Habana vintage

For two weeks, I saw not a single advertisement for a corporation, not a company’s name at all, unless it was under the command of the Cuban government. It is the exact opposite of the shock of those pictures of random Hong Kong or Shanghai alleyways, that flash thousands of signs, brand names, and neon lighted characters (which have a doubly shocking effect if you cannot read Japanese or Thai or Mandarin); instead of this, it is actually very shock-less, in that I barely noticed that these things were absent at all. Cuba looked just as I expected, and its color motifs fit right in with the rest of the Caribbean (powder pinks, sea foam greens, sun-scorched blues). The cars really are that old. The newer cars are ’90s-era, so really, even if they aren’t the ’50s classics you’d watch for, they’re all getting along in years.

I was Havana-bound without any particular topic for either of the two papers I must produce this summer. I thought of a couple while there, that I figured sounded simple enough. Upon returning, I have even less of a cohesive plan, and instead find myself in a myriad of winding thoughts, each day, picking up old books I’ve read and pining for some others that I want to read. Almost two weeks after returning, I have a stack of books by my desk, dogged-eared and leading towards no one particular theme, and a head full of complex but ultimately unhelpful reflections on how I feel about Cuba, the Cuban people, the role of foreigners in the Cuban economy, and of my own personal experience with all of those things.

There are plenty of stories, photographs, and points to be made, many of which I could try to make here. I will put some of them on this blog, to share. They will be anecdotal, each one a small and succinct reflection on one topic, or occurrence. But there is no easy way to sum up my trip, no massive revelation to take away regarding history, memory, culture, language, politics–all the things that make me tick and keep me thirsty to learn, travel, discover.

Except, probably, that last bit.

I went to Cuba to learn about a nation caught in a long battle with its large next-door neighbor, a country that has defied all predictions and stuck one to the closer side of the Iron Curtain, and after 1991, when it lost the support of U.S.S.R. (because of its dissolution), it went through an extreme period of austerity to continue to prove the same point. I went there to see what politics and economics has done to Cuba since 1959, and to see a bit of its history before that. I went to meet some of its regular people, and to be charmed, once again, by laundry lines hanging outside apartments. This is what I wanted to find, to gain from two weeks there.

Perk of studying Cuba: Caribbean sunshine

It isn’t though, and even while I was boldly ready, honestly excited, to head off to China at nineteen years old, when I got there, for the first time in my life, I felt the weight of 8,000 miles, of being so far away from anyone in the world who even cared I was alive. It was a strange feeling, alienating, even while you may be in the most populous nation in the world. I needed that experience to bring me to where I am today. In Cuba, to a much smaller extent, the same sense of alienation arose, where I found myself talking to new people and without cell phone or internet. This time around, there were spurts of anxiety (mostly caused by some nasty, violent stomach and digestion issues, if I am being brutally honest), but mostly I felt invincible. Four years made a huge difference. (Also, probably being in a Spanish-speaking country was much easier than trying to order in a restaurant with a Mandarin menu.)

From the moment I have been back home, after seeing a few familiar faces to bring back a bit of energy, I have been in a bit of a funk. Back to reality, to debit cards and filling up my little white Scion with $3.85-per-gallon gas. Back to work, where I spend the shifts managing federal documents, allowing me plenty of time with my own thoughts and the music on my iPod. I want more of what I just came from, and I’m not afraid to admit that to myself or anyone around me. I’ve lived on my own for five years, and have needed very much a sense of security, a grounding force to help me get through school. But now I am an adult, one year left on my master’s degree, and traveling abroad  really is where I see myself headed. There is a reason for the tattoo I got when I was eighteen, even though back then I didn’t know what kind of internal struggle I was getting myself into. One of the things I felt most deeply while in China was a sadness, sometimes, that no one I loved was there to see the same sights I witnessed, the beauty, or the poverty, or the pain, or the empowerment. But I think my sense of community has grown stronger now, and of that community being a much larger one; sharing moments with strangers has become blissful.

