Mao’s poetry and Chinese amusement parks – part two of a retrospective on Saddleback’s trip to China

My phone was under my head when I woke up, the ghost of its approaching alarm piercing into the part of my subconscious reserved to stay awake whenever I left my zip code. 

A compounding tenseness crawled up my spine, culminating in a roll at the nape of my neck that caught and dragged when I turned my head, jutting itself forward into my collarbones to remind me of the shallowness of my sleep; this was the first night of finding balance in the tightrope walk between maintaining a normal presentation (sans the eyebags, post-nasal drip rasping in my voice, and culminating ache in my stomach crunching my posture forward) and a secure alertness while morning drew forward. 

It was 6:57 a.m., three minutes before my alarm was set to go off — passively and unenthusiastically set the night before. 

Cooper was already awake, leaning on his elbow across from me and scrolling on his phone with a dusty and unappealing expression. I was the first of us to take a shower and get dressed. 

I’d prepared my clothes by laying them out over one of the windowside chairs the night before, making a concerted effort to plan my outfit as normal as possible after impressing myself onto others yesterday with a gaudiness which had taken almost all of yesterday to register as something I wanted to avoid.

Cooper got into the shower across the room, head down and shuffling; I drew back the blinds all the way to the sides and leaned myself against the wall to look outside. 

There’s a struck and repressed quality that the dry cold brings, especially on the tail end of a season suffocated by it, that you hardly see in Southern California, an area which no matter the weather or temperature consistently radiates something thick and unsustainable. 

Tangshan, with the golden palm of sunrise cradling the tops of its buildings, lulling them upwards out of the compression underneath, possessed an unnatural verticality against the frigidly unmoving air. 

Searingly clean white-yellows gradiated down to the burnt and moody oranges, dragging with certainty on the immensity of the pride of the buildings.

This was not the poverty-stricken village the state department funds depictions of in your favorite CW show, nor was it the utopian steel-and-glass post-pastoral pipedream of an ancap shitcoin bro on Twitter. High-rises were disconcertingly normal, with squared-off repetitions of opaque glass blanketing buildings the size of offices in central Irvine. The park closest to our hotel was pathed with charming brick-and-cement designs and rimmed with trees drained completely of any moisture. 

Cooper was ready now, gathering his things behind me and slinging on his jacket. 

“What are we doing today?” I said. I refused to download or look at the schedule for the trip that had been emailed to us, and would continue to refuse so for the remainder of the trip, but was at once unconcerned with burdening myself on everyone else who had. 

Cooper filled the air with a noise signalling thought. The important part of his response was the news that we were going to the amusement park tonight — yes, tonight; each of us cinched our foreheads in and looked closer at his phone, trying to figure out how the hell we’d have time for that with everything else — best to think of it later. 

Noticing the exchange program college visit today, he spared me one of his packages of Jolly Ranchers to provide the assorted gifts that Angela had prescribed on days that we visited schools.

On the way out, I nodded away the creeping curiosity on what the rides would be like — who would sit with who? There was a lightness to the intrusion embarrassing for a twenty-year-old.

I followed Cooper through the halls imbued with cheap prints of bland paintings and ugly 90s hotel carpet (I seemed to always trail behind when we left the room). There were six elevators, and in the small waiting area with the black-with-gold-specks tiled floor and fake mahogany finished walls, there were two shined, black standing ashtrays. 

Each of us antsy to get the hotel breakfast promised before we left this morning, we didn’t speak much on the smooth ride down or while we walked through the lobby to the dining hall. Grace and Esmeralda were waiting for us behind the ambiguously waiting greeter, each of them setting their bags down lethargically to claim a table for four, both flashing a counterfeit greeting smile with a head cocked to the side.

Told to be ready and in the hall at 9 a.m., lest a promised grand forgotten-student-at-the-hotel fiasco ensue, after eating, we implanted ourselves on a sofa in the lobby five minutes late and still ended up waiting 15 for everyone else to drip into the room. Once accounted for, we entered the bus and were greeted by the same cheerful and guiding woman we were the night before. 

Cooper and I sat next to each other, across the aisle from Grace and Esmeralda and right around the center of the bus — those four seats repeating for the rest of our bus rides during the week. Our first destination was not far at all, only requiring a quick filtering east through surface streets to a welcoming plaza now bathed in a late-morning glow. 

