China Revisited -- 2013 [#13]

Oh, Santa! Walkabout, Pt 2

Half a block into our walk, shortly after arriving in Lehu, we passed the Catholic Church, which would not be unusual in Anytown, USA, but certainly is in China.

People had been coming up to Edward's father and mother from the moment we stepped out the door of their building, so every hundred feet or so we were greeted by a new group. Many were relatives who live in town; others were old friends from the neighborhood. Distracted by the exchanges of conversation and introductions, I did not realize we were standing beside a church.

Our first view of the Catholic Church was of a colorful "Merry Christmas" banner with a very western looking Santa crowning the main door. His face was European and his nose bulbous. I would describe him as a caricature here, but I'm certain all Santas are basically caricatures. I was surprised initially by the English message and then by the fact that Santa was still in place.

It was also curious to me that Santa was prominent in the Church's Christmas proclamation. Protestants from my tradition tend to have concerns about iconography anyway. In what sense is Santa religious or Christian?  During Christmas season we are the people, usually, who complain about "taking Christ out of Christmas," and Santa often represents that displacement.

In Lehu the usual questions were immediately more complex and confusing and layered. Santa with the European face and then the English words!  Such an American saying, "Merry Christmas!" Yet here it is in China.

To begin sorting it all out, it is useful to have some idea about origins. If we consider it at all, we tend to think "Merry "Christmas!" is specifically American; but it is not. Actually "Merry Christmas" is imported, dating from 16th Century England, possibly earlier. It is likely, as well, that the meaning of "merry" has shifted significantly over the centuries.

Furthermore, while Lehu is half a world away from home in New York, only a week had passed since our own celebration of Christmas. So why wouldn't Santa still be in place? 

As I reflect on it, this, like all of the cultural details bombarding us, was essentially related to context and perspective.  What is Santa doing way out here in Lehu -- a western Santa at that?!

What were we expecting?

While I was taking in the spectacle, Edward's parents called a church employee out of his office.  He came rushing down the little stairway next to the church to shake our hands and welcome us. He was all eagerness and good cheer. He was dressed completely in black. I thought he might be the priest. He spoke no English, so we just shook hands and smiled at each other while various conversations in Chinese went on around us.

After an exchange between this man and members of the family, Edward said, "He is inviting you inside.  Do you want to go into the Church?"

I had not particularly thought about entering this church since we were out for a walk; but why not?  It was not at all like he had suggested we sit down to eat raw seafood.

"Sure," I said.

My curiosities now piqued -- our hosts encouraging us -- we ventured into the Church.

Outside, in addition to the Christmas decorations, we had passed a display featuring Mary in a kind of stone grotto. I am familiar with these jagged stone formations from Chinese paintings; but this display of Mary in the grotto was both strange and strangely familiar, a little like seeing Santa over the door of a church.

Inside the church doors was a large foyer with Christmas displays set up among or in front of permanent art and iconography. A large nativity was set in an interesting bamboo-and-thatch shed, set behind more traditional railings and dressed up with red flower displays, mostly but not exclusively poinsettias. The characters -- Mary, Joseph, the Christ-child, shepherds, the Magi, and so forth -- were as western looking as Santa. In this display the color scheme was the surprising element; the bright blues, reds, and varied purples struck me as lurid.

For Yujia, who was taking pictures of us, the interesting part of this church were our reactions and not the Christmas displays themeselves.

It turned out that the man who had originally greeted us was not the priest. The priest was upstairs in the sanctuary. So we were ushered up to the second floor to be officially welcomed.

The inside of the church was no warmer than the streets outside. Donna was glad to have worn every piece of warm clothing she had brought.

Despite the lack of heat, a common practice in southern China, this was not an old building. A quick look at the sanctuary shows modern construction, built-in wiring for lights and fans, cleanly plastered walls, and very up-to-date projection equipment.  The pews were pine benches, reminiscent of camp meeting halls in America. They appeared to be relatively new, as they were bright and showed little wear.

The walls held posters of scenes from Bible stories and from the life of Christ. All appeared to be familiar western Bible illustrations.

The priest, too, was eager to meet us. He had been working at the front of the sanctuary with a group of young people, who found our sudden appearance to be quite a surprise.

Unlike the waitress at the restaurant who wanted her picture taken with us, these kids stood back with their hands over their mouths to hide their reactions.

The priest spoke to us in English that was polished enough to suggest that he had studied in an English speaking country. He was rather eager to relate as much information about the Catholic presence in China as possible.  He had figures about how many Catholic parishes there were, where the churches were located, how many Catholic believers attended every week, and so forth. We had the feeling that he was giving us an "official" talk -- an affirmation of Chinese Catholic well-being that he had practiced and delivered before.

