Kait Howell

Asian Con Interim

Jan. 25, 2015
Reflecting on my time spent in China:
What is Nature, and How does it Mean?
"The Buddha's secret treasure was not his teachings, but rather the inexpressible, what could
not be taught, what he had once learned in the hour of his enlightenment -- this is what it was,
what he was now distilling from experience, what he was now beginning to experience. He had
to experience himself now" Herman Hesse, Siddhartha (40).
I could memorize every Chinese character and master China's complete multi millennial history;
I could major in China Studies and go onto receive a masters and then a doctorate to later
become a professor at university...I could do all of this and not actually travel to China. Would I
have truly learned anything? I agree with Siddhartha when he mentions above that true
enlightenment comes not from the teachings, but from experience, experience of oneself.
Studying abroad in China this interim of 2015 has offered me the opportunity to not only learn
about other cultural perspectives, but also learn what my own perspectives really are.
The purpose of this paper is to reflect on this month's direct experiences by exploring one
conflict of perspective, "What is Nature, and how does it mean?"
Coming to China, I wanted to see green tea fields and farmers working in rice paddies,
mountains lining the horizon, and Chinese birds fluttering from one bamboo leaf to the next.
What I met and struggled to incorporate into was one of the largest cities on the face of this
planet: Shanghai.
When thinking about the connection of culture and nature, I often think of culture vs. nature.
Many cities and settlements have been built by subtracting their natural surroundings and then
bringing greenery back after the paving the streets. This felt true when walking through the
alleyways of Shanghai. If I spotted trees, they felt fake; planted, pruned, and drinking in the
smog laden air. They drooped and hung in the saddest of fashions, and often times I would
place my hand on one while passing, as if to offer a friend some comfort. I have never spent
much time in a city, let alone a city the size of Shanghai. I am used to the wide open spaces of
Northfield, and felt just as closed in and suffocated as these creatures growing in the sidewalks.
Though these are trees, they do not say "nature" to me; they conflict with my idea of nature:
pristine and untouched by man. I used to live on the West Coast, where wide tracts of forest
climbed the misty mountainside. The clean crisp air, the birds chirping, and wide-based pines
say "nature" to me. Even the tame deciduous forests in Minnesota say "nature" to me. Anything
with the slightest hint of green would say "nature" to me more than those Shanghainese trees.
People living in this city seemed unphased by the absence of greenery, or fresh air. Their
relationship with nature must be different than mine because most of them did not grow up on

the West Coast of the United States, they grew up on the East Coast of China. Small cities here
are made up of at least a few million. The smog in Shanghai is not a passing breeze, it is a
reality. The compact, concrete nature of city is "nature" in a way, because 24 million people live
in this environment. It is essential to use the earth as a resource rather than as a national park
when high numbers of people live in such a concentrated area...or else you sacrifice the
existence of such a community.
Even once I came to this conclusion, I still ached for the China I often dreamed about before
coming to Asia. Maybe Shanghai has been tamed, but I believed that "true" China must be only
a short distance away. So on our free weekend, I decided to hitchhike back to Hangzhou. Sure,
the West Lake is crowded and full of tourists, but the mountains just on the other side could be
quieter, right? I wanted to escape to the mountains, to the tea fields, to the farmer folk who
climbed the rolling hills to visit ancient pagodas. I held this vision so closely that I blinded myself
from the truth: 10 million people live in Hangzhou, and they don't all live on the eastern side.
On the afternoon train ride over to Hangzhou, I imagined the taxi pulling up to a small youth
hostel, green bamboo to the left and tea bushes lining the mountainside on the right. I thought of
how easy it would be to navigate this place compared to Shanghai. Well, when the taxi cab
pulled up on the side of a four-lane traffic-lighted street, I rechecked the address I had given
him. Uh, did he drive me far enough? He did, he brought me to the exact area of Hangzhou's
youth hostels. Only, once I had paid him and stepped out of the cab, I couldn't find the youth
hostels because there were so many shops, houses, restaurants, and hotels crowding the
edges of the street. These establishments nestled in the mountain folds catered to local and
foreign tourists. Did this mean I was a tourist, just like the rest of these materialistic suckers,
sneaking a peek at the mountainside because I wanted to take some pretty pictures?
After searching an hour for a cheap place to stay in this increasingly dark and unfamiliar place, I
found a little youth hostel and fell asleep worried about my planned hike for the next day.
Two conversations I had with locals the following morning diversified how I thought about
"nature". Though I may have doubted the mountains the night before, by 7:00am I was
bushwhacking my way through thick underbrush and the occasional stalk of bamboo in efforts to
find a groomed trail. The good thing about China having so many people and being such an old
country is that infrastructure is not hard to find, and within ten minutes I was climbing stairs up a
foothill towards a looming temple. Passing by staggered rock on the left, and looking out to a
mountain city on the right, and with cleaner air in my lungs, I felt a bit like I was walking through
"my" pristine nature. However, this country is old and lived in; almost nothing is pristine and
untouched. I bumped into a man stringing rope around a tree, and pulling the young sapling
away from the trail and tying the rope around a stake, as to keep the tree leaning backwards.
Using Chinese, I asked what he was doing. Reforming young trees so that they don't grow into
the trail, apparently. I thanked him and kept waking, thinking about the relationship between the
planted trees in Shanghai and the reformed trees in Hangzhou. I continued up the steps,
following another elderly man who wore a navy blue jumpsuit. Once we reached the summit of
the foothill and stepped into the temple pavillion, he greeted some friends who were waiting for
him. They all turned around and chatted with me a while (using Chinese), first about my height

