Wall, Ego, and Nage

Yes, I went to the Great Wall of China.  Yes, I was expecting to be underwhelmed.  I find that when things are as built-up as this wall (you can even see it from space!*), they generally disappoint.  Is this attitude a clever/sad way of distorting high expectations in an effort to allow myself to be wowed rather than merely satisfied?  Yes, yes it is.  Did I learn this trick from a life full of disappointments?  Yes, yes I did.**

Oh yeah, the Great Wall.  It doesn't disappoint.  There's nothing particularly grand about any given 100 foot (I almost typed 'meter' there; the dark side is creeping into my soul) chunk of the structure; it is, after all, just a big stone wall.  It's the scale of the thing that gets you.  I went to a section about 90min outside Beijing, and as you drive up and see it on the top of a pretty steep hill, it looks mildly impressive.  But once you trek up to the wall (you can take a cable car if you roll that way) and walk along it to a high point, you get it.  It goes on forever, and when that is coupled with the fact that construction began in 200BC and the whole thing hit 5,500 miles long at one point, I was forced to take a deep breath and admit non-underwhelming-ness. 

I am typing this on my last night in China from the city of Beijing.  I am sad to go, though I will not miss having Facebook and my blog blocked.  I would have no qualms being transferred here for a job, and I am tempted to take a stab at learning the language even though it seems quite impossible; the sounds and names and characters have zero to do with any of my life experience thus far, and it's very intimidating.  

Speaking of the language, the people in Northern China seem to use 'that' like we would use 'um.'  For example, I might say, "I'll have um, um, the roast duck."  While a Chinese person would say, "I'll have that, that, roast duck."  No big deal, right?  Well, maybe a little bit.  'That' in Chinese is translated as 'nage', which is pronounced exactly like the slang version of a very bad N-word that is often used in rap songs.  (Rhymes with 'wigga'.)  So, I'm walking the Great Wall or running the streets of Beijing or sitting in a restaurant, and all I hear are Chinese people loudly using an English (American) racial epithet.  I did my part and told my (attractive) tour guide to remember never to say 'that' should she find herself in America.

I hesitate to report this last bit about China, because I do not want it to discredit my previous blog posts of praise.  I will assert that I have enjoyed China for China, and this last piece of the story only affected my ego (and mildly, at that).  The truth of the matter is that my hair has gotten a bit long and more than a bit curly, and Chinese women don't seem to mind.  For the first week, I thought I noticed members of the opposite sex looking at me a bit more/longer usual, but I shrugged it off and figured my eyes still hadn't fully healed from laser surgery.  

But, at the beginning of the second week, a random girl came up and said, "You handsome. Picture?"  She was the first but not the last to look up 'handsome' and 'picture' on her iPhone dictionary before coming up to me and unknowingly plunging me into a struggle to retain my humility.  But not to worry, I am headed to Beirut to hang out with a much cooler and admittedly more attractive man-friend, and should that not cure me, I have complete faith that my Houston friends will help knock me back down to where I belong.  Finally, if they don't succeed, my sister will see how much weight I've lost on my journey and immediately start taunting me with her favorite word: manorexic!   

*apparently a mistake by a US astronaut

**blatant lie