Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (12 page)

The Buddhists, too, have a soft spot for Tai Shan, and ever since the second century
B.C.
, people have bedecked the mountain with temples and calligraphy. There is even a staircase that winds up to the very summit of Tai Shan, nearly 6,000 feet up in the clouds. Altogether, there are 6,660 steps of stone leading up the old Imperial route. Confucius, who lived in nearby Qufu, had climbed Tai Shan and famously declared
The world is small.
Mao, too, had somehow managed to waddle up to the peak, and after viewing the first rays of dawn, he proclaimed,
The East is red.
So deep!

Over the centuries, seventy-two emperors had stood upon Tai Shan. Indeed, the mountain was so important in Chinese cosmology that a new emperor was expected to hightail it pronto to Tai Shan to receive a special heavenly blessing. Intriguingly, only five of them went on to climb to the summit. A failed attempt was regarded as a divine rebuke. So why risk it?

And, as I was very pleased to learn, Neil Peart, the drummer and lyricist for the Canadian rock band Rush, had also apparently climbed Tai Shan. In the early 1980s, Rush was the pride of the Canadian rock world. Admittedly, this was a very small world, composed, really, of Rush and the twiddly-winks from Vancouver, the band Loverboy. Nevertheless, for a certain thirteen-year-old boy in Toronto, Rush was the be-all-and-end-all of his rock world, leading, in time, to his joining the Official Rush Fan Club, which sent him buttons that he proudly wore on his parka, while he tried to conceal the intense jealousy he felt for the boy in his class who claimed to have singer Geddy Lee’s mother on his paper route. Oh yes, this thirteen-year-old was a
serious
fan. He had all their records and he played them every day on his record player, a record player that was never sullied by the likes of Journey, the fakers.

And then, in 1983, Rush released the atrocity of an album that was
Signals.
What is this? cried the thirteen-year-old boy, who had stood in line for hours at the record store with money he had earned delivering newspapers
by sled
so that he could be among the very first in the whole of Canada to have the new, oh-so-eagerly awaited Rush record. He listened to this album on his record player. And he felt betrayed. He could not believe his ears. But it was true. It was unmistakable. Undeniable. There were
synthesizers. Et tu,
Rush, the boy said, swelling with bitterness. Have you, too, gone to the dark side? And he felt so lost that he drifted, aimlessly and alone, for two whole months, eight bleak and cruel weeks, until, from somewhere in the darkness, he was found by Bono, who raised him up and made him whole.

But eventually, this thirteen-year-old boy grew up to be a man, a man who one day found himself in a chintzy hotel in Tai’an, sitting in a smoky Business Center, idly wondering what a censored Google search would reveal about the mountain known as Tai Shan, when he discovered that in 1987—and by 1987, the year of Big Audio Dynamite, he was so over Rush—Rush had recorded a song called Tai Shan, and suddenly the memories flooded back and he was lost in a bittersweet reverie.

I stood at the top of the mountain

And China sang to me

In the peaceful haze of harvest time

A song of eternity

You’re smoking crack, Neil, if you think the haze that permeates China is the peaceful haze of harvesttime. I mean, come on. Clearly, the bitterness had never lifted. Nevertheless, as I stood in line at the base of the mountain to pay the entrance fee, I hoped that China would sing to me too. Actually, as I watched a nearby vendor do a brisk business selling bird whistles, I wished that China would just quiet down for a while.

At the gate, a sign informed us that old people (sixty to seventy years old), students, and maimed persons would have to pay only 50 yuan to climb Tai Shan. Not too many mountains offer a discount to the maimed, but Tai Shan does. The sign went on to inform us that teachers, provincial model workers, and combat model heroes also received a discount. Should one be tempted to proclaim oneself a Combat Model Hero—and I certainly was—you will be asked to provide a certificate confirming your status.

