long overdue

I miss China. I know that's the last thing most of you expect of me, but I do, and I knew I would. This semester was really unbelievable, and mostly because of the people I met. I got to know my twelve other classmates down to the grossest, most intimate detail, and I love them. I miss them all, especially the venerable Courtney Morse, the girl with an eerily similar name and my sister from another mister. I miss Tenzin, my Tibetan host father, and Sophie, my three-year-old sister from Kunming. I miss the pigs from my home in Shaxi, and, more than anything, I miss the mountains at the edge of the world.

In China, I ate chicken eggs, quail eggs, and hundred-year-old eggs. I drank goat's milk, yak's milk, cow's milk, and warm milk. I traveled to the tropical rainforest, tea plantations, the Great Wall, and the himalayas. I lived with the Hui, the Dai, the Bai, the Mosuo, and the Tibetans. I shouted at waiters to blend into my surroundings. I pet nearly every dog I met. I went bowling. I witnessed a Tibetan bar brawl. I climbed mountains. I experienced what my classmates and I dubbed "China rage."

besides my whole, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" mantra, I am thankful that China pushed and prodded me in all these ways. Life in the countryside was hard at times, but nothing like it is for many of its citizens. Most of China continues to be rural, though the cities get most of the press. But if I didn't tell you what a fucked-up, backward, self-obsessed country China is, I wouldn't be doing my job. I don't think it would be a service to anyone except the Chinese government if I came back and didn't share the frustrations I felt, because China has a millennium to go if it is going to bring liberty and progress to all its people. I hope that everyone who reads this will keep in mind that the same country lauded for the most dramatic poverty reduction in history saw little reason not to throw thousands of democracy supporters in jail right before the Olympics.

Before I went to China, I believed the hype. I believed that the Communist Party might soon fall out of power, and that wealth was reaching everybody, and that the the consolidation of power might actually be doing some good. Now the idea seems ludicrous to me that China could ever change. Even its desire to "save face" abroad does not trump its Machiavellian obsession with greatness.

My experience in China was so meaningful because it helped me to understand that. A lot of things I saw enraged me. They made me appreciate more than ever to come from a country like the United States, which often deservingly receives a bad reputation, but which fosters discussion and diversity inside its borders.

Beijing is a nice city. I would have loved to have more time to explore it, in the way that I would like to explore New York or Hong Kong. But for all you potential China travelers out there, it would be a crime to leave China without seeing the mountains. Go to Tibet. And don't you dare let the Chinese government off the hook for anything.

From having little interest in the outside world to an obsession with being number one to a feigned concern for its own minorities' protection, China has a lot of the qualities negatively attributed to the US. In the past three and a half months, China often left me completely frustrated, as I struggled to understand so many things about its culture. From the six-fold leap in decibel level to the staged "minority shows" to strangers on trains telling me I would catch cold to the baffling continuation of Mao-worshiping, I felt like a martian who had disembarked a spaceship in a parallel universe. While Beijing may be an area of comparatively free political expression, my experience is that it in no way reflects the countryside and smaller cities, which might as well be another planet.

What really drove me nuts was that not only did China have very little idea about the outside world, but it pretended that it did, and would claim influence in a realm of areas in which it had very little business. I'm not being facetious; a country that prided itself on isolation for centuries is still very obviously dealing with the consequences.

On one of my last days in Beijing, I was riding a taxi and picked up a copy of Taxi Magazine, available for passengers' reading pleasures. There was a feature on a festival called "Christmas," which was suggested to be a spinoff of China's Spring Festival.

Not only was the introduction unapologetically uniformed ("Americans celebrate christmas for 7 days while Europeans celebrate it for 14"--really, how difficult is it to google the 12 days of Christmas?), but sexist: "even the stingiest Danish housewife will make sure her family has enough goose live paste to celebrate the holidays." Everything was stretched very thin to allude back to Chinese history, as the article proceeded to literally make shit up about each country, claiming that Mexicans ate only fruit on Christmas and that Swiss fondue was inspired by Chinese hotpot. This greatly offended my Swiss friend, to say the least. I went home and searched the web for anything to back up this connection; there has not been so much as a facebook note crediting the Chinese with fondue. The Chinese also claim that Italian pasta is not actually Italian at all, but brought from China by Marco Polo when it was in fact introduced by Arab traders in the 8th century. And for a piece on one of the most celebrated Christian holiday in the world, there was not a single mention of Jesus Christ.

I have a lot of good things to say about China, because I really did have an extraordinary and eye-opening experience, one of the most rewarding of my life. But I cannot with a clean conscience go on to tell any of that without first getting something off my chest.

