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.

Busan Journal, bloggus interruptus

Down at Heels

We sought advice before we left for London in 26 August 2010. What to take, what to anticipate, how to pack. Perhaps the best piece of advice that came from our seeking was Jim Wardwell's advice to take two pair of comfortable shoes.  Why two?  Because experience told him that one pair was bound to get wet in the well-know English rain and I would need a second pair as a dry backup.

He gave good advice. I took two pair of comfortable footwear to see me through an inclement English autumn. One pair was my New Balance cross-trainers, useful for running, walking, and just kicking around. I own several pair of what we call "school shoes" or dress shoes for wearing to the office or to church on Sunday.  But none of these actually fit the "comfortable" category when the walking, as I imagined it, would involve lots of city streets and sidewalks, the occasional journey to outlying towns and villages, and perhaps a hike or two somewhere in the country.

More recently -- over the recent Thanksgiving holiday my youngest son asked me if I had finished with my travel blog.  He may have used the word abandoned.

No, I responded, perhaps too quickly, I have plenty of material I want to write about.  I want to get back to the Busan Journal.

For complex reasons, however, I have let the blog suffer what I hope is not a career ending hiatus. As with the comfortable shoe story left unfinished above, I fully expect to return to the blog project, this travel account, my impressions of a year away from home. In making the adjustment back to my sedentary life of teaching in the little New York village I have lived in for 27 years, I have discovered that my paying job keeps getting in the way. Adjustment, like the blog, is incomplete, in process.

Well, now the semester is over, the papers are read, the grades have been agonized over and entered into the computer.  During this Christmas break, I plan to resume my blog, to finish my China story and to write a few pieces dealing with my impressions of Korea. I may also, before too much more time has elapsed, write a few pieces about this year of travels generally and, I think now, even compare London with Busan.

As with the blog, I must return to the story I began with. The end of the comfortable shoe story is simply this: following the good Wardwell's advice, I bought a pair of Merrill's before we left for London and I wore them every day.  They are by far the most comfortable and durable shoes I have ever owned.

The heels of these shoes showed very little wear after four months of tramping about London. Bearing in mind that I generally abuse the heels of my shoes, that I wore my cross-trainers only twice, and that we either walked or took public transport for our daily touring, the durability of my shoes, including heels, was remarkable.

So remarkable, in fact, that I took the same comfortable shoes to Korea and wore them for nearly five months, again without benefit of a car. In Busan we did get caught out in the rain on several occasions, and I came home with sopping feet.  But the shoes dried quickly.  If I loosened the laces and pulled the tongue forward, they always dried over night. I actually needed my back-up footwear on very few occasions.
 
I am still wearing the globe-trotting Merrill's, although they have developed a few worn spots in the usual places.

For those of you who have traveled with me from my first posts back in September 2010, thank you. I have a few more bits to write and post, so I hope you will come along.  My intention is to post more regularly and avoid the kind of gap that exists between this post and the last. That is, I hope to be a better person.  Starting now.

As for my trusty Merrill's, I will likely wear them until either the shoes or the comfort level disintegrate.  But I did buy a new pair last week, which will serve for the time being as my back-up pair.  It is my hope to raise their status to first pair the next time I am in London or Busan.

Busan Journal, China Adventure, Part 2

 Busan to Shanghai to Hong Kong

It's a simple matter really.  You book a flight, you get on the plane, and you go. So, with our newly returned passports in hand and Alien Registration cards we did not need, we were ready for our trip. To China!

At Gimpo, the Busan airport, we reached our gate far earlier than we expected. Security was fairly straight-foward and efficient, so we did not have to stand in any long lines or take off our shoes and so forth. Even with our language limitations, it was easier than O'Hare.

Aside from the pure joy of going to China and the relief of finally seeing Edward in Hong Kong, our day was memorable for two unexpected events.