As the three buses pulled in parallel next to each other and halfway-perpendicular to the painted lines, a profound metal statue erected in the center of the small complex, leading forward from a building which looked like a courthouse. 

The statue stood at around thirty feet, depicting three different generations of coal mining with subjects bursting from the firmly shaped medium using historically appropriate tools: pickaxes, an advanced drill, and a remote control.

A small group of police followed loosely from behind as we got closer — and no, I’m not referencing the nearly-teenage security guards that were assigned to us the rest of the trip, effectively over-indulgent babysitters who you’ll eventually find to be there just so we don’t accidentally kill ourselves; these were actual cops for some reason, and this morning was the only part where we were ever graced with their presence. 

They had a deeply serious look lathered across their faces and walked with hands in their pockets. Hair parted at the side; very Americanized millennial; the only people I saw on our trip, besides a few people on the final day, who looked like that.

Ushered to the base of the statue with their help, everyone scattered at different angles to take pictures at the feet of the miners. 

Here: the American exchange student, crossing their legs and looking to the side, slightly laughing, hands flipping unconfidently between their hands in their pockets, at their waist and behind their head; the Chinese miner stomps forwards in the middle of the scene, a self-directed reverie glowing with the now dawned-sun, pickaxe in one hand, a soon-to-be-produced-in-China chipped device in the other. 

The tariffs have hit — the Chinese Century has begun.

 

At the edge of this, Esmeralda took a few pictures of Grace, afterwards lightly scanning behind her to check if Cooper or I were eager for one ourselves. Pictures have this fantastic quality of solidifying you into the scene all at once and without ability for removal. With the fluttering morning bathing me, feeling like a drop fitting into the river flowing through the courtyard, my usual acidic anxiety for record-keeping didn’t register, reflected in my unlaboured smile at her turnaround. 

“I’m good. It’s alright.”

After a few minutes, we were guided into rows in front of the courthouse-type building, with the students at the front subsequently handed an incredibly long banner with extensive Mandarin text and a translation underneath, including a general message of prosperity through foreign exchange programs and a quote from Mao: “In the flower of the youth.” 

Look me up in a few years for an extensive multilingual analysis on the yonic imagery unfolding in the beautiful rose of Mao’s poetic career.

Poised now with the motivation of the valiant and immortalized miners, we meandered around the steps of the museum to enter a structurally inset seating area, ultimately giving way to a dimly-lit back entrance, where we shuffled through in groups of eight or so down cream hallways obstructed with resin infographics covering generalized Chinese history on workers’ rights — something near the equivalent to the museums on the California gold rush they bring fourth graders to.

Once brought down to the museum converted from mining shafts, we were led to a section with a bin full of hard hats and a dankness permeating the extended hallways. After a turn, we were directed by a middle-aged woman with a pixie cut and smoother English than most of us, a subtle underpinning of sharp humor shining through her answers to questions from faculty that I appreciated.

There was a piercing and ominous red lighting the whole stairway down to the actual mine; it felt like something you’d work through on the way to a Star Wars ride in Disneyland — the vitality and commercialism cusped by that poignant red transcends national barriers, and in the States, is maybe even a mirror of China’s sourced and direct aesthetic strength. 

The polished rocks on the sides and top of the tunnel curled like smoke emanating from the pit at the destination of our 35 degree decline. Cooper and I walked ahead, taking shitty point-five photos like an on-the-nose performance of unabashed young Americans. 

There were a lot of kitschy photo opportunities, with smaller statues of Chinese miners squabbling themselves into comical predicaments or displaying a heroic valiance that itched something in me to join the army — an army. 

The tunneled part of the museum ended with a rectangular room with tracks leading mysteriously out into an even smaller tunnel, hardly above five feet high — if that. I made a horribly confident statement — in the form of a joke — that there’s no way we’re getting on a train here.

However, a train is exactly what arrived. Cutting through the chatter of the increasingly cramping room, a teal and white metallic snake dinged its way through the meek entrance, stopping against the wall adorned with a cartoonish train stop. Around us, people quickly kneeled down into the seats, requiring a small step hunched in order to bring their knees up at a ninety degree angle. 

I walked ahead, and instead of trying to cram in along with everyone else, despite a rushed encouragement from Cooper behind me, I went straight for the back of the room and end of the line, the block of people inverted against me fanning a spark deep in my abdomen I worked with reckless certainty to keep mute. 