He seemed disappointed to learn that we were not Catholic ourselves, although I may have misread his reaction. There were many things about him we could not figure out, and my ability to read faces and situations is not always accurate.


This short visit to the Catholic Church in Lehu had many surprises, but nothing was more surprising than a display in the foyer featuring Mary flanked by two, five foot Santas playing saxophones.

We have found workable explanations for many cultural curiosities we saw, but nothing in our frame of reference has helped us gain perspective on Santa's saxophone, unless they are an odd reference to American street musicians who don red costumes during that long shopping season.

Judging from the number and size of the Santa references, the Christmas influence here had less to do with the birth of Jesus that with western commercial culture.

The Chinese are not unique in appropriating foreign cultural artifacts that they have somehow mistaken. The most telling characteristic of Chinese restaurants in America, for example, is the fortune cookie; all Americans expect fortune cookies at the end of their "Chinese" dinners. But the fortune cookie is a cute tradition that has its roots in America, not in China.

Santa and his saxophone may belong in that category.

China Revisited -- 2013 [#12]

Walkabout, part 1

Edward's family has an ancestral home in his father's village, but they -- the Zhang family -- stays ten minutes away in "town" [Lehu] when they come to visit. The town has 380,000 people, I'm told, so it is a different scale of "town" than I am used to. The village is quite small, however; and despite the short distance, the space from town to village is countryside, not suburbs.

Still, the town has features that make it decidedly different from cities like Shenzhen. Comparisons are hard, but I had the same sense of difference when I was in Korea between Busan (3.5 million) and Seoul (14 million).  Seoul is the global city, intense, immense, sprawling, and clearly cosmopolitan.  Busan is, by comparison, a big small town; lots of people, yes, but with a strong Korean, less globalized feel to it.

When we arrived "in town," after visiting the Yuanshan Temple on the way and having lunch nearby, maybe five hours after leaving Shenzhen, we pulled into the Zhang family building, each floor of which is set aside for a different family group. The oldest brother, who lives there year around, occupies the 2nd floor with his family. Another floor belongs to Edward's grandmother, the matriarch of the family, although she does not leave the house in Shenzhen very often. Edward's family occupies the fourth floor whenever they drive up from the city.

This apartment-home is sparsely furnished as compared with the family home in Shenzhen, the one we refer to as "the mansion." I was surprised, for some reason, to find the familiar portrait of Mao on the living room wall. We observed similar portraits on several walls in town and village homes but not, in my observation, in the modern cities.

Each floor of the Zhang building is composed of two large central rooms, one for eating, the other for hanging out. Off of these are bedrooms, bathrooms, the kitchen, a smaller sitting room, and balconies. I took lots of pictures from both balconies, as they offered a "back street" view of the town.

The apartment was cold so we opened doors and windows to allow the warmer cold air in. Despite its recent construction, this building (like most) lacks heat, so staying warm requires a bit of effort.

Donna asked Edward whether they had thought about buying space heaters for this house if only for visits, like ours, at the beginning of January.  "Not really," Edward said. He shrugged it off as a temporary inconvenience.  Maybe so, but it is an inconvenience offset by wearing jackets indoors.

After we had settled in and had tea, which does warm the body, we all went for a walk in the neighborhood.  Donna and I had thought getting out for a walk would be both needed exercise and a chance to see what the town was like.

Our little walkabout was an education. Our first discovery was that everywhere we went had a story about this building or that corner or the side street, tied to Edward's father and mother. More amazingly, we were stopped and greeted every hundred feet or so along the way by friends, relatives, and acquaintances; some times we were stopped by strangers. It was easy to see how tight the social connections remained even years after the family had moved away.

It was also easy to see how even the casual exchanges carried significance and why Edward's parents are well thought of. There was lots of small talk and lots of laughter. Edward's father offered cigarettes to nearly every man we met. Most took them, lit up, and stayed around to chat until the cigarette had disintegrated in smoke and ash.

We visited a Catholic Church, a traditional market, a school, a new promenade along the river, and a neighborhood of busy shops (one of which was a foot massage business that caught our attention); and we experienced the press of traffic as pedestrians.  Most of these sights deserve their own accounts.  When we turned down the street where we had started our walk, I realized we had walked in a big circle.

In front of us as we rounded that last corner, next to the recently constructed Zhang family apartment building was a vacant lot with footing pillars already poured. Around the pillars, the family living in the low buildings behind them had planted an extensive garden, in the traditional manner we were to see many time.  And beyond that, the town as it was developing.  There, in one frame, the past, the present, and the future. China.

