Travel Memories of JFK

I have never been a big fan of New York's JFK International Airport. It runs a close race with Los Angeles' LAX for my least favorite American airport and is on my short list of airports-to-avoid globally.

But it does have a special place in my traveling heart.

It was a hot and sticky day in late August 1996 when I landed at JFK from Columbus with a large suitcase and a large down coat embarking on my first international trip -- a semester in Russia. I still remember nearly passing out from the heat as I waited for the inter-terminal transfer bus (for some reason, I thought it was a good idea to WEAR the down coat while lugging my enormous suitcase). I must have looked utterly ridiculous.

I sat for several hours in the Delta Terminal waiting for the other members of my study group to join for an evening departure. It was the beginning of a life-transforming experience.

It was a year later when I again found myself at JFK boarding a direct flight to Moscow -- by myself. This was one of the scariest moments of my life, as no one was meeting me on the other end and this was long before the days of the new Sheremet'evo and the Aeroexpress Trains. Although I probably paid a bit more than I should have for a taxi upon arrival in Moscow, all was well and it was the beginning of another amazing experience.

I've passed through here many times since, coming and going from many points around the world. While I vastly prefer the experience of entering or departing the US in Detroit (with the soft roar of the air train and the jumping water fountain) or Minneapolis (with its classical music piped into the bathrooms) or even Chicago (where else has a full-scale dinosaur skeleton!), JFK will always be filled with memories.

Where to? Tomorrow morning will find me in Dakar, Senegal, where I will spend four days before traveling on to Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Looking forward to being back in West Africa. Not looking forward to another 10 days away from home.

Cultural Meeting Points

While it could be argued that just about any place on earth is a meeting point for various cultures, there are a few places in the world that represent what I see as “macro” cultural meeting points, where ideas from widely different cultural spheres come together. Often, these cultural entrepôts are more important for the flow of ideas out of them into the various cultural heartlands that mix in these cosmopolitan centers. Cities such as Beirut, Istanbul, Shanghai, and St. Petersburg all come to mind. Harbin, the provincial capital of the northeastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang, is such a cultural meeting point.

If I properly understand the history of Harbin, the city itself was founded by Russian traders and officials in the late nineteenth century, after the treaties of 1858-1860 that opened much of China to western trade (similar treaties gave Britain, France, and other western powers similar influence over areas of the eastern coast of China, including much of Shanghai). The Russian influence is still palpable in the city center, not so much in the sort of faux Russian culture of the shops and restaurants geared toward the legions of Chinese tourists, but in the distinctive fin de siècle architecture that can be found in so many Russian cities. The looming presence of St. Sophia church seems to represent the heart of both this cultural meeting point as well as the contemporary city of Harbin. It stands at one end of what was once the main axis of the town, the other end being the railway station of the Russian-built Trans-Manchurian railway to Vladivostok. 

A vanished world - Queen and Princesses of a Russian ball in Harbin

Yet like so many things in these cultural meeting points, the forms remain but they are indwelled with different meaning as time passes. St. Sophia is no longer a church, but rather a museum exhibiting photos of old Harbin from a distinctly post-revolutionary Chinese perspective. It seems to serve as well as the symbol of this great Chinese city, adorning billboards and even welcome signs at the airport. This warm Saturday morning found it serving as the backdrop for several Chinese couples in their western-style wedding finery. It remains a meeting point. 

St. Sophia Church and the central square of Harbin

While the influence of Harbin in the flow of ideas between west and east in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century pails in comparison to such centers as Tianjin and Shanghai, it served as an important cultural entrepôt between Russia and China, with influence flowing in both directions as the two societies came to know one another. It remains, perhaps, such a meeting point. Russians seem to be about the only “western” tourists that I see, representing perhaps one in every thousand Chinese faces in the city center. While the odd translations and brick-a-brack of the “russkie firmy” (with frequent misspellings, I have to add) may represent a largely vanished Russian culture, the legacy of this intercultural mixing remains strong in booming, globalizing Harbin.

The Phenomenon of Peking Duck

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the joys of dining in China is trying local specialties. In Beijing, this includes Peking Duck (I’m not fully clear to what degree residents of Beijing embrace this or if the Peking Duck restaurant is a phenomenon catering to the burgeoning -- mostly Chinese -- tourist masses as the various “Ottoman” restaurants cater to the tourist masses of old Istanbul).

I’ve had Peking Duck a number of times, but our Beijing dinner on Monday evening was unforgettable. We dined at a multi-story restaurant in a narrow alley off of Wangfujing Street, a major pedestrian passage in central Beijing. My Chinese colleague ordered the set Peking Duck meal.

