My school was very, very lucky last year to have a terrific exchange teacher from China. Na is an English teacher at home, but while she was at my school, she taught introductory Chinese. She and her husband Li are lovely people, and they live in Baoding, a smaller city fairly near Beijing. When Na heard that I was visiting, she and Li graciously offered to drive into the city and spend a day with me. When I saw Na in the lobby of the hotel on Thursday morning, she surprised me by saying that she had taken Friday off from school and could spend two days with me! Lucky me! I was feeling a bit worried about being on my own on Friday, and so I could just relax and enjoy her company.
On Thursday, Na and Li took me to the Summer Palace. I am so glad to have been. I think it is my favorite sight from the whole trip. It is a huge complex built around a beautiful lake to be an escape from the city’s summer heat for the royal family. During the Ming dynasty, when it was built, the Summer Palace would have been located in a suburb north of the city, but today the city has grown up around it. It is a palace, like the Forbidden City, with great halls, temples, and pavilions for the emperor’s public duties, but there are lots of buildings for the royal family to use privately, and they are set amid beautiful forests, meadows, and gardens. There are lovely, shaded walkways, and bridges where the family members could wander to enjoy the beautiful views of the lake. One of the most remarkable things about the Summer Palace are its outdoor corridors. Every beam spanning the top of the corridor is painted with a different scene. No two are alike. Apparently the emperor employed his 100,000 artists and craftsmen during the summer months, too. Another highlight is an area called “Suzhou Street.” One of the Ming emperors had visited Suzhou, which is a beautiful city in the south of China that is built on a river. He had become enchanted with its canals and footbridges, and decided to make his own little Suzhou at the Summer Palace. He constructed an artificial village along a creek on the palace grounds to look like a typical street in Suzhou. He even outfitted his little village with real shops and teahouses and residences so that he and the royal family could pretend to go out into the real world and trade and order shoes and have dinner, kind of like Marie Antoinette had a hobby farm so that she could play at being a milkmaid. Na and Li were excellent tour guides, explaining things to me and translating the signs into English. We had a wonderful day wandering and looking at this beautiful place.
After all of that walking, we were hungry. It was time, of course, to have Peking duck! Na and Li took me to their favorite place for roast duck, and it was definitely not touristy. Our meal began with steamed snow peas (yum), duck liver (double, triple yum), and duck feet (not as yummy). The duck feet had been deboned, boiled, and then covered with mustard sauce. They were very chewy and full of cartilage, but didn’t have much flavor. Li said that Chinese chefs don’t waste anything and to expect to be served the duck’s head as well. When the duck arrived, it had already been carved into thin slices. Na said that the chefs carve the birds very carefully so that each slice will have muscle, fat, and skin, the famous part. The skin really is as crispy as can be. It crunches audibly when one bites down on it. Na and Li also taught me the proper way to eat Peking duck. First, I took a thin, round dough wrapper with my chopsticks and spread it out on my plate. It looked like a won-ton wrapper, but it had much more flavor. Next, I took a piece of duck meat and dipped it into the special sauce. (I had an ah-ha moment when I first did this: we call that dark, savory sauce that comes in little packets with our Chinese take-out food “duck sauce” because it was made to go with this dish! Maybe you knew that, but I never quite put it together until now.) When I had put plenty of duck sauce on the meat, I dropped it on the middle of the wrapper and then added a few pieces of thinly sliced green onion. Using my chopsticks (and my fingers) I rolled the duck up in its wrapper, folded it in half, and ate it like a dumpling. Fantastic! I wish I could eat Peking duck in Atlanta. I’m sure that with enough practice, a good cook could come pretty close to making this dish at home, but getting the duck’s skin to darken and become so crispy and crunchy is a trade secret, and apparently very hard to do. I’m so glad to have gotten the chance to try it.
On Friday, I had a long shopping list. Although I had purchased some souvenirs with Lili in Shenyang, I still needed to pick up several gifts. Na and Li were up for it, and they took me to Wangfujing Street, which is just steps from my hotel. This street is closed to cars so that it is safe for pedestrians to wander along as they shop. At the southern end of the street there is a huge, beautiful shopping mall, where I didn’t have to do any bargaining. Li said that I should expect to pay more here for what I was looking for, but that I could count on it to be good quality. Paying a little more to not have to bargain with the vendors and to know that the silk scarf I was looking for was real silk is just fine with me. I actually enjoyed looking through the lovely stores and picking out some nice things.
Then, Na and Li took me to a nearby neighborhood that is an art district. The shops along these old streets were full of calligraphy, paintings, and antiques – real and fake. Li spent some time as a boy studying calligraphy and explained about the process of painting Chinese calligraphy and about all of the various brushes, bowls, and stamps an artist would need. We went into a shop that sells all of these items to have a closer look, and then we wandered into a gallery selling calligraphic works by famous artists. Some of them were outrageously expensive! There is a lot more to it than meets the eye, and although I still don’t like calligraphy as a decoration in my own home, I certainly appreciate it much, much more.
My last day in Beijing was lovely, and I had such a nice time visiting with Na and Li. It is sad to think that it may be a very long time before I see them again, and I will miss them.
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