Tag: Han Chinese

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Once Around the Sun: From Cambodia to Tibet

Title: Once Around the Sun: From Cambodia to Tibet

Author: Jessica Mudditt

Chapter 20 – In or out?

As I walked the streets of downtown Hohhot in search of a travel agency, I felt further than five hundred kilometres from Beijing. I was still in East Asia, but the capital city of Inner Mongolia had Central Asian influences too, such as the cumin seed flatbread I bought from a hawker with ruddy cheeks and a fur hat. I passed a Muslim restaurant with Arabic lettering on the front of its yellow-and-green facade, and many street signs and shops featured Mongolian script as well as Mandarin. With its loops, twirls and thick flourishes, Mongolian looked more similar to Arabic than Chinese. In actual fact, the top-down script is an adaptation of classical Uyghur, which is spoken in an area not far to the west.

The winds that blew in from the Russian border to the northeast were icy cold, so I was glad to soon be inside a travel agency. It was crammed with boxes of brochures and a thick film of dust covered the windowpanes. Hohhot is the main jumping-off point for tours of the grasslands, so I was able to get a ticket for a two-day tour that began the following morning.

I wasn’t enthusiastic about going on a tour because I preferred to move at my own pace, however there was no other way to access the grasslands. The upside was that I was guaranteed to sleep inside a ger, which is a circular tent insulated with felts. The Russian term of ‘yurt’ is better known. I had read that Inner Mongolia was a bit of a tourist trap for mainland Chinese tourists, but I was nonetheless excited to get a glimpse of the Land of the Weeping Camel.

I walked into a noodle shop and a customer almost dropped her chopsticks when she saw me. The girls at the cash register were giggling and covering their faces as I pointed at a flat noodle soup on a laminated menu affixed to the counter.

Foreign tourists must be thin on the ground in Hohhot, I thought as I carried my bowl over to a little table by the window.

Inner Mongolia was one of the few places that Lonely Planet almost discouraged people from visiting: ‘Just how much you can see of the Mongolian way of life in China is dubious.’ But I was still keen to see what I could.

I ate slowly, enjoying each fatty morsel of mutton. I was pretty good with chopsticks by that point – I’d never be a natural, but I didn’t drop any bits of mutton into the soup with a splash, as I used to in Vietnam.

Hohhot seemed a scruffy, rather bleak sort of city – or at least in the area where I was staying close to the train station. Street vendors stood cheek by jowl on one side of the road, calling out the prices of their wares. The opposite side was under construction and the one still in use was unpaved, which meant that two lanes of traffic had to navigate a narrow area of bumpy stones while avoiding massive potholes and piles of dirt. I saw a motorbike and a three-wheel truck almost collide.

I spent the next few hours wandering around the Inner Mongolia Museum, which has a staggering collection of 44,000 items. Some of the best fossils in the world have been discovered in Inner Mongolia because its frozen tundra preserves them so effectively. The standout exhibit for me was the mammoth. It had been discovered in a coal mine in 1984 and most of its skeleton was the original bones rather than replicas. I gazed up at the enormous creature and tried to imagine it roaming the earth over a million years ago. Mind-boggling.

I admired the black-and-white portraits of Mongolian tribesmen, and then took photos of a big bronze statue of Genghis Khan astride his galloping mount. The founding leader of the Mongol Empire was the arch-nemesis of China, and parts of the Great Wall had been built with the express purpose of keeping out his marauding armies. Genghis Khan must have rolled in his grave when China seized control of a large swathe of his territory in 1947.

What was once Mongolia proper became a Chinese province known as ‘Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region’. This long-winded name is an example of Orwellian double-speak. So-called ‘Inner Mongolia’ is part of China, whereas the independent country to the north is by inference ‘Outer Mongolia’. Nor is the Chinese region autonomous. The Chinese state has forced Mongolians to assimilate. Their nomadic lifestyle and Buddhist beliefs had been pretty much eradicated, and although speaking Mongolian wasn’t outlawed, learning the state language of Mandarin was non-negotiable.

On top of this, the government provided tax breaks and other financial incentives to China’s majority ethnic group, the Han Chinese, if they relocated to Inner Mongolia. Mongolians now account for just one in five people among a total population of 24 million. The same policies of ethnic ‘dilution’ exist in China’s four other ‘autonomous regions’, which include Tibet and Xinjiang, the home of the Uyghurs.

Shortly before I left the museum, I came to a plaque that described the official version of history, which was at odds with everything I’d read in my Lonely Planet.

