Fog

Foggy might be a masterpiece of understatement when describing my sweet mama, a stroke victim who hardly knows her own name anymore, let alone ours. Except for occasional explosions of almost manic conversation when she suddenly seems to be aware of events—“Lewis is dead? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”—she is relatively passive, no longer a master of her own fate. These explosions of memory when they do occur (maybe once a year or so, sometimes lasting a few days) lead my siblings and me to wonder just what is memory? Does it have a place if it can be retrieved occasionally in someone who is approaching a vegetative state of mind? How do some historically precise details suddenly find themselves woven into my mother’s otherwise fantastic narratives?

While in China, I only heard stories about the last such explosion—one in which my mother allegedly expressed relief that I had decided against becoming a nun. (Mind you, it had never crossed my mind. Among other things, I’m not a Catholic or anything close to it.) She did, however, know who her children and grandchildren were, and my sister tried like crazy to get her on the telephone with some of us while the awareness lingered.

While in China, I think about her fogginess a lot. I think I’m getting a preview. There may be nothing like living in a foreign culture, immersed in a foreign language before you’ve mastered it, to get a taste of what dementia might be like. 

I remember being an exchange student in New Zealand, scanning the strange night sky for the Big Dipper, only to remember I wouldn’t find it, not in that sky. I remember looking up at the noontime sun—shining brightly in the north—on Christmas Day—a hot summer day. Those were disorienting moments, but not disorienting the way it is when living in a culture with a completely different language, when living so much at the mercy of others, without really knowing just what it is the others are doing because so much is not transparent, even under ordinary circumstances.

Yesterday the phone rang. It was the DHL delivery courier wanting to know where to leave the book he was supposed to deliver. He understood me, but there was a problem. What it was I didn’t really understand. Eventually he got someone who could speak English (somewhat) to speak with me. I understood her. But she didn’t understand me (really). We persevered. They persevered. I got the book, something my New Zealand host brother had recommended on his Goodreads site. Now, I should tell you that all my mail first goes to the Office of Foreign Experts on campus, but I came home and found the package on a chair inside my hallway. I do know that I can thank Mrs. Niu for putting it there, but exactly how it got to her is part of the mystery.  This package hadn’t been opened. The thing is, I’m not directly in control of things I’m used to controlling. It just is what it is.

Control. I’ve just had to let go. I’ve come home to find my apartment crawling with workers moving in beautiful pieces of furniture, furniture I didn’t ask for but can appreciate. A huge wardrobe, cedar lined with a gorgeous wood veneer. Again, I know that Mrs. Niu will watch closely to make sure nothing is stolen—but there’s much that isn’t transparent to me.

Time. I would probably fail the Mini Mental State Examination. What day is it? What year is it? The whole rhythm of the calendar is different—even the school calendar. How disorienting for it to be a few days before the start of a new semester—at the end of February. For it to be a week before the end of the semester—around the Fourth of July. My computer and publications from home (for example the daily digital NYT) constantly tell me it’s one time, when it’s a different day here. I was into the rhythm of writing dates in the logical Chinese way of big to little when I went briefly to Thailand and Cambodia where they write from little to big, only to do my taxes and have to use the US mixed up month-day-year way. Little things, these, but they add up.

Place. I’m very visual and like maps, but I find it difficult to find Chinese maps—and Google maps and other online maps may not be labeled in helpful ways (for me). So I might be on a bus somewhere, winding through places I had no previous knowledge of to arrive in a place I had only minimal knowledge of.

Language. And everything it mediates, which is culture and life itself. I’m working on it—and loving working on it—but there’s so much to learn. So much to miss—if I’m not quick enough. It means I’m in for constant surprises—thinking I bought a little bottle of one thing that turns out to be something else when shaking it into the stir fry. So it goes.

If I’m in a fog some of the time, I can laugh. I can imagine how others feel, maybe Chinese students arriving on US campuses. Strange food. No mass transportation. So many things so different. So much mystery.

I suppose—I hope—one of the best ways to clear the fog, just a little, is to keep building my little collection of Chinese characters, these amazing visual-verbal representations. Sudoku for some; Hanzi for me.

Descending into the gorge

Descending into the gorge may be getting ready to spring into a new semester, which in China runs from the very end of February until mid-July. That's about to happen. Or it could refer to yesterday's adventure, beginning and ending in the dark of Beibei, and in the middle descending into a breathtaking gorge in the Black Mountains, a gorge that separates by only a few feet the province of Guangzhou from the (province, sort of) Chongqing.

