Trip South: Part A

So I’ve past the Sunday deadline, and I’m feeling that this may be the beginning of increasing laxness in the predictability of these posts. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll get back on track next weekend. Who knows? In the past too weeks I have started working nights. Not evenings, but nights. My shift starts at 12 and goes to 8. That’s what it says anyway. In reality, I can get there around 1 or 1:30 and no one says boo. The first weekend I did it, (yes, weekend nights…it’s a bit sad) I tried diligently to stay awake all night, spending a good amount of time randomly surfing, and even calling home. The problem was that despite the fact that I needed to be there, aside from around 20 minutes at 2, I had no work to do till around 5:30 at the earliest. This idea of staying awake while being paid to work, I realized, was silly. So this past weekend, I brought in some headphones and put my head down on a dictionary for a couple hours of sleep, between the 3 o’clock news and the beginnings of the 8 o’clock editing. It’s been working out well, and I’ve been much happier with the arrangement, accept of course, that its no fun in general to say “so hey, this is a great party guys…. but I have to go to work.” Ah well. I shouldn’t complain.

Last week, I finished work on Monday morning and didn’t start again until Thursday afternoon. So I put myself on a train and headed down to Henan province. The people sitting across the way took the piss out of me for sleeping through the entire 8-hour train trip, but hey, I needed to sleep.

I hit Zheng Zhou around 9:30, and opted to spend the night instead of heading onwards to Kaifeng, figuring that the earliest I could get there would be around 11 or later, and that’s generally not the best time to get to a new town. So I got myself a hotel room, and spent an enjoyable evening walking around Zheng Zhou. I’d read that the municipal planners left the old city walls up as a kind of park, and so I decided to walk the couple klicks over to check them out, and then walk along the walls back towards the train station. These were not great feats of stonework and masonry, but old, beaten earth hills more than anything else, with a path on top. It only occurred to me after I was already there that purposely seeking out the one dark empty place in a city late at night might not be the best idea.

But then I realized that was New York talking, and that this was china after all. I encountered no problems, though by the hushed giggling I heard I might have interrupted a few couples fun.

Though the city was by a large an open one, full of wide boulevards and brightly lit streets, I managed to find the one dark part of town on my way back, and in it, a realio trulio red light district. Lining the streets were hair salons (a common front in china) with frosted glass window fronts positively oozing with a red-pinkish glow. It was great, I laughed a lot.

Next morning, I got up early to the din of the street out my window, and took a bus about an hour and a half to Kaifeng. Kaifeng was the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty, before it was invaded by the Jurchen Invaders (a common term) and the crown prince fled southwards, setting up, rather predictably, the Southern Song Dynasty. But as with any city whose heyday was more than a thousand years ago, it’s kind of a dump at the moment. Most of the architecture is late Qing or early Communist, and both genres are in the mid-stages of decrepitude. It was the kind of place that seemed like it was perpetually grey, and whether or not this is in fact the case, it held true for the duration of my stay.

That first day I spent my morning walking up through town, getting a feel for the place (see above) and learning the layout. In the afternoon I shelled out an enormous fee (around 10 dollars) to go see a Song Dynasty Theme Park, mostly because it had a Jewish history museum hidden inside. The park itself was the definition of Chinese bad taste, and the museum was a worthless collection of photocopied documents (really) and a couple of fuzzy, blown up pictures.

The story with the Jews goes like this. A bunch of Jewish merchants arrived in china around 800 CE, having come along the Silk Road through central Asia from Persia. Maybe they were tired of traveling by this point, because they decided to stay, and, because they’d brought no women of their own, to marry the local girls as well. This excuse has since been used by many other foreign guys when it comes to Chinese girls, but what can you do. They settled in Kaifeng, then the capital, and generally made a good life for themselves, finding their niche in Chinese society. They thrived for almost a thousand years, but by the 1800’s the community has succumbed to forgetfulness and assimilation, and when the yellow river flooded Kaifeng, it washed away most traces of Jewish life, along with the synagogue. It was the descendents of these Jews that I’d come to find, and the reason I’d spent so much to go see the dinky museum.


I was not in the best of moods upon leaving, being somewhat hungry and still jetlagged from a weekend of night shifts, so I went and got a hotel room and took a nap.
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The rest of my stay in Kaifeng (all 24 more hours of it) will have to wait for another day. I’m writing about it independent of this, and it’s late, so you’ll just have to bear with me.

Since I’ve been back in Beijing, I’ve attended a great dinner party of real, interesting, and generally cool people, and a couple Colby kids have come down from their program in Harbin to spend a week in the City. So I have houseguests, and it’s a lot of fun. Many new pictures (about 2 weeks worth) are up, and I’ll try to finish the Kaifeng adventure as soon as possible. Heart. Martin.