山西省
May 4: Datong and The Yungang Caves
The road to Yungang is the road to the coal mines and I follow a constant stream of overfilled blue dump trucks all spilling chunks of coal onto the road. Without a fairing on the motorcycle I am especially vulnerable to taking a hit directly in the head. However, if I hang back so that I don't get spattered by coal falling from the truck in front of me, the truck behind me decides that he wants to fill all that extra space I left in front of me, and overtakes, spilling coal on me as he careens recklessly by. If another truck is oncoming, the driver does not hesitate to move directly into me. In this survival of the biggest, it is up to me to pay attention and drop back, squeezing into the tiny spaces between tailgating trucks.
It is the ride from hell, even when I find a place behind a truck that is not as overfilled than the others. Not to say it is not overfilled. It is simply lightly overfilled. I remain close behind this guy, dodging the larger chunks that bounce out while the trucks behind me tailgate, then pass both of us. Several times the overtaker chickens out, and comes in to my lane forcing me to brake hard to let him have my space. Along with the big aggressive blue trucks there are a few tour buses and taxies also headed to the caves.
Each side of the road is lined with black dust and chunks of coal. The pile is consistently about three-feet high and equally as wide. Children and old women walk slowly along it filling dirty burlap bags. They are covered in coal soot, and I already feel my just-showered face becoming grimy. Thankfully, the turnoff for Yungang comes quickly.
A parking lot leads me to the cave's entrance, but I can barely get to it because of a crowd of Chinese tourists surrounding, of all things, a braying camel. The camel is on the ground ready to receive a customer on its carpet-adorned back. The young woman about to board wears a long lace dress and black high heels. Her husband, also dressed formally, holds a camera ready, but each time the woman approaches the camel it shakes its big head, causing the bells around its neck to clang, and lets out a terrifying roar, displaying huge yellow teeth and a slobbery mouth. The woman understandably shrieks and skitters back to hang on her husband's arm, and the crowd thinks this is hilarious. The camel man convinces her to try again so she bravely approaches, but the camel, eyeing the spike heels, clambers and rocks to a standing position. The yellow teeth and slobber from six feet up is more than she can take. The sale is lost.
The camel man spots me and so does the crowd but I quickly walk away. I know from experience that the getting up and down part that is not as bad as the bucking and nipping, and this one looks pissed off enough to do both.
Before I can reach the gate I also have to navigate a crowd of postcard hawkers waving packs of accordion-fold cards under my nose. I buy a set from an old man with a white beard. Flipping through the cards I realize that the caves are going to be really fantastic.
Paying admission gains me both access to the cave site and a rare silence. A sparkling white expanse of concrete the size of a football field covers the ground between the fence and the caves, which look like tiny dark holes in the cliff from this distance. I start to follow the signs for Caves 1-4, and begin to enjoy the peaceful stroll when a a group of five young women spot me and burst into a run, heels clacking across the concrete. For some odd reason they are all wearing fancy dresses with lace and stockings.
Before I can react, they grab me by the arms and pull me away from the caves, laughing and chattering like birds, and drag me onto a park bench under a tree at the edge of the concrete.
Bewildered but compliant, I am unceremoniously plopped down on the seat. One girl holds a compact mirror up to my face. I almost jump. My face is black with soot except around the eyes where my goggles were. Another girl tears open a packet of wet tissues and helps me wash it off. They go about all this with the utmost seriousness, and once my face and hands are clean I am rewarded with a little package wrapped in green corn husks which turns out to be a compact triangle of sweet sticky rice with a date in the center.
They don't know they are giving me my birthday party. For a minute I think I'm going to cry, but then one of them wipes my face clean again and I am handed a lipstick and mirror. All of them sit dow to watch, staring so hard that it's unnerving.
I laugh, and say I can't possibly have them all looking at me like that, and dig into my bag for my journal and pen to occupy their attention.
"Your names," I command, tapping the page, and they burst out laughing. For a moment I think I have the intonation wrong, and I haven't said "name" but something else, but one after another they laboriously record their names in Chinese characters and Pinyin.
