Monthly Archives: February 2014

A Night in Beijing

Departures

 

There are a lot of routes to Bangkok and there aren’t many nonstop flights. It’s just a little too far. So you can get there via Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Frankfurt, Beijing, and other cities. I chose Beijing because Air China (the national airline of the Peoples Republic—as opposed to China Air, which is based in Taiwan) offered the cheapest round trip to Thailand—and among the shortest. The two legs totaled just over 19 hours, with a 90-minute layover at Beijing. The short layover turned out to be a poor choice, for reasons that I will explain shortly.

When I booked the flight in December, I neglected to check the phases of the moon. It didn’t occur to me departing on February 3 would put me in the middle of the Chinese New Year celebration. No wonder the plane is full! In the crowded 119-seat aft cabin of our Boeing 777, where I managed to snag aisle seat 53J, I’m one of three or four non-Chinese.

The New Year is celebrated for about two weeks not only in China but in most of East and Southeast Asia. It’s a time for reuniting families—for returning to the ancestral village. Many of my fellow passengers are doing just that—going back to their “villages,” even if that village is now a city of 12 million.

Seven years ago, in February 2006, we flew into Ho Chi Minh City at the height of Vietnam’s New Year celebration. On arrival at the airport there—on my first trip to Asia—I was struck by the mountains of baggage that Vietnamese expats, mostly from America, were lugging into Vietnam. Not just giant suitcases, although there were plenty of those, but huge cardboard cartons and plastic tubs full of clothing, detergent, toothpaste, even small appliances. These folks, many of whom had fled their country at the end of what the Vietnamese call “the American War,” were bringing evidence of their more prosperous new village back to their old village.

The eyes of relatives and friends standing behind a barrier with small welcome signs and armloads of flowers, expectantly scanned the arriving passengers. Trom the tears that flowed, I guessed that, for some, this may have been their first time back—some 30 years since the end of the war.

At JFK today, the departure gate is alive with families. Everyone queues up well before the boarding announcement, even though each person already has a seat assignment. (The Chinese seem queue naturally when it seems like something might be in short supply.) The mood is ebullient as we board the plane. Celebratory music drums from the PA system and excited chatter reaches a crescendo as the generations settle into their seats.

Because of the steady snow in the Northeast, departing planes are being held for de-icing. The boarding is delayed more than an hour, and once in our seats, we wait for two more hours before getting into position for de-icing. After the glycol bath, we take off forthwith—three hours late. I know before leaving New York that I will miss my 90-minute connection to Bangkok.

A JAL plane is de-iced at JFK International.

A JAL plane is de-iced at JFK International.

So here I am in Beijing, at a decent hotel near the airport. After promising a free room for the night, the airline makes me pay150 yuan (about $25) for a single room because I refused to double up with the next Flight 984 refugee, another American on his way to Bangkok. Don’t get me wrong; he seemed like a nice guy, but was a total stranger. My protest to an Air China agent at the airport next day would be fruitless. In China, there may be a one-child policy, but two strangers must share a room when marooned en route.

The van to the hotel is reminiscent of the customs line at Ho Chi Minh City eight years ago. At the Beijing airport, huge bundles and gargantuan suitcases appeared on the baggage belt while officious mamas and grandmas loudly supervised their loading onto a flotilla of luggage carts. My photo tells the tale. Our driver is somewhere behind these bundles of—well, it’s hard to tell except some of them looked extremely heavy. My little suitcase is under there somewhere!

Our hotel shuttle driver is behind this pile of baggage.

Our hotel shuttle driver is behind this pile of baggage.

In the unheated hotel lobby, it’s Wednesday, Feb, 5, and I’m not particularly sleepy. My brain thinks it’s about noon on Tuesday in New York. Several of us English speakers, including a Chinese American from Baltimore who is making his familial pilgrimage, rouse a waiter in the darkened restaurant, order beer and noodles, and swap travel stories until after 2:00. The Chinese guy pays for the food. Happy New Year!

