Speaking Poems

Speaking Poems

While I have no clear exit strategy and am not working with a fixed timetable, it is safe to say that I am in the last phase of my teaching career.  This phase may last for some years or I might get a late career burst of energy and want to keep going.  I just don't know. But what I can say for certain is that the 40 years I have spent teaching and the nearly 50 practicing the craft of poetry now affords me the luxury of taking the long view back toward what has transpired during that half century.

One of the sure things that has emerged as I consider where I have been and what made me who I am is that I owe a great deal to people who served as teachers and mentors to me, especially to people from my own father's generation. Poets don't generally have patron saints; but if we did, William Stafford would make a strong candidate.

I don't know where I first encountered William Stafford although it was likely during my graduate school years in San Francisco in the early 1970's, and it likely involved his poem "Traveling Through the Dark." That poem, much anthologized and much loved, reappears from time to time as if it were an answer to questions I had been harboring. It is one of a handful of poems by a handful of contemporary American poets that crosses nearly all the barriers posed by "modern poetry"; it works almost as well for those who do not often read poetry as it does for people like me.

In "Traveling Through the Dark" the narrator finds himself miles from town or from human habitation, faced with a minor crisis: a doe, recently struck and killed, is obstructing one lane of the narrow canyon road Stafford has been navigating. The car that hit the deer is gone.To one side the canyon wall rises sharply; to the other side, a precipice. The road itself, one imagines, hangs precariously on the canyon wall.

The narrator, perhaps Stafford himself, can just drive around the deer, so he might have kept going himself. Instead, knowing the carcass poses a problem to the next driver, he gets out of the car to appraise his dilemma, only to discover that the doe is pregnant and the unborn faun has apparently survived the collision that killed its mother.

Those are our details. What should he do?


As readers discover so often while reading his poems, Stafford puts his finger on exactly the point where our certainties are most vulnerable.

"I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;/ around our group I could hear the wilderness listen," he writes. "I thought hard for us all -- my only swerving --,/ then pushed her over the edge into the river."

The temptation for readers, frequently, when they reach this stanza, is to fasten onto that last line without considering the implications of the three lines that precede it. In these lines Stafford is doing his best work. To judge too quickly is to mistake the narrator's last action, pushing the dead deer over the edge, for a cold heart and a lack of sensitivity. But his hesitation, his asking of questions, is weighted with the responsibilities and implications of his decision.

Before I actually knew much about him, and shortly after I moved to begin teaching at Houghton College thirty years ago, William Stafford came to our campus to read. This would have been in 1984 or 85. I must confess I was not so much impressed as puzzled by the man and his manner.  He was dressed, if memory serves, rather casually in a flannel shirt, Dickeys slacks, and a sports jacket that I remember as shapeless and dark. He played down the reading aspect of the occasion, and he played down his role as a visiting poet. He brought no folder of poems-in-progress nor, to my memory, no books to read from, although he had written many at that point.

Instead Stafford leaned against the lectern on his forearms and chatted after being introduced as if we were all old friends and he just happened to be in the neighborhood.

He was grateful to be asked to come to Houghton, he said. He was happy to see those of us who had come out that evening. He hoped we would not be disappointed. About when I was concluding he had arrived unprepared and was filling time with chit-chat, Stafford pulled a bundle of folded papers from his jacket pocket and spread them open on the lectern in front of him. He told us, almost as if he were asking permission, that he would like to "speak" some poems.

I do not remember what Stafford read on that occasion, but I have read his many volumes of poems over and over in the intervening years.  Every time, I find myself delighted, as if I were discovering his work anew.What I have learned about the value and impact of poetry, about the qualities of direct language from reading his poems has been invaluable in my own work. Although I have scarcely been conscious of it, it would be fair to say that I have served a valuable apprenticeship with Stafford the poet.