They leaf through my journal, commenting on the scribbles and crude illustrations. They are shocked to find that I've pressed beer bottle labels into some of the pages, as most women don't drink here. Then they find my list of common motorcycle parts and names of tools in Chinese, Pinyin, and English that Jim Bryant wrote down for me, which keeps them occupied for a long time.
"Mó tuō chē?" One of them asks. Yep, motorcycle, I reply, and I think it is only then they finally realize why I was so covered in coal dust.
More makeup is handed out. Powder, eye shadow, blush, more lipstick. They hand my journal back. I pronounce their names, trying to read the Pinyin. They giggle and correct me. We settle back down on the bench to trade more vitals: my age (sì shí), my nationality (měi guó), motorcycle, unmarried (wèi hūn), and no children (zǐ nǚ - bù). This last news makes two of the girls jump up to giggle and clap. They both shake my hand and look around at the others significantly, like "So there!"
Friends in their twenties, they live nearby and came by bus. None of them are married and the three of them who want children mime looking sad about it. The other two say they don't want children, they have bigger plans, apparently. I wonder if they're planning to run off to a factory town to escape marriage to a coal-miner, one of those guys I saw crawling out of the tiny caves in the cliffs.
They have all heard of America, San Francisco, New York, Michael Jackson, and Bill Clinton, but California doesn't seem to be in their vocabulary. When they see that I have circled Xiahe on my map, at the far west of the country in Gansu province, it starts a different tone of chattering and looks of grave concern. Obviously I am too ambitious. I don't tell them I plan to turn south from Xiahe to make my way all the way to the Burmese border.
It's nice to sit with them on this bench in the shade of the tree. I'm in no hurry, which is why the sudden rush to take photos takes me aback. It is a beautiful day under a clear blue sky sitting by an elm tree on a wooden bench looking toward the cliffs, and I want to sit there lazily all day, but they pull at me urgently, as if they will be late to catch a train. I pose with each of them alone, and then various group shots are arranged.
After the photographs they formally shake my hand, one-by-one, and then, as lightly as a flock of birds, they clickity-clack away, their long lacy dresses fluttering behind like transparent wings in the cool, bright sunshine.
In the first cave I visit, my silent footsteps send up send up white puffs of chalky dust and I stand, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. After a while I realize that I've been gazing at the middle of a Buddha's lower leg. He is about fifty feet high and thirty feet wide. The second cave is larger, and the third, larger than that. There are fifteen or twenty of them, and I am already overwhelmed.
The Yungang Caves are one the four important Buddhist cave groups in China. Over 50,000 Buddha carvings sit, stand, or lie prone in a series of fifteen caves that stretch for one kilometer along sandstone cliffs. East Indian monks began the project back in the fifth century, interrupted occasionally by Chinese emperors who preferred Confucianism or Taoism or nothing at all.
A lot of the statues are headless. In the early 400s AD, the Emperor Taiwu, convinced that priests were conspiring against him, attempted to eradicate Buddhism. Early 20th century looters and antique-hunters lopped heads off the statues for their private collections, and then during the cultural revolution, people were encouraged to destroy art, and many of the faces were bashed in. Today the coal mine across the road belches black dust onto every protrusion, into every crack. This isn't the only damage. In the fifth cave I visit, a careless worker had left two tall fire extinguishers leaning against an ancient mural, and a boy of 6 or 7 years old uses one of them as a launching pad to climb the statue next to it, cheered on by his parents, who snap photos.
I meander to the caves at the end, and in the furthest, the stench of urine is overwhelming. Outside again, I notice that discarded candy and ice cream wrappers float through the breeze. I am awed and disgusted, in equal parts, by the rich history and the inconceivable disrespect.
But Buddhism insists on tolerance, and I try to tolerate, except that I'm alone now and a little grumpy from being used as a foreign prop by the five girls and from the day's beginning with sledgehammers being slammed above my head, the coal truck assault, but mostly because of the lack of a birthday email from Michael.
