China Reflection

I follow Hunter Spirit up the stairs of the Culture Center.  As I walk I notice the intricate patterns of the Hawaiian shirt that he wears flapping with the self-created breeze that he makes while he ascends the staircase.  The interior of the building seems not much different than any other government building I’ve been in before, with the exception of the occasional pictures on the wall depicting scenes from around the province–the chryanthemum flowers, mountains, a snow scene, a village scene depticting shaman rituals handed down from the Manchu customs.

“This way, this way…” Hunter Spirit slows down his pace to walk next to me.  He puts his hand on my shoulder for a brief moment in an amicable way.  I feel like he could be everybody’s grandfather. 

In fact, Hunter Spirit is a grandfather.  As we walk into a small office, a young girl wearing a purple dance outfit runs into the office to join us.  She is cute as a bundle, and her eyes look up at me with the curiousity that is ubiquitous in all 7 year olds around the world, regardless of their ethnicity or culture.

“Grandpa, who’s this?” Purpley asks Hunter Spirit.

“Come here bumpkin!  This…this is our new American friend.  Want to say ‘hi’?”  She puts her hand out, but I have to give her a hug, she’s so cute in her little purple outfit.

In the corner of the room, there are many large photos that have been laid out, as if recently on display.  They are much like the photos that were on the wall on the way up the stairs.  Hunter Spirit notices me looking at the photos.

“We had a big display this last month of this photographer.  These are some scenes around the county.  Have a look.”

I flip through the pictures:  a sunset over rolling hills, a smiling girl wearing a pink scarf with a glint in her eye,  a country dwelling enveloped with mountain snow, Spring buds beginning to blossom and open up for the new year. 

“Not bad, eh?  We have a nice county,” he says.  “So…I know you’re interested in the Manchu.  How much do you know? ”

“I don’t know so much, maybe you can tell me something,” I say.  I’d rather here what he has to say then tell him what I know.

“Well, you know about the 8 banners, right?”  The Manchu divided themselves up according to a very comprehensive system of military banners.  Some of the banners included Han, Mongol, and Tibetan Chinese as well.  The 8 banners were delineated according to distinct colors and flags:

Plain Yellow Banner, Bordered Yellow Banner, Plain White Banner, Bordered White Banner, Plain Blue Banner, Bordered Blue Banner, Plain Red Banner, and Bordered Red Banner

Hunter Spirit tells me that he is of the plain White Banner.  I still don’t know exactly what that means, or how the system worked for deciding who was in what group.  After some reading on the subject, the only thing I was able to ascertain is that once you were in one banner, you were in it for good. No switching back and forth amongst the banners.  The banner system remained a rigid military order of regimentation that for hundreds of years enhanced the ethnic and class divisions during the Qing Dynasty.  The fact that even today, modern Manchu can quickly tell me to which banner their family belongs states the importance of reputation and distinction that being a member of a banner brings with it.  At the same time, in Beijing I have heard Han Chinese mockingly refer to those belonging to the 8 banner system as diletenttes, boasting about their ethnic heritage while lazily raising birds and playing games in public parks without making any lasting societal contributions.

The Boss Lady

Hunter Spirit tells me that he knows a person who can speak the Manchurian language.  He is a taxman but is unfortunately occupied until the afternoon.

“So, you’re welcome to stay here until he has time.  Let me show you around our center.”

Purpley tugs at Hunter Spirt’s arm, sending the message that it’s time to go.

“Ah. Right.  Your mother is waiting for you.  Get along now, cupcake.”  He pats her on the behind and she scurries out of the room, her little purple tights hugging her close all the way out the door.

Hunter Spirit leads me out into the hallway.  He tells me he wants to introduce me to the boss lady around the corner.

“She’s a nice one, she is.  When the cab driver made the call, I mentioned to her that you’d be coming.  Let’s go see what she’s up to.  She runs this place.”

We walk down the hallway to an office with the word “director” written over the doorway.  Hunter Spirit knocks on the door. 

