Dragon head kite. by Yu Zhiqiang

The frame of a dragon head. by Yu Zhiqiang

A happy scene in a Beijing kite shop. by Yu Zhiqiang

When I was a boy back home in the States, kites were easy to find and at $1.99, I could always talk my mom into buying one. Made of plastic tubes and something akin to a plastic bag, they were usually emblazoned with your favorite superhero or the classic cheap kite, two enormous bloodshot eyes inappropriately named “The Bat.” I remember the joy of liftoff, the sorrow of power lines and the tedium in between as if it were yesterday. Finally, I got a little older and stopped asking my mom for kites. Their simple charms begin to lose out to the world of skateboards and Nintendo. Once you realize that you can do a kick flip or save the universe from Mother Brain, standing in a field, holding a piece of string seems a little silly.

Now that I am no longer playing video games as much, I find myself quite grown and living in Beijing. One of the things about living somewhere as exotic as China is that it opens up so many new doors of perspective. A new language, culture and history can open up your ideas to things both new and old far more than just reaching adulthood could ever do on its own. In my enthusiasm for new experiences, I often find that I can go back to old ones with a fresh sense of wonder. I realized that maybe there was something more to his kite flying business than I knew. I started to pay attention to kites, their forms, their vast differences in look and mood.

I started paying attention to the weather and added learning to fly kites in China to my Spring wish list. In the meantime I began to learn that kites go far beyond kid’s stuff. I began with a visit to the ever-popular Wikipedia, expecting some succinct little snippet saying that, like ice cream, kites started off in China and were now loved by children the world over. What I found instead was well over four thousand words and nearly three thousand years of history, pretty impressive for something that many of us still consider a toy. My scholarly nature led me to dig even deeper; the deeper I went the more impressed I became. I’ll fly a few facts your way to make myself clear.

The kite first came about in Weifang, China, about 2,800 years ago. Originally it was made of silk and bamboo, but within 500 years or so, some genius not only invented paper but also made a kite out of it. Ancient Chinese texts, there’s that paper again, tell us that kites were used for measuring distances, testing the wind, signaling, communication for military operations and, no lie, lifting men! Okay, so maybe I’m not quite as grown up as I thought, because lifting men into the air with silk, bamboo and string a couple of thousand years ago is just really cool to me. I also learned that these same uses have continued all the way up to the present day. Even protecting ships and coastlines from air bombardment during the Second World War and lifting lookouts from submarines. I learned about kite fighting, about transmitting radio signals, helium-filled kites, pulling container ships and new space age materials. Obviously, I found all of this fascinating, but I couldn’t help but feel as if there were something more appealing about the plain old kite, nothing fancy, just bamboo and silk or plastic with a keel, silken line or old cotton twine. There is something beautiful about a design so simple and elegant that it hasn’t been forced to change, like so many other things, in order to keep up with and impress mankind for three thousand years.

It may not be this way for everyone, but for my generation, having grown up on kung fu movies, we have this idea that if you need to learn something obscure then you should talk to an old Chinese man. We grow up with belief in their nearly supernatural wisdom about all things natural, basically we believe that old Chinese men KNOW things, secret things, powerful things, beautiful things, things about tai chi or bagua, things about the universe, things about the wind, and the older and the more serene looking the better. So, the first sunny weekend at the beginning of Spring I ventured to the International Sculpture Park in Beijing’s Shijingshan District, to seek out an old master. I had been told that, along with the Temple of Heaven and Ditan Park, this was prime kite flying territory. Over the course of that weekend, I found that I had been told the truth. I also found that I still had much to learn.

