Against the Odds

by John L. Pendergrass

  If my IRONMAN® saga was a Greek tragedy, this would be a good spot for the chorus to appear and bemoan the fall of the hero. Fortunately, there’s no chorus, no fanfare, no gnashing of the teeth. It’s a very ordinary end of the affair, not the spiritual death penalty I thought it would be.

  I climb off my bike and take it to the transition area. A few other athletes have just bailed out, the race director tells me three times to make sure I turn in my timing chip (race officials don’t really mind if you die in a triathlon as long as you first turn in your chip).

  I’m stuck at midday under the blistering Chinese sun, searching for shade, wishing for a cool drink. The wind continues to blow mightily and the sun bears down. A young Chinese girl tells me, “Good morning.” It’s a quiet, disappointing ending.

  It’s been a tough day, about a third of the competitors failed to finish, but that of course means that two-thirds made it home. Those warnings you hear on television every summer during a heat wave are true; high temperatures are particularly dangerous for the elderly. Only one of the eight entrants in my age group managed to finish. I’m disappointed for myself but I take no pleasure in other’s misfortunes, that’s a loser’s game. Plus, I’m not about to wrap myself in a blanket of shame and despair.

  The wonderful, mysterious, complex country of China awaits and I’m ready to go hit the road. Good morning, China.

  I’m a true babe-in-the-woods when it comes to getting around in China. I can’t speak or read Chinese and the vast majority of Chinese can’t speak or read English. I do better deciphering hieroglyphics than I do reading a street sign or a menu in China. The barrier is near total; it’s like trying to communicate with the birds in the sky.

  Despite this giant language gap, I get along fine. I’ve managed to learn a few basic words and phrases in Chinese, and I toss them out to everyone I meet, sort of like I’m handing out dollar bills. Ni hao, I say (hello) on first encounter, then mei wenti (no problem) when they stare at me, plus xie xie (thank you).

  Invariably I get an unintelligible response that probably translates along the line of “you foreign dumbass, if you knew how stupid you sounded, you’d probably keep your mouth shut.” This doesn’t bother me at all, for all I know they might well be saying, “Welcome honored guest, we are blessed and enriched by your visit.”

  The Chinese have a special word for people like me. I’m a laowai, a foreigner. I come from a less evolved, less sophisticated civilization, one that falls far short of China’s five thousand glorious years. I’m an intruder, a barbarian, a fool, or at best a curiosity. I’ve played the useful idiot role before, so I offer up a goofy smile and a half bow and invariably receive the same in return.

  In France, Spain, Germany or even Russia, you can look at signs and make an honest guess at their meaning. These languages have a lot in common; they’re simply variations of a common tongue.

  Not the case in China. Instead of letters like much of the world, the Chinese use characters. There are somewhere around twenty thousand of these little fellows, but you only need to know three thousand or so to read a newspaper. Some characters represent pictures or ideas but most have a phonetic component. They’re a combination of meaning and sound.

  The Chinese are helpful, though. They’ve translated the characters into letters that we laowai are familiar with, a system called pinyin. Scholars say they’ve romanized the language. In any case, the letters are easier than the random lines of the Chinese characters, and they allow me to take a stab at Chinese words.

  The Chinese have thrown in another obstacle to keep an old-timer laowai like me from learning Chinese. They’ve created a tonal bag of tricks. There are four basic tones. If you say a word or phrase in one tone, it means one thing (I’ll skip the dog meat, thanks). If you say the very same words in another tone, it means something entirely different (if you will, supersize that order of ox penis).

  China can be full of fun and surprises.

  A couple of days after the race I join a group of laowai for a trip around China. It’s a small crowd of 15 people from the United States, Canada, and Australia, mostly athletes who competed in the 2010 IRONMAN® China, plus friends and family members.

  These are some of the most interesting and most accomplished people that I’ve ever traveled with. We all share a similar interest and as a result there’s an ease and comfortableness that comes from not having to explain why you travel to the four corners of the Earth and pay good money to push your body and soul to the point of collapse.

