Thursday, April 25, 2013

China Revisited -- 2013 [22]

Village End-notes

Note 5: The Hot Spring Bath




The last night we were in LuHe it was decided that we would go to the Hot Spring Bath Motel, a spa built over naturally occurring hot springs.

Some time after dinner, three noodle dishes and two vegetables I can't name, we headed out in two BMW's toward the Hot Springs.  Edward's mother drove the lead car with her sister and brother-in-law, while Edward, with Yujia, Donna, and me in the other, gave chase.

I have written about these driving adventures before, noting mostly how we negotiated road hazards and the intricacies of full throttle dodge-em in daylight.  This drive to the spa took place at night -- a very dark, moonless night. On roads without lights.

Edward worked hard to stay within sight of his mother, who not only handles the car with practiced skill but with Edward's skill for finding the third lane and split second decision making as well. She has, we might say, nerves made of something harder and more durable than steel. This was the same trip on which a passenger bus, the Chinese equivalent of a Greyhound, chased us for close to ten minutes, blasting its horn and flashing its lights, before shooting out around us on a corner.





One of the interesting aspects of night driving in China is that the cars have a special feature -- a kind of rapid, intense flashing of the headlights.  These are warning strobes Americans see only on police cars and emergency vehicles.  They are blinding. And I think they are used at night the way horns are used in daylight, as a signal to say, "I'm coming around, move over!"

I could be wrong, of course.  It seemed like there were lots of cars flashing their lights when the pack got dense and simple jockeying didn't open a lane.  Nearly everyone seemed to be using the flashers.

It was particularly jarring when lights started flashing from the car riding your bumper. They lit up the car's interior like an operating room. I wanted to ask Edward about them but thought it wise not to disrupt his concentration.

Forty-five minutes of this intense road racing later, we pulled in at the Hot Spring Bath Motel. We were all wound up tight from the ride, so the bath sounded promising.

The Hot Springs Bath Motel is laid out like any one story American motel, with an office at one end and then several long arms of side-by-side rooms. There were dim lights over the doors of the rooms, but no windows anywhere. Everyone but Donna and me
went into the motel office to make arrangements; we stood in the empty parking lot decompressing, trying to imagine what awaited us.


Soon the others emerged with the manager and an assistant carrying an armload of towels.We walked to the second arm of the motel, where the manager opened a solid metal door and handed us towels.

Edward turned to Donna and said, " Do you want a room of your own, Mom?"

Donna grabbed my arm and pushed me through the door ahead of her.  "Not a chance!"
 
The room was a concrete box lit by a single dim florescent lamp near the door. Its walls were painted cinder block.  There was a wooden bench near the door at the high end of the room. At the other end, down a gently sloping floor, was a stone jacuzzi big enough for five or six people. As instructed, we turned on the water that poured into the tub through a three inch pipe.

We folded our clothes on the bench, slipped on the rubber flip flops, and shuffled down the slope. The water was indeed hot. We stepped in rather carefully and gradually submerged ourselves. Once I was seated with hot water up to my shoulders, I noticed that the ceiling overhead was actually open to the night air, no doubt to keep the room from becoming a steam bath.  Two or three feet above the opening was a pitched metal roof to keep rain out.

In no time, the hot water had done its magic: we were cooked inside and out and had to climb from the tub into our towels. Steam rising from our bodies looked quite spectacular in the pale florescent light.

When we came out maybe a half hour later, the parking lot was nearly filled with cars.  Gradually everyone from our group reassembled and we drove to a restaurant to eat.


Perhaps the traffic was lighter on the way back. Perhaps the adrenaline rush of competitive driving had been soothed away by the hot waters.  Clearly the high point of the evening had already been reached.

Whatever the reason, we drove back to LuHe much more sedately than we had driven out to the Motel. At least it seemed that way.  Even the flashing strobes lighting up the car's interior did not disturb our sleepy contentment.

