China!!! (Part IV)

THE CHINA EXPERIENCE: PART IV

What, I ask you, would a trip to China be without the Great Wall? (A travesty!)

In lieu of hiring a driver for the day as we had done in Xi'an, we elected to go Full Tourist and join a guided tour - which meant we were also going to see the Olympic Stadium and a bevy of gallery/museum/factories designed to sucker us into buying overpriced souvenirs. Our tour group ended up being rather small - just us and our new German friend Bjorn.

After the cloisonne factory (which was really cool, did you know those gorgeous vases were made of copper and enamel rather than porcelain? darn things are near indestructible), we headed up to Mutianyu, our access point for the Wall. We trudged up the stairs (though there is a chairlift for the feint of heart) and emerged atop one of the Wonders of the World and it was, in a word, wonderful. A vendor plopped a Mao hat on my head and snapped a pic with me, my faithful cohort, and our new German friend.


We explored a couple of the guard towers and generally cavorted until it was time to make our way back down - which, at Mutianyu, meant tobogganing! It was pretty fabulous. (And would have been even more fabulous if the guy in front of me hadn't had one hand firmly on the brake all. the way. down. Mrg.)

Finishing out the day, we saw how silk was made (poor little dead pupa!), watched pearls harvested (poor big ole dead oyster!), had a tea tasting (learning the proper way to slurp oolong), and snapped our touristy pics of the Birdnest and Water Cube. Then... because our nine hour tour hadn't done us in, we went out to the local pub with some fellow ex-pats (where there may or may not have been a demonstration of how to have, ahem, relations on horseback - that one's for you, Sara Ramsey!). Vacation: An endurance sport.

And speaking of feats of athleticism... We went to see an acrobat show and can I just say DAMN, that was amazing. Beyond amazing. Terrifying at moments. I wanted to beg them to use the safety wires (they only snapped them on twice, but my heart must have stopped in my chest twenty times). Flying through the air, contorting themselves and stacking themselves and wow, just WOW. But what made it even more stunning was the fact that they truly pushed themselves to the limit. Twice they failed perfection and that failure made the otherwise flawless performances that much more real.

But it was also staggeringly hard to watch. The first wobble was in the first sequence of performance. The male acrobats were using a teeter-totter to launch one another through the air. One stood on the lowered end while two other guys climbed to the top of a platform and jumped down onto the raised end, flinging Guy Number One up in a series of spinning backflips thirty feet above the stage where he tried to land seated on a chair perched on top of a pole being held by another guy. On his first attempt, he overshot and landed standing on the chair only to tumble down (thank god this was one time they used a safety wire). The expression on his face was intense. What he'd done was still amazing, but he looked angry. Deeply pissed. And all of that rage was visibly self-directed. I actually said, "Holy crap, his face," to my friend as he set up the trick to do it again - and executed it perfectly the second time.

The second flub was in a performance of the female troupe. They were doing this sort of gymnastic juggling trick and one girl was supposed to walk up the back of the other girl to stand on her shoulders and then they would fling these spinning balls to one another - but when one girl started to walk up to the shoulders of her cohort, she wobbled and stumbled back down. Both of their faces instantly fell with this intense icy self-flagellation. They tried again, again executing perfectly the second time, but those two girls never smiled again the entire performance. And behind me, a Chinese man "tsk tsk tsk"ed in disapproval.

It was his tsking, as much as the crestfallen expressions, that really brought home to me the shame of failure (or even a little wobble followed by success) in Chinese culture. As a child of the "you didn't fail, you tried" culture, this was startling to me. Both extremes bother me. Yes, strive toward perfection, but it is an unattainable ideal, a goal to motivate not to achieve. And for the lack of it to be met with shame... the concept was foreign to me. Disappointment, yes, but shame... hmm. I suppose I'm trying to figure this out because of the constancy of rejection in the writing biz. And the subjectivity of success. Could we really be creative if we knew we would be shamed by the lack of perfection? And how do you define perfection? I can't write a word unless I give myself permission to suck - and fix it later. Could Edison have invented the lightbulb without finding a hundred ways not to... and pushing on? And at what point in Chinese culture did innovation and the permission to fail become subsumed in tradition and perfection - because they created the traditional art at some point, created kung fu and gunpowder. So when did that shift... and does the drive for absolute perfection actually hinder our ability to break through and created something new (and beautifully flawed)?

Aaaanyway, enough pseudo-philosophical ramblings.

Perfect or no, if you do find yourself in Beijing, don't miss out on the evening entertainments. Beyond the belly dancing and acrobats, there are kung fu shows, the Chinese opera, and trivia challenges pretty much ever night at the week at various English-speaking pubs (I'm such a sucker for trivia). Make sure you head up to Hou Hai, take a rickshaw through the hutongs, eat hot pot (soooo goooooood!), drink Hong Kong milk tea (with tapioca balls!), and nibble the sugary-deliciousness of hawthorne berries on a stick. Visit the insanity of the Yashow market (but bring along a friend who likes to negotiate or you'll get ripped off - even if you think you're getting an amazing deal). It stunned me how far my money went in China. The flight and visa may be dear, but once you get there, you feel like a pasha rolling in riches. Go for Peking Duck - or just "duck" as it is called in the City Formerly Known as Peking. Make sure you have Shao Mai at a local dumpling restaurant and if you get the chance, I highly recommend "Strawberry Snow Ice" - even though we never did figure out exactly what we were eating. And if you're feeling overwhelmed by the Stranger-in-a-Strange-Land sensation, go to Sanlitun Village for lunch, grab birthday-cake-on-a-stick and a latte from Starbucks, or swing by the Bookworm and browse their shelves.

Beijing is a phenomenal place. The ex-pat community feels like a small town wrapped in a big city. The Beijing culture is shifting rapidly from a virtue-and-tradition culture to a powerfully status-oriented one, and as one ex-pat told me over drinks, it is one place in the world that is changing before your very eyes. A true emerging nation. It's a powerful place to be. I have a feeling I'll be back.