That's Just Insipid!

There are many cell phones in China, but there are many more bikes. There are poorer people who shove postcards and shitty crafts at you outside any major tourist attraction asking for the equivalent of less than an American dollar, and there are the poorest people with sizzled-off limbs asking only for water in the 95 degree summer heat. There is a magnificent summer palace with a long corridor (the Chinese love the word "corridor" even in English), a high-perched temple that is a human mountain squatting at the knees of a real one, and a man-made lake on which rests a steam-boat-sized boat of marble and an arched bridge in the shape of a turtle's neck connecting man-made islands to the rest of the land. It was here that we saw men constructing a stage made of silver panels, as if for solar power, in the shape of a manta ray, which we learned was to be used in part of the 'round-the-globe torch ceremony for the 2004 Olympics in Athens.

There are countless odd translations that laugh at you confidently even when you find them amusing. We smirk firstly at The Gate of the Heavenly Peace or at the Temple for the Good Harvest until we wash away the Disney from our eyes and feel the sudden ancient realness. They mean "peace" and "heaven" like a river means flow. And these are only several hundred years old. In Xi'an a "top grade" restaurant specializing in dim sum boasts on a plaque that they are proud to be the vanguard of "dumpling culture" in the 21st century. I waited for the post-modernism to settle, but it does not. They mean it.