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The Liu Xiaobo Project

The Chinese poet, essayist, former professor and pro-democracy activist Liu Xiaobo is still a political prisoner in China. His work is banned. The very words “empty chair” are censored from the Internet in China, referring as they do to his seat left vacant at the Nobel prize ceremony in 2010, occupied only by his Peace Prize.

I had very mixed feelings about visiting China. I’ve often struggled with such thoughts: do I avoid France because of Algeria? Spain because of what it did as a conquering and colonial power throughout Latin America? England because of what it did to Ireland, in India? But China still at this moment oppresses Tibet. On the very eve of my departure more people were killed in demonstrations in the Xijiang Uighur area. Its own citizens are not free to speak and publish.

In the end, obviously, I went. My humble gesture of conscience and defiance was to take along printed copies of Liu’s work—mostly poems—in the original Chinese, kindly provided to me by the editor of a collection in translation due out in April, No Enemies, No Hatred. These I—distributed, as I went: in the Temple of Heaven, in restaurants, taped to the “red panda” enclosure at the Beijing Zoo, the longest treatise left in the library of the riverboat Katarina, given with tips to chambermaids and guides. Etc. That was my project.

I hope we see, sooner rather than later, Liu Xiaobo, Yu Xie, Li Tie, Chen Wei, Chen Xi, Zhu Yufu, and every other Chinese dissident, freed from detention, free to speak out. Liu Xiaobo, perhaps more forgiving and noble than I can hope to be, said in late 2009: "I still want to say to this regime, which is depriving me of my freedom, that I stand by [my] convictions. ... I have no enemies, and no hatred."

The Liu Xiaobo Project

Wednesday

During the night we docked at Chongqing ("Chunking" in the past to the West; now pronounced chong ching). Just when I’d almost adapted to the rocking, rushing sensation, the sudden tipsy gravitational shifts beyond my control, we were riding a funicular railway up to the largest city in China, perhaps—in the fluctuating calculations of such things—in the world: 32 or 33 million. I’d gone up top to take photos last night before retiring, of the dazzling skyline. Even then I could see—and feel—that that downtown straight ahead was only a part, that we also were surrounded, on both sides of the river (we’d finally come far enough up the Yangtze, retracing Mao’s path for that matter, that it was a river again), by city. Dense, high-rise city. By day it was not dazzling, but seemed rather grim. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/mar/15/china.china

Leaving the Katarina, we met several men walking the other direction, carrying in supplies to the boat. They were carrying these unimaginable loads, three cases of beer on either side, for instance, in the old, old manner, suspended from a bamboo pole. We walked from the waterfront area to a crowded square and boarded a tour bus (accosted every step of the way by intense vendors, as always); there was free time before we needed to be at the airport. After a short ride through the crush of humanity and traffic, we disembarked at a square for a short walk to a multi-story old market building.

Unfortunately for someone who gave up red meat over twenty years ago for ethical, not dietary, reasons, the first floor we entered was the meat and fish one. Now, I grew up in the country. I knew our freezer of butchered, wrapped beef, for instance, I’d seen walking around our pasture not long before. I saw chickens being killed, and helped pluck them. But this place was huge, filled with seemingly never-ending rows of stalls of hanging cow, pig, duck, goose, chicken carcasses. Dogs. Blocks of pig’s blood, a sort of congealed blood sausage also called “blood tofu.” Tubs of live frogs and eels (that one woman helpfully killed in front of us, should we need to know how at some point). Traumatic as it was for me, I was not the only one: every single one of us wanted out; the smells of blood and what had recently occupied intestines were everywhere. The market was actually kept quite clean, but still you were aware that you were walking over absolutely anything. So is that Western squeamishness again, considering everyone else in the group eats meat? Being detached from the reality of where it comes from and how it’s obtained?

The produce level was fascinating: the hugest cabbages and carrots any of us had ever seen, a wide range of mystery vegetables even beyond those I’d seen and asked about at an Asian market in Los Angeles, stalls selling everything from baked goods to “thousand-year” or “hundred year” eggs (depending; never really older than several months at most).

From the market we went gratefully back out into the chilly air of a large nearby public plaza. Rows of people on the far side were doing a jazzercise-ish dance session to music. A few older women closer by went repeatedly through what was clearly some version of Tai Chi closer to its martial arts origins, each holding a sword (we’d seen a small group of people in a small porch area at the top of a flight of steps, going through the very routine we’d—two of “the boys” and me, at any rate—been learning on the boat). Bamboo pole carriers came and went. The square was in constant motion, crisscrossed by people coming and going. A few of us made it a point to visit the “happy rooms” before leaving: very clean, not Western; somewhere in them incense was burning.

Eventually we headed back to our bus, and it headed for the Chongqing airport. While waiting inside the terminal for Jia to check us all in, I noticed and was awed by the long list of Chinese domestic airlines, almost none of which I’d ever heard of.

The drive in from the Shanghai airport, about two and a half hours later, itself took over an hour. On the way our Shanghai guide, a native, explained pudong (“east of the river,” the name of the airport, in fact) versus puxi, “west bank,” for a city based around a river, the Huang Po, last tributary of the Yangtze before it empties into the South China Sea. Flaunting its avant-garde new skyscrapers, with the glamorous, historic European-style waterfront Bund area, Shanghai at first glance feels more open (despite its population of 23 million), more cosmopolitan, than Beijing.

After settling in a little in our new hotel, some of us trailed along with Jia at dusk to become oriented a bit and get a few pointers about our immediate area. Emerging from an alleyway where merchants were closing up for the night, we found ourselves on the historic Nanjing Avenue, a portion of which is now pedestrian-only, on a corner occupied by a large shiny new Apple Store. She’d pointed out a couple of small markets, and now the multi-story shopping mall across the way, before turning us loose for the night. I went across with one other woman to check out the food court on the sixth floor of the trendy, upscale mall. The restaurant we finally settled on, one Jia had recommended, in fact, had a sizeable line waiting for tables. The two young women taking reservations spoke no English, even to indicate how long the wait might be. We took a number anyway. Finally there was one young man who did speak English, who was kind enough to intercede for us, since otherwise we wouldn’t even have known when our number got called.

