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One of the bags of swag the Ladybug made out with from Christmas was a small library of “board books,” childrens’ books that, paradoxically, are on Viagra: large, stiff pages suitable for handling and groping. Right now her attention span is on par with a caffeine-addled chipmunk, and so the Ladybug is less interested in hearing the narrative of the books than she is is trying to disassemble them into itty bitty pieces. Nevertheless, we still sit down together, me trying my best to convey the plot to her and she trying her best to escape my pedagogy with her book in tow.

One of her books is Eric Carle’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?, a charmingly illustrated book in which a congregation of monochromatic animals look at each other in sequential order before finally being summarized by the children in a classroom. The Ladybug likes the big illustrations, and I get a chance to do animal voices and noises when I read it.

We also have a sequel book called Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What do you see?, which I incorrectly assumed would be a bichromatic extension of the previous work. Instead, it’s a tree-hugging crystal-gripping hippie revision of the previous work. The back cover of the book indicates that Eric Carle has also written something called Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What do you hear?, which clearly implies the bugger is just phonin’ in his books anymore. (That, or he’s a college textbook writer: new edition, same old crap.)

The Ladybug also snagged several copies of Goodnight moon, a classic lullaby in which a little bunny family systematically wishes goodnight to everything in the house and the heavens. I suppose the book is cute and the poem easy to recite for little kids, but I find the book troubling on two counts. First, the protagonists in the book are anthropomorphic rabbits who have taken in kittens and mice as pets, and I have a deep aversion to these caste structures imposed on fictional animal communities.  Freedom for all mammals, you elitist rabbit bastards! Viva la revolucion! (Yeah, and I still got my eye on you too, Disney! Let Pluto free!)

Second, and much more deeply disturbing, is the following, seemingly innocuous picture of the rabbit household:

It’s hard to make out in the reproduction above, but on the dresser by the young rabbit is a copy of the book Goodnight moon. This raises some serious existential questions. Are the characters in the book aware that they are merely characters in a book? Or are they “real” entities in some convoluted Escheresque reality that coils recursively upon itself? Does this imply the existence of an infinite number of rabbits, and what if any is the relationship between a given rabbit and its metarabbit? Assuming a reality similar to ours, does the existence of such a book necessarily imply predetermination of events, or necessarily invalidate free will?  Goodnight moon is an existential nightmare waiting to be unleash countless horrors on your pysche. I’m not letting the Ladybug near it ’till she’s finished with college.

Instead, the Ladybug and I are sticking to the classics: Dr. Suess. Today we sat down in the living room and read Are you my mother?, a Dr. Suess book by Dr. Not-Quite-Dr.-Suess. As we finished up, the Queen B walked in from downstairs. She spied me holding a wildly squirming Ladybug, who was in turn holding her book with a Vulcan deathgrip. “How was the book?” she asked.

“Fine,” I replied, and let the Ladybug go. “We actually got all the way through it before she tried to escape.”

“What’s it about?”

I summed up the plot. “It’s about a baby bird who falls out of its nest and goes looking for his mother. He asks a kitten who says no and then a hen who says no and then a dog who says no and then a cow who says no and then a Snort who finally puts him back up in his nest and his mom finally shows up.”

“What’s a Snort?” asked the Queen B. “Is that a pig?”

“No,” I said, “it’s a big construction digger. It’s exhaust sounds like a snort.”

“If it’s a machine, how did it know to put the bird back in the tree?”

I shrugged. “I assume the driver saw the bird fall and put it back up there.”

“Oh.”

“However,” I added, “given that the bird engages in English discourse with all the other animals, who likewise converse in return, it is perhaps not unreasonable that in the alternate, parallel reality depicted in the book that the digger itself possesses some degree of sentience and awareness, and therefore determined on its own to help the bird out.”

The B pondered this for a moment.

“Ha dah!” said the Ladybug.

“Yes honey. He is a dork.”

One of my goals during our trip to China to fetch the Ladybug was to post pictures to Flickr and to update the site with stories from the Far East. Unfortunately, I neglected to remember the fact that I can’t remember to do anything on time, and so I didn’t. Nevertheless, I’d still like to document the voyage (no matter how late) simply for myself, so that I can remember all the interesting details when I tell the story to the Ladybug years down the road. So, I present The Ladybug Chronicles.

