China Vacation 03

We arrived in Pingyao early in the morning after a comfortable night train ride from Xian. The walk from the train station to our hostel was memorable, in that the shops were not open yet, hawkers were out in force, and we were the only tourists on the street. We were bleeding cows trying to cross the piranha-laden Amazon, or the Beatles in Help! It was a strange experience.

Pingyao is a little walled village in a dusty coal mining region. It used to be a banking center for China, kind of along the lines of Greenwich CT. Now, the town’s economy appears to be largely directed at domestic tourism. The flag-led tour groups were even more omnipresent within the confined space of the old walled city than they were anywhere else we saw.

Every nook and cranny is coated with chokingly thick soot from the neighboring coal mines and industry. The little town is so smoggy that you can stare directly at the sun unaffected, like you are wearing dark shades. You want to shower after every time you go outside, just from the pollution.

Although, to be fair, that could be because I was bedridden much of the time we were in Pingyao. To speak discreetly, my stomach had a party and nothing was invited. Not sure what I ate that caused it. Luckily, the hostel was pretty nice and the Houston-Portland playoffs were on TV, albeit a couple hours delayed (Yao is just as big in China as one might think, but so is Kobe and Lebron). I can think of worse situations to be indisposed at length.


One thing that was easy to notice in Pingyao was how much smaller people there were than in the bigger cities. This is especially true with older people, who are dwarfed by the younger generations. However, even the younger crowd is smaller in Pingyao than a similar group of people from Xian or Beijing. One could quickly differentiate local residents and domestic tourists in Pingyao by height alone. Telltale signs of how hard life in the country in China still is.

From Pingyao, we took a “hard sleeper” to Beijing. My parents were worried about the prospect of a night in a hard sleeper train, but it turns out that a soft sleeper only affords you more luggage space and a door. The hard sleeper, by contrast, is only mildly smaller and less comfortable than the more expensive option. I slept rather well.

It was hard to tell where we were as we approached Beijing. The city is similar in size and population to the Greater Los Angeles metro area. There are no high-rises to be seen near the center of the city, and the massive blocks dismay pedestrians attempting to hike between the historical sights near the Forbidden City. Instead of apartment buildings, people appear to live in small Hutongs. Hutongs are little grey-brick neighborhoods, accessible via claustrophobic, winding, and often dirt-paved alleyways. The Hutongs are cool to walk around and have character out-the-wazoo, but they do make life difficult when trying to explain to your cabbie how to get back to your hotel.

Of course, the Beijing accent does not help things in this regard. In general, I feel that I was reasonably successful at communicating throughout the trip. While I am certainly not ready to discuss the nuances of eastern philosophy quite yet, I am quite capable of haggling and dealing with basic transportation issues. The one exception to this was in Beijing. Beijing’s accent is unusual. At best, it sounds like the speaker is pretending to be a pirate by throwing hard “Arrrrr”s into their conversation. At worst it sounds like they are dipping with their left lip and clenching a fat cigar with their right. Needless to say, confusion occurred.

The first place we decided to explore was the Forbidden City and the surrounding parks. There appears to be few traditional public parks in Beijing. Instead, the city has converted the gardens of the imperial court and the larger temples. These gardens have many of the things one might find in a large park in a western city; gazebos, lawns, public work out spaces, etc… We even saw a bumper car ride, with American flag bumper cars, a block from Tiananmen Square. But the most common sight to be seen in the parks of Beijing is the hackey-sackers.

When Americans hear the phrase “hackey sack”, they usually think of college-age hippie assholes, flicking vaguely tribal looking beanbags around with the sides of their Birkenstocks. Yeah, the Chinese don’t truck with that nonsense. They kick stacks of metal washers, “artfully decorated” with a handful of day glow feathers to keep the bottom always pointing down. Rather than hippies, Beijing has middle aged men and women kicking around their washer stacks and acting like shills for the ever-present hawkers that lurk at the edges of the crowd and wait for someone showing interest. Oh, and for the record, those shills are sick-nasty at hacking. They put to shame every sandal-wearing degenerate one trips over on American campuses (you know who you are!).

People say you go to Shanghai for ten years of history, Xian for a thousand years, and Beijing for a hundred. Having learned a bit about the last decades of the Ming dynasty, I cannot help but feel like Beijing got the short end of the stick. All the major historical sights in Beijing are clear demonstrations of how far removed from reality the Chinese political leadership was for hundreds of years until Sun Yat-sen helped organize their ouster.

The Forbidden City is a good place to start. When talking about the Forbidden City, it is only fair to compare it to other buildings of similarly tremendous scale. Unfortunately, the Forbidden City in many ways comes up lacking. The problem is that there are no arches in Chinese architecture. That put a limit on how complex the buildings could be. What is left is a very big network of triple-scaled, bland buildings, with cobblestone parking lots in between them. Compared to St. Peter’s Basilica or even the Summer Palace, and the whole thing comes off less awe-inspiring than just… meh. It reminded me of nothing so much an artfully decorated prison.

