Saturday September 16, 2000

[Another letter home]

Last night I went to Hua Shan. Shan is mountain and Hua, well, its something along the lines of brilliant magnificent splendid (or so my pocket dictionary tells me). But the mountain tells me no different. I made a pilgrimage this weekend, not knowing it beforehand. It swept me up when I passed beyond my third or fourth exhaustion, around 2 or 3 in the morning. but anyway, the beginning...

The weather right now is probably as good as it’s going to get, crispy morning air and the occasional leaf falling and just the right layer of clothes. Plus enough wind to blow away some of the pollution and see blue sky in Xian. So on Friday in my second class three boys packed up their books saying they were going to Hua Shan and sorry to the teacher. I immediately packed up my books too and went with them.

With three other korean girls we took a train to Hua Shan. That makes 7 of us, two boys from switzerland, one from italy, the korean girls and me. The train, 2 1/2 hours, was about 1 dollar for no seats. We girls were gallantly shifted from seat to seat by men who were traveling about 36 hours south to Xiamen. For them 2 hours is nothing. But the white boys got to stand in the aisles.

Arriving 15 km from Hua Shan we took a taxi which didn't drop us off at the mountain, but at a restaurant in late afternoon. Hua Shan is one of five sacred mountains in China, 2500 meters or so high, taoist temples along the way up, caves high in the granite rocks with chains and cut-out foot notches to pull yourself up with characters painted on the rocks telling names and stories. There are a few ways of getting up to the top, the easiest being an Austrian-built cablecar. The next easiest being hiking up the 6 km of sheer cliffs during the day. The last option is hiking up at night and arriving at dawn to see the sunrise. Needless to say we took the last.

A few things to set the scene: it’s china first of all so hiking means cemented path with several gates to pay at (they figure when they've gotten you to pay 80 kuai you won't go back so they'll charge you another 20 a few hundred feet later). Second on the set is that last tuesday was the second biggest festival known in translation as the Mid-Autumn Festival. In true pagan spirit it’s on the full moon and everyone sits outside with candles and sings. So on this friday we had a nearly full moon.

There is of course tradition, which is to arrive in Hua Shan and sleep a couple hours in a room for too much money and then start hiking at 11 or midnight and that gets you there around dawn. The korean girls could sleep but we westerners were too excited to be out of the city to take a nap. Plus I was with swiss boys who insisted it was unnecessary for them to rest before climbing a mountain (to their credit they arrived at the top an hour before my italian friend and I, and a full three hours before the korean ladies).

While we waited the evening out we drank tea and met some very very drunk chinese who insisted we drink some bai jiu (white liquor made from something terrible and tasting even worse) and made friends and so on.

At 11 we began by passing through several of those red sloping roof gates that make china so picturesque, paying at each of them. Then through a temple and then the upward climb.

It's magic as soon as you forget about being a foreigner (for they make you pay more). The moon the moon the moon, nothing does what the moon does to the world when it’s bright and blue on the skin of mountains peeled away from the bushes and trees of its surface. Crossing white chinese bridges with massive white boulders beneath and only the sound of water reflected off the earth to tell you it’s there. I discovered on the train that two of the boys were photographers, and when I remarked as we walked that it was like walking in a negative one of them let out an audible breath, for this is really what it was like. It was so bright there was simply no need for flashlights. There were shadows were there should have been light, and where there should have been shadow it was like the underworld was lit up in blue water.

As for the path, made out of white granite rocks, like hansel and gretel they lit up the trail unnaturally - or super-naturally. But make no mistake, even a semi-paved trail cannot make the climb easy. For the first 3 km it’s a steep path upwards, with plenty of small shacks and stone pavilions with chairs and tea and apples and cucumbers to nibble. At some points the path is right in your face it’s so steep. But then comes the stairs. The last 3 km are steps cutting into the mountain with chains along the sides to pull yourself up with. There's no real break in the steps, just turn the corner and face several more hundred feet of stairs going straight up. The first set of stairs is at least 200 feet to a reststop, and to stop in the middle of them is death. It’s a shock, for even knowing that there are that many stairs is incredulous and you think they must be the end but they are not, not at all. The great fear is of looking up for then you just can't imagine taking another step. but you do.

With a recipe like this - all these stairs and all night long and altitude and the mountains rising up on all sides and the singular fact of the moon, well, it's no surprise that it turns into a nearly hallucinatory experience of pure beauty and loss of self, fully absorbed by the natural world around you. For the chinese are decidedly pagans and no church or temple will do what the natural world will do without being asked, on its own, you there or not. The chinese just know to go there.

