In Shanghai and Beijing: Feasts & Leftovers

February 17 at the Shanghai Bund

My 33 year old friend Wang Qian is one of the best feasts of human nature that I have encountered in China.  

Call that a mixed metaphor. But it's true.

I ran into her at the Bookworm Book store in Beijing last September during a lecture on the Gaia hypothesis. During the lecture, a British naturalist and poet proceeded to assure our international clique of coffee klatch sophisticates that Nature (Gaia) will handily overcome all the polluting iniquities inflicted by human kind this past century.  Never mind that during the Permian Period "wipe-out" 252 million years ago, 95% of the all life on earth went extinct in less than 200,000 years.

After his lecture I remember feeling "juiced up." When I raised my hand and questioned his thinking, mostly the implications of his thinking -- namely that no matter how much foul air and water we dump into the environment, Mother Nature will readjust -- lo and behold, the audience burst into applause.

After the lecture was over (I seem to recall the Brit was oddly paired with a Czech poetess who was awfully eloquent, though I can't remember her name), a lithe, 5'10" long-haired Chinese beauty sat down at our table with a Northern Irish girl named Hannah. Hannah had also questioned the scientist during the lecture; she maintained a calm demeanor and argued against his viewpoint persuasively, despite the fact, she later acknowledged, she was practically screaming inside her head, trying to marshall all her forces to shout the guy down.

Hannah, Qian and I had a long chat, along with fellow ICB instructor Robert Rostermundt, who was my "date" for the evening.  I discovered Hannah was traveling through Beijing and Western China with Wang Qian (I regret to say I can't remember how they met); regretfully she was on her way back to Europe after a period of Chinese study.  I took Qian's phone number and didn't think much about it.  We promised to get in touch sometime soon. A few weeks later, finding myself alone again  on another Saturday night in Beijing, I called her.  She was in Guilin, Guangxi province with friend Hannah, but promised to call me when she came back. For weeks I was completely snowed under with teaching work and student papers.

One evening, though, she called me.  I met her at a subway station, one of the dozens of vast underground caverns that snake through a city so enormous it dwarfs New York, Rio, and London. Soon thereafter I discovered I had met one of the loveliest world citizens I've ever had the privilege to know.

Wang Qian comes from Shanghai. Does that explain everything?
Every hutong, every foreign restaurant, ever soaring tower with a gigantic "window" of empty space in the middle, every shopping center, every tiny little shop with teddy bears in it, every piece of international paraphernalia that can be found on a city street -- all of these things are Wang Qian.

She brings me to tiny crooked streets in Shanghai, my favorite city in all of China. She helps me find a ridiculously expensive chi pao (traditional Chinese dress) for my daughter's wedding, and we bargain down and go back and forth and back and forth over whether it really is worth it and I can't tell; her smile is somehow reflected back at me in the mirrors, the shop keepers, the woven white silks. She's about as naturally happy as I am naturally brooding and intense. Perhaps she is the better half I lost at about age eight. I don't really know.

Qian, it turns out, is a journalist with many credits, including several years with Phoenix Weekly, one of the best journals in China. Of course there is no such thing as a completely independent journal in China, because the media are controlled by the government. But Qian wants to be a foreign correspondent in China writing in English. Last fall, she was taking a sabbatical and working for a Western journalist as a researcher, hoping to improve her English to pass the IELTS exam, which would give her a passport to England or the U.S. for a year or two to study political science on a graduate fellowship. This is the path that many young people take; Qian is exceptional in that she is already out of the career gates by a good ten or eleven years, and, being from Shanghai and already qualifying as an epicure, she has a hankering to see Europe.

We have met over many dinners in small hutongs in Beijing, including a hutong across from the LAMA Temple (which has a lot of garish Buddhist statuary, including a Kuan-yin made out of a 200 foot tall tree imported from Tibet.) Twice we have eaten in a Greek restaurant there (white-washed walls and rotund Mousaka). Last November she took me to Thanksgiving dinner, with turkey and fixings at the Culture Yard, a meeting place and tutoring center for ex-pats in Beijing
situated near the 2nd ring (these "rings" refer to vast concentric circles of highways that radiate out from the center of Beijing, which is roughly situated at the bulls-eye of Tian An Men Square and the Forbidden City). Wherever I go with Wang Qian, I find something that reminds me of home.

Three weeks ago Qian and I met in Shanghai, one of the highlights of my time here. I took the gao tie (high-speed train), which was notorious in 2010 for its accidents and alleged issues with electrical switching equipment and cracked steel casings (the Wenzhou train crash in July 2010 took 40 lives and injured 191). These problems have since been addressed, according to government announcements (Caixin media led the charge in exposing the railway scandals). On the train, we sailed along from Beijing's South Station to Shanghai in five hours. The top speed, posted above my seat on a chiron, along with Chinese rock videos, was 306 kilometers per hour, although 302 kph was pretty much the clip.

