It’s been three months since our little band of MOJO-ers high-tailed it to northwesten China. Three months – good golly, Ms. Molly! I can’t say it feels like yesterday, last week, or even last month that we traversed the Chinese landscape and bathed in the generosity of our hosts. It feels entirely like three months. I can say, however, that still feels real, which is more than I can say for my trips to Disney (at age 6 and 17, respectively). And that, ladies and gentlemen, says quite a lot, as I’ve been staring at the trip footage for, well, three months now.

Oh, yes: the footage. While waltzing along the Yellow River one day, it was brought to my attention by Dr. Rob Williams that even the most mundane activities were instantly cooler as a result of the little phrase “…in China.” I lounged on a rock/seat/crevice and said, “I’m sitting on a rock…in China” and it was true! Sitting never looked so cool! Hence, the following retrospective, entitled “Everything is Cooler in China”. All edited and ready for your enjoyment.

China. The land of the cool.

-Kristen

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.

On the surface, that’s not entirely surprising – I mean, you need adapters in Europe, too. The Chinese adapters, however, are unlike most because, well, they’re hard to find. Go to most travel stores and they have a “Chinese Adapter.” Unfortunately, a few of us on the trip had the pleasure of finding that there is, apparently, more than one China where plugs are concerned. Who knew? Surely not I.

But that’s not the only adapter you need to plug-in to China. And by adapter I do mean a means to plug-in still – just to the technology that has aptly been called “a series of tubes.”

The Internet requires a completely different mentality – namely that which one is okay with not being on it. Yes, the Internet was available to us at the vast majority of our locations and the Chinese people have unsurpassed network access (cellphones with Internet EVERYWHERE), but most of our online tools vanished the second we touched down in Beijing.

YouTube. Twitter. WordPress. Goners, all of them. Google was censored and there was a very real feeling every e-mail or Skype call was not as private as I once believed. The fact that my family got our blog updates and e-mails was surprising every time.

So, my China adapter? My adapter was being okay with unplugging, of being away from my social media outlets and RSS feeds. I adapted to the Great Fire Wall of China. If only my iPod charger could have done the same thing.

-Kristen

I checked with my health care provider to find a primary care doctor in Burlington to rid myself of this “disease” once and for all. After a short conversation over text messages with Jenica, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was stressed. Why? I have everything I need to live, a great job, had just returned from a life-changing trip, etc. I pondered these things late into the night until I felt I had come to a solid conclusion.

I was carrying the weight of the world (including China, and that’s heavy!) on my shoulders. It was during my experience in China that put a face and name to poverty and oppression and I felt like it was my responsibility to fix these issues. Obviously, I know that I can’t take on the problems of the world alone, but something shifted in me and suddenly I felt moved to make substantial changes in my life. I found myself completing a Peace Corps application, a volunteer application for COTS in downtown Burlington, and seeking out opportunities to make some iota of a difference for the betterment of humanity.

For me, China was life-changing, paradigm-shifting, and an experience that has completely altered my future plans. Even though I find myself hurting for the impoverished and aching for the oppressed, I no longer battle swine flu symptoms and my indecisive equilibrium. *Sigh*

Since returning from China, I’ve discovered that I may have the Swine Flu.

Haven’t had it confirmed.  All the symptoms… a serious flu, more serious than anything I’ve had in years.  But it makes for a pretty comical story.  

I have a clinic just down the street from the house.  On Sunday, I took a quick ride over to the clinic to “turn myself in,” figuring it was my civic duty.  After all, I’ve got 2 high school kids living with me.  If it’s H1N1 and they show up at school with symtpms like I have, that’s sufficient to close down the town’s school system. 

The clinic refused to “test” me for H1N1.  They were willing to check me into the emergency room for $300 (I’ve got a high deductible on my health insurance), but I wasn’t there for “emergency” treatment.  I just figured someone in the health care system ought to know, given that the WHO has declared a global pandemic.  

No dice.  Nurse Ratched says I have to go see my doctor, and “No, the clinic doesn’t give a rat’s %#&@ if I’ve contracted H1N1.  The Clinic isn’t in the charity business, you know.”  So, I called my Primary Care Physician under my HMO, and he can fit me in on Thursday, and oh by the way, his office is half way across the state.  

Now, the school sent home a general notice with the kids saying that if anyone has the flu, they should “stay indoors, rest, drink lots of fluids, wash their hands, and generally avoid sneezing on people for a week.”  (There’s one confirmed case of H1N1 in the middle school.)  If that’s the prescription my GP is going to give me – stay home, get some rest, drink lots of fluids, wash my hands, and don’t sneeze on people, I’ll skip it.  I’m camped out on the couch, waiting for the thing to pass or get so bad they need to send an ambulance.

