China Revisited --[26]

Angel

The highlight of Guangzhou has involved, on both our visits, reuniting over dinner with some of our Chinese kids, meeting their parents, and sometimes making new friends. When I had explained to one of the Chinese homestay daughters how many dinners we had had on our first visit, she explained that dinners were an important form of hospitality.  Then she added, "Maybe they don't know what else to do with you."

Fair enough. This second trip, being a bit longer, allowed us to see some old parts Guangzhou that were not part of our initial trip in 2011 -- in addition to our impressive dinners.

One our first full day in Guangzhou we were taken to one of these "old" parts of Guangzhou by the parents of one of the girls who had been scheduled to live with us this last school year.   We were privileged to spend the first morning of our stay in Guangzhou with Angel's parents.

Angel's parents picked us up at the hotel where we were staying in the "new" part of Guagzhou. After Edward exchanged information with them, presumably about our destination, we traveled out to Yuyin Shan Fang (Ancestral Garden), a restored ancestral home in Nancun Town, Panyu, Guangzhou City.

This walled compound, built in 1871, is not old by Chinese standards. Nevertheless, it is filled with intricate and significant architectural and artistic features, as well as astonishingly beautiful and beautifully designed gardens and water spaces.

Each of the three dozen or so buildings, some connected and some not, has its own unique function and its own architectural or artistic features.

Just inside these front gates, guarded by traditionally dressed and fearsome warriors, one finds rooms and "landscapes" dedicated both to the functioning of this large, wealthy household and to activities, each of which required a different view of one kind of garden, tree, flower, or scene. In other words, there was a unique aspect to almost every view and vantage point in the compound.

 

One of the more intriguing features for a poet is that there is an octagonal room built in the middle of a pond where the house master can enjoy poetry and wine.  It is here that he sits to gain inspiration for his own poems, one of which is inscribed on the door post.

Through the doors on either end of the room, he can see a bridge over which members of his household pass from one side of the compound to the other. There was also a room with a special stained window (called a Manzhou window) that would allow one to see the scene outside in all four seasons, just by looking through different parts of the window. So, it is explained, one can see a winter scene even though such a scene never happens in southern China.




 These features played for us against the recent history of the cultural revolution.  When the cultural revolution broke out and it became clear that powerful, landed families were being sought and punished for being powerful and propertied, the family fled.


 In order to preserve the house itself from destruction and vandalism at the hands of cultural revolutionary zealots, townspeople hid or covered over many of the unique features of the house, putting up plain walls over priceless artifacts and architecture and hanging pictures of Chairman Mao that the zealots would not move or destroy.

These days the compound is protected as a National Protected Cultural Relic.  All of these photographs were taken by Angel's father, who was good enough to share his pictures with me since my camera was "full" at that moment. Fortunately, he has a good eye and his ideas about what to photograph are quite similar to my own.

It was cold on this early January day in Guangzhou as our winter jackets suggest.  The circular entryways were an interesting feature of this site as was the intricately cared door frame, now blocked to outside access, through which only family members could enter or leave the compound.

At the end of our visit to Yuyin Shan Fang, we were treated to ginger custard, a regional delicacy that was made to order. We were a tad hesitant because not every "ginger" is agreeable to the western taste buds, but we agreed to have some. In quite a marvelous way, two hot liquids, cooked separately, are poured together, which congeals immediately to form the custard. It was warm enough to warm us from the inside and quite tasty.

From now on, every trip we make to Guangzhou will need to include a visit to the Yuyin Shan Fang and a bit of the ginger custard.

After the cultural tour, Angel's parents took us back into town for lunch at an upscale restaurant. We had sea-snail soup, shrimp, noodles, and dumplings. For some reason my notes are not more specific than noodles and dumplings. To be that general is a little like identifying potatoes in an American meal without indicating more specifically the kind of potatoes or how they are prepared.

Angel's parents are as nice as anyone you would ever want to meet. Language was only a small obstacle, once more mitigated by Edward's services as essential translator, with Syan's help. Angel's parents extended love and hospitality to us in unmistakable ways. We shared laughter, admiration, food, friendship, and at the end tears.

China Revisited - 2013 [25]

The High Life

The night before we left for Guangzhou, after a day of seeing Splendid China, Edward and his mother took us to a restaurant on the 96th floor of the tallest building in Shenzhen. Donna was excited because Edward mentioned that the restaurant served western food. After a week of immersion in real Chinese food, she was anticipating something, well, something less Chinese, more familiar.

