by Vago Damitio
I wanted to be a Hobo Joe with a place to go when the road grew too weary. I wanted to be a Vagabond Errant with a space that wasn’t invading the space of someone else. I wanted to gain some control over my existence again rather than letting letters, visa’s, and money determine my course of action.
Hopalong Tom kept saying he was glad to know me cause when the Chinese cut my head off he’d have a great story to tell.
It was strange to suddenly look at my backpack and realize that that would be hold all of my possessions for the next who knew how long. I laughed when I realized I had timed my departure perfectly to coincide with the end of my unemployment compensation in Washington State.
I got a hold of the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco. The woman and I had big communication problems from the get go. Finally I found out my visa had been sent out to me the day before. All it took was her hanging up on me three times, spelling my name slowly fifteen times, giving her the same information over and over and persistence.
As my grandfather used to say so charmingly “Sweet oil and persistence will get you in a snakes ass.” I don’t know why you’d want to go there…but if you did…
The drive down the coast was great. I stopped at my Aunt and Uncle’s for a day. . My Uncle was proud of his latest achievement. He had been getting liver spots on his head but didn’t want to go to a dermatologist. Instead he used sandpaper to sand the spots right off his noggin. His wife told me he appeared at the top of the stairs near the kitchen asking her to help him with one more spot, meanwhile blood was pouring from his head. His eyes swelled in reaction to the cuts or the Neosporin he had smeared on his head. By the time I got there, he had the smooth bald skull I remembered as a child. He was talking about opening a clinic in Mexico.
Breakfast was a weird hodgepodge of dirty jokes, banter, and huevos rancheros. My aunt gave me a sweater before I realized it was my uncles and she hadn’t asked. I was putting it on when I saw the look on his face.
“Is this your sweater?” I asked.
“Is that your sweater?” He asked back.
Neither of us wanted to answer so we nodded sadly. We knew from experience there was no going back. She always did this. He told me about a picture my cousin once painted for him. He treasured it and a neighbor came by and admired it. As he got home from work, the neighbor was walking out with it and thanked him.
I spent one day in Florence looking for John Patric or his place on Frying Pan Creek, but no one had heard of either of them. A woman in a bar suggested I go to the museum, but it didn’t open until the day after the next. I didn’t have time to wait. I would have to find out more about Florence, Oregon when and if I returned.
After that it was onward to Redding and back to Seattle. As my plane took off from Seattle, a 7.3 magnitude quake struck the Puget Sound. It shut down the airport for days. I found out about it as I ran past a television to catch my connecting flight from Vancouver, B.C to Beijing, China. I had left just in time and had no idea what the future held.
Culture Shock Upon Arriving in Peking
Eight weeks before I’d had no money, been living in my car, and had no idea what the future held. Now here I was, Beijing or Peking, as the middle-aged travel agent had informed me it was called within China.
I stepped off the plane and nervously went through customs where I expected to be strip-searched, pulled aside, and cross examined as to my motives for coming here in the first place. It never happened, I was a bit disappointed but I couldn’t really explain why I was here anyway. It just sort of happened.
I walked through the airport noting that it wasn’t that different from the airport in Seattle and then stepped outside to light up a smoke. It hit me then. An overwhelming feeling that I was lost. A feeling that everything was different. The cars, the money, the people, the language. Everything was so incredibly different.
I remained outwardly calm as I powered through the internal hurricane that swelled within me. I nonchalantly took drags from my cigarette and then walked back inside to the exchange booth where I changed $200 US for about 2000 Yuan.
The taxi drivers were bee lining for me. They sensed my confusion and like hungry wolves circled the exit closest to wherever I stood. I could feel them watching me. Waiting to charge me too much to go someplace I didn’t want to go. Maybe that was the problem.
I’d won nearly $2000 in the casino eight weeks before. I’d been riding a cloud and the jackpot hit, triple double diamond on a two-dollar slot machine. I found a round trip, 6-month, open-ended ticket for $575. I bought it on the spot.