Appetizers

The meal began with appetizers, which included spicy cucumber slices, sweet dates, dried seahorses in chili oil, and several other vegetable- and tofu-based dishes. The appetizer plates also included several forms of duck:  sliced duck gizzard, shredded duck wing, and, perhaps most interestingly, duck feet served with spicy Chinese mustard (the latter was surprisingly untasty without the mustard and surprising tasty with. Go figure. Chinese food is all about harmony).

duck feet with spicy Chinese mustard

After grazing on the appetizers for 20 minutes or so, the pièce de résistance arrived on a cart. The full roasted duck was shown to us, browned to a beautiful, crisp hue, head and all. The server then proceeded to lob off the head before beginning to carve the duck meat off of the bones, being careful to preserve the pieces of crispy skin. The skin of the Peking duck is the special part to be savored, with its crisp and crackly exterior and its slightly nutty and crystal-like interior. This is accomplished by blowing air between the skin and the flesh of the duck before it is roasted. 

The duck being carved

Peking Duck is eaten in three different ways:  first the skin, then the meat, and finally the soup (more on that below). Both the skin and the meat are eaten by taking a Peking duck pancake (a rice pancake about 5 inches in diameter) and placing in the middle a few shreds of sliced scallion and cucumber dipped in hoisin sauce. After this, some duck is dipped in sauce and then the whole thing is carefully rolled with chopsticks. One variation appears to be stuffing the duck and vegetables into a small raised-dough sesame-seed bun. Many, many pancakes were enjoyed around our table that evening, along with several other fish and tofu dishes accompanying the duck.

But this is not the end, nor even the penultimate piece of this elaborate meal. After the duck had been mostly annihilated by our hungry group, we were presented with yet another shrimp dish, celery stir-fried with walnuts, and breaded duck livers in a sweet and sour sauce. The final dish was perhaps the finest of the evening.

The third and final way of eating Peking duck is duck soup. After the server finishes carving the duck, he or she rushes it back to the kitchen where it is boiled at high heat with some cabbage and tofu to make a broth. This is served in tiny bowls together with the bones. Rendering the meat off of the duck neck using chopsticks was one of the more complicated endeavors of my recent life, and I would be lying to say that I accomplished this with complete success and without splashing a bit of broth.

duck soup

As one of my Chinese friends told me, the only way to be sure that a Chinese meal is truly over is when the server brings a plate of fruit. It is melon season in China, and nearly every meal included mounds of fresh, sugar-sweet watermelon.

Sitting around our table on one of our final evenings in China, our group reflected that over the course of nearly ten days, we had rarely seen anything resembling the same dish twice. Such is the sheer variety of Chinese cookery. With the exception of durian-stuffed pastries, which I quietly avoided (that’s another story), I didn’t find a single dish that I didn’t at least appreciate. But it is hard to surpass Peking duck!

On Art – otherwise known as driving in Beijing

Part of Beijing's Forbidden City

I rarely travel in a group. To be quite honest, while I enjoyed the fellowship of traveling with some dear friends and colleagues across China the following week (if it’s Tuesday, it must be Shenyang…), I can also appreciate the benefits of traveling solo. I’ve never been very patient with luggage.

One significant aspect of travelling en masse is traveling by a rented bus, which becomes cost effective in a group. Our bus driver in Beijing was perhaps the single best driver I have ever encountered (although Ugandan and Lebanese friends could likely give here a run for her money). Not only did she show a remarkable alacrity at managing the maddening traffic of central Beijing, she also had a unique ability to move with lightening speed from the driver’s seat to open the passenger door in the flash of an eye, smiling the whole time.

Driving in Beijing is not for the faint of heart. I often say that we in the United States (along with western Europe and perhaps a few spots in Asia like Hong Kong) drive defensively, while most of the rest of the world drives offensively. While there is a unique play on words to be read here, I mean offensively primarily as the opposite of defense (although it does shade occasionally into the other usage as well). To fail to nose your car into an open space on the road in Kampala or Lima is to show quite a good bit of rudeness. Lane dividers are mere suggestions. The horn has totally different meaning. To wait patiently for others to pass, it seems to me, would send the whole system grinding to a halt. Just as I learned in queues in Russian train stations long ago, to be overly polite is to be quite rude. Pushing and jostling a bit helps everyone to move forward. Yet this is not to suggest that these processes are without rules or represent a state of chaos. While the mass of u-turning cars attempting to turn left on Beijing’s Chang’an Avenue today may look chaotic, a deeper look shows that there is a clear method to the madness, a social contract of sorts. Failure to follow these rules – either through undue politeness or aggressiveness – is destabilizing to the whole system. Driving is, in reality, a fine art and a thing of beauty. Our bus driver in Beijing was a master artist.

