【09.10 The Atlantic】Village Dreamers

和解团结

【原文链接】http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910/chinese-town【作者】James Fallows
【原文媒体】The Atlantic
【出版日期】2009年10月
【原文标题】Village Dreamers
【说明】James Fallows是前Atlantic驻华记者（刚返回美国），他的博客是jamesfallows.theatlantic.com；维基百科上他的介绍在http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fallows


【原文】
In a lushly beautifulcorner of China, an experiment is under way to determine how lush andbeautiful the country can remain—or become—as its economy continues togrow. The test is occurring in Yunnan province, the hilly andsubtropical area just north of Burma, Laos, and Vietnam, and it hasbrought together an improbable combination of American and Chinesepersonalities, institutions, and historical connections.

The main American player is Brian Linden, 47 years old, who came toChina in 1984 and has been here most of the time since. Linden is wellover six feet tall, with expressive, theatrical features that once werefamiliar to hundreds of millions of people. Soon after his arrival, hewas spotted by a movie director while jogging down a Beijing street andcast as the lead in a Chinese movie. The film, He Came From Across the Pacific, was based on the tragic story of John Zeidman,an American exchange student who caught viral encephalitis in China anddied in 1982. In one emotional scene, Linden, who has learned that heis dying, leans over and kisses his female Chinese friend—chastely, onthe forehead. Or so I was told by Linden this spring, as hemelodramatically reenacted the scene with his wife, Jeanee.

In the early 1980s, Linden worked in China as a cameraman andtranslator for CBS. After graduate study at Stanford, he returned inthe 1990s and traveled constantly across China, spending at least 200nights aboard Chinese trains. While studying at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center,he met and eventually married Jeanee Quan, whose grandparents were fromsouthern China but who had grown up in San Francisco, speaking Englishbut not Chinese. In fairness and because it’s relevant to the Lindens’bearing as public figures in China, I should point out that she too istall by China’s standards, and pretty by anyone’s.

Linden’s parents had run an antique shop in Chicago, and through the1990s Brian and Jeanee built an Asian-arts-and-antiques business. Theyspent much of each year traveling to Asian villages to buy paintings,furniture, and objets, which they then sold in the summertimeat a gallery in the upscale resort community of Door County, Wisconsin.All the while, Linden says, they were looking for something more—aplace where they could build a cultural center that would preserve andhonor Chinese arts and handicrafts and, they hoped, provide a haven forcreative artists from around the world.

Throughout my time in China, I was attracted to dreamers—to people,Chinese and foreign, with big plans for what they’d like to achieve inthe country. This is no doubt what drew me to the Lindens when I metthem in Beijing last year and what led our families to become friends.After they had spent years considering locations, including three yearsin which they home-schooled their two young sons in hotel rooms, theyfound what they were looking for. (The two boys, now ages 13 and 10,are still being home-schooled.) They sold their house in America andput the proceeds into a derelict four-courtyard compound in the Yunnanvillage of Xizhou.

Xizhou (the name means “happy town”) is a sleepy-looking place withan impressive history, on the shores of Erhai Lake, 12 miles north ofthe larger and better-known city of Dali. To get there, you either flynonstop from Beijing, Shanghai, or Hong Kong to Lijiang and then drivetwo or three hours, or you fly to Kunming, stay overnight, and fly toDali the next day (the flights are morning-only, so you can’t make thetrip in one day). There are normal Chinese hotels in the vicinity, butmost Westerners will prefer the Linden Centre, at about $100 a night.  

Through the long era of trade in tea and horses between this part ofChina and Tibet and Burma, Xizhou was an enclave for prosperousmerchants, officials, and scholars. The people of the region are mainlyfrom the Bai ethnic group;Bai cities have a distinct architectural style, with sharply archedroofs and richly decorated tile work and wall paintings. During WorldWar II, the Yale-in-China campus ended up in Xizhou, for safety from the oncoming Japanese. When Flying Tigers aviatorsflew supplies from Burma to Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists in Chungking(now Chongqing), American radio and radar operators in Xizhou were oneof their first points of contact after they made it over the Himalayanhump.

The crumbly radar complex is still there—the Lindens hope to make ita museum—and so are Yale’s old Bai-style buildings. All around thosestructures and the courtyard compound the Lindens have bought is anexpanse of paddy land that stretches to Erhai Lake on one side and tothe Himalayan foothills on the other. In arid northern and westernChina, to depend on the land for sustenance is to be poor. In Xizhouthe soil is so rich, the rain so steady, and the climate so mild thatthe valley has a sense of rural abundance like that of the AmericanMidwest. In poor farm villages of the drylands, children wear rubberflip-flops or often-repaired hand-me-down shoes. The shoes we saw onchildren’s feet in Xizhou looked stylish and new.


In Xizhou, the Lindens worked with party officials to securesomething rarely accorded foreigners: the right to use a “Class A”historical relic and restore it—its tiling, wooden arches and fretwork,painted murals. The buildings survived the 1960s because a People’sLiberation Army detachment had encamped there, keeping out the RedGuards. The Lindens have invested their savings in the faith that therest of the town will be restored in similar taste—as local officialsassure them—making the Linden Centre and Xizhou an internationallyappealing cultural destination.

This is a big assumption in today’s China, wherethe population is rich enough to travel domestically in huge numbersbut where the aesthetic of travel is unrefined by Western standards.People travel in big groups, on big buses, behind guides with flags, toa prescribed list of “famous” sites. Across China, “ancient” villagesare being redeveloped in a kitschy, gift-shop-heavy way epitomized by Lijiang,100 miles north of Xizhou, a favorite stop of many Chinese tour groupsand a disappointment to most Westerners. On my first visit to Xizhou,Brian Linden assured me that the local officials had all “learned fromLijiang” and were planning to do something “really authentic andclassy.” On my second visit, I wandered into a real-estate showroomcomplete with models of a new housing estate to be built in “AncientXizhou.” I hope the Lindens have bet right.


   James Fallows is an Atlantic national correspondent; his site is at jamesfallows.theatlantic.com.