The Mini FSP

There are a number of things that might have kept me from posting about this program until four weeks in.  Perhaps I never left Xining, having succumbed to what really was poison in the blood sausage.  Perhaps I never got on my flight, considering that the travel agent booked it under the name "MICTHELL."  Perhaps I got lost in Beijing's network of subways, hit by a reckless driver, or suffered a nervous breakdown upon realizing that out of the 20 million residents of this city, no one will understand my dirty puns.  Or maybe there is no internet in my dorm, or maybe there is but it's just really slow (often true), or maybe there's a national block on Blogger (also true) that I haven't been able to circumvent.  But none of these are the reason I have not posted.  I have not posted because I am a feckless urchin.  Also, because I'm having a good time.

Here we are, the entire program.  With me, of course, taking the picture.

The Music FSP this year has only five participants.  If you're wondering how this did not cause it to be cancelled, I too wonder.  Maybe they didn't want to scuttle the ship before its maiden voyage.  Sacrifice the virgin, if you will.  Near the end of New Zealand, the upcoming Beijing trip was beginning to assume an ominous feel, as the recipients of infomational blitzes dwindled one by one from ten to half that number.  Like we five were going to become the protagonists of an Asian horror film, and the other five had a ghostly premonition and dropped.

My first days in Beijing were disorienting, but pleasantly disorienting.  It was not so much culture-shock as a reverse culture-shock.  Coming from Xining, I experienced a return to certain conveniences of life in a crowded but smoothly developed city.  I thought, "Finally, they're speaking my language!" not because they speak English a lot here, but because the Chinese I learned in school is modeled on the Beijing accent.  Not the weird stuff they get up to in Qinghai Province.  I actually expected my interactions here to be brimming with people eager to practice English, but in fact few adults know much, and college students are often not confident enough to want to use it.  Since three of the four other participants on the FSP, plus the director, speak Chinese, group and individual conversations often slip in and out of Chinese and English.  Kui (the director) sometimes gets mixed up and speaks Chinese to us, then explains what she told us, in English, to a Chinese person we're talking with.

Our first evening, right off the bat, we had a concert.  All of Ligeti's Piano Etudes, which are, as the program title "Devil's Keyboard" suggests, dark and bizarre.  Like clocks and shrapnel.  But oddly mesmerizing.  It was like, "So, you want to go on a music program, huh?  Well, take a listen to this."

Beijing Concert Hall, actually the city's smaller venue since the opening of the National Center for the Performing Arts.

Mira's candid shot in the concert hall-way.

The pianist received maybe ten bouquets, probably from his students.  "He did a good job," said Kui, "but if you know Ligeti's work, you can tell there are some parts where he fudged it."  Ever the critic.

I had had qualms about living in Beijing for ten weeks.  I imagined noise, crowds, smog, nature withdrawal, and everybody simultaneously trying to rip me off.  Actually, I really like it.  Whereas I had pictured gray skies and low visibility over even small distances (indeed what I encountered when here for three days five years ago), the weather is mostly clear.  Sunny, if not always warm, but the temperature seems to rise every day. 

Chang'an (Long Peace) Road, the largest road in Beijing, which runs past the Forbidden City.  This section near us features a landmark we've dubbed the Shattered Rainbow.

There are crowds, but not everywhere, and not always.  Cities have circadian rhythms, and the flow of people builds and ebbs predictably.  (Imagine a time-lapse Koyaanisqatsi-esque shot of the subway.)  In China, I think people hold very tightly to such schedules.  I may be generalizing, but at the campus cafeteria at least, most people come within about fifteen minutes of it opening for lunch/dinner, and then almost everyone is gone an hour later.  One day it was too crowded so Weijie and I ate our noodles outside in the sun while getting weird looks from many who passed on their way inside.  Apparently word spreads, and our director told us that the staff were remarking on what free-thinking Americans we must be and wondering if we were trying to stage a protest.

A subway platform.  They're all pretty much identical, except some have doors to prevent you falling onto the tracks.

Chinese has a phrase ren shan ren hai, or "mountains and seas of people."  I know why.

The mad rush to transfer to the Batong Line.

I've developed a fondness for the Beijing Subway system.  Not having traveled much to cities with subway systems, I think only of the dirty confusion of the NYC underground.  Here, though, everything seems so streamlined and simple.  There are over a dozen lines, and they go everywhere and all connect.  You know where to go because of the color-coded subway maps which are everywhere.  It costs you 2 yuan to ride (about 30 cents) no matter how many times you transfer, which you can deduct from a fancy card you swipe.  Maybe this is how it works in all subway-having cities, and this is just the first time I've understood it.

