I arrive in China on Saturday in the late morning. My hotel is The Peninsula, which in my imagination is exactly like the one in Beverly Hills but turns out to be more like the Westin Galleria in Dallas. The rooms are comfortable but overpriced and the hotel itself is built into a luxury mall. I didn’t realize that the Chinese could widely afford Prada, Gucci and Chanel, but an endless stream of wealthy Chinese wander in and out of these stores from 9am to 9pm the entire time I am here. This could just as easily be Vegas or South Beach.
I spend a mentally foggy afternoon wandering around the Forbidden City, which is located near my hotel. I find this site astoundingly beautiful and so steeped in historical mystery and lore. I could spend days here, but preferably when fully conscious.
I stop by a nearby middle class mall to purchase some toothpaste. My tube, which I dutifully placed in a plastic baggie, was liberated from me at LAX by the authorities because they claimed it was too large to carry on. I guess size really does matter! The Crest packages I find are graphically the same as American packages but are written in Chinese so I consider buying several as gifts for my nieces who would think the characters are cool. I decide against toting around gifts so early in my trip, which turns out to be a good decision given that at this very moment, we are entering into the whole tainted toothpaste phase of the tainted drugs and pet food debacle. Due to this fact and in combination with a rapidly increasing trade deficit with China, I decide to try not to buy products made in China when there is an alternative. I discover with alarming immediacy the near impossibility of this challenge.
I wander the mall but lose interest quickly. With the exception of some Chinese signage here and there, the stores are pretty much the same as at The Beverly Center or The King of Prussia Mall. On my return to the hotel, I see some people bungee jumping off a building using a permanent contraption that looks like an electrical tower. Apparently this is a big local attraction so I wait for 20 minutes or so and see a man take a leap.
I return to my hotel and have a salad and a glass of wine in the lobby. The waitress gives me an English copy of the local paper and I read about a mass wedding in the south of China. It makes me think of the Moonies rather than romance. I note that Britney is in trouble again and wonder why this information makes it into a Beijing newspaper. I give up on the news and do the crossword in ink because I can.
This morning, I am scheduled to meet my friend Julia who I met on trek in Bhutan a couple years ago. Julia is only 8 years younger than my mother, which astounds me because my mother is only 74 but she decided to be 100 when she turned 50. That makes her about 123 now.
Julia must have decided to remain 25 on the day she turned that year. She is one of the first top female American marathoners, an inspiration to a runner like me. She began her career when running shoes were only made for men and had no choice but to compete in Keds, boys’ running shorts and Jackie O sunglasses. She claims she was never a great runner. Her gift, Julia says, is sheer will and determination.
Julia is no Chatty Cathy and she is very unassuming so when she says something, you really want to listen. When she reveals tales of her life, you often feel blown away because you just don’t expect that to be her story. Which makes the story even better. She talks of what would be considered great and unique accomplishments to most of us as though it’s just another little something that happened along her way. She is a tiny thing, a peanut as I am known to say, and she looks great in every photo I have seen of her. She habitually strikes a pose when a camera focuses on her rendering her a perfectly positioned figure in a Pissarro landscape, subtle, unobtrusive and yet critical to the image’s balance.
Julia and I agree to meet today for a one-day tour of some key sites. The itinerary turns out to be identical to the one I followed the last time with my friend Helga, who was then living in Hong Kong. I was blond back then and I received a lot of attention for it. Usually it is Helga who sets the heads turning, with her flawless AmerAsian beauty (she is half Puerto Rican, half Chinese with a powerful German name), but on this trip it was me who was continually mistaken for a celebrity or at least, the Chinese stereotype of Western beauty. In reality, the only thing blond hair did for me was get me a lot of honks from trucks and vans in the States and centrally positioned in countless family vacation photos in Asia.
Our travel company failed to tell either Julia or me where and when to meet so I cannot find Julia and, I learn later, Julia cannot find me. I only know to be in my hotel lobby at 8:30 am because our guide also picked me up at the airport on Saturday. I arrive there at about 8:15 and sit on the step outside the Versace shop. By 8:20, I decide to wander across the street to buy a diet coke. The store is unlit and only a smattering of random items are on the shelves. My diet coke is warm and tastes like metal. By 8:45, my guide convinces me that we need to move along without Julia due to time constraints, which is how I am forced to take the redux tour of the Great Wall and the Ming tombs like a celebrity: chauffeured alone by my personal guide and driver. At least the windows aren’t tinted.
I am taken to a different section of the Wall than during my last visit but this time I am greeted with a mile of stairs, some of which are so large that I have to be pulled up them.
