Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [123]
“Just a trim,” I indicated.
I thought I’d keep the beard. True, it was approaching Grizzly Adams proportions and we didn’t want that. I had a Jeremy Irons kind of beard in mind, the sort of beard that suggested, There goes a bad, bad man—yet he is also curiously intriguing. Like Satan.
With the first pass of the razor, however, I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I stoically absorbed the assault upon my facial hair. When she finished, I regarded myself in the mirror. This was not the face of a bad, bad man. It was more like the face of George Michael. Indeed, with my fey George Michael beard, I looked like the sort of man who wears lots of cologne, and who lingers in nightclubs wondering where he’s going to get the evening dose of cocaine. Perhaps, I considered, I looked like a terrorist. But no. I just looked preposterous.
When I left the barbershop, darkness had descended. Not that it mattered, of course. Lanzhou hadn’t seen the sun in years. And then I noticed that the hotel restaurant was offering a Western buffet. I had been in China long enough to know that the words “Western buffet” should be regarded as a threat and one should flee to the nearest market. But I was in an upscale hotel in Lanzhou, and I thought, What the hell, embrace the escapism for an evening. Besides, in my brief glance of the city, Lanzhou struck me as an excellent place to get mugged. And so I entered, and loaded my plate with meat and potatoes, and a serving of frog legs done in the French manner. It was competently done, and incredibly bland. Even the frog legs, which do, in fact, taste like chicken. The flavors of China had fried my taste buds. I picked at my food, feeling clumsy and barbaric using a fork and knife again.
I looked about and was suddenly startled by the other customers. There was not a foreigner among them. Indeed, most of them were upscale Chinese parents teaching their kids how to use forks and knives and how to eat Western food.
“Ah, ah,” tutted a father to his young son. “Only use English words.”
“Do I have to eat this?” the boy pleaded.
Afterward, I marched up to the business center and sent an e-mail to my wife. Start the boys on Mandarin lessons now. And have them use chopsticks.
It’s going to be a competitive world they inherit.
19
There are few words more evocative than Silk Road. Imagine a world inhabited by Sogdians, Gokturks, Ferghanians, Parthians, Bactrians, Nabataeans, Samanids, and other civilizations now lost to us, a world of traders and conquerors, missionaries and zealots, poets and muses, traversing the vast distances of Eurasia, trading the gold of Rome for the silk of Xi’an. There were hundreds of trails from the Mediterranean to China that would collectively become known as the Silk Road, lonesome paths over treacherous passes and barren deserts upon which civilizations rose and fell. One such path had skirted the vast desolation of the Taklamakan Desert in northern China and made its way to the town of Dunhuang, near the splendid Mogao Caves, where for centuries Buddhist monks had carved and painted scenes of wonder and devotion, a vast tomb of extraordinary artwork that for centuries lay lost and forgotten.
Flying in, I could see how this could happen, this losing of one of the great repositories of ancient art. The Mogao Caves lie at the very edge of the Taklamakan Desert, an enormous, expanding emptiness fringed by the soaring Kunlun Mountains. This desert is one of the world’s largest sand deserts. And, of course, it can get a little dusty here as wind stirs the fine grains. Indeed, as I walked across the tarmac at the airport, I listened to the jet engines wheezing and sputtering from all the sand. I watched the mechanics on their bicycles, pedaling toward the plane to investigate this strange grinding and whirring of the engines, and I thought of Buddhism, its Zen variation, and once again noted that I should look into it, because I was not at all calm flying in China and I really needed to do something about it.
Fortunately, Dunhuang is