The Road to Chini

It is that time of year again here in China where all the incoming freshmen don military uniforms and go through two weeks of basic training on every campus across China. Apparently, this only started happening after tianneman square incident. It is a way to develop nationalism in all citizens so eventually no one will criticize the government. So for two weeks they practice marching and drilling and yellng slogans of alligence to China in front of the rest of the student body lest they all forget who is boss. Ahhh the sounds of autumn!

WOW it's been awhile

Let's see.... I am sitting here thinking what just happened? Two weeks ago I was in Albuquerque getting ready to help Sarah drive her daughter Kate back to school in Boston. I am musing about driving to Boston and about my summer vacation helping Sarah move out of her house in a quiet neighborhood near the university of 17 years and into a loft directly in downtown Albuquerque. Quite a change... hmmm Sarah celebrated this move with a haircut that said goodbye married, divorced, four kids, five cats, three bunnies, various turtles and scores of ants on the kitchen counter to..... hello sexy single urban dwelling uber fit independent woman excited and ready for a major change in love, life, and the pursuit of personal happiness look.... not to mention ready to experiment and try new and exciting things look.... hm quite a change. This haircut was a statement of change, a good change, an exciting change... great time to be in Albuquerque... I just happened to show up at the right time, and to tell you the truth, I really like the change... So several weeks before I was to leave on my vacation to Albuquerque, Sarah sells her house. My original plan in going back to Alb. was to take the big camera out and take small 2-3 day trips with Sarah around the area and do some photography and just enjoy the moment. Well that plan never happened. Closing date was the 29th of July which meant we needed to be out of the house in three weeks. Sarah had already started to pack and unload many things by the time I arrived on the 11th. However that effort only scratched the surface. For the next three weeks we packed up memories and keepsakes, along with the furniture and kitchen items that were meant to go and sell the stuff she didn't want. We craigslisted all the big ticket items and had a yard sale the weekend of my return. We spent two days hocking and selling anything and everything. I had some things at the house I either moved back to my house or sold at the yard sale. I managed to sell the rest of my tools and my computer. We finally sold everything we needed to sell and made a nice pile of cash to play with, and by golly we played, well as much as two exhausted people could play after all was said and done. So, Cool! I hate moving I really, really do and anyone who says they love throwing their lives into a giant waring blender are nuts. There was nothing fun about this. Not at all! On top of all this her cat bites me and I end up with blood poisoning a week into the move.... oh yes... there were the cats.... 4 of them. All had to go somewhere. Marble went to the crazy neighbor across the street, Buttons went to Liz's, Chloe was given back to the Ex and he took her down to Carlsbad to his sister and Henry, mean, nasty old Henry .... well we dropped him off at the pound... The cat that sprayed everywhere and attacked anything got his just rewards. Dang he almost killed me! I for one was happy to see him go. Here I am, jet lagged and poisoned I was not in the best of shape to do this. Sarah had a nagging injury to her heel that wouldn't heal so I was spacey and she was, well she was down right cranky. Between the hidden dirt under the beds and Libby's candy wrappers all over the floor of her bedroom there was an unmistakable feeling of angst and crankiness in the air. Letting go of this home for Sarah was very hard. Make no mistake about it, this was Sarah's home. She created a sanctuary for her and her children and at one point her husband too. When she was finished with decorating it with murals from her art classes and remodeling the walls and windows it was a homey cozy place to hang out. We would spend mornings drinking coffee, working the NYT crossword and either she or I would make some fancy omelette or a simple gruel and talk art. That I will miss... Shoot she raised all her children there. Home takes on a new meaning when you have children to share christmas' with and halloweens, and all the birthdays and special occasions you share and grow up together. Home is more than just where you lay your head at night, home becomes your heart and when it beats happy you are happy and when it cries you cry too. As you go so goes your home. Ahhhh... there was a lot of worry and frustration, anticipation and fear .... the whole gambit of emotions. I came back to help her with this. Labor of love? sounds trite and misses the point... but I would not have missed doing this for her for the world. Why? because she is truly my best friend and companion... But!!!! that was not the end of this adventure! No Sir!!! How about getting in a car and travel three days and 2200 miles to drop her daughter Kate off at school and pick her eldest, Abby, up and bring her back to Albuquerque. Ok! ROAD TRIP!!! WHAT FUN! After this tumultulous and sometimes very contentious move, Sarah and I packed the Toyota up and drove daughter Kate back to Boston. 3 days felt like well an eternity. 3 days in a car with 3 people who had really nothing to say to each other. The more we wanted to get there the longer it took. Yikes... We listened to Harry Potter along the way, the rest of the time was spent in silence. My hearing was all messed up since I had arrived in Albuquerque and my not being able to hear a damn thing was driving Sarah up a wall. Every time I had to ask for her to repeat something she would explode and yell it in my ear. Yes things were a little tense with us, and no, yelling in my ear did not clear my hearing up. We managed to get to Boston and spend some quality time on the beach near her brothers house and on the cape where we spent a lovely night a at a wonderful BandB. Then it was time for me to leave. In the end, she let me go too. This was not a surprise to me. I knew it was coming. At the end of my visit we spoke little, our words being charged... like a downed power line in a hurricane... done... At the airport I couldn't tell whether she was so sad to see me go or .... she couldn't wait to see me disappear into the terminal....hohooooooo come on! I knew better at this point... done is done.... so here I am back in Peizheng College ready to begin the adventure again here in China...and yes I miss my Kitty .... we did a lot of good things together despite our contentious behavior towards each other. Regardless, in the midst of all this craziness I did manage to take a few pics with the big camera. I will leave you with some images of the Albuquerque I know. Sarah is driving back with her oldest at this writing I wish her, Abby, and Emmons a very safe trip....

