The End

Looking back over my trip to China so many thoughts pop into my head. It seems impossible to tether them all down into one blog post. Instead of picking ten revelations out of a possible ten thousand I decided to go back through the semester readings and my individual blog posts to connect them to my experiences in Beijing, China.

One: A Mongolian Outlook

"Unlike the other steppe tribes that had embraced the scriptual and priestly traditions of Buddhism, Islam, or Chirstianity, the Mongols remained anmists, praying to the spirits around them. They worshiped the Eternal Blue Sky, the Golden Light of the Sun, and the myriad spiritual forces of nature. The Mongols divided the natural world into two parts, the earth and the sky. Just as the human soul was contained not in the stationary parts of the body but in the moving essences of the blood, breath, and aroma, so, too, the sould of the earth was contained in its moving water. The rivers flowed through the earth like the blood though the body..." (Weatherford 32).


This quote from Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World remains one of my favorites out of all the readings from our China Mobile Journalism class. On our fifth day in China we hiked a remote section of the Great Wall spanning over five miles. At the top of one of the battlements I stopped to catch my breath. Looking down over the edge of the wall my eyes were drawn across the terrain and up the mountain range into the clear blue sky, which was so unlike the smog-covered Beijing. I was immediately reminded of the quite and thought how rational the Mongols were for worshiping this stunning and spacious environment.

Two: Cheaper! Cheaper!

"China has kept the value of its currency artificially low...the daily surprise is how inexpensive, rather than expensive, the basics of life can be. Starbucks coffee shops are widespread and wildly popular in big cities, even though the prices are equivalent to their U.S. levels.. But for the same 24 yuan, or just over $3, that a young Shanghai office worker pays for a latte, a construction worker could feed himself for a day or two from the noodle shop likely to be found around the corner from Starbucks" (Fallows 5).


Before arriving in Beijing, China I had heard rumors of how cheap everything was, from food to liquor to women. I'm not sure if I believed everything I was hearing or if I assumed people were over exaggerating, either way they weren't. For only 2 Yuan, the equivalent of $0.31 USD, you could travel anywhere on Beijing's subway network. 

En route to the Jade Garden Hotel, professor Rob Williams explains the

Beijing subway system to the MOJO'ers.

Three: Ouch. Sorry. Excuse Me.

"A less attractive side of China's social bargain comes in public encounters. Life on the sidewalk or subway may have been what Thomas Hobbes had in mind wuth his 'war of every man against every man.' As technology, Shanghai's subway is marvelous; as sociology, it makes you despair. Every person getting on a subway understands that there will be more room if people inside can get off. Yet the more crowded the station, the more certain there there will be a line-of-scrimmage standoff as the people trying to surge in block those trying to escape" (Fallows 22).

I thought having taken the Boston "T" I would have sufficient knowledge to navigate Beijing's subway system. False. Not only did you have to fight to board the subway, once you got on you were lost in a below-ground mini version of Beijing. Thank goodness there were English translations of each subway stop announcement. Probably one of the most interesting elements of the Beijing subway were the advertisements and signage.

A public safety ad on how to exit the subway in case of an emergency.

Four: Occupy!

"In America, the Internet was originally designed to be free of choke points, so that each packet of information could be routed more quickly around any temporary obstruction. In China, the Internet came with choke points built in. Even now, virtually all Internet contact between China and the rest of the world is routed though a very small number of fiber-optic cables that enter the country at on of three points the Beijing-Qingdao-Tianjin area in the north...Shanghain on the central coast...and Guangzhou in the south...Thus Chinese authorities can easily do something that would be harder in most developed countries: physically monitor all traffic into or out of the country" (Fallows 171).


Surprisingly I didn't miss the constant need to check, update, and simply stare at Facebook while I was in China. I was curious to see if access to Facebook,  Twitter, and Google Search was actually denied, but otherwise I didn't have time to update my statuses. This probably had to do with the fact we were constantly on the move...

One of the spookier aspects of our trip was visiting Tiananmen Square. Upon arrival I was ready to be awed by one of the most significant places in all of China's history. I wasn't. Someone (ahem ahem I think we know who) placed gigantic jumbotrons smack-dab in middle of the square. Each screen repeatedly played beautiful images of China accompanied by soft instrumental music. Had I not known what had taken place at Tiananmen on the June 4th, 1989 I would have never know.

Five: Street Life

"Route 312...is a crazy melange of mobile humanity. Every type of human land transportation is here, heading in both directions, as though a conference on the history of road transport is being held somewhere and representatives of every era are hastening to attend. t's like one of those evolutionary diagrams of man, emerging from the tansportational ooze. People walking with their knuckles scrapping the ground (not really), a scavenger pulling a three-wheeled cart...Men and women on simple, rickety bicycles...Men and women, helmetless, zipping past on little scooters. Men and women with helmets on, clearly further up the evolutionary chain, buzzing in and out of the traffic on bigger cooters. Car, pickups, cement mixers, local buses, long-distance buses, superdeluxe long-distance buses are all here too. Then, pulling up at a traffic light is the Homo erectus of his Darwinian scene. A shiny white 7 series BMW" (Gifford 29).