The swarms of people have a sort of calming effect to them.  As if, confronted with so much of humanity at once, you forget entirely that others can see you or would even have an interest in doing so, tiny piece of the world that you are.  Crammed up against strangers on all sides, you don't feel claustrophobic.  Instead, for that time in the otherworldly space of the subway car, your personal space extends only to the boundaries of your skin.  Everyone is one another.

I swear this has a sort of feng shui to it.  Look at it branching out in the eight directions.

On the subway map above, I marked the closest spot to campus in black.  As you can see, we're pretty near center.  Two stops, in fact, from Tiananmen.  Beijing has five "rings" (2-6) which refer to concentric roads that run around it.  The little blue square route in the middle of the map corresponds to Ring 2, and the bigger blue one to Ring 3.  So we're in Ring 2 and can get to pretty much any important location in about 10 to 30 minutes.  Or just walk around and find bunches of shops and food stalls.  For comparison, the Chinese FSP is in Ring 5.  Ohoho.

For reference, here's campus:

A mosiac on an administrative building.

A curvy walkway in front of the classroom building.

A courtyard outside the performance hall and cafeteria.

A fountain in the center of campus.

The Practice Room BUILDING.  It has 14 floors.  Dartmouth music people, drool.

Oh yeah, this is the Central Conservatory of Music, the foremost music school in China.  We're probably only able to be here because our director went here.  There are about 5,000 students, and the campus consists of about what I took pictures of, plus dormitories.  Whereas at Dartmouth everything is spread out among quaintly named buildings, here there is the administrative building, the library building, the classroom building.

As far as what I'm actually up to, I have three classes.  One is a performance and discussion course, taught by the director, where we go to all sorts of performances throughout the city and then analyze and critique them in class.  The second is about Asian music (again just for us five students), taught by a Chinese professor of musicology who happens to also study NORDIC MUSIC at the UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI and speaks FINNISH.  He is me in 40 years, except if I had done music instead of poetry.  My third class is one-on-one lessons in a Chinese instrument.  I chose the dizi, or bamboo flute.

Inside the National Center for the Performing Arts, our second home.  We're here about once a week.  There are six stages within, and...no cameras allowed inside.  It's built like a symphony.  There's a ceiling with water flowing across.

Because Kui is a native Beijinger, she's able to take us out to lots of sightseeing spots, well-known and otherwise.  And the food!  Having spent most of my savings to avoid starvation while in Auckland, I'm amazed at how much this program covers.  We not only go to performances about three times a week, but out to eat quite frequently as a group.  I call it FSP (Food Study Performances).

Because you have to go to the Forbidden City.

And Tiananmen Square layed out before it.

A canal in Beihai Park, northwest of the Forbidden City.

Somehow buoyant and also motorized, the boat we road across the lake at Beihai.

I think Kui wins most adorable FSP director.  (Sorry Igoe...)  She's like a penguin!

An alleyway Kui was able to navigate us through.

Sometimes the things we do as a group might be a little hard to justify academically.  Occasionally we'll go out to eat, just cuz.  One performance was a DJ group at a club, and we accidentally showed up three hours before they started.  So instead we went to a bar, had a round of beers, and watched the band which at one point became pole dances, who we continued to watch.  Then, cold and desperately hungry, we found the only restaurant nearby that was both open and not hyper expensive.  McDonalds.  And THEN we went to the club, split a bottle of wine, and danced for an hour a half.  Yeah, it's pretty great.

The lit street of bars, with guys outside pestering to get you inside.  As you go down the line, the price of a beer (which you can ask the pester-men to get an overall priciness comparison) goes down, from 35 yuan to more like 15.

And on the way...  This sign is impressive in using a euphemism none of us had seen before.  Usually a sex shop will use the name "Adult Products" or "Husband and Wife Protection."  But no, this one is a "Convex Concave" protection shop.  The red lights below say "sexy underwear."

And of course I've explored on my own, usually walking until I get lost, then taking the nearest subway station back.

Spring blossoms, in Xuanwu Park.

I almost felt touristy-American for taking pictures until I saw a number of other people doing the same.

The day's newspaper pinned up at the park.

I decided to get my hair cut one day, so walked along a road until I found a haircutter's.  There was one with a pink sign, and inside eight or so fashionably dressed male hairdressers with huge dyed or gelled-up hairdos.  There were three levels of haircuts, at 20, 38, or 68 yuan.  I asked what the difference between the 20 and 38 was, and was told "it's better."  What the hell, I took the 38.  And, as an added bonus to getting my hair washed and cut while surrounded by attractive, stylish Chinese guys, they had a pet piglet!  Even better!  It was just running around outside, and sometimes inside, among the hair clippings.

