In my last week before leaving China, I took a trip to see the Hailuogou Glacier Park, which lies in the mountains of western Sichuan, fairly close to Tibet. A sign from the park police read as follows:"When consumer's legitimate rights and interests receive the violation; when you discover the fake and shoddy merchandise, please dial..."
That was the best bit of Chinglish I had encountered since reading the suitability guide on the back of Tom's weight-gain protein powder: 'Suit Mass: Teenager, the elderly, weakling and fitness and body-building people.'
The most poignant sentence I saw came after I returned to America, as the opening line of an email from my friend Xiao Han: 'Dear Matt, Last night I dreamed tow bears and them wanted to hit me.'
Anyway, cheered by the park tourist affairs police bureau's effort at reassurance, I headed up to see the Hailuogou Bingchuan (the latter word meaning 'ice river') – the lowest glacier in Asia.
It's a beautiful place. I arrived in the afternoon, and the diffuse, gray clouds had already set upon the mountain, giving a fairy-tale quality to the looming trees and slicking the rock faces, which are shaggy with vivid green moss. As you can see in the above photo, the glacier itself (or at least its tongue, which is the part you're allowed to walk on) consists of hillocks of ice intermixed with dirt and snow and the various rocks and boulders that it has pushed with it down the mountain.
I was guided to and on the glacier by a friendly, middle aged local man with a thick Sichuanese accent. Having failed to foresee that my worn-out sneakers might not be ideal for hiking on a glacier, I accepted the man's hand now and then going up and down the icier patches. At one point he pulled out a cigarette and forged ahead, simultaneously smoking with one hand and pulling me along behind him with the other. Coming down the glacier, several times he turned full around and held both of my hands while backing down the slope, and I thought that we must have looked like a parent and overgrown child in some sort of bizarre but tender skating lesson.
The man told me that he has two children, one in college and one in high school, and that it is very difficult for him to pay their tuitions. I asked him what his daughter is studying at college, and he said he doesn't know. "Wo mei you wen hua," he told me by way of explanation. "I don’t have education."
When we got back down to the trailhead, I gave the man an additional seven or so dollars on top of the eight he had asked for, and he thanked me profusely, on the verge of tears. He said that if any of my friends ever visit the park, he would guide them around for free. I wish I could say that all of my stories about economic inequality in China were so amicable, but most were not. When I was in the bus station in Chengdu waiting to catch the bus to Hailuogou, I realized I didn't have a pen on me and went to try and buy one. It was early in the morning, and I spotted a woman just opening up her little store at the side of the station. I saw a box of pens and, taking one out, asked how much they were.
"Three kuai," she told me - about 40 cents.
I knew the price was inflated but didn't care about such a relatively small amount of money. It occurred to me, however, that the pen was very likely be of low-quality and might stop working after a short while, so I asked if I could have two pens for five kuai. The woman, in her late 30s or early 40s, nodded and took my five kuai, but at that point she either changed her mind or realized she had misunderstood me, because she said, "Six kaui! Add one kaui!"
Now, in a shopping market in Chengdu, one can probably buy ten or fifteen pens for five kaui. Feeling irritated, I put one of the pens back, took two of my kuai back out of her hand and began to walk out of the store.
"Okay," she said. "Okay."
As I gave her back the two extra kuai and took another pen, I noticed the shame in the woman's eyes. She had looked fierce and frightened as she challenged me for the extra pittance, and now she just looked bitter and unhappy.