Fellow Peace Corps volunteer Keri Ann and I boarded a clean, comfortable bus to Nanping, one like many with clean cloth headcovers on every seat and cushy reclinable seats, only to board increasingly crowded buses to Wansheng, until we found ourselves on a tiny bus winding up the Black Mountains, one that was so over-capacity that the standing passengers occasionally squatted to dodge the notice of some passing authority, none of whom, I'm sure, was fooled. Up and up past terraced rice paddies, to the thickly forested mountains, poking up as if some mythical figure just stuck its forefinger in the earth from below, making all these tall, steep mountains that seem unique to China.

There in the dolomite of the Black Mountain karst were gorges, caves, and turquoise spring fed waterways, with ferns whiskering the walls of the gorges. The cave-studded dolomite frequently reminded me of scenes along the waterways winding through the Ozark Mountains at home, but there's still something different about the Chinese caves, as if waxen rock were dripping around the mouth of the caves.

 Unlike the situation a few weeks ago where Chinese tourists were thickly populating everywhere, including the Cambodian sites where I happened to be, there were very few people hiking yesterday. The holidays are over, and most people are gearing up for life ahead. A few food stands along the way were all boarded up for the season. We had the day to ourselves in perfect stillness except for the sound of gushing water from waterfalls everywhere.

The large bus taking us down the mountain had perhaps double its capacity, continuing to pick up passengers who just crammed in, so that the two stairwells, the one in front and the one halfway back, both had perhaps seven or eight people. That's a lot, in case you didn't know.

 The thing is, I'd never heard about Wansheng until Keri Ann proposed going there, and I'd say it's one of the hidden gems that most tourists (Chinese and foreign) have tended to overlook. I need a good photographer to do justice to the place--my photos don't quite do it. We got back late, clambering up the hill to our apartments in the dark, pleasantly exhausted and grateful that it's still a relatively well-kept secret.

Aging in Ban Zhu Cun

I waited for my morning water to boil and could hear far below some high-pitched meowing from a tinny radio. It’s a common sound here in my residential village, Ban Zhu Cun, which is full of small gray-haired people strolling around the public areas, clutching cheap radios that blare old songs at a high volume, songs that to my untrained Western ears sound like cats whining. But, even if I don’t particularly like these headache-inducing songs, I like the way old people age in Ban Zhu Cun.

My apartment village is right across the street from Gate Six of Southwest University in a “small” Chinese city of half a million—and may be a remnant of the “iron rice bowl,” the state provided social welfare system. Today, China has privatized most of its previously state-owned businesses and collectives, which is no doubt a good thing, but in doing so it also has gotten rid of the “iron rice bowl” providing health care and retirement benefits to most of the population. An exception, as far as I know, is the university system and housing like mine here in Ban Zhu Cun. Professors not only have housing provided for them, but they can live on in their homes long after retirement. Aged scholars shuffle around campus as well as here in Ban Zhu Cun, a collection of maybe fifty or so multi-story apartment buildings nestled at the foot of a small mountain. As far as I can tell, retired faculty outnumber younger ones because younger faculty tend to sublease their apartments here and live elsewhere in more upscale housing. I don’t know who all of the people are living all around me, but many of them are old.

But if I’m living in what is becoming a defacto retirement community, it differs from most Western retirement communities in some significant ways, ways that I hope aren’t lost in the rapidly changing Chinese urban landscape: It is not entirely isolated; it is not separate. Not only do I hope that China keeps some of its collectivist tendency to integrate populations, to maintain dynamic community, but I also hope that the West might learn a thing or two from China. If nothing else, the West might notice, as China is noticing, that an aging population is right up there with climate change as a critical issue in the twenty-first century.

I don’t have a brain big enough to fathom how to solve the real problems with an aging global population, and China certainly doesn’t have all the answers. The one-child policy may have curtailed population growth, but it has also created the 1-2-4 situation, where every child today will be responsible for caring for two parents and four grandparents, all of whom are living longer lives, few of whom have any kind of significant health or retirement benefits. The burden on youth is staggering.

With more people living beyond productive working years, China can count on a labor shortage in the not too distant future, with huge economic consequences. The burden on the family unit to be the safety network is fraying as men and women join the labor force and move to distant cities. Lots of young women are conflicted between traditional Confucian ideals and contemporary feminist beliefs. I see nothing like ADA standards here, and I pity anyone caring for a loved one needing a wheelchair or other special services, especially in a mountain city like Beibei. How does a country care for what will soon be hundreds of millions of people who are "getting old before they are rich,” before the government has smoothed out new kinds of pension plans? The challenges confronting China’s middle-aged and young adults to care for their elders are simply mind-bending. So, again, I'm not pretending that China has all the answers.

