Mountain City

My student Co concocted Saturday's walking tour of Chongqing, a mountain city an hour away from Beibei. Though he'd been to the city before, he'd never done the back alleys and neighborhoods accessible only by steep stairs, and he wanted to do all that before taking in the night lights seen from mountains on the other side of the Yangtze River (Jiang Chang). Hiking in the Himalayas hardly prepared me for keeping up with Co, his nose half the time on his smart phone, the rest of the time leading us up circuitous stairways--on and on for about ten hours. The sun does shine in Chongqing, but it was gray and smoggy on Saturday, and, while there are big spectacles to behold, we chose to focus on other things.

For example, we were on our way to the Great Hall when we passed rows of men and women  kneeling on stone stairs, petitioning some uniformed men about something. A number of taxi drivers pulled up and watched. I am conspicuous even in a crowd, and I could see someone at the top of the stairs watching me as Co engaged passersby to find out what the matter was. We didn't get a solid answer but thought it had something to do with people (taxi drivers?) losing their jobs (to what?) or citizens losing homes due to some planned demolition (see some photos below).

The city itself is on a mountainous peninsula nosing into the juncture of the Yangtze (Jiang Chang) and the Jialing River, but the larger municipality is one of four municipalities that have equal status with twenty-some provinces in China (the three other municipalities are all on the east coast: Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai). So, Chongqing is an up-and-coming inland force, soon to be a "port" because of the bigger ships that will be able to cut their way up deeper channels created as a result of the massive Three Gorges Dam. Plans are afoot to make it a major airline hub, and it's already establishing itself as an economic force to behold.

But it wasn't that many decades ago that people got around primarily by stairs--it is one of few modern cities with its scale of development laid out on such steep terrain. The photos below depict a crummy day and sites that wouldn't make the covers of tourist brochures, and yet there were lots of beautiful little niches in what might look quite dreary below. Old people played mahjong high up on a terraced walkways under trees holding their bird cages. Hidden parks, here, there, all over popped into view only when practically in them.

Before the night lights scene found on a Yangtze cruise website, you'll find over a dozen photos from our walk--so brace yourself for lots of pictures.

Chongqing in January (cold but green)

Co crunches on sugar cane while taking in a traffic scene over the Yangtze (Jiang Chang) below.

The character on the "garage door" marks the place for demolition.

 

We went up lots of stairs.

We went down lots of stairs.

We snaked through places like this on the way up or down.

We heard birds singing from cages hung in branches throughout numerous little pocket parks,
their owners, often elderly, doing taiqi or playing mah jong nearby.

The pagoda is on a little mountain top--and Co is playing peekaboo.

These trees grace stone walls and gardens everywhere.

Chongqing is a city of bridges as well as of mountains, with more to come.

The green waters of the Jialing (not too visible here--
over my left shoulder) merge with the brown Yangtze (Jiang Chang).

Note the stairways and imagine the scene a while back, before the highway was in.
The Yangtze (Jiang Chang) is in the distance and more city and mountains are faintly visible south of the river.

A common scene in the dozens and dozen of public spaces.

Jeifangbei is the People's Liberation Monument in the center of the Jeifangbei CBD.
The clock on the top of the historic monument advertises Rolodex watches.

A building in the CBD has layered red and black "chopsticks."
At the blunt end of each black chopstick is the character for peace.

We did catch this nighttime view of Chongqing from the Nanshan mountains (on the south side of the Yangtze).
I did not take this photo, though; it's from a Yangtze cruise website.

Here Comes the Sun

Shattered. That word suddenly ceased to be a cliche for me several years ago. I came to understand that grief wasn't simply about being disconnected, unhitched, cut off from one who had just died and other losses, but also being disconnected from pretty much the whole world. The whole world as I knew it had broken up, no longer existed. What I came to know about "shattered" was not so much the fragments with unfamiliar edges, but the space, the gaps, the void between the pieces.

That sense of being disconnected had a time dimension--it was hard to imagine the future. I didn't completely recognize present reality and the future was even harder to compute.  I would tell people this, and I don't think they believed me--because, after all, I went to work and did things and seemed normal enough. I knew how to be practical, functional. And maternal love put a bubble around my  sons--they would be okay and I'd make sure it was so. But on some level, it was hard for me to imagine a future for the rest of us.