“Come in,” a female’s voice answers.  Hunter Spirit opens up the door to a large office room.  Boss Lady is younger than I expect her to be, and quite attractive.  Hair pulled back and wearing a skirt with tights, she’s probably in her mid-late 30s.  Her lips are full and her eyes are deep.  She’s not exactly sexy, but there’s still something alluring about her.  Maybe it’s her skin.  I want to touch her face, her cheeks, they look so soft. 

I bring myself out of my reverie concerning Boss Lady’s cheeks, and instead shake her smooth hand. 

“Nice, to meet you.  I’m the Boss Lady.  I hear your interested in Manchu,” she smiles as her soft, pale hand slithers away from my own.

“Yes, I am, are you Manchu?”

“We all are,” she says.  “Would you like to have some tea?  Sit down, have a seat.” 

Boss Lady is gentle in her demeanor, but I sense that she can be all business and nails when she needs to be.  I sit down and do as I’m told, trying not to look up her skirt as she uncrosses her legs.  She pours the tea with a kind of delicate deliberateness that seems practiced.  It’s as if she has been waiting to pour the tea especially for me her entire life.

“Do you like China?  Do you like Xiuyan?”  she asks. 

“Of course.  If I didn’t like China, I wouldn’t spend so long here.  Xiuyan seems nice.  All I’ve seen so far is the bus station, one jade market, and this building.”

“Do you like jade?” she asks.

“It’s ok.  My father is a geologist, so….”

“I see.”  I sip the tea, along with Hunter Spirit.  We sit back, and I look around the room.  The office is like most offices I have seen in China.  There is the ubiquitous calligraphy on the wall, probably given to Boss Lady as a gift.  Her gigantic desk is in the middle of the room.  Next to the desk is a bed.

“Do you live here?” I ask.  I’m joking, but I just want to see her response.

“No.  I usually take a nap in the mid afternoon.”  I look at my watch.  It’s mid afternoon.

“Boss Lady, I really don’t want to disturb your afternoon nap if that’s what you were planning on.”

“No, no, no, no.  Don’t mind, really.  It’s not often we have visitors from the US.  Which part did you say you were from?”  She puts her hands in her lap and crosses her legs.  I try not to look again.

“Virginia.”

“Oh,” switching the subject, “You know, I like to travel, too.  Let me show you some pictures.”  She stands up and swishes her way over to her desk to pick up her laptop computer.  She brings it back over and sits next to myself and Hunter Spirit.  My body temperature rises a fraction of a degree.

Unfortunately, whoever took the pictures for Boss Lady has horrible photography skills.  I’ve seen this gaffe hundreds of times in China.  She tells me that the photos are of a trip she made the previous year to Jiangsu^W province in the South of China.  The scenery in the photos is beautiful and reminiscent of Tang Dynasty poetry.  However, in each photo, Boss Lady or one of her friends stands directly in the middle of the picture, blocking out most of the scenery.  Additionally, Boss Lady is reckless with her poses and gestures, making either the peace gesture, a heart shape with her arms, or some other posture that seems too practiced for the viewer to truly appreciate the faces and scenery in the photo.  Still, after looking through the pictures I am able to get a sense of Boss Lady’s friends.  Most of the pictures seem to be taken in some mountain resort, with ancient architecture.  I ask her where this building is in Jiangsu.

“Oh, that’s one of my high school friend’s houses.  He remodeled it to look like classical Chinese architecture.  I don’t like to travel where there are so mahy people, so this trip was mainly to see a friend.”

After looking through the photos and drinking some tea, Boss Lady offers to show me around the culture center to see some of her “projects.”  She really doesn’t seem too busy this day.  Hunter Spirit excuses himself at this time to go back to his office.

“You two enjoy yourself.  I’ve got some stuff to do,” he says, with a nod of the head and a handshake.

There’s not much activity going on in the culture center on this day, as it turns out.  A teacher is giving an erhu^W class to a young student in one room down at the end of the hall.  As we peek in, another young girl comes up behind us to talk with Boss Lady.  The young girl wears glasses and speaks excellent English.  As it turns out, she’s an English teacher in the culture center.

“I teach private classes here, she says.”  We walk back to the office so that she can talk with Boss Lady about some planning issues with some of her students.  With nowhere else to go, I join the two of them in Boss Lady’s cavernous office.

