- animals in Beijing (where ARE they?)
- a wild, starry-eyed week in Paris with my mom over Chinese New Year
- what it was like to come back to Beijing and a week of horrible pollution AFTER a wild, starry-eyed week in Paris
- feeling disgustingly behind on learning Chinese
- going to Singapore, and how it is NOT A REAL PLACE, OKAY?
- and traffic patterns.
I even started an entry about schools, and how I've spent my life thinking of school buildings as an extension of my home. Really! It's about four paragraphs long so far, and will include an anecdote about how I was recently thrown out of a cab in the middle of the street (tears and snot streaming down my face) after flying into Beijing on a red-eye. One of these days, I'll finish it.
But that's the problem -- I'm like a magpie with the things I want to write about these days. I keep thinking of things that would make great essay fodder, and I get really proud of myself for being so clever, and then I never actually write any of the damn stuff down. I think I'm worried that as soon as I write any of this down, it'll turn from perfect jewel-like prose into a muddle of adverbs, mundanity, and words that probably don't actually exist except in my head.
It's hardly the most original source of writer's block; in fact, it's sort of embarrassing how common it is. And then the embarrassment feels embarrassing, too -- I mean, really? I can't get over myself enough to write some words on paper about my trip to Paris? Come on, Crawford; this is hardly high art.
However! Tonight's the night, people -- a struggling student absolutely KILLED it on his oral presentation today, I graded twenty commentaries, my medical insurance claims are winging their way to the insurance company as we speak, and I have confirmation that my form requesting an extension on my taxes arrived in Austin. Also, yesterday? I went to the gym.
It's so on.
So here it is: the story of how I finally walked in my great-grandfather's footsteps.
Three weeks ago, I knew that my great-grandfather Walter Crawford was a teaching missionary in China around the turn of the nineteenth century. He sailed up and down a river in a rowboat -- possibly the Yangtze, but probably the Yellow -- and taught English. My grandfather was born in China. I grew up with old Chinese vases in our house. I don't know how old they were, exactly, or if they came from my great-grandfather's time there, or if they were even really Chinese, but they were a warm grey color and they had ornate handles and decorative black Chinese dragons sprawled across their round bellies.
At an early age, my father taught me how to identify a dragon's provenance -- three toes meant Japanese, four toes meant normal Chinese, and five meant Imperial Chinese. When I was eleven years old and bored at dinner, my dad set me a fairly common non-routine logic problem: you're lost, and you meet someone who knows the way, and you know that they either always tell the truth or always lie, so what do you ask them? Except that he grabbed a prop close at hand to tell the problem as a story, and that prop was a tiny carved dragon holding a sign, his mouth hanging open to laugh at his audience -- and so for me, that problem has always been about how dragons are either constant truthtellers or liars.
It's hard for me to tell where Crawford lore begins and China ends.
Sometimes it's even difficult to keep the Crawford lore straight on its own. For example, in my head I remember my father telling me a story about my great-grandfather. In this story, my great-grandfather is rowing his rowboat along a river and all of a sudden, there is a whirlpool. My great-grandfather and his friend (another missionary, I wonder, or a Chinese man? or are they even in China?) row as hard as they can, and manage to escape. And it's a good thing they do, because my great-grandfather is on his way to be married to my great-grandmother, and if he hadn't escaped the whirlpool, then none of us would have been born.
Or is it that my great-grandfather is on his way to meet my great-grandmother? But that's strange -- it implies she was in China on her own, before meeting Walter. If that were the case, wouldn't I have heard more about her? Maybe they were already together, and she just hadn't had my grandfather yet? That seems more likely, but certainly less dramatic -- although does a story with a narrowly-escaped whirlpool really need more drama?
I just don't know enough.
And it's not as though I've managed to hang onto the things I learned in the first place. While the Crawford-China connection has always been wallpaper on the back of my mind, for some reason it didn't occur to me when I took my job in Beijing. My father had to point it out before I realized that China is, in fact, a place where my family has some history.
