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A Front Row Seat for the Cultural Revolution: Some Freedom In Peking (Part 2)

by Beverley
August 13th, 2013

Chapter Nine
SOME FREEDOM IN PEKING
Part Two

Peking Duck

Peking Duck. (photo by Kheng Guan Toh | Bigstock.com)

Peking is probably as well known for Peking duck in the western world as for the Forbidden City.  It was with drooling anticipation we set off for a banquet at the legendary Peking Duck Restaurant one cold snowy night.  Due to illness our ranks were smaller — we were down to Helen, Louise, Jerry, Steve, Peter and me.   The hors d’oeuvres were similar to those previously described and were served with hot wine in tiny earthenware cups followed by fertility food, shark’s fin filet in sauce.  Duck made its first appearance in the form of duck liver and kidneys, served with winter bamboo and strips of peppers.  Winter bamboo was showing up with frequency this meal, with chicken, with sea cucumbers, with crisply fried seaweed.

The third dish prompted Steve to remark, “Its great winter sport here to watch them shoot the bamboo!”

We were served slices of stone mushrooms from the mountains, a rare treat.  It was explained that these mushrooms, found in the Himalayas, grew to several feet in diameter.  They could be cut off in the morning and the next morning it would have grown back to full size.  An interesting story.  And who was going to check it for accuracy?

The chef came in with great ceremony, displaying our golden brown Peking ducks.  Then he showed his true skill in slicing the crisp skin with surgical precision.  We next rolled the skin of the duck, with shreds of leek, in thin pancakes covered with delicious plum sauce.

Various parts of the ducks arrived in assorted sauces and shapes as course followed course. At one point heads arrived in a dish many of us passed up. The last of our Peking ducks arrived as duck soup with lettuce floating on the surface.  Were this meal served to Chinese guests it would have ended with the soup, but since we were westerners we received toffee apples sprinkled with sesame seeds.  They arrived like hot coals and after we plunged them into ice water the exterior turned into crackling caramel.  Not being forewarned we discovered to our discomfort the interiors were still like hot coals.  This feast that lasted several hours of continuous eating cost us approximately $12.00 per person.

During dinner everyone compared tales of their day’s adventures.  No one in this group had a hospital day.  My panda bear story inspired all to take a trip to the zoo before departing Peking.

“And there is a fur fair going on in the building next to the zoo,” I added although I hadn’t investigated it.  “It’s in a big green and white building right next door.”

Jayne Meadows wasn’t there to play her usual role as straight person to her comedian husband, but unwittingly I was.

“That’s a great place to have a fur fair, next door to the zoo,” Steve quipped.  “Saves travel time.”

The Peking Duck Restaurant wasn’t very far from our hotel so our group strolled home through back alleyways.  Some people were still awake and active in their cramped quarters, a single light bulb of lowest wattage dangling from the ceiling.  On every window sill sat an old bowl or pot with a living plant growing.  Some were simply pots of wild green clover.  Passing through a park lightly frosted with fresh snow we saw young couples sitting on benches enjoying a bit of time alone, a luxury seldom found in the cramped living conditions of China during the Cultural Revolution.

Chapter 1: Part 1  Part 2
Chapter 2: Part 1  Part 2  Part 3
Chapter 3: Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4
Chapter 4: Part 1
Chapter 5: Part 1  Part 2  Part 3
Chapter 6: Part 1  Part 2  Part 3
Chapter 7: Part 1
Chapter 8: Part 1  Part 2
Chapter 9: Part 1  Part 2
Chapter 10: Part 1
Chapter 11: Part 1  Part 2
Chapter 12: Part 1
Chapter 13: Part 1

By The Way
This blog was started to sell my new book and I keep going off on other topics. Please do check out The Beautiful Lady Was A Palace Eunuch at Amazon.com
Acknowledgement:
Kathleen Fetner, Technical Advisor and Friend
Categories Books, My Life

A Front Row Seat for the Cultural Revolution: Some Freedom In Peking

by Beverley
August 3rd, 2013

Chapter Nine
SOME FREEDOM IN PEKING
Part One

doc024-v2

Because the hotel phone service was so impossible, except for distances exceeding 10,000 miles, we left lots of notes under each other’s doors.  “Meet me in morning at 8:00 in dining room” or “Do you have any extra hair rollers?” and similar messages would be slipped under doors at all hours.   Once we’d hit Peking and the evasive entry visa was discovered, we didn’t see much of our leader.  But we did have daily assemblies to coordinate our plans.  The note-leaving operation was great when it worked.  But there were times it didn’t.  One night I was tired and didn’t go to a late night assembly so Marge left me an important communication.  “We are meeting at 8:30 to go to the China Travel Office.  Very important so get up early.”  Fortunately Jerry, an early riser, saw the note and beat on the door awakening me to give me the note to tell me to get up early.  Well, as I said, sometimes it worked better than phones.

