Because of my jet lag and Ann’s migraine, we stayed back at the hotel when everyone else went to see the terra-cotta warriors, but we were able to take our own tour several days later and take in some of the other archeological ‘treasures’ of Xi’an.  Xi’an’s attraction for tourists is its status as China’s first capital, dating back to the Qin dynasty, a dynasty which, lasting from 220 to 206 B.C. is officially shorter than the syndicated run of the soap opera of the same name. Unfortunately, this means that the city specializes in tourist sites rather than tourist sights, for most of its treasures are located 1) underground, 2) in books, or 3) only as a series of ditches and small indentations in the ground. The terra-cotta warriors, well outside the city limits, are, of course, a notable exception. However, it seems to be virtually impossible to book a tour to the terra-cotta warriors without also seeing all the other sites (not sights) along the way.

Our tour itself started with the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, not far from the hotel. Eight stories tall, the Pagoda houses the first Buddhist texts brought to China, over 1300 texts which were transcribed from Sanskrit to Chinese.  Unfortunately, the tower, already leaning akin to its sister-tower in Pisa has been rendered unsafe due to the last earthquake, and we were no longer able to make our way within. This did not distress us however; the day was hot and we had a long way to go to get to the terra-cotta warriors so we were happy with what we could see.  And Ann and I discovered the day before when touring the Forest of Stone Tablets Museum, looking at stone tablets and books in Chinese is well summed up by our National Geographic travel guide: “Fascinating to students of classical Chinese, but may prove inaccessible to most foreign visitors”. The Pagoda does come with an interesting legend.  Apparently there used to be two branches of Buddhism, one was vegetarian the other of which ate meat. During a time of starvation, a local monk from the meat-eating faction saw a flock of wild geese flying overhead.  He prayed to Bodhisattva to get some, and the leading goose fell from the sky, its wings broken.  The monks were startled and, being the contemplative sort, wondered if perhaps praying for a goose wasn’t the most pious or worldly of prayers.  So they atoned by building a temple on the site, The Wild Goose Pagoda, and turning the order vegetarian. As for myself, I can’t help but wonder if message might have been something more along the lines of “look you’re hungry, goose is good with a little rice wine and oranges”.  But history of course has chosen its own reading, and eating goose will now and always be sacrilege for Buddhists.  Tasty, tasty sacrilege.

After our tour around the Wild Goose Pagoda, we went to the Bampo museum we showed us that even books we can’t see is more to see than what’s left of the matriarchal Bampo civilization.  The museum is a large concrete structure built over the remains of a village dating back to approximately 3,000 BC.  All the wood, fiber, and other materials except a few human bones seems to have disappeared all together; so all that the museum really houses are some circular outlines of a fire pit, and an occasional outline of small post holes where there once may have been a wall. To again quote the National Geographic Guide: “Viewing the ancient remains is a rather dry experience, although current renovations aim to inject more attraction for the average traveler”. Those renovations are now in place, and do help considerably.  Next to the site, there is now a television set which shows you diagrams of what the 2 inch wide posts might have looked like that once filled those 2 inch wide post holes. I left with a feeling of respect that we might be able to see anything, and infer anything, about a culture so old, and at the same time, unnerved that what was left could have been undone by an overzealous golfer replacing his divots.

