A while later, it has been hard to choose how to talk about what I saw during the rest of our time in Xi’an and the remainder of the trip in Shanghai. Rather than try in vain to give a detailed chronology of events, I want to share a few of my most memorable impressions from the country before I returned to my home in Japan.
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On our final day in Xi’an, we visited the world renowned Terracotta Warrior statues. Emperor Qin, the one who united the kingdoms of ancient China to make it one land – and the same emperor who I believe is featured in the famous Chinese film Hero – upon reaching an elderly age ordered that a life-size clay imitation of each of the thousands of warriors who served him in his armies be created, so that he may be buried with them after his death. The people under this bidding suffered endlessly to have them ready by their tentative deadline, shaping and firing the clay in pieces before gluing them together and painting them (now the paint has been destroyed on most of them due to the immediate effect of the air upon their exhumation). The emperor died before their completion (and so the necessity to carry out the order to the end was halted as well), however as many as 8000 (maybe more) statues were buried along with the emperor. Over time, people with a vengeance against the emperor’s cruelty are said to have broken in to the underground and destroyed many of these statues.
Regardless, hundreds now stand excavated in one of the burial sites for all to see. They stand together, horses, weapons (real ones), carts, all facing one direction as if prepared for the next battle to come. It is such a mix of emotions to stand before something so hauntingly amazing yet knowing that it required so much involuntary suffering to make. I left with the others for Shanghai with that image in mind, of thousands of warriors standing, waiting together for a battle that would never come, in an age where battles no longer bear any resemblance to the ways of honor and even respect that hand-to-hand combat entailed. Mind you, I still find all war ugly – but there must be given a great care of respect in one’s regard to the difference between the warriors of old and the State-wielded militia of our time. It is not black and white either. The past had its share of military-minded individuals, and the present still holds, I believe, at least a handful of new warriors. But the hearts of the military-minds carry no philosophy, no meaning, no sense of life inherent to the concept of death they witness; and the present-day warriors’ swords are no longer blades of metal – indeed, they are in their greater numbers likely not found in the fields of war today at all.
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Upon arriving in Shanghai, we all sat on the bus from the airport sleepily observing the environment around us, perhaps only a couple of us listening to the information our new Chinese guide was serving us. She was younger than the others and her slightly wavering fluency gave the impression that this was still one of her new experiences in her business. In my dreamy state, I watched her carefully, noting her movements and fluctuations, little details of her personality revealing themselves through her more unguarded moments. I allowed myself to enjoy this one-way company with someone I had never met, forgetting about myself even for a bit to enter her head (as best I could) and see the world through her. She was nervous but also headstrong. Her youthful, slightly inexperienced appearance seemed to annoy the other older male guides with us, and I felt that despite her somehow sensing that, she kept her confidence about her. In forgetting about myself for those moments, engrossed in this simple and honest willfulness, I allowed myself to become completely engrossed by a stranger.
I have not really spoken of it with anyone, but I feel now, with the likeliness being that I will never see Lilang again, this sort of obligation to write about it and make yet another case of the mysterious of life and love known to others. It deserves it, I think.
She told everyone that her English name was Meibo (not a name I am particularly familiar with, but a nice one nonetheless), however I still came to call her by her real name. I am not a confident person when it comes to attractions to people – I tend to create romantic scenes in my head and prohibit it from becoming anything more than that on my part. I do not think it is so much that I am closed to the idea as that experience has taught me to look for signs of promise in people that I rarely actually see. In any case, though, this time it had nothing to do with any romantic endeavor, and the attraction really had very little place in the preset as it did in the effect following my selfless meandering into her persona. Confidence usually being held in check by a sense of disbelief in my fantasies, it ran into no antagonism here, as there was no fantasy to which it was expected to respond. I felt completely free to just say something to her – and I did, at almost every opportunity that presented itself, sharing everything from families to our multiple international names to future intentions. From our first meeting on, I regarded her as a close friend, intimate through the deep and boundless potential she contained for something more than that. And her smile indicated she felt the same of me. We smiled often.
