China -- Revisited 2013 [#16]

Into the Mountains

On January 1st we headed for our first visit to "the village"  to see the old China, or at least what remains of the old China in the rural areas.  After a cold night, we had breakfast of broad noodle soup with pork meatballs at a restaurant literally around the corner from the Zhang family "town" house.

We drove to the village via the mountains, which is, we might say, the long way to get there. As I have noted earlier, leaving the town means literally and abruptly driving into open space; the houses end and the gardens or meadows or hills begin.  We drove up into the mountains to walk about and eat lunch -- and then back down to see the village.

There are several points of interest in these mountains. The first is a dam that serves to conserve water for the villages and towns like Lehu in the valley.  Edward's father had built an aqueduct to bring water down from this mountain reservoir into the family's village to provide them with sufficient, clean water. The stream in the village is polluted and subject to seasonal fluctuations, so it is neither reliable nor healthy. The water level in the reservoir when we saw it was abnormally low, creating a rather alien landscape with its denuded embankment.

Although we stopped at the dam office and went inside for tea (of course) with the officials there, who were friends of Edward's father, the only pictures I actually took at the dam are the picture of Edward and Yujia pointing at a map (included in post # 4) and this photo with its high vegetation line.

Driving away from the dam, we glimpsed a "big Buddha" on a mountaintop in the distance, which I photographed from the moving car. My original intention in taking the picture was just to bring the Buddha close enough to see it -- as I was unable to make out more than a white bump with the naked eye.

There was so much enthusiastic conversation about this Buddha, I thought it might be a destination.  As it turned out, this picture was as close as we got.  If memory serves, its distinction, in addition to its size, is that it depicts a female Buddha, which is rare.

What we saw instead was a mountain forest area famous for several very old species of plants and animals. The identification that appeared in English on the sign is red vertebral forest; the lengthy explanation was in Chinese.

We were told that there were pangolin native to this mountain, although we did not see any. The pangolin is a small mammal with a snout reminiscent of an anteater and a kind of plated armor like the armadillo.



The only wildlife we actually did see were ducks, paddling in one of the shallow stream beds that carry run-off down the mountainside.

We parked at a shop that sold tickets to the trail.  It also served meals and sold various dried roots, herbs, mushrooms and other fungus, berries, seeds, greens, and so forth. Anything edible and vegetable that could be grown or found locally and dried was there in zip-lock plastic packages. My understanding is that these are primarily for soups, which are ubiquitous in that part of China. Many of these dried vegetable items are spread out on sidewalks, parking lots, and road pavements to dry in the sun.

The mountain trail is a concrete path along a rock-strewn stream bed. It is a pretty easy walk for maybe half a mile.  When the path began to involve climbing rock steps along the side of the stream, it was decided that we had gone far enough; so we turned around and walked back to the parking lot.

One of the prehistoric plants that grows here is a fern tree with huge, familiar looking fronds and a trunk that resembles a palmetto. It was a bit off the path, but I would estimate the trunk to be about six feet high.

The stream gorge that we walked along provided a number of convenient photo ops to demonstrate our presence.




















Back on level ground again, we found a number of ducks hanging to dry. I made an immediate connection between these ducks and the ducks we had seen in the stream.  Fun today, food tomorrow.


 Unknown to us, Edward's mother bought two of the ducks from the rack I had photographed near the shop where we bought our tickets for the mountain trail.


 We also saw -- but could not approach -- a couple of traditional houses that would have once belonged to landowners.  We were not able to get a clear story, but I gather these had been abandoned for decades -- perhaps since the turmoil of the cultural revolution that began in the mid '60s. We saw other, more elaborate landowner homes on our visit to Guangzhou.

 

From the mountain shop we drove twenty minutes to a village restaurant for lunch. Just after we pulled in, a bus pulled in behind us and unloaded its twenty-five to thirty passengers, many of whom went into the small restaurant. Others stood outside near the road where we were standing to let the sunshine warm us.

After considerable conversation between Edward's father and various other people -- the bus driver, the restaurant workers, passengers -- we learned that Edward's father was buying lunch for the whole bus.  It was a rather astonishing gesture of generosity.  He went around handing out cigarettes to the men and chatting with them in the same way he had in Lehu the day before.

