The Great Wall and The Great Zoo
Beijing, China
The frigid bite in the September morning air in Beijing made me glad I had brought along a jacket. With the help of the hotel clerk who acted as my interpreter, I hired a taxi to drive me to The Great Wall. I thought that my request was simple enough, but I was wrong.
Because of the demands of the 50th anniversary celebration under Communist rule that Beijing was carrying out that day, a lot of the streets had been barricaded. Normal traffic flow had to take alternate routing. Instead of driving me right up to the entrance of The Great Wall, the taxi driver had to drop me off about half a mile down the road from the wall. In that universal sign language that taxi drivers use to talk to us tourists, he told me to walk to a nearby ticket office where I could buy my ticket for The Great Wall. I promptly followed his instructions without even contemplating that I might have misunderstood them.
Off in the far distance, I could see winding sections of The Great Wall. All I had to do was buy a ticket and step through the official entrance. Excited that I was finally going to see one of The Seven Wonders of the World, I crossed a parking lot, bought a ticket at the ticket booth and got on a bus filled with local Chinese tourists who were enjoying their government-endorsed day off.
The bus didn’t start up right away. We sat for at least thirty minutes. A bunch of monkeys kept running up to the bus to be fed by the tourists inside the bus. Just about everyone was throwing peanuts, slices of bread and pieces of bananas out the window to the monkeys who were jumping on each other and shrieking at one another as they competed for the bits of food. After half an hour of this monkey business, the bus finally started up and down the road.
We stopped in front of a large, solid, iron gate that was twice as high as the bus. I saw there was a fence that stretched out on either side of the gate. I couldn’t figure out the reason for that fence. Maybe, I thought, that was their way of keeping out the people who didn’t want to pay the entrance fee.
The iron gate opened. We drove through and came to a stop in front of a second set of solid, iron gates. This gate also had a fence that stretched out on either side of it. I automatically surmised that this fence was an additional measure to keep out the people who didn’t want to pay the entrance fee. The bus sat idling by while the first gate behind us closed. After that gate closed, the gate in front of us opened. We drove through, stopped, waited for the gate to close behind us, then proceeded along a winding road.
I thought it was odd that they had taken such extreme measures to keep out the people who didn’t want to pay for tickets. Two solid iron gates and two sets of fences? Wasn’t that a bit extreme? I was stuck on those erroneous assumptions until I saw the sights right outside my bus window.
I noted lions and tigers running loose around the bus. That was when I realized I had gotten on the bus for an outdoor zoo! I can’t believe this, I said to myself. How could this have happened?
In a not-too-graceful scamper, I scooted out of my seat and walked up to the bus driver. “Excuse me,” I said, “but I got on the wrong bus. I was trying to go see The Great Wall.” The bus driver stopped the bus and turned to look at me. He gave me a quizzical smile and shook his head to tell me he didn’t understand what I was saying.
I’m Vietnamese. Since I had arrived in Beijing, everyone I came across assumed I was Chinese. When I spoke to them in English, they looked at me as if I might have been an expatriate Chinese who had to resort to speaking English because he had forgotten how to speak his native Mandarin.
“The Great Wall,” I peeped out to the bus driver one more time. He maintained the quizzical smile that told me I wasn’t getting anywhere in my communication. I looked back at the crowd on the bus to see if anyone might have understood what I’d just said. The people looked back at me with a collective, confused expression. I thought about shouting, “The Great Wall,” one more time in a last-ditch effort for aid, but I saw my effort would have been futile. Nobody had any idea what I was uttering and I had no idea how to tell them I had boarded the wrong bus. Furthermore, it was all too obvious that I was holding up the zoo tour. The only option was to sit down, shut up and enjoy the zoo tour. And that’s what I did.
Two hours later, having seen more lions and tigers than planned, I found the entrance to The Great Wall, half a mile up the road from the zoo. I bought the correct ticket, passed through the correct entrance and walked for a mile on top of the Wall that I had only read about in books.
I returned to my hotel that afternoon thinking about how much my visit to The Great Wall had been well worth the effort. Not only had I seen and walked on the centuries-old slabs of stones, but I had also seen and ridden through a zoo tour that will always remain in my memory as The Great Zoo.
I left China two days later thinking how fortunate I was to have a job that allowed me to fly to Beijing for the weekend. I also departed China pondering a side note of curiosity about my image in America and China. In America, people keep mistaking me for Chinese. In China, they also keep mistaking me for Chinese.