Still, I see people puttering around Ban Zhu Cun without being cut off from the world at large. In the park-like public area way below my apartment, disciplined elders sweep their arms gracefully through taijiquan moves in the morning and trot to waltzes and other dances at night. Grandparents walk slowly hand-in-hand with pre-schoolers, not rushing. Again, grandparents walk. Children walk. They walk! They smell the roses! Each child is handled, steadily, constantly.  They walk because there are places you can walk to—vegetable vendors, little shops, schools. These places are all laced throughout the community. In fact, on a summer night, Ban Zhu Cun might look like a small county fair with hawkers here and vendors there and public performances—and the sounds of music and humanity filling the evening skies. There are few walls between public and private, between elder and junior, between inside and outside. Life moves fluidly and therefore somewhat purposefully back and forth. A much older citizen might hobble around, their grandchildren grown and off to college, and still have much young life to observe. Dogs run freely everywhere. The area is teeming with life, and the aged are not cut off from it.

To maintain some of this quality of life, certain collectivist values need to be maintained on maybe a village-like scale. People need to be able to walk around without having to go great distances to meet simple needs. Towns need to be laid out so that homes, school, shops are still village-like, close together. Lots of green spaces and public gathering places need to be laced through residential areas. Older people need to be able to witness, if not actively participate in, community life. Physical activity needs to be a natural byproduct of simply getting through the day. People need to be bathed in community and social discourse. The aged need to be dynamically integrated as much as possible. . . to be a part of, not apart from community life.

How to maintain what I see in Ban Zhu Cun in a rapidly changing China, I don’t know. I’m not an economist. I’m not a city planner. I’m not a social worker. But I think the first thing might be continuing to cherish the common good—and maintaining a context where that value can be realized, village-like communities. If I were 95, I think I’d like puttering around Ban Zhu Cun, listening to my tinny radio.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-hodin/post_6495_b_4483135.html

http://www.economist.com/node/13888069

http://thediplomat.com/2013/11/population-aging-in-china-a-mixed-blessing/

The Hidden Wonders in Cambodia

Lotus-bud temples crowning Angkor Wat

Last year I discovered what it's like to travel shoulder to shoulder with homeward-bound Chinese folks on the days leading up to the Chinese New Year. It's intense. This year I happened to arrive in another country, Cambodia, just before the  New Year dawned, only to discover that I was still traveling shoulder to shoulder with many a Chinese tourist, at least when squeezing through the corridors of Angkor Wat.

There, at one of the "Seven Wonders of the World," Cambodian tour guides spoke not only in  Chinese, but also in German, French, Italian, and English to describe this pinnacle of the Khymer Empire, this amazing 12th century complex of temples within temples--and to narrate the Hindu tales depicted in the sandstone bas relief.

Indeed, the temples were awesome - a Hindu / Buddhist mishmash reminding us just how fluid the walls are between religion and culture, politics and economics, as competing kingdoms vied for power over a three or four century period. Angkor Wat may be the crown gem, partly due to its awesome scale, symmetry, and stunning detail and its iconic lotus-bud temples, but I found many of the nearby temples more atmospheric and stimulating to the imagination. They were peekaboo play palaces, some with tree roots growing right through the walls, ruins with steep stairways and doorways, towers, ledges, and temples within temples within temples.

But most interesting for me was the Cambodian life in and around the temples . . .

Little barefoot salesman checking his cell phone

Down time at the Bayon Temple not far from Angkor Wat.

Locals and some tourists traveled by motorbike and "tuk tuks" like Wat's below; other tourists sped by in Mercedes Benz buses and Lexus 4WDs. Lemonade-stand-like "gas stations" dotted the roadside in the shade of sugar palms, with petrol in recycled soda bottles.

"Gas station" on the left

Wat and his tuk tuk

Haunting were the tunes played by various Cambodian Landmine Bands, made up of talented musicians who were blind or missing body parts.

One of many Cambodian Landmine Bands

Staring out to sea in faraway Sihanoukville.

Seaside play in Sihanoukville on the west coast of Cambodia.

These for me were the (relatively) hidden wonders of Cambodia.

Jim Curley photos.