As Ann and I made our way to the Terra-cotta warriors it became clear that the Bampo museum served an important purpose for tourists:  it was a stark contrast to the 8,000 meticulously preserved soldiers that emperor Qinshi Huangdi left to guard his burial site.  Qinshi, of the aforementioned “Qin” dynasty seemed to accomplish a lot during his remarkably short reign. The Emperor Qinshi unified the warring areas that were thereafter to be joined together as China.  As in any country, however, we should probably be suspicious of the term “unification,” since in this case it seems to have meant killing most of the population, and enslaving the rest into building the Great Wall in order to protect what was left, as well as a cultural “unification” which came from burning books and leaving most of the country’s pre-history in carbon.  After such achievements, what’s an Emperor to accomplish?  Why, preparing for the afterlife of course, building an underground necropolis larger than the great pyramids, and populate it with terra-cotta soldiers for protection along with anything else that he wanted to preserve for his life in the underworld.  It gives one pause to think that the site is already referred to as the eighth wonder of the world, has been declared the most important archeological site of the 20th century, and yet much of it has still to be unearthed, including anything that the emperor may have wanted to spend his afterlife with other than clay soldiers.  As Ann politely asked our tour guide, “Aren’t there any terra-cotta concubines?”   Chances are there is more to be uncovered in the tomb itself, but chances seem equally good that what other treasures may have lain there were long-since stolen.  Many of the terra-cotta warriors themselves were destroyed by the peasant uprising and the armies that came through soon after Qinshi’s untimely death.  I can’t help been wondered that as the necropolis was sacked, they simply took everything with them that was small enough or valuable enough to carry.  As our tour group made it back to the bus in the blinding sun, merchants tried to sell us whole boxes of stone or bronze soldiers for as little as 10 Yuan.  It seemed like a remarkable deal, but if we couldn’t bring ourselves to buy a box of six-inch size replicas because of the space they’d take up in our luggage, what must of the pillagers have thought of the real thing when they had to go home by horseback or on foot?  “Hi Honey!  I’m Home!  And guess what I brought you from my travels?”

If there is an afterlife for Qinshi, it must be bitter irony to see what has become of the Wall that would be extended for so many years, and his terra-cotta army.  Designed to keep outsiders at bay, they are now the two largest draws of tourism in the country, and certainly among the largest draws in the world.  So now all kind of cretin wanders into town and gawks at his tomb before going out to buy Kentucky Fried Chicken.  Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

–Ted

Nanking Massacre Museum

We went to the Nanking Massacre Museum after a stop on Thursday at the John Rabe House, also known as the Peace museum, right next to the Nanjing University campus. The photo, above, shows us with our Chinese friends who came to the museum with us to help us with any Chinese translations. Rabe, also referred to as “the good man of Nanking” and “a living Buddha” by the survivors of the massacre that he helped save, was also a member of the Nazi party. During the height of the Nanking invasion by the Japanese in 1937, Rabe sheltered 600 people in his yard, rushing outside when Japanese soldiers tried to climb over the wall to rape women and defending Chinese people by threatening the Japanese soldiers with a swastika and claiming an alliance with Japan. The irony is astounding, and there was, even at his tiny house, a sense of great sadness.

(A sculpture outside of the massacre museum created from photographs of people fleeing Japanese soldiers.  The series of sculptures sits in flowing water outside of the museum.)

The Nanking Massacre museum itself is new. After reading Irish Chang’s controversial book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II and watching the recent documentary Nanking, both of which I recommend, I thought that there was little in the museum that would surprise me. However, it’s one of the best-done, most moving, and most terrifying museums I’ve ever seen.
According to the museum, 300,000 Chinese died in the invasion. Numbers are, of course, controversial, because many people were slaughtered and placed in mass graves, but the magnitude of the events is overwhelming. In Chang’s book, she makes the point that Germany paid restitution for its crimes during WWII, but Japan did not, and till this day, some people in Japan do not acknowledge that any war crimes took place in Nanking. After seeing the museum, it’s incredible to me that anyone could deny what occurred.
Many people might compare the Massacre museum to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. Since I haven’t visited the Holocaust Museum, I can’t make that comparison.
But the problem that both museums face is once that I frequently explore in the classes I teach. How do you convey the magnitude of a tragedy this large? What do you do when language fails? In a graduate course I teach called “Writing the Unspeakable,” we explore how people write about what is “beyond words.” In the

Nanking Museum, we directly encountered a tragedy that is beyond words and beyond comprehension. How do you account for 300,000 dead? Or even 30,000? How do you account for the viciousness of soldiers who raped old women and young girls? Who killed civilians by burning, beheading, torturing, and drowning them? Who killed women while they were nursing babies?

