Shanghai!! (Part 1)

I was invited to go on a quick weekend trip to Shanghai by Kyle, one of my fellow Ligong teachers. We were going to stay at the house of one his family friends. Both of us had a gap in our schedules for that week and so we were able to squeeze in a four day trip from Thursday to Sunday (including travel). So we hopped a train and about 21 hours later we were in Shanghai. Trains are pretty tedious travel mainly because of the length of the journey…China is very big, and so while some places (mainly within provinces) take less than 10 hours to get to, others take more than 24 hours, more than 48 even. In this case, Shanghai was about 16-21 hours. The trip is easier when you are able to space that out so that you can sleep through the night. We were able to do that for the first trip, but the trip back to Xiangyang we left in the morning and got back late at night.

I got a bottom bed on the way over to Shanghai, but on the way back I took the top bed. If you're looking for a more comfortable journey, get the bottom one. But usually it's not too bad...unless you're used to the finer things of life. 

It just gets a little hotter up at the top, and also you have no space to fully sit up. So it's best to either find a way to lie down and use a laptop on your belly, or to get a nice book that's not too big to read. Trying to read on your side with a book that's too big is not possible. And what I mean by too big is more than 8 inches long. The beds up there are very narrow, made only for sleeping.

This is what most of the trip looked like outside. Farmland for miles, with the occasional buildings thrown in. This is what the Chinese call the Nong Cun (农村), the country. This is rural China as rural as it gets.

Recently on a train ride, I asked some friendly Chinese passengers next to me what the people in the Nong Cun do to get supplies. I asked if they have a convenient store or supermarket...I mean, they can't just grow everything they need out of the ground. The passengers told me that they have a little store nearby where they live where they can get a few things. I imagine that the store has a limited supply in which other things have to be ordered several weeks or months in advanced. I mean, that's what the pioneers had to do when the American west was being colonized.

So anyway, we got to Shanghai and we were picked up by the family’s driver. The family we were staying with was an expatriate family, and the father had been regularly traveling all over the world for the job he had. The family has been everywhere…so to me that is such a cool thing, not having traveled much until I was 18. The father of this family has a pretty high positioned job in the company he works for, and so they were living pretty nicely in Shanghai…but a little more on that later.

We were picked up by the family’s driver…but before you jump to conclusions about the family having their own personal driver, keep in mind this: most expatriate families are required by their companies to have a Chinese driver (at least in Shanghai), because if they are driving around in the foreign country and they get into an accident with no driver, then they could get into more trouble…the fact is, an accident they were possibly involved in would create much more of a hassle than simply having a Chinese driver would. I think that’s a very smart thing to do, and hey, I wouldn’t complain if my company made me have a personal driver that knows the foreign country better than I do.

This is the van that drove us around Shanghai that weekend.

So we found the driver and I discovered that the driver really didn’t speak any English. I personally was able to communicate with him perfectly fine, but it occurred to me that because the family spoke no Chinese, how could they communicate with the driver to get around Shanghai?

I posed this question to Kyle, and immediately at that moment he looked down on the floor of the car and by his feet was a big ring of cards…a REALLY thick pile of cards all on this ring. And we picked it up and from what we saw there was a big list of different places on it. They were color-coded, if I remember correctly, and the cards were divided into specific sections such as entertainment, exercise/recreation, restaurants/bars, shopping, banks, etc. On each card, there was English and Chinese written on it, so it looks like they just give the card they want to the driver and then off they go to wherever they want to go. That works and it’s a good system, but the only thing about that is that they can’t communicate how long they’ll be staying or whether they want the driver to wait for them or when to pick them up. I’m sure they find ways, but it must be more tedious than just speaking in the language. Makes me really grateful to be able to speak Chinese.

So the taxi driver asked us where we wanted to go, and after replying to him in Chinese, he remarked on how good our Chinese was (as pretty much every Chinese person does when they hear me talk to them in Chinese) and off we went to Nanjing Xi Lu (West Nanjing Road).

Nanjing Xi Lu is a popular area for shopping and food that I used to go with my roommate and her friends while I studied in Shanghai in the summer of 2010. I remember one day when she asked me if I liked a Chinese food called “Xiao Long Bao” (小笼包). This is a Chinese soup dumpling, with a pastry exterior and soup placed inside it. They cook it like that and the whole thing looks like a little bag twisted at the top. When you eat it, it’s like a burst of flavor in your mouth. REALLY REALLY good.

