China Revisited -- 2013 [31]

Splendid China, part 1

One afternoon between our trip to the village, LuHe, and our days in Guangzhou, Edward told us he would take us to a cultural exhibition in central Shenzhen.

The place is called Splendid China. Were we interested?

Sure. Of course.  That's what we're here for.  Although we had never heard of it, the name is typically Chinese in its use of the grand descriptor "splendid." Splendid in many ways it is.

Splendid China is a new construction, a tourist destination built to show off all parts of China, not specifically the cultural sites of Shenzhen. It was described for us in various ways.  It is an outdoor museum / folk village after the order of Mumford Village (for folks in western New York), though on a vastly larger scale. It is a theme park of recreated places and structures that might make one think of Disney World -- without the fantasy and without the rides.

Well, maybe with a touch of fantasy and rides.

The entry to Splendid China features several huge displays of modern, cartoonish renderings of traditional Chinese things (like dragons) and new Chinese things -- all of which suggest the universal appeal of modern TV animation. Note the characters have "western" rather than Asian eyes.

On our visit to Splendid China, the kissing couple, more traditional and clearly Chinese, was drawing young folks who posed for photographs in front of it. I don't remember seeing too many of those young folks in the park itself, however. To be honest, there weren't many people of any age in the park on that day as the weather was cold and showers threatened.

[We did encounter a group of Korean tourists that we identified by the sound of their conversation. Quite a feat, I must say.  Donna called "Anyounghaseao (hello!)" as their open carriage drove by us.]


Edward parked at the car entrance, in an partially submerged parking garage just beyond an enormous tree that I remember as being a tropical species of sycamore.

The cultural center itself had no other Disney-like characters that I remember, although it did have an aerial tram for those who wanted a seated overview. We chose to spend our visit on foot, all four hours of it, which began with a series of imposing stone archways that lent a more traditional "weight" to the park entrance. We did not have time to visit every corner of the park and we did not see any of the cultural shows that were offered in better weather.

These arches, like nearly everything in the park, were newly constructed replicas rather than old originals; they create the look and feel of an ancient imperial city, although no ancient sites had been scavanged for artifacts. At other displays in the park, as, for example, with the Great Wall reproduction, the model is so vast in its scaled down version as to demand an emotional response. One cannot help but be impressed by this staggering feat of engineering, ingenuity, and physical labor. 

The mission of Splendid China is, objectively speaking, preposterous.  How does one take the mind-boggling variables -- a land mass the size of China, a civilization that spans 5,000 years, and a population that includes 56 ethnic groups -- and adequately represent it in one "theme park"?

To be fair, one could hardly do justice to China's diversity, scale, and longevity even with a life-time of free travel and ready access. Nevertheless, Splendid China accomplishes some significant things.

In an odd way the large and the small replicas, and the presence of floral "representatives,"achieved a sense of "China" that would be hard to create short of the life-long tour I have just suggested.

Perhaps the first conclusion one might draw from these re-creations of the wonders of China is just how varied China actually is. I grew up while China was a very "closed kingdom," imagining China as a land of exotic wonders and drab daily existence -- this was during Mao's early years, after all -- but never in terms of diversity.  I would have thought that the Chinese were uniformly Chinese, with one language, one form of writing, one identifiable look, one mode of dress (sometimes plain, sometimes fancier), one means of living, and so on.

Although much of what was unknown about China in those days is knowable today and while no intelligent westerner would admit to holding the kind of singular view of things Chinese that I just described, the fact remains that we often don't think past the false notion of China as a mono-culture. The truth is -- and the value of a tourist destination like Splendid China is -- that mono-culture idea is quite simply false.

Splendid China will never replace visiting actual cities, countryside, and historical sites, of course; no recreation can. And we will want to see the actual terra cotta figures and the Great Wall on our next visit.

But  Splendid China is, in fact, an efficient way to begin understanding the Chinese complexity.  China is many things: it is mystery, it is confusion, it is contradiction, it is elegance and dignity; it is in many ways overwhelming.  It is a long, significant, complex history. It is many enchanting cultures. It is diverse and fascinating peoples.

But China is not fantasy.

One of the ways that Splendid China is different from a place like Disneyland is that while it creates fantasy it is not really a destination. The fantasy is wanting to see the real thing -- all of it.

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.