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.

China -- Revisited 2013 [#6]

On Soups, Meatballs, and Tofu

On the evening we arrived in China after 24 hours of varied wakefulness, 18 hours of which involved flights and airports, Rochester to JFK to Hong Kong, followed by transport via car from Hong Kong to Edward's family home in Shenzhen, including two border crossings and a "random" but extra stop to have our luggage X-rayed, we were greeted with enthusiasm by Edward's dogs.

The whole Zhang family turned out, actually -- father, mother, grandmother, brother, house maids -- with apparent enthusiasm for the American guests. Maybe the brother did not look as thrilled as everyone else, but who noticed.  At that point we were thinking bed, mostly bed, simply bed. But the family, hospitable as ever, was thinking dinner.

Dinner is a specific form of hospitality, a welcoming gesture in most cultures, and China is no exception, so dinner it was.

Our first dinner in China consisted of snails, shrimp, beef, tofu (raw and cooked), three or four kinds of greens that included spinach and lettuce of several varieties in chicken soup, octopus, potato, a vegetable root with holes, beef meatballs and fish meatballs. The potatoes, root, and octopus were in the soup.  Maybe the meatballs were in the soup, too, but my notes don't report that detail.

Sadly I have very few pictures of the food we were served.  I knew I would regret the absence of photographic evidence, but my efforts, especially at the beginning, were aimed at avoiding cultural missteps that I would regret later. Better to err on the side of sensitivity and respect.

This molded fish, swimming among pineapple chunks, was made of something like tofu with a sweetness to it -- not sweet in the American way, but sweet-ish none-the-less.  (It came, actually, as part of our last dinner in Shenzhen rather than our first night.)

Still, this gold fish was very good. No bones.  I ate it, head, tail and all. 

The snails were a special delicacy, a treat I'm sure for this special meal.

Meat always comes in strips and usually with other things, a vegetable, for example, or bitter melon. These may be part of soup or they may be added to the soup or they may be eaten alone. A whole piece of meat, like a steak, or meat cut into slices (like roast beef or slices turkey), would be a western thing rather than Chinese. We did have steak once, but I think it was provided as a kindness to the Americans.

Tofu, which has never interested me much, being predisposed like many Americans to dislike it on principle, can be fixed in a variety of ways.  It is quite good when it is cooked, bland when raw. Much was bland or mild; very little came to the table spicy, although you could make it that way if favor burning sensations.

Shrimp, too, are often favored.  I have at least one good shrimp story I will save for later. Octopus as we had it generally means little pieces of baby octopus, which I found easy to eat once I determined to eat without inspecting. The red octopus on ice in this photograph is for display.

"Vegetables" refers to a variety of greens.  They look a little different than American varieties of greens, especially lettuce, which the Chinese boil. I had never seen boiled lettuce before YuSi, our first Guangzhou home stay daughter, cooked it for us at home. The texture changes but the taste, or what there is of taste, stays the same.

The vegetables with holes tasted very much like potato. We learned later that it was lotus root. I couldn't have guessed.

Apart from the number of soup dishes, the real departure from American expectations are the meat balls. Over the course of the first three or four days we had lots of meat balls that were beef or pork or fish. Here again it is not the taste -- although I must confess I have not eaten fish meat balls anywhere else. The chief difference is the texture.

Chinese meatballs are dense little things.

American meatballs (that is, those of European origin) fall apart easily, sometimes with no prodding. Chinese meat balls or fish balls, on the other hand, stay together. They are solid as well as dense, and they are little -- about the size of a ball on a paddle-ball toy, with the consistency and mild taste of a round hot dog.  Pretty much like round hot dogs, if we had such things.  Often they are in soup, as they might have been on our first night in China.

Often, too, meals are served without tea or water. One simply drinks the soup.

I have recounted this meal in clinical detail because it proved to be typical of what we were served frequently. For the record, I ate everything that was offered in our first real Chinese dinner.

I was not able to say I always ate everything; but at the beginning I was determined to eat anything that didn't look back at me.