China, get over yourself.

I had culture shock coming to Beijing. Compared to the rest of China, it was almost like an American city. The only thing I thought when I was looking out the bus window on the way from the airport to the hotel was, "money." Everything was sleek and clean and new, and when I went to the drugstore, it sold things like deodorant (which is simply not available in Yunnan) and people formed lines to get to the cash register. Buildings are made out of glass windows instead of smudged concrete and Beijingren are polite and apparently have political opinions. It was weird to walk down the streets and not be blocked by tricycle carts and linked-arm girls, and not to see fruit vendors and people shouting at shopkeepers.

at lunch at a nice restaurant yesterday, Kelly and I were raving about the food and the ambience when all of a sudden the huge heating vent fell from the ceiling and cut her as it came down. The waiters and Lu Laoshi hurried over to put medication on her side, and she was just sitting there awkwardly trying to eat as they were lifting up her shirt.

today we had a snowball fight on the Great Wall. Driving through the countryside, the branches of trees were covered in ice, and Ashley and I sang christmas carols. I bought a panda backpack.

I prefer Beijing to Kunming, but I don't think anything's better than northwest Yunnan. I miss the mountains already.

I sent my clothes to a washing woman in Shangri-La and they came out smelling like barbecued yak. I don't mind, because at least my clothes are clean and not filled with Tibet-dust, but I wish I didn't smell like a meat locker.

in the past few weeks, I left Shangri-La, stopping over in Kunming to stock up on snacks from Wal-Mart for the train to Guilin. I was on the third bunk for the 18-hour ride; below me were some very yappy Chinese ladies with tragic taste in fashion. I accidentally dropped the foil seal from my jar of peanut butter on their beds, and that sent them yapping off their rockers in unintelligible haranguing. I was happy to get off the train.

Yangshuo was pretty cool, a city outside of Guilin where all the karst is. Karst is limestone that has been chemically eroded to produce steep, jaw-dropping peaks covered in green, and it's really famous in southern China. I thought maybe the karst would be in this one little park cordoned off by the government, filled with boisterous Chinese tourists, and demanding a 70 kuai entrance fee to view from a crammed platform. Wrong. The bus ride from Guilin was spectacular, construction workers and pomelo vendors and rice paddies still brimming with water surround the towering, vertical karst peaks. Yangshuo seems to have squashed itself into the most beautiful piece of land of all, mossy cliffs everywhere in the backdrop. It was hard to get over. The company wasn't bad either.

we rode bikes through the karst valleys at sunset, and took a bamboo raft along the Li river.

Now I am in Kunming, which is cold and gray, trying to finish my paper in an internet cafe. I had my presentation this morning, thank god that is over. The only thing good about this city is the Indian food.

Things That Describe China:

yelling

spitting

shoving

staring

slurping

interrupting

rubbernecking

smoking on buses

driving like madmen

wasting no part of an animal

toilet stalls without doors

KTV for hours at a time

screaming into cell phones

cute fat furry puppies (not all things on this list are negative)

wearing slippers indoors

wife-seeking white men

not drinking water during meals

no indoor heating

couples who wear matching outfits

the asian squat

wearing surgical masks outdoors

using umbrellas when it's sunny

getting geared up in proper hiking atire but then not actually doing anything

taking a million pictures of your girlfriend holding a cappuccino

yelling at waitresses

long pinky nails

pouting (if you're a girl)

eating pickled eggs and chicken feet as snacks at movie theaters

men pulling their shirts up to their nipples at bars

telling tourists not to eat at your restaurant because you don't feel like cooking right now

wearing the same outfit three days in a row

putting sugar on tomatoes

bureaucrats getting off on making your visa extension miserable

yelling at white girls wearing shorts

corn-flavored popsicles

telling foreign exchange students from the Upstate New York that they will catch cold (we're at the Tropic of Cancer)

children not having to do chores

weird acid-wash jeans

Kung-Fu movies on buses

card games at bars

not knowing that the Olympics are over

my semester in China is winding down. I have had a fantastic time on my ISP, and really enjoyed getting to meet all the people I did. I'm in Guangxi province right now, but will return to Kunming to see my classmates for the first time in a month. I will miss the people and the experiences, but China, I'm sorry, there's just no love lost between us.

you should go to Tibet though.

also, the Obama cabinet is really cleaning out prominent Democrats.  The administration is taking three of the best and most visible Democratic senators, two great governors, and the 4th-ranking Democrat in the House.  What will the Democratic caucus be like without Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden?   At least he left us with Ted Kennedy and Chuck Schumer.