I suppose Chinese-speaking is more accurate here (or Mandarin, if you want to get even more particular about it, which I know some of you probably do).

Much of our time in China was spent with Marisa’s dad Roger, who does a lot of business in the country and has been coming here for many, many years. He recently started teaching himself Mandarin and I have to say, he was very impressive. There was one consistent misunderstanding though. When we met someone, Roger would introduce Marisa and I as ‘daughter’ and ‘husband’, which put a few confused looks on the faces of those who initially thought that meant I was Roger’s husband. I also picked up on how to say ‘a little bit’, which kind of sounds like ‘ee-dee-ahr’, since Roger kept explaining how he only spoke ‘a little bit’ of Mandarin. It reminded me of all the times I’ve told people ‘solamente hablo un poquito de español.’ It was a lot of fun interacting with everyone through/with Roger, and his presence enhanced our experience significantly.

China was not on our itinerary when we started our trip. We discussed it but decided that China would be too much to tackle on top of what we were already doing. It seemed too big and a little too intimidating, plus we had the trip all planned out to a grand finale in Japan and a relatively short hop to Hawaii. When we learned that Roger was going to be in the People’s Republic for a few weeks on business (and would be willing to put us up), we changed our minds. We rearranged our schedule (which had always been flexible) and then started getting ready to apply for our Chinese visa (significantly less flexible). We learned that China, for some strange reason, doesn’t like Americans and charges us twice as much as everyone else for a visa. We also had to get our visas super-double-rushed in Tokyo because we needed our passports to use our rail pass (long story). It ended up working out surprisingly well but it was a major source of stress while we were trying to figure it out with our shaky wireless on Bunaken Island.

So, China. It’s one of those places that I had developed some assumptions that were both strong and vague. I knew it was more complicated than ‘Communist’. I have met quite a few people from China that seemed cool, Marisa’s dad has always spoken highly of the place, there have been reams of academic papers published on its cities, and yet it was hard to clearly picture what actually being there would be like. This worked out, as one clear lesson from this trip is that not having a clear vision of a place is consistently a good thing, as I have yet to be disappointed by places that were complete blank spots on my mental map. Brussels, Laos, and China were all places I didn’t have expectations of, and my experiences of each were the better for it.

We visited three cities. We flew into Beijing from Tokyo, rode the rails to Xi’an, and then flew from there to Shanghai. My one-word description for each, starting with Beijing: SMOGGY, old, and consumer-oriented.

Beijing is not a nice city, but I hear there are nice parts. The place has been central-planned into oblivion. This pic encapsulates it well:

It’s not going to get any better, either. As in the US, Chinese cities are being used as engines of economic growth. Urban development is part of their national economy and the more luxury office and apartment space they produce, the better their numbers look. China looks like it might be heading for a fall in that respect but it didn’t stop them from putting up skyscraping apartment buildings all across the countryside. These developments were everywhere along the train and the highways. They all looked abandoned.

A large part of China’s economy is based on the strength of their real estate industry. Property development in China is also very strangely run, with heavy involvement by the state and a circular logic that sees the state selling to developers in order to make money on taxes. It was explained to me by someone we met while we were there and I can’t quite remember how it works. The upshot of it all is that the government has been pushing for the development of more and more of these empty and/or incomplete skyscraper developments and has artificially increased their value. The bubble is expanding quickly, and China may be heading for a huge crash. Real estate bringing down a national economy? Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Anyway. We weren’t in China for the real estate. We were there to see what we could of a country that most people just have vague impressions of. From the outside, China can seem scary. Communists! Repression! Military bluster! Fear! While those aren’t inaccurate perceptions (look at Hong Kong if you want an example of how little the Chinese government cares for democratic causes), there is more to the country than its politics.

I’m not trying to say we met a wide variety of people, because we definitely did not. Many of Roger’s friends in China are fairly upper class. We don’t speak Mandarin and there aren’t a lot of English speakers wandering around looking for tourists to befriend (a big difference from India). What made China’s diversity clear for me was just being there and witnessing the range of people that call China home. We didn’t leave the cities, and there is a lot to China (good and bad) that I know we just didn’t see because of where we were. I recognize that. But even so, the diversity that we did see in the cities we visited made it clear that China does not have a monolithic culture. Seeing the little that we did makes me want to travel outside of the cities and see more of Chinese culture.

All of this is kind of moot, though. We went where we could and saw what we saw. China was a very cool place to visit and I recommend it to anyone that has a chance. We saw Beijing (Great Wall and the Olympic Park), Xi’an (terra cotta army and Mount Huashan), and Shanghai. It was a great couple of weeks and I’m glad we got the opportunity. I’m going to add on to Marisa’s post and publish some of my favorite pics from in and around Beijing.