Saturday, April 20, 2013

China Revisited -- 2013 [21]

Village End-Notes


As we prepared to drive back to Shenzhen and the visit Guangzhou, there are a number of items I have not yet fit into stories. For these, all worth mentioning, I will offer a series of notes.

Note 1: The Great Uncle

On our first visit to the Zhang village we met Edward's grandfather's brother. He came out to greet us. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say he was brought out to greet us.

He is a tiny man, short, thin, and a bit fragile; but he stands very straight, with a strong handshake. It is the handshake of a man who has spent his life doing physical labor. He was wearing what I have always thought of as a Mao hat, the short-brimmed Army cap with the single red star that everyone wore in the pictures of China I knew growing up.

Memories of pictures of China from that long time ago are hardly helpful in thinking about modern China, yet it is just such fragmentary images and impressions that often shape our understanding of places we have never been. Our perceptions are fixed on a sliver of something much larger, more complex, and changing.

I did not see another hat like that during our time in China.

We exchanged the "Welcome/I'm glad to be here" sentiments, but we did not have time to sit down to talk over tea.  And we did not have an opportunity to ask questions. Maybe he is no longer capable of extended conversation even if we had sat down and our interpreter had not been eager to shoulder the work of such translation.

But what I wouldn't give to spend an hour with this man, listening to what he has seen and done, to be inside his head.




Note 2: Strawberries

When we first arrived at the Luhe (town) house, the daughter of Edward's uncle, the one with the four year old who was frightened of me and the one Edward referred to as "my sister -- that cousin brought along strawberries she had just picked when she came up to visit. They were great strawberries. In fact, they were so good, I ate my share quickly, then part of Donna's share, and then perhaps, well, more than I had a right to eat.

The next day on our way back from the visit where we had met his great uncle, Edward drove us to a strawberry farm at the edge of town where three of us -- Yujia, Edward's mother, and me -- went into the fields to "pick our own" strawberries.



The field was very well set-up and cared for, like all the cultivated fields we saw.



The plants grew on raised beds in long rows, growing through black plastic ground cover. The three of us took bowls and went down the rows. I picked as quickly as I could but I was no match for Yujia.  Apparently all those memories of my strawberry picking chops are not accurate; maybe I have gone rusty in the years since I last picked professionally.

Yujia cleaned the whole lot in very cold water at the kitchen sink once we got back to the house.  These berries were, if anything, even better than the ones we'd eaten the day before. And in January no less. This was my very first experience picking strawberries on New Year's Day.

Note 3: Do they? Don't they?

Donna lay down for a nap almost as soon as we got home, still feeling tired from jet lag, and she missed dinner.  Dinner was at a restaurant with Edward's mom's family.  The family had gathered, not to celebrate the New Year but because someone in the family was moving. I met a lot of people I couldn't talk with, including an uncle who had been a doctor and another uncle who had been a farmer.

There were a lot of toasts, which I gather concerned the move, the new house, good fortune and all that.  Among other things we were served dog meat and cow's stomach soup.

The soup spoke directly to the great American do-they/don't they undercurrent about the Chinese.  We, of course, generally find the idea troubling. More troubling is what to do when it comes your way on the lazy susan. Can you just say No without giving offense? Our Korean kids always told us people make all sorts of allowances for Americans, so bad manners won't matter. Funny kids.

Hypothetically at least, we want to experience culture to the extent we can, we don't want be excused because we are Americans, and we certainly don't want to give offense. But the soup was real.

Edward solved the problem for me.  He was kind enough to explain what was in the dishes as they were brought to the table -- a "heads up" for the squeamish American -- which also gave me a way to sidestep. At the end of our time in China, Vicky, a classmate of Edward and Yujia's, confirmed for us that it was OK to pass up some things. "I don't eat organs," she said during a conversation about "interesting" dishes. It was a welcome endorsement for our selective American appetites.



