Farewell, Lanzhou! Final Peace Corps China post: 天下没有不散的宴席

天下没有不散的宴席 – There are no eternal banquets under Heaven

The time has come at last, a final post for my marvelous Peace Corps China adventure! This post is almost two months late – I served 25 months with Peace Corps and signed the completion of service papers July 19^th 2018. (technically, Peace Corps is meant to be a 27 month program, so actually I am writing this post at exactly 27 months after I started!)

For one reason or another, I never got around to writing the final blog post. I always found an excuse to leave my desk, to go for a bike ride, to video chat with my parents– to do anything but write the final chapter of my experience here and close the book for good. There were too many people to write about, too many memories to summarize.

Where do I start? Lanzhou will always be a second home to me, no matter how much the city changes – even if the metro is ever finally completed, or if the old low-rise buildings of ChengGuang district are bulldozed over for new luxury condos, or if White Pagoda Hill is felled by earthquake – I’ll know and love this city for all its endless changes, for its overwhelming chaos and few moments of peace, for all the backroads and alleys I’ve walked and biked a hundred times over.

I’ll be forever grateful for these two years – the experience of living in an amazing city in the heart of China, the students who taught me to care selflessly for others, the many friends I made on campus and downtown Lanzhou, the vegetable lady who hounded me about being single… my incredible relatives, the staff at our PC headquarters and my host family in Chengdu, and the never ending, hilarious, and insightful misadventures I got myself into that I will remember for the rest of my life.

---

There is a phrase in Chinese, 舍不得 (she bu de), which means something similar to – but much deeper than – “hate to part with”. The final weeks of Peace Corps were full of舍不得moments, of parting with a community that I lovingly built for myself, that made me smile every day.

At our vocational college, students graduate after 3 years. I hadn’t seen the juniors much in the final semester of my teaching here, and when I ran into a couple of the girls I taught the first semester moving out of their dorms for the last time – and out of the campus for good – I could no longer hold back the tears. We gave our hugs and I smiled and laughed through my tears – it finally seemed real, that our time here was over, and the young women would pursue their dreams and futures in the uncertainty of the real world, out of the safety and comfort of our small college campus.

A part of me wanted all my students to stay in school forever, but we should never hold ourselves or others back for fear of failure or hurt. My last words of advice for them: 日子很短，时间过得快，一定要为自己活！life is short, and time passes quickly– you must live for yourself!

---

I had a more proper sendoff with a group of male juniors before they left. The guys all lived in the same dorm and we quickly planned a night of singing at a downtown halal KTV, belting out some of my favorite Chinese songs I learned these past two years.

The guys will be alright – some will return to Xinjiang to teach English, others will spend another two years at a different college in Lanzhou to get a proper bachelor degree, and one will return to his hometown to be a teacher. We went to a local night market, ordered 甜胚子奶茶 fermented barley milk tea, and sat outside to enjoy our final hours together, before taking a lengthy bike ride back to our campus in relative silence.

---

Sometimes a goodbye just doesn’t feel adequate without chocolate cake, loud music, and an excessive amount of booze. 

My sophomores – class 2, always so mischievous – knew what I had on my mind, and threw a kickass farewell party for me in an empty classroom when the rest of the school was busy studying for finals.

I brought the cake, they brought the beer, and the rest of the night was a mishmash of dancing, shouting, selfies, and all the best energy in the world you would wish for a group of 20 year olds getting hammered off fake alcohol and whipped cream.

---

Some equally important goodbyes in Lanzhou: this one, to the adults!

Here we have our farewell banquet with the Dean and Vice Dean of the English department, our co-teachers, and my site mate Michelle. I’m grateful for the support they gave me through the two years and for their crafty sense of humor. (The Dean in particular waxes poetic about life’s pitfalls – namely marriage and having children – when he’s tipsy)

Zhou and Ciara- all our endless back and forth nonsense we pushed on each other – rare to have friendships like these. we’ve all moved on out of Lanzhou since – Zhou to Liverpool UK for yearlong English language program, Ciara to Bejing for dance. Until next time…

---

… my volleyball team!

