“Respect Ghosts and Gods, but keep away from them.” - Confucius
The most beautiful thing I saw in the entire world was not a majestic purple sunrise on the rocky shores of Southern New Zealand. It wasn’t the heavenly view from Machu Picchu, nor the golden pyramids of Egypt, and not even the Mona Lisa hanging on the walls of the Louvre. The most beautiful thing I laid eyes on in my year of traveling around the world wasn’t a woman, though a few did come close. Surprisingly the thing that filled me with the most “beauty and truth”, as Keats would say, was an in-flight movie on a rickety old Air China DC 9.
Yeah, I know- crazy, right? The messed up thing is that the movie was in Mandarin, so I had to endure squinting at subtitles to understand what was going on. But man I’m telling you – this movie touched me. I found myself openly balling, tears streaming down my face unchecked, even though I was packed in with one hundred Chinamen, who just looked at me funny and readjusted their surgical masks less they expose themselves to my germs. I swear to you that I wasn’t going through man-opause or having any sort of emotional breakdown triggered by seeing the gelatinous mystery-meat they were serving on the flight. No, this movie was just damn sublime.
I had no plans on watching it when the screen first flashed to life, but the opening image of a young man walking to a destination unknown, alone through the snowy, desolate plains, caught my eye. Maybe I would watch it a little just to put me to sleep.
The movie starts with a young man coming home to the small village in the mountains of Northern China where he grew up. His father had died unexpectedly and he came back from the city to comfort his mother. He finds a sad vigil outside the schoolhouse where his father taught for all of his years. In those modern times no one observed the ancient customs to mourn and bury the dead, but his mom was adamant that they would do just that for his father. No one believed in ghosts anymore, but his mom said that if they didn’t honor him he would become Gu Hun Ye Gui, a ghost who hadn’t been properly cared for by his family, doomed to loiter on earth forever, blocked from entering the spirit world with his ancestors where he belonged. The son, Yusheng, tried to talk her out of the silly old ritual it but she didn’t waiver in her resolve. Yusheng thought it was ridiculous because by ancient rite they had to find men to carry the coffin for miles in the winter snow to its resting place. Even if he could find the thirty-two men needed to make the journey he would have to pay them a small ransom and supply them with rice wine to keep them warm. Yusheng was frustrated, so he went into the schoolhouse to sit by himself, remembering his father and thinking about his courtship with his mother; it was a story that everyone in the village knew well…
I was enthralled. The simple elegance of the movie couldn’t have been more in contrast with my surroundings. The old DC Nine’s prime of service was way back in 1965, and by the looks of it not much maintenance had been done since then. At that time, unbeknownst to me, Air China was one of the shoddiest airlines in the world. The plane we boarded looked like it wasn’t even suitable to practice drink cart procedures for stewardesses-in-training, yet alone safely fly us from Tokyo, Japan on a Northern trajectory past the inhospitable, barren plains of Mongolia and then across the Korean Peninsula to Beijing. The interior walls and cabins were yellowed with age and cigarette smoke. The original blue-patterned carpet was frayed and stained with years of vodka, coffee, and vomit, and some of the seats were held together with duct tape. Somehow the pilot maneuvered this bucket of bolts airborne and we cruised uneventfully for an hour before the storms rolled in.