After dinner we finally walked in the direction of the river, to see the Bund at night. Its reputation is deserved: it’s spectacular. The skyscrapers across the Huang Po in Pudong are brilliantly lit up in colors; on the side of the Bund itself, the long row of stately old European stone buildings is bathed in a golden glow. The river is visible only from an elevated promenade now, much as in New Orleans, which offers a place to stroll and stare at both.

In the morning after breakfast, which we now took in the eighteenth-floor restaurant with a panoramic view of Shanghai, we set out for a silk rug factory. We got to watch one young woman at work weaving a new one and hear about the various combinations and knot counts before beginning to look at rugs on display and for sale. It belabors the obvious to say that they’re beautiful, as well as to say some larger ones cost as much as a small car. One room was filled with antique, museum-quality silk rugs, worth visiting just to see and touch them. Downstairs, among other things, there was a gallery and shop of silk embroidery. Some of these pieces are astounding, appearing fully three-dimensional by the use of colors and types of thread and stitch; one large one of a tiger had won a national award, and looked literally alive—the fur, the eyes, everything.

The next stop was the Yuyuan Gardens, a 400-year-old classic Chinese garden we entered after crossing a zig-zag bridge past a famous old tea house (where Queen Elizabeth took tea while in Shanghai). The garden is—duh, beautiful, plum trees beginning to bloom when we were there, large examples of bonsai throughout it in addition to the rockery, pools, and trees themselves. The garden is now at the heart of Shanghai’s Old Town, a preserved bit of the way the whole Chinese part of the city used to be (and thankfully, really authentic, though cleaned up and restored and now crawling with tourists; our Shanghai guide mentioned that twenty years ago people were still living in the upper floors of some of the buildings. I'd asked whether there were many surviving hutongs in Shanghai, earlier, only to be gently set straight: in Shanghai they're called shikumen; Jia reminded me, later, that hutong is a Mongolian word, and so used only in the north).

We were left to fend for ourselves for a couple of hours, and I set out in search of food. Though we’d been told we were more likely to find people who spoke English in Shanghai than Beijing or the other places we’d been, it long having been an international city, that certainly had not proved to be the case. The multi-story restaurant I wound up entering continued that pattern. The second floor was cafeteria style, but with each stage along the way being a different vendor. By the time I was pointing and holding up one finger for some squid and vegetables a woman was stir-frying before my eyes, the Indiana couple from our group had also shown up, and we ate together. I also had some sort of soup with chopped greens in broth. Busy, busy place, incessant noise and bustle. The cashier, as happened other places, just turned the total around so that I could see the amount without words.

The couple finished and went on to their sightseeing before I did. So, alone, I wandered the old town. The modus operandi everywhere, in shops as on the streets near tourist attractions that are like running a gantlet, is for vendors to attack. If you so much as approach a counter (as in one nicer large shop I entered, with a number of things that seemed interesting), that vendor starts leaping to the conclusion you’ve agreed to purchase, whipping out packaging. There doesn’t seem to be a concept of “browsing.” Being left alone is not an option. There was a huge candy store (no English) filled with utterly unidentifiable products. By comparison the sellers were a tiny bit restrained (the shop was very busy), one offering me a small sample of what was in the foil-wrapped fish: chocolate. I bought a few sesame candies, that I could recognize, and a hawthorn cake (because it did say so in English).

Eventually, after wandering and sitting in a pavilion by the small lake and wandering, I stopped and bought tea. I was brought a small pot of it, with a handleless cup a quarter the size of a Western one. It was good and hot, sitting at a table outside; the day—though sunny!—was chilly. But then I realized my time was up, so I quickly finished it and went to rejoin the group at our meeting spot by the big famous tea house and the bridge.

After rest and cleanup at the hotel, our bus took us to the restaurant where we’d be having dinner. Traffic crawled along. We seemed to be away from the glitziest façade, in a regular shopping street. We saw a man nudging a plump little yellow and white kitten out the door of one shop with his foot—gently, and the kitten was obviously clean and well-fed, but such a busy sidewalk and busier street.

Our last official dinner together, in a big steamy restaurant, was of course good and varied. I wound up sitting with all the Mexicans, and before it was over found myself saying “Si” to the Chinese waiter, a harbinger of the disorientation surely to come when it was all over. One large group of men across the way appeared to be celebrating—something, periodically cheering loudly and laughing.

Our ultimate destination of the evening was the Shanghai Circus—which, far from a tent, performs onstage in a theater in a swanky multi-story downtown shopping complex. It’s—justifiably famous; every act—every contortion, feat of balance, magic trick—was absolutely astounding, sneaking up on you with a slow, subtle beginning, then building and building, becoming more and more unlikely and astounding. It also was beautiful, costumes, backdrops, choreographed, in the way Olympic figure skating transcends the physicality. One trapeze act was at the same time a thrilling dance of longing and goodbye between one man and one woman, in old-fashioned street clothes, against a huge blown-up photo of old Shanghai (I asked afterward).

The Liu Xiaobo Project

Tuesday

The only notable thing about the morning was climbing a mountain. By steps, but still. I did get up early again for the Tai Chi class before breakfast, interestingly considerably lengthened and with added movements, as if he felt those not that interested had been weeded out. Rusty from utter neglect of this beneficial routine (plus being thrown into a non-modified version with an instructor who was blithely stretching out nearly touching the floor), in the excessively hot lounge I was soon seriously perspiring.

