Mousie Dung

Hey, y’all. Sorry about the radio silence and lack of postage since my Tuesday return from Beijing (Egads! Is it Friday already?). This alarms my family especially since dropoffs in my communication usually indicate a slide into deep poopiness. There’s been a slight element of that but…I dunno. There’s really no good reason except there’s a certain frame of mind I like to be in when I write and it’s been somewhat inaccessible and…anyway, here I am with a nice pot of tea, so let’s go.

Had the conditions been met that A) my keyboard was functioning properly and B) there was anywhere in my neighborhood offering a wireless hotspot or C) there had been an internet café in said vicinity, I had planned to write the shortest DODR post to date. Exactly five words and a colon, to be precise: “Beijing: you can have it.”

My virgin excursion into the ancient land of China might be summed up thusly: In two and a half days I was taken to Starbucks (three times, twice at my instigation; even though I’m contemptuous of their burnt roasts, my addiction mostly trumps my snobbery, and I must say that once I did have a nice red bean scone), McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, and, most peculiarly, a 7-11.

The Mongols I spoke with consider the presence of American chain retailers a great symbol of prosperity and they’re always scheming how to lure them to Ulaanbaatar (happily, our behemoths are reluctant to enter a market of fewer than 5 million people). I had so much difficulty conveying why this is so depressing to me as an American. Simply put, when I go to China I want to see and experience China.

Right now, I’m reading Bill Bryson’s screamingly funny book about Australia, Down Under. I’ve never read another writer who so perfectly mirrors my sense of humor, and so maddeningly channels it into words with such superior skill. It was a little embarrassing on the airplane. I had so much trouble controlling my giggles my seatmate could not be faulted if he concluded I was suffering some form of advancing dementia. Just now Bryson and a British traveling companion have reached Alice Springs, smack in the middle of the Australian outback, and he encounters the same homogenizing American retail colonization and experiences a similar shock and dismay:

“Nearly all guidebooks and travel articles indulge the gentle conceit that Alice [as it’s familiarly known] retains some irreproducible outback charm – some away-from-it-all quality that you must come here to see – but in fact it is Anywhere, Australia. Actually, it is Anywhere, Planet Earth…My room had a balcony where I could watch the setting sun flood the desert floor and burnish the golden slopes of the MacDonnell Ranges beyond – or at least I could if I looked past the more immediate sprawl of a K-Mart plaza across the road. In the two million or more square miles that is the Australian outback, I don’t suppose there is a more unfortunate juxtaposition.

“Allan was evidently held by a similar thought, for a half hour later when we met out front he was staring at the same scene. ‘I can’t believe we’ve just driven a thousand miles to see a K-Mart,’ he said. He looked at me. ‘You Yanks have a lot to answer for, you know.’

“I started to protest, in a sputtering sort of way, but what could I say? He was right. We do. We have created a philosophy of retailing that is so totally without aesthetics and totally irresistible. And now we box those places up and ship them to the far corners of the world. Visually, almost every arrestingly regrettable thing in Alice Springs was a product of American enterprise, from people who couldn’t know that they had helped to drain the distinctiveness from an outback town and doubtless wouldn’t see it that way anyway. Nor come to that, I dare say, would most of the shoppers of Alice Springs, who were no doubt delighted to get lots of free parking and a crack at Martha Stewart towels and shower curtains. What a sad and curious age we live in.”

To be fair, if I had been on my own dime and running my own show I would have approached Beijing quite differently, and I was treated to some succulent Peking duck. But Bryson exactly expresses how I felt generally. Beijing, most especially with the global scrutiny of next year’s Olympics looming, is at great, great pains right now to project a combination of muscular affluence and civic order and doing a bang-up job, frankly. I predict the most efficiently run Olympics anyone has ever seen. No one can mobilize huge chunks of population like the Chinese. But what seems to be sacrificed on this economic altar to wealth, order, and efficiency is anything that might reflect the unique soul of the Chinese people. Everything’s clean, bright, perfectly nice, and crashingly boring.

I had been brought to Beijing by someone at the center of Ulaanbaatar’s downtown development to offer my opinions about things (“Oh,” remarked Ani Alana when we spoke earlier today, “your dream job.”) – architecture and interior design, mostly – from my perspective as someone who’s grown up and traveled widely in the West. When asked about the outside and inside of bazillions of new buildings in Beijing, my standard response, to the point of monotony, was, “It’s OK.” And that’s how it was. There were, to be sure, a few egregious architectural catastrophes that I urged my friend never to replicate, but for the most part it looked like Beijing’s development had been contracted out to the Marriott Corporation. There was nothing wrong with any of it, but neither was there a single element that might raise your heart rate, or stick in your memory.