Day 3: China’s past and present

The order of the day for Saturday, November 11, was more sightseeing. Our first stop was to that most famous of Chinese landmarks, the Great Wall. Because of the popularity of the monument and the proximity of the day to orientation, our tour group increased from 2 adoptive families to thirteen. We piled onto the bus, together with tour guide Mei and our adoption agency liaison Les, a delightfully talkative Englishman who reminded me a great deal of Douglas Adams, with the notable exception of being not dead. The Wall is about an hour’s drive to the mountains north of Beijing, another white-knuckle excursion into Chinese traffic made enjoyable insofar as the Queen B and I could could take solace (and, it must be said, some degree of bemusement) from the looks of abject terror on the faces of our new companions as they experienced it for first time.

As we drove, Mei and Les filled us in on various aspects of China and the Great Wall, partly to help acquaint us with Chinese culture but mostly to distract us from the insanity of the traffic below, thereby preventing a few heart attacks and averting a nasty class-action lawsuit. Les explained that three commonly held “facts” about the Great Wall were, in fact, myths. (Warning! Educational content follows!)

1. The Great Wall is a single wall. It actually consists of many individual segments, separated by particularly nasty mountain passes. As Les explained, since the Wall was built as a fortification against northern invaders, it was only built over those parts were the terrain itself wasn’t a sufficient deterrant.
2. The Great Wall is the only manmade structure that can be seen from space. This is certainly false nowadays, as any modern city is easily visible at nighttime. Of course, more to the spirit of the claim, even though the Wall stretches for almost 4000 miles along northern China, it is only a few yards wide and is mostly the same color as the terrain around it, making it invisible to the naked eye, even from low Earth orbit.
3. It’s called the Great Wall of China. It was actually called the Long Wall for much of its history, and the trip there suggested why: for much of the last ten miles it could be seen running along the ridge of the mountains to our left, like the spine of the world’s longest scoliosis patient. It was only when Western explorers saw it that the West upgraded its status.

No matter whether you call it Long or the Great, though, the Wall is a monumental thing, an immensity of brick and earth that winds its way up and down ragged mountain crags from horizon to horizon like a giant stone snake, or, more appriately, a Chinese dragon. The Wall zig-zags through the terrain, passing through several check-points, large stone fort-like structures that break up the enormity of the Wall into sections. Where we toured, the Wall runs more or less north-south, bisecting the village of Badaling, which consist of a single road flanked on either side by vendors selling masks and carvings and eateries offering various mammals cooked up to your specifications. The road passes under the Wall through an insanely narrow tunnel and past an old Chinese military fort, which acts as the entrance to the Wall itself. The only tacky bit is giant billboard erected right by the Wall hawking the 2008 Olympic Games. The billboard depicts a stick figure running towards the words “One World One Dream,” which I assume is the official symbol of the 2008 Olympics. (The unofficial symbols, as seen in every storefront in China however, are the Beijing Friendlies, cutesy mascots that might be best described as the ferral cousins of the Powerpuff Girls.)

When we arrived, we noticed that the northern portion of the Wall was completely devoid of people, while the southern portion of the Wall was occupied by what appeared to be everyone in China. Though the reason for this was unclear — neither Mei nor Less had ever seen such a thing before — it did mean that we were able to catch a few bits of snap-shot gold: up close and personal with miles and miles of Great Wall in pristeen condition, unspoiled by seventeen thousand tourists in cheap Chinese knock-off apparel and digitial cameras crawling about all over it:

So I snapped some pictures with my digital camera, tightened up my cheap Chinese knock-off jacket, and headed to the southern portion of the Wall, where I was promptly joined by seventeen thousand other people.

Being on top of the Wall is an entirely different experience than looking at it. Whereas from a distance the Wall is a straight and imposing piece of engineering, up close it rolls and undulates in a manner that suggests its engineers might have had one too many glasses of rice wine during its construction. It’s also tough terrain, alternating stretches of flat and slippery rock inclines with wild staircases of irregular steps whose depth changes from a few inches to a foot-and-a-half with little rhyme or reason. The rolling of the Wall and exertion of the hike, coupled with the inhospitable weather (just a few degrees above freezing with biting wind) and close proximimity of seventeen thousand other people trying to climb the same insanely inclined narrow stretch of real estate, means that everyone on the Wall wheezes and wobbles as if drunk, as if the entire Great Wall of China were populated by the cast of The Real World.

