Life 2.0: A Game of Walls
Pushing up my 130-pound frame up the steep stone steps of a 4,000-year-old wall is not exactly my idea of a how I’m going to spend the first day of the next 50 years of my life.
The climb, as it was the first time many years ago, is unforgiving. If you spend most of the day sitting in front of a computer and couldn’t even manage the 10,000 steps recommended as part of a daily fitness regimen, you would think twice about climbing walls.
But here I am on my 51st birthday, trying to move my overweight body up one stone step at a time in unbelievable slow motion. “Lord, please help me make it to the first tower at least,” I implore the heavens above. “Just the first tower.”
But in between stops and long, breathless pauses, it’s lovely to gaze at the skies because even with the temperature dropping to below zero, it’s a sunny day at Huanghuacheng, a village in Jiuduhe town, Huairou District, 70 kilometers north of Beijing.
Unlike the more popular sections of the Great Wall in Badaling or Mutianyu, the lakeside section of the wall in Huanghuacheng is eerily quiet on this winter morning. Silence is “so freaking loud,” says American novelist Sarah Dessen. So loud, it makes you uncomfortable.
This side of the great wall isn’t postcard pretty, the sides are chipping off and the terrain is uneven. Even the towers, once the majestic lookout of China’s vast imperial army, looks abandoned and melancholic. Yet, it’s unrestored state makes it more beautiful than the wall most tourists get to see in other parts of China.
It mirrors a life that has seen better times. Mine.
And so I lie down in the hard concrete built thousands of years ago and surrender to a higher power because, maybe, it’s meant to be that I spend the first day of the next 50 years of life confronting the inevitable that everything from here on, not just these centuries-old staircase to the heavens, will be a hard climb.
Let the children remember the sun
Let them dance, let them soar
For their lives have begun
— The Prayer, Celine Dion and Josh Groban
Accompanying my 10-year-old son on a school field trip in a foreign country — and I suspect this isn’t going to be the last — is among the first of these hard climbs. The energy of the young, while infectious, is tough on a semi-retired me seeking solitude and change.
I’ve always traveled for work, and had seen the world only from the perspective of beating deadlines, of writing stories and taking photographs. I’ve crossed borders, slept at airport lounges, and met a great many people in the hurried blur of everyday coverage, not really seeing much of life.
So I hoped that coming to China with my boy and his school friends — and hopefully in other trips in the future — will be a nice change in perspective. I have a different mission in life now. I want my boy to remember that he had traveled with me all throughout the rest of his childhood.
What does the world look like outside the borders of our known life, let mom be the teacher and travel buddy.
Part of the wall in Huanghuacheng is submerged in a lake and slopes all the way up the mountains in that snake-like trail that they say is visible on the moon. On this winter morning, the lake is frozen and our group is almost alone in the historic wilderness.
The path begins in a foot trail just a few hundred meters from the road. Even before you reach the stone steps somewhere half a kilometer up — if you are not fit, as I am not fit — you start loosing your breath.
And so here I am in this vast promontory of silence, gasping for air, legs screaming out in agony. I hear the kids making noise on their way up to the highest tower as swift and light as the wind.
I can’t stand to fly
I’m not that naive
I’m just out to find
The better part of me
– Superman (It’s not Easy), Five for Fighting
I know this now: there is no solitude in journalism. It is a job that is constantly around people, forever weaving in and out of experiences and geographies, a maddening pace that can either suck the life out of you or make you want to live life more.
I guess at some point it sucked the life out of me that for a time I wanted to withdraw from everything hurried. And so here I am in an abandoned side of the Great Wall with unbelievable slowness of being. At every pause I close my eyes and think of happy times, happy thoughts of long ago and overlapping memories of people and places, the pains and pleasures of half a century of living.
Where I sit, a stone’s throw from the first tower, I remember the snow’s son.
In English, he said his name means snow; in Mandarin, xuě. He was born when the snow was falling so his mother named him Xuě Fei, flying snow. He is the snow’s son.
I met him at a time when I haven’t even seen snow or know what it’s like to be extremely, painfully cold. Every time I come to Beijing I remember him and stories about his country told in halting English and small conversations. The memory of that trip — sixteen years ago now — still warms the heart. And more than foot warmers and winter scarves and bonnets I need that now because the light has faded in my dream world, my own winter of discontent.
I met Xuě Fei on a press tour that took Asian journalists to a 10-day journey across the Japanese countryside. Can I teach him to speak better English? He asked when we we were on our way to Sendai City from Tokyo aboard the Shinkansen Express, a 674-kilometer journey on a late autumn morning. From the train window I saw farms, people, mountains and endless horizons like a movie on double fast-forward. He was eager to chat.
Of course, I said, if he can teach me how to count in Mandarin.
Two days later on our way to Otaru from Goryokaku, our bus stopped at a lonely roadside gas station bordered by hilltops and mountains. I woke up from sleep seeing white all over the place and knew instantly that I was looking at something straight from the pages of a book.
Was it in “Dr. Zhivago” when Yuri was gathering firewood in the dead of winter at the height of the Bolshevik revolution? The scene has the same melancholic touch in the fading light of dusk. I could almost hear the faint strands of Lara’s Theme playing in the background.
The snow’s son was beaming in his seat. He knew I had never seen snow.
Do you wanna be a poet and write
Do you wanna be an actor up in light
Do you wanna be soldier and fight for love
— Burn, Tina Arena
I wonder if Xuě Fei is still a newsman today and a great many others I’ve met only once in a quarter century of writing.
In workplaces, there is at least a performance review every year. Why can’t life have its own KPIs? But if you reach the half-a-century mark, you are automatically thrust into a crossroad. Do I still want to be a journalist? What am I if I am not one?
I see childhood friends celebrating their golden anniversary on planet earth with birthday bashes and grand celebrations. But when I turned 50 last year, I left the job that I love. Not necessarily an existential crisis, but you get the idea that I’ve been on an uphill climb even before coming to China.
It still hurts to this day, maybe it’ll hurt for life. But whoever had said that you need to destroy in order to build could never have been more accurate. Someday, when this dust of uncertainty has settled, I can start to build. Maybe I can start to dream again. Maybe I would still like to write, maybe not.
But until that day comes, I know I will be climbing walls.
