A Traveler in China - Part Two
By Harriet Vaulkhard
Outside the protective sweeping roofed walls of the Forbidden City , Imperial China is doomed. One walks out smack bang into Chairman Mao, his huge ugly face looking over the infamous square where hundreds of innocent students were brutally slaughtered. He keeps watch over a city where hideous buildings sprawl for miles and miles until they reach the shanty towns and factories. A city where thousands of cars puff clouds of thick smoke into the lungs of millions of Chinese, who cheer and praise Mao's name, while embracing the red doors as they exit the Forbidden City. And so it is all over China .
They are moving the factories inland, to clean up the air for the Olympics, to places like Zhengzhou , where I spent 11 months and where we must unfortunately return again for a few days. I have a few things to finalise with my company, my visa needs renewing and I have a few problems with the bank.
Chinese bureaucracy, what a joy! One stands for hours watching them as try to look important while stamping a billion pieces of paper. The electronic strip on my Bank of China card had died in Beijing . The only way to access money from my account was to return to the branch that issued it in Zhengzhou . There was nothing else that could be done, the man behind the glass shrugged while I gaped in disbelief.
In dire straits I asked my Father to send me money via Western Union and once I had the code I went joyfully to the nearest one. I filled in the form correctly, showed them my passport and watched in dismay as their faces creased into nervous giggles and they shook their heads. “Ni da mingzi shi Harriet Rose Vaulkhard. zhega mingzi shi Rose Vaulkhard Harriet.” Realising the confusion I explained in my limited Chinese that in Western culture the family name goes at the end. Still they shook their heads. A westerner is never right. More trouble awaited at the PSB visa office. The officer on duty happily mounted his high horse with great importance and told me it was time to go home. Realising I was about to burst into tears and lose a lot of face, my friend Niall took over. Oozing with flattery he talked the policeman into allowing me just four weeks. In the end the horrid man conceded; he would think about it and let us know in three days. “You should have bought him a good bottle of baijiu or some expensive cigarettes,” a Chinese friend offered helpfully after the ordeal.
There is not much to do in Zhengzhou , and I could tell Niall was not impressed with orange smog hanging almost below the trees. Still, we had three days to kill. A visit to the shaolin temples two or so hours away is a pleasant way to spend the day but the monks try to squeeze you for every penny you have.
“When I first came to China ,” my tai chi teacher told me, “I spent all day practicing with a master at a Shaolin temple. At the end of an exhausting day I felt uplifted. When my master invited me to join him for a game of pool I was surprised, but not as shocked as I was when he ordered a bottle of baijiu and two packets of cigarettes and proceeded to consume the lot.”
IIt is not only the alcohol drinking, meat eating, promiscuous monks that seem to have taken Siddhartha's “sinner” lifestyle and lost any sense of spirituality but most of the population of China. Spirituality has been sharply banged on the nose by the Cultural Revolution and communism. Altruism is not deemed a worthy characteristic and material possessions the only thing worth having. It is all about face after all.
After three days we received my visa and decided to make a hasty departure, discovering at the train ticket counter that the only available tickets to Guilin , South China , were seated carriages. So on we piled to a carriage jam packed with people. As the train made its eighteen hour journey more and more city folk got off and more and more peasants appeared, many without seats.
People squatted on the floors, smoking under non-smoking signs and spitting chunks of phlegm anywhere they liked. I got up to visit the bathroom and two jokers leapt into my seat. Their inbred faces gawped at me when I tried to take back my seat, and they just sat with their legs up, chewing sugarcane. I wasn't going to get my seat back so I stood up for about two hours watching my friend sleeping peacefully.
The final part to follow soon.....
|
