Double time

[Picture 1: Stan, Alysia, Chinese friend who's house I stayed at.  Picture 2: Stan, Hanna]

 

I haven't posted in a while, I know.  The internet was down, then travel, then things got busy.  But I'm back :)  Things have picked up.  I'm teaching some more English classes, doing three times as much orphanage work, going to the clinic more, and I've added a couple guitar students.  This just means less time for studying Mandarin.  Last week was good.  I went to Yu Ci (a city about 1 hour south of Yangqu and 10 times its size).  It mostly consisted of shadowing doctors and sitting in on public health lectures given by Evergreen.  I stayed with a Chinese family the whole time, which forced me to use my shaky Mandarin.  They had three turtles, a bird (who woke up early) and a garden right outside their apartment.  They were poor and extremely generous.  Very faithful Christians.  I liked riding my bike alone late at night -- it was a neat city to explore.

 

I have some new friends, Alysia and Hanna.  They'll be with Evergreen for six weeks.  Both are from Canada, but their families are originally from China and Hong Kong.  Since we're doing a lot of the same stuff, we see each other a lot and they've been fun to get to know.

 

And back again

 

Noises began to merge and shrink.  I was sinking into a muffled underwater world where sounds melt into vague blobs.  You could hardly distinguish the sudden cry of a cell phone from the din of Mandarin and the crinkle of stubborn newspaper pages refusing to turn.  An epic decrescendo engulfed me.  At the same time, my ears began aching.  First it was faint, then violent.  How could I end this madness?  Swallow.  Equalize.  At once, hazy hearing became crisp and my world realigned.  I was traveling through the longest tunnel in China (23 km) on a high-speed train coming back from Beijing.  We were nearing the tunnel's end, thus the changing pressure.

 

I looked at the window.  The window looked at me, wearing a 4 day beard on a 23-year-old face.  This reflection was abruptly erased by a thick rush of light.  We had exited, and were now hurrying past mountains tinged amber in the sunset.  The falling shadows cast each fold, each turn of terrain into running gradients that collided now and then, forming sharp contrasts. Every shade of green played upon the hills.  There were deep gorges where the ground sunk unexpectedly, making rows of earth stretch like giants' fingers from the heights.  And all around, the land was dug into terraces, planted with trees and garnished with an odd hut or two.  What a breathtaking finale to my travels in Beijing.

 

Then we ducked into another tunnel, and the face reappeared.  Reflections make lonely companions.  A familiar pang of homesickness punched me in the stomach and I had the distinct feeling of riding a tandem bike alone.  This train was taking me where I lived, but not home.

 

Our train made the station.  The city was so... small!  Honey, I shrunk Taiyuan.  And had they coated it in a fresh layer of dust since I left?  After my trips to Hong Kong and Beijing, the difference was jarring.  This was not cosmopolitan or modern, it seemed backward.  Yet I loved it.  I knew it better somehow.  You really gain perspective after getting away for a while, and sometimes you have to shed something for it to grow on you.  Sometimes distance brings people closer.  Sometimes leaving home helps you find it.

 

Palaces and parks

 

A few decades ago Beijing was rather flat. Two-storied buildings crowded an urban ocean that touched the horizons. It was a two-ply city. Then it modernized. They launched skyscrapers, spread out highways and built McDonalds. The Great Mall supplanted the Great Wall. But, not wanting historical landmarks to become history (or go unexploited), they preserved the old sites. And so I visited some yesterday: the Forbidden City and The Summer Palace. The Forbidden City was aptly named -- I forbid anyone to waste money on it. I think it's like the Mystery Spot. You only go to say that you've gone. So unless you're a history buff, you'll enjoy the exterior as much as the interior. Do see the Summer Palace.

 

There are parks too, like the one beside my hotel. A large sign welcomes visitors with a complete list of 20 banned activities. Keep this up, and they'll soon be prohibiting prohibitions! They would have done better to list what you CAN do in the park. Once inside, though, it is green, breezy and calm. The wind sets the weeping willows swinging and blows waves through the hairs of grass. It sails over the pond, causing it to bob. This is ideal for writing, so I am. At least I was. Now I am done.

