Retro-Fever. Now with pictures
OK. So, when last we left our erstwhile hero, he was lying on the floor of a cold, cramped rented room in the ancient Chinese city of Pingyao.
No. This isn't another write up of a D+D game.
Yes, at the moment, I am your erstwhile hero. If you don't think I'm an especially heroic-type person, well, join the club. We're trying to get a deal on T-Shirts.
The alarm on my cellphone woke me up at about 6:45. I say "woke me up" in the same way that every alarm "wakes me up": almost without exception, I was awake already, and the alarm only serves to make it official. I stumbled out of the room and down the stairs to the street, ascertaining that the doors were open. I immediatly turned around, went back to the room, and announced that the doors were open, because that's the thing to do. I also didn't actually wake anyone up (most of the people appeared to be asleep), but the people person who was still awake now knew that their beds were available.
I also got my gloves, which I'd left there for some reason. So, I was going back anyway.
No one followed as I went back to the hotel, pulled off my coat, used the bathroom with the excretory equivalent of a dying camel's thirst, and collapsed into the bed.
Did I get some sleep? You crazy? It's seven in the morning! I don't know, maybe you can fall asleep at seven in the morning, but my biological clock wasn't going to let an off-kilter pineal gland throw the whole system out of whack.* No. It's day now. No real sleep for you. I lay in the bed for a while, trying to drift away by force of will, but my will is as muscular as a baked potato. After about a couple hour's, my biological clock pointed out that it wasn't budging on the sleep issue; to emphasize the point, it whispered sweet nothing to my stomach glands; the gastric juices started flowing. Logic had lost this one.
* Yeah, fine, that doesn't make biological sense. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
Of course, it was nine by now, and the actual breakfast was gone. So I downed a couple cups of coffee, Moleskined about the previous evening, and then headed out into Pingyao.
The first and most important thing I did was, at long last, find a place that sells memory cards. I say "at long last" not because it's normally hard to find them. They sell them everywhere in China; I think I saw a tray of them next to the hair dye at the 7/11. The problem was, I kept not getting one, even though my camera sorely needed one if I was going to actually use one, because the pictures it could hold without a card proved insufficient on the rare instances I remembered to bring my camera somewhere. And now that I was dedicated to get a flash card once and for all... I was stuck in Pingyao. Now, as I said before, Pingyao only has a veneer of the ancient. Any place that has "Everybody" karaoke... Well, yes, it's old, but not ancient.
And for a while, that was a good way of summing up the camera selection.
I went from store to store, seeking a camera memory card. And everywhere I went? Film. Film, film, film, as though it were still the 1990s. At last, I found a man with memory cards, and was able to convince him to part with half a gig of camera memory for far more than someone who was mentally and (at that moment) physically capable of haggling. Feeling in somewhat better spirits, I started snapping pictures as I walked down the road, stopping at a stall to pick up a cheap air-powered plastic pellet gun, of the type which other people had been shooting at each other yesterday.
Which brings us to the street merchants which I'd alluded to in the previous posting. Now, the main road I was on (well, mentally it was the main road, because that's the one the hotel was on; the one I'm about to talk about was probably just a little narrower, but "main" is purely a subjective term here) was no slouch in the ; the stores were packed in close, shoe shops and food shops and book shops and (film) camera shops; a bakery had put a cart out in front, to better entice passer's buy to sample the chocolate-covered cakes. This was capitalism, indeed.
Until you walked farther, and took a right. No: this was capitalism. The street seems narrower, not because the buildings are closer, but because the wares flow into the street like sand on the banks of a river. Most of them appeared to be antiques or handicrafts made to mimic handicrafts: metal opium pipes, a couple daggers, Buddhas, jewelry. A few had the cheap pellet guns that were on the previous street, or wooden swords, or western-looking hats. (I always notice the hats). And behind them, like cars double-parked, were the stores themselves, selling wares too precious to leave outside and unwatched: jade and paper. And masses of people, strolling past, all glancing, many browsing, some haggling, and perhaps a few buying. Enough to make it worth their while, one assumes.
