Oh, the irony – Nanjing

Nanjing’s airport knows how to make a lady feel special. When you land there, rather than being dumped unceremoniously from your plane onto the tarmac – where you’d then have to catch a bus to your gate – you actually step directly into an airport. After making it through a domestic flight in China (where fellow passengers begin rummaging around in the overhead bins at about the same time the wheels touch ground) this is no small luxury.

Going straight from the plane into the airport also gave us a few extra minutes of clean air, which is nice because Nanjing seems to live in a glowing fog. And the higher you go, the brighter and more numbing the fog gets. From our 58^th floor hotel room, the ground below looked out of focus and diffused. If you didn’t look out the window you might be able to pretend that you were at some anonymous coast, enveloped by a rolling, misty fog. But a single glance outside and you knew there was no sea and there was no shore. There were just the invisible factories pumping out their industrial clouds.

But Nanjing (南京) is an important place and well worth visiting regardless of air quality issues. Nanjing literally means “Southern Capital” and it was first named the capital for all of China in 1368 by the Ming Dynasty. And after the Qing Dynasty was overthrown in 1911, Nanjing was the provisional capital for the new Republic of China with Sun Yatsen as its first President. Chiang Kai-shek also governed from Nanjing before the city's 1949 “liberation” by the Communists, who then moved the capital to Bejing, while Chiang’s Guomindang fled to Taiwan. It was fascinating to visit the sites where these men led China towards a modern history they couldn’t have envisioned. And it was equally fascinating to see Chinese tourists walking through these spaces.

We appreciated the irony of flying north to reach the “Southern Capital” but we were a little less enthusiastic about the irony in eating Japanese ramen our first night there. We were tired and bleary eyed and only midway through our late evening meal did we make the connection between the cuisine and the memorial hall we would visit the next day. Nanjing was the site of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre (also known as The Rape of Nanjing) when Japanese troops killed over 300,000 residents and raped more than 20,000 women after invading the city. The memorial hall is extremely moving and its English language signage is measured in its presentation of a horrific series of events. The only unsuccessful aspect of the visit was our being culled from the crowd based on our looks and made to log our citizenship in a small notebook off to the side of the main entrance. There was no introduction and no invitation – a guard pointed at us and then pointed towards a notebook. Some might find irony in this as well.

We crammed a lot of sightseeing into one day and after walking through the Presidential Palace and grounds, exploring the 14^th century Ming Palace ruins, cresting 600 year old city walls, eating a lunch of random pastries from the Commune Café, and experiencing the emotionally heavy memorial hall, we were exhausted and ready to sit down to a good meal. Our only other break in the day had come via a brief and surreal visit to Starbucks. They had the red holiday cups and the Christmas music, but they also had a sign in the bathroom saying: “For your safety please do not squat on the toilet seat.”

Nanjing is near Shanghai and like that city is known for its soup dumplings. These, in turn, are notorious for being all about the molten broth inside – making them both terribly difficult to eat and yet something that must be eaten immediately to be properly enjoyed. So for our dinner we bumbled our way through two kinds of lava-filled dumplings, one bursting with a salty and savory crab stew and another that was little more than a quivering soup holder. Both varieties suffered moderate to severe losses as we used our chopsticks to prod, position, and pivot the fragile orbs in the general direction of our mouths. Delivering all of the broth to its intended destination may not have happened (dumpling skin is more delicate than it looks) but the fact that we emerged from the meal burn-free made it an unqualified success.

Another success was finding a street that the concierge’s directions had clearly meant for us to avoid. It was slender and vivid and filled with the narratives of real life. Friends played pool in the street and children slept in the cramped spaces behind storefronts. Curtains fluttered through open doors revealing skimpily-clad women waiting behind, and the noise of mah zhong clattered from tables set out in smoky rooms.

Visiting Nanjing was also a reminder that this country is one big time zone. We’re so used to waking up in the dark of southwestern Chengdu, that opening the curtains to a bright (yet still early) Nanjing morning was an unexpected pleasure.

These simple differences have a way of showcasing how much your world has changed more than any national landmark or presidential palace ever could. It’s because these are the markers you grow used to over time… the way the world looks from your bedroom window, the sense you gain for telling time based on where the sun hits the wall…  these are the rhythms of days and weeks and months, and with enough time they accrue into a life. Or at least a few years in China.