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.

Busan Journal,China Adventure, Part IV: Edward's House

The Family House

When I picture a house in China, the image I usually summon is a quaint old single-story row house with a curving roof line on a crowded, crooked alley.Or maybe in a modern city, an apartment in a high rise with narrow hallways and small rooms. Like most people of our time who have not traveled, my brain pulls together a lot of notions from movies I have seen. Impressions of America are compiled in the same fragmented and haphazard way I should think.

Edward's family apartment, where we went to meet his grandmother on the evening of our second night in Shenzhen comes close to what I had imagined, although the rooms were bigger and more numerous.  It was good to see a real family dwelling to replace what I had inaccurately imagined
.

Just before noon of that day, after our visit to the cultural center of Shenzhen and meeting up with "our kids," we got into cars for a ride to the development where Edward's parents are building a new house. I use the word "development" here, but here too what we found is not what I usually think of in American terms as a development.  It is in fact a huge gated community, with the amenities of a city on the premises.

These amenities would include six golf courses and the "country club" complex where we had "lunch"  before we actually visited the house itself. I took pictures of everything in sight, of course, including the huge scale model of the community.

Lunch was a buffet that defies description.  I was so impressed that a noodle chef, one among many chefs, was actually making "fresh" noodles as we browsed the food options that I stopped to make a video of his performance.  My interest was greeted with laughter from the other chefs, who applauded when I finished. I think maybe the video may have brought him some teasing, too.

There was enough physical drama involved in turning a lump of noodle dough into the long thin uniform noodles we are used to eating to keep an army of kids entertained.

While I am aware that noodles do not originate in cellophane packages on grocery store shelves, I have never seen them made before.  I suppose it is a little like the proverbial city kid who has never gotten closer to a cow than the milk carton in a store. What a treat.

After eating we headed for the new Zhang house, which has a gate of its own off a cobblestone residential street. As one impressive sign of China's growing affluence, there are quite a few of these houses being built and occupied in this newly developed area.

The house has four floors with each floor being designated by its function or by the family members occupying the floor.  Edward and his brother, for example, have a floor, with their own bedrooms, sitting room, and game room.  His parents have another floor.  As the house was not yet occupied and at that point only partially furnished, many of the rooms have a similar look in my photographs. But we spent quite a bit of time touring room to room, floor to floor.

The central living room is dominated by a twenty foot ceiling and a huge chandelier. Midway to the ceiling along the back wall is the balcony overlook of the floor Edward and his brother will occupy.

Due to its stage in the process of being furnished, as I have said, much of what we saw had to be filled in with explanation as to what would be added before the family moved in, as with this bedroom.

The marble walls, hardwood floors, ornamented wood furniture styles are all apparent, although the stuff of family life had not arrived.

We were, of course, all impressed and envious of the video room with its high tech cushioned seats,

and the Olympic sized pool table,

and the sitting room between the two where Edward's mother served us tea and snacks.

It is hard to construct an adequate picture of the house even using pictures.  There was a huge kitchen, two dining rooms (dedicated to Chinese style eating or western style eating), laundry room, maids' rooms, sitting areas, an elevator, flat screen TVs on the wall in nearly every room in the house, bathrooms everywhere, a huge garage, and places we didn't even get to.

It seemed a little too much for one family of four, which is the way an American mind works.  But a better way to think about it is that it is a family home for the extended family.  This means that when uncles and aunts and cousins, brothers and sisters and spouses, grandparents, family friends and invited guests come, as is likely, on holidays or festival days, there is room for everyone to eat, play, talk, sleep, and hang out.  I'm not sure how the modern term "hang out" fits the traditional Chinese occasions to gather as a family, but it is a similar idea.

Outside, the house offers many different looks.  The architecture is interesting, and I got better photographs from the yard or looking toward the neighborhood than I did inside.  Sadly, my skills are not always up to the task at hand.

This view from the back yard almost shows the chandelier through the tall windows middle right. The central ground floor glass doors leads straight to the pool table. But the highlight of the back yard is the fish pond to the left of where this picture is taken,

an outdoor sitting area in the other direction,

and a golf course beyond the wall, giving the view from the house a feel of being out in the wild and well-tended countryside.

Then it was back to the Shenzhen center for another big royal feast and introductions to Edward's grandmother.

Probably the most astonishing thing about the house for us was when Edward told us that his father was under the impression that this was how most Americans lived.  An interesting observation, not all that different in its way from how I had imagined the Chinese live.