest House before dusk.   

 

That night at the guesthouse, we played poker with the boys and drank a bottle of Yunnan baijiu.  Two of the men in this group were from Israel (we met a lot of people from Israel during our travels), one of who was a coin collector.  When we were looking for spare change to place bogus poker bets with, the other guests in the guesthouse gladly opened their pockets and gave us an assortment of foreign currency.  The coin nerd was beside himself—we had to brush him off with the promise that he could go through the treasure after we had finished our game.

 

The next morning it was foggy and rainy.  We set off on a trail slick from mud and wet animal shit.  We saw mountain goats.  The sound of bells on horses and cows.  Waterfalls. 

 

The end of the trail, as far as we planned to hike it, took us to Tina’s Guest House where we met a group of Chinese men who shared a bus back to Qiaotou with us.  Biking gloves.  Belting songs.  Boisterous personalities.  They had hiked the Gorge before setting off on a bike tour to Lhasa—which would take them one month to complete.  Later, as we winded up and up mountain roads that would reach 4200 meters, we thought about these boys and how crazy they must be. 

 

The road from Tina’s to Jane’s was precipitous and absorbing.

 

At Jane’s we meet the two Israeli men again and shared a mini bus with them, as well as the two shy Germans we had seen in Lijiang, to Shangri-La.

 

Food eaten along the trail:

 

At the Naxi Family Guesthouse:  pumpkin, mushrooms, and fried rice with egg

 

Banana and walnut pancakes with honey

 

Ginger tea with honey

 

Black tea with milk

 

Coffee with coconut milk

 

Shangri-La (Zhongdian)

 

Women, women, women.  Women restaurant owners.  Women running the guesthouses.  Women cab drivers.  And women bus drivers—like the one who took us to Shangri-La.    

 

We impressed the boys in the van by practicing our minimal Chinese with the driver.  We passed more amazing views.  White stupas.  Tibetan prayer flags.  Yaks.  Pigs.  Pigs.  Dogs.  Pigs.  Women with bright pink scarves coiled around their heads.  Rising incense smoke.  Stupas.  A muskrat hanging from a wooden post.  Stupas.  Tourists. Telephone lines.

 

In Shangri-La there were police everywhere.  A group of policemen stood around looking bored as women in brightly colored clothes sold fruit on the street.  “Dissidents” require military vigilance—and the Tibetans are capricious barbarians as far as the Chinese government is concerned. 

 

We walked most of the way to the Ganden Sumptseling Monastery (Songzanlinsi), the largest and most famous Tibetan Buddhist monastery in South West China.  Inside I forgot that one is not permitted to take pictures, and some monks frowned at me.

 

 Yellow kneeling pillows.  Dim-lit rooms.  Red robes.  Silver Tibetan butter tea teapots.  An altar with the picture of the Dalai Lama.  Little boys with shaved heads.  Monks with black teeth.  Stern looks.  Smiles.  “No naked light.”

 

Weaving our way through the monks’ houses on the hill next to the monastery, taking outdoor and permitted pictures.  Door.  Door.  Door.  I take many pictures of doors and windows. 

 

A little boy with glasses and snot running down his face followed us as we weaved through the community.  “Shi yi.” He is eleven.  He asked us our ages and told us that we are so old.  When Linda told him that I am her “meimei” (little sister), he nodded his head as if the fact was most ascertained.  Another little boy sped passed us, precariously balanced on the back of a calf.  Our friend laughed wildly and ran.             

 

We ate dinner at a restaurant specializing in local cuisine.  The waitress handed us pamphlets before our meal was served and told us about local national parks and other places of interest.  I stared in horror at a picture of a snub-nosed monkey. 

 

Food

 

More liang fei

 

Baozi filled with brown sugar

 

Tibetan fried cheese butter

 

Tibetan barley bread—dense with hard clumps of what I guess was yak yogurt

 

Local mushrooms

 

We love the local mushrooms 

 

Deqin

 

Awoke to muffled, static prayers blaring through loudspeakers across the city.

 

Another long bus ride.    Between Shangri-La and Deqin we peaked at 4200 meters.  Everyone on the bus was smoking, making Linda and I feel even more nauseous.  When we stopped at a restaurant for lunch, neither of us could get down more than a few cups of pu’er tea.

 

Deqin is strange and claustrophobic.  We hire a driver to take us to the Tashi Inn, outside of the city closer to the town of Feilaisi.  Tashi’s place is even more unsettling—it is like a hippie commune tucked away in the mountains in China. 

 

As the “hiking expert” at the Inn rolled a joint, I inquired about local trails.

 

“I don’t want anything too strenuous.” 

 

He looked me up and down.  “You can do it.  Suck it up.  You’re in the Himilayas!”

 

We walked from Tashi’s to Feilaisi—an hour-long walk—and ate at a restaurant.  At the restaurant, we again ran into the men from Israel who bickered over what yak meat dish to order.  They were headed to the Miyong Glacier the next day, and we were headed on a two-day trek up the Meili  Snow Mountain and then down the other side to walk along the Mekong River.  The Israelis had no desire to get close to a river:  not so long ago, an Israeli fell into that river while hiking around Deqin.          

