{"id":47,"date":"2012-04-29T19:53:36","date_gmt":"2012-04-30T00:53:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/garyvineberg.com\/?p=47"},"modified":"2014-01-02T20:00:43","modified_gmt":"2014-01-03T01:00:43","slug":"the-woman-from-harbin-an-almost-perfect-trip-to-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garyvineberg.com\/?p=47","title":{"rendered":"The Woman from Harbin: An Almost-Perfect Trip to China"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

They’ve got a wall in China<\/em><\/h6>\n
It\u2019s a thousand miles long<\/em><\/h6>\n
To keep out the foreigners they made it strong<\/em><\/h6>\n
I\u2019ve got a wall around me<\/em><\/h6>\n
You can\u2019t even see<\/em><\/h6>\n
It took a little time<\/em><\/h6>\n
To get to me<\/em><\/h6>\n

–Paul Simon
\n<\/strong>
\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Great Wall at Mutianyu<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

WHEN I STARTED THIS BLOG I made an unstated commitment to post when moved to do so, instead of on a regularly scheduled basis.\u00a0 On the other hand, delving into the personal was one of the last things I intended.\u00a0 Yet here I am, baring my soul about a recent trip to China while it\u2019s still alive in my aging memory.<\/p>\n

The opportunity to tour China arose because of the invitation of Susie, my high-school sweetheart and a good friend for most of the four and a half decades since we met in fifth grade.\u00a0 Susie\u2019s base is Montreal but, as an executive with a global corporation, she and her family have lived abroad, in places as distant as South Africa and Poland.\u00a0 After her husband Daniel fell to cancer several years ago, she did a stint in my adopted home town of New York; her two children, Emily and Max, now adults and on their own, she\u2019s currently stationed in Shanghai.\u00a0 At her urging (and with a timely break in the parade of earnings announcements vital to my work as a securities analyst), I planned a 10-day visit that also took me to the historic cities of Suzhou, Xi\u2019an and Beijing.<\/p>\n

Susie was a most gracious host, showing me the delights of China\u2019s booming commercial metropolis: the dignified architecture of the Bund; Pudong\u2019s pyrotechnical skyline across the Huangpu River; the French Concession, with its time-worn colonial residences where clothes hang outside to dry; the parks where groups of locals engage in\u00a0singing and ballroom dancing, even\u00a0matchmaking, all in public view.\u00a0 Shanghai is a great dining city too, and we enjoyed both Eastern and Western meals.\u00a0 There and on the journey ahead I would partake of juicy\u00a0dumplings, lamb soup and Beijing duck, marveling from a safe distance at\u00a0such novelties as roasted scorpion on a stick.<\/p>\n

On my own I covered every exhibit in the first-class Shanghai Museum, housing superb collections of ancient Chinese bronze and ceramic works, hanging painted scrolls and calligraphy.\u00a0 One day I rode the bullet train to and back from nearby Suzhou, once home to the country\u2019s greatest clockmakers and now reputedly the world\u2019s largest manufacturing site of digital cameras and laptop computers.\u00a0 There, surrounded by industrial sprawl, remain some of China\u2019s finest classical gardens, with poetic names like \u201cGarden of the Master of the Nets\u201d and \u201cHumble Administrator\u2019s Garden.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Pudong Skyline<\/p><\/div>\n

As Susie well knew, Shanghai is an ideal introduction to China for the novice, a place to get accustomed to its ways and recover from jet lag.\u00a0 To facilitate my journey onward she provided maps and papers with the addresses of hotels and restaurants written in English and Mandarin for the taxis, booked drivers to take me to outlying sites, even loaned me a China Mobile phone with a lifeline to her bilingual assistant Connie.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t have been more fortunate.\u00a0 Only five days remained, and I had a lot of ground to cover to see as many of the glories of this ancient land as possible.<\/p>\n

THE APRIL WEATHER was excellent for traveling: warm temperatures during the day and cool at night, with practically no rain during my entire stay.\u00a0 The semi-opaque air was another story entirely.\u00a0 According to different accounts I heard, it was dust blowing in from the Gobi Desert and fog mixed together,\u00a0good old-fashioned pollution, or some other combination thereof.\u00a0 This was tolerable for breathing,\u00a0worse for photography.<\/p>\n

In a China that is both rapidly modernizing and still under firm government control, I was almost unaware of the scandalous details regarding Bo Xilai, the deposed Communist Party chief of Chongqing.\u00a0 Our Western media have been captivated for weeks by this tale of corruption, wiretapping and notably Bo\u2019s wife, Gu Kailai, portrayed by some as an Asian Lucrezia Borgia for\u00a0her alleged poisoning\u00a0of a British\u00a0businessman.\u00a0 Still, political censorship in China is nowhere near as absolute as it used to be, and I had no problem staying current on all of the major events in business and sports.<\/p>\n

The everyday folk I encountered were never hostile, occasionally curious and friendly, but mostly indifferent to my presence.\u00a0 I rarely felt unsafe, nor did I even lose anything of value (other than the tube of toothpaste that Beijing airport security confiscated from me before boarding my flight back to the States).\u00a0 At the major destinations, mobs of Chinese tourists — who tend to spit loudly and often don\u2019t respect another\u2019s physical space — could be oppressive.\u00a0 Yet I understood that rising affluence has given many a first chance to discover their own country, which the American majority takes for granted.\u00a0 They\u2019re in a hurry.<\/p>\n

