Curious Peering

The mapping visual on this Air China flight is pretty cool.  I’m imagining flying over parts of Henan I’ve never seen.  Places I’d like to take in, slowly.  I wouldn’t hesitate to try life for a while, in a third-tier Chinese city of distinction.  But then, I have to educate my children.   This pins me in to one of three areas, none of which offer much of anything new.

Let’s assume you didn’t have to worry about an international school, what city in China would you want to live in?  The first place that comes to mind in Qingdao.  I am enamored with the province of Shandong.  That city has mountains down to the water, historic deco districts and a more nascent sense of possibility than the tired ball-belle citadels of Beijing and Shanghai. 

If I had to plant my terrarium in the provinces I’d likely pick Shandong as there’s an affinity, and a familial tie, and it’s a central pillar that keeps the civilization aloft.  But I’m not sure where else I’d live.  The old downtown in Yantai is two blocks in either direction.  Jinan’s built out, nondescript.  Weifang has lovely old memories and Zibo older extant history, but they’ve been brutalized into a modernity, and continuity, inhabited nonetheless by the sturdy decedents of the Qi Kingdom.  Binzhou, perhaps.  There is a lot of water and God knows how long a drive to a reasonable airport. 

A Ming village in Anhui?  Something with standing architecture in Yunnan?  Tourists and more tourists from every part of China and worse still the ones who speak English, would take the shine off all that quickly.  The Mandarin belt of the northern Yellow River bend is coal extracted and coal heated and aquifer depleted.   Huadong is built out for miles from the Yangzi-head, costly, crowded.  I've already done this, many times. 

The circuitous peering of a tired mind, looking for Combray.   Something satisfying would take work to find, work to cultivate.  And the schools aren’t there so it’s all idle anyway.  Get ready to fly back down in to Beijing.