A thirteen-hour plane ride from Beijing to Newark, NJ brings me home. The world is a small place these days. This point is driven home to me at every turn in the journey. Beijing is a city as modern and comfortable as any place on earth to those of us who have been spoiled by the idea that human progress is most evident through the monuments created within the past generation – the sparkling, glitzy, high fashion Malls at the Oriental Plaza or the 17-story soaring atrium lobby, topped by a glass canopy, at the 5-star Renaissance Hotel. At the Great Wall, members of our Champlain College 2009 MOJO group run into “friends” from half way around the world – a group of University of Vermont students coincidentally on a tour of the great sites in China. The world is a very small place, indeed.
But this reflection is about the places beyond the Xi’an “frontier” in western China. There’s a physical experience and then there’s a mystical experience when foreigners go to China. And I wonder if I’m fit to lead these kinds of trips in the future. It’s never been my intention to make these trips mere sightseeing excursions, although there are plenty of once-in-a-lifetime things to see. The questions go through my mind constantly. How do I prepare people who have never been here before for what they’ll see or how they’ll feel? How do I deliver on the implied “promise” to the people we meet, that we’re here to do more than just snap pictures and buy cheap mementos? What happens to the people we meet and the places we see once we leave? How do I inspire those who are blessed by good luck and fate to make a difference in the lives of others whose luck and fate just happen to be not as good?
These questions gnaw at me. And I wonder, again, if I’m fit to lead another group of US students and teachers into the heart of western China. I’ve lost the innocence of a first time visitor. I’m now focused, almost obsessively on the faces of the people – grizzled veterans of China’s civil war period when Mao and the communists first took control of this ancient culture of four thousand continuous years of development, people my age whose lives have spanned both the national Chinese nightmare of the convulsions and insanity of the Cultural Revolution and the incredible rise of China’s economic development that has lifted more people than ever before in the span of human history out of crushing poverty to what, by most economists’ definitions, would be modest middle class lifestyles, and the children… Ah, the children; full of hope and wondrous expectations, living in an age of remarkable possibilities but quite aware of the fragility of their very existence in communities virtually unchanged from the days when Chinese emperors lived so lavishly within the walls of the Forbidden City.
These faces, indeed these stories, haunt me. I come back again and again, not because it’s a comfortable feeling to be in a part of the world that sits so precariously on a ledge of history, but because I have a sense that here I’ll find the truth. Here, I’ll see the first glimmers of what really lies ahead for all of humanity in the next one hundred years.
This hubristic quest for knowledge is vaguely reminiscent of a Greek tragedy. The story of Oedipus is not so much about a monstrous human being who murders his father and weds his mother, as it is about a man, rational in every way, who tempts fate by needing to know too much. It is this unrelenting “need to know” that leads to such a timelessly tragic story. When fate fulfills the Oracle’s prophecy in spite of all human attempts to avoid it, we must confront a simple question; are we possessed of free will, to make rational decisions that control real outcomes? Or, are we simply actors in a grand play whose script is written and sealed?
This is my seventh trip to western China. The 2009 China MOJO is my fourth trip with students and teachers. But I continue to come back to western China for answers; for answers to riddles I do not really understand. I should be comfortable in the twilight of a life lived in relative security and materialistic abundance. I should be guided by my peers, whose deafness to the cries of those with futures hanging in the balance is a clarion testimony to a fatalistic belief that no one of us can change the world or the conditions in it that are the purest outcomes of human nature. Instead, I seem drawn inexorably into the vortex of the swirling mass of human hopes and dreams rubbing up against nature’s laws of limits that personifies this peculiar and uniquely particular place on our globe.
And so I find myself wondering; what do others see and feel in this place? Is a dinner at the Master’s table at the Ta’er Monastery a revelation of the spirit or is it just another item on life’s checklist of places and experiences? Are we aware of the shepherds tending the grazing yaks and sheep who serve as a momentary backdrop for pictures, or do we feel the disturbance of the rhythms of lives so simple and honest by the infrequent bands of tourists who come out through these high mountain passes in buses with blaring horns and caravans of cars from the city? In encountering the Muslim peoples tending the small subsistence farms of western China – Hui and Uighurs, do we feel the intensity of an insatiable desire for education, for contact with the world, and the opportunity for cultural and economic sustainability? Is consumerism, as we know it in the West, sustainable in the East, or are we all on the edge of a fatal cliff from which we must turn back together? Nature makes no guarantees that the human species is immune from the extinctions with which Mother Earth has so effectively used to be rid of harmful parasitic species in past epochs. If we do not turn back together, are we to suffer a human-induced fateful future of lives tragically cut short and all hopes banished by brutish 20th century style conflicts for scarce resources and constant “clashes of civilizations” so cynically predicted by Samuel Huntington?
All of this is on my mind as I think about what the experience of traveling nearly 2,000 miles by car, bus, train, and plane throughout the incredible landscapes, villages, and cities of northwest China, has been for the other members of the 2009 China MOJO band of brothers and sisters. All of this is on my mind as our group of traveling foreigners is so innocently and enthusiastically embraced by the people we meet, their warmth and curiosity so earnestly displayed.
I see flashes of brilliant empathy in some of the blog postings, videos, and photos. But what is on the minds of the others as they reflect, having returned to “civilization” now for several weeks and no doubt, having found their way back into the rhythms of daily life, home among family and friends, as memories fade, even if just a little, of a far, far away land?
We humans are wired for social interaction. Our relationships to others of our species are hard to compartmentalize and generalize. As imperfect as I am in so many ways, I’m a constant and intense observer of fellow travelers. As I make my morning run through the assembling markets or take my last midnight stroll past carpeted stalls breaking down for just a few hours of deep rest until the ritual repeats itself in an endless beat of the hearts of a million urban dwellers, I can not help but wonder. Am I doing the right thing here in northwest China? Is my desire to engage these peoples, to do something to enlighten those who have accompanied me, to exhort a personal plea to make the heart and soul of this place visible to unknowing minds half a world away, is my sacrifice real or am I simply fooling myself in a quixotic adventure of hopeless and unrealistic expectations? Indeed, do I need these people in northwest China more than they need me? Who is the beggar, who the thief, and who might be the saint among us? Ah, hubris, that stuff of ancient Greek tragedy. These questions gnaw at me.
In the end, we must decide to decide, whether it is free will we possess or the thing be wholly scripted and we are but actors on the stage. I will return to northwest China, where nothing is as it appears, because regardless of motivations or intentions, promises or expectations, pasts or futures, I am happy in this place among these people of such honest simplicity, living in such a complexity of relationships. And I fervently hope others will also make this journey of self and look into the faces of the old, the not-so-old, and the children… especially the children, whether the memories are near and real or long past and faded. For here lives the collective future of humanity and the human spirit, in northwest China.