As one would expect of a restaurant on the 96th floor, it had a panoramic view of the city. The windows that afforded us this view extended clear down to the floor line.

There were a number of interesting features to this restaurant that are related to its location.  The fact that we had a table next to the window with a view extending 1000 feet straight down was one of these features -- an exciting prospect.

Standing well back from the glass, I could clearly see Hong Kong territory beyond the river and clogged traffic on the arteries below as far as the eye could see.  Just like an American city.

In theory at least, and in retrospect, I am glad for the opportunity; but the experience itself was rather unnerving.  Irrational and unmanly though it be, I admit that I am generally afraid of heights, which has meant a number of highly stressful tourist adventures through the years. In 1986 I found myself virtually crawling along the fortification wall of a castle ruin in Wales that my kids and pregnant wife had just crossed. With no apparent hesitation or discomfort.

I found myself nearly paralyzed, able to move forward only by bending nearly double and focusing my attention entirely on the the walk immediately in front of my feet.  I gripped to the stone numbs along the edge that had once shielded this walk from the enemy, sliding my hands forward so that I would not have to let go.

I have a similar, though less severe problem watching others dangle over the abyss. These window washers swishing from side to side twenty five or thirty stories up a  building in Haeundae in Busan, made my legs and ankles hurt.

 And on a visit to St. Paul's Cathedral in London, in October, 2010, my son Ian, who shares my terror of heights, asked me to ascend the dome of St. Paul's all the way to the little walkway at the top. We made it, although we found ourselves riveted to every surface we could make contact with.

Our dinner turned out to be a western style buffet, different on the whole from what we had been eating for a week, but with precious few American offerings. I found a table with lamb, which was extraordinary, so I was able to skip the octopus.

There really were an enormous number of options from all food groups, foreign and domestic.  One I found particularly interesting was labeled "French Cut the Cheese."

One table held a large, elegant tray of what looked like dark tapioca.  Nothing else, just the tapioca. I didn't try any.  But Donna later identified it as caviar.



I was personally far less concerned with exotic foods than I was with the fact that my chair sat 18 inches from the window with its view of the ever- darkening abyss.

The topper to the evening was leaving the restaurant.  The elevator, which could whisk you up in a matter of seconds and make your ears pop, only went as far as the floor below. To get to the food itself, one had to climb a spiral stair case that rose about forty feet in the center of what is essentially a large room.  Because the walls of that floor, too, were entirely glass and because the bannister was supported by glass panels, the staircase appeared to be suspended, rising as if in mid-air.

I had managed to climb to the restaurant by focusing on each step as it came.

Now, how to get down?

It's not like me to speak of in terms of the laws of physics as a rule, but I was well aware that he who goes up must go down. Irrational though it may be, fear of heights defies most logical attempts to explain it away.  Nevertheless, I have learned that a man who freezes with fear will remain frozen. So I have learned to address the fear by moving because it is easier to keep moving than to start moving.

So -- I stepped forward, slowly, fearfully, and kept going although every step going down was like stepping out into thin air a thousand feet above the city streets.

China Revisited -- 2013 [24]

In Which He Lost His Memory

Twice in moments of distraction climbing from the back of Edward's BMW, I dropped my camera onto the pavement. It looked OK when I retrieved it, both times, so I did not think much about it until I tried to delete a few blurred pictures discovered I couldn't.  The delete malfunctioned, due, no doubt, to the jolts of being dropped.

I have taken and kept lots of blurry pictures over the years, so the loss of the delete function did not immediately concern me. Apart from this function the camera seemed to operate normally.

As we had a day between our village tour and our trip to Guangzhou,  Edward took us to Splendid China, a cultural "theme park" in the center of Shenzhen. During the four hours we spent walking around the displays in Splendid China, I took over a hundred pictures.

That night we had dinner on the 96th floor of a building with a panoramic view of the sprawling city.  During dinner I mentioned to Edward that the delete function on my camera had stopped working, no doubt due to the drops, and that I was worried I would fill up the memory card before we left China.

No problem, Edward told me, you can just remove the memory card from your camera and delete pictures after you have downloaded them onto your computer.

What a wonderful idea. Why hadn't I thought of that?

When we got back to the family home, I pulled the memory card from my camera and looked for the memory card slot in the computer.  I found one and pushed the card in. It was, I assure you, an exact fit.

Puzzlingly, nothing appeared on the screen to indicate the computer recognized the card.  I tried several approaches with no results. At some point, it dawned on me that I might not actually have found the real card slot.  Suddenly concerned, I tried to retrieve the memory card only to discover that I could not pull the card back out of the slot.  The more I tried, the deeper it went until I lost sight of it inside the computer.

