‘Why Do They Hate Us?” Egyptian-American writer Mona Eltahawy laments on the cover page of Foreign Policy, in an article illustrated by provocative photos of a naked woman painted to look as if she were wearing niqab. Who are the ‘They’ and who are the ‘Us’ referred to in the title of Eltahawy’s piece? She claims, in her many television interviews since the publication of the piece, that her intention was to turn the 9/11 mantra ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’ on its head. But in fact, she subscribes to it. The ‘Us’ she claims to speak for are Arab/Muslim women, but the ‘They’ accused of hatred are the same: Arab/Muslim men. In subscribing to that sweeping generalization, Eltahawy created a media controversy in the States but forfeited the support of a considerable segment of the women she purports to champion.
It is easy to understand and sympathize with ElEltahawy’s bitterness and disillusionment: a vocal supporter of the January 25th Revolution in Egypt, she was assaulted sexually and had both her arms broken by riot police during a demonstration in Cairo. But Eltahawy’s article is a blanket condemnation, not only of the tactics of the riot police under Mubarak and his loyalists; not of a misogynist interpretation of Islam pushed by an extremist sect called Salafis; not even of regressive attitudes toward women arguably prevalent, especially among the less educated, in the Middle East.
Eltahawy’s generalization tars all men in the Muslim/Arab world with the same harsh brush, as if the riot policeman stripping a female protester were indistinguishable from the young man trying to protect her. She ignores the experience of thousands of Egyptian women who camped side by side with men in Tahrir Square day and night during the heyday of the revolution, without being subjected to harassment or intimidation.
With similar lack of distinction, she makes sweeping generalizations about all Arab countries, as if Saudi Arabia, the only country where women are not allowed to drive and are forced to wear a niqab, were indistinguishable from Tunisia, where policewomen direct traffic.
Eltahawy selects the worst instances of abusive laws or practices from each country and throws them indiscriminately into her quiver of accusations: for instance, the abhorrent practice of female circumcision is still common in parts of Egypt, but it is a Nilotic practice, not an Islamic one, and is unknown in the Muslim country most repressive against women: Saudi Arabia. On the other hand Egypt and most Arab countries enforce a minimum age of sixteen for marriage for girls, whereas Saudi Arabia does not.
By wielding her weapon so bluntly and indiscriminately, by making the same mistake Western feminists have historically made in trying to disassociate the ‘Oriental’ woman from her context, Eltahawy risks alienating the support of the women she may sincerely be trying to champion. A woman does not exist in a vacuum; she is a mother, daughter, wife, sister; she is a Muslim or an Arab. There are claims to her loyalty other than gender. At a time in history when her sons or brothers are indiscriminately branded as potential terrorists for being Arab or Muslim, she will shrink from comforting those dangerous stereotypes by subscribing to an equally reductionist diatribe against them as misogynists; at a time when wars are being waged, or threatened, against Arab and Muslim-majority countries partly with the justification of ‘saving women’, these same women fear the consequences of such reasoning.
But perhaps the most misguided aspect of Eltahawy’s indiscriminate attack in ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’ is that it leaves the women’s rights movement in these countries with nowhere to go. If feminists in Arab and Muslim-majority countries are to gain the full measure of rights and liberties for women, they will need to enlist the support of a sizeable segment of the male population, not antagonize it wholesale. Women’s rights cannot be imposed from outside, by marshalling public opinion in the West. Eltahawy’s courage and sincerity must be tested by the same measure as any feminist facing the same dilemma: by her efforts to change facts on the ground in Egypt, not by success in creating a media uproar in America.

Now that the Republican primaries in the U.S. have been decided in favor of Mitt Romney, and Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande are facing off in France, perhaps the most critical presidential ‘primaries’ of all are being fought out in Egypt. Everything is at stake here, arguably not just for Egypt, but for the region and the world.
The future of the Arab Spring hangs in the balance, with three possible scenarios: Egypt’s elections return a hardliner Islamist for president, setting it on the path of Ayatollah Iran, confirming the worst fears of the West; or the military re-asserts its role in the power balance, along the lines of traditional Turkish politics; or, in a case of Mubarak redux, an old regime loyalist is brought in to protect the interests of the beleagured business elite.
In a region that has consistently demonstrated the validity of the mantra ‘as Egypt goes, so goes the Arab world’, the United States has vital interests, from Iraq to Israel; the run-up to the June-slated presidential elections is closely watched from Washington to Moscow. So it is intriguing that the process of elimination of candidates is taking place in the courts rather than at the polls.
The explanation for the critical role of the courts lies in a constitution riddled with Mubarak-era amendments jerry-rigged to ensure, in effect, that no one but the former president, or his offspring, stood a real chance of running for president of Egypt. One such rule, excluding anyone convicted of any misdemeanor, even on blatantly political, trumped-up charges, was intended to disqualify Ayman Nour, who had dared to run against Mubarak. After the revolution, the same rule was applied to disqualify Muslim Brotherhood candidate Khairat Shater, jailed under Mubarak for his Islamist activities.
Moreover, after the revolution, the Islamic-dominated new parliament voted into law new hurdles for presidential candidates, designed to exclude certain figures from the old regime or certain candidates it deemed too secular. On the one hand, Ahmed Shafiq, a Mubarak-era prime minister and the current military rulers’ candidate-of-choice, was recently disqualified according to the new rule against any ancien regime top ministers running for president. On the other hand, it was with considerable schadenfreude that many saw the most radical hardliner among the Islamist candidates, Abu Ismail, a vociferous reviler of the Unites States, disqualified by the courts on a technicality: although born of Egyptian parents on both sides, his mother had become a naturalized American citizen at some later date.
But in this game of arbitrary court-decreed elimination, the ‘Mubarak redux’ lobby was dealt a blow of its own, when the courts disqualified Omar Soliman, Mubarak’s long-time spy chief, top liaison official with Israel, and eleventh-hour vice-president in the final days before Mubarak’s resignation. Soliman was excluded from running for the presidency on a technicality involving a mere 31 votes, a blow to the military rulers of the country, who considered Soliman, himself a military man, one of them: he was never caught in the wide-ranging net of prosecution that swept up the major cabinet and business elite figures associated with Gamal Mubarak, and is widely believed to have retained much of his behind the scenes power.
As have many of the old establishment, even those currently behind bars. Western observers who follow the trials of Mubarak, his sons and his loyalists focus on the ‘humiliation’ of ‘the cage’, as they call the traditional dock with bars, ubiquitous in Egypt and in some European countries. What Egyptians are more likely to note are the obsequious salutes with which these Mubarak politicians are greeted by the policemen assigned to guard them as they enter the courthouse, a clear sign that these men in white prison garb still wield power to be reckoned with, even behind bars, and that they have the tacit protection of the military rulers of the country.
So in the run-up to the June election, as one candidate after another is knocked down by the courts on a technicality, schadenfreude is short-lived, and new candidates pop up in their place: the relatively moderate Muslim Brotherhood and the fundamentalist Salafis are already fielding new candidates in place of their first choices, whereas the ‘secular-liberal’ movement is left with nothing but compromise options.
The first choice of the young revolutionaries and most liberals would have been Nobel Prize winner Dr. Baradei, but he has refused to throw his hat in the ring, opting instead for the rather Utopian goal of building a new, progressive party that would be ready to contest free, fair elections next time around. That decision may partly have been dictated by his lack of popular appeal among a certain sector of the masses which suspects Baradei of American bias, ironically, given that he was anathema to the Bush administration for his obstructionist role as head of the U.N. Atomic Energy Agency in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War.
The compromise candidates before the secular liberals at the moment are narrowed down to two: Amr Moussa, former head of the Arab League and former Foreign Minister under Mubarak, but less tainted than he might be by this association on account of his reputation as an independent, nationalistic politician; and Abou El-Fotouh, a moderate former Muslim Brotherhood member who resigned from the party over his differences with them.
But there is still over a month to go till the June elections, and typically skeptical Egyptians predict that the military rulers of the country will step in and pre-empt them. Recent demonstrations against just such a scenario have united a broad spectrum of the population, Islamist and secular, but there is yet another contingent of the electorate that would welcome a military take-over in the name of ‘a return to security and economic stability.’ Meanwhile, the courts play an unpredictable game, disqualifying one candidate after another, and issuing equally arbitrary rulings in other cases: one of Egypt’s most popular comic actors was convicted on a charge of ‘insulting Islam’ in his films, only to be exonerated of the self-same charge in an identical case. The power struggle between the different political currents in the country is playing itself out in the courts, and if that is any indication, this will be a hot election season in Egypt.

The crazy woman is back. You hear her shouting on the street in front of the building, early in the morning and at sunset, ranting yells as indecipherable as an infant’s existential angst. I never see her, only hear her; I don’t know how she survives. For several months there was no shouting, she was off the street; I only realized it when she came back, the way you only realize your tooth had stopped aching when it starts acting up again. I wonder where she had gone to, why she was back.
The street is in an upscale neighborhood of Cairo, but in Cairo proper, even in the best neighborhoods, the comfortable are not insulated from the poor; it has always been that way. In this city, the poor and the affluent cross each other a hundred times a day with easy mutual acceptance and civility. Residents of this neighborhood of embassies and banks share the sidewalks with doorkeepers, servants, delivery boys, shopkeepers, unofficial parking attendants, street vendors; high and low exchange a second-nature calibration of greeting according to status.
So, when the revolution broke out, there was some relief that it had not morphed into what is called here ‘a revolution of the hungry’, in which mobs stormed the villas and high-rises. Only in the new suburbs of October 6th and Qattameya were the gated communities obliged to hire armed guards to protect the villa dwellers from intruders. In Cairo proper, it was felt, that was not necessary.
But lately there has been an alarming up-tick in ‘drive-by’ purse-snatching, even in the most privileged neighborhoods. This scenario is typical: the robber sweeps by on a motorcycle with missing license plates, targets an elderly woman, swoops down on her, snatches her handbag, spilling her onto the sidewalk in the process, and speeds off. The modus operandi is ingeniously adapted to a congested traffic pattern where cars have zero maneuverability in narrow streets but motorcycles or bicycles can thread their way between the cars and zigzag in and out. The typically elderly victims of these drive-by raids often sustain broken bones as well as the theft of their purses.
Almost everyone, by now, personally knows of someone who has been the victim of a purse-snatching or a car-jacking. People avoid traveling at night now; they are more suspicious of strangers. It’s not that there are more thieves or kidnappers, some people sigh, only that before they were afraid of the long arm of the police state. On the contrary, diehard supporters of the revolution counter, the breakdown in order is a plot by the disaffected security forces to create a rising sense of panic that will strengthen the ‘law and order’ –read military- lobby at the polls in the upcoming presidential elections. Both viewpoints are correct, at least partly.
The presidential election in June looms as an uneasy deadline; some frustrated liberals are threatening to boycott the ballot boxes, rather than be faced with a non-choice between various shades of Muslim Brotherhood candidates. The MB wants a president ‘with them but not of them’ went the mantra, until they started to speak of fielding their own candidate. And in any case, bewildered citizens object, on what basis can you elect a president, when the constitution that will define his powers, retroactively, has not yet been written?
Meantime, the strategy of the ruling council seems to be to keep the citizenry off balance with rumors and counter-rumors, periodic shortfalls of gas, and setting Egyptians against each other over soccer matches. The Islamist-dominated Parliament, rather than focus on alleviating the crisis in unemployment and the economy, is playing diversionary politics by threatening to ‘clean up’ satellite television stations.
But there are many in the business community who, although wary of the Muslim Brotherhood, find reassurance in the fact that leading members of the Brotherhood themselves are known for being some of the most successful business men in the country. The most optimistic of these observers count on the military to guarantee security and the Brotherhood to foster business; ‘in five years, in ten years, we’ll be Turkey,’ one highly successful businessman assured me.
He could be whistling in the wind. More serious than the ‘lapses in security’ are the signs of an ugly rift tearing apart the social fabric just where it should be strongest: philanthropy. Philanthropists who had devoted a good part of their lives to charitable organizations are finding themselves under attack by the very people they had served. In one case, a group of women, both Coptic Christian and Muslim, who had successfully and tirelessly worked for years to bring electricity, water, and schools to a dirt-poor Coptic-Muslim village, find themselves resented and unwelcome by the very community that had benefited so tangibly from their efforts.
In another instance, a woman in her seventies who had devoted her entire life to running an orphanage that had been the 100-year-old legacy of her grandmother, and who had taken abandoned baby girls off the streets- raised them, found them employment, gave them a home till they married, and helped them set up house when they did- this elderly lady now finds herself accused in court of abusing the girls and turning them out into the street to become prostitutes. Her shock and disillusionment is so great the philanthropist now goes about like a bewildered shadow of her former self.
More callous observers assign this ‘biting the hand that feeds’ to unsuspected reserves of class resentment or to the effect on easily manipulated minds of a daily barrage of corruption exposés in the media. Whatever the case, it is a sign that the time-honored understanding that lubricated social interchange in the country, and provided for the needs of the least privileged, is breaking down. Take the case of the crazy woman who shouts in the street early in the morning and at sunset.
Apparently she had worked for a resident of the building once, and when that lady died, the woman could not be rehired because of her mental instability. At some point she had been sent to an asylum, but was so ill-treated there she found her way back on the street, and from then on relied on the kindness of strangers. I have never seen her, but someone who knows her tells me she survives on ample handouts of food by the denizens of the neighborhood basements and garages: doorkeepers, chauffeurs, servants of the villas and high-rises, restaurant waiters. Periodically, some kind soul in one of the apartment buildings reels her in for a bath and a fresh set of clothes, and releases her back on the street.
Why she disappeared for several months is a mystery that, like much in Egypt, is dismissed with a shrug if you ask the question. Perhaps someone took her in for a while; or perhaps someone got fed up with her mindless ranting and sent her away to an asylum again. Either way, the crazy woman is back on the street, yelling her existential angst to pained if tolerant ears. That is Egypt.