There’s also a lot of graffiti carved into the bricks of the Great Wall. Mei remarked that many of the bricks were inscribed with the names and numbers of the army platoons who fashioned and installed them, although I’m sure much of it is the toilet-humor vandalism of modern teen slackers. Nevertheless, I found myself hoping that maybe, just maybe, they instead were bits of toilet-humor vandalism from the army plattons who fashioned and installed them: millenia-old insults like “Northern invaders can kiss the unblinking red eye of Qin Shi Huang” and “Atilla the Hun sucks panda balls” and the like. Call me a romantic.

Like all hikes, getting to the top is only half the journey, although in my case, it was only four-fifths of the journey, since the Chinese military abruptly closed one of the check-points on the Wall and redirected all of us back to the northern section. Descending the Wall is a scary exercise, a vertigo-inducing trip during which is its easy to lose your footing, and I speak from personal experience. (Twice, actually. Stupid new tennis shoes.) As we descended, we learned the reason for all the sheparding on the Wall today: African diplomats were visiting, and the Chinese army was clearing out stretches of the Wall to protect them from the masses of tourists.

In fact, the army closed the one tunnel through which visitors to the wall could leave in order to allow the Africans a swift departure. In essence, this meant that all seventeen thousand tired hikers were forced to wait outside a single tunnel no more than 20 feet wide for a half hour before allowing them to enter. And unlike body heat or body odor, one of the things seventeen thousand tired hikers do not posses en mass is patience, so when the tunnel was opened, every single one of ‘em rushed into the 20-foot-wide tunnel at once. I will let you do the math on that, but the end result is that (1) the Queen B and I got a lot more personal with several thousand Chinese tourists that we ever expected and (2) the B and I have a profound and uncomfortable understanding of the “birth” experience that makes us even happier that we chose to adopt the Ladybug.

After the hike, Les decided we were all feeling a bit “peckish,” so he sent the bus down the road to the Friendship Place, a sort of Chinese department superstore and restaurant. We ate a delicious meal that only included two dishes of meat with the head still attached before the womenfolk descended to the bowels of the store to shop for knick-knacks and souvenirs. Apparently, one of the highlights of the shopping experience was the factory at which Cloisonne was made. I’d never heard of Cloisonne before, but apparently its French for “pretentious pottery” and involves a multi-step enameling process to create pottery with detailed scenes of flowers, fruits, and women with perky breasts and not a lot of clothes. (Why it’s not more popular with men I can’t tell you.)

After the shopping, we ventured back into that famous Chinese traffic. As dusk approached, we returned to Beijing to a district called Hutong. Ostensibly, the Hutong is a collection of densely packed neighborhoods of “courtyards,” clusters of buildings arranged around central open spaces. Each courtyard, every single one of them, is exceptionally old, uniformly gray, and and seemingly in a state of disrepair. However, the Hutong is not a Chinese slum, but is instead a highly desirable plots for communal living: each courtyard is home to several different families, sharing common kitchens and bathrooms, and working togther for the benefit of the group as a whole. Indeed, everything about the Hutong is rich in Chinese history. Much of the Hutong is several hundred years old, and were once home to generals and scholars of dynasties past; their grey color indicated the class of the occupants relative to the emperor and high-ranking government officials, whereas the stonework on the doors to buildings indicated the occupation of their long ago inhabitants. The courtyards are packed together, connected by a spaghetti mesh of alleyways too narrow for most cars.

Hence, to experience Hutong fully, we vacated the monster bus for a more intimate mode of conveyance: rickshaws. Well, their modern equivalents, anyways: the small, two-person cart of the rickshaw is attached to the back of a bike rather than carried by hand. Our tour group split into pairs, assembled themselves into rickshaws, which then raced single-file into the ever darkening Hutong, zipping through the murky maze of sharp corners at breakneck speed and occasionally crossing heavily trafficed side streets with suicidal abandon. Think of it as Mister Toad’s Wild Chinese Ride, but with the omnipresent threat of certain death. The Hutong is home to many small businesses as well — local grocers, hole-in-the-wall eateries, fortune tellers and acupuncturists — which meant that the Hutong alley would be dark at one second, lined only by the ornate gate-like doors of residential courtyards, and then aglow the next second, illuminated by the neon signs hawking vendors and mystics.

