Aesop forgot this one

Too much like a flying visit, we're back to Hong Kong today.

This time I exit China splattered in half-digested watermelon, thanks to one unnamed daughter's explosive vomit at the back of the bus en route to the airport. As the watermelon drips off my hair, she regards me, and says by way of consolation, 'I feel a bit better now'.

I am resigned to it.

Last time I left China I was on a boat chugging down the Pearl River, nurturing the start of a bladder infection.

One day, I caution the little Grits, you will be on an eight-hour bus journey packed with old farmers spitting between the bars of the windows while clutching chickens and sugar cane. The bus will shudder to a halt after four hours for a comfort stop. Everyone else will wee sensibly in the open air by the roadside. You, effete foreigner, will shrink and whimper about privacy until someone tuts and nods to a hut. Inside the hut is a bamboo screen. On one side of the screen is a mud patch and a rudimentary hole in the ground. Do not peer over the bamboo screen to see what is making the snuffling and grunting sound. Pigs are easily disturbed.

The moral of this story is, when you have to let it out, let it out.

With the caveat that it is better by a tree than an upset pig. And a plastic bag rather than your mother.

Past and present

Walking through Xi'an brings me out in a mild gloom. Twenty years ago it looked like this. Dismal with dusty grey buildings. I think the street trees may be new.


I console myself. The trunks - competing with China's national telephone network, the four lane highway and the thick soupy smog - are still upright. Maybe the way they are cantilevered into place is helping.

But then there's that same absence of colour in the cityscape. (Except for red.)


This has barely changed in twenty years. I put it down to the lack of advertising in China to jolly up the barren concrete, which is another numbingly depressing thought. That the inhabitants of a city can fill their eyes with multicolour only if there are competing commercial interests blasting out advertisements to better procure the yuan in their pockets. That's started, anyway, and maybe the Chinese authorities will invite some more.


So I look to the people instead, and how they're dressed. I recall more worker uniform blue and grey about the streets, whereas now it's utilitarian black, brown and grey padded jackets and trainers. I wonder if it's yet an unthinkable, inexplicable act to dress wildly, flamboyantly. I see one Asian teenage head, bobbing away from us down the escalator, bleached spiky blonde, but he is the exception. Maybe with him, the elders of the Xi'an City Collective imagine they are wrestling with the social problem of urban discontent.

In looking for the Museum of Steles which we found twenty years ago (but this time lost), we stumble across what looks like a craft or an artisan street. Highly organised with regimented stalls it reminds me of Camden after the clean up. Except for the noodle stall, which is a fantastic reminder that street life can be inviting and lethal all at once.


It's not all doom and gloom though. This time it's Chinese New Year, so the inhabitants are blowing the place up, without any ceremony at all. Nothing like, Excuse me, I'm about to create a sound which will make you think you're under artillery fire. None of that. Someone strolls up to a shop front, sets fire to a magazine of 50 firecrackers, then walks away. The pedestrians barely register the smoke. Eventually, their lack of remark transfers itself to me. After a couple of hours of smoke, silver flares and crack-crack-crack, I mostly tune it out and walk on by.

I thought firecrackers had been banned on account of the cost to life and limb, and the way that these rogue incendiary devices have a habit of burning down new hotels and thousand year old temples. Maybe I'm confused, and they were banned once but not now, or banned elsewhere and not here. Anyway, they're sold openly on the streets: I watch one elderly woman teach a toddler how to throw them to the ground for best effect.

But here's a relief. The grocery shops are not as I recall. Twenty years ago I couldn't find any, and ate mostly a pack of peanuts with my own body fat. How different from today! The convenience shops seem to be filled not with live animals, dessicated fish and tree bark, but with soap, alcohol and dried salt biscuits, so that's a relief. To me, anyway.


We find a Vanguard Supermarket, and I wander around there with my eyes popping out, lost in wonder, resolving that I'm living here until my visa expires, so I can learn enough language to shop confidently, play with all the foods, and cook Chinese vegetarian.



I suppose I should add in my educational notebook blog thingy that it wasn't all wandering about the streets in observation and reminiscence. We visited the Shaanxi History Museum and I lectured the little Grits on changes in China over twenty years and six thousand. We revisit what we learned about the Silk Road, because Xi'an is at the beginning of it. Or the end, depending which way you start.