The Gimpo terminal itself is huge, with departure gates along one side, shops along the other, and a wide center "aisle." We found our gate near a little display of traditional Korean life (more of less) and then dragged our carry-on bags across the aisle to buy lunch.

With lunch in hand, we looked around for a place to sit. The center aisle was dominated by a big screen TV broadcasting what appeared to be an ice hockey game.  The benches in front of the TV would accommodate probably sixty people, but they were empty. I suggested we go over to watch hockey while we ate.

Years ago, when we were dating, we went to a lot of hockey games. In person, ice hockey is about as engaging a sport as I can imagine.  When it is well-played, it is fast, graceful, and visceral. To see, oh, let's say, a player like Bobby Orr take the puck from behind his own net and rush the length of the ice, weaving in and out of opponents to shoot or set up a shot on goal is about as breathtaking as a sport gets. For the record, we did see Bobby Orr make some of his famous rushes forty years ago at the Oakland Colliseum.

The game on the TV was the 7th game of the Stanley Cup Finals, just after the 3rd period face-off.  Boston Bruins, our old home team, verses Vancouver. Boston was leading by a goal. Boston had not won the Stanley Cup since, well, since Bobby Orr was on the team.

This was the kind of coincidence that would raise suspicion if it appeared as fiction. Nevertheless.

Two things came immediately to my mind.  One is that I had not followed American sports at all since we left New York in February, so I did not even know the Stanley Cup was in progress, let along that the Bruins were playing.  Second is that the Bruins have had disappointing teams for a number of years recently, so how was I to know they had a good team this year?

We were the only people in that airport, apparently, with any interest in this game; but we were glued.  We finished our lunch.  Then, as if scripted, the game ended, followed within minutes by our boarding call. The Bruins won. We did not need to watch the on-ice celebrations. We tossed our empty lunch bag and got on the plane.

The second unexpected event occurred after we landed in Shanghai to change planes for a connecting flight to Hong Kong.  We deplaned, followed the crowd through customs, and then approached an airline counter with two red-uniformed airline agents.

As I recall, it was a big room with nothing in it except a customer counter and these two female agents.  No signs, not even in Chinese.  I handed my tickets to one of the agents, who glanced at them, tore them in half, and dropped the pieces into a waste basket behind the counter.

"Flight canceled," she said.

We were stunned. 

OK, the flight is canceled, but what do we do now? When a flight is canceled, something else is supposed to happen.  A new flight, for example. A procedure to follow or a different counter to visit.  Words of regret or explanation.

Apparently, however, "flight canceled" was the only English these agents could come up with.  Even after a Stanley Cup victory, this was a deflating experience.

After several attempts to explain our plight to someone, to anyone, actually, who could help us out, we found ourselves on another floor in another nearly empty room -- the size of a hangar.  We walked past numerous counters with computers and signs but no agents before we came to one that did have agents. From this desk, after another careful and time-consuming examination of our passports, we were sent to yet another floor and another series of counters where other passengers with our particular predicament had gathered. 

Unlike us, they had apparently understood the directions and went straight to this gathering point for the bus ride to a second airport and a new flight to Hong Kong. We felt fortunate to have stumbled upon the right spot in time to catch the bus without actually understanding any of the directions given to us.

To compound matters, we were not able to call Edward to tell him our flight had been changed.  Our phone would not connect us to his number. And Edward faced a similar problem. When he arrived at the airport in Hong Kong, all he could learn was that the flight had been canceled.  We were not listed as passengers on flights arriving from our original airport in Shanghai, so he was not even sure we were coming.

Much to our relief, when we finally proceeded through the gates into the waiting area in Hong Kong, there was Edward, smiling and waving.  It was so good to see him, and not just because he ended our hours of uncertain and hesitant wandering and wondering what lay beyond the next set of swinging doors. Edward is a prince of a young man, as the saying goes. He is friendly, kind, generous, helpful, hardworking, funny, and many other good things.  He is enough to make even former home-stay parents proud.

And his translation skills aren't too shabby either.  Shay shay.