China Revisited -- 2013 [#11]

NASCAR, China Style: Always an Adventure

4 January 2013 . Scheduled to go to cultural center [Splendid China] in Shenzhen. Breakfast of noodle soup and vegetable dumplings.

Language note: man man che (tsi?) "Excuse me. Take your time." Cantonese (?) [Man, man is easy enough, but tongue placement for the last part is impossible for the western tongue.]



9 o'clock -- No Edward

Subject note:  Remember to write about driving, traffic, the hair-raising adventure rides, the Chinese version of the intersection standoff.

Drove into Shenzhen.  Stuck in traffic jam.  Edward called Candy [Chinese home-stay daughter from several years ago] to arrange meeting -- dinner, it turns out. She sounds good. Will be nice to see her.

Edward left us in their in-town apartment while he met friends.  Will take us to lunch and cultural center when he gets back. While he is gone, while we wait, I shall write about what, by any estimation, has been a really big adventure.

Our experience w/ Chinese roads -- ah, yes.

First, everyone shares the roads from pedestrians to bicycles to scooters to cars of all sorts to trucks to huge trucks to farm equipment [of many sorts] to three wheeled taxi-truck things. That's for starters.











Then there are road hazards of all sorts -- piles of sand or gravel for road work, pot holes and gaps in pavement (nearly always concrete), produce laid out to dry on half the road in farming communities

(so, anything that drying preserves -- greens of all kinds and descriptions, peanuts (with chicken, above), sliced yellow carrots, etc.), parked vehicles (cars, scooters, trucks, farm wagons), old people shuffling along, kids (meaning even small children) walking or running or playing along the edges, lack of shoulder either due to open shops along the way or to a drop-off from the road surface --



common in agricultural areas, sometimes people repairing the road while traffic swept around them, occasionally as well ducks-chickens-dogs and in one village horses, cows.

No doubt there were other impediments that are lost at the moment and will reappear when the dust settles.

Now the traffic itself.

It seems to us that everyone drives fast, aggressively; nevertheless, there appears to be a certain protocol drivers and pedestrians seem to follow. On, let's say, a two lane road one stays generally to the right hand side and travels as fast as the vehicle allows and necessity demands.  When you come up behind  something slower, you simply zip around, usually with a hefty toot of your horn.

If there is a vehicle coming, you zip around anyway if the approaching vehicle is your size or smaller.  Pedestrians, bicycles, scooters, and most farm vehicles get tooted aggressively -- and usually they move right to let you pass.  [But not always.] Big trucks, buses, or road obstacles (like piles of sand, of course) require that you hold back from passing unless you can force the thing (whatever it is) in front of you to move over quickly. We have been passing in situations where we made a lane in the middle so we passed three across on a two lane road -- or we passed close by scooters or pedestrians or workers at fairly high speeds while on-coming cars passed on the other side without slowing, moving to the outside of their lane just in time.

If brakes were needed -- or more accurately, when brakes are needed -- they were never applied a second earlier than absolutely necessary. [Urgency appears to be the single operative in driving Chinese style.] Passing on corners at high speeds or on hills is common, ordinary. On the night we went to the hot-springs motel [a subject in itself] a bus followed us for miles at close range, blasting its horn.  Edward did not move right [He was not going to be intimidated] so apparently there was a battle of wills going on over right-of-way and over who-would-lead.  Finally, the bus shot around us and several other cars on a series of corners, filling the other lane.  I was glad to have it ahead of us, whatever it may have cost us in terms of face, than behind us dogging our heels.  In the next town it had stopped to let off passangers and we retook the lead.

On another occasion, in Lehu, vehicles came together at a T intersection.





Edward was nose to nose with a smaller, older car with a family in it. Edward somehow signaled to the other driver to back up about 100 feet to the other side of a little bridge and then turn off on the side street.  This required the car behind the other driver to back up as well.

Meantime, a car heading into the T was bumper to door panel with Edward's car while bicycles and scooters [often with two or more passengers] pushed around and among the cars, timing their moves to the little maneuverings of the cars engaged in the standoff.  As the car in front of him backed up, Edward stayed close to his front bumper so as to keep both his spot and his advantage.

Through all of this Donna kept saying, "He's going to hit us!"

Sensitive as ever, I replied, "Close your eyes." There is no man man tsi for traffic.

China Revisited -- 2013 [#10]

Little Faces

The young waitress who wanted to be photographed with us was one of many memorable young faces that are now China to us. As I did during our months in Korea in 2011, I found the face of babies and children to be endlessly fascinating.  I suppose it is the grandfather in me, but I also find them endlessly endearing.