  Our guide Michael looks about 40 years old and comes from the southern part of Hainan Island. Michael, like most Chinese who have studied English, adopted an English name early in his studies. These English nicknames are an interesting phenomenon. I’ve run across a few strange names (Apple, Dragon, Fort, etc.) but many seem to have been taken from a Jane Austen novel (Reginald, Joshua, Lucy, Marianne, etc.) There seem to be very few modern names.

  Michael’s language skills are home grown, but he and I hit it off well. I enjoy his brief and pithy insights, delivered in a fortune cookie style. He has a great sense of humor and a genuine pride of his country.

  The first stop on our tour is the ancient city of Xi’an. Once the capital of China, it was the eastern terminus of the Silk Road, a network of trade routes that connected Asia to the Mediterranean world.

  During the Dark Ages, when Europe was muddling along and the Renaissance was centuries away, Chinese civilization was in full bloom. In the seventh and eighth centuries when London, Paris, and Rome were small settlements, Xi’an was the largest city in the world with a population of more than a million people.

  This period is the famous Tang Dynasty, a high point in Chinese civilization. It’s a landmark for today’s China, a source of pride, a reminder of the country’s ancient, great, and glorious history.

  In the old days, the Silk Road used to draw the merchants to Xi’an, but today the streets are filled with tourists. The city is a regular stop on the standard foreigner’s tour of China.

  The first thing that strikes you on arrival isn’t the splendor of ancient China but rather the horrible air pollution. The air is thick and heavy, a yellow-gray color, your eyes and nose feel the sting, visibility is limited, the horizon fades quickly into an ugly fog.

  The major source of pollution is coal. China is a huge coal-burning nation. All the other usual suspects also contribute to the problem: increasing construction, growing automobile traffic, more heavy industry, desertification with growing sandstorms. The Kyoto Protocol has yet to touch home in China.

  In Xi’an, we visit the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, a Buddhist temple dating from the seventh century. It’s about seven stories tall but I decide to make the long climb to the top for a sweeping view of the city. It’s midday but the entire city is cast in a fog, like the opening scene of a crime movie. I expect to see Humphrey Bogart emerge from the shadows, but instead I get a glimpse of a tour group from South Carolina (they all are sporting Gamecock logos), but not much else. They’re milling about, searching for their tour bus, fiddling with their cameras, noisy and excited like schoolchildren.

  In the past 20 years, China has rebuilt many Buddhist and Taoist temples destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. The People’s Republic is officially an atheist country, religion went out when the communists came in. According to the government, China guarantees freedom of religion and recognizes five religions—Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism.

  Xi’an has a massive city wall surrounding the downtown area. It dates from the Ming dynasty and the fourteenth century and runs some eight miles around the oldest part of the city. On the average, the wall is forty feet high and forty feet wide. It’s a nice place to stretch the legs. You can rent a bike or take a pleasant walk. Some even come in November when Xi’an stages a marathon atop the Ming wall; strong lungs are a necessity.

  One evening we attend a dinner show featuring the music and dance of the Tang dynasty. Chinese officials ar
e rightfully proud of this period in the country’s history and they spare no expense in putting the country’s best foot forward. Everything is excellent: the food, music, costumes, dance. I love these cultural shows. Sometimes they’re flabby performances, designed more to separate the tourist from his hard-earned dollar than to entertain and enlighten, but some of my fondest travel memories have come from tourist-based cultural events. This is the best I’ve ever seen anywhere.

  The Terracotta Warriors are also a sight to behold. They have earned a spot as one of China’s big three tourist attractions, along with the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. The Chinese have dubbed them the Eighth Wonder of the World.

  The army is a collection of over eight thousand terra cotta sculptures made during the time of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang. These sculptures date from around 210 B.C., but were only discovered in 1974 by some local farmers digging a well a few miles outside of Xi’an.

  Before viewing the army, we get an opportunity, at a convenient souvenir factory, to see how the figures were constructed. Large workshops produced the head, arms, legs, and torso separately. Since the emperor had decreed that no two figures were to be alike, a lot of time was spent fashioning different facial features. All the parts were then joined in assembly line fashion, and the units were fired. A color lacquer finish was added, and real weapons and armor completed the project. The final warriors vary in size, but most are around six feet high.

