Four minutes to read.
Besides gunpowder, the Chinese invented prosthetic devices. I know this because my guidebook says that circa 221 B.C. the Emperor Qin Shi Huang ruled China with an iron hand.
I’m in China, alone. Without family or friends around, I have started talking to myself, telling myself jokes. Lonely people talk to themselves.
Beijing is Los Angeles with Chinese street signs and five times the population. Urban sprawl, skyscrapers, freeways. Great food. Great museums. Busy people on the move. Impenetrable. Mysterious. Isolating.
The Beijing sky is a hazy grey, horizon to horizon. It’s as if everyone here has forgotten what a blue sky looks like. Poor air quality is my feeble excuse for not leaving my hotel, for daydreaming about home, for wallowing in my fucking loneliness.
In my hotel room—my hideaway, my segregation—I’m spending way too much time getting a jaw-grinding education on censorship. The TV gets 53 Chinese channels, mostly a boring mix of local sports and banal game shows. When news about China appears on CNN, the TV goes black—enforcing another moment of isolating apartness. Without my wife to tell me to get some sleep (or at least let her get some sleep), I stay up half the night with the TV screen glowing in the dark.
Judged by Western white-bread palates, the Chinese are gluttons for exotic foods. Camel’s foot is mild, chewy, slithery. Scorpion is crunchy. Snake wine is poured from a bottle with a coiled snake inside it. I think the snake was doing the backstroke. Eating alone is eating alone.
Last week in Xi’an, I rented a bicycle to ride atop the parapets of the walled city. The skyline of tiled roofs and the scarlet lanterns at the South Gate evoke the majesty of old China. Crammed against the ancient walls, seedy housing with clotheslines strewn helter-skelter and communal water spigots are a study in tenement living. As I biked along, a frail, solitary woman in a raggedy cotton dress stood at a dirty, cracked window watching me—our worlds as different as fate permits. Yet there we were, alone and separate.
The next day, I toured the Xi’an Terracotta Army. Rows of clay soldiers, each one battle ready, massed on a sprawling parade ground. In their mute immobility, the warriors radiate a menacing, mesmerizing presence. My insides flinched. Intimidating, phalanxed WWII Nazi parades and Trump cult rallies propagandizing his criminality bombarded my mind. My stomach hardened, legs frozen in place. No one noticed.
Yesterday, on board a Li River cruise, the guide’s grating, nonstop narration insisted the mountain outcroppings along the river looked like mothers with babies, bats in flight or galloping horses. Chinese tourists with cameras—as goofy as American tourists with cameras—thought the elephant-drinking cliff was especially photogenic. I only saw a large, lumpy, lonely rock.
By the time I arrive home my travel narrative will be a maze of misperceptions, muddlements, mental fogginess. To unscramble my opaque memory, I decide to write a few journal notes about the Forbidden City, but stop myself. Maybe it’s forbidden.