I love a
good travelogue.
No matter if
someone is showing me a slideshow, I’m reading a magazine, or I’m just hearing
about it over a cup of coffee, I’m frequently entranced re-imagining tales of riding
in hot-air balloons over France, witnessing riots in Ireland, or putting bird
seed in your sister’s hood at Trafalgar Square while she isn’t looking, so she
gets attacked by pigeons.
Romanticizing
mundane walks through a European street is one of my favorite pastimes and
thinking about exotic, far-away places and spaces leaves me in a fantasy world
of first class flights and champagne that (I now know) is as far from the
reality as possible. When I was still in possession of my naiveté, however, the
only thing that could ruin my musings was when someone said,
“I had fun,
but it sure isn’t America, and I’m glad to be back.”
Instantly,
my imaginings evaporated and all I could think was:
“Well…DUH! Of
course it wasn’t America. It bet it was better! You just got back from riding
in gondolas and lazing about in palazzos. In America, you probably would have
been riding in SUVs and lazing about in the McDonalds drive through…”
In my mind,
America seemed so…ordinary. Timbuktu, Shanghai, London, New Delhi, Dublin, my
mind didn’t want to make these places any less than I had imagined them, and I
scoffed that returning to America could be so wonderful.
Going to
Tiananmen Square, however, made me realize why foreign stories are always
upended with my old daydream killer.
Before I
begin, contradictions, restrictions, and all-around ridiculous bureaucracy tend
to make me laugh. It always seems to be people can’t see the pointlessness of
it all and they either get really mad or timid. I, however, get giddy and start
to skip. Literally.
As we
crowded onto the bus from the hotel, I couldn’t help bouncing in my seat. I
kept imagining what everything looked like in 1989 and wondered if we were on
Tank Man’s street. Since I had known I was coming to Beijing, I was unable to
contain my joy at going to the paragon of ridiculous restrictions, and planned
on doing something sarcastic that screamed
“’MURICA!” As I scampered off the bus, however, I was struck with an epiphany:
The Chinese
government don’t play, y’all.
Tiananmen
Square, at first, seems to be your typical square that is able to hold 500,000
people. Really big and really empty (except for the line to see Mao’s body).
Every couple hundreds of feet, there is a group of tourists, the odd street
vendor, and really elaborate lamp posts that immediately caught my attention.
Classic and elegant, these lamp posts have obviously been here for a while, but
on closer examination, I realized they have been subject to some modernization
and now each is home to a large, wholesale electronic store.
Speakers are
arranged like a hive under the lights and at least five cameras are pointed in
every direction. If I pulled my little stunt, it would be seen from 614
different angles, and would probably result in me starring in my own
combination show of LockedUp: Abroad and Survivor. Sitting in a Chinese jail
cell, I’m sure I would have still found the situation hilarious, but in a very
dark
“Call-my-embassy-I-promised-my-mother-this-wouldn’t-happen-I-don’t-want-a-bullet-int-the-head”
sort of way.
Still marveling
at all the security, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was standing on some kid’s
(who probably wasn’t much older than me) grave. Would I have had his courage to
stand up for my beliefs and hunger strike in the middle of a Square? How could
this place –filled with families, fans, and fake, waving Mao watches—be the
staging ground and cemetery of a better organized Occupy Wall Street?
Suddenly, being
there, knowing what I know, Tiananmen stopped being funny.
It stopped
being something I had only read about in history class.
It stopped
being passing pop culture.
It became
serious.
It became
real.
It became
morbid; a hallowed ground showed no reverence because the principles it stood
for ran counter to the goals of the reigning status quo.
I finally
realized that my friends weren’t talking about the little things in foreign
countries that make you realize you aren’t in America, like the food, the
toilets, the beds, the bugs, the fruit, the traffic, the streets, the houses,
the farmer’s markets, the night markets, the malls, the mannerisms, the
clothes, the people, etc. etc.
Those are
superficial and (hopefully) you get used to them (I have), but that my friends,
my countrymen and women, were talking about the big things.
Like the
Declaration of Independence. The
Constitution. The Bill of Rights.
For many
Americans, those documents can seem like old, crusty pieces of paper that you
are obliged to see when you pass through D.C.; however, when you don’t have
them and are staying in a country that fundamentally doesn’t understand them…
that’s stuff I could never get used to not having and would never want to…
Proud to be
an American,
Mr. Mockler
