"Great Doesn't Even Begin To Describe It"

Taped to my bedroom door at home in the U.S. is a torn out advertisement with a picture of the Great Wall on it. It reads, "Great doesn't even begin to describe it." I only just found out how true that statement is.

I often question why I continue to study Chinese. I think almost all Chinese students do. It's a difficult language, and there are many obstacles to perfecting it. Chinese studies then go hand-in-hand with the country itself, and China can be just as frustrating as it's complicated language. However, every time I question myself, the answer reappears. This time it took the form of the Great Wall.

My friend and I were discussing the appeal of China and the Chinese language. I realized that part of China's draw is that it surprises me at every turn. Before I could say so in our discussion, my friend offered her own take on the matter. She said that the appeal is that China is "vast and inaccessible." I think we're both right.

We drove three hours from Hohhot to the Inner Mongolia-Shanxi province border where we parked the car on the side of the road to set off on an hour hike. Little shacks made of brick, mud, and detritus stood in feeble clusters. The roaming chickens were some of the only hints of vivid color in these farm-villages, which are still likely the same as they were under Mao. "Villages" may even be too suggestive of collective civilization because we only saw a handful of shacks--and even fewer people--during our hike.

As we ascended, the view behind us became more and more awe-inspiring, with brown mountains carved into by both Mother Nature and man. In front of us large, white windmills stood tall against a sky bluer than I have yet to see in China.

The part of the wall we trekked to visit is out of the way of a typical tourist, and it is seldom visited and never maintained. This is the wall is it naturally remains:

We all climbed up onto the wall and suddenly the whole experience became vastly more important. While the view of the rest of the landscape only an extra several meters up did not improve, the perspective of the wall itself shifted, and we saw how surprising, vast, and inaccessible it really is.