ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 15, 1996 TAG: 9612140005
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BARBARA M. DICKINSON
"Two dollah! Two dollah!"
With those words - literally translated "Everybody here!" - from our cheerful and competent guide, our tour group of 30 set off expectantly and exuberantly each morning of a nearly three-week exploration of The People's Republic of China. It was a highlight of this traveler's life.
Travel in China is not for the faint of heart nor fleet of foot. The billions of people who live there ensure waiting everywhere: airports, customs, restaurants, museums, Friendship Stores (where you are a friend only if you purchase a Chinese objet d'art), and especially in Tiananmen Square.
But one soon learns that patience is a great part of the Chinese psyche. Relax, squat on your heels, go with the flow. Send a kite soaring to the heavens, sip a handleless cup of soothing hot green tea and nod contentedly. Smiles mean the same in every language.
The trip's one life-defining moment came when I found myself standing before the barricade at the topmost point on the Great Wall. The exhilaration and emotion was akin to feelings I had at the time of my first marriage and the birth of my first child.
The Great Wall is awesome, snaking from east to west for nearly 4,000 miles over mountains crowned with trees, brilliant with orange and red foliage on a clear October afternoon. The Wall is also perilously steep and dangerous on many different levels. All I could think about as I stood at the topmost parapet was the number of lives it cost to build this bulwark and how the astronauts must speculate when they look down upon it from their spaceships.
To visit the Great Wall one has to experience, or at least pass through, the capital of China: Beijing. We stayed four days. It is a city of 15 million. From observations behind my anti-pollution mask it is a populace that never sleeps, never stops driving fume-spitting cars and buses, never stops riding antiquated bicycles, never stops bustling toward building new constructions nor tires of trying to sell souvenirs to any and all foreigners. It was in Beijing that I noted the first of many contradictions I encountered.
I never saw a dog (though I understand lap dogs are permissible), I never heard a bird sing (but bird markets and caged birds abound), I never heard a baby cry. I also never saw a trash truck, though armies of wizened old people patiently sweep trash with twig brooms to the side of the busiest of thoroughfares, where it sits in a heap until the wind blows it away.
Tiananmen Square, the world's largest man-made plaza (100 acres in the city center) was familiar from news photos and television. Who does not remember the pictures of the passionate students camped out there and the tanks rolling into that vast place in May 1989? Our tour group wandered freely for over an hour, always keeping an eye on the picture of Chairman Mao (our designated meeting spot) and the huge clock that shows the countdown to the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong (July l, 1997).
The Square is crowded at every hour: busloads of school children from distant provinces, retirees making pilgrimages with colleagues, foreign groups like our own, hawkers selling marvelous kites and gaily colored flags. I left feeling chilled, somber, eager to move on to the splendor of the equally enormous Forbidden City and the Sacred Way to the Ming Tombs.
After the wonders of Beijing I thought I had used up my cache of adjectives and wide-eyed exclamations. Not so.
In the relatively small (6 million) city of Xi'an to the South we trekked to see the famed terra-cotta soldiers. Before his death in 210 B.C., Emperor Qin ordered his subjects to build him a mighty tomb and an army of pottery soldiers to guard it. Discovered in 1974 by a farmer, the soldiers have rapidly become China's No. 1 tourist attraction.
Archaeologists have uncovered and restored but a fraction of the 6,000 artifacts (they have not even gotten to Qin's tomb, some distance away) but there is enough to view to be impressed. And overwhelmed. When our group entered the hangar-like shell where the army stands (or lies crumbled with horses, chariots, weapons) the tone was reverential and almost worshipful. To witness thousands of likenesses, each modeled on a living person some 22 centuries ago, provokes an eerie sensation.
Some soldiers wear smiles, others look grim, many look victorious; all stand at attention for the glory of Qin who declared that they should surround him at his death.
After the man-made sights we had seen, our group welcomed the prospect of three days on the mighty Yangtze River, fourth longest in the world and longest in China. This broad, muddy, rapidly flowing tidal river severs China neatly into North and South.
Of great controversy is the new dam under construction. Proposed in 1919 by Dr. Sun Yat Sen, the dam will raise the water level along much of the Yangtze, eliminate annual flooding and increase the output of hydroelectric power. It is expected that the first great output of power will begin in 2003. Many of the villages and archaeological wonders along the famed gorges will be under water in three to five years. The affected villagers who will have to relocate to higher areas have no choice. It has been dictated by the government and thus it is right and so. End of discussion. |n n| Nowhere do people live closer to the earth than in China. From worn and barren ground they coax all matters of vegetables to grow and then consume every part. Or haul it off to street markets for their neighbors to buy. From watery fields they coax two harvests of rice per year and hoard every grain for their three bowls a day. From the rivers, lakes and seas they fetch fish, eels and vegetation to eat and rocks with which to build or carve. From land too stubborn to yield anything but mud they make bricks and fashion crude houses. They recycle everything, even their own excrement, in their zeal for getting the most out of this good earth.