But in a way, that’s what it was. The Forbidden City was only accessible by the Emperor’s female family, harem, and eunuchs that served as administrators to the empire. I don’t get the impression that the Emperor got out very much. Having an exclusive city dedicated to yourself is great if you want to be a deity-figurehead, but it also puts a lot of power in the hands of those who interpret your decrees from on high. The Forbidden City was a tool to empower Middle Kingdom middle management.
The Summer Palace was much nicer. While the Forbidden City felt sterile and empty even when filled with crowds of people, the gardens and temples of the Summer Palace were warm and inviting (and also filled with crowds of people). One of my favorite aspects of the Summer Palace is the adjective-heavy names that every room or pagoda has. “The Hall of Benevolence and Longevity”. “The Gardens of Nurtured Harmony”. “The Outhouse of Splendiferous Tranquility”. “The Bedchamber of Pimptastic Crunknasticance”. Ok, so I made up the last two, but you can see what I mean.

The Summer Palace has some hilarious and interesting (read: absurd and terrible) history. It was repeatedly burned down by British and French marines throughout the late 19th century. The Dowager Empress then took funds out of the Chinese navy to rebuild her vacation home. Just another sign of how much the Royals had checked out by the end of the Qing dynasty.

However, it must be noted that my knowledge of this period comes largely from reading the placards in the museums. The current Chinese leadership has found itself in an awkward position when discussing Chinese history. They are clearly proud of China’s culture and accomplishments. Every description of any building or shard of pottery is laden with superlatives. The Most important incense holder. The Greatest south-facing, two floor teahouse. Yadayadaya. But on the other hand, the Communists want to demonstrate why all the painful aspects of the Communist takeover were vitally necessary. So everything is described as graceful and magnificent on the one hand and inept or oppressive on the other.

The next day, we woke early to take a tour van out for a hike on the Great Wall. While the oft-cited claim that it is visible from space is false (indeed, due to it being built out of the same rocks as the mountains it passes through, it is often barely visible just a couple miles away), the Great Wall is still really cool. Totally pointless, of course, but really cool.

I mean, look at those mountains. Would you take an army through that? Of course not. You would do what the Mongols did when they invaded; go to a nice, accessible spot of the Wall, and buy off the guards. In fact, the Wall does not look like a wall so much as a big highway. Those mountains would be much harder to traverse if not for the nice paved walking path running through them.

The Wall is not in particularly good shape, and indeed, more accessible regions of it have disappeared completely. While I am sure the elements have done a number on it through erosion, the biggest factor in the Wall’s decomposition has been theft. Whenever a nearby peasant wanted to build a house, they probably just knocked some bricks out of the wall for it. The section I was at was in such good shape specifically because it was not running through a populated area.

One last thing worth noting about the Wall is the hawkers. Yes, there were people trying to sell things up in the mountains, too. The “Mongolians” that followed us around on the Wall spoke as good English as any group of salesmen we encountered. They were selling postcards, t-shirts, and warm beer. They were even helping people who looked like they were having trouble with the steep staircases or might be in danger of falling. I couldn’t imagine buying things that I would have to carry back into Beijing from them, but all in all the hawkers on the wall were a great bunch.

The strangest thing about going home to Taipei was how nice the air felt upon exiting the plane in Taiyuan International. Taiwan is not known for its superior air quality, but the improvement over Beijing was refreshing. Likewise, while China is by no means a “Third World” country, Taipei has all the middle class affluence of an American city. Really, the two places feel totally different

What I had heard from people in Taiwan was that people in China are very rude. I did not find this to be the case at all. With the notable exception of the cabbie in Hangzhou, everyone we met was impeccably polite and helpful. More recently, I have heard that this is because we are foreigners, and they are less polite to other Chinese. For their part, Taiwanese have a reputation in China of being spoiled and pretentious. This disparity in views is revealing.

When Taiwanese go to China and leave the more affluent cities of Shanghai or Hong Kong, they are really going to a totally different country. Taiwanese have not had the same cultural experience as the Chinese have had, because by and large Taiwan is a middle class country. They must go to China and act like foreigners. But the Chinese treat Taiwan as just another province. In the same way that a big of gawking and discussion on “how people live here” would go over worse in Oklahoma if it came from a New Yorker than if it came from a Malaysian, the Chinese must bristle over their “compatriots” acting like rich Waiguoren (foreigners) rather than Chinese.

Or anyway, that’s my pop-psychology explanation. But what the hell do I know?

Anywhoo, I flew back home to Taipei the day after my Parents left for New York. I spent my last day wandering around Beijing, but nothing noteworthy happened. The trip on the whole was great, but it was nice to be back in Taipei. Coming back to work was rough, but isn’t it always after a vacation? I have some new stories of my Taiwan exploration in May (and by the time I write about them, June), so there should be another post coming soon for that. Hope you enjoyed reading about the trip.