 

To Hong Kong... O visas...

Any trip starts at the beginning, and my beginning was Evergreen's office in Taiyuan.  I flagged a cabby and got a fair fare to the airport (These days I'm harder to dupe).  Not far out we pasted a construction site -- a sure sign I was still in China -- and I was rereminded that this country is development crazy.  I mean it, they're really going to town.  Before me were 7 skyscrapers emerging from the earth.  These bones of  an embryonic city were swaddled in green tarps encrusted with mud, suggestive of a kudzu infested wood.  There were cranes bending over their work, too.  They formed inverted Ls on the horizon.  Then it was gone, and I was at the airport.

 

Plane travel is plane travel.

 

2000 miles (and 100 pages of Mark Twain) later, we landed in Guangzhou.  None of the signs were in English.  Wait, not true, one was.  The sign that said STAN, that was in English.  Mia held it.  She is a Chinese girl studying for her masters in interpreting and was a friend of a friend.  Now she is a friend.  If I had a sweetest-girls-I've-ever-met list, Mia would be near the top.  So gentle, so generous.  She acted as guide while we bus-hopped across town to her university.  We had dinner together, then for a haircut (you're welcome Mom), then into a Christian bookstore, then to the hotel where Mia had booked me a room.  The next morning we bus-hopped again.

 

These busses are something else.  I feel like I'm back in middle-school and getting stuffed into a locker... with 50 other people.  Or imagine a moshpit, but with 80-year-old ladies.  Funny story: I was slouching on the bus when this woman with the face of a happy raisin says "Stand up straight!  The best doctor is yourself.  I'm 80 years old.  When my mother was pregnant with me, she was sick.  That's why I have this black spot on my neck."  I got this secondhand via Mia, my personal translator.  My posture has improved dramatically since then.

 

Next up I took a subway to the train station.  Then a speed train from Guangzhou into Hong Kong.  There must have been 20 countries represented in our car.  My favorite was this cute little Arabic-babbling girl, maybe 6 years old.  For two straight hours she laughed and danced up and down the aisle.  I didn't laugh and dance up and down the aisle.  No, boring me, I just read another 100 pages of Mark Twain.

 

Then the end.  We were there.

Door to door health salesman

Hop on a bike, and five minutes of downhill coasting brings you out of Yangqu and into Shanxi countryside. Everything is dry, yet somehow they coax crops from this chalky soil. It is also hilly, so the fields inhabit quaint terraces rising like amphitheaters above the road. I feel like I'm riding through a topographical map.

 

Last week I went on a house call with Dr. Kurt Elliot past the farms and up into the mountains. Kurt is about my Dad's age and looks identical to John Piper. We met downtown, and after stowing some medical supplies in a black and turquoise fanny-pack that a middle-schooler wouldn't be caught dead in, we set off. Did I mention we were biking up a mountain? Soon Kurt was out of sight. Luckily for me we planned to rendezvous at a Catholic church near the top, a big one. You couldn't miss it. So I pedaled on, glad for the stiff wind blowing in the right direction. Gusts would lift dust into eerie curtains and let them play in the air before dashing them to the ground. The snow (yes, it is still below freezing... I don't want to talk about it) glided silently by. Eventually I arrived. Be still my beating heart.

 

Kurt let me peek into the church, then we rode to visit his patient. He lived in a traditional Chinese home -- courtyard with raised garden, pig pit and outhouse next to a modest brick structure with cement flooring. There were three rooms arranged like a row of jumbo-sized mailboxes. Inside, a TV squawked in the corner. Above this hung two pictures, one of Jesus and one of Mary. There was a naked light bulb strung from the ceiling.