What they do sometimes is deep fry these babies and they’re called a different name “Sheng Jian Bao” (生煎包), which basically means “potstickers”. And THESE…well…you gotta eat these a VERY specific way, or else the whole thing falls apart and the liquid spills out all over your plate. L

So my friend asks me if I like Xiao Long Bao, and I love them so I said yeah! She tells me there’s a really great place for Xiao Long Bao down at Nanjing Xi Lu. So off I go with her and her friends. Nanjing Xi Lu is a very long road located in Old Shanghai (there’s New Shanghai which is much more metropolitan where the expats live and business people stay in hotels and go to work and all, and there’s Old Shanghai where a lot of the Chinese migrant workers live and it’s much more traditional in appearance, but seeing Shanghai three years later I’m seeing that change a lot…it beginning to look less traditional Chinese village and more bohemian hipster village). I didn’t remember how long the road was until we got there again this time. And me and my roommate and her friends get out of the taxi in front of this kind of mall district that has clothes stores, a food court, and several small restaurants. We go into one teeny restaurant packed with people…it’s a miracle we all got seats together. And we sit down at a table and my roommate orders something for me (at the time my Chinese was pretty bad).

A few minutes later comes these HUGE, POTSTICKER dumplings that I had never seen in my life. They’re piping hot and I wait for them to cool, then I take a big bite. WRONG DECISION. Liquid squirted everywhere, on my plate, on my face, I was lucky it didn’t squirt anyone next to me. Yeah, and my friends laughed. Fail. But it was the yummiest burst of flavor in my mouth…so good…epicness all in one bite. It was the best I’d ever tasted. Win.

Soooo…FLASH FORWARD.

The driver drove us down Nanjing Xi Lu in search for those very same potsticker dumplings. I knew it would be wishful thinking to try and find the same place we were before. I didn’t know what it was called and it was three years ago that it all happened, so I was resigned to find a place that served the potstickers. So we find a food court down on Nanjing Xi Lu, which according to the internet served those potstickers, and we go inside to see if it has what we’re looking for. The whole food court is packed with people and there are little restaurant booths lined up next to each other. Every booth was serving really really good food, but we couldn’t find the potstickers. So we settled for some other good food. After searching for a seat for a long time, we managed to find two chairs that were almost right next to each other, and sat down. As we were eating though, we noticed someone go by with the exact potstickers we were looking for, and I jumped on that. Even though we were pretty full, I went and bought some potstickers…because they’re worth it. For something as good as these, you make room.

Upon sitting down to eat them, I made the same mistake I made last time: CHOMP. Liquid everywhere. Now let me explain to you what exactly is the correct way to eat these kinds of dumplings. You first take a little dainty nibble out of the top of the dumpling. This creates a little hole in the top of it, from which you neatly drink the soup out of the dumpling. And ONLY THEN do you proceed to chomp on the rest of the fried and meaty pastry. It looked so yummy and good that I did not stop to think about how to properly eat the dumpling…I made the chomping mistake four times. Kyle did not. I just wanted to stuff them all in my face and devour them. That is NOT how you eat them. Don’t do what I did if ever you come across these dumplings.

Anyway, they were super super good and super worth it. Then we moved on to our next destination: The Bund.

Thanksgiving!!!!

So the other foreign teachers and I all decided to celebrate Thanksgiving together, and our American boss suggested we have it at the Crowne Plaza, where they usually celebrated Thanksgiving each year. So that’s what we did.

Now let me give you a little background as to how all of us teachers were feeling at the time of Thanksgiving’s arrival. Xiangyang is beginning to get quite cold and dismal, and because of the lack of insulation in the walls of our apartments, our apartments are in fact COLDER inside than outside actually is. I’ll be there sitting in my apartment, wearing a couple layers and shivering, but then as soon as I put on a coat and go outside I feel a blast of a soft cool breeze, which was way more endurable than the harsh cold of my apartment. This has been happening since maybe the beginning or middle of October, even when the weather hadn’t turned cold yet. So, cold house = being cold all the time.

Now also we are living in deep almost rural China, and so food choices here are pretty limited and they will almost always be Chinese. I don’t know about the other teachers, but my diet has been mostly noodles, and every occasionally some hot pot. Here in Xiangyang, I’m finding meat less easily accessible than America…a lot of times when there’s a meat dish served at a restaurant, there’ll be a lot of bones and you have to really search around to get every part of the meat that’s clinging to the bone. So I’m also not eating a ton of meat. I’ve been trying to add some eggs to the noodles I get so that I’m maintaining some protein. Probably the most accessible thing here in Xiangyang is fruits and vegetables, though. But you better believe I’ve never been skinnier in my life! It’s pretty nice, but at the same time it doesn’t feel like a healthy and strong skinny, by Thanksgiving it was a thin/unhealthy skinny…and later on by end of December it was feeling like a life-hanging-by-a-thread skinny.