  The actual soldiers are displayed in three large pits. While the site contains an estimated eight thousand figures, less than two thousand have been excavated. Many were destroyed a few years after the first emperor’s death by some unhappy warlords. All of the pits contain numerous fragments as well as the complete figures. As a result, careful reconstruction is a long-term, ongoing process, a never ending jigsaw puzzle.

  This is a very popular site. There are tourists from all over the world strolling along the elevated walkways, looking down on the pits containing the figures. The soldiers stand in long columns just as they were found, in formation, ready to go to battle in the afterworld.

  Everyone tells you that today’s China is a mixture of the ancient and the modern, a place where the old gives way grudgingly to the new. Nowhere is this dichotomy more striking than in Shanghai, a city where the spur and lash of commerce do battle with the old traditions.

  The modern jumps out immediately upon arrival in Shanghai. There’s a brand-new airport staffed by well-dressed young men and women, a recently completed magnetic levitation train that travels around twenty miles to the city center reaching a speed of 269 miles per hour, and enough new skyscrapers dotting the skyline to make Manhattan seem like a provincial backwater.

  One of our first stops in the Shanghai wonderland is the Oriental Pearl Tower. Completed in 1994, this spaceship-looking building seems like a relic of the old days, it’s almost a fossil by Shanghai skyscraper standards. Nevertheless, it has everything a modern-day tourist could desire—a revolving restaurant, a shopping mall, an observation deck, and thousands of screaming Chinese children in constant motion. It’s not unlike visiting Seattle or San Antonio.

  The view from the Oriental Pearl Tower is stunning. The Shanghai area is awash in new buildings, it’s a true forest of skyscrapers. The most majestic of all is the Shanghai World Financial Center. It’s the tallest building in China and it houses the world’s highest hotel. Shaped like a giant bottle opener, the World Financial Center is the most distinctive of all the Shanghai giants.

  Running alongside the Huangpu River is Shanghai’s most famous area, the Bund. There you’ll find all the art deco and neoclassical style buildings that once housed the grand hotels, banks, and trading houses that were symbols of western commercial dominance.

  Sometimes your own ignorance can bowl you over. Your lack of knowledge about a subject is so absolute, so complete that you wonder where you’ve been for the last six decades. How could you not know anything about something so important?

  And so it is with the traditional Chinese garden.

  I grew up in the rural South where the garden was a place to grown butter beans, okra, and squash or, on a higher plane, a lovely setting for azaleas, camellias, and dogwoods.

  The Chinese garden transcends simple horticulture, it’s a work of art, something every bit important to the Chinese as literature, calligraphy, and music. The Chinese garden is elaborate, complex, and a bit mysterious; there’s a meaning for everything, nothing is random. Symbolism and balance are the order of the day. It’s above all a place for meditation and enlightenment, a spot for the contemplation of nature.

  It’s not a question of planting some trees and bushes with a few flower beds thrown in for good measure. A Chinese garden is a meticulously constructed area of rocks, water, plants, and buildings arranged in a specific order. Limestone rocks from certain lakes are highly treasured, water gives balance and acts as a mirror of the surroundings as well as a home for goldfish, a symbol of good fortune. Bamboo represents strength, pine trees longevity, peonies wealth, and so on. Pavilions and halls are carefully placed in order to produce spots for viewing idealized scenes.

  In the Chinese garden, everything is in balance, the yin and the yang are alive and well and doing whatever they’re supposed to do. I tell Michael that I honestly believe that I’m too ignorant to become properly enlightened. I come from the school of thought where a tree represents a tree, where rocks are rocks, and bodies of water are places for fish to live.

  “John,” he replies, “you come live in China, I make you smart man.”

  He’s not smiling, this laowai needs help. I’m again reminded that I’m a heathen and a savage afoot in China.