My weekend in Shanghai also flew by. Freezing by the Huangpo river, Qian and I walked at night to the Bund, the old international commercial district, which had its heyday in the 1930s. The place was luminescent. And the Putong skyline with its space needles and enormous revolving globes took away my breath and even some memories. Shanghai is divided into two parts -- Putong and Puxi --by the Huangpo river which is situated at the mouth of the Yangtze river. In 1995, when my kids were still small, I had visited Shanghai's waterfront and stayed with friend Jason Wu's sister and her husband in a lovely teak-floored house that had been divided up during the Communist regime. The house reminded me of the fallen beauty of the Zhivago era. Every floor was allocated to many different families. I stayed in one of the preserved rooms kept as a guest bedroom by Jason's sister (I regret to say I have lost track of her). It had a real bathroom -- no squat toilets. It had a real bed and a radio and an air conditioner. This was affluence. The waterfront then had the space needle and a few buildings, and the haze over the Huangpo made it hard to see. But when I stood in the same place three weeks ago, I was dazzled. Architects had completely re-sculptured the skyline with revolving glass ball convention centers, restaurants and other soaring geometries. Qian and I took a series of silly pictures together; I felt like a kid again (how did I miss the fun with girlfriends?)

And the rest of the trip, with lovely food, visits with friends, and a delicious taste of Shanghai excess -- in coffee shops, bakeries, and dress shops on every crooked little street in the French Concession (which resembles a mini Paris), made me realize how bourgeois I am.

Did Robert Frost say that "happiness truly makes up in height for what it lacks in length?" It was on our Shanghai escape that I found out that Qian had recently separated from her long-time boyfriend and was taking the first tentative few steps on her own. She was so graceful about it in correspondence that I had had no idea. After her break-up, she was staying with parents in Putong to regroup, re-study for the IELTS, and relaunch her career in Beijing when she returned shortly after I did.

A week later we met for Korean Barbecue in Beijing. She was giggling and happy, always telling me, "Be happy." She took the IELTS the next day without a hitch and reported she had done much better. Then back to a friend's house until she can locate the right job and apartment in Beijing. I hope next year will bring new things to her, perhaps a fellowship in the States. Given how difficult it is to write professionally in a foreign language, especially if you were not born to a bilingual family, I'd call her my Donna Quixote. Whatever windmill she tilts, I'll be cheering her on. AE

A Memory on the Occasion of Putting Animals to Sleep

You think about the pit mix who was young once along with your children.
They were all of a piece.
The dog with the pointy ears and pink and black snout.
The child with the pointy ears
and the sudden way
she darted across the room followed by the puppy.

Now the puppy has rheumatism.
The daughter is grown, has a job, and asks you for a little extra money to buy an IUD.

The son darts naked through the den spraying water
on the daughter and the white carpet and the cat who leapt to the top of the glass door catching a fly.
Now the cat licks his chops in a square of sunlight while the son rockets down a field in circles like a billiard ball.

You cry thinking about having to put these beloved animals to sleep.
You miss putting your children to bed and holding their hands while they sleep.
You dream -- I dream -- of the softness of fur, the unspeakable wetness of children's kisses.
Reminded of how young we were,
Darting through life.
Crazy with the love of it,
Believing, half believing, this would never end. --AE

In Charlotte NC: Daughters and Moms on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

The picture of the relaxed-looking daughter above who seems in charge of her life as she surveys prospective wedding venues in Ashville, North Carolina is actually an illusion created by my Nikon 3100 SLR camera.

She is 24 now, an independent curmudgeon who never appreciated a thing I did. She is also funny, devoted to me, and wild. As a kid, she drowned her pagers; she smoked and drank; she told me she was going to be a food scientist at the age of 5, pulling out every sauce and meat and mustard concoction from the refrigerator, adding soy sauce to strawberries or mixing cheese with maple syrup. In virtually every respect she did exactly what she wanted because she knew what she wanted.

At 14 she started catering at old folks homes. She read to Alzheimer's patients. She made a lot of friends with women and men I would have classified in another age and time as "low class" or even "trashy." Frequently they would cuss at me when I'd try to find out where she had disappeared, which was often. At one point, at the age of 16, she clocked me and gave me a bloody nose. All her girlfriends, Grainne excepted, got pregnant by the age of 17 and none went to college save for her. She was the one, I remember, who walked all the way into Media to keep her appointment at Planned Parenthood. I once caught her in our apartment fooling around with a tough leech of an Italian boy who had good abdominal muscles which he called "cut." Our apartment was robbed by one of his friends when he left the backdoor open. My daughter screamed at me for not throwing him out after the first week of leeching (before the robbery); finally I had to call his father to throw him out of our house because he would not stay in my son's room.

When she was 14 years old I had to take a business trip to Monterey, California. As the plane touched down on the runway at 11 pm local California time my cell phone rang. "I can't find your daughter. She's disappeared!" the baby sitter cried. My Juliet had climbed down from her second floor rooftop chamber with the assistance of Guttersnipe, the local Romeo from Garden City who helped her use the fireman's trick of sheets knotted together. I remember her tantrums when I sent out the police after her...And I remember several times when she smashed her fist through the panels of her armoire (it was a pretty cheap armoire). Throughout her childhood she scratched or threw our family pictures against the wall, smashing glass all over the place. As a kid, she had something like dyslexia but ended up loving to read and even made self-help tapes for me at age 9 to talk me out of my depressions regarding men. She reminded me, in form and function, of her father, but seemed to have other redeeming qualities that came out of no where.