So…that’s the background for our coming into Thanksgiving Day.

That evening we all hopped a public bus and booked it to the Crowne Plaza, which was offering a special buffet and discount for Thanksgiving. Alongside their normal dishes, they’d be serving a whole bunch of Western style food often served at Thanksgiving. I didn’t know what to expect but I knew it would be loads better than what I’d been eating for the past three months.

When we got there, it was amazing. First of all, they had set up Christmas decorations outside and in the lobby. There was a giant gingerbread house, and a big tree with presents (couldn’t tell if they were real or fake) all laid out at the bottom of it. And the thing that got me most: HEAT. PROPER HEAT.

And the whole area just smelled good. The bathrooms were warm and also smelled wonderful. I didn’t have to watch my step on the ground so as to avoid spit or pee or poo or trash, I really think that the Crowne Plaza hotel is the cleanest place in Xiangyang, or at least one of them. Either way, after being cold for so long, the whole ambiance of the environment just made me feel so much better.

So then we walked into the restaurant where the buffet was being served. Man they had pretty much everything you could think of and more. They had their Chinese dishes: hot pot, noodles, etc. They had sushi, sashimi, oysters, shrimps, scallops, all this seafood! And then they had the Western dishes, which weren’t all American or traditional Thanksgiving items: they had curry duck, they had German sausage with mustard (I mean, as good as you’re gonna get in Xiangyang), spaghetti, mashed potatoes, ALL KINDS OF BREADS (they don’t really serve proper bread in China), butter (they don’t have that really either), real thick slices of ham, roasted beef, steak, and of course TURKEY, cranberry sauce, salad with all kinds of  condiments and dressings, different types of soups, sauteed vegetables, and more that I can’t think of. They served all you can drink wine along the way too. And as we were eating, waitresses walked around trying to get us to eat their lobster, as if they were trying to get rid of it (and it was part of the buffet too, so it didn’t cost extra). So I thought, “Who am I to say no to some LOBSTER??” And of course, I took that too. Man, they had so much stuff it was amazing. The only thing I didn’t see was stuffing.

Then they had desserts too. They had cheesecake, chocolate mousse cake, different kinds of ice cream, little slices of these petit four-looking things, custard, and more cakes that I can’t remember anymore. And at the end, they served us coffee to those who wanted to have any, and of course I had some. It was amazing, and we ate until we couldn’t eat anymore. I ate as much as I possibly could, and I didn’t really feel guilty at all because I knew that it was one of the rare times I’d have so much in front of me to eat…and if I gained any weight from it, I was just gonna lose it within a week. So no guilty feelings at all. It was amazing. It was the best I had felt in a long time, and we were all just so happy to have that kind of brief moment away from the harshness of life here in Xiangyang.

I can’t imagine this is as interesting to read as it was for me to experience, but hey, this was a HUGE highlight of the first half of my time in Xiangyang. It’s amazing just thinking about it still. There’s something really special about having food (or anything for that matter) when it’s not so easily attainable. Food never tastes better, heat never feels warmer, scents never smell sweeter, and it’s more than just what they are…what they do to you is more than if they were easily attainable because what happens when they’re rare is that they really sink down into your soul and make you feel good inside and out. I think I’ve had that experience in America a few times, but not nearly so often and so strong as I’ve felt it here in Xiangyang. As harsh as life has been here, food has never tasted so good, and any kind of comfort has never been more welcome. Even something like warm water from a faucet to wash your face in the morning just feels good deep down to my soul now, rather than in America when I just say oh hey look it’s warm water, whatever.