The State of My World

It is cool today in Chini Town. I spent the night tossing and turning worrying about whether my lessons are working with the students or not and with a conversation I had with a very good friend of mine, my best friend about life. I issue is this. We were skypeing with each other and we got into a tussle about something I can't even remember. Nothing serious. But I said you have way too much time on your hands you need something to do. Well she bristled at that and reminded me that she has plenty to do that she has her painting and her website and her landscaping and half a dozen other projects she is involved with that are furthering her profession as an art educator. So last night I thought about it and felt uncomfortable with my flippant remarks to her. I was joking but in reality this is no joking matter and I think I need to weigh in on this if nothing more than to be clear about what is really at stake here. She is right. She has a multitude of meaningful things she is doing to stay active and involved with her world. What is not happening for her and for many of us over 50 is gainful employment in this woeful economy. One of the reasons I left the States is because I couldn't find work. My younger counterparts didn't seem to be suffering too much in a crushed economy, yet the older fellas of the business were scrambling to find work. This is my beef, that, in America the workable life span of a contributing member of society spans 30 years. From the age of 20 to 50. After that we are considered useless, throw aways, unless you have your own business or you are in a profession that regards those with experience as mentors. My friend just spent the last 4 years finishing her masters in Art Education. This is no small feat considering she also was raising four children, and struggling with a marriage that did not work any more. This is a woman with a vast amount of knowledge in her field and is constantly updating her professional data base all the time. She has spent countless hours learning about the computer and how to use it as a tool to further her profession. In fact, she is working all the time. She could not only teach but work circles around anyone I know. She has amazing grace and stamina. Yet she is 55 just like me and has been searching for work now for the last 6 months. She has more knowledge more experience more patience and any of her younger constituents. Why then is she not working for a living? She has had a few interviews. Nothing has panned out. She has an impeccable resume and a very impressive portfolio. Yet no one seems to care. She told me on one interview for a teaching position the principal dismissed her never even looking at her portfolio. I think it's her age. America has always been about the young and new and we are not young or new, we are vibrant and experienced. We want to work. We want to belong. We want to see things change and grow. We have a wisdom about life no twenty something could ever have. I am in China learning a whole new skill set to take with me where ever I go. I was wrong to be flippant. She was right to let me have it...... You go girl!