The three of them sat on the bench to wait for the next tram, and I squatted down in front of them; they laughed about planning to post something on Instagram, how they had to take a video in the train, how it had to have “Talk Talk” playing in the background; it had to be in the background of everything they posted this week. 

I traced each of their eyes as they talked to each other, and as they simultaneously kept a friendly tab on me as I restlessly got up and down, walked side to side, and checked awkwardly down the tunnel to see if the next tram was coming yet.

After it did, they played the song and took the video.

We were spat out still deep underground, but now with the vertical promises of both an escalator and stairs. The first pair, I got on the escalator, turned my back from the top like I usually do, and talked disconnectedly with Grace and Esmeralda, latching on in between words to Cooper running up the stairs to our left. 

In an in-between area, a group of the security guards handed Cooper what looked like a piece of bark, snickering to themselves in between attempted cross-language communication. They talked louder and slower for him to understand, which strangely made me feel a little more at home.

What got the point across in the end was a group-choreographed opening of their mouths and animated point down their throats. 

Cooper took the bark, chewed it for maybe half a second and turned his back from them to spit it out. Seeing me, he said that  the bark was one of the worst things he’s ever tasted, but that he needs to try and talk to them (Cooper took three years of Mandarin in highschool and is vacantly confident that he did not learn a single thing) — to dap them up in a dap to end all world conflict. 

I tried the pine bark too, and it was alright for the first five minutes and then I understood why they were laughing. It was immediately minty and not necessarily soft, but squishy, becoming more and more splintered as I chewed it, poking at the inside of my mouth with a growing ginger flavor — something almost sour.

The next set, I chose the stairs and hurriedly ran towards the sun. Towards the end, attempting to double-step the cement ledges, I nearly bashed my entire head open in front of the now-stranger grouping of Saddleback students, stumbling enough to catch myself with my hands before ducking through the final roofing into the now brightly-shining outside, the pine-bark painfully soggy and packed to the side of my mouth. T.J. fumbled his way behind me. 

“Dude are you okay?” he said in his familiar, guttural half-laugh half-talk.

“Did you see that?”

At least someone saw it.

Now we were inside the main section of the museum, after another short flit of pictures on the steps. Near the check-in desk they had a small collection of fake-silk traditional Chinese Hanfus. These were particularly for the women, Grace and Esmeralda putting them on for a few pictures, excitedly and over their clothes, Esmeralda leaving hers behind and Grace keeping hers on. 

I wanted to put one on, but saw only one guy do it at the time, someone who I still thought was a professor — shorter, hairier and quirkier than the rest of us, sure — but that I’d come to learn later with a scary recontextualization was not.

Much of the content in the above-ground section of the museum was strictly toured, with a few moments spared for short performances from actors and choiced segments for us to walk around on our own. 

There was a lot of abstracted stuff — something I implicitly didn’t suspect from the hyper-literalist propagandized interpretations of authoritarian art I’d been fed growing up; “show” don’t tell, with the fumbling caricatured shadow of the Soviet Union in the background, had gotten all the way from ‘70s Iowa to 2010s Orange County. 

Compositionally commanding portraits of a group of people driven towards a single upwards motif of the Chinese flag and abstractly scratched portraits of miners and organizers, given an anxious wavering to them by the medium, gave some of the most interesting looks into actual Chinese culture I had the whole trip.

In one room, shortly after Cooper made an observation to me on how they spelled Marco Polo’s name wrong, then to Grace who gave him a much better reaction, the kind you can’t practice, Esmeralda waved me down to kneel with her and look at an inset sculpture of a Chinese village warmly occupied by playful and actionable small figures.

“You have to look at it from their level. It really immerses you.”

She asked who we’d most want to be. My attention was immediately drawn somewhere on one of the second story balconies, but I thought better than to say them, and chose someone coyly smiling and rolling an apple in their palm in the middle of the town square.

Down a floor, Cooper had now worked up the courage to try and talk to the security guards. Grace and Esmeralda were in the bathroom, so it was just him and me, and by the time he started talking, the whole rest of the room had cleared out, too. 

The guards’ faces did not shift into a relaxed or excited entreatment at all — it was immediately a labored confusion, followed by the excited Mandarin response from the pixie-cut woman.

I had instinctually walked away by the time anyone really started talking, me assuming there would be no real talking, but the clustering of them spurring a conversation that lasted probably twenty minutes.