I think this has all given me a taste of what it’s like to have such limited things, yet at the same time I believe it’s easier to endure if you’ve never had certain other things, if you’ve never been used to “higher living”, because you don’t know what you don’t have…this is life for you and so it’s as good as you know it can be in your mind. If you’ve seen a cushier lifestyle, like all the teachers here (some far more than others), then you’re likely to maybe have a harder time with all this. But nonetheless, I still feel like I’ve been enlightened in a way from all of this, and I think the BIGGEST thing I’m taking from all of this is that I can most certainly appreciate so many of even the smallest things that are so easily attainable in America and not so in China. I can walk out the door of my house and buy a fresh sandwich. Not so in China. I wake up and can take a hot shower without having to wait any more than 1 minute for the water to heat up. Not so in Xiangyang. I can drink tap water. I have heat in every building I enter when the weather gets cold. I can walk outside at night and not worry about tripping and falling because the streets are properly lighted. I don’t fear for my life all the time when I’m in a car because driving rules are strictly enforced. You don’t think about certain little things you have in your life (not just material things…things in your culture, how you use language, anything really) until you go somewhere that has something different. I’m glad I’m having that experience right now.

Smorgaspord of awesomeness.

Cheesecake and Watermelon slices

Lobsterrr

I think this was steak with pepper sauce over it. Really yummy!

Ice Cream with custard...usually I don't like custard, but this one was creamy and delicious and had a syrupy surprise at the bottom of it!

Surprise on a Public Bus

Now here’s another story about life in rural China.

On days when I end classes early before the school day is over, I take the public bus home. Now the public bus I have to take from Ligong travels on a rural route and then into the city, so the people on this bus are usually farmers or more rural people. Often I see a lot of interesting things that they bring on the bus, like huge amounts of vegetables and other agricultural items. Now this particular day, I was standing near the side door on the bus because there were no seats, and though I wasn’t looking around, out of the corner of my eye I could see someone getting up nearby me to get off the bus.

I still didn’t look around because hey, it’s just someone getting up to get off the bus, that’s what people do on the bus, it’s not a very special thing. But then I heard *fwapfwapfwapfwapfwapfwap*, and I felt a light breeze nearby me accompanying the sound. Hmm, that was weird...meh, whatever. Then I hear it again. *fwapfwapfwapfwapfwap* So I slowly turn my head around to what’s next to me, and guess what I see?

The lady that had got up out of her seat was carrying in one hand two chickens by their feet. As I continued to watch, I saw that one of them was trying to put up a fight and was flapping its wings furiously no more than two feet away from me! I’m not a farmer, so I’m not used to seeing this kind of sight.

Now that was an interesting experience, taking a public bus that is such a seemingly urban thing and coming pretty much face to face with a live and flapping chicken!

I fell in a hole.

Yeah, that’s what happened. Now let me explain further.

The part of Xiangyang that I live in really can’t be regarded as what you and I know to be a city. We are at one of the furthest points away from the city center, in an area that’s even more rural than suburbia. If it was any more rural than it currently is, it would be regarded as the 农村 (nong cun), the countryside…aka the boondocks.

As I believe I’ve mentioned before, we live in the bed of a few mountains, nearby lots of farmland and pretty scenery. Every day I see chickens and cows and pigs and hear the crowing of roosters. Often I can see the farmers burning parts of their fields, or just burning trash. I’ve got another interesting story of my life in this area, but that’s for next entry.

Anyway, one of the things that comes with living in rural China is the lack of certain things that are necessary but you hardly think about in America. Things like simple driving rules that should be enforced by police officers to prevent a multitude of accidents. Things like having adequate lighting on the commonly-used roads at night…or anywhere people need to be walking in the middle of the night.

The latter issue was the thing that caused the title of this entry. Where I live, there is maybe one street light every maybe 300-400 meters, which creates huge patches of dark on the streets. There are places where you have absolutely no idea where you’re walking and are just floundering around in the dark. Now, on the final stretch to my apartment, on a small road, I discovered an opening in the sidewalk earlier that day. It was about 3 feet deep and inside there was some sort of faucet, so I assume the opening was there for hoses to attach to. Anyway, the hole was big and deep and I made a mental note to myself to not go walking on the sidewalk when it got dark at night.

So that night I was in a bit of a hurry to get to where I was going, so I walked out of my apartment rather quickly and made my way down the road. When I got near to the end of that stretch I realized I had left my key back in my apartment. Now, it was raining and it was cold, and all I was focused on doing was turning back and going to get the spare key so I could open my apartment and get my own. So I turned around quickly and began walking fast down the sidewalk back to my apartment.

I was walking…and then all of a sudden I was SO not.

I didn’t understand how I was on the ground, all scratched up, and then I realized that I had fallen into the very hole I had warned myself about earlier. Ow.

I’m really lucky, because if I hadn’t fallen the way I’d fallen, with my arms in front of me protecting my face, my mouth would have gone straight into the corner of the top of the hole and that would’ve been disastrous. And if my legs had fallen in any stranger a way, rather than pretty much straight down, bones would’ve been broken. Yikes.