 

Kurt broke out his stethoscope and blood-pressure cuff -- merely a routine checkup. Things looked good. The patient laughed and talked nonstop, not hiding his sole upper tooth. Every smile swallowed his face in wrinkles and exposed a youth at odds with his real age. Only his shuffled step revealed the truth (or maybe it simply reflected the slow pace of life). But he was not afraid to die. "When God says it's time, it's time." We finished the house-call with a prayer. Then it was back down the mountain. Going downhill is glorious. I highly recommend it.

Creepy Ditch

Every Thursday afternoon I go to Creepy Ditch.  No easy task.  The van bumps and seesaws over 10 cm deep canyons in the road, jostling the packed occupants.  (China has officially cured me of car sickness -- I can now read anywhere.)  The traffic is thick and chaotic.  After almost two months of this, I've become numb to daily near-collisions and my heat-rate barely rises.  It's when the entire car goes berserk -- screaming a torrent of Mandarin two octaves above normal -- that I get afraid.  That's only happened once.  After rough highways and the maze of downtown Taiyuan, we move to the outskirts of the city.  The alleys become narrower, there are fewer shops and more garbage.  Heaps of wrappers and plastic bags marinate in sewage.  Feral cats and dogs grub through the mess, hopeful for a snack.  Then we turn left here, make a right, another left, and at last we're there.  Creepy Ditch.

 

It is anything but creepy.  I'm greeted by a pack of kids dangling on the gate bars.  They are happy and loud.  I can't tell if they're excited because we're there or because it is recesses, and suspect it's a little of both.  About four of them give us an official welcome as we enter the gate.  Usually they wear red handkerchiefs tied around their arms, heads or necks.

 

Suddenly, Jingle Bells blasts from the loudspeaker and the students stampede to their classrooms.  That means it's time to start.  I find my room, take a breathe, and go in.  They all greet me.  The timid ones steal a glance and then turn to giggle with friends; the bold ones shout a hearty "Hallo!" and wave furiously.  I'm glad I have a Chinese-speaking helper to keep order.  By myself, it'd be like trying to pick up oily marbles with chopsticks.  After calming them down I begin the lesson.  It's important to exaggerate everything (which I'm good at): it makes them laugh and understand you more.  By the end I'm smeared in chalk dust.

 

I love Creepy Ditch.  I will really miss these kids.

 

[Picture: four of my 4th graders]

Peek-a-boo

Reputation is everything.  If you come to China, you'll find that out.  They call it "having face," and it's entrenched in the culture.  The government does it, your neighbor does it, your twin sister does it.  I'm reminded every time I ride into town.  Crowning the heights above Yangqu, and prominent from the highway, is a temple.  It is three stories of red grandeur -- an impressive pagoda.  There's only one thing: it's a shell.  There is nothing inside.  It's merely a stage set.  Apparently the country got a face lift for the Beijing Olympics, and backwater Yangqu wasn't overlooked.  This would be like Milford erecting a 10 meter high George Washington statue if the Olympics came to Chicago.

 

At the people level, it's all about respect.  They will never criticize you, and you better not criticize them.  You also can't get angry.  Life is very passive aggressive here.

 

This idea of face isn't completely foreign to Americans.  Not at all.  Take for instance Facebook.  There you can manipulate your image ad nauseam (but remember to keep close surveillance on your wall and untag awkward pics).  Then there are blogs -- the ultimate way to Photoshop your life.  Plus on the street we have fashion, parlance, Starbucks and Macs.  Image is everything.  The difference is that Americans like to HAVE face, but few are careful to GIVE face to others.

(Aside: obviously I'm not completely against Facebook and blogs.  They connect people, which is good.)

 

Does God have face?  Yes.  One theme running through the Old Testament is the Name of the Lord.  God saves his people (and sometimes punishes) so that everyone will fear and glorify his Name.  I recently read Daniel 9:15-19, which talks about this.  It's in the New Testament too.  I read Luke 11:5-13 the other day.  There are probably better examples, but that's what came to mind.

 

Does God give face?  Yes -- in Jesus.  The perfect example of God giving us face.

 

I thought this was an apt post to include my picture.  Notice that I chose a decent one.