The people I speak with back home are listless and miserable, suffering through frigid air and snow, burdened by the morbidity that sets in when it seems like there will never be warmth or color—Christ, even hope—again. Thanks, February, you bastard!

Winter in Xi’an, in the Shaanxi province of north-central China, is no different. But here, the naturally gray winter sky, which is often foggy to boot, takes on a verdigris cast from the remarkable pollution.

I’ve never encountered everything like it. On Monday, the worst day, it was like being on another planet—one with an atmosphere that has an entirely different chemical makeup, and is warmed by a sun much less powerful than ours (which is like a C student—merely average). The sun was clearly shining somewhere, but the smog was so low to the earth that I was kicking through it. That day, I saw more people wearing surgical masks than on any other.

Here’s an example of the ogre-ugly light in Xi’an, taken at the Shaanxi Provincial History Museum (itself a great place to visit).

Truly a foul nimbus.

In this sort of environment, color becomes more than something that catches your eye. It becomes nourishment. Last February in Cairo, I saw lattice-climbing flowers whose fuchsia glow literally took my breath. I gasped. Tears blurred my eyes. Maybe it was simply jet lag (compounded by my tendency at the doddering old age of 34 to get quite teary when it comes to natural beauty). But I think that after months of monochromatic winter New York, I was being reminded of something within me that I had curled around protectively, something that would otherwise wither in the cold and darkness.

Such has been my relationship with both Xi’an’s skies and Xi’an’s bright colors. Humans have a large hand in both. Ostensibly I came here to see the Terracotta Warrior Army, which has been rendered by two millennia as drab as the dirt they’ve been buried in. Their colors have been stripped by time.

They’re no less remarkable for that, however.

I did take in my share of ancient sites—it’s hard not to in Xi’an, the imperial capital of China for nearly 2,000 years—and I also did two interviews. But mostly I wandered in modern Xi’an, which for all of its pollution is a pretty hopping city with many beautiful buildings and a 14th-century wall that encases the downtown area in 8.5 miles of 40-foot-tall brick and a now-shallow moat. Just amazing.

Here is the South Gate.

You can walk or bike atop the entire wall. For three hours I walked it with Leo Ye, an urban native and a freelance interpreter for the U.S. construction company Caterpillar, who proved to be my intrepid guide to all things Xi’an over the next few days. Leo has a pass to visit all the tourist sites in two provinces—Shaanxi and Yunnan, where I head next—which at 200 yuan for two years is a pretty good deal. I had to pay 10 yuan to enter, much as this couple probably did.

At 45 feet wide, the top of the wall is so roomy that you could drive three Hummers (or 84 regular-sized cars) side-by-side at the same time. Luckily those greedy monsters aren’t anywhere in Xi’an, though they apparently exist in Shaanxi; Leo told me that of the many shady mine owners in the province, the most extravagantly corrupt flaunts his ill-gotten wealth with four Hummers. Boo-yah, workers of the world. Suck it.

Instead, we saw displays in progress. The city was preparing for the Spring Festival—also known as the New Year—which begins February 17. Covered in glossy fabric or plastic and waiting for parts, the displays were gorgeous and freakish at once.

Xi’an is a now a city of seven million. In the Tang Dynasty (6th–9th centuries), it was one of the largest cities on the planet. Being one terminus of the Silk Road, Xi’an was open to foreign ideas and influence in a way that China purports to be today.

I’ve yet to see a face with a moustache in China, but perhaps this grooming feature will lead the way. It did in the Tang Dynasty.

“Do you see that one there?” Leo said, pointed to the figure of a fellow with the straight, mid-length ‘stache of central Asia, who was rendered kowtowing to a monk riding an elephant. “He’s a foreigner.”

“He looks Kazakh,” I said, though really he could just as likely be Turkmen or Uzbek.

“Yes! Right! Kazakh!” Leo agreed, pleased.

Workers in blue overalls were busy assembling or repairing the displays. Lots of musicians and dancers—

—flowers and animals—

—back-up flowers, because you can never have too many—

—and, of course, a sage.

In many parts of the world, spring is a sweet dream only achieved by surviving weeks more of unfortunate weather. But not in China. It’s spring. It’s the New Year. At least, that’s the promise.

So Happy New Year. Hope is on the way.

With this blog, I’m trying to tell stories with both words and images. But not everything fits into a story—or, sometimes, is its own tale. So here’s a new category: One-Offs. It will include images or words that might not fit somewhere else but that I like too much to abandon.