So I pulled myself up out of the hole, and I had hurt my hip a little so it was a little hard. I then took a moment then got up from the ground and proceeded to go back to my apartment in the rain. I didn’t even see the hole coming. The street was completely dark and even after I knew it was there and looked again, I still couldn’t see it. Talk about dangerous. So that’s my story.

Chen Kaige's Movie Base

ALRIGHT!! I’ve been super excited to write this entry! I’ve just been backed up with the others so I haven’t gotten to it. I suppose it won’t be as exciting for you as it was for me, but it’s just because I love movies so much. Movies are my thing, and any kind of chance I have to witness something to do with movies makes me happier than you can imagine. One day, very early in my time here in Xiangyang, I was sitting at the coffee shop, talking to the boss, Fuli’s, boyfriend…his name is Chris. We were just talking about anything and I decided to ask him out of the blue (because I was curious) what his favorite movie was. Now quite honestly I don’t remember what it was or if he even told me he had one…and it’s not because I’m writing this months after it happened because I forgot it pretty much immediately on account of he had said something not long after that I was never to forget. I was telling him that I had seen a whole bunch of Chinese movies and that one day I hope to make movies, maybe with Chinese actors and directors. What he said to me afterwards was this: he asked me if I knew Chen Kaige (pronounced CHEN kye-GUH). No that’s not the end of it.

Now to those of you who aren’t cinephiles like me, and to those of you who ARE cinephiles but only for American or English-language movies, let me explain to you who exactly Chen Kaige is. There are three super famous (even in the West) Chinese directors, here they are in order of their popularity:

Zhang Yimou: (JAHNG yee-MOE) (by a long shot leaving all the others in the dust) he directed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Hero; House of Flying Daggers; To Live (the movie about  the evils of the Cultural Revolution which was censored in China); and The Road Home. Zhang Yimou’s biggest trademark is creating movies with elaborate sets, beautiful costumes, and bordering-fantastical dramatic scenes. His stories are generally seemingly very simple but with points that keep you thinking for weeks and even years to come.

  

Chen Kaige:  he directed  in order of popularity Farewell My Concubine, The Emperor and the Assassin, and Together. Though he has directed many more, these are the three that have acquired a following in America and other foreign countries. Chen Kaige’s trademark, in my opinion, is having more complicated yet still moving stories that still have you thinking for weeks and years. All three of these films I have studied in class, The Emperor and the Assassin I’ve studied twice. Both Farewell My Concubine and The Emperor and the Assassin I have never stopped needing to constantly think about, constantly considering their themes and morals, and coming to new conclusions of what the filmmakers wanted me to learn and what I personally can take from these films. I could write several essays of several pages about what I’ve taken from these films, and others directed by Chen Kaige…he knows how to pick his stories.

  

Wong Kar-wai: (WONG kar-WHY) At the moment, I’ve only seen three of his films, so I’m not as personally familiar with his style as I am with the others. He is a Hong-Kong filmmaker and has directed internationally acclaimed films such as Lust, Caution; Chungking Express; and In the Mood for Love. In my opinion, his films are much more what people would call “art-house”…films that experiment with camera shots and angles, camera technology usage, and even the running time of the film. The stories are much more grungy and about “the real man”, and his stories are far from simple and easy. They are about people’s struggles with love amidst their own battles in the modern world, and they are centered around the culture of Hong Kong, or at least reminiscent of Hong Kong.

He doesn't like to take off his glasses. Google him and you'll see what I mean.

  

Note: There is also Ang Lee, who is also a Chinese (Taiwanese) director, but I don’t count him (not because he’s Taiwanese) but because he has changed his citizenship to American and has been producing American films for years. He did Brokeback Mountain, Sense and Sensibility (1995), and the most recent Life of Pi.

So those are my brief introductions of these directors. As I mentioned before, I have studied Chen Kaige in school, in high school and in college, so I’ve been VERY aware of Chen Kaige for many years. I know my Chinese stars and my Chinese directors (at least the big three), and so when Chris asked me if I knew Chen Kaige, to reply to him, “Yeah, I know him” was definitely an understatement. I am very acquainted with Chen Kaige.

