Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (41 page)

“In 1924, Americans take the statue. Now at Hoffhod University.”

“I’m sorry. Where?”

“Hoffhod University.”

“Ah. Harvard University.”

“Yes. Hoffhod.”

I was completely sympathetic to the difficulties many Chinese have with that pesky
r,
as I could not fathom getting my mouth around the vast majority of Chinese sounds.

“Chinese people very angry. It is our cultural heritage. Many things stolen from Mogao Caves.”

She did have a point. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western archaeologists had plundered the world, filling up the museums and libraries of Europe and America with international treasures. But, of course, China had had its own little Cultural Revolution—
Destroy Old Culture!
—so much of China’s cultural legacy had been sadly destroyed by the Chinese themselves.

“Cultural Revolution finished now,” my guide noted when I made the point.

Very true.

One of the appealing things about being in a small town like Dunhuang is that one can entertain the possibility of riding a bicycle without succumbing to mortal fear. After all this time in China, I had yet to avail myself of the preferred mode of local transport. Now seemed like a good time to do so.

“How about this one?” I asked at a café that offered bicycle rentals.

“No brakes.”

“And this one?”

“Broken.”

“So this one, then.”

“Is good.”

It was a bicycle meant for nine-year-old girls. Midget nine-year-old girls, I thought as I pedaled my way out of Dunhuang. And it’s hard pedaling a bicycle for nine-year-old girls when you’re not one. Without being able to extend my legs so that the thigh muscles could do the work, it was left to the kneecaps to do the pedaling. I rode like an oversized clown on a tricycle, grunting savagely as I made my way up a slight incline. Teenage boys overtook me on their big bicycles, laughing and jeering from their perches high above, and as they passed I hoped that one day soon they’d find themselves overcome by a debilitating bout of acne.

I was heading a few miles out of town toward the giant sand dunes that surrounded Crescent Moon Lake, which wasn’t really a lake but a small pond with a pagoda, a classic oasis in the desert. The sand was alleged to sing atop these dunes, which stretched for miles into a barren wilderness. When I finally arrived, I uncoiled my legs and briefly contemplated stealing someone else’s bike before hobbling though a gate, where I discovered to my delight that I was in the midst of a thousand camels, idling in the sun, waiting to ferry passengers up the golden Mountains of Shifting Sands, or Mingsha Shan. This thrilled me, because really, is there any better way to climb a sand dune than on the back of a camel—a creature so large yet so silly-looking, with its strange contours and perpetual countenance of dopey confusion, an expression I empathized with completely here in China. No, there is not, I concluded as I settled myself between two humps and with bewildered glee experienced the swift, staggered, doddering thrust of a camel rising. True, this was essentially the local equivalent of a pony ride, and I was led by a camel walker who guided the camels up the narrow, ever-shifting trail of sand. Lawrence of Arabia I was not. But it’s a graceless ride that can only be embraced. So trust me here. If you’re putting together a To Do list, include
Ride a camel up a sand dune.

But hold on. Camels do not lightly set off their passengers. They collapse. First the front legs go, and just as you think you’re about to hurtle front over end, the back legs go. It’s a startling sensation. The camel doesn’t so much sit down as fall down, and it’s an interesting feeling—crumbling to the ground together with a 500-pound animal—and you feel lucky to have survived the experience. Still, we hadn’t quite summited this mount of sand. There was farther to go, and I clambered up a steep wall of shifting grains.

At the top, it was alleged that this was where one could hear the sand sing. I did not hear the sand sing. I heard only the whoosh and demented cackling of someone hurtling down the sand on an inner tube. But it was not the only option for getting oneself down the other side; there was also something alleged to be sand surfing. Boys had carried the lids of wooden crates up to the peak, and the sand surfers were meant to sit on these lids of wooden crates and gently push themselves down the slope, which, frankly, looked like a really lame way to get down a sand dune. No, I thought. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do this. So I went with the inner tube.

I settled myself inside the tube and gazed at the wonder of the scenery, the desert, the mountains in the distance. I considered going farther west into the emptiness, through Xinjiang, all the way to Kashgar, where China meets Pakistan. But what would I learn about China, Han China, that I had not learned in Tibet? There were Uyghurs out there, the poor Uyghurs, China’s Turkic minority. Like the Tibetans, the Uyghurs, too, would prefer not to be a part of the People’s Republic of China. And so the government represses them with the same grim methods they use in Tibet. And while I had a pang of regret at missing the fabled market bazaar of Kashgar, it was time to turn my attention back to the east.

So I would go back to Han China. And as I pushed myself down and began the fast, oh so fast, descent down the swirling sands, I had one last thought in western China, a region I’d really come to enjoy. Perhaps, I thought as I hurtled perilously toward a herd of lumbering camels, I should have gone with the sand surfing after all.

20

I
had come to Chengdu to see the pandas. I’m not sure why, exactly, I felt the need to see the pandas. I do not feel warm and fuzzy inside when in the presence of pandas. There are far more charismatic mega-fauna out there. But still, I was drawn to see them, if only because I’d been wondering whether the Chinese may have regretted giving two Giant Pandas to Richard Nixon in 1972, when he became the first president to visit the People’s Republic of China. Since then, as any visit to a zoo that contains pandas will confirm, the public has responded with one long collective
aaaawwww,
assigning to them all sorts of anthropomorphic attributes. The pressure to ensure that Giant Pandas do not become extinct must be immense. And that’s the last thing the Chinese government needs. More pressure.

