His Sound Was Driven Out

Is Hunan tropical?  No.  Is it semi-tropical?  I don’t think so but it must be awful close.  Outside it’s just stopped raining and we’re on a highway heading up through a world of green hills that extend forever.  I notice that I’m not marvelling at their raw, innate, natural power.  It is China and there is always too great a density of humanity for that.  These hills are better appreciated for all the work people have done to work around them and beside them. 

I must have traveled through three dozen tunnels by now, on this trip.  Nome of them have been especially long, the longest one was maybe a few hundred yards.  But each a phenomenal effort, certainly.  There is another elevated highway under construction off below me that will tee with this one here. I’ve asked the driver if he’s heard the weather.  Tis’ the second person who told me later today will be sunny.  But then he reminds me that you ought never to trust the weather people. 

Fenghuang left me confused, I must say. The setting cut down to a winding river between the green hills provides an idyllic start.  And there are many obviously redone water front buildings in a faux old style along with a dozen older fashioned, facsimile, reproductions of building that were or perhaps never were.  And there were many, many Chinese people.  My word.  Some were in groups ploughing along behind a flag poking up above a raincoat.  Some were independent, couples, or families.  And of course there were lots of young people looking for fun. 

Chauvinist perhaps, but I’m going to say that China is still learning to use its spending power to demand something different.  So much uniformity in entertainment.   Clearly if the foreigners were here in numbers, they would push a certain kind of commercial response.  With Chinese in such volume driving the spend, we have a chain store mentality to the whole village.  One group must own a large portion of the town and have deiced place the same sort of store in over and over in different locations.  I wouldn’t note if it had been a trinket store, because I’m not shopping or trinkets.  But, as mentioned yesterday, there were profusion of drum stores which were so glaringly out of place.  Someone must have decided that vaguely “ethnic” looking bongos were precisely what visitors would buy.  Furthermore, someone must have decided that having a young or sometimes not so long woman playing the drum at the entrance would no doubt lure aspiring Mango Santamaria’s into the store and generate sales.  We saw eight such stores last night.

And if bongo stores were the sum of the noise pollution, that would be management but of course it was only a small annoyance that came to the fore when anyone walked passed such a store.  We must have passed twenty-five places with young men playing acoustic guitars and singing earnest but unconvincing pop songs.   I joked with my friend that perhaps we were unaware that there was a budding Elliott Smith among them but before I could decide if one guy or another had something to say his sound was driven out by the next crooner a few steps away.

There were also six, perhaps nine different places that decided that what the ancient riverside township really need were mega-volume clubs, with DJs yelling, and sirens wailing and a few men standing around the bar.  I would never want to stay in the old town with this absurd volume threshold.  If it were silent it might feel a bit more like Venice at night, or perhaps Varanasi meets Venice at night but the noise-pollution is so overwhelming it can only be something China ruined in a Chinese sort of way.  Even if someone has the courage to say this is a compromise and a degradation of Fenghuang life-quality  the city administrators will no doubt complain that they are interrupting commerce.  This will take another generation. 

The stones were slippery and my feet hurt, walking back home to our hotel, avoiding people.  These days few people stared at us, though we were probably only two or three other foreigners we saw amidst what must have been seventy-thousand tourists.   Very few people called out "laowai."  Progress.  No one seemed to care about us.

Saturday 05/12/18