All those already physically compromised, with backs out, who’d come on the trip with already-pulled ligaments, etc., opted to stay at the bottom once they saw the escalator was not working this day (technically through no fault of its own, but because an upper level was being resurfaced). Except for Tessa, the English lady with two knee replacements (a palm tree fell on her some years ago in Palm Springs, too, breaking her back and both legs, of which she commented with an airy stiff upper lip, “I’ve never been quite the same since”), who to everyone’s amazement persevered to the very top.

IMHO, the reward awaiting us did not really deserve such exertion nor devotion, though goodness knows we needed the exercise after days on the boat eating and only minimally exercising: a series of Tao temples, the cautionary “ghost city” depicting the hell that awaits the naughty, etc. After so much “wow” in China, this was really only “meh.” The park area is apparently about to be greatly expanded. Employment opportunities have to be created for the displaced, such as the former farmer who works at the present one and seems to be the only person who’s also mastered the trick—and prowess—of lifting a massive iron dome-shaped thing, to rest atop another iron dome. For tips.

Our final dinner was a banquet rather than buffet, with toasts drunk and various Chinese dishes. Afterward, I watched part of the elaborate—in costume, at least—cabaret show in the lounge. Most of the ship’s staff is very young, still in their teens, many of them, who are recruited in the towns along the river and trained right after high school. One girl bartending in the lounge is seventeen. The same multitude of girls who were lately serving us dinner appeared now in a series of costumes to do little dances and acts. (The Katarina’s activity director is a slightly older “local boy” who gets to see his one-year-old daughter one day a week (he whips out photos of her at the tiniest provocation). The cruise director is Bulgarian; her nine-year-old daughter lives with her sister, the girl’s aunt, most of the time.)

The Liu Xiaobo Project

Tuesday

This morning the Tai Chi class met. I recognized only a couple of the movements; from the opening one I’d venture a guess it was Ch'ang style, while I’d previously learned mainly a modified version of Sun.

The excursion today was by transfer to a smaller boat at Wuhan, the provincial capital of Hubei province, for a trip up a “lesser” gorge off the vast lake now behind the great dam. Always one is conscious that the water is some 200 feet higher than in the past (and this at low water in the dry season), obscuring who knows what, and yet the gorges are still spectacular. Some areas we passed over we were told were impassable rapids before—or were passed by means of crews of men, stripped naked, physically pulling boats through by long leather straps around their bodies. There are photos of this.

Then we docked, and boarded small motorized sampans to go still farther, up a “lesser lesser” gorge. The benches were hard and narrow, with less knee room than coach airline seats (if you can believe it). But we had all passed into the “family” bonded stage by then and thought it hilarious (and, hey, we weren’t spending our lives as beasts of burden). We were now intimately close to the water, could reach down and touch it if we’d wanted, what’s left of the gorge walls looming over us. Caves are frequently visible up the walls, and occasionally the remains of ancient “hanging coffins” of the Bo people who inhabited the area before the Han. Sometimes there are remains of more recent dwellings.

The boatman posed for us in a traditional palm frond hat and rain cloak, and then sang a song. I was stunned: the song sounded exactly like Native American ones, its cadences and tone. When he’d finished, the Albuquerque woman in front of me turned around and exclaimed, “That sounded like something Navajo!” Yes. But better still, the large Mexican contingent promptly burst into “Cielito Lindo” at the top of their lungs. Think of it: in all the millennia those gorge walls have stood, they’d never been serenaded in Spanish. Now that was unique. The boatman appeared nonplussed; I wonder whether he really never had gotten such a response.

Back on the Katarina, all afternoon the lake, former gorges’, walls passed: terraced fields of rape, sorghum, wheat, vegetables, scattered homes and settlements, large towns for all the many relocated people, with the same apartment and condominium towers as in the larger cities. One stunning view after another unfolded, including the one on the back of the ten-yuan note (called to our attention as we passed it). The litany of benefits of the dam despite initial skepticism, hardships, and loss of ancient traditions began to sound suspiciously like a mandatory party-line speech after the third time a guide or speaker offered it, in almost the same words. Yes, the dam will control historical flooding (by flooding, permanently), will provide much-needed hydroelectric power, and yes, everyone has gained modern bathrooms.

(Note: As you probably are already aware, the Three Gorges Dam was internally and internationally controversial from the start, and now is apparently being suspected of everything from actually increasing the danger of landslides to causing severe droughts: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jan/31/china-freshwater-lake-dries-up )

The Liu Xiaobo Project

Monday

But by then I was up, sitting at my desk/dresser, wondering whether we had, in fact, gotten underway. In a movie-scene detail, a Chapstick there before me fell over and rolled to one side: yep. Definitely on our way, sailing upstream; almost 400 miles to go.

We all were amazed at the lavish breakfast buffet onboard (and every meal that followed). It and our departure were too early to have the Tai Chi class onboard. The morning’s shore excursion was brief by the extreme standards we’d set in Beijing: a bus ride across a soaring bridge and up a mountain, with a couple of stops, showcasing the Three Gorges project. The fog we were told is the norm for area persisted. A large scale model of the project in a visitor center brought the huge project to graspable dimensions. A dam at this site was proposed as far back as the 1930s, by Sun Yat-sen, due to the fact that the river bed here is granite rather than sand- or limestone.

But more interesting by far was the afternoon, when our riverboat passed through the five-stage locks themselves. These are the largest inland waterway lock system in the world (as opposed, say, to the Panama Canal, which is saltwater, for oceangoing vessels). And they are indeed huge; we were one of four vessels that went through them together, two riverboats and two large cargo barges. Everything about the process—I sat mesmerized through two locks—was amazing, but always the gigantic scale, the gates, the walls above us. The first (second, actually; I’d been in my cabin during the first) I watched sitting with a very nice English couple even I might call elderly. They and two Australian couples, all traveling independently, were for all intents but meals, at which we still were segregated into our assigned tables, grouped with our tour so that the ship could sort shore groups into one Chinese- and one English-speaking one.

