The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  Finally, our cabbie nosed us down a rock-strewn dirt path and pulled up to a row of houses connected by a dirt path. There was no stream in sight. A mangy dog shuffled toward us. There could not have been more than 10 houses in the entire village. Most were made of concrete but covered in a thick layer of dirt, and were surrounded by dirt fences that had never been fully built or were partially washed away by rain (it was unclear which), creating the impression that dirt overran the village. We stared blankly through the windows, unsure of the next step. To stall, I closed my eyes and focused on dispelling my nausea. I imagine Dad and Michael did the same.

  Our cabbie waited for us for three heartbeats and then flung open the car door. We hesitated, then followed suit. A middle-aged woman was perched on a low stool in the sun, and as we approached, she aroused herself from her stupor and made small talk with our cabbie in the local dialect, while eyeing us with faint curiosity. She pointed to a house in the back where, our cabbie translated, we would find the oldest person here. He might have answers for us. Nobody appeared under the age of 40.

  We stepped into a concrete building with dirt floors and dingy whitewashed walls. A couple of squares cut into the concrete served as windows. A man in his 70s drooped on a rickety chair as he watched a television drama. Flies buzzed about the walls.

  He rose. We introduced ourselves. He rumbled his family lineage and confirmed no Yens lived here. Everybody had moved away, he told us, the young gone to the cities in search of opportunity. If Yens once lived here, they had left by the time he was born.

  As he spoke, the television drama ended and the credits began to roll, a weeping violin playing in the background. A couple of flies landed on the old man’s back and began exploring the holes in his shirt. A tinny cello joined the violin, and their harmony reached a mournful crescendo.

  How many people does it take to preserve critical mass in a village? One neighbor passes away; another is brought to the city to live with their children. At what point are villages abandoned entirely, to be swallowed up by dirt and reclaimed by the mountainside, and how often had this story played out across China in the past 20 years? Was this the fate that befell the tiny, unmarked cities within Yuyao County that dotted our map? Had our own Yen Family Village fallen into such disrepair? Or had it simply been swallowed up by the county as development brought the edge of Yuyao to meet the village Yen that stood next to the river Xia, much as the city of Jinhua, with its sterile new hotels staffed by student interns, steadily marched outward?

  Our journey had traced China’s latest wave of development. We’d hopped from Beijing to a string of increasingly less-developed cities, ultimately landing in a village made up of just 10 households. Whereas mid-twentieth-century China had sought to become a shining model of socialism, an alternative vision for modernity that could compete with the West, by the early twenty-first century China wanted nothing more than to adapt the Western model to its purposes. This village had likely been built during the former, and was one of thousands of casualties that came from altering the course of the world’s most populous nation. Yet were these choices so different from the ones third-generation Chinese Americans faced regarding assimilation—what to keep, what to discard, how to marry tradition with modernity?

  I didn’t mind that we hadn’t found the ancestral village. For me, the experience of traversing this dizzying spectrum of economic development, as illuminated by Dad’s readings, reinforced a lesson China had taught me time and again. So often I was clueless about my desired destination, let alone the path to take, that I pursued what ultimately proved to be a red herring solely because I needed an impetus to begin, and it was only through trusting the dao that I found my way.

  Later, Michael told me he hadn’t minded the unexpected twist, either. For him, visiting the village was one of the few times he’d been truly off the grid, faced with poverty as he could never know it in America. And yet, he thought, there was a plan for these people. He hadn’t seen them as left behind, as I had; he didn’t view them as masses to be pitied by outsiders. In the last 20 years, China had lifted more people out of extreme poverty than the rest of the world combined. You could focus on the squalor and decay, or you could see the historical context, the complexities of bringing a billion people out of poverty.

