The pandas in Chengdu

There was a panda waiting for me when I landed in Chengdu.

 

Admittedly, this panda was actually a cheesy costume with a man inside it, but it felt as if I'd been welcomed to Sichuan Province by panda-kind nonetheless.

Chengdu is home to the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, and I felt like I couldn't leave China without seeing these guys in their natural habitats.

Last time I'd seen a live panda in China, I'd been 10 years old, and we'd just arrived in Beijing.  A giant panda was huddled like a prisoner in a concrete cell, bars over the window, scraps of bamboo at his feet.  I'm anthropomorphizing, but he looked deeply depressed.  He was alone.  The hospital green paint on the walls didn't help.

I saw something about China's improved panda habitats on National Geographic's "Wild China" series (which I highly recommend) and felt inspired to visit Chengdu.  I had never intended to go to Sichuan, honestly, though.  Huajiao (Sichuan pepper) is famous for numbing your entire face, not just your lips and tongue, and I must confess I preferred cuisine from Hangzhou or Xi'an, both of which are full of flavor without making the skin of your tongue peel off.  One of my students encouraged me to drink lots of water, and her classmates nodded enthusiastically.

I was going to stay with a friend who was teaching in Chengdu and who had offered his guest bedroom free of charge.  I hadn't seen Kristopher since last July, but I was sure his reddish-brown hair would make him stand out in a crowd of 5'5", black-haired Sichuanese.

I was finishing my photos of the panda man when a tall, somewhat shaggy figure approached.  Canvas loafers on bare feet were topped by shorts and a parka and scarf.  On his head was a tam-o-shanter-like hat.  A white mask hid most of his face.

"Heather," he called.

"Kris!  Yay!"  I exclaimed. 

"Welcome to Chengdu," he said as we hugged.  He took a step back and held out a second mask.  "Put this on."  When I laughed, he went on, "PM 2.5 is two-fifty today."  (Shanghai, for reference, averages a particulate matter level of 150.)  "Oh, God," I said, putting the mask on immediately.

"I'm also coming down with something," he said regretfully.  "I may not be much fun."

"Well, you sounded busy," I said.  He was lead teacher at his center.  I hadn't been sure of his schedule, but he said he'd go with me to see a few sights.

We caught a cab to a Tex-Mex joint near his apartment.  Chengdu has only two metro lines, so it's more of a bus/cab town than Shanghai is.  We caught up on gossip and made plans.  We agreed to see the pandas my second full day in Chengdu. 

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Due to seeing another friend and staying up quite late, it felt painful to get up before 7 a.m.  My schedule teaching adults means I never have to be up early these days.  But I'd been advised by no fewer than five people that the pandas were fed at 9 a.m.  They were supposedly asleep or very lazy for the rest of the day, and I was hoping to see something entertaining in the way of panda behavior.

We met Kris' friend T.J. at the red panda enclosure.  Red pandas remind me of cats--if cats had come from a marriage between red foxes and raccoons.  They seemed to want only to rub their posteriors on things or to chase each other, but they were fun to watch. 

 

Next up were the giants.  Xiong mao, or bear cat, is the name in Mandarin.  Use the wrong tones in your pronunciation, though, and you're saying "chest hair".  So be careful!  The walk was uphill, and in the slightly moist, cool air, it was invigorating.  With all the grass and bamboo around, the air was fresher.  I could smell the soil of the Earth and the roots of growing things.  I inhaled deeply and frequently, trying to get my fix.

First up were the "juveniles".  I thought the term was hilarious, as I'd had many experience teaching "juveniles" and even "juvenile delinquents".  And, typical, the juvenile pandas weren't that different.  They seemed incapable of sitting upright, preferring to lean against wooden poles or each other, gnawing on snacks or pushing at each other.  Give those juveniles a cell phone and some girls, I thought, and the picture would be almost human.  They were adorable.  Eight of them (probably on purpose, as it's a lucky number in China) sat on weathered bamboo platforms, eating fresh bamboo.  T.J., Kris, and I acted out conversations ("Hey, that's my stash, man!") when one juvenile tried to steal a friend's food, and giggled.  We made jokes about them smoking bamboo joints and made funny voices for them.  I felt like a little girl seeing a pony for the first time.  I hadn't expected to be so giddy about it, but there they were!

 

On the way past panda "Kindergarten" we saw a few peacocks, and I failed miserably to capture their shimmering blue colors on my phone's terrible camera.  I'd forgotten my camera in Shanghai and kicked myself for it each day I was in Chengdu.  The "kindergartners" were cute, but most of them had finished eating and were napping (cutely) in trees.