Note 4: Chennault

The day of the celebration for Edward's father, as we sat around the table under the trees, the visiting businessmen asked us about an American airman who had helped China during WWII. Did we know Chennault? Had we heard of him?

We consulted. Hmm, maybe? No?

Regrettably, we had never heard of Chennault.  It was a humbling moment. These businessmen said Chennault was a great man, a good friend of China, a great American.

Later I looked him up.  Sure enough, Major General Claire Lee Chennault, was a legendary leader of the "Flying Tigers," architect of the Chinese Air Force, and leader of Chinese efforts in the air war against Japan beginning in the 1930s. I had heard the name "Fighting Tigers," of course; boys of my generation would have grown up with any number of catchy, daring names like that. But I had never attached it to anything specific. The "overseas" I  learned about was, primarily, Europe. Countries in Asia, across the Pacific Ocean (Japan, Korea, Vietnam, "Red China"), are notably remembered in terms of specific wars and little else -- in terms of mystery more than history.

So Chennault was new to us, his part in history largely forgotten in America, but clearly not in China.

If I had that hour with Edward's grandfather's uncle, the man in the Mao cap, I would like to ask him questions about Chennault, that American friend-of-China from a lifetime ago.




Wednesday, April 10, 2013

China Revisited -- 2013 [#20]

Hakka Village

After the celebration for Edward's father, we returned to the family house in Lehu. Edward's cousin was there to meet us. We had tea and tried to converse. He teaches geography in a junior high school in town. And when Edward's parents are in Shenzhen, he takes care of the top three floors of the building. After several exchanges -- basic questions, short answers -- we focused on our tea.

Late in the afternoon we climbed into Edward's car and followed his cousin, who was weaving in and out of traffic on a scooter. More than once I imagined chase scenes through tight, crowded, decidedly foreign streets as in the Bourne films. He would dash through small spaces between cars and then have to wait for us to make a bigger opening.

He led us to an "old" abandoned Hakka village somewhere at the edge of town, so we were only dodging traffic for maybe 20 minutes. Still, it seemed a world away.  The village compound is near a development of new, essentially middle class homes -- two story boxy structures made of concrete and brick, softened with tile where Americans would use shingles. The new development is still being built; but it is difficult to know how old the Hakka village might be.

My initial impression, based on what we learning in this preserved village, was that the Hakka are a distinct people group within China, one of about 56 people groups that are recognized and "protected" by law. That impression is not correct. They are a branch of the majority Han peoples but have a distinct language and history. Edward describes the Hakka more as a culture than a race.

Not here, but later in our visit, we detected a measure of irritation (resentment?) toward "privileges" that accompany this protected status. It did not seem to be directed at any one in particular, but I felt it was not all that different from feelings one hears in America toward perceived "special treatment." The impression that such protections are unfair or undeserved must be universal.

Whatever an accurate read of these feelings might be, the government clearly has decided that some of  old China -- what we might call China's diversity -- needs to be preserved.  This preservationist model is not consistently applied, however, as we know from the destruction of traditional neighborhoods in Beijing to make way for construction of Olympic venues in preparation for the '08 Games.

While this Hakka village on the outskirts of Lehu is deserted, it remains intact because of this protected status.  We saw no evidence of current habitation and some structures within the walled compound are falling down (below), yet whatever may have already been bulldozed for the nearby development, the village does not now appear to be losing ground. And there are signs that parts of the compound are still used.

The walled compound would have been home to 400-500 people.  People didn't live exactly "on top" of one another, as might be true in modern cities like Hong Kong with its crowded hi-rise apartment buildings, but they did live at close quarters.  Basically, they would have slept indoors and conducted their day-time activities -- cooking, talking, trading, discussing business, and so forth -- in the open areas. This pattern is identical to what we found in the two family villages we had visited earlier in the day.

There are (or were) nine courtyards in this Hakka village, and 18 halls, which were used for worship or meetings.  The structures that served as homes lined the walls of the courtyards.  A literal translation of the Hakka word for these courtyards is "sky well."