A flat bed and five hours’ sleep, a shower, and a shave feel great, and I’m ready to head back to the airport for a restart. I don’t mind the unexpected on a trip like this. There are always new people to meet (including friendly, helpful Chinese with little English but a strong desire to connect) and new places to see—like the Golden Phoenix Hotel near the Beijing International Airport—if you stop, look, and listen.

 

 

Stop, Look, and Listen

The Other Side of the Tracks

Snow is floating earthward in fat, wet flakes as Train 172 rumbles under the Barry Bridge in Chester, Pa. Harrah’s Casino gleams on one side of the tracks; a state prison glowers on the other. Ironically, gambling and incarceration are the two biggest industries in this downtrodden rust-belt city—by many measures, Pennsylvania’s poorest.

I’m on my way to JFK to catch a plane to Asia, but right now I’m wondering about train tracks—how they both bring people together and divide them. “The other side of the tracks,” a common idiom, is about the divide.

The snow covers up a lot of the ugliness along the Amtrak line—the abandoned businesses, warehouses full of frigid cold air, crumbling walls, rusting cars. But a blanket of white cannot hide the prison or the casino. Rows of houses huddle along the rails, their dirty windows glimpsing us as we hurry by in our cozy Quiet Car. A rich man rarely builds his home along the Northeast Corridor main line, and in some ways these tracks that speed us to our destinations in comfort—with free WiFi and a glass of merlot—are like prison walls, barriers that are dangerous and even impossible to cross.

As I head to Thailand for a few days of sightseeing, then on to Cambodia to build houses for the Tabitha Foundation, I must pay attention to the tracks. “Stop, look, and listen,” the crossing signs once said. Be still, be mindful, with eyes wide open. Listen to the other voices. Find the words. Write.

Here I go again.

Stoplook

A Survey in Progress

Michael Cothren, the scholar who scrapped the survey course at Swarthmore, has become co-author of a best-selling survey textbook. Photograph by Eleftherios Kostans

Michael Cothren, the scholar who scrapped the survey course at Swarthmore has become co-author of a best-selling survey textbook.
Photograph by Eleftherios Kostans

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“A Survey in Progress”

By Jeffrey Lott

Swarthmore College Bulletin
April 2010
 

It used to be that, like a hot shower or a glass of orange juice, an art history survey course was best taken first thing in the morning. Anyone who ever took one knows this. As one of the few academic disciplines taught in the dark, with slide after slide flashing on the screen while whirring projectors pumped hot air into an already stuffy room, art history after lunch was often soporific. But in the morning, there was a cup of joe in your hand and a fighting chance to stay alert as you engraved image after image into your memory, scratching notes on paper you could barely see, connecting great works period-by-period, artist-by-artist into a sort of Aristotelian cosmology of painting, sculpture, and architecture that reached back through the Romans, Greeks, Sumerians, and Egyptians, all the way to the Paleolithic. (Who can forget the “Venus” of Willendorf?) And that was just the first semester.

Until the late 1980s, if you took an art history survey course at Swarthmore or most other colleges, this was the drill. Your textbook was probably Helen Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Concise History (first published in 1926) or H.W. Janson’s History of Art (1961)—books still used today in updated editions. Both texts presented an inexorable progression of Near Eastern and European art that rose from the primitive to the near-perfect—the latter represented by the art and architecture of Ancient Greece, the Italian Renaissance, and 19th-century French art. Gardner’s book now contains coverage of Far Eastern, Indian, and African art, but the “truth” of art history, largely handed down from 19th-century German scholars, was, and remains, the Western canon. And the approach—from Giorgio Vasari’s 16th-century Lives of the Artists to Erwin Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology (1939)—was variously biographical, critical, comparative, stylistic, and iconographic.

But then, in the 1980s, came what is known as “the crisis in art history,” a professional upheaval for traditionally trained art historians that ushered in new ways of studying and thinking about art. “I call it the theory wars,” says Scheuer Family Professor of Humanities Michael Cothren…. [more]