The constant visits to China Travel had begun in Hong Kong and only grown more frequent and frustrating as the trip progressed.  The only sign I found in English in all branches of China Travel read “The People who have triumphed in their own revolution should help those still struggling for liberation.  This is our internationalist duty.”

Visits to the big local hospital were unexpectedly on our agenda.  Doctors could not come to the Hotel.  Patients had to seek aid at the hospital.  Louise went for a swollen jaw.  An English speaking Chinese doctor sent her to a dentist.  Here she was given a prescription and the medicine.  Her total bill was $1.50.  Comparing notes at dinner it came out Marge’s sore throat was only an .80 cent illness.

My health was holding up so I went to the zoo.  They had an interesting setup with the Peking Hotel taxis.  If you could find where you wanted to go in a little book that was written in Chinese and English with simple drawings, you could get a taxi to take you there.  The taxi would wait, even if it was hours.  And once there it wasn’t surprising to look back quickly wherever you were and see your driver following at a distance. There was always someone spying on us. The fare was shockingly cheap.  At the end of your ride the driver would give you little tickets which you presented at the main desk of the hotel and you paid there instead of paying the taxi driver directly.  You might have had a one ticket ride, or a long wait could mean a nine ticket trip.

The Front Gate of Beijing Zoo was built in 1904. (Photo taken 2004 by snowyowls | Wikimedia)

The Front Gate of Beijing Zoo was built in 1904. (Photo taken 2004 by snowyowls | Wikimedia)

The Peking Zoo was big and well-tended.  People were proud of their zoo.  And the real pride of the zoo was the panda bears, which of course was where I was heading.  When I first got word I was going to China, my 17 year old daughter’s immediate reply was, “You are going to your version of heaven, a world of Chinese food and panda bears.”

Not wanting to waste time I drew a quick picture of a panda bear and showed it to two teenage girls passing by.  They giggled and pointed left.  Through an arch to the left was a large brightly painted map with each animal beautifully painted in its own locale.  As I tried to orient myself with my back to the map, several people pointed the way to the pandas.  They knew where an American lady in a funny ski hat with a tassel on top wanted to go.

The two pandas were worth the trip to China.  They were smaller than expected, but were definitely professionals constantly performing for the huge audience that surrounded the moat that circled their world.  Space was immediately cleared for the foreign lady by the smiling citizens, a relief from spying cadres.  My enthusiasm must have been adequate thanks.  I was enchanted.

Nabisco-like wafers were thrown to the pandas by children and grownups alike.  The pandas assumed the most ridiculous positions to eat, reclining with one leg over the other or lying on their stomachs.  Anything they did was amusing.  Chomping on bamboo was a whole routine.  Finally I got down to serious photographing.  Literally hundreds of people participated.  They would clear space at the rail every time a panda changed direction, sending a child to bring me there by the hand.

Deeply engrossed in what I saw through my lens I wasn’t paying much attention to anything else — until I heard laughter behind me, the kind of laughter that designates something naughty.  It’s a laughter that sounds the same in any language.  I looked up from the camera viewer to find the source of the merriment.  It was two soldiers near me who were staring down at the boy panda in the moat beneath us.  The panda was looking straight up at the big border of beautiful blue Norwegian fox that served as the hem on my brown broadtail coat.  He was staring at the blue fox and most embarrassingly appeared to have been excited into a full erection by the fur on the hem of my coat. …to be continued

Chapter 1: Part 1  Part 2
Chapter 2: Part 1  Part 2  Part 3
Chapter 3: Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4
Chapter 4: Part 1
Chapter 5: Part 1  Part 2  Part 3
Chapter 6: Part 1  Part 2  Part 3
Chapter 7: Part 1
Chapter 8: Part 1  Part 2
Chapter 9: Part 1  Part 2
Chapter 10: Part 1
Chapter 11: Part 1  Part 2
Chapter 12: Part 1
Chapter 13: Part 1

By The Way
This blog was started to sell my new book and I keep going off on other topics. Please do check out The Beautiful Lady Was A Palace Eunuch at Amazon.com
Acknowledgement:
Kathleen Fetner, Technical Advisor and Friend
Categories Books, My Life

It’s Very Cold in Tokyo and Raining in Taipei

by Beverley
February 4th, 2012

My friend David Patrick Columbia generally starts off his daily report on his super popular New York Social Diary with a sort of weather report. “It’s a gray dreary day today” “Snow today….” Well I’m starting off with it’s been 85 degrees in Santa Barbara, the Flowering Pear tree is in full bloom as is my Flowering Cherry tree.

Natalie’s cherry blossom tree and in the background the redwood tree I bought in a five gallon can in 1974 and planted in that spot. It now towers over a three story building.

