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CHINA
Yin Yang and Mickey Mouse
By Jheri St.James
Chinese culture has colored so many aspects of global life: Chinese astrology
concepts, Tai Chi Chuan, Chi Kung and other martial arts, acupuncture, the I-Ching
or Book of Changes, Chinese cuisine, Oriental arts and architecture, the concept
and symbolism of Yin-Yang--duality.
Then
there are mundane facts to consider. The mind bends under
the weight of data about China, home of the oldest
continuous civilization and the world’s
most populous country (1.3 billion).
There are the statistics: Situated in eastern Asia, bounded east by the Pacific;
third largest country in the world (next to Canada and Russia); area of 9.6 million
square kilometers (3,696,100 sq. miles), 1/15th of the world’s land mass.
China’s border stretches over 22,000 kilometers on land; 18,000 kilometers
coastline, washed by the waters of the Bohai, the Huanghai, the East China
and South China Seas; 6,536 islands larger than 500 sq. meters; the largest
of which
is Taiwan. But China is, of course, much more than statistics can articulate.
There is history: the Shang (1770-1120 B.C.); Zhou (1120-221 B.C.); Quin/Chin
(221-207 B.C.); Hann (207-220 A.D.); Sung (960-1279 A.D.); and Ming (1368-1644
A.D.) Dynasties are now but a list of eclipsed rulers and epochs in China’s
history, a list that does not even approach the last half of the 20th Century
where even more dramatic changes occurred, thanks to the historical impact
of men like Chaing Kai-Chek, Mao Tsi Tung, Deng Xiaoping and Hu Jintao, current
President. But Walt Disney? Really, now.
There is the three-part geography: A high Tibetan Plateau, mountain ranges and
steppes in Western China; lowlands, highlands and part of the Gobi desert in
North China; and a maze of hills and valleys in South China. China boasts deserts,
mountains and fertile river basins as well as the highest and one of the lowest
places on earth; it is high in the west and low in the east. There is the Yangtze
River in central China and the Huang He (Yellow) River in the north. Beijing
is the capital (formerly Peking), and China’s largest city is Shanghai.
And geography means soil, and the collection of some of its soil is the point
of this journal entry.
There are economics: Jeffrey E. Garten, Dean of the Yale School of Management
said, “There is no doubt in my mind that China is headed towards being
a great power and as such will shatter the global status quo.”
There is Chinese literature and art: As recently as the 17th century, China had
the largest and most sophisticated empire on earth, one that used its cultural
prestige to hold diplomatic sway over much of Asia and beyond. The earliest written
records in Chinese date back to about 1400 B.C., making Chinese one of the world’s
oldest continuously written languages. The definition and history of Chinese
art are beyond articulation in this narrative.
*
* *
And
then there is Hong Kong, a former British Crown colony on
the coast of southeast China. Hong Kong is an island gateway
into Southeast Asia and China,
an extraordinary, complex territory of 7 million people that’s a repository
of traditional Chinese culture, a recently relinquished British outpost, and
one of the
key economies of the Pacific Rim. The skyscrapers on Hong Kong Island,
across the
harbor from Kowloon, China, present one of the most stunning urban panoramas
on earth, but Hong Kong also hosts inviting beaches, hiking trails and
some surviving bastions of Chinese village life, most of them in the
New Territories.
Since
the handover of Hong Kong to China by the British in 1997, foreign domination
has gone from this area, and it is free to grow and achieve balance,
even with the current inequality of incomes. The conspicuous consumption of
a few hundred
super-rich, for which Hong Kong is famous, tends to mask the fact that
most people work long hours and live in crowded, tiny apartments.
Common Ground 191’s soil Hong Kong could
be called the youngest Chinese soil, as it has only been since 1997 that it belonged
to the mainland again and,
as a “Special Administrative Region of China,” Hong Kong
is in such a state of accelerated change that its soil must surely
embody
that.
*
* *
Kevin
Wren was in China in February of 2005. He’s
an airline employee, so he does that run often, because it leaves from
Los Angeles, near his home
in Southern California. He had agreed to collect Chinese soil for
Common Ground 191 on this trip. We interviewed him for the
story of his take on Hong
Kong soil.
“
There’s a huge Buddha statue about 10 miles from the airport. It’s
up on a hill and people make pilgrimages to it. I had a day off and I asked
the guy to take me someplace interesting, and I took it from there.”
“Oh, that’s lovely.”
“Yeah, I took it from the side of the parking
lot.”
“Well, that’s very spiritual of you.”
“From what I was told it was the biggest Buddha around. And I guess
China would
have the biggest Buddha’s.”
“How big was it? The size of a five-story
building?”
“Yeah, it was close to that. It’s a
tourist attraction, a place people visit.”
“So it was huge. Was it gold?”
“Yeah, it was gold-ish.”
Buddha’s do not get any bigger than this, especially seated, outdoor Buddha’s.
Dreamed up by the community of monks on Lantau, it took more than 10 years
to build. Made entirely of metal and consisting of a steel framework covered
by
a steel and bronze skin, it has over one ton of gold amalgam, with 268
steps.
“Can you visualize it for us?”
“I guess it was impressive. I was looking
at dirt. Not taking in my surroundings. But so many people collect dirt. Not
like for our project, people who do what
I do for a living. They bring home sand or dirt from wherever they go.”
“They do? And why do you think they do that?”
“I guess just to have something to say—like people collect figurines,
you know? And it’s so easy for them just to scoop it up and take it home.
I’ve talked to so many people that collect dirt from places they’ve
gone to. I say, ‘What do you do it for?’ They say, ‘I just
collect it.’ I say, ‘What do you do with it?’ They say, ‘Keep
it in jars in the house.’ ‘You know, that sounds stupid to me,’ and
they say, ‘Wait a minute, you’re the guy carrying DHL and UPS boxes
around. Why do you have so many bags and boxes around?’ ‘I’ve
got boxes for dirt.’ ‘You’ve got what?’ ’I’ve
got boxes for dirt.’ ‘Excuse me?’
“Was it an urban or rural setting?”
“It wasn’t urban in Hong Kong, maybe
a couple of apartment buildings within the area, but it was basically just
greenery around.”
“Like a park?”
“Yes. It was set aside. No water, on a hill with grass and trees. That
part of Hong Kong is just green mountains, and it’s—I would say where
the Buddha is it’s maybe 40 minutes from where the new Disneyland’s
being built. Whenever we left the apartment, we’d say, ‘Hey, there
it is,’ but you can’t see Space Mountain yet. It’s not in an
urban area. There are apartments around but it’s too rural to be urban,
because it’s basically in the mountains. Maybe 20 years from now it’ll
become urban because they’ll run out of room.”
So 40 minutes from the biggest Buddha in the world is the site of the new Disneyland,
and our Common Ground 191 soil came from a juncture of these two cultural icons
in Hong Kong, a place sorting out two governing systems, communism and colonialism—duality
in the place famous for the Yin-Yang symbol. Ah, soh.
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