This was one of my proudest achievements from my time at the university. I got a volleyball team going with my students. We weren’t the best at first, but the girls were open to nourishing a competitive spirit, and bruising their arms in the process. A couple guys hanging around (playing basketball, or badminton, etc) came to check out the commotion and pretty soon they grabbed their friends to join

…then volleyball became really fun! All of us would rush out of our 6:30 class, quickly eat dinner, and play until it was too dark to see the ball (around 9 PM). This secondary project took up most of my evenings in the final months of peace corps- sometimes even seven nights a week!

I loved that the girls were willing to try something new, and put their pride on the line. I love that they failed and missed the ball 50 times but kept going. I love that the guys are strategic and take turns spiking the ball. I love that there was potential for romance between players (and I hilariously got dragged into it all as a wingman at some point)

And when it was time for me to leave and say goodbye, one of the guys on the team (teal shirt, on the right) wrote a most heartfelt farewell poem for me, which sums up all the best Peace Corps has to offer:

这个大高个
喜欢画画喜欢打排球
画的画呢真的是好看
他是我见到的第一个
用绘画的形式记录生活的人
想要组建排球小分队
现在小分队也已壮大了
嗯，还是希望你
可以一直做着自己想做的事
过着自己想要过的生活
平淡岁月欢乐不断
我的大兄弟，Harrison
Good luck

This tall guy here
He likes to draw and likes to play volleyball
His paintings are really good
He is the first one I’ve seen
Who uses painting to shape the memories of people in his life
He wanted to create a small volleyball team
Now that team is already robust and strong
Yes, I hope that you
Always do what you want to do
Always live the life you want to live
In peace and endless happiness
My older brother, Harrison
Good luck

---

To LanZOO GanZOO

We did it! We survived two years in a part of China no foreigner has ever heard of, and no Chinese national would want to spend two weeks in, much less two years. And we made the most of our time here: grew, laughed, loved, played too much Nintendo Overcooked… all the best to my LanZOO/ GanZOO 22s!

---

And to my family

It’s beyond good fortune that my Peace Corps site just happened to be in the same city where my half-aunt and her family live. I cherished spending two years with relatives I had never met before, but felt connected to immediately after our first dinner together.

In the rare days I was unhappy or faced uncertainty about the future, I would drop by my aunt’s home for lunch and tea, and even sitting in silence I felt comfortable and loved. Perhaps she and her husband didn’t have the answers, but their presence always calmed me; wisdom from having lived 80+ years through unimaginable turmoil – famine, war, revolution, personal loss – can be felt without words, and I always left their home believing things would be okay. Thank you for everything.

Cycling Trips: MenYuan, XiaHe

From June – August, most parts of China during the summer become unbearably hot and humid. Historically there were three furnaces (三大火炉) – Chongqing, Nanjing, and Wuhan- cities that were notorious for their deathly summer heat. Then there were four furnaces (Changsha being the forth), then seven… and now thanks to global warming there are like 20+ furnace cities in China.

Luckily for us in the northwest, we have wonderfully tolerable summer days, due to high altitude and low humidity. This makes for great exploration of the vast fields/ plains/ grasslands that make up most of Qinghai and some parts of Gansu. I spent some time in MenYuan and XiaHe to enjoy the scenery and good climate- and was smart enough to bring a jacket, as temperatures plummeted at night.

MenYuan

MenYuan is two hours northwest of Lanzhou by high speed rail. Had I arrived in mid-July, i would have been greeted with endless fields of bright yellow canola flowers. I went a week late (around the end of July) and missed out on peak-canola season, but the vista was still astounding. 