 

That night I didn’t sleep as our two Canadian roommates giggled and popped painkillers. 

 

Woke up before 7 AM the next morning.  Stretched on the roof of Tashi’s, surrounded by a white mist.  The mist was too thick to watch the sunrise, or anything else around me, but I listened to life rousing in the dawn.  Cocks crowing, cows lowing--screaming.  People shouting to one another in Chinese or Tibetan.  Bells.  Clang, clang, clang.  My favorite sound.

 

None of the hippies running Tashi’s were awake.  Linda and I made coffee in the kitchen.  We left our bags by the reception desk with a note stating that we’d return in two days to retrieve our stuff and pay our debts.

 

Got in a car to Xideng, where we would start our hike.  It was raining.  At Xideng, I tried some Tibetan butter tea in a man’s hut at the foot of the mountain while we waited for the downpour to subside. The man built a fire in a cast-iron stove before pressing play on a cassette player that blared warped jungle beats with strange Chinese or Tibetan warbling.  He had to unplug the tape player in order to plug in the blender that creamed the yak butter with the tea.  The raking sound of the blending caused little transitional interruption to the music.  With the tea made and poured, my host handed me a tin bowl full of golden-brown powder.  He motioned for me to eat a spoonful before I sipped at the tea.  As I raised the spoon to my mouth, I suddenly felt awkward, laughed nervously, and sent powder flying in a golden-brown cloud.  The tea and powder were delicious—like a malty, fatty breakfast drink.   

 

The man seated across the table from me, pouring more tea in my cup when it got half-full, showed me his Communist Party ID.  Pigs squealed.  Rain pattered on the roof.

 

I bought a purple poncho and we began our muddy ascent.  Up up up up up up up for 2000 meters.  A girl in black and white striped knee-highs barreled past me, pulling at the reins of a horse with a Chinese tourist on its back. 

 

Rain.  Mud.  Horse piss and shit. Clang, clang, clang. A cow in a bush, visible only by the sound of its bells.  Passing people on their way down as we climbed up.  We were given thumbs up.  “Jia you!”—a cheer, for encouragement.

 

As we got closer and closer to the top of the mountain we saw more and more prayer flags.  At the top, bushes and trees were covered in flags and jewelry.  I left my wooden bracelet, the gift from the monks outside Qiaotou, dangling on a branch sprouting from the head of the Meili Snow Mountain.  

 

Again we got lost as we tried to find a place to spend the night.  We walked from one side of a small village to the other and then back three or four times.  Two partially blind old ladies holding prayer beads stared at us with two good eyes.  Shoes caked in mud. Heavy feet.  More horses.  More pigs. 

 

Finally settling in at a guesthouse, we occupied the vacant common room and waited for dinner.  Linda asked someone to turn on the lights, and a man communicated to us, through gesture, that we would not have electricity until they revved up the generator.  Eventually, when they got the generator kicking, we couldn’t turn OFF any lights.  A little red lantern in our room casted a pink light as we slept, all night long. 

 

We were so hungry as we waited for our host to cook dinner that we snuck a jar of peanut butter we found above the bar in the common room and made a snack by rolling globs of peanut butter into hot cocoa mix.  Drinking tea, eating whatever we could get our hands on, I read the absurd English on the side of the hot water thermos: 

 

GREEN HOMESTEAD

 

a street played a day.  be about to go by car to go home now.

 

Before dinner, our host told Linda how much he loves the Dalai Lama and hates Mao.  Then we ate with the host and his little brother.  The horse poked its head in and out of the kitchen window.  Our host filled our bowls with more and more rice even as we protested. 

 

Another sleepless night.  A creature rustling under my bed kept me awake all night.  Mistakenly, I left some energy bars on the window ledge next to my bed; I woke up in time to see one of the bars being drug under the bed, but I was too late to see exactly what kind of creature had been so daring.  Restless dreams of snub-nosed monkeys running across the roof . . . 

 

The next day we spent about 3 hours trying to find the right trail.  When we were headed in the right direction, we were already tired.  We passed empty rural village after empty rural village.  Well-tended crops, unoccupied houses.  An old woman with a heavy stack of firewood on her back and an axe in one hand passed us and made exasperations in a local dialect we couldn’t understand.  Posters with the face of the Israeli who went missing on the trail.  Notes hidden under rocks that are stacked on the side of the trail.  One note read:  “Elephant ear.”  Another:  “Rain Jacket.”

 

Eventually we found a group of men seated around a fire.  One white man in a circle of Chinese locals.  This man is the cousin of the man on the missing posters.  They are both Israeli.  He recently got out of the military.  Two weeks ago his cousin fell into the Mekong.  They still had not found the body.  He made little indication of whether he was hoping to find his cousin dead or alive, but one glance at the raging river pronounced the word death under its raucous crashing.  Roar, roar, roar--all I can hear. 