Ten or twelve years into my teaching career I became aware that Stafford had written and spoken about his own approach to teaching -- and that I had begun a second phase of apprenticeship under his guidance, my apprenticeship as a teacher of writing. Here, too, his many books on writing, writers, and teaching -- often collections of interviews and essays -- have directly informed my own approach and strategies. Here, too, he has influenced me in ways that would be hard to number or to name.

Chief among these ideas, to choose but one, is the idea of permission to fail. Permission to fail, odd as it may seem, allows the writer to take risks necessary to discovery, to take risks that permit success. Like my other teaching mentor, Donald M. Murray, Stafford taught students so as to empower them; that was his aim and objective. He thought a teacher's primary role was to remove obstacles for the apprentice writer, obstacles that too often include the teacher.

Learning is not a competition in Stafford's view, whatever benefits we might derive from knowing how to distinguish good from better from best. Each student brings something important to the task of learning; the teacher's role is to help the student find ways to identify and develop that important thing.

The third phase of my apprenticeship under Stafford's mentoring must have begun a long time ago too, although, as with learning to write and learning to teach, I have only recently become conscious of what I have been absorbing. It has to do with living a principled life.

Stafford served his country during WWII by performing alternative service. That is to say, he declined to join the Army for reasons of conscience. Instead he spent the war living in Civilian Public Service camps, first in Arkansas and later in several west and mid-western states, and working on public works projects. It was a decision filled with considerable consequences.

It was a dangerous thing to be a pacifist, a conscientious objector, during a war that virtually everyone thought we needed to fight. Discussion of those beliefs will have to wait for another occasion; but for my purposes here, it is enough to note that Stafford's stand was both costly and courageous.  The personal risks were great.

More importantly, for me, Stafford's commitment to his beliefs is reflected everywhere, in his positive and encouraging attitude toward his students, and in the humble stewardship of language evident in his poems.

Maybe the most valuable lesson I have derived from William Stafford is the lesson of "Traveling Through the Dark." In that poem, Stafford, the narrator, stands on that little-traveled canyon road and ponders what he ought to do. He weighs the antagonisms that exist, the forces that pull in opposite directions. He weighs moral implications, and he thinks of both broadly and narrowly. The point is not that he pushed the dead deer over the precipice, however necessary that may have been.  The point is that he accepted responsibility for the situation he found himself in, a situation not of his own making;  he considered the consequences of his options, and he did his duty.

Life on the Space-Time Continuum

What's New, What's Old 

While it is likely any book with "enigma" in the title would attract my interest, re-reading V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival has been an energizing experience; not least of all it has energized me as regards my blog, this blog, which has been languishing for many months following an eighteen month focus on our visit to China in January 2013. Thus, I hope to re-imagine the blog as well as revive it along lines that will gradually become clear.  The Enigma of Arrival, a book about many things, is especially about how literature, and our ideas about literature, shape our understanding and appreciation for where and who we are.

Nearly a year after our trip to China, on Christmas Day 2013, in the evening, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren gathered in the day room of my mother's nursing home in Leesburg, Virginia, to sing Christmas carols.  A woman of dignity, grace, and unfailing good will even in her present confusion, my mother directed our singing from her wheel chair. She was not entirely sure of who we all were, but she energetically connected with music she has known for better than 90 years.We sang each carol until we ran out of word to finish out the familiar tunes.

This experience was, I suppose we could say, enigmatic, embracing as it did the bewildering landscape of my mother's mental state and the hope and sadness we all felt keenly. It was one of those occasions where the past and future, and a world of colliding emotions, are compressed into a single moment.

An hour later we were back at my brother's house, catching up with nieces and nephews, cousins, assorted family. My nephew Jameson, an English teacher himself with children in high school, asked me whether I found life in Houghton, my village in western New York, boring now that I have become a world traveler. He had lived in Houghton himself during college, so he had some notion that life there might seem tame after months lived in Korea and in England and for shorter periods in China.

It was, and is, an interesting question, although I must confess I was unprepared to hear it and, more than surprised that I had no good answer.