My favorite was her "tire therapy," when she ran out our side door and leaped onto a large rubber tire swinging from a heavy rope tied to our lovely chestnut tree. She hung from the hole in the tire and dragged her bare feet in the mud beneath, telling me she played in the "tender mud" because it made her happy. These kinds of therapies were uplifting after my husband left and she could no longer stand my tears as I confessed my anguish and self-pity fruitlessly to my mother or sister on the phone. (I should have saved it all for a priest.)

Today, as the psychologist Mary Pipher might have predicted, she is a disciplined worker, a banquet supervisor at Marriott Corporation in Charlotte, and a creative marketer who writes well and still swings sadly into dis-ease when her fiance must take to the road to work.

She pays her bills, has a college degree, rails at me for allowing her to go to the school of her choosing (Johnson & Wales) instead of a "first-rate" school, which of course she refused to even consider when she was of the age to do so. She is a jumble of charms, fears, and resentments -- most of the resentment is reserved for me and the terrible mistakes I made as a young parent. She is still afraid of tackling an MBA, even though she seemed confident about it two years ago. For a while she seemed worried about making any career move without her fiance Jason, a very talented executive chef and all around Zen-like Southern boy who gleams when he looks at her.

A day ago in Charlotte she charged ahead of me when we walked on the streets. Finally I talked back and said she needed to walk with me even though I am loping and "slow."

But yesterday, after a thankless morning at a chic but impossibly priced bridal salon, after she charged ahead of me again forgetting to thank me for lunch, I was reminded how sullen I was and STILL CAN BE when I am upset. She reminds me of how lousy she is at housework, how incredibly loving she is toward Jason and her friends, and how occasionally loving she can really be toward me, wrapping her arms around my neck and saying, "I'm really appre--appre-cia-tive of that dress." Yes, that incredible dress, which she found on the fairyland mannequin of herself at New York Bridal salon in the middle of a strip mall outside Charlotte. She found the right fitter, a girl named Mona with lovely dark skin, her smile cracking open, as Grainne's did after the fourth or fifth try on. She was in bliss. Mona brought a half-size Mannequin of a groom (cut off at the knees) so she could stand next to him and compare their "looks." And yes, with her bridal party of dearest friends David and Kristin cheering her on with tears and extravagant exclamations, Grainne poured into that antique lacy confection showing all her curves like buttermilk pouring into a gelatin mold. We knew, after a dozen more try-ons, that she had found her happy fit; that gorgeous thing every bride wants. And I also realized, no matter what, she would walk down an aisle I've never taken and be braver than I have ever been. Because it is not easy to surrender oneself to another person and agree to share another's fate; and this is precisely what she has done.

Bridal Party Cheering Squad: Dave, Grainne, Kristin

And so, with the agony and ecstasy of this daughter, I celebrate her tire therapy once again and hope she will swing swing swing up and out with all the happiness and unexpected twists and turns of a new life.

What I Meant to Tell You About Mongolia

Hello friends and family--

To catch you up on the last 6 weeks, since much of the time either my brain or the UC Denver Virtual Private Network (VPN) doesn't work and thus I can't get access to my own blog...

Chapter 1: Mongolia

After waiting in Beijing Capital Airport October 1 for 18 hours for a flight to Outer Mongolia, and having been bumped again from another Mongolian Airlines flight that actually did fly and told to come back at 3 AM to find out whether the Ulan Bator shuttle which was supposed to arrive 24 hours earlier at dawn might finally show up -- my friend Lona O'Connor and I decided to call it quits.

Tomorrow is another day, we said to ourselves, exhausted and cognizant that if we waited until 3 AM, another flight might arrive. Or it might not.

We shrugged and headed for the taxi stand. Our booking agent in Ulan Bator told us she'd have to check at 9 AM on the morrow to see if we could rebook. By now we realized that even with rebooking, we had already lost 36 hours of our planned 6 day Genghis Khan Glorious Reunion Tour to the frontier, and would lose another day or so before we could get there.

I felt despondent. Lona had flown all this way from Palm Beach, Florida to see the wilds of Mongolia. We had planned to take a 1000 kilometer overland jeep tour to Bayangobi, to see the Hoyor Zagel Ger camp and to ride horses on the steppes, the dunes and mountains. We were then headed to Erdene Zuu monastery in Kharakorum, in the middle of the steppes, to see their collection of the most remarkable Buddhist paintings and religious objects in Mongolia. And we would finish in Khustai National Park...to see the wild horses and enjoy the feeling of understanding what Genghis Khan's birthplace was all about.

No dice. The weather was against us. The travel agency couldn't rebook the flight for some reason mainly because, I think, we hadn't bribed the airline agents to let us on. And there was no one at the Mongolian Airlines office on a Sunday. And the computers were either non-existent or stopped working. The travel agency, very strangely, refunded our money rather than trying to rebook our trip.

And that flight at 3 AM ended by showing up near dawn. So, if I had been more patient, and willing to wait out the full 24 hours at the airport, we would have gotten to Ulan Bator after all.

Bite me!