  When I first arrived in China I was frequently confronted with the question “Nali ren?” which roughly translates as “Where do you come from?” It took me a couple of tries to realize they were not curious about where I lived in Beijing or even that I came from America; they were asking where my ancestors originated. The bilingual immersion program had taught us much, but it did not teach us that phrase. When I remember that the immersion program was so young and experimental that my fourth-grade science teacher was also my creative-writing/drama teacher, and when I think about the strong emphasis my parents have placed on education throughout my life, I am amazed they were willing to take such a gamble on our formative years. Yet they viewed language as a window into another culture, and they wanted us to be proud of our Chinese heritage.

  We spent our final days sightseeing throughout the province, and somewhere during this time Dad began responding to the question Nali ren? by identifying himself as Yuyao ren, that he was originally from Yuyao even though he was now an American citizen, a huayi. It seemed important to him to have seen Yuyao, if only briefly. I think it made him feel closer to Grandpa.

  Language was indeed a window into another culture, but it was only through understanding a culture that language could be leveraged to its full potential, and Dad understood the power of tongxiang, the way a shared hometown is one of the strongest markers of group identity that exists in China, no matter how many generations removed that connection might be.

  Dad loved traveling like the locals. As he chatted up cabbies and shopkeepers with this line, I continually admired his amicable bantering style. He only slipped up once or twice. A cabbie turned to him once at the end of a ride and asked, “Fapiao?”

  “Hunh?” Dad said, unfamiliar with the phrase and bereft of any context from which to guess its meaning.

  Michael grabbed the receipt that dangled from the machine. “Pay!” he commanded as he slapped Dad on the arm, a bemused grin on his face.

  “What—oh! Oh!” Dad fumbled for his wallet. Michael waggled his eyebrows at me and then vacated the cab.

  We’d stopped by the former house of a local scholar that was now a museum. We wandered through bright white rooms filled with low, dark furniture, where large calligraphy scrolls hung from the walls. Dad rambled about excelling at calligraphy as a child, how it took as much discipline as a martial art. I nodded, eyes roaming the room so as not to encourage him, but not interrupting his well-worn account, either. “There were female scholars,” he said at last.

  “Not many,” I said.

  “But some. Just like there were female generals and historians and rebels,” he said. I tilted my head and looked at him, a question. “Mulan?” he said.

  I recalled the picture in my elementary school textbook, a daughter embracing her parents as she left home to fill her aging father’s conscripted shoes, a classic tale of filial piety.

  “But built like an Amazonian,” Dad said. He squared his shoulders and flexed. In the traditional telling of Mulan, she was already well trained in martial arts before she left home. “Not like Disney.”

  A long, shallow pool of water lay beneath the black, curved eaves, and as it began to drizzle, the droplets slid off the concave tiles and fell in a line in the rectangular pool below. “See how they designed these gardens for both rain and sun,” Dad said. “It’s a different experience, depending on the weather. These pools create a musical tinkling that scholars listened to as they wrote poetry in their study.”

  “Just like poets used to talk about the delicate tinkling of jade against jade,” I said, latching onto a memory from a Chinese literature class. “That sound was the epitome of womanliness.” Michael turned away but I could see h
im rolling his eyes.

  Perhaps Dad knew these kinds of details through close perusal of the guidebook. Or perhaps he had read them in a novel, just as he once told me of a short story that described the distinctive smell of paocai, or “pickled cabbage,” that overtook Beijing every fall as the city prepared for winter. He wanted to know if this still happened. Not so, I said. I had a friend, a native Beijinger, who could remember when cabbage was the only vegetable that lined the streets each autumn. But at some point all that changed, though she couldn’t remember when the transition occurred.

  At the time, I thought her comment exemplified the destructive nature of Beijing’s rapid development, personal histories obliterated as the city destroyed the vessels of its denizens’ memories. But as I stood there in the museum, this memory collided with our recent interaction with the cabbie, and I saw Dad and I both had different, both incomplete, ways of accessing Chinese culture, both cobbled together through a combination of book learning, popular culture, and personal experience.

