Month: December 2010

Penman for Monday, December 27, 2010



THANKS TO the university’s class-free Mondays policy and to Cebu Pacific’s ridiculously low budget fares (and, let me add, to our daughter Demi’s hotel job which gives us staff rates in her chain’s hotels worldwide), Beng and I managed to sneak out for a mid-December weekend in Beijing.

Anyone who knows where Beijing’s latitude is would realize that winter may not be the best time to visit the place, but Beng and I are incorrigible cheapskates when it comes to travel, and we’ll happily fry or freeze if it means getting somewhere for next to nothing. In this case, I’d booked this flight minutes after the fares were posted online by Cebu Pacific last August. (To give you an idea of how irresistible these deals can get, our round trip fare per person—with all surcharges, travel tax, seat selection, checked baggage, and travel insurance thrown in—came out to about P5,000.)

I’d been to Beijing once before—more than two decades and about a hundred pounds ago, in 1987, in the merry company of fellow writers Krip Yuson, Ricky de Ungria, Eric Gamalinda, and Fatima Lim. While Beng had joined me on another wintry CP sortie to Shanghai in 2008, she’d never been to Beijing, so I thought this would make her a nice pre-Christmas treat (we have our own “open skies” policy, a pledge to travel together while we can walk, and while we can afford it, before arthritis and penury bring us down).


You go to Hong Kong for the gadgets, to Guangzhou for the food, and Shanghai for the skyline, but there’s really only one major reason to go to Beijing: to imbibe the majesty of China, old and new. Beijing visitors invariably have two destinations on their itinerary: the Forbidden City (and Tiananmen Square, just outside it) and the Great Wall (one of several sections open to the public).

I’d seen both of these before, but a young man’s awestruck eyes can gloss over many details; back in 1987, many sections of the Forbidden City were still closed to public viewing—they were just shooting The Last Emperor then—and I was happy enough to be able to take a passing glance at Chairman Mao’s embalmed body in his mausoleum in a corner of Tiananmen. (“What do you want to see him for?” our Chinese guide asked me, not knowing I had been a fervent teenage Maoist. “He had my grandfather killed during the Cultural Revolution.”) As guest writers, we were also on a strictly guided tour then, with official guides and drivers shuttling us from place to place.

This time Beng and I decided to play tourists to the hilt, although we decided to forgo the services of an English-speaking guide (and many of them will approach you, boldly but politely, asking “Have you been to the Great Wall?”), at least for the Forbidden City. We took a cab from our hotel—cabs are plentiful and relatively cheap in Beijing—and arrived at the East Flowery Gate, which yielded us a seasonable view of the moat turning into black ice flecked by yellow leaves, the last stragglers of departed autumn.


It would seem that a palace with some 9,000 rooms would be the last place you should go into without a guide, but we wanted to muck around the corners of the City and not be hurried along. It proved to be a good idea, as the Forbidden City—basically one pavilion after another strung along a north-south axis—was best taken with many pauses. Too many things to see—a constant threat in China—can dull the senses, and the train of imperial images soon melded into that of one eternally undulating dragon. The most poignant scenes were those of desolation: the last emperor Pu Yi’s living quarters, for example, shone with ghostly dust. Indeed one’s lingering impression of the massively ornate Forbidden City is not that it is full, but that it is empty.


We did take a van with a guide—along with new friends from Manila, the Chinese-speaking sisters Conchita and Christine—to the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall. An old friend, the former activist and now Beijing CNN bureau chief Jimi Flor Cruz, had recommended that we choose the Mutianyu stretch of the wall over the nearer and more popular Badaling, and I’m glad we took his advice, because this is the Great Wall that snakes through your imagination, like a spiky ridge on the mountain’s back, vanishing into infinity at either end. Nothing more can be truly added to what thousands of historians, archeologists, and poets have already said about the Great Wall, and again the wintry silence that greeted us—it wasn’t snowing yet, but the sub-zero temperature guaranteed that there would be very few of us on the wall that day—was like a vault in which our smallness resonated.


Solitude, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found in the one place off the typical itinerary that I insisted on bringing Beng to: the sprawling Panjiayuan weekend flea market, where all manner of jade jewelry, Tibetan relics, fake Ming pottery, and ancient coinage could be found. My search for vintage Chinese Parker pens went for naught, but the vitality of the marketplace was a welcome tonic, reminding us—perhaps better than either the Forbidden City or the Great Wall did—of what China has been about all these centuries.


And let’s not forget the food, sumptuous and inexpensive, particularly if you walk out of the hotel and follow the hotel staff to where they themselves have lunch around the corner. For 11 yuan or about 70 pesos each, Beng and I had huge bowls of steaming noodles laced with mushrooms, chicken, and vegetables, the perfect antidote to the December chill.


A few days after we got back from China, Beng and I went to a favorite haunt, Ma’s Noodle House in Trinoma, for bowls of hot chicken mami, and then we watched Frozen, a snowbound survival saga. For a moment back there, it felt like Beijing all over again.


(That's Beng in between the flags in this panoramic shot of Tiananmen Square, taken with my iPhone 4.)