Suddenly I remembered a little episode in Southern Taiwan 37 years ago, when my friend Melinda Liu, who later became the China Newsweek correspondent (she is still reporting from Beijing after all these years, and I am having dinner with her tonight) told me we had to stuff ourselves into a bus to get to the Southernmost tip of the island. Otherwise we would be stranded on a dirt road in the jungle with night about to fall.

At the time, surveying the Taiwanese country bodies hanging out the windows of the little yellow school bus, I said, "There's got to be another bus. Or we can take a taxi. This can't be the last bus."

"This is the last bus," Melinda said. "Get on." She shoved and I moved. People were getting on the bus by climbing into the windows and jumping on the top. There were geese and ducks in cages and kids without bottoms on. We squished and stood for about two hours with one foot on the bus floor and another atop our suitcases.

We ended up having the time of our lives on that trip. We took tours through the jungles where the '7 pacer' snakes slinked in the bush and drank Coca Colas with children without bottoms on who set up a lemonade stand in the red clay flats only 100 meters from land's end. At night, at our little hotel, we climbed on the roof and saw the claw of Scorpio dipping a golden arrow into the Pacific. The ocean caught all the light of the stars, and I remember looking southward toward the dark spit of land, the South China Sea on our right, the Philippine Sea to our left. I could reach up and touch the planets and stars in the dome, so bright. To this day, I dream of stars that bright and touchable.

But I had forgotten her lesson. "For these people, this is the last bus." And now I kicked myself for it...I've never waited for the last bus. I've been a Mexican jumping bean. Melinda did, and that's one of the reasons she's at Newsweek and I'm at the International College of Beijing teaching journalism to Chinese kids!

Anyway, we never made it to Ulan Bator. But something else happened. Once again, my opera singer friend, Hasegaowa (see post below, "Close Encounters")-- part Mongolian, part Manchurian, part bologna and cheese, and her artist husband, Liu Ya Jiang, one of the most gifted artists I have met thus far -- rescued us. "We'll drive you to Mongolia," they said.

And they did.

II.


Though we didn't reach Outer Mongolia, we did get within ten miles of it, traveling through the umbelievably huge grasslands of Inner Mongolia.

Now Inner Mongolia is a part of China. Mr. Liu Ya Jiang tells me, confidentially, that Outer Mongolia is a pretty dangerous place to be. If you don't bribe everyone you meet, you are likely to get your things stolen or perhaps your head or your legs will be exchanged for a horse's. Or you just won't come back from that long jeep ride of yours. Outer Mongolia, now an independent country, is still trying to 'find itself.' Apparently it is drifting between hyperinflation and Mr. Liu's hyperbole. It is still the land of Genghis Khan, Liu tells me, but it must solve huge economic problems that come with independence following decades of Soviet corruption and repression.

As I learned, Inner Mongolia has fewer problems. It is becoming richer (and more polluted) with mining, which casts a gray shadow over the otherwise sparking and treeless Soviet-style cities. People from Outer Mongolia frequently cross the border to shop in the towns of Inner Mongolia, where foods and other goods are still more affordable. Nonetheless, some of the people of Inner Mongolia are still facing grinding poverty -- sometimes from a sudden loss of herds (freezing storms that kill whole herds at a time), sometimes from other personal misfortunes. I had an opportunity to encounter some of these people on the trip Hasegaowa strategically arranged.

The Lius picked us up on a Wednesday morning in the sunlight which is so rare for Beijing and we headed in their rented SUV northwest to their suburban home of Yanjing, about 130 kilometers northwest of the city. Yanjing is a gorgeous farming town set on the border of mountains; it is not that far from Badaling, one of the restored sections of the Great Wall. We skirted the Great Wall which I saw on the mountaintops above us, then we drove along highway G7 through the mountains and lakes toward the tip of the Guanjing Reservoir, a big and lovely body of water in unspoiled areas that reminded me of the drive in Colorado toward Breckenridge.

We stopped along the way to see a Buddhist festival (with touches of native Taoist traditions) on a mountain top; this particular day, townspeople were remembering and sacrificing to Mothers. Chinese opera singers were hamming it up on stage, and the towns people dressed in woolen caps and pullovers were sitting enjoying themselves in an openair ampitheatre. Just past the ampitheatre, I saw little temple courtyards with cheesy statues of Buddhist and Taoist gods and goddesses, including Matsu, the goddess of the sea (one statue has a baby sucking her nipple). People were burning sacrifices of sausages, fruits, red pieces of paper, cigarettes, and other goodies on coal fires. It was festive, and in the parking lot a group of ambitious farmers was decapitating a sheep, thankfully already dead (I tried not to look, but I couldn't help myself).

We stayed the first night at Hasegaowa and Liu's beautiful traditional Chinese home in Yanjing, were treated to her marvelous meals and fresh European coffee and juices, and finally got to see Liu's painting studio, where he is assembling a series of heroic oil portraits of the Mongolian women he has grown to love in many trips to the countryside there.
Lona and I stayed in the studio and though there was no heat, the Liu's have KANGS, so they can put hot coals in a pot beneath their elevated bed and stay warm and toasty at night.

Hasegaowa, with her unbelievable powerful party connections, arranged FREE hotel lodging for us and free feasts (including a high definition TV set which was turned on in every hotel banquet hall) in the Mongolian steppe throughout out trip there. We stayed in the cities of Xi Ling Hao Te, a large, expansive Soviet-style stronghold on the grasslands, not a tree in site, with a gorgeous museum filled with Genghis Kahn and other archaeological memorabilia.

