Where would you most like to go to that you have never been?
My answer was always "China", a place more different from where I grew up than anywhere else on earth.
And why not? China is exactly half the way around the world from the US. But to really go there? Hah! Fat chance,
I thought. But then again I thought I'd never turn 30, and that just sort of took care of itself.
Well, amazingly in October 2000 I did go when my brother Hans hooked me up with a group from Washington, D.C. who
were planning a surprisingly affordable trip to run the Beijing Marathon. Of course Hans didn't go - the bum -
so I knew nobody in the group, except to say that they were runners (which reveals more than some care to admit).
Two years later I am finally telling this story. Why? Because like most travellers I tend to go to a place without
a clue as to what it's really about. Oh sure, you can "research". But to honestly know a place, you have
to go there first, then come back home and figure out where you've been - particularly if you don't speak
the language!
 To attempt
a description of a country of 1.3 billion (or so) people, which, for the decades when most of us grew up, was totally
closed to the outside world - is ill-advised. To try to identify with a land which was purposely mauled by outsiders
for centuries before being split in two by the 1940's Communist Revolution - is crazy. And to suppose that one
could actually convey the still visceral yen for heroic leadership, from within a people who have been at turns
been both saved and savaged by such leadership, and in a country where many people still great each other with
the phrase "have you eaten yet?" - well, it's not your best way to sleep at night.
But I'm going to try it anyway. And in that trying, you can at least catch a little glimpse of what the Chinese
people are about - being Chinese regardless of the odds of survival of any one individual.
What we present here is simply a going to be a snap-shot of what I experienced in October 2000, and what I have
learned in the two years since - with a little American fun thrown in (yes, rubber chicken related). It comes at
a special time. China is making an intense effort to open up to the world economically and culturally (some would
say "too slowly", some "too quickly"). They are hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics, which for
them is huge, huge, huge. And amazingly, they are talking with Taiwan, which has potentially profound implications
for both countries - maybe. It's all in motion. It's controversial. And nobody knows where it'll end up. But we're
not in Kansas anymore... oh, did I mention that in fall 2002 we are going back? And this time Hans is coming too.
- Eric
( to be continued... )
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