In the next room, centralized around a gong each of us were given an opportunity to hit, the three of them escaped, Cooper tagging me with the epithet of abandoner — which I certainly was.

We hit the gong. We said what they told us to say: Gōngxǐ Fācái (恭喜发财). Wishing you health!

After exiting from the gong room, we crossed the entire thing, past the buses that we took, into a nook overarched by a massive structural recreation of a mining bridge, and past an intensely wide alleyway with recreations of steam trains lining the sides. 

We, at first, freely explored the area before a presumed event started. There was a core spot to take pictures, and Cooper and Grace stayed there as Esmeralda and I walked into the alleyway, enjoying the funneled breeze, looking passively at the statues and talking about the faculty on the trip who had come with us.

The event started. She waved me back to the main area with a careless rush and decided step.

Underneath the profoundly industrialist overhang, a handful of performers entered the interior of the arch that the Saddleback students had naturally built, and we were given a historical breakdown of Chinese opera before the performance started.

It was great and interesting, and then proceeded to last thirty minutes, which I might’ve been in the mood for if we were in seats designed for enjoying an opera, but standing with the sun now weighing down on all of us, gave breadth for my attention to wander, causing Cooper and me to look across the arch, see a student doing something, laugh, and an advisor to actively turn around and shush us. 

After the event dispersed, without warning, a man with a sculpted face, deeply constructed and voluminous hair, and an all black outfit tied together by an oversized denim jacket, skinny jeans and clown-shoe combat boots, took the stage in what pulled in rapturous laughter and cheering from Saddleback.

He performed a pop song similar to what you’d imagine a contemporary pop song in China to look like in a movie from the States — there were guitar solos, a bravado baritone from the singer and a wide gait and open chest as he waved on us to keep getting into it.

It didn’t take long into the first song for people to start clapping on one and two. A group of students frantically asked the security guards through translate what the song was. They took a picture of one of them pulling it up on a Chinese streaming service, prompting someone else to take a picture of that picture, and ending the tunnel with my final inscrutable picture — if anyone can decipher this and find the song, email me at willstanley397@gmail.com. 

Our next activity was mug-painting in a retired and repurposed train. 

We were given fat brushes and thin paint for mugs that they would fire, as well as a few premade stickers. I scrawled my name like an eight-year-old, my handwriting always seeming to dowse for my age of most severe arrested development, and peeled a single sticker on the side. 

Grace’s, because of the water she used, looked like the last attempted help message from a victim of a commercialized crime; I asked everyone to put their thumbprints on mine, and I was the worst at application, but the idea caught on and we all latched our identities onto each other. Now it’s them and the People’s Republic of China — they can each make clones of me if they’d like. 

This area was bookended with a trip to the gift shop. Inside, students frantically deciphered who they were closest to who had cash, rolled out a guerilla headcount of everyone with service who had already set up their card on AliPay, and scattered across the separate booths.

The bobbling of heads distorting over time, fumbling into a movement which stuck my legs to the tile, choked my eyes past them, to the back of the room; I pushed my hair repeatedly back and forward, the five people I told myself I’d get gifts for flashing in my mind, but none of them particularly sticking.

Of the four of us, I was the first to get outside, escaping the descending feeling in my throat rattling out in the resonance of so many people. I exited from the far exit, and waited facing the group forming around the main one for Esmeralda to finish checking out and bring the rest of them outside. 

“There you are,” one of them said when they tried the other exit.

We sat on the bench furthest from the train we had done the mug painting, furthest from the main entrance with a half enclosure sectioning the growing group of students off. Behind us, a handful of rusting four-story apartment buildings hung over from what was obviously outside the perimeter of the cultural center we were still in; the contrast between the two contextualized the area with a rushed impermanence.

I had an incredible urge to follow the walkway away and around into the abandoned buildings.

I stepped down onto the tracks that were inactive, gravel crumbling under my feet and a perfect chill seizing my arms under the light overshirt I was wearing. The three of them were all sitting on a bench parallel to the tracks, talking to each other. It felt comfortable to watch and stumble from far away. 

The four of us were asked for a picture from a few of the security guards, which we took. Afterwards, Abdullah, Noah, and Jon — someone I had met last semester at two meetings of the Game Design Club, a period of indigestible loneliness for me where I joined every club on campus — approached to tell us that they were going to be playing poker with the security guards that night — 9 p.m. — in a room on the eighth floor. They each laughed and one of them said that he had just bummed a cigarette from a guard, too.