We were astonished not only by this act of generosity but also by the poverty of the people living near the restaurant. Many of the houses were half-finished new construction, which meant they were concrete and brick shells with no windows or doors and with construction rubble in the yards. We were told many new homes had not been completed because money had run out. The region is poor. Times are tough here. Small children from the house next door were running around barefoot on the broken brick and construction trash in very cold weather.

Out of respect, I did not take pictures of those children or their parents, or of the young woman -- maybe 20 years old and mentally disabled -- who crawled out of the house on her hands and knees and began to make her way out to where the crowd of travelers was standing while lunch was being prepared. When we were called in to lunch, she was still on her hands and knees in the middle of the road.

I did, however, photograph an old man who came marching down the road from the village. He was wearing an old army uniform, complete with arm bands, cap, medals, insignia, and a leather pouch. He carried a flag that was Buddhist rather than military. His face carried a look of serious, if inexplicable, purpose.  Under his elbow he held a yellow megaphone constructed of a plastic bottle such as we might use for orange juice. He had cut off the bottom and taped a handle to the side.

He, too, was clearly living in an alternate reality.

Just as he started to deliver his rant, Edward's father came out to him. After a brief conversation, the old soldier tucked his megaphone under his arm and marched back into the village. Edward told us later that his father had given the man 100 yuan, a considerable sum for an old veteran on a pension, and asked him to forgo the speech.

After our lunch of soups -- black bean, chicken, vegetable -- and white rice, we drove to the family village for our first look.  Here, too, we were impressed with the generosity of Edward's father, what he has built, what he has done to improve village life.

Edward's father is a complex man. Although he remains in many ways a mystery to us, he is as man who possess great awareness and responsibility. Like China itself there are many stories to tell here, and they are intertwined in ways that is hard to reflect in brief accounts. The family village deserves at least one story of its own.

China -- Revisited [#14]

Walkabout, Pt 3

Once past the Catholic Church with its Christmas decorations, we walked a loop, heading west through the market, turning south along the river, and then east through a business district. At the end, we found ourselves back at our starting point in front of the Zhangs' building.

As we headed into the traditional market, we encountered folks who stopped Edward's parents to greet them and, briefly, to catch up. Sometimes we were introduced, but often we were just told how this person or that was related. These two boys couldn't take their eyes off of us, but their older sister (with the impressively colorful half-fingered mittens) and their grandmother didn't pay us any direct attention.









Although cars did not travel through this market, bicycles and scooters did, often quite fast. Pedestrians seemed to know when to step aside and when it was safer to let the scooter find a way around them, but those skills did not come naturally.  Several times we were tugged or nudged to the side by our alert hosts.

Here and there little alleyways branched off of the market.  We did not have time to follow them, but on another trip I would love to just wander the neighborhood.

At one point we came out from between buildings into a clearing that turned out to be a school yard.  Faded lines marked out a field of play for several games -- soccer, I assume, and basketball. A pair of hoops without nets stood in this school yard. Boys who had been shooting hoops and other kids who had been running around stopped to look when we appeared.  That was usually a signal for me to stop shooting pictures and act gracious.

Beyond the school we came to the river that ran along the edge of Lehu. The river bank had been improved with stone walls making a channel, on top of which was a new walkway and a new concrete road.

The houses across the road from the river walkway were squat, mostly two story affairs. They struck me as being not necessarily older than the town buildings we had just come through but more rural, more village construction.

For reasons that I can't explain entirely, I find myself drawn to virtually everything in this landscape, from the houses that could be described as boxes set one atop another, to the admittedly mundane color scheme (varied eath tones), to the window lattices, to the roof lines and roof tiles. I am draw to tools, especially traditional tools.  I am drawn to more abstract things too, like colors, shapes, patterns.  I love brickwork. In another life I could see myself as a stone mason.  I love trees, especially when they are twisted or oddly shaped, like this sycamore that had been left to grow through the new sidewalk between street lights.  If I remember right, the tree inhibited foot traffic to the point where we had to walk single file around it or step out into the street.







Here, too, men on bicycles would stop to chat with Edward's father.  He would offer them cigarettes and they would converse while smoking.

Across the river was countryside.  In the low space between the road and the houses was an open space, maybe 150 feet wide, that local residents had planted as gardens. All the gardens were neatly laid out and well tended.  Often we saw people working these gardens. Everywhere we went we saw the same thing, cultivated open space. The houses might be cluttered or in poor repair, but the gardens always looked well-tended.