I was prepared for other questions. Had Jameson asked, as others have, whether it is sad to see my mother, his grandmother, in a nursing home, I would have answered, "Yes, of course, it is sad to see my mother this way."  That is the only possible quick answer.

On the other hand, a more complex, considered answer would pass over the "yes" quickly into the landscape of aging.  Despite being saddened, I am also happy and relieved that she is content and well-tended. It is not her present confinement I lament so much,  her displacement from her home of many years, but the loss of her mind to Alzheimers.

Thus, the question about boredom is both easy and complicated. For those of us with freedom and choices, boredom is a condition of the mind more often than a consequence of physical circumstances. Both boredom and restlessness, boredom's frequent companion, can be enemies of contentment, a most rare though enviable state of mind.

That said, now that my wife and I have had opportunities to travel to China and other opportunities to live for extended periods in Busan, Korea, and in London, I must confess to a strong desire to do it again, to see more, to live where the environment is unfamiliar, where I am called upon to figure out the landscape.  I feel restlessness, yes; but I hope it is a restlessness of curiosity -- a wholly different animal from boredom-produced restlessness.

I want to travel more now that I have lived, however briefly, in Europe and in Asia because travel has given a specific shape to my curiosity. Like education generally, a little knowledge of elsewhere spurs greater curiosity. We might call our time in London and Busan and southern China threshold experiences. I have had just enough of an introduction to Asian cultures to learn how much I don't know, just enough to want more.

I understand the assumptions people naturally make about small towns, rural villages, tiny communities surrounded by cows and corn fields.But it would simply be incorrect to imagine that my desire to travel is somehow related to where I live, to the small town where "nothing happens" and where the real world is held at bay.The truth is more like this: places are not necessarily boring, nor are other cultures necessarily better than our own. The capacity for curiosity, like the capacity for boredom, resides in the individual.

Naipaul spends 350 pages exploring this complex relationship between people and place. An immigrant to England, he examines his new rural home at first with "new" eyes. As months and seasons and years pass, as his new eyes gain the longer, deeper vision of the permanent resident, he understands in new ways both landscape and its human occupants.

He describes it this way:  "I had slowly learned the names of shrubs and trees.  That knowledge, helping me visually to disentangle one plant from another in a mass of vegetation, quickly becoming more than a knowledge of names, had added to my appreciation.  It was like learning a language, after living among its sounds." This does not sound like boredom to me. This learning to distinguish is what living anywhere -- geographically or chronologically -- is all about. A little later Naipaul continues, "Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself.  Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memories."

Although it would be unfair to my nephew to suggest that he sought more than companionable conversation with an often distant uncle, the question that has been bouncing around my brain is a question about smallness, about limitation; it is a question about the issue of living a diminished life. In this way, then, perhaps boredom is passive, where contentment is active.  My mother, for all that the years and her disease have taken from her, is still herself; she is learning the landscape of her world, however diminished it may appear from the outside.

And in her lucid moments, she has chosen contentment. It is not my landscape yet, but I recognize the journey.  I have read about it.

China Revisited 2013 [35]

Lessons in Obvious Wisdom

Our 13 day trip to China in January has taken me eight months to explore, a span I cannot explain simply in terms of laziness. Just as one does not easily turn down an invitation to go to China, so one does not quickly digest the experience.

Despite the time I have spent working out the narratives from my notebook accounts, with photographs to spur memory -- and to keep myself from wandering too far afield -- I am astonished both about how much material I still have not touched and about how ordinary my conclusions about China look when I set them down. Not everything will fit into this blog as an adventure. But I would like to end with some thoughts that I will try to pass off as insights.

 When I was a child, my small town American existence was so seriously White- Anglo-Saxon -Protestant that I knew only one non-white student before I graduated from high school, an African American girl whose family lived somewhere in our town. I did not know her well. She was very nice, but quiet; and, to put it bluntly, I did not know how to talk with her.

