Memoirs From China
The Three Types of Traveler
By
Chad Pollock
China is exploding right now with fireworks and
the people of the North East are bursting the seams of their
padded coats with excitement. It’s the Chinese New Year.
Tomorrow, I’ll go to the seaside city of
Dalian to celebrate the New Year, but at the moment, I’m
back in the sleepy city of Jinzhou after three weeks meandering
through the South of China.
My trip South was a personal exploration of my
own identity as a “traveler.” I’ve noticed
that there are three types of traveler’s in China: tourists,
backpackers, and a third, less specific group, which I will
call “sojourners.”
The tourists are easy to spot. Their cameras are
always visible and ready for a quick draw, and they are often
following a sexy Chinese girl who’s wearing a slinky dress
and carrying a colored flag that matches the baseball caps that
all the tourists are wearing. Tourists are to be avoided at
all costs. They are not experiencing China so much as observing
It, as if China was an animal in the zoo. Ironically, most of
the “tourists” in China are Chinese.
I spent two weeks—the bulk of my vacation--in
the small mountain town of Dali in China’s Yunnan province.
Every morning I took my breakfast at a café called “Sunshine,”
and every morning the tour groups would wander by. The buxom
guide would stop the group in front of the café, so they
could all have a look. They would stare at me and note what
I was eating, what I was drinking. If I said “ni hao,”
their eyes got wide and they would have a laugh with their friends
“he said ‘ni hao’ the foreigner said ‘ni
hao.’ They never addressed me directly. Isn’t it
fun to poke a tiger in a cage? This is the nature of the tourist.
The backpacker has an illusion of assimilation
into Chinese culture. They are the rough and rugged. They are
wealthy by Chinese standards, poor by Western standards, and
often seeking respite from the horrors of their own culture.
Many of them are fed up with the materialism of their home cultures,
but all of them will return after a year or so, and they’ll
sit in coffee shops and bars talking of the halcyon days of
their world travels. They’ll talk of the cheap hash and
of drunken exploits in Bangkok, Saigon, Bana, and Laotian villages,
and they’ll talk of the beauty of Tibet, and the forced
lessons they learned when they shared a bus with traveling monks.
They are simultaneously admirable and despicable, and I’m
more often than not a member of their ranks.
I ran into many backpackers in Dali. I ate and
drank with them, and we went through the necessary small talk,
“where have you been?” What have you seen?”
“What have you experienced?” Each of us tried to
one up the other with the craziest, most exotic story of travels
and travails. “I woke up in a Bangkok telephone booth
with my panties in my back pocket, and I couldn’t remember
how I got there.” Ha, ha, ha. “We were racing down
the streets in Guilin in rickshaws, and my driver tripped.”
Ha, ha, ha. “The hash, man, in Laos put me flat out. I
wasn’t looking at the stars; I was the stars.” Ha,
ha, ha.
It left me empty. Is this who I am?
I installed myself in a guesthouse in Dali that
commanded a view of the Cang Mountain. The place was called
the Cycle Lodge, and it was quiet, the staff unobtrusive, and
there was a playful dog named Pipi with whom I could amuse myself
when I needed company. I spent my time there reading and writing.
Finished a short story, started on another, took long walks
into lakeside villages, and up into the Cang.
I fancied myself as a spiritual pilgrim, and I
imagined the streets of old Dali as a labyrinth that I had to
walk with fear and trembling. But I have too much of the vagabond
in me to be a true pilgrim.
Vagabondism is my disease. I’m a restless
son-of-a-bitch. Always have been. This disease is what makes
the sojourner.
The sojourner comes in two types: those who are
at peace and those who are seeking peace. I’d fall into
the later category. In Dali, I met a Japanese man who appears
to fall into the former, but he seemed crazed. His name is Hiro,
and he resides full-time at the Cycle Lodge.
Hiro comes across as one stuck in the ‘60’s.
He wears the hippy garb that they sell at all the Dali tourist
shops, loose fitting hemp shirt and pants, scarves, and wraps.
Add to this a mixture of Chinese peasant clothes, Buddhist prayer
beads, and Bai jewelry and the result is the aging Japanese
radical.
Without being pejorative, Hiro is as irrelevant
as the worn out peasant slippers that he wears, yet he’s
happy that way.
He told me he was a writer, but never gave me
opportunity to tell him my own writing ambitions. In fact other
than the question that opened our conversation together, I had
little chance to reveal anything about myself. When I asked
him about his writing, he responded in a muddled way that he
wrote some travel literature and had even worked for the Lonely
Planet. He was more definite about what he didn’t write.
