I had a couple days to just wander the streets of Nanjing by myself. This was quite relaxing for me personally, but probably not for my feet which developed all manner of hurts.

Day 5:

A number of canals criss-cross the city. Maybe this is how all the cities of the Eastern floodplain are. Remnants of ancient modes of trade and warfare, or perhaps just arteries for fengshui. 

I stopped to eat near Taiping Lu. The young waitress (xiaojie) kept coming in to offer me stuff that I didn't need. First there was a spoon--which I had no need for, as I was managing my kuaizi quite fine, thankyou--then there was the extraneous box of napkins. Then I thought she was trying to ask me how to say a few phrases in English, but actually she was just attempting to give me her phone number. She was interrupted in her attempt by the patriarch (grandpa, probably) who told her to stop bothering me, even if it was to learn some English.


Typical urban road. I dread the day that all these bike lanes are removed to make way for extra car lanes.

That evening I girded myself in confidence and entered an establishment that advertised itself as a Xinjiang 'musilim' restaurant--near Nanjing University. Upon entering, I tried to tell them the paltry few names of Xinjiang foods that I had memorized from my guidebook. No, I sat down at a table, but the proprietors were having none of it. I'm pretty certain they didn't actually listen to what I had to say. As I made a second attempt to procure some food, a kindly young man asked me in English what the problem was. He didn't look Chinese, so I thought that perhaps this was the actual proprietor, perhaps a Uighur man. He ended up asking me to come into a different room with him, to eat with him and his friends.

Thus I met Talib, a Chinese-Kazakh, as it turns out. Talib spoke English quite well, and scanning the menu he ordered a few things for me. He also apologized that this was perhaps not quite true Xinjiang food. The restaurant was in fact co-owned by a Kyrgyz and a Hui from Gansu. It also turns out that Talib had been learning some Turkish! To practice my Turkish was a pleasure. My pronunciation could be a bit suspect, but as Talib pointed out, was probably an improvement on the pronunciation of his Chinese professor for Turkish. I had to agree with that.

The Kazakhs (and their own language) are related to the Turks (and their language). Bir, iki, uc, dort, bes, alti, yedi.... Their numbers, among other words, are either very similar or the same as those in Turkish. Y, however, becomes a soft J. So Yedi becomes Jedi.

Talib, Baghdad, Murat, and a girl (I forget her name) were all students in Nanjing, or visiting from their studies in nearby cities. I got to hear a little about the trials endured by China's minorities. Minorities are generally taught in their own minority schools, in their own language, up through secondary school. They are taught Chinese perhaps from the third grade onwards, and might only learn English at a much later date--although I should say that I've heard that the Turkic minorities of Western China have a much easier time with English pronunciation than do the Han. After secondary school, if they wish to attend university, they must attend an additional two years of Chinese (and English?) before they can move on to a regular university. While they are students, they are proscribed from attending the mosque, or other religious involvement--I don't know if this law also extends to Christianity or other religions, but you might well imagine that it could. 

So things are a bit difficult. However, I guessed that if you were a muslim minority making it as far as university in China, you probably came from an affluent family, liberalized by wealth (of course it begs the question, how is there such a thing as an affluent minority in China?). As we were drinking some beer, I asked them about the importance of religion to them, personally. In response, Talib said that it wasn't terribly. He said he would drink wine even--no problem. He said that in general the Kazakhs, maybe also the Uzbeks and Kyrgyz, etc were not really so conservative. The Uighurs were the main conservative muslims in China, with their secret medresseh hidden here and there in the west of China.

Talib asked me, "And what about the Turks? Are they also like us? Do they drink?"

I responded that although there are plenty of conservative muslims among the poor, and in certain parts of Turkiye, most of the Turks I knew personally had been young, from affluent families--so they enjoyed drinking without much qualm. 

"Ah, like us," He smiled.

And oh, the food may not have been (so) authentic, but it was good. There's a certain amount of sameness amongst the meals I've had in China. Perhaps this has to do with the limits of my language abilities, or perhaps there are some real limits in the variety. Perhaps there are just some spice combinations that I miss dearly.

Day 6:

That day I made it my mission to find the Nanjing Massacre Memorial.

I feel like this is one common thread--an interest that animates--in my travels. Such a strong impression, to take a moment to remember all the humanity slaughtered by humanity throughout history. We seem to take this as a hallmark of modern times. Those empty Armenian lands in the eastern reaches of Turkey. The multitude of memorials placed at Yad Vashem, in Israel, could make you think that there was only ever one genocide in human history. Someday I'll make my way to the memorials in Cambodia, and one day there may be similar ones erected in northern Iraq, or southern Sudan, or the hundreds and thousands of other places where thousands or millions of (arguably) innocent human lives were taken. The only difference modernity places upon this age-old story is one of scale. There are quite simply many, many more humans gracing (or disgracing) this planet, and thus many, many more lives to be lost to hatred and fear.

Of course, Stalin noted that there seems to be a golden mean, in the matter of massacre. If you murder a person, or a few people, then it is an outrageous thing. If you murder hundreds or thousands, then these murders just become statistics written on paper. It's difficult to grasp. However, I would add that when it comes to millions dead, there seems to be yet another threshold passed. Human minds can somehow once again grasp (not actually, but in some manner) the importance of a million-plus deaths in a way they couldn't for a few less. I think that's one reason why Turkey fights so hard to claim that less than a million Armenians were killed, and the Armenians fight so hard to have as many as 3 million become the generally accepted number. That isn't just a matter of a few numbers; it's a matter of how people will be capable of grasping and perceiving that historical occurence.