She was not the only person I did not know how to talk with; there were many. I was a shy person all of my early life. I might speak of similar uncertainties I held about interactions with kids who were Catholic, for example, although the religious differences were apparent mostly on holy days.

As for Asians, I did not know any -- except for a Japanese woman who figures dimly in my early memory, a friend of my mother's from church. I could not describe her. Unless my mother was with her, I did not actually detect her presence. She was, I suppose we could say, invisible to me. To make that statement now is both appalling and inexplicable; it speaks volumes about those time and circumstances.

What I am trying to say is that my homogeneous upbringing left me nearly totally blind regarding race and culture, a neutrality of attitude based on ignorance. Unlike many kids with a similar background, my parents did not burden me with a value system that made a virtue of this homogeneity.

Nor did my parents burden me with the language of dismissal or disrespect. To their great credit, they would never have tolerated such expressions from me.

My mother, as I say, had a Japanese friend; my father was given to inviting his foreign graduate students, always men and mostly middle-eastern or Indian, to Sunday dinner and on holidays when they would otherwise be alone.  We grew up aware of difference, but also of the dignity with which my parents treated these guests. Consequently, attitudes and language we now think of as abusive or inadequate or hateful or plain ignorant always surprised and shocked me when I witnessed those expressions in the world outside our home.

We might say that what I had to overcome, mostly, was not prejudice but a  poverty of exposure.

When my own children were able to attend a small, nearly rural school with Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Ugandan, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Russian boarding students, I immediately understood how much richer their upbringing would be for this cultural exposure and racial engagement.

When my children were growing up, we began to have a succession of international students live with us as they attended Houghton Academy.  We began with KeeDuk, a boy from Korea, and Michael Shih, who came to us as a seventh grader and stayed for six years.

In my childhood, China might as well have been the moon. Nobody, as far as we knew, was allowed to visit China.  Any Chinese person I might have encountered on some rare occasion hailed from Taiwan or required a visit to Chinatown in New York or San Francisco.

Today, as we all know, the Chinese are everywhere -- not as refugees or political exiles primarily, but as students, entrepreneurs, business people, travelers, tourists, immigrants. In short, they go where they go for the same reasons you and I might -- governments permitting, of course. Despite the commonplace nature of this information, I was astonished to find on a weekend in Scotland in November 2010 that many shop signs were in English and Chinese. In Wales, one finds signs in English and Welsh, so one might have expected English and something Scottish in Scotland.

And the little shop lady wearing the kilt in one Edinburgh store of Scottish woolens, to my great amusement as she turned toward us, was Chinese as well.

The world I had grown up in continued to influence my expectations.Think of it this way: In 1948, the year I was born, Mao's soldiers gained control of China, ending a war for dominance with the Nationalists that had dragged on for many years. Mao's victory was considered by many Americans as a victory for world communism and as a "loss" for the west. It was an event that added to our geographical distance from China; arguably, Mao's victory precipitated the war in Korea and the war in Vietnam, both of which we Americans saw as a necessary and, perhaps, desperate fight to "stop the spread" of communism.

As further by-products of this effort, the US experienced both the Cold War with its legion of anxieties and the disruptive cultural revolution/antiwar movement of the 1960s.

My point is not to argue the politics of that time, but only to suggest the world that shaped American attitudes toward what is "foreign" -- the cultural environment I grew up in -- no longer suits our world. And the China we were so privileged to visit for two weeks in January is not the China we imagined it to be either. 

That's all to the good.

Of course, I think now, this is so obvious. What took me so long to figure it out? Or, maybe I have really known it for a long time -- in the faces of all my young Chinese friends.

China Revisited 2013 [34]

Hong Kong from The Peak

After our climb to The Big Buddha, the tofu pudding, the glass gondola return trip,  we rode the Hong Kong subway into the heart of the city for a visit to The Peak. The Peak is the highest vantage point in Hong Kong for viewing the central city.