The death of Pope Shenouda, spiritual head of Egypt’s Coptic Church for four decades, threw millions of Copts into mourning, and was marked by the Egyptian government as a state funeral, attended by top political authorities and the Muslim religious establishment, as well as foreign dignitaries. Copts were given an official three day holiday in which to mourn, and thousands took the opportunity to besiege the cathedral where Pope Shenouda’s body was displayed in state, first lying in a coffin, and then, as if risen, propped up on a throne, in his most magnificent robes and miter, looking peaceful, if ashen and close-eyed. Such was the crush to catch a last glimpse of their ninety-year-old spiritual leader that two elderly Copts suffocated to death in the crowd.
While the heads of the Azhar, Islam’s oldest university and religious authority, paid their respects, and many Muslims called their Coptic friends to offer condolences, Egypt’s Sunni Muslim majority followed the proceedings with awe and curiosity. There is no equivalent figure to the pope as spiritual leader in Sunni Islam, which, in this respect, is more akin to Protestantism. The head of the Azhar University, the highest religious authority in the land, commands considerable but by no means universal influence, and is regarded by many as a political appointee, with supporters and detractors. Nor is he seen as representing his Muslim countrymen, whereas the Coptic Pope has come to represent his coreligionists. His funeral would be a simple affair not much different than that of any other Muslim: the body washed and wrapped in white cloth and buried as rapidly as possible, on the same day or the next. The burial would be followed, within a day or two, by visits of condolences held in one of the major mosques of the city, at which one and all would be free to stop by and present their respects to family and close friends. Typically, men would receive in one part of the mosque and women in another.
If the spectacle of the deceased pope risen and sitting up in a bishop’s chair riveted Egyptians to their screens, the election of a new pope is similarly shrouded in exotic ritual. The council of bishops casts votes amongst themselves, and the names of the three top-polling candidates are placed in a box, from which a child draws one name, presumably under divine guidance; the bearer of that name becomes the new pope. The late Pope Shenouda the third was himself the second-ranked candidate in his election.
During his forty-year reign, Shenouda expanded the political power of his office to become a national figure, claiming to represent the Coptic community vis-à-vis both the Egyptian regime and foreign governments, while tolerating little in-house dissent among Copts. He oversaw the exponential growth of the Coptic Orthodox church in America, and in general reached out ecumenically to other churches as well as to the Islamic establishment. Popular in Egypt among many Muslims as well as Copts for certain patriotic stances, he fell afoul of Sadat and was exiled for four years in the Natron Valley Monastery in Egypt’s Western desert, where he was buried today. On the other hand, he consolidated his relationship with Sadat’s successor so that, at the time of the revolution, his diehard pro-Mubarak stand put him at odds with the younger generation of his base, who saw the deposed regime as complicit in the sectarian conflict it exploited to justify its draconian police state.
Dying at the ripe age of nearly ninety, after a long reign that spanned Nasser to post-Mubarak, Shenouda III leaves the Coptic community to ponder the succession and the conundrum of his legacy: the expanded role of the Coptic pope. If he is not only the spiritual head of his community but also its ‘national’ representative, does this not marginalize the Coptic community? At a time of the rise of Islamist parties in the Egyptian parliament, does this not exacerbate the danger of a polarization of the two communities? And given the extent to which personality shapes politics, will Shenouda’s successor have the clout and charisma to negotiate Egypt’s treacherous political waters today?

It is hard to paint a coherent picture of today’s Egypt from the inside; you experience daily life and news items as a fragmented reality. Things are not following apart, the center holds, but centrifugal forces pull at the periphery of this once brutally centralized state. The ‘Arabs of the Sinai’- the Bedouin tribes- are on the warpath, their long-term vendetta with Mubarak’s police forces breaking out into open hostilities, effectively shutting off the Sinai to tourists and Egyptians alike. It sounds like an atavistic throwback to the era of the historian Jabarti, who wrote a chronicle of Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1789: Jabarti describes the citizens of Cairo fleeing the city ahead of the French forces, only to be driven back by the menace of the Bedouin outside the city walls, waiting to plunder and attack them. So it is today in Cairo, once the safest city of its size anywhere; you will hear people say that central Cairo is safe, but the outlying areas are vulnerable to carjackers and highwaymen.
That was very much on my mind last week as, in a hurry to return to Cairo from the Mediterranean coast, we took the shortcut through the 200 kilometer Natron Valley, an unpopulated stretch of desert where you might not cross another vehicle for hours in the high season of mid-summer, let alone in the dead of winter after dark in these fearsome days of insecurity. Given the risk of carjacking or even a flat tire without a gas station or emergency vehicle in sight, we were luckier than I realized to make it through the Wadi Natron.
Once we rejoined the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road I breathed a sigh of relief, took my foot off the accelerator, and stopped at the nearest rest house, Omar’s Oasis, an old-fashioned restaurant whose main attraction are the fragrant loaves baked to order in a traditional Egyptian bread oven, in full view of the diners. As I walked into the restroom, the attendant handed me a few sheets of toilet paper, and smiled at me as she adjusted her headscarf: “Happy Valentine’s Day!”
It seemed so incongruous a greeting, from such a seemingly unsophisticated person, in such unpromising surroundings. But that’s Egypt today: a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces refuse to fit.
St Valentine’s is a recent importation in Egypt, where it is known as the Festival of Love, but the younger generation of urbanites has taken to it with gusto. Now there are gloomy predictions of: “This will be the last St Valentine’s to be celebrated in Egypt; once the Muslim Brotherhood take control, they will abolish all such Western ‘decadent’ festivities.” Whether or not this proves to be the case, it is shocking to compare the mores of Egypt in 1963 with those of 2012, half a century later. A 1963 newspaper advertisement for a new resort at Gamsa features two women in tiny bikinis; it is a measure of how far Egypt has regressed from modernity that today, such an ad would be unthinkable. Although women in bikinis do still stroll the beaches of most of the private resorts on the Mediterranean coast and all the tourist beaches of the Red Sea, it is becoming increasingly common to see women bathing in ‘Islamic’ dress.
The Muslim Brotherhood claim they will double tourism, without resorting to bikinis or alcohol, but this wishful thinking is met with skepticism and derision by their many critics.
And that is perhaps the most hopeful sign left in today’s Egypt: the critics of the Brotherhood and of the Military are many and fearless. The genie let out of the bottle on January 25th refuses to be stuffed back into the black hole that was the police state.

Today, February 4th, is the anniversary of the so-called ‘Battle of the Camel’, the decisive turning point of the Revolution of January 25th, when the peaceful democracy protesters in Tahrir were able to beat back a vicious onslaught by pro-Mubarak thugs who attacked them on horseback. A week later, Mubarak resigned. Part of the credit for the push-back against the Mubarak forces went to the ‘ultras’, as the most extreme soccer fanatics are called in Egypt, akin to England’s infamous ‘football hooligans.’
Today, a year later, the soccer ultras are being blamed for a massacre on a football field in the town of Port Said on the Suez Canal; but the real question is, who put them up to inciting a riot? And the even greater outrage now debated in the extraordinary session of Parliament and everywhere in Egypt is this: why did the security forces stand by while Egyptians killed Egyptians? Why the lapses in security from the beginning, not only in the case of this soccer match, but in several suspicious incidents over the past week, and indeed the past month?
In the minds of even the least conspiracy-minded of Egyptians, one answer is inevitable: at the very moment when there is the most pressure to abrogate the loathed ‘emergency laws’ under which Mubarak ruled for thirty years, and now the SCAF rules with complete unaccountability- at that very moment, the incidents of suspicious random violence are multiplying. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the climate is being created in which the SCAF can claim that the people are fed up with the insecurity in the country and are calling for a return to the heavy-handed tactics of the police and the military.
Writing about the Nasser era in my first novel a decade ago, I had said that in Egypt, soccer rivalries replaced party politics in a country with a monolithic single-party regime that prohibited any expression of political opinion. In today’s post-revolutionary Egypt, the airwaves buzz with political debate and party politics are hotly contested at the ballot box and in the media. But at what price freedom? How do you explain the spectacle of Egyptians killing each other on a soccer field for no apparent reason? One year from the day when outrage against the thuggish tactics of the Mubarak loyalists united Egyptians behind the protesters in Tahrir Square, united them young and old, Muslim and Copt, secular and religious, ultras and ulamas; one year from that hope-filled day, Egypt’s Revolution seems to have gone terribly wrong.

Tahrir Today, the first anniversary. I was there, along with so many people I met whom I knew, famous writers, major businessmen, doctors, professors. An immense crowd, at least as big as February 4th, and the same spirit: determined but cheerful and peaceful. Men, women and children, many young people, a diverse crowd, from all walks of life, from the most privileged to the most underprivileged; many secular young liberals, no harassment of women in spite of the dense crowd. The Muslim Brotherhood, if they were there, kept a low profile. No checking of I.D.'s. The difference from a year ago: the chants of "Down with the rule of the Military!" instead of "Down with Mubarak!" Actually, the word used, "Askar" is closer to "Militia."

Egypt’s Revolution : First Anniversary, Part I

So you had a revolution…and now, you have the first democratically-elected parliament in sixty years. Today was the day when the new parliament was seated, and all of Egypt watched the spectacle in the hemi-circle parliament hall as newly-elected candidates stood up to take the oath of office- or didn’t. One presumably Salafi representative tried to put his own spin on the oath, which requires him to respect the republican system and the constitution. He was finally prevailed upon to read the oath as written, and the proceedings carried on smoothly from that point on.
So what does this new post-revolution parliament look like? As expected, there was a predominance of Muslim Brotherhood, stocky men in business suits, their facial hair neatly trimmed; but also the typical thin, long-bearded fundamentalist Salafis in robes; also a sprinkling of exotic men in red fezzes and odd dress, presumably Sufis. Then there were the sleek, clean-shaven representatives from the liberal parties, and the de rigeur fifty percent quota of ‘peasants and workers’, as per the existing constitution. Women were few; a cluster of them sat together front and center, in a rainbow of pastel hijabs: mauve, pink, blue.
For the liberal movements, as for the young revolutionaries who paid the price for this free election with blood and tears, the spectacle is bitter-sweet. They paid the price but saw the prize seized by the Islamist currents that had initially sat out the protests. But a young artist I spoke to yesterday at the opening of an exhibition at a gallery in Zamalek seemed to be optimistic. I was arrested by his large-scale painting of a woman lying on the ground, violated and near-naked, pain and dignity in her face; next to her on the ground were a riot police helmet and truncheon. The message was clear: the woman in the painting stood for all the women assaulted by the police and army since the revolution began.

The young artist in a black beret, an activist member of the new Tahrir Party, was not worried. “The Muslim Brotherhood will have to be pragmatic in office- the problems they are facing, economic especially, are so huge in scale that they will need all the allies they can get to spread the responsibility around. And in a year or two, at the next elections, we’ll be ready. We’ll claim our revolution.”

It's rather disconcerting, being in Cairo these days. I imagine it must be like looking through bifocal glasses: close up, daily life carries on as usual, the social and cultural calendar as busy as ever; but in the bigger picture, every day brings 'fresh alarms', and the current crisis in the country is the sole topic of conversation, whether at dinner or lunch invitations; over tea on the Marriott Promenade; trying out new flavors of macaroons at the competing patisseries in Zamalek (mango at Fauchon and Earl Grey at Tortina); strolling around gallery exhibition openings; at book launches; power-walking around the jogging track at the Gezira Club.

