Category: Travel

11-12 January 2017

What a great beginning for my China trip! For days, Ashland has been in the grip of snow and ice and ice and snow, the roads too often a skating rink, the cars twirling dervishes, not even the buses running. But Wednesday, just rain and the snow all melted and traffic moving easily, and not only could I drive – or be driven – to Medford, but my flight from Medford would be able to ascend in this lovely clear weather. Arrived early and eager, only to learn the flight was a bit delayed. But not to worry – still plenty of time to make my connection at San Francisco to my fourteen- hour direct flight to Hangzhou, China. 

A little late, but United loaded us up and we are sitting on the tarmac, and now the announcement that the flight is overbooked. Nobody wanted to give up a seat. Great conferencing up front, staff disappearing and going back to the terminal and more conferencing and the minutes are spinning away. Finally, someone gives up his seat, but not before my China flight is in the business of loading in San Francisco and going to be taking off without me. Always hopeful, once landed in San Francisco, I ran and fast walked in what I was told was the direction to the International  Terminal, only to learn, no – wrong way. You take the causeway. You go back to where you came. That is where the you find the causeway to the International Terminal. Alas, the flight was quite off and away before I reached Gate 100, where  my flight had long left without me. 

Trudge – no more running – to Customer Service, where I was less than composed. No more flights to Hangzhou available today, I was told. Maybe tomorrow That is the best we can do, and so I fussed and fumed and wondered why this should be  This was NOT supposed to happen! I did everything right. I even got out of Medford. And how – trying yet to compose myself – how in the hell can I make lemonade out to this? Missing a whole precious day in China, when I have so few, and now to be stuck here in San Francisco Airport for a day or whatever, and then (oh, marvelous), a creative United Customer Care representative took some care and asked, “Ms. Reed, have you been to China before?” 

“Oh, yes.” 

“Can you get to Hangzhou from Shanghai?”

“Oh, YES, I can,” and within the hour I was on a twelve-and-a-half-hour flight direct to Shanghai in a half-empty plane, where I had a whole row to myself in which to stretch out and sleep. Food was served hot, and then we had ice cream. Life seemed somewhat improved.

Always before my Shanghai flights from San Francisco have been at least fourteen hours This one: twelve and half. And even if I had been in a row with other people on either side of me, the seats were reasonably sized in this 787. All that and ice cream. Yes, life had improved.

A beautiful flight, the windows opening up to blue skies piled with fluffy white clouds and here we are flying above it all. Do you ever get over the thrill of  flying? Should you? The young man across from my seat on the Medford flight was a pilot on reserve with United and just breaking in, finally flying a jet. Four years of flight school in Nevada for one hundred grand, and he is still going to college as well, but the thrill of flying stays with him. He loved it as a little boy, and he still loves it. A lucky man to be doing what he lives and to still be thrilled by it.

How amazing that we can sit here so any miles above the earth, warm and fed and safe in this extraordinary and complicated-put-together machine with so many, many parts that somehow all fit together to carry us forward. 

The woman, who was my seat partner on the Medford flight, had nothing good to say about United: “They always overbook. Every United flight I have ever been on was overbooked.” And she recounted numerous trips that involved waits and arguments and disputes. Fortunately for her, her connecting flight was also delayed, so I think she made her connection. The chap in the seat in front of me had a connecting flight as well, but how well he took it in stride, just did not say much and took off speedily when we finally landed in San Francisco What a nice way to live. Not to be upset by what are, finally, not disasters. (Though I was certainly felt it was a disaster, even while the rational mind said it was not. No accolades for me.) How generously he handled it. What a lovely way to live, to just roll gently with the punches and keep steadfastly on your way. No spewing , no fuming, just quietly moving along.

When we consider the complexity of any airline transporting the millions – or it it billions – of people on even a single flight – ensuring that this humungous machine is safely together and air worthy, the maintenance, stocking it and cleaning it and fueling it and packing it with available staff and the food and the supplies, the ticketing and the checking-in, the organization of air space and takeoffs and landings, even ensuring that the overhead bins actually close. So many details. Such complexity. It is amazing that anyone ever gets anywhere on any plane, let alone on time. But for the most part, we do get there, and we do get there on time, and we are able to indulge in this splendiferous, luxurious, global way of life that allows the vast vision of this vast world. 