At least, that’s what the Queen B told me — I kept my eyes closed and prayed the whole time.

Our cavalcade of rickshaws took us deep into the Hutong, eventually stopping at one of the many nondescript courtyards. There, a small Chinese woman with a warm smile appeared from one of the doorways, inviting our entire group to drink jasmine tea and share conversation with her in a house probably half the size of our hotel room. She told us about the history of her home and her family, and answered our questions about Chinese holidays and schooling. The meeting was brief, perhaps only a half-hour, but the friendliness of this woman, who brewed hot tea for 26 strangers she welcomed into her home, spoke volumes about the good nature and good heart of the people of the Hutong, and of the Chinese personality in general.

One final rickshaw ride back to the bus, and one final drive back to the hotel, and the Queen B and I fell restlessly to sleep, knowing that tomorrow was orientation, our last chance to learn anything new about the Ladybug before we met her on Monday…

More…

You can check out more pictures from our trip to the Wall and the Hutong over at Flickr.

One of my goals during our trip to China to fetch the Ladybug was to post pictures to Flickr and to update the site with stories from the Far East. Unfortunately, I neglected to remember the fact that I can’t remember to do anything on time, and so I didn’t. Nevertheless, I’d still like to document the voyage (no matter how late) simply for myself, so that I can remember all the interesting details when I tell the story to the Ladybug years down the road. So, I present The Ladybug Chronicles.

Day 1: Touring the palaces of Beijing

We awoke on the morning of Friday, November 10, rested, refreshed, and only slightly traumatized by the experience of Chinese traffic the day before. The “rested” bit in particular surprised me, since Chinese mattresses are only slightly less flexible than, say, a block of concrete. Our adoption agency set us up in the Peace Hotel, a five-star hotel in central Beijing and, with the exception of the beyond-firm mattresses, a helluva lot nicer than any hotel I’d ever stayed in before. (Thanks, Holt!)

The official purpose of arriving in Beijing was for the Orientation Meeting scheduled on Sunday, but the Queen B and I arrived several days early in order to experience, at least minutely, the culture of China and to explore its rich and ancient history. By which I mean see all the tourist traps we could before we had a screaming, crying poop-machine with us at all times. So after breakfast, me, the Queen B, Nana and Papa F, Nana Schoo, and one other adoptive couple met up with tour guide Mei and set off for our first taste of ancient China, the Forbidden City.

Mei decided to take us there on foot. If Chinese traffic was frightening inside the relative safety of the steel confines a van, it’s absolutely terrifying by foot. (Quick trivia question: how do you spot pedestrian tourists in China? They’re the ones in who cross the street running… with tears… down their legs.) Fortunately, it was only a few blocks to the Forbidden City, which was nice, because it meant that we only lost one of our tour group to vehicular manslaughter. The City itself is a massive walled palace complex in the heart of Beijing, which at 180 acres, is the largest such complex on Earth. The perimeter of this massive City is protected by an enormous stone wall thirty feet tall, which is itself surrounded by a brackish moat twenty feet deep and a hundred feet wide. Numbers do little to convey the sheer bloody massive hugeness this (athough this satellite picture might help), but having being there in the first-person, let me just say it’s GINORMOUS.

We approached the city from the Eastern Gate, a place where the grey stone wall gives way to a massive red one, upon which rested a magnificent building of wooden pillars, tiled windows, and rafters intricately painted blue and green, topped by an imperial yellow roof. The thirty foot face of the wall itself was featureless, save for three long, narrow archways at its base leading into the palace complex:

And that’s just the doggy door. This is the main entrance:

The Meridian Gate consists of three sections of thirty-foot-high red stone walls meeting at right angles, forming a large square plaza just outside the southern wall of the Forbidden City. Atop the main span of the Gate is an imperial pavilion, similar in decoration to the Eastern Gate — red wooden pillars, tiled windows, yellow roofs and blue-green rafters — but on an insanely grander scale. Atop the each corner of the red wall stands a smaller watch-tower, similarly decorated. The Gate’s walls themselves are completely featureless, except for three massive wooden doors, painted bright red and lined with row after row of large brass buttons.