Lightning flashed all around, illuminating huge black clouds as big as cities that enveloped us. Driving rain and wind battered the side of the plane horizontally, and water was actually trickling in the seals of my window. The plane pitched violently, dropping my stomach to the floor. When we hit a particularly bad patch I saw a petite Air China flight attendant fly right past me. The movie screen went blank and the pilot got on the loudspeaker and spoke in Mandarin for what seemed like ten minutes, leaving my fellow passengers nervous and chatting vociferously with Buddha. He then delivered the same diatribe in broken English, and I could see why they were concerned:
“Uhhh hello there, this is captain Sheng We with Air China, part of the United Star Alliance. We’re so glad to have you aboard today. We are currently diverting off of our course slightly to get around some thunderstorms over Mongolia. They have the potential to be dangerous – we might hit high pressure air pockets that cause the plane to lose altitude up to 2,000 feet at a time, causing us to experience up to three G’s of force, which can shoot you right out of your seat to the ceiling. You could crack your head open on the ceiling, or get thrown to the back of the plane and snap your neck or collide with someone else and knock them unconscious and cause great bodily harm, so please fasten your seatbelt. I understand that you have physiological needs but this is important. Thank you and have a nice flight.” I buckled my seatbelt so tight that it cut into my large intestine, buckled the seatbelt for the old lady sitting next to me, who I think was a yak farmer with a mustache thicker than mine and had no clue what was going on, and looked up towards the cockpit to see if Satan was flying the plane.
His speech did nothing to inspire confidence that we would arrive in one piece. It’s not that I’m scared of dying, per se. I mean, of course I want to keep kicking as much as the next guy – I have a lot of shallow sex and beer drinking left in me – but I don’t want to go out like that. My father died in a plane crash. Among other things, including an engineer, an accomplished artist, an amateur musician, and a great drunk driver, he was a pilot, and actually built and flew a couple of small planes. One of them was a single person Cessna and out on a fun skyward jaunt one sunny day the engines failed completely and he crashed and died, leaving nothing but a seven-foot crater in the pavement and a young wife with two babies at home.
So dying in a plane crash wouldn’t bother me so much as it would really shake up my mom, and I would like to spare her that trauma if at all possible. I said a quick prayer to Buddha to at least let me land safely, and then if he could arrange for me to be crushed by a stampede of wild elephants or overdose on Viagra during a weekend with Anna Nicole Smith if that was his fate for my demise.
Despite the rough flight I was excited to leave Tokyo. I found the culture too cold and materialistic for me, a strange algorithm of ancient social norms that exuded no human warmth. For instance it was ok for business men in suits to pass out drunk in their own puke and sleep all night on the sidewalk or a train platform, and you could buy anything from 500 page Anime comic books to used school girl’s panties in the vending machines, but it was gravely frowned upon to use someone’s first name casually. Sure I had fun kicking it in the more traditional city of Kyoto with my buddy Casey from Boston, and I thoroughly enjoyed going to the Kabuki theater with Shane, who fell asleep and snored loudly through the whole performance, pissing off both the theater patrons and the actors whose monologues he interrupted, but for the most part it lacked any friendliness. And it was expensive. Tokyo, the most densely populated city on Earth, cost so much that even a “room” at a business hotel cost me $250 a night. The room was actually a cubbyhole – a round person-sized tube in a human kennel, where businessmen stayed when they were coming in or out of town. Upon entering the hotel I put all of my possessions and clothing in a locker and got a key, some fuzzy slippers, and a kimono to wear. I asked for an extra large kimono but apparently they only come in one size – big enough to go to the knees of the average diminutive Japanese businessman, but for me it barely covered my man-junk. I had to keep pulling it down to not flash the all-female staff, who followed me around giggling, pointing and laughing to themselves when my kimono slipped open or I had to bend down and pick something up. I felt like Sharon Stone with a penis. I found my “room” – the third tube high on a catacomb of humanity that extended to the ceiling. It was just wide enough to slip in without touching the round plastic walls, and I had about six inches clearance above my head. Inside was a little reading light, a three inch TV screen that looked as big as a movie theater because it was almost touching my nose, a tiny mirror, and an alarm clock. It was actually pretty comfortable, even though my feet stuck out the bottom and I could hear every snore and cough of my neighbors.