As soon as I was aware of the echoes, though, I made grand plans. I decided that I was going to learn Chinese, dig into the history of missionaries in China, make contact with our other relatives who'd done some research on Great-Grandpa Walt, and sail down the river on which my Great-Grandfather plied his English-teaching trade. (As you know, I also made a blog with the grandiose subtitle of "walking in my grandfathers' footsteps". I'm cringing at it now, but to take it down seems sort of dishonest.)
Well. My Chinese remains execrable and I wouldn't even know where to start in terms of research, but two weeks ago, I did take a boat down my great-grandfather's river. I was on a three-day cruise that started in Chongqing and sailed down to the Three Gorges Dam, passing through each of the gorges and by the Shibaozhai Pagoda, originally built in 1819. We took smaller boats down the Shennu Stream, and I could barely wrestle my gaze away from the clear green water to notice the mountains rearing up on either side of us.
I read up on the history of the Three Gorges Dam as we went. The scenery in the area has changed since its construction; the water level rose about a hundred meters (I think), and most of the old villages along the river were drowned. What villages you do see are newly constructed and the water is much safer. The Shennu Stream -- originally a trickle only a meter or so deep -- is now a real river in its own right, fifty meters deep or more.
I thought idly, when my great-grandfather was in China, this would have looked very different.
But here's the thing. All this was the Yangtze River, and I was all but convinced that Walter had sailed the Yellow River. I didn't learn until I returned that I'd been traveling down my great-grandfather's river all this time without knowing it. And I was ashamed.
I wasn't really there when I was there, is the thing. My excuse: I was exhausted from a hard four days of traveling and eager to get some rest. I watched movies with one of my best friends, and slept, and read trashy young adult fantasy books. I played a stupid game on my iPhone. When we climbed up the Pagoda, I didn't think, Walter might have made this climb. When we went through the first of the three gorges, I didn't think, my great-grandfather was here.
I don't even remember what I did for the other two gorges; I definitely wasn't up on deck. So much for my grandiose dreams of connecting with my ancestors.
Even though I didn't know I was following his steps, however, Walt was always in my mind. I thought of him when we sailed down the Li River with its sidelong mountains humped like dragon backs. I thought of my grandfather when we went through the five-step ship lock at the Three Gorges Dam, and Jo and I watched the water whoosh out of the first set of locks into the next, and two men on a coal ship next to us struggled to attach a tire to the side of their boat to act as a bumper. I thought of my father when I climbed up the very top of the Shibaozhai Pagoda and remembered the time that we climbed to the top of the Duomo in Siena, Notre Dame in Paris, and every other high place that we could find.
I'm always going to be bitter that I didn't realize that I was on my great-grandfather's river, but this has helped me realize something that must in be in the grasp of any five year-old's comprehension: that walking in my great-grandfather's footsteps (and my grandfather's, and my father's) doesn't actually have to literally mean walking in his literal footsteps. I wanted to find a connection with this man I'd never met, but it turns out that I can find echoes of him in my grandfather, my father, and myself. For one thing, my parents raised me with kindness, grit and a sense of adventure, and you'd survive ill without those qualities on a river in China at the turn of the nineteenth century.
For another, thinking of the past can make it present, at least for a little while. I have no actual idea what Walter was like, but I see the legacy he's left in my family. I see how my father and uncle move through the world with a steady wit and an essential decency. I saw my grandfather's reverence for wilderness and I hear about his legacy as a principal. I think about myself as a foreigner in this land, and I'm aware how much more alone my great-grandfather must have been. He must have been brave, I think. Possibly too hard on himself, and maybe he also was overconcerned about what others thought of him. But brave, no doubt. Kind, too, and clever.
I have one more piece of evidence to back me up on my assessment of his character, spurious though it may be. We have an old menu from a Chinese dinner he cooked for the family in 1949, and on the side of the menu are three Chinese characters that spell out the name he used in China. I took it took it to a Chinese speaker at school to ask what it meant.
"The first character means wise, or bright," she told me, "and the second means virtuous."
Then she smiled. "Your great-grandfather must have been a wonderful man."
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