There is a sense of an impending crisis to mark the milestone first anniversary of the January 25th Revolution. There are those who predict popular outrage if Mubarak is let off his trial without a guilty verdict, but almost no one who expects the actual death penalty called for by the prosecutor, and even fewer who would condone it.
Conspiracy theories are encouraged by the seeming collusion between the Scylla and Charybdis of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Military. At a book discussion yesterday attended by the author, Bahaa Taher, whom I'd met when sharing a panel a couple of years earlier, that was the scenario that dominated the discussion. Taher himself in no way underestimated the strength, organization, and professionalism of the Muslim Brotherhood, but he warned against taking their ostensibly moderate views at face value, recalling their history of international ambitions and ulterior motives. As for the Salafis, as one woman shuddered, "what they would like to establish in Egypt is Saudi Arabia without the oil."
There is some self-reproach but a great deal of frustration among women like her- the educated, privileged, secular elite- about their inability to compete with the Muslim Brotherhood in offering the kind of social services- educational, medical- that have bought the MB their support at the voting booth.
Meantime, life carries on in Cairo, but the outlying provinces, and especially the highways leading to them, are riskier to venture into. The Sinai in particular; St Catherine's Monastery, once a tourist mecca for international and Egyptian visitors alike, is a ghost town.
Ominously, the best and brightest young people, those with the most expensive educations and international experience, are starting to leave the country. But it's hard to blame them, when the latest scandal in the domestic media is the shocking political brainwashing cropping up in this year's middle school mid-term exams: "Write an essay on the great role played by the Supreme Military Council in recent events," runs one essay topic. "Write a letter of congratulations to the Muslim Brotherhood Party on their electoral victory," runs another. "Conjugate: the Revolutionaries have destroyed the country," runs a grammar exercise.

January 25th risks being the day the idealists of a year ago come back to Tahrir one more time to take back their revolution.

The day before, there had been thousands of people demonstrating against the brutal stripping and beating of women protesters at the hands of the Military Police. But on Saturday, when I went to Tahrir Square for the first time since March of this year, it was quiet and somewhat bedraggled: tattered flag banners ringed the remnants of a tent city served by makeshift stands selling tea or roast corn on the cob. Of the people lounging around, not all looked like young protesters; there were some older men in farmer garb and some who looked like homeless vagrants. There wasn't a policeman in sight, but car traffic circled around the square unimpeded under the direction of Tahrir civilian volunteers.
Earlier that week clashes had resulted in several deaths and scores of injured demonstrators calling for an end to the military power grab and an immediate transition to civilian rule. It must be a bitter irony to the young liberals who spilled their blood for that cause that those who stood to gain most by their sacrifice- the Islamist parties- had been conspicuously absent from the struggle. A transition to civilian rule would inevitably mean handing over power to a parliament dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood who, together with the Salafis as a junior partner, have won the first two rounds of elections by a landslide.
There is that sense in Egypt today, of a revolution hijacked, gone awry. Some people shake their heads, speak of a lost generation, of emigration, if not for them, then for their children. Things will get worse before they get better, they say.
The anxiety over the economic crisis is the most acute and pervasive. A stark case in point is the Mena House Oberoi, the landmark hotel where world leaders once held meetings against the stupendous backdrop of the Giza pyramids. I had lunch there today, and it was sadly empty of guests: the vast expanse of hotel reception rooms and restaurants with their gorgeous Mamluke-style wood paneling and coffered ceilings, the pools, the annexes under construction, all empty but for a handful of tourists. Seeing me look around nostalgically at the familiar landmarks of one of the fabled hotels of my youth, the eager-to-please staff offered to show me the Churchill suite; they hope against hope for better days. But we all know that with some Salafi spokesmen spewing the most ignorant and prejudiced propositions imaginable on the media, the tourists were keeping away in droves.
A final incident comes to mind. On the way to the hotel via the Pyramids Road, traffic was so bad that we decided to try an alternate route on the way back- the 6th October Axis bypass. In the middle of the fast-moving traffic on the busy highway, an accident occurred. The engine of the car involved was spewing smoke, and the man in the car looked in imminent danger of the engine blowing up. While we were trying to figure out how to call the police, we saw a man on a passing bus leap off and rush to the aid of the trapped motorist, smashing the window to open the jammed car door. Hard on his heels came two other rescuers. All three of the Good Samaritans sported the typical Islamist beard.

My interview with Frank Stasio of NPR's State of Things runs today at noon U.S. East coast time. Frank will be asking about the state of Egypt today. In the week since I've been in Cairo unsettling events have cascaded one after the other.

At a recent reading, I am seated right next to the cartoon effigy of Daniel Wallace....

Hosni Mubarak ruled Egypt for thirty years under emergency powers with the justification of ‘après moi le deluge’, an argument that played better in the West than at home. He presented his military-backed regime as the sole bulwark against the flood waters of fundamentalist Islam. Never mind that, in effect, he was making the prophecy come true: by ruthlessly repressing legitimate opposition and emasculating secular parties, he left the field clear to the underground opposition of the Muslim Brotherhood; by supporting the unbridled greed of a narrow elite while ignoring the misery of the majority of the population, he left the door wide open for the Brotherhood to fill the tremendous gap in social services. For years, the Brotherhood accumulated good will, trust, and name recognition. When the revolution broke out on January 25th, the Islamists initially held back, letting the young progressives fight the good fight, perhaps as much out of calculation as prudence: their presence in the field in the early days would have allowed Mubarak to damn the uprising as ‘radical Islamist.’
And when the revolution succeeded, the Muslim Brotherhood were ready, the only organized party in a field of fragmented, chaotic, leaderless, secular start-up movements. This came as no surprise, but the unexpected took the form of the seemingly sudden emergence of a hitherto obscure sect who called themselves the Salafis, asserting a fundamentalist approach at odds with the Brotherhood’s moderate stance.
At the polls, the first-time voter- and all Egyptians are first-time voters, after sixty years of single-party rule and single-candidate presidential ‘referendums’- the first time voter was faced with a bewildering choice of deliberate complications: independent lists, proportional representation lists, a plethora of unfamiliar parties and candidates, an electoral sheet that would have baffled a nuclear scientist- in a county where thirty percent of the electorate is functionally illiterate. The election sheets actually featured dozens of random icons like a basketball or sunglasses to identify the parties for those who could not read the names. Not only is there no literacy test for eligibility to vote, there is a Nasser-era mandate that requires 50% of the seats in Parliament to be held by ‘peasants and workers.’ Is it any wonder that the hordes of the illiterate, downtrodden and newly enfranchised citizens wielded their vote in favor of the familiar name of the Muslim Brotherhood candidate?
So now the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is makes its power grab with the stern threat of their version of Mubarak’s conundrum: It’s the Military or the Islamists. The new constitution, according to the SCAF, will reserve supra-constitutional powers to the military and remove them from civilian scrutiny or control. No longer behind the scenes, the military will directly appoint the Prime Minister.
So what is the torn Egyptian liberal progressive to do? Uphold the principal of democracy even if it means letting the revolution he bled and died for be co-opted by an overwhelming Islamist majority government? Or endorse the military power grab as a secular counterbalance? Either way, his revolution has been hijacked: his choice is between the junta or the mullah.
There are two potential scenarios: an Islamic-leaning party wins in parliament, but proves to be a moderate and even competent custodian of the country’s economic and social good, as in Turkey and in Indonesia after Suharto’s fall. In the other scenario, Western powers intervene to nullify election results favorable to an Islamic party, as in Algeria, leading to a decade of unspeakably bloody civil war.
The Egyptian liberal prays for the first scenario, but knows that he must avoid the second at all costs.

The first inkling, for many of us in Cairo last February, was the sinister text messages that appeared on our cell phones. I remember my eighty year old mother calling me in alarm: “The military forces are sending me SMS (as text messages are referred to in Egypt) to tell me to go home and observe the peace.” I checked my own telephone and found the same unbidden message from ‘Egypt’s Armed Forces.’ They had apparently commandeered the country’s mobile servers to reach every subscriber with their stern warnings. It was the first indication that Mubarak was only nominally still in power, and that the Armed Forces were in de facto command.

The Big Brother moment was chilling. But that was back during the honeymoon period with the military, when they were seen as protectors of the people from the abuses of the police and the thugs of the Mubarak regime. When the deposed president’s helicopter finally took to the skies on February 11th, bearing him away from Cairo, the military were credited with having given him the final ultimatum. In the days that followed, the SMS messages continued to pop up in our cell phone message boxes with directives to ‘go back to work, go back to school’. Now they were signed ‘the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces’, a title ominously shortened to ‘the Supreme’ in Arabic newspaper headlines and given the acronym SCAF in English.

Even at the zenith of the military’s popularity with the people during the revolution, there were many, including me, who were skeptical that the generals, once they were in full control, would ever cede power again. After all, I grew up with the bitter legacy of a family devastated by an earlier ‘revolution’- the coup d’état of the colonels that deposed the king in 1952. What followed was sixty years of dictatorship by one military man after the other, Nasser to Sadat to Mubarak, backed by an all-powerful military-industrial complex. If July 23rd 1952 was a coup that later claimed to be a revolution, then January 25th 2011 had the potential of turning from a genuine people’s revolution into a silent coup by the generals. To many of my mother’s generation, it was déjà vu: it was revolution redux.

Today, nine months later, the worst fears are confirmed. Ahead of the first potentially free parliamentary elections, the SCAF seeks to arrogate supra-constitutional powers for itself and entrench its immense privileges and economic clout. The Armed Forces are squashing free speech and dissent with as heavy a hand as the reviled police ever wielded.

So it is time for the demonstrators to take to the squares again, in Tahrir, in Alexandria, and elsewhere around the country. Their courage, or their desperation, is nothing short of breathtaking. Particularly since, this time, the Muslim Brotherhood has abstained from joining in the protests, leaving the liberals and the students to battle the toxic gas and the bullets alone. In colluding with the military, the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood have betrayed their ruthless electoral ambitions and discredited themselves in the eyes of a large part of the population, including some of their own younger rank and file who joined the protests in defiance of directives to abstain.

The only predictable outcome of this second wave of protests with its rapidly rising body count is the postponement of Monday’s scheduled parliamentary elections. The liberals, for want of a better name for a faceless, leaderless and fragmented movement- the liberals welcome this outcome: if the election had gone ahead, returning a Muslim Brotherhood majority and entrenching the military’s supra-constitutional powers, the last chance for a civilian, democratic government would have been lost. The door might have clanged shut for another sixty years, and all the blood and sacrifice would have been to exchange one autocracy for a more authoritarian and sinister one. It remains to be seen what can be salvaged of the ideals of January 25th, and if a chaos-weary public and a crippled economy can withstand another trial by fire.

As one of five editors, I am very excited about the just-launched South Writ Large online magazine of Stories, Arts, and Idea. It explores the South as state of mind, linking the U.S. 'South' with the Global 'South' in an increasingly connected world. An outgrowth of the meetings at UNC-Chapel Hill of a dynamic multidisciplinary group of writers, psychologists, artists, anthropologists, political figures and more, the magazine has been years in conception and a year in gestation. The first issue of the quarterly South Writ Large takes the theme of 'Raised to Leave' as its focus, with provocative essays from such diverse voices as Lee Smith and Roy Blount; stunning photography; an audio reading by myself; and much more. Take a look!

Sunday 16 to Friday 21st
Xian: the Warriors; Guilin: Joie de vivre and Rice Paddies; Shanghai: Irrational Exuberance; Beijing Airport: Traveler's Worst Nightmare Scenario

From Xian on the bus for the hour-long ride outside the city walls to the site of the discovery of the Terra Cotta Warriors. The museum is a vast complex built on a large esplanade with three main halls representing the three ‘pits’ in which the fragments of the 7000 lifesize terra cotta warriors and horses buried two thousand years ago were discovered by a peasant in 1974. The existing warriors on show were pieced and glued together for the exhibition. I found it somewhat disappointing, perhaps because I had in mind the colossal statues of Upper Egypt, three thousand years older than the small warriors of Xian.
We had lunch in the museum restaurant, which featured a chef hand-stretching noodles from fresh dough as easily as a pizza chef tosses pizza dough. Some of the other offerings on the buffet were dodgier, including ‘roast bowel with eggs’.
By the time we got back to the hotel we had barely 30 minutes to shower and dress up for a gala dinner and theatre show, but it was worth the scramble: we had a sumptuous Dim Sum banquet at a fancy restaurant with hostesses dressed up in fantastic headdresses. The walnut-filled dim sum, cunningly shaped like walnuts, and the bean paste purses, were my favorite on a seemingly endless succession of delicious varieties.
Outside the restaurant two glamorous policewomen in miniskirts and white Courreges style boots stood on platforms, rigid as statues.
We arrived just before the lights went out for the program to start at the theatre, where we sat around tables and had coffee or wine while the show went on stage. Astounding costumes, lightning costume changes and scenery changes, special effects from rain to fog, lights, action, singing, dancing, a tremendous show that left us breathless.
Our guide Mark had explained that when someone comes to a city, he is served noodles, as a sign of a long stretched out stay, and when he leaves, Dim Sum, so it was appropriate that our last night in Xian was a dim sum banquet.