The countrysides of southern China provided panoramas of corn trees: trees adorned with hundreds of ears of yellow corn drying in the sun. We also saw the second rice crop being harvested, usually with an awkward-looking (but obviously efficient) hand-driven machine but more often with the patient water buffalo, who works only four weeks a year. The drying rice became a multicolored mosaic brushed neatly into composition by the head of the family on a flat area in front of the homestead. The same twig-like broom that sweeps the city streets serves the same purpose in the agricultural regions.
If the people live close to the land, they also live close to the streets and roads. Drive along any roadway and you get a glimpse of "As The World Turns."
Early morning: mother feeds her child, husband, sister, mother and ancient grandfather in front of the house. Sister, chic in high heels and tailored suit, mounts her rusty bicycle, grabs her cellular phone and pedals briskly down a bustling street. But wait: what is that slung on the back of her bike? A whole side of beef, unwrapped, probably on its way to her restaurant.
Noontime: the oil-drum-turned-heating-stove is fired up and an open-air cafe opens. Simmering pots of stew, soup and stir-fry are consumed by squatting hordes.
Afternoon: Granny watches the youngster as mother works or sews. Single-armed sewing machines flourish on every corner and pedestrians halt, take off jacket or trousers and get patched or pleated on the spot.
Evening: Children play in front of the dwellings with sticks, rocks, an occasional orange. No plastic here: Fisher-Price has not hit China. Dimly lighted rooms reveal an evening meal in progress usually around an even more dimly lighted television set. If there is no television, there is a congregation of neighbors squatting and sipping and chatting. Hair cutters seem to do a brisk after-work business. All that is needed is a stool, a sheet and a pair of shears. Park benches serve nicely if a stool is not available.
Another contrast is the flimsy bamboo scaffolding that encases every new building under construction. No safety belts or barriers for these sneakered workers. They scamper up and cling to the sides as they sling mortar and bricks together. Although the gray, concrete block type buildings of the early Communist era prevail in the larger cities, progress is rampant.
While hygiene, like trash pick-up, is not at the top of the priority list for the Chinese, the people seem remarkably fit and healthy. I attribute this to Tai Chi - that ancient form of exercise practiced anytime, anywhere, all the time; to the walking and cycling done constantly; and to the fact that there are few elevators in the apartment houses in the large cities. If the building happens to have more than 10 stories, the elevator starts on the 10th floor, but operates during limited hours.
Small children still wear slit pants to enable mothers to attend to the infants' needs immediately, but I did spy one or two babies sporting Pampers underneath. And the abundance of bamboo enables every infant to ride in style in his or her own wooden pram. I noted on more than one occasion that this mobile unit also acted as a play pen while mother was shopping.
On a narrow passageway leading to a large mosque (yes, there is a Muslim community in China) we strolled past open offices housing a dentist, a doctor, a drugstore and an herbalist, who was grinding herbs with her feet as she filled a prescription for the pharmacist next door. She told us the herbs would be mixed with honey, rolled into balls and then doled out to the patient in accordance with the doctor's orders.
Our group (which included four Harvard-trained doctors) visited a Western-Chinese medical clinic in a large hospital. The doctor presented a seminar that was part common sense, part religious ceremony and part P.T. Barnum. As I left, I again marvelled on the general good health of the people who had welcomed us so warmly.
In a Communist country one goes where one is allowed, sees what one is allowed to see, all under the aegis of a government-approved guide. Ours was exceptional. If he envied our freedom, our irreverent and frequent laughter directed solely at ourselves, our superb hotel accommodations, he never let it slip. He gave of himself every inch of the way and his last words to our group through a curtain of tears (his and ours) were "Two dollah!" We had all come and we were were all reluctantly leaving.
Barbara M. Dickinson is a Roanoke writer, inveterate traveler and occasional artist.
LENGTH: Long : 176 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: BARBARA DICKINSON. 1. The Great Wall (left), pictured atby CNBBadaling, stretche for 4,000 miles. A Chinese herbalist, (above)
fills a presciption. The herbs will be mixed with honey, rolled into
balls and then doled out to the patient. 2. It's wash day (right)
along the Yangtze River. This broad, muddy, rapidly flowing tidal
river is the fourth largest in the world and longest in China. It
severs China neatly into North and South. 3. The author (left) poses
with a friend near Beijing on the way to the Ming Tombs. 4. Waiting
for the next buyer, eels swim around in a market in Xi'an. color.