On museums.

I picture the end of the Roman occupation of Britain like this: somewhere around the late fourth century A.D., people looked around themselves, said, Hey, when was the last time you saw a Roman tax collector? and proceeded to take stones and bricks from Hadrian's Wall to use in their houses, barns, and stiles. They didn't even bother to raise a glass. They just raided, and why not?

Much, much later on the timeline, we went to visit. What is the Roman Wall? we asked ourselves. We bought maps and studied websites and visited sites and discussed things amongst ourselves. There are ruined garrison towns and forts and all sorts. People are digging them up, and providing explanatory placards, and suggesting pathways through the dig. In a word, out of the ruins of history they are making museums: exhibits that narrate a lost past, a past that would be all but invisible but for these efforts.

°

When we got to Sichuan, we had toured the following:

1. The Forbidden City (aka The Palace Museum)
2. The Lama Temple
3. The Summer Palace
4. The Mutianyu section of The Great Wall
5. The City Wall in Xi'An
6. The Terra Cotta Warriors
7. The Forest of Stelae (more about this in a subsequent post)

In other words, eastern China's Greatest Hits. 

[Digression: on a first visit to China, would it really be possible not to have gone to see these monuments? Would it really? If I were going back to China, I would still want to see the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace again, because I know that I did not exhaust the interest nor the elements of either place. In fact, when I looked at a map of the Forbidden City, I realized that we had only seen maybe a third of what there was to see. And we spent hours there. Hours.]

[Digression 2: periodically, when we ventured down some dark alleyway or gritty, unpicturesque location, my son would turn back to us and say, This is real China, as if to say: what you've been seeing heretofore has been prepared for your consumption as a tourist. Not this. This is unprocessed, unfiltered, this is not arranged for your comfort or your pleasure, this is how they do it here. Examples: shopping not in the fancy Euro-style mall but down the narrow halls with a thousand booths selling a mad efflorescence of goods. Taking the sleeper train from Beijing to Xi'An. Eating porridge for breakfast on some completely un-touristy street in Beijing. Real China. Whatever that may be. You can feel it when you're in it. Not fancy, not Western-fetish-style clean.]

Resuming the narrative: when we got to Sichuan, we had done a lot of the Major Attractions. (They were awesome.) We had arrived very very late the night before, so we slept in while my son went to class. For lunch, we ate Yan Jian Rou and had some green tea with his friends. We walked around the campus, just to see it, had a smoothie where he often has a smoothie, went to the People's Park. 

What do you guys want to do in Sichuan? This was the big question. We had four days left before we would get on a plane and fly back to our lives.

There are temples to see in Chengdu. Museums. One thing I had imagined doing when we first started planning the trip was visiting an ancient irrigation system near Chengdu. It was right beside a sacred mountain. Also, it happened to be not too far from a panda conservation center. Sights to see: restored and preserved ancient technologies. Shrines. 

We mulled our options over, and my son said, with deliberation: The more I think about it...I think we should go to Four Girls Mountain. 

I was surprised. He'd been somewhat resistant to this idea when I mentioned it--I've already been there, Mom. Let's find a place I haven't gone yet. Which made sense, and was a point of view to which I had come around, if a little reluctantly. He was there with his friend. They posted pictures. I wanted to go there too, to take my own pictures.

[Digression 3: Is picture-taking a motive in itself? Or just another way of seeing?]

He continued: If we go to Four Girls Mountain, we could stay two nights or three nights. You'll see these beautiful valleys. 

I was in. We talked over the details, and the historian decided, yes, he too was in. It would be a completely different experience than anything else we had done. We wanted to see a different part of China, and here was our chance.

My son: To be honest, I'm just so tired of museums.

I think it might have been the Forest of Stelae that did him in. He said, I liked it for about forty minutes. And it's true: it was practically an infinity of stone tablets, engraved with all manner of ancient and historical texts. It was mesmerizing, it was overwhelming. It was, in a word, a museum. A shrine, a temple. Exhibit. Monument.

[Digression 4: I love museums. If there had been, in easy proximity, a straight up art museum anywhere we had been staying, it would have been hard for me to stay away. I love the way an exhibit is a narrative and an argument. I love the way an exhibit, its specific articulation of a collection, its specific gesture of preservation, is a form of cultural love and attention. I love parsing exhibits, and I love falling in love with the museum space. I just love them.] 

As we walked through the first valley at Siguniangshan National Park, my son said, Now what is your favorite thing you've done on this trip? And what he was implying--that this, this setting, the high, high mountains, the shifting mist and the snow, the Tibetan stupas everywhere, was surely the best--seemed inarguable.

