China Revisited -- 2013 [29]

Auspicious Timing

YuSi was the first of our Chinese home stay daughters from the mainland. She followed YatShen, whom we called Janet, also Chinese, but from Hong Kong.  HongKongese, as she would say.

YuSi and Jacky, also a former Houghton Academy student, came to our hotel to pick us up in the afternoon of our visit with Angel's parents. They wanted to take us across the city to YuSi's house and then to dinner.

YuSi's uncle drove the four of us back in the direction of  Chen's Lineage Hall. He was cheerful but quiet. He spoke no English so beyond "Ni Hao" we couldn't talk with him.We did the stop and go thing again at every intersection. Lots of cars and buses. Lots of scooters and panel trucks.  Lots of pedestrians.

We drove first to YuSi's house, which is a fairly new, free-standing house in a gated apartment complex.  Sadly, I did not have a working camera at this point due to the memory card incident. The few pictures I do have were taken on YuSi's iPhone.

YuSi's house is two stories with a basement.  Her father has an acoustically engineered listening room down there where he goes to sit with his eyes closed and take in the music. He is clearly a cultured man, someone I would like a long conversation with another time.  We met him briefly two years ago, although our lack of a common language kept the conversation down. We, too, were on a "Ni Hao" basis, although I might not have known "Ni Hao" at that point.

The upper two floors of the Wu house are modern by any standard, with marble floors, lots of woodwork, high ceilings in the living room, and many pieces of modern art, including a large painting with "peace" written in many languages. By large I mean 6' X 8' or 8'X10'. It doesn't sound all that compelling but it was actually quite striking. A word painting.

In another part of the apartment complex we visited the home of another former Houghton Academy student who had been in Donna's classes, Jack.  He is not to be confused with Jacky, who comes with YuSi. His parents are calligraphers. Artists. Jack was out of the country, a student; but his mother was home.  They are friends of YuSi's parents. She took us into their studio and let us look at the paintings and calligraphy they were working on.

The studio was a large rectangular room with high ceilings, many flat work areas, and dozens of art pieces hung or stacked. Chinese calligraphy is practiced with a vertical brush held over a horizontal surface. I was permitted to try my hand, so I tried out a few Korean letters that I remembered from our days in Busan.

At the end of the afternoon we climbed back into cars with Jack's mother, YuSi's aunt and Jack's cousin who spoke English well from a 10 year stint in Canada. It was after dark when we arrived at the LiWan Lake Park. The park has a number of lakes, ancient banyan trees, weeping willows, exotic flowers, and birds, most of which we were not actually able to see. What we saw mostly were lights, which were beautiful.

We ate at the Panxi Restaurant, which lies along the lake shore. Its 40 eating rooms (many of them huge)  can serve 3,000 customers at one time.  As we walked along a hallway open to the lake on one side, we passed at least 5 wedding celebrations.

Everyone, including brides and bridesmaids, was wearing jackets because of the cold.  What we found amusing was that the bride would pull off her puffy white jacket to pose for a picture or two and then put it right back on.


When we commented about the number of wedding celebrations in one place on one evening, we were told it was an auspicious date, so many had chosen that day for the wedding.

The Panxi is a Cantonese dim sum restaurant. We wore our winter jackets into out private room like everyone else. But we had enough experience by now to know that after a few cups of hot tea and a bit of soup, the body would warm up enough to allow us to take off our jackets.

In addition to its beautiful landscaping and architecture, which we saw mostly in terms of lights, the Panxi is famous for its little animals, especially the dumpling rabbits with carrot bits for eyes and the bread pigs.  You can't do much better than bread pigs.

We also had pig curry, lotus root, and fried chicken with potato chips. Pig curry and lotus root are clear enough, but the fried chicken and potato chips need a point of clarity.  We are not talking KFC and Lays here.

Somewhere between the rabbits and pigs, Yusi and Jackie asked us if we could stay in Guangzhou until January 14th.

As we were to fly back on the 10th and expected to be teaching on the 14th, we said, Sorry, no. What's so special about the 14th?

It was, we were told, an auspicious date. They had chosen that date to get married.

Such good news -- but after six or seven years of dating, why not give some advance warning? We would have found a way to stay for the wedding. Well, we were told, there is no wedding, just a registration with the local authorities.  The celebrations, of which there would be three, would come later, no doubt on other auspicious dates.