The Museum addresses this by telling a story about the massacre that runs fairly chronologically. Upon entering the museum you descend a staircase in almost total darkness to a recovered bomb shelter. Black and white film of the initial Japanese bombing of Nanjing plays, and sounds of dropping bombs echo around you in the dark. The next large room is almost completely dark, and in raised letters (all in Chinese) the names of the victims are inscribed on the walls of the museum in dark gray stone. Even though I can’t read the names (my Chinese vocabulary is growing but is still less than ten words), there was something about touching the names of the dead that struck me. In fact, I literally went to the walls and traced the names, touching them with my fingers. In the center of the room, a name and a photo flash every few seconds displaying another image of someone who died.
There are dozens of artifacts and videos displayed in the next part of the museum and a depiction of what the land looked like after the bombing, but what got me was the next room where twelve skeletons of those who died during the attacks lie partly unearthed. It seems to be a Chinese practice to build museums on the sites of archeological discoveries (we saw a Han dynasty excavation/museum on the way into Xi’an, and the Terra Cotta Warriors are of course in the spot where they were found). At the time, I didn’t know this, however, and seeing the twelve skeletons where they had been buried in a mass grave, still unidentified, was devastating.
The entire museum is dark, partly underground, and like walking with ghosts. I didn’t take too much in after the first twelve person mass grave. The European and American missionaries who helped save people in Nanking were all recognized, among them John Rabe, the good Nazi, and Minnie Vartrin, the farm-girl from Illinois who ran Nanling Women’s University and saved 10,000 women from rape, but who later returned to the states and committed suicide. Iris Change was memorialized as well (in 1994 after writing The Rape of Nanking she also committed suicide).
The museum is huge, and after a trek through the memorial garden, there were at least two more large partly excavated mass graves: one with two hundred and fifty skeletons in it. In contrast with the graves, the gift shops were typically Chinese aggressive, and my Western face brought out the Iris Chang book (in English) along with the usual array of Mao paraphernalia (which I generally really like, but not in this context).
Another display that really struck me was a depiction of photos of the 300,000. Every twelve seconds, a sound like water dripping echoed through the chamber, and another picture of one of the victims lit up. If you stood for a minute you saw five victim’s photos. It takes six weeks to get through all of the victims of the massacre with a new image every twelve seconds.
While the museum was painful and overwhelming, I would really like to go back some day and go through the whole thing more slowly. I’d like to hear translations of more of the surviving victim’s stories, and I would like to talk with more Chinese people about their family’s memories of Nanking and what havoc the Japanese invasion caused.
While meeting with Chinese college students at a local university in Xi’an this week, one of them asked why so many people hated the Jews. While the student’s question surprised me, it was wonderful to hear someone who spoke with such candor about race/ethnicity.  I rarely get such direct comments from students in the U.S.  After talking for a while, I understood that she had read The Merchant of Venice in her English class, and she didn’t really understand the other characters’ hatred of Shylock (although she loved Portia). The easiest cultural key I had to explain the irrational concept of hate/genocide was the Holocaust, which these students seemed mostly unfamiliar with—until I compared the Holocaust to the Rape of Nanking. Then we has a moment of cultural understanding where we all recognized the cost of hating one another based on race, religion, or ethnicity. And I knew why it was so important for us to come to China.

Disclaimer: This is Ted, Ann’s husband, posting under her account, so it should be noted from the start that anything said is my own personal opinion and not representative of the network and its sponsors. Nor, since I have only just arrived in China, should the trials and tribulations that I describe be seen as anyway indicative of the management of the trip or any one else’s. It is suggestive only of my own general lack of common sense while traveling, and perhaps, something of the ailing state of our nations airlines. Of course, the airline industry has suffered greatly for the last decade, but I can’t help but feel at some level, that this suffering is greatly deserved.

Murphy’s law:  If something can go wrong it will.  O’toole:  Murphy was an optimist.

First off, I knew it was a bad idea to try and travel to China only a day after I finished administering finals to my English classes at Drexel. Already fatigued from three days of conferencing with students and a last ditch effort to clean up the house, I made an early morning trip to the airport with little in my carry on bag than 88 final exams and airline necessities. After long-time friend and limo driver Jason Mezey dropped me at the airport, I soon discovered that the flight for the first leg of the journey to Chicago had been cancelled because there was no crew. After playing ticket pachinko with the electronic kiosk, I was able to reschedule for a flight two hours later—but the printer jammed and sent me to another machine. After I logged in to that machine, however, it said I wouldn’t have a flight until the following day. Fortunately I checked with a real person behind the counter and discovered that I did indeed have a ticket for a delayed flight that would be leaving the airport, but had a good chance of missing my connecting flight to Beijing.

