I totally abandoned this blog because I felt like I was seeing in person most of the people who read it. Oops. Sorry, all you non-immediate family–we love, you, too!
So. Beijing was really exciting. We were there for three weeks, so we had time to see all the famous sights and really absorb the culture. The Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace vie for favorite in my memory; both are vast, meandering gardens with pagodas and temples popping up among the trees, dazzlingly painted with intricate colors, forcing stillness in even the most raucous visitor. The much-heralded Forbidden City made a fainter impression, probably because it was more locked-down and overrun with pushy salespeople.
We saw dozens of temples, a few cathedrals and even a Muslim mosque. My favorite day–the one I wish I could repeat and meant to on our last day, but didn’t, to my regret–started at the Tibetan temple, a sun-filled, scented place surrounded by trees. We spent hours there, watching the faithful bow and say prayers and light incense. Each corridor brought a new surprise, and at the end we came upon the temple’s prized artifact: A 10-meter Buddha carved from a single piece of sandlewood. Maybe I was dizzy from the incense, but I got that same feeling I felt on the Seine a year earlier: nausea induced by overwhelming beauty. We hung out for hours there, then stopped by the nearby Confucian (I’m no fan–what a sexist!) school before stuffing ourselves at the vegetarian buffet. We walked off the meal by wandering the hutongs (Beijing alleyways), and ended the night at a little bar, ourselves the only customers.
This sounds great, and it was, but despite the occasional glorious days, we knew we couldn’t live there. What mars the memory of those wonderful experiences is the pain it took to get to every single place we wanted to go. Beijing is sprawling, with mile-long blocks of big, flat concrete. A lot of it looks like Stockton. Our walking urge kept us from fully enjoying some things, since we spent all our energy schlepping miles to our destinations. And when we did ride transit–whew. It was quite an experience. The busses and metro are always packed. Always. We’re savvy transit riders, having squeezed in with Paris commuters as well as Seoulites and Angelenos. But wow, was it tight. At times, I feared suffocation; they just kept pushing and pushing, pushing their way home.
We got used to all this pushing, to the touch of strangers, and paid for it with our very-first pickpocketing a day after we arrived in Shanghai. We were lucky, though: Joel planned ahead. The guy (girl?) only got 200 yuan (about $25) and a bank card, which we cancelled after running–race against time!–to the hotel, explaining things to the not-surprised clerks, and getting into the room. We pledged not to let the experience color our impression too much; we were in the tourist district, after all.
Still, despite Shanghai’s incredible beauty and warmth, compared to Mongolian-wind-chilled Beijing, we realized, to our devastation, that we couldn’t live there either. We loved the architecture and the cosmopolitan buzz and the expat diversions, but we realized something really important: that we couldn’t ever just blend into the crowd. We couldn’t in Korea, either, but it’s different in China. In Korea, everyone noticed us and seemed happy we were there. In China, they noticed us and seemed angry by our presence. They either suppressed the anger to try to make money from us (”Hey Lady: you want purse?”), or they indulged it and swore at us. We’re happy we went, but it did make us sad. We were really hoping to move there.
We flew back to California a few weeks ago and have been hopping between families, seeing California anew, and making plans for what comes next. We’re checking out L.A. next week to see if we could live there for awhile, to write and think and explore grad school options. But it’s been hard living without kimchi and saunas, and I miss my friends and my life in Korea more than I ever thought I could. Who knows? Mr. Kim’s dream just might come true.
