The Greatest of Walls

My friend in China had gone there to teach at an international school soon after finishing college. She met a guy, of course, and this pretty midwestern American managed to charm her way into the heart of an Australian physics teacher. Not that she has a hard time charming anyone - she's a fun, dynamic, and driven woman who I'm proud to call my friend. Her husband was a very pleasant fellow himself, and John and I really enjoyed wandering around China with them and chatting through the evenings about life.

We had arrived at their place on a Friday, so we did a little wandering around on Saturday through a "traditional" area of the city. We got stared at quite a bit, especially with Tikvah in tow. Over and over my friend would say "they're saying she's cute!" when we passed strangers on the street. I don’t know how many phones Tikvah's picture ended up on, but she might as well have been a celebrity for all the attention she got. Ladies in a shop full of snacks gave her free food to chew on, parents took pictures of her with their kids like she was a princess at Disney World, and taxi drivers would turn around in their seats at stoplights to coo at her. Incredible.

Anyway, we wandered a bit, and I bought some cheap wooden chopsticks as my China souvenir. We climbed a drum tower which had a large bell-looking object at the top with a suspended log with which to make it sound. My friend's husband gingerly pushed the log into the 'bell', which produced a pleasant and resounding gong. Afraid that perhaps some of the incomprehensible Chinese characters had been warning of some terrible consequence of ringing the gong, we quickly retreated down the many stairs. But shortly after exiting the main room, a Chinese man behind us thrust the log into the gong, making a much louder and more pervasive tone, as if to say "let me show you silly foreigners how this is done!". Well, if there was a curse associated with ringing that gong, we could rest in the knowledge that he was going to get it worse!

Outside the drum tower, quite a crowd was gathered around a large exercise mat. On the mat were two older Chinese gentlemen in a physical joust that resembled some form of judo. The whole scene looked rather quaint with the traditional Chinese architecture all around as a backdrop.

On Sunday John and I accompanied our friends to their church. It was an international group that met in a hotel auditorium. And when I say international, I'm not exaggerating. There were Asians, Americans, Europeans, and quite a contingent from various African countries. There were no Chinese though, according to government regulations. In fact there was a note on the power point that informed everyone who entered that they must have a foreign passport in order to worship with that group. It was a very poignant reminder of the spiritual condition and governmental control of the country.

In the middle of the service, some rather loud banging noises started resounding through the hotel, loud enough that I was a little afraid of what might be happening. But no one else in the room seemed bothered, and the preacher kept right on talking as if nothing was going on. I turned to my friend with a questioning look, and she said to me, "fireworks." Ahhhh, yes. We had seen some fireworks while at their apartment, and she had explained that people here set them off for anything and everything. Massive, ear piercing fireworks that would be illegal to buy in the US let alone to set off in the middle of an overly crowded city. In fact, she said, if we looked we could see burns on the spare bedroom window where a misguided firework had made it's mark, while she and her husband were watching! Now that would be a bit of a fright!

Monday was our last full day in China, so my friend took a 'personal day' from her work at the school and took us to see, of course, the Great Wall. We rode for about 3 hours out into the country, away from that pervasive 'fog' of pollution, to one of the less visited sections of that famous structure. So far all we had seen of China had been flat, but after an hour or two of driving some mountains finally appeared on the horizon. They weren't fantastically tall and impressive, but they were lovely. We stopped at a rest stop about 2 hours in, and I got my first experience with a genuine Chinese 'squatty potty'. It was rather interesting - simply a ceramic 'sink' in the brick floor with a flush hole in one end and treads on either side so your shoes could grip. As my friend had warned it was a BYOTP service (Bring Your Own Toilet Paper), but all in all it wasn't a terribly unnerving experience. Rather, I wondered if such a public toilet wasn't much more sanitary than ours in the US, whose seats are graced by so many bare bottoms in a day. Hmmm. Anyway, the Great Wall…

As the landscape changed and we entered the mountains, we noticed that the faces around us changed as well. The Chinese of the countryside had a distinctly unique look about them compared to the Chinese we'd seen in the cities, even to our untrained foreign eyes. Finally we could see the Wall on a mountain above us, but it seemed we would have a bit of trouble getting there. The entrance to the road up was completely blocked by a crowd of people who were calmly conducting their market business as our driver honked obnoxiously and accelerated slowly through the scene. A few more minutes of driving and we were at the base of the Great Wall entrance. Stepping out of the car, we wondered how we would make it in the cold mountain air that invaded our layers of clothing. But we breathed deep of the clear mountain air and started up the seemingly endless stairs that led to the Wall.

I was well out of breath by the time we finally reached the actual wall, but was excited to see this amazing place that I'd only seen in pictures. Most of what we saw that day was a restoration of the original wall, but it was fascinating nonetheless. As far as grandeur it was not particularly impressive. It was maybe 15 to 20 feet wide and only 20 or 30 feet tall at the highest places. It was a rather simple stone structure - just a wall with a stone rail on either side, or on only one side in some places. Dotted at intervals along the wall were small towers, which consisted of an enclosed area with a second story. The wall ascended and descended with the landscape, sometimes simply sloped, sometimes with short stairs, and sometimes with very steep stairs that made me dizzy.

The sky above us was blue and sunny, and in no time the exercise of walking up and down the stairs made us as warm as we needed. John, who was carrying Tikvah, even stripped off a couple of layers to keep from overheating. The landscape around us was a mix of brown and barren hills, empty terraced gardens, and scrubby mountain brush and trees. We tried to imagine Mongolian renegades sneaking across the countryside while Chinese night watchmen attempted to keep from freezing to death as they manned their patrol. I definitely didn't envy the plight of either party!

One or two sections of the wall were composed of rough yellowish stones, a stark contrast to the smooth gray stone that made up the majority of the wall we had walked. These small sections were part of the original wall, and it was incredible to think that we were touching a bit of ancient Chinese history.

At one point John let Tikvah out of her carrier, and she gleefully frolicked her way down the wall. Finally we reached the exit of the wall, and I gingerly descended the trail down to the road with legs that felt incredibly similar to jello. On the ride back to my friend's apartment, John and Tikvah and I all three slept shamelessly in the backseat of the car. It hadn't been an incredibly taxing hike, but it was enough to wear us out for a while. And I realized how out of shape my leg muscles were, as going up and down stairs hurt quite a bit for the next three days. But the experience was more than worth the discomfort. My only regret was that Tikvah probably won't remember seeing the wall, nor will her little sibling who I carried in my tummy. But such is the plight of many missionary kids, I fear. Still, I would imagine that the things they experience, even before they are old enough to recall them later, are shaping and informing the people they will become. And if that is the case, I'm thinking we may have to combat an inflated sense of importance in Tikvah's future… :)