This is the second part of our trip. The first one is here → – Beijing, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall. After the north, we flew south, into a completely different China: stone forests, ancient cities at night, and Shanghai shining on a river.
Zhangjiajie
This was so beautiful. A huge national park full of those tall, narrow stone pillars rising out of the forest – the famous “Avatar mountains” (the landscape that inspired the floating Hallelujah Mountains in the film). Really unique nature, nothing I’d seen before. I loved the whole journey to get there – the bus, the lift, all of it perfectly organised, one thing sequenced cleanly after the other.
Because of my new barefoot shoes, my Achilles tendon hurt a lot. It made me a bit sad. On our second visit to the park, we didn’t see literally anything because of the weather – and that was sad too, but I actually liked the vibe of it. There was something almost dreamlike about wandering through pure white fog where stone giants were supposed to be. It would just have been great to also see the view. 🙂
Fenghuang
An ancient city that was supposed to be the highlight for many people. We had a very nice hotel, a big one. I don’t really remember the breakfast, but I think it was good.
At night, the whole place turned into a huge amusement park. Everything was loud and busy, but in a way that felt very touristic and disconnected from anything real. Maybe it’s a dream for some Chinese people – but for us, it just wasn’t it. I was silently happy when my mum said it herself: too sparkly, too not genuine.
It was also there that something I’d been feeling all trip really hit me: there’s almost no real craftsmanship left in the places we visited. None of the things you’d usually bring home from a country – no original local souvenirs, nothing handmade with care. Everything looked cheap. And when they did try to make something “traditional,” it came out so strange. There were these little figurines made of natural-looking materials, like tiny creatures – but they didn’t look folk or charming, they looked almost like odd little monsters. Nothing about it felt authentic. Just weird.
We literally couldn’t find a single souvenir we wanted to take home. Not for ourselves, not for my brother, not for anyone. It was as if the regime, or mass tourism, or both, had quietly erased that whole layer of a culture – the small, lovingly-made things – and replaced it with cheap copies of the idea of itself.
Shanghai
When we arrived, we decided not to go up the tower with the group, and I’m glad we didn’t – the weather was bad and they ended up just queueing the whole time. Instead, my mum and I had a bit of time together. We went up the highest building in the city and made it to the 67th floor. The lift was so fast my ears popped.
Then our internet stopped working, and that stressed my mum a little. Without internet, there was no way to contact our guide – all the Meta apps, Telegram and Google are blocked in China. We somehow figured it out, and afterwards we visited a beautiful (very busy) garden. We saw almost the same garden the next day in Suzhou, which felt a bit unnecessary – and meant we didn’t get to see the part everyone calls the “Chinese Venice.” We could also have taken the train to Suzhou instead of spending 2.5 hours on a bus. But – nevermind.
The day ended on a boat, watching Shanghai by night. That was super cool. Really not comparable to any city I’ve been to before. Bangkok feels so young and fresh and active – Shanghai and Beijing didn’t feel like that at all. They felt very specifically Chinese. I still don’t quite know how to describe it.
A Few Things I’m Sitting With
On craftsmanship. Fenghuang stayed with me – those weird little figurines, the cheap shops pretending to be traditional, the whole “ancient city” performance. I keep wondering how much of what we call culture, anywhere, is actually still being made – and how much is just a stage set. And whether other places I love are heading the same way (like Berlin :))
On scale, and on being a tiny country. China gives you a context for where you actually are on this planet. The decisions of presidents and rulers there shape how the whole world will look, what the climate will do, what we’ll all be living with. I’ve felt this for a long time, but it was something else to watch my mum take it in: that astonishment at how, back home, we get so worked up about what are basically hobbit problems – tiny things that, in the big picture, don’t really matter. What is 10.5 million Czech people compared to crowds like these?
It made me even more certain that the most useful thing is to take care of yourself and the small circle around you, and to make whatever impact you can there. Locally. With the people in front of you. We’re not going to fix the world from a country the size of one Chinese district.
I also kept thinking about the 9-9-6 work culture – 9am to 9pm, six days a week. The exhaustion of it. People moving through their lives almost robotically, with no real space of their own. And then us, in Europe, with so much free time, so much choice, so much room. We are the cream of the world in this very specific sense – we have time. We’re allowed to be slow, to take a year off, to travel for two months, to ask ourselves what we actually want. That is an enormous privilege I don’t want to forget again.
On going home. There was this small moment on the trip that I keep coming back to. At one point our guide was handing back our passports – but only to the people over 60. She included my mum in that group, and my mum was shocked. Genuinely caught off guard. Suddenly being on that side of a line. I tried to tell her that it’s actually great – that being 60+ means you finally get to stop caring so much, that you don’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore, that you’re allowed to just enjoy. But it was interesting to watch her be a bit shaken by it.
I think I needed this trip to just be with my mum, without being her daughter-the-traveller, the one who’s always somewhere else. To share the same tiredness, the same overwhelm, the same Chinese virus or whatever it was. To watch her – how she talks to other people in the group, what makes her laugh, what makes her tired, how she’s surprised that she’s turned 60, how she carries that 60-year-old body through 12-hour days. To see her as a whole person, with her own way of being in the world. Not just my mum. That was maybe the real Year of the Fire Horse gift.
And One More Thing
I’ve been thinking about this since we got back, but I didn’t want to write it next to the rest. It belongs on its own.
I feel like my mum is slowly letting herself live again, since my dad is no longer here. As if she finally allows herself to go on – to accept that nothing else is left, that life doesn’t end with him. That she can still have a “second life.” Still have beautiful experiences. That her role on this earth was never just to take care of my dad, who was so deeply lost in his addiction.
Watching her in China – laughing with strangers, getting overwhelmed, being curious, being tired, being sixty and somewhere completely new – I think I saw it. The first signs of her allowing herself something that’s just hers.
I hope my dad is in a better place now. And I hope my mum gets a long, soft, surprising second life. She deserves it.