Getting to The Peak, like getting to The Big Buddha, requires riding a rare form of transportation. In this case it was a 10 minute ride on a 125 year old tram railway that ascends 1300 feet in 10 minutes. Officially, the gradient is between 4 and 27 degrees, but from a passenger's perspective it seemed closer to 45 degrees, with most of the trip on the steepest part of that spectrum.

I was unable to manage a clear picture of the tram. For anyone who has made the voyage, the tram resembles the cog railway that climbs Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, which is only to say that the tram is an old style railroad car (two actually) with all the seats facing one direction -- uphill.

When the tram left the station and began to climb, we thought, momentarily, that we would be in big trouble if the mechanism that grips the cable failed.  Five or six minutes into the climb, we began to wish the old trains had head rests.  The ride was a serious and literal pain in the neck.

Nonetheless, the ride was clearly an improvement over the means of transportation employed prior to the building of the tram in 1888. In those days, anyone wishing to ride to the top was carried in a frail bamboo sedan chair, powered by what the brochure calls "two strong coolies."  As with their brothers who power rickshaws, apart from the benefit of the exercise for "staying in shape" it is hard to imagine an upside to a job like this. I found no information about the time required for a sedan chair hike to the vista.

At the top of the tram run, we disembarked at the base of The Peak Tower; at the top of this tower is the best view of Hong Kong anywhere.  Six or seven escalators and one more ticket booth later, we arrived on Sky Terrace 428.

We arrived a little early for the light show that begins at dusk.  The light show is not entertainment as, say, a laser show might be.  It is simply the point at which the tall new buildings around the harbor in the center of Hong Kong turn on their external lights.  This kind of light show is a fairly common feature of the modern Chinese cities we have visited so far. The lights in downtown Guangzhou, for example, are quite impressive.



As with the tram itself, I had trouble getting a clear picture of the lights themselves as they came to life on cue, which was 6:30 if I remember correctly.  My difficulty this time was not motion but the fog, the crowds (which became denser as 6:30 approached) and, of course, my on-going camera issues.

Street level Hong Kong was reasonably warm on this day in January, but the air at The Peak, given the departing sunlight and the steady breeze was rather cool.

After dinner in the tower we took the tram back down the steep hill.  To my surprise, we rode backward down the hill. Too bad, I thought it would have made for better viewing to see where we were going rather than where we had been.  Then it occurred to me that forward facing seats would have dumped us onto the floor as soon as we hit the slope.

We had a set up an elaborate system to be sure we awoke on time to catch the shuttle over to the airport for our flight back to the States. 

But the arrangements were unnecessary. At 5 a.m. the fire alarm jolted us out of bed.  We went to the door and looked out at the empty hallway. No smoke, no burning smell. 

Pretty soon Yujia appeared at our door to say, "Don't worry. Just stay in the room."

We did.  The alarm stopped.  We debated going back to bed and decided against it. The fire trucks that had gathered on the driveway below our window turned off their lights and rumbled away.

After welcoming us aboard for our trip home, the captain said we would have strong tail winds so we could expect a shorter trip to New York.  But when he turned off the seat belt sign, the largest Asian woman I have ever seen flopped her seat back into my lap, and I knew it was going to feel like a long trip regardless of how much time the tail winds saved us.

China Revisited 2013 [33]

The Big Buddha

Our last day in China was both a day of preparation for our flight back to New York and a day for sight-seeing in Hong Kong.  We said our good-byes to Edward's grandmother and the two maids, who had been so kind and hospitable to these high-maintenance guests, loaded our bags into the van, and headed for the border.

It doesn't take long. There are two border check points, one for China itself and one for Hong Kong. Paperwork needs to be in order, passports ready.  After the second border crossing the van shifted from driving on the right to driving on the left, British style, and we crossed the river onto the islands that comprise Hong Kong.

It was a hazy January day, but even with restricted vision, it is clear that the harbor is extremely busy with all manner of boat traffic.

Our first stop was the airport hotel where we would spend the night in preparation for our early morning flight. Near the airport is a mall with a train station, Tung Chung, where we went next to meet Yujia, who was to arrive from Guangzhou to be with us on our last day. It is always a treat to have Yujia on board.