Next were the giants of the giant pandas.  I expected more laziness, and the first big guy I saw seemed to confirm it.  He was laying on his back and eating, he was so lazy!  In the next paddock over, though, a curious guy emerged.  He climbed a tree--slowly, to be sure--as Chinese and foreign tourists snapped pictures, rolled video, and babbled quietly and in awe, pointing and smiling and posing.  When he got about halfway up the tree, he hung upside down in a crotch, pivoted a bit, and began rubbing his butt on part of the trunk.  A couple of times we could hear small grunts of pleasure, and we all laughed.  Taking his time, the panda clambered down, panting, and proceeded to climb up another, thinner tree.  A few branches snapped off, and the "audience" gasped as the main branch bent like a fishing pole, but Kris was an old hand.  "Just watch.  He won't fall.  They never do."  And he didn't.  He turned the same trick, though, hanging upside down like a kid and scratching his butt on a branch, grunting.  He came down a few minutes later, panting heavily, but I swear there was a big grin on his face.  He moseyed over to small pond lined with smooth, round stones, plopped himself in it with his back finally turned to us, and sighed.  The performance was over.

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My first full day, Kris and I had gone to the JinSha Museum.  I had plans to meet up with a friend from my intake group in the People's Park for drinks later that night, and Kris gave me a few recommendations for the area.  I'd be on my own, since he'd be resting up.

"Oh, by the way," Kris said with a grin, "Watch out for ear cleaners!"

"Huh?"

The metro put me down at Tianfu Square.  Poppies were blooming everywhere, months ahead of their North American cousins.  There was a huge statue of Chairman Mao across the street, holding his hand up like a command and a blessing.  I felt obliged to take a picture, but I'd grown tired of the Chairman's smug mug on every piece of paper money, to say nothing of the plain-style Communist propaganda statues in every city.

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It was later, after the pandas, before I learned what Kris had meant by "ear cleaners".

T.J., Kris, and I were sitting in a fabulous teahouse.  We'd just seen DuFu's (famous Tang Dynasty poet) Cottage, and I'm sure we all felt poetic, wanting to continue our journey into Chinese traditionalism.  We ordered a pot of cinnamon tea and a few Sichuanese dishes that tickled my palate without leaving me screaming.

The clear glass cha hu (teapot) sat over a candle and was often refreshed with steaming kai shui from huge copper kettles nearby.  Teahouses are comforting, I find, and often extremely pleasant.  Many are open to the sky, or let natural light in from skylights.  Bamboo and other plants grow up to this light, mingling with cigarette smoke, steam from cups of tea, and the chatter of Chinese dialects.  This particular teahouse offered sunflower seeds, and the snap and crunch punctuated every conversation.

Totally satisfied and relaxed, I gazed lazily around at books on shelves and noticed a bronze statue of two Chinese men.  Each wore traditional robes with frog clasps.  One was seated, with his head titled to one side.  The other was poised to clean his ear with a long metal rod.

"So that's what you meant!"  I said.

T.J. laughed, shaking his head.  "You should see them in Tianfu Square.  They rub those two metal rods together like they're selling them.  And they'll follow you across the park!"

"They're wiped but not sanitized," Kristopher warned, then added wryly, "I don't see myself taking 'em up on the offer any time soon."

Making peace with China

A ten-year-old sits on the second floor of a duplex and ties bed sheets together.  She's thinking about how she can use them to crawl out the window unnoticed--when her mother enters the room.

Months later, I'd try to run away again, this time while my family was in China.  I remember I packed a few RMB, some clean underwear, and maybe some White Rabbit candy or peanuts.  We didn't have many snacking options.  I don't think I brought any water--I was 10, remember?  I walked along the dirt road that wound through the sand dunes.  I was walking east.  I came to an overpass and stopped, realizing I hadn't seen any water the whole time.  I don't know how far I'd walked, but it felt like a good hour had passed.  All around me was sand--just sand.  No water.  No animals.  No people.  No plants.  I could count to ten in Mandarin, and say hello and thank-you, but I had no idea how to say, "Get me the hell out of here and back to my hometown and back to the life that my parents gave up so we could come to this hell hole."

I was only 10, and I wasn't exactly thinking of all of these things, but I could feel them.

