7/9/07- Terra Cotta Warriors, Dumplings, Wolf Pelts

I woke up to mainland China, woke up to the caller blasting techno music below me at 7 AM, to the sound of cars honking at each other in the streets below, people moving inexorably toward work and jobs and school. I dressed, slowly, and went downstairs to that surreal breakfast buffet again, picking up hunks of super-sweet sponge cake, watery melons, albino white sausage, radish sushi catering to the AM tastes of Japanese tourists. The saltines tasted like pure butter – but the coffee was drinkable, which is saying something in mainland China.

We met our guide at 9:00 sharp in the lobby, beside the revolving white piano. Piling into the van, we headed to the Banpo Museum, where the Chinese government cheerily presents a Neolithic village for the entertainment and edification of tourists. I was more interested in our guide, who gave us her edited life story as we drove. She was a minority, grew up in the muggy lands outside Shanghai, minority status allowing her parents to expand outwards to seven children. The youngest, she was expected to stay home and tend her parents – but she went to university instead, studying architecture, a degree she said was “useless.” And she defied her parents again, moving to Xi’an and marrying, despite the fact that she sent back money, plenty of money. There was no work for female architects, so she tried being a stay at home mother, which she found boring, unfufilling.

One night she met an American professor, a friend of a friend, and he complimented her on her English – and so she began studying English at nights for four years straight, poring over books after her son went to bed. She passed the tour guide exam three years, and now she leads around tourists, ranging from loud Aussies and ever-so-nice Brits to obnoxious Americans like ourselves. She pulled out her notebook from her bag, filled up with English phrases she didn’t know and wanted to learn, ranging from “abbot” (As in an abbey, the guy who runs it) to “tea sandwich,” the eventual lofty goal to be to read all of the state run China Daily newspaper in one go. (There she will read about economic success and escaped tigers, day after day.) Someday, she said, she wants to be an interpreter.

But on to Banpo, to Neolithic people. The Chinese government likes to believe they were matrilineal matriarchal communist egalitarian people and I suppose I cannot prove otherwise, these people living in mud huts on the fertile Xi’an plains, charring pigs, “knowing their mothers and not their fathers.” The women, those liberated women, kept “walking marriages,” kicking out men to their families when they grew sick of them, keeping the house and all the good, nice pottery. When they died, they had washing bone burials where the rain and the elements would wash away all the flesh, and the white bones left behind would be put together, brothers laid out in rows, sisters laid out in rows. They cooked food in the same ovens they use in rural China today (because China’s history is the longest, the very longest.)

Outside the village-contained-in-a-hanger, the government had reconstructed a chintzy faux version of a Banpo village. A stone mural on top of one of the huts showed muscular, busty women battling leopards and caring for children, long flowing power edging off romantically in the clumsy cement carvings. We went to the gift shop.

They were selling bright, colorful “farmers paintings,” produced by the forced labor of intellectuals during the cultural revolution, now a minor closet industry. One resembled another, and you could see the farmers in their factories, poring over images of sweet chubby little birds and little boys pissing into rivers. Tourists loved them, and we bought some too.

And next was the goddamn terra-cotta warriors,why anyone comes to Xi’an at all. Ringing the unopened pyramid that contains the remains and the art and the junk the First Emperor accumulated, they stand in unique and symmetrical rows, each with his own facial expression, each carrying his own special bronze weapon. Qin Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor, craziest bastard of them all, sucking down mercury on the conviction it would cause him to live forever – but he died in the end, his stinking corpse ferried down the length of the country before the government admitted he had shuffled off the mortal coil. They have not opened up his tomb and taken a look at him yet, but it is only a matter of time, and the tourists have the warriors anyway, thousands of them.

But before that we went to the handy photo op that was the Terra Cotta Warrior Factory, where reproductions in all shapes, sizes and price points are made for tourists to take home and sit in their gardens. Packs of Russian tourists with startlingly blonde hair browsed the stacks of twisted and broken rejects, as a jolly woman showed my dad a row of generals, pointing to their girth and to my father again. “They look like you!” she noted. He bought two.

And then we began the dusty drive out to the Warriors and out to Qin Shi Huangdi’s tomb, past the burgeoning billboards and the speeding minibuses, the little mud-brick houses, the searing and sticky heat of the day coming up all around us. As we neared the warriors, tourist opportunities reared up all around us, ranging from faux torture chambers to Journey to the West fun-fairs to Ancient China replicas. As we sailed past the unopened pyramid that supposedly contains the last mortal remains of the immortal First Emperor, we noted a faux-Egyptian pyramid built next door, hoping to draw people into a Sphinx themed souvenir exhibit inside.

And then we were at the tremendous Disney-World esque parking lot – and we opted to walk unlike 99 percent of the other tourists, passing people in visors crossing their legs and zipping quietly up the walkway to Ancient History. Jennifer and my mother unfurled their colorful plastic umbrellas – to preserve the complexion, to prevent skin cancer – and we tromped up the walkway, past wilting gardens and up to the tremendous airplane hangers that house the warriors themselves. After watching a 360 degrees movie from the 70s in a room full of corpulent Chinese children licking ice cream bars, we entered the room.