  I had spent my entire life facing east. That entire time, China had been engaged in a race toward the west. I saw then that the third generation’s conundrum—perhaps I should say my third-generation conundrum—was unsolvable. I had become Chinese enough by my own standards. Somewhere inside the path shifted, and China, though part of my dao for a long period, slipped from the horizon, and, with it, Grandpa’s dream of professorship, a family legacy that could only be fulfilled by a different Yen. It was time to go home.

  A couple of years after this trip, Dad mentioned in passing that he relearned his mother tongue when we attended the bilingual school. He sometimes read a couple of chapters ahead in our textbook so he could answer our questions, because a quarter century in his adopted country had eliminated Chinese from his daily life. We had given him the opportunity to fall in love with the language, culture, and history all over again.

  The last day of our trip we booked Dad on a train back to Shanghai, where he would fly to Beijing and return home. Michael and I were headed to Hangzhou to see the West Lake. Dad stood in front of us, white floppy-brimmed hiking hat on his head, waterproof sandals purchased specially for this trip bound to his feet, gray backpack on his shoulders. He was excited for the soft sleeper bed we’d secured for him, his first ever. Michael gave him a brief one-armed hug. I flung my arms around him. He waved, then turned and slipped into the crowd.

  JIANYING ZHA

  Tourist Trap

  from The New Yorker

  Recently, the Beijing police took my brother sightseeing again. Nine days, two guards, chauffeured tours through a national park that’s a World Heritage Site, visits to Taoist temples and to the Three Gorges, expenses fully covered, all courtesy of the Ministry of Public Security. The point was to get him out of town during the 2018 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, held in early September. The capital had to be in a state of perfect order; no trace of trouble was permissible. And Zha Jianguo, a veteran democracy activist, is considered a professional troublemaker.

  While President Xi Jinping played host to African dignitaries in the Great Hall of the People, the police played host to my big brother at various scenic spots in the province of Hubei, about a thousand kilometers away. A number of other Beijing activists and civil rights lawyers, including several whom Jianguo knows well, were treated to similar trips. Pu Zhiqiang headed for Sichuan, Hu Jia to the port city of Tianjin, He Depu to the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, and Zhang Baocheng to Sanya, a beach resort on Hainan Island. Kept busy in the midst of natural beauty and attended to closely, they had no chance to speak to members of the foreign media or post provocative remarks online.

  This practice is known as bei lüyou, “to be touristed.” The term is one of those sly inventions favored by Chinese netizens: whenever law enforcement frames people, or otherwise conscripts them into an activity, the prefix bei is used to indicate the passive tense. Hence: bei loushui (to be tax-evaded), bei zisha (to be suicided), bei piaochang (to be johned), and so on. In the past few years, the bei list has been growing longer, the acts more imaginative and colorful. “To be touristed” is no doubt the most appealing of these scenarios, and it is available only to a select number of troublemakers. In Beijing, perhaps dozens of people a year are whisked off on these exotic trips, typically die-hard dissidents who have served time and are on the radar of Western human rights organizations and media outlets. Outside the capital, the list includes not just activists but also petitioners (fangmin)—ordinary people from rural villages or small towns who travel to voice their grievances to high government officials about local malfeasances they have suffered from.

  Jianguo became a tourist only in recent years, but he has been a target of governmental attention for more than two decades. In 1999, he was given a nine-year prison sentence for helping to found a small opposition group, the Democracy Party of China, the year before. Since his release, in 2008, he has lived under constant police surveillance, which is ratcheted up during “sensitive” periods. For three months surrounding the Beijing Summer Olympics that year, the police parked in front of his apartment building night and day. Officers periodically knocked on his door to search his home, and followed him everywhere he went. Just as polluting factories were shut down and a barrage of rain-dispelling rockets were launched to ensure clear skies during the Games, political irritants were vigorously contained.