So of course, I said yes, and he then says to me, “You know he has a big movie base here.” I’m there thinking, “Yeah, I know that. We’re in China, and he’s a Chinese director, of course he’s got a film base in China.” Chris continues on to say, “He’s building a huge base, one of the biggest, right here in Xiangyang.” My jaw literally dropped. And he said that people can go and visit if they wanted to. My jaw LITERALLY dropped again. He said that Chen Kaige was in the process of making a new movie, set in ancient Xiangyang, and the set for the movie was in the process of being built at the time…as cool as this already sounded, I jokingly asked him, “Will there be any stars in the film?” to which he replied to my surprise, “Yeah! There should be a bunch!” and then proceeded to name at least one or two that I was well acquainted with.

So that was the beginning.

Chris had said that I could go there whenever I wanted to, and so I had to find a way to go. So I asked around to a few of my Chinese friends, including my co-teacher Xixi, and a couple weeks later Xixi told me that she had found the movie base! Now Xiangyang is not a huge city, but it’s pretty big and I figured that this base was gonna be in some far corner of the city, miles away from any civilization…at so far a corner that any further it would be considered another city. I figured it would be maybe at least a 40 minute drive via taxi, the only form of public transportation that could get me to an obscure location. But soon after Xixi found the place, she suggested we make a trip together to go see what it was all about.

So not long after, Xixi picked me up in her car along with her mother (and I brought along another one of the foreign teachers named Cat), and the four of us drove to the base. Twenty minutes after getting in the car, we were there. The general location was something I had passed several times before, and nowhere near as obscure as I thought it would be. If I had wanted to go by myself, I could’ve hopped a public bus and walked the rest of the way. This base was hidden in plain sight, just a little trip down a dirt road off the main road and we were there.

We entered a large area untouched by civilization except for the movie base itself. A small building in Chinese traditional style architecture served as the office/headquarters. The place was almost completely empty of people, save for some five or six tourists and the security workers that were there. We entered the grounds, which were very crude…there was no parking lot, only a dirt plain where parking cars was implied.

There really wasn’t too much to see at the start, and the only way you could see more was to go further up and further in. (There happened to be a small hill behind that office which played a huge role in covering up most of the base, as seen in the photo above. All that could be seen was the tip-tops of ancient style roofs covered with scaffolding.)

After standing around for a bit, then taking a few steps to the right, and a few steps to the left (there really was literally nowhere to really go because all there was to be seen was dirt, grass, and hill), Xixi talked with the security guards dressed in these GI Joe-looking uniforms. She then said to me, “We’re not allowed to go further in.” For some reason I wasn’t disappointed, because for some reason I didn’t believe that was actually true. Things that are said often aren’t always as final as they seem from what my experience has been in China. At that moment, the security guard standing nearby me and Cat pulled out a camera and snapped a picture of us.

BAM. That was what we needed.

I didn’t even need to say a single word to Xixi, she was WAY ahead of me. She jumped on that immediately. She was super clever the way she talked to the security guards, she spoke very politely and very sweetly and worded everything I was thinking in a much sweeter way than I was thinking. I was there thinking, “Look this guy just took a picture of us! He won’t let us through, but he gets the privilege of taking a picture of us? Uh uh, seeing a foreigner is a really cool thing for many Chinese people. Let’s compromise: he gets a picture of us and we get to see the set.”

This is how Xixi put it: “I know you’d love to take a picture with the foreigners, right? Well, why don’t we go up the hill and take a picture together with the set in the background? Then that would be a MUCH better picture.”

This lady…she’s fantastic.

The security guards ate it all up, and before we knew it, we were being led across the rope that blocked the way, with the security guards not only leading but serving as a tour guide, explaining to us the whole spiel about the movie base, how it was being constructed, what styles of dynasties different parts were being built in, what would happen to the base when filming was finished, and when exactly would the filmmakers come and begin filming.

The main security guard led us up the hill, commentating as we went, and I was just taking it all in. Now as I keep saying, I love film. I love the art of making it and I love the fun of watching it, and as soon as I crossed over the rope that kept everyone else out, I felt shivers of excitement that I only feel when I’m doing something I really really love. It’s a great feeling and I hope all of you have experienced the same feeling too. We walked up the hill, which was lined with these purple flowers. I found it strange that the hill was covered with these blooming flowers, even though it was the middle of fall and beginning to get cold…certainly not flower weather. Xixi told me that they were planted there for the film. I thought that was pretty cool.

Finally we got to the top of the hill, and I could see the whole set that was under construction. My pictures don’t do it justice, I couldn’t capture the awesomeness that I was witnessing. Traveling to foreign countries and seeing beautiful sights has made me realize how very limited cameras are, even with all the capabilities they have today…despite it all, the cameras of today are still unable to capture the beauty of what the eye can perceive. I can show you pictures of what I saw, but you’ll never see the full extent of how awesome it is. I’ll see it when I look at the pictures because they are an easy reminder of what I’ve witnessed with my eyes, but for someone who hasn’t seen it, all they have is the picture.