And so we come to the Nanjing matter. This is, among other reasons, why if China ever came to be most powerful in the world, Japan's days would be sharply numbered, and there would be yet another matter of genocide for us all to remember or forget as the political winds blew.


Of course, I tend to doubt that the 300,000 lives claimed at Nanjing by the Japanese occupation are the real reason why all (and I do mean all) mainland Chinese hate the Japanese with an undying fervor. Really WWII was just the completion of many years that China had lost massive amounts of 'face' to the West, and even worse to Japan--an Asian country that they had firmly viewed as a satellite hinterland that should someday acknowledge itself to be China's proper domain. Face is a huge concept for the Chinese, and I'll have to cover that one more another time.

I wondered if the white doves were purposefully a part of this attraction. I wondered if--as with the ravens of the Tower of London--the massacre memorial would collapse if its avian denizens were to leave.


And the memorial really was quite gruesome. Quite intentionally so, although I suppose it is both the subject and domain of such a place. Massive statuary arms groping from beneath the ground is probably okay...


...but I really thought that the public viewing chamber for the mass grave that lies beneath the memorial (over 1,000 buried in this particular one) was a little over the top. It reminded me of what the Lonely Planet guidebook for Turkey has to say about the 'Genocide Museum' in Van(the museum that makes the claim that it was in fact a genocide of Turks, rather than Armenians, and proudly displays some Turkish bones as proof). I seem to recall something about 'a grisly display of bones that should have long ago been returned to the earth'.


Now, I really wasn't going to take a picture, but the Chinese--albeit much fewer than normally would have been the case--were taking pictures, so I figured they probably wouldn't tear me apart for doing so. The whole exhibit smacked a bit of a Paleontological site. I kept expecting to see some Triceratops bones poking up among the others.

I will say that the photographic/journalistic portion of the memorial had me almost at tears. You can be as jaded as you want--and desensitized as I doubtlessly am--but it'll still hit you something hard to read of so many people being savaged, raped, killed. Man's inhumanity to man. So horrible, and so revealing of the hypocrisy latent in our terms: 'humanity', or 'humane'. Here such terms are shown to be wish, not fact. Definitely not the whole fact.

Something I noted, as I read through the stories concerning what little humanitarian aid was offered Chinese refugees during the Japanese occupation, was the presence of a sibling to the Red Cross that I'd never previously heard of. I'd be speaking of the Red Swastika, of course, whose volunteers apparently were set to work tending wounded Chinese and ended up burying quite a few of the corpses that had been left on the streets to rot. Hitler's alliance with the Japanese certainly did no little to help them persecute the Chinese, but there were Nazi medical workers laying their dead to rest?

Of course,  the swastika is actually an ancient Asian symbol (a version reversed of the one we are familiar with) and is common to be found in Buddhist and Hindu temples (I've spotted it at Jiming temple in Nanjing, and even on modern buildings in Singapore), so could it actually be a Buddhist branch of the famed aid organization?

A quick googlesearch of the term says: Yes. Of course I can't access the whole Wikipedia article because I'm behind the Great Firewall. But I can at least see that  "In 1922, the Chinese syncretist movement Daoyuan founded the philanthropic association Red Swastika Society in imitation of the Red Cross." That sounds fairly likely. Google also revealed that in India and Sri Lanka there have also been Buddhist 'Red Swastika' societies which they've tried to connect up with Red Cross/Red Crescent, but have so far failed to do so. Anyway, someone please check it out and let me know what the rest of the deal is. I'm curious.

Day 7:

I managed to connect up with my buddy, Jerry, and we wandered around the city a bit together. One stop of interest was the main bridge over the Yangze river. The Chinese are rightly quite proud of it, as it was the first modern bridge which they built. The story goes that the Russians were going to build it, but because of souring China-Soviet relations, the Russian engineers pulled out. The Chinese in turn went ahead with the construction, and built it for quite a bit less money than the Russians had quoted.


Socialist Realist statues perch like proletariat gargoyles on either end of the bridge. Such grotesquely over-sized arms and hands! (The better to smack you around with.)

On our way back into town from the bridge, I was struck with a sudden idea. A craving for cheese. I knew there was a Walmart in Nanjing; I had heard that cheese could be procured in that Mephistophelian place of business. I was about ready to sell my soul--Behold the power of Cheese!

Luckily, the Carrefour was much nearer. The French may not be great, but they beat out Walmart in my book. I obtained some New Zealander 'Vintage Cheddar'. Oh my, oh my.

These were my last views of the downtown skyscrapers--so recently built in the last ten years or so--as the sun went down and I bid my friend goodbye. But look what lurks in the shroud of dusk, beneath those skyscrapers!


Of course we must realize, if Walmart were considered a country unto itself, it would be (so I've read) the fifth largest export market for China. This is one of the ways in which they achieve their infernally low prices. However, this is probably reason to find their presence here quite appropriate. In some ways this company is quite representative of certain qualities in American and in Chinese business.

Day 8:

I hit the bus station, and back I went to LYG. Care for a mango, anyone?