I didn’t think this would be a bad idea. I’ve been put up in hotels before, and usually the airline accommodations are good, sometimes I can even talk my way into getting a better ticket the following day. At the very least, I would have completed one leg of the journey and wouldn’t have to start over again from scratch. (I was pretty certain, too that long-time friend and limo driver would be neither if I asked him to pick me up again at six o’clock the following day). But apparently my past experiences with overnight lay-overs were not fully representative of all the evils that can plague one at the cheaper, seedier, less reputable hotels in the Chicago areas. After a three hour wait in line, I was directed to the “Days Inn Addison” roughly twenty minutes from the airport, and this is where my troubles began. 1) The hotel I was given a voucher too didn’t really have an official van, so it took more than two hours in the rain before I and my fellow voucher-holders were picked up in an unmarked van at the airport. 2) Upon arriving, the hotel accepted all our vouchers but pointed out that it had no restaurant so the meal vouchers were pretty much a lost cause. 3) Four hours after check in, we were called along with all other United customers back to the front desk, 18 of us in all; they had declined our vouchers because United claimed to have never given them out in the first place, suggesting that they were probably forgeries. 3) In spite of the fact that we seemed to be a rather large and sundry mix of con-artists, the hotel clerk seemed surprisingly kind to us so long as we were willing to fork over cash or credit card numbers, but if we wanted to return to the airport, they were sure to tell us that since our vouchers were rejected we would have to pay non-customer rates for the trip. 3) Since it was already the cheapest, seediest hotel I had stayed in, and since a tornado had just hit southern Chicago and was working in our direction, I figured I might as well just pay for the night and figure out the bill issues later. After finally giving up and going to bed, I was woken up at 11:30 by a Korean man who tried to deliver me a pizza. I finally convinced him that I had ordered no pizza, but by the time he left I thought back with regret—perhaps he would have accepted food vouchers? 4) Early in the morning the fire alarm started blaring; we were all evacuated from the hotel and watched in dismay from the street as smoke poured out of the breakfast area in what shall henceforth always be referred to as “toaster-gate”. Turned out that one of the customers tried to make toast in the microwave, and accidentally sent the timer for 30 minutes rather than 30 seconds. Fortunately, this problem was small enough that it could be handled by the two fire trucks and ambulance that arrived shortly thereafter. While written off as an accident, I secretly suspect that it was one of the customers subtle commentary on quality of service and accommodations. Better to burn the hotel to the ground and start over than try and refurbish or repair the dwindling status of the Days Inn hotel.

The one perk I had from United in having to wait twenty-four hours for the next flight was that they reassigned my seat to an economy plus seat in the emergency exit aisle. Unfortunately, when I checked back in to the airport the following day they reassigned my seating to a new one, shoe-horned into an aisle with a family of children that had also been grounded for the night. They were well mannered enough, though everyone of them also came down with air sickness over the course of the flight. The flight was otherwise uneventful, though of course every movie seemed to star queen latifah or matthew McConaughey. The flight arrived in Beijing two hours late, though. This meant that I missed the connected flight to Xi’an and ended up having to pay cash for the last flight of the evening. After the mystery hotel and toaster-gate experience, however, this seemed like only a small hiccup in the final journey. I was happy to turn over my paper Maos if it meant not having to spend another night in a strange city, wondering if Ann and the class were still going to be in Xi’an by the time I arrived. Sure enough, I made it just under the wire and Ann was able to pick me up at the airport with a kindly driver. I had never been more relieved. Now, here I am at last, at the palatial Garden hotel with its fountains and peacocks, and hall these nasty memories are already starting to disappear like mist. Perhaps this is just the Ambien kicking in, but whatever the reason for the memory loss, I say good bye, and good riddance.

It’s time to get this adventure off on the right foot. I look forward to meeting the rest of the group tomorrow.

(Us and a Buddhist Monk in Tiantai–loosely translated as Sky Mountain Altar)

A friend who visited China last year told me that what she loved about China were the people–their willingness to communicate with you across the language barrier, their openness and friendliness, their hard-work. This, too, is what I have loved so far about China. We’ve had an exceptional opportunity to learn from Chinese students about their country while we’re speaking English with them, but we’ve also had an exceptional opportunity to connect with different Chinese people as we’ve traveled from Nanjing to Tiantai and Nimbo and around Shanghai.

