China. It is vast. Our travels consisted of one overnight train and 4 domestic flights. It is populated. Land of over a billion. You have to experience it to understand critical mass. The Forbidden City is far from forbidden. It is polluted. The smog makes your eyes water and you walk in an ever lingering layer of polluted grayness. Plastic bottles stack up high in landfills. It is noisy. Never a hour where a honk is not heard or a hacking spit of gob lands near you. It is toxic. Always wondering if there's lead in the paints. It is restricting. Not once was able to access my blog. It is aggressive. Pushy is an understatement. With the masses, it really is survival of the fitness. From shoving to get subway seats to budging through little kiddies in line at HK Disneyland, the term 'queue' doesn't not exist. It is consuming. All the name brands are here along massive glitzy avenues with crowds of shoppers wanting more, more and more. It is connected. Everyone has a cell phone. Rail tracks are being laid to link unthinkable rugged terrains in the furthest reaches of the territory. It is rapid. Fast trains zoomed us from Shanghai to Suzhou in 30 minutes. You can take the bullet trains connecting Beijing and Shanghai and onward to the Silk Road in record time. It is ancient. The terracotta warriors date back 2000 years. Peking Man used fire and basic stone tools 600 000 years ago. It is agnostic. Not a sign of Easter here. It is communist. I feel an eerie sensation of a third eye watching. It is emotional to witness the faces of elders watching the raising of the red flag while young pioneers stand in salute with their red sashes around their necks. Mao smiles from the huge portrait that adorns the Gate of Heavenly Peace. A guard dare not smiles at the crowd. A line waits hours to see the Great Helmsman in his mausoleum. It is haunting. I get chills thinking about the tanks which rolled along Tian'an Men Square suppressing prodemocracy protesting students in 1989. How is all gets swept under the concrete rug. It is draining. My emotions get the better of me here. It is hard to explain. I am wiped by week five. It is corrupt. Fake jade stole to my mom, stolen paintings from our hotel and discovering that bribery works. It is fake. Knockoffs abound. A whole pirated film fest in Sichuan on a sick day. It is self centered. With the one child policy, I see little emperors and empresses being closely guarded. Play dates are more difficult to come by as everyone seem to protect their own. The intergenerational family unit is disintegrating, no longer residing beneath the same roof. It is disturbing. Ai Wei Wei, artist and activist, is arrested a few weeks before our arrival. The Jasmine Revolutionaries mysteriously disappear. Tourists are denied entry to certain destinations while monks show tanks on their cellphones. It is modern. The Beijing of bicycles has been taken over by a continual stream of automobiles in a perpetual traffic jam. A disappointing rickshaw tour of the hutongs (narrow alleyways of old neighbourhoods) in Beijing, lead us on a money grabbing tacky visit to swanky real estate housing catering for the Olympics, making me wonder where the original residents disappeared to. It is foreign. I can't understand a word or read the slogans on the walls. Ni hao and xie xie are in my limited repertoire. It is hard. By far, the most difficult part of my travels anywhere. I connect with neither the country nor its people. There is even a greater disconnect with my heart and soul. Even the most prettiest of landscapes are tainted with a superficial wash.
Yet it is my heritage. The reason we decided to pay China a visit in the first place. With its poor human rights record, I hesitated to travel here. I eventually decided it was important to come and witness it for myself. In doing so, I leave with more questions than I have answers. With more frustrations than insights.
The journey here, however, was special on another level. We had a family reunion in Beijing. From there we traveled together as an extended family for 3 weeks to Yunnan Province and then to Shanghai. My mom, dad, my sisters Auntie Angie, Auntie Mandy and their husbands Tony and JJ made their way here. We organized a family tour which provided us with our own personal guide and van. Lisa in Beijing, Eric in Dali and Ivy in Lijiang. They were all very pleasant. Lisa liked to laugh, Eric presented us with roses and Ivy loved to sing. The sights were pretty enough. The green rice paddies, the old cobblestone roads of the old tea and horse caravan trails, the colonial architecture in Shanghai, the grandeur of the Snow Dragon Mountains to name a few. However, the treasures and culture which I had expected to find in this ancient civilization did not reveal themselves to me. The real beauty of this trip was spending time with my family. It was the smile on my mom's face along the Great Wall, standing strong with all her girls surrounded by a canvas of pink cherry blossoms. It was the endless enthusiasm of my dad to play hacky sack at the Temple of Heaven and the thrill of riding a tadem bike. It was playing family majong in Shaxi, enjoying communal meals and cycling along country roads in Yunnan. We laughed, we vented and we vomited. We supported one another in all our trials and tribulations. Mao may have his slogan of Long Live the People's Republic of China. I prefer to rejoice in the Lau Reunion.
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