"Three weeks in Xi'an," a worldly friend grimaced. "That's like three weeks in Cleveland!" No offense to Cleveland; he doubted the attraction of this Chinese city because it lacks Beijing's power, Singapore's sophistication, and Hong Kong's 21st-century glitter. What he did not know is that, to a traveler who has a little time and a job to do, Xi'an reveals its own fascinations.
I was in Xi'an for three weeks to teach English, one of a team of nine Global Volunteers. The work anchored me in college-level classes that provided energy, interest, and a sense of achievement. I also had time for sightseeing, shopping, and wandering around. I could watch how people live. Three weeks in a workaday Chinese metropolis showed me, up close and personal, an old nation rushing into the modern, globalized world.
Ancient Xi'an, capital of China for a thousand years, still exists. There are the city wall and moat, temples, mosques, and pagodas, museum of antiquities, and most famously, the Terracotta Warriors, located in their restored ranks about 45 minutes outside of town. Each of these sights deepens the sense of China's ancient history and diversity. Having the luxury of time, I could visit some of them more than once, trying to comprehend their great age, the violence, artistry and philosophy they represent.
At the same time, exploring around the hotel, or traveling to teach at my academy, I could not escape Xi'an's propulsion from the past into the future. Constant construction fills the horizon with huge office buildings, sports complexes, factories, and hotels. All post modern, the towering new structures are glass and marble, green or black or tawny, capped with decorative pagodas or guarded by ersatz Roman columns. Piles of paving stones and gravel surround roads, sidewalks, shops, everything that is about to expand. Xi'an is a city in the making.
The streets pulse with action, thousands of bike riders jockeying for position amid double-decker buses, little red taxis, cars, trucks, and pedicabs filled with riders or piled high with furniture or boxes to deliver. In the afternoon, schoolchildren calmly thread their way through traffic that keeps me hesitating on the sidewalk as if I were waiting for the minute to start jumping rope.
Amid this modernization, the old world remains. Two women work near the shoulder of the highway, which is newly expanded from six to eight lanes, heavy traffic rumbling in both directions. With large twig brooms, they sweep the road, gather the trash in a large dustpan, dump it in to a wooden cart that stands nearby. One woman settles herself in the wagon's traces, pulls it 100 yards down the busy road, and they set to work again.
Both ancient and modern, there is shopping. In Xi'an it sets the adrenaline flowing. On the way to the mosque, stall after stall in the Muslim market offers an eye-popping array of porcelain jewelry and bowls, painted scrolls, silk clothing, scarves and fabric, spices, paper cutouts, embroidered table cloths, jade. Farther down, merchants offer spices, live chickens, raw meat, or soup made to the eater's specifications at the hot pot stands. On the sidewalk in front of individual stalls, someone offers to solder metal, repair bikes, or make a suit.
Bargaining is required. Once a customer offers half the asking price, the real business begins, racing to the rhythm of the hand-held calculator. Because I had time to return to certain stalls with my Global Volunteers buddies, the merchants kept flinging out discounts. Who could resist the kimonos, chops, and paintings these new friends were practically giving away?
In the more conventional shops, I bargained as I selected the silk I wanted made into the jacket I had been thinking about for days. I stood in the aisle getting measured, and chose a pattern from a book, accompanied all the while by advice to the tailor from clerks who gathered to judge my ability to strike a good bargain. It was hard to remember that China is a Communist nation when the capitalistic excitement mounted between seller and buyer.
Because I had three weeks in Xi'an, I had time to learn the bus routes from our hotel to the city center. I could walk most early mornings on sidewalks filled with people practicing TaiChi, sword play, and ballroom dancing, past sellers squatting near displays of cell phones, phone cards, palm pilots, baby chicks, herbal medicines, and mysterious green vegetables. Many faces I passed became familiar to me, and I to them; after a while people nodded to me as I walked by.
In an ordinary Chinese city, going about its business "like Cleveland" my three weeks gave me a chance to glimpse the pattern of its life. It was China in the midst of a social revolution that reveals itself in everyday sights and sounds; the booming construction, the busy streets, shops, and everywhere the excitement of change.
If they realize their dreams, my Chinese students will lead this change. "Why are you studying English?" I asked them in our first class. "To be in business," "to work with tourists," "to be in a start-up," "to travel," "to be a translator." Twenty-year-old proto-capitalists, they see themselves as the engine that will pull China out of ignorance and poverty into the future.
My chance to know them and to see their city of Xi'an over time was my own education in past and present, far and near, familiar and strange. I would not trade it for a quick touristy trip to more famous places.