‘Since the founding of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region fifty years ago, a great change has happened on the grasslands, which is both a great victory of the minority policy and the result of the splendid leadership of the Communist Party of China. The people of all nationalities on the grassland will never forget the kind-hearted concerns of the revolutionary leaders of both the old and new generations.’

I rolled my eyes, snapped a photo of the plaque for posterity, and continued walking.

* * *

I didn’t venture far from my hotel for dinner because I planned on having an early night. I chose a bustling restaurant with lots of families inside and was waiting for a waiter to come and start trying to guess my order when a group of men at the next table caught my eye. They seemed to be waving me over.

Me? I asked by pointing at myself.

Yes, they were nodding. Shi de.

I happily joined the group and introduced myself by saying that I was from ‘Aodàlìyǎ’. I think they were Han Chinese, as they didn’t look Mongolian. I whipped out my phrasebook and tried to say I had come from Beijing, but I was fairly certain they didn’t understand me.

Anyhow, no matter. Ten shot glasses were filled from a huge bottle of baijiu, and I was soon laughing as if I was with old friends. One of the slightly older guys used a set of tongs to place wafer-thin slices of fatty pork into the bubbling hotpot on the table, followed by shiitake mushrooms and leafy greens. As the impromptu guest of honour, my bowl was filled first once it was cooked – by which time I’d already had three shots.

The hotpot was fantastic, and I had to remind myself not to finish everything in my bowl. Bethan had told me that Chinese etiquette requires a small amount of food not to be eaten at each meal. This indicates that it was so satisfying that it wasn’t necessary to eat every last bite. As a kid, it was ingrained in me to finish everything on my plate. I loved food and was generally in the habit of licking my bowl clean, so I had to exercise a certain amount of restraint.

I had just rested my chopsticks across the top of my bowl to signal I was finished when I was invited to go sit on the wives’ table, which was across from the men’s. The women were very sweet and a couple of them seemed to be around my age. I once again tried to communicate using my phrasebook, but I was hopelessly drunk by then. I could hardly string a sentence together in English, let alone Mandarin. I was also beginning to feel queasy from the baijiu, so I gratefully accepted a cup of green tea from the porcelain teapot that came my way on the lazy Susan. After taking some photos together, I bid the two groups ‘zaijian’ (goodnight). I tried to contribute some yuan for the meal, but they wouldn’t hear of it. I curtsied as a stupid sort of thank-you, and then I was on my way.

* * *

More hard liquor awaited me the following day. A striking woman in a red brocade gown with long sleeves handed me a small glass of baijiu as I stepped off the minibus a bit before noon.

‘It’s a tradition,’ she said with a smile, while holding a tray full of shots.

I downed the baijiu with my backpack on and grinned as the backpacker behind me did the same. There were four foreign tourists on the tour, and about eight domestic ones. The liquor gave me an instant buzz, which I needed. I hadn’t slept well and woke up feeling lousy, so I’d kept to myself during the two-hour journey. Even though I should have been excited, I got grumpier and grumpier as the reality of being on a tour began to sink in. Plus, the landscape was not the verdant green steppes I’d been expecting. At this time of year, it was bone dry and dusty. It hadn’t occurred to me to check whether my visit coincided with the low season.

I began chatting to the other tourists. The guy who had the baijiu after me was Lars from Holland. There was also a couple from Germany. I could immediately tell they were pretty straitlaced. Their clothes looked very clean and functional, and the girl refused the baijiu.

The woman in red introduced herself as Li, our tour guide. Then she led us along a path lined with spinifex to a dozen gers. They faced each other in a circle, and off to the right was a much larger ger with the evil eye painted on its roof and Tibetan prayer flags fluttering in the fierce winds. There were no other buildings in sight and no trees.

Li told us to meet inside the big ger in fifteen minutes after we’d put our stuff in the smaller gers she proceeded to assign us. Lars and I would be spending the night in a ger with ‘82’ painted on its rusted red door. There certainly weren’t eighty gers, so the logic behind the numbering system wasn’t clear – but no matter. The German couple took the ger to the right of ours.

These were not portable tents for nomads. Each ger was mounted on a concrete base and I think the actual structure was made of concrete too, and merely wrapped in grey tarpaulins. The door was made of metal and at the top was a sort of chimney structure – perhaps for ventilation. Like igloos, the only opening was the door, and it was pitch-black inside. I located a dangling light switch as I entered.

‘Ah – I love it!’ I exclaimed.

It was a simple set-up, with single beds lining the perimeter and a low table in the middle of the room. Patterned sheets were draped from the concave ceiling. I chose the bed with a framed portrait of Genghis Khan above it. Lars put his backpack next to a bed on the other side. I was happy enough to share a ger with him. He gave off zero sleazy vibes.