Over the time before my plane left I arranged a visa, located a job teaching English that I wasn’t sure I wanted, and wrapped up all my possessions and personal affairs. I’d never really bothered thinking about what to do once I arrived. I had a Lonely Planet guidebook I’d meant to look at on the plane, but the earthquake that rocked Seattle two minutes after my plane left had sort of shocked me as I ran to my connecting flight in Vancouver, BC. I’d only had long enough to see massive damage on the television screen as I ran to catch the plane.
I stepped back outside trying to look like I knew where I was going. I saw a number of white college students getting into a van and decided to see where they were going.
“Hey, you guys part of a tour?” I could feel how pale my face was and sense my own quivering voice.
“We’re studying at the University.” It was a skinny blond American kid who replied . The rest were loading their bags in the van. “What about you?”
“Well, I’m not real sure. I just sort of got on the plane and am not sure what to do now. How far is Beijing from here?”
“I don’t know, let me ask the teacher…hey, what do you mean you just got on the plane…didn’t you know what you’d be doing here?” The kid had a weird expression on his face. I swallowed and shifted my fedora to the back of my head.
“It was sort of a sudden decision and now I feel…well, I feel sort of lost. It’s a real weird feeling. I guess this is what they call culture shock.” I swallowed and tried to look carefree.
Several of the other students were gathered around now. They listened and one pretty hippie girl turned to a Chinese man who was helping them load their bags.
“This is our teacher,” she told me “Maybe he can help you.”
I began to feel very uncomfortable, too much attention. “All I really need to know is where to catch the bus that takes me to Beijing, I mean Peking.”
The girl laughed “Everybody calls it Beijing now. You catch the bus right over there. It should be about 15 yuan.”
“Uh, thanks,” I said. I started to walk away but the boy stopped me.
“Hey, you can take this guidebook and map I brought with me, I don’t think I’ll need it as much as you.” He held out one of the fancy Berlitz City packs. I took it and said thanks and then attempted a halfheartedly brave “See you in the city sometime,” and walked back inside the airport to look at the map.
It looked like the airport was a good distance from the city. I waited hoping the strange tight feeling in my guts would disappear, but when it didn’t I grabbed my pack, walked outside, and got on the bus handing the 15 yuan to the Chinese girl who was taking fares.
I was still lost but it felt better to be heading somewhere, anywhere. I didn’t know where to stop and look for a hotel, I didn’t want to pull out the map and announce how lost I was to everyone, so I looked out the window at the ox pulled carts and giant fields of rice. It was like I’d stepped into some movie, except I was here.
I decided to get off at the third stop once the bus reached the city. Beijing has more than 15 million people and there was just as much chance I’d find a hotel at the third stop as the first or the thirtieth.
The third stop came and I stepped off. The light was bright to my eyes. The buildings were so tall. It was bright, but the February day was cold. I bought a pair of sunglasses for 10 yuan and looked at myself in giant windowpane reflections for nearly a qu
arter hour before I realized I’d bought bright purple glasses with huge rims.
I took them off and braved the light. Fancy hotels loomed several blocks ahead and I made my way towards them trying to figure out where Tienanmen Square was. I stopped in a small public space and pulled out a map.
Two of the millions of Chinese men in suits noticed me and came to assist. They spoke no English and my Chinese was limited to “Ni hao” so not much was accomplished except I had my first encounter with the typically messy haired, dark suited, cigarette smoking, Chinese worker and lost some of my fear of being mugged or kidnapped.
The two guys were great. They looked at the map, they pointed, they laughed, but finally I had to just pretend I got it and walk away towards the big hotels.
I checked the price on the first two and they were about $100 US per night. Way beyond my budget. I figured I would spend $50 the first night. I finally found a room at the Jinghua Gardens Hotel for 400 yuan (exchange at the time was about eight yuan for one US dollar), exactly my price. It was a plush place. I quickly locked myself in my room and dug out the Lonely Planet and the Berlitz City pack to determine where I was and what I would do next.
