zaiShanghai

Guilin is a city in south­ern China that gov­erns the 10,700 square mile Guilin pre­fec­ture, an are fea­tur­ing myr­iad oppor­tu­ni­ties for vis­ceral out­door stim­u­la­tion. Endless spans of small karst peaks dot its land­scape. Scattered around the bases of these roughly oval-shaped jut­ting lime­stone peaks are stretches of calm rivers and small lakes, rice terraces–mountainsides carved into lay­ers of zig-zag lines–cover some of the more rural parts of the region.

I spent a week in Guilin via a NYU-organized (and, more impor­tantly, sub­si­dized) trip. There, I shared some much-needed time with Mother Nature, bonded with some of the locals, and learned a bit about myself.

A Chinese god­dess

In my first week of lan­guage classes, my Chinese teacher gave me my Chinese name: Wang Mu Nan. "Wang" appro­pri­ately means "king" in English, but "Mu Nan" is a bit more dif­fi­cult to trans­late. Since then, I've made a game out of ask­ing Chinese peo­ple what my name might mean.

Our sec­ond morn­ing in Guilin was spent drift­ing along the Li River on a bam­boo raft. Soon after embark­ing, a friend and I began mak­ing intro­duc­tory small talk with our five-foot-tall Chinese boat­man. As he thrust us for­ward on using a bam­boo pole some eight feet in length, he gave his name and we gave our Chinese names. Neither party under­stood the other. But in try­ing to sound out my name, our raft pusher set­tled on an inter­pre­ta­tion that sounded like "Wang Mu Nan Nan." He broke out into hys­ter­i­cal laugh­ter.

As we glided past other rafts, he began shout­ing for the atten­tion of his fel­low boat­man. Once he got them to look, he would point at me and shout a string of Chinese which always ended with "Wang Mu Nan Nan!" It was always fol­lowed by a cho­rus of laugh­ter (of sim­i­lar inten­sity) from the other boat­men.

Obviously, I thought, my name had a dirty mean­ing.

Afterwards, back on land, I briefed our Guilinese tour guide, Jessie, on the sit­u­a­tion. I quickly recounted my story, anx­ious to hear her deci­pher our raft pusher's response, but I was inter­rupted by a burst of gig­gling. She spoke quickly.

"Wang Mu Niang Niang. It is, how do you say… Chinese god­dess. Her name means 'Mother of the West.' Like, hmm. Like your Mother Goose?"

She con­tin­ued gig­gling. I imag­ined myself in a gray wig and grandma spec­ta­cles and couldn't help but laugh with her.

A beau­ti­ful American

On my sec­ond night in Guilin, a few friends and I went out to din­ner in down­town Yangshuo, a town down the Li River from the city of Guilin. We picked a restau­rant on the main street and sat out­side at a table bor­der­ing the main artery of pedes­trian traf­fic. We were the only non-Chinese peo­ple in sight. Additionally, we were, prob­a­bly, also obvi­ously American. I say prob­a­bly because nearly every Chinese per­son that passed our table with a cam­era in hand stopped to shoot a pic­ture of us. Uncertain as to whether I should pose for the cam­eras or ignore them, and increas­ingly annoyed by it all, I began to sym­pa­thize with celebri­ties' com­mon loathing for paparazzi. But I was more sur­prised that a group of Americans was such a rare sight for these guer­rilla pho­tog­ra­phers.

Not ten feet away from our table was a large group of Chinese men rang­ing in age from late ado­les­cence to late adult­hood. Three gen­er­a­tions sat hud­dled around the wooden table, enjoy­ing a night of drink­ing and dice. Tubs filled with ice and Tsingtao sat at each end of the table, and they were almost con­stantly in need of refill­ing.

Towards the end of our meal, one man from the group stood up, chugged the last of his beer, and stum­bled toward us. He was a lit­tle chubby, had a friendly, bub­bly face, and wore big, square glasses. His English was not as good as his con­fi­dence would have led you to expect.

After intro­duc­ing him­self, he quickly moved on to pro­fess his love for America, his dream that America would accept and wel­come him one day, and his love for us, as peo­ple who believed in and rep­re­sented what America stands for: free­dom. He thanked us for lis­ten­ing and insisted that we join him and his friends for a few drinks. We accepted.

As we enjoyed com­pli­men­tary Tsingtaos and received instruc­tion on how to play their dice game, our new Chinese friend launched into a tirade of ques­tions.

"Where are you from in America?" "Do you like base­ball?" "Do you like Kobe Bryant?" "Do you like movies?" "Do you like Tom Cruise?" "Do you like Obama?"

At one point he paused his inter­ro­ga­tion to intro­duce me to one of his friends. His friend was thin, shy, and about my age. He had on a t-shirt with the movie poster for Pulp Fiction.

"Hey, great movie!" I said, point­ing. "I'm a big fan of Tarantino."

The younger man smiled, but our friend felt that wasn't appre­cia­tive enough. He pinched his friend's arm, whis­per­ing angrily under his breath, "say thank you, say thank you." I began to feel a lit­tle afraid of my new Chinese friend.

In addi­tion to ask­ing ques­tions, he also felt the need to tell me many of his thoughts regard­ing American pol­i­tics and pop cul­ture. The more mem­o­rable rev­e­la­tions included: he thinks for­mer Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping was the polit­i­cal equiv­a­lent of our cur­rent pres­i­dent Barack Obama; he doesn't like Obama as much as Bush (W.), pre­fer­ring the way Bush "treated the law"; Mao Zedong is one of his major idols; the most-played band on his iPhone is The Cranberries; and he loves the movie Mission Impossible, thinks Tom Cruise is a very hand­some man, and thought I was a sim­i­larly "beau­ti­ful American." I didn't know whether to feel flat­tered or fright­ened.

After one more Tsingtao, I stood up to bid him a good night and left. He shook my hand vio­lently and fol­lowed me out onto the main street, wav­ing me off as I turned the cor­ner. The last image I recall is of him trip­ping on a step and falling to his knees. A cou­ple of his friends came over to help him back up, and they went inside to the bar to dance. The three sober elderly men in their group stayed seated and quiet, look­ing on as they smoked their dark cig­a­rettes.

A ter­ri­ble climber

There is no excit­ing story behind this rev­e­la­tion except my failed attempt to climb the side of a moun­tain (a route that was rated "medium" in dif­fi­culty by our group's assigned climb­ing guru) at 9:00 a.m. while tired and slightly hun­gover (see: pre­vi­ous night, free Tsingtao, etc.). The assort­ment of cuts and scrapes that gath­ered on the under­sides of my arms and legs were badges of my inep­ti­tude.

But in the pound­ing heat of the moment, as I ascended 100– to 200-something feet in the air, as I strug­gled to fit my feet onto the thinnest sliv­ers of ledge or to keep my body afloat using only the ends of my fin­ger­tips, my mind kept flash­ing to a mem­ory from high school gym class. There I had also tried my hand at "rock climb­ing," albeit on my school's state-of-the-art, man­u­fac­tured moun­tain­side, out­fit­ted with friendly plas­tic color-coded grips to guide me along as I worked my way to the top. Here, how­ever, it was dif­fer­ent, and although I wasn't much bet­ter at climb­ing a karst cliff face in Guilin than I had been at work­ing my way to the top of our high school climb­ing wall, I'd arrived at a place that I never pos­si­bly could have imag­ined in my high school days, a place of self-discovery as much as one of an explo­ration of the other. Whether a Chinese god­dess, beau­ti­ful American, or ter­ri­ble climber, I was, strangely, dis­cov­er­ing some­thing new about myself here in China, far from home–and that's the real beauty of travel.