In our days touring Beijing and Xian, we twenty-one Americans, a regionally diverse group from Washington State (2), California (3), Nevada (2), Texas (2), Illinois (2), Florida (6), New Jersey (2), and Maine (2) used every sense to capture the magic and unusual.

We clicked our digital cameras at contrasting images of men carrying mops or vegetables in pails hanging by rope from their cross-shoulder yokes, while other Chinese drove Lexus sedans beside them. On the sidewalks and streets men and women, recent emigrants from farm regions, wielded straw brooms, brushing debris into buckets. We brought skyscrapers close with telephoto lenses and captured the narrow streets and houses of a hutong (village of one-story flats) near the Forbidden City. Our local guide told us that the number of steps leading to an entrance of a home in a hutong told the status of the occupant. Five steps was the number for the most prestigious residents.

We were hearing the sounds of Mandarin on the streets, in parks, and at the Great Wall. We dickered with vendors at every stop and departure, learning the intricacies of converting money and finding an edge in negotiations for color photography books, caps, and purses.

We tasted egg drop soup, bok chow, steamed eggplant, Peking Duck, and the ever-present fried rice, rice noodles, and dumplings off revolving platforms at the centers of tables. We marveled at the smooth flavor of local beer and drank cup after cup of Jasmine tea. We came to know that a meal was over when watermelon slices appeared on the table. And, no, Chinese restaurants did not serve fortune cookies.

As often is the case on group tours, our guides put a human face to our adventure. Each guide adopted an English language name to make it easier for us to remember and probably to avoid embarrassing mispronunciations. Our tour director, a resident of Beijing who had emigrated from northern China, called herself "Joy." The name was appropriate, for she managed to remain upbeat even to the fourteenth day in spite of leading a group of meandering seniors. Not only did she wear a sincere smile, but she told jokes as well. Unlike our hotels which had western-style toilets, she took us to public parks where we witnessed Chinese doing tai chi and dances, both traditional with ribbons and fans, as well as modern swing steps. These places had what Joy referred to as "Happy Houses." They were rated with stars. The ones that had clean western-style toilets with paper were four- or five-star; whereas the ones that didn't have western-style toilets and were less clean, requiring you to squat and use your own paper, were rated three stars or less. On a late evening unscheduled bus trip, we stopped at a truck stop for emergency needs, and I encountered a restroom I rated a minus three.

Perhaps knowing foreigners carried many misconceptions about China (including those advanced by the current American administration that has the tendency to demonize perceived enemy governments), our guides used the time between bus stops to explain social and political realities in China. Joy explained the birth control situation by decades. In the '50s and '60s, couples could have two children. In the '70s and '80s, only one was allowed and that one had to be applied for in advance with a birthing certificate. She related that some couples had neglected to get permission and forced abortions were the outcome. Now, in the 21st Century, citizens of the six largest cities could have two children and farmers could have two if they spaced the children five years apart.

She explained how parents cared for their children when both parents worked, the norm in China. Children from eighteen months to six years old were often left with grandparents during the weekdays, and if grandparents were not available, they were put in childcare facilities. School-age children were placed in boarding schools and came home on weekends and/or on vacation breaks. In China men retire at age 60 and women at age 55 if they were working class, but educated persons continued, if they wanted, for an additional five years for either sex. Health care varied throughout the country with the farmers getting the least attention.

Peter, our local guide in Beijing, said he was a Han, the majority ethnic group in China. He explained that there were 52 minority ethnic groups, comprising about 7 percent of the population. Peter talked about each destination in Beijing as we drove to it, giving us background information to enhance our experience of such places as the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the Summer Palace and Tiananmen Square. These three places were all packed with tourists (Chinese, other Asians, and westerners from Europe and America) and provided another perspective on the immense scale of things in China, now and in the past.

The Gate of Heavenly Peace held many temples (one Buddhist temple was under repair) and a lake where an Emperor's favorite concubine had a marble boat built on the shore. This marble vessel was about 60 feet long and had two floors above the deck.

The Forbidden City, the home and audience hall of Ming and Qing Emperors, took fourteen years to build by 100,000 artisans and 1,000,000 laborers. The pagoda style buildings contain 9,000 rooms and were home to 9,000 ladies in waiting and a vast entourage of eunuchs the only other males allowed in the city at night besides the emperor.

This explains why the adjacent Hutong existed to house the families of male advisors to the Emperor. The Summer Palace was built in the 12th century and enhanced by the Empress Dowager Ci Xi in 1895. The emperor's court lived and conducted business here from mid-April to mid-October annually.