I find this all very ironic… comically ironic, compared to the “heightened state of awareness” we encountered in China and the “mobilization of resources” to try to limit the spread of the disease and it’s possible mutation into something more serious..  What do you suppose the response would have been if Yajuan had discovered my temperature was over 99 degrees?  

Currently, there’s a health care debate going on in the halls of Congress and at our CT State Capital.  (CT is the “Insurance Capital” of the world!  Woohoo!)  We like to think we’re a highly evolved society here in the good old USA, but I think this situation is nuts.  Even Ken Kesey’s twisted mind would have had trouble wrapping around this one.  I may or may not have H1N1, but damned if anyone in this system really wants to know.  

I’m going back to the couch with my hot, sweet fruit tea and read the Tweets out of Iran.

-Steve

My general response? “Oh. Okay.”

At the time, I chalked my neutrality on the sightseeing portion of our great China journey up to being tired, grumpy, overwhelmed. But now? Now, I understand: I’ve seen those sites before. On TV.

Okay, so not everything we saw was on TV, but a lot of it was. It was covered by PBS or the Travel Channel or any network that covered the Olympics in Beijing in 2008. Through little effort of my own, I experienced bits and pieces of China from afar. So “afar,” in fact, that a 30-second commercial between locations seemed like an eternity in a way that I now understand the flight from Newark to Beijing to be an eternity.

My point? China was rarely a shocker for me in the way it appeared to be for others. I had seen this place before. I had laid my eyes on these people and heard their native tongue. I had salivated as they cooked their dishes and winced into my armchair as they tumbled across the gymnastics mat (Travel Channel – your programming, no matter the commercialism, is glorious in this girl’s eyes).

I had seen bits of China but I had not experienced it. Now, I have experienced it and I wonder if my twisted take on the sites is indeed twisted.

Or maybe “Oh. Okay.” is a more common response than I’ve been left to believe.

-Kristen

-Kat

Kat Maund and I were fortunate enough to jam with him later in the evening.

Check out his two minute solo here:

That is a dangerous question because of two little facts:

1. People want a short, succinct answer.
2. China is neither short nor succinct.

I mean, we could say, “China was good” or “Fine” in response but that’s not entirely satisfying for us or the questioner. We could say, “China was a remarkable experience that changed my life in 2 short weeks and here’s the 500 reasons why…” but, truly, that’s boring. Way boring. Boring like whoa.

So, avoid the extremes was our ultimate conclusion. Try for a Tweets-worth (140 characters or less) of an answer – short, sweet, and to the point. Here are a few examples that have been brewing in my mind:

“Great! Lots of people, lots of fun!”

“Filling. If we didn’t eat dumplings every 3-hours, it was an off day.”

“Wonderful. Many walls – only one Great one.”

“Confusing. Did you know they speak Chinese there?”

“Overwhelming. Too much to take in, so little time to do so.”

“Warm. And cold. And sticky. And rainy. Yeah, there was weather.”

“Fantastic. Can’t wait to go back.”

Of course, as a group, we came up with an all-around perfect answer that I intend to use whenever possible:

“Too hard to describe. Here’s my blog, you can read about the entire trip there.”

-Kristen

One World One Dream

The phrase was coined for the Beijing 2008 summer Olympics – last year’s global coming-out party for the Middle Kingdom, and Beijing is the symbolic city of 21st century China: sleek, sophisticated, modern, cosmopolitan, on one hand, but deeply rooted to the broad sweep of thousands of years of Chinese history and culture, on the other.

Before we left the hotel this morning, I managed one last run through the street behind the Malls at Oriental Plaza, past a lone man hanging his wet laundry, through a hutong and into my new favorite urban garden, a modest rectangular two-block-long sequestered space that snugs up against the Forbidden City.

I am feeling many things today.

Most of all, I feel a sense of gratitude for this remarkable two week experience.

I feel compelled to issue a big SHOUT OUT to everyone who has made this trip possible.

First to my family – Kate, Anneka, and Theron, and my business partners at Vermont Yak Company – for holding down the fort while I was gone. I love you all, and am so grateful for your support of this trip.

To my Champlain College dean, Jeff Rutenbeck, and my able globe-trotting colleague Gary Scudder, both of whom believed in this trip and supported it from the get go, as well as to my fierce friend and Champlain colleague Sara Cohen, whose energy is unmatched.

And on our trip:

OFL (Our Fearless Leader) Steve Wilmarth, whose passion for and commitment to improving understandings between China and the United States is inspiring.

Donna DeGennaro, my professional colleague at UMass Boston whose knowledge of educational technology far surpasses my own, and whom I am now fortunate enough to call a friend.

Miguel Vazquez, sophomore at Babson College, whose quiet maturity, organizational skills, tech-savvy know-how, and ability to read maps saved us on more than one occasion.