Then, as I have said, we reached a cross street and turned back into town. 

But that's another story.

China Revisited -- 2013 [#13]

Oh, Santa! Walkabout, Pt 2

Half a block into our walk, shortly after arriving in Lehu, we passed the Catholic Church, which would not be unusual in Anytown, USA, but certainly is in China.

People had been coming up to Edward's father and mother from the moment we stepped out the door of their building, so every hundred feet or so we were greeted by a new group. Many were relatives who live in town; others were old friends from the neighborhood. Distracted by the exchanges of conversation and introductions, I did not realize we were standing beside a church.

Our first view of the Catholic Church was of a colorful "Merry Christmas" banner with a very western looking Santa crowning the main door. His face was European and his nose bulbous. I would describe him as a caricature here, but I'm certain all Santas are basically caricatures. I was surprised initially by the English message and then by the fact that Santa was still in place.

It was also curious to me that Santa was prominent in the Church's Christmas proclamation. Protestants from my tradition tend to have concerns about iconography anyway. In what sense is Santa religious or Christian?  During Christmas season we are the people, usually, who complain about "taking Christ out of Christmas," and Santa often represents that displacement.

In Lehu the usual questions were immediately more complex and confusing and layered. Santa with the European face and then the English words!  Such an American saying, "Merry Christmas!" Yet here it is in China.

To begin sorting it all out, it is useful to have some idea about origins. If we consider it at all, we tend to think "Merry "Christmas!" is specifically American; but it is not. Actually "Merry Christmas" is imported, dating from 16th Century England, possibly earlier. It is likely, as well, that the meaning of "merry" has shifted significantly over the centuries.

Furthermore, while Lehu is half a world away from home in New York, only a week had passed since our own celebration of Christmas. So why wouldn't Santa still be in place? 

As I reflect on it, this, like all of the cultural details bombarding us, was essentially related to context and perspective.  What is Santa doing way out here in Lehu -- a western Santa at that?!

What were we expecting?

While I was taking in the spectacle, Edward's parents called a church employee out of his office.  He came rushing down the little stairway next to the church to shake our hands and welcome us. He was all eagerness and good cheer. He was dressed completely in black. I thought he might be the priest. He spoke no English, so we just shook hands and smiled at each other while various conversations in Chinese went on around us.

After an exchange between this man and members of the family, Edward said, "He is inviting you inside.  Do you want to go into the Church?"

I had not particularly thought about entering this church since we were out for a walk; but why not?  It was not at all like he had suggested we sit down to eat raw seafood.

"Sure," I said.

My curiosities now piqued -- our hosts encouraging us -- we ventured into the Church.

Outside, in addition to the Christmas decorations, we had passed a display featuring Mary in a kind of stone grotto. I am familiar with these jagged stone formations from Chinese paintings; but this display of Mary in the grotto was both strange and strangely familiar, a little like seeing Santa over the door of a church.

Inside the church doors was a large foyer with Christmas displays set up among or in front of permanent art and iconography. A large nativity was set in an interesting bamboo-and-thatch shed, set behind more traditional railings and dressed up with red flower displays, mostly but not exclusively poinsettias. The characters -- Mary, Joseph, the Christ-child, shepherds, the Magi, and so forth -- were as western looking as Santa. In this display the color scheme was the surprising element; the bright blues, reds, and varied purples struck me as lurid.

For Yujia, who was taking pictures of us, the interesting part of this church were our reactions and not the Christmas displays themeselves.

It turned out that the man who had originally greeted us was not the priest. The priest was upstairs in the sanctuary. So we were ushered up to the second floor to be officially welcomed.

The inside of the church was no warmer than the streets outside. Donna was glad to have worn every piece of warm clothing she had brought.

Despite the lack of heat, a common practice in southern China, this was not an old building. A quick look at the sanctuary shows modern construction, built-in wiring for lights and fans, cleanly plastered walls, and very up-to-date projection equipment.  The pews were pine benches, reminiscent of camp meeting halls in America. They appeared to be relatively new, as they were bright and showed little wear.

The walls held posters of scenes from Bible stories and from the life of Christ. All appeared to be familiar western Bible illustrations.