But hey, it’s better than nothing.

Anyway, I stood at the top of the hill looking down across the vast set that was being built. I could see the traditional style buildings underneath green nets and scaffolding. Some were very tall and others were smaller. The security guard explained that only about 25% of the set had been built, and already there was a lot there. There were different styles of architecture being built, from the different dynasties that would be featured in the film. I don’t remember what the other ones were that were mentioned, but I know the Tang dynasty was one of them. The whole set was not going to be done for maybe almost another year, but the filming would begin in March 2014. If you don’t know, sometimes what filmmakers do is build part of the set and film the scenes set in those locations, while simultaneously other parts of the set are being built. And this will continue, part by part, until the movie is complete. It’s inconvenient financially and timing-wise to build everything all at once and then film it. Especially when the set is just going to be taken down when it’s all over.

Pics, or it didn't happen ;)

However, in this case the set was not going to be taken down. Like what has been done with the Shire set from Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit series, the buildings in this film are not simply facades (as is normally done) but rather they will be permanent structures. The Shire set from The Hobbit has become a kind of museum/tourist site, but this whole complex will become a shopping center after all the filming is done.

It was amazing just taking it all in. Movies take you to worlds where you could never go in real life, and I felt that being there gave me just a taste of a world of ancient China. It was more than ancient buildings being plopped in the middle of a mostly-modern world like I see every day in Xiangyang: this was really ancient China, no signs of modern life. This was another world. And I’ll get to see it again when it is more complete…but more on that later.

As we took in the huge set stretching almost as far as the eye could see, they had us turn around to look behind us. I turned around and they showed us a large hill, further in the distance not currently part of the closed off set but rather nearer to the main road. Part of the hill kind of had a cliff face to it. They told us that this hill would also be part of the film, with Chinese characters and a face of a famous ancient Chinese poet carved into the cliff with the help of CGI (computer generated imagery). It’ll be like a smaller Chinese version of Mt. Rushmore, with only one face and writing on it. Later on, they showed us a picture of what it would look like, and though it was a fake picture, I could only imagine how epic it would look as part of the movie, as real as CGI can make something look (and that’s pretty real).

That's the hill in the distance, click on the picture to see a bigger version.

After that we went down the hill. We couldn’t go further down into the set because it’s a construction site, but the adventure wasn’t over. At this time right now, I’m doing all I can to keep myself from acting like an excited and crazy fangirl, and I realized how cool the Chinese people there thought it was to see foreigners at a movie base (I’m serious though, even when we go shopping Chinese shoppers observe our shopping carts to see what we’re getting…once we were at a store’s grand opening and taking advantage of the free wine tasting they had, with no Chinese people around. After a couple minutes of hanging out there, after seeing us there all of a sudden Chinese people begin to join us to take part in it too…and there are many more stories like this, we’ll be standing around in a circle literally doing nothing but talking and Chinese people will come up to us and just stand with us watching us.)

So instead of acting like a fangirl, I’m trying to play it off like I’ve done this plenty of times, like it’s totally cool, like this is just a day in the life of a glamorous foreigner. I’ve got my sunglasses on and everything, no huge smiles, just cool. I think it worked because most of the Chinese people there (and there weren’t too many, the place was pretty empty) were snapping pictures of me. Me and Cat went to pose somewhere to get some pics with our cameras and I found that there were more cameras snapping away than simply those belonging to the people I came with.

So anyway, as I’m trying to play it cool and all, they lead us down the hill and to my delight there was more to be seen. They took us into the small main office building where inside they showed us a huge model of the whole complex in its intended entirety. Because the place would be a shopping mall after filming was over, the model showed not only the completed sets, but also extra parts of the complex that would be part of the mall (for example, there will be a small amusement park built after filming is over). But the size of the whole thing was immensely huge. I couldn’t believe it, but Chris had said earlier that this would be one of the biggest movie bases in China. I can certainly believe that.

Click on this photo and observe the triangle at the left...look closely and you'll see that that's the model for the mountain carving. You can see the face of an old man carved into the mountain. Look for it in the other photos as well.

The model lit up and changed colors, and different sections could be lit up separately.

I tried to get a closer picture of the mountain, but my camera gets very blurry without sunlight.