A couple of flight delays that I endured were a minor inconvenience, never deterring me from my appointed rounds.\u00a0 To take in all the sights, sounds and smells without interference, I avoided tour guides, pedicabs and even taxis whenever possible.\u00a0 I walked until my feet, legs and back ached, along Suzhou\u2019s old canals, in the Muslim souk of Xi\u2019an at one end of the Silk Road, up and down the steep course of the Great Wall at Mutianyu, around the lakes of the Summer Palace and through the picturesque hutongs (alleys) of Beijing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Forbidden City<\/p><\/div>\n

So I hit all of the highlights on my route, and now could cross the China trip off my bucket list.\u00a0 But I had very little meaningful human contact in the final days, knowing only a handful of Mandarin words in a country where few outside the major hotels speak any English.\u00a0 Armed with a Nikon and an iPad, I brought home nearly 300 pictures of the trip and don\u2019t have a single one with me in the frame.\u00a0 And here too, many people went about with earphones plugged into their music players, almost oblivious to anyone whose path they crossed.\u00a0 I might as well have been one of them.<\/p>\n

ON MY LAST DAY of sightseeing, I was fumbling with a pair of maps outside the north gate of Beijing\u2019s Forbidden City, the enormous palace compound for two imperial dynasties, when a woman\u2019s voice asked me from behind where I was from.\u00a0 Turning around, I told her I was American.\u00a0 She was of a younger but indeterminate age, with a sweet, sad face that seemed to me more Mongolian than Han Chinese.\u00a0 Petite and conservatively dressed, she said she was visiting from Harbin, a city in the extreme northeast of China.\u00a0 There, she told me, I would be one of the few Westerners anybody ever sees, other than the odd Russian.\u00a0 The woman said she had spent three hours in the Forbidden City; I had spent four.\u00a0 But I will never know anything more about her, except for what my imagination conjures up.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Terra-Cotta Soldiers<\/p><\/div>\n

Suddenly, she asked me if I wanted to go for a coffee.\u00a0 By then I had become inured to girls in touristy areas calling out, \u201cHello, Mister,\u201d trying to steer me to expensive, supposedly authentic tea ceremonies and the like.\u00a0 Outside Xi\u2019an — where more than two millennia ago the tyrant Qin Shi Huang ordered the production of a whole terra-cotta army and other figures to guard his mausoleum \u2013 a pretty tour guide set me straight when I politely declined her services: \u201cYou think you so smart.\u201d\u00a0 (In hindsight, it would have done me good to explore the site in her company.)<\/p>\n

When a 55-year-old man is approached like that by an unfamiliar woman, it\u2019s natural for his guard to go up.\u00a0 This was out of the question.\u00a0 She was too aggressive, her English ability suspicious.\u00a0 I had a lovely wife waiting for me at home.\u00a0 There was no time.\u00a0 \u201cLook,\u201d I said, \u201cI\u2019m leaving early tomorrow and I only have a few hours left to see Beijing.\u00a0 I need to finish my walking tour.\u00a0 But it was very nice meeting you.\u201d\u00a0 After shaking her hand I rambled off toward Prince Gong\u2019s residence, which turned out to be a beautifully restored, scaled-down Forbidden City, overwhelmed by tour groups.<\/p>\n

By the next morning the woman was beginning to haunt me.<\/p>\n

What was she hustling me for: a sugar-daddy night on the town, a Green Card?\u00a0 Or maybe she was just a more mature version of the schoolgirls on an outing to the Suzhou Museum who asked me, an exotic American, to pose for pictures with them, wanting just to practice English with a native speaker.\u00a0 She was a human-rights activist trying to recruit me, perhaps, or a government agent posing as one.\u00a0 \u00a0Did I really want to find out?\u00a0 I, who never missed taking a pill the entire trip, tracks his personal net worth in real time, works out at the gym every two days and logs in his activities, pictured myself as a Prufrock, measuring \u201cout my life with coffee spoons.\u201d\u00a0 I switched from T.S. Eliot to Henrik Ibsen (\u201cWhen we dead awaken.\u2026 We see that we have never lived\u201d) before my clich\u00e9 alarm sounded.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Schoolgirls at the Suzhou Museum<\/p><\/div>\n

Still, didn\u2019t my drive and self-discipline ultimately afford me the wherewithal and savvy to arrange (with Susie\u2019s invaluable help) such an adventure on short notice?\u00a0 Haven\u2019t I visited dozens of countries and connected with people all over the world?\u00a0 Shortly, like Odysseus, I would be returning home to my Ithaca, my Penelope, where all would be right \u2013 and that alarm went off again.<\/p>\n

On the final flight leg back to New York from San Francisco, I went into the aircraft lavatory and spontaneously cried.\u00a0 It bewildered me, because I had been so pleased with everything, but for a moment the tears washed away a lifetime of jadedness.\u00a0 Soon enough she will fade from my recollection; I\u2019m already having trouble visualizing her face.\u00a0 But the China trip could\u2019ve been perfect.\u00a0 What would I have risked to spend a half hour with a diminutive stranger who braved rejection to meet me?\u00a0 Why didn\u2019t I join the woman from Harbin for a cup of coffee?<\/p>\n

To see more photos of China visit http:\/\/garyvinebergsphotos.shutterfly.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They’ve got a wall in China It\u2019s a thousand miles long To keep out the foreigners they made it strong I\u2019ve got a wall around me You can\u2019t even see It took a little time To get to me –Paul … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyvineberg.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyvineberg.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyvineberg.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyvineberg.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyvineberg.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":40,"href":"https:\/\/garyvineberg.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":297,"href":"https:\/\/garyvineberg.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions\/297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyvineberg.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyvineberg.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyvineberg.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}