More embarrassed than worried, I decided to ask Edward to get the memory card out when we saw him next morning. He is studying to be an engineer, after all, a tech-savvy guy.

The next morning as we gathered for our trip to Guangzhou, I explained my little predicament to Edward.  No problem, he said.  He went to get his set of really small screw drivers. When we got to the hotel in Guangzhou, he went to work on the computer.  Soon he had a pile of very small screws and a larger pile of various computer parts.

Finally, Edward announced that he would get me a new memory card to get me through the rest of the trip because -- despite the fact that he could see the chip and despite the pile of disassembled parts --  the card would not come out.

Our plan to get a new memory card didn't work either. After buying and trying several memory cards that were "too new" to work in the camera -- Syan jumping out of the car in downtown Guangzhou and meeting up with us later -- borrowing a camera from YuSi's father that had directions in Chinese, we decided to give up finding a memory card. To get pictures, I enlisted the help of various people with cameras or i-phones, exchanged email addresses, and asked for copies of their pictures via email.

So we operated like that for the remainder of our trip -- various people took pictures for me -- and I took the 15 or so pictures every day that the camera's internal memory would hold. We limped through the image recording final phase of the trip. One benefit of this fiasco is that I had learned how to erase the camera memory through the computer while they were wired for downloading, a trick that would have saved all this hassle to begin with.

The end of my story is rather anticlimactic.  When we got back home, I took the laptop to my friend John, the IT guy without equal at Houghton College who fixes these things for me.

Once I had told him my rather long, painful story, he popped the CD drive from the side of the computer, shook out the memory card, and asked me why I hadn't called him.

It took less than 90 seconds and required no tools.

China Revisited -- 2013 [24]

The Town and The City

Shenzhen is a world apart from LuHe.

To drive back into this modern city from the countryside is like driving the hi-way after driving country roads. To enter the gated community in Shenzhen where Edward's family lives, with its huge upscale houses, its trees and shrubs and well-tended landscaping, and its designer golf courses, is another of these "worlds apart." 

We arrived at Edward's house and took off our jackets and sweaters for the first time since we had left. It was warm there, indoors and out.

We spent the afternoon at the Shenzhen house, reading, writing emails, connecting to Skype, although there was no one to Skype with.  Any one we might have Skyped with back in the eastern US was sound asleep. Fortunately Edward had found a power strip with sufficient holes to make an American three-prong plug work, thereby allowing us to charge Donna's laptop.

After Edward had gone to a bit of trouble finding an unused power strip, I discovered that the standard Chinese outlet could accommodate nearly any plug configuration, making the power strip unnecessary. We had struggled in London getting adaptors to power down 220 electrical supply for 110 appliances. We conducted a similar hunt in Korea.  But the outlets we found in China, at least in the modern areas, were good to go.

We created a new email account because we could not remember the password for Donna's regular account. It was an obvious word, of course, so that in a pinch we would remember it.

Later when the password reappeared in our minds, and we were able to access the original account, we had a bunch of alert messages to tell us that someone in China suspiciously wanted into her account.

Edward went to play golf with a friend. Donna finished reading a textbook she had started on the plane, which made her feel more confident about the impending semester.


For my part, I read from the two books I was juggling, sat outside in shirt sleeves, tried to take pictures over the back wall of golfers on the course, and had a lengthy conversation with Grandma.  She spoke in Chinese, of course, and I spoke in English.  I tried hard to figure out what she was trying to tell me but couldn't. I thought maybe she was talking about the weather, so I did too.  Eventually we both gave up.

On our way up to dinner, I noticed two ducks hanging from a small folding ladder.  Apparently two of the ducks we had seen at the mountain trail head our first day in LuHe had come back to Shenzhen with us.

Like the chickens in the back and the little vegetable garden beyond the wall, these are village traits. We all seem to take some habits from our upbringing with us wherever we go.

At dinner I told Edward about my attempts to converse with Grandma.  Would he inquire about what she might have been saying.

She wanted you to go for a walk with her, Edward said.

That was for me the low point of our trip to China.

Such a simple request and I could not figure it out. I was for a time overwhelmed with what I can only describe as ignorance. A brighter man might have tried more inventive gestures or guessed that she was not commenting on the weather. A more aggressive woman might have simply taken my arm and begun motoring me around.  My own Grandmother would have done that, language barrier or not. She was the most forceful human being God ever packed into a 5 feet 2 inches frame, bar none.