I looked out the window for landmarks but only saw tarp covered ruins right below my room. A moment’s looking showed that the ruins were fully inhabited. I took off my coat and then searched the desk drawers for stationary with the address on it. Having found that I used the Berlitz map to determine that I’d found a hotel just a half mile east of Tienanmen Square and the Forbidden City.
I had arrived, but what was I going to do now?
Climbing the Great Wall
The sun had yet to rise, but the pre dawn light was bright enough to show thousands of people doing Tai Chi exercises in an eerie slow motion. I wanted to join them, to practice the Tai Chi with them.
Instead I watched while a small fear inside me told me again and again that I needed a private space to concentrate. I recognized the fear for what it was. I just didn’t do anything about it. And so, more and more days went by without me doing my exercises because I couldn’t find a place where no one was watching me. After all, this was China, and I was a white foreigner. Everyone watched me.
The line of reasoning made me laugh as I looked out at people of all ages moving slowly. Some had swords, some had brooms, and some simply walked backwards with careful precision in an attempt to shed some of the negative karma they had gathered by walking forward in life each day. This was the last place that I should feel shy about doing Tai Chi, but I didn’t want to be a spectacle. The Chinese stared at me enough without giving them any special reason.
It was disconcerting those first few days. The way people had simply stared at me as if I were some sort of ghost. After the first score of encounters I recognized a word that seemed to indicate me “Lao-wai.” The Chinese would stare, one in the group would sing song “Lao-wai” and the rest would laugh, while continuing to stare at me. The word seemed to hold a certain contempt. Most of the actions of the Chinese towards me, in fact, seemed to hold that same contempt.
As the sky lightened, the benevolent face of Chairman Mao looked down upon the people from where it was painted on the outer wall of the Forbidden City. A soldier appeared next to me and indicated that I should move to an area a good distance away. I didn’t ask any questions, taking the order from the tall youth in a perfect uniform.
I had heard that the soldiers in Beijing had to be six foot or taller. I’d wondered where they found so many tall Chinese, but it seemed they grew em big in the north. The regulation seemed to accomplish its purpose, because as a visitor, I was impressed and intimidated by the physical size of the military. I’d thought I might be tall in China, or at least average height. Not in Beijing.
A flag platoon marched out with perfect timing and precision. Other soldiers pushed and prodded a select group of lucky civilians into a platoon position of their own. The civilians squirmed and wiggled in undisciplined contrast to the soldiers as the Chinese national anthem began and the flag was slowly raised. It was easy to believe that China was the master of the world as the ceremony unfolded in the city of giants.
A giant flag, on a giant pole, raised by giant soldiers in a square of nearly a mile, surrounded by giant gates, temples, buildings, and more than 15 million people. The thousands of people doing their exercises stood at attention while the flag was raised. A final burst of martial majesty ended the daily proclamation of Chinese greatness and the daily business of making money began.
As I walked through the square to the bus terminal, I was approached by dozens of vendors selling everything from postcards to the gaudy Chairman Mao lighters that lit up and played Chinese music. I turned them all down with a firm “Bu yao, xia xia.” No, thank you. The vendors and merchants almost never called me lao-wai until I had passed them. I wanted to find out what it meant. Lao-wai.
I walked through the pedestrian tunnel that led from the square to the other side of the gigantic streets that circled it. Circled the square. Everything was so god damn big here, even the geometry.
“Badaling, Badaling… Hey, you go Badaling?” The street hawkers were savvy to why a white person shows up at the bus station so early. The reason could only be to take a tour of the Great Wall. I didn’t really want to go to the Badaling section though, I had heard that Badaling had been completely rebuilt by the Chinese government. Simatai was the area that had been recommended to me. It was there that people got the experience of “walking the wild wall.”