The mall also houses the cable car terminal for the aerial tours out over the Tung Chung Bay, up and over the hills that form the Lantau North Country Park to Ngong Ping Village, which lies at the base of "The Big Buddha." We tend to think of Hong Kong simply as a congested city, which is true enough, but it also includes forested hills on multiple islands.

Edward booked a "crystal cabin" for us, which meant the cable car had a clear glass bottom. It was both a generous gesture, as these crystal cabins are more expensive, and a bit of teasing since both Donna and I fear heights. Edward took advantage of this knowledge to remind us at every opportunity just how high up we were.

The glass bottom did not concern Edward or Yujia, nor, apparently, Edward's mother. They moved about quite happily, while we held onto the plastic seats.

 

I offset the effect of riding without visible support just a bit by setting my backpack between my feet to hide the view straight down. It also helped us to look straight out rather than down through the glass floor. For me, at least, once the car was out and away from the platform, I was OK.

 The cable ride is 25 minutes.  About 18 minutes into the ride, after we have crossed the bay and the first set of hills, the Buddah comes into view in the distance.  Because it was hazy, as I said earlier, the statue at first was mostly a dark, ghostly presence in the distance.

As one would expect of a Buddha, it just sits placidly atop the hill at some distance from the cable route.  We disembarked at Ngong Ping Village, which is a new commercial enterprise constructed as a tourist destination. I was surprised to learn that the Big Buddha itself is of recent construction; it was finished in 1996. There is a mix of commercial and religious forces at work here that I cannot entirely disentangle; but my best explanation is that after years of suppressing religious practices, the Chinese authorities have begun to encourage the ancient forms due to their commercial value. They are, in fact, beneficial to the local economy.  I realize as I make this observation that Hong Kong was under British control during the construction of the Buddha and the village. That fact does not dissuade me; I think my explanation is likely close to the truth.

There is a Buddhist monastery in the village to serve the needs of worshipers who come to the temples that are also part of the complex.

We had lunch in the village, but not at Zen Noodles, which had been my suggestion. As near as I can tell we ate at Ngong Ping Garden Restaurant.  I have eliminated most of the other possibilities -- Starbucks, Subway, Zen Tiawanese Bistro, da dolce Gelato Italiano -- you get the idea.

The village itself is basically one street of stores that head through a set of gates toward the Po Lin Monastery and the hill dominated by the Big Buddha. The Monastery is separated a distance from the shopping district by a stone-paved pathway lined with figures of historic generals whose deeds in battle have legendary status. The shrines in front of the monastery were filled with people burning incense.  Smoke and ashes were everywhere.

The Monastery itself is beautifully kept. Clearly the commercial prosperity of the new village has allowed the Monastery itself to prosper and, in turn, to serve as an colorful display of ancient art and architecture. The detail in these traditional styles is quite astonishing.  I am personally attracted to the little animals that one finds along the roof ridges, which were reminiscent for me of similar traditional styles in Korea.

 








After we had looked at the Monastery, we climbed the stairway to get a closer look at the Big Buddha -- 15 separate sets of 14 steps, or, 210 steps altogether. There are a few more steps at the top if one wants to pay a separate admission to get up close and personal with the Buddha itself, but we all thought 210 steps was plenty.

My impression was that few people, maybe just the seriously devout, actually paid the separate admission. Most settled for the 210 steps.  There was actually quite a bit to see from that vantage point. In the little rooms beneath Buddha's platform was a set of large room that had information about Buddhism, photographs and diagrams about the construction of the Big Buddha itself, and items for sale to help you remember your trip.

 At the bottom of the 210 steps again we stopped for a snack of tofu pudding in an eating hut that also reminded me of Korea -- plastic hung walls, outdoor cooking.  The tofu pudding was good although I don't have any memory of the exact taste.