This was the one thing I wanted to do in China, smoke — confessed by me to everyone weeks prior —  and they had already firmly clutched my dream. I admittedly did not expect this element of the culture shock, for it to be this common (at this very moment, the guards sat and smoked outside the shop), so I planned into thin air to buy some at the convenience store tomorrow morning.

I hadn’t smoked in the last four years, the time where it seemed like I should’ve tried it, because I’d impressed on myself that that wasn’t something you do while you’re in a relationship. I’d impressed a lot on myself like that — nearly everything; I’d planned to transfer across the country, still staying together through long distance, just to try and escape the impressions I’d trapped myself in.

We sat across from Grace and Esmeralda again on the bus ride to (where are we going now? Cooper pulled out his phone) the planned college that we were visiting. 

We were on the road for around two hours, the daylight now illuminating the barrenness that had peaked through the darkness the night before. Each tree was marked with a white paint up to six feet from the ground — Cooper noticing as he leaned his head against the window, brown flickers of his hair frizzed from the dryness, asking generally why that was. I guessed out loud that it was dead bark from the snow line. Maybe. 

The drive was loosely hilly, but the campus itself was completely flat, with evenly sectioned out lab halls and dorms mirroring each other completely. We were brought first to a central building, guided through to the slippingly sleek floors, up two flights of stairs, and into a library where a photo op with stairs, once again, was prepared. We held the same banner as we had in the morning.

After the picture, looking up, there were four curiously poking heads over the handrail, as this central area was without a roof, but surrounded by ascending floors with visual access to the bottom. They bobbled with a playful curiosity over us — here we were! Were we disappointing to them, peeking over at us like owls to prey beneath, like a cat to a mouse, like an adopted puppy to the runt of the litter? I doubt they saw it that way.

I couldn’t peel my eyes from theirs, as they slightly chuckled and waved. I waved back. 

We were given a quick bathroom break in recognition of the rushed quality of our first entrance. There was that familiar and alluring smell. Bathrooms in China are unglorified smoking rooms, a preeminent wall slapping you like a furious and romantic love for coming home too late whenever you had the audacity to walk in. 

The bus drove maybe a block to our next location, which, I will spoil it now, was absolutely identical to every other building contained within this portion of our tour of the school — down to the floorplans, though also in itinerary. 

We would start at one corner, work through a hallway, and then into a room filled with architecture, electronic engineering, or some other esoteric S.T.E.M. class, where groups of students would huddle hollowly around a table, pretend to work on something, and steal darted glances at us in between breathy laughs with their heads down. It was charming and connecting, but probably not in the way intended by the university.

In the engineering building, a group of boys collected around a single monitor for CAD, pointed at us and attempted impressions for each other. They stopped when their professor, supervisor, whatever, walked directly in between them to break it up. As their faces dropped, I did my best to make eye contact and laugh with them.

They build trains there. The buildings are solid. The machines are expensive; believe me, I’m fucking sold. Take me back! I know the dollar is dropping — I’ll put it all in yuan.

The last building was dedicated in part to a ceremony between Angela and an administrator from Tangshan Polytechnic University. We were driven the maybe hundred feet to the entrance by the bus.

On arriving, under each of our seats was a tote bag with images and slogans from the school, containing a water bottle and a notebook.

The University administrator gifted Angela — Saddleback — a hand-painted ceremonial plate, guarded in a special case and handled with a choice cloth, gifted to her from a man beaming from across the room with an all-reflecting white smile. 

Quickly glancing to one of the associated faculty to hand her a tote bag, Angela pulled out a T-shirt and a tumbler adorned with the principle Saddleback logo in yellow font against red fabric and metal. Whisperings of each being made in a factory 100 miles from here clutched the room for a moment. 

It was too sad for anyone to really laugh. Imagine what would’ve been handed to them ten years ago, when our mascot was still the Gaucho? 

All the while, there were those familiar sprites casting something down on us from four floors above, peeping over the handrails, making observations, eye contact. I’d look at them to avoid everything in front of and around me. 

“That was terrible,” Grace said as we walked down a hallway, shaking her head absently.

Esmeralda was already shaking her head, too, and breathing in her teeth like one of her cliches; “No, that was way too much.”