We climbed and we were not alone, for it is china. And there are people everywhere all the time! At one point, at the sheerest point, with steps only the width of half of my shoe, at 3 in the morning, I was waiting in a line, step by step, with chinese before me and chinese behind p. Somewhere above us were the swiss boys doing credit to their country.

I surpassed physical presence several times, over and over again. We asked ourselves what our legs would feel like tomorrow, and eventually asked ourselves what our legs felt like right now.
At one point p and I sat down on the steps and talked about china with confusion and awe and ideas and more confusion. We were looking out between the crack of the mountains on either side, both of us blue, clear air and chinese people passing, continually commenting on the laowai [foreigners]. We discussed how china is so huge it incorporates everything, turns everything chinese. And it was spiritual in the bathwaters of blue negation, a swamp of reversal.

And when I started climbing again step by step the thought occurred to me that this is what a pilgrimage is, and I had never really thought about it before, but it means to do something beyond yourself for the sake of whatever is beyond you. And it was religious from that point on and really I felt no tiredness or pain anymore, simply rising with the mountain.

When we got to the 10-foot-long stretch of level ground right before the last set of stairs, we were greeted by policemen who check your ticket to make sure you paid. I didn't even have the energy to laugh, I just searched blindly through my pockets and moved on.

When we paused to wait for others I would become very cold and shiver and feel sleep coming on like a shadow under light approaching its apex, to collide violently with my senses and set them in slumber. But I held off until the end, the top of the mountain, where p. and I met up with the swiss boys and we ate chicken roll on chinese bing.

I was the first to lay down on the steps. We slept the rest of the darkness away, fitfully for we were wet with sweat and upon stopping the wind swept away all our body heat. Even with long underwear wool socks 4 shirts a jacket and a thermal tied around my head, it was freezing. I don't know how long I slept but when I next sat up everyone was holding their bags and curled up on the steps like cats.

The sun rose and it was delirium. It seemed that I had all the crises of a real transformation, though later in the blasted sunlight all I was left with was silver threads and a memory of the tapestry.

The three boys climbed back down and the korean ladies took the cablecar down and I rented a bed for a few hours (there are hostels up top - stone and small between the rocks and cliffs). I couldn't leave the mountain so soon after such an effort (psychically or physically).

I got up around 11 to the deafening sound of chinese tourists up on the mountain for the day via cablecar. I walked around a bit and decided to slip into some bushes to sleep off the rest of my exhaustion. The chinese will sleep anywhere but in solitude it seems. I saw one guy in a ditch beside some stairs in mid-afternoon. But I managed to find some dirt and small purple flowers and trees to scatter shade on my skin and I napped for several more hours. I woke up and sat on some chairs and listened to a few businessmen urge each other to speak some english to me while I made my lunch (chemical soup, aka, ramen noodles). After a few minutes of listening to them, I turned to them and told them they could ask me themselves as I could speak chinese. Shouts of laughter and great satisfaction on my part, followed by a not so interesting conversation about money.

When the chinese were quiet enough I heard someone playing the flute deep down below the ravine.

Halfway through my walk down the mountain I felt a lightness pervade me. I ate chocolate sitting on a boulder. Dropping off to the right were more white boulders with water so clear you could only tell it was there by the noise and the dampened part of the rocks. My knees were weak beyond functioning but I didn't care because I met a beautiful tiny old lady who lives in these rocks, white hair pulled away from her wrinkled tanned face and fastened neatly in a bun and a black leather band an inch wide running all around her head.

Her eyes were black shiny marbles tucked under stretched flaps of skin and she spoke a dialect I couldn't understand. But we smiled and her eyes scattered light against the rocks and against my face. She gave me a glass of hot water, as I'm sure it was all she had. She kept stepping out on the path and looking up at the mountain.

And I came slowly farther down, down down steps and stopped to sit in a chair and had tea with a beautiful girl woman who spoke very slowly and clearly about china and huashan and her family and food and her life. We drank and talked for 15 minutes and she wouldn't let me pay for the tea.

Coming down the mountain the workmen sang loudly against the rocks and steps and offer to carry my bag sweetly. We talk slowly because its all a dialect but we manage to communicate while the spring down the steps in soft chinese shoes and rubber strong legs, giving and taking with the mountain as it sees fit.

And now back in Xian, showered and munching on peanut butter and crackers.