Some do it with grace and other do it with less.

When I reach Shanghai, I will locate a bus or a train and reach Hangzhou in the middle of the night, run down a taxi driver and show him my destination written on a card in Mandarin characters, ad say the words “Zhejiang University” in my very poor pronunciation of Mandarin. Somehow, I will get to the Univerity and to my hotel. Things have a way of working out.

Maybe, this trip is not about China at all. Maybe I really had to learn that there is an easy and gracious way to live and to move through Life.

11 May 2016 Wednesday HANGZHOU

Alibaba and Jack Ma are famous not just in China, but throughout the world. And I was fortunate enough to be able to visit the Alibaba campus today, that is, the camps on the south side of the Quintang River. It was large,I thought, but I learned that the newer campus on the west side of Hangzhou is three times larger with, no doubt, three times as many amenities.

I ate at the cafeteria, where every kind of food is available, along with fresh fruit to be purchased at the fruit stand . At the cafeteria, I saw this pretty bridal arch. Yesterday, the campus was open to the public, and a group wedding was held ,along with entertainment by celebrities, and all sorts of other activities. It is a beautiful campus and cashless. Security is tight, and everything is paid for with a Alibaba card that is carried along with your Alibaba ID. A gym is available, as is a beautiful bookstore where you can buy or just read books in a truly peaceful atmosphere – a really lovely place. I did not hear about a swimming pool, but there seems to be everything else, clubs and activities, such as classic movie nights.

Everyone is about nineteen years old – or at least looks so. My guide said he was thirty-nine, but it was hard to believe. The atmosphere is, as you can imagine, noisy and vigorous and electric. My guide said that you work at Alibaba either to become rich or to change the world. We both agreed that it is easier to change the world after you have some money.

Back to the States, leaving at four in the morning. Thanks for listening.

10 May 2016 Monday  HANGZHOU

Aizezi picked me up at nine this morning , and off we went to see Ancient Street. We took the boat that runs on the East Canal from the center of town for a ride of about an hour to reach the East Canal”s end, from where we could easily walk to this glimpse into nineteenth-century Hangzhou..

The ride on the Canal, which everyone calls a “river,” is beautiful, with willows hanging over its placid waters and trees and shrubs lining the banks of both sides. On one side, home come almost down to the edges of the banks, but on the other  side, the banks are filled with trees and plantings, parks and docks for loading passengers on the boat. We saw two egrets, a fisherman pulling up crabs in a net, all sorts of people walking or strolling along, a beautiful variety of plants, many bridges, one of  which, rebuilt, dated back to the Song Dynasty – though a dispute arose about that, for another passenger said “Ming” Dynasty. Ether Ming or Song, rebuilding was certainly a good thing to do. The boat chugged gently, the pilot sang along with the traditional Chinese music, and you could imagine Hangzhou as it must have been a century ago, without traffic or vehicle horns or petrol fumes. 

Ancient street looked just like my photo, with its narrow streets and many shops, the products sold from the twenty-first century, but the extent and energy of the commercial transactions unchanged. My interest in Ancient Street was somewhat diminished by the most awful odor (Aizezi said it was tofu), and I completely forgot to look for the ancient shops that I had read about in my haste to leave the area. 

 Aizezi is a Uyghurs, one of the fifty-five recognized minority groups of China, who are not Han. Aizezi grew up  near the Russian border in the northwest of China. HIs parents wanted him to be well-educated, so they sent him to school in another province at age sixteen, where he lived with three other students in an apartment. 

Those from Uyghurs, along with those those from Tibet, are viewed with great suspicion by the Central government, About once a month, Aizezi, a student of world literature, working on his Ph.D. dissertation on the Turkish writer Pamuk, is called into the police station to sign papers testifying that he promises not to destroy the Chinese government. He cannot stay at ordinary hotels, but he is a student at the University of Zhejiang and a teaching assistant in his Department of World Literature. He hopes to find a teaching position after he competes his studies.