“I don’t write about politics. It’s too…dirty,
you know. It’s all a dirty mess,” he said, “all
about this,” and here he rubbed his fingers together,
the universal symbol of money and greed.
Prior to this conversation, I’d been in
my room reading a collection of Hunter S. Thompson’s letters,
and because I had Hunter on the brain, I asked Hiro if he’d
read any. He looked at me doubtfully. I said that Hunter was
the crazy journalist from the 60’s. “Ah,”
said Hiro, “that’s my time.” Then he launched
into a diatribe about books. “Books. Good Japanese books.
That’s what I need.” He railed against technology
and was proud of his own Internet illiteracy. Much of this speech
I couldn’t understand because his English accent was different
than what I’m used to hearing from my Chinese students.
“Books,” he said, “are much better than anything
you read on the computer.” I smiled—in fact I’d
been smiling and nodding my head the whole time. Hiro continued
to admonish me about the superiority of books, by which I took
him to mean books of literature.
The interview was beginning to get tedious. Hiro
had hijacked me in the hallway of the Cycle Lodge as I was on
my way to the W.C., and my need to pee was becoming critical.
But he seemed in dire need to talk, and I could relate to that.
I had spent several days locked away in my room
at the Cycle Lodge, and I knew what it was like to have a world
of thoughts and no one to share them with. There are more similarities
between Hiro and myself. Both of us are rootless, restless,
and left leaning. We are both in danger of being perpetually
alone. Hiro, of course, has twice as many years as I. He’s
had time to become comfortable in his sojourn. He’s had
opportunities in the past, I assume, to choose to be alone or
not, and he’s made his choice.
For me, I’m not sure if Hiro serves as a
warning or and encouragement. This is what has been weighing
on me of late. This is where I begin to question what it means
to be a sojourner. I look at Hiro and see a man who has never
been willing to surrender his personal ideals. He has refused
to compromise himself. This is admirable. Yet he’s also
irrelevant and alone.
What exactly do I mean by irrelevant? It sounds
harsh and even contradictory to my own ethic that every living
thing is relevant. All life is relevant and needful to me. Hiro
is a beautiful man. He’s wise, temperate, and judicious.
But if he were to die today, he would pass in the same manner
as Eleanor Rigby, and all his ideals, the ideals to which he
has been chaste his whole life, would mean as much as the faith
of Father McKenzie. Hiro is “writing the words of a sermon
that no one will hear.”
This to me is irrelevance.
I begin to question my stubborn idealism. I’m
not sure that my character will allow for anything else, but
I wonder sometimes if I could be happy living the American Dream.
The “American Dream.” Hardly are those
words out when a vast image of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight.
I think again of the journalist of Gonzo. I think about his
proclamation some thirty years ago that the American dream is
dead and that we killed it. I’m too disillusioned with
America to be happy with a quiet life in her bosom. But my
Unhappiness is killing me, and I know it.
Some people possess a strength of character that
allows them not only to envision an alternative life—a
happy life lived outside the boundaries of the mechanized society—but
to actually achieve it. But I still haven’t come to that
point. I can imagine a better life, but then I’m plagued
by the thoughts that keep me on sojourn. Why must we bend over
and take it to make it in this world?
I try to look at my life in China with humility.
I have to because there are a million things every day that
will humble me if I don’t. But I know who I am here. I
am the “laowei,” the “foreigner”—that’s
all I have to try and be. And I’ve come to love it. I
can’t imagine coming back to the States. Whither would
I go??? But the sojourner knows that his days are numbered.
The journey has to come to an end. The problem is that after
looking for the Promised Land for so long, even when you find
the Promised Land, you’re liable to look around and think,
“this can’t be it, maybe it’s just over that
hill.” The journey becomes your lifestyle—like smoking
or playing hockey—and you can only move on. You miss the
blessings of the present because you’re looking for something
better.
I went to Dali to write and to relax, and I did
both of those. What I found there, once I passed by the tourists
and backpackers, was a strange community of sojourners, of which
Hiro was only one. People from all over China and all over the
world have found shelter in Dali. They are all warm and friendly
people, artists and world-weary creatives—good people.
Chilly mountain nights, I huddled with these folks around a
fire at the Bird Bar, a local hangout. We smoked our hash, drank
our beers, and avoided talking about two things: why we were
there and what was happening in the world. I sat with Israelis
who were dodging the draft in their country, an Irishman tired
of the occupation of his country, and Chinese people who didn’t
fit the new corporate mentality of China. I couldn’t help
but wonder what it is that we’re all hiding from.
I know that someday soon I’ll have to return
to America, but for now I’ll keep hiding here in Mao’s
bosom. It’s a warm breast that I lay my head against.
....
memoir two
memoir three