I'm an American and I'm paranoid too!

Well I am back. Back from vacation. Back from the States, back to China. I have moved. I am now living and working in Peizheng College. Peizheng is a stones throw from Chini which is a short drive to Huadu which is a hike to Guangzhou. However no one knows where this place is so I just say I am in Guangzhou. Or if people really do not know I say I am near Hong Kong. That usually works. I am out in the middle of no where, in the jungle far from civilization, rooming with 80 some odd foreign teachers here to teach oral English to the students. I just returned to China four days ago and have been settling in to my apartment trying to make the limited space comfortable. In the meantime I have also been taking in some of the local color. In this case it is all the Americans who have come to China to teach. Out of the 80 or so foreign teachers, roughly around forty or so are American. Out of those a good seventy five percent are male. These guys run the gambit of young and inexperienced to late fifties, sixties, with a wealth of life experience. Some speak Chinese very well the rest just well... not. What some of them do have in common is this intense desire never to return to the States. Everyone has their own reasons. Some of which result from the fear of being watched. Americans love conspiracies. We spend hours, days,years, fixated on our desire to prove the government is behind it all. We love it so much no matter where we go we import this fear of the man in heavy doses. We will tell anyone and everyone willing to be within earshot. Ah the paranoia. I think it's the beer we drink. There is something in those micro brews that makes us so crazy. So we are sitting around a table at one of the smallish restaurants just across the street from the campus and I am listening to everyone talk about their adventures around China and abroad and one of the teachers pipes up and exclaims, they will find you if they want you. They being our government and their ability to ferret out anyone on the planet if they so desire. They have their ways!!! I know I worked in a bank and every time you use a credit card they know where you are! OK I am thinking maybe there is a way to disappear so they can't find you. Well we talked about everything from satellites with powerful telescopes to the computer chip in your passport. I argued that maybe there is a way to "get off the grid". Well that's just not possible, he says. No matter where you are or what you are doing they will find you. They will find you!! The funny part to all this is he doesn't seem to mind that the Chinese Government knows our every whereabouts no matter where we are in China. Oh the hysteria!! Be afraid! It is like a mantra that I was feeling weary of. I love conspiracies I am the first to say that there was more to Dallas than they let you to believe, 9-11 was way too easy for a bunch of foreigners to execute it on their own, you know, the usual stuff. This though bugged me. Who cares whether they can find me or not. The guy is living in a Kafka novel. The bottom line to all this is so what, who cares. Life is way too short to worry about such things. Oops, someone is knocking ....got to run...