"Grandfather" is as close as I can come to analyzing this interest, although I can describe the phenomenon.  For one thing, as we all seem to know without being told, the very young are unabashed; they have not yet learned to hide their curiosities and emotions.

These two boys were being walked around Luhe by their older sister and grandmother on the afternoon we arrived from Shenzhen to see the village. They were, I imagine, not sure of what they were seeing.  It is likely they had never seen a non-Chinese before. I stepped closer to take another picture and had to back away since they were clearly becoming frightened.

This little girl in red was riding on the back of a scooter.  Her mother was driving, weaving in and out of traffic, and a younger sibling was riding on his mother's knees. We often saw four on a scooter at once (mother, father, two kids). Donna counted six on one scooter, which was a record for us.

This little girl is the daughter of Edward's cousin.  He would say the 1st daughter of the 1st daughter of the fifth uncle on his father's side. We met her at the family apartment building in Luhe.  She was quite frightened of me at first -- well, for the first day at least -- so it was hard to get a photograph. Eventually she seemed OK to have me in the same room, but she never exactly warmed up.

We found this little boy in Edward's mother's home village. He, too, has a family connection, although I can't set it out for you now. He was more than willing to let me photograph him.  But his real friend on our visit was Yujia, who took his hand and sometimes carried him along our walk.

These little boys were playing at the edge of a rock pile in Edward's mother's village. Like kids everywhere, they entertained themselves with what they had at hand. Their parents (or mothers, at least), no doubt, were around; but since they played out in the open, they were easily watched and cared for by the whole village.

In Edward's father's village, on the day we went to celebrate the opening of the senior citizen's center, we saw two children in particular who hung around to see what we were up to.  One was this little girl, whom I have written about before, who demonstrated her English skills for us.

Another was this little boy, who sat or stood beside his grandfather at the table under the big tree where the adults were exchanging information and then asking us questions. This little boy watched for the better part of an hour without fidgeting or, apparently, losing interest to the adult chatter.

He watched us with keen interest but without apparent concern or fear. He and his grandfather clearly had a congenial, respectful, and close relationship.

At one point, his grandfather had him raise his thumb to say Okay after we had complemented him on his good behavior and long attention span. His little jacket, like many we saw, showed the influence of American culture (Mickey Mouse) and the common presence of English.

The little boy in what looks like black and white pajamas was the only person we saw on our visit to the Hakka village, an abandoned ethnic compound on the outskirts of Lehu.  He watched us when we drove up and while we were getting out of our cars. But when I got my camera up and ready, he would not look up from his game.

Perhaps my favorite picture of all was this picture of Ye Wan Ping, the 14 year old daughter of another cousin. When we visited her home after our brief visit to the Hakka village where we saw the little boy above, she greeted us at the door with an extended exchange in perfect English.  She wanted to meet the American teacher who had meant so much to Edward and Yujia while they were students in our own small village in western New York.

"What is your favorite subject in school?"  Mrs. Zoller asked.

"Oh, English, of course!" she responded with no hesitation.

For us it was worth the 18 hour plane flight just to meet Ye Wan Ping.

China Revisited -- 2013 [#9]

The Store-Front Restaurant

From the Yuanshan Temple we drove a total of three minutes through the center of town to a restaurant. The street was narrow and clogged.  The storefront was already crowded with parked scooters, which had to be moved so that we could park. Two men attended to this task, one older than the other by a generation. The younger man moved the scooters, the older one kept him hopping. Some things are the same everywhere.

Edward's father had already arrived in his car and made arrangements both for parking and for lunch.

Through a store-front with an opening about the size of a double-car garage, we entered the restaurant. To the right were a few round tables and a staircase. To the left, the restaurant's menu, laid out like a buffet to display food choices -- some of it already cooked, but most of it raw.

Edward's father and mother had already made selections for our lunch; but if they hadn't or if we had come on our own, perish the thought, we would have been expected to choose from this array of options. Then, given our language skills, rather than bartering or negotiating menu and prices, we would have pointed and nodded and repeated "Xiexie" (thank you) optimistically.  Crude, I admit, but I am certain we would not have left hungry.

Just beyond the kitchen with its food display were three or four small round tables to the left, and a separate room to the right where we would be served.We were nearly always taken to a room out the main area, not so much to keep us hidden, which might have been a wise decision, as to follow the common practice in China. All of our restaurant meals were taken in rooms that were either private or semi-private.

In this as in many restaurants our eating space was simply an undecorated square room with a round table. For the sake of distinction, I will use the American term "family style" to describe these restaurants.