“Bu yao, xia xia,” I told them “Simatai?” at which point they would generally walk away calling me lao-wai. Nobody at the bus station seemed to be going to Simatai. All the special tourist buses were going to Badaling. I might have guessed it would be like this. I’d asked one of the many English speaking art students where I should go to get a bus to the Great Wall. She brought me there and told me to come back in the early morning. I should of known she would point me to the section most tourists went to.
The buses left at 8 AM and I waited until 7:45 before resigning myself to seeing the “new” section of the wall. The important thing was to get to the wall and climb it. I had to do that if I wanted to be a hero. That was what the art student had told me. She explained that Chairman Mao had proclaimed that any person who wanted to be a hero, must climb the great wall. Every Chinese Emperor, Sun Yat Sen, and Chairman Mao himself had all climbed the wall.
And now, as soon as the tourist bus got me there, I would climb the wall too. I felt silly and serious thinking it. I would be a hero.
The bus finally filled up. Everyone on board was Chinese except for me and a European looking couple in stylish jackets with wolf fur lined hoods. I had on a beat up army coat…not very stylish at all.
I stared out the window as the bus took us from the city. It was an extremely quick transition from masses of humanity to rolling countryside hills and water filled fields. I was mesmerized looking to see how different everything was from the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
I heard the whispered exclamations of the Europeans several seats behind me. “Mon Dieu, C’est Fantastique…C’est tres belle!” The woman had a lovely voice made more so by the Parisian accent. I snuck a peek back at her. She was beautiful. I noticed the large diamond wedding ring on her hand wondering if I could have such a beautiful wife if I could afford such a giant gem.
An hour later, the bus made it’s first stop, Juyong Pass. One moment we were winding through green hills looking at farms and villages and the next we were pulling into a huge parking lot and seeing the serpentine architecture of the wall winding up and away in two directions. It was breathtaking. It seemed to go straight up and just kept going on and on as far as the eye could see.
The bus came to a stop and the woman who was conducting the Chinese tour showed me her watch. It was 9:15. Then she wrote on her hand 11:00 AM. “Ni dong?” You understand? She asked me. “Wo dong.” I felt like I had learned the right thirty or so words of Chinese
…I just wanted to know the meaning of lao-wai.
I heard her going through the same routine with the French couple but decided to avoid the tourist formalities of introducing myself, finding out who they were, and exchanging the ‘where ya been, what ya dones?.’ It was a sort of expected thing that white people should meet each other in China because there weren’t too many of us. Overall it was an annoying custom to me, who hadn’t come to China to meet white people.
So I bounded out of the bus, bought the ticket that allowed me to climb the wall, and started up the huge stone steps. I had less than two hours to climb and come back down the wall and I didn’t want to waste any time. Ours had been the first bus of the day to get there so there was no one on the wall. I looked up and could see empty stairs all the way to the top. It was a long way.
Top was sort of a subjective term anyway because the wall went on for miles and depending upon which section you were on, the elevation varied quite a bit. I picked out the highest guard tower and made it my goal.
I would have to pass three other tower sections in order to reach it and I wondered if I would have the time. I figured an hour going up and that left forty-five minutes to get back down. Five minutes into the climb my leg muscles began to burn. The steps too were giant. Each one a minimum eighteen inches tall. Some of them were more than two feet tall and less than six inches wide. I developed a sidewise stepping action and began to zig-zag up the wall using a crablike motion.
Fifteen minutes after I began I reached the first guardhouse. It was only then I looked back down the immense number of stairs I had climbed. Others were climbing the wall now, they were far below me, but I could recognize the coats of the French couple steadily climbing. A fierce competitive streak burned in me and despite my already aching leg muscles I pushed on, focusing on the next landing, and then the next, and then the next…seeing the second tower getting closer with each series of steps completed. Refusing to look behind me for fear that someone was going to catch up with me and pass me.