‘I might just take a couple of those extra blankets,’ I said to Lars as I piled on a few extra floral quilts from another bed. The wind had an extra iciness to it out on the steppes and I shuddered to think what the temperature would drop to overnight. We zipped our jackets back up and headed out.

I wandered over to the toilet block, which was quite a distance from the gers. I made a mental note to drink as little as possible before getting into bed to avoid having to go in the night. Once I got closer to the toilets, I was glad they were so far away. The stench was unbelievable.

In the female section were two concrete stalls without doors. In the middle of the floor in each was a rectangular gap. I almost gagged. Just a few centimetres away from the concrete was an enormous pile of shit. I could make out bits of used toilet paper and sanitary pads and there were loads of flies buzzing around. Without running water or pipes, the excrement just sat there, day after day, building up. I would have turned and walked straight back out but I was busting for a wee. I held my breath so I wasn’t inhaling the smells. I wanted to close my eyes too, but I was terrified of falling in, so I had to look at what I was doing. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

‘Oh my god, Lars – the drop toilets are totally disgusting,’ I said after I met up with him in the big ger. ‘It’s just a pit of shit without running water.’

‘I know an American girl who fell into a drop toilet in China last year,’ he said.

‘No way,’ I said with a shudder.

‘Yeah. She said it was terrible. She was in a really poor village somewhere in central China and she went to the toilet at night. She couldn’t see that some of the wooden planks had gaps in them – and then one of them broke and she fell in. She was up to her neck in shit. She was screaming for people to come help her. Apparently, it took them half an hour to fish her out, and all the while she could feel creatures writhing around her body. She cut her trip short and had to get counselling when she got home.’

‘I bet she did,’ I said. ‘That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard in my life. The poor girl.’

Just then Li appeared and said we were heading outside to watch horse racing and traditional wrestling after some sweet biscuits and tea. We assembled around a fenced area where there were about thirty ponies tethered to poles. Some were lying down while still saddled.

‘Horses usually sleep while standing up, so these ponies must be knackered – pardon the pun,’ I joked to Lars.

Notwithstanding, they looked to be in reasonably good condition, with shiny coats and no protruding ribs. There were chestnuts, bays and dapple greys.

I heard the sound of hoofbeats and looked behind me. A group of men on horseback came thundering across the steppes. It was a magnificent sight, and any lingering resentment I had about being on a tour melted away.

One of the men rode ahead of the rest. He was wearing a cobalt-blue brocaded tunic and his wavy black hair came down past his ears. He was really good-looking. He approached Li with a smile, said something to her and dismounted with the ease of someone who had probably started riding horses before he learned to walk. Li and the man exchanged a few words – I definitely saw her blush – and then he got back on.

‘Gah!’ he yelled as he dug his heels into his horse’s sides.

The other horsemen followed after him with whoops, leaving a trail of dust in their wake. These Mongolian ponies were only about twelve or thirteen hands, but they sure were fast and could turn on a dime. I loved watching them carve up the dry earth.

Next a group of men on motorcycles appeared along the track. There were quite a lot of them – at least twenty. We formed a big circle, and the traditional wrestling began. I wasn’t sure what the rules were, but it was fairly self-explanatory: one man got another in a headlock and thumped him to the ground. The next man came along and fought the winner, and so on and so forth. The spectators egged on the fighters with what I assumed were good natured cat calls. Everyone was grinning. By the time the wrestling matches were over, the fighters were absolutely covered in dust and the sun was beginning to set. I’m sure it was all staged for our benefit, but it was good fun.

With the seamless orchestration of a tour that has been done a thousand times before, we gravitated to the big ger. Dinner was bubbling away in a large clay pot and it smelled pretty good. There was also a big vat of noodles with black sauce and the ubiquitous Chinese vegetables of thinly sliced carrot, bok choy, baby corn and onion. There was a bottle of baijiu on each table.

We were serenaded with traditional music while we ate. One of the instruments reminded me of the didgeridoo and there was also a violin. I had read that strands of horse mane are used to make violin strings. The male singer had a deep voice that was almost a warble, and it was hauntingly beautiful.

Five men and women emerged from behind a red curtain and began to dance. They wore long-sleeved, billowing satin tunics that were cinched at the waist with embroidered belts. One of the women had a tall hat made of white beads that dangled down to her waist. It must have been heavy. It was a high-energy display of kicks and splits and parts of it were reminiscent of Irish dancing. They twirled their billowing skirts like sufis. The Chinese tourists started clapping in time with the music and then we all joined in. Sure, it was a bit cheesy, but I was really enjoying myself. At the end of the concert, we had photos with the performers as they were still trying to catch their breath.