More than this, it is always humbling to visit a developing country, any place where people survive with so little. And to return home to my things, they do not mean as much to me. I am reminded of what I truly need and of how a year from now, I could easily leave much of it behind. This is a very long-winded way of saying, rambling, on what has most glaringly become clear to me since coming back home. I need to see more. I need someone to pay me to do this. Next May, I will make a concerted effort to find a job in the United States. But I think I will make a much greater one to find something abroad. If I had my say, it would be somewhere in India or Southeast Asia.

It goes without saying that I never “lost” my bug to see the world. I realize that “finding” myself in Cuba sounds atrocious. That’s not what I did. I was gently reminded that it’s my life, now, to take where I want.

Today I was reading a bit of one of the (seriously) too many books that I want to read this summer, a travelogue by Susan Jane Gilman, and she hit the nail on the head, what going abroad does to a person, alone.

In the United States, I would never have dreamed of approaching strangers and asking if I could join them for dinner, but here, what did I have to lose? The game had changed entirely. Perhaps, this was what true liberty was: nothing left to tether you, plus an absence of shame.

In China, this took me awhile to work out. In Cuba, I was sad to have too little of it. One night in Havana, a few of the girls and I were talking about the last bit, the absence of shame; it is a real thing. No one cared at all if your clothes smelled or your hair was nasty. Obviously Gilman’s comments are going much deeper than appearance, but it remains a very existent thing: not caring. It’s one of the best feelings I’ve taken from my travel abroad.

A very excited me, holding a quilt I bought from this woman, outside Trinidad.

One of my favorite photos in our Cuba collection, from a trip in the early 2000s.

This is my first semester in grad school. Besides showing up at an entirely foreign campus in downtown Atlanta, I had also moved into an apartment on my own several weeks earlier, and was naturally leaving my job at the campus bookstore at Kennesaw State (where I received my undergraduate degree) because it was simply too far to commute for a student position.

So naturally, I needed another job, and I was hoping that would come in the form of a graduate assistantship through the history and heritage preservation department of my school. By mid-July, I still hadn’t gotten a definitive answer, and had begun applying to other full time jobs in the area, because grad school with no job was not an option. When I did finally hear from the director of my department, I was so excited just to be employed I was hardly concerned what I would be doing. Research or making copies, I didn’t care.

Now though, I feel I have definitely lucked out; I am working with the director, and I am not making copies or filing paperwork (or organizing paperwork, or shredding paperwork, etc.) but am handling all the groundwork for next the Heritage Preservation Program’s Maymester abroad. There is a lot of work involved, but I have yet to mind one task. To me, looking through old slides of Cuba, writing up brochure text, and manning a booth at the study abroad fair is not “work.”

A square in Havana

View from the moutaintop temple outside Yangzhou

To end my series on Yangzhou, it is only right to leave you with my favorite image: a hut, full of character, perched on the side of a mountain, overlooking the valley and farms below. Above this humble and beautiful home was a temple that we visited, which was also stunning on the breezy, calm day we were there. If you look closely, you’ll see the man tending to his crop (in the lower right-hand area of the photograph); I didn’t even notice him until someone else pointed him out.

This is my favorite image that I collected that summer, and when I took the picture, I didn’t even really notice the absolutely stunning hut. It is the star of this scene, which became clear to me once I looked back through all my pictures. But when I was standing there in the breeze, the mist that billowed down around the mountain and engulfed the fields and forests was what made me take the picture; it was ephemeral.

When I got back, and stumbled across this hut among the thousands of other images I had, I was taken aback at the yellow roof. I was also reminded of a joke my Dad had long told his wife and children, when the world got overwhelming: he’d say he was going to give it all up, and move to a hut on the side of a mountain, in China. I printed this image big–2′ by 3′–and framed it, and gave it to my Dad as his “hut on the side of a mountain, in China,” for a Christmas or birthday soon after. Now it resides on the wall opposite my parents’ bed, reminding them of the goal for a simpler life.

