Goodbye Mao, Hello Borat

Mike: It turns out that China is a lot harder to leave than it is to get into. When we applied for our Chinese visas in Bangkok, filling out forms in triplicate and then waiting around for days before forking over a hundred dollars each to have our passports adorned with the official stamp, we thought we were getting the hard part out of the way. Little did we know.

After exploring China's little known (but REALLY big) Xinjiang Province, we decided to take the train from Urumqi accross the border to Almaty, Kazakhstan. It sounded simple enough, but booking cross-border train tickets in China ain't easy for us foreign imperialist types. Rejected at the train station ticket window and several travel agencies, we eventually found ourselves in a hotel suite on the outskirts of town negotiating for tickets with a hulking Russian guy and his beanpole Uigur sidekick. After a frenzy of cacaphonic tri-lingual communication, we finally managed a breakthrough: they couldn't sell us tickets, either.

Finally, it was a small counter in the lobby of yet another hotel that saw us through. Tickets in hand, we triumphantly boarded an old Russian railcar for the two-day journey to Almaty. The other two berths in our compartment were taken by a Mongolian woman and a Chinese guy. We passed the miles in good spirits, exchanging stories (Tower of Babel, take two) and the food we'd packed. All was right with the world. Then, like that famous piece of refuse colliding with that famous fan, we trundled up to the Chinese border post.

We didn't expect trouble - we were leaving the country, after all, not trying to get in. Still, we should have known better. As the train ground to a halt, Chinese soldiers immediately climbed aboard, collected passports, and herded every European and North American aboard off the train and into a seperate building. There weren't many, just your faithful correspondents, three New Zealanders and a Norweigan. Good thing, because the soldiers brought each of us into a small room individually, with our luggage, and interviewed us for a minimum of 15 minutes each while they rifled through our bags.

Mike had an especially good time, since the Chinese were somehow aware of his checkered past as an imperialist military officer. It took over an hour for him to clear. He passed the time evading bizarre questions about his military service and watching a squad of the People's Liberation Army's finest look for secret documents sewn into his boxer shorts. If there's a transcript out there, part of it reads like this:

Chinese Officer: "You in army before, we know this. Yes?"

Mike: "Yes."

China: "Where in army you fight?"

Mike: "I fought with my sister sometimes, when I was a kid, but we get along great now."

(faint but audible rustle as socks are held up to the light by a teenage soldier, breathing loudly through his mouth)

China (after long silence): "You in army, yes? We know you in army."

After such hospitality, the Kazakh border was a glorious sight. We were also questioned by Kazakh officers - but all they wanted to know was why their Chinese counterparts kept giving westerners so much trouble, and they stopped by our compartment to ask their questions instead of confining us. Finally, after engineers changed the wheel guage on our train to accomodate the old Soviet-laid track to the north, we were on our way into Kazakhstan.




If Sasha Cohen's character Borat is your image of modern Kazakhstan, think again. Almaty's wide and leafy avenues, mountain vistas and European sensibilities felt cleansing after China's industrial, desert interior. As we arranged visas and plotted our onward journey to the Caspian Sea, and Istanbul beyond, we strolled through parks with locals decked out in western fashions bought with new petro-dollars and visited resplendant Russian Orthodox Churches.



At the famous Green Bazaar, we gawked at mountains of fresh meat and produce and indulged in heaping portions of laghman, the national dish of pulled noodles, vegetable sauce and meat.



Kazakhstan's largest city was the most vibrant place we'd visited since Shanghai. Still, despite the Italian fashions and French restaurants, we couldn't help singing a few lines from Borat's ficticious national anthem, written to the tune of the Star Spangled Banner:

"Kazakhstan is the Number One

Exporter of Potassium,

All other countries

Export inferior potassium!"

China's Inland Empire

It's obvious enough from a glance at the map that China is an exceptionally large nation, stretching from the Pacific to the mountainous ramparts of the Pamirs. But to truly appreciate just how damn big it is, there's nothing like crossing the country by train. Only when you've spent an entire day and night sitting on a bench in a packed rail car full of rural Chinese, with many people standing in the aisles or slumped on their luggage, does all that colored map space really sink in. It took us the better part of a week to make our way from Beijing to Kazakhstan, traversing Xinjiang's deserts in the hoof-prints of the old silk road camel caravans. Along the way, we discovered one of the world's most overlooked Islamic communities, the Uigurs.