The green water rises quickly once the gates are closed. Sitting there at the prow, right at the railing, the sheer scale of the construction, the overwhelming pressure of the water the giant next gates in front of you hold back, are intimidating. And then, finally, they begin to swing open: first a tiny crack of sky and water between the immense gates, then wider and wider like a stage curtain parting.

The second stage I watched, I watched from the topmost deck almost alone. There I stood mainly on one side, where I realized that the prolonged metal screeching came from the massive metal “boll-ards,” as the English gentleman had informed me earlier, to which the boats are lashed, rising up slots in the great concrete walls—surely hydraulically—as the water and the boats rise.

That evening was the captain’s welcome reception in the ship’s lounge, so again as spruced-up as possible. There was a lovely buffet (capable of leading me astray from the fact that dinner was yet to be served) and a local apple “champagne” I liked, though some thought it overly sweet.

The Liu Xiaobo Project

Sunday

Checked baggage had to be outside our doors at 7:00, if we were going out on the morning tour (9:00 if one chose to sleep in). Then down to breakfast, and the bus.

On the way to the hutong Jia told us not only about some 80% of the traditional neighborhoods having been demolished in just the past twenty years—which I’d already been reading about from a preservation standpoint over the past few years—but spoke of her own experience growing up in one. One of the first groups Mao went after in the Cultural Revolution was middle-class property owners; when it was over, courtyard compounds that had once housed one extended family now housed up to ten families—all of them poor. She talked about the one common neighborhood toilet (a hole in the ground), cleaned out daily by a cleaning crew; of people bringing their chamber pots to empty in the morning; of having to choose, upon waking, between staying in bed a little longer and getting there before a line formed. In the crowded, narrow courtyards everyone knew everyone’s business, and as is human nature, invariably there was at least one unpleasant neighbor (once when her family’s precious coal began disappearing, she and her brother dug into a block of it and put firecrackers inside, and then waited to hear whose fire went off).

But in the good sense, too, everyone knew everyone, and if the old people wanted to get together a game of mah jongg there was always someone available. Jia’s parents, both retired M.D.s living now in a high-rise condo, don’t really know their neighbors any more than in any big city anywhere, and are reduced to playing mah jongg online with strangers.

When we arrived at the square between the Drum Tower and Bell Tower by foot from our bus, we had sprung on us a delightful surprise: we were going to our destination by pedicab (the modern version of the old rickshaws). I had one all to myself, so I don’t think was too heavy a load for the young man. Red fringe swinging, we set off in a long single-file parade through the hutong, laughing.

Most of the streets there are barely wide enough for even the pedicabs to pass, though in some stood dusty parked cars, and later, when we were on foot again, a couple of cars actually came down one street, so that we had to stand next to a building to let them pass. All the buildings are still gray—gray brick, gray stone, gray paint if necessary—as in the past, by law. In the past this was because red and gold were imperial colors only; color itself was apparently reserved for the upper classe. Doors, now, are red; window frames; and red paper lanterns are everywhere. Minuscule neighborhood bakeries had fresh-baked or fried pastries on display, the scent wafting out to us. Bathrooms are now modern, labeled “men” or “women,” looking like rest stops anywhere—but still communal, and we passed one or two people bearing chamberpots.

Our destination was two small rooms—one room and a sleeping alcove, really, plus what had been a porch, enclosed to make a tiny kitchen: the home of an elderly woman. She was out walking her dog when we arrived, but her niece greeted us, served us tea, and gave us the history of the home, Jia translating. In 1903 her aunt’s great grandfather had bought this property. A wooden model shows it as it once looked: a double courtyard surrounded by buildings of various sizes. The main family dwelling was in the rear, the most desirable location, where it received afternoon sunlight.

Where we now sat, these two rooms, had been part of the servants’ quarters in the very front, next to the street—the only part not confiscated in the 1960s and redistributed.

The family are the equivalent of “Living Treasures” in Japan, practitioners of the disappearing art of painting on the inside of glass containers. That great grandfather had been a court painter in the Forbidden City. For this reason they are permitted to give these talks to tourists, and three days a week give painting lessons there in the house. Unlike residents of all the new condos, who hold seventy-year leases only, they own what is left of their home in perpetuity (though not the land under it). The niece, the only family member of her generation to continue the painting tradition, lived there with her aunt until she married. She demonstrated the technique for us, with a long-handled brush with right-angle bristles of wolf hair. The work is incredibly detailed and fine; by fifty most such artists’ careers are over because their hands are no longer steady enough.

More than one of us said this visit was the high point of the entire trip.

Back we went in our pedaled procession to the square. There was time enough left to visit just the Drum Tower. Dating to the fifteenth century (replacing a thirteenth-century one) it dominated the Beijing skyline for centuries. It and the Bell Tower, on an axis with the distant Forbidden City, once kept time for the area, either bells or drums sounding every other hour. In front of each is, not steps, but a large stone slope—excellent drainage, I’m sure, but seeming madness in a climate of annual snow and ice.

The number of steps inside given was seventy—very steep, high ones, straight up. But at the top one emerges into a high, long room with rows of massive red drums on their sides in cradles—yet another “wow” moment. From the narrow balcony outside there are views of the surrounding hutong; of the city beyond, I’m sure, if it were ever clear (though the sun was actually threatening to break through just then); and, indeed, on a straight line, the temple at the Summer Palace beyond the Forbidden City, on its manmade hill.

We had a plane to catch, so back to the hotel we went one last time, to pick up the rest of our group and make a quick restroom (“happy room,” as they say in China) stop. In the square at the Drum Tower, as we left, several groups of young men were playing the ubiquitous “hacky sack”-type game (jianzi), with a feathered object like a large shuttlecock.