(Sorry for the delay in this post– I’ve been on vacation and attended a very important wedding, etc.–much needed rest.)

On the outskirts of the city, the huge mall loomed as a vision of the future towards which China is aiming.

On the outskirts of the bustling city lies some of the newest additions to the area, a modern development area that includes the enormous mall here, as well as the giant new museum that I was standing in when I took the picture. Surrounded by high rises, the mall contains at least six floors begging to be shopped, with ribbons and streamers and lots of busy displays and professional salesmen roaming the atrium at the bottom floor. There is a Dairy Queen, the only one I ever saw in China, and a Starbucks (fairly rare outside of Beijing and Shanghai), and lots of stores selling home goods, like dishes and bedding and child’s play room equipment. The only problem was, the sales people far outnumbered the shoppers; it was a largely deserted mall on the two occasions I visited it. It was obviously a huge investment for the city, or the government, or whoever built it. And they built it for a time in the future, most likely, hoping that within a  few years the population of Yangzhou would find their pocketbooks able to handle consumer spending À la the western model.

I don’t imagine the global economic situation has helped this mall in the years since I last saw it. Notice the many cranes gracing the skyline on both sides of the shopping mall, the ubiquitous sign of expansion and change throughout my time in the country. Every city has this crane skyline. I can only imagine what this mall and this same city will look like ten years from the time of this snapshot, for better or worse. I’ll try to go back in 2017.

A multi-level shopping extravaganza, teeming with decoration and just waiting for its shoppers

Our desks, made our own

We stayed in the international student dorms during our time in Yangzhou, and for a small monthly fee (around 5 dollars), a man would come by and hook up the internet for your computer. This was a huge relief after the horrors of the Zhengzhou computer labs with their limited hours, terribly slow and/or mostly broken computers, and other international students who wanted to play computer games endlessly. We didn’t mind at all paying for two connections, which I’m pretty sure the building staff thought was an extreme luxury.

My desk is on the right, closer to the door. Collections of pantry food, schoolbooks, and schoolwork graced my shelves. The TV was as good as worthless unless you had an ear for Chinese or wanted to try to keep up with the lightning-fast dialogue for a bit of practice; I never even scratched the surface of comprehension when faced with a TV. Needless to say, it remained off.

Our beds were slightly improved from the slabs of wood with medium-thick cushioning that we’d had in Zhengzhou: we had mattresses, at least, but they felt as stiff as box springs. (I would be very surprised if they were not actually box springs.) We had two big wardrobes where we hung and stored all of our clothing and other possessions (not many). We’d keep our room cold, and after a long day of classes and trekking to site visits, it did become a haven of sorts, the way any room does if you live in it long enough.

From another angle, showing my bed, the closets, bathroom door, and room entrance.

My favorite meal

A big steaming pot of freshly-made noodles with mushrooms and cabbage; add some cayenne pepper flakes and a soy-type sauce and you’ve got a delicious, satisfying dinner. That whole pot would cost me 8 yuan, about $1.14. Plus a few yuan for a cold water. YUM.

Our group ate regularly with various groups of our Chinese friends, including the boys’ sports buddies and a girl who was studying abroad from California (so she sounded completely American). Food is always ordered for many, you order lots of dishes, and then it’s served on the spinning lazy Susan in the center of the table, so everyone has access. It’s a good way to try a lot of dishes and it’s also so affordable to split. This restaurant was down a back alley, and filled with Christmas/Santa Claus memorabilia, but it was extra delicious– and also very close to the store we liked that sold ice cold soy milk.

Dinner Chinese style

Don't mind me...

