June 15th, 2005
**Ya, these are Terra Cotta Warriors! They don’t seem that great but the history behind them is amazing. They are 2,000 years old and it took thousands of people 40 years to complete. It was pretty sweet to be there, especially on my birthday. It’s great out here. I wish you could’ve been here with us but maybe India is a better plan. This was too short of notice!! I’m in Xi’an right now eating breakfast about to leave to Datong then straight to Beijing. Yay! This should be great. We’re going to see the Great Wall, circus, shop and other stuff. I’m excited! This place is crazy because they sell baby bunnies and puppies on the side of the road. I was so tempted. The rabbits only $3.00 and the dogs $16.00. People, like always, stare like crazy. It’s fun to smile and wave to people. Not only because you feel like a star but because you make the people so happy. Also people literally come up to you and say, “You are so beautiful! Can I take a picture with you?” Of course you say yes. What else can you say? Haha I’m going to feel so unimportant when I get home. Aaw, Terri, they were selling cantaloupe slices on the stick (they were so big we didn’t think it was possible to be cantelope!) and it reminded me of you and Yogen Fruz. Oh and I was on a boat for three days! My first one ever to sleep on. I felt like I was on titanic (I’m such a geek) hehe. Keep reading the blog! Love you sooooo much.
Savannah Grace xoxo (K)(L)**
Sitting at a round, concrete picnic table, I endlessly twirled my pen in my hand. Terri’s blank postcard was waiting for me to write something – anything.
I started with the easiest part, the date: June 17th, 2005, and then wrote the opening lines.
“Hey Babycakes!! Oh how I miss thee. Do you know how long it took us to get here from Xi’an, the place I sent the last card from?! Eighteen hours!! Eighteen bleep-jeeping hours on a train!”
“Did you tell her about the Terra Cotta Warriors?” Mom reminded me, still excited about ticking something off her bucket list. “That they’re discovering new things every day. I can’t wait to come back when they’ve finished digging the whole farm and the replicas of the livestock!!!”
“I put that in the last card Mom, and no, I---”
“Or how every soldier is completely unique? How every single man was given different armour and features,” she stated more than asked.
“Mom! No! I didn’t tell her any of that. I didn’t have enough room!” The heat was giving me a headache, and she wasn’t helping. Yes, of course there was a lot I wanted to share with Terri. I had wanted to tell her that they were discovered by an unsuspecting farmer digging a well. That in itself was incredible, but again, I didn’t have room on the card.
“The picture on the front is of the Cloud Ridge Caves, that’s where I am right now. On our walk here, you wouldn’t believe it, I saw a camel! And I’m not talking a statue one like a real live one just sitting there on the side of the road…. (it’s got a double hump and apparently their humps are just essentially big boobs) speaking of boobs… mine, Mom claims, are getting bigger!! I’ve got boobs!! Wish you could be here to see them!”
Oh geez, what if some pervert mailman reads this…how embarrassing! Maybe if I change the b into a k? Then I’d get humps made of books? I’ve got books? Man, that makes no sense at all!
Quickly moving on to cover my idiocy, I jotted down what I’d learned from Ammon.
“The Cloud Ridge Caves are more than 1,300 years---”
Before I could finish the thought, Mom was piping in again. “I thought it was fifteen hundred years old? Ammon said fifteen hundred. Right Ammon?”
“Yah, it says it was the sixth century, so about fifteen hundred years old.”
“Mom! Are you reading over my shoulder?! Stop it. I hate that!”
“Just making sure you get it right.”
“Well, stop it.”
I put my pen down and flipped the card over defensively. There’s no way I could ever fit everything I wanted to say on it anyway. I started chewing the pen as I held up the picture on the front of the postcard. It was a giant, solid-rock Buddha carved into a cliff face, but the picture didn’t do it justice. I lowered the card and looked ahead at the real Buddha. It was humongous! The few people passing by looked like tiny ants in comparison. I’m actually here. Looking out at the camels on the lawn and the cliff wall crawling with religious carvings, I saw how far we’d come. Picking my pen from between my teeth I neatly changed the three into a five and continued.
