Comments on Oasis of Hope

cctv.com 10-15-2005 17:21

Upon our arrival in Korla, driving down the city’s widest avenue – a street lined with trees, high rise apartment buildings, and small shops selling everything from tires to tea – one of the members of our crew made the comment that Chinese cities “are all the same; they all have the same style of architecture, the same structural features; there is nothing unique about each city.” This is a man who has traveled extensively in China: by his count, there are only two of China’s thirty-three provinces or special administrative regions that he has not visited. So, surely, there is some merit to his comment. I, too, have noticed that many of the apartment buildings in Xuzhou, for example, are indistinguishable from many of those in Nanjing, Wuhan, or, indeed, Korla. But having just come through a period of particularly extensive travel (including Yunnan, Guilin, Shanghai, Xinjiang, and Beijing – all in the last four months!) I have to say that there are some ways in which this statement is entirely misleading. Particularly as one travels from east to west in China, the environmental and ethnic characteristics of each city can give a visitor the sense of having entered a whole new country.

As my companion on this trip, to fill in the long hours spent driving from shooting location to shooting location, I brought along a book to help inform my observations of the people we came in contact with along the way. A fascinating and humbling read, The Dust of Empire by Karl Meyer gave me great insight into the ways that the geography and environment of Central Asia have shaped the culture and attitudes of its inhabitants, shining examples of whom have inhabited the Korla region for centuries. Given that this episode focuses on ways that modern residents of Korla are interacting with the desert, I thought I would take advantage of the opportunity that my “Behind the Scenes” comments gives me to share some of my thoughts about the deep-seeded way the desert seems to influence the psyches of the people with whom I came in contact.

In The Dust of Empire, Meyer made an observation that really resonated with me: often, Westerners tend to think of the world in terms of seaports and airports; destinations. Central Asians in particular, on the other hand, tend to see things more in terms of routes; journeys. (One notable exception to this is my father, who, I think, could draw a to-scale map of all of the highways in North America with nothing more than a pencil and sheet of paper.) I think this is especially true, at least of most Westerners, in the modern age. For me to get to Beijing, for example, from my hometown in the southern United States, I really don’t need much more than a plane ticket: knowledge of navigation, provisions of food and fuel, and climate regulation are all taken care of by other people. And on that journey, I am so insulated from the environment around me (specifically, the ground below me), that being above the Great Plains of the Midwest is no different from being above the rocky Alaska coastline, or the vast Pacific Ocean. To be sure, driving in the deserts and wetlands around Korla, we never saw caravans or tribes of nomadic herds en route to their next destination. But the people I did meet were much, much closer, genealogically and culturally, to their nomadic ancestors than I am to my seafaring ones.

The Korla residents who made the deepest impression on me were those I met one afternoon by accident, when I found myself with some time on my hands for exploring the city. Locals recommended that I visit a Uighur-run, Uighur-frequented bazaar to really get a sense of life there. The stalls sold spices and medicines that aren’t found elsewhere in China; men with amber-colored eyes sold doppa (stiff, boxy hats that Muslim men wear) while women, some entirely veiled and some dressed more risquély than even I dare to, sold brightly colored silks and polyesters. Yellow gold jewelry shone like man-made stars reflecting the little light that made it through the afternoon shade. In the heat of a weekday afternoon, middle-aged career women browsed these items as school-aged boys kicked around balls and filled the aisles with their shrieking and giggling. Elderly men smoked; couples ate; but no alcohol was to be seen.

It was in the midst of this that I made eye contact with Langanr. In an hour or so, he would invite me to stay the night with his family and meet his children; but first, he would serve as translator and mediator as a crowd of non-Mandarin speakers gathered to listen at first and then, gradually, work up the courage to ask me questions through him. For a pregnant but lighthearted while, politics was the elephant in the room, er, bazaar, that none of us dared touch. Like many Chinese people, they asked me about my family: how many kids do my parents have? What does my older sister do? Am I married? How many kids do I have? But one woman’s questions surprised me, and ended up giving me food for thought that I continue to chew to this day. When her turn to ask “the American” a question came around, she asked, “Does America have wind? Does America have rain?” I paused, trying to think of the best angle from which to approach my answer. I wondered what rain and wind have meant to her in her lifetime. In my week or so around Korla, there hadn’t even been the potential for rain, and the fruits and vegetables we ate each day were only able to be grown locally as a result of a fairly recent large-scale irrigation project. My experience of wind in Korla was as the annoyance that blew my freshly coifed ‘do right into my lip gloss, just after the camera began filming. But what was it to her? And was there a way that America presents itself that made it seem, to her at least, as though we have no wind? Was she asking these questions out of pure curiosity, or was it more of a, “logically I know you probably do, but all appearances make me wonder…” It made me think about the questions Americans who have never been to China have asked me about life here. It made me think about the way our environments shape the ways we see the world. It made me wonder if these irrigation projects and wetland restorations will fundamentally change the way people affected by these changes think. How different a person would I be, had I grown up in the desert instead of a small town in verdant North Georgia? And how much do the norms and conventions of that place color the way I perceive things here? Having the impetus to ask these questions is one of my favorite parts of this job.

Editor:Liu  Source:CCTV.com