Let’s just say that the ancient Chinese really knew how to make an entrance.

Past the Meridian Gate lies the actual Forbidden City, which might be best described as a maze of ornate wooden gates that connect ever larger plazas that in turn house ever more ornate pavilions, like some kind of architectural brinkmanship. The pavilions themselves are decorated in the same style as those on the Gates, and have wonderfully long names such as the Hall of Supreme Harmony, or the Palace of Heavenly Purity, or the Really Big Room of the Superlative Transcendental Adjective, and so forth.

One interesting feature of each pavilion, aside from the sheer length of its name, is that at every corner of every roof stands a row of carved animals. It’s reminicent of Noah’s Ark, except that instead of marching two-by-two after a old prophet away from a divine flood, these animals are marching single file after a dude riding a big chicken and away from what appears to be an evil giant jackelope. Further up past the line of animals, along the either top edge of the roof, are a pair of carvings, each depicting a dragon with a sword plunged into its open mouth.

When I asked about the animals, Mei explained that they were a way of indicating the relative importance of the building’s function: a paltry two animals, for example, might indicate a building for low-level bureaucrats, while a mystical nine animals meant the building was reserved only for the emperor for ceremonial duties. When I asked about the dragon, Mei explained that they symbolized a creature from ancient Chinese mythology that devoured anything it saw: gold, stone, brick, and so on. To prevent the dragon from devouring these important buildings, a sword was thrust down its throat, holding it at bay. When I asked why, if the dragon could eat anything, didn’t it just eat the sword, Mei explained that I was most likely a problem child when I was growing up, and left the matter at that.

After three hours of touring, we made a pit stop at the Forbidden Restrooms, wherein I had my first experience with a non-Western lavatory. In the stall was what Mei refered to as a “Chinese toilet,” which may be charmingly referred to as a “squatty potty,” or, more accurately, as “a hole in the ground.” From this experience, I was able to draw two subsequent observations during my stay in China: (1) Chinese chicks have awesome legs, and (2) I’m so glad I’m a guy.

From the Forbidden City, we took a terrifying twenty-minute bus ride northwest of Beijing to the Summer Palace, another imperial palace complex on the shore of Lake Kunming. According to Mei, the Summer Palace was originally built by an emperor as a birthday present for his mother, initiating several hours of guilt as my mother repeatedly pointed out that “You have’t built a palace for me, why don’t you love me?” Thanks a lot, Emperor Qianglong.

The Summer Palace famous for a number of its magnificent structures. There is the multi-story octagonal Buddhist temple that towers magnificently on the hillside looking south upon the lake. There is the Marble Boat, a magnificently detailed two-story replica of a paddleboat made of marble and stained glass. There is the Long Corridor, and half-mile covered wooden walkway that magnificently depicts different scenes of ancient imperial Chinese life through hand-painted murals on its rafters and beams. And, of course, there is a souvenir shop in which you can have your picture taken as a Chinese Emperor, with lovely Chinese concubines draped magnificently on either arm.  Dude, the Chinese knew how to vacation.

From the Summer Palace, it was another bus ride back into town. ALong the way, we hit bumper-to-bumper Chinese rush hour traffic, which is more or less identical to American rush-hour traffic, with the notable exception that folks routinely hop out their cars to pee in the bushes along the median. We returned to Beijing just in time to head to the Red Theatre, a massive red building that is best described as a real-life incarnation of Escher’s Cubic Space Division, but with more neon.

There we saw “The Legend of Kung Fu,” a martial-arts ballet that can best be described as Cirque du Soliel meets The Matrix. The basic plot involves a small boy sent away to live with Shiolin monks who… blah blah training and discipline blah blah… blah blah confronts his fears blah blah… blah blah spirtual quest blah blah… who beats the crap outta everyone else with his mad kung fu skillz. And there’s a kid that does back flips… on his head. I pointed out that that kid could totally kick my ass up and down six ways to Sunday, a comment with which the Queen B agreed with considerably less argument than I would have liked. Nevertheless, the show was sweet.

More…

You can check out more pictures from our sightseeing adventure over at Flickr.