“The Taxman will be here soon.  You don’t have long to wait,” Boss Lady says as she and the young English teacher look over some forms pertaining to students.  I sit on the black couch, open up my notebook, and prepare for the Taxman.

The Glaze

The door opens.  He looks like a Taxman, pudgy around the waist, glasses on the eyes.  Nothing about his appearance is exceptional.  I would never expect that a dead language lives in this man’s brain.  I expect he has a watch on a chain somewhere in his life.  He reaches out his abacus fingers to me and shakes my hand with his soft palm.  Money hands.  Cute hands.  We exchange pleasantries, and everything seems like bread and butter until I start to dive into my quest for the Manchurian language. 

It’s at this point that The Taxman’s eyes light up, and I can feel him disappear while the Glaze takes over.  The Glaze is something I love, and I’ve had the pleasure to experience when I meet someone who has a passion.  When someone has a passion or a love, this person seems to step outside of himself, almost leaving his own body.  His mouth moves on its own accord, and his eyes film.  I’ve seen the Glaze happen with my friend who owns the tea shop in Beijing.  I’ve seen the Glaze happen with Old Beijing when he talks about the The Three Character Classics^W.  Usually the Glaze is calm and I welcome it’s embrace.  To see someone spout his passions in such an unabashed and freeflowing manner can be inspiring.  It’s like seeing someone’s whole-hearted belief. 

Sometimes, however, the Glaze can be terrifying and feel like a trap.  I remember once I was on an airplane returning from Japan about 5 years ago, and I observed the Glaze in a woman talking with me while we waited for a vacant restroom.  She was an elderly woman who had gone to Japan with a group of Christian nurses.  She began to talk with me about Jesus Christ and how his blood was everywhere, protecting us, “all around us,” she said.  She held an airplane plastic cup in one hand, tinkling the melting ice around in her cup, back and forth, clink, clink.  I was horrified by the Glaze at that point.  Her eyes were not herself.  I wanted to escape.  She was possessed by her words and gripped by her beliefs, and I was to have to listen to her in this flying capsule.  Clink.  The blood was “EVERYWHERE,” and the restroom door was locked.  The woman’s mouth kept running, the ice was clinking, and the Glaze was hammering down on my bladder full of urine with each Clink Clink of the ice in her cup.  But…there was nothing I could do except for ride it out, thousands of feet up in the air over the Pacific Ocean.  When the Glaze happens, one just has to accept it and permit the possessed to talk it off. 

“It’s my hobby, you know.  I’m Manchu.  We all are, actually.”  He gestures around the room at Boss Lady. 

“I’ve always been interested in the language, the culture.  You know, we’re not just the same as Han Chinese.  You can’t find people around here who speak Manchurian anymore, though.  Not many people like me, I guess.  I know about 20 people  online that I’ve met over the years.  There’s a following, but it’s not very big.  When we chat online, we chat in Manchurian.  I’ve even met some of them when they’ve visited Xiuyan.  They have regular jobs:  taxmen, doctors, teachers, accountants.  There are even some areas in the Northeast of China, around the city of Qi Qi Ha’er in Heilongjiang^W where you can find older people who actually speak Manchurian amongst themselves to communicate in daily life.  I’m a member of the yellow-bordered banner.  I even have a traditional Manchurian outfit, and when we have one of our traditional Manchurian festivals, I don it.  But, you know, young people…they just don’t know.  It’s hard to keep people interested in the language.  No one studies it much anymore…unless, like me, they just have an interest in it.  And you can’t MAKE someone interested in learning something.  They just have to BE.”

I ask him to write something in my notebook in Manchurian, like a song or a poem.  He squints his eyes, takes his abacus fingers and holds my pen up against his lip, tapping it there for a moment.  Hunching over, he scribbles a few words into my notebook.

“It’s a song,” he says.  “A short Manchurian song that I know.”

“Can you sing it?” I ask, expectantly.  I glance over at Boss Lady.  She breaks eye contact with me, taking some folders out of her desk.  I can feel that she is just biding her time pretending to look at something that doesn’t needs to be looked at.  Her body language tells me that she’s had enough of her office for the day, and the time is wrapping up for the evening.  I look back at the Taxman.  He slips his glasses down to the end of his nose and peers over the edges at the writing he has scribbled into my notebook.  With his right hand, he holds the notebook up in his hand and stares intently at the words.