9 May 2016 Monday  HANGZHOU

The rain spat a bit but waited util we were all back at our respective home nests before it came gently, early in the evening. Still, it was a very dark day. Gray light can make good photographs, but this was very gray.

At nine o’clock, those of us who could stay an extra day climbed into a van and were taken to LIngyin Temple to enjoy the honor of dining with the Master after a tour of the temple. One of the guides, Siaya, is a twenty-nine-year old sophisticated Ph.D. graduate, doing post-graduate study under Professor Shen and headed for Oxford in November for research on the background of Thomas More’s Utopia. Utopia was the subject of her dissertation.

Siaya is married to an artist – a sculptor- and they have a studio and a loft  in Beijing, where he works and she stays when she is with him. Tomorrow, they were off to an art show in Shanghai now traveling internationally. 

Shiya had seen the temple and suggested we sit and talk while the other tromped around taking photos. She spoke of how she was considered “a weird woman” in China because for wanting to study so much. In China, apparently, as a woman, you go to university, study very very hard, and when university is completed, you marry and have a baby. You marry a man who is a party member and so can hold a government job,and the money is secure. Artists are – as ever – considered outside proper society, but there seem to be many of them anyway. 

Shiya described the life of her father, who loved literature and had many books that, as I understood it, were secreted during the Cultural Revolution, which had divided her family, for one side joined the Party, but her father did not, and so his job remained always menial. As with so many life-time office workers, she felt he did not live a healthy life, dying at fifty from lung cancer. But what kind of a life? Every day to sit at the desk, after hours to play Mah Jong and smoke – not healthy – and so she thought it was not surprising he died so young.  

Professor Shen Hong is supporting a number of – from what I can gather – independent-type students. He has a group working under him doing research on Christian missionaries in China, who are compiling a biography of every Christian missionary who ever worked in China. His other group are Ph.D. students in English and English literature, who are writing on early English literature – such as More’s Utopia or Shakespeare, and who, once graduated, teach English language and literature. – all bright, enthusiastic people.

After our non-tour of the temple, someone rounded us up and told it was lunchtime. To eat with the Master! We were instructed that we were not to speak during the meal – complete silence. We marched into this vast hall with – maybe twenty – rows of polished wood long tables and benches that went in long rows from one end of the room to the other. In front of the long rows of empty benches and tables and facing us were sitting the master and the other masters, all shaven heads in various degrees of regrowth, all in gray robes, all men.  Of course.

We were marched in single file to the very last bench row against the back wall. We sat on the benches without speaking for quite some time, one hand on each knee. facing the master(s). On the table in front of us were two white paper bowls and chopsticks in cellophane. After some time, a troop of orange-clad, variously shaven-headed monks appeared in single file and climbed onto the bench row directly before us, sitting down in their long row. One orange robed monk directly in front of us, stopped to honor his seat with the hands in prayer, and almost stopped the march, for his small bow had a domino effect on the row of monks behind him. When he stopped, his follower did not and for a moment the second follower did not. All recovered, but – nasty me – had visions of a row of orange-clad monks, one falling on top of another, piled up high behind a  long wooden bench and table.

Once the monks were seated, a great gong was struck, the sound hurting my ears and body and the –  forget the name of the screechy things played with drums – was whisked and scratched. The gong sounded again and again, each time more unpleasantly as far as I was concerned. Finally, it stopped, and there was a sonorous song-chant, neither one or the other but a mixture of the two. It went on for quite awhile, and sometimes it sounded as though they were saying “Ave Maria,” but I am fairly sure that was not the case.

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Finally, the gong stopped, everyone sat down, the remaining rows between us and the one row of monks and the masters facing us at the far end of the hall remaining empty.  Monks had come around with pails and ladles, piling into one bowl the white rice, into the other potato, some greens, a piece of fried tofu, and another vegetable. It tasted fine, and they even came round checking bowls and offering to pile more food into the bowls for seconds. Indeed I saw a number of monks, when they took off the full orange robe and were seen in their motley gray, to appear very well fed. 

Time to eat was short. More song-chant, and everyone filed out. Back into the van and on to a boat tour of Westlake.

