Sino Sign Language

May we remind you: please be self-restraint and be a good tourist to mold a well-mannered imagination.

So read the sign welcoming me to Beijing’s Jingshan Park. To the degree I understood it, I honored it. My “well-mannered imagination,” however, had unruly ideas of its own.

If China is a nation of 1,330,313,812 people, where were they? If one in every five people on the planet is a resident of China, did they prefer to reside indoors? While Japanese and Korean tourists abounded, with touring Chinese supplementing their numbers, the locals were notably scarce. Our small gaggle of journalists looked for telling signs—pets, children, laundry, waiting lines, wild life and indigenous music—and came up with vendors and trinkets, service people and shop clerks, humming bikes and still waters. When the loudest sounds in a country emanate from Buddhist temples, a New Yorker has to ask: is this Nirvana or Neurasthenia?

The plaque, above, urging the reader to “Take the initiative to classify discards of paper… or gourd skin,” also tells him or her to “Cherish the resources,” “Don’t talk or laughter loudly in the scenic area,” “Don’t shin or overstep the rockery” and “Don’t urinate or defecate.” No one in my company did any of the latter things in my presence.
 
Not with reminders like these:

China teems with culture on the calm. Tiananmen Square is a procession of the orderly. The Chinese have become Olympic smilers. I didn’t hear raised voices. Everything is a negotiation. Even navigating large vehicles in heavy traffic is a negotiation. 

 

If any sign exists that says “No raised voices,” I didn’t see it. So I raised mine. I sent a pair of cotton slacks to be washed and ironed at the Grand Hyatt, Taipei. I told them the bottom hems were frayed before they told me. “Just do the best you can and don’t worry about it,” I said. Over the next six phone calls from housekeeping and the laundry, I found half a dozen additional ways to tell them the same thing, not to concern themselves with the pants, just do the best they could, that would be fine. When I returned to my room at 11:30 that evening, my phone was ringing. The seventh person was calling to tell me my pants were damaged. Is it possible the “Banana Republic” label intimidated them? I certainly didn’t. A gentleman came to my door. Out of patience, I raised my voice. He smiled. And they did a beautiful job.

 
Maybe this sums it up:

Three Guides and One Twilight Zone in the Two Chinas

Sabbath in the Lama Temple with Zion

When the professor escorting an irreverent band of six journalists through Beijing says it's time to return to Zion, he's not thinking of the Holy Land or Zionism—he's trying to collect us and shepherd us back to our touring van and our Chinese superguide, Zion Zhu.

Zion, the son of missionaries, knows everything there is to know about: the Ming, the Qing and every other dynasty in China's long history; Nyngmapa and Galupa and presumably any other kind of Buddhism; and Hollywood movies. Ask Zion how he knows an English word he's just surprised you with and he'll tell you the film he learned it from. Then he'll tell the driver to "hang a right."

In addition to the “usuals,” the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, et al, Zion led us to "Longevity Hill," and through the Lama Temple and "The Hall of Longevity"—the hall of you should live so long, as I like to think of it.


Tuesday in the Park with Teresa

As Shanghai-modish as Beijing is quaint, our guide Teresa graced and grinned us through the gardens, canals, tunnels and towers of Shanghai. Teresa eschews a business card for a rubber stamper, a delicate pink one, which she uses to imprint her name and cell phone number on the document you’re least likely to lose. (That she presented the stamp after she lost me once is a Chinese puzzle.) Not exactly traipsing over hill and dale, we followed Teresa through the Humble Administrator’s Garden, the Master of the Fishing Nets Garden, Blood Alley and Tiger Hill. I remain seduced by the poetry of the names.

They say the national bird of China is the crane. The Chinese wear face masks to prevent contagion from foreigners bearing flu, but it is the edifice complexes that are catching. Park Hyatt Shanghai boasts of having the highest restaurant in the world. A presidential suite at Shanghai’s Hyatt on the Bund becomes “The Emperor’s Suite.” It followed that I was dubbed—by the incongruous professor of architecture and comedy—the Son of the Cucumber Emperor.


‘Tis the Season to Be Airy

“September Song” declares, “It’s a long, long time from May to December.” In an inscrutable reversal, Air China gave us December in May by piping “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” into its cabin of seven sole Caucasians amid an untold horde of Asian passengers airborne between two predominantly Buddhist countries, China and Taiwan. “Oh cuh-uh-ome all ye-ye fai-yay-aithful.” A gospel-soul rendition, in English. Ha-al-lelu-oo-oo-yah and amen. The evergreen Christmas Carol, the lone musical offering, was so felicitous for take-off they repeated it on landing.


Four Days on the Road with Lily

Bitten by the mine’s-bigger-than-yours bug, Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, boasts of the tallest building in the world (for now). Be that as it may, the poetry of Taiwan is the roll call of the cities. By bus, plane and bullet train the Caucasians go rolling along. Taipei to Taichung to Lugang to Tainan to Kaohsiung to Hualien to Taroka. A street festival, a lantern shop, a night market, a foot massage. A serene trek through the sublime Taroka Gorge, for which there are no adequate words or camera lenses. And everywhere, our Taiwanese guide Lily charging forward to rein in the pace-setter of the pack and scampering back to bring up the laggards. Pen to pad, camera in hand or short on breath, I am laggardly.

A la Cart

In a few hours, I will be on a China Airlines flight to China and Taiwan. I don’t expect to see Joe Biden on it with me. I am looking forward to traveling with the five other journalists I’ll be spending nineteen hours with in the air bound for Taipei, our first stop.

We’ll be visiting China’s Golden Triangle, which I like the sound of. Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei. My Manhattan triangle consists of the Upper West Side, the Theater District and Gramercy Park which, while highly desirable, doesn’t have quite the same siren call to it.

Flying is always an adventure. Nineteen hours presents limitless possibilities, but my most bizarre time in the sky took only moments during a one hour and fifteen minute flight to ingrain itself forever in my memory.

I was on a shuttle flight from New York’s La Guardia Airport to D.C.’s Washington National Airport (renamed the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in 1998). I was en route to meet privately with an ex-President of Lebanon whose foes wanted him ex-living and were not beyond following him to Washington to do it. Not long before, they’d bombed the life’s breath from a Lebanese president-elect on their own blood-drenched soil, so meeting places and meeting times were planned, and then changed, with wary, painstaking care.

Everything surrounding my suddenly-green-lighted flight to D.C. was clandestine; my “orders,” to draw no attention to myself. My head was buried in the morning’s New York Times while a flight attendant was pushing a beverage wagon forward through the aisle from the rear of the plane. As she got to me, a bottle of red wine tipped and poured into my lap. Whatever its provenance, it was full-bodied and anything but dry. Flustered, she grabbed two napkins and started frantically wiping the wine-soaked fabric clinging to my inner thighs and crotch. Some heads went up. A second attendant tore over to us, grabbed a bottle of soda water from the wagon and emptied it into my crotch. As I watched. A napkin in each hand, she began to pound on my lap. The first woman joined in. Now four hands were flailing in my lap. I was no longer inconspicuous.

Everyone noticed, but no one understood. By the time we landed, all was forgotten. The only thing identifiable about me was the dried crescent-shaped stain on my light tan slacks—and the ill-concealed glint in my eyes. I had a story.