Monday October 17
The next morning we visited the city wall surrounding Xian, where we had interesting vistas contrasting the new ultramodern city with the ancient, and where in the distance we could see high-density projects with shockingly high buildings going up for the working class.
Our Duke host gave us a talk on the Vietnam war at the city hotel followed by a Mongolian hot pot lunch, where we were each given a small pot of boiling broth over a Bunsen burner and dipped small slices of raw meat or mostly vegetable into the water just long enough to cook it and fish it out again to eat. Very light, and a change, though not nearly as good as the ones I’ve had before.
In the afternoon we visited the mosque in Xian, which is home to 100,000 Muslims, apparently one of the largest communities. Those people came with the opening of the Silk Road in the early second century AD, according to Mark, although he refers to them as Muslims and of course in 200 AD there was no Islam and therefore they may have been Arab but not Muslim. Later they went with Ghenghis Khan on his campaigns and then returned to China, so they are called the ‘returned’ people or Uighurs. Of course he mentioned nothing of the tensions surrounding that community.
There are four mosques in China worth visiting. I was curious to see the architecture compared to the mosques I’ve seen around the world, but the Xian mosque is by far the most exotic, entirely in the pagoda style, with nothing remotely suggesting a mosque other than the Arabic inscriptions on one or two walls: ‘temples are the houses of the pious’, I deciphered on one. There are several pagoda style buildings in a succession of courtyards culminating in a large hall that is the prayer area and is closed to non-worshippers. There are traces of blue paint on the roof and Mark tells us that blue is a royal color in China but that the emperor at the time made a concession allowing the mosque roof to be painted blue in part as a sign of favor.
The one thing the mosque seemed to have in common with other mosques is a sense of stillness, of quiet, especially compared to the overwhelming busyness and sensory overload of Buddhist temples where every inch is decorated and gilded and the hum and crowding and incense are an integral part of the experience. There are wash rooms, too, our guide told us, and although I didn’t try them out myself, my husband did and found them impeccable.
Mark also told us that Muslims, like other minorities, are allowed to have more than one child, but that Muslim children are kept in separate schools because, ostensibly, they do not eat pork and cannot have school lunch with other Chinese children. I wonder how that excuse would go down with our Jewish friends in the US, or if the Chinese government does not realize how segregating minority children precludes socializing them.
We were then given free time to visit ‘the Muslim street’, which is basically the same as any other commercial bazaar in China, with the same goods, so-called pashminas, table runners, silk scarves, embroidered cushion covers, etc. and the same look to the salespeople, with only a handful of veiled women in sight, and those seem to be tourists from Malaysia. I bought a few souvenirs and then went to have Hagen Daz ice cream, at $5 a scoop, in the square outside. There were some delicious looking big red dates in baskets on the fruit stands, wonderful looking fruit in general in China, including gigantic grapefruit and pears, but I didn’t dare buy any.
Our guide Mark had warned us to beware of pickpockets in ‘the Muslim street’ but there were none, and in fact I was surprised at the lack of pressure on the part of salespeople. Very different, from my experience in Cairo or Istanbul or elsewhere where you are solicited at every corner.
Another woman in the group had another observation. “It’s odd that the people here don’t make eye contact, the men don’t harass you at all.“ She had been travelling alone, a vibrant woman with long reddish hair who looked a decade younger than her avowed fifty years. She had been having trouble with the food, and been out of things for a while, and seemed generally to sit alone, although she gave me the impression of doing so by choice. I was surprised when she told me that afternoon in Xian that she was thinking of going home. She wasn't enjoying herself, she was homesick, she couldn’t eat the food, China wasn’t what she expected. I didn’t want to probe, or to ask what her expectations had been; or her reasons for traveling alone when she apparently had young children at home that she missed. But I tried to encourage her to stay for the remaining three days. I could see, though, that she was ‘mal dans sa peau’, as the French say, on this trip, and it was too late to change that. Perhaps she came to China in the wrong frame of mind, or perhaps she didn’t find in the group a clique that was a comfortable fit, and wanted to keep aloof from the ‘salon des refuses.’ Sad, because I’m sure many people would have welcomed the opportunity to know her better.
Back on the bus for the airport at Xian, crowded and noisy. Had a quick meal at the airport restaurant, not bad per se, in fact most people ate it, but I was not in the mood for it and just had fruit. Crowded flight to Guilin, plenty of Flemish and other tourists.

Part V: Guilin: Joie de Vivre and Rice Paddies
Guilin reminds me immediately of Egypt, something about the vegetation, the climate, the Li River running through it, the shaded board walks along the river banks, the liveliness of the street life late in the evening, with people sitting at cafes or strolling around, the shops open, bright lights everywhere. Also, on the side alleys on our way to town from the airport, the dingy little mechanic’s shops and small houses with laundry hanging from the windows.
Our Sheraton Hotel is right on the river bank in the nicest part of town, with a wide lobby and high atrium, and we are happy to check into our impeccable rooms, with tub as well as shower, and French press coffee pot. The hotel seems exclusively occupied by Westerners, as do all the restaurants we are to eat in while in Guilin. Apparently this is a very popular tourist destination, and moreover 100,000 foreigners have made their homes here according to our guide.

Tuesday October 18
In the morning, along the river bank, you see the locals in great number taking exercise in the warm morning air, not so much traditional Tai Chi as variations with paddles, with swords, and especially ‘Western’ dancing to loud speakers. Others seem to be using the monkey bars and other equipment that I would have thought were children’s playground objects. There is a sense of laissez vivre in this town that I find very pleasant, almost French style joie de vivre.
On the other hand, even in this resort city, traffic moves briskly, on scooters, in cars. China is a country on the move, and the flaneurs during the day are rare, apart from the retired.
We take the bus for a 60 kilometer drive to Gongshuo, a river town from which we will board the ferry for our four hour cruise on the river Li. We are on the lower deck of the boat with a party of Flemish tourists, whereas the Asian tourists seem to have congregated on the upper deck. It is quite warm but there is a breeze on the open deck and inside the air conditioning keeps things pleasant. The Li is much narrower and more shallow than I imagined- for some reason I must have had the Luxor-Aswan cruise in mind- and the Li is flanked by high, vegetation-covered limestone hills on each side. The typical Chinese print landscape, we are advised by our local guide Jo, is the Li river with the gorges in the background and a water buffalo and a cormorant fisherman in the foreground. That is the scene depicted on the 20 Yuan bill.
Our guide, Jo, a thirty something who looks twenty, is a skinny young man with a backpack and a phone earpiece who speaks perfect English in a way-cool voice. His offhand demeanor when he tries to quiz the group on what they know about Guilin grates on one person who rather pointedly quips back that we are paying him precisely to tell us about Guilin.
That he does, but rather in the detached, cool way of Miss Panda back in Chengdu, and I wonder if that is a generational gap, in comparison to the impassioned, personally intimate outreach of our two forty-something guides, Wally and Mark.
The cruise is relaxed but not boring. We slip along, crossing many other boats. The water buffalo are less big and bony than the ones in Egypt. Lunch is an interesting mix of which I partake only the angel food and watermelon dessert; I brought along a pain au chocolat from breakfast. The restroom situation is probably the most challenging of this entire three weeks, and that unfortunately colors my memory of the cruise.
We get off at the tourist town of Guongjo and wander around the market stalls. It costs 5 Yuan for a photo with a fisherman carrying a stick on which two large black cormorant are perched. The old man is so skinny and deformed that it is more than worth it. Apparently a trained fishing cormorant is so valuable that it might cost more than a water buffalo. It is trained to fish but not to swallow the fish, rather to spit it out to the fisherman.
From the market stalls- where even the KFC has only squat toilets- we take four golf carts- 6 people per golf cart- to visit the rice paddies, about an hour away. The road all the way into the village is entirely paved and smooth. We stop briefly at a rice paddy where the backdrop of the sun dipping behind the black limestone mountains makes for the perfect picture. Then we stop in a village where the rest of the group walks into a house to visit the lifestyle of the locals. I stay in the cart and observe village life on ‘main street.’ There is a female butcher in a polo shirt, jeans and wellington boots who sits behind a meager counter and combs her hair. Our golf cart driver, also a woman, gets out with her white driver’s gloves and handbag and buys some meat or fat from the butcher. A man guts and washes two fish at the tap and sink, followed by a woman who kills, plucks and washes a chicken at the same tap. There is no other running water, apparently, as I see an old woman and a young one carrying heavy pails of water suspended from each end of a stick across their shoulders, exactly like traditional Chinese prints were it not for the incongruous ‘modern’ clothing. Unlike India or Egypt, where peasants still wear traditional dress, the Chinese villagers are dressed in what could pass for western style, except for the ‘coolie’ hat, which I’ve only seen in this part of the country. I still remember the touches of saffron and fuchsia of the Indian peasant women flaming out of the green fields.
The children are coming home from school, very cute and neat-looking, while older people play cards or watch grandchildren; toddlers wear slit underwear.
Finally our group reassembles and we board the golf carts again for the drive back to the town where our bus awaits. Then another hour and a half drive back to Guilin where we shower and change before a five minute walk to a restaurant where we are served one of the better meals of the trip, with pretty place settings and Chinese cuisine more adapted to Western tastes- understandably, as the clientele is Western.
A walk around town after dinner is very pleasant, such an active street life, young people strolling and eating from street stalls or from the ice cream and other western franchises along the street. There were two weddings going on at our Sheraton hotel, and I noticed that although the food seemed lavish the guests were not dressed up. Perhaps after sixty years of communism they did not know how to dress appropriately, but that doesn’t seem a satisfactory explanation. I see people on the street dressed quite extravagantly, including women in miniskirts and fishnet stockings on scooters who, in other cultures, would be assumed to be ‘fast’ to put it mildly.

Wednesday October 19
This morning took a brisk walk at 8 am along the river to watch the locals at their exercise, then went back to pack up and sit down to a very lavish breakfast. The papaya, the persimmons, the dragon fruit, are all so tempting here, and of course the variety of breads and cheeses. There is also Chinese breakfast food, of course, but that is not at all what I want for breakfast.
We leave the hotel around 11:30 for a restaurant where we spend the first hour or so exchanging views on our China experience under the direction of our Duke host. Most people’s impressions were of how Western China was, how impressive, how advanced, how insular the West was in its lack of knowledge of China, but also of the discrepancy between the big cities like Beijing and the rural back country around Guilin. I share some of the same views but my own points of reference are wider, encompassing Egypt and India as well as the US and Europe, and I can see where the role of women in China is different; where parts of Guilin reminded me of Egypt, and Beijing of a cleaner, wider New York. I also focused on China’s foreign policy, and its growing influence in Africa, for instance; even in Egypt, there are Chinese workers.
After lunch, which was good but I could barely touch after such a humongous breakfast, we set off for a tea institute where we attended a tea ceremony which taught us a great deal about the different kinds of tea, their prices, their benefits, their taste. First we were given coolie hats to wear to visit a tea plant garden. The inner shoot of the tea plant is the most precious, used for white tea, which is caffeine free. The two closest leaves make yellow or green tea, again light and low in caffeine, high in anti-oxidants. These teas are not fermented, just dried. Next comes Oolong tea, the highest grade of fermented tea, which is rolled into tiny balls by hand. Next the outer leaves make black tea, or tea-bag tea, which is highly fermented and rolled and chopped. All the leaf picking and curing is done by hand, mostly by women who earn about $15 a day.
The blossom of the tea is used for honey, and the fruit is pressed for ‘tea oil.’
Next we entered the museum to attend the tea ceremony, which involved various tea pots, both clay (good for fermented teas) and porcelain (good for all teas) and a tea tray with a plastic drawer to catch the overflow of tea that is poured over the pots and cups to warm them. The young man who conducted the tea ceremony with such delicacy and dexterity seemed very knowledgeable. We were given tiny tasted of yellow tea- no white, too expensive- which was very pale and sweet; then oolong, which smelled of apricot and was also sweet; and then compressed tea, which is a mixture of teas pressed into cakes that are then used for tea. We were told that good quality loose tea can be used in very small quantities- half a teaspoon per person- and re-used up to five times in the same day and steeped a minute or so more than the original 2 minutes for the first time.
All of which made me appreciate as never before the good tea that our Chinese friends gave us.
Following that we were ushered into the gift shop, where the typical tea mug/pot/strainer combination was on sale for the equivalent of $40 whereas I’ve seen them on sale at Southern Season in Chapel Hill for half that.
But the tea ceremony was a very pleasant interlude, after which we boarded the bus again for the airport, where we sat down to our third meal in 8 hours; I can hardly believe I tasted the chicken strips and the lotus flower root and the soup; some people at my table actually ate very heartily.
Now for Shanghai, our last stop. We’ve saved the best for last.