Then after that, they showed a 10 minute video about the base, talking about the filming and about the future shopping mall. The security guard even gave us some brochures to take home. HA. And they said we couldn’t come in. What a change of mind!

NOW, ALL OF WHAT I JUST WROTE RIGHT NOW WAS EPICLY AWESOME…BUT NONE OF THAT REALLY COMPARES TO WHAT HAPPENED NEXT. I DON’T EVEN KNOW FOR 100% CERTAIN WHETHER TO TAKE IT SERIOUSLY, BUT STILL JUST THE IDEA OF IT COMING UP WAS MORE THAN I’D EVER EXPERIENCED.

After we were all done watching the video, we took a few more pictures around the building and then got ready to go. Xixi then spoke to the security guard once more, thanking him profusely for allowing us to go further in and see the set. She really did an excellent job, saying, “Thank you so much. We’re so grateful to you, we know that you didn’t have to let us see all that we did.” And man, by the end of it, guess what happened? The security guard gave her his number and told her, “They begin filming around the end of March. If you want to come back again at that time, and either meet the director and the stars, or even be an extra in the film, give me a call.”

:O :O :O

I can’t even believe he said that. Xixi really must have gotten through to him. I still can’t even believe it. I think in regards to being an extra he was referring more to Xixi, because the film is an ancient China film, so it’s unlikely foreigners would be invited to be in it…not 100% sure though. However, I think that in regards to meeting the cast and the director Chen Kaige, he definitely meant all of us. After we had left the base, I thanked Xixi for being a genius at getting us in, but Xixi also said (and I think she’s right) that it took all of us together to make that happen. If Xixi had been by herself or with an all-Chinese group, the guards would probably have turned her away. But being a foreigner in China gets you some privileges at times (not all the time, but more than a Chinese citizen…sometimes we get free drinks, free food, people treating us to dinner, students giving us gifts, people inviting us to go places together, etc.), because I think it’s because there’s something fascinating about us to most Chinese people as you go deeper into the mainland (I’m not talking about Shanghai and Beijing, they don’t count :P).

I’ve been pondering for years, trying to find an equivalent of something we see here in America that would give us a similar reaction as Chinese have to us. At first I thought maybe it was seeing someone from a particular culture in their traditional wear, like an Amish person in their dresses and caps, or an Indian lady in her sari, or a Muslim lady in her burka. But that’s not quite the same, because we in America are generally used to seeing people of different cultures, our nation being a big melting pot.

No…after years of pondering, I think I found the answer. It’s a strange one and perhaps a funny one, but try to get past the humor to understand why this is the best equivalent. The best equivalent of Chinese people deep in China seeing foreigners is like seeing Disney costume characters walking down the street.  It’s not normal to see a Disney costume character walking down the street (maybe in Disney world, where they belong, but not anywhere else), and if we saw one we’d stare. I know I would. Now here’s the comparison. Sometimes Chinese people think foreigners are so beautiful (like maybe Disney princesses) that they have to go and talk to them, and will even forget their manners and invade your privacy just to be able to talk to you. Then there are the Chinese people (mainly little children) that are quite frightened of foreigners (like the Disney villains) and they stare from a far with wide eyes or even cry. But mostly, when seeing a foreigner (like most Disney costume characters) they just want to take a picture and instead of signing an autograph, they ask for our number.

This can give a lot of benefits, I’ve just named a few a little earlier. But also this causes the problem of a disconnect from reality. Often foreigners here are treated like stars, like they’re more special for no other reason than their race. I know that’s blunt but there it is. (That’s also another reason why some foreigners come to China, to feel validated…that’s also blunt but there it is.) Anyway, the problem with this is that they treat you like you’re so much better than they are for no other reason than what you look like, and I hate that. It feels like I’m being worshipped and it makes me angry, because we are all the same. We’re people, and no one should sell themselves short.

BUT THAT WAS A TANGENT. And at any rate, I really don’t mind using my foreigner status to get me in to see a movie base. That’s perfectly harmless, and I also helped my Chinese friends (Xixi and her mother) by doing so as well.

So all in all, my trip to Chen Kaige’s movie base turned out to be way more awesome than I imagined it would be, and because of what happened at the very end, Xixi and I intend to return in March and see what we can see. Maybe something epic will happen then. Maybe not. But I’ll have fun either way. It’s a movie base! How can you NOT have fun???

These were out in one of the hallways of the office building.

This is Xixi's mother.

Me and Xixi! Buddies :)

Me and Cat :)