I feel a little sad, because twenty years ago I would have worked out the postal system and posted a letter home to Suffolk where I could let my mother know where I was, and that I wasn't dead yet. She's dead now, so there's no-one to write home to.

But on reflection I think she thought it hilarious that at the age of 30 I declared I might like to stop going to work and go to China instead where I had a mind to bicycle. So I did that, yes I did.

Maybe in twenty years time my daughter might come to Xi'an and write to me back home in Suffolk. I'll open her letter in my papery hands and hear it say, 'Mother, you'll never guess where we are. It looks just the same, all dusty and grey without any colours. But tomorrow we're heading south. We're going to find some bikes and see some mountains.'

The reason to be here

Whatever that is, I say First stop, Banpo Neolithic settlement.


This has to be one of the most completely excavated neolithic sites around, hasn't it? Tell me about the others. I want to visit those too.

Grain pits, burial chambers, defensive ditches, evidence of settlement over a lengthy period of time due to multiple post holes, kilns, fire pits, tools, pottery... The children wish I would shut up as well. They shove their hands in their pockets, scowl, and say it's too cold to stand around.

Here's Squirrel, looking glum by a model of neolithic settlement.


She is probably counting the days when she can leave home to study a degree in Fairyology. That will mark an end to the ancient-tending mama dragging everyone out of warm beds, only to watch me enthusiastically jump up and down and joyfully point at bits of clay while breathlessly over-using the word fantastic!

Granted, the site is freezing, and covered in a thick layer of dust, so I try to be patient. Anyway, I bet she ends up dumping the poxy fairies and studying something useful like history, or rocks. One day it will dawn on her that fairies are not real, but neolithic settlements are and, best of all, this is where your great great grandmother used to live.


Not in the building above, obviously, because this is a terrible outdoor reconstruction in the process of being knocked down.



I hope so. At the moment it looks like the primitive neoliths used it as a dump site for the local builders.


Sorry about that, Banpo Museum, because Dig tells me the exhibits inside the new halls are just great and well worth visiting. Much better, he says, than staggering around outside, complaining about Chairman Mao and what that means for the Chinese marketing of prehistory.

So I didn't get to see the new exhibits. At all. I can only shake my head sorrowfully and know that I've left so many places where I wanted to stay longer that I've had to come to terms with regret and reluctance by saying that anything left undone is a reason to return. That's what I do here, so see you again, Banpo.

Anyway, it's a quick stop en route. The things the kids really want to see? The reason why anyone visits Xi'an at all.





All smiles now. Except Tiger. She is deadly serious. She brings the crowds to a halt with four hours of this.


I don't know what this says about the Chinese visitors, but most of them seem utterly intrigued by Tiger's sketching. They spend some time staring over her shoulders and pointing her out to their friends. Thanks to her, we get requests for photographs, intensive arm stroking, and one gentleman clasps his hands and bows to her.


She is totally oblivious to it all, so it hasn't gone to her head, although it might have gone to mine. Any more of this public attention and I will really become that home ed mother put up by the popular press - the one who is convinced her child is a genius, and maybe even Einstein, or Michelangelo, reincarnated in a frock. Soon I shall be insisting on an art degree by age 14 and invoicing Saint Martins for the privilege of looking at her. Dig, who is more level headed than me, but who didn't receive all the hugging, suggests she might just start with a GCSE in art, but be aware, because whatever the exam question, and whatever the site, she'll only ever draw a horse.

Xi'an

Sitting on the bus from Xi'an airport to the city centre, Tiger's first words are, 'Has there been a war?'

I've been thinking exactly the same. The yellow clay is churned over, as if by caterpillar tracks of heavy tanks. The dips and hollows in the flat land, gouged out like bomb craters, hold pools of still, grey water. Between the holes and spoil heaps, the broad flat lands are marked by shelled out buildings. We can see, interspersed along the wide, empty highway into town, windowless, grey concrete blocks, standing in half-state. I'm unsure if they are part way through construction, or part way demolished. There's no visible building equipment to put them up, or knock them down.