Part VI: Shanghai: Irrational Exuberance
Thursday, October 20th.
Shanghai’s new airport is huge, brand-new, the bathrooms are luxurious, there is not a squat toilet in sight; it is our first indication that we have left the third world far behind. But the terminal is interminable, and we drag our luggage for miles along corridors and up and down escalators to reach baggage claim and then again to get out to the parking lot.
Shanghai by night as we drive from the hotel to downtown is futuristic and fantastic. The bus whizzes along a maze of spaghetti junction overpasses that float over a neon-lit skyline that looks as if a creative child had been let loose to draw: round pink globes atop needle towers and a staggered building like a stylized cartoon sketch. Everything is new and shiny and humming along smoothly, not a scooter or a bicycle in evidence. The city is still lively at nearly midnight.
Our local guide for the short Shanghai leg of the trip is a young woman called Yolanda with a square face, a bowl cut, and earnest eyeglasses, who greets us with a red flag. Her English is the hardest to follow of any of our guides so far. The bus is a few minutes late, and our Chengdu experience comes to mind, since we will be staying at the same government-run Jin Jiang Hotel chain, but this time around when we arrive at the hotel our room keys are available instantly, and we gratefully repair to our rooms. Late as it is, I wash my hair and go to bed, and in the morning attempt to dry it with the hairdryer in the room, but since the only dryer outlet is under the desk, this requires a contortionist skill I do not possess.
Breakfast is at a civilized hour, since we are given the unprecedented leisure of setting off at 10 am on our tour of the city. Our first stop is the museum, a four-story treasure house of bronze sculptures, ceramics, paintings, calligraphy and more, probably the best general museum in China. According to the dating of some of the artifacts, all civilization begins with the Chinese, a claim disputed by the Indians, the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians. Regardless, there are examples of Bronze Age pottery stunning in imagination, detail and skill, like the cunning bowl topped with life-like yaks, flanked by two handles in the form of tigers attempting to climb up onto the rim of the bowl to get at the yaks.
But I truly lost myself in the ceramics gallery: the purity of the shapes, the delicacy of the design, the sheer eye candy of the celadon, the blanc de Chine, the rose red; the traditional blue and white, so popular in the Islamic world; the over-the-top green, pink and gold; from the tiny pots to the enormous planters and plates, from the horse to the camels, with the wild eyes and straining mouths typical to animal depiction in Chinese art, your eye keeps going back and forth, from astonishment to astonishment. For me, my coup de Coeur, my moments of actual covetousness as opposed to mere aesthetic admiration, came for two pieces, both 18th C: one was a pair of small rose petal pots with delicate lid topped with a golden stopper. I actually found, not a replica, but a piece inspired by them in the gift shop. The other coup de Coeur was for an equestrienne on a horse: the horse so alive, so perfect in proportions, and the lady so dignified, young, beautiful, with a wimple headdress and high-waisted dress reminiscent of early Renaissance women were it not for the fact that she is riding astride, not side-saddle. Her hands are lost in her voluminous sleeves but you can see that she must have been holding reins that did not survive the centuries.
After the museum we are driven to the waterfront, where the Bund, the European quarter of the French concession with its stately fin de siècle buildings, confronts across the river the futuristic new Shanghai with its fantastic skyscrapers, all built over the past thirty years. The boardwalk is alive with tourists taking pictures, an invigorating freshness to the cool air and overcast but clean sky. There are many Westerners in evidence, and quite a few who seem to be living in Shanghai as opposed to merely visiting. Indeed it does seem to be a livable city, at least for those who can afford it, as it is beyond the means of most Chinese, according to the laments of our guide Yolanda.
I get photographed taking by the horns the big bull on the boardwalk. Shanghai is to Beijing as New York is to Washington D.C., apparently; people there are all about money and hypocrisy, according to the guide, who like our other guides seems curiously uninhibited, indeed eager, to give stereotypical regional characterizations of the denizens of each city we visit.
A member of our group, Peter from Durham, points out to us the grand colonial building where his uncle had his business office in the forties. He has visited inside and has even visited the house his uncle rented in town, now an upscale bed and breakfast.
After the visit to the waterfront we go to a Chinese restaurant for lunch, and since it is late we are hungry and eat heartily, although we should be saving our appetites for the special farewell dinner promised for the evening. We walk off our lunch in the Yu Yuan Gardens, which we can only access, according to our guide Yolanda, by walking through small commercial back-alleys lined with cheap souvenir shops. It is a twenty-minute walk to the gardens themselves, in the best Chinese style, Tang dynasty Pagoda style buildings interspersed among the maze of walled gardens with their traditional landscape elements of willows dripping over pools of red carp, small bridges, and rock arrangements. There are interesting details of sculptures on the roofs. The gardens are quite crowded with Chinese locals or visitors, at 40 Yuan the entry ticket.
A long walk back to the bus followed by a tense negotiation when the group realizes that our special restaurant for the farewell dinner this evening lies in the same YuYuan neighborhood and requires the same 20 minute walk through the back alleys. Finally a compromise is reached: the driver will try to deposit us a little closer to the restaurant, although he cannot park there. After a welcome respite in our hotel rooms, we reassemble in the lobby, somewhat dressed up for the evening; I forsake the outfit I had planned, which would have involved a skirt and high heels, for a more practical flat shoes and trousers.
The walk to the restaurant is more pleasant than that earlier in the afternoon; we take an alternative route through a picturesque pagoda-style commercial area, but it is raining and quite muggy. The restaurant itself is quite festive, with an absolutely stunning view over the Shanghai skyline. I am finally ‘excited’, realizing that I am in Shanghai! In China! Not in Chinatown! The dinner is also more elaborate, with some new dishes to discover: rice-stuffed whole duck, for instance. But it is all quite heavy food.
We repair to a private room where our Duke host, Bill, sings a farewell song to ‘Mark’ our guide for the whole trip, in which we all join whole-heartedly. He also presents him with an envelope containing a collective gift from the group. Mark is touched and tells us he will save the donation for his daughter’s education, and that he is encouraging her to eventually attend Duke University if at all possible. There are several people in our group who certainly have some influence over making things possible at Duke. Mark is very popular with the group, particularly, I think, because he speaks fondly and often of his daughter, his wife, his family, and makes fun of himself and of them. Perhaps also because he deprecates China’s power and expresses his admiration for the U.S., quite sincerely, I believe.
Next come the tributes to our Duke host and his wife. Three members of the group sing songs and read poems in his honor, and he responds with his inimitable imitation of JFK’s ‘ask not’ speech.
It is a sentimental, happy and replete group that treks back to the bus, takes a final look at the Shanghai by night skyline, hugs our Duke hosts goodbye in the lobby- they are taking a direct flight to the US later in the evening while the rest of us brace for a 4 a.m. wake-up call to head back to the airport for the long flight home. But this trip is far from over for me, and my worst nightmare is about to come true.

Part VII: Beijing Airport: Traveler's Nightmare Scenario
Friday 21 October
We load onto the bus at 5:30 a.m., some of us well-rested, some, like me, groggy from only a couple of hours sleep. On the bus Mark hands us breakfast boxes, which some people tuck into heartily, and I leave untouched. The ham sandwich I don’t want, the coke can won’t make it past security, but I save the boiled eggs and Danish pastries for later.
We are leaving from the older of Shanghai’s two airports, for the first leg of our long trip: Shanghai to Beijing at 7:55 a.m., Beijing to JFK at 1 pm. By the time we get into New York at about 3 pm local time, we would have been travelling for 19 hours, and then most of us will still be taking connecting flights out of JFK for our final destinations. For me, the connecting flight to Raleigh-Durham should have me back in North Carolina by 10 pm, and with any luck in my own home before midnight Friday, that is, around noon of Saturday in China, where my body clock will be set.
Once our luggage has been checked in and our boarding passes issued, Mark bids us adieu and disappears, and we go through the line for passport check and security. I am asked to open my carry-on bag: the violation turns out to be the small container of yoghurt included in my breakfast box. But the young security man is nice about it; when I ask if I can drink it, he agrees readily, but it’s neither easy nor elegant to drink down yoghurt without a spoon as you stand in a security line.
After security we have a couple of hours to spare and I wander around, looking for a horseshoe-shaped neck-support cushion, looking through the Duty Free shops, visiting the restroom. I prefer to keep moving as I know I will be sitting for hours on end, and also because I am so sleepy that if I sit down I might be overcome. By the time I get back to the gate and find my husband and the other members of the group, our flight is boarding, and I stand in line and think to bring out my boarding pass.
That is when I realize I don’t have my handbag with my boarding pass, my passport, my credit cards, driver’s license, cash- everything. I have been pulling along my carry-on case and slinging my jacket over my shoulder, but my handbag, my all-important handbag, is missing. At first I can hardly believe it, and run back to the last place I sat down to see if I left it there. It isn’t there. I run to the last restroom I used, and check the hooks on the stalls, where I would have hung my bag. It isn’t there. I run back to my husband in line at the boarding gate and ask him to wait for me and rush back like a madwoman to retrace my steps to the Duty Free area. I see one of those airport golf carts and get on but the driver asks me for money and I have not a cent on me; I hop off.
I run on and find two security guards, both young women, and stop them, trying to explain my problem. They don’t understand, and finally walk me to the information desk to explain to the girl behind the desk in a yellow silk outfit. She is sweetly sympathetic but speaks very little English. I am frantic and have a hard time conveying the urgency of the situation: my flight is boarding, I have not a cent or a piece of I.D. on me, and time is being wasted. Either a thief is getting away with my bag, in which case there is no hope, or someone has turned it in, which would be a miracle. I ask the security women and the information clerk over and over to inquire at Lost and Found, or whoever in security is responsible for turning in unattended luggage, but they shake their head and say there is no such thing here. I ask them to call the police; the information girl finally does but five then ten minutes pass and the police do not show up; be patient, she advises me, the police is in another building, it will take a while for theme to come. I ask her to call the boarding gate, E-31, and ask if anyone has turned my bag in there; after all the boarding pass would indicate the flight. I ask them to hold the flight, to contact my husband. But the language barrier is insurmountable. The security women ask me what color the bag is, and I tell them brown, which conveys nothing, so I point to my shoes, but that does not help much. They wander away and leave me at the Information desk, increasingly desperate.
Finally I am resigned to missing my flight, but I need to tell my husband; I ask the information clerk if I can go fetch my husband, and make her promise to keep the police agent at the desk if they show up. I run again like a madwoman back to the gate, and find my husband and run back to the information desk. A young policewoman finally shows up, but by then the two security women have come back and the information clerk is getting busy on the phone in Chinese. They ask me again what color my bag was and I again say brown and they ask: “Coffee?” “Yes, yes, coffee color, dark brown,” I confirm. I hardly dare believe there is a glimmer of hope, but they tell me to go to the boarding gate and wait.
My husband and I head back, this time on a golf cart, as he has cash to pay the 10 Yuan per person, and wait at the gate. In a few moments a woman dressed like airport staff, not security, comes panting up with my bag, and I am so grateful to find my passport, boarding pass, wallet, that I give her a very substantial cash expression of my gratitude. My husband and I board the plane and find our seats; a couple of people in our group who realized what had happened ask me if I found my bag and who had taken it, and I am still too rattled and unsure myself to give a satisfactory answer. I can imagine what would have happened if indeed my husband and I had had to miss the flight; it would have been delayed till our luggage had been pulled off, and that would have meant a considerable delay for the other passengers. As it was, the flight takes off almost on time.
Finally, take-off. A little later, around 2 p.m., we are served lunch, with the pleasant surprise of fruit and yoghurt. I sleep for a while, exhausted with the adrenalin rush and the preceding sleepless night. Then I read, then I write on the computer. It is eight o’clock p.m., Beijing-time, and eight a.m. New York time when we are served our second meal, this time a sandwich. Still six hours to go before we land, and even then, it is not the end of the trip. To be continued.