Unfortunately, it was closed the day we got there, perhaps for the October 1-10 Autumn Festival. As we headed toward the grasslands, we stayed in smaller cities: Ou li ya si tai (also known in Chinese as Dong wu qi) and Xi Wu Qi. The accommodations got a bit more modest as we headed along, but every hotel was at least three stars, the food was marvelous, and at Dong Wu Qi we were treated to a feast and entertainment with four Mongolian girls that I can best describe as "wards" of Hasegaowa, Liu, and a group of private citizens who are trying to help them with their schooling and heating bills.

Three of the girls are sisters. Their mother died tragically from an illness a few years ago and their father is confined to a wheelchair after a car accident. The girls are 19, 18, and 12, one more gorgeous than the next; the middle child, Chaolumen Ge Ri La, has served as model for Liu's paintings of strong Mongolian women (she and my Uncle Don look alike, which again makes me think we have a Mongolian connection somewhere in our medieval past as horse thieves).

The girls sang traditional songs of Mother's Love and Father's Bravery for us (I am checking their names before I include them). I will post their songs on audio files on my blog if I can ever get access to it again. All of them wore rich quilted traditional Mongolian costumes of brilliant colors: reds, blue, and green. The little one, who lost her mother at a very young age, greets Hasegaowa with kisses; she's like favored daughter. The little one got the courage to sing for us; as she sang, her reedy voice grew louder and more confident; she was brilliant.

The fourth girl, whose parents are both alive, is an especially fine student (although all the girls are hard at work in school; the older two are planning on university with the help of private citizens who contribute). She danced for us, but no longer can afford a dancing dress since she has outgrown the other. We visited their homes after the feast. The three sisters belong to a proud herding family and their home in the grasslands, which we later visited, is now closed shut. The family lives in a barebones apartment on the fourth floor of a city tenement. Fortunately, this apartment has heat (the last one didn't), and the girls like it better. The older is like a mother to the other two. Her cousin, a young man of about 15, sang for us and his songs brought tears to my eyes. They are happy and hardworking kids...I wish I knew more, but I don't. I gave the kids some scholarship money to continue their studies. If they don't finish, their options are very limited, and Hasegaowa and Liu told me the upsurge of capitalism in China doesn't permit much government aid to these people. The mother of the fine student girl hugged me when I gave the young girl some money to put away for her dancing dress.

During the day we went to the grasslands and visited the 49 year old mother of Saihaqi-ma-ge, another 18 year old dancer so talented she is now studying at a university in Xilinhaote, Mongolia. The mother and father live year-round in a GER, a traditional tent, and the mother invited us in for tea and snacks with the father's younger sister's husband in attendance (the Dad, unfortunately, was on herding duties). The GER is about 15 feet in diameter; it has decorative wallpaper and a stove in the middle. The mud floors are covered with rugs and pillows. I imagine they can keep warm in the winter, barely. The mother looks worn, about 70 years old, but not unhappy. The daughter hopes to become a dance teacher.

My friend, Lona, a journalist, doubtless took better notes than I did, and I'm anxious to read her account of those days on the steppes. I can tell you that Hasegaowa could easily become a public relations manager for Premier Wen Jia Bao of the Communist Party, or Paris Hilton, or the Inner Mongolian government. She can finesse anything and anyone. At one point, when Lona and I were thrown into a police car by a seemingly tipsy town manager at Xi lin hao te, a "da ge" (big brother) of the Lius, she popped into the car with us, convinced him to hold us ransom only for a dinner, and then let us go on our way. During that drunken feast Big Brother, a staunch Communist apparachik who reminded me of a character from Dr. Zhivago, drank so much liquor I thought I'd have to personally pump his stomach. No matter, I tried to emulate Hasegaowa's charm (not easy for me), fed him with my chopsticks, flirted a little, and was happy when his anger at my memory of Taiwan abated (I said only that I had learned Chinese there more than 30 years ago -- his response, a growl, was that "Taiwan belongs to China.").

In our final day on the grasslands we met a rich family of herders who guided their horses and sheep with motorcycles rather than riding on horseback themselves. The handsome father, Er deng bat te, and his wife, Duo dea Mugin, live 900 kilometers in the grassland from DongWu Qi near the Outer Mongolian border. They have an adorable motormouth of a five year old, Gom Batu, who is incredibly smart, runs back and forth to Hasegaowa hugging her, and mastered my camera in about 5 minutes. The boy eats everything in sight. He is already learning his Mongolian and Mandarin characters at kindergarten. He has to live with his grandfather in order to go to school, but neither he nor the parents seem to mind it much. All of them dressed in their blue quilted Mongolian outfits to greet us; and their house had many rooms, parquet floors, an entertainment system, and soft couches. What a contrast to the gers and tenements of the days before! They seemed to enjoy their life; and Er Deng Batte particularly enjoyed a feast of MACDONALD's hamburgers that Hasegaowa brought him from Beijing. In turn he gave us roasted meat and yogurt. I think we got the better part of the exchange, although some things on that party platter that resembled organs from a med school's cadaver lab. I'm glad he didn't force us to eat them.