First off, some images from around Beijing.

St. Xavier’s hand from the courtyard of a cathedral on Xuanwumenwei Dajie.

Children are like beautiful flowers. They must be stopped at all costs.

Graffitti scratched into bamboo in Zhongshan Park, adjacent to the Forbidden City.

Faded glamour in the hutongs.

A pedestrian overpass in downtown Beijing.

All of Beijing seems to be under construction 24/7. I’ve heard the drills at midnight.

The Buffalo natives I know would say this sign is the very embodiment of looking for love in all the wrong places.

Join the military. Defend China. You know, as effectively as the Great Wall did. Ahem.

Old and new Beijing. Even the cars face opposite directions.

I have the best feng shui on Jiaozi Hutong.

You see, my room in the Jin An Bin Guan (Zen Hotel) looks south. Apparently, in feng shui, south is the most auspicious direction for your home to face. I had dinner with a Beijinger named Angela Wang last night who told me that homes in the city with a southern exposure cost a truly extortionist amount of money per square meter—the most expensive of any exposure.

Most of the people who live in the hutongs I can see from my room have neither southern exposures nor worries about the cost per square meter (well, not entirely—but more on that later).

The view from my room.

Hutongs are the narrow alleys and lanes formed by the one-story brick-and-mortar buildings traditional to Beijing since the 13th century, when Kublai Khan established a capital here. They weave in labyrinthian coils between those foot-wearying avenues on which I’ve taken so many death marches. They were built on an east-west line to capture that southern exposure—which, as Angela pointed out to me last night, at Beijing’s latitude guarantees sun in the winter and shade in the summer. They had inner courtyards for privacy and fresh air.

Early on, the hutongs surrounding the Forbidden City were where aristocrats had their quite swanky residences. The rest—the vast majority—housed regular folks. Now there are no hutongs left in the city center, which is dominated by highrises, and it’s only the poor who live in hutongs.

Electricity is sort of available. Plumbing isn’t. Public bathrooms are everywhere in the hutongs. As a New Yorker, my first reaction was that this was responsible urban planning in a density populated city. The people’s party had given the people a place to pee!

After a couple of days, though, I realized the preponderance of bathrooms probably indicated just the opposite: terrible urban planning coupled with jet-powered governmental malfeasance. The reason there are so many public bathrooms in the hutongs is that there are no private ones. That sure puts the “community” in “communism.”

One of the public bathrooms.

My ability to immerse myself in the hutongs stopped at the bathrooms. I dared not venture in.

I can’t find reliable numbers, but it’s safe to say most of the hutongs are gone. Hundreds left from what used to be thousands. The government pays people to leave the hutongs and resettle in the suburbs, where they might get that crazy newfangled indoor plumbing that’s all the rage with the kids these days. You can’t blame people for taking off. Then the hutongs are bulldozed and more modern housing put up in their place.

The hutong atmosphere is alternately crackling with action and centuries-old sleepy. Men seem to be quickly moving in and out of doorways at all times. Older men meander with their hands loosely clasped behind their backs. Old women supervise, telling everyone else what to do. Slumping teenagers watch TV. Children throw stuff or jump over things. Vendors of round coal bricks, sweet baked goods, meat, meat, and more meat, and other, more mysterious wares drive their carts through the alleys. Some call out what they’re selling, and the more prosperous blare a recording through a small yet powerful speaker. Bikes and mopeds weave through the on-foot. Laundered blankets and sheets hang drying in the sun. Skyscrapers pose icily in the distance. Crumbled piles of destroyed hutongs offer a warning—or a promise—just across the street.

North of the Forbidden City, some of the hutongs are successfully making the grade for next-generation tourism, which aims to be more B&B than backpacker, more coq au vin than chicken feet. Jiaozi Hutong, which is in the Xuanwu area in the southwest of Beijing, is just plain-old poor. I wonder if a very unusual doorway such as this—

—will be around in 10 years.

There’s a whole other Beijing I’m not showing you. It’s very neon, and very tall, and not very interesting. You can find this public face of Beijing anywhere. Try any Chinese media source, where you’ll also get a stupor-inducing Party-line spin about Biejing being a “world-class city.”

Sure, okay. But what the propaganda would like you to overlook is the fact that the world kind of sucks a lot. Most of the world is starving, violent, polluted, or diseased. So hell yeah, Bejiing is the world. So is New York. So is your hometown.

There is a hyperconsumerism to the New Beijing that’s fascinating—and just as expensive as any other international city—but in the end it’s too familar in ways I don’t like and too alien in others. I know overpriced city life. And I hate shopping.

