Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
It’s Forbidden
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Dear Faculty Friends,
Greetings from Bejing. Two weeks in to my sabbatical, and I can tell you that this place is a Chinese puzzle: impenetrable, enigmatic, isolating.
Despite being surrounded by 1.4 billion people, I am alone. I even miss our raucous, futile faculty lounge debates. Without family, friends or any of you to argue with, I’ve started talking to myself, telling myself jokes.
Did you know that, besides gunpowder, the Chinese invented prosthetic devices? I know this is true because my guidebook says that circa 221 B.C. the Emperor Qin Shi Huang ruled China with an iron fist.
Beijing sprawls like Los Angeles but with Chinese street signs and five times the population. Freeways are as tangled as a plate of noodles which is saying something because there are 1200 varieties of noodles cooked in China.
Skyscrapers disappear into a hazy sky. Horizon to horizon, the Beijing sky is grayness, making me wonder if the locals have forgotten what a blue sky looks like. Poor air quality is my excuse for retreating to my air-filtered hotel room, but more fundamentally I am overwhelmed.
Compared to our Western white-bread palates, the Chinese eat adventuresomely. Camel’s feet slither on my tongue. Scorpions are crunchy. Snake wine marinates in a bottle with a coiled snake. I think the snake was doing the backstroke. Whatever the menu, eating alone is just eating alone.
Hiding out in my hotel room, I’m getting a jaw-grinding education on censorship. Fifty-three Chinese channels broadcast a tedious mix of local sports and banal game shows. On CNN, the screen goes black whenever news about China appears. I stay up half the night watching TV, aggravated by what I'm not allowed to see. I never thought of a television as good company, but that’s the truth of traveling solo.
Last week in Xi’an, I rented a bicycle to ride atop the parapets of the ancient walled city. The skyline of tiled roofs and the scarlet lanterns at the South Gate evoke old China. Below me at street level, seedy housing with clotheslines strewn helter-skelter and communal water spigots are a study in crowded tenement living. As I pedaled along, a solitary woman in a raggedy cotton dress stood at a dirty, cracked window watching me. Our different worlds divided; and yet there we were, together in our aloneness.
The next day, I toured the Xi’an Terracotta Army. Rows of clay warriors, each one battle ready, formed in phalanxes on a sprawling parade ground, radiated a mesmerizing, menacing stillness. My insides flinched. Propagandizing WWII Nazi parades and Trump rallies bombarded my mind. My stomach hardened.
Yesterday on board a Li River cruise, the guide’s grating, relentless narration insisted every rock formation along the river looked like a mother with a baby, a bat in flight, a galloping horse. Chinese tourists with cameras—as goofy as American tourists with cameras—thought the elephant-drinking outcropping was especially photogenic. I only saw a large, lumpy, lonely rock.
Like all travelers, by the time I return to campus, I will be a maze of misperceptions, muddlements, mental fog. To preserve my memories, this evening I decided to write a journal entry about the Forbidden City. I would have, but it’s forbidden.
Missing you all,
Noah