But before I could officially escape from Japan I had to land safely in China, and from what it looked like that wasn’t a sure thing. The rain and lightning crashed down relentlessly but eventually we did pull out of the storm and the pilot stabilized the old DC Nine. They re-started the movie:
The story of their love was legendary in the village. The young man’s mother, Zhao Di, was eighteen years old, living with her blind mother, when a young man appeared from the city to be the new schoolteacher. His mother, Zhao Di, was the prettiest girl in the village and soon began pining just to be near the handsome outsider. He noticed her attention and soon they grew closer. Their young love was unspoken because it was still a time when marriages were arranged, but their gravity was so intense that everyone understood it was fated by the Gods. But then one day Party men in gray uniforms with red buttons from the city came and took him away for questioning. It was the start of the Cultural Revolution, and any intellectuals and those who were not party members were under scrutiny of treason to Chairman Mao. Before they could take him away Chang Yu rushed to Zhao Di’s side and professes his eternal love for her and promised to return as soon as he could. Then he was taken away...
When we landed I dried my tears, hugged the old lady next to me, wiping my nose on her yak-hair tunic, and walked out onto the metal staircase leading us to the tarmac. I had landed in the midst of the worst blizzard Beijing had seen in thirty years. I walked down the metal staircase into the frozen elements in short sleeves and jeans, shaking like a leaf. I managed to wander through customs and grab a taxi to a hotel in the center of the city without getting hypothermia.
Beijing, also called Peking, was shrouded in a blanket of fresh snow, drifts sitting placidly on every street, every rooftop, burying the bicycles that hadn’t been used in the last day, and frosting the shopkeeper’s windows. I couldn’t tell if it was still snowing lightly or snow was just being blown off the rooftops, but thick crystal flakes fell all day long. I couldn’t escape the bitter chill that blew down from Siberia. The cold was like a starving wolf, chasing me around the streets like I had I stole its only bone, finding me when I ducked into foyers of buildings to escape him or storefronts that mercifully offered me a cup of hot tea, but once he caught up and bit me he wouldn’t let go. I was properly dressed to hang out on the beach in Thailand, not walk around all day in wintery Peking, so every time I left my hotel room I put on every piece of clothing I owned: three pairs of shorts, nylon tracksuit pants, a pair of jeans, four pairs of socks, three tee shirts, two short sleeve shirts, and a sweatshirt, so bundled with layers that I wobbled around like the Michelin Man float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. But I still froze my ass off. I found a knockoff North Face ski jacket and mittens at an outdoor bizarre and those helped a little, but even indoors it was only a few degrees warmer than outside, so the only way to try to keep from freezing was to keep moving.
Do you know what I noticed about Beijing? I didn’t see any churches or dogs. It’s funny how you take for granted certain things always being in your periphery and then one day they’re gone. I assume they ate the dogs, and the churches were nonexistent, or underground, because China was the last real a strict Communist country and any religion other than the most traditional Buddhist or Taoist followers in the countryside were considered a political threat and met with clandestine detention and electric clubs for its practitioners. Remember this was in 2000, only a decade after the bloody civil revolts in Tiananmen Square, and the world was a different place, still crawling out from the shadows of the Cold War. China was still a last real stronghold of Soviet communism, and soldiers in full military dress practiced their formations and flag-raising exercises every day under a fifty-foot mural of Chairman Mao. Western influences were still strictly regulated; all of the television stations and newspapers were run by the state and no one except the nicest international hotels had any access to the internet. In a country of over one billion people, with thousands of years of rich history like a hand-spun tapestry, the cold post-modernism of Communism was withering up and dying right before my eyes. Everyone knew it was inevitable that they would be opened up to the rest of the world, and soon be drinking Pepsi and wearing the blue jeans that they manufactured in factories, but that didn’t stop the government from sabotaging it’s own demise anyway it could, like scratching the American music CD’s that they allowed through customs. But most of the populace still operated on the level of consciousness of scrambling around trying to feed themselves and live through another day. Everyone rode around on bicycles, even through the snow, and outside of every store or alley there were hundreds of bikes stacked up, but never stolen. People attached wooden decks or carts to the backs of their bikes and carried around firewood, buckets of clean water and fuel, carcasses of dead animals which would be slaughtered and cleaned right on the streets, or their family members. Colorful red banners and paper globes hung everywhere for good luck and blew around in the snow. This place was so beautiful and mysterious and foreign to me – I might as well have been on a different planet. Of course all of the writing is in Chinese characters, so I couldn’t even identify a street sign, the name of hotels or restaurants, or what denomination of money I was handing someone when I bought noodles or tea. I would just walk into a little kitchen restaurant, have a seat, and point to something on the menu or at someone else’s plate and hope for the best. After the meal I’d hand them a fistful of Yuan bills and let them take what they wanted. I’m pretty sure I ate some horse, dog, turtle, snake, and who knows what else. When the sun fell behind the walls of the Forbidden Palace vendors lined up their bicycles, with food stations on the back under a single light bulb, to sell everything edible you could imagine accompanied by noodles and hot tea. There were thousands of these carts side by side, stretching for a mile on each side of the street, and I walked up and down trying a little of everything for a few Yuan coins. At night I retraced my steps to my hotel and bundled up under every blanket, towel, and curtain I could find in my attic room, the wind howling against the rice paper windows until dawn turned the world golden once again.