Be right back, never leaving.

Two Tibetan Mishaps

I am going to tell you the story of my two possible ends on the Tibetan plateau.  Because symbols and dialectics are a poet’s fetish, I might say that one was by fire and one was by ice.  (They involved, respectively, cooking and a frozen lake.)  Evidently, I did not die, and to spare you histrionics, I was not actually close to it.  These were rare times, though, when I realized that, alone in another country, I had the ability to lead myself to a naïve doom.  (And for your benefit, one of them was scenic!)

Bird Island

My guidebook tells me that Xining is a common home base for travelers to Bird Island, a breathtaking (apparently) avian sanctuary on the west end of Qinghai Lake.  Qinghai means “clear ocean,” and is thus an interesting misnomer for a vast, dry, mountainous province.  Except if you take into account this huge lake, which is both the province’s identifying feature and its prominent aberration.

Fate—a messenger of concrete, wind, and gasoline—did not want me to go to Bird Island.  It was a long tussle between the two of us, but eventually Fate, like a parent the child must admit knows better, shook its head and nudged me back toward the safety of my hostel.

The first sign was failing to book a group tour.  My guidebook recommended cheap tours run by the Post Hotel on Fuzhu Road.  It gave the address—138 Fuzhu Road—but not the Chinese name of the hotel.  I walked to and along Fuzhu Road, only to discover that, at a certain point, construction made continuing impossible.  Literally, the road deteriorated into piles of concrete rubble, and the shops that were still standing were deserted.  Because most of the shops have no marked address, I could not locate 138 Fuzhu Road exactly, but am pretty sure it was beyond the threshold of destruction.

What I am pretty sure is the former address of the Post Hotel.

I gave up and hailed a taxi to the North Monastery, which was nearby.  The driver let me know that in March, there is not enough interest in Bird Island, and no such group tours exist this time of year.  May and June are the popular months.  He offered to drive me himself, though, for 200 yuan.  I parsimoniously declined.

While casually glancing at my map, I noticed the coach bus schedule.  And, lo, every day a bus ran to Bird Island to “tour the scenery.”  I left my hostel the next day at 6:45 a.m. to make the hour-long walk and just catch the 7:45 a.m. bus.  Again, Fate told me something was wrong.  There was only one other person in the bus with me, who said, “I guess it’s just the two of us.”  (With the driver, the perfect number of characters to start a road-trip horror flick.)  When pulling out of the parking space, the driver immediately ran into a barrier.  Fate was angry.  As was the driver’s boss, who came and chewed him out when he surveyed the damage, as I could see going on in the rear-view mirror.

(The ominous atmosphere is not helped by the fact that we’re studying the composer Ligeti for the music FSP, and I’m listening to “Lontano” as I write this.  Like from The Shining.)

Half an hour later we were on our way at last into the countryside.  The mood of the bus became more cheerful as I learned people on the side of the road can hail the bus, hop on, and pay the driver the amount a ticket would have been.  We stopped at another bus station, where two men came on board selling tea eggs, corn-on-the-cob, or big scallion pancakes.  One of them obliged my ridiculous attempt to buy a 3-yuan pancake with a 100-yuan bill, and gave me the proper change.  The sun was lifting, and with it, my outlook on the day ahead.

The Open Road

I had estimated the 200 miles to Bird Island would take about three hours.  But by that time, we were not even half-way there.  I began to wonder what was meant by a bus trip to “tour the scenery,” and whether it would include a return trip, as I had assumed.  As the other lady who started out on the chatted with the driver, I heard, “Yeah, I work out there.”  I began to doubt whether she was going to Bird Island at all, or just somewhere on the way.  One purpose of this trip, though, was to see the scenery, and so I did not mind spending long hours looking out the bus window.  Though in the summer, the grasslands are apparently green and splendid, not uniform tan of dormancy I experienced.

I saw flocks of sheep roaming the grass, which reminded me of New Zealand.  The herders and their yaks, less familiar.

An early portent.  A reservoir lake which was frozen over.  Living in New Zealand, I had forgotten it was winter elsewhere.  I figured, Qinghai Lake is big...maybe it's not entirely ice!

There were many small roadside settlements, or those a bit off from the main road.  I am compelled by abandoned buildings, and somewhat accustomed to them from rural northern Minnesota.  But there’s a special aura to a concrete shell of a building, or a building standing alone among bare, expansive hills.  Even buildings still in use that rise up out of a field have a sense of not belonging, of being temporary.  As if eventually, the must be abandoned.