“1,500 years old and are still mostly in good shape. Some even still have paint! The caves are manmade and there are 51,000 Buddha statues carved into the walls inside the cliffs. Some of the Buddhas are huge like the one on the front of this card. I’m looking at it right now, actually. Lots of tiny ones are quite eroded because they were more exposed to the elements. It is very hot out and I got a bit of a burn.
The food out here is way better than I thought, when it’s not peanut butter sandwiches and instant noodles. We play a lot of cards because we wait around lots for trains and buses and things. We saw panda bears in a sanctuary place and also went on a trek into the mountains on horseback.”
I rested my head in my hand as I thought about what to put in next. She’ll never understand through these measly words and one photo. There’s just so much to say!
I’d seen snow falling in June and ridden up 4,000m (13,123ft) on horseback, even higher than when I went skydiving when I was thirteen years old! But I knew saying that would never give her the feeling in your lungs as you gasp for air that seems not to be there, or how our Chinese cowboy guides went into the woods to cut down trees to build our tents and fashioned beds out of evergreen boughs, or how we’d used horse saddles for pillows, or how cute and incredibly lazy panda bears are as they lie on their backs eating bamboo all day. I wanted to tell her how the local ladies in our dorm room on our Yangtze River boat cruise had brought a plastic bag FULL of duck tongues to snack on, and to see her face when I told her I had eaten one myself. Or even that the Yangzi River is the third longest in the world, after the Nile and the Amazon! I wanted to tell her about the crazy Belgian guy who carried his fishing pole with him everywhere he went and how his wife only shook her head, because he’d never once caught a single fish on their seven-month backpacking trip, but he still insisted he was a fisherman and would one day catch a great big fish.
But with so little space, how could she ever understand? I felt like I’d lived an eternity without her, and that there was so much we’d missed from each other’s lives. I was already fifteen, and she wasn’t even there for my birthday! I just wished she could be here. I wanted to tell her my every thought and wish and dream. I wanted her to feel the same things I’d felt and see what I’d seen, but she wouldn’t. No stretch of imagination could give her that.
I flipped the postcard back over. There could never be enough room on that tiny card to tell her all I wanted to say. How can I write this in a way she can understand in the space I have left? I picked my pen up one last time and simply ended it.
“It’s pretty crazy out here. I miss you so very much. Love you.
Your best friend, Savannah.”
I kissed the flat card and wished she could just smell a hint of the land around me. Letting go, I slipped it down the wooden mail box and heard it fall onto the unseen pile within.
Chapter 27: Stepping Back
I was staring out at the Great Wall of China at last. It slithered like a centipede across the hilly horizon, and I found myself trying to imagine all that had gone on over the years along its path. In a way that was similar to how I wished Terri could grasp what I had experienced, I became frustrated at how much I couldn’t possibly grasp. Although I was there in body and spirit, my brain could not access the millions of tales I knew were trapped beneath my feet.
I grabbed my pen and notepad, the two things I always carried lately, and jotted down a few words, doing my best to describe what I was observing. I could see all the way out and over the mountaintops that looked like snow moguls, b
ut with an ever-present trail of bricks dipping up and down, until the very furthest stretch appeared to be no bigger than a piece of Lego.
I had heard of The Wall from teachers and textbooks, of course, but hearing about it was far removed from the experience of standing on it. How could I not take it seriously now? Trying to comprehend the dates always gave me butterflies, now even more than ever. It had always been easier for me to avoid history and pretend it was just fiction, but seeing it in the flesh made it real in a way that I simply could not just brush aside.
We had taken a short walk through the forest to see a quieter part of the Great Wall. Although we had chosen to go off the main tourist track, there were still a few vendors waiting when we arrived.