We were given torches to light our way back to our gers. It was absolutely freezing, so I wore all my clothes to bed. I snuggled into my blankets and pulled them right up to my chin, feeling grateful for the warmth of Bethan’s jumper.

Mercifully, I slept right through until morning and avoided a late-night visit to the shit pit.

When I wandered out of the ger the next morning, breakfast was being prepared nearby. The carcass of a freshly slaughtered sheep was hanging from the back of a trailer. A man was skinning it while the blood drained out of its neck into a big metal bowl. Its head was in a second bowl, while squares of wool were laid out flat to dry on a tarp. A toddler in a puffy orange jacket was playing in the dust while his mother worked away at skinning parts of the wool. What distressed me more than butchery up close was the live sheep that was watching on from the back of the trailer. He presumably knew he was next.

After a breakfast of ‘sheep stomach stew with assorted tendons’ (as Li described it) we headed out for a ride on the steppes. I couldn’t wait to ride a horse again. I’d spent most of my childhood obsessed with horses, and I was lucky enough to have one for a few years, until I got older and became more interested in hockey and parties.

I rode a stocky bay with a trimmed mane that bobbed up and down as it trotted along the path. I looked over its perky little ears. The saddle had an uncomfortable pommel that kept jabbing me in the stomach, but I loved being under the wide open sky. It was a pale blue with just a few wispy clouds. Sheep grazed and crows rested on clumps of rocky outcrops.

I winced at the Chinese guy ahead of me, who was bouncing out of time to the rhythm of his horse’s gait and landing with a heavy bump in the saddle; his oversized suit flapping in the wind and his feet poking out straight in the stirrups. Much easier on the eye was the guide two horses ahead of him. He was every inch the Mongolian cowboy. Dressed from head to toe in black, he wore a leather jacket, cowboy hat and scuffed black cowboy boots. He never took off his wraparound sunglasses and he spoke little. He smouldered like the heartthrob actor, Patrick Swayze.

We’d travelled several kilometres when we came to a building block that was the same greyish brown as the earth. Inside it had a cottage feel. We sat around a table covered with a frilly tablecloth and drank yak milk. As we did, Lars told me about his day trip to North Korea. While in South Korea for a couple of weeks, he had visited the demilitarised zone (better known as the ‘DMZ’), where a ceasefire was negotiated between the two Koreas in 1953. In a military building is what is known as the ‘demarcation line’ – and Lars had one foot in North Korea and another in South Korea. I hung on his every word.

Our conversation got me thinking about how cool it would be to go to North Korea. I was actually quite close to the border. When I got back to the ger, I retrieved my Lonely Planet out of my bag and thumbed to the section titled ‘Getting there and away’, which had instructions for every country that borders China.

‘Visas are difficult to arrange to North Korea and at the time of writing, it was virtually impossible for US and South Korean citizens. Those interested in travelling to North Korea from Beijing should get in touch with Koryo Tours, who can get you there (and back).’

I was pretty sure the cost would be prohibitive for my budget and decided to stick with my existing plan of cutting south-west towards Tibet. Maybe one day I’d get the chance to visit North Korea, but it wouldn’t be on this trip.

Once back in Hohhot, I boarded a train bound for Pingyao. As I watched the apartment blocks pass by in a blur, I thought with satisfaction about the past twenty-four hours. Any visit to Inner Mongolia is problematic, but I couldn’t fault the Chinese tour company. They had made every effort to keep us entertained. Mongolian culture was so new to me that I couldn’t even tell whether something was authentic or staged, but I had seen and done all the things I hoped to during my visit. And, sure, my time there was really brief. But I’d be forever grateful to have seen a part of the world I thought I’d only ever get to see in a documentary.

Photo Courtesy: Jessica Muddit

About the Book: While nursing a broken heart at the age of 25, Jessica Mudditt sets off from Melbourne for a year of solo backpacking through Asia. Her willingness to try almost anything quickly lands her in a scrape in Cambodia. With the nation’s tragic history continuing to play out in the form of widespread poverty, Jessica looks for ways to make a positive impact. She crosses overland into a remote part of Laos, where friendships form fast and jungle adventures await.

Vietnam is an intoxicating sensory overload, and the hedonism of the backpacking scene reaches new heights. Jessica is awed by the scale and beauty of China, but she has underestimated the language barrier and begins her time there feeling lost and lonely. In circumstances that take her by surprise, Jessica finds herself hiking to Mount Everest base camp in Tibet.