 

The men in the circle smiled at me and gave me bread and pickled vegetables.  They would not accept the meager two-Yuan I tried to bestow on them.

 

A white river swells with a red one.  The red bean milk tea colored river is the Mekong.  We had been walking through a path lush and green all morning, and now, on the other side of the mountain, following the bend of the river, we encountered desert and rocks of geological intrigue.  Neon-colored lizards.  Snakes.  The Mingyong glacier, astoundingly frozen in the distance.  A small spotted cat with a bushy tail—it was no bigger than a house cat, but could it have been something more?

 

At a village we asked people where we could buy food and water.  An old man with milky pupils tried to sell us marijuana.  We mistakenly walked into a school.  Two rooms.  A blackboard with some Chinese characters on it.  Four children watching TV with a young lady.  The young lady sent a little girl with us to lead us to the local convenience store and restaurant.  We greedily drank water and ordered some noodles.  Flies swarmed.  A second skin of flies. Our hostess squinted at us through the bright sun and did laundry by hand.  I felt like I was in a remote desert.  I felt like I had left China far behind . . .

 

In the next village we encountered, a man escorted us and his horses back to Xideng.  We came full circle.  Our trek ended at a place called “The Karma House.”  We sat on the porch of The Karma House and waited for a ride back to Tashi’s.  An old woman smacked a stubborn calf on the rump.  Crazed-looking horses dashed by. A curious little girl tried to get me to let her steal a sip from Linda’s camel back.  Linda was annoyed.  I distracted the little girl with my camera and let her take pictures with it.  I drew a doodle in my notebook and let her try to copy it.  She took my swirling design and made little animals out of it:  snakes, fish, and birds.  When she finished, I ripped the page out of my journal and gave it to her—after all, it had her dirt-smudged fingerprints all over it.  She was filthy.  She scratched her head and white flakes drifted into the pages of my journal. 

 

A young man drove us back to Tashi’s.  He was high-speed obsessed and tone deaf.  No range, high or low, fit his voice as he sung along to the radio.  He asked us if we knew the song every time someone started to sing in English.  Christian rock.  “This song is about Jesus.” He didn’t know who “Jesus.”  He knew every word to this song about Jesus, though.

 

At Tashi’s, we partook in the communally served dinner.  It was the first “Western” food we had eaten in a long time.

  

Food:

 

At Feilaisi:  green peppers and mushrooms, fried rice with egg and tomato, broccoli in garlic sauce, white Shangri-la tea (which looks like coils of white fungus speckled with clots of dirt), and braised yak meat with onions (which I, of course, didn’t try, but which Linda assures me was delicious)

 

Tibetan butter tea

 

At the guesthouse before hiking along the river:  green gourd, cabbage and chili, cabbage soup, eggs and tomato, cauliflower, lots and lots of rice

 

At Tashi’s:  pumpkin soup, salad, and pasta

 

Back to Shangri-La

 

Another van, shared fare with more world travelers.  An Australian couple—botanists and conservationists.  The man was quite talkative.  Linda and he talked for the entire seven-hour ride and, later, through a 3-hour dinner we shared with him and his girlfriend. 

 

Kangaroo farming. Paul McCartney misinformed.  Josh Pike’s friend and drummer.  Chinese medicine is ineffective.  A Clockwork Orange is a great film.  

 

In the van I was seated in the very back and had to strain to keep up with the conversation.  I decided to sleep—some of the topics they brought up were interesting, but I found most of the interaction pretty exhausting.  When I woke up from a nap, I caught a chat about US politics and wished I was still asleep.  Linda claimed that McCain is a hippie because of his environmental policies. In fact, she went as far as to proclaim that McCain is the most “progressive” candidate.  I wondered if “progressive” has different connotations in Canada, and then I tried to force myself back into a rickety, agitated slumber.

 

The next few days . . .

 

 . . . were pretty uneventful.  I wandered around Shangri-la and arranged for some bus and plane tickets that would eventually get me back to Suzhou (where I returned for no longer than a day before I left for Canada).  In Shangri-la, I took more pictures, talked with the hostel owner, and treated myself to a Thai Yoga massage. 

 

The hostel owner told me I am too young to be a teacher.

 

“How old do you think I am?”

 

“Thirty.”

 

Night bus to Kunming

 

A few days before I returned, Kunming was flooded and the airport was shut down.  I had no problem upon my arrival to the airport, but the night bus was one of the worse public transit experiences I have ever had in my life.  It doesn’t take much effort to figure out why an all-night bus with beds, traveling on a winding mountain road with chain-smoking passengers, creates an environment akin to hell.

 

In Suzhou

 

I finalized my packing and prepared for a trip to Vancouver.  My boss from the school came to my apartment to give me my deposit.  He sat on my sofa and sweated.  It was muggy and miserable in Suzhou.

 

“What will you do next?”

 

“Work in a hospital in New York City.”

 

“A hospital!  That is perfect for you!  A hospital is a good place for a woman to work.”

 

I laughed and laughed and he looked at me strangely.

 

“Keep in touch.”

Anhui

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