The first thing you notice are the colorful kites, bold, cheerful spectrums of color shouting “Hey, look at me! I can fly!” Most of these belong to children, but I was surprised to see that many were also under the control of old timers. There were many kite samplings on this sporadically windy, slightly, chilly Saturday afternoon. I was snapping pictures when suddenly approached by a young man, probably in his early thirties, who, as we learned from his friendly banter was from my wife’s hometown. He cheerfully told us that if we walked over to the other side of the park that we would see even more kites. We followed his suggestion and headed west, through the colorful playground and concession area, admiring the sculptures along the way. A quick note about the charm of Chinese playgrounds, often times they are two playgrounds in one, one for the kids and one for the unbelievably healthy elderly of the region. Body weight exercises, pull-up bars and stretching machines sit side-by-side with jungle gyms and swing sets, both sides full of smiling, chatting Beijingers. There was even an ancient, serene looking man doing sets of pull ups like he was in the Marine Corps, I’ll bet he KNOWS something, I thought to myself. Finally, we began to see more kites up ahead. It was here that I first saw bird kites, not some delta-winged plastic with Harvey Birdman painted on it, but honest to goodness birds, steely looking raptors with the ability to terrify small animals from a great height. My eyes followed the silk line down to the man in charge of the most elegantly flying bird. I was not disappointed to find a smiling, yet intent looking man in his sixties. The Chinese are a friendly people, especially towards visitors, but I began to notice that these kite flyers were an exceptionally friendly lot and seemed more than happy to show off their kites and skills to an interested foreign guy. Offering to fly it high and make it behave like an eagle so I could get some better shots, he laughingly wouldn’t give me his name, but told me that he has already been interviewed five times and is worried about getting too famous. However, as I was the first foreigner to talk to him he was delighted to share a bit of his philosophy with me. We also found that he was actually well into his nineties. “I’ve been making and flying kites for about seven years now, but I do it every day I can, so I guess it’s something important to me. There’s something special in it, something old, makes you feel connected. And you’ve got to get to know the wind.” My wife sheepishly asked if it was like shaking hands with the wind. He looked at her pleasantly and maybe a little surprised. “Yes little sister, I think it is.”

Feeling as if we’d already gotten what we came for, we headed back to the east side of the park, hoping to see more. My wife suddenly pulled my arm and pointed at a kite she knew I would like, undoubtedly the simplest, purest one in the sky. A simple octagonal piece of paper held together by the thinnest of bamboo, with 15 feet of double tail and a hand painted Chinese symbol called bagua, a symbol holding within it, all of the simplicities, complexities and mysteries of the universe. The bagua is used in everything from fengshui to martial arts and is something of interest to me. Feeling as if there was no way this wasn’t another master of wind and peacefulness we headed over the small hill as fast as we could. There he was, an ancient wizened figure, the very picture of a legendary master, his long eyebrows hid eyes that had seen and understood great mysteries, his long beard nearly swept the earth. No, actually it was the young guy who had told us about the other side of the park. “Baby, it’s your hometown dude.” I said to my wife, with more than a hint of disappointment. Again, I found that I had much to learn, just as something as simple as kites on wind may hold mystery, often so do people.

He greeted us like old friends as he reeled in his kite. He asked if we had seen anything good and we chatted about the kites and the people we had met. He offered to show us a twenty-meter long snake kite and then he did. Its spiraling movement echoed something in my own mind, something that had been touched upon by the old man we had spoken to a few moments ago. I started to pay more attention to this guy. He was young, with a certain ruggedness that suggested a man who really works for a living, rather tough looking and so … happy. That’s really all I can say, his face would light up as he spoke, he was just plain happy. “So you like flying kites?” I asked lamely. Luckily, my wife weeded out my stupidity in her translation. “I love it,” he says. “I had a serious neck injury a few years ago. I couldn’t move it at all. I got the idea of flying kites from a friend at work. We make airplanes, you see. I have to look up and move my neck a lot and after a while I finally got better.” When asked if he has profound thoughts or tries to shake hands with the wind, he laughs, “No. It just makes me happy.”

That day I saw entanglements smoothed over with laughter, I spoke to a father and son who agreed that flying kites, “is fun and we can spend time together.” And I saw that what you get out of it seems to be what you need. I really can’t think of a better reason than that. I saw that as the day grew on and the children disappeared, older men and women found conversation or perhaps a little high altitude competition to connect them with their fellow man, as a peaceful feeling seemed to shut out the rest of the world. Next week I’m off to the Temple of Heaven.

It’s often said that eating Beijing duck in Beijing is something you should do before you die. I’ve done it, eaten the duck I mean, I try to steer clear of dying, and I have never felt as if my life were more complete because I was clogging my arteries with duck fat; but flying a kite as the Temple of Heaven sits gloriously in the sun nearby, well, there is a certain magic to that. As I get older, I begin to pay close attention to each precious moment in life. Little things don’t bother me as much as they used to, but at the same time, little moments can seem to mean much more than things that seemed huge when I was young. Trying to feel the wind as it connects and affects, and is affected by everything, feeling the pull of some golden spiral that goes far deeper than mathematics, helps us understand that a connection as tenuous as man and kite through silken line somehow connects us with something more. It’s moments like these that stretch on, suddenly making us feel as if skateboards and Metroid, and school and work, debt and getting older are all silly, and that standing in a field, holding a piece of string can indeed hold something magical once more.