The hutongs, on the other hand, are ostensibly exotic to my experience, and yet I feel easier there, even thought the language barrier is most extreme. People eat, they sleep, they sell things to one another, they ride their bikes, they yell at each other, they kiss their kids, they spit everywhere, they watch TV or me as I walk by. I point at things with a smile and a nod and a few Mandarin words and soon I have something to eat. Life is very essential here, in a way.

This isn’t my requisite “look at the poor but happy natives!” moment apparently required of the Western tourist abroad. At least I hope it isn’t. I’m not saying they’re happy. I’m just saying they’re there. Poor, but present, when Beijing would like you to believe otherwise. (So would D.C., Paris, or London.)

For some reason it makes me have a better understanding of the childhood of my mother and father, Eileen and Jim, who were both very poor. It makes me understand how if you can get the hell out, you stay the hell out at all costs, and perhaps you might even scorn those who don’t. After all, if it was impossible, you couldn’t have done it. Yet to speak of being born poor as just slight bump in the road—something that can be simply overcome with some good old-fashioned hard work—would make it seem that getting out had been easy. And you know how damned hard it was.

Some of the hutongs are relatively prosperous. Just south of Tian’anmen Square, in an area called Qianmen, I got a massage in a barber shop owned by this woman, Red, and her husband:

It’s an area that sees some foreigners because there are several hostels nearby. Places to check email or make cheap international calls abound. While her husband gave a hip young thing a buzzcut, Red gave me what was probably the most distracted massage I’ve ever received. But that’s because we were too busy talking. What she didn’t do for my muscles she did for my spirit.

Like many people I’ve spoken to, she wanted to know if it was difficult to get a visa to the U.S. I told her that’s what her countrymen had told me, so probably yes. Holding my leg in the air while she kneaded my calf, she considered the possibilities.

First she suggested that I should hire someone to clean my home because I am obviously too busy working and traveling to clean. And, you know, if I looked her way, she wouldn’t be upset. She laughed slyly. I laughed too. She then suggested I should open a beauty parlor, and if I needed some help, well, she and her husband just happened to have the experience to do me a square.

“You don’t have to do anything. You have everybody help you. You just own the business,” she said, her fingertips rotating against my temples. “I think this is good.”

She stood up, grabbed my arm, and began to shake it briskly. I answered that I didn’t have the money to start a business. She shrugged, unconvinced. Of course I had the money. I was American. She shook harder, perhaps trying to see if money might fall out of my very skin. “I think you can do this.”

I rolled my eyes. She laughed.

After my clothes were back on, I stayed to chat for another half hour with her and her husband, a trim guy who reminded me so much of someone back home, but I can’t figure out who. We played with Red’s Chinese-English pocket translator, trying to find the difference in the characters for “email” and “website.” They wished I were staying another night in Beijing so they could have me to their home for dinner. I wished I were too.

On the walk back to the Zen Hostel, I realized there was something about the hutongs that reminded me of Chiapas. I think it was a sort of Schrodinger’s Cat state of being that can belong to the architecture of poverty. Sometimes the decrepitude of a building hits a perfectly poised place between construction and destruction. In Chiapas, I had often been confused by a partial building buoyed by haphazard piles of bricks and painted a tropically cheery pool-blue, but was half undone in either direction. It kept its existential state undeclared. I would think, is this thing going up or coming down?

It’s much the same in Beijing, even though I know which direction the hutongs are headed. Even their shabby two-story brethren don’t have much of a chance:

My room in the Zen Hostel isn’t exactly swanky. For one thing, it’s freezing. At least the shower spits a boiling-hot stream that might originate from the bowels of hell. The TV has one English-language channel, which has taught me how truly soporific propaganda can be. The walls are astonishingly dirty in a Mickey Spillane sort of way. There is actually a full hand of four-inch-long finger smears of a brown-red substance about six inches northwest of the wall outlet. It’s the perfect distance from the bed for someone to lean out, making one last effort to escape their tormentor and get help—but instead collapse, vanquished.

Yet I have the water, the electricity, the heat, the ability to get the hell out whenever I want. And I also have that thing we Americans are always so willing to pay a premium for: my own space. That’s why I have the best feng shui on Jiaozi Hutong—because I can pay the per-square-meter cost for that southern exposure.

And so it has ever been, Mao’s Little Red Book or no.

A neighbor.

