May 8: Wednesday morning. I have no classes today, plan to spend the morning correcting midterm exams and the afternoon with Mary at Bai Ta Se, the White Pagoda high above the city. The telephone rings; it’s Sun Yue Rui asking me if I would like to go to Xi’An tomorrow and spend the next four days judging a speech competition. Of course! She instructs me to go to a downtown hotel for the “interview” at 11. I don my best skirt and blouse and hurry to the bus. In the hotel lobby, Sun joins me and she confers with several people in Chinese. I chat with a bubbly girl from the local broadcasting station who speaks fluent English. Sun relates that there is no speech competition, but we are to be “hosts” of the tour. Is that OK with me? Sure. Why not? Host? Meaning chaperone? Who knows? We also learn that there will be seventy “children” on the tour, and that we’ll leave at 6 in the morning. If Sun knows more, she isn’t saying. We’ve been in the lobby about fifteen minutes, and it’s time to leave. She tells me she’ll phone me later with more details, and we part.

I cancel my plans with Mary and spend the afternoon getting ready: clean the fridge, sort out clothes, put my passport out where I won’t forget it. All the while I reflect on a fact of life in China: information is rationed. Information is shared late, always truncated, incomplete, often deliberately misleading. This gives the few, the owners of the full story, tremendous power over everyone below them in the rigid hierarchy. In early evening I learn from Sun that the “producer” of the tour has withdrawn the invitation. We won’t go to Xi’An after all. No reason has been given, not that I expect it.

Countless times in China I have opened my Daily eMo from Barbara Crafton and found the very words I needed to salvage my day. This time was no exception:

Night Prayer

Lord,
it is night.
The night is for stillness.
Let us be still in the presence of God.
It is night after a long day.
What has been done has been done;
what has not been done has not been done;
let it be.
The night is dark.
Let our fears of the darkness of the world and of our own lives
rest in you.
The night is quiet.
Let the quietness of your peace enfold us,
all dear to us,
and all who have no peace.
The night heralds the dawn.
Let us look expectantly to a new day,
new joys,
new possibilities.
In your name we pray.
Amen.
-New Zealand Prayer Book, p.184

Qing Ming: Tomb Sweeping Day. Beginning this year, the Chinese government has re-arranged the system of national holidays. Instead of three "golden weeks" of public transportation mayhem, we now have a range of one-day holidays. Work units are already leaning toward the long weekend approach that is popular in the U.S., cobbling in an extra day of leave if necessary, to be paid back at another time. Some of the current roster of holidays are historical/political (e.g. International Labor Day) and others are traditional, based on the lunar calendar (e.g. Qing Ming, long unrecognized under Communist rule.)

This year I celebrated Qing Ming with a walk in the park followed by tea with a colleague and his girlfriend. My walk is documented in video:



From my journal:
Tea with Li Wei and his cute girlfriend. He is a nice kid, a typical young Chinese guy: humorless bore. During our tea, the girlfriend sometimes yawns, sometimes rolls her eyes at me. He bores her, too. He just talks and talks. NBA, capitals of US states . . . on and on. He stumbles upon the issue of Sept. 11 and suddenly veers to Tibet, informs me that recently China experienced terrorist attacks in Lhasa. He fills me in on some details, from the Chinese nationalist perspective. He apparently assumes I live under a rock and know nothing about any of this. I ask with feigned innocence, why does he refer to the people of Tibet as the “Tibetan ethnic minority?” I get a huge, bombastic answer about the various Tibetan peoples who inhabit Yunnan, Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai as well as the so-called autonomous region. Their linguistic differences. Blah, blah. I ask him if it isn’t true that many Han Chinese were once Buddhist. “Never!” he shouts, looking horrified. I ask him why I see temples and pagodas everywhere I travel in China. Oh, he concedes, yes. But never Tibetan Buddhist!