Some villages were surprisingly energy-conscious, with solar panels and windmills.  This one reminds me of another, newer-looking one I saw, consisting entirely of identical yellow houses, each with a solar panel and windmill.

We'll just pretend the bus was going vertically at this point.  Sad un-tech-savvy truth: I cannot make this picture (only this one!) not turn on its side when it uploads.

An impressive mosque near Duoba that reminded me of The Thief and the Cobbler.

In the distance, a village with more traditional architecture.

One day, horizontality will overcome.

This abandoned fuel station gives me chills.  But, oddly, good chills.  I wanted to get off the bus and run around in it.  I wanted make love in it.  I wanted to embody it.

After almost five hours, we had made it to a comparatively large town called Gangca, complete with its own bus station (meaning a parking lot with adjacent ticket office).  According to the regional map I kept checking, this was about 2/3 of the way to Bird Island.  It appeared to be the de facto end of the line, seeing as everyone got off but me.  Just as I was about to ask the driver if he was going back to Xining that day, he leaned toward me himself and asked, "Do you really want to go to Bird Island?"  He told me that the lake is, indeed, still frozen over.  I asked him if there were any buses running from there back to the city.  He told me not today.

It was at that point that I realized that I actually could end up getting myself killed.  Especially had I known no Chinese, and as a result ignored any advice given me.  Bird Island, by nature of being a tourist attraction, means a bus line runs there as a final destination.  Unlike, assumably, most other bus destinations, which are towns that can offer emergency accomodation.  Where you're supposed to buy a return ticket from Bird Island itself, and why the bus line still runs all the way there in March are mysteries to me.

I asked the driver if buses were running to Xining from Gangca, and it turned out yes, in just an hour and a half.  I decided to walk around, grab a bite to eat, and then have a pleasant five-hour return journey seeing the scenery on the other side of the road.

Prayer flags over the highway coming into Gangca.

The Tibetan Buddhist mantra ཨོཾ་མ་ཎི་པ་དྨེ་ཧཱུྃ ("om mani padme hum").  This is linguistically interesting because the syllables come from Sanskrit, not Tibetan.  To account for retroflex stops and word-final nasals, the scribes made up backwards letters and circles to put above others.  As a result, the most common thing you'll see written in Tibetan includes non-original Tibetan letters.

Tantalizingly close...

Another ominous sign leading into Gangca.

Gangca itself was simple, but charming.  There were two roads like main streets, lined with restaurants and stores.  A market with cheap goods ran between them.  There was also a large public square, with no one in it that I saw, and some other unnotable buildings.  My most interesting, almost eerie, impression was how the town dissolved into the countryside.  Near the edges, the buildings were falling apart or abandoned, as if the emptiness were slowly encroaching.  I felt almost like a non-person, five hours from the closest center of civilization, which was still more remote from anything I'd ever known.  Gangca felt like an Asian Brigadoon I might enter and be spirited away into, having not been witnessed for days by anyone who could identify me.

A initial view down the road from the bus.

An engaging statue "downtown."

A view of bread vendors at the market.

The alley that was home to the market.

You could tell by the bilingual signage that Tibetans were the prominent ethnic group here.

Contrast with this sign (not in Gangca, but back in Xining) which exhibits a special Chinese-character font used to express exotic Tibetanness.

You can tell I was trying to be furtive as I took photos, to not look ignorant or rude.  The one I think I took behind my back.

Inside the Tibetan restaurant I ate at, sharing a table with an older Tibetan couple who were quite friendly.  Then for some reason they were moved and I got businessmen instead who didn't talk to me.  Anyway, the picture is blurry because I felt like everyone was watching me and took the picture furtively, backward through my armpit.  When uploading the photo, I saw that yes, they were indeed looking at me.

An empty-feeling alley near the town's periphery.

Toward the vanishing point.  These all used to be storefronts.  Their bold colors make them all the more wistful under the dust.

But, as you see, from this place of vanishing, which felt like another dimension, or the surface of another planet, I have returned.  To do more dumb shit.


Blood Sausage

I should not have eaten the blood sausage.

From the first time I saw it on the menu, I was aware that it was a local dish.  I recognized it at a Muslim market, but was too shy and germ-conscious (I know, me) to buy it there.  I tried to order it at the restaurant in Gangca, but they did not have any at the moment.  I was on a mission, though, as I get with food conquests.  I was going to lose my blood sausage virginity.  (Which, incidentally, has to be the most unsettling innuendo I've ever made.)

I found a Tibetan restaurant on the north side of Xining.  After shyly being shown my table with room for six or more, I made my bold order: milk tea, meat pastry, and blood sausage.