From Beijing to Yichang was about two and a half hours by air. There, we had clearly left the megalopolis behind for a small-town airport out in the country—small town/city by Chinese standards, we were soon informed: only some four million. And we did soon find downtown—a little scruffy, buildings in the process of being demolished (and I saw one woman cleaning a pile of bricks by hand), others being built. A boomtown of the Three Gorges project, having been at one time not much more than a fishing village.

We had a very good dinner at a rather posh hotel (a wall of fish tanks outside where we exited afterward, full of all manner of aquatic life waiting in uncomfortable circumstances to become someone’s dinner—including one turtle trying desperately, again and again, to surface, but it couldn’t quite make it), then rode down—and I mean down—to our boat waiting on the Yangtze: narrow road, dizzying height we discovered ourselves at in the failing light, no guard rail.

After a little orientation session in the dining room of the Katarina, we got our passports returned once more, along with our cabin assignments. When I located mine, on Deck 4, it was freezing. Tiny, pleasant, very clean, with a balcony—but freezing. It all was rather disorienting at the moment. From my balcony, which was to starboard, I could make out almost nothing in the deep darkness and fog: the water itself, a looming hill across. I left and went up to the observation deck—alone; everyone else was apparently settling in for the night. More darkness, fog, water, mountains. An ominous subconscious identification with the accident in John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8 made me hang onto the not-quite-high-enough for 5’10” railing in the dark.

I went to bed first in the thermal underwear, and fell asleep quickly—only to be awakened at around 11:00 by Jia’s voice over the loudspeaker. The staff had finally finalized the next day’s schedule (which was supposed to have been already posted via the ship’s TV channel; I’d thought just my set wasn’t working earlier, had had someone in from housekeeping who spoke very little English and couldn’t figure it out, either, had called Jia—and poor Jia, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one). But at that point the room had gotten really warm—hot—requiring a change of attire.

All the rest of the night, sleep interrupted, I was intensely aware of our non-earthbound condition: the gentle unsteadiness; the boat rocking in the wakes of other ships that passed; in the early morning, the engines revving and our setting out in the dark; the rush of our own wake.

The Liu Xiaobo Project

Saturday

My wakeup call was at 6:15, for a 6:45 breakfast and 7:45 departure. It was not snowing, but still quite hazy. Our first stop of the day was the Beijing Zoo, to see the pandas. Pandas are boring. They’ve overspecialized to the extent that they seem intent on extinction. They’re not even interested in breeding, for heaven’s sake, even when coddled and fed and shown (I am not making this up) “panda porn.”

“Red pandas,” more closely related to raccoons, with cute catlike faces and long tails, are feisty and active on the other hand (“agitated” might be more accurate, for a while, after not only a pack of obnoxious children but the adults accompanying them were shouting and banging on the enclosure. They should have been in the cage). A golden pheasant was breathtaking, looking like an enameled jewel that moved. And that was about it for the zoo this day.

From there we went directly to Tiananmen Square. Jia gave historical background on the way, about the evolution of the square, its rank as the largest public square in the world, and for those too young, perhaps, to know—or at any rate to personally remember—an account of the events of June, 1989. She stressed that it would not be okay to ask her questions about that time while in the square, as she could get in trouble if overheard. Our schedule, in fact, had changed twice, from an early morning visit to an afternoon one to a late morning one, due to the fact that a national political party congress was convening adjacent to the square, with heightened security. I certainly hope that’s not the normal level; military, police, and incredibly obvious “plainclothes” security were everywhere. She also said quietly, as an army platoon marched in formation across the square (the first of several) not to photograph them (I’m afraid I did out of sheer defiance, though surreptitiously. I remember the massacre, and the hopeful days leading up to it, as if it were yesterday). She pointed out the Beijing Hotel up wide Chang’an Avenue to our right, from which the famous photo of the unknown man confronting a line of tanks was taken. After duly photographing the huge square and the Gate of Heavenly Peace from that angle, we crossed the busy thoroughfare via a wide, bustling tunnel.

Just inside the Gate there is a security headquarters; a line of additional “plainclothes” emerged in identical black down jackets, heading back toward the square.

Like the center of any empire, everything in or (because there are layers of approach—“Outer” and “Inner” functional and ceremonial courtyards before the actual residential areas of the emperor and all the vast array of family and concubines and eunuchs, etc.) near the Forbidden City squeezes out yet more “wows” by its sheer immensity, its grandeur, its onetime richness (gold leaf!). On this day, let it be remembered that every moat (and later, a lake—photos!) was frozen solid enough—in one instance, at least—to skate on. People of many nationalities were there to bear witness, including jostling, pushing throngs of Chinese. I can’t imagine it being more crowded, and yet surely it is in balmier weather.

Absolute power certainly, if you’re not one of the dime-a-dozen underlings or slaves, has its perks. Its downside, too, once you’re only a descendant of a dynasty creator, when the bureaucracy has multiplied to hem you in and isolate you. When assassination had been a common enough theme that the concubine du jour (or nuit) had to receive the eunuch naked to be carried into the emperor’s presence, to be sure she wasn’t carrying any sort of weapon.

From a museumist’s (yes; I just made that up) point of view, there seems what I can only call a certain passive-aggressiveness about the Forbidden City as museum. It’s open to the public, yes, but I certainly wouldn’t say it’s maintained. We were told only a part of the vast complex, much as it seems, is actually accessible, due to inability to fund preservation of all the rest. Yet—aside from the heavy layer of dust over it all, the same grime that accumulates on any stationary object in Beijing—everywhere the gilt is peeling or gone, the paint is cracked, the glass is dirty. The great halls are off-limits to foot traffic, but still stand open and certainly not climate-controlled. The overwhelming onslaught of visitors is barely restrained.