I passed the First Gate of Heaven, a square arch emblazoned with calligraphy, and started to clamber up the stairs, which wound ever upward through a forest of pine and cypress trees. Huge boulders and rock formations were emblazoned with ancient calligraphy, but since for this hiker they were about as inscrutable as, well, Chinese calligraphy, I turned my attention to the signs I could read.
Please fling the rubbish into the dustbin.
And I started to look for rubbish to fling.

I continued upward through a damp, muggy drizzle and it wasn’t long before I began to sweat. Tai Shan, I was discovering, was no stroll through the park. True, I was climbing stairs, but these were narrow stairs, suitable perhaps for tiny little bound feet but treacherous for others, particularly when they were as rain-slicked as they were that day. And, while I do want to commend the hard work that must have gone into building a stone staircase up a mountain, I did begin to wish that perhaps a little more effort could have been expended so that each step was similar to the others. But, of course, each step was different—a stutter step here, a two-foot chasm there—making it impossible to establish a rhythm.

I paused to take a breather.
Keep distance from the precipitous cliff,
a sign read. What cliff? I wondered. I couldn’t see more than ten feet through the drizzly haze. Instead, all I could see were people. Thousands of people. Tens of thousands of people. I had, of course, known that Tai Shan was the most climbed mountain on Earth. I had envisioned a Matterhorn-type crowd, a few streams of hikers, but in no way was I prepared for the seething masses scampering up Tai Shan. Good call, I muttered to myself. Wanted to get away from it all for a couple of days, did you? A little nature. Serenity. And so you choose to climb the most climbed mountain in the world in a country of one and a half billion people, give or take a hundred million.

While I stood there ruminating, I noticed people pointing at me.
Laowai,
I heard. Very often, it’s not meant kindly, either. And then “Picture,” said a man waving a camera. A moment later, I was surrounded by the Zhang family from Hunan, or whoever the heck they were, smiling for the camera.
Xie xie.
Thank you. Well, good, I thought, at least my presence here as an odd curiosity to be gawked at and photographed was bringing joy and mirth to many.

I trudged upward, momentarily pleased to have summited, until I noticed a sign informing me that I was presently at the Midway Gate to Heaven, and that I had roughly another 2,000 feet in elevation yet to conquer. Well, shoot, I thought, noticing a man who had just managed to hawk an enormous amount of phlegm out of his mouth while still keeping a cigarette dangling from his lips. If he could do it, I certainly could. And with a deep breath I resumed my climb into the clouds.

Fortunately, the mountain offers plenty of diversionary temples and pagodas along the way. I entered one, a dimly lit temple dominated by a large golden Buddha. Or perhaps it was a bodhisattva. Or maybe Pan Gu. Really, it’s so hard to tell. In front of the Buddha-esque statue lay plates of food. I made a mental note—snacks? why?—and as I stood pondering this curiosity I was approached by an affable young monk.

“Would you like to make an offering to the goddess?”

“Absolutely,” I said, pleased to learn that the statue was a goddess.

“Sign your name here,” the monk indicated, pointing to a ledger. “One hundred
kuai.
”

Fifteen dollars. That’s no small sum in China. I wondered what I would get in return for this largesse.

“You take the joss sticks and bow three times in front of the goddess and say a prayer,” informed the monk.

“And what should I be praying for?”

“Wealth.”

“Wealth?”

“Yes. You make an offering and bow and pray, and the goddess will make sure you become a wealthy man.”

I pondered this for a moment. The cost of health insurance was becoming onerous. And the price of food certainly wasn’t going down. And we’d probably need a new car in the next few years. I decided that I was amenable to wealth. I paid the monk. He took his chop, a carved seal that the Chinese use much as we use signatures and notary publics to legitimize a document, and stamped it next to my name. And then he placed a small red bag over my head.

“Inside,” he said, “is a Taoist medallion. It is very holy.”

Indeed, there was a round golden medallion inside. “A gift bag too. Thank you very much.”