The priest, too, was eager to meet us. He had been working at the front of the sanctuary with a group of young people, who found our sudden appearance to be quite a surprise.

Unlike the waitress at the restaurant who wanted her picture taken with us, these kids stood back with their hands over their mouths to hide their reactions.

The priest spoke to us in English that was polished enough to suggest that he had studied in an English speaking country. He was rather eager to relate as much information about the Catholic presence in China as possible.  He had figures about how many Catholic parishes there were, where the churches were located, how many Catholic believers attended every week, and so forth. We had the feeling that he was giving us an "official" talk -- an affirmation of Chinese Catholic well-being that he had practiced and delivered before.

He seemed disappointed to learn that we were not Catholic ourselves, although I may have misread his reaction. There were many things about him we could not figure out, and my ability to read faces and situations is not always accurate.


This short visit to the Catholic Church in Lehu had many surprises, but nothing was more surprising than a display in the foyer featuring Mary flanked by two, five foot Santas playing saxophones.

We have found workable explanations for many cultural curiosities we saw, but nothing in our frame of reference has helped us gain perspective on Santa's saxophone, unless they are an odd reference to American street musicians who don red costumes during that long shopping season.

Judging from the number and size of the Santa references, the Christmas influence here had less to do with the birth of Jesus that with western commercial culture.

The Chinese are not unique in appropriating foreign cultural artifacts that they have somehow mistaken. The most telling characteristic of Chinese restaurants in America, for example, is the fortune cookie; all Americans expect fortune cookies at the end of their "Chinese" dinners. But the fortune cookie is a cute tradition that has its roots in America, not in China.

Santa and his saxophone may belong in that category.

China Revisited -- 2013 [#12]

Walkabout, part 1

Edward's family has an ancestral home in his father's village, but they -- the Zhang family -- stays ten minutes away in "town" [Lehu] when they come to visit. The town has 380,000 people, I'm told, so it is a different scale of "town" than I am used to. The village is quite small, however; and despite the short distance, the space from town to village is countryside, not suburbs.

Still, the town has features that make it decidedly different from cities like Shenzhen. Comparisons are hard, but I had the same sense of difference when I was in Korea between Busan (3.5 million) and Seoul (14 million).  Seoul is the global city, intense, immense, sprawling, and clearly cosmopolitan.  Busan is, by comparison, a big small town; lots of people, yes, but with a strong Korean, less globalized feel to it.

When we arrived "in town," after visiting the Yuanshan Temple on the way and having lunch nearby, maybe five hours after leaving Shenzhen, we pulled into the Zhang family building, each floor of which is set aside for a different family group. The oldest brother, who lives there year around, occupies the 2nd floor with his family. Another floor belongs to Edward's grandmother, the matriarch of the family, although she does not leave the house in Shenzhen very often. Edward's family occupies the fourth floor whenever they drive up from the city.

This apartment-home is sparsely furnished as compared with the family home in Shenzhen, the one we refer to as "the mansion." I was surprised, for some reason, to find the familiar portrait of Mao on the living room wall. We observed similar portraits on several walls in town and village homes but not, in my observation, in the modern cities.

Each floor of the Zhang building is composed of two large central rooms, one for eating, the other for hanging out. Off of these are bedrooms, bathrooms, the kitchen, a smaller sitting room, and balconies. I took lots of pictures from both balconies, as they offered a "back street" view of the town.

The apartment was cold so we opened doors and windows to allow the warmer cold air in. Despite its recent construction, this building (like most) lacks heat, so staying warm requires a bit of effort.

Donna asked Edward whether they had thought about buying space heaters for this house if only for visits, like ours, at the beginning of January.  "Not really," Edward said. He shrugged it off as a temporary inconvenience.  Maybe so, but it is an inconvenience offset by wearing jackets indoors.

After we had settled in and had tea, which does warm the body, we all went for a walk in the neighborhood.  Donna and I had thought getting out for a walk would be both needed exercise and a chance to see what the town was like.

Our little walkabout was an education. Our first discovery was that everywhere we went had a story about this building or that corner or the side street, tied to Edward's father and mother. More amazingly, we were stopped and greeted every hundred feet or so along the way by friends, relatives, and acquaintances; some times we were stopped by strangers. It was easy to see how tight the social connections remained even years after the family had moved away.