In some important ways, a very large amount of that colored map space representing China isn't very Chinese at all. A massive percentage of China's land mass is found in its two westernmost provinces, Tibet and Xinjiang. In our travels through both places, we found the majority of people speaking non-Chinese languages, following non-Chinese religions, eating non-Chinese food, wearing non-Chinese clothes and generally going about their lives in a very non-Chinese way. (All of this, it goes without saying, happens under the attentive supervision of some very Chinese officials and police). There are some pretty obvious complications that result from this arrangement, and we discussed them at some length here and here during our travels in Tibet and in the Tibetan exile community in India.



While Xinjiang's Uigur Muslim majority hasn't found itself in the spotlight (or under the gun) to the extent their southern neighbors have, they do face a similar situation in many respects. Separatist movements have arrisen here on a number of occasions, only to be crushed. Still, despite the political tension and riot police patrolling the streets, life in Xinjiang's villages adheres to a rhythm much older than the town clocks chiming on Beijing time. Mao's face still appears occasionally, but the heart and soul of Xinjiang is the call to prayer echoing in the early morning, and the afternoon light filtering through grape trellises to illuminate the mud-walled alleys.

Hutong Quest

Susannah: The city of Beijing was my first glimpse of Asia. It was 1996 and was I sixteen. I had no affection for the grim smoggy skies and treeless avenues lined with blocky cement buildings; what I loved was pointing my Flying Pigeon bicycle down the narrow, winding hutongs of the old part of town. Here, onion pancackes and fried dumplings sizzled on every corner, crowds gathered to watch mahjong games, and women called to each other in piercing tones asking about their husbands' hemorrhoids. There was always something to wonder at, so much so that I often narrowly avoided collisions with bicycle carts overloaded with cardboard, beer bottles or laundry.

Many of these hutongs are several hundred years old. Through the narrow entryways lined with rusty bikes lie the courtyards of ancient family complexes and vibrant hidden temples. When we arrived in the city with Mike's mom, we barely made it to Tiananmen Square before I dragged everyone off to see "the real Beijing" of the hutongs.

I couldn't remember where my old haunts had been, so I consulted the ever-present guide book and pointed us toward Qianmen, the old southern gate to the city. We were immediately confronted with what seemed like miles of corrugated metal barricade, forcing us through a narrow, dusty channel reverberating with the sounds of jackhammers and buzzsaws. Through a gap in a fence I saw a vast expanse of rubble punctuated by the vibrant color of recently constructed faux-imperial splendor: the Beijing the government was readying for the Olympics.



Сhargrined, we pushed through the dust to a narrow commercial street. Here, cheerful workmen were busy rebuilding storefronts full of souvenirs. Dismembered mannequins lay piled against a fence.



A little desperate now, I took us down a promisingly narrow alleyway that I hoped would yield some local color. There was hardly a sign of life, apart from some wet cement. The old walls had been painted a uniformly stark grey on grey.

A couple days later (at my suggestion) we rented bikes and tried a different part of town, behind the Forbidden City. Same story, except this time there were signs in English pointing the way to this or that "authentic hutong." Toward the end of the day we happened upon some hole-in-the-wall noodle joints and a makeshift bike repair stand, but most of the businesses were self consciously shabby-hip joints for foreigners, or sold relics of the old Beijing.



As the defacto China tour guide, I was a little embarassed to be dragging Mike's mom along on a wild goose chase for something that apparently no longer existed. Once we had left China's borders and the reach of the "Great Firewall of China," I did some internet research to see what had happened to the Beijing I remembered.

According to this insightful article in Open Democracy, (featuring some beautiful and sobering photos), a third of the central city's 62 square km has been destroyed in the last 3 years, displacing 580,000 residents, many of whom are homeless while awaiting resettlement in highrises. The hutongs not being torn down are getting the makeover we witnessed. One of the aspects of this makeover that pleases residents is the upgrading of their public toilets--though only those in tourist-frequented areas are getting the fancy kind with electronic flush mechanisms.

According to this (surprisingly hilarious) article in The Hindu,

"the city authorities have also instituted a "morality-evaluation index" that ranks neighbourhoods according to the level of refinement they have achieved. Sharing housework, speaking a foreign language, regular reading of newspapers, large book-collections and window-sills displaying potted plants boost the neighbourhood score on the civility index while spitting, alcohol abuse, and noisiness act as blackmarks."

This is all happening, of course, to mould the city into a Beijng the government thinks will impress its first-world Olympic visitors. This is a shame, because a sterilized, spoon-fed experience of China can be had much more easily at Epcot Center. But the real shame is that Beijing's residents are being forcibly encouraged to believe that their rich, lived-in history and deep community roots are worthless.