Visiting this last family was in some ways, the highlight of the trip. I think Lona got to see enough that she was satisfied there was so much more to see. We wandered across the steppes, now brown and rolling as Iowa in winter. We took pictures. Hasegaowa's talented son, Michael, and his friend Jason, took lots of photos of us. It was sunny, and the wind was not too fierce. I understood how and why a woman like me, living near Chadds Ford PA and loving the Wyeth artistic tradition, could end up in Mongolia with a family that also loves the Wyeth tradition. We were entirely lucky to visit these people, and I look forward to the day I can go back in July and August, when Mongolia turns green and purple with rain and flowers. This is the Mongolia Liu paints; although I love the barrenness of the place, I want to see it again in the sunlight when the men go shirtless and ride their horses in competitions to see who is the strongest and best.

Liu, I think, will one day come to the States and see our grasslands of Iowa. Hopefully, I will help him exhibit his paintings of strong Mongolian women in the Brandywine museum, next to his muse.

Love,

Arielle

A Message For Chinese Students: Go Anywhere but Here

See the full story at Caixin Media Magazine (English), published in Beijing, China, at http://english.caixin.cn/2011-10-24/100317029.html

The students in my Beijing classes must believe I hold the key to their future career success. When I arrive each morning at the International College of Beijing (ICB), part of a University of Colorado Denver cooperative undergraduate program, their eyes light up as though I am a ten-foot tall avatar. They believe in my power, or at least they pretend to. We speak the common language of their futures: both Chinese and English. They are among the lucky and privileged Chinese youth who, powered by scholarships and their parents’ cash, are among the 440,000 Chinese students flooding international university programs both at home and abroad.

My birthplace – the West – has quickly become the Shangri-La from which these students hope to reap the rewards of an international education. Those with solid English and strong technical skills will become the investment bankers, economists, researchers, and golden transnational communicators of the next generation. As they pass their TOEFL tests and complete their studies in America, the UK, or Australia, these students are likely to outperform and out-earn their stay-in-country college counterparts by far.

Close Encounters with Beijing and Mongolia

Artist Liu Ya-jiang, painter and unique voice of Mongolia

Shortly after arriving in Beijing, I joined a local gym on the 5th floor of the Jinma hotel and bought a hot pot whose operation required a hands-on demonstration by three Chinese sales people at Sunning Appliance store. I also attended the opening ceremonies at the International College of Beijing, my home university, and met a husband and wife artistic team with roots in Mongolia.

Extraordinary things happen every day here. At least every day happenings appear extraordinary to me, the Western outsider with just enough Chinese knowledge to be "dangerous." In other words, I can comprehend much of what is being said; I don't understand all that it means.

First off, the Jinma hotel is dubbed a five-star hotel and it sits just west of the Chinese Agricultural University East Campus. There is a Starbucks on the ground floor around the corner from the hotel, along with a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Subway franchise, with turkey and bologna meat that appears to have been shaved or hacked from local farm animals. However, the Zhangbei fitness center is a picture of modernity. You enter the center from the back side of the hotel and emerge in a dark cavernous space on the 5th floor where two Chinese women receptionists without any English will welcome you, albeit reluctantly. Since I speak Chinese, I was able to register with my colleague, economist Enoch Cheng, without a problem.

A friendly, strikingly tall young man, Jiang Wen-leng ("Culture Dragon" Jiang), whose English name is Penny, sits down and explains all the gym services. There are frequent classes including Yoga, Latin Dance, spinning (which Penny teaches), and Pilates; body building equipment, and a sky-lit indoor pool (now out of order; it is being repaired, and I have since heard from an Irish colleague that people spit in it). I have been to the gym five or six times, adapting to an electronically compromised cross-trainer and the weight equipment.

Two young athletic coaches, Mr. Wang, who is about 25 and a graduate student (friendly with an easy laugh) and Mr. Liu Fei, have given me free training. Liu Fei, who is 29 years old and built tightly, like an acrobat, has repeatedly asked for my phone number and declared that I am "piaoliang" (beautiful). I believe the blond hair and fit build are inspirations fed by Western advertising. I have discussed the subtleties of Japanese body building technique and research on physiology with Mr. Liu, and even though I don't understand everything he says, he has assured me that he is available for personal coaching sessions (for a fee). We have also talked about democracy and the progress China is making in that direction; the first thing Liu told me is that China has too many people.

I appreciate this instant attention, even if it's coming from an uncertain place. Liu has already taught me new words, like "duan lian" (tough workout). I don't get to hear many personal compliments anymore in America, especialy compliments about my looks. In China, no one believes I am past a certain age (maybe in the future I won't tell them). I look at my photographs now and ask myself how I suddenly got here, tilting toward middle age. Even though my body is still in good shape and the muscle tone is decent, there is something in the flattening of disks and spine and the loss of winsome skinniness that diminishes me. Moreover, I frequently take pictures standing with my children, who are now grown and at the peak of their beauty. Nonetheless in China, some people believe I'm "hot."

Yesterday at the gym I relented and gave Liu my business card and told him I'd be happy to have dinner with him as a friend. Somewhat risky but he knows I'm a third degree blackbelt; he seems to have backed off from his original passion. He now realizes I am old enough to be his Mom.