Better than any museum, he said. Arguing, but only lightly.

Les étrangers.

It is inevitable, is it not, when one is in another country, the way we remark upon our differences, large and small?

Huh, noodles for breakfast again! we say. Or why does that man have his shirt rolled up so that we can all look at his belly? Am I supposed to look at his belly? But there it is, right there, right there where his shirt is rolled up.

Like that.

Or the time we were in an elevator in Xi'An, and the guy in there with us glanced at us, then looked back in a series of lengthening looks. He turned to his friend and they started chatting animatedly.

He probably thinks you look like Karl Marx, I said to my husband the historian, who is (a) bearded, and (b) a socialist, not that they would know that, except that maybe the beard implied it?

My son said, That's exactly what he just said. He said, He looks like Karl Marx. 

And that's when he leaned in for a selfie with us. In the elevator.

In China, we were the odd ones. We were strange and exotic. My tall, curly-headed bearded son was, of course, used to it, having lived in China, at different times, for more than a year. I loved seeing how people responded to him, once he spoke, and how he was able to negotiate so capably in this place so far from home, in a language so different than his home language. None of this grace was an option for us.

If you want to say 'thank you,' it's 'xie xie,' he instructed us. We were in a grocery store in Beijing, our very first morning. We wandered past the vegetables, past the dried fruit, the practically infinite varieties of dried mushrooms, past the nuts, practicing this tiny phrase in a spectrum of pronunciation manglements. A lady sitting by one of the stalls smiled. Hilarious. I smiled back, because it really was.

The historian said 'xie xie' the whole trip long, like a champ. I did too, but more hesitantly and less frequently. No amount of phrase-mongering would obliterate our strangeness, our otherness. It was right there, written on our faces.

In Rilong, in western Sichuan, I admired the canvas shoes of one of the young women working at the guest house.  They had hefty tread, black, a black toecap, army green canvas uppers, laced up.

My son translated: my mom likes your shoes. Where can you get them?

She said we could find them anywhere, and when we did find them in a little shop on the main road, a small group clustered around, watching while I tried them on. A local man laughed, although not in a mean way: her feet are bigger than my feet! he said. Back at the guest house, when I came down to dinner, the woman with the admirable shoes took a look at what I was wearing: cotton trousers, a light shirt and light cardigan, canvas shoes. She entered some text into her smart phone, then showed me the English translation, which read something like this: I am worried about the thinness. Please put on more thickness so you are not becoming cold. 

So much the clumsy-footed stranger, and, in a corollary, evidently unable to dress myself appropriately. It's possible that I had to rescue myself from feeling almost existentially incapable a little bit every day. I found this to be one of the recurrent threads in the whole narrative of the trip. It was unsettling, but then, I think I knew that it would unsettle me. I had a talk with myself about it long before we departed.

At the moment, I think this kind of experience is useful. It's useful to be reminded that you're are not the prince of everything, or the princess. That the world is not yours to command, that you are every bit as strange to some people as some people are to you. Part of the grace of this kind of experience--the experience where one feels lost and graceless and incapable--is to be reminded that you live in the world and the world is not made in your image. The world is enormous. The big world contains you and you might as well keep your eyes open, to see every last strange, unfamiliar bit of it you can.

I think you can see why these nice people wanted
a picture with me. Because I am a celebrity, obvs.
(Xi'An City Wall)

List.

1. Finish book review.
2. Write e-mails to x, y, z, and also a, b, and c
3. What should I read en route? Do I want an actual, you know, book?
4. Charge up all the devices. ALL THE DEVICES.
5. Every little thing that makes life in my own skin (and, let's face it, head) must come.
6. Back up SD card, because there will be pictures OH YES there will be pictures!
7. Fruit snacks, for a fruit snack deprived son.
8. Call all the people I love to tell them I love them.
9. Take care of this forgotten/neglected item of business.
10. What about this or that appointment when I come back?
11. Shoes, back up shoes, slightly cute but still comfortable shoes.
12. All the socks.
13. Twelve days = fourteen tee shirts WHY.
14. ANTICIPATE.
15. Crossword, back up crossword, back up back up crossword.
16. Magazines?
17. Gum for the air/ear pressure.
18. Pens. Notebooks.
19. All manner of wipes.
20. Everything ready? Check? Let's go.

Ten things to do when you have finished the grading.

1. Lie down. You really should. You deserve it. Lie down and finish your novel, or if you are not reading a novel, start one.

2. Review your agenda. In my case, the agenda is entitled, The Get the House in Order Project, and it was wildly ambitious. Some of the stuff on that agenda--that stuff can be done later. Maybe in a few weeks. Resume your lie-down.