When Chang Yu was taken away Zhao Di braced herself for the wait. She kept herself busy cleaning the schoolhouse and repairing its paper windows. Chang Yu was gone a long time. Her heart grew sad in his absence and soon she could not even eat or sleep without her love. She couldn’t stand it anymore, so she ran up to the road that led out of town towards the city far away, and waited there for his return. She wouldn’t move from that spot, no matter how people came and tried to talk her back into the village. It was cold, and the snow blew all over her. For three days and nights she stood there until she was covered with snow like a statue, and so feverish that she collapsed. They carried her back to her bed and lit a fire and tried to attend to her so she did not die…
I visited Tiananmen Square on a rare sunny day, which looked exactly like the main square where they have military parades in Lenningrad. There was a lovely Chairman Mao museum with his embalmed body, in full Party uniform, eerily-displayed in a bulletproof case. It’s not every day that you see a malevolent dictator whose been dead for a quarter of a century frozen under glass. I skipped the adjacent Chariman Mao gift shop where people racked their credit cards for tee shirts with his likeness or plastic Little Red Books hanging off key chains. I bolted that creepy scene as soon as possible went in search of more traditional Chinese culture.
One of the most interesting forms of entertainment in Japan and China was visiting the bathhouses. Unlike in the US, where bathhouses have a questionable reputation like massage parlors, in China and Japan public bathhouses are an enjoyable part of family life. Most Chinese take a bath in the evening but don’t have heated bathrooms, or it’s too expensive to pay for the electricity to heat the needed water, so for 3 Yuan (36 cents) they can go to the public bathhouse to clean up and relax for hours, sort of like we treat our spas. Since I was always freezing cold and didn’t have much money for bars or other forms of entertainment, I hit the bathhouses regularly. I paid at the front desk and then put all of my clothes and possessions in a locker and donned just a towel and flip-flops. The first room had rows of hot steaming showers packed with little middle aged Chinese men sitting under the water on wooden stools with wooden-handled brushes. When I walked in they peered over, curious to see a white guy undress and compare the size of their “Great Wall” to mine. I don’t think they were too impressed, but for the record it was a little cold in there. From the shower room I went into a bigger room that had several hot tubs, pools, and saunas. There were dry saunas, steam saunas, ice-cold pools, a regular hot tub, a super high temperature hot tub, and even one infused with aloe vera and other herbs. In the back corner there was a tub by itself, the only one that no one was going into. What was it? I asked Shane. He had no idea either, and we tried to ask a few of the Chinese men but we couldn’t understand their animated responses. Curious as always, I went over to take a closer look. It looked just like regular hot water with nothing special, though there were a few cracked and broken tiles around it. Shane put his leg in first, and reported that the temperature was good but suddenly he yelped and jumped out of the tub, stringing together curses with his laughter. He’d been shocked! There was actually an electric current running through the hot tub! I didn’t believe him so I had to get in there myself. Sure enough, I could feel an uncomfortable electric buzzing through my body that turned into stinging pain after a few seconds. I jumped out as well and we laughed. Was this tub supposed to be like this? Was it some ancient Chinese wisdom that electrocuting yourself is very good for your health? Or