and nationality, and then I asked what they were doing here at 8:00am on a Saturday morning.
Practicing taichi, like they do every morning, of course! It is good for one's health and energy to
conduct a daily pilgrimage to this mountainside and practice this sport. I thanked them for our
conversation and walked back down the mountainside, meeting two new realizations at the
base.
First, reforming the trees along the trail allows for humans and green life to coexist, even if the
growth of the trees is moderated. People walk the mountains and appreciate the natural
scenery, and in this way the mountains provide sustenance to tourist hotel owners. The
mountains survive because people want to interact with them; the presence of human
population does not mean the destruction of "nature". In fact, the presence of 7 billion humans
on this planet means that most of nature has been touched, modified. Finding real pristine
nature would require a lot more effort than catching a ride to Hangzhou.
Second, pilgrimage into nature is a repeated phenomenon, as seen in Matson Basho's Narrow
Road to Oku, in American cyclists who take months off of work to bike across the U.S., and in
this old Chinese man who practices taichi on the Hangzhou mountainside every morning. In my
own way, this trip out to Hangzhou is a mini pilgrimage escaping the confinements of Shanghai.
People's need to seek themselves while in nature gives me much comfort, because that means
even though large cities exist, they are not the only places that matter.
My interactions with the places and people in Shanghai have shown me four purposes human
cultures use nature, in practical ways (utilizing nature as a resource for cities), pristine ways (to
admire the wild untouched world from afar), pastoral ways (building a bridge between the
practical and pristine experiences of nature), and as an opportunity for pilgrimage (finding some
spiritual connection with nature and oneself).
My original perspective of what nature should and how it is used was wrong. While it can be
pristine, it does not have to be in order to be nature. Which begs the question, what is true
nature, true China? Given all of these new ways of thinking about nature, I conclude that we are
always in it. I need not travel all the way to Hangzhou because "nature" wasn't in Shanghai. It
was in Shanghai the whole time. It is in the parks, the concrete, the trees, the air. It is our
environment, our surroundings. Like how a bird constructs his nest using the fallen branches of
the forest; humans build structures using the materials in the earth. This process does not
forever separate us from the land, it is how we are choosing to interact with it. How we interact
with our environment affects what nature looks like, and thus how I feel about it.
Along these same lines, no matter where I go in China, it is still China. My expectations and
wishes will not change that fact, although they can reform the truth of my reality. My goal is to
start thinking of culture in nature, instead of culture vs. nature.
I want to continue thinking about nature and the environment second semester in Asian
Conversations; I am even thinking of working on a farm this summer to explore the "pastoral"
viewpoint. I want to continue to study Chinese so that I can revisit China and further my lived

experiences there, to learn and come upon further realizations. I want to finish reading
Siddhartha too, so that I can find out if his theory of lived experience vs. structured teaching
proved as true for him as it did for me.