After Peter explained an icon or a place, he would pause, as if he too had grasped the point by saying, "Yeah, that's it." At other moments he would survey the group sitting down the aisle and say, "OK?" He didn't expect an answer to his rhetorical question; he was just putting an exclamation mark on his comments. When he directed our attentions to a building, a bridge, monument or place, he would add, "Take a look, yeah." These phrases established that he had learned his English from Americans, and the use of the word "ideer" occasionally placed at least one teacher as a New Englander. He told us about the meaning of colors (red=happiness, yellow=Emperor, gray, black and white=commoners) about treasures (jade and silk=China, porcelain, tea, gold and pearls, etc.) and about numbers (nine is best, three and eight are good, but four is to be avoided.) Peter was particularly emphatic when he said upon our arrival at the Great Wall, "If you walk the Great Wall, you are a hero."

We had all, of course, been looking forward to climbing on the Great Wall. Its construction history spoke again to the grand visions undertook by Chinese emperors. The wall extended over 2,400 miles and had been tackled in sections and only linked together after about twenty centuries had passed. We took a cable car up to the Great Wall and climbed up steps to the walkway at the top. The weather was perfect, and we could see the wall snake itself along the hills and over ridges in both directions. There were gate houses every block or so along the route, where soldiers had served as lookouts and defenders of the border from the masses to the north.

After an hour or so of taking photographs and just soaking in the atmosphere of this wonder of the world, Helen and I and the others returned to the cable cars and descended back to the real world. That world included a gauntlet of venders that stretched on both sides of the trail to our bus parking lot. These were the most aggressive venders we had encountered, and some sales were lost because of it. There was no grief in our group over this situation since many had packages of silk and fresh water pearls stored in the bus from our earlier stops at two factories. We had survived and were rewarded that evening with a Peking Duck dinner before we tucked ourselves in to rest before our flight to Xian.

Tony, our local guide in Xian, took us first to see the ancient wall around the old city boundaries. The wall was still intact, and one could rent a bike to ride around the nine-mile circumference on the street wide top. Tony then ushered us to and through the terra-cotta soldiers' shrine and got the attention of wayward members of our group by saying, "Hello." Often he would accent a point with an elongated "Yeah," and a distant gaze, as if pondering the meaning of the idea himself.

We saw Yang Pei Yan at the terra-cotta shrine's sales shop. He is the farmer who discovered the soldiers when he dug for a water well. His discovery increased the knowledge of the Chinese past, and led to this tourist center. President Clinton visited the site and asked to meet the farmer. He was brought from his farm and shook the hand of the American President. Hilary Clinton then asked Yang to sign her copy of the book on the terra-cotta soldiers. These scenes were picked up by TV stations around the world. Since then Yang Pei Yan, the most famous farmer in the world, has been employed to sit at a chair behind a sales table, signing copies of books and getting his picture taken.

On our way back to our hotel, Tony directed our attention to a fender-bender between two cabs and said, "Dog bites dog." In moments of silence in the bus, Tony would regale us with jokes. He told us how Chiang Kai-shek had escaped to Taiwan with huge amounts of Chinese government money. He grinned and gave his nickname for the former President of Mainland China, "Cash man-shek." The undercurrents of tensions between the Chinese and a few other nations became apparent in these jokes. Both Peter and Tony joked that Japanese hotels weren't comfortable for Americans because the beds are too short. When our bus driver refused to obey a parking attendant's direction to park our vehicle to the side of the building and instead pulled the sizable bus right to the front steps of the Sheraton Hotel, Tony exclaimed, "We're out of control." "No," Joy retorted, "We've got a number-one driver," a term used to describe a willful vehicle operator, a necessity in the crowded streets of the cities of China.

One speech difficulty all our guides had was in pronouncing Ls. "Night club" became "night crib" for Tony. A kiln was kee-an for Joy. We didn't assume any superiority on this because Chinese, an inflected language, could hold considerable problems for beginners. A word in Chinese could change its meaning just by raising the pitch of one's voice.

So far we were learning more about our guides than about each other. Our conversations did reveal that we had three MD's, two Ph.D.'s, two teachers, two former business executives, one banker, one diplomat, one technologist, one acupuncturist, and the balance in homemakers. The two topics that engaged many Americans at home, politics and religion, had been left behind, at least so far.

© 2006 Belltown Messenger