I couldn’t find anything online about how to rent a bicycle, but that wasnt an issue in the end- the plaza outside the MenYuan rail station hosted a bike rental shop for the adventurous traveler. A full day rental costs 100 RMB, and i dropped off my US Passport as a deposit (the guys at the shop had never seen one, and gleefully passed it around for a short while) 

i swerved off the main highway into the small villages to check out the scene. the lifestyle there was still very traditional- people had collected cow dung to burn for fuel, and piled the dried dung into large mounds. (village not pictured, but see cows below)

there were also many beekeepers who come through Qinghai in the summer to let their bees do the work of pollinating the flowers, and collect fresh honey in return.

the downside is that I must have rode through areas of heavy bee traffic, and a bee got caught in my hair and stung my scalp! (a bee trapped in human hair will recognize the situation to be a bear attack, and sting when it cannot get out of what it thinks is bear fur. i know this from my Redhook community farm beekeeping days! see below for evidence from 2014)

The sting caused lingering pain for a good 15 – 20 minutes. i decided to protect myself by wrapping my hair in my t-shirt for the rest of the day…

Xiahe

I had come here last summer to see Labrang Monastery, and returned again to check out the local grasslands. I rented a bike for 50 RMB and rode south of the monastery.

the views were not as splendid as the plains in Qinghai (mostly because the grasslands here have been fenced off, and no matter how far away from the touristy areas i biked, everything was still enclosed). however, i did see a lot of bored-looking horses; born with the ability to run endlessly through the wilderness, but fated to spend a lifetime sequestered in a few acres of land to pose with tourists for a small sum of money. 

i sent the horse photo to my parents (“oh no! the baby horse is dead!”) but i think foals sleep on the ground… i think…

the street signs were interesting where everything was written three times- in simplified Chinese, tibetan script, and English (or a phonetic translation of tibetan script, more accurately. the tibetan script pronunciation sounds nothing like mandarin chinese)

at some point, the distant dark clouds caught up with me, and on my return journey home i was forced to ride under a patch of cloud that was relentlessly pounding the ground below with rain… i didnt want to miss the bus back to Lanzhou so i had no choice but to speed through the 1km span of angry cloud, and was utterly drenched… but a few minutes later i emerged into the sunshine yet again!

Great Wall Cinema Park and Lanzhou New Area

Every time I head to the airport some 40 miles north of Lanzhou, in the final minutes of my ride I always pass a giant replica Sphinx and Acropolis rising out of the desert dust, and an endless expanse of construction in the background. This week I finally took an hour long bus ride to visit these structures and find out more about “Lanzhou New Area”!

---

Great Wall Cinema Park

At the edge of Lanzhou New Area sits “the Great Wall Cinema Park” where the Sphinx and Beijing’s Temple of Heaven are casually hanging out. A ticket costs 50 RMB, and another 10 RMB gets you access to a sight-seeing cart, which I took because I wasn’t in the mood to walk across this large but sparsely decorated park/ movie set.

The Cinema Park is mish-mosh of cultural heritage sites- Forbidden City to your right, a scaled down Tang Dynasty DaMing Palace to the left…

…and then suddenly, a massive Transformer’s head the size of a small hill greets you around the corner.

I suppose it’s fitting that something Transformers related shows up at this park; the franchise has been hugely popular in China, and several films had extra scenes spliced in with Chinese stars for the mainland market.

I should recommend they add a monument of Kim Kardashian’s ass here too, as she is equally influential around the world, the perfect role model for a new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs who will give up anything to make it big and #haveitall! #womenwhowork #bosslady

Anyway, I reach the southern end of the park where the Sphinx is resting. It’s not at all out of place here in the desert, neglected and alone in the sand and dust. I can’t comment on the artistic integrity of the structure (my only planned trip to Cairo was cancelled in 2011 at the height of the Arab Spring). I hate it when citizens fighting for democracy disrupt my well-deserved vacations to authoritarian countries a swing set in front of the Sphinx ruins my perfect selfie!

Next up is the Parthenon, which I have been fortunate enough to see in 2009 (also near the height of the Greek debt crisis- bad timing all around) It’s likely a 1:1 replica, replete with missing portions of the façade, due to looting by the British asshole Thomas Bruce, the 7^th Earl of Elgin from 1801 onward.   

And then there was this structure a few steps east of the Parthenon, a large cerulean-blue tiled pavilion. Worldly Harrison was so, so certain it came from Shiraz or Isfahan in Iran.