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Shanghai was simply amazing. My general distaste for cities is often nevertheless overridden by the sheer wonder of design and structure that some of the world’s major cities incorporate. Shanghai, like some places in Japan, shows a large interest in developing its more eco-friendly aspects alongside its mass industry. All along the highways and the building rooftops were trees and gardens, some tucked under beneath the roads below, wasting as little space as possible on bare concrete. The next day, I would visit, alone with two other travelers, the city planning and development center to observe a full-scale model of the city that covered the floor of a three-tiered, banquet floor-size room, surrounded by displays of management and development details, videos, maps, etc. A lot of it was rather tourist-oriented, but it did succeed in giving the sense that Shanghai had a pretty elaborate plan for itself in the years to come. One display arranged a line of photographs of the city’s major river inlet and port region, showing one-year increments of growth over a ten year span. The speed was unbelievable, and it left me speculating just how much of the country’s financial resources were being pulled in, not unlike a black hole, by this centralizing vector of a yet widely poverty-stricken nation.
In fact, financial distribution had become a prominent theme to this remainder of the trip. Considering Shanghai alone, my very first experience having got off the bus was a brief detour through a side venue to a park to get to a region of the city whose marketplace guaranteed a place for us to eat. The path along this venue was stricken with people. Broken, disfigured, poorly or hardly clothed, old and young, unmercifully approaching us to sell us some junk they found, or to simply beg from us with plastic cups, save those who had clearly given up long before and now merely lay on the road waiting for nothing. In catching sight of one girl whose face was heavily scarred and whose hands had apparently been the victims of some previous tragedy, followed only a few steps away by a beaten, crumpled man who was forced by some inexplicable condition of his legs to travel the streets on a wooden board with wheels, I nearly lost myself despite being among my peers. I wanted to cry out, hold the girl who hopelessly staggered through the streets in my arms and take her away from that place, scold without remorse those who I was traveling with for their utter insensitivity to it all. The inhumanness of that moment was unbearable, and I was reminded again of the people I had seen in the poor village of Xi’an, irrationally contemplating how it was possible that this could happen to people.
Humans among humans, now all the more resembling humans among machines. We do not realize the nature of ourselves, machines, as that all that is human is left abandoned somewhere else, on the outskirts, on the streets of the forgotten. I think the lesson of diplomacy here was perhaps lost on everyone that day.
Turning a corner to board the bus again after our meal, a woman quietly approached us with her cup, and I immediately noticed her shoeless feet and collapsing figure – not so much her body even as a lack of any outward signs of hope that are regular of a person. In her other arm was an infant, silent, its body as worn as its mother’s. We all walked by, and then, despite my awareness of the danger of giving to one when others are near (they can swarm you as if with the mind to eat you), I ran back at the last second on an impulse to drop what was in my pockets into the cup, replying to her sad Chinese ‘thank you’ with a Japanese ‘I’m sorry,’ as it was the only thing that managed to come to mind for me to say. Fearing I would lose it again as I nearly had at the park, I ran back to the bus without looking back, catching a glimpse of her just one more time as the bus passed her corner, the baby on her shoulder still lying motionless.
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On the second to last day, I believe, we held an ISLP diplomacy workshop. It was meant to resemble something like the sort of forum actual ministry of affairs officials held, and the issues we were asked to debate in groups over were supposedly authentic issues that U.S.-China relations ministries were themselves pondering over. I have unfortunately forgotten a good bit of the particular issue my group of assigned, but I believe it basically ran that: There is a hypothetical business opportunity for a hypothetical U.S.-based multinational corporation that proposes proffering China an industrial location in one of the country’s less economically viable regions. It entailed production and export of a native form of craft (I think) that was already frequently produced by the region’s locals, offering a new venue of employment for them and a new assembly line for a popular exotic product for America. ......I am quite sure there was more to it than that, but the details have slipped my two and a half months later. In any case, we had to consider the value in this proposal, as to whether or not it would be and come up with legitimate alternative courses of action were something to go foul.
I am sure to the other members of my group I did not seem the least bit interested in the activity. I was in fact very interested. My apparent lack of participation was triggered by a quick realization that my response to the details of the issue were different in numerous ways from the others, and I decided that I would stand to learn more about today’s present day politics – through the newest line of American individuals predominantly educated in political science, economics and international affairs – by taking note of my colleagues’ deductions rather than imposing my own.
Philosophy (in the least) had clearly influenced my disposition to a perceived issue, whereby I immediately relegate to all possible ethical concerns, with heavy reflections on my own sense of morality, before making any initial decisions. My political-science / economically minded peers, however, laid out first and foremost America’s wins and losses at every step of the issue. No attention was called at all to the nature of the product concerned (it could have been anything from bamboo lantern stands to McDonald’s new tiger penis hamburger patties), or whether it would have a positive effect on the health and attitudes of both the people producing it and those demanding it. So much for any progressive forms of modern consumerism. Second, the common denominator remained the United States’ overall profit and return. Any negotiations that may have involved benefits for China’s rapidly changing economy were left completely unaddressed. There was no hint of prediction of the course of the country’s, or even just that particular region’s, growth in the presence of a possibly successful multinational enterprise. If there had been a map offered us to refer to for the activity, I am positive it would have been immediately replaced by a scoreboard: U.S. and China.
