a journey's vacation

i'm sitting in a dark, smokey room full of computers, fans, and chatty chinese teenagers. it's a space where young people come mostly to play computer games, but also to instant message and meet with their friends. i've found these places even in the smallest of towns, except perhaps, in the tiniest farming villages.

i'm back in fangcheng after having a week-long sojourn to nanning (to obtain a visa to enter vietnam) and to yangshuo (in search of western food and western folks). both proved successful.

in nanning, i bumped into luke, a 22 year-old american taking some time off from his job as an english teacher in the northern reaches of china. he had to catch a train to Guangzhou, but we had time to get lunch together. i was most excited because he knew some chinese and would be
able to order from a menu. lucky day! luke taught me some chinese words for food dishes so that i can order myself....(which unfortunately hasn't proved successful in the least bit). he also spent quite a bit of time talking about how he's waiting to hear back from columbia law school
regarding his application. luke hopes to become a corporate lawyer and do good from within society's institutions. i couldn't take much more of his near-obsessive focus on entering columbia, but i soon found an obsession of my own: his lonely planet traveler's guide to china.

except for a fancy compass and a handful of crappy maps, i haven't had much guidance on my trip. i definitely haven't had an entire guidebook to consult every step of the way, and i quickly delighted in this fact-filled text. i already spent 2 days trying to meet people in nanning without any success, so i was for something new. i found a wealthy entry in the guidebook on yangshuo, a small city boasting a plethora of tourist activities and accommodations. it was a tourist trap, for sure, and i could smell it. every lonely planet-touting american and european trekking through china would stop in yangshuo. and the effect, i knew, would be a fictitious chinese city, manufactured for the comfort of travelers (and profit of locals). it's exactly the kind of place i had been avoiding and planned to avoid throughout my trip. but i wanted to go. i wanted to eat
french fries and pizza. i wanted a cup of coffee. i wanted to speak english. i caved.

8 am the next morning i found myself sitting quite uncomfortably on a cramped train to quilin. from quilin i took a bus to yangshuo where i was immediately greeted by people trying to sell me this or that. i found a hotel room and set out to find some food. no more dumplings, noodle soup, rice and meat, steemed yams, green tea, and bananas. i wanted american greasy food and i wanted it with ketchup. the town was very quaint; certainly the type that receives high marks in a guidebook. small, old, two-story buildings with characteristic roofs lined narrow, cobble-stone covered streets. menus outside many restaurants boasted foods from all over the world. there was more american food than one would find perusing most streets in the u.s.

i settled down in a cafe and ordered coffee. after putting some labor into my new book (jane austen's persuasion), a group of english-speakers entered and i soon found myself sitting at their table. i was a little dissapointed in our conversation's superficial tendencies, but i was delighted to find at least one other person was interested in digging deeper. and so i formed a friendship with terri, an english jedi knight* who was on vacation from her job as an english teacher also in the northern reaches of china. everybody got up to leave (to go to their respective massages), but terri and i stuck around to talk more.

over the next day and a half we spent time discussing art, politics, life, race, class and, of course, china. i was relieved, after having spent 3 uncomfortable and challenging weeks largely to my own internal ramblings, to find someone i could engage with intellectually. later that night we joined a couple of english boys and two dutch (i think? they didn't talk much...or rather the englishmen talked too much) for dinner and drinks. the conversation ping-ponged between violent english bar culture and international politics. even though the two seemed completely unrelated at the time, perhaps they are not?

full of american breakfasts, cheese pizza and all things familiar, i bus-ed it back to nanning. soon after picking up my vietnamese visa (success!), a chinese student about my age approached me and struck up conversation. "bing", which means "soldier" in english, wanted to practice his english. if it weren't for brave personalities like soldier i don't think i would have made half as many friends in china. he was heading to an amway meeting and i needed to check into a hotel so we decided to meet the next day in the park. bing and his friend (whose name i didn't catch)showed me to walmart to get lunch. i was going to protest, but decided against it, too curious to see what it'd be like. alas, the lunch at wal mart was 5.5 yuan, and decidedly too expensive for cash strapped soldier and friend. so we found another fast food restaurant and chomped down on our 3 yuan rice, bok choy, beef and chicken soup.

soldier and his friend were interested in my trip; i was interested in their impressions of america. and so our conversation revolved. both thought of america highly, saying that americans have freedom. after questioning them about the iraq war, they thought it strange there were no weapons of mass destruction in iraq, but seemed to dismiss that in light of the fact that bush was reelected. soldier used his observation that south korea has experienced development and better living for its people since america's "involvement" there in the 1940s to argue in favor of america.

i'm finding that many chinese people have a glorified perspective of america. (this isn't too shocking given that many people *in america* have quite a thick layer of sugar coating their concept of america.) it makes sense, though, that the chinese people i have met think highly of america. for one, there actually are significant opportunities and wealth to be had in the states. but the dark side is that many, many people in the country are still poor. and because the telescopes through which many chinese people observe america--hollywood and and popular music outlets--strictly ignore the less fashionable reality of poverty, their impressions too are
warped.

later soldier showed me to a big bookstore and i picked up copies of toni morrison's beloved and kafka's the castle (yipppee!). most of the bookstores i've found only sell classical english texts such as shakespeare, which i not only find disappointing but also odd, because the people likely buying them are chinese people wanting to practice their english....but the classics are all in pretentious old-english, not the english vernacular they would find useful.

i wanted to get back to fangcheng and get reunited with my bicycle. (i loath being a boring pedestrian). soldier offered to drive me to the bus station so i sat on the rear rack of his bicycle and he pedaled us about 4 or five kilometers. it was quite a sight given that soldier is such a
short fellow--and quite the experience given that i've never rode on the back of a bicycle.

having arrived in fangcheng, i reclaimed my bags and bicycle and settled down in another motel. tomorrow i will ride to dongxin...and then to vietnam!

*apparently during the last census in england many people identified as jedi knights as a joke