Backdoor Diplomats
a case for curiosity as a tool to help us be better humans
I have always been attracted to the worn, to patina, to rusty, and to rotten things. Whether it be architecture (Havana, Yangon), fashion (a good pair of old jeans, or used leather boots), or even food (dry-aged steaks, pickle, fermentation – which when you boil it down is rot, tasty, tasty rot…). And as a boy from the south, humidity, the great instigator in speeding up both life and death, has always sent my head spinning into a world of dream and magic, a world of Borges, Faulkner, and Burroughs. Hot climates produce good music, spice, plant life, as well as madness and disease, and I think this constant contradiction is what makes me love moving about this globe.
My first few hours in Asia were a long layover in Kuala Lumpur on my way to China, jet-lagged, young, scared, excited. And mind-blown. Being jet-lagged is the perfect mind-state for a first time in Asia – it makes all the sense in the world that there is a physical response to moving through the world too fast, that your body has to take time to catch up to your geography, and to land a stranger. Jet lag just fits.
As soon as I landed in KL, and walked off the plane into the wall of heat and wet, the smell and feel rocked me. It’s a moment I shall never forget, and have been chasing in all of my travels ever since.
I spent a lot of time in China in the early 2000’s, trying to make up for an overly euro-centric upbringing. I knew there was a world I’d overlooked, and hadn’t been taught about in school, a missing hemisphere. I’d read books like Ernst Gombrich’s History of Art which ignored the “East” side of the globe, attended the University of Georgia’s Philosophy department which had no eastern philosophy program…. Faced with the choice of German or Greek or the woods, I picked Greek and studied Aristotle. But when my formal education finished, I ran to the missing parts on my map to find out what was there.
I lived in Taiwan for a bit, then got a job in southern China and stayed there for the better part of 7 years, before heading to Peru and Ireland (other blank parts of my map). My relationship with China has been complicated – there is fascination and curiosity, frustration and confusion, and plenty that I still don’t understand. So I have spent more time in my adult life working on the puzzle that is China than any other place.
I was confused at the issues before I went and only after going and seeing for myself, smelling the smells, hearing the sounds, feeling the vibe of the place, only then did I come to some sort of a beginning to understanding. And this is really what I am talking about.
The winds of Dabancheng can pick up an 18-wheeler and toss it like crumpled newspaper. The winds are so strong that the landscape has no soil, no sand, no plant, no animal – just rock left over, boulders. And if the winds here can pick up a 40-tonne truck, then the rocks left over, you can imagine, are pretty big. This isn’t some account of a landscape in “Dune” or “Star Wars” – this is western China, in a slow, cylindrical depression called the Turpan basin, in a corner of a corner of the world where no one looks.
But as you descend through this desert depression, you eventually reach the bottom, which is a cartoonishly perfect Oasis, below the winds and protected by its depth at 505 feet below sea level. Lush grape valleys fed by underground rivers called Karez, built with Roman technology from the Silk Road days, bringing glacial waters from the Tian Shan Mountains miles away. 80% of China’s grapes are grown down here. It is rural, hidden, and surrounded by the hot winds of an inferno.
At this time in my life I was running from many things (a failed relationship, a broken country) and took on an alias. My name was “Tu Da Hun” which was explained to me to be something akin to “Billy-Joe-Bob”, the Uyghur country bumpkin name, a name given to me by a family I was somewhat adopted by in one of the grape valleys of Turpan.
For a few years I spent a great deal of time in this part of the world, depressed in a depression, hiding and learning and discovering. I played live shows with a band, American style blues music, I took biking trips, I learned how to pull noodles and pick grapes. My memories of the place are bucolic, a Brigadoon hazey sort of memory, and the haze isn’t just a euphemism. When the winds really pick up, the roads in and out of the bottom of this bowl are all shut, and the city is locked in or out for a few days.
These days the lock down isn’t from the weather or wind. The Uyghurs are being erased by state-run re-education camps. Over a million people, including the family that named me, have disappeared, been swept up. Again, this isn’t fiction. Over a million people gone, into prisons that are meant to purge and change any sense of self, in order to secure a new Silk Road route that will redefine commerce over the next 20 years and make it possible for me to get a cheaper pair of Nikes faster.
I think back on the time I spent there and how the Turpan I knew is no longer. A place that is now being erased. There is something inherent in the going, in the relationships and conversations, in being aware and knowing and being known. Because without that, first hand human connection, it could just disappear lost in historic erasure. Without travel and curiosity and interaction, the demons would shout down the better angels of our world.
For the curious mind, the process of setting up a trip usually starts the same; a spark of an idea, an interest, a curiosity. It sparks the armchair looking up of various lists and reviews of a place/country/hotel in books, magazines, social media sites. This step helps give a foundation and inspiration, but can be dangerously full of reduction and fiction. The next step is talking to people who are from there or who have lived there or been there, telling them what you are interested in and what advice or introductions they might have. A travel specialist might help put you in direct contact with the folks who know the place. But all this is set up, limited; it is the going that is the goal.
I have always felt that travel is, or can be, a backdoor diplomacy. And that as long as it is safe, going to a place to see it for yourself and to interact with people and place is the best way to judge for yourself what might be there. Of course flying into a war zone is not a good idea. But going to places like Cuba, Uzbekistan, the United States, going to places that are on the fringes of being understood or misunderstood, takes the going and talking and laughing and crying with the people in those places. It allows for relating and communing rather than consuming and feeding. There are moments of euphoria and moments of stillness, both intrinsically valuable to understanding. These aren’t vacations, these are a dialectic, and it is an activity we are losing the capacity for; attention and patience. There are many reasons for the loss of these skills, and that isn’t what I am talking about here. I am talking about what we can do to get better, a technique through a certain way of travel and curious openness, diplomatic and slow and indirect.
Backdoor diplomats - beautifully written.