If you look at American fast food as a sixty-year experiment, international in scope, China’s countryside would be the control group. While fast food in the U.S. was born and has grown up with the interstate system, China’s inter-province system is still in its infancy, and thus, there have been no arteries to clog. Pardon the pun. What you find instead, and only at great intervals as you travel, are little roadside shops with refrigerated cases out front. In the cases are a wide variety of lettuces, goose eggs, chicken eggs, beans, peas, lotus root, doufu, chickens whole and in pieces, chopped up pork mixed with spices, whole chunks of pork, beef, sausage, salted fish and various animal organs. The proprietor always comes forward with her order form as soon as you step up to the case. Depending on how many of you there are, you select several dishes and specify how you would like them cooked—with or without garlic, spicy or not spicy—and then you find a table, sit down and order your drink. Within minutes the food begins to arrive, piping hot, and perfectly cooked. The locals don’t need a new-fangled word such as “locavore” here; they’ve never been anything else.
Many aspects of Chinese culture seem to have endured despite the upheavals of the past century. Communal dancing in public squares is one. Last night, returning to the hotel from dinner, we passed a middle-aged to elderly group dancing to music from a boom box. Generally such dances are led by one individual, usually a woman, and the dancers don’t necessarily know each other well—at least they don’t seem to—but they all dance in sync. The dancing is a pleasant way to exercise, and anyone can join in. At the same time that this group was dancing, not far off in the central square of the old town, the Chinese equivalent of a conga line had formed and grew larger as we watched. The line consisted mainly of young people, hundreds of them, and it simply moved in a circle, but the music was very pretty and everyone seemed familiar with the necessary steps. Everyone was laughing and enjoying the moment, and dancing so spontaneously did not seem to be anything out of the ordinary for them. It did not take a sports event to draw them together; it was the getting together that was the event.
Of course not everything stays the same. This morning we left relatively early to wend our way to the Yak Meadow of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, the eastern edge of the Himalaya in China. To get there, we first boarded a bus that was actually part bus, part pack mule. Much of the road was paved with natural stones, roughly three to six inches long by an inch across, set like cobblestones, though very irregularly, but there were potholes and frost heaves everywhere, and the bus rocked and wobbled and shuddered its way up the steep terrain, often down-shifting before lurching through each hairpin turn. Along the way, we passed the world’s highest golf course, which has attracted both Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy. The air is so thin at this altitude that a drive will travel much, much further (as will a bad slice, unfortunately). Beyond the golf course, we came upon two Yi women sitting by the side of the road. The Yi are the Tibetan minority who live at the highest altitude. They comprise about a tenth of the population of Yunnan Province. These women were in their ethnic dress, the headdress of which is the size of four mortarboards, two by two, covered by a dark cloth over which a sash is used to tie the whole in place. (If the woman is married, the sash is red.) The bus stopped, and one of the women got on and sat next to the driver. Since the bus service had earlier seemed to make a point of putting us on our own bus, separate from the Chinese tourists, this was a little surprising, so I asked Evan, our guide, what was happening. Apparently, the government employs many Yi to keep the roads clean, and the buses are their modern means of getting from one job to another.
The next stage of our journey was by two-person, open-air cable car, which delivered us to the Yak Meadow at an elevation of 3700 meters (over 12,000 feet). Somewhat disconcertingly, there was an “Oxygen Station” at the base of the cable car, and at the top there were small oxygen canisters with mouthpieces available for anyone who happened to need one. The Jade Dragon Snow Mountain is 5600 meters (over 18,000 feet) high. By comparison, Mount Whitney, the highest peak in our lower 48 states, is 14,500 feet high. Nobody has ever summited Jade Dragon, primarily, so it is said, because the rock won’t hold a piton; it crumbles too easily. And even though the mountain contains gold and rich deposits of uranium, lead and tungsten, the government will not allow mining, because the process would ruin the pristine environment. Because enterprises have nevertheless attempted to steal in and mine it undetected, the military now operates surveillance of the entire mountain, an area that stretches a vast 35 km north/south by 25 km east/west (about 338 square miles) via satellite.
The mountain is pristine; both literally and figuratively breathtaking. The actual peak was in a cloud, and down the sheer faces were snow fields, couloir and crevasses. Off to the lower left of the peak was a glacier. Far below, at the base of all of this, just ahead of us when we disembarked from the cable car was the Yak Meadow with its Tibetan temple and colorful prayer flags flapping in the wind. The meadow is brown at this time of year, and since there is no food, there are no yak. (Fortunately, we had seen a few earlier before boarding the bus.)
Minorities on Broadway
After we descended from the high elevation of the meadow, we were treated to a show called “Impression Lijiang,” which is meant to showcase the Yunnan minorities. I learned about as much about minorities from this show as I learned about Native Americans from watching The Lone Ranger, but it does give the audience the sense of having had an experience, kind of like Disney World. It is produced on an open-air stage with the Jade Dragon as a backdrop, and the set is meant to resemble intersecting, diagonal mountain passes. Along these passes come hundreds of men and women dressed in their various ethnic costumes, sometimes dancing, often drumming, sometimes marching and once even on horseback. Interspersed with the movement on the passes are a number of dance pieces and vignettes about love and loss in the mountains, and all of it is accompanied by surround-sound and a booming announcer. One of the performers, a young man with very long hair, who was particularly exuberant in his dance moves, kept Abby and Ola thoroughly entertained throughout the hour-and-a-half-long ethnic extravaganza. We even got free hats.
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