And CC China Mojo – Jenica, Kat, Maryse, and Kristen – who had the courage to believe in this trip and make it happen, each in her own way. I am so pleased that each of you decided to make the journey, and I am honored to have an opportunity to get to know each of you a bit better. Be sure to tell your stories, early and often, in the months and years ahead. Capable Web 2.0 blogmistresses, all of you are – I look forward to reading your reflections on our adventures.

And I reserve special gratitude to our new Chinese friends, especially Liu Jinqui at the foreign affairs office, for approving our visas; Zhang Ya Juan, for her good humor, patience, and remarkable translating skills (we’ll see you in Vermont come the fall!); and the entire Xu family, whose generosity, warmth, and hospitality proved awe-inspiring. May we one day soon have the chance to return the favor when you visit Vermont.

One World One Dream.

It is a compelling phrase, and recent research indicates that Chinese and Americans might be more alike than we think.

In a December 2008 Journal of Chinese Political Science article with the cumbersome title “Chinese Political Attitudes and Values in Comparative Context: Cautionary Remarks on Cultural Attributions” (republished in the Spring 2009 Wilson Quarterly), researcher Steve Chan points out that most cultural characteristics that we in the West consider “typically Chinese” – nationalistic, authoritarian, conformist, deferential – fly in the face of preliminary polling data in the new China that indicates that Chinese don’t conform to these traits as much as we in the West think they do.

In fact, Chu concludes, “Chinese people expressed the opposite of conventional wisdom on many of the most important issues of the day.”

For example, only 26% of Chinese said they were proud of their nationality, compared with 72% of Americans; 19% of Chinese expressed support for “strong leaders who do not have to bother with parliaments or elections,” compared with 30 % of Americans; and 15% of Chinese said that “obedience” was an important attribute, as compared with 32% of those Americans surveyed. Chan concludes that differences between East and West “were exaggerated in the beginning and have lessened over time.” The lesson? “Using cultural proclivities to explain contemporary events may be a mistake – even if we judge the proclivities correctly.”

One World One Dream.

And yet…

Behind this sexy slogan, of course, we are different worlds with different if converging histories, who often don’t fully understand or appreciate each other’s dreams.

While here in China, we’ve down some remarkable things. Via plane, bus, train, car, foot, and yes, rickshaw, we’ve visited with thousands of ancient terra cotta warriors and explored the burial sites of ancient kings; climbed two Great Walls (Xian and Mu Tian Yu); climbed Herlan mountain; walked through the Forbidden City and across Tiananmen Square (several times); visited with hundreds of students, teachers, and ordinary Chinese people across close to 3,000 miles of territory, from Beijing to Xining and back again; expanded our culinary sensibilities by eating regional Han, Hui, Uighar, Mongol, Tibetan and Cantonese food; consumed more baiju (rice wine) than we ever thought possible (Gom Bai!); and shopped ‘til we dropped, haggling with our newfound communication skills.

And we’ve only just begun to share our stories through photographs, videotape Flips blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.

And at the end of the day, that’s what it is about.

Sharing our stories, and the new relationships we’ve developed along the way.

A recent report published by a 20 member committee led by former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and U.S. foreign policy expert Joseph Nye advocates that the United States create and subsidize a “US-China education fund” to foster exchanges between high school students in both countries. As a result, “China experts” and “US experts” could better assist each country in deepening mutual understandings.

The report goes on to point that Americans know far less about China than Chinese know about Americans – more than 300 million Chinese, for example, now speak English, compared with the only hundreds of thousands of Americans who speak Chinese, and far more Chinese profess a liking for the United States (60%, versus 26% who say they don’t like the U.S.), then Americans profess a liking for China (52%, versus a whopping 45% who dislike China.)

So, we’ve got some good work ahead of us, and trips like this are a good first step.

Extended exchanges, and mutual language learning and collaboration, to each country would certainly help.

In the end, for me, it comes back to the stories of individual Chinese people who are working to make their own personal and professional dreams more real, and in the process, changing China for the better. I think of Professor Tian, and Janet, and the Xus, and Liu Jinqui, and Zhang Ya Juan, and Mei, and all the other folks we’ve met along the way, each with an extraordinary story to tell. “I am just anordinary person,” I heard many of them insist in our conversations, a very Chinese way of thinking.

To which I say, as a westerner with my own proclivities:

Not so.

You are extraordinary.

You are powerful beyond measure (as Nelson Mandela once observed) and your story matters.

Each of our stories matter.

This is where I place my hope for the future.

I hope that all of us on this trip will contribute to this collective story-telling process.

And now, some time to rest is in order.

My favorite “outbuilding” (read: big temple) in the Forbidden City was “the room of doing nothing,” where the Emperor would go to, well, chill.

I think everyone needs such a room.

For two weeks, we’ve been “China Mojo a’go go.”

One World One Dream.

Now I’ll slow down, do nothing, and reflect on this vision.

For the moment.