We first climbed a passage to the top of the ancient stairs of one of the many watch towers. Of course, Ammon had his lessons ready as if he’d prepared lecture materials the night before. “This is the longest manmade structure ever built, from Shanhaiguan in the east to Lop Nur in the west. It’s about 6,400km (3,977mi) with all the little side walls and everything included. During the Qin Dynasty which was from 221 BC to 206 BC, under the rule of Qin Shihuang-something-or-other, the warring feudal states finally unified. Shortly after that, they started building it,” Ammon continued. “Well, there were actually some walls made before that to defend specific pieces of land, but then they started to connect them and make it this huge project.”
“How many men would it take to build something like this?” Mom asked in amazement. From a distance, it looked very smooth and seemed to flow over the land like a ribbon, but walking along it was nothing short of strenuous.
“Well, let’s just say that a million men died doing it, whatever that tells you,” Ammon answered.
“Holy-karolly! I can’t even begin to imagine a million people – I can’t even imagine twenty thousand. That’s, like, a thousand times twenty!!!” Bree said.
“It’s good to see you haven’t forgotten your math,” he teased.
“Couldn’t they have used those men as soldiers instead? Wouldn’t that have worked as well or better than making ’em build for years? What were they trying to keep out, anyway?” I asked.
“A bunch of the nomadic forces kickin’ around from Mongolia and stuff. To protect the Chinese Empire.”
“Maybe it was more about keeping them in than it was about keeping them out,” Mom thought aloud, probably relating it to China’s strict rules for using the Internet.
The sun lay low in the sky by then and was a bit blurry behind the layers of greenish/grey fog, but I was overheating anyway.
“See these?” Ammon continued as we explored the inside of one of hundreds of watchtowers dotting the hillside. “Archers would sit in here and shoot invaders.” There were narrow holes on three sides of the small tower as well as along the wall itself. The wind gusting through the small passages made them a good place to rest and cool down.
“And this part. See how it’s shaped? How it goes into a V, with the narrow part on the inside? That’s so there’s less space for enemy arrows to get in, but it still gives the defending archer good sightlines and range.”
“Wow! That is so cool!” Bree said, jumping into formation with one elbow pulled back, ready to shoot. Something which would normally have bored her silly was transformed into a real live history lesson.
The extent of our Mandarin consisted of all of four phrases: ‘thank you’, ‘hello’, and sometimes, on lucky days when we were able to reproduce the right tone, we could say ‘ice water’ and ‘not spicy’. Plus, we could count to ten, something I always practiced in the markets along with the required hand signals.
The Wall was much more eroded and torn up than any of us had expected. A tiny woman who looked as decrepit as it did, one of the few peddlers tagging along, took me by the hand and insisted on helping me down, instead of the other way around. I was rehearsing some words and trying to learn a couple more with her. As I was trying to pronounce the word for stairs, I was also wondering if the men who built them had been giants. They were much too tall for the people of today, and I imagined great big warriors, armed with giant bows and arrows and wearing pointed helmets, leaping up and down them, defending their territory.
“Didn’t they do more harm to their empire by making everyone suffer to build this?” I asked, moving ahead to talk to Ammon.
“Yah, but I don’t think they really cared. Empires are just about royalty and keeping the uppity-ups happy.”
“I hate that the big, head-honcho guy gets all the credit and probably just sat on his butt all day eating and getting fat! And he probably had a whole big harem and screwed everybody, too. Errgg! That makes me so angry,” Bree said.
“But you know it wasn’t all just one guy. I mean, this thing took centuries to build. It was built over the course of a bunch of dynasties. And it probably even went through stages of no production at all,” Ammon continued, partially ignoring her outrage.
“Die nasty? What kind of accent are you trying to have? I bet lots of people had nasty deaths!” Bree said, getting angrier.
“I knew I should have explained that one,” Ammon said, shaking his head. “It’s not ‘die nasty’, it’s dynasty. That’s like a period of time that was ruled by emperors from the same family. Most of the parts still around were built in the Ming Dynasty which ended in 1644,” he added to show off just how much he knew.