One of my goals during our trip to China to fetch the Ladybug was to post pictures to Flickr and to update the site with stories from the Far East. Unfortunately, I neglected to remember the fact that I can’t remember to do anything on time, and so I didn’t. Nevertheless, I’d still like to document the voyage (no matter how late) simply for myself, so that I can remember all the interesting details when I tell the story to the Ladybug years down the road. So, I present The Ladybug Chronicles.

Day 0: The trip to Beijing

Confucius said that “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” but the Chinese philosopher neglected to mention that the taking of a single step is preceeded by the packing of a thousand things. Per person. Per day. Now, packing two weeks of clothes and medicines for two adults isn’t a problem, but this task was complicated by the fact that we also needed to pack two weeks of clothes, medicines, and toys for a kid whose dimensions and personality we knew only in Chinese (and hence, not at all), a problem soluable only by simply packing everything thrice over in various different sizes. To add to the challenge, China allows only one checked bag per person (Damn you, Asiatic binariphobes!) with a maximum weight allowance of a paltry 42 pounds (Damn you, metric system!). Consequently, from the minute the Ladybug’s referral packet arrived, the Queen B spent the following four weeks figuring out how to feng shui the hell out of our two suitcases, cramming in all the needed goods without exceeding the weight limit while maintaining a sense of aesthetic balance so desparately needed in checked baggage these days.

I should also note that in addition to packing the suitcases, the Queen B lovingly decorated them as ladybugs, drawing big black spots on them in permanent marking. She did this partly to commemorate the ladybug mythology in Chinese adoption and partly to make the bags easy to spot at a baggage claim, but mostly because the fumes from the markers made her high as a kite, which is possibly the only way to pack suitcases under China’s rules and maintain a modicum of sanity.

We finally left for China the afternoon of Tuesday, November 7. Our eventual destination was Beijing, China, but due to vaguaries of international air travel, we were forced to do this by way of Rapid City to Salt Lake City to Los Angeles to to Guangzhou to Beijing, with stops in the Twilight Zone and the Ninth Ring of the Hell. Fortunately, three of the Ladybug’s soon-to-be grandparents — my mom, Nana Schoo, and the Queen B’s folks, Nana and Papa F — met up with us at LAX to join us for the trip. We were of course thrilled that they would be able to share with us this experience: the majesty of the Far East, the first formative moments of our fledgling family, and of course the never-ending call of diaper duty.

I was particularly leary of the flight to China, mostly due to the fact that while we left the United States at 11:50 PM on Tuesday the 7th, we didn’t arrive in Guangzhou until 6:50 AM on Thursday, and the prospect of a thirty-one-hour flight is only slightly less unappealing to me than having my genitals gnawed off by a school of hungry piranhas. Consequently, I forked over the extra cash to upgrade our seats from “Steerage” to something called “Business Premium,” which might be better described as “Low Brow First Class:” large seats with knee room (knee room!), fully articulated headrests, a personal kit of toiletries, felt slippers, even personal televisions that could be retracted from the armrests. If that wasn’t enough, the attendants served us hot meals (hot!) with real silverware (real!), preceded with hot washclothes and followed by tasty nightcaps. Even better, it took only 16 hours to arrive in China at the pre-specified time, indicating a perk I’d never dreamed up: warping the fabric of the space-time continuum. Neat! I can only imagine what true “First Class” must be like, although I assume it must include either either carnal fantasies or papal absolutions, or both (and preferably in that order).

Of course, the highlight of the trip to Beijing was the three hour layover in Guangzhou, China, during which we needed to do only two things: (1) pass through customs and (2) go from the international terminal to the domestic one to catch our connecting flight. This being our first time in China, a land whose language, alphabet, and customs were completely alien to us, we decided to take it slow. The first of these tasks was easy enough: we simply collected our bags and ambled from one kiosk to another kiosk, each time handing over one of the thirty-seven-odd travel documents we filled out on the plane just prior to landing to be stampled by yet another customs agent.

