East is Relative

Nanjing wanderings

On February 14th, New Year’s Day, we went to the Nanjing Massacre Museum in the morning and spent several hours there. It was a really grim, really detailed museum of the things that happened when Japan occupied Nanjing before World War II. It was really interesting and made me wish I knew more about modern Chinese history. Most of what I know is pre-1911, during the dynasties, and because of my sieve-like memory, I’ve already forgotten a lot of that, too. We went to Xuanwu Lake later that afternoon to walk around and see a “light sculpture” festival, which was pretty anti-climactic for me. There were a bunch of arches over walkways that lit up, but most of them looked the same and it just wasn’t much to look at.

The real fun happened later when we walked out of the lake and people were lighting wish balloons (essentially paper lanterns that work like hot air balloons), so we lit one together. The people gathered there were explaining to us with big arm motions that the balloon would inflate and float, which we thought was pretty funny, since we’d been standing there watching for about 5 minutes and had already figured it out. A little further down the street, a man was selling fireworks off a cart, and we walked up to look at the boxes. He was smoking a cigarette (awesome). I asked him how many fireworks were in the biggest box and he said 100. We asked him how much it cost, and he said something like Y380, which works out to about $55. Then, to give us the full effect, he made noises like fireworks going off really fast (like a tommy gun). It was classic. We ate dinner at Pizza Hut because Theo was curious about it; I’d explained to them that Pizza Hut’s a really fancy deal here in China. They have calamari and escargots on the menu. My family was sufficiently impressed with the food and the atmosphere.

The next morning, we took the subway to the Yangzi River Bridge that established the first direct rail link from Beijing to Shanghai in the 1960s (I think). It was big and impressive, but the viewing platform was pretty much right on the highway, so it wasn’t someplace you wanted to linger too much. Then we went to the Fuzi Miao (Confucius Temple) market and went to the Imperial Examination museum. This is a part of Chinese history that I know a good bit about, thanks to LK’s classes, and she had told me I should go to the museum because it was hilarious – and she was right. In Chinese history, up until the end of the Qing dynasty, the only legitimate way to get a position in government was to take the imperial examination, and it was a really high-stress test. Examinees were essentially locked in a cell about 3′x4′ for 9 days to take the test, with only their writing implements and a table that could be converted to a bed. The museum had these cells on display with some really ridiculous mannequins of the examinees doing random things, like trying to fight off snakes that had crawled into their cell, or trying to cheat. The best part is that the English translations were probably the worst I’ve seen in all of China, so the labels on the display made no sense.

We went to the Confucius temple after that, which was really interesting (but filled with really tacky fabric lanterns for the annual lantern festival they hold there), and then we made our way to the hotel to pack up and leave Nanjing for Xi’an.