Sunday 16 to Friday 21st
Xian: the Warriors; Guilin: Joie de vivre and Rice Paddies; Shanghai: Irrational Exuberance; Beijing Airport: Traveler's Worst Nightmare Scenario

From Xian on the bus for the hour-long ride outside the city walls to the site of the discovery of the Terra Cotta Warriors. The museum is a vast complex built on a large esplanade with three main halls representing the three ‘pits’ in which the fragments of the 7000 lifesize terra cotta warriors and horses buried two thousand years ago were discovered by a peasant in 1974. The existing warriors on show were pieced and glued together for the exhibition. I found it somewhat disappointing, perhaps because I had in mind the colossal statues of Upper Egypt, three thousand years older than the small warriors of Xian.
We had lunch in the museum restaurant, which featured a chef hand-stretching noodles from fresh dough as easily as a pizza chef tosses pizza dough. Some of the other offerings on the buffet were dodgier, including ‘roast bowel with eggs’.
By the time we got back to the hotel we had barely 30 minutes to shower and dress up for a gala dinner and theatre show, but it was worth the scramble: we had a sumptuous Dim Sum banquet at a fancy restaurant with hostesses dressed up in fantastic headdresses. The walnut-filled dim sum, cunningly shaped like walnuts, and the bean paste purses, were my favorite on a seemingly endless succession of delicious varieties.
Outside the restaurant two glamorous policewomen in miniskirts and white Courreges style boots stood on platforms, rigid as statues.
We arrived just before the lights went out for the program to start at the theatre, where we sat around tables and had coffee or wine while the show went on stage. Astounding costumes, lightning costume changes and scenery changes, special effects from rain to fog, lights, action, singing, dancing, a tremendous show that left us breathless.
Our guide Mark had explained that when someone comes to a city, he is served noodles, as a sign of a long stretched out stay, and when he leaves, Dim Sum, so it was appropriate that our last night in Xian was a dim sum banquet.


Monday October 17
The next morning we visited the city wall surrounding Xian, where we had interesting vistas contrasting the new ultramodern city with the ancient, and where in the distance we could see high-density projects with shockingly high buildings going up for the working class.
Our Duke host gave us a talk on the Vietnam war at the city hotel followed by a Mongolian hot pot lunch, where we were each given a small pot of boiling broth over a Bunsen burner and dipped small slices of raw meat or mostly vegetable into the water just long enough to cook it and fish it out again to eat. Very light, and a change, though not nearly as good as the ones I’ve had before.
In the afternoon we visited the mosque in Xian, which is home to 100,000 Muslims, apparently one of the largest communities. Those people came with the opening of the Silk Road in the early second century AD, according to Mark, although he refers to them as Muslims and of course in 200 AD there was no Islam and therefore they may have been Arab but not Muslim. Later they went with Ghenghis Khan on his campaigns and then returned to China, so they are called the ‘returned’ people or Uighurs. Of course he mentioned nothing of the tensions surrounding that community.
There are four mosques in China worth visiting. I was curious to see the architecture compared to the mosques I’ve seen around the world, but the Xian mosque is by far the most exotic, entirely in the pagoda style, with nothing remotely suggesting a mosque other than the Arabic inscriptions on one or two walls: ‘temples are the houses of the pious’, I deciphered on one. There are several pagoda style buildings in a succession of courtyards culminating in a large hall that is the prayer area and is closed to non-worshippers. There are traces of blue paint on the roof and Mark tells us that blue is a royal color in China but that the emperor at the time made a concession allowing the mosque roof to be painted blue in part as a sign of favor.
The one thing the mosque seemed to have in common with other mosques is a sense of stillness, of quiet, especially compared to the overwhelming busyness and sensory overload of Buddhist temples where every inch is decorated and gilded and the hum and crowding and incense are an integral part of the experience. There are wash rooms, too, our guide told us, and although I didn’t try them out myself, my husband did and found them impeccable.
Mark also told us that Muslims, like other minorities, are allowed to have more than one child, but that Muslim children are kept in separate schools because, ostensibly, they do not eat pork and cannot have school lunch with other Chinese children. I wonder how that excuse would go down with our Jewish friends in the US, or if the Chinese government does not realize how segregating minority children precludes socializing them.
We were then given free time to visit ‘the Muslim street’, which is basically the same as any other commercial bazaar in China, with the same goods, so-called pashminas, table runners, silk scarves, embroidered cushion covers, etc. and the same look to the salespeople, with only a handful of veiled women in sight, and those seem to be tourists from Malaysia. I bought a few souvenirs and then went to have Hagen Daz ice cream, at $5 a scoop, in the square outside. There were some delicious looking big red dates in baskets on the fruit stands, wonderful looking fruit in general in China, including gigantic grapefruit and pears, but I didn’t dare buy any.
Our guide Mark had warned us to beware of pickpockets in ‘the Muslim street’ but there were none, and in fact I was surprised at the lack of pressure on the part of salespeople. Very different, from my experience in Cairo or Istanbul or elsewhere where you are solicited at every corner.
Another woman in the group had another observation. “It’s odd that the people here don’t make eye contact, the men don’t harass you at all.“ She had been travelling alone, a vibrant woman with long reddish hair who looked a decade younger than her avowed fifty years. She had been having trouble with the food, and been out of things for a while, and seemed generally to sit alone, although she gave me the impression of doing so by choice. I was surprised when she told me that afternoon in Xian that she was thinking of going home. She wasn't enjoying herself, she was homesick, she couldn’t eat the food, China wasn’t what she expected. I didn’t want to probe, or to ask what her expectations had been; or her reasons for traveling alone when she apparently had young children at home that she missed. But I tried to encourage her to stay for the remaining three days. I could see, though, that she was ‘mal dans sa peau’, as the French say, on this trip, and it was too late to change that. Perhaps she came to China in the wrong frame of mind, or perhaps she didn’t find in the group a clique that was a comfortable fit, and wanted to keep aloof from the ‘salon des refuses.’ Sad, because I’m sure many people would have welcomed the opportunity to know her better.
Back on the bus for the airport at Xian, crowded and noisy. Had a quick meal at the airport restaurant, not bad per se, in fact most people ate it, but I was not in the mood for it and just had fruit. Crowded flight to Guilin, plenty of Flemish and other tourists.

Part V: Guilin: Joie de Vivre and Rice Paddies
Guilin reminds me immediately of Egypt, something about the vegetation, the climate, the Li River running through it, the shaded board walks along the river banks, the liveliness of the street life late in the evening, with people sitting at cafes or strolling around, the shops open, bright lights everywhere. Also, on the side alleys on our way to town from the airport, the dingy little mechanic’s shops and small houses with laundry hanging from the windows.
Our Sheraton Hotel is right on the river bank in the nicest part of town, with a wide lobby and high atrium, and we are happy to check into our impeccable rooms, with tub as well as shower, and French press coffee pot. The hotel seems exclusively occupied by Westerners, as do all the restaurants we are to eat in while in Guilin. Apparently this is a very popular tourist destination, and moreover 100,000 foreigners have made their homes here according to our guide.

Tuesday October 18
In the morning, along the river bank, you see the locals in great number taking exercise in the warm morning air, not so much traditional Tai Chi as variations with paddles, with swords, and especially ‘Western’ dancing to loud speakers. Others seem to be using the monkey bars and other equipment that I would have thought were children’s playground objects. There is a sense of laissez vivre in this town that I find very pleasant, almost French style joie de vivre.
On the other hand, even in this resort city, traffic moves briskly, on scooters, in cars. China is a country on the move, and the flaneurs during the day are rare, apart from the retired.
We take the bus for a 60 kilometer drive to Gongshuo, a river town from which we will board the ferry for our four hour cruise on the river Li. We are on the lower deck of the boat with a party of Flemish tourists, whereas the Asian tourists seem to have congregated on the upper deck. It is quite warm but there is a breeze on the open deck and inside the air conditioning keeps things pleasant. The Li is much narrower and more shallow than I imagined- for some reason I must have had the Luxor-Aswan cruise in mind- and the Li is flanked by high, vegetation-covered limestone hills on each side. The typical Chinese print landscape, we are advised by our local guide Jo, is the Li river with the gorges in the background and a water buffalo and a cormorant fisherman in the foreground. That is the scene depicted on the 20 Yuan bill.
Our guide, Jo, a thirty something who looks twenty, is a skinny young man with a backpack and a phone earpiece who speaks perfect English in a way-cool voice. His offhand demeanor when he tries to quiz the group on what they know about Guilin grates on one person who rather pointedly quips back that we are paying him precisely to tell us about Guilin.
That he does, but rather in the detached, cool way of Miss Panda back in Chengdu, and I wonder if that is a generational gap, in comparison to the impassioned, personally intimate outreach of our two forty-something guides, Wally and Mark.
The cruise is relaxed but not boring. We slip along, crossing many other boats. The water buffalo are less big and bony than the ones in Egypt. Lunch is an interesting mix of which I partake only the angel food and watermelon dessert; I brought along a pain au chocolat from breakfast. The restroom situation is probably the most challenging of this entire three weeks, and that unfortunately colors my memory of the cruise.
We get off at the tourist town of Guongjo and wander around the market stalls. It costs 5 Yuan for a photo with a fisherman carrying a stick on which two large black cormorant are perched. The old man is so skinny and deformed that it is more than worth it. Apparently a trained fishing cormorant is so valuable that it might cost more than a water buffalo. It is trained to fish but not to swallow the fish, rather to spit it out to the fisherman.
From the market stalls- where even the KFC has only squat toilets- we take four golf carts- 6 people per golf cart- to visit the rice paddies, about an hour away. The road all the way into the village is entirely paved and smooth. We stop briefly at a rice paddy where the backdrop of the sun dipping behind the black limestone mountains makes for the perfect picture. Then we stop in a village where the rest of the group walks into a house to visit the lifestyle of the locals. I stay in the cart and observe village life on ‘main street.’ There is a female butcher in a polo shirt, jeans and wellington boots who sits behind a meager counter and combs her hair. Our golf cart driver, also a woman, gets out with her white driver’s gloves and handbag and buys some meat or fat from the butcher. A man guts and washes two fish at the tap and sink, followed by a woman who kills, plucks and washes a chicken at the same tap. There is no other running water, apparently, as I see an old woman and a young one carrying heavy pails of water suspended from each end of a stick across their shoulders, exactly like traditional Chinese prints were it not for the incongruous ‘modern’ clothing. Unlike India or Egypt, where peasants still wear traditional dress, the Chinese villagers are dressed in what could pass for western style, except for the ‘coolie’ hat, which I’ve only seen in this part of the country. I still remember the touches of saffron and fuchsia of the Indian peasant women flaming out of the green fields.
The children are coming home from school, very cute and neat-looking, while older people play cards or watch grandchildren; toddlers wear slit underwear.
Finally our group reassembles and we board the golf carts again for the drive back to the town where our bus awaits. Then another hour and a half drive back to Guilin where we shower and change before a five minute walk to a restaurant where we are served one of the better meals of the trip, with pretty place settings and Chinese cuisine more adapted to Western tastes- understandably, as the clientele is Western.
A walk around town after dinner is very pleasant, such an active street life, young people strolling and eating from street stalls or from the ice cream and other western franchises along the street. There were two weddings going on at our Sheraton hotel, and I noticed that although the food seemed lavish the guests were not dressed up. Perhaps after sixty years of communism they did not know how to dress appropriately, but that doesn’t seem a satisfactory explanation. I see people on the street dressed quite extravagantly, including women in miniskirts and fishnet stockings on scooters who, in other cultures, would be assumed to be ‘fast’ to put it mildly.