I walked ahead of everyone else, needing a second to ease the dissonance between my crashing tiredness and surroundings. 

Through the pack of now unfamiliar Saddleback students, the bodies compressed further, down into the hallway, which wound and wound forward, without promise, trapping down into a point, cradling the outside light, piercing up and through; I could hardly see the bodies around me, just as I could feel the pulsing start in my head, the thrashing somewhere deeper, the bubbling up from my stomach: 

I was greeted, now near the front of our students, with the actual area where we were promised to be able to interact with other college kids. Everything settled.

Two girls walked up to me excitedly, already laughing and locking gazes to synchronize something. Each of their eyes were beamingly wide and they bounced off of each other in an infectious display of friendship — an infectious display of meaning in this one moment.

“You are handsome! Picture?” They were cracking up now. They said it with their arms splayed out and a small hop. 

Yes, yes! I responded, flattening the distance I was indulging in for a few minutes as I took pictures with each of them individually, as a group, and then exchanged WeChats with them. 

Once things ramped up, all around us there were prided rehearsed compliments shot out to Saddleback students.

Grace was called beautiful many times — and I’ll include here: Grace and I were much more popular on first impression than Esmeralda and Cooper; Grace having the aforementioned green eyes and strawberry blonde hair, me with my silver-blue eyes and curly blond hair, each of us freckled and very, very pale. 

We are two real survive-the-holocaust types, which seemed to really spur an adoring fawning from most students we met (I’m not sure what else it would be if not that), which was a stark reminder of how inescapable some things are, even across the world.

At first, we were sat down to do activities, Cooper and I separated into the spill-over rooms, where we didn’t have the scissors to do the planned cutout images, and so were instead guided to spend our time folding cranes from the massive and flimsy sheets of paper provided. 

Whenever I looked up, it felt like I was catching someone’s attention, like I was the exciting feature of the day for somebody — what they were looking forward to on our arrival, which made me profusely sick and horribly tired. 

The crawling ache in my spine from the morning, which I’d managed so obediently to not feel until now, collapsed downwards into a settled wheeze; it pulled me out of the moment, draining my awareness deeper into the pool sitting at the bottom of my stomach.

The Tangshan University students around me gave up on my limp responses and helped those to my side, Cooper attracting two people to walk him through making a crane. 

But that I really could do on my own, so I did, at least the variation I knew how. 

I finished the crane and flapped its wings proudly to the people in my general vicinity — Cooper and the Chinese students lit up in a non-lingual shout and slight applause.

Now was the time for the real socialization, Esmeralda initiating it by handing out a collection of gifts to a small coupling of guys from an assorted bag — she was probably the most prepared for this portion than anybody else, having asked her sister 18 hours before our plane departed to buy her a collection of Mexican and U.S. candies, as well as grabbing a specialized lion Beanie Baby from the ‘90s to give to her favorite person she met. 

She’s explained to me probably four times why this lion Beanie Baby was lying around but I still can’t remember which family member was the one who left her an extensive and probably expensive collection. But someone was getting one this trip.

I stood behind most of them as they went around in a circular conversation. We accumulated people slowly, some of their friends, the four of us eventually all coming together. Grace was the best at talking to them, towards the end asking what her Chinese name would be — hers in English was Grace, in case you forgot. They all stared at each other and laughed, said something phonetically similar to Grace in Mandarin, lord knows what it was, and shrugged off the question.

They asked what their English names would be — in this moment I stepped forward, and decidedly named them Michael, Kevin, Jared, and David. I got a particular scowl from Esmeralda from the decision on Jared.

Before we left, Michael, whose English, as described by the other students, was the best in the group, got separated, and I tried to strike up a conversation with him. 

“What do you like least about going here?”

He laughed and looked away. I could hear distant echoes from my high- and middle-school careers of people calling me an annoying asshole.

“The playground,” Michael said.

“Why the playground?” There was a playground probably a few blocks down, there specifically for the students majoring in education — it was presumably just a model one to show how best to handle a group of kids in that environment. Michael was not an education major, so it was perfectly strange for him to immediately be drawn there.

“Well —” he looked off. “I shouldn’t say.”

He didn’t say anything else.

Further research should dive into the ongoing mystery of the Tanshan Polytechnic College playground. The Powers That Be may have caught Michael’s tongue in the middle of his confession, but their grip will be loosened with the greater heat of Saddleback’s academic and historical research prospects.

