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.