was this tub under construction or in need of repairs and they failed to put up warning signs and rope it off? This was too good. I jumped in again up to my shoulders and spent the next quarter hour testing to see how long I could stay in there, Shane timing me with the clock on the wall. The pain was moderate for the first 5 seconds, but after that it became pretty intense and around the twenty-second mark all of my muscles began to lock up and palsy uncontrollably. My record was 23 seconds, at which time I was dancing uncontrollably with muscle spasms and my screams of pain sounded like Gold Medal victory cries from the Special Olympics. I tried to get out of the tub and my arms but hands turned inwards and my legs wouldn’t respond, leaving me in fits and stumbling like a newborn baby deer. I fell out of the tub with a grunt and cracked my hand on the tile, landing buck naked in the fetal position before Shane could help me up. I was bleeding all over the white tiles and my jaw muscles were still locked up. The Chinamen in the bathhouse looked on intently but did not comment on my antics. To this day I still don’t know if they are proudly telling folk stories of the white guy they witnessed set the elctro-hot tub endurance record, or if they thought I was an abject moron with a death wish and I set US-China relations back a decade. I’d have to put my money on the latter. When I emerged into the Beijing evening an hour later the dry winter air steamed off my skin and I was finally warm.
The love of her life, Chang Yu, heard a rumor about her being sick when he was in the city. A political tribunal was planned to judge his guilt or innocence and he wasn’t supposed to leave, but when he heard that she was sick he bolted for the village without permission. Like in a feverish dream he appeared at her bedside. They professed their love to each other again, and he promised that he would come back for her no matter what happened. He waited that night by her side until her fever broke, then in the morning he had to go back. Since he had left without permission he was in serious trouble, and the tribunal ordered him detained him for two years. Zhao Di waited patiently two years for his return. Every day after her chores were done she walked to the end of the road and faced the direction of the city, watching for him to reappear on the horizon. For two years she stood out there in the rain and ice and driving snow, intent on being there to greet Chang Yu when he returned. No one tried to talk her out of it, but when it was cold they would come bring her hot tea or drape a blanket around her shoulders and then leave her be. Their love became legendary in the village and the same day that Chang Yu walked back into the village they were married in the schoolhouse under hand sewn red banners, for good luck and blessings that they never be parted again…
I commandeered a van and a driver from the hotel to drive me to the Great Wall an hour outside of Beijing. I was amazed that only a few miles outside of the modern city people lived in conditions that were almost medieval. Most country dwellers lived in little one-room stone huts and farmed a rocky patch of earth and kept a few goats or chickens to sustain their family. The huts had thatched grass and mud roofs and many of them were caved in by the snowstorms. Women with rosy red cheeks bundled up and lit cooking fires and pounded meal with mortars in their front yards. The men dressed in traditional fur and animal hides like Mongolian warriors and appeared at the edge of the paved road, holding up freshly hunted ducks, fish, and small game to sell to the passing drivers. I read in a national newspaper that the Chinese government confessed that hundreds of thousands of their countrymen were still living in caves – and that’s just the number they admitted.