On June 1st, Children’s Day in China, we hiked around two Chinese natural scenic areas in Tiantai. For most of the weekend, we were the only Western faces we saw, and this, occasionally, literally stopped traffic. When we fed coy in a pond in a scenic area, Maura told us that people were walking by saying, “Who are these people?” and getting “Oh, they’re the Americans” from various people passing us along the path. Sometimes children are afraid to speak with us because we look so different; sometimes they call out a loud “hello” and when we respond with Ni Hao, they are surprised. Mary Ann goes up to them and asks them how old they are in English. Sometimes the children can answer, and sometimes the only words they appear to know are “Hello” and “How are you?” although English is taught in every school from kindergarten on. The photo above is of a grandmother and grandchild. Weiping and I spoke with the grandparents who were bringing the grandchild to the scenic area for Children’s day, and I asked if I could take their picture. The little four year old girl was quite animated when she saw her picture on my camera, but otherwise was as somber as the photo.

Chinese mother and daughter.

The great thing about this past weekend was we had several translators–Popo, Weiping, Ling Ling, and Maura all helped us bridge the language barrier. When Maura asked this mom if I could take her picture, she said sure, no problem, and then spent the next ten minutes trying to get her son in the picture (he had other plans) and trying to get her daughter to smile. It was great to be a Chinese natural areas and see Chinese people taking advantage of their own scenic wonders as a family. I finally got this photo of the little girl in her yellow sweater, and her mother said it looked “very natural.”

Because we were outside of the city for the first time, we also got to see some rural people at work. Since I grew up on a farm, I was fascinated by how the Chinese grow crops. Every bit of usable land is used, and the Inner Mongolian restaurant we went to in Tiantai had the best bok choy I’ve ever tasted because it was picked that day from their own garden. On Sunday morning, got up early and watched this farmer plow his rice patty with what I think is a water buffalo. It was amazing to watch. He was barefoot, and road on top of the plow, like he was surfing, until he came to the end of the row when he lifted the plow up and dumped the weeds, etc. on the ground. This particular field was immediately outside of our hotel parking lot, and you can see the walls separating the hotel from the field in the background. His friend came along and began sowing the rice. What struck me about this was that the rice sower put on long rubber boots. In the miles of ground we covered over the weekend, I saw one very small tractor, and the rest of the work was done by hand with simple tools. Even though the farm I grew up on was very small by American standards, we had at least 3 tractors of different sizes at any given time.

Plowing the field.

Clearing the plow. (I believe the plow was wooden.)

To get the pictures of the plowing in action, I climbed down from the pagoda where I was writing, and walked along the edge of the rice patty field on a raised wall that keeps the water in. While I meandered around the edge, I was really aware that if I fell into the well-fertilized rice paddy, no one was going to want to sit next to me on the bus ride back to Nanjing. Miraculously, I didn’t fall in. On the way back to the hotel, I ran across this older woman praying at an altar in the woods. She waved at me (at first I thought she was telling me to go away, but then she answered my “Ni Hao” and went to praying). She kowtowed at an altar within a few feet of the rice patties. This picture, for me, conveys part of the beauty and wonder of the Chinese people. Tomorrow I will try and write more about the exceptional Chinese students we have grown to know over our past few weeks in China, and our special visit to Kevin’s house to meet his family.

It’s been almost a week now, and I thought that I would be pretty adept at eating Chinese food. After all, I like it a lot, my husband is an excellent cook of Chinese, Thai, and various other Asian cuisines (on our first date he made hot and sour soup and beef with asparagus; he’s recently started working his way through a cook book of pot stickers of the world), so I thought, hey, a month in China, no problem.

Two Chinese banquets later, it is still no problem. I love Chinese food–for lunch and dinner. I’ve eaten jellyfish, the innards of bamboo, goose liver and green beans, bits of whole fish with its eyes in it, and shrimp with its head on. Weiping (see below) prevented us from eating pigeon. We may, however, have eaten frog. We’ve certainly eaten pork. And I’ve sampled some wonderful Chinese alcohol that you do shots of when your host toasts you (a necessary cultural competence!). But I haven’t quite managed to grow to like Chinese breakfasts.

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