Mao’s pickled corpse lies unseen by these eyes, but on my first full day in Beijing I did check out his portrait. Lording as it does over Tian’anmen Square and the entrance to the Forbidden City, it’s impossible to miss.

That quintessential Mao collar is excellently crisp. I don’t think I’ve ever been so unwrinkled.

It took me a while to get to Tian’anmen Square. Beijing is deceptively large. You look at a map and calculate the walking distance from A to B. Ten minutes? Fifteen at most? But instead, it’s 30. Have that happen a few times and suddenly you’re hours in and not really all that much closer to your destination. Three hours later, you’ve taken in more restaurants, banks, and neon—the siren sisters of Beijing—than you could ever have the belly, funds, or pupils for.

The smog has clogged your nose with brain-grey snot, and the vendors who cook the most amazing street food ever are nowhere to be found. (Jian bing guozi is a sort of pancake cooked on a hot circular griddle right in front of you. It’s layered with fresh egg, scallions, four mysterious, gloppy sauces, and a deep-fried shell. Neatly folded into a little baggie—with handles!—and a napkin that keeps your digits from burning, it costs a whopping two yuan. That’s about 25 cents. It keeps you full for hours. New Yorkers, get thee to Chinatown-ery now. )

Suddenly you’re exhausted and wonder whether it might be better to catch a cab back to the hotel and nap, just for a little while. But now that you’re several hours deep into something that’s veering dangerously close to a goddamned death march, it seems a waste of energy to turn back. So you soldier on.

Speaking of soldiers:

He’s guarding Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, where Mao’s aforementioned pickled corpse is stashed. In Beijing, you almost always see soldiers in profile; as they stand on foot-high platforms in front of embassies, important financial and governmental buildings, and historical sites, they aim those stern (yet mostly baby-faced) visages over one shoulder and then the other.

I’m afraid to take their picture. I think I should be. Apparently, I’m lucky I even got into the country. Last night I met an expat American journalist who told me it’s surprising I didn’t simply get blacklisted after applying for a J-visa. Gulp.

But the word on the street is, being a journalist rocks. The college kids who adopted me in Tian’anmen Square thought that my travel itinerary was a most amazing thing.

They had been sent by their English-language professor—one Brian from Texas—to practice their skills by making “international friends.” When I was first approached by Lu Chang—take a look at her charming self here—

—I of course thought she was trying to sell me something. There is a common scam in Beijing where “art students” take you to tea and you get stuck with a bill for 2500 RMB—an astonishing $360 or so. But I figured that one must be an idiot to fall for something like that. Plus, the only hawker I encountered was a woman who pressed her shoulder into my elbow and repeated “Butterfly! Dragon! Frog!” as she flipped through placemat-sized prints. It was over pretty fast.

It’s a rare thing in this world to find two strangers so equally delighted to speak to one another, but such was the situation with Chang and I. We each had our reasons. Once again, she had gotten up the guts to chat up a foreigner; she had been rejected before. (When I suggested these unfriendly foreigners probably assumed she was trying to sell them something, she looked hurt and dismayed.) And I was enthusiastic. I had been wandering around in a jet-lagged fog, pretty content but nagged by a little internal voice that worried, What the hell am I doing by myself 9,000 miles from home in a place where I can’t talk to anybody? I was lonely already, and it was only day one of my supposedly grand adventure. I hardly seemed worthy of it.

So we wandered the outer grounds of the Forbidden City and Zhongshan Park for hours. The conversation—about her life, my life, Beijing—rarely faltered, but sometimes she would come out with questions more often found on online dating sites. Queries like, “Who was your puppy love?” or, “Who is your idol”? It was only later on when we met up with her schoolmates—

—that I found out where those questions had come from: Texas Brian. Over tea and dumplings—my suggestion—I saw Colin (left), Zhang Xuangji (second from left), and Fan Xiang (right) flip through printouts loaded with such clunky icebreakers. I don’t know if their professor came up with them himself or if they’re found on an established curriculum, but, well, they need some work.

On the other hand, Xiang also had flash cards with awesomely rude phrases. There were five variations alone on the phrase, “Don’t act like an ass!” Perhaps Mandarin has such a rich array of ways to tell people to stop being idiots that it requires a bevy of translation. I suspected this earlier—on more than one occasion my husband, Steve, has expounded on the exquisite grossness of the curse “dog fart”—but such expansive vulgarity makes Mandarin a compelling tongue.