It was the strangest thing, almost everywhere we went in Beijing we saw the most eclectic variation of people I had ever seen. There were three "genres" of people I kept noticing as we toured Beijing. The first was the local street vendor or shop owner, the second was the hipster girl wearing short with leggings, high heel boots, glasses without lenses, and a boyfriends carrying her enormous designer-labeled purse. The third was the mysterious business man or woman who could afford genuine designer product and who drove the BMWs and Audi A4s, but who you never actually saw.

Six: Are We There Yet?

"Route 312 runs just south of an invisible line that cuts across eastern and central China. The line runs roughly along the thirty-third parallel and divides the country into two very different geolog geographical regions...The road itself divided...[t]he shiny new, four-lane Route 312 has taken much of the traffic off the old road. The old 312, one mile to the south, narrow and potholed, built for an earlier age, looks relieve that all the trucks heading west now take the freeway and it needs to deal only with local traffic. The two roads are in many ways symbolic of the two Chinas that are emerging across the country The new freeway, which cuts through the green fields without engaging with them in any way, is the road that the government wants everyone to see and use and marvel at. The old road, intimately connected with the lives or the villagers, is the one that tells the real story of rural China..." (Gifford 53).


One of the most impressive aspects of Beijing was its size. Our hotel was located in central Beijing, within walking distance of Tiananmen Sqaure, and we traveled to multiple sections of the Great Wall, the farthest being a two hour drive. On our way to the rural most section we kept asking Williams and Lily (our adorable tour guide) if we were still in Beijing. Then answer was always yes.

 

The view of Beijing coming into the city from the Airport Express Subway.

The view of the Forbidden City from Jianshan Park. 

The rural exterior of China from the Great Wall.

Seven: Place to Go and People to See

"I defy any reporter to make China boring. Almost everything about it is surprising and interesting, in part because it is so different from what you're expecting. One of the great things about living here...is just going with the flow, walking out in the morning with only a very vague plan and seeing where the day takes you. It's almost always somewhere you's never have predicted" (Gifford 177).


Another one of my favorite aspects of the trip was people watching. Even when I didn't notice I was doing it, I was still silently watching everyone around me. How they talked, walked, sat, ate, drank, texted, interacted. It was fascinating. I had always pictured the Chinese people to be a quiet and polite bunch, it was quite the opposite. They were friendly, talkative, and sometime a little pushy. Especially when it came to bargaining.

Melanie and Ryan after bargaining with locals on the Great Wall at Mitianyu.

Eight: Beijing Frogger

"In a Chinese automobile, the horn is essentially neurological - it channels the driver's reflexes. People honk constantly, and at first all horns sound the same, but over time you learn to interpret them. In this sense it's as complicated as the language. ...A single Chinese horn...can mean at least ten distant things. A solid hooooonnnnkkkkk is intended to attract attention. A double sound - hooooonnnnkkkkk, hooooonnnnkkkkk - indicates irritation. There's a particularly long hoooooooonnnnnnnnkkkkk that means that the driver is stuck in bad traffic, has exhausted curb-sneaking options, and would like everybody else on the road to disappear. A responding hooooonnnnnnnnkkkkkkk proves they aren't going anywhere. There's a stuttering, staggering honk honk hnk hnk hnk hnk hnk hnk that represent pure panic. There's the afterthought honk - the one that rookie drivers make if they are too slow to hot the button before a situation resolves itself. And there's a sort basic honk that simply says: My hand are still on the wheel, and this horn continues to serve as an extension of my nervous system"(Hessler 31).


At first I thought Beijing drivers were crazy people, dodging and swerving and NOT USING SIGNALS. "What is this madness?" I thought to myself. "We are going to die." Nope. I was surprised to discover the spectacular agility the cars and their drivers seemed to poses as the sped through traffic. Honking actually served as (somewhat decent) substitue for turn signals. After a while I wasn't phased. After all, if the cab driver I was riding with was still alive I would most likely survive the ride too.

Nine: Lost in Translation

"In China, it's not such a terrible thing to be lost, because nobody else knows exactly where they're going, either....Over time my learning curve never really flattened out. China is the kind of country where you constantly discover something new, and revelation occur on a daily basis. One of the most important discoveries is the fact that the Chinese share this sensation. the place changes too fast; nobody can afford to be overconfident in his knowledge, and there's always some new situation to figure out" (Hessler 47).


Being lost was one thing I could always count on in Beijing. I was lost in the language, in the customs, in the style, I was even lost in the food. But being lost in this situation was actually a good thing. If you weren't lost you obviously weren't a foreigner in China. Getting lost in the culture was one of the best things that happened to me on the trip. I had a fantastic time behind my camera lens observing every exotic detail that past in front of me.

This is the photo I was taking when I got lost from my group at the Summer Place...

That wasn't the fun kind of lost.

Ten: China Mojo a Gogo

"Are you ready?" (Rob Williams).


Nope. I was not ready for the experiences I was about have on this trip to China. Luckily they were fascinating and fantastic and at times even a little frightening, but nonetheless it was the trip of a lifetime. One I will never forget.