The g(l)ory!

The waitress brought it to the table, wiped off the knife, and handed it to me.  Sagely, she asked if I knew how to prepare it, and of course not.  She expertly sliced off the ends, then cut off two chopstickable sections and placed them in a dish for me.  I knew the dish was made of blood, of course, but had expected it to be cooked to a uniform consistency, or for the blood to be congealed.  No, this was a flamboyantly bloody dish.  It dripped out the middle when cut, onto the plate, the knife, the chopsticks.  This struck me as hilarious, for how gruesomely realistic it was, how it confronted you with the blatant death involved in its preparation.  It was also hilarious how eager I had been to reach this cringe-worthy moment.  When I cut into it, some blood squirted onto my pants and I chuckled.

I ate the two pieces the waitress had cut for me.  The flavor was distinctly sausage-like.  (I had thought "sausage" was perhaps a convenient euphemism, describing the carnivorous and cylindrical quality of the food rather than its consistency.)  There was something else, too.  Not the metallic twinge of blood in the mouth, but an earthy undertone.  Not bad, I thought.

And then it hit me like a 110-degree fever.  In an instant, I was filled with a dense nausea, spreading from my stomach to my head.  I had to sit sideways on the bench, resting on the decorative pillow.  My brain felt swollen.  My ears began to hurt.  When I opened my eyes, there was the impression of the restaurant, but clouded by a field of white and frenetic specks, like the disorientation of walking into a dark room from bright sunlight.  I noticed I was sweating profusely.  In seconds it was dripping off me, and I padded it away with the tissues they had given me to wipe the blood off my hands as I ate the sausage.  It was like every pore in my body was crazed to eject what I had put into it.  I realized that I might end up throwing up over the table, then throwing two hundred-yuan notes at the waitstaff as I ran out of the restaurant in embarrassment.

For a while I wondered if I had eaten something toxic, a possibility for a weak American constitution eating something made of blood in the middle of China.  But then I reasoned that few poisons act within seconds.  No, the reaction was psychological.  While my conscious found the experience novel and even humorous, my subconscious revolted.  It was as if I had done something that, by all standards of biology and morality, was anathema.

I realized how deep culture and habit run.  I can practice and embrace open-mindedness, but my organs and conscience have been trained differently.  As much as Mitchell the person wants to eat everything new, Mitchell the body is vocal about its limits.

After a mortifying eternity, my nausea calmed down mostly, and I could move freely again.  (I was not poisoned!)  I tried, feebly, to call for the the waitress, explaining that I was sorry, but I could not finish the sausage.  She seemed not to hear me.  Instead, I pushed the blood sausage to the corner of the table and focused on the meat pastry which seemed to have apparated during the time I could only half-see.

There.  A proper dish.  A civilized dish.

I ate this warm and delicious dish while sipping my warm and delicious milk tea.  I tried not to think about the monster in the corner.  But the better I felt eating the other food, the more my rebellion kicked back in.  I had been confronted with the stark inalterability of my physicality and my heritage.  And I wanted to do one better.  I wanted to prove my body wrong.  I wanted to trust that the mind could triumph.

I weighed the intelligence of the decision.  After all, I had only a short while ago suffered the most sudden and severe bodily reaction of my life by eating this blood sausage.  But hell, I have only so much time left where "young and reckless" is an excuse.

I ate more than half of what was left of the blood sausage.  Bite by bite, concentrating on the flavor rather than the sight of it.  When I was finished, I could say I was finished because I was full, not because I was disgusted.  (I was full, too.  I had eaten that whole pastry.  Look at that thing.)

For dinner, I was not in the mood for mutton sausage noodles, as it was too reminiscent of lunch.  I was determined not to lose my lunch later in the day, as that would indicate a failure of sorts.  Instead I opted for the purest foods I could think of.  Bread and fruit.  A meal of aesthetics.  A meal of ablution.

Nothing in these sumptuous swirls could hurt me.

Dragonfruit, mangosteen, and mango.  The first two both new flavors for me.

The dragonfruit has a surprising white flesh, with the consistency of kiwi.

The mangosteen rind is distasteful--inedible in fact.  But the creamy white sections, one of which contains the pit, have a luscious, flowery flavor.

While my palette was cleansed by the fruit, I smelled blood sausage on myself for the rest of the day.  How, I wondered, was this possible?  Then I noticed it was not a novel smell.  It was a long-familiar smell--the spiced, slightly greasy-smoky scent of the city itself.  The foreign smell that had contributed to my initial stomach-sick homesickness.  Now I had truly--viscerally--internalized it, and conquered.  And I was exuding it myself.