The latter is very special to me as the ashes of my beloved standard wirehair dachshund Natalie are buried there. When that tree bursts into glorious bloom with Monarch butterflies and bees fluttering around it and a neighborhood shiny blue hummingbird sipping from the pink blossoms it is Natalie coming back to say hello to me. But there is a very interesting story connected with Natalie being there that will be a whole blog in itself.

Whenever I’m thinking about weather reports the title of this blog today “It’s very cold in Tokyo and raining in Taipei” comes to mind. It goes back to the days when my daughter and I were a traveling team. I started traveling at the age of four with my parents:

My parents and me when I first started traveling

And I started taking her with me at about the same age. Here is our first travel adventure together in Honolulu in 1963.

Beverley & Tracey Jackson. Hawaii 1963.

A certain four year old and I on our first solo travel adventure Hawaii 1963

This picture reminds me of something she said when years later we landed in Bucharest after a flight of over 48 hours during the Cold War and our plane carrying just a very few of us, and needless to say she and I were the only Americans crazy enough to be going there at that time, was met by soldiers with bayonets and rifles pointed at us: “This certainly isn’t the way we’re greeted when we get off the plane in Oahu! They meet us there with floral leis!”

Well there I go getting off the subject again. Checking out weather reports. The first time we were going to Asia I read the weather reports and told her, “It’s very cold in Tokyo and raining in Taipei.” When she repeated it, emphasizing each word, it became a sort of chant and from then on whenever weather came up with it came the chant “It’s very cold in Tokyo and raining in Taipei.” And frequently when I go off to those areas now it still holds true. Try saying it in sort of sing song way and you’ll see what I mean.

And this all leads me to something I read in the New York Times today while lunching poolside at the Coral Casino Beach Club enjoying our beautiful weather. It was an article by Sharon LaFraniere titled Activists Crack China’s Wall of Denial About Air Pollution. My first thought was it’s about time!! When I first went to China in 1975 there wasn’t really a pollution problem. But within a few years I found that Peking I’d known with beautiful blue skies was now Beijing with smog that reminded me of Los Angeles when I was younger. However I never realized how really serious the problem was until a trip my friend Tamara Usher Kinsell and I took in October 2002. It was just after Zhang Yimou’s marvelous film Raise the Red Lantern had come out and I wanted to go see the mansion with the incredible roofs in that film. I researched and found out you had to go to Shanxi Province and stay in the city of Taiyuan and go out from there. Taiyaun proved to be a very large city in the middle of the major coal mining area of China and about the only person we found at the time who spoke any English was one phone operator in our Shanxi Grand Hotel. Tamara’s fluency in French, Italian, Russian and I don’t know what else was no help since she lacks Chinese and so do I. But somehow we got along with our language books and lots of pantomime.

Here is a scene from the movie “Raise the Red Lantern” that shows the amazing roofs.

I was so excited as we drove off for several hours into the countryside to see that glorious Qiao mansion, those incredible sweeping roofs. My first clue something wasn’t according to my plan was gigantic balloons flying high and an avenue of vendors selling tee shirts etc leading up to the the mansion as our car approached. We braved the mob scene and toured some the very grand house that was almost empty except for some imitations of fine old Chinese furniture. The Qiao mansion has 313 rooms, six major courtyards and 19 minor ones. And everything was jammed with Chinese tourists. But most importantly you couldn’t see those glorious rolling gray tile roofs I’d come all that way to see. You just couldn’t get an angle. I was pouting all the way back to Taiyuan and finally Tamara said, “Didn’t you realize that to get those angles they had to have cameras on cranes or take them from the air?” No I hadn’t realized. But with her son Kinka Usher a leading producer of commercials in Hollywood (the kind we’ll be seeing at the Super Bowl — the big league ones) Tamara had figured it out. Just wish she’d figured it out before we dragged thousands of miles to Taiyuan. Although one day we went to the ancient village of Pingyao, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, I’d wanted to see. Pingyao was once a town of rich merchants and financial center. Amazingly the magnificent city walls built in 1370 still survive as do their towers and the city gates. And we visited other incredible mansions in the general area, driving out each day in a different direction. It turned out that very successful pirates had gone from this remote area to the coast, made/stolen their fortunes and come home ultimately to their ancestral villages and built these gigantic compounds to prove their success.

Little boy in Pingyao

Little boy in Pingyao

Pingyao street scene

Pingyao street scene

A street scene in Pingyao

Well now to my point of this whole blog. It wasn’t until our departure plane flew out of Taiyuan that I realized we had been in a valley the entire time, surrounded by tall mountains. The smog had been so thick we never saw the mountains until we flew over them! Yes the New York Times article is right. The smog situation in China definitely needs some attention!

As a postcript, after going all that way for the first time in my photographing lifetime ALL except three of my photos from this journey got lost!

By The Way
This blog was started to sell my new book and I keep going off on other topics. Please do check out The Beautiful Lady Was A Palace Eunuch at Amazon.com
Acknowledgement:
Kathleen Fetner, Technical Advisor and Friend
Categories My Life

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