I did my devotions, and as I prayed for loot, I could hear from somewhere in the depths of my brain the stern voice of Sister Mary Anthony reciting the Ten Commandments—
Thou shalt have no other gods before me
—and I felt a sudden chill. But then I reflected: I was killing a lot of birds by climbing Tai Shan. I’d live to be a hundred and I’d be a wealthy man.

The last 1,000 feet or so was particularly grueling. I could feel the burn in my legs. You don’t quite comprehend how many steps 6,660 steps are until you’ve climbed them. As I clambered up, I paused to consider the postcards available for sale. They offered a far better view of the mountain than what I could see through the damp, gray gloom. Indeed, they made it seem rather idyllic. But Tai Shan, when viewed ten, possibly twelve feet at a time, depending on the swirling mist, and all the while surrounded by thousands of breathless people, didn’t leave me feeling soft and fuzzy inside. It left me feeling really knackered.

I passed through the last archway, did a desultory raising of the hands together with the others who had staggered up, and then, with my Taoist medallion dangling around my neck, found a mountaintop vendor and celebrated my ascent through the ancient Chinese custom of eating beef-flavored Ramen noodles. And it was good. And then I began to freeze. Powerful gusts of cold, cold wind buffeted the summit. I spent a half hour shivering, poking my head into temples, and then decided, That’s it, I’m done. Mission accomplished. I could now confidently expect to become a rich old man.

I pondered the descent. I could man-up and climb down. Or I could take a cable car. I would take the cable car. Thousands of others were of similar thinking, and as I joined them in the now-familiar hell that is lining up in China, I thought of Neil Peart.
And China sang to me / in the peaceful haze of harvest time.
What drivel, I thought. Did you think of that while putzing about on your synthesizer, Neil? Clearly, I was in a grumpy state of mind. Indeed, I had only one thought while I was being shoved and squeezed in the line for the cable car.
The next person that cuts in front of me I am flinging off the precipitous cliff.
And yes—I glared at the elderly four-foot woman who was attempting to push me aside—that means you, Grandma.

7

I
n China, it doesn’t take long for a first time visitor to realize just how very delusional he has been in terms of his assumptions about the country. If nothing else, traveling through China is a profoundly humbling experience, no more so than when you realize that nearly everything you thought about the country, all your presumptions and book learning, your opinions, turn out to be utterly, completely wrong. Take, for instance, the issue of public order. I had taken as a given that in a country under one-party rule, a party that has periodically felt the need to kill a million here and a million there and to now and then run over its citizens with tanks, and that even today jails its citizens for even the slightest suggestion of dissent, public order just wouldn’t be an issue. But this turns out not to be the case. Indeed, I couldn’t imagine a people more disinclined to obey rules than the Chinese. And nowhere is this more evident than in a train station.

The next day, I found myself idly waiting in what a sign informed was the Communist Youth League Waiting Room inside the Tai’an train station. I was bone weary. My legs still smarted from the climb up Tai Shan. And I’d been awoken so often the night before by telephone calls from courteous young women kindly offering to provide me with a
messagee
that I finally felt compelled to take the phone off the hook. Somehow, I had managed to successfully convey my desire for a train ticket to Qingdao, a coastal city on the Yellow Sea, and after responding to the clerk’s inquiries with the big dopey grin I used to answer all questions put to me in Chinese, I found a seat on a bench in the waiting room, quietly pleased that at least the Chinese were thoughtful enough to display numbers in the Western manner. I matched the numbers on my ticket with the numbers on the board, found the correct waiting area, and settled in together with hundreds of other travelers. Then the announcement came. It was time to board. And then there was pandemonium. Why? I thought, watching the melee as 500 people scrambled to squeeze through a single turnstile. Are there door prizes for the first fifty people to squeeze through? Free DVD players? Coupons offering 20 percent off the pig knuckle special at the Golden Dragon? Wearily, I looked at my ticket. It’s assigned seating, right? Please?