We arrived at a popular tourist spot on the Great Wall and I spent the next few hours hiking up and down the embankment on top of the wall, sliding and scampering in the snow. The views of the countryside were breathtaking, and I was in complete solitude except for a little old man with a long beard sitting near the entrance, laughing cheerfully as he smoked opium from a long pipe. He smiled at me like we shared some ancient secret that need not be spoken. Back in the 5th century BC, when Cher was just starting her singing career, they began building the Great Wall out of stone and earthen bricks to protect Northern China from invasion from Mongolian warlords and Nomadic tribes. It was built and rebuilt all the way through the 16th Century AD, though most of it was fortified during the Ming Dynasty. It stretches an improbable 3,800 miles, from the eastern edge of Shanhaiguan to Top Lake in the West. Some of the walls rise to 40 feet high, and in other places they are crumbling and no taller than a person. The Great Wall snakes up and down hills and mountains, across rivers and deserts, and it’s the only man-made structure you can see from outer space. The Emperors used indentured servants to build it – they would round up the best craftsmen and masons from the villages all over China and force them to work for a lifetime on the wall. There was built-in accountability that they did a good job, for failing to do so would mean that invaders could get in and topple the Empire. Each brick a mason placed in the Wall had his family name etched in it so later on if a section crumbled or proved to be shoddy they could track down the responsible craftsman, as well as his entire family, and cut their heads off.
Sitting in the schoolhouse, Yusheng reflected on this story of his mom and dad and his frustration softened; he understood why his mother wanted to honor her late husband with the proper traditions. He went to the mayor of the village and gave him all the money he had in the world to buy a coffin and hire the men for the ceremony.
The day of the funeral Yusheng walked his mourning mother up to the schoolhouse. They expected few people but amazingly they were greeted by over two hundred of Chang Yu’s former students waiting for them. They all lent a hand to carry the coffin through the snow to the burial site, and none of them would accept any payment for their help. The next day Yusheng went to the schoolhouse and taught one day of classes to the young pupils to honor his father’s memory...
On a day the snow stopped falling from the slate-gray sky I walked to the Forbidden City in the center of old Peking. This vast, ancient city-within a city was the ceremonial and political home to 26 emperors through the Ming and Quing Dynasties. The entire city complex is surrounded by a 25 foot high wall and a100-foot wide moat to protect from outsiders, and indeed it survived bloody occupations by the Japanese, Taiwanese, military warlords, and Communists during the Cultural Revolution. Artists and craftsmen pulled up their bicycles and worked on sidewalks outside of the wall, cutting hair or painting pictures outdoors, and early every morning groups of citizens practiced Tai Chi in perfect unison. The Celestial Emperor, the son of Heaven, never stepped foot outside of the Forbidden City entire life. His wife and family lived within the city but in separate palaces apart from him, balancing out the Yin and the Yang. The Forbidden City and Imperial Palace within are about 8 million square feet, or 178 acres, with 980 buildings and 9,999 bays. It could quite possibly be the most ornate, grand architecture that I’ve seen. Every single color, tapestry, gate, waterfall, mural, rooftop, bridge, koi pond, garden, and statue has religious significance down to mathematical precision. The Chinese Emperor’s court was closed off to the outside world for centuries, believing that the primitive ways and culture of foreigners would taint the chosen people of Heaven.
I wandered around the Forbidden City the whole day, transported to an ancient place of honor and beauty, where the past was just as real as the present and echoed eternally in the silence. On my way out of the city I saw a two men playing music. One man sat on a chair playing a rickety wooden violin, while his partners stood next to him and sang traditional Chinese love songs. I pulled out my camera to snap a photo but they stopped playing and yelled at me. They called me a “Gweilo,” the word for white people or literally, Ghost Man, and ushered me away, still protecting their Forbidden City from foreigners. Was I a Gweilo? A white ghost? It was hard not to feel like that. I was alone in this ancient place, enveloped in a blanket of white like gently blowing curtains. I felt like I was becoming invisible, like the wind and the snow could gust right through me. Did I even exist? In this distant place, far from home and family, who would even know if I was gone? I hoped I had the spirits of ancestor protecting me, too, and there would be people showing up at my funeral to honor me like in the beautiful in-flight movie that I will never forget.
Yao Di is happy because the love of her life is honored. His soul will be at peace for eternity, and he will not be a ghost roaming around - a Gu Hun Ye Gui who has died far from home or was forgotten by family. She, too can rest, and no longer has to stand vigil at the end of the village road, waiting for the second half of her heart to come walking home.
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