“Daddy, I don’t want to go to Jimingyi”. Why not, I asked my two year old over my shoulder, while dodging trucks on the backroads of Hebei Province in June 2017. “Because it’s not good to go in there. It’s very dangerous”.
Tag: china (Page 1 of 2)
November, 2016. Sunrise above Shuitoucun. Set off at three in the morning, a cold November Sunday, hike four kilometers through fog and forest to the pass, down to the Watergate and then up the long line of Great Wall. The first light rises as you breach the cloudbase, and then, southeast, to your left, the huge yellow sun bursts into the world from beyond the range.
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July 2006, Beijing: The legendary hard seat on Chinese trains.
We’d waited and waited and tried and tried but just couldn’t get sleeper tickets. How bad could the “hard seat” be? I mean, it has a cushion, right? The trip’s only 23 hours – no worse than flying from Sydney to London. As is so often the case, here was another great example of “famous last words”.
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Depending on the hat you’re wearing, and who you’re talking to, and where, you might describe this place as Taiwan, Taiwan Province of China, Chinese Taipei, or the Republic of China. Any of those terms will annoy some of the people some of the time; occasionally leading to major problems if you mix it up in a professional context. This can happen even when you’re a “China Hand” – I once gawped as a foreign diplomat in the People’s Republic of China cluelessly thanked his host for the “warm welcome to the Republic of China”. Oops. So Heaven help the average person who gets caught in that little trap. Perhaps the best solution is to refer to the city name – “I’m visiting Taipei” – and if discussing it outside of the physical territory in question, dodge words like “country” or “province” and say “what a lovely…place”. It’s not unlike the useful word Australians use when we’ve forgotten someone’s name. “Hi there…mate!”
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Ten years ago today I was stuck in my apartment complex, or 小区, alone and hungry, and lucky to be in, not out. Because the authorities had locked down everything within a few blocks of Tian’anmen Square and Chang’an Avenue for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Today’s the 70th, and though we’ve now left China, from all accounts this lockdown is even heavier than the last. For all the wonderful memories I have of China, there are many like this, too: the raw display of power over people; the infinite urge to control.
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In 2006, westerners could travel into the Tibetan regions of Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu provinces relatively freely. For one shining moment in early 2007, it looked like the group-tour-only restrictions on Tibet Autonomous Province itself would be lifted. It was a Golden Age, the time when China boosters found most evidence for their prediction that the country would continue to liberalize and ultimately democratize. The Olympics changed all that. Riots and protests brought unprecedented clampdowns in western regions. The internet was simply switched off in sensitive areas and politics nationally took a new, harder-line direction from which it’s never really diverted. Since then, troops are often on the ground in sensitive towns, and for a few years there was a spate of self-immolations. Foreigners are often thrown off buses at Kangding and other towns, long before they get anywhere near the western reaches of Tibet. Cynicism and uncertainty grows on the eastern seaboard, though you don’t notice it unless you pay attention. But out west, by most accounts, well, it’s quite, quite different to how it was when we visited.
In amongst all that, the Litang Horse Festival, a longstanding fixture on the Tibetan cultural calendar and the backpacker loop, was cancelled, and stayed that way until very recently.
On our own journey of exploration in the summer of 2006, we saw one of the last Horse Festivals before the big crackdown.
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“Don’t worry”, said the old lady, “just relax, it will all be fine”.
That was the best advice we heard about giving birth. Simple, straightforward, and spot on. It didn’t come from a doctor, a midwife, or the author of any of the veritable library of pregnancy books around our place or any of the generous friends who’d shared them along with their own stories. Instead, it came from the woman in the blue apron in the photo above, a mother of two from a small rural village in China who, doubtless, had given birth in what most of us would consider spartan conditions. The lady spoke quietly, gently and wisely, but more than what she said, it was how she said it. Yon, by then more than eight months along, smiled, and relaxed. As the uncertain father-to-be, I felt the anticipation ease as well. It was almost the first time I really thought “we can do this”.
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