Feeling largely disconnected somehow had implications for thinking and valuing. For a while it was hard to make conceptual connections that mattered, to find those relationships between and among A and B and C, those right relationships, that add up to meaningful thoughts--to thoughts that matter.

Shattered wasn't the only word that resonated. So did other words that ceased to be cliches for me: Unhinged, unraveled, unplugged, broken.

So, without boring you with the details of that strange state of mind, I can simply say that I worked on improving it, bit by bit, day by day for a long time. Focusing on just one beautiful thing every day-- journaling a bit and running and meditating and being in nature. I did other things, too, but certainly those. Reading. If the familiar was totally unfamiliar, unreal, I thought I would literally go somewhere unfamiliar to seek the familiar.

That seeking of the familiar in the unfamiliar is just one of many reasons I'm here in China. (First of all, I believe in the value of cultural exchanges and of my particular program; I also wanted to ply my trade in a different context. So, those programmatic and professional reasons were paramount. But I also had personal reasons, especially this one.) And I discovered that I could indeed find bits and pieces of the familiar in this unfamiliar world. I could see bits of the word "resilience" in the ferns and ivies sprouting everywhere from inhospitable walls of limestone. I could see bits of the word "resilience" in a people who have a long history of suffering. Some have dared to make a comparison between the Holocaust and the Sino-Japanese War, which resulted in millions of casualties. You just find a way to go on. But I found the words "joy" and "life" in the children's songs on a Chinese CD a student gave me to help me learn Chinese. The "joy" in those little Chinese voices, totally butchering the one English song they attempted (the alphabet song), sparked memories of singing to my sons once upon a time. Seeing a little rosy-cheeked face watching me intently from the basket she's being carried in upon someone's back. Seeing a little toddler skipping along and suddenly squatting--those split bottom pants are handy, eliminating the need for diapers--all this sparked joyous memories. It goes on.

So, for a while I felt like I was getting better, little by little--perhaps I wasn't "there" but was certainly better--but more recently it's been dawning on me that I really do feel about as whole and grounded and connected to my world and beloveds as I ever have. I feel in right relationship with the pieces of  my being and world and present and past--about as whole as whole is going to be, knowing that we all live our lives in various states of disrepair.

So these were my thoughts as I swung my legs out from under the quilts on Monday--waking up in a very cold room, knowing it was my dead husband's birthday, and thinking how shattered I had felt for so long. But I was feeling like, no, I don't feel shattered any more, those glass fragments have really fused into something else. I was just picturing a stained glass window of a rising sun, trite as that might sound, as I walked over and clicked on my laptop.

 

There I found an email from my friend Ann with a link to a flashmob YouTube video filmed in an unemployment office in Spain. Listen yourself to their rendition of "Here Comes the Sun." I couldn't have been in a more receptive mood. http://youtu.be/kS709ZyZ_YU

(And, once again, just what does a sun look like? I might find out in a month, when I go to Yunnan Province, literally "south of the clouds" and far from Beijing. I will indeed go to Yunnan, where the sun does shine and the sky is blue and the air is breathable.)

Credits for the images:

Shattered: 

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http://images.google.com.hk/imgres?q=shattered+glass&num=10&hl=zh-CN&newwindow=1&safe=strict&tbo=d&biw=1039&bih=639&tbm=isch&tbnid=Zx-WD_ZlmJee4M:&imgrefurl=http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2011/02/14/shattered-chromosomes-cause-cancer-chaos/&docid=kwRTxPoDtoSNRM&imgurl=http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/shattered_glass.jpg%253Fw%253D300&w=1600&h=1200&ei=G5jzULuzBKHImQXYyoCQDQ&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=1&sig=108949288615991249508&page=1&tbnh=133&tbnw=188&start=0&ndsp=17&ved=1t:429,r:10,s:0,i:109&tx=928&ty=293

Stained glass:

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http://www.squidoo.com/VintageGiftStore

Beyond Pig Parts

We were all stabbing our chopsticks at the beautifully arranged dishes on the lazy Susan in the middle of the restaurant table. Thin purple slices of onion created scallops around the edge of one platter, carrot peels were curled into flowers on another. I was stabbing my chopsticks into the tasty brown stuff on top of the sweet potato dish, thinking it consisted mostly of mushroom, only to discover that this, too, was pig parts. Stomach parts. But none of the body parts on the table before me were patented, as far as I knew.