Wednesday October 19
This morning took a brisk walk at 8 am along the river to watch the locals at their exercise, then went back to pack up and sit down to a very lavish breakfast. The papaya, the persimmons, the dragon fruit, are all so tempting here, and of course the variety of breads and cheeses. There is also Chinese breakfast food, of course, but that is not at all what I want for breakfast.
We leave the hotel around 11:30 for a restaurant where we spend the first hour or so exchanging views on our China experience under the direction of our Duke host. Most people’s impressions were of how Western China was, how impressive, how advanced, how insular the West was in its lack of knowledge of China, but also of the discrepancy between the big cities like Beijing and the rural back country around Guilin. I share some of the same views but my own points of reference are wider, encompassing Egypt and India as well as the US and Europe, and I can see where the role of women in China is different; where parts of Guilin reminded me of Egypt, and Beijing of a cleaner, wider New York. I also focused on China’s foreign policy, and its growing influence in Africa, for instance; even in Egypt, there are Chinese workers.
After lunch, which was good but I could barely touch after such a humongous breakfast, we set off for a tea institute where we attended a tea ceremony which taught us a great deal about the different kinds of tea, their prices, their benefits, their taste. First we were given coolie hats to wear to visit a tea plant garden. The inner shoot of the tea plant is the most precious, used for white tea, which is caffeine free. The two closest leaves make yellow or green tea, again light and low in caffeine, high in anti-oxidants. These teas are not fermented, just dried. Next comes Oolong tea, the highest grade of fermented tea, which is rolled into tiny balls by hand. Next the outer leaves make black tea, or tea-bag tea, which is highly fermented and rolled and chopped. All the leaf picking and curing is done by hand, mostly by women who earn about $15 a day.
The blossom of the tea is used for honey, and the fruit is pressed for ‘tea oil.’
Next we entered the museum to attend the tea ceremony, which involved various tea pots, both clay (good for fermented teas) and porcelain (good for all teas) and a tea tray with a plastic drawer to catch the overflow of tea that is poured over the pots and cups to warm them. The young man who conducted the tea ceremony with such delicacy and dexterity seemed very knowledgeable. We were given tiny tasted of yellow tea- no white, too expensive- which was very pale and sweet; then oolong, which smelled of apricot and was also sweet; and then compressed tea, which is a mixture of teas pressed into cakes that are then used for tea. We were told that good quality loose tea can be used in very small quantities- half a teaspoon per person- and re-used up to five times in the same day and steeped a minute or so more than the original 2 minutes for the first time.
All of which made me appreciate as never before the good tea that our Chinese friends gave us.
Following that we were ushered into the gift shop, where the typical tea mug/pot/strainer combination was on sale for the equivalent of $40 whereas I’ve seen them on sale at Southern Season in Chapel Hill for half that.
But the tea ceremony was a very pleasant interlude, after which we boarded the bus again for the airport, where we sat down to our third meal in 8 hours; I can hardly believe I tasted the chicken strips and the lotus flower root and the soup; some people at my table actually ate very heartily.
Now for Shanghai, our last stop. We’ve saved the best for last.

Part VI: Shanghai: Irrational Exuberance
Thursday, October 20th.
Shanghai’s new airport is huge, brand-new, the bathrooms are luxurious, there is not a squat toilet in sight; it is our first indication that we have left the third world far behind. But the terminal is interminable, and we drag our luggage for miles along corridors and up and down escalators to reach baggage claim and then again to get out to the parking lot.
Shanghai by night as we drive from the hotel to downtown is futuristic and fantastic. The bus whizzes along a maze of spaghetti junction overpasses that float over a neon-lit skyline that looks as if a creative child had been let loose to draw: round pink globes atop needle towers and a staggered building like a stylized cartoon sketch. Everything is new and shiny and humming along smoothly, not a scooter or a bicycle in evidence. The city is still lively at nearly midnight.
Our local guide for the short Shanghai leg of the trip is a young woman called Yolanda with a square face, a bowl cut, and earnest eyeglasses, who greets us with a red flag. Her English is the hardest to follow of any of our guides so far. The bus is a few minutes late, and our Chengdu experience comes to mind, since we will be staying at the same government-run Jin Jiang Hotel chain, but this time around when we arrive at the hotel our room keys are available instantly, and we gratefully repair to our rooms. Late as it is, I wash my hair and go to bed, and in the morning attempt to dry it with the hairdryer in the room, but since the only dryer outlet is under the desk, this requires a contortionist skill I do not possess.
Breakfast is at a civilized hour, since we are given the unprecedented leisure of setting off at 10 am on our tour of the city. Our first stop is the museum, a four-story treasure house of bronze sculptures, ceramics, paintings, calligraphy and more, probably the best general museum in China. According to the dating of some of the artifacts, all civilization begins with the Chinese, a claim disputed by the Indians, the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians. Regardless, there are examples of Bronze Age pottery stunning in imagination, detail and skill, like the cunning bowl topped with life-like yaks, flanked by two handles in the form of tigers attempting to climb up onto the rim of the bowl to get at the yaks.
But I truly lost myself in the ceramics gallery: the purity of the shapes, the delicacy of the design, the sheer eye candy of the celadon, the blanc de Chine, the rose red; the traditional blue and white, so popular in the Islamic world; the over-the-top green, pink and gold; from the tiny pots to the enormous planters and plates, from the horse to the camels, with the wild eyes and straining mouths typical to animal depiction in Chinese art, your eye keeps going back and forth, from astonishment to astonishment. For me, my coup de Coeur, my moments of actual covetousness as opposed to mere aesthetic admiration, came for two pieces, both 18th C: one was a pair of small rose petal pots with delicate lid topped with a golden stopper. I actually found, not a replica, but a piece inspired by them in the gift shop. The other coup de Coeur was for an equestrienne on a horse: the horse so alive, so perfect in proportions, and the lady so dignified, young, beautiful, with a wimple headdress and high-waisted dress reminiscent of early Renaissance women were it not for the fact that she is riding astride, not side-saddle. Her hands are lost in her voluminous sleeves but you can see that she must have been holding reins that did not survive the centuries.
After the museum we are driven to the waterfront, where the Bund, the European quarter of the French concession with its stately fin de siècle buildings, confronts across the river the futuristic new Shanghai with its fantastic skyscrapers, all built over the past thirty years. The boardwalk is alive with tourists taking pictures, an invigorating freshness to the cool air and overcast but clean sky. There are many Westerners in evidence, and quite a few who seem to be living in Shanghai as opposed to merely visiting. Indeed it does seem to be a livable city, at least for those who can afford it, as it is beyond the means of most Chinese, according to the laments of our guide Yolanda.
I get photographed taking by the horns the big bull on the boardwalk. Shanghai is to Beijing as New York is to Washington D.C., apparently; people there are all about money and hypocrisy, according to the guide, who like our other guides seems curiously uninhibited, indeed eager, to give stereotypical regional characterizations of the denizens of each city we visit.
A member of our group, Peter from Durham, points out to us the grand colonial building where his uncle had his business office in the forties. He has visited inside and has even visited the house his uncle rented in town, now an upscale bed and breakfast.
After the visit to the waterfront we go to a Chinese restaurant for lunch, and since it is late we are hungry and eat heartily, although we should be saving our appetites for the special farewell dinner promised for the evening. We walk off our lunch in the Yu Yuan Gardens, which we can only access, according to our guide Yolanda, by walking through small commercial back-alleys lined with cheap souvenir shops. It is a twenty-minute walk to the gardens themselves, in the best Chinese style, Tang dynasty Pagoda style buildings interspersed among the maze of walled gardens with their traditional landscape elements of willows dripping over pools of red carp, small bridges, and rock arrangements. There are interesting details of sculptures on the roofs. The gardens are quite crowded with Chinese locals or visitors, at 40 Yuan the entry ticket.
A long walk back to the bus followed by a tense negotiation when the group realizes that our special restaurant for the farewell dinner this evening lies in the same YuYuan neighborhood and requires the same 20 minute walk through the back alleys. Finally a compromise is reached: the driver will try to deposit us a little closer to the restaurant, although he cannot park there. After a welcome respite in our hotel rooms, we reassemble in the lobby, somewhat dressed up for the evening; I forsake the outfit I had planned, which would have involved a skirt and high heels, for a more practical flat shoes and trousers.
The walk to the restaurant is more pleasant than that earlier in the afternoon; we take an alternative route through a picturesque pagoda-style commercial area, but it is raining and quite muggy. The restaurant itself is quite festive, with an absolutely stunning view over the Shanghai skyline. I am finally ‘excited’, realizing that I am in Shanghai! In China! Not in Chinatown! The dinner is also more elaborate, with some new dishes to discover: rice-stuffed whole duck, for instance. But it is all quite heavy food.
We repair to a private room where our Duke host, Bill, sings a farewell song to ‘Mark’ our guide for the whole trip, in which we all join whole-heartedly. He also presents him with an envelope containing a collective gift from the group. Mark is touched and tells us he will save the donation for his daughter’s education, and that he is encouraging her to eventually attend Duke University if at all possible. There are several people in our group who certainly have some influence over making things possible at Duke. Mark is very popular with the group, particularly, I think, because he speaks fondly and often of his daughter, his wife, his family, and makes fun of himself and of them. Perhaps also because he deprecates China’s power and expresses his admiration for the U.S., quite sincerely, I believe.
Next come the tributes to our Duke host and his wife. Three members of the group sing songs and read poems in his honor, and he responds with his inimitable imitation of JFK’s ‘ask not’ speech.
It is a sentimental, happy and replete group that treks back to the bus, takes a final look at the Shanghai by night skyline, hugs our Duke hosts goodbye in the lobby- they are taking a direct flight to the US later in the evening while the rest of us brace for a 4 a.m. wake-up call to head back to the airport for the long flight home. But this trip is far from over for me, and my worst nightmare is about to come true.

Part VII: Beijing Airport: Traveler's Nightmare Scenario
Friday 21 October
We load onto the bus at 5:30 a.m., some of us well-rested, some, like me, groggy from only a couple of hours sleep. On the bus Mark hands us breakfast boxes, which some people tuck into heartily, and I leave untouched. The ham sandwich I don’t want, the coke can won’t make it past security, but I save the boiled eggs and Danish pastries for later.
We are leaving from the older of Shanghai’s two airports, for the first leg of our long trip: Shanghai to Beijing at 7:55 a.m., Beijing to JFK at 1 pm. By the time we get into New York at about 3 pm local time, we would have been travelling for 19 hours, and then most of us will still be taking connecting flights out of JFK for our final destinations. For me, the connecting flight to Raleigh-Durham should have me back in North Carolina by 10 pm, and with any luck in my own home before midnight Friday, that is, around noon of Saturday in China, where my body clock will be set.
Once our luggage has been checked in and our boarding passes issued, Mark bids us adieu and disappears, and we go through the line for passport check and security. I am asked to open my carry-on bag: the violation turns out to be the small container of yoghurt included in my breakfast box. But the young security man is nice about it; when I ask if I can drink it, he agrees readily, but it’s neither easy nor elegant to drink down yoghurt without a spoon as you stand in a security line.
After security we have a couple of hours to spare and I wander around, looking for a horseshoe-shaped neck-support cushion, looking through the Duty Free shops, visiting the restroom. I prefer to keep moving as I know I will be sitting for hours on end, and also because I am so sleepy that if I sit down I might be overcome. By the time I get back to the gate and find my husband and the other members of the group, our flight is boarding, and I stand in line and think to bring out my boarding pass.
That is when I realize I don’t have my handbag with my boarding pass, my passport, my credit cards, driver’s license, cash- everything. I have been pulling along my carry-on case and slinging my jacket over my shoulder, but my handbag, my all-important handbag, is missing. At first I can hardly believe it, and run back to the last place I sat down to see if I left it there. It isn’t there. I run to the last restroom I used, and check the hooks on the stalls, where I would have hung my bag. It isn’t there. I run back to my husband in line at the boarding gate and ask him to wait for me and rush back like a madwoman to retrace my steps to the Duty Free area. I see one of those airport golf carts and get on but the driver asks me for money and I have not a cent on me; I hop off.
I run on and find two security guards, both young women, and stop them, trying to explain my problem. They don’t understand, and finally walk me to the information desk to explain to the girl behind the desk in a yellow silk outfit. She is sweetly sympathetic but speaks very little English. I am frantic and have a hard time conveying the urgency of the situation: my flight is boarding, I have not a cent or a piece of I.D. on me, and time is being wasted. Either a thief is getting away with my bag, in which case there is no hope, or someone has turned it in, which would be a miracle. I ask the security women and the information clerk over and over to inquire at Lost and Found, or whoever in security is responsible for turning in unattended luggage, but they shake their head and say there is no such thing here. I ask them to call the police; the information girl finally does but five then ten minutes pass and the police do not show up; be patient, she advises me, the police is in another building, it will take a while for theme to come. I ask her to call the boarding gate, E-31, and ask if anyone has turned my bag in there; after all the boarding pass would indicate the flight. I ask them to hold the flight, to contact my husband. But the language barrier is insurmountable. The security women ask me what color the bag is, and I tell them brown, which conveys nothing, so I point to my shoes, but that does not help much. They wander away and leave me at the Information desk, increasingly desperate.
Finally I am resigned to missing my flight, but I need to tell my husband; I ask the information clerk if I can go fetch my husband, and make her promise to keep the police agent at the desk if they show up. I run again like a madwoman back to the gate, and find my husband and run back to the information desk. A young policewoman finally shows up, but by then the two security women have come back and the information clerk is getting busy on the phone in Chinese. They ask me again what color my bag was and I again say brown and they ask: “Coffee?” “Yes, yes, coffee color, dark brown,” I confirm. I hardly dare believe there is a glimmer of hope, but they tell me to go to the boarding gate and wait.
My husband and I head back, this time on a golf cart, as he has cash to pay the 10 Yuan per person, and wait at the gate. In a few moments a woman dressed like airport staff, not security, comes panting up with my bag, and I am so grateful to find my passport, boarding pass, wallet, that I give her a very substantial cash expression of my gratitude. My husband and I board the plane and find our seats; a couple of people in our group who realized what had happened ask me if I found my bag and who had taken it, and I am still too rattled and unsure myself to give a satisfactory answer. I can imagine what would have happened if indeed my husband and I had had to miss the flight; it would have been delayed till our luggage had been pulled off, and that would have meant a considerable delay for the other passengers. As it was, the flight takes off almost on time.
Finally, take-off. A little later, around 2 p.m., we are served lunch, with the pleasant surprise of fruit and yoghurt. I sleep for a while, exhausted with the adrenalin rush and the preceding sleepless night. Then I read, then I write on the computer. It is eight o’clock p.m., Beijing-time, and eight a.m. New York time when we are served our second meal, this time a sandwich. Still six hours to go before we land, and even then, it is not the end of the trip. To be continued.