I have no idea if that woman or my park guide are technically impoverished. I don't know much about their lives or how they feel. But what I do know - what I came to sense as I stayed in China - is that an ocean of desperate uncertainty lies beneath the social surface of that country. While I was in China, three people were trampled to death in a grocery store in Chongqing in the rush to buy large jugs of cooking oil that the store was selling for half-off to mark its anniversary. Part of the explanation for such tragedies is that there are simply so many people in China, but it goes beyond that. It lies in the presence of China’s past. Unprocessed suffering and its progeny, the anarchies of desire, are at play in China; they are at play within and amidst a billion and a half people. I know this because these tendencies, which are present to greater or lesser degrees in everyone, became more and more exacerbated in me the longer that I stayed in Chengdu. My breath grew shallower and my energy less focused. I found myself becoming easily irritated, and when I blamed people, the cautionary voice that I have worked to develop in my head, the voice which says that there is a reality of non-self as well as a reality of self, was becoming more of a toyish concept to me than the spiritual guide that I want it to be.
In the end, although I can say that I had an interesting time in China, I left there with a depth of sadness in my heart. It is a sadness sprung from the realization that the world’s largest population has been disinherited of its culture, orphaned from its identity, and left to make its way in the fields of modernity and postmodernity, where the soul-sickening weeds of nationalism and consumerism flourish. It is a sadness bred of the knowledge that there was nothing I could do but take heart in the good times I shared with people there, and go.
And so I have returned to the monastery, to the place where I feel most supported in the effort to understand and generate peace in our life. What peace I feel here is not, however, a peace outside of suffering, not a blissed-out detachment or a dreamer’s retreat; it is, rather, the peace of generating a nearer heart-broken life.
I am keeping China as close as I can. It is me.
"Three kuai," she told me - about 40 cents.
I knew the price was inflated but didn't care about such a relatively small amount of money. It occurred to me, however, that the pen was very likely be of low-quality and might stop working after a short while, so I asked if I could have two pens for five kuai. The woman, in her late 30s or early 40s, nodded and took my five kuai, but at that point she either changed her mind or realized she had misunderstood me, because she said, "Six kaui! Add one kaui!"
Now, in a shopping market in Chengdu, one can probably buy ten or fifteen pens for five kaui. Feeling irritated, I put one of the pens back, took two of my kuai back out of her hand and began to walk out of the store.
"Okay," she said. "Okay."
As I gave her back the two extra kuai and took another pen, I noticed the shame in the woman's eyes. She had looked fierce and frightened as she challenged me for the extra pittance, and now she just looked bitter and unhappy.
I have no idea if that woman or my park guide are technically impoverished. I don't know much about their lives or how they feel. But what I do know - what I came to sense as I stayed in China - is that an ocean of desperate uncertainty lies beneath the social surface of that country. While I was in China, three people were trampled to death in a grocery store in Chongqing in the rush to buy large jugs of cooking oil that the store was selling for half-off to mark its anniversary. Part of the explanation for such tragedies is that there are simply so many people in China, but it goes beyond that. It lies in the presence of China’s past. Unprocessed suffering and its progeny, the anarchies of desire, are at play in China; they are at play within and amidst a billion and a half people. I know this because these tendencies, which are present to greater or lesser degrees in everyone, became more and more exacerbated in me the longer that I stayed in Chengdu. My breath grew shallower and my energy less focused. I found myself becoming easily irritated, and when I blamed people, the cautionary voice that I have worked to develop in my head, the voice which says that there is a reality of non-self as well as a reality of self, was becoming more of a toyish concept to me than the spiritual guide that I want it to be.
In the end, although I can say that I had an interesting time in China, I left there with a depth of sadness in my heart. It is a sadness sprung from the realization that the world’s largest population has been disinherited of its culture, orphaned from its identity, and left to make its way in the fields of modernity and postmodernity, where the soul-sickening weeds of nationalism and consumerism flourish. It is a sadness bred of the knowledge that there was nothing I could do but take heart in the good times I shared with people there, and go.
And so I have returned to the monastery, to the place where I feel most supported in the effort to understand and generate peace in our life. What peace I feel here is not, however, a peace outside of suffering, not a blissed-out detachment or a dreamer’s retreat; it is, rather, the peace of generating a nearer heart-broken life.
I am keeping China as close as I can. It is me.
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