From a monks’ dormitory in Laos to the steppes of Inner Mongolia, join Jessica as she travels thousands of kilometres across some of the most beautiful and fascinating parts of the planet.

About the Author: Jessica Mudditt was born in Melbourne, Australia, and currently lives in Sydney. She spent ten years working as a journalist in London, Bangladesh and Myanmar, before returning home in 2016. Her articles have been published by Forbes, BBC, GQ and Marie Claire, among others. Once Around the Sun: From Cambodia to Tibet is a prequel to her earlier book, Our Home in Myanmar.

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Essay

Peeking at Beijing: Fringe-dwellers and Getting Centred

How can anybody comprehend Beijing, one of the largest and most ancient cities on Earth? Its origins date back three millennia, but Keith Lyons tries to get a sense of the real Beijing in just full three days.

Photos provided by Keith Lyons

Day Three*

After a series of false starts on the previous day, when I’d thought I would be ticking off Beijing’s main iconic sights, for my third and final day in the city I took a different approach. Instead of heading into the heart of the capital, I sought out enclaves that were more on the periphery of the megacity, both literally and figuratively. 

I’d been reading the accounts of Colin Thubron’s visits to China, including his 1987 book Behind the Wall which started in Beijing. Feeling displaced in the impersonal capital, his impression of Beijing was more of a building site than a city. “I tramped its streets in disorientation, looking for a core which was not there.” He found Tiananmen Square arid and couldn’t wait to get out of the city. “The fission of solitary travel — travel in a boyish euphoria of self-sufficiency — tingles in my stomach as I march across Beijing’s railway station,” he writes as he sets off on his travels around the Middle Kingdom as it emerged from decades of Mao and Cultural Revolution oppression.

Looking back on the previous day’s ‘failures’, I tried to reframe the disappointing experiences as learning, rather than ruminating on the rejection I felt after not getting inside the Forbidden City. 

One turning point in my journey was coming across a quote from Robin Sharma while thumbing through a bilingual personal growth book that sat among the artsy and anime library at my new accommodation, the hipster co-working space and ‘serviced apartment boutique hotel, ’ Stey 798. Initially when I saw the pull quote in English and Mandarin, I thought to myself, “What a douchebag; it’s fine for the business guru to say, having made millions spouting his stuff to the likes of Microsoft, IBM, General Motors and FedEx.” But then I reflected on the words and realised the truth in them: “There are no mistakes in life, only lessons. There is no such thing as a negative experience, only opportunities to grow, learn and advance along the road of self-mastery.”

I wasn’t exactly on the road to self-mastery when I found myself lost, tired, bothered and despondent on an unnamed minor road on the outskirts of Beijing. However, I realised that some of my preconceptions had been limiting. 

For example, the fixed idea that because Beijing was big and busy that it would be dangerous to hire a bike and cycle around. There were rows and rows of identical-looking bicycles for hire at every street corner, wide separate cycle lanes, and lots of visitors navigating successfully around Beijing by bike. If I’d been on a bike the previous day, I could have cycled right through Tiananmen Square rather than circle wide around the massive open space (though security personnel will still make sure you don’t stop to take photos at the best spots). 

So, note to self (and to others), try exploring Beijing on bike rather than just using the subway, taxis, or buses. To make bike hire possible, get a Chinese SIM card, install Mobike, and set up payments via WeChat and Alipay, so you can use the lockless sharing bikes provided by Meituan (yellow bikes), Didi Bike (green) and Hello Bike (blue) simply by scanning QR codes, or unlocking bikes with Bluetooth. 

I’ve since learnt some bike hire operators can loan high-quality bikes, with English-speaking staff who deliver bikes to your hotel. So even without a smartphone connected with a local SIM and data, you could arrange to discover the city formerly known as Peking by bike.

Beijing was once capital of the ‘kingdom of bicycles’, with the uptake of bikes trebling in the 1980s across China, as the rationing was cut for locally made bikes such as the prestigious Flying Pigeon brand. Cycle lanes were first incorporated into main roads throughout much of Beijing when car ownership was limited to government officials, with more than 3/4 of Beijing’s road space taken by cyclists in 1988. According to one study, some busy intersections saw 20,000 bicycles an hour, and 8 out of 10 Beijing’s used a bike as their primary transport. 

While China is the leading exporter of bicycles, bikes dropped from 62% of vehicles on the road in the late 1980s Beijing to just 16% by 2010. However, in the last decade, there has been a boom in bike use, not so much by the proletariat but by middle-class Chinese with an environmental and health consciousness embracing a post-materialist sharing society. Bike schemes featuring special locks, non-deflating tyres, rust-resistant bodies and GPS tracking have proliferated across Beijing and in most cities and towns, though following the boom there was also a bust for some players unable to cope with aggressive competition practices copied from the Uber monopoly playbook. 

