China - The true melting pot?

After soaking up our dose of authentic cultural exploration, we bused back to the city of Man Zhou Li and checked into our hotel. The city was unprecedented from my experience in China – every building was brightly colored, clean, and constructed with the façade of Russian architecture – a ploy to draw Russian tourists and business from across the border, which was only 5 miles away. There was even an enormous Russian Orthodox church standing on a hill just outside of town, complete with fake flying buttreses.

Standing under the impressively powerful showerhead of the plush hotel, it was odd to think about having ridden a train, a bus, a magic carpet, a fake soviet tank, a horse, and a camel on the same day. Sitting with other classmates at a table in the hotel’s disco club later that night, it was even stranger to reflect on the glitzy neon lights that trimmed the ceiling and lit up the dance floor. They were probably powered by one of the enormous coal plants we drove by earlier in the day.

It was tempting to wish that the forces of

modernity and cultural imperialism had not yet infiltrated the “purity” of Inner Mongolia and its nomadic heritage. It’s very easy to think that way when you drop in on their lifestyle for a few hours and then return to fresh bed linens in a Western-style hotel. I had had a minute to talk with one of the locals at the “village” during the afternoon, and he told me how much he wanted to get out of China – to go to live in a city in Korea or the United States. The view from his hut seemed hard to exchange for a life of anonymity in a large city, but to him, the open grasslands probably looked like a mindless, boring lifestyle with no job opportunities.

On the way to Man Zhou Li, we dropped in on a husband and wife who still lived in a set of three traditional, portable huts. While the sixty-something year-old couple seemed to live fairly traditionally, their four sons had all gone off to universities and held jobs in distant cities. A windmill powered their satellite TV. Their rounds huts, seeming so small from the road, are actually rather spacious when you get inside. One of the huts had a wood stove in the middle with a removable flap in the top for venting. Both the man and his wife seemed very cheerful and content to spend the summer poking around their 2,500 acre spread.