Luckily, I have rarely felt the need to use any such phrase during my loooong walks around Beijing. In fact, in comparison to Cairo or Luxor, Beijing is a gentle breeze tickling a baby’s chin with a lotus flower. (Beijing makes me angry at Egypt all over again, but that’s another story.) My next post will be all about hutongs, the traditional (and quite medieval) dwellings in the city, and why I have the best feng shui in Jiaozi Hutong.

Finally, a personal note. Dear friends of mine back home in NYC have a band called Knife Fight. They rock. They have great hair and suitable baditude. But they can only dream of having a band photo this cool:

Thanks to Thai Airways, I have a web signal. I’m not one of their VIP customers, just a Cathay Pacific Economy-Class plebe sitting in a cheap café one floor below the airline’s VIP lounge. But I am an experienced poacher, so here I am in the Hong Kong airport with a freshly bagged signal caught with my (inter-)net. I’m eating room-temperature cheddar on a cracker and blueberry yogurt. Two hours on the continent of Asia and I am already chipmunking the dairy in anticipation of weeks without.

The 16-hour flight from New York to Hong Kong was remarkably unremarkable. I expected a monumental journey, a rite of passage even. It seemed that the longest flight I’ve ever taken should have a narrative arc somehow. It might start with keep-my-chin-up coping enabled by Carl Sagan’s Contact. (His deep compassion for humanity works wonders on improving one’s tolerance for snoring jerks, monkey-howling babies, and cruelly pointy elbows.) I’d read, I’d eat, I’d try to sleep. Rewind, replay.

An empty cabin—alas, mine to photograph but not to sleep in.

There would be an in-flight movie, and then another. Peeing would become entertainment. Waiting on line for the bathroom would offer the chance to stretch and thereby annoy the flight attendants. That might be a ploy to get some scant personal attention in this vast cabin of intimate yet anonymous strangers.

In a sane world—perhaps a beautiful futuristic world in which they will recoil in horror at the pain and length of early-21st century air travel, similar to how we react to the idea of Stone Age trepanation—halfway through might be the end of the trip to a place ten times as far. But not on January 31, 2007. Not on flight CX831 from JFK TO HKI. Halfway through would mean just that: another eight hours to go.

Tiring of the read-eat-watch-sleep cycle, at some point I would realize I was peering into the eternal essence of Boredom itself, the Platonic form exposed for me right there in seat 59G. It would be beige and too cold. It would be beautiful and horrible at once. I would quietly weep from the burden of such knowledge.

And yet the flight would go on. I’d eat foil-wrapped food of middling quality. I’d sleep the plane half-sleep, in which you never quite stop hearing the hum of the engines or the squeak of movie voices through people’s headphones.

I’d wonder if I was going to make it. I would think about how desperate and lonely and good we all are, and how everyone everywhere deserves compassion. The landing gear would thump out from beneath the thorax of the plane, we’d land on the runway in a scrape of tires and speed, and I would venture into Asia solid in the knowledge that I had gone through something important. A trial, and I had made it. It would be useful for the rest of my life, or at least this journey I’ve just embarked on.

Instead, I pretty much just slept.

Thank you, two weeks of insomnia caused by preparation for this trip coupled with a low-dosage but equally effective generic equivalent of Xanax!

Also, I have to thank my rowmate. A man in his twenties had the other aisle seat in row 59. There were two empty seats between us—one extra apiece. A treasured thing when you’re flying economy. We each commandeered our extra space, his feet in his, my ass in mine. But eventually, he feel asleep in his aisle seat, leaving his extra empty. An hour passed, and then another. I’d been lying on my side, trying to cram all 5’10” of me into the space. So I asked him if he minded if I use his other seat for a while. He said it was no problem. I lifted the arm rest and stretched my toes and ankles half away across the seat, making sure my feet were completely covered by the blanket. It’s not nice to flaunt your dogs so close to someone, particularly when he’s let you invade his valuable real estate.

It turned out to be more than “a while.” I slept for most of the next eight hours.

I wasn’t exactly comfortable, but I was much less uncomfortable than I had been before. On a 16-hour flight, his gesture was more than a small mercy. It was an immense act of kindness. Thanks again, stranger. You kept me sane.

The temperature in Hong Kong right now is about 65 degrees. Pretty much ideal. I haven’t been in fresh air in about 24 hours. But to actually inhale that fresh air, I’ll have to pass through immigration. Ack. But I still have four hours to kill before my flight to Beijing, so I might as well.

You know you’re bored when queuing up for bureaucrats seems like an appealing way to pass the time.

Here’s a portrait of the moon from the airport.