“Okay, this is getting annoying. Do you have the answers for EVERYTHING, or are you just pulling this completely out of your arse, Ammon?!” I commented. Laughing, he threw his head back and smirked at me instead of responding.
“You’re so vain,” I told him, unimpressed by his cocky manner. He just moved on, taking the last sip of water. The moment his bottle disappeared, a peddler magically appeared with a bag full of ice and bottles of water.
“EE KUAI, EE KUAI,” the hawker insistently called out the price he was asking, the equivalent of fifteen cents. Ammon swung his daypack off his back and pulled out a second bottle of water. The hopeful seller’s shoulders slumped with disappointment, and he immediately retreated to wherever he’d come from.
“By the way, I’m still bummed about my go-kart!” Bree said.
“They would never have let you do it anyway, so your dream was shot before it started,” Ammon said realistically. Bree had always dreamed of driving a go-kart on the Great Wall of China, but her fantasy was immediately crushed the moment we saw The Wall. Unlike the wide, smooth, city wall we’d seen in Dali, the town where we’d spent Mom’s birthday, the Great Wall was a bit on the narrow side for any go-kart, even if it hadn’t had extremely steep, broken brick stairs. If anyone out there has similar crazy ideas, I’m here to tell you it’s not going to happen! I’d imagined that The Wall would be a smooth masterpiece of cobblestone paths gliding along like a silk snake, complete with accessible ramps, so this was another reality check for me. I grew up in a glossy world where everything was pristine and exact, one where almost nothing was more than two hundred years old.
“I heard they buried people in the walls!! Alive!!” Bree announced to change the subject.
“Oh, c’mon, Bree! Stop with your horror stories,” I said.
“Hang on a minute. This time she’s actually kinda right,” Ammon began.
“Sweet!” she said, once she’d recovered from her initial surprise at being right for a change.
“They say that archaeologists unearthed the bodies of a bunch of workers who were buried inside the walls. I sorta doubt they were alive at the time, ’cause they needed them to work, but who knows?”
“They dug up The Wall?!” Bree asked, “Isn’t that, like, bad??”
“Not really. You see how worn this wall is?” Ammon said, as he made his way down another steep stairway littered with rubble. “And this is the part that’s preserved and taken care of. I mean, this thing is looong. Most of it stretches over mountains and remote grasslands and desert. It’s been exposed to rain, snow, wind, and such for
thousands of years. Some parts are collapsing and lots of parts were buried in sand before anyone discovered them. But if it makes you feel any better, a lot of the workers were criminals,” Ammon stated, more to present the other side’s argument than because he truly felt that made it any better morally.
“That does make me feel a bit better!” Bree said seriously.
“Criminals. Pft! For what crime, I wonder?” I asked. “Stealing a rice cake? They were probably just looking at someone funny and got arrested.”
“Well, now I feel bad again,” she said, looking back and forth between me and Ammon.
“Speaking of rice, did you know that they used rice to build The Wall?” Ammon went on. “In the last phase, they used a sticky, rice-pudding-like compound mixed with slaked lime.” He opened his book for a split second to check his facts and then continued, “It was the main ingredient for their mortar. And it’s super-strength stuff that even weeds can’t grow through. You know how tiny sprouts can somehow grow up through the concrete? Well, this rice stuff they used is better. It’s stronger and a lot denser!”
“Holy crap!!!! I thought that was just a joke!” I said.
“How much rice would that take, though?” Mom asked.
“That’s such a waste of food! They make them use all their food while they’re starving. Oh, that’s so mean,” Bree said.
“Well, that’s the thing. The farmers and commoners would’ve been pretty upset. First the ruler takes their men, then he takes all of the harvest in the south to make The Wall and to feed the men working on it,” Ammon said. “During some periods, boys of all ages were forced to join. It got to the point where the women were afraid to have sons. With the men all gone to The Wall, it was nearly impossible to keep the fields and manage the rest of the required household chores. Those who lost their husbands or sons were left without the support or manpower they needed to manage their farms. Many died as a direct result of that, too.”
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