A young Chinese lad – Joshua T. Perry is his Western name – came up to me and said they he thought that the three carved figures that I had shown during my presentation  were remnants of a local religion, now probably not practiced ,but belonging to the Hongzhou region. Wonderful news, because no one else had any idea what these strange statues were about. He was vital and enthusiastic and on his way to Australia in August to deliver a talk on art that had been protected the Cultural Revolution. Joshua had been in America, In Utah, for two months at a home stay with a Mormon family with seven children, and had worked at MacDonald’s under a Mexican supervisor, who hated Chinese. He had been all over the South and is working on his Masters and wants to go to University of Chicago for a Ph.D in Art history. 

He pointed out how wonderful was this gray day in Westlake, as all becomes misty and mysterious, not detailed in the glaring sunlight. It was romantic, but taking photo,s unless you had a special camera, left you with only gray blobs. 

We disembarked on the largest island of the three in Westlake, all park  and curving paths around the lake that is within the island, along with tourist shops, and all crowded with many tourists. We wandered around,  learned about the three moons that are reflected in the lake and the reflections of the candles lit within the stone lanterns submerged in the lake – so many lights multiply reflected – returned to the boat, passed a half-moon bridge that Sidney had taken a photos of, and were returned to the dock

And then Gwang came up to me and offered to take me to see the three- arched bridge on the Grand Canal. Super! 

Gwang teaches English and English Literature, sixteen hours a week, at the University and has written on the Moule family, who were British Chinese missionaries for several generation in China. Joshua and another lad who is another university joined us, and we saw the three-arched bridge on the Grand anal, whose history goes back centuries, but whose details I cannot access on the Chinese internet. The day still misty and romantic and all details impossible to see or photograph but what I could see clearly was the maybe 50 – I have no idea how many – storied skyscraper that overlooks the Canal and its vast surrounding public spaces 

It all smacks of prosperity and good living, at the same time honoring traditional Chinese architecture and values – We walked through a traditional area, but modern in every other aspect, tea houses and upscale shops, studios for people to create with clay or to paint their finished work, a shop where several were practicing the flat-stringed instrument that belongs to China. Inventive clay figurines and pottery and everywhere, beautiful plantings and greenery. All the best of the old and the new pulled in to a package of gracious living with Feng Shui and Traditional Chinese Medicine much practiced. Gwang’s father-in-law and her husband are both TCM practitioners.

It is difficult to become used to people yelling at each other and at me, but it is just a way of being friendly, and I did find that not everyone yells. 

8 May 2016  Sunday  HANGZHOU

Today was the day for my presentation of 160 or so slides that have been the focus of my life for these past many months, as I have been exploring the vagaries of Photoshop and learning what is possible when photos are muddy and faded and over a hundred years old. With lots of help from my photographer friend, Cornelius Matteo, the photos look very good. Once the photos were enhanced, I listed them in the  order in which they were to appear during my talk, numbering them. 

I have a MAC, and as I added photos into categories already set up, I would add a letter after the number: Slide 10, Slide 10A, Slide 10B, etc. A very convenient way to do things. Otherwise, I would have to change 10A  to 11 and 10B to 12 and then change all the.subsequent numbers. 

And so this is just a bit of information for those who might have to move their disk with its 160 numbered slides from a Mac and use another (just a little inferior) computer. When you attempt to project the sides that have letters after the numbers and you are on one of those other (sorry, really stupid) computers, the other computers simply ignore those slides numbered with a letter after the number. You are preparing to talk about 160 slides, and instead ou are talking about 80. It rather destroys the flow of your talk and certainly eliminates a great deal of information. 

This is what happened to me wen I stood up in front of the assemble group and began discussing the photos taken by Clarence James and Sidney David Gamble. Months of work vanished. Very embarrassing. My presentation was rescheduled for later in the day, while I attempted to renumber 160 slides, Then, thank goodness, we found that when using a Dell, the sides with numbers and letted would at least appear, though in a strange  inverted order. Never mind. At least, they appeared.   

So for all you techies out there and for all you Mac-lovers, keep this in mind if you have to present numbered slides using some retrograde other machine.