  I may be ignorant, but I’m an open-minded man, ready to adopt the oriental mindset. I take a long stroll around Yuyuan Garden in the old central part of Shanghai. This garden features a beautiful temple and a lovely teahouse, but there’s no peace and tranquility.

  There are thousands of Chinese packed along the pathways and they’re not searching for enlightenment, they’re looking for a good spot to take a photograph. I’m pushed along in a sea of Chinese and do my best to avoid a swarm of cigarette smokers before exiting the garden to meander around the adjacent bazaar. The stalls are packed with ancient Chinese crafts, ancient Chinese medicines, and not so ancient Chinese souvenirs. It’s a forced march through a perilous gauntlet of consumerism. Chairman Mao items compete for shelf space with Elvis Presley mementos.

  Yuyuan Garden is nice but if you’re really interested in Chinese gardens (and Michael our guide tells us that we are indeed very interested) then the place to go is the nearby city of Suzhou.

  Suzhou is the center of China’s silk industry and is famous for its gardens and stone bridges. We visit several gardens including the Humble Administrator’s Garden, considered by many to be the finest garden in all of China.

  In the sixteenth century, the Humble Administrator retired and constructed his garden. He was no ordinary bureaucrat; in those days imperial officials were scholars and poets, the kind of men capable of constructing a metaphysical masterpiece in no time at all.

  Today, the garden is a series of pavilions, halls, bridges, and lakes, separate yet connected in a mazelike fashion. Each turn produces a new portrait, a lovely tableau worthy of any artist. The Chinese garden is a long way from the butter bean fields of Mississippi. I think I’ve got a lot to learn.

  The next day, our group is delayed on our flight into Beijing. The previous day the city had experienced a massive sandstorm with visibility so reduced that the airport had to be closed. On arrival, the air is still thick and yellow, there’s a film of sand coating everything in town; it looks like a scene from Lawrence of Arabia.

  The sands of time are on the move in China but no one in Beijing appears to have noticed. This is another one of those Chinese ecological disasters brewing under the surface. Close to thirty percent of the country is now desert, and each year desertification claims another nine h
undred miles or so. The Gobi Desert is marching toward Beijing and currently is less than one hundred and fifty miles away.

  Still, for Beijing residents it appears to be business as usual, there are maybe a few more people wearing face masks, but no one is staying inside. The Chinese deal with life as it is.

  Tiananmen Square is at the heart of modern Beijing and is ground zero for the worship of Mao Zedong. An enormous portrait of Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman, rests over the Gate of Heavenly Peace, staring serenely over Tiananmen Square.

  Mao is China and China is Mao and you’re never allowed to forget it. Everywhere you go you see his face. The Chairman’s picture is on not one denomination, but every single piece of paper currency. No matter what you buy, you pay with Mao. The memorabilia is unending: coins, stamps, pens, pencils, key chains, cigarette lighters, wrist watches, CDs, cups and saucers, tee-shirts. You thought IRONMAN® memorabilia was a big business, wait until you meet Chairman Mao.

  Tiananmen Square is massive, said to be able to hold a million people. There’s no vehicular traffic so it’s a good place to stroll about and breathe in the thick, brown air.

  The giant portrait of Chairman Mao at one end looks past the Monument to the People’s Heroes to his very own mausoleum. Thousands gather early in the day to stand and wait for hours for a chance to view the personal remains of their man. Mao’s waxen body is raised from its refrigerated home each day just in time for the throngs of worshippers.

  You’d think it would be something like visiting the Lincoln Memorial but this is serious business for the Chinese. Mao inspires the same rapture and devotion that I’ve seen at the various shrines to the Virgin Mary across the Catholic world. School groups, tour groups, older men and women, they all seem greatly moved by the Great Helmsman’s embalmed corpse.

  We pass under the portrait of Chairman Mao to gain entry into the Forbidden City. The Chinese call this seventy-eight acre complex the Palace Museum. It was once home to the emperors of the last two dynasties, the Ming and the Qing. At one time, it was the very center of the Chinese universe, the exclusive domain of the emperor and his court, an area seen by very few people.