My guide is not interested in stopping on the ascent to the Wall. “Five hundred meters more. No stopping,” he says about 6 times as we pass groups of Chinese sitting sweaty and winded and sipping cold, bottled water in the shade. Though I am not tired, I can really feel my legs and I am sweating like a pig so my jeans are getting tighter and more uncomfortable. Plus, I didn’t wear socks so my feet are swimming in my Merrills. It is a big Chinese holiday today so it is largely local Chinese on the Wall, celebrating like we would July 4th with a visit to the Washington Memorial. By the time we get back to the parking lot two hours later, I feel completely disconnected from my legs, as one does their head when battling the flu. My legs are noticeably wobbling and for some time, I worry that they will buckle beneath me. The Wall is extraordinary but more for its history and physical reality than for the actual sight of it. It is a wall after all. Like other great walls, it is most notable for what continues to unfold around it, like Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall or the former Berlin Wall.
After our visit to the Wall, I am taken to an outdoor restaurant for lunch. There are large pools with what looks like trout swimming in them. I am told they are a fish found only in this part of China. “Not trout.” I am invited to fish for my own meal but being a person who chose vegetarianism for 18 years because of my love for all animals, I elect to let the waiter do it. I am ushered to a 10 top table where I sit by myself as my driver and guide prefer to eat separately. I don’t feel at all uncomfortable. As the restaurant starts to fill, I am the unfortunate witness to approximately 10 unsuspecting fish being beaten against a stone wall after being netted from the water. My appetite is lost. I buy a diet coke and pick at the broccoli. The spices they use on the fish make it inedible anyway.
After lunch, we head to The Ming Tombs on a quiet rural road with gorgeous views of the mountains. It is the sort of view commonly featured in travel magazine articles on China, with several layers of craggy, verdant mountains laying one atop the other in gradually increasing levels of atmospheric fog and mist. It might be romantic if I weren’t alone.
The Ming Tombs hold about as much overall allure as the Great Wall.
They are all underground, being tombs and all. So the really interesting thing about them is that they were ever actually located as well as the engineering feat that occurred to unearth them. Everything appearing in them on “display” is not original. The booty taken to the tombs to enrich past Emperors in the after life has long since been removed for safekeeping and the thrones and sarcophagi are all reproductions. Even the eternal flames expired when the air ran out a long, long time ago. So there really isn’t much to see but the park built on top of the Tombs, which is lovely. Outside of every important site, there are the ubiquitous Chinese vendors selling every form of tschotchky that you never wanted from row upon row of 5’x5’ cubbies. The biggest sellers are the t-shirts announcing your presence here, in case people at home don’t believe you when you tell them. Three for $1! And made in China to boot.
I tell my guide that I am looking for a hand painted glass vial after seeing some outside the tombs. I purchased one on my last trip here. It had snow leopards on both insides and looked like a little secret potion bottle with it’s domed, waxed stopper. My cat, Gracie, batted it off the mantle a couple weeks ago and it shattered into a thousand pieces.
My guide shakes his head and says, “No. Not here. I take you. Better quality!” I am driven to a store located outside of the tombs where before being unleashed into a retail wonderland, I am offered a dissertation on the qualities of real versus fake jade, good versus inferior quality jade and the overall history of jade. I am bored. And hot. At last, I am freed to wander the store but I am followed closely by a chain of clerks who seem to emerge from nowhere as I make my way back, back into the store. They each gesture to me, inviting me to look, “just look” at this counter or that vase. A giant jade ship catches my eye. It reminds me of one of several massive jade sculptures that adorned a friend’s family home in Bangkok. My friend lived next door to me in the graduate dormitory at Northwestern and was so Thai like in her simplicity and demure sweetness. Other than the presence of her two chaperones on our plane to Bangkok, there was not one sign that she was the product of such astounding wealth. It wasn’t until I arrived in Thailand that she admitted her father owned the largest bank in the country. I guess she didn’t want me to be dumbfounded when we reached her family estate, which instantly evoked memories of The King & I.
When I realize that the clerk has mistaken my reminiscence for interest in this gigantic object, I quickly move on. I went down this road the last time I was in China and ended up with a strand of pink pearls and matching earrings that to this day, I have never worn. I don’t even like pink. Even on a pearl. I had been intimidated into the purchase. Prodded into it as a result of my deep seated Anglo/wasp/I never want to disappoint anyone sense of guilt about everything. It is at this very moment that I realize the single greatest benefit to age: with it comes a complete lack of concern for what people you don’t know think of you. So I move confidently through the aisles, averting all gazes and never ever giving the slightest impression that I am looking with any intent at anything at all.
I do not find a single hand painted glass anything in the entire store so I wave American style, bow Chinese style and thank everyone in both languages before fleeing through the front door. Once outside, I look around but I can’t find my driver. It is so hot that the driver has left the car locked with the air conditioning running. I know they can’t be far so I stand under a tree and wonder how much of a kickback my guide receives for every customer he brings into this “good quality” store. I am beginning to feel faint, or jet lagged, when my entourage returns and we head back into the city.
Given that I don’t see Julia, who ended up in a local park taking pictures of people taking pictures,
I conclude that I probably would have been better off flying in through Shanghai so I could have visited my friend Margie, who recently moved there. Or I should have gone to the Summer Palace. It’s really pretty and has lots of shade.
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