A trave(b)logue: Beijing

Ben here. A few hasty notes from my recent Beijing trip follow. The trip lasted from October 31 to November 11. During this time I attended an international academic conference hosted by the Beijing municipal government (the 2012 Beijing Forum), gave a few lectures at Peking University, and spent a week exploring Beijing with friends old and new (see the photos below). The trip was also bookended by, on Halloween eve, a 13.5 hour direct flight from Chicago to Beijing and, on the return trip, a 12+ hour plane that wonderfully left Beijing at 5:30 pm Sunday afternoon and arrived at Chicago before 4:30 pm, one hour before I left. (Space travel is time travel!)

Touring the Forbidden City with best friend Zachary Rogers.

Promo shot for the Beijing Forum (which really knows how to choose controversial themes!)

The PKU people were delightful. 

Below a few working observations and moments from my whirlwind trip, some of it adjusted from the notes I wrote for myself and for my family report, whom I missed dearly. If I have my way, next time I am in China, we will go together. 

1. Whatever else it is, China is big. People. People everywhere. Everywhere. Even the country is called the People’s Republic of China. China has 1.4 billion people. America has 0.3 billion people. Pause on that. Yet the style of the scale and press of people in public--modern, urban, and lively--surprised me. In Manhattan, people press down on you wherever you are, and the landscape matches it: towering skyscrapers, loud bustle, crowds everywhere. In Beijing, it's different: people press down everywhere as well, but it doesn't have the matching bustle of the big city. Buildings are shorter, with very few over six stories. It is as if, because indeed there are, more people everywhere, not just in the busy city centers.


2. Whatever else it is, modern China is no black box. Like all modern nation states, China is an imagined hybrid mishmash of fractally stacked other identities: the closest thing I came to identifying Chinese food, for example, was a mixture of Mongolian, Korean, and Szechuan influences. Chinese mainstream Buddhism, similarly, boasts clear Tibetan and Indian influences. The history of modern Chinese politics, a strange mixture of Soviet socialist rhetoric and American capitalist policies, all carried out by an ancient patronage-style bureaucratic state; the National China Museum, one of its arms, was overfond of claiming that the "foundations of the modern Chinese nation" were laid dynasties ago, thousands of years before the modern nationstate existed as such. No matter how convenient it may be for the West to emphasize the long-standing tradition of mutual unintelligibility between the West and Eastern Asia, and no matter how convenient it may be for the Chinese to emphasize the "Chinese characteristic" as a catch-all term for describing difference, in fact, modern China appears just as intelligible as any other country. Just like every other nation, it is a readable nation in ways more helpful than the reductions close at hand to clueless foreigners and proud natives. China seems anything but isolated, anything but unique, anything but coherent, anything but possessing a single defining feature or essence. As for articulating those differences, alas, I remain firmly in the clueless foreigner camp, reduced to stammering through replies like, "well, China was not like Japan, or Korea, or Russia, even though it had elements of all of those." My colleagues, many of whom played the "Chinese characteristic" card, too, stammered at times: all of them were Communist Party members for professional, although not for ideological reasons; some of them tell jokes about South Koreans, don’t know any North Koreans, await for apologies from the Japanese, and have a pleasant, at-arms-distance attitude about Thailand and Vietnam. Where that leaves China is not much clearer than my response. The point remains: however hard China may be to understand, this is not abnormal. China is not beyond understanding. 

3. The Chinese language is crazy fun-hard. Chinese is not really a language: it is a family of languages, where there are maybe a dozen different languages or dialects—Mandarin, Cantonese, Shainghainese, Wu, Han, Hunan, Qin, and others, several of which I was lucky enough to hear briefly and compare.  This family of languages shares a common genome in its writing system, but that is it. As spoken languages, dialects are mutually unintelligible. Suppose you, like many other native speakers, decide you must learn the Beijing Mandarin dialect: when an English-speaker learns Spanish, things will be pretty straightforward. You hear the word, you write it down, you read it out loud, and then you remember the sounds and the symbols as one. La familia, el libro, etc. Chinese is not so simple: sounds, tones, and characters do not converge. First you hear the word, “Jia1ren2”; you write it down in phonetic English “Jiaren,” then you quickly discover the pinyin system for transcribing Chinese sounds into English offers nothing near a one-to-one mapping. Sometimes my ears (brain, really) would play tricks on me: I would ask a native to repeat the same word three or four times in a row, and each time I would register the same sound as a different English consonant. Then you need to layer into each syllabus one of four tones: (1) rising, (2) fall-then-rise, (3) falling, or (4) flat. Thus, you can learn that Jia (1) ren (2) means "family" or "household," although here again the relationship between fixed symbols and meanings are new, inventive. Then comes the written characters (家人, or jia-ren), which have no bearing on the sounds memorized, exercises a whole new mental muscle for optical recognition, and must be read out loud repeatedly to be remembered. Put all of these together, a new sense of sound, symbols, and semantics, plus diverse, non-converging relations between all three, and you now know a word in Chinese. Congratulations! Try it out on a super simple example: “Shu1/书” which means "book/letter/style of calligraphy."
         So learning Mandarin would be undeniably hard. To learn to read Mandarin would require memorizing tens, then hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of characters. Learning to write Chinese would require a lifetime of practice. In Beijing, I was consistently reminded, as my dear friend Zachary noted, that visiting a foreign culture, may be somewhat similar to what it is like to live with a disability: one may learn to be functional, but only in one’s own way, failing to understand or become responsively aware and engage many of the complexities that surrounds oneself. I bought dinner from a street vendor one night through a series of pointing, smiles, and grunts--any more than that comes only with the assistance of my abled local friends.
         There's the other side of the grammar coin as well. Once comfortable with the new sound-symbols-semantic arrangement entrance barriers, then Chinese spoken syntax turns out to be quite easy. Quite a bit easier than English at least. For example:

In English, one needs to say all these words: I want to learn how to speak Chinese.

In Mandarin (or so I've been told: correct me please), one says this: Wo shu zhou chen Gongzhen.

Or literally and simply, I want learn speak Chinese. None of those pesky small words to mix up like “to” “the” “a” “how.” Instead, just say the keywords in order. The fact that Chinese has so few base sound syllables also means that, within a day or two, one can imagine hearing Chinese in one's head; those sounds may be gibberish, but the limited set of them makes for very plausible ear-training exercises. At a slightly cooler level, Chinese is super poetic. Everyday speech is full of metaphors and productive pun potential. Each sound syllable can mean five or six things, depending on the context, which means that while the density of English letter redundancy might let you sustain a three dimensional crossword, my sense is that a Chinese character crossword might theoretically sustain four or five dimensions simultaneously. The language is an endless opportunity for puns and word play. One more piece of awesomeness: as I toured the imposingly large National China Museum, I began to recognize a payback to Chinese literacy I did not initially expect: if you learn to read English, you can read back through maybe three hundred years of history in the original before the writing changes too much to understand easily. By contrast, if you learn to read Chinese, you can read back about ten times that, maybe 3,500 years of history in the original before the characters change too much to understand easily. Imagine reading bronze age symbols. Also, if you learn to read Chinese, again, you can read all modern dialectics of Chinese—no matter how it sounds. Everything written by the whole Chinese language family and everything in the whole of Chinese history is yours to grapple with: and that is a serious passport to intertextual space and time travel. 

4. I really enjoyed the Chinese people I met. The hospitality was unparalleled: there was always someone to talk with or someone to show me around. A small horde of volunteer, and very bright graduate students accompanied me to the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and the National China Museum. They did not have to, but they wanted to spend the day doing stuff with me. As I sat in the airport in Beijing, a friend called me at the airport, just to make sure I had made it safely, while another friend called me the day before, and two others wrote emails checking in on me. And yet, alongside all this individual hospitality and warm generosity in private relations came, in public, an interpersonal register that was refreshingly tough-minded and urban. Perhaps because there are so many people everywhere, and because people are busy and fast-moving, toughness is a survival mechanism. I was surprised how often native Chinese laugh at each other, not to be mean or heartless, but because it is acceptable to laugh and insult people in public in China. According to the reports I received, unlike Japan, and probably more like Israel or Germany, Chinese kids are OK with foreign kids in their classrooms. They might laugh at foreign kids, but they also laugh with and play with everyone equally. The Chinese seem to enjoy laughing and joking; they are surprisingly fun people to be around. Even when they are laughing at, they don’t seem to mean to hurt. As I told my kids, if someone calls you fat or slow, it is simply because that is what they think: everyone laughs and then nobody worries about it. Analogously, no one accepts spare change. Gratuity, good and bad, is gratuitous in China, and that's refreshingly straightforward. At least two cheers for that. 

5. Then there's the no-cheers bad. As Grandpa John Milton Peters pointed out in his journal back in 1984 on a trip, the air quality in Beijing was very poor--terrible at times. Some mornings I declined to go running outside because the air smelled so bad. How can one exercise regularly, without doing more damage than good, is an open question. 

On the Great Wall, and wildly alone. 

A Snapshot: the Great Wall: Friday, November 9, 2012. 