In tandem with the return of the bike have been some other initiatives to address the problem Beijing was once synonymous with: air pollution. Much has been made of just how bad air pollution is in China, with 16 of the 20 worst air quality cities up to recently located in China. For the nation’s capital, vehicle emissions and burning coal to produce electricity have been the main causes of smog, but a wide range of measures have seen air pollution in Beijing decline by 50%. The air pollution in Beijing is still three times as bad as that in the US’s most polluted city Los Angeles, and some daily measures still exceed the World Health Organisation’s guidelines, but the initiatives which include better urban planning, switching away from coal, extensive public transport, and Low Emission Zones where only e-vehicles are allowed seem to be working. 

As an aside, a recent comparison of air pollution readings found Delhi was five times as polluted as Beijing, though the sources, composition and frequency of air pollutants are different for the two cities, with Delhi’s woes from biomass burning, road dust and the burning of agricultural waste. Delhi has been judged the world’s most polluted capital for four years in a row, according to IQAir. 

There’s another thing too. Much has been made about how polluted the air is in Beijing, but on the three full days I visited, only one day seemed to be overly hazy with smoggy, dirty air. Admittedly, particles in the air don’t have to be visible to be harmful, as the world is learning with more research into fine particles, but from a check of several air monitoring sites, including the US Embassy’s real-time monitoring which started in 2008, the readings were not too high. Probably no worse than smoking half a packet of cigarettes. Maybe that’s why many people in China wear face masks, not just because of illness or to stop the spread of germs. 

So next time — if there is one — I will definitely brave it on a bike. But that’s for next time. 

If Colin Thubron’s stomach was tingling with excitement in anticipation of travel, my stomach that morning was rumbling with anticipation of food to enable me to experience different parts of Beijing. Eating local is one of the best ways to experience a new place. 

I retraced my steps to the window-in-the-wall vendor I’d got a snack from the previous night, who made one of the specialties of Beijing, a thin savoury crisp-friend crepe stuffed with a selection of fillings. The man recognised me from the previous day, and we went through the process of assembling the ingredients to my liking to go on and in the pancake, which is eventually folded and wrapped like an American breakfast burrito. Unlike other jianbing I’d seen being made by small eateries, roaming food carts, or on the back of tricycles, my man’s crepes were made with buckwheat rather than wheat or mung bean flour, giving them a speckled purple appearance which I said to myself was like choosing a healthy option at McDonalds. 

To keep things fresh, jianbing are always made-to-order and cooked under the watchful attention of the mouth-drawling customer. Once the batter has formed small bubbles on the large round hotplate, a series of interventions are enacted, from cracking eggs over the pancake, to flipping it with long chopsticks. With brushes, the chef would smear on spicy and sweet fermented bean pastes (like miso), hoisin and chilli sauces, sprinkle on chopped coriander leaf, scallions and tangy pickled vegetables, and then add crunchy crispy-friend wonton dough strips and lettuce before cutting it in half and folding it into a rectangle. 

The pancake is Beijing’s favourite breakfast, but the staple food is little known outside China compared to steamed buns, dumplings and Yum cha dim sum. 

Also not well known outside China is the fact that Beijing has a sizeable Muslim population. At least a quarter of a million people who identify as Muslim reside in the capital, with a Muslim presence in the city dating back to the 8th century. As you may know from following the news, China has some issues in its north-western province of Xinjiang where Turkic-speaking Uyghur Muslims account for 12 million of its inhabitants, along with some ethnic Kazakhs. Less well-known and visible are the Hui Muslims, classified as an ethnic group and religious affiliation, who are found all across China. The Huis have adapted to the dominant Han Chinese culture, while maintaining their beliefs and customs.  

There’s one feature of Muslim life that is at odds with Chinese living, and that’s the eating of pork. Pork is China’s favourite and default meat, accounting for up to 70% of all meat eaten. With Muslims not eating pork, deemed unclean, impure and forbidden, instead the preferred Islamic meat is beef, with lamb/goat also featuring. This food divide meant that Muslims often lived together in neighbourhoods with not only a mosque, but also Muslim food processing and services. Across China, Muslim beef noodle restaurants are ubiquitous, and considered cheap and cheerful as well as clean, a godsend in a land of food hygiene concerns and stomach upsets.

In Beijing Niujie and Madian are the two main Muslim enclaves, though the latter in the north has declined. Niujie, south of the centre, even has its nearby subway station, and while there is still a mosque (with Chinese-style architectural characteristics) the main attraction for most visitors is the distinctly Muslim food available, with snacks and delicacies on offer. 

