Spring/Summer

It is only my third week in the Spring City, but I’ve already fallen into a routine that I believe was mostly settled my third day here: I wake up as the old ladies in the courtyard below finish their morning dancing; I read a page or two with a cup of Yunnan coffee; and I stop at the “baozi lady” to get my two sweet bean paste-filled Chinese pastries to breakfast on as I read over email and the morning’s (or should I say night’s?) headlines on the New York Times.

The end of my semester in Hangzhou proceeded without major event. It settled into the rhythms an iPod-accompanied walk between my dormroom and the various places I habited to eat, life’s reality sharing time with the fantasy provided by reading. Hangzhou provided time or at least an incentive not found at Middlebury to read for private entertainment, and I added to the aforementioned books Charles Frazier’s (author of Cold Mountain) highly anticipated sophomore work, Thirteen Moons; Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude; and am now close to finishing my rereading of Tolkien’s The Two Towers.

And so I came to the end of my time in Hangzhou. Most classmates (and I am no different), were just ready to get out. For some this meant home and loved ones, far away from the eccentricities of Chinese life. For others, it meant family or friend-accompanied travel. And for a fair number of others, it meant life moved to a new Chinese city or at least a new life in the same Chinese city for studying or working. I think everyone was confronting some form of disbelief. It seemed impossible that some of us would be home in a matter of days; that some would not be home for months; that some still had to languish through the added days and weeks of traveling when all they wanted was their own bed.

As I was just realizing that my time in Hangzhou would soon be over (what a week or two earlier seemed unending), I also realized that I had just passed the halfway point of my time in China. This discovery was aided by a time calculator on the internet, which also revealed to me that I had spent about 10 million seconds in China; another 10 million remained.

And so, for better or for worse, I moved to the wild west—Kunming, Yunnan—to begin my internship with The Nature Conservancy. But first, I decided I’d have a little vacation. Taking a day to relax and see a bit of the city with my supervisor and co-intern, I headed out with a 40 liter backpack to Northwest Yunnan: I went to see what the government calls “Shangri-La”—the corner of Yunnan nestled at the feet of the Himalayas. Once you get to Zhongdian (now officially Shangri-La, or Xianggelila in Chinese), you realize “Tibet” is not bound by the borders of the map. In fact northwestern Yunnan, western Sichuan, and Qinghai Province are all regions heavily-populated (heavily used here as a comparison, not suggesting density) by Tibetans—many nomadic.

In the course of a few days, I crawled my way by bus, taxi, and boot to Meili Snow Mountain (a range of snow-capped peaks on the border the maps draw between Yunnan and Tibet). There I spent some time in a small village nestled in a lush valley, meeting western and Chinese backpackers, drinking local grape wine, seeing a sacred waterfall, and enjoying both sun and storm. I can genuinely say it was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been and definitely one of my best experiences in China. I hiked down on a stormy, cloud-swallowed day, and we drove back to the nearest town on winding mountain roads listening to the driver’s cassette of Tibetan folk—a haunting music of women wailing in song and men underscoring with deep tones. I looked back, but the mountains and the world and our little van were all swallowed, hidden in cloud.

These short weeks in Kunming have so far been filled with exploration of its endearingly decayed infrastructure, settling into the routine of working 9-5, and finding ways of busying myself. The city feels very alive but relaxed, the old and young ambling or lazing along the streets. It is called the Spring City for its cool climate throughout the year and perhaps its bursts of rain throughout the day. To my amazement, though, it is more a rule than an exception that the day’s stormy weather will be spited by the sun breaking through at 5, parting the way for blue sky. 5 million more seconds till summer.