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.