Beds, bathhouses and the Gobi Desert
BAOTOU, Inner Mongolia — My former student Diamond is particularly pleasant. She has a round face, a big smile and eyes that twinkle as though she is always thinking of something very amusing. She is one of the sweetest people I know.
When I sent Diamond a text message reminding her that I would not be arriving at her Baotou home alone, she immediately replied with this: “Excuse me Dan could you please tell me the sex of your traveling companion?”
I told her it was Johnson. Diamond, aka Chen Wen Yi, remembered him from my class and said she was excited to see him again. And I thought everything was fine. I didn’t realize this revelation sent Diamond into a tizzy.
You see, Diamond, 20, and her mother share a small two-bedroom flat. In fact, Diamond warned me via text message that her place was a “slum. :)” (she ends all of her messages with a smiley face). But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Johnson was a man.
Diamond could sleep on her bed. Her mom could sleep on the couch in the living room — she often does this anyway. But that only left one double bed. And somewhere in her schooling, Diamond read a report that said a foreign man would never share a bed with another man — and if he did, he was surely a homosexual.
Diamond, evidently, did not want to turn her English teacher into a homosexual.
“So I dare not ask you to do this,” she explained later.
09.07.2004, 3:46 PM · Inner Mongolia, The Trip · Comments (14)
Inner Mongolia: Finding God in the grasslands
ER YANG BO VILLAGE, Inner Mongolia — I spent a good chunk of a week in Inner Mongolia — and I met not one person of Mongolian descent. I did meet three Roman Catholics, however. And thus, after one month on the road in this officially atheist country, my curiously lengthy list of religious run-ins grew a little bit longer.
This was in Er Yang Bo — population less than 100 — an increasingly touristed farming village in the central part of Inner Mongolia, the autonomous (in name only) region that covers a long swath of land in northern China, stretching from the northwest to the northeast and bordering eight other provinces or autonomous regions, Mongolia and Russia.
More than 85 percent of Inner Mongolia’s population is Han Chinese, and tourists who visit the region in search of Mongolians or signs of a traditional Mongolian way of life often leave disappointed. But, while post-1949 Inner Mongolia may be somewhat culturally barren, its rolling and wide-open landscape is beautiful — a wonderful place to get lost for a while and escape a sultry Chinese summer.
09.02.2004, 10:45 PM · Inner Mongolia, The Trip · Comments (5)
