On Victory

My travels this weekend took me to the Shanxi (Administrative Region #18) and Henan (#19) provinces. During the trip, I wrote a required "field report" for the Yale-China association that nicely describes the quest that this blog documents. I submit it to you, reader, in place of any original content, with photos from the weekend underneath:

Although I was well aware when I first was introduced to the Yale-China Teaching Fellowship that 12 hours is a rather small fraction of the 40 hours that are generally understood to compose the average work week, and a mere instant compared to the 168 in every actual week, I never really reckoned with the notion of 156 unfilled hours until I arrived in China. During orientation, when we read the advice of outgoing fellows, I dismissed their exhortations to take advantage of free time as the hackneyed advice of newly formed adults who, after a childhood filled with playdates and a formal education bursting at the seams with superfluous extracurricular involvement, had suddenly discovered that real people don't always have that much to do when they go home from work. "Say yes to things...take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way!" Thanks, but I read the Yale viewbook, too.

I figured that China was like a gigantic Ouija board: full of an untold number of undiscovered secrets waiting to be disinterred by me, maybe even while wearing pajamas. Everything would come up roses as I lived the overfunded expat dream. China was going to just happen to me. Good old carpe diem could be left back in those New England prep school dormitories, where it belonged.

For better or for worse, I found my assumptions to be rather misguided. Even in a megalopolis like Changsha, in a country as weird and variegated as China, there's a limit to how much excitement you can squeeze out of everyday life at a low-intensity job, especially if you lack the Peter Hessler-like ability to form close friendships with every Chinese guy who gawks at you and asks you if you're used to Chinese food. That is why I decided to put serious effort towards my goal of visiting all of China's 33 (or perhaps 34) sub-national administrative regions, and hitting all of China’s 38 UNESCO World Heritage sites to boot.

Now, I realize that spending one's Yale-China time and money on travel is not exactly a novel idea, but making a goal out of it has a way of making even the most mundane or even dreary things about China seem exciting again. Case in point: I started writing this little ditty in an internet café in Datong, Shanxi (my 18^th region) and finished it in Luoyang, Henan (my 19^th). Both of these provinces are of the variety that Lonely Planet tends to write off as mostly one-trick ponies with rather uninteresting tricks (coal and centrality, in these cases), but as any good capitalist will tell you, to incentivize is to divinize. Thus, disembarking from an overnight train in Pingyao just shy of 5 AM in sub-freezing temperatures wasn’t wearisome; it was World Heritage site #15. And that dusty suspension of noxious particles perpetually hanging in the Henan air was not a nuisance, nor even disagreeable; it was the smell of victory.

Yungang Caves - Datong, Shanxi


The ancient town of Pingyao at dawn - Pingyao, Shanxi


Shaolin Temple - Dengfeng, Henan


Longmen Grottoes - Luoyang, Henan


A hutong - Kaifeng, Henan