Sitting next to me was “George,” a molecular biologist I’d heard about but had never met. Not only is George a biologist, but also a lawyer and a CPA. George, I thought, might have opinions about patents and body parts. Indeed he did. 

In bygone years I’d had some of my science students read and discuss articles about gene patenting and informed consent—in fact, we had engaged in one such discussion after reading Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a book about the woman whose cancer cells ended up creating the oldest and most widely used cell line, now known around the world by the name of HeLa (letters from her first and last name). I once rode on a train in Switzerland, where a Bosnian saw the book in my hand. He did not know who Henrietta Lacks was and knew nothing about her contribution to the development of the Pap Smear test for the screening of cervical cancer, but he knew all about HeLa cells. Molecular biologists all around the world use this cell line. But who owns those cells? Anybody?

Who owns your cells? And who owns your genes? You?

You might be surprised who holds the patents on some of your body parts—and what those patents have to do with who controls research, drugs, and the pharmaceutical industry. You might be surprised how much university administrators in the US celebrate the awarding of patents (You published how many articles? Got how many grants? And how many patents?). Didn’t you know it is a good thing to count among your prizes lots of patents on body parts?

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George and I were seated at this table along with Clay’s son Daniel, visiting from San Francisco, and half a dozen other people, none of whom probably care too much about body parts, HeLa cells, or gene patenting. But George cares. He’s petitioned the UN to set standards that might constrain some of this patenting. He’s published thirty some scholarly articles just about this, mostly in Chinese journals because he fears his English isn’t good enough to reach the most prestigious science journals that now happen to be published in English.

He and many scientists in other parts of the world question not only the ethics of gene patenting (and patenting of other science-related discoveries), but also the implications for research. Who controls the cost of certain body parts (and non-living parts)? Who controls access to these things? How do pharmaceutical companies relate to this? And biotech companies? How does this affect the availability and cost of certain drugs for patients? Food for anyone?

http://www.bio-itworld.com/images/1112_gene_patents_head.gif

Many of these things I’d thought about a little bit before, but I’d never quite thought about them from George’s perspective. Because we were celebrating Daniel’s arrival in China, George and I didn’t throw ourselves into a conversation that is waiting to be had, but I can already see more layers to the complexity of the issue—and more layers to the role of the English language as a carrier of culture and the dominant culture’s values. That, of course, is where my work comes into the story.

Not only are the patents gatekeepers, so is the language—for good or for bad.

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Pigs' Ears and Stomach Parts

These aren't the Christmas Eve elves. These are the Queens of Jiaozi (Chinese dumplings), queens who heralded for me what turned out to be a twenty-four hour eating marathon--one that started New Year's Eve in my apartment, wove through the apartment of some other Chinese friends for lunch on New Year's Day, to the terraced slopes of JinYun Mountain (along with hundreds of other revelers), and then back to the apartment of some colleagues who served up an amazing New Year's Eve dinner with amazing parts. Pigs' ears. Stomach parts.

All this feasting is not to be mistaken for the real bonanza yet to come--Chinese New Year or Spring Festival, which is neither in the spring nor at the beginning of the year, at least according to a Western calendar. Eastern--or lunar--calendars, of course, tell a different story. My story, a version of the Western New Year in Beibei, is suggested in the pictures below.

Before the Chinese cabbage is diced in to millimeter sized pieces.

"Vicky" is making dozens of dumplings--still New Year's Eve
in my apartment.

"Edith" and "Naomi" aren't about to be outdone by "Vicky."

We're ready to eat by eight--and the conversation rolls on for another few hours.

"Merry," "Tom," and "Lizzy" scramble ahead
of our four-family party on New Year's Day - 2013.

They turn to wave. Terraced vegetable gardens are in the foreground,
the rest of JinYun Mountain looms in the background.

We wind right through various peasants' gardens, up and down the slopes.

Beibei and the Jialing River are wedged between two mountain ranges.
In the foreground are lots of freshly pruned trees (plums maybe?)--
their recently pruned flowering branches now adorn
homes all over Beibei (including mine).

Mrs. Niu brought me these.

We're still far from the top of JinYun, but you can see Beibi below.