It is scary for me to think about the new generation of business and political leaders in the United States. I have to believe that those least likely to serve for the good of the nation, if simply because they are also those who would think to serve for the good of the world, are the ones who will make the most substantial difference in times to come. Carefully watching the attitudes and responses of my colleagues to this foreign culture, a culture we have by habit for centuries now posited as the Other to the West, I recognize the same tendencies that the least understanding of us also frequently display. It is one thing to be misunderstanding of a culture – and it is another to approach from the start with a preset of assumptions, or (in the style of the neocolonialist) an agenda, and an utter lack of sensitivity to the present differences. For a country whose history is riddled with chaotic changes, the States’ peoples are more often than not the least willing of those I know to change. I do not believe I am necessarily implying a liberal worldview – I am merely saying that to keep a conservative outlook in a nation that least resembles their own is dangerous and inherently illogical. One cannot be progressively diplomatic and not be open to change. (Note that I do not mean the business of forming comprises, but of amending the conditions for agreement from the bottom up, starting with the assumptions of what is ethical and what is important for each party.)
Some of those I watched on this trip displayed this sensitivity, I believe, and I hope that in time they are each recognized and encouraged for this character (as I do not feel it is my place, with respect to age and whatnot, to do this formally). We will very much need it.
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On the last night, we dined at the top of Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Tower. (I continue to wonder who gave it its English name.) Standing far above the layout of the massive city, on a rotating floor that gave one sitting in her chair a full 180 degree outlook of both sea and skyscrapers, we became engrossed in the dim-light ambience, presented with a buffet of everything from French fries to pickled seaweed to all form of noodles. Again, the scene of my professor’s story stands out in my mind, looking out over a world of GDP-fixated corporation development and relentless poverty, ourselves immersed in an isolated hamster-ball world of pleasure and consumption.
I do not mean to be entirely cynical, of course. These were indeed also good times. We shared stories of our pasts and futures that gave way to a quiet sadness that we would have to depart from each other soon, many of us claiming that among all the academic congregations we had attended, this was by far comprised of the greatest people. I could feel how far my personality had slipped back into its more American mode of character, and I allowed myself to really enjoy it with few reservations for the remainder of that last night. I knew I would miss many of the friends I made on this trip. Throughout the evening, Lilang and I exchanged smiles at a distance, and I believe that I may have been the happiest person in the building that night.
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We all left for the airport in fatigue, despite being yet the last caravan that morning to depart for it. The bus ride seemed mostly silent to me, except for the conversations I had with my new friend from Georgia sitting next to me (unaware I had hoped Lilang would have the chance to sit there, thrilled that she would accompany this particular portion of the group to the airport). My eyes brushed back over the rushing city landscape, enjoying the pitfalls from the highway rail sides into deep green tree groves or city fountains. I reflected over all the experiences I had had in this city and those in the days before. The trip seemed to have lasted a month or so in my mind – hence the power of travel over even just ten days.
I separated quietly from the line waiting for baggage check, being one of the few who understood that I would be returning to Japan from here and thus obliged to depart on another airline. I preferred the secrecy of my unannounced farewell (caught on the way out by only a couple of people who made me promise to keep in touch). I sat in the waiting area, preparing for a three-hour hiatus preceding my flight home. I suddenly recognized Lilang walking toward me, showing no sign of hesitancy in sitting right up next to me, cutting off between us any of the physical distance I am so used to from my Japanese friends. She smiled. She had to return home in a few minutes. I asked if we should go downstairs for coffee or something, and she chirped that she does not drink coffee. Oh, yeah, I thought, I don’t either. I nearly laughed aloud at my life’s blunt refusal to be comparable to any extent at all to a movie scene, even in its more romantic moments. We talked about our homes for a little while, and she promised to contact me if she ever considered visiting Japan (which she said she had wanted to do anyway). She is still the only one of us to have any contact information between us, assuming it did not get lost since the time we first met. She left with both hands waving, subtly, disappearing from this last chapter of the journey as well. I was by far happier than I was sad.
After four hours in the air, I stared mesmerized out my tiny window at the black night of nothing that slowly became little by little overtaken by tiny lights, becoming swarms and finally a pronounced shape of coast and islands. My Japan was a beautiful sight to return to.