It's Just the Chinese Way

I have been a bit distracted this past month. There has been sooo much happening! I was invited to show at the prestigious Wuxi Photographers Association along with seven other local professional photographers. We called the show The Power of the Eye. I was asked to exhibit my work on my impressions on Chinese urban life. I had scads of images that once I started to sift through all of them I started to think Hmmm, nice image but not worthy to hang. I am my most critical judge. I went through everything. I sent some thirty to forty images to them. Some were in black and white, some in color. Some were film and some were digital. They looked through all of them and picked all the color digital images. They picked things that I never would have exhibited and they left out stuff that I thought were worthy of hanging. When the show went up I was one of two photographers showing color work. How odd I thought. The work they chose, some of the images were strong and held there own, others were studies that I was working on, and others were snaps for friends and family. An odd mix. But I have a bunch of huge shots to give away as presents! I am already trying to figure out how to get these things back to the states. Some I will leave here. So for the last three weeks I have been slaving away at my work. having moments of genius mixed in with moments of why am I doing this, refresh my memory please? In retrospect, I do not feel I have finished what I have started here. Admittedly, I have found distractions to take me away from my goals in the last couple of months. Some of it has been the weather. The weather here has been absolutely awful. Some of my distraction has been the news from the States. I am sickened by what I read and see about the BP oil spill in the gulf. It is so very sad to see a country as great as ours run by men and women addicted to their own false sense of power living in denial, unable, paralysed by greed to do what they know to be the right thing. Among other things the wars... notice there are two of them still raging on. The damage to our souls and psyches cannot be measured. Some of it I think, irreparable. Then there is the real estate and the joblessness and the education and health crises that kind of round it all out. We are addicted to our own false sense of entitlement. We believe all the lies we tell ourselves about how great and strong we are, as the proof of who we are stares us in the face every day. Aghhhhh... this whole thing makes me sad. I think with all this happening in the world, people suffering, the oceans dying, what am i doing talking about my stuff. Seems a bit self indulgent to me. Like waking up in the Friendly Hotel the third day of my visit and having my phone cut off by the Secret Police. I couldn't get ahold of anyone, no one could get in touch with me. I spent the day waiting hoping Colin would come by and we could figure this out together. No Colin, This is where knowing a language can be a great asset. I felt so isolated and alone. I thought, maybe this is the signal to get out. I packed my bags just in case I needed a hasty exit. I wondered where they found my phone number since it was under a students name. My my imagination was starting to play games with me. By the time lunch rolled around I decided to walk to the apartment in search of any family member. An hour and a half later I make it to the apartment starving. Then it hit me. Even if I wanted to eat I couldn't communicate what I wanted because I didn't know how to say it. In less frustrating times I could have muddled through it. As it turned out I did end up at a restaurant and the best my waitress and I could do was a plate of potatoes and a bowl of rice. Oh I am much more linguistic now. The frustration of spending thirty minutes buried in a dictionary trying everything understanding nothing and getting no where was taxing. It's then I realized how much I depended on Colins help. With no one home I braved a taxi and pointed my way back to the hotel. I hated this feeling of being totally vulnerable. I ended up at the front desk and got the girl there to call Colins number on her cell. No response. He had changed numbers yesterday and wasn't using the one I had on my phone. Confused and bewildered I went back to my room to devise plan Z what ever that was going to be when the hotel phone rang and it was Colin just as frantic because he could not get in touch with me. I was frantic, frazzled and starving.He told me to wait and he would be there shortly. I suddenly felt relived. I relaxed my life rope had been thrown, I was not going to drown. Lin and Colin picked me up, we went to a restaurant and I ate like it was my last meal. We then went and Colin bought a new sim card for the phone for me under a different name that I still have to this day. He then gave me all the contact numbers I could use incase something like this happened again. They dropped me back off at the hotel. That was my day. In retrospect, neither one of us thought the police would go to these lengths to harass us. We kept telling each other it's ok, this is nothing we have done nothing wrong. In retrospect to what is happening to the world, this really was nothing... and I am ok...