3. Okay, fine, get up. Think about dinner. Make soup and make blueberry scones because there are (a) blueberries in the refrigerator and (b) no reasons necessary to make scones if they are delicious and you want to. (check out the butter technique in that recipe--it is legit.)

4. Read some more. Take a short nap.

5. Watch tons and tons and tons of basketball. Revel in both the sloppy and the elegant play of the post-season, especially when you have no horse in the race, no dog in that fight, no team that you particularly care to root for. Learn other teams' players' names. Root for a team that is almost certain to lose to either (a) the Spurs or (b) Miami, depending on which part of the tournament you're prognosticating.

6. Read the nice comments students sent you. Remind yourself that you only had to wrangle with just one student, and even there, the wrangle was civil and is now resolved. Forget about the time when you woke up thinking about said student. Just let that go.

7. Sort through your winter clothes and put them away. Remind yourself how many freaking sweaters you have, not to mention skirts. Make vows about shopping, vows that will no doubt be fruitless but which feel salutary whilst putting the sweaters, not to mention skirts, away for the season.

8. Catch up on the last few episodes of The Mindy Project. This can be done concurrently with nearly any item above, but is worth enjoying on its own. However, eating a scone while watching television will never go amiss.

9. Think about China. China China China!

10. Put off decisions about meetings and commitments. They are out there, calling to you in faint, distant voices. But they can wait. They can wait while you open the windows (figuratively--it's still a little chilly) of your summer life and let the wind chimes make a beautiful, apt music, a music that is spring and the end of grading and the taking in of a deep, expansive breath. Breathe it. Just--breathe.

National Poetry Month is eating my brains.

I just thought you'd all like to know--you, the reading public--that my lack of posting, or postage, or whatever nominalization you prefer for "where on earth is The Megastore?"--it's all the fault of the cruelest month, April, which is (coincidentally? I think not.) National Poetry Month. So, you know, you can go read some poems over here. I am behind, but just one poem, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. Dr. Write is also posting poems. In conclusion, it is super poetish over there.

In the meanwhile, I do have some recommendations, however.

The Megastore Recommends.

1. Getting your visa application mailed off finally. You guys, do you realize that when you go to China, your passport is like chopped liver? And by "chopped liver," I don't mean "something gross, whoever THOUGHT of that?," I mean "something that is pretty much useless without a visa." AND, the people, getting a visa means a lot of steps that make your head hurt. As in, do you need to have all your hotel reservations and your plane reservations set? or is that a little waffly, and will your basic itinerary do, as long as you have an invitation letter from someone in China, aka your son? How much does it cost? HOW MUCH? omg. And you need pictures. And you need a FedEx office. And so many steps that you think, whoops, too bad I already bought my plane tickets, because I am never going to get this done.

But then you do get it done, step by step, and all your brains are still, mostly, in your head, except the poetry-writing portions. And then you wait.

2. The amazing food you will eat when you are in China. Everyone I read says that the food in China is beyond. My son says so. My friend says, "Make sure you eat Uighur noodles!" I tell my son about the Uighur noodles. He says, via Google Hangout, "They're all right. Tell your friend (shrugs with palms up) 'They're all right.'" With or without the noodles, though, I am going to try as many things as possible. I am looking forward to what China will taste like.

3. Don't think about the crazy toilet situation over there. Just don't.

4. Also, while you're not thinking about things, don't think about that fourteen hour flight. It sounds horrible.

5. Do think about the fact that there are beautiful mountains near and around Chengdu. 
Like these:

The people, I recommend Chinese mountains like these.

The Megastore recommends just one thing.

1. Buying plane tickets to a foreign land. There is nothing that sends the blood rushing to your head--like maybe you're about to have a stroke--like buying tickets to a foreign land. To wit:

• They speak a foreign language there. 

On the other hand,

• Your son, who speaks that foreign language, lives there. And will guide you.

Also,

• some of the possible layovers on your possible itineraries are so tight they make you feel super-charged anxiety right now, when the layovers are still only theoretical. 

On the other hand,

• Some of the possible layovers are so wide that you could practically rent an apartment and live in the city for awhile or a few hours while you wait for your connecting flight. 

On the other other hand,

• you might find a booking where the layovers are just right, like Baby Bear's chair/porridge/bed.

So go ahead and buy those tickets, even if they

• make you think about the straitened circumstances in which you might possibly be spending your old age.

Once that's done, and you've cried for a minute and taken the dog for a walk, contemplate the following:

The people, we are going to China, and we couldn't be more thrilled/terrified/freaked out/excited!