August 26, 2008

Shirley, a 23 year old Chinese tour guide, took us to Dazu. This had to be the highlight of the trip so far. Buddhist monks in the 12th century carved enormous statues, including Buddhas and other figures, into limestone cliffs and caves. There are hundreds of figures, each one more interesting than the next. During the trip to Dazu, Shirley asked me about the book I was reading. The book, Way of the World by Ronald Suskind, is a fascinating tale of numerous persons who have been effected by the Bush/Cheney administration. One theme of the book is that the current administration does not truly embody American values because it uses secretive, non-democratic behavior in carrying out its foreign policy. I suggested to Shirley that the Chinese government engages in the same type of behavior by not allowing its citizens to truly participate in formulating domestic policy. She did not agree. I pressed her on what she thought as an individual about her government because she kept answering my question by using the term “the Chinese people”. She finally said she does not agree with her government all the time, but in fact listens more to what her parents say. This was particularly true when it came to the question of what a Chinese girl would do if she became pregnant out of wedlock. This issue came up because one of the characters in the Suskind book was a young man from Afghanistan who was living in the US and learned that an American female friend had a baby and was not married. He said in Afghanistan the girl would be killed. I asked Shirley what would happen to the same girl in China and she said the girl would not be seen as being evil and would be accepted into society. We came back to Chunqing (pronounced Chun Ching with an accent on the Ching) and I told Shirley the only thing I wanted was a Big Mac after having eaten Chinese food for a week. Chunqing is made up of four districts, all connected by tunnels and bridges. The North District is where the hotel (Holiday Inn which has seen better days) was and is at least the size in population and territory of Philadelphia. It is 83,000 square kilometers, a number I kept questioning Shirley about but was verified in a book later on. The solution as to the size of Chungqing in square kilometers and population became apparent after speaking with an American named Dick on the Victoria Anna. It is the municipality of Chunqing that is so large, and comes about because the municipality has incorporated all the land mass from Chungqing proper to a spot 240 miles away. The other two districts are the Central and Knight Dragon districts. Each district is again at least the size of Manhattan in population and geography, and probably has as many skyscrapers. We were taken to Liberation Tower (a monument to victory over the Japanese in WWII), and of course there is a Rolex clock at the top, allegedly keeping the most accurate time in the country. Just as there were swarms of people all around shopping at the various malls and stores in the South District when we stopped for a big Mac, there were countless numbers of people (mostly young females like Shirley) out shopping near the Tower.