By Martin Aretino
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 since 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.
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A happy scene in a Beijing kite shop. [Yu Zhiqiang from China Pictorial]
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I started paying attention to the weather and added learning to fly kites in China on 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 2800 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 filed 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 Gung 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 taiji 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 in the beginning of Spring I ventured to the International Sculpture Park in Shijingshan, 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.