He opens his mouth and sings.  If I didn’t know the language coming out of his mouth was dead, my brain would just think the song foreign and unrecognizable.  Instead, the tone of the song is melancholy and lost.  It’s a love song, but to me it’s fringed with death.  It doesn’t even sound like a tune to me, instead, like a funeral dirge or a record playing itself slowly backwards. The dirge is short.  The notes are low and soft, almost hymnal, like a druid’s trance.  His voice is not beautiful, but lonely.  The song finishes, and I sit on the black couch that one can find in any office anywhere in China.  In front of me is the boss lady pretending to look at the folders of random information.  I realize that her desk is just like the one in my boss’ office, in ANY boss’ office I’ve seen in the past 5.5 years.  The room suddenly is devoid of character.  The dirge is an echo of the past, and it makes me sad.  I feel sad because the death language no longer exists.  The Taxman closes my notebook and sets it down on the lifeless couch in the empty space between the two of us.  Boss Lady puts her folder away and rests her head on the palm of her hand.  It’s up to people like him. 

“Let’s get something to eat, ” I say.

Down the Hatch

Boss Lady and the Taxman hold up their glasses, both full of “bai jiu,” or Chinese spirits.  The liquid inside is clear but strong, over 40%. 

“I’m really not a drinker,” I protest to the two of them.  My rebellion is weak.  My hand is already around my glass, which is full of the dreaded fire water. 

“Please…” the Taxman raises his glass higher with his right hand.  His left hand assists his right hand.  He keeps the fingers of his left hand together and the fingertips touch the glass in a gesture that says, “now presenting….Chinese alcohol!”

“We should celebrate like the Manchu.  Let’s have a toast.  When in Rome.”  He tilts his head back and pours the alcohol down his throat.  Then he smiles, tips his glass upside-down to show that their is no more liquid in the glass, and resumes the pose of holding the now empty glass up in the air with his right hand while presenting it with his left.  His face never flinches.

“Please…” he repeats.

God, I can’t stand this stuff. I lift my glass up and the alcohol rips down my throat.  Boss Lady drinks hers as well.  In front of us is a beautiful meal typical of the Manchu diet, consisting of lamb spareribs, lamb dumplings, lamb stomach, a wild mushroom dish, and fried cicadas.  My face flushes.

“So why a taxman?” I ask.

“I remember when I was a kid….I was tricked by a tax collector.  I was selling vegetables in a market and had one of those handheld scales.  The guy who worked for the tax bureau said that I had tried to cheat him out of his money, and because of that he took my scale from me.  That was what I remembered about the tax bureau when I was a kid.  Crooks.  Corrupt.  I thought, ‘if I can grow up and do something, be in a position of power, but not abuse it,’…well, I didn’t want to be like that guy for sure.  Here I am, anyway.  I think I’ve done alright….Please….”

He holds up his glass, mysteriously full again, and resumes the pose.  Down with the hated alcohol.  I follow, along with Boss Lady.  The evening becomes hotter.

After dinner, things blur along for me, and events melt together.  We go to a karaoke bar, and the room we rent for the evening is entirely too large for the three of us.  I can remember that.  It becomes one of those evenings where everything whisks around in a whirlwind of alcohol and noise.  I have the taste of sunflower seeds and peanuts somewhere in my mouth.  The shells are all over the table and the floor.  There’s cigarette smoke coming from the Taxman at one point.  Afterwards we go to a park somewhere.  There are lights from alongside the river.  The ground is unevenly landscaped and it’s difficult to walk.  I nearly injure myself on an exercise machine made of metal and bolts.  I wonder what we’re doing there.  The cigarette smoke sticks out of the Taxman’s face and he keeps the same smile, the alcohol never seeming to effect him.  Boss Lady doesn’t seem to have drunk as much.  The park is spinning for me.  Before I know it, we’re in another taxi, heading for my hotel with the red curtains in the room.  Everything happens so fast and I’m whisked to my front door by the Taxman and Boss Lady.  I feel like I’m going on a cruise.  I’m leaving good friends.  Something somewhere is dying.