It was impressive, how can I say otherwise? The warriors have only partially been excavated and they still stretch in marching rows all down the building and down the sides, each with different facial expressions and weapons, personality emanating from every single mud-painted face. I found the un-put-together warriors most fascinating, clumped into piles of contorted body parts like execution victims. Two young looking warriors, thrown together in a pile, burnt long ago, embraced each other like lovers. Horse hoofs jutted out of the ground, gaping horse faces peering from the dirt, piled together in corners. The warriors were painted, once, but opened up the colors faded away and oxidized, crumbled into dust. (Should we be looking at them? We weren’t supposed to, Qin didn’t want us to, he would be angry…)

There were three hangers and we filed through each one, warriors upon warriors,most still buried in trenches and lumps far beneath the ground. Tourists of every nationality filed through but they were not particularly obtrusive – because the space was so big, because the scale was that huge.

We ate lunch at the site, buffet style, a half-assed attempt at regional specialties – hand pulled noodles in bland beef sauce, curiously lumpy coconut cake, lamb and yams, the ubiquitous plate of French Fries for Americans. We silently chewed our mushy vegetables and watched as a middle-aged woman pushed around a cart, hocking drinks. She had Coke Light, Sprite, Fanta, and a big jug of liquor with a preserved snake curled up at the bottom. I had Coke Light. (And my mother mocked me, mocked me for not drinking snake.)

And we then progressed to Pit Two which was enormous, simply enormous, charred wooden roof supports marching off into the distance (they had tried to burn it, broken in, but it’s hard to burn terra cotta which has already charred apart.) I noticed terra cotta horse asses jutting ardently out of the ground, waiting.

The Official Museum was a monolithic communist building, sweating gently in the sun, as crowds of tourists hooted at each other from within the corridors. The highlight was the impeccable bronze chariot excavated from the site, horses standing in rows, tiny metal worked braids and feathers sprouting off their flat-worked bridles. Chinese children gathered around the exhibits, talking ferociously – this was their cultural heritage after all, and not mine.

The walk back to the car seemed to take hours, as we hiked on through the sweltering heat, past seemingly a mile of empty and deserted art galleries and ice cream shops and souvenir stands, limping tourists dropping off occasionally to purchase popsicles and gorgeous, verdant peaches. Sweating men hawked primitive souvenirs and “wolf” skins that looked exactly like the pelts of neighborhood German shepherds. We weaved through the women scurrying about in their umbrellas (us too) and piled into the car, where I immediately fell asleep, drooling softly as we went through evening traffic and checkpoint after checkpoint.

And at 5:45 I arose and went to the Dumpling Buffet And Show which ever Xi’an tourist on a package deal must enjoy, or the government will be Pissed.

We were ushered into a tremendous banquet hall and plied with cold appetizers first: duck, chicken, beef, and various and delicious pickles. We ordered rounds of beer and muscled our guide into eating with us, despite her entreaties that she couldn’t take advantage of our kindness – but we really did like her. She personified a rabbitish, soft spoken intelligence that was encouraging to see, as she scribbled down English words she didn’t know, somberly determined what was Different about America, whether it was really any better (we don’t know either.) She believed, was convicted, that the American way of life and raising children was better because we were more independent, because we thought for ourselves - but we were not so sure. American kids have their independence, that's for sure, but my generation, myself, also are fully capable of becoming and being spoiled little assholes, depressive and self-involved, thinking for themselves to such a fantastic extent that they cease to think of anything else.

Jennifer was obviously not convinced, but I found her own story a testament: she had gone against family expectations, gone against her gender's expectations, defied her husband. She would learn English and learn about our culture because she damned well wanted to, because she could - and I doubt she could have turned out any better if she had been raised here, going to soccer practice and being told how special she was on a daily and tooth-aching basis. I was more ostentatious then her, more outspoken - and she admired me for it - but I knew she was stronger. We, my generation, I - talk a big game and throw ourselves around, and collapse like paper under pressure. I poured myself more rice wine.

And the dumplings kept on coming, in fantastic animal shapes, in the shapes of snails and pigs and fish, filled with cabbage and scallops and hazelnuts and strawberries. My favorite was the spiced and rich yam dumplings, steamed quickly, Our servers grimly told us that to use soy sauce and chili oil on them would be a crime against humanity. Thanksgiving transferred deftly through Chinese eyes. We finished slurping up mini-dumpling soup – I got two dumplings, which meant would make money, or so they encouraged us. I finished the meal and carefully slurped sweet and oily rice wine, rocket fuel.

We were sitting next to a couple of plump and soft spoken Danes and their ostentatious Chinese guide, who knew our own guide from before (she seemed chastened, embarrassed by the association.) The other guide waved around her cherry red and fierce nails and constantly reapplied her lipstick. She discussed with evident pride her Danish charges, pointing to the woman’s face –“She has TWO dimples. I only have one.” She looked me over appraisingly and informed me that I was pretty, and I could see, slightly, the wheels turning in her head, appraising.

A beautiful and tall Thai boy with his family sat across from us, blinking dreamily as his parents chattered across the table. I exchanged glances with a coiffed and handsome Indian boy, drinking beer.

The dinner show was good enough, although any actual association with Tang dynasty entertainments was doubtful. Lithe young women danced in elaborate costumes, twirled about ribbons, sang songs in the high and eerie voice traditional Chinese music favors and Westerners abhor. A baby-faced man played a bi trumpet and sang with a super high voice – inhaling hyper actively deadly Chinese helium no doubt. A group of 13 year old student ambassadors from the USA watched, fascinated, at the finale, as scantily dressed women leap about a tremendous and supremely tacky demon mask, with electric and red flashing eyes. And then we went back, weaving through the dark streets of Xi’an, people grilling meat and chasing dogs and flying kites in the supplicant heat of the evening.