It would be incredibly expensive to properly maintain the complex. Two words: Beijing Olympics. (Or “Catherine Palace,” outside St. Petersburg, obliterated by the Germans in World War II and painstakingly rebuilt, right down to the astonishing Amber Room. Or Versailles.) It’s a question, if not of half-heartedness, of grudging reference to the pre-Communist (pre-Republic) past, of priorities—and everywhere in China, it appears the priority is the future, whatever that may mean, rather than the past. There are symbolic nods to the past, seemingly more for tourist consumption than anything else, but all the while hutongs are razed for condominiums, the Three Gorges Dam displaces over a million people and drowns village after village and thousands of years of history.

On this day we walked five miles, more or less. When we finally exited the Forbidden City, in our scrounged time, our bus took us to a late lunch. The dining rooms in this restaurant were large, old-fashioned, dark—and the young waitresses were in full old-style regalia: silk dresses, large Manchu headdresses, traditional platform shoes (which seemed downright cruel for a busy standing job). The lazy Susans went round and round, we ate and ate, blah, blah. All the women but me refused to use the restroom; their loss (they asked, on my return, whether it were “nice.” I said that “nice” was perhaps too strong a word, but that it did have soap, and the hand dryer worked—unlike our shared experience earlier in the Forbidden City—and that it even blew hot air, a plus in our pretty chilled state).

Onward, to the Summer Palace built by the real Dragon Lady, she of perpetual regency by virtue of repeated murders. This was the site of the frozen lake, where ducks were walking, but also of a long, long, curving arcade covered with non-repeating hand-painted scenes. Also a little drinks stand our “boys” discovered sold coffee; I looked for the German woman who lives in Miami to give her the news, but couldn’t spot her—and then she materialized with tea for me, after my bemoaning that lunch’s chrysanthemum tea wasn’t going to provide any caffeine to keep me awake.

From there we drove to an official government pearl “factory,” where the Chinese process of seating us all in a room for an actual lecture repeated, on the history and uses of freshwater pearls this time. Of course, as at the “jade factory,” (though this lacked a gallery) there were breathtakingly beautiful displays, of pearls in all their naturally-occurring colors (and unnaturally, in a more low-end part of the shop).

Finally we dragged our weary selves back into our hotel. After an hour or so another woman and I went up the street for a bite to eat—a bite that wound up being Sichuan, requiring two tall pale Tsingtao beers to—alleviate, if not quench.

The Liu Xiaobo Project

Friday

Having made a sizable deposit in my sleep bank, being unable to go back to sleep after 5:00 A.M. didn’t seem too great a hardship, though all things considered I would have preferred not hearing doors slamming all up and down my hall, together with American voices that made me think I must have missed my 6:30 wake-up call (I never did find out who the voices belonged to; no one in our group, apparently). The breakfast buffet downstairs, as in Taiwan, ranged from eggs and omelets to order and cereals to a wide offering of Chinese dishes such as congees, stir-fries, and fried breakfast bread.

A heavy mist was hanging over the heavy traffic beyond the dining room windows; by the time I went back to my room for a few minutes, I could see the first flakes of snow floating down. Back on our bus, we crept along with the rush-hour crush, on streets and then a ring road, fat ragged flakes pouring down. I’d joked with Jia, our guide, that we’d brought the snow; she’d just yesterday been telling us Beijing, like so many places this winter, had had hardly any snow, which is very unusual.

Beijing is just immense (20 million immense). It still was impossible to see it clearly, but in any direction it is obviously possible to drive for over an hour and still be in it, still passing densely-packed buildings. The snow was increasing, which as we drove through the Olympic park from 2008 was too bad; we could only dimly see the famous “Bird’s Nest” stadium and the solar-heated walls of the Water Cube aquatic stadium. I do vaguely remember reading at the time that a large part of the Chinese government’s expense for the Games was compensating all the people (to some degree) for their property cleared to construct the Olympic venues, which memory our guide confirmed. As in Russia, where shelters cover statues in winter, special covers protect garden beds, small hedges, and tall two-sided windbreaks even shelter taller shrubbery and small trees.

We stopped at a jade factory, which includes a gallery, shop, and background lecture on the history and properties of jade, as well as a glimpse through glass of a jade craftsman carving jade with diamond dust, the only natural substance harder (gem substance harder? ). Snow was still falling intermittently as we left there, and the wind was blowing. We drove on farther into the countryside, climbing. So by the time we reached the parking lot below the Great Wall, quite a bit of snow had accumulated at that elevation. Quite a bit, several inches (I can feel you cold weather haters recoiling, but I found it hilarious. I mean, what were the odds? Our guide pointed out that classic Chinese art often depicts the Wall exactly as we were getting to see it, in winter, with the mountains shrouded in mist.

The first modest flight of steps sounded the alarm, for what the weather conditions really meant. The snow on every step already had been compacted and polished by many feet to something like glass; just getting up these involved hanging onto the metal railing for dear life. And we weren’t really anywhere yet. So, here we are, a no doubt once in a lifetime event: what to do? Risk breaking an ankle (or worse), or miss what we’d come to see?

Right. You know what my answer was, don’t you. Step by step, inch by inch . . . down another steep flight of slick stone steps to a long gradual sort of ramp—no less slick, but more level, at least. The minutes passed, the breathtaking views unfolded (even limited by the fog, the snow made them spectacular, outlining the long vertical and horizontal stretches of ancient stone in sharp positive-negative). Those who persevered clung to rails, took tiny baby steps (I have photos! of lines of us ascending and descending desperately clutching them)—and I don’t mean just my group; Chinese, German, whoever. The rails on the inner side of the wall (outgoing, in other words, for us making our treacherous way) unfortunately were extremely low, so as (presumably) not to be higher than the stone wall itself. At the level of various beacon platforms the rail would stop for a stretch.