It was also easy to see how even the casual exchanges carried significance and why Edward's parents are well thought of. There was lots of small talk and lots of laughter. Edward's father offered cigarettes to nearly every man we met. Most took them, lit up, and stayed around to chat until the cigarette had disintegrated in smoke and ash.

We visited a Catholic Church, a traditional market, a school, a new promenade along the river, and a neighborhood of busy shops (one of which was a foot massage business that caught our attention); and we experienced the press of traffic as pedestrians.  Most of these sights deserve their own accounts.  When we turned down the street where we had started our walk, I realized we had walked in a big circle.

In front of us as we rounded that last corner, next to the recently constructed Zhang family apartment building was a vacant lot with footing pillars already poured. Around the pillars, the family living in the low buildings behind them had planted an extensive garden, in the traditional manner we were to see many time.  And beyond that, the town as it was developing.  There, in one frame, the past, the present, and the future. China.

China Revisited -- 2013 [#10]

Little Faces

The young waitress who wanted to be photographed with us was one of many memorable young faces that are now China to us. As I did during our months in Korea in 2011, I found the face of babies and children to be endlessly fascinating.  I suppose it is the grandfather in me, but I also find them endlessly endearing.

"Grandfather" is as close as I can come to analyzing this interest, although I can describe the phenomenon.  For one thing, as we all seem to know without being told, the very young are unabashed; they have not yet learned to hide their curiosities and emotions.

These two boys were being walked around Luhe by their older sister and grandmother on the afternoon we arrived from Shenzhen to see the village. They were, I imagine, not sure of what they were seeing.  It is likely they had never seen a non-Chinese before. I stepped closer to take another picture and had to back away since they were clearly becoming frightened.

This little girl in red was riding on the back of a scooter.  Her mother was driving, weaving in and out of traffic, and a younger sibling was riding on his mother's knees. We often saw four on a scooter at once (mother, father, two kids). Donna counted six on one scooter, which was a record for us.

This little girl is the daughter of Edward's cousin.  He would say the 1st daughter of the 1st daughter of the fifth uncle on his father's side. We met her at the family apartment building in Luhe.  She was quite frightened of me at first -- well, for the first day at least -- so it was hard to get a photograph. Eventually she seemed OK to have me in the same room, but she never exactly warmed up.

We found this little boy in Edward's mother's home village. He, too, has a family connection, although I can't set it out for you now. He was more than willing to let me photograph him.  But his real friend on our visit was Yujia, who took his hand and sometimes carried him along our walk.

These little boys were playing at the edge of a rock pile in Edward's mother's village. Like kids everywhere, they entertained themselves with what they had at hand. Their parents (or mothers, at least), no doubt, were around; but since they played out in the open, they were easily watched and cared for by the whole village.

In Edward's father's village, on the day we went to celebrate the opening of the senior citizen's center, we saw two children in particular who hung around to see what we were up to.  One was this little girl, whom I have written about before, who demonstrated her English skills for us.

Another was this little boy, who sat or stood beside his grandfather at the table under the big tree where the adults were exchanging information and then asking us questions. This little boy watched for the better part of an hour without fidgeting or, apparently, losing interest to the adult chatter.

He watched us with keen interest but without apparent concern or fear. He and his grandfather clearly had a congenial, respectful, and close relationship.

At one point, his grandfather had him raise his thumb to say Okay after we had complemented him on his good behavior and long attention span. His little jacket, like many we saw, showed the influence of American culture (Mickey Mouse) and the common presence of English.

The little boy in what looks like black and white pajamas was the only person we saw on our visit to the Hakka village, an abandoned ethnic compound on the outskirts of Lehu.  He watched us when we drove up and while we were getting out of our cars. But when I got my camera up and ready, he would not look up from his game.

Perhaps my favorite picture of all was this picture of Ye Wan Ping, the 14 year old daughter of another cousin. When we visited her home after our brief visit to the Hakka village where we saw the little boy above, she greeted us at the door with an extended exchange in perfect English.  She wanted to meet the American teacher who had meant so much to Edward and Yujia while they were students in our own small village in western New York.

"What is your favorite subject in school?"  Mrs. Zoller asked.

"Oh, English, of course!" she responded with no hesitation.

For us it was worth the 18 hour plane flight just to meet Ye Wan Ping.