It was Team China versus Team USA one hot day, and we were the sideline cheerleaders. They had kept this rivalry up for a number of sports: basketball, table tennis, and most certainly, soccer. We, the girls, were not the most cheery crowd, but we tried to be present when we had the time. Out of nowhere, this guy came across the soccer field, mid-game, on his bicycle, and we thought surely something important had happened, and he was either coming to tell us or the guys, or perhaps just trying to get somewhere quickly. None of the above. He pedaled lazily all the way across the field, right through the game, stopping to talk to no one and continuing on through the campus leisurely. It was moments like this that I appreciated and marveled most at the Chinese way of sharing space; who were we to say this green patch was entirely ours, anyway? It’s kind of exhilarating and a bit frightening too, to live within a cultural sense of community space that is unheard of in my own country. No one cared at all, and the game was not affected.

I saw it on the Great Wall, I saw it on dusty temple walls, and I saw it in the concrete surrounding any oft-visited site throughout China; but the graffiti on the members of this lush bamboo garden won the prize. It was a dewy, inviting, and enchanting garden–and it never takes too long to spot the evidence of visitors bygone.

It’s the same human proclivity for wanting to claim and object in nature, or to prove our presence in a space, but I was surprised and charmed by it in Chinese characters, almost like they were somehow more respectable than the English “I wuz here” scratched into a bathroom stall (for the record, I did not, to my recollection, find Chinese phrases scribbled in bathrooms). And that’s probably all the Chinese is saying too, but it has more innate beauty, for sure.

Something's not right here...

It was a regular afternoon, and Stacey and I were either sweaty or exhausted or (probably) both, and we decided to spring for the 3-yuan (42-cent) rickshaw ride back to campus. He was confused, rightly so, by our feeble Chinese language skills, and we had tried to tell him we wanted to go to Yangzhou University, but were less successful in communicating which entrance. I don’t remember all the details, but I recall that he was stubbornly determined to get us as close to campus as possible as soon as he could–which in this case meant that we rode the length of the campus (it’s behind the trees on the left, in the photo) right at the edge, on the wrong side of the road.

Now, Chinese roadways are already overwhelming to an American used to driving with ample road laws and safety measures, and the concept of a right-of-way. Chinese roads function under the general rule that if you think you can make, go for it–and do it fast. This applies both to number of lanes as well as intersections and stoplights. I actually found it exhilarating and pretty easy to navigate; and if I was in doubt, I just tagged along with a group of Chinese people when they crossed the street. And since there were enormous lanes for pedestrians and bicycles running on the edges of the actual roads (think of sidewalks but equally as wide as the whole road), there was plenty of space for everyone to share the road. More than a few times, I saw actual cars driving in those pedestrian/bike lanes, and no one seemed to mind.

But this particular day, we were rendered pretty nervous when our driver did not simply turn and then adjust his lane. Nope, he rode on the wrong side of the road for about two miles, heeding no car, bus, truck, or motorcycle that stood in his way. Cars swerved past us and we sat embarrassed and half-laughing as we flew past them. Eventually, we made it to campus and gratefully wished our driver farewell, no worse for the wear but laughing all the way to our dorm.

Paying no mind to the oncoming cars

Winding pathways and misty gardens along Shouxi Lake

The very first day that the whole group was together, we spent a disgustingly humid day at Shouxi Lake that almost made us forget the sticky heat. Little enclaves were built in random spots, with wide-open window frames and benches and tables; old Chinese men were playing checkers and women could be spotted chatting in a shady corner. Bamboo grew alongside the water and the paths wound unendingly around the lake and its greenery and gardens. Right up there with temples, gardens were a common destination for us visitors, and if I ever mentioned visiting any of them to a Chinese friend, they would beam with pride at their nation’s beautiful entities and the care the collective people took to preserve them.

Suzhou, a city we spent several days in near the end of our trip (after leaving Yangzhou), is famous for its gardens. Chinese tourists come from all over in trains, planes, and even cars to revel in their world-renowned beauty. This was something I never knew until I went, but every Chinese person I heard speak of gardens had either seen or desired to visit Suzhou’s. Having seen several of those as well, I think this one in Yangzhou rivals them; and it has a personality all its own.

Blistering heat calls for relaxation with friends