Hasegaowa in tennis attire with me at the Guest House

At the opening reception of the International College of Beijing, which contained many speeches, including a nervously competent delivery by my student Claudia, I was entertained by a couple, Mr. Liu Ya-jiang (Liu "Asia river") and Ha Se Gao Wa, his wife. Both are incredibly talented. They sing, they paint, they philosophize. Ha Se Gao Wa sang Mongolian grassland and love songs with a carefree lilting acapella. Yi-jiang also has a gorgeous baritone voice with a catch that will make you cry.

Both in their 40s, the Lius have experienced the best and worst of Chinese contemporary life. Ha Se Gao Wa saw both her parents carted away during the Cultural Revolution for three years. She was about 3 years old when this happened and was cared for by her older sister while her parents labored in the countryside. Early in her life she became a movie actress and she thrives today on stories of love and peaceful reconciliation. When I ask about Chinese censorship (including censorship and repudiation of the imprisoned Nobel Prize winner Liu Shao-bo), she explains that negativity and harshness may foster reprisal in the government and that love and peace produce much more positive feedback. Husband Ya-jiang believes that the lack of stability in China for many years has produced a wariness regarding complete and uncensored freedoms. I sense they are patient and hope eventually things will loosen up. In the meantime, this couple drives a practically new SUV and enjoys a comparatively carefree artistic life.

Ha Se Gao Wa and her husband both know a smattering of English, and they immediately befriended me (I felt privileged, since there were about 30 faculty members at this first dinner). When I visited them in their own private quarters in our Guest house (they get some nicer suites on the 4th floor) Ya jiang showed me some images of his sketches and paintings. I was flabbergasted; my thought was as good as Wyeth, maybe better, and different. A graphic designer by trade, Ya-Jiang has his own successful graphics business, is friendly with Dr. Meng and appears to have some understanding, if not ties, to Party apparatus, although the exact nature of his relationship to the Community Party is not clear to me. He is a student of a Chinese painting master in Beijing. He is also quite familiar with the Wyeths of Chadds Ford (he mentioned the city, and I told him I lived nearby), both Andrew Wyeth and N.C., whose style and subject appear weirdly to intersect with Liu's across a century of time and space. Liu has spent months in the winter living with families in the Mongolian steppes. He produces complex portraiture of Mongolian women and farmers which I hope to preview in the States at some point.

The Lius have also "adopted" an 18 year old Mongolian girl, a dancer, someone they've known for years. They made a video of her at the age of 12 dancing gracefully with cups on top of her head (I will encourage him to release it to Youtube; it is so precious it should go 'viral'). The young girl did an authentic Mongolian dance for us combining minute seductive glances and shoulders invitations, along with simulated horseback riding. The dancer hopes to train at University and perhaps to go to New York. In addition, Ha Se Gao Wa and Ya-jing have a talented 15 year old son who is training with his father to become a painter or illustrator. The boy sings Michael Jackson songs in a faithful falsetto. The Lius have elected to home school him rather than place him in conventional Chinese secondary school.

I love spending time with this family because their language is truly Chinese. Liu, who seems to be fairly wealthy, with a home in the countryside of Beijing ("the air is clear there," he says) and in Guangzhou, for the winter season, is preparing an exhibition of his work. I suggested he start with an exhibition in the Brandywine (Wyeth) museum in Chadds Ford. He says he is at least three years from perfecting his work for the world to see. However, I sense such spirituality in his work so true to life (at least an elevated life) that I believe it is bound to be noticed in any country. He offers a glimpse of an untainted Mongolian life that probably should remain a secret. Perhaps his vision is too pure for a society already jaded by manufactured realism.

Line 1 subway in Beijing: Jet Li stars in a movie about war and love

Short notes: Since I've been here I have also shopped in the very modern, spacious "Merry Mart" supermarket, taken the subways (crowded, but efficient), and met up with friend Ivy Lu, from China Monitor, a 23 year old woman who has spent exactly two weeks in America and speaks like a native. I have shopped with her in the monumental Wang Fu Jing, which has a dizzying Western style punctuated by enormous avenues and shopping malls leading to Tian An Men Square. I have also been to San Li Dun, to the Bookworm Store, to hear a lecture/debate by a Dutch woman novelist and, separately, a Dutch scientist who doesn't believe in Global Warming (we argued). And I have met many lovely people here on campus. My students are a blog in themselves. Soon I will post some photographs on Flickr, but for now, I will leave you with the news that I will be writing as a regular columnist for Caixin,probably the best investigative English language economics and news publication in China. I will start as an education columnist, but I have to do the research to find good stories in a society that still appears guarded and largely opaque to me. -- Arielle Emmett

Anguish and Order in China

Pictured above: Sculpture in front of Olympics Stadium at China Agricultural University

Dear World,

This is my first post from the International College of Beijing. I have been here since Friday, so I'm hardly an expert. Relying on the good graces of a very capricious virtual private network (VPN) that links me directly to the outside world through the University of Colorado Denver, I bring you these first thoughts.