The little appliance in the corner behind Edward and Yujia is an air-conditioner, not a heater. This restaurant near the temple we had just visited, like most buildings in southern China, is not heated, and the front door -- in this case, a wide opening -- remains open during business hours, which may have been 16 or 18 hours every day.  Everyone wears a coat indoors.

For the sake of keeping our diet adventures up to date, I noted what we were served. The dish in front of Yujia is won-ton soup and the the dish on the lazy-susan is roasted peanuts. Sometimes these peanuts are boiled instead of roasted.  Either way, you pluck them one by one with your chopsticks, which I usually did straight-away to establish my chopsticks-cred.

We were served bitter melon soup with clams, oyster pancakes, pig stomach with almonds, broad flat noodles with bean sprouts, white fish with peppers and greens, fish dumplings, beef (in strips, of course) with green peppers, chicken soup with almonds and squid, and vegetable (swiss chard, I think).

A side note, as a reassurance of "freshness" we were told that the cow for our beef dish had been killed just the day before at 3 p.m. You have to admire that kind of precision, I think.

We were also told that the chicken for the chicken soup was killed just for us when Edward's father ordered the soup dish. Too much information, I suppose, for the average American restaurant goer. But a welcome bit of information nonetheless.

A further side note, this one in the faux pas (i.e., cultural blunder) department. The bowl is for eating and the little plate for bone, not the other way around.

When the dinner was done, one of the teenaged waitresses asked to have her picture taken with us.  So we posed with her while her friends recorded the moment on their little cameras.

I know it would be easy to over-imagine this moment of celebrity.  But as a story teller, I am interested in whether (or how) that moment plays out. This young waitress is, now, a small but important part of our stories of China.

I wonder how -- or if -- we figure into hers?

China Revisited -- 2013 [#8]

Smaller Roads

It's fair to say that the China we hoped we were coming to see, the China that --in our imaginations at least -- significantly  predates the modernization of the last quarter century, began for us when we left the expressway heading northeast from Shenzhen. Immediately, we found ourselves weaving along smaller roads.  Our first stop was at a temple in Lufeng city in Jieshi.

The temple was actually a complex of Buddhist worship centers that covered the side of a hill, beginning at the center of the town where a gate permitted access and ending at the top of the hill. I am under the impression that many temples like this one had been shut down or, at least, that public worship had been discouraged following the Maoist revolution of 1949 and only permitted to resume during the Deng Xiaoping era, years after the Cultural Revolution.

Perhaps that view is too simplistic, as many of our views of China have been.  At any rate, Yuanshan Temple is now an active worship center.

The temple grounds were filled with people, many of whom were involved in burning incense. Bundles of smoldering incense sticks were held between the palms in a prayer-like fashion while the supplicant bowed in the direction of the altar or of a particular statue. Then the sticks were stuck upright and left to smolder in sand-filled urns. Many supplicants also bought papers, single rectangular sheets or small stacks, some gold colored, which they waved in the direction of the shrines before tossing the papers into kilns to be burned. There were many of these papers lying on the ground as well.

Every so often firecrackers would pop and bang rapidly, like automatic gunfire, shattering the quiet for minutes on end, littering the ground with unburned red wrappers.  Between the incense, the kilns, and the firecrackers, the smokey air was heavy with the smells of burning.







At several points food, fruit mostly, piled onto plates, was being offered as part of these worship activities.  Sometimes the food was left on the ground in the main temple area; at other times, it was left on altar-tables.  In several places we saw older women on their knees throwing tiles onto the ground.  I was told these are called jiao, although my efforts to track down the word has led mostly to discussions of Chinese currency.  The jiao looked like pieces of  a broken ceramic bowl, irregular, curved, about the size of a child's palm. When these little tiles are thrown onto the ground, they land with the curved side up or down and in relation to one another. We were told these practices probably originated from local beliefs that pre-date Buddhism. The jiao are used to foretell the future.

I had been taking a lot of pictures until I spotted a sign in English that said No Pictures Inside.  That bit of information made me reconsider how I took pictures outside too, especially of people going about the business of their worship activities. The fact that it was in English clearly made the prohibition hard to ignore.

Many people will describe the Buddhist rituals not as worship but as "showing respect." Given the earnest postures and attitudes of those we observed in the temples, it is hard for me to see any real line distinguishing one from the other.











We wandered ahead of the Yujia, Edward, and his parents until we found ourselves quite far up the hill at a point where people were handing money to a temple official. As we had no Chinese money at this point, we decided to turn around and find the others. We had thought to bring them up the hill to the point where we had turned back.

But we never got back up the hill.  When we found them -- or they found us, Edward said,
"We've been looking for you.  It is time to go!"