And I kept climbing, and climbing, stopping only occasionally when my heart was going like a jackhammer. The steps were far from regular; there would at random intervals be one of double height (our guide later said this was deliberate, to thwart any breach in the dark by invaders, who would not know the Wall. I was puzzled, since this would mean they’d already gotten inside the Wall, but maybe it’s true). Finally there was only me. The higher I went, the easier the going, actually, since very few other feet had been there to compact the snow. It was still fresh and crunchy. It was also falling hard by then, the big flakes from the outset replaced by small ones falling in a heavy windblown shower.

Coming down, predictably, was vastly more terrifying than going up. Looking back down at the way I’d come (have photo!), it was wistfully tempting to just stay put until the snow melted. The little snack stand for sunnier times wouldn’t have provided much shelter (at that point, though, I was sweating inside the thermal underwear, down jacket, and double-thickness mittens). So, developing a process of holding the rail tightly behind my back with both hands, so that I could dig one heel into the uncrushed snow right up under it, step by cautious, slow step, I went down. There were many occasions when I could feel a foot slide when a step was just too slippery; only a tight grip and focusing absolutely on each step, trying to put my feet down strategically where it seemed there was the least compaction got me down. Yes, I know you think I’m insane (know you know I’m insane). It was exhilarating. It was beautiful. It was a sort of meditation. It was amazing. The only time I fell was back on the long gradual ramp near the end, where I Could Not keep my feet no matter what strategy. By the end, as you can imagine, I was exhibiting symptoms of a Jelly-Leg Jinx (it’s a Harry Potter thing), and my arms of course were aching.

So we reboarded our bus and headed back toward Beijing. About halfway in, we stopped at a little plain building tucked against the mountain in a curve of the highway for lunch: a Mongolian hot pot. Our guide had pre-briefed us on the procedure as we were driving, so we sort of knew what we were supposed to do. First a quick bathroom/handwashing break (I won’t rant at you—much—about American women and their obsessive avoidance of the squat toilets. I mean, what is the huge deal?? Here, though, our guide told us, Gate 1 has enough economic clout in China that the owners had put in one Western-style one in order to get the business; they refer to it as the “Gate 1 toilet.”)

Then to the two rooms set up for our lunch. We sat around big round tables, the usual lazy Susan in the center. But at each place there was a pot of boiling broth. We were provided a plate of thinly sliced goose, black fungus, bean curd, an egg, and assorted noodles and vegetables to cook in the broth, remove, and eat. The only real advice had been that the sweet potato noodles take a long time to cook, so we should probably add them to the broth first. It was great fun, messy, and tasty.

Because we weren’t exhausted, sleep-deprived, and full then, we drove next to the valley of the Ming Tombs. It really is a whole valley, exclusively devoted in its time to royal burials, off-limits to all others. Feng shui demands as an ideal burial site water before, a mountain behind, and this valley had that—a lake, and of course mountains. There’s much more—the conquering emperor who established the practice, the burial sites, the beautiful ancient trees in the snow, the open museum, the low tower to, yes, climb (and the four twenty-something guys were racing each other to the top. Disgusting.) for a view over more of the park.

From that area it was a short drive to the Sacred Way, the road along which the funeral processions passed. We had only to walk another mile along this stone path lined with bare willow trees and huge statues (making our way in the opposite direction from that the processions would have gone), to a massive square building (not wide, but tall and very—thick, in the sense that the Arc de Triomphe is massive, though not that huge), set in the midst of another grand square, inside which was a tall tablet carried on the back of a bronze tortoise—which the Chinese believed carried the world itself on its back. Legend has it that you stroke the tortoise’s back if you want great wealth; its head if you want long life. Interestingly, I didn’t see anyone pet its back.

Finally back in Beijing through what was getting to be rush-hour traffic again, we had about an hour to get minimally freshened up for our Peking duck dinner. Having discovered the evening before that the hotel’s water was sufficiently hot and the tub sufficiently long to create a hot tub experience—so hot I would venture to compare it to natural hot springs, minus the minerals—I quickly recreated that; I don’t think there was a part of my body that didn’t need it, ankles to wrists and everything between. The most painful aftereffects, which would last for days, were in the front of my thighs, so that I could still climb without much problem, but going down was excruciating.

As dolled-up as my wardrobe would permit, which wasn’t much (I hadn’t packed even one skirt, but I did switch from jeans to slacks), I met the others who were going to the dinner in the lobby. Let me backtrack to mention the little trees in the median all through downtown Beijing, covered with pink blossoms, that I’d first seen driving in from the airport. I’d first thought, oh, a sign of spring—were they cherries? crabapples? only to realize on closer examination they were fake, and thought, how sad, the pollution is so bad they have fake trees. Well, by night their fakeness explains itself: all the little pink blossoms are lights, and every tree blooms in dazzling pink. In addition to the primarily blue and white lights wrapping other, real trees that are bare at the moment. To the tall building that finally induced me to interrupt our guide as she was in mid-instruction for the dinner, to ask what building that was, so ablaze with colored and running lights that it looked like fireworks (everyone was wondering; I just asked). It was the international apartment building, very exclusive and expensive, that she’d pointed out by day, but unrecognizable now.

At the restaurant we climbed (!) the stairs to the lovely dining room set up for us. There’d been some preview on the bus of how the dinner would proceed, its historical context (originally a meal exclusively for royalty, later introduced to the public by the emperor’s former chef in one fancy restaurant, and now available generally, though it still follows, in its purest form, a set protocol), what to do—but most memorably, frankly, the uses and proper consumption of fire water (not “firewater,” not “Firewhiskey,” but the very potent liquor distilled from sorghum). It is drunk from tiny stemmed glasses, a little smaller than a shot glass, but downed in one gulp like a shot of—something. Since there is a lazy Susan in the center of each table, and it is not possible to clink glasses together as in a Western toast, everyone taps their glasses against the lazy Susan to signal their agreement to the toast, and then—bottoms up. This began before the first of the food arrived, so, reluctant to begin on a completely empty stomach, I was frantically nibbling at the little slivers of cucumber and onion there by my place for the duck. The firewater is good, actually, reminiscent of vodka, but with a sweeter, slightly smoky taste. It burns just a little going down, but does certainly warm one up.