Of the quarter of a million Muslims who officially reside in Beijing, perhaps half live in the neighbourhood of Niujie. There are halal supermarkets, butchers selling mutton and beef, a Hui hospital and a kindergarten. 

For a block, on both sides of the wide street, are stalls and restaurants, and queues. The smoke from sizzling charcoal grills serving fatty lamb skewer kebabs and the aromatic cumin-scented air probably push Niujie’s air pollution readings beyond acceptable World Health Organisation levels, but no one is complaining. Uyghur vendors, wearing round white hats, call out over the grill to whip up even more business, or shout out to younger men to fetch more of the freshly-baked sesame-studded flatbreads that are stacked high beside tandoor ovens, like round naan, but with a thick edge, like a deep dish Pizza Hut crust.

Steam rises from the large bowls of beef noodle soups slurped by families sitting on low stools around a square table, and visitors line up to order from a selection of fruit pastries. The largest amount of tripe you may ever see is cooked in a huge pot, while a rich cake made with dried fruit, nuts, seeds and sugar is sold by weight. 

One of the quests for the self-labelled traveller, as opposed to the unaware tourist, is to be less an outsider and a consumer of tourism products. But underlying all this is the enigma of travel. That we go to experience things that are different from back home. And occasionally we wish to be less visible as an outsider, and more like an insider. 

I think you can do this to a certain degree, depending on where you are and the acceptance of diversity of that place. But for me, as a visitor of European heritage, to the reasonably homogeneous and definitely differentness of China, I stand out. Not just because of my height at 6 feet. Or that my hair isn’t the standard black. 

So what I seek is more of an authentic experience. Which for me often involves shopping local, eating local, random exploration of neighbourhoods rather than ticking off sights, preferring places without tickets or queues. 

It is travel with some risks, not mentioned in the insurance fine print. It is travel which is self-deprecating, acutely aware of my ‘otherness’ and awkwardness, and of how I might connect with others. Some of that is transactional. I buy fruit from an old lady at a local market. I hop on a bus. I go to a place, but it is not the place recommended by the receptionist or concierge.

In Niujie, I am both an outsider and the ‘other’. Yet I have more empathy for and connection with the Muslim street vendors than I do with the Han Chinese who have come that afternoon to eat delicious food that is different to their normal diet. 

After rubbing shoulders with fellow diners at a cramped eatery in Niujie, having finally located the area that doesn’t feature in most Beijing guidebooks, I still had one mission to complete. 

Photo provided by Keith Lyons

So, as you are probably aware, Beijing hosted the Olympics back in 2008, with much fanfare and pomp. It was China showing off to the world just how modern and developed it was. It awed us not just with its impressive pageantry but also its buildings and facilities, many created just for the International sporting event. The Olympics provided the impetus for numerous infrastructure projects, particularly transport networks which were state-of-the-art. 

Some facilities remain, and the Bird’s Nest is still an attraction in itself, despite its lack of use following the 16 years. You probably remember the Water Cube, the swimming pool. 

Bird’s Nest: Photo provided by Keith Lyons

Often when I travel, I check to see if there are swimming pools near my accommodation, or even inside my hotel (if someone else is picking up the tab). So when I found out that Water Cube is open for casual swimming, I set my sights on swimming a lap or two in the famous pool. 

It turns out the pool for public use isn’t the actual one for Olympic races — that’s reserved for competition — but the training pool where swimmers warmed up and down has been open to anyone for more than a decade. But there’s a catch. 

First, you have to know that you can swim there. And there’s another level of safeguard. Because the pool is several metres deep, and there’s the danger of non-swimmers drowning, the pool is partitioned into two halves. The accessible half has a raised floor so it is only around a metre deep. You can stand up in it. Kids can stand up. 

But the other half, where the depth darkens the water to deep blue, is strictly controlled entry. You need a swipe card to access it. And to get that, as an American working in Beijing described to me, involved a medical test as well as completing various swimming feats, which included swimming two lengths without pausing. 

Without the time in the city to complete the rigorous entry requirements, I had to contend myself with the learner’s side, where parents walked alongside their children like chaperons, adults swam on both sides of the lanes, and there were frequent close calls or collisions. 

Inside the Water Cube: Photo provided by Keith Lyons

I’m a reasonably tolerant person, and having lived in China for more than a dozen years had got used to behaviours I initially found, to my mind and upbringing, a little disgusting. But when I swam my first length, only having to stop a couple of times to negotiate around erratic swimmers, the first sound I heard was from a fellow swimmer rising up from his lane to loudly clear his throat and spit onto the floor edge. I made a mental note not to rest my goggles up there.