Today’s highlight came with three new PKU graduate student friends--Water, Forest, and John: a morning walking on top of a half-mile stretch of the battlement-ringed Great Wall, which rose between two snowy, wind-swept valleys about 85 kilometers north of Beijing. I don’t mean to wax too poetic, but the experience was stirring and striking. We even had the good fortune to happen first upon a just opened stretch of the wall that climbed the length of three towers, which left me (see photo) alone on the wall for a moment. The wall, so clearly immense and imposing, is not a thing that can simply be built. It can have no single date. No single length. It must be rebuilt before it can ever be built. (This thing is too big, too old to be anything but postmodern.) According to some estimates, parts of it stretch more than 5000 miles and dates back more than 3000 years. The wall follows the precipice of mountaintops, zigzagging through oxbow after twist and turn, winding its way into two horizons stretching out on either side of you. In my view, that horizon--itself repeatedly swallowed in the quick, short rises of these mountains buried under a thick blanket of smog-fog--surrounds me. I'd blame the poetry in the Chinese language for my impulse to pen a few lines here: 

Mountains, short yet sharp,
Leave valleys, wind-swept and cloudy,
Sunk in the snowy continental climb.

Friends in front of one of the wall's countless towers: Water, John, Ben, River. 

From http://www.crystalinks.com/chinawallarge.gif

Tourists in Manhattan

For the majority of our first few days in Manhattan, we played tourists with my sister Krista and two of her kids. We were a little put out by the fact that it rained most of that time, but we managed to get around okay anyway. 

As I mentioned, we stayed at a friends' place in the East Village (which was so wonderful to have our own place). We were happy to discover that Katz's deli was on our way to the subway everyday. Of course we had to step in and have a sandwich, but at $15 per sandwich, we opted to share one as a family. We each got a few amazing bites of the recommended pastrami on rye. It really was incredible. The kids especially liked the giant pickles.

Bliss

Aaron was the only kid who chowed on the sandwich. Not surprisingly.

Of course we had to end up at Times Square at some point. We took the kids to Toys R Us and spent a couple of hours playing with the toys there. They especially loved

Tato sherpa

Libbie and Evie opted to use their $5 spending money for a ride on the carousel

They were quite pleased with the result

We spent the most time at this station that had several remote control cars to try out. Our favorite was the super small one that zoomed around.

The T-Rex was a big hit. The girls were slightly frightened by the roaring. Elliot kept asking, "Is it real?" And we kept saying, "It's a real statue, yes, but it's not alive." I think he finally got it.

The tourist crew, minus the moms (who are both taking pictures)

Aaron had a great time posing with the Lego statues. It's funny--we have been here a handful of times and I think Aaron had the most fun this time, as an eight year old.

Elmo was waiting out on the street. The kids all (except Aaron) wanted to give him hugs.

We took the subway down to Brooklyn and walked over to Grimaldi's Pizza. I almost had a heart attach when it said it had been closed down for repairs. Luckilly the construction guys told us that they had opened next door for the interim. The pizza was almost as good as I remembered it. I'm not sure if that's because they were using a newer coal oven and not the ancient one in their old place or if my memory is just too kind.

Mmmmm....

We took the scenic route back to Manhattan and walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. We had a little trouble with kids walking over the line into the bike lane (hence the grouchy Elliot face) but otherwise it was a great walk.

Krista ended up carrying/pushing her two kids the last stretch.
(Don't worry, I took over pushing the stroller as soon as I saw her like this.) 

The next day we took it a little easier and spent the morning at the New York Hall of Science in the Bronx. The boys have been there several times but it was somehow still new and exciting as tourists with cousins.

Astronaut Elliot

Aaron and Gabe

One morning we walked over to Chinatown (that was Aaron's #1 request for our time in NYC). We ate lunch at an incredible dim sum place. Aaron enjoyed a couple of chicken feet and we all drooled over the steaming pork dumplings.

Aaron still loves looking at and sampling the small dried fish

After lunch and a few street snacks we headed over to the Chinatown ice cream factory. The coconut pineapple combo Ben and i shared was delightful, although Elliot was a little disappointed with the richness of his chocolate cone. The next time he got chocolate ice cream he said, "I sure hope it's not rich chocolate like last time."

Proof that I was there too...

Ben in Rome

I spent yesterday in Rome, that hilly expanse that once boasted a million people in the meridian of time. Here are a couple travel notes. My day in the city began at 8:30 at the Colosseum, moved to the Roman Forum by 11:00, stopped for scrumptious street pizza at 14:00, passed by the Castel di Sant'Angelo on the way to the Vatican City at 15:00, visited St. Peter's Basilica at 16:00, leisurely strolled through a series of idyllic public squares (including the Piazza Navona, the Pantheon--a once-pagan-now-Christian church with a fantastic open-air skylight, the Spanish and French squares), and stopped for exquisite gelato (Italian dark chocolate, coconut, and toffee flavors) somewhere around 20:00 in the evening. Many thanks to my friend and guide for the fabulous day. Here's a hazy photo of us standing against the Spanish square just minutes away from sunset. 