Leadership, like driving in Beijing, is also an art. While there are clearly administrative methods and procedures that can contribute to leadership effectiveness, it is the higher-context art of leading in the midst of such inscrutable rules where I believe that real success is found. It doesn’t take a lot of skill to exert command and control leadership. I saw this yesterday while hiking on the Great Wall of China. It was a hot and muggy day and the crowds were immense – wall to wall people (pun only slightly intended). About half way up a particularly long and narrow series of steps, a major bottleneck developed. It appeared to center around an elderly Chinese lady who sat down in the middle of the stairs, unable to go any further. People began to veer around her in the narrow spaces available. Others stopped to figure out what was going on. Some crossed to the other side of the stairs when there was a brief break in the downward flow of people. Suddenly, above the din arose a voice with a tellingly American access. “People, people… this isn’t working,” he shouted. “We need people going up on this side and people going down over here. No one sits down. No one stops. Keep it moving.” All of this was done, of course, with “helpful” illustrative hand gestures. I watched as this man, trying so desperately to organize China, was quite literally swept up in a tide of people totally ignoring him. He was not happy and will likely return from his holiday with stories of nearly dying at the hands of unruly Chinese mobs. Gradually, the situation righted itself. A lady trying to climb on the wrong side was gently squeezed into the flow moving in the proper direction and everyone made their way to the top or the bottom. Everyone survived. (Nearly) everyone was happy, even if a bit hot and sweaty.

Lessons learned?

1.     Do not ever, under any circumstance, visit one of the sections of the Great Wall near Beijing on a hot and humid day in July during Chinese holiday season.

2.     An ability to read the dynamics around you and exercise patience and grace will get you a lot further than command and control.

3.     When hiring a bus for a tour group in Beijing, hire the lady who drove us. She will not disappoint. She’s an artist.

Unavoidable Impressions - July 7

This is my seventh visit to China. No matter how many times or how widely I travel in this country, I cannot escape from its immensity, especially in demographic terms. The sheer press of people and the sheer scope of development never cease to amaze. Driving into the city of Harbin, 30-, 40- and more-storied towers rise by the dozen, if not by the hundred. Cranes are everywhere. Whole new cities, it seems, bloom overnight. I cannot begin to understand the social dynamics of such a rapid change in society. Today, one acquaintance here in Harbin told me that this city has changed more in the past five years than in the past fifty years of his life. This same dynamic plays out in every Chinese city I visit. This country is moving quickly. The challenges of thinking about leadership development in such a context are legion. 

A new development on the edges of Harbin -- one of many -- stretching to the horizon

One of the most enjoyable things about China for me is the food (yes, I know, a surprise to all…). While I rarely meet Chinese food that I do not like, my favorite meals are those that feature local specialties in whatever province. Besides the sheer varieties, I love to see people get excited to share a local specialty, be it Liaoning shrimp and vegetable pies, Sichuan spicy fish, or Zhejiang winter melon soup. Sometimes the food is absolutely unique – unlike anything I’ve ever had before. But other times the special local food is remarkably similar to something I’ve had elsewhere. Even then, the excitement of sharing in such a meal remains. Chinese food as it has traditionally been known in the United States and Europe is, as far as I understand, largely the food of southern China – especially Hong Kong and Guangdong province, perhaps with a bit of Hunan and Sichuan thrown in from time to time. In my experience, the foods of northern China and northeastern China almost never get airing outside of specialized ethnic eateries. Several meals this week in the northeast have included no rice at all, featuring instead varieties of noodles, dumplings, and other wheat- and corn-based foods. Yesterday’s lunch near Shenyang was among the best meals of my life, featuring Chinese barbequed ribs, beef and potatoes served under a pancake, fish cooked with boiled eggs, freshly made warm soy milk, shredded tofu sheets in a spicy vinegar-soy sauce, and innumerable other dishes. The variety was overwhelming. The sheer complexity, diversity, and sophistication of Chinese cooking continues to amaze me, even as it means I can hardly bring myself to eat Chinese food in North America anymore.

 

 

beans with corn cakes in Shenyang

beef-under-a-pancake

I’m frequently asked questions about my favorite places to travel or the most interesting places I travel. While I always say that I have a bit of my heart in many, many places, it is without a doubt that China is routinely the place that I find the most amazing. The sheer dynamism of the place, its breakneck development, its unbelievable diversity, and its value for aesthetics all continue to strike me. It’s a privilege to know this great country, if only just a little bit.

Risk Taking

One of the lessons I learn over and over again in life is the value of taking risk. Without question, the most deeply rewarding experiences of my life have been the fruit of stepping into an uncomfortable space. Sometimes this is as mundane as deciding to take the subway to explore a foreign city at the end of a long day. Sometimes it’s as momentous as deciding to move to new city. I’ve experienced both of these in recent months. Both have been deeply rewarding.

