Southwest Jaunt

Although I personally thought that I did not deserve a week of vacation after only three weeks of class (this of course following a two month break from any gainful employment), who am I not to join in the celebration of the 58th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic?

Two Fridays ago, I hopped on a plane to the hardly provincial city of Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan, in China's southwest. There, Wei, Tash, and I unsurprisingly found old city buildings being torn down, yet covered with official propaganda posters proclaiming "Protect the Old Town through Economic Development." A Givenchy showroom was being built next to housing that was marked for destruction (拆).

The next morning, we made a quick decision--jump the border for Burma, or follow the backpacker route northwest? We ultimately decided that even our collective charm didn't stand a chance of getting us out of military detention south of the border, and so we hopped on the eight hour Lijiang Express, a luxurious coach that featured a dubbed screening of "White Chicks," among other local cultural production.

Lijiang is an extremelycharmingcutetown populated in large part by the Naxi, a group who have largely been marginalized from the town's reconstruction following an earthquake about ten years ago. I do not count as an expert on either Lijiang or the Naxi, mostly because I spent my whole stay in the extremelycutelovely hotel courtyard, pictured below, eating furu (creamy and fermented spiced tofu).

That is of course hyperbole, because I also found time to pose in front of doorways and pursue other readily charming visuals.

Craving a second eight-hour bus ride through mountainous roads... ...we hopped on one headed for Luguhu, a lake area populated in large part, by the Mosuo, famous among anthropologists for their matrilineal culture and "walking marriage" practices. I spent the first few hours of the ride translating text messages for the gentleman next to me, who was feverishly corresponding with a Dutch woman he had met some months before in his home province of Shaanxi. He explained that although his four siblings all worked and had families, he preferred not to work, instead relying on his parents' nominal income to support his travel hobby, an interest I found surprising given his simple luggage, and the fact that he wore the same clothes each of the three days I saw him at the Lake. The text messaging was interrupted, as was our bus, by a landslide that had occurred a few hours earlier. A few dozen cars and buses had stopped on either side of the debris, which was resolved within an hour by a small dynamite explosion and a bulldozer that pushed the rocks into the river below. In Luguhu, our bus driver and hotel proprietor assured us that we would have no trouble finding a guide and itinerary for a 2-3 day hike, yet they had no suggestions as to how to organize such a trip. The café frequented by backpackers proved no more fruitful; fully 6 guides sipped tea while offering hikes lasting half a day, 5 days (back to Lijiang), or 10 days (on to Shangri-La) and chiding the notion of a trek of any other length.

Undeterred, we sat down at a simple lakeside restaurant and asked our waiter for advice. He promptly announced that for a nominal fee, he and his cousin would meet us the next morning to accompany us on a 2 day mountain trek, with a chicken in hand. We declined the chicken but made the deal. By the next evening, we had climbed to about 3600 meters, allowing our guides to take many smoke breaks on the way,

and not having encountered even a single goatherd on the often pathless ascent. As they grilled potatoes and corn on an open flame among the dense brush, I was pleased to find that my language lessons on marriage, divorce, aging, and the One Child Policy (often a two child policy in the countryside, depending on the circumstances, the family's ethnicity, and the sex of the first child) allowed me to ask many impertinent questions about rural life.

After a long descent that afforded us panoramic views of bordering Sichuan Province,






we were led to our guides' home, where we were given a tour of their biogas toilet (allowing them to generate energy from compost instead of burning wood) and watched soap operas while we waited for the family matriarch to prepare lunch. Her husband crouched in the corner carefully brewing small glasses of tea. Towering over the room was a giant portrait of Mao, adorned with flowers and incense (our guides explained that they did not "believe," but their father did).
After a stop at the local hot springs, we spent the rest of our time in Luguhu riding bikes around the lake (about an 80km loop, except that loops traditionally are uninterrupted, rather than terminating in swamps and requiring riders to ride boats for one hour back to the start of said loop), Wei commented on the cuteness of every single local resident (particularly if under the age of 35 or over the age of 45) and the abominably boring habits of every single Chinese tourist we passed (ostensibly a general lack of adventure), and I remained agnostic as to the value of these judgments but decidedly interested in returning to eat more creamy fermented spicy courtyard tofu, and so we returned to Lijiang without so much as an earthquake or landslide, but not before meeting another indubitably adventuresome woman from Chongqing who, like my bus buddy, belonged to the leisure class and was traveling for several weeks, in her case, taking several months off from her silver jewelry retail business, adorned in the meantime with colorful shawls, and outraged that the waiter did not invite her on our mountain climb.

Lijiang's music festival attendees were decidedly more eclectic than Beijing's, affording encounters with a sort of Yunnan Von Trapp family (accompanied by a drum and bass beat), a downright frightening Tibetan-like Björk who demanded that an army of volunteers remove every speck of dirt from the stage before she performed barefoot, and a delightful group from China's northeast that performed in drag and falsetto, invoking features of that region's opera style. My dear readers will see that Lijiang police are as adept at group formation as those in Beijing.

Although the situation is surely not unique to China, many dissertations remain to be written on the ideal of whiteness here, particularly constructed and reflected through marketing. I scour the labels of any moisturizer or sunscreen before purchase, in order to avoid the whitening creams present in most.

Back in Beijing (but not before a short airplane delay, during which all passengers were promptly served hot meals while we waited at the gate), I sought out a haircut at the edge of my apartment compound, at Hair Rodeo. The expedition was successful, even though I do not speak Korean. Fortunately, a Mandarin speaking employee translated throughout the entire event for my apparently monolingual Korean stylist. As far as I could tell, the rest of the customers freely spoke Mandarin with their stylists, and I can only speculate why I had two Hairdesigners for the price of one, but such is the luck of the draw in my neighborhood, where the menu of my favorite basement café is all in Korean, with about 65% translated into Chinese, and only some of that same portion in English. And so my roommate's dinner last night came with a side dish of green tea and chocolate ice cream on a Belgian waffle, instead of a vegetable pancake. Such are the felicitous hazards of our enterprise abroad.