Golmud (sometimes on the map as Ge'ermu) was at the end of the train tracks in Qinghai Province.  Back in 1988, there was no airport in Golmud, no high speed train.  A chugging steam engine took three days to go from Beijing to that little town in the middle of the desert, where criminals were sometimes sent.  As if the town were a penal colony without walls.  I'm sure it felt like the Old West in America--nomadic Mongolians and Tibetans (the "Indians") and the Han Chinese and laowai (foreigners) (the "cowboys").  It was poor and dusty and colorless, and there was plenty of moutai ("whiskey") to drink.  If Chinese people were allowed by their government to own firearms, I feel certain that there would've been a fair amount of shooting going on.

 

I think it was that first evening in Golmud, when our bus pulled up to the hotel, that Mom sat on her bed and cried.  I didn't see this.  She told me about it later.  I don't remember if I cried then.  I do remember seeing some wild white ponies on our way in, and, as a horsey girl, that sight alone made the idea of living thousands of miles from home seem not quite so bad.

But that didn't mean I wanted to be there.

I had friends back home.  My whole world was Cheyenne Road where our yellow and white house was.  Pets that had died were buried in the back yard.  My handprint was in the concrete we'd poured.  How could Mom and Dad have given that up?  It was my homeland.

I'm now nearly the same age now as my parents were back then.  The thought sometimes gives me pause.  Of course I understand better now.  But back then I was so angry.  My mind was dead set against China from minute one, and so was my heart.  I was determined to hate it, and it wasn't hard to do when we got out there, because the living conditions were worse than those I'd experience later as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  The locals, unused to seeing white people, touched my hair and my sister's constantly.  I started wearing my hoodie up with the strings tied tightly.  People said "Hello, hello!" and formed huge groups whenever we stopped to buy something at the market, or look at something at a tourist site.  We were stared at the way amoebas are examined under a microscope.  And China was gross!  People hawked snot and spat all the time!  Their cigarettes stank.  The men had long, dirty fingernails.  Sheep were butchered steps away from our dining room, and after walking around their bloody corpses, I had no appetite for the stuff.  Yak milk smelled funny and tasted funny.  The tofu was tasteless and looked disgusting.  The sweet and entertaining cook had some strange ideas, like putting cloves in the spaghetti sauce.  The bread grew mold at an alarming rate.  Beer had dead flies in the bottom of the bottles.  My sister and I existed on white rice and Chinese fruit juice that came in little green boxes.  We ate peanuts and White Rabbit candy and whatever luxuries came from home (my favorites were peanut butter and oatmeal).  There was one channel, CCTV.  The only bright spot were the interesting commercials, and the episodes of "Journey to the West".  Our newspapers came through DHL weeks after the news was fresh.  And of course, there was no internet or Skype back then.  The President could've been assassinated, and we would have never known.  Especially since the Chinese would've kept it from us if they'd found out first.  I feel pretty sure that that's true.

 

When it was 2013 and I'd accepted my job here in Shanghai, my dad smiled and shook his head.  "I can't believe you're going to China, Heather."

But here I am, and nearly two years later.  I've learned that Shanghainese are some of the rudest people in the world--they push, they shove, they cut in line, they never say "Excuse me"--but also some of the sweetest people--students give me gifts of candy and fruit juice, exclaiming, sincerely, about how great I am and how much they love my classes.  I've been invited to a Chinese home for Mid-Autumn Festival.  I've made some good friends with locals, both at work and outside of work.  And I know that some of those friendships are some of the most genuine I've had in my whole life.

China is not America.  That is the truth in 800 different ways.  But my mom is right--there is a sweetness about China that does not exist in America.  There is an appreciation for learning, for study, and a respect for teachers that I feel is lacking in my own country.  I have left my wallet accidentally in a market and half a dozen people yelled at me in Chinese, one man running up to me with it in his hand, grinning.

I'm not saying China is better.  I wasn't always wrong.  China can be gross!  I still dodge lugees on the sidewalk, and I still see men peeing on the street all the time--in broad daylight, next to main roads.  I saw an eight-year-old girl pooping about 10 feet from the gate to my apartment complex.  The side streets are still slippery with rotting vegetables and the blood of freshly butchered turtles and frogs.  There are sidewalks covered in dog poop and oily noodle water, discarded in the gutter.  And then there are sidewalks in Jing'an or the former French Concession, buffed to sparkling--neighborhoods I could never afford to live in or even to shop in.

And I'm not saying that America should be a Communist country--far from that!  But this experience in China has been my own.  It was my choice to come here this time.  And the experiences I've had have changed my mind and my heart about so many things that I thought and felt as an angry 10-year-old.