Then, having seen the Big Buddha, we checked to see where in the world we were -- a mere 13,000 km from New York -- before we boarded our crystal cabin for the ride back to Tung Chung, Hong Kong.

China Revisited -- 2013 [32]

Splendid China, part 2


Scale is often an issue for a foreigner in China. How does one imagine size and distance, for example?  How does one understand engineering, even with a knowledge of physics, a comprehension of mathematics, and an appreciation for architectural beauty? How does one understand weight and balance, motivation and vision, the costs of human labor?

Splendid China does not answer those questions, of course, but it provided for us a beginning, a point of reference; in short, a way to imagine the unimaginable.

The Great Wall, which runs for hundreds of miles across northern China and is one of the few ancient human structures visible from space, is one illuminating point of reference.  To see it in miniature run for hundreds of yards as a replica frees the imagination, even against the backdrop of modern Shenzhen, which is a product of Deng Xiaoping's vision in the early post-Mao era. One is prompted to think of the Great Wall as "the glory that was China." That is fair enough, but one ought not stop there.

It is necessary and helpful in all of these observations to think in terms of people as well as engineering, to think of citizens as well as emperors, to think of laborers as well as engineers and architects. The little costumed figures on the terraces and stairways allow the tourist to do that; they offer a human dimension that provides perspective both in terms of scale and of human activity.

In this regard, nothing is quite so moving as the model of central Beijing leading from the Temple of Heaven north to the Forbidden City. The actual structures, dating from the early 15th Century, were, among other things, designed to demonstrate physically the Emperor's connection to heaven.

The Temple of Heaven, the largest building in the world dedicated to the offering of sacrifices, lies at the southern end of a north/south axis, with the Forbidden City, home to Emperors from 1406 until 1911, at the northern end. The road linking these two complexes is, or was, roughly 4 miles.  The model in Splendid China, built to scale, runs at least a hundred yards from end to end.  In real life, even centuries ago, it would have been hard to see from end to end.  In miniature, that view is not only possible -- the scope of the endeavor itself gives one pause.

 

Consider also for a moment the fact that the entire route is lined on both sides with people, and not just ordinary people, mind you, important people who were summoned to take their places when the emperor traveled between the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven. Judging from the figures in the model, these men are standing roughly an arm's length apart after the fashion of soldiers who space themselves in formation by extending one arm to the shoulder of the next soldier.

 The scale model does not, of course, include extraneous building, which is both good and bad. The fact that there is no way to imagine clearly what Imperial Beijing beyond this axis is a loss. In modern Beijing, too, there are thousands of buildings that clutter this central plan, so the model is deficient in that sense too.

On the other hand, the model allows one to imagine the Imperial grip on Beijing, both in terms of architecture and in terms of power.  Part of the original intention of the first emperor's vision was to create a small model of the cosmos as it was or was intended to be understood. Beijing itself was then built in concentric rings around this central architecture.

What we as Americans know generally of this long complex construction is almost entirely related to what has been preserved of the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City with its 30 foot high red walls, its 800 buildings, and its 178 acres is one third the size of the Temple of Heaven.It required, apparently, a million laborers working steadily for 14 years. There are many facts and details that I need not mention here. But the sheer size and complexity of this endeavor is hard to comprehend even viewed in miniature.

The red wall of the Forbidden City, as everyone knows, is now additionally famous for it huge portrait of Chairman Mao.

But for the outsized gestures like this Mao portrait, the human figures are all but lost against this astonishing achievement.  This is indeed what puts the "splendid" in the name, Splendid China. Almost lost, but for me no less splendid, though in a different way, is the massive physical effort, the hidden human cost, that made this magnificent vision possible.

China Revisited -- 2013 [31]

Splendid China, part 1

One afternoon between our trip to the village, LuHe, and our days in Guangzhou, Edward told us he would take us to a cultural exhibition in central Shenzhen.

The place is called Splendid China. Were we interested?

Sure. Of course.  That's what we're here for.  Although we had never heard of it, the name is typically Chinese in its use of the grand descriptor "splendid." Splendid in many ways it is.