He was the last person to say goodbye to us. Esmeralda stayed behind to exchange WeChats with him, as he was probably the nicest person we met — shy enough, direct enough, that effortless immersion in the moment I am insanely jealous of.  

It was golden hour now, maybe one of the better ones I’ve been a part of in recent memory, including in California. We took turns taking pictures with another group. I also do a handstand around here, a talent I acquired during a stint in calisthenics videos and male loneliness during my first semester at Saddleback. 

In between here and dinner, we stopped at another cultural museum, this one indoors and almost Epcot-ball-esque. It was really cold, and there was much worry about me without a jacket, Angela directly asking me a few times if I had anything, which I did; I had a sweater in my bag, but I did not put it on. 

Here, also: one of the guys revealed to me that he had gotten a full pack of cigarettes somehow (maybe bought for him by a security guard — we hadn’t returned to the hotel at all since the last time we spoke); we entered a room with all-over screens very Disneyland-esque, and everyone talked during the presentation, prompting a stern reminder from Angela the day after that we must be respectful even if we find something horribly boring — she recommends talking quieter; and I attempted to take off my overshirt on the way out causing the three of them to all yell at me to keep it on. 

The breeze clutched and slammed us on the way back to the bus. It pierced clothes the way that an off-shore one wraps its appendages around you on a midnight trip to Laguna, but it was onshore, the beach probably under 50 miles behind us. 

Dinner was across the street and in a building with spotlights bleeding down its front, teal and purple ones, immediately awkward against the otherwise nice event hall. 

It had a weird northern-European influenced Gothic style, and a silhouette really similar to the central castle in Disneyland — and an important contrast to the Disneylandness of this strip of land: there was the museum, this hall, and then maybe six other buildings before the complete return to rural dryland. 

Everything is being compared to Disneyland to nudge towards the more explicit observation (one collaborated on by Cooper and Esmeralda): this was just like the Truman Show. Everything was made for us, and seemed to be crafted just to be experienced by us. This partially came from a culturally homebase-oriented arrogance, but there was also a very strictly planned undercurrent, in a way that your parents might be half-right about in a state-funded Chinese exchange program. 

The food was buffet-style again. 

Going to the bathroom halfway into eating, Cooper and I were met with a group of familiar faces standing in a circle just beyond the open door. 

The young men were all sparking up here, embroidering into the fabric of their lives cheap imitations of scenes from Murakami’s later novels: careless flicks of lighters — no hand cupping — , a look to the side, a heavy sigh with smoke in assistance. The one that seemed the most aware told us when we walked in that this was just what it was like here: everywhere had a smoking bathroom. The group laughed. 

A history professor entered who I knew of through Cooper and Esmeralda. 

“Hello boys,” meek, dry, almost threatened. He was probably a foot and a half shorter than the figural leader of the situation. He kept his head down.

They start talking about history and by the way, how is China so far? That’s good — as we’re walking out, Cooper plants his palm on the flat of his forehead and with special emphasis on the first syllable: nightmare blunt rotation, dude. 

After everyone finished eating, the hosts of this dining hall played music for us, offering microphones for karaoke, only a few people taking the bait in what could bitterly be called an embarrassing display of unmitigated confidence.

And with that, our final destination was locked into navigation from the silent bus driver. The ride to the amusement park was quiet, and I mournfully watched over everyone with the lights dimmed to a humming blue for the majority of the ride.

The middling and scattered laughter first transitioned into a quiet conversational tone, and then into a spaced out whisper. Tangshan let us back in with a soft and distanced embrace, the repeated apartments erecting themselves out of nowhere.

Not far from our hotel — something I felt instinctively — there was a promising Ferris wheel commanding over the red-and-gold cloud resonating presumably over the theme park, breaking the seal of the stinted skyline over Tangshan. The only other protrusion from the blanket of the other world was a single, skinny, cylinder. Maybe a drop ride?

Esmeralda said that those were the types of rides she could never go on, but maybe now she could, in China. 

It was already 10 p.m. People were still waking up as they stumbled out of the buses, placing themselves in a line curving through a roped-off section and towards a handful of main gates they let us through without checking any tickets. The employee leaned back against the red pillar behind him, squinting his eyes at something behind us while holding down the opening button for the turnstile.