But, as always in China, a visit to the Panda Breeding and Research Center was nothing if not interesting. I had expected to find it outside Chengdu, another urban megalopolis, somewhere in rural Sichuan Province. And once, that is where it was. But today, the lush grounds of the Panda Breeding and Research Center have been swallowed by Chengdu itself, and its bamboo-lined paths and frolicking inhabitants are now found in a light industrial zone on the outskirts of town. Inside its walls, there are, of course, Giant Pandas, dozing and munching on bamboo, and generally behaving like extremely contented animals. More interesting were the plaques and statues strewn throughout the grounds with quotes and testimonies attesting to the importance and value of the animal kingdom and that it is our responsibility as guardians of the planet to ensure their well-being. So said Gandhi and others. It’s a lovely thought, of course, and as I recalled the peddlers of endangered animals in Guangzhou, I suspected that the sentiment wasn’t universally shared in China.

There were other interesting sights inside the Panda Breeding and Research Center, including a baby panda nursery. For the panda lovers, this would be their nirvana moment, a large crib filled with a half-dozen baby pandas tottering about, ready for their calendar shoot. There were five little pandas, including two sets of twins, overseen by a man in doctor garb, complete with mask and paper hat, looking bored senseless as he sat next to a bucket full of soiled baby wipes. I began to wonder at the statistical likelihood of there being two sets of twins, born just days apart, in the Panda Breeding and Research Center. And then, as I read through the signs that outlined the panda breeding process, I was informed that China practices the West Virginia model of panda breeding. This wasn’t merely a kissing cousin situation. No, conjugal relations here were conducted in true hillbilly fashion. It makes them happy, the sign informed me. And if brothers and sisters fall in love, who are we to stop it? We want happy pandas. It’s no wonder, then, that the first panda to be bred in the Panda Research and Breeding Center and released into the wild did not live long. It was a genetic mutant. This all made me think of the movie
Deliverance,
and I set off in search of a panda lounging in a tree, strumming his banjo.

Beyond mutant pandas, Chengdu pleased me in other ways. It has some scrumptious street food, which for someone like me, so easily flummoxed by Chinese restaurants, was a special treat indeed. The meat on a stick is lip-smacking good. I couldn’t say for certain which animal in particular I was eating, but whatever it was it had a mighty fine spice rub. I wanted more.

And there were oranges, big, impossibly juicy, mouth-watering oranges. I had no idea where they might have grown. Chengdu, like every city in China, resided under a gray-brown haze of pollution. Indeed, surrounded by the high mountains of Sichuan, the pollution was particularly awful. But no matter. Someone somewhere in Sichuan Province had grown the most perfect oranges. And here they were.

Really, I was so happy I was nearly tittering. This is because not only was I in the possession of citrus, I also had in my hands a thick stack of magazines and newspapers—
Time, Newsweek, The Economist,
the
International Herald Tribune,
a full week’s worth of news from the outside world.

How can this be? you wonder. Surely, it’s not possible to buy unfiltered Western newsmagazines in a country so very, very touchy about a free press. This is true. You can’t. Not in Chengdu, in any case.

But you can steal them.

So steal them is precisely what I did. This was not a crime of opportunity even. This was planned. It had been weeks since I’d read a newspaper that wasn’t a broadsheet of propaganda. Deep inside the Middle Kingdom, one could even doubt the existence of a world beyond the walls of China. True, the Chinese press was very diligent in reporting on the Deputy Minister for the State Economic and Trade Commission’s successful meeting with counterparts in Tajikistan. And they did note that a Chinese firm had won a bid to build a road in Algeria. But this wasn’t the news I was yearning for. Out there, beyond China, celebrities were falling apart in glorious splendor, politicians were soliciting sex in airport men’s rooms, vice presidents were shooting people in the face, and the cost of housing in California was finally (finally!) coming down. Such were my informational concerns. And they had gone unmet in China.

And so I put on my cleanest clothes and did my best impersonation of someone who would pay $350 for a night at the Hilton, when you can get a very good room in a Chinese hotel for $35 (and it even comes with a brothel). “Good afternoon, sir,” said the doorman as he opened the door, and I was delighted to discover that they speak English at the Hilton. Tempted as I was to stop and inquire about his life story, I marched in, busy-like, as if I had meetings or possibly an important conference call, and walked up to the business center. There arrayed ever so delicately lay my prize. A sign warned me to not even think about taking these magazines and newspapers outside the business center. But that was precisely my plan. I waited patiently, idly flipping though the
International Herald Tribune,
which informed me that while I was in Tibet, the Chinese army had shot two Tibetans on a mountain pass near the border with Nepal. Normally, of course, one wouldn’t hear about the Chinese Army shooting Tibetans. But the incident had been captured on videotape by German mountain climbers on the Nepalese side of the border, and soon the tape, like all tapes today, had made its way to YouTube.