Just Thinking

I have taken to throwing darts. Kiwis and Brit expats against the Americans. 6 against 2 unfair odds but we have a good time. Every Friday we all get together for beers peanuts and team darts. The first time we took to the board, we were a disaster. Lately though we have been holding our own thanks to practice. I broke down and bought a board. Now we have home and away matches. What a hoot! It's a great way to end the week, share stories, and ponder the world outside. So everyday I practice heaving darts at a board. It is a zen thing for me, like yoga. It helps me clear my mind and focus. Well maybe not, but I'd like to think so. One thing it does do for me is it helps me avoid the things I really need to get done. Like this blog entry. I want to finish this adventure to Xinjiang Provence but I am having panic attacks about it. Not that I felt physically threatened, it was more psychological then anything else. I spent long hours in my hotel room waiting. Waiting for Colin, waiting to decide what to do. The time in Yining is the same as it is in Beijing though it is 3000 miles to the west. The time difference and the fact it was the same time as someplace else really messed up schedules. Noon felt like nine am but it also felt like the middle of the day. I never got used to it. I would wake at seven, and it seemed like four in the morning. I would do my yoga and then go down stairs to the restaurant to eat twice tortured eggs. At breakfast the Chinese would stare at me with blank faces. The Arabs, Russians and Uighur would look at me quizzically, like who are you? I haven't seen you around these parts. The last day in Yining I made friends with some Russian Business men at the breakfast table. I couldn't speak Russian and their English was limited to hello. We traded pictures of kids and we were able to tell each other where we were from. They thought I was one of them. That made me feel better. But every breakfast I would try to eat alone. The Chinese made me feel very uncomfortable. The hotel was also a favorite meeting place for the military. Funny it is the only place foreigners can go to get a room too. What's that old saying, keep your friends close, keep your enemy closer. People from the military would eye me up one side and down the other, never saying a word. After three days I just accepted it as part of the territory. After three days I was getting used to everything. Mornings usually ended with me watching the Australian Open on Chinese Government TV and waiting. On this particular day, I was waiting to hear from Colin, we were going to his grandparents house for lunch and to talk. Colins grandfather, a professor of history at the college in Yining is the preeminent authority on the Uighur. We were going to talk about that and to see if we could get grandfather to take us to a Uighur village. I thought what a great photo op. This is exactly what I had come to do and see. I was stoked! ten went by no call. Eleven, nothing. At noon I decided to call Colin. No answer. At noon thirty I called again. The phone was shut off. At one oclock, Colin calls me. His voice is stressed. His English is incomprehensible. The only thing I could understand at the time was policeman, I come to your hotel now. When Colin got to the hotel it was 1:30. He came with his friend we call Big Dog. They came in. Colin was hysterical. He was mixing Chinese and English together. I told him to calm down. Colin described how the police had called him that morning and told him to meet with them alone at an undisclosed hotel. They wanted to talk to him. When Colin arrived at the hotel he was told to go to a room on the second floor that people were waiting for him. When he walked into the room two men in plain clothes met him. They sat Colin down in a chair opposite the two men. One of them asked the questions the other took notes. Colin said this went on for a couple of hours. They would ask Colin a question and thirty minutes later ask him the same question. They asked him about his family what his parents do what he does, if he has brothers or sisters, where they work why, who I am what am I doing in China, why did I come to Xinjiang, did I have family and where are they, on and on. Colin said the questions became very personal and that he was scared. Any time the Chinese Secret Police start asking personal questions about you and your family is not a time to celebrate. You do not want the SP probing into your private life. Enough said. It took Colin a good thirty minutes to calm down. From there we went to see his grandparents on the other side of town. Colin had told his parents and everyone what happened with the police. From that point on, my options became very limited. We went to lunch and it was delicious, but there was no discussion about the Uighurs, there would be no going to the village like I had hoped. Colin's Mother met us there to help with lunch and everyone was a little edgy. The table conversation was light and polite. We ate lunch we left, Colin, Gou Li, and myself. Before we hailed a cab for the ride back to the hotel, Gou Li took Colin to a phone store to get a Xinjiang phone number. In China, you buy the cell phone and then you purchase numbers. Every provence has it's own prefix. Colin had a Jiangsu prefix on his phone which was already being listened to. Gou Li decided to get Colin a Xinjiang number in her name so that the SP couldn't trace the calls. Even Gou Li became suspicious of me. I carryed my photo bag to lunch and she could not believe that all there was in the bag was camera equipment. Right there in the street, she wanted to see what was in the bag, so I opened it for her right in the street. She seemed almost dissatisfied that she didn't catch me with something more than cameras and equipment. The SP had every one freaked out. Now the family thinks I am not who I claim to be. That hurt.
I felt suddenly on the defensive. I felt very alone and very isolated. Funny how a small moment can change so much. When they dropped me off at the hotel all I wanted to do was hide. Now I was concerned.