The main courtyard and preliminary area for the rest of the park consisted of buildings from synthesized stone bricks, bright golden spotlights on tarps with elegant red letterings, and three large and dominating statues of political figures — I swear, that’s what they were, the central one a proud and reserved Mao, but I can’t find anything online to back this up. 

The golden lamps combined with the dotted spotlights into a localized brightness that lit everyone up like it was day, despite the sky above our special cloud being oppressively dark. There was a final emphasis on how important it was for me to put on my sweater. Esmeralda told me that I don’t have to suffer, and then that either way it’s fine: it won’t affect her. I put it on.

Grace and Esmeralda walked down into a split-off alleyway to take pictures. Cooper too, now. I held myself at the right distance, against a pillar like the opening employee, to not be asked. There was something so cheerful in each of their unpracticed turns, flashing smiles, raised hands up to the sky — something so proud in their proclamations of being here. 

“Don’t you feel better?” Esmeralda asked, straying back towards the main area and pinching at her own sweater to accentuate the question.

“Not really.” I let a smile curl as I looked back towards the statues. Back towards the feet that would crack the ground were they to walk. It was cold outside whether I wore a sweater or not. 

Thirty minutes passed in this idle waiting area, people filtering in and out of the bathrooms, waking themselves up, asking the faculty if anything was even open anymore. The entrance to the central area was a large arched bridge across a river dividing the whole park. 

Its scale was impressive from outside, but stepping underneath built this intricate feeling of being crushed, each dramatic red arch hammered down with a nail right on this moment, giving in each pierce something unretractable from memory. 

The nearly glowing red frame weaved itself in perfect conjunction with a neon-blue-and-green glowing tree on one side, roots like tentacles slapping themselves around the far end of the bridge, looming over a collection of stylized alleyways and shops — maybe restaurants, too, had we been there a few hours earlier. 

Everything on that side was draped with the same synthetic gray that had been on the other, a protected rustic feel giving way to what would’ve made it easy to spend a lot of money if we were there when more shops were open. 

Repeated out to the horizon over the river, the bridges were identical to each other, with each placement of them having its own small pouring of excited —mostly domestic — tourists, ogling and walking backwards or sideways to admire the gaudy scale.

On our left, from where we had driven from, the Ferris wheel’s LEDs pranced with a lightshow of that one Chinese character mascotting the movie that outsold the US a few weeks ago. Everything was immense.

We walked around the few stores that were open, quickly breaking away from the general conglomeration of students, before resigning to just walking along the alleys following a nondescript professor near the edge of our sightline. Grace had a particular affinity for and desire to break away in order to try a Teahouse that had only just begun to close. There wasn’t enough time. 

Peeking over a hill nearing a full loop to where we were dropped off, still, however, well within the village area, the four of us wandered behind the shops, into an alleyway of an alleyway, and intimated as if we were going to ring the comically large bell that was hiding behind the buildings, likely there for events or parades during normal operating hours (and why weren’t we here to see that?).

Our group collected for its final moments, after only around 45 minutes of walking, around a fountain — the bottom littered with scatterings of coins.

“What’s your dream?” Cooper asked, poking fun in a reference to my favorite drunk non-sequitur.

“If only I had a coin.”

“Maybe to get here earlier?”

“Or to stay for a time that made any amount of sense,” Grace added.

As the group leaders made a vain attempt at gathering people by bus to count heads, other attendees carelessly walked through us. One of them, the final memorable portion outside of the hotel for the night, was a woman leading a walk with her shoulders, poignantly lighting a cigarette with one small hand cupped over the other, eyes drawling down like a recent Charli XCX picture. 

The lighting was a part I hardly remember seeing; it felt like the most intimate moment, like a burning cigarette was normal, but to see someone make the choice to start and light it was something really special. I envied her — I don’t think she even noticed we were there.

It turns out we were only 10 minutes away. People got on the bus quietly, rode it quietly, and guided themselves through the hotel quietly. 

We hardly said goodbye to Grace and Esmeralda. Cooper and I were in our room and collapsed on the bed before there was much thought on anything.

When the lights were off, we snickered through a conversation about whether or not he should delete social media. Silence faded in; my alarm was set for the next morning for 6:30 a.m. to wake up in time to walk to the convenience store before there were too many guards waiting in the lobby.

I rubbed my arms underneath the covers to warm them up; it didn’t matter that I was in the hotel, covered in a room-serviced duvet: it was still cold outside. 

Comments

comments