But Edward's Grandma did not take me in hand. I don't know what she thought of my failed efforts to understand, my silly chatter.  I would have loved a walk with her, wherever she wanted to go.

I told him to tell her we could walk another afternoon. 

Sadly, the opportunity did not come again.

China Revisited -- 2013 [23]

Paying Attention: What to See When There is Nothing to See

There are family stories from my childhood that involved me sleeping in the car. But they are not, obviously, things I remember -- I know the stories second hand. I put boredom in the same category.  I am sure that I have been bored at various times -- during  a tedious sermon, perhaps. But I do not remember being bored, ever, actually, and I do not remember sleeping in a car unless I have been sleep deprived and my body shut itself down.

During our return to the States after a good will basketball visit to Russia in 2004, while my teammates slept or watched an out-of-sinc Bruce Almighty, I looked out the window. Whenever the cloud cover broke, I looked down at the expanse of the Atlantic and at the land as it gradually emerged from the horizon. Waves, currents, boats, icebergs, coastlines -- not to mention the subtle shifting of blues, greens, greys -- you get the picture. It was all good. Not only was there something to see, there was much to contemplate, to feed the mind.

On our first morning in LuHe, January 1, I wrote in my notebook, "Praise God for this opportunity!"  We saw a lot in our three days there, everything we had asked to see and more. At the same time, we hadn't asked to see nearly enough. We had not known what to ask for. What we saw raised new questions for us, created new curiosities, and revealed doors I could not have imagined before.

As always happens when we are open to what is there rather than just to what we expect, the questions and possibilities far outnumber the answers. And yet so many answers, so much information!

On the day we left, all we had planned was the trip back to Shenzhen. It was to be, essentially, a travel day.

Nevertheless. The raw data in my notebook for this travel day reads as follows:

"7 a.m. [wake up] call for 7:50 departure [It was cold every night but by this last morning it felt less

Breakfast -- same restaurant as yesterday [around the corner from the Zhang "town house]

3 or 4 kinds of noodles -- soy drink -- fried bread  [outside the restaurant, two women are repairing a hole in the street. One is wearing a red jacket; the other, black. Beside the hole in one direction is a pile of sand; in the other direction, a two wheel hand cart filled with what I take to be bricks. On our first short trip to the Zhang village we had seen something similar: two women screening gravel to mix with powdered cement in the mixer they were operating.]

Head back to Shenzhen       litter everywhere     poverty mixed with prosperity   side by side     families on scooters, kids/old people on bicycles
[the common American impression that Chinese streets are clogged with bicycles is no longer true]

scooters    /car garages next to restaurants, steel (rebar) sellers and stone cutters next to food shops, half built houses between/next to old houses and, new houses

much rubble/ red plastic trash bags, clothes hanging on lines from hangers, here and there vegetable plots (always neat [as I have noted often]) or larger fields (rice terraces [easy to spot now that I know for sure what they look like]), cows grazing [on stubble] in last year's rice paddies, stacks of product from bamboo to bricks to wood posts to rebar to building materials -- cement bags   boxed cases of whatever [not being able to read Chinese],   soy jars, dried plant material

[there is a lot of litter and litter is a problem, but I think litter is a problem nearly everywhere. the questions is what to do about it. the solution will, I think, require the cooperation of everyone]

from a distance the square buildings look like Soviet era buildings in Russia, women laboring alongside of men, digging trenches, working in road despite traffic [a Soviet era building is essentially a square or blocky concrete structure with a somber, grey, aging utility to its appearance]

household goods, chickens, cats, stray dogs (all tan) [am I missing something?] pens with animals, police stations and walled government buildings, lots of concrete, all farm roads are raised, most fields systematically scoured with irrigation trenches

[firearms, I think, are illegal (no second amendment here. But three times along the road between settlements I saw men carrying crossbows]

so far I am handling the food OK . D less so.

Duck ponds with hundred of white ducks [around the edges and in the water]

Once we got back on the big hi-way, the view changed. Like American interstates, the farms and towns and backroads are hard or impossible to see, the details harder to absorb. To the west in the distance rise the mountains; to the east somewhere beyond the shrubs and trees growing up along the route lies the sea.


My conclusions about what we had seen and what that might mean are still tentative, subject to reconsideration and new information.

At some point in the years after I stopped napping in the car and forgot how to be bored, I adopted a life principle that has served me well.  It has served me well.

It is simply this:  pay attention.