I can't stop thinking about him, which is ridiculous and I should forget it, but then his outdated attitude is ridiculous, too. How can he admit that it's okay for me to go along on his journeys but he couldn't possibly be expected to join me on one of mine, and not make a change. Just saying it out loud should have raised his awareness enough to think about evolving his ideas.
This thinking is from our parent's era, I reason, uselessly. I wonder if we are that influenced by parental role models that, despite ourselves, we grow up with the same expectations. It seems that way, and I wonder if I'm destined to be alone.
Because the Chinese tourists just snap photos from the outside of the caves, I'm able to find peace in the darkness inside where it's cool and dry. I sit ankle-height at the foot of one Buddha and let his hand bless me from twenty feet above. He seems to listen, so I pour my heart out, not caring if I look like a crazy person talking to myself.
Michael and I have a lot in common, I tell myself. We are both California transplants, me from North Carolina, he from Lawrence, Kansas. We are both willing to experiment with new ideas, or so I thought, but now I suspect that our activities have been, for the greater part, led by his interests, and my ideas are not as welcome as my starry-eyed in-love self might want to believe.
I put my bag down and sit on it, leaning up against the wall of the cave, enjoying the cool dust and trying not to think at all because a tiny voice in the back of my head is whispering things I don't want to hear. The Buddha statue isn't going anywhere though, and so I lean my head back and close my eyes, relaxing in the cool dust, succeeding in emptying my mind, and fall asleep until some tourists with loud voices go by outside.
The tourists ask to snap photos with me, and I politely stand and smile next to groups of families and friends, their shiny black heads hovering about chin-height. Then a young man runs at me laughing, snaps a photo and runs away as if I might bite him. Others who see me point and stare. I excuse their rude behavior because really they have never ever seen a foreigner in the flesh and I have realized by now that I might as well be the purple people eater. Not a woman, not a motorcyclist, not an American, but a creature from another planet.
My mood darkens and to cheer myself up I remind myself once again that I am visiting a famous spiritual site in China, and traveling around by motorcycle despite the fact that it's illegal, and what could be more fun than that?
A boyfriend who emails me on my birthday, the little voice at the back of my head whispers. Who is happy for me that I'm doing what I love to do.
After all, I tell the Buddhas in the next cave, about 100 of them carved into a wall, Michael became interested in me because I traveled, because I motorcycled, and because I was a writer. In fact, just after we started dating I took off around the United States on a research and development trip for the American importers of the Ural Russian motorcycle, who needed to find out how the machine performed on American roads so they could do some quality control at the factory in response to the inevitable problems. I also had an assignment to document the journey in one of the first realtime blogs on the internet. He loved to brag about it, to show me off. See, here's my girlfriend, the adventurer, mechanic, and technology writer. He encouraged me to give sidecar interview at a big annual party he held in San Francisco, the Digital Be-In. My Ural was lifted onto a ramp, and people would hop in to the sidecar to be interviewed live on the internet.
I move through the caves at a glacial pace. In the next cave, the carvings depict an elephant supporting an enormous pagoda on its back. In the next is another giant Buddha.
Michael might have given me a clue before this that he didn't like my traveling lifestyle. I really couldn't believe that he didn't share in the excitement of my invitation. It had never occurred to me to visit the country, as it was closed, and impossible to ride a motorcycle legally, as a tourist. Pretty exciting, really, and if he couldn't deal with it, that voice whispered again, well maybe you need to think about what you really want.
At the last cave I say goodbye to the Yungang buddhas, and thank them for listening. The gift shop sells a booklet with sections printed in English which I take across the street to a stark, overly air-conditioned restaurant. It was designed to serve the hoards of tourists who arrive in big busses from the cities, but this late in the day the hoards have retreated, which is good, because I'm tired of being stared at.
