The Laowei Dialogues

First Dialogue

1: Do you see the foreigner?
2: The one with the prunes?
1: Yes, the girl with the bag of prunes.
2: Why do you think she has purchased prunes?
1: Perhaps her system is in a state of crisis.
2: She seems too sprightly to need to eat a prune.
1: Perhaps the system of a loved one or family member is in crisis.
2: Aha! Good thinking!

Second Dialogue

1: Where should I drive my expensive Mercedes?
2: Straight into the foreigner.
1: Which foreigner?
2: The one with the satchel of prunes.
1: But she is on the sidewalk.
2: So?

Third

1: It is a pity that the price of prunes is so high.
2: Yes, I pity those who need the aid of prunes.
1: Like many of the members of the Harvard Alumni Association currently in Xi'an.
2: Indeed. They are in bad moods.
1: Lethargically so.

***

These small pieces were inspired by my wanderings last night and by the language textbooks I've been browsing at the stores. I love language textbooks. They make everyone sound ridiculously stilted. I read a few pages of "Office Speak the Quick and Easy Way." My favorite sentence "Did you hear about the events in the marketing department?" And no explanation! What happened in this fictitious marketing department? Was there an upheaval? Did someone miss their flight at the international terminal of the airport which is on your left, past the sign?

We had the evening to ourselves. So I went and wrote the entry from last night, and when I returned to the room, my Mom was asleep. The time was 5:45. So I went to the hotel gym and returned to see if she was awake and would like to go explore. She was not awake. So I went exploring and also to buy prunes for certain people who have claimed that their stomachs are troubled by our diet.

Xi'an has a smaller foreign population than Beijing, so in the supermarket/department store, I was an object of much curiosity. Laowei is the word for foreigner and small children whispered it to their mothers and their mothers wondered what I was doing in a store where most of the pants would serve me well as mittens. I bought the prunes and walked around for a while carrying the prunes. I was also hoping to calm down the small taste of stir-crazy that was spinning in my head.

I didn't have enough Chinese money - yuan - to eat out so I went back to the hotel where I had pizza and beer. This did the trick. Pathetically, indeed, - sitting alone munching on pizza and drinking by myself in a hotel bar that is supposed to mimic an American sports bar. It got slightly more pathetic when a possible prostitute wandered in and began drinking. I say possible prostitute because her shirt was very explicit. If it had words on it the word might have said "look at my breasts and nipples through the thin fabric of this shirt." In lieu of words, the shirt simply displayed her breasts and nipples.

I might be wrong. It might be the fashion here. I doubt it. There's a fair preponderance of business travelers running around here.

Anyhoo, I woke up this morning (5:20am, OPT) and felt much better. Relaxed, ready to sightsee. It was also sunny out, which helped this very industrial city gain a measure of charm.

And now I can focus on talking a little bit about the Great Wall and the Terra Cotta warriors and describe them in terms better than "awesome" -

The Great Wall was awesome. In the legitimate sense of the word, implying awe. It's not continuous any longer, but certain sites have been preserved for the tourist crowd. Some are very touristy, I understand, and others are very rural. We split the difference by going to Mutianyu. It's about a 2 hour drive from Beijing - 3 in horrible traffic. Upon arrival we were met with the standard chorus of vendors.

American museums and sights have gift shops. Regulated gift shops full of standard tchotchkes, run by the museum or the park service. Chinese sites have hundreds of vendors, independently run, all selling slightly different versions of the same goods: Mao watches, lighters, plates, little red books, tableclothes, t-shirts. At the great wall many of these stalls also sold "North Face" coats. The vendors are insistent, strong, and will, if need be, grab you. It's unsettling.

If you want things you are supposed to bargain and you can get people to desperately low prices - pennies for t-shirts. One American dollar for several. And if you look and turn and leave without bargaining, they will cry out that they have a cheaper price, for you, their friend, don't you remember me? And if you keep going, some of them will grab you. I got grabbed by the wrist and pulled up stairs on the way back. A tiny lady with short hair and strength that alarmed me. I had to spin my wrist in a faux self defense move to keep going.

It's terrible. It's terrible to not get anything and it's terrible to bargain. Who are you to get the price of a crappy t-shirt from 120 yuan (roughly $12) to 15 yuan - two bucks? Mainly because it's impossible not to be conscious of the privilege you have and represent - guilty about it. I was. I know it's a standard traveler's trope - encountering the dispossesed. Which makes me feel strange to write about it - like another level of exploitation or ignorance on my own part. But that's what happened. I don't know what the right way is. I bought a t-shirt for less than the price asked. I tried to hustle down and not look interested in anything.

Aside from the chaos at the bottom, the top of the Great Wall is magnificent. We got to stay up there for about an hour, and walk back and forth from guard tower to guard tower. The great wall is also on top of extremely forbidding mountains and winds and switchbacks to the horizon in front of you. It's incredibly beautiful. I had a hard time imagining the Mongol hordes attacking up a mountain at the wall, but I guess they did pretty well at it. So, for a while I pretended I was a guard and I could see Mongol hordes on horseback. Mainly I took a lot of pictures of the mountains (mountains! the world is not a flat prarie!) which will not be as awesome when they are developed, but will help me remember how excited I was to be up there.

Today, we visited the tomb of the man that built the Great Wall. Qin Shihuang di. The first and only Emperor of the Qin dynasty which lasted from 221-208BC. He was instrumental in unifying China, driving the hordes back, building the wall, standardizing coins and the written language and being a complete bloody tyrant megalomaniac. I know this about him in part because in 9th grade I wrote my very first history paper on the tomb of Shihuang di. I believe that I used one source, a National Geographic magazine and quoted extensively from it.

This man's megalomania led him to develop a tomb that stretched over 56 acres. And, in 1974, local farmers, digging a well discovered a terra cotta head. Upon further excavation, over 6000 clay soldiers, all live size, with 300 different face molds, were discovered standing in ranks in three locations around his tomb.

Seeing them. Well, I'm not sure how to really describe it yet. I'm just amazed that it was done. That humans created these, painted them, ordered them, and then I'm back on a trip to see them because evidently humans like to see things that humans have done. People do things, eh? Build big walls, weapons.

And in their free time, like we saw in a local museum yesterday, make little depictions of what we do for fun, or what's pretty. And, until recently, bury it with us, maybe along with some unwilling servants and women.

I keep having unprofound thoughts about what they'll dig up from us. Cubicles? "Here, in this place, the Americans created many workspaces that symbolized their economic prowess." Skyscrapers? Toilets, both western and non-western.

So, that's Xi'an. Tomorrow we see the local Muslim culture and head for Guilin, where there is, I believe, mountains noted for their beauty. Good.