The Wall

by Wa Ode Halidun (Indonesia)

Making a local connection China

I could not stand for the cold and mist that night, yet it was the happiest to see the fireworks cracked off along the way to Beijing. Fireworks are banned in Beijing, and mostly the well-developed cities in China because it contributes to bad air quality on a large scale. ‘We were surely through the small villages,’ I whispered. It was quite entertaining, so I took my small traveling pillow and lay my head on it, blowing out my breath to shape a round of dew on my train window, and watching the magical fire that shaped a lot of flowers. A policeman was walking from the second carriage, he headed to my friend, stopped right in front of her, and asked her identity card unfriendly. He hardly glanced at my friend, and my friend spontaneously said ‘I only have a foreigner passport!’ she raised her tone in Putonghua as she was feeling indignant, she took her passport out and made sure the police will check only the specified page. The police, then, gave it back to my friend and said I thought you are Chinese, he giggled friendly, and just left. ‘I always feel insecure every time the Chinese thought I am Xinjiang people just because I put my hijab on, she grumbled. ‘But the next side of you has the same, she is Chinese who is wearing a hijab, the police just passed her?’ ‘My eyes are bigger!’ she pointed out the difference. ‘Then you are beautiful, as the beauty standard of Chinese. Big eyes!’ I laughed at her; still, I felt pain in her heart because unfairly statement that ordinary people here thought. It was the new year's eve when mostly everyone will set at home to enjoy their family time, but an excellent opportunity for a traveler like us to buy the intercity train ticket, particularly those who feel intimacy only they are out of a crowd. We were eight in the carriage, and the silence was slapped by the echoed of my friend and I conversation, until a police reprimanded us for speaking in Chinese ‘you have to talk in Chinese as it will be an international language, he stopped for a second in front of us, we frowned, then he left. ‘He just noticed we cannot speak Chinese.’ I smiled. The train finally arrived, it took 15 hours from the border of Russia-China to Beijing. As we stepped out from the train, the cold wind swept my skin smoothly, I crouched and shivered slightly from the cold. We hastily reached the bus to a small village in Hebei province, to find a settler before the severe freeze us. The tour guide started to count to make sure there was no one left. In 30 seconds, the bus went off. The dust was flying, and the particles hit my nose, I sneezed. It was quite sunny, I saw a grandma was watering her plants, slouching in her bench. I noticed throughout our bumpy bus. The guide loudly announced ‘WE HAVE ARRIVED!’. He told us we were going to hike 20 km of the great wall, it will be hardly walked with no hiking experience, but I thought it will be just walking the great wall with stairs as at Badaling great wall site. He instructed us to go to the toilet since no one carried a portable toilet. But I prefer to use my empty bottle as my public toilet. We hiked 500 meters up to reach the great wall, a Chinese man came to me carrying a brick and told me, ‘This is the original brick of the great wall. I was panting to reach the top until I looked up by his voice. I was amazed by the long-ignored great wall and the fact it was built on the hills. It keeps the history of Qin Shi Huang, who extended the border to protect his nation from the Mongols. And the great wall stands sturdy following the indentation of the hills, with the bricks mix with soil, the grass on it, and no one knows how many bodies were buried to defend the state.