Quite apart from the practical logic of this term, which becomes clear when you see the structures, it is such evocative language.

One enters each courtyard by way of tall doors decorated with fierce warriors. We saw these warriors everywhere. They serve to keep out misfortune, bad luck, harm. For this gate, one fierce warrior and one gentle warrior,Yujia, in a Minnie Mouse t-shirt, guard the gateway to the sky well. Inside, beyond the high threshold and across from the gate is one of two halls, this one now barred by a locked iron fence. To the side of the hall entry were "greens" left to dry in the sun.

The hall behind the locked iron gate is an ancestor hall, with its altar, symbolic paintings, incense sticks, signs signifying various prayerful sentiments, and food brought to show respect for the ancestors.  The orange objects on the table in front of the incense stick urns are, in fact, fresh oranges.

All these things -- the dried greens, the oranges and the recent red door frame panels, the cloth hangings and lanterns that are still vividly red -- are evidence of continuing activity in the village.


I poked my camera through the bars and took a long shot of the ancestor hall. Edward's cousin tested the gate for us just to see whether we might gain entrance, but the lock held.

To the right of the door beside the window is a marble plaque noting the special characteristics of the architecture.
I must confess that I had never heard the name Hakka before we arrived, and I had to ask Edward to repeat the name several times before I got it straight. His family is Hakka by ancestry.



Often, of course, I found myself lost in reverie and separated from the group. I strayed to take pictures of things that interested me and things I just wanted to remember.






The gate house we had come through to get into this compound is itself an interesting structure with many interesting features.  When I was with the group, I asked a lot of questions, some of which couldn't be answered or easily translated. 


Outside the courtyard but inside the walls of the compound is a large pond, now stagnant.  I had noted ponds like this in other villages, both those we stopped at and those we drove past.

I surmised that these ponds were for raising fish, which are a staple in this region. It seemed a logical deduction, so I asked even though the ponds themselves do not look like they would sustain fish.

Edward consulted his cousin, who said the ponds traditionally served to put out fires. In the days when construction featured wood, a pond on premise meant that fires could be contained before the entire community went up in flames.






These curiosities are compelling to me, both as part of local history and as achievements in themselves. So many facets of Chinese architecture and ornamentation lend themselves to appreciation; their grace and symmetry alone are astonishing.


Roof lines, like brick walls and wooden doors and handmade brooms, are a favorite subject of mine. Patterns, parallels, repetition -- all warrant a closer look, although too often I felt like I was missing something crucial, the thing that would allow me to "get it."






Both outside and inside the attention to detail that is traditionally labor-intensive and painstaking strikes me often as effortlessly elegant. In addition, none of this artistry is impractical; every detail serves a second, pragmatic function.





As often happened, the group had gathered to go while I was still deep in my investigations. The next time we come . . . I kept thinking, both of this Hakka village and of many places we visited. So much to see, so little time to see it.


Near the car we stood for a photo op with Yujia, Donna, and Edward's mom . . .and a photo farewell to the sole visible inhabitant of the village, who was not interested in us at all.

Then we were off, chasing the scooter through the streets again into the new development to see the cousin's new house.


Monday, April 1, 2013

China Revisited -- 2013 [#19]

The Art of the Ordinary


We did not spend a lot of time in the villages. We were in Edward's mother's village once for about 90 minutes and in Edward's father's village twice, on consecutive days, for a total of three hours or so.

I took a lot more pictures than I have been able to use in the stories I have told so far.

These pictures of brooms, for example, have not found a place in a story -- yet I find myself drawn to them as meaningful objects. These brooms are made of a kind of dried weed or straw tied to a bamboo pole or stick. There is nothing unusual about these brooms apart from the fact that they are handmade of regional materials and, thus, they look interesting.