I order from the menu, thankfully all photographs, and I pore over the brochure, which describes the bigger statues and provides timelines in terms of dynasties — the Wei, the Qin, the Liang — and the politics as they affected Buddhism and the arts, and the support or persecution of the artist-monks. The history is foreign to me, the characters mysterious. The only thing I ever learned about Chinese history is that in the Ming dynasty somebody made a lot of blue porcelain vases that were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, and I think I got that from novels, not history class. When the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976 I was 16 years old, and besides the fact that the history I learned in school was limited to Anglo-European culture, China had shut itself off for so long that America had all but forgotten about it until Nixon made a visit, and started the ball rolling again.
I wish I had bought this brochure before I went in the caves, and I wish I had paid more attention in art history class in college. The first statues are thought to have been influenced by India's Buddhist art. The bigger buddhas in the later caves are similar to the Bamiyuan statues in Afghanistan. Some of them have Greco-Roman features, and others, Byzantine and Iranian.
I want to go back and take another look, but too much time, and I need to get back while it's still light so I can negotiate the lumps of coal being tossed from the truckbeds. It takes all my attention, experience, strategy, and instinct from many years of motorcycling to negotiate the obstacles, and I feel grateful to reach the rebar-studded parking lot of my hotel unscathed.
The young woman at the desk, again surrounded by admiring businessmen who melt away when I appear, is delighted to assist in my next attempt to get email, even though she's mystified at my insistence to connect to the fax machine instead of the phone line. I should have asked Teresa or Jim to write down that a digital PBX system would fry my modem, but it's too late now.
She peers over my shoulder as the messages stack up in my inbox. Still nothing from Michael. Back in my room, thoughts about our relationship pester me again, and I shut them down for a while by writing up the journey to Yungang for my blog. They come back when I try to fall asleep.
That was that, I'd decided in the cave, but deciding a thing doesn't make it so. Though we've had problems lately, I'm still committed, in love, and realize that we're compatible in many ways. He is much more social than I am and has interesting friends outside of the writing world, which gets me out more than I would on my own, and we connect on publishing and technology, and he knows a lot about art and music and philosophy. He likes my grounded nature, I like his metaphysical bent.
Our first few year together was full of adventure. He moved to San Francisco from San Diego, and I moved to the city from Santa Cruz. We'd met at a party my friend next door had thrown at a beach house there, and were immediately attracted. After the party we went to a downtown Santa Cruz dance club for music and Margueritas. We were drunk and laughing and when I stumbled on the red-carpeted spiral staircase down to the street he caught me in his arms and kissed me.
The next months were spent visiting each other in San Diego and Santa Cruz and spending time with friends that included Timothy Leary, who was the first person to react to my solo motorcycle trips with positive enthusiasm and not horror and warnings. I wondered about that until I realized that he had spent most of his life educating himself to handle adventure, both internal and external.
When I was riding the Ural around the US, I stopped to see Michael at Arcosanti in Arizona, and then in Beverly Hills at Tim's again, and then we both found apartments in the city. It was 1995 and Multimedia Gulch was just forming around South Park. I freelanced as a journalist at PC World, writing about electronic travel gadgets and laptops, did some tech writing for Silicon Valley companies, and worked for Michael's company creating multimedia CD-ROMs. Wired Magazine was next door and there were salons in our offices, which was an old coffee warehouse, and raves every weekend in some warehouse or another before it was gutted and remodeled into office space. I remember taking a rave at the Amazon book warehouse in Oakland just before they vacated to larger digs, dancing among the bookshelves, painting the walls, drawing with chalk on the concrete floor, and puppy-piling into psychedelic jumbles of neon fishnet stockings and lingerie.
The decadence lasted a couple of years and I burned out on psychedelics and the loud, thumping music, but Michael shifted his energy to electronic music, publishing CD-ROMs and even became a DJ, attracting a following of colorfully dressed young people who saw him as a tall, elegant, gray-haired wizard. Eventually, when I woke on Sunday mornings he was just winding down. We'd have coffee, and then the rest of the week would be almost normal, except for the nights I sat alone eating a special dinner I'd made for us, because he'd forgotten.