The first sustenance to arrive was, naturally, the duck—whole, the size a 60-day-old duckling could be, crispy and brown. The chef’s prowess is verified not just in the preparation, but in the ability to produce 108 slices from one duck (I have no idea; it was not possible to count). The main waiter for our table demonstrated for each of us how to take a small “pancake” (more like very fine crêpe) from a stack, dip a bit of duck in plum sauce, spread the sauce around on the pancake, add a little of the cucumber and onion, and roll the whole thing up like a tiny burrito. It was, not surprisingly, delicious, as moist—and a little sweet—and crisp as I’d always heard. There was a whole array of other dishes as well, with the duck (plate after plate of duck) as a centerpiece. And wine. And chrysanthemum tea. And—fire water. After two I meant to stop, but well into the meal, the mainly male table (it’s unclear how our tables had segregated so by gender—it never really would happen again, and there were a couple of wives at that other one, though “the boys,” as they came to be known, were by default a majority) was ostentatiously banging glasses down. Not to be outdone, we banged down our own (this leads to a certain amount of sloshing, by the way). Vowing that was really it, I ignored the next refill immediately provided. Still, it required a real effort to appear lucid in responding to email back at the hotel. And I was nowhere near the seven shots I later learned (some of) that other table had downed.

The Liu Xiaobo Project

Thursday

On a day when we’d eaten our sandwiches from Bay Cities Deli in Palisades Park overlooking the Pacific, a day brilliant enough that Palos Verdes and Malibu were visible through just a little sea haze, embracing the vast flat vista of dark blue between them (and the big tent of Cirque du Soleil at Santa Monica Pier), a day warm in the sun and very cool in the shade, when we’d then walked through an exhibit of protest posters from the years 1965 through 1975 at the West Hollywood Library (itself beautiful and airy, all glass and wood and overlooking the also-vast vista of the much-enlarged Pacific Design Center across the street—no longer just the “blue whale,” but red and green as well, now), we still wound up eating large quantities of very, very good sushi once I’d pestered my way through a whole list of little tasks and needs and requests to get re-packed. Far from the last gastronomical leaps of faith this trip, I predict.

Then it was time to fly chasing the night, fleeing the sun that had long since risen where I’d departed from. How surreally suspended a feeling (and suspended we certainly have been for all we know, unless we put our faith in the progress over Alaska and Siberia the ever-changing maps show us), like squeezing melon pulp, to extract, finally, a couple of hours’ sleep from thirteen spent moving in the dark. How surreal, period, the calculation and organization of time on our planet, that in another four hours or so we will approach catching the sun rising on a day one later than the one in progress where we began.

…And then there was Beijing. Not that I can say I’ve seen it, exactly, given the unrelenting density of the fog/smog. From the moment we entered the sprawling, modern airport, there has been the smell of smoke, which together with a cloudy day has meant visibility of a few blocks. I’m hoping to get one clear view before leaving. The new skyscrapers we passed in the heart of downtown are cutting-edge architecture (at the expense, I know, of many a traditional neighborhood). The hotel is very pleasant (and contrary to the experience of others who offered me a heating pad to bring, based on their experience of heat being turned off because it was not yet officially winter, I’ve turned off the heat in my room because it was too warm—but, then, I suppose it is still “winter.” It’s certainly quite chilly—in the upper 20s Fahrenheit when we landed this morning, with a cold wind when buildings didn’t block it). After depositing belongings in my room, having the checked bag (that had been ferried into town separately) arrive, and minimally freshening up, I adhered first to one group (of Mexican women traveling together, three of them sisters), then another (a couple from Indiana, after the former’s companions returned declaring the recommended nearby holes-in-the-wall too dodgy for their taste, and in fact had lunch in one of the said holes, which was very tasty.

The three of us then set off to find the Temple of Heaven. Perhaps my innate need to become lost and pound pavement unnecessarily is contagious, because we wound up missing it, though in the end acknowledged that we otherwise would not have seen a whole neighborhood likely not often seen by tourists. In our defense, on the second attempt it became clear that the tallest roof, that would have been the obvious clue, already vague in the thick haze, disappeared precisely behind a tree if you hadn’t already glimpsed it by a certain point.

In the end the temple—a whole walled temple complex, actually, dating to the 15^th century—was magnificent and quirky (the raucous card games in progress along the entire length of one long arcade, the barely seen woman in shadows singing loudly (“Jingle Bells,” when we first noticed her). The heavy murk leaves always the impression something’s being missed—any sort of vista, certainly, but even what’s close at hand, as the ceiling lowers and lowers and you feel you’re having to sort of breaststroke through it.

After that the sleep-deprived exhaustion (no, actually, I do not want to hear from one more person who cheerfully tells me he or she got eight hours of sleep on the flight) was impossible to deny any longer, Lama Temple and its giant Buddha or not (though I did finish the book I’d been reading before finally succumbing). Awakening hours later to darkness, I called to find out what time it had gotten to be (it appears the difference is the plus-one-day, less eight hours from California, if that makes sense (as in, my California-time watch was saying 5:30 (A.M., presumably), when it was 9:30 P.M. here. In the time before I crash again (early wake-up call in the morning, to head out to the Great Wall), I ponder some of the instructions available in English in the room (“When you drink too much, for your health and safety, please do not use shower facilities.” “Please don’t eat wild animals as the raw material of the food.”). Not that I could give the tiniest instruction in Chinese, spoken or written, being completely illiterate as I fumble around their country.