The bus turns to the prestige, Soviet-style highway that rolls straight into town. We pass a line of maybe twenty drooping trees, each trunk held upright by four large logs. They could be dead and rootless Christmas trees that some planning director agreed could be lodged in the ground, maybe not in the blind hope of renewal, but more as a political show of some future intention for the six lane highway.

'It's New Year' I tell Tiger, although I doubt it. We're looking at everyday in one of China's rapidly industrialising cities. 'All the builders are on holiday. When the festivities are over, they'll come back to finish the buildings.'

I think, but don't say, No they won't. I can't imagine any plan here. There's no architectural vision, no planning control, no strategy for satellite towns or urban living. The brutality, from airport to city, is blasted earth and infill. It is a bleak, post-war landscape, confusing and chaotic.

I have a point of comparison. I travelled in Xi'an twenty years ago. I remember flat lands, sure, but not this savage scarring, this ripping apart of the earth to expose its innards. I see nothing green, no grass, no crops. The scattered trees are leafless.

'And it's winter' I add. But I don't think a cold season explains this sight either. Here's the education. I tell her, 'China, it's going through the equivalent of an Industrial Revolution. Manufacturing needs factories, energy, utilities, transport. People come to the cities for work. They need somewhere to live. Xi'an is zoned for development.' It all sounds too cruel, so I say, 'Maybe if you travel back here in twenty years, perhaps you'll find the building rubble has gone, and the planners added parks, and street trees.'

I doubt my words, but I can't tell her what I really think. There isn't any plan. China's industrial explosion is without any coherent vision. It's a huge gobbling up of land in manufacturing, urban expansion and limitless construction. It's industry, technology, advancement. Ruthless, it's without rival, and we're witnessing it happening, raw.

The consequences for your future, my little girl? You can join pressure groups, urge environmental awareness, use your voice to question governments. You can't tell people in other countries that they are not allowed to aspire to lifestyles of easy transport and comfortable homes. Maybe you can tell them, they should try and avoid the damaging impact we already made.

In truth, facing this bleak vision of the future, I feel pretty much hopeless. I don't say that. We pass a Buick showroom. It stretches out, gleaming white frontage. I realise it's clean, shining, unlike every other building around, dusted in yellow earth. Then, as we pass a dirt track to the left, I don't point out the battered and dirty road sign, North West Institute of Nuclear Technology. Some observations are simply too fearful to utter.

As we approach the town centre, the buildings congregate closer along the roadsides. Low level, they close up the gaps and hug up next to each other, until they swell in dense clusters. Occasionally, sturdier building with severe lines and regular shuttered windows rise above the rest. I don't know what these buildings are for. They're all closed, shuttered with metal screens. Maybe they are local government offices, maybe administration centres. A few bear titles in English. I'm not much the wiser, although I can hear the brutal honesty of Chinese authority: Canadian Embassy Child Friendly Centre; Food Industry (Eastern); Middle School Number 83; National Base.

We've seen very few people in this extended suburb. The scale is too vast, the distances too far on foot or by bike. But as we approach the ancient city walls, Xi'an is thronging with people. Night is falling, and brilliant red letters illuminate the route. Inside the walls are the buildings that somehow escaped Mao and the cultural revolution. I'm unsure how; I guess they were useful to someone.

As the bus slows, we pass a huge TV screen. Orwellian, it pumps out a loop of advertisements: a giant woman, smiling, blowing a bubble into a bright blue sky, children running over a field. Around us there's thick air pollution, smog and dust. This, I remember from twenty years ago too. I left Xi'an with my throat burning. I blamed the thick stew of gases, chimney output, vehicle exhausts. Then, it was so much smaller, but I guess it was the beginning. Dig says, These days, they're trying. China has some environmental input. The vehicles can run on LPG, so something's being done, right?

The roads are congested, the pavements are filled with people, our bus stops and we alight, while Tiger holds my hand. She says, in the time we've been away from England, she's not seen a single sheep, or cow, or goat, or pig. There were chickens in cages, but we wondered if that was an illegal transport. She asks, 'Where are the farms?' I say, truthfully, 'I don't know. I guess they're somewhere.'