[Otherwise, without VPN access, my blog is entirely blocked in China. I can't even download instructional video training from sites in the US or anything on Facebook or Youtube. These are strange and imperial restrictions that bear no logic for me,the alien girl from another earth!]

I arrived Friday without incident at the Beijing International Airport which appeared to me to be entirely modernized and imperial (with great red colonnades reminiscent of the Forbidden City and China's association with "red" as the color of love and good fortune.) My "seatmate" on the United Flight, Chris Luo (Luo Dong-ping), an entrepreneur who shuttles back and forth between his Internet security firm in Beijing and his family in San Francisco, provided some amiable instruction and pointers. He was kind, considerate, and reminded me that the two most popular areas of Beijing for foreigners, among them Haidian and the Chaoyang District, east of the Eastern gate in Beijing, were far and frustratingly apart. Right now that's pretty much my feeling about all of Beijing. Far and frustrating, "must get to," but not yet. I plan to venture out seriously Thursday nite to a Bookworm event in Chaoyang and hence brave the bus and subway system. Even though I have all my time in Taiwan behind me -- more than three decades past, as a very young, long-haired "golden dragon" who aggressively pursued Chinese and a new life --this city feels strange and new to me, and I am strange in it.

My first encounter with Chinese "efficiency" was in buying a cell phone. I went to a China Mobile store and was told to find an appliance store to buy the handset. I go into the appliance store and muddle my way to a fairly inexpensive Nokia handset. I am given a set of instructions in completely inexplicable "tu-hua" -- something about a chong zhi ca (charge card) and some freebie domestic time I have, but no information about how to obtain an international plan. I return to the China Mobile store and the same young lady eyes my China Unicom SIM card number and tells me she can't help me with an international plan. "Go back to the appliance store and get another SIM Card," or find a Unicom shop which, she says, is "miles away" (no address). She doesn't know where it is.

There is military music blaring as I speak. The campus seems very unmilitary, and the students in general casual and well dressed.

I return to the appliance store and the help (no one speaks a word of English) reported that the SIM card comes with the phone and that they cannot switch out a SIM card that has a China Mobile brand on it. Meanwhile, the kind Claudia, my student escort of the moment, and a freshmen at ICB, is trying to translate, but she is just as frustrated as I am. "The Chinese systems are really inefficient," she tells me. We return to the China Mobile store, find a young man, explain the situation, and he notes that China Mobile can give me a new SIM card, a new number, and a new plan, only I have to take a number and wait for at least an hour to talk with a technician. At this point we're out of time, I [figuratively] throw up my hands and return without a card or a plan.

The situation immediately rights itself when Patrick Dodge, my adorable boss, takes me on his scooter to a group of little shops around the corner from our campus, part of a tour he generously gives me, along with a decent meal. A store owner hands me a China Unicom pre-pay card. He charges me 30 yuan for a 100 yuan international calling card. What happens if it doesn't work? we ask. Then he can't take it back, he says. But he is convinced it will work. I fork over the 30 yuan (roughly US$5), what do I have to lose, and the next morning I make my first successful calls to my sister and my kids to let them know I'm okay.

I would be lying if I said I felt completely adjusted to this combination of intense population that is peaceful and totally organized, a city where blue sky is almost never visible because of pollution, and where Communism and Communist principals and virtually never spoken of openly. The main objective at the college is to enjoy and learn and then get a good phat job...the idealism and social consciousness appears at a bare minimum.

The campus where I live is in the midst of military training. All freshmen must participate for two weeks prior to the opening of school. From 5 AM young girls and boys in white or yellow T shirts march to orders barked by young men in military fatigues. There is a lot of "counting" -- "yi er san si!" ("one two three four"), much stiff legged goose stepping, and some practice suspending one leg in midair for long periods of time. Other than that I can't much decipher what these kids are doing.

I asked Claudia, a lovely (and tall!) young freshman girl who spent 1 1/2 years in Melbourne Australia perfecting her English in highschool, what the military training meant. She really wasn't sure. "I don't care for it," she said. Did it have something to do with training young people to fight for their country? For helping to unite them in a spirit and love of her school? "Yes, something like that," she admitted (we speak both Chinese and English together). Claudia was hoping that the military theory class she planned to attend two days ago would be quite interesting. But it turned out she couldn't go; another teacher made some demands on her time, so she missed the one class she was really looking forward to.

Claudia is a beautiful, shy, and anguished young girl. She is trying to get her bearings in a college and admitted she felt some uncertainty and loneliness. I tried to assure her that everyone feels that way starting out, but she said that it was lonely especially because she had no brothers and sisters, and her cousins are quite distant. Her one boyfriend is now in America studying, and she feels he is more like a brother than a lover, but she misses him terribly. "I have known him since I was five or six years old," she says sadly (I tried to give her a hug). She scored the highest of the entire college on her English entrance exams and was practicing her matriculation speech for me, very nervously.

The organization and ability to "ting hua" (listen to talk, literally), is extraordinary among these students. They do exactly as they are told, even if they admit (like Claudia) that it doesnt' seem to have much meaning for them. I will be interested to see what really does have meaning. I have enjoyed a few brief encounters with faculty but, as I mentioned, I still am feeling my way through all of this. Luckily, there is a Starbucks around the corner but the coffee is just as expensive as the States.