While I had the passive-aggressive stance towards those spitters, during rests at the end of the lane other swimmers struck up conversations. A middle-aged women confided how she had lessons to swim in her 40s, and now tried to swim at the Water Cube a few days each week, even if she could not go a few metres without gasping for air. “Can you give me any tips to improve my swimming,” she asked as she returned to my end. I replied in Chinese the word my blind masseur used to give me when he hit a sore point on my feet. “Fang song” — relax. It was probably the worst word to say, like shouting ‘keep calm’ out repeatedly when something has gone disastrously wrong. 

I probably should have taken on board my own words, as I swam into a father shepherding his daughter along. He was blocking my way. I saw him do the same to others. Deliberately blocking the way of oncoming swimmers. You are the symbol of modern China, I thought. Selfish, entitled, arrogant. Because I am a man of peace and goodwill to all, when he next blocked my way, I just carried on swimming, exaggerating my kicking to churn up the water and splash his rotund belly and smug grin. 

I switched to another lane, and after a few more lengths, as I waited for a slow swimmer to get a head start, a boy of 12 years decided to strike up a conversation with me. “My mother says I should practice my English, so that’s why I like to come here,” he said, pointing up to the viewing window where a dragon mom waved and then proceeded to turn her phone camera towards us. After exchanging the usual questions about himself and me, he then abruptly turned the conversation around to China and the world. “China is the biggest country in the world. We are the leader.” 

Unable to find the right words to express himself, he asked another swimmer, a man who had just moved to Beijing from the north, to articulate. 

I wanted to ask him if China was such a great country, why did so many of its people want to escape to a better life in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But conscious that swimming at the Water Cube gives just two hours in the facility I escaped myself and tried to complete a length unimpeded or uninterrupted. 

When I got back, the boy, who was rather overweight, was still there, waiting with another claim about China’s might. 

Maybe I’m being nostalgic, about the good old days, but in the 1990s and 2000s, being a foreigner in China meant automatic adulation and attention from Chinese. Foreigners were feted and admired regardless of their behaviour and personality. 

Now, in the mid-2020s, things have changed. They started changing a decade ago, when China realised that foreigners were not so great after all. When stories from the government claimed that most of the foreigners were economic spies. When Chinese TV had footage of young Americans drunk and predatory on the Shanghai subway. When my friends said how they’d heard that many foreigners teaching in China were losers in their own country. The tide had turned. The golden days were over. China has regained its swagger. The sleeping giant was waking up. The dragon was turning. And I was getting tired. 

Before my number got called and I got requested to leave the pool, I got out, and used my token in the shower, wishing I’d brought my flip-flops to protect my feet from contact with the floor. 

Not just being in the water, but being underground, it always takes a little to adjust to being back above ground and at maximum gravity, weightless. One of the things I like about swimming is that afterwards, some of that fluidity, ease of movement, body perception and gentle feeling remains, like a reminder of how you could be in the world. My senses feel renewed, my mind a little lighter, my awareness more centred. 

Near the Bird’s Nest, they were having a skateboard class, with over 50 participants, many of them young women. And as I strode along the wide boulevard, groups of newly initiated skaters wove in and out of the family groups and sightseers, a sign to the world of new ways of being, new freedoms, and new leisure. Was this a victory for American culture? Or was China taking this recreation and adding Chinese characteristics to it? 

My last swim was both a relaxation exercise at the end of the day, and a future — proofing myself for a long-haul flight home. 

The faint linger of chlorine on the webbing of my hands and fingers. The sensation of lying face down and being held by the water. The realisation that the more I know the less I understand about China. These are the things I took with me as I sat in the aisle seat, stretched out my legs, and reminded myself, that I was 30,000 feet above the earth, going from the ancient capital to one of the youngest nations on earth (New Zealand). Much is lost, falling away, lost in time, the memories not so much fade as slip away imperceptibly. I scroll through the photos on my iPhone. So long Beijing.

*Read the Day two of Keith Lyon’s China trip by clicking here

Read the Day One of Keith Lyon’s China trip by clicking here

Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer and creative writing mentor originally from New Zealand who has spent a quarter of his existence living and working in Asia including southwest China, Myanmar and Bali. His Venn diagram of happiness features the aroma of freshly-roasted coffee, the negative ions of the natural world including moving water, and connecting with others in meaningful ways. A Contributing Editor on Borderless journal’sEditorial Board, his work has appeared in Borderless since its early days, and his writing featured in the anthology Monalisa No Longer Smiles.

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