I’ve deeply appreciated my time with the faculty of the Torch Trinity Graduate School of Theology here in Seoul. They are, at heart, risk takers in the best sense of the term. It is deeply encouraging to see them now engaged in doctoral-level training that breaks a lot of the rules of theological doctorates. Their program is intentionally interdisciplinary in its nature, seeking to prepare Asians for leadership in seminaries or other educational institutions. Although most of the faculty hold more traditional, specialized doctorates (some from the world’s most prestigious universities), they realize that there is a critical niche to be filled in a more blended, integrated degree that doesn’t seek the same level of specialization. This is not to say that there is not deep value in such degrees. But they’ve decided to take the risk of doing something different, something that others are not doing. It seems to be working extraordinarily well. One of the most fulfilling parts of my job is encouraging people engaged in such ground-breaking work.

After a morning and afternoon of faculty meetings and discussions, a couple of my hosts took me into Seoul to see one of two palace complexes of the Chosun royal dynasty. Although I’ve explored Seoul a bit on my own during previous visits, this was my first opportunity to visit the palace complex. Strikingly similar in form and layout to Beijing’s Forbidden City, the older of the two palaces sits at the end of a broad boulevard lined by government buildings, the national theater, and the American embassy. The palace is entered through a grand gate that flows into a succession of courtyards filled with royal pavilions. The complex has clearly suffered from the effects of the Japanese occupation and especially the Korean War. Much of the facility is reconstructed. At the back of the palace complex, tucked up against a mountain, is the Korean “Blue House,” or the home of the Korean President. The whole thing follows the principles alignment that are so prevalent in Asian architecture, where flow of both space and power through architecture are critically important. 

The central pavilion of the Gyeonbokgyung Palace in Seoul

The evening ended with some additional risk taking. My hosts treated me to a deeply traditional but now quite rare Korean meal of fresh water squid. The squid were sautéed with scallions and some other vegetables and then simmered in (you guessed it) Korean red pepper sauce, and large quantities thereof.  The meal is accompanied by a simple clam broth soup, steamed rice, daikon pickles, and lightly pickled bean sprouts, fresh lettuce, and crumbled dried seaweed. It was a worthy risk and a tasty one, although I have to say that it took me to my personal limit of spiciness. The experience, however, was definitely worth the risk. 

Fiery squid for dinner

Adventures with Kimchi

I discovered and developed a strong affinity for Korean food long before I ever set foot on Korean soil. The spicy-and-sour blend present in so many dishes has long made it one of my favorite cuisines.

As I was walking off the plane yesterday after landing at Incheon airport, the Korean-American ladies behind me were talking about how they wanted to stop at a restaurant in the airport to get some “good, real kimchi.” “I can’t wait to smell it,” said the younger of the two. While many nations express deep passion for their national dishes, it seems that kimchi has a unique place in the pantheon of ethnic foods. While kimchi is indeed the fermented cabbage with copious amounts of red pepper that is increasingly available in the US (even outside of ethnic markets), the name actually encompasses a whole wide variety of things pickled with red pepper – including daikon radish, cucumbers, etc. I even tried something called “water kimchi” yesterday which was drunk in little metal bowls. I’ve yet to have a meal in Korea that did not include kim chi in some form. A Korean-American friend told me last night that even European restaurants here in Seoul often add a small garnish of kim chi to their fare. A day without kimchi is a bad day indeed.

Like most of East Asia, dining out appears to be both frequent and of reasonable cost in Seoul. Walking with a Korean-American friend last night down one of the main avenues of Seoul’s commercial south side, I saw restaurants of every conceivable variety – and those were just the signs I could read! We ended up at a “chicken galbi” place. Apparently, the term actually means “chicken ribs” but the dish is made by filleting the meat off of the chicken legs, cooking it together in a large hot pot in the center of the table with various kinds of mushrooms, cabbage, potatoes, various types of noodles and copious amounts of red pepper sauce (if anything is more elemental to Korean cuisine than kimchi, it is the red pepper). After everyone has eaten a good bit, steamed rice and a bit more red pepper sauce is stirred in to the reheated pot and a second round of eating commences. Of course, various types of kimchi are served from a type of salad bar to properly complete the meal. 

Chicken Galbi being prepared at our table

Seoul is an intense place with traffic rushing along the broad freeways running on both sides of the River Han. Buses, cars, bicycles, motorbikes jostle for position, but in a very orderly fashion. Some of the motorbikes are McDonalds delivery people whisking an order to a customer. Wide avenues are lined with enormous video screens, all varieties of flashing neon lights, and every other variety of electrical advertisement. Lush advertisements for every conceivable product jump out at you, most employing models so blonde as to be nearly albino in their marketing.

Like most Asian cities, the streets swarm with youth, reminding me as always that we live in an increasingly Asian world. More than sixty percent of the world lives on this enormous and varied continent. While most of the world lives in some mash-up of pre-modern, modern, and post-modern, I find this tension absolutely front and center in much of Asia. That’s nowhere more apparent than in this chic district of one of Asia’s chic cities, where little garnishes of kimchi grace the finest French plates.