After a good night's sleep on the train, we arrived at midmorning in Beijing. The station, as all stations usually are in China, was incredibly crowded. Wendell negotiated for a large taxi or van to carry all of us to his college, where we hoped to stay. The first driver, I believe, wanted 500 yuan. Several drivers later, Wendell agreed to 100 yuan, and off we went through the streets and highways of the proud, vibrant, throbbing heart of China.
Frankly, we weren't very excited about going to Beijing. We don't especially like big cities. Primarily we went to Beijing for medical reasons. Anne had noticed some breast lumps about two months before. She had gone to doctors in Xiangtan and Changsha and had gotten several different opinions -- probably nothing serious, possibly serious, maybe not serious -- things like that. She wanted to know something definite, one way or the other. I wanted to get the spot on my forehead diagnosed. For about two years I had had a small sore that wouldn't heal, and it was past time to get it checked. We called the embassies to get a hospital recommendation. We called some hospitals. Some charged western prices -- definitely beyond our means on a Chinese salary. We ended up at a large, well-known hospital not far from Tiananmen Square. When we registered, we found that we could choose the kind of doctor for consultation: basic doctor, professor, or well-known professor, with prices to match. To abridge the saga somewhat, Anne eventually saw the well-known professor, who read her X-rays that she had brought along from Changsha. He said that she definitely did not have any serious problem, that she had some harmless cysts and one small, benign tumor. Other than getting regular checkups, she needed no further attention. I had a biopsy taken on my spot. Basically, they took a #3 cork borer and, with no local anesthetic or other gratuitous preliminaries, excised a quarter-inch circle of skin. They said to call back in a week for the results. (Further details forthcoming in a later chapter)
Our living accommodations in Beijing were modest. We stayed in a college dormitory at the Beijing Culture and Language University, on the north side of the city. It is well known as the place where foreign students come to study Chinese intensively for a year before going to another college for their main course of study. By Chinese standards, the college is expensive and exclusive. We found a very high concentration of foreigners. At the risk of sounding stereotypish, in general we found that students of African/Asian origin were friendly and open, but students of European origin were cold and aloof. It was like being in an affluent suburb in America; people avoided our eyes and kept us out of their own world. After a year in China, where the Chinese openly stare and instinctively smile at us, it was mildly disturbing. Anyway, the food was good and surprisingly cheap, with much more variety in the preparation than in Hunan. Other than the loud pounding for 12 hours a day, due to renovations in the elevator shaft of the dormitory, we had a quiet week.
On our first day, we went to the hospital and wandered around downtown. I paced off Tiananmen Square -- about 500 meters on a side, big enough to hold a million people if you put them shoulder-to-shoulder. To the Chinese, it is like the Mall in Washington D.C., a big place to hold parades and rallies at the seat of their government (no comments from home, please). We didn't go to the Forbidden City, but we did wander through a park beside it, eerily empty of people -- a rather unique experience in China. On the way home that day, Taalan announced that, for the first time in his life, he was homesick. He missed his friends and wanted to leave Beijing immediately. When we told him we were planning to visit the Summer Palace the next day, he brightened up instantly, declaring that it had been his favorite place in the whole world since he had read a story about in school last year. So the next day Taalan led us around the Summer Palace, exploring ahead and running circles around us like a hound dog turned loose in the woods. We stayed until dusk; Anne and Tariqa rested on a bench while Taalan dragged me around the lake to see the seventeen-arch bridge, the dragon king's temple, and the bronze ox. Actually, it was a fantastic place, with beautiful gardens, incredible artwork, even more incredible architecture, and matchless craftsmanship. The last ruler, the dowager empress, spent lavishly and whimsically to create her own heaven where she could ignore the outside world. She even took the money allocated to build and equip the Chinese navy, and spent it on the palace, including a mock ship built out of marble.
Another day we went to the big ruins. One of the later emperors had built an alternate summer palace. The French and English destroyed it in 1860 in the second Opium War; then it was destroyed again around 1900. After the second time, it was left in ruins. Only the garden maze had been left untouched, with its symmetrical, 4-foot- high gray-brick walls, and it is quite popular with the children. Everything else was reduced to rubble, with only some foundations and a few lonely columns still standing. As an aside, it is such painful memories of the foreign-colonial period that contribute to the Chinese determination to be strong enough that no one will attempt to push them around, ever again.
We traveled around by bus and subway. The city buses were bigger, but they were just as slow and crowded as buses elsewhere in China. By contrast, the subway system was very modern, clean, and efficient. You can travel anywhere on the subway for only 3 yuan. At the end of the week we bought tickets at the main train station to go back home. On the morning we left, Tariqa wanted to look at the tickets. As I showed her, I noticed the character for "west" printed on the tickets, a character I had learned only the day before. We checked the map. Sure enough, there was a west train station; when we bought the tickets they hadn't told us to go to another station. If we hadn't noticed, we would have missed our train. We are convinced that Murphy formulated his famous law -- anything that can go wrong will go wrong -- while traveling around China. As it happened, though, we made it to the station, onto the train, and safely home without mishap.
We left Beijing around noon and had a pleasant afternoon in our hard berths, snacking, playing cards, reading, and watching the scenery. In northern China they grow mostly corn. They have big fields and use relatively modern equipment to farm them. In the morning we awoke to the rice paddies of south-central China, where the fields are small and all the work is done by hand and water buffalo. While we had been away, the farmers had harvested the first crop of the year and planted the second. Despite a widespread drought, the rice was flourishing. The day promised to be hot and muggy, the crowd jostled us as we hefted our bags off the train in Changsha, the bus to Xiangtan was crowded, and the roads were bumpy and congested. It felt good to be home again.
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