As odd as this may sound, I think that the brooms people use indicate something about them. Certainly these brooms tell us about culture and history, but perhaps they indicate an attitude about the present as well.  To illustrate, in all my six plus decades, I have never seen anyone use a handmade broom in America; yet I have seen handmade brooms in all the foreign countries I have visited.  I am not sure what this indicates about us as Americans apart from our preference for the neat, progressive look of factory brooms.

But both in Russia and in Korea I saw brooms without shafts in common use.  Imagine straw brooms, like the ones pictured, without handles.  Short brooms of that sort require the sweeper to bend over, sometimes nearly double.  In Russia these short brooms seem to be made of bundles of sticks, although I may be wrong in that observation. I first saw them in use by soldiers sweeping at the front gate of a military post, so they are not just the choice of the old women who appear everywhere sweeping streets and hallways. Many of these old women seemed to be bent double from the hardships of life.
A broom similar to the Russian model, made of straw, is common in Busan as well. The stoop of old women using the brooms might be unrelated, but the visual connection between bent posture and sweeping, to me at least, is compelling.

Another kind of picture I have been drawn to involves gardens. As I have said, it did not matter what poor condition a house might be in or the general state of a neighborhood, the garden outside or nearby was always well laid out and well tended. Even on January 1st the produce was thriving.

 
This first picture is the common area in the Zhang village close by the tea table under the trees. Likely the plots are individually assigned or owned. The area itself is neatly fenced, cultivated, staked, and healthy.


These two gardens are in Lehu, the neighboring town of 380,000. Local residents have created neat gardens that fit and utilize small or odd shaped areas that would otherwise lie vacant and gradually fill with trash. In both of these cases, the areas are designated for building projects; but in the meantime, enterprising folks are raising vegetables.


To shift my focus a bit, disposing of trash, like pollution generally, has been an urgent problem of rapid modernization in China during the last thirty years. Among the pictures I did not take (for a variety of reasons) was a picture of the stream that ran through LuoXi village. It lies below the iron pipe railing on the left-hand side of this picture.


What struck us about this little stream was that it was filled with plastic bags of the grocery store variety. Many of these bags in the countryside are red, so they stand out. The widespread use of thin plastic bags is a recent phenomenon in China, as it is, interestingly, in England too. These bags are cheap, useful, and sturdy to a point; but their wide use has created a litter problem previously unseen.  Villagers, until recently, would have used bags or baskets made of natural fibers that could be repaired or that would disintegrate over time, so the habits of disposal that have worked for milenia  now create problems.

A third kind of photograph I like to take involves brickwork, stonework, tiles, roof lines, wall construction, earthen buildings.


Whatever else this building may tell us, its construction is an odd mix of masonry.  Part of the building was built of stones such as one would pick up from the river bed or even from the fields. Walls lining fields in New England are famously made of stones removed from cleared land in order to facilitate cultivation of fields.  Sometimes, too, foundations of old New England homes may be made of these same stones; these are called rubble foundations. Well-made, they can be sturdy; but inexpertly made, they tend to fall apart. On this building, the stone-work is augmented by or repaired with two kinds of bricks. The older of these are the larger, tan bricks. These don't separate from one another and crumble into a heap like stones, but they do tend to break apart more easily than the newer, smaller, modern "red" bricks, which are the newest part of this building.

After our celebration dinner for Edward's father and after our conversations around the community tea table under the trees, I had wandered a little bit to get some pictures. I walked down to the dry, stubbly rice fields, I looked at the gardens and chicken coops and pig houses.  I found a shrine to the local land gods.

When I walked down to this little building to take pictures of the walls and the tiled roof, thinking the sunlight might create some interesting textures and patterns, my interest seemed to create a stir.

As I got to the door, after shooting any number of wall pictures, Edward hustled over.  "Pop," he said, "don't go in there."

I backed away, thinking I had approached something forbidden, hidden, secret, mysterious. 

"They are afraid you might go inside," Edward said.  "It's an outhouse."

I shot a lot of interiors, but not of that building. That was another picture I decided not to take.