Saturday October 15
Last day in Chengdu, indulged in a lazy start to the day, and checked out of our hotel at noon. We went to lunch, went for a walk in the pet and flower market- amazing fish, birds, bonsai- visited the stunning Brocade Museum- embroidery on silk so fine that, backlit, you see the hairs on a panda’s back. Bought a couple of scarves. Went for another walk, to the Wide and Narrow Street pedestrian neighborhood, lined on both sides of the streets with cafes and restaurants, clearly a hangout for locals and tourists alike. Some fun trompe l’oeil three-dimensional murals.
Finally off to the airport for our late flight to Xian, a short flight of an hour, but I was exhausted.
Sunday October 16th
Xian, Terra Cotta Warriors
Xian is the home town of our tour guide Mark and he is visibly excited when we land late last night. It is an ancient city that was once the capital of China, and is today a bustling city of 8 million revitalized by the tourist boom after the discovery of the thousands of terra cotta warriors put it on the map for the west. Its other claim to fame is the largely intact city walls that surround the modern downtown with its incongruous high-rise buildings.
Our hotel in Xian, the Metropark, is a high rise and our room is adequate but unattractive. The weather, though, is splendid, sunny, crisp, cool, and everyone’s spirits are up as we meet at 9 am for our first day’s tour. We visit the Buddhist Big Wild Goose Temple, a large garden complex comprising a 1300 year old temple surrounded by construction of new ancillary buildings. Inside the temple, a gigantic gilded Buddha, but none of the incense-stuffiness we remembered from Tibet. Ten percent of Chinese are Buddhists, we are told.
Back on the bus for the hour-long ride outside the city walls to the site of the discovery of the Terra Cotta Warriors.

Part III Chengdu: Panda a Day
Thursday October 13
Chengdu the Spicy City
Up very early to fly from Tibet to Chengdu, a smooth 2-hour flight. Cheng du, capital of Szechuan, is an ancient city of some 10 million people and lies in the dead heart of China; once a crossroad on the silk road, it is traditionally known as the brocade city, as well as the hibiscus city. I haven’t seen any hibiscus, but there are flowers and trees and parks and greenery everywhere, a sign of its humid, subtropical, perpetually overcast climate. That absence of sun is credited with the pale complexion of the women, who are known both for their beauty and for their ‘spicy’ temper, whereas the men of Chengdu are known to be hen-pecked husbands. All this local lore is relayed to us with an absolute straight face both by Mark, our permanent guide, so to speak, and by Jiji, our local guide, who exemplifies the reputation of Chengdu women: a contrast of white and black, as round and pretty and cute as a small panda.
The other reputation of Chengdu is for being the most ‘laid back’ city of China. Perhaps that is the reason we have to wait for twenty minutes for our bus at the airport, and another couple of hours in the lobby of the Jin Jiang Hotel to check into our rooms. The hotel itself is a large, opulent, old-fashioned government-run hotel with a Sikh doorman. It is centrally located by the Brocade river and apart from the check-in snafu, the hotel staff are prompt and helpful.
Chengdu may have a reputation for being laid back, but on the street people are moving along at a brisk pace, the women in short skirts and skinny jeans; many scooters as well as small local cars. Taxis here are lime-green, in contrast to the blue and white taxis in Lhasa. Chengdu is an intel industry hub, and the downtown is dominated by the great luxury brands from Louis Vuitton to Gucci.
We have a free evening, and my husband and I take advantage of it to have a Western meal at one of the hotel’s restaurants: it is a nice change to have a perfectly-cooked pan-seared salmon fillet in red pepper cream sauce. Later most of the group go to a local, outdoor theatre show featuring Chengdu’s typical theatre arts: face-changing, puppets, comic skits, etc. While they watch, the spectators are served tea, peanuts, and an optional foot massage or ear-picking.
Friday October 13
Panda Reserve
After breakfast we take the bus for the hour’s drive to the Panda Reserve outside of Chengdu. We arrive at the same time as wave upon wave of impossibly cute elementary school-children, wearing red, yellow or white caps to distinguish each school group; holding hands two by two, boy and girl, waving and calling to us in English: “Hello, good morning!”
The pandas themselves can barely compete in cuteness. As we walk along bamboo-shaded alleys, we stop to photograph the small groups of pandas we see mostly lying around scratching or lolling on tree branches. Whenever one of them turns over or summons the energy to move around or chew on a bamboo shoot, the whole audience of spectators exclaims and applauds and cameras click away for all the world as if we were watching the biggest movie star. The pandas themselves are more beige than white, although the yin yang coloring of the panda- black and white- is part of its importance to Chinese lore. Our guide Jiji entertains us with riddles: What does a panda dream of? Taking pictures in color.
And lying around dreaming seems to be mainly what pandas do. They need to conserve e energy as they absorb very little nutrition from their 14 kilos of bamboo a day.
Pandas seem to be clueless: they have no interest in mating or even an instinctive knowledge of how it is done; they need to be shown panda porn, so to speak, to instruct them on the process. Artificial insemination is the default method of reproduction at the reserve. But even when a female panda, who is fertile only 5 days a year and can carry only one cub every 2 years, actually does deliver a tiny one-pound slithery foetus, she has no maternal instinct to guide her, and often swats away at the poor infant until the reserve staff intervene to save it.
Just as you begin to wonder if the panda is a species worth going to so much trouble to save, you visit the panda baby nursery: there are four adorable, furry little babies lying on a wooden baby crib, nuzzling each other, baby scales and baby bottles and Similac milk in the room, for all the world like human babies. For a mere 180 dollars, you can have ‘private time’ with a baby panda and be photographed holding it. In our group, only one couple goes in for the ultimate panda baby bonding experience.
Lunch at a restaurant in the reserve features several bamboo dishes. After lunch, we group around long tables on the banks of the swan lake to listen to our Duke faculty host, Bill Chafe, talk about Nixon’s legacy and his visit to China. At first there is too much noise from the surrounding school children noshing on what looked like the Chinese equivalent of Twinkies, but Mark hushes them and they obligingly wander further off, so that in the end it is a satisfactory experience and rather a pleasant change, to listen to the lecture in the open air while sipping jasmine blossom tea.
It occurs to me, as we recalled the years before China opened up to the world, when in the West we thought of the Chinese as an undifferentiated mass of automatons marching in lockstep to the orders of Chairman Mao, that all the time they were people just like us, individualistic, materialistic, ambitious, family-loving, very much aware of their regional differences and distinctions and proud of them. The ‘other’ is always dehumanized, always seen as a monolithic mass until you get to know them personally. That hasn’t changed, even if the designation of the ‘other’ has.
After a final stop at the Museum souvenir shop, we board the bus for the hotel. A couple of hours later we are picked up again to go to dinner at a local Szechuan restaurant. It is very much a local dive sort of place, and the service is somewhat brusque. There are some Szechuan cuisine dishes on the table, but as they tend to be very spicy, there are few takers. There is a dramatic dish called rice cake soup, which is not bad, but there are also other dishes that are unfamiliar in texture or presentation that are less successful.
The problem is that most of us are tired of Chinese food after 10 days. Our guides try to vary it with regional dishes, but to us it is still Chinese food, and we are all bored with it and longing for Western cuisine. It’s an insoluble problem.

Wednesday October 12



As it turned out, we had an interesting experience with Chinese medecine yesterday evening. My husband didn't feel too brilliant, and the hotel suggested calling a doctor to administer oxygen. The doctor, a Chinese woman who spoke not a word of English, promptly showed up and there ensued an experiment in using the computer to translate; but eventually the services of the handsome young receptionist were required and offered with the best good humor. The oxygen tank was left with rather summary instructions, as well as several ampoules of dark liquid oral medication that smelled very much like roach traps but seemed to do the trick. We ordered room service for dinner instead of yak dinner number 2.
This morning, Wednesday, at breakfast in the hotel’s dining room, there is some discussion of the day’s program, and a more a la carte option is offered. After a talk by our Tibetan guide on his native culture, the bus will take the main group to visit a traditional Tibetan home; another group will be dropped off for shopping; yet another couple of people will stay behind at the hotel to take oxygen- everyone wants to be in shape for the highlight of the Tibetan trip and probably the whole tour, the Potala Palace, 500 steps and thirteen stories high.
I opt for the Tibetan family option. A low house, with large peonies in the courtyard, and a long low room with a long low table on which a tasty selection of toasted seeds and beans are spread. Our hostess is a dignified woman in her fifties, with a cute teenage grand-daughter who serves us little cups of yak butter tea. I donate mine to Bob. We sit around and ask questions, most of which are answered by our guide Pasan rather than the host family, which speaks no English. Interestingly, he admits that his mother would be dismayed if he were to marry a Han Chinese woman but would object much less to a Western daughter-in-law. We buy a few of the fabric goods the family makes: aprons, pouches, all colorful and typical.
Following the visit and the opportunity to photograph the stunning Potala Palace from a vantage point across the square, the bus takes off for a restaurant for lunch. My husband and I and another three people pass up lunch and take taxis back to the hotel.
At 1 pm we leave for the Potala Palace climb; everyone, even Carole and Maria, who were ailing, are on the bus. At the Potala, we look up at the iconic soaring walls with their regularly-spaced, curtained windows and took a deep breath and gave up our passports in exchange for tickets into the hallowed halls. Tickets to the Potala are timed, but our guide had us moving at a brisk pace. We made the 500 step climb in less than the forty minutes allowed, under blazing sun, without water. Once inside the palace we jostled a couple of other tour groups through chamber after high-ceilinged, highly-decorated chamber, into the inner sanctum of mind-boggling solid gold sarcophagi and giant solid gold statues incrusted with turquoise and jewels. Nothing comes close, not even King Tut’s treasures. It was a revelation to me that the Dalai Lamas, associated in my mind at least with Buddhist renunciation of earthly affairs, should have accumulated these unimaginable treasure and been commemorated in such extravagant idols.
The smaller rooms, and the corridors between the grand halls, are narrow, dark, and stuffy, so that I personally was not tempted to linger past our allotted time. In any case, Pasan had another adventure scheduled for us immediately after: the bus drove us a way out of town to a monastery where we entered a tree-shaded courtyard and watched scores of maroon-robed young monks in training ‘debating’ with elaborate hand gestures. They looked like they were having fun and couldn’t help grinning as they caught the eyes of the tourists all around video-taping them.
Back to the hotel for a lightning quick change in time to get on the bus again for dinner and a show at ‘The Crazy Yak.” Dinner was buffet-style, a bit of a scramble with the other tourists around the very large dining hall; the food was authentically Tibetan, and included sheep tongue soup and yak meat dumplings. I tried a taste of ‘barley wine.’ The entertainment was typical Tibetan dances, with yak-costumed dancers, and men and women in colorful costumes singing and dancing. The final was a sort of Conga line dance around the room, and when Lori, who was sitting right next to me at table, got up and joined the Tibetan dancers on stage, several of our group members did the same, and danced around the room. As someone said, ‘what happens in Lhasa stays in Lhasa.’
Tomorrow, off to Cheng Du and the giant Pandas.