Pulling Into Jinan Now

I’m sentimental.  But sometimes Shandong really does look like something from a Pearl Buck novel.  The earth is yellow.  Every minute or so on our high- speed journey we pass a brick village with yellow daub and wattle walls beneath red tile roofs, dusty ochre pathways. Out now from the Dezhou rail station the countryside extends out in every direction.  Flat, overly cultivated farmland with green shoots and trees for harvest in a row.  To my left a new high-speed rail line appears to be under construction.  Electrical wires crisscross the land no matter where you look.  It only vaguely suggests the peninsula that spawned the Boxers and their amulets.  Modernity is ever more forcefully overlaid, in spite of the simple villages, in spite of the individuals who still burn waste in the field. 

I’m cooking up another Shandong trip for one month from now.  Fifty I’ll turn.  I’ve no business going anywhere fancy.  But perhaps I can come out here.  Qin Shi Huang Di and approximately forty subsequent emperors have all climbed Taishan.  Mao Ze Dong climbed Taishan and called it like he saw it:  “the east is red.”  There is a chairlift.  So my kids can perhaps meet me up top.  But I’ll have a go at climbing it.  A quarter century in this land with dozens of trips to Shandong and I’ve never seen the holy mountain. 

We’re pulling into Jinan now.  It doesn’t look like anything that particularly suggests Jinan.  There are rows and rows of new apartment buildings, just like there are in my neighborhood in Beijing.  Someday these will all be great legacy structures that speak to a boom time long gone.  There is a pagoda off to the right.  Where is Huashan?  Jinan has a Huashan. It’s hanging in my house in the Zhao Meng Fu painting.   Both Qianlong and Li Bai stopped dead in their tracks when they saw it.  I can only imagine it’s pocked with tacky buildings and obscured by near by encroaching development these days.  

Later, meetings done, I’m waiting for the train home.  The Jinan high speed-rail station is not dissimilar to the Beijing highspeed rail station or the Hangzhou high speed rail station.  Dramatic, uninspired cavernous spaces with lots of shops, none of which I care to enter.  I am in a section near my gate.   I need to find an ATM.  There are literally eight banking establishments within nearby eyeshot.  Walking over to the first, there are no ATMs.  None of these places have ATMs.  They’re all pointless, showcase VIP oases for high net worth individuals.  They are all empty.   A garbled announcement, a mad scramble to the gate.  The Beijing train, approacheth.