China Revisited --2013 [27]

Caught in Traffic
or Why We Don't Ride the Subway in Guangzhou

On our way to Guangzhou -- Edward driving and his mother riding shot gun -- I wrote down two signs in English I thought were worth remembering.  One sign on the side of an office building read, "Community Childbearing Culture Center." Donna and I had a long discussion as to what childbearing culture might suggest.

The second was a traffic sign of the "Click it or Ticket" variety we see in New York. It read "Beat Traffic Bandits and Obey Traffic Laws."

So we beat the traffic bandits and obeyed the traffic laws. I am not sure what traffic bandits are, but we did not beat the heavy traffic. Nevertheless, we got to our hotel, the Ritz Carlton, in good shape, and began the cycle of big meals with former students and parents who wanted to express their thanks to Donna for her efforts in teaching their kids.

We met up with Yujia, who had taken the train back to Guangzhou the day before, her parents, April (pictured below, left), and Cynthia (below, next to April). We piled into two or three cars and made our way through considerable traffic from the new part of Guangzhou, where our hotel was located, to the "old" city, where we were to visit a cultural treasure.   It took an hour, more or less, mostly spent merging or waiting for lights to change. My notes record that Edward was "fuming." I don't any longer know what I meant by that.

At one point as we were sitting in traffic making smart comments about getting out to walk (like mother-in-law jokes, these comments transcend cultural barriers), we asked whether there was a subway system in Guangzhou. Surely, we thought, there must be a way to beat the red lights at every intersection and the pedestrians and the merging lane backups.

"Yes, of course Guangzhou has a subway. This is a modern city."

"Do you ever take it?"

"No. Never. It is too crowded and very complicated.  It would take us twice as long to get where we are going."

When we arrived at Chen's Lineage Hall, a huge walled compound similar in outward appearance to YuYin Shan Fang, we met Syan, another former student and frequent visitor at our home, and his mother.

The Hall was only open for another hour -- was it worth going in at all? There was animated conversation in Chinese; then we moved toward the ticket booth. Since we had made the long trip to the old city from the hotel and would have another long trip back, it had been decided we would see what we could see.

Then, when we had rushed through the Hall, which I write about in my next post, we stopped in the Museum store to find some little things to take back to the US. Most of the things that caught my eye were too big (for suitcases), too heavy (stone sculptures, books), too cumbersome (the paintings and calligraphy), too expensive (most of these) or too touristy (trinkets one could find in NY, Hong Kong, London). 

 We settled on postcards and name stamps, which were carved with our initials in both English and an old form of Chinese while we watched.
 
From Chen's Lineage Hall we reentered the traffic to head for dinner at a restaurant owned by Syan's parents.

At dinner we were treated to -- among other things -- rice porridge fondu, pumpkin noodles with sugar and vinegar sauce to give them flavor, bitter melon, and oyster pancakes. We were also served steak after the American fashion, a concession, no doubt, to the western appetite. We also found the tomato rabbit appealing.  Among the signs of respect I noted were a chair with arms (the only one at the table) and a manager's toast in which the manager led his staff to my end of the table and drank to our health.

After dinner we went out for a walk near the hotel.  Some of the lighted buildings we had seen on our river cruise in 2011 are visible from the hotel.

We are directly below the pink tower on the left.  As in many cities, new building designs in the Chinese cities we visited incorporate light shows so that an outdoor stroll has an entertainment aspect to it. Even on this cold night in January, we found the square full of people -- couples, families, teenagers, older folks.


At the edge of this plaza where we walked to view these building were three gigantic transformers.  I am guessing that they stood 15 feet high.  They rotated their bodies and moved their arms, sending out colored light beams from different parts of their bodies.

Somehow I had gotten separated from our group, like a child wandering away from the adults to look at the pretty robots.  I wanted a picture for my grandson Toren, who is fascinated by such things. But my camera was already full and my unyielding laptop, not the traffic bandits, still held my memory card.

China Revisited -- 2013 [#9]

The Store-Front Restaurant

From the Yuanshan Temple we drove a total of three minutes through the center of town to a restaurant. The street was narrow and clogged.  The storefront was already crowded with parked scooters, which had to be moved so that we could park. Two men attended to this task, one older than the other by a generation. The younger man moved the scooters, the older one kept him hopping. Some things are the same everywhere.

Edward's father had already arrived in his car and made arrangements both for parking and for lunch.

Through a store-front with an opening about the size of a double-car garage, we entered the restaurant. To the right were a few round tables and a staircase. To the left, the restaurant's menu, laid out like a buffet to display food choices -- some of it already cooked, but most of it raw.

Edward's father and mother had already made selections for our lunch; but if they hadn't or if we had come on our own, perish the thought, we would have been expected to choose from this array of options. Then, given our language skills, rather than bartering or negotiating menu and prices, we would have pointed and nodded and repeated "Xiexie" (thank you) optimistically.  Crude, I admit, but I am certain we would not have left hungry.

Just beyond the kitchen with its food display were three or four small round tables to the left, and a separate room to the right where we would be served.We were nearly always taken to a room out the main area, not so much to keep us hidden, which might have been a wise decision, as to follow the common practice in China. All of our restaurant meals were taken in rooms that were either private or semi-private.

In this as in many restaurants our eating space was simply an undecorated square room with a round table. For the sake of distinction, I will use the American term "family style" to describe these restaurants.

The little appliance in the corner behind Edward and Yujia is an air-conditioner, not a heater. This restaurant near the temple we had just visited, like most buildings in southern China, is not heated, and the front door -- in this case, a wide opening -- remains open during business hours, which may have been 16 or 18 hours every day.  Everyone wears a coat indoors.

For the sake of keeping our diet adventures up to date, I noted what we were served. The dish in front of Yujia is won-ton soup and the the dish on the lazy-susan is roasted peanuts. Sometimes these peanuts are boiled instead of roasted.  Either way, you pluck them one by one with your chopsticks, which I usually did straight-away to establish my chopsticks-cred.

We were served bitter melon soup with clams, oyster pancakes, pig stomach with almonds, broad flat noodles with bean sprouts, white fish with peppers and greens, fish dumplings, beef (in strips, of course) with green peppers, chicken soup with almonds and squid, and vegetable (swiss chard, I think).

A side note, as a reassurance of "freshness" we were told that the cow for our beef dish had been killed just the day before at 3 p.m. You have to admire that kind of precision, I think.

We were also told that the chicken for the chicken soup was killed just for us when Edward's father ordered the soup dish. Too much information, I suppose, for the average American restaurant goer. But a welcome bit of information nonetheless.

A further side note, this one in the faux pas (i.e., cultural blunder) department. The bowl is for eating and the little plate for bone, not the other way around.

When the dinner was done, one of the teenaged waitresses asked to have her picture taken with us.  So we posed with her while her friends recorded the moment on their little cameras.

I know it would be easy to over-imagine this moment of celebrity.  But as a story teller, I am interested in whether (or how) that moment plays out. This young waitress is, now, a small but important part of our stories of China.

I wonder how -- or if -- we figure into hers?