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Editor’s Note: Frank McMains, owner of Red Star Bar and all around renaissance guy, blogs about traveling, studying and eating his way through China for six weeks.

Monuments are not built to be underwhelming. Visitors to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. are not motivated to curl up in the 16th president’s lap. And a trip to Tiananmen Square in Beijing leaves you with no illusions about the scale of China’s national self-image. Tiananmen is huge. It is the largest public square in the world with enough room to accommodate more than 85 football fields. The crowds at Tiger Stadium are like memories of a small town meeting compared to this. The expanse of tan colored stone is flanked by the Forbidden City (a testament to China’s history of the grandiose) and the Great Hall of the People. There are daunting statues of selfless workers, farmers and soldiers. There are wandering vendors selling every imaginable item on which an image of Chairman Mao can be affixed. And there are swarms of people visiting, maintaining and guarding this huge space. But none of the activity can take away from the immensity of the place. China is big and the scale of Tiananmen seems to indicate that they plan on getting bigger.

That was the first impression I had of China. Before arriving here China had existed in my mind as a world apart. When I thought about China it was in the context of some plastic bauble in the bottom of a cereal box, or as an unfamiliar and inscrutable place that was important but probably unknowable, like Giant Squid or the rivalry between Jesuit and Brother Martin.

Growing up in South Baton Rouge does not provide an easy context in which to place China. Safe at home we can think about China in convenient and easy-to-take bits. We eat the food but worry about MSG. We see short video clips of endless throngs of bicycle-borne commuters and are a little puzzled. We recall National Geographic magazine covers of clay warriors or dubbed Kung Fu movies playing late at night. But, we do not really know how to put all of these disjointed impressions together. From far away China can seem like a box of mismatched puzzle pieces. Standing under a basketball court-sized flag of the PRC, flapping red and yellow in the wind, does not let you put China aside, though. Tiananmen’s monuments to China’s power have worked their magic. This is not some far off land. China is here, kid, and you better be ready.