  China has grown wealthier and more powerful in the ensuing years, and, as it hosts more global forums, there are more sensitive dates on the state’s calendar—Party congresses, trade summits, multinational meetings. Old imperial powers, with deep pockets and grand ambitions, tend to be fastidious about their image as host and benefactor, and China has always set great store by ceremony. Each occasion is vulnerable to disruption by protesters, so care is taken to sweep them out of sight. All major state functions have so far run without a hitch: perfect weather, perfect banquets, and perfect citizens waving glow sticks. Since 2011, China’s annual spending on domestic weiwen, or “stability maintenance,” has, according to some reports, surpassed defense spending.

  But how serious is the threat of a disruption? After Jianguo and his comrades launched the Democracy Party, all its leaders were swiftly sent to prison, and, for the past 10 years, Jianguo has been a solitary critic, with no party affiliation, no NGO membership, no local or foreign patron. Now 67 years old, he lives alone, having moved to a ground-floor apartment because he tires when climbing stairs. He eats and drinks modestly: mostly vegetables, a light beer or two. Having lost a lot of hair during his prison years, he shaves his head. He used to hold forth at meals; now he listens more than he talks. His smile is serene, as if to convey that all under heaven is forgiven. Someone remarked to me once, “Your brother looks like a Buddha now.”

  Yet, in recent years, the Chinese government has come to see him as more, not less, of a security threat. The authorities monitor his phone, block some of his messages, and bar him from certain gatherings. During sensitive periods, he is watched and followed around the clock. On bei lüyou trips, three officers usually accompany him, often including one who sleeps in his hotel room.

  Why do they think he is so dangerous? My brother may no longer operate a party cell, but—like more than a billion other Chinese citizens—he does have a cell phone. He regularly posts his analyses of current events in online groups, and he has become an increasingly prominent pundit on the Chinese internet. Since 2012, Jianguo has trained his criticism chiefly on one target: the Global Times (Huanqiu Shibao), a pro-government, strongly nationalistic, and influential tabloid daily, which is distributed widely under the auspices of the People’s Daily. In a series labeled “Debating the Global Times,” Jianguo took up editorials and scrutinized them point by point.

  Looking at his posts, I used to marvel at his bullheadedness, but the whole thing seemed to me like playing a game of solitaire; the posts appeared to go unnoticed. Gradually, however, I saw that Jianguo was honing a new voice, and gaining a followin
g. From 2012 to 2017, he produced, with accelerating frequency, a total of 456 “Debating the Global Times” posts. He was helped by the explosive growth of WeChat, the messaging and social media app: by 2015, Jianguo was sending a new post every other day to between 50 and 70 WeChat groups, reaching tens of thousands of readers.

  He’s part of a broader trend. Since organized opposition is impossible, protest and resistance have increasingly shifted to the internet. Spotlighting abuse and corruption, online critics and bloggers have often succeeded in rallying public opinion and pressuring authorities to act. Online platforms like WeChat and Weibo, in their fragmented immensity, can still provide badly needed public spaces for critical exchange, as well as bonding and camaraderie, all with the advantage of speed and influence.

  Back in the late 1990s, the Democracy Party of China was a fringe group of radicals whom the government could easily quarantine. Reformist intellectuals, who supported a path of incremental change, viewed men like Jianguo as politically naive and their mission as suicidal. Few people even knew that his party existed. But now, using social media, Jianguo has accomplished something that his old comrades never could. He has reached the much larger camp of Chinese liberals—educated urbanites who generally embrace Western ideas of democracy, want the rule of law, and are critical of the party-state. Although they have flourished in China’s “reform era”—decades of fast growth that have brought them apartments, cars, holiday travels, study abroad for their children—they are mostly convinced of the superior vitality of the multiparty system. In a joke they liked about the 2016 US election, a bunch of eunuchs are so appalled by the bawdy quarrels among the married folk that they congratulate themselves: “How fortunate we are to be castrated!” Yet many Chinese liberals doubt that the Western system is feasible in their country. They fret about the burden of history, about the prospect of chaos and mob rule. In their own lives, they avoid radicals and former political prisoners, for fear that such association might jeopardize their personal freedom. They shun the sort of political action that could put their comfortable lifestyle at risk.