How romantic 浪漫, the idea that two architectural structures from millennia old rival civilizations – both ravaged beyond recognition by the neoliberalism (first Iran in 1953, when a secular and democratically elected Mohammed Mosaddegh was overthrown by the British government and CIA to protect the revenue streams of the oil and gas company known today as BP, and now Greece held hostage by the IMF, European Commission, and European Central Bank for failing to pay back risky, artificially cheap loans originated by private German and French banks [why are ordinary citizens responsible for failed investments made by private financial services groups?!?]) – now sit side by side in an empty movie park, next to Lanzhou airport.

But no, the lady driving my sight-seeing cart tells me it was just a random pavilion built for the Hui people in Lanzhou. My inner historian and faux-economist are crestfallen.

---

Lanzhou New Area

China is infamous for ghost cities; Ordos in Inner Mongolia is probably the most notorious, a $160 billion USD gleaming modern city meant to be home to one million occupants but is mostly empty a decade after completion. (a photo of Ordos from GettyImages below)

Municipal governments across China build these mega cities in the middle of nowhere – complete with museums, soccer stadiums, artificial lakes, parks, etc.) to reach public spending/ economic growth quotas, only to find there was never a real demand for these “new development areas” to begin with. 

I have faith that Lanzhou New Area is different- tens of thousands of Chinese outsiders (外地人) from more provincial parts of Gansu and the west move to Lanzhou each year. There is genuine demand for housing (Lanzhou is sandwiched between mountains on the north and south side- the city cannot physically expand beyond its current borders),

By 2030 one million people are expected to move in as full time residents. There is a promotional video for the new city, stylistically similar to propaganda clips from the Trump and Kim Jong-Un administrations, for interested investors.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Lanzhou New Area’s 5 hospitals and 75 public schools are up and running near capacity by the end of the next decade. For now, it’s still a surreal experience to take a bus through the Lanzhou New Area.

In New York you see the occasional skyscraper built; in Chengdu you might see dozens of residential complex apartments rising simultaneously in the outer city rings. But here, the entire city is still under construction- hundreds of commercial and residential towers are half finished, stretching for miles on end. I wish I had a drone to capture a bird’s eye view of the construction frenzy.

Vast roads meant for six lanes of traffic are mostly unused. Interestingly, it seems all of the vegetation has already been planted, giving the trees and parks a decade to mature before they are put to daily use- pretty good planning!

Most of the finished apartments sit empty, but there are pockets of residential life where some people have permanently moved in. I ate a bowl of tomato and egg noodles and asked the guys at the shop about the cost of the apartments- currently under 5,000 RMB per square meter (half of the price in Lanzhou proper, less than 1/15 the price in Tier 1 cities). I should invest in an apartment here, instead of a master’s degree…

I quietly relished in the experience of riding the new cross-town bus (with new car smell!) as the only passenger; Probably the only time in my life living in China that this will ever happen!

groomsman!

I had the privilege of attending the wedding (as a groomsman, no less!) of my best friends, Monica and Fox! Here are some highlights of all the antics that went down, starting 24 hours before walking down the aisle:

---

Mylar balloons:

The gang thought they picked up golden mylar balloons that spelled “LOVE”… but opening the pack, the first couple letters were “H” “P” “D” “Y” and we freaked thinking that we got a “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” set… but after blowing up and sorting out all the balloons it actually said “HAPPY WEDDING”, which was a bit funny but still thankfully relevant. Anyway the balloons were impossible to stick the wall, and letters kept falling off throughout the evening

---

In a traditional Chinese wedding, the groom and his guests have to go to the bride’s home before the wedding, and beg for her hand in marriage. There are lots of games held to test the groom’s devotion before the bride is set free and can finally leave the house, and I got a taste of how some of this plays out. (on the car ride over I had heard horror stories where the groom was so frustrated/ humiliated with the situation that he leaves without the bride and cancels his own wedding- yikes!!)

So it is a bit like a fantasy video game with a half dozen levels, combining both strength and wits to clear all the challenges and reach the bride. Except instead of demons and goblins we have in-laws, which, if relationships are not properly managed, could be worse than video game monsters 🙂

---

Level 1: As soon as the elevator door opens, we step out but realize the door leading to the hallways has been forced closed.. and the first challenge is to rip the door open. There’s a lot of heckling from both sides but the bride’s guests finally relent and we get through unscathed.

