Abigail Washburn tour diary - Regina to China and Somewhere in the Middle

* Note: "Regina" is pronounced "rah-gina." The town slogan is “Regina rhymes with fun.”

We started at 4 a.m. yesterday from the Ramada in Regina, Canada. First layover in Minneapolis for eight hours, then Tokyo, then Beijing. Just arrived in our Beijing digs. Sitting on a high floor of Oakwood Apartments near Beijing’s third ring road at the airport expressway exit. The view out the window is of other newly built residential towers just like this one, and a neon-bannered restaurant of food in the Xiamen style that the receptionists says is “hai keyi” (translation: "it’s ok") with a smirk on their face… That means "don’t eat there." Everything else around here is closed. I’m hungry. It’s 1 a.m., and the only thing to eat is complimentary cornflakes and warm milk left as a welcoming present.

I’ve been coming to Beijing since 1996 and never stepped foot in this particular section of town. Or maybe I have and I wouldn’t know it... Changes here are so radical and vast it’s disconcerting, especially if you try to make sense of it. When I first came to China I was overwhelmed, and I wasn’t even sure I liked it. As a westerner it struck me as a caucaphonous, treacherous, malodorous mayhem...

I can remember being packed like sardines on a bus going 10 mph at the most down the main thoroughfare, certain that no one else could possibly fit on, with a child rammed into my right groin, an old lady's back hump propped on top of my butt and a laborer’s head nuzzled into my armpit. We managed to cram another 25 people before someone disembarked. The bikes passed us. The squish factor wasn’t as bad as it sounds, but the bikes passing us was over the top. I started riding my bike after that.

I can remember the monsoons in Shanghai causing a mold like an evil groundcover growing up the side of the curtain in my dorm room and the stench of the local bathrooms coming alive when the pipes flooded and carried sewage all over the campus.

I remember puking bad meat out the side of a bus all night between Urumqi and Kashgar, plastering the side of the bus with vomit until in the morning the acid had stained the upper right hand corner of the bus company name green. I thought I was going to pass out from dehydration until another woman’s one-worse fate saved me as she crashed into a severe epileptic seizure. When she recovered she still had to stand the remaining 10 hours to Kashgar.

I remember my parents visiting me for the first time in Beijing. They had flown in and were aching form the long journey. I had seen a massage parlor sign in my hood and thought that was just the antidote. As we walked down the hall to our separate massage rooms, I realized that we were in a whorehouse and two prostitutes were going to offer my father special services once out of my view… Not letting it sink until I was in "my" room and the door shut, I finally snapped to, ran down the hall calling my dad’s name and told him not to accept anything extra. Why didn’t we leave? Are prostitutes good masseuses?

I would still describe China as a vast, invigorating puzzle that will never make sense to my western upbringing. But this is only one small convex corner of an intricate glass orb shooting rays in all directions. It isn’t possible to just come and remain a visitor if you intend to stay for any length of time…unless, of course, you're on a corporate card for Olympic land and headed home as soon as you finish watching women’s volleyball.

China won and claimed the Olympic games, and it’s staked out a significant amount of the real estate on the map of my human existence too. This doesn’t scare me. And, maybe the Olympic types won’t get out wholly unclaimed either.

I know the non-fiction vignettes above aren’t exactly compelling, but each one embodies something that changed my life, opened my mind and made me think beyond myself. And that’s the crud on the bottom of the shoe. The list of mindblowing events that have stolen my heart and placed my spirit firmly in the middle of the two lands is ongoing…from a steaming bowl of noodles in Zhongdian on a cold frosty morning to mahjong in the bamboo park in Chengdu to dancing on the square with Lao Peng in Xi’an to sitting in the creaking chair listeining to lao wang tell me stories of the cultural revolution and the amazing feats of the human spirit. I’ll be keeping track of all colors of the spectrum and trying to share them with you on this brief jaunt through and beyond Olympic land.

We received the itinerary from the State Department today, which is bookended by plays in Beijing and a tour thru southeast China to Guangzhou, Dongguan and Foshan. Tomorrow is the kickoff performance at a private party at the U.S. Ambassador’s home in the old embassy village between the 2nd and 3rd ring road. I’ve been fortunate to play for the honorable Sandy Randt and his wife Sarah, and their friends in their home every year since 2005. Will their home be filled with the Olympic crowd? Or will it be the regular mish mosh of U.S. expats and multi-spangled cultural representatives including a small smattering of Chinese officials? Pigs in a blanket were served after the show last time. More to come.

Read Paste's Catching Up With... Q&A with Washburn here.