Splendid China is a new construction, a tourist destination built to show off all parts of China, not specifically the cultural sites of Shenzhen. It was described for us in various ways.  It is an outdoor museum / folk village after the order of Mumford Village (for folks in western New York), though on a vastly larger scale. It is a theme park of recreated places and structures that might make one think of Disney World -- without the fantasy and without the rides.

Well, maybe with a touch of fantasy and rides.

The entry to Splendid China features several huge displays of modern, cartoonish renderings of traditional Chinese things (like dragons) and new Chinese things -- all of which suggest the universal appeal of modern TV animation. Note the characters have "western" rather than Asian eyes.

On our visit to Splendid China, the kissing couple, more traditional and clearly Chinese, was drawing young folks who posed for photographs in front of it. I don't remember seeing too many of those young folks in the park itself, however. To be honest, there weren't many people of any age in the park on that day as the weather was cold and showers threatened.

[We did encounter a group of Korean tourists that we identified by the sound of their conversation. Quite a feat, I must say.  Donna called "Anyounghaseao (hello!)" as their open carriage drove by us.]


Edward parked at the car entrance, in an partially submerged parking garage just beyond an enormous tree that I remember as being a tropical species of sycamore.

The cultural center itself had no other Disney-like characters that I remember, although it did have an aerial tram for those who wanted a seated overview. We chose to spend our visit on foot, all four hours of it, which began with a series of imposing stone archways that lent a more traditional "weight" to the park entrance. We did not have time to visit every corner of the park and we did not see any of the cultural shows that were offered in better weather.

These arches, like nearly everything in the park, were newly constructed replicas rather than old originals; they create the look and feel of an ancient imperial city, although no ancient sites had been scavanged for artifacts. At other displays in the park, as, for example, with the Great Wall reproduction, the model is so vast in its scaled down version as to demand an emotional response. One cannot help but be impressed by this staggering feat of engineering, ingenuity, and physical labor. 

The mission of Splendid China is, objectively speaking, preposterous.  How does one take the mind-boggling variables -- a land mass the size of China, a civilization that spans 5,000 years, and a population that includes 56 ethnic groups -- and adequately represent it in one "theme park"?

To be fair, one could hardly do justice to China's diversity, scale, and longevity even with a life-time of free travel and ready access. Nevertheless, Splendid China accomplishes some significant things.

In an odd way the large and the small replicas, and the presence of floral "representatives,"achieved a sense of "China" that would be hard to create short of the life-long tour I have just suggested.

Perhaps the first conclusion one might draw from these re-creations of the wonders of China is just how varied China actually is. I grew up while China was a very "closed kingdom," imagining China as a land of exotic wonders and drab daily existence -- this was during Mao's early years, after all -- but never in terms of diversity.  I would have thought that the Chinese were uniformly Chinese, with one language, one form of writing, one identifiable look, one mode of dress (sometimes plain, sometimes fancier), one means of living, and so on.

Although much of what was unknown about China in those days is knowable today and while no intelligent westerner would admit to holding the kind of singular view of things Chinese that I just described, the fact remains that we often don't think past the false notion of China as a mono-culture. The truth is -- and the value of a tourist destination like Splendid China is -- that mono-culture idea is quite simply false.

Splendid China will never replace visiting actual cities, countryside, and historical sites, of course; no recreation can. And we will want to see the actual terra cotta figures and the Great Wall on our next visit.

But  Splendid China is, in fact, an efficient way to begin understanding the Chinese complexity.  China is many things: it is mystery, it is confusion, it is contradiction, it is elegance and dignity; it is in many ways overwhelming.  It is a long, significant, complex history. It is many enchanting cultures. It is diverse and fascinating peoples.

But China is not fantasy.

One of the ways that Splendid China is different from a place like Disneyland is that while it creates fantasy it is not really a destination. The fantasy is wanting to see the real thing -- all of it.