Level 2: the apartment door is locked shut. We come prepared with red envelopes and “bribe” various in-laws to open the door for us. A guy pulls out his phone and demands Fox pay him via WeChat – but Fox cleverly says there’s no wifi in the building and he only has 3G, averting a costly showdown. Eventually we give enough money that the front door opens.

Level 3: of course, the bedroom door (where the bride resides) is also locked shut. Monica is trapped in her castle tower with four bridesmaids, who also – not surprisingly – need some red envelopes before we are allowed in. The girls refused to budge for the longest time until the adults were nervous we would all be late for the wedding, and they finally relent.

Level 4: now, things get tricky. Monica presents Fox with a napkin that has been kissed by the five girls, leaving five lipstick stains of various shades. He has to correctly guess which set of lips belongs to his future wife. He guesses incorrectly and the girls pull out a tray of sesame balls, normally a welcome treat, but these have been laced with mint toothpaste and Sichuan peppers.

The groomsmen are sacrificed and take turns eating the sesame balls as punishment. I suspect the game was rigged as Fox’s first four guesses were all – allegedly – incorrect (statistically unlikely), and we are forced to finish the tray of repulsive, stomach-churning snacks.

Level 5: we are presented with a loaf of sliced bread. By this point I was certain there was arsenic and laxatives baked into the crust, but no, it gets more interesting. Using our teeth we must bite the bread into pieces that can be assembled together to form Monica’s surname, Ge 葛. I didn’t even know her last name was Ge, and I have no idea what this character looks like, so I make a bunny with my bread.

We failed! but the wedding was already paid for, so the games continue!

FINAL LEVEL: Monica’s shoes have gone missing! She can’t possibly leave the house until we find her shoes! They are hidden somewhere in the room. I rip open the wardrobe doors and I’m ready to *TRASH* the closets much to Monica’s shock and horror, but the guys are fast and find a shoe under the bed and another behind the curtain. Yay! Game Over! We get to leave for the banquet, with the closets intact!

---

Bride Wars: Spring is wedding season in Lanzhou, and it’s impossible for a bride and groom to find a venue just for themselves on the weekends here. There will be multiple weddings going on at once, and this was the scenario we faced as well. Both brides were standing across from each other in the grand foyer greeting their guests; more than once a little kid ran up to greet the wrong bride 🙂

The wedding planner is meticulous in his plans, and at the start of the banquet the groomsmen and bridesmaids must walk onto the catwalk in unison, paired together by height. Monica and Fox follow and they look so thrilled in the moment – Fox in particular is overwhelmed with emotion. I couldn’t be happier for them, and it was a real treat to see two of my best friends in Lanzhou get married… aww!

---

As groomsmen, its our job to circulate throughout the banquet and force everyone at each table to take a shot of baijiu with the groom. Obviously Fox would be dead if he took 200+ shots, so the responsibility is shared amongst the guys. I was initially looking forward to taking part in these antics, as the tables have *finally* turned, and I could get my revenge and shout at everyone “DRINK YOU WORTHLESS SCUM!” “TAKE A SHOT!!” “AWW, DON’T TELL ME YOUR ON ANTIBIOTICS!” “ARE YOU SICK? DO YOU HAVE A DOCTOR’S NOTE?” after having this happen to me so many times already at other weddings.

But, I would of course be required to drink my share of liquor in return, and – unlike Carey Elwes killing off Vizzini with iocaine powder in The Princess Bride – I haven’t been working on my alcohol tolerance at all these past two years……and no one wanted to see a groomsman puking mid-wedding, or worse – drunkenly snatching food off other people’s plates, or throwing a glass of Sprite in a kid’s face, etc – so I was relieved of my duties early and was able to enjoy the rest of the banquet as a mere commoner.

The bridesmaids and groomsmen initially planned to throw a big KTV party later that evening, but we were all so exhausted from the past two days of chaos that we postponed the karaoke madness for another weekend… stay tuned!