Unfortunately, the ease of customs was offset by the mind-numbingly slow pace at which it moved, and by the time we were out of it, we had just under thirty minutes to find our new terminal and catch our flight. We hastily rechecked our bags and desparately secured directions to the terminal, which the staff politely explained in broken English was just a quick, thirty-minute walk away. Eventually one of the ticket agents suggested that we pay for a “car” that would take us there. I assumed he meant an airport shuttle, but the vehicle to which he was referring was a small but super-charged golf cart. The cart driver carefully loaded all our carry-ons onto the bumper of the cart and packed the Queen B and the three grandparents sardine-style into its two rows of seats before inviting me to climb on the back and secure the carry-ons by doing my best impression of a bungee cord. Apparently, this is a common packing technique in China: simply continue piling on crap until the gravitional field formed by its own mass is sufficiently strong to hold it together:

The following five-minute ride, as we zipped through the airport at breakneck speed, was perhaps the scariest moment of my life, although it did prepare me for the vehicular nightmare that is Chinese traffic (see below). It did, however, get us to our flight on time, and after a further uneventful three hours, we finally landing in Beijing. We were promptly greeted by our tour guide for the next few days, a spritely twenty-something with curled brown hair and an infectuous smile named Mei, who escorted us to a shuttle and took us to our hotel. During the half-hour van trip into central Beijing, Mei outlined our itinerary for the next three days and explained some of the workings of Beijing, but I did my best to simply absorb the experience that was Beijing around me.

Beijing is an amazing city, a massive metropolis that in many ways reflects China as a whole. The city of Beijing, like the country of China, grapples with the horns of a dilemma, torn between preserving an epic history that stretches back several millenia and embracing a technological future whose only tradition is the guarantee of omnipresent obsolenscence. It is a land where massive ancient relics and monuments, hundreds (even thousands!) of years old, stand side-by-side with state-of-the-art skyscrapers housing cutting-edge technologies and powerful corportions. Beijing itself is a checkerboard of tightly organized blocks of boxy towering apartment complexes and sleek skyscrapers, shining with steel and neon, and shapeless seas of ancient single story buildings, faded a dirty gray with time and tradition.

While Beijing, and China in general, is simply another world compared to the United States, I think that the main differences between the Chinese and Americans can be summed up in two important things.

First: There is no concept of “Personal space” in China. This is certainly a consequence of having so many people packed into such little space, and also a result of deep sense of family and history the Chinese feel, but it feels clustrophobic and alien to us Americans, a people for whom “personal space” is so holy a concept that we actually think the Hummer H3 is a tad on the cramped side. On the one hand, this means that anywhere you go in China seems packed with thirteen million people milling about shoulder-to-shoulder, which is particularly disconcerting the first time all thirteen million of them cram in with you inside an elevator. On the other hand, this trait also means that the Chinese are immediately friendly and welcoming, greeting complete strangers with a smile and a Ni hao. Every day people would walk up to us and strike up conversations, even if neither they nor we can understand even a smidge of what the other was saying. This unabashed friendliness is so profoundly un-American that I initially found myself simply hoping someone would scowl at me outright so I could feel better about the universe.

And second: Chinese traffic is fucking insane. At first blush, Beijing traffic is nothing but chaos and anarchy. Imagine any bumper-car rink you’ve ever been in, but moving at 80 miles an hour. Vehicles weave in and out of traffic without regard to lane lines, traffic signals, or indeed other vehicles, while motorcycles, bicyclists, and pedestrians simultaneously weave in and out of the cars. Vehicles careen by in every conceivable direction, whizzing past each other with nothing but a few centimeters of space between them (Hi, metric system!) and a suicidal case of indifference. It turns out, though, that the apparent randomness of Chinese driving is in fact govered by exactly three rules of the road: (1) Lane lines and traffic signals are merely suggested courses of actions, not directives; (2) If there is sufficient blacktop for you car to squeeze in, then you’d better squeeze in before someone else does; and (3) The right-of-way is yielded to any vehicle bigger than yours. That being said, however, I should also note that in the entire two weeks I was in China, I only saw one auto accident, and that was within two blocks of the American Consulate, so something must be working right there.

After digesting all this information in the thirty minute van ride from the airport to our hotel, my brain short circuited, and I promptly crashed in my hotel room and slept through the rest of the day, dreaming fleets of suicidal Chinese drivers with no fear of violating my territorial bubble.

More…

You can check out more pictures from our trip to Beijing over at Flickr.