The only exception was not in Beijing, but in Shanghai. At the construction materials exhibition we attended (I know, you’re jealous), there was a picture of Shanghai’s World Financial Center as it will ultimately look early next year. It was the first time I said “whoa”; it struck me as the most stunning modern skyscraper design I’d ever seen. Now that expresses something about the new China and Asia.

My last day I was free to be a tourist. I had wanted to go out to the Summer Palace and combine sightseeing with a little birding, but the logistics and timing proved too daunting. So I took in the obvious – Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City – and I’m very glad I did.

The Forbidden City was, of course, the winter residence of China’s imperial court. Famously, and without a trace of irony, Chairman Mao’s humongous mug is slapped over the entrance.

Like others I’ve spoken with, I was under the impression that it consisted of one, maybe two large courtyards surrounded by grand residences. Wrong. It’s, well, a city, with innumerable courtyards both grand and intimate, palaces, temples, gardens, ramparts, and all the quarters and facilities such an enormous enclosure would require. It was a wonder, with the entire sprawling complex either having been, or in the process of being, meticulously restored and refurbished in anticipation of the ’08 invasion. Think they’re skimping on the details? Think again:

This was a Monday, and thousands upon thousands of tourists, mostly Chinese, were pouring in. At five bucks a head, I think they’ll have no trouble financing the restoration work. Though we breezed through the open buildings and gardens, we really spent some time with a special exhibit of treasures collected during the Qing Dynasty (the Manchu rule from 1644-1911).

Now, here’s where I really became flummoxed. Every single object on display, every single one, was gorgeous, and most often sublimely, exquisitely so. Sometimes I felt I could hardly breathe for the beauty of the ceramics, calligraphy, furniture, garments, objects of worship, textiles, ceremonial accoutrements, timepieces, paintings, etc. etc. I mean, China has produced utter masterpieces of design for untold centuries. I was constantly beckoning my companion over to take in another jaw-dropping creation. So is it a triumph of Communism’s relentless suppression of individual expression that a visit to their capital city reveals none of that history, but rather elicits the reaction, “It’s OK”? I understand the exploitative problems of the imperial model, believe me (I’m reading another fantastic book, Wild Swans, which is an ex-pat Chinese woman’s tale of her grandmother, mother, and herself spanning the Chinese experience from the turn of the 20th c. to the 1980’s), but surely there can be a balance between more equitable economic models and the urges of the human spirit?

Maybe I’m just dreaming. They did have clean toilets.

Accolades and admiration to the first person who's not in my immediate family who identifies the source of this post's title.

Comments

[Julie]

Ha ha! Mao Tse-tung!

That Shanghai World Financial Center is STUNNING. Really gorgeous. (And I giggle like a crazy person when I read Bill Bryson too. Haven't read Down Under yet - I'll have to look for it!)

[Julie]

PS I'm not laughing at Mao Tse-tung; it's the punny title of your post I'm laughing about. :)

[Judy]

Aw heck, Julie beat me to it. It's the correct pronounciation of Mao Tse-Tung.

[Konchog]

Very good, Julie and Judy, but that's not the actual source I was angling for. I'll give a clue -- the pun comes from a book of drawings.

[Carol]

Well, clean toilets IS pretty nifty.

[Carol of Seattle]

It's from Kliban.
If I had 2 dead rats I'd give you one.
I think he also did the one of Ghengiz and Sylvia Khan that used to crack me up.

[Konchog]

Carol of Seattle: Accolades and admiration! It's from his seminal book Cat, and I see someone at some point turned it into a t-shirt. No wonder we get along so well.

Carol of Elsewhere: Agreed, clean public toilets are desirable, but not exactly the pinnacle of collective human endeavor, you know?

[Carol of Seattle]

love to eat them mousies,
mousies what I love to eat.
bite they little heads off,
nibble on they tiny feet.

[Palzang]

What's even more disgusting about China than the infestation of KFCs and Starbucks is the fact that they're acting like US (as in the USA) now! Hegemony through capitalism...

[kunzang]

Can't argue with the thesis - though I will say for most people the greater concern regarding US presence in Alice is not K-Mart, but the secret space base that is an integral part (presumably) of US defence, making us a target we don't want to be. THAT's the deadly stuff I wish wasn't exported.
That aside, its funny when you look from the other side (as an Alice resident now living in the US). Trips to K-mart, in a small, hot town with limited recreation, can be a great escape on a stinking hot day. I've had a lot of fun outings, without buying a thing!! Its not just about shopping, its about creative entertainment.... And as for the illusion of the outback - so true, visually (Alice is a very mediocre town vis a vis architecture), and yet undeniably alive and well, if you let it soak in.