Museums occasionally showed up on one side of the road. I went into a couple; the difference between the first and the second was almost purely academic. Eventually, I met up with some people for lunch. After lunch, I was feeling a bit ill (mostly due to the lack of sleep, I assume), and went back to the room to recuperate.
It didn't take that long; realizing that napping wasn't going to happen, I soon found myself outside once more, now in better spirits, headed for The Wall.
Pingyao, you see, is a walled city, like... well, like all cities were in warlike lands, before the advent of gunpowder made walls ineffective. I've been playing way too much Civilizations IV today. And from the top of the wall, you get a pretty good view of the city itself.
After climbing up and looking around, I went back to my room, dropped off my jacket and sweater (because I was honestly getting pretty warm at this point, although a fever that I'd felt coming on after lunch went away), and went back to the exploring. Which reminds me: one interesting thing about Pingyao was how many kids I noticed:
This wasn't because there are more children than there would be in Beijing (there might be; I don't know). But in and around Pingyao, apparently, every child is trained to go up to Western-looking people and say, in an adorable way, "Hello", and then giggle and run off at the response (be it "Umm... Hi", "Ni hao", "Ni hao... Shit, Nimen hao", or whatever else).
Also, on the way back, a man asked me if I could pose for a picture with his daughter. Well, say I, why not?I'm obliging:
Yeah. I don't look well, do I?
I'm going to skip over a long chunk of time; stay with me.
After dinner (which was good; we had mantou, which never steered me wrong before), I went out again, alone this time. The hotel had given all the people who'd been stranded outside tickets to the Lantern Festival, which otherwise would have cost ten yuan to enter. What, you may well ask, is the Lantern Festival?
Have you ever been to the Magic Kingdom? Have you ever seen the Main Street Electrical Parade? Dozens of floats, all lit up like a fifties-style future?
Imagine that, only stationary.
And Chinese
It brought something into focus for me, though, an insight which I thought I'd share with you. Because, as I walked through the fair, a feeling of semi-profound understanding passed over me, as I walked past the people wearing Manchu costumes:
and adorable robotic dancers in pastoral settings:
This isn't what up-and-comers do.
We hear all the time about how China is the second super power, how whenever we go the way of Spain and England it'll be the Chinese who replace us. But under Stalin, under Khrushchev, hell, under Yeltsin, I don't think the proletariat was dreaming about the days of Tzarist Russia. But here I was, in a place which (as far as I could tell) average Chinese citizens considered a tourist definition because it resembled the past, wandering through a celebration of the New Year, the Year of the Pig, which was at the same time a remembering of what had gone before.
A Superpower doesn't do that. A Superpower needs to think about the future, not recollect the past. A Superpower's best days are always yet to come.
But China's best years feel yester. Let's face it: For thousands of years, China was the big man on campus; history forgets this, in part because it declined against the West over the past six hundred years, but also because (compared to most of Europe) China was relatively monolithic. Certainly, there were civil wars, and peasant revolts, and new dynasties, and changes: but China itself endured, the Middle Kingdom for six millennia. And, until the Opium Wars ruined China on a psychological level, forcing it to see how the rest of the world had overtaken it, the world was divided into two parts: 中国, and the Barbarians.
Of course, the China of today could kick the China of yesteryear's ass on many, if not all fronts. But that's beside the point. Because (and yes, I understand I'm psychoanalyzing an entire nation based on absolutely nothing more than a fleeting sense of profoundness. Makes sense to me), to the Chinese, their civilization has gone nothing but downhill, probably since the Qing claimed the Tien Ming, almost four hundred years ago. The Manchu failed, the revolutionaries and warlords of the teens failed, Chiang Kai-shek failed, Maoism failed. The Cultural Revolution was the last gasp, an attempt to establish that China belonged to the future by obliterating their ties to the past. But China is a land of memory. And as I walked through the Lantern Festival, I felt a real sense of understanding: to feel as though I were in a nation of thirty-something high-school heroes, constantly reliving their football glory days and never understanding that every moment is theirs to live. That only they could decide where China had reached it's apex. It was an epiphany: sudden, maturing, and fading as swift as sunset.
Then the moment ended, and I went back to the hotel, loaded a pellet gun, and became a kid again.
Look me in the eyes and tell me that I'm satisfied.