I didn't have a camera. Tourist-quality pictures are available here (http://www.rome.info/pictures/). 


I've been on an ancient Rome kick recently and, after visiting, I must say Voltaire's golden riff still holds: "This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire." While only one of those three, Rome itself is incredible. It begs for a follow-up visit. I want to go back. Perhaps the discovery of the day is that people who live in Rome still call one another "Romans." A neat-o reminder that ancient Rome was an empire built on a city-state and that the modern city Rome continues to lay claim to its ancient past. 


Ancient Romans, the Colosseum proves, knew how to celebrate death. With systematic, unrepentant savagery. In one festival alone, 10,000 gladiators fought (only sometimes to the death) and 11,000 wild beasts were hunted there for public spectacle. The architecture is genius, staggering: the seating rises five complex stories high, showcasing highly regimented seating for somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 Roman inhabitants (anyone could come). The decorations and frescos, of which only traces remain after Christian Rome later scavenged ancient Roman monuments for building materials, would have been strikingly ornate. Beneath the central arena floor lay a now visible complex underground layer of hallways, holding pens, and storage areas with elevator-trap doors for raising Gladiators, weaponry, and wild beasts into public view. It is not clear--at least according to the historians consulted for the largely Christian visitors--that Christians were sacrificed in the Colosseum. Thus the place is not currently designated a site of Christian martyrdom, a convenient alliance of facts fit for the Papacy and the demands of modern tourism. 


The Roman Forum occupies a large public square, now littered with ruins, that once housed the heart of the Roman republic, the Senate, the Palatine (a building so impressive it reportedly gave European languages the word "palace"), many temples to Roman gods, and endless political machinations (the kind I have been reading about in Colleen McCulloch's Masters of Rome series). The magnificent infrastructure, the detail-laden culture, and the bold ambitions of the ancient Roman contrasts with modern-day Italy, with its unhurried, informal, and even openly lazy culture. In terms of current public dress, male slovenliness is compensated for by over-the-top female fashion; while common today, none of the former would have been tolerated, as I understand it at least, in ancient Rome. With waves of suicidal scooters zooming through streets lined with fancy high-end women's clothing stores not withstanding, Rome today strikes me as mostly a sleepy European capital. 


Mussolini, perhaps like King Herod, is often remembered only as a bad guy. Yet, I learned yesterday, Mussolini, too, played a significant role in building up the state that would later despise him. He built new neighborhoods for the Rome Olympics in the 1930s, expanded agriculture and developed industry throughout the countryside. Controversially, he built the wide Boulevard of Reconciliation which connects the Vatican and the nearby Castle di Sant' Angelo. This required knocking down a whole block of buildings. Originally, back in the 1500s, the architect had designed the connecting streets to be narrow alleyways with the goal of having every visitor stumble upon the Vatican plaza only to be disoriented by the sudden magnificence and magnitude of it all. Mussolini's revision made pilgrims approach the place differently. Now the helicopter (below) can give us a totally different view. I suppose the point is to beware the big egos. They can build and destroy with equal dexterity.

The Vatican from helicopter

Speaking of the powerful, the Catholic church boasts incredible wealth. St. Peter's Basilica, the largest and perhaps most revered Church in Christendom, is utterly breath-taking. I have never been so impressed by the grandeur and immensity of any building, let alone one that holds 60,000 people and is over 130 meters tall. If the architect's intention was to humble and dazzle its parishioners, it sure worked a number on me. 

St. Peter's Basilica

This immense space, covered in the finest marble and woodwork, is crowned with art work, much of it by Raphael and other Renaissance masters. The Pieta by Michelangelo stopped me in my tracks. Marble more alive than life. 

Pieta by Michelangelo

The signs of untold riches--some humbling, some ostentatious--abound in the Vatican, the world's smallest state (which I read as a mutually beneficial, if largely symbolic, separation of Catholic church and Italian state). While the details are unverified, I was told that the Catholic church owns close to 60% of the real estate in downtown Rome and that it enjoys tax-reductions for most of its holdings, which includes the peerless collection of masterpieces in the Vatican museum, not to mention the nearby Sistine Chapel. Here again, just like the Greek Orthodox Church owning the land that holds the Israeli Senate, the Catholic Church enjoys tremendous political sway in Rome (and throughout the world) in part thanks to tangible real-world assets. 


What else? The public squares were full of artisans and chilled out crowds. Most of the people on the street were, no thanks to me, tourists. The gelato was... oh man, so delicious, as was the home-made pasta we had that night. That's enough for now. Let's save parallels with Jerusalem, the other major center of geopolitical religious power for another day. 16 waking hours, one unforgettable day. Not bad for a layover.