January 18
Today was our first full day of traveling. We deposited our savings into the bank before leaving Chengdu, both setting new personal records for carrying large sums of cash around on our person. And then negotiating the chaos that was the bus station zoo, which is much more manageable now with 1) more Chinese at our disposal and 2) seeing what mid-autumn vacation crowds are like. Today felt like riding a bike with a tail wind.
The bus ride to ZiGong was 4 hours, climbing and winding through the Sichuan basin countryside. Looking out the window, the contrast flying by is what strikes me. I catch a glimpse of a mom with a baby tied on her back with a purple shawl, walking down a field with a basket in her hand. Trees interrupt the view; a break in the shrubs—three men tilling the soil of one field as another is crouched next to the small green saplings of a nearby field. Enter a tunnel; exit the tunnel to see a small brick house surrounded by irrigated fields of rice, a duck swimming across. Driving around China, the food you see growing is clearly all grown by hand, under intense individual cultivation. And the apparent poverty of those people is beyond my imagining. I can only grasp the contrast to the life I live and the world I inhabit in the cities.
We arrived in Zigong in the afternoon and Steven, our friend and host, rushed us to his family’s home. He told us on the way that they both don’t speak English and that we should practice our Chinese. They both turned out to be wonderful and warm hosts. Both Buddhist, his dad immediately made us traditional Chinese tea sitting on the couch while his mom cooked us a lunch. It was very delicious and was way too much. Food portioning is one of my struggling points here in China. I always want to leave the plate and table empty, but in China the tradition is that the host provides such an abundance of food, the guest cannot go hungry. Steven’s mom is very traditional, and here you see my dilemma. Needless to say, I will be eating a lot I think.
Steven’s mom is also simply amazing. After this late lunch she put on for us and then cleaned up for, we went for a walk downtown and came back at 7. When we arrived, there were three guests and dinner was ready. She had, by herself, cooked another meal entirely made up of about 9 different dishes, three of which were take out, but that didn’t diminish the feat any at all. We began eating while she was still slaving away in the kitchen, bringing out the final dishes. She sat down a for a few minutes at the end of the meal, ate, and then spent the rest of the night cleaning the kitchen. It was painful for me to just sit on the couch watching CBA (Chinese basketball). OK, not that painful, but I really wanted to help with dishes. Steven assured me that this was normal and that I would only cause a scene if I tried to help clean. Ladies, you have it so good in the US.
January 19th
Today we ventured into the bamboo sea (竹海, zhu hai). We didn’t need swim trunks or goggles for this sea, just rain gear and hiking boots. This was an unique trip for us because this was the first time we were going to some place where we had no idea of what was there. We looked at a map of Sichuan, saw someplace that was marked “Bamboo See” in green writing near Steven’s hometown of Zigong, and we decided it was worth visiting. Steven hadn’t gone, no one in the Lonely Planet had gone and written about it, and the internet was equally mum on the topic. Undeterred, we woke up at Steven’s at 6 am and fell asleep on the 7:10 bus to Yibing. A taxi ride across town to another bus station, a long argument with a man trying to rent us a ride to the Bamboo Sea for too much, and another bus ride later, we were waking up with rice paddies and bamboo on wither side of the bus. And rain. And thick clouds. But lots of bamboo.
竹海 turned out to be one of China’s top ten most beautiful forests in China, one of the top National Parks, a World Something Or Other Beautiful Place, and something something something… I find the title “National Forest” ironic because bamboo is a grass. So this national forest is a big grassland with maybe 25 trees in the whole place. But I don’t mean to diminish the place; it was beautiful.
竹海 is in the transitional zone where the mountains of Yunan peter out and sink into the plains of the Sichuan basin, trapping the clouds into a cloud bamboo grassland. As you can tell, I was easily hooked. Bamboo everywhere, the fog gave it a mystical and surreal feel. WWe hired a driver at the gate who snuck us through without buying a park entrance ticket (this is called guanxi in China- personal favors from who you know) and drove us through the forest for the day. The pictures say far more than the words, but it was really, really cool. Things I noticed:
1) The bamboo we’ve seen everywhere else grows in clumps, like bunch grass. The bamboo here, older and thicker than most of the other bamboo I’ve seen so far, was evenly spaced out, as if it were an old growth forest. And all the bamboo stalks (I think trunk is reserved for angiosperms) bend over on each other like a field of grass blowing in the wind. It makes you feel small. But back to the spacing: what we were seeing was a climax bamboo forest.
2) Everywhere we drove, signs of humans living in the forest were in sight: trails leading to the road, bamboo stumps dotting the hillsides (always spaced out in among the living stalks), small houses along the road, and bigger hotel complexes with homes built on the side. As we were leaving the park, I realized that we were seeing a case of humans living in a national park in what appeared, in the 5 hour drive through, as a sustainable way of co-habitation. Bamboo from the forest was used as firewood, as raw material for the products that we were sold in the small shops, dried mushrooms (maybe from the forest) were sold in other stores as well. Other people offered bamboo boat rides along the lake. Maybe I was completely wrong and the bamboo is dying at an uncontrollable rate due to hightened levels of degrassation, but in a moment of Alan Rabinowitz clarity, I saw the potential for co-habitation with a nature preserve/park and I was very excited. I will gestate on this for some time.
3) I saw no bamboo shoots in the forest. I am beginning to think that they don’t exist and that the “bamboo shoots” you eat in the store are something else. Or that there are no baby bamboo anywhere. Vicious humans.
I will end this with the story of how we got stranded on the side of the highway outside of ZiGong. The bus that we rode back on was going to Chengdu and agreed to drop us off at ZiGong on the way (common practice in China). We were all asleep when the driver woke us up and slowed down to a stop on the side of the highway, saying here was ZiGong. Steven (and Luke and I) were greatly alarmed. This was the highway, not the city. Steven said he was confused and the driver drove on to the next gas stop, where we were left. No taxis in sight, we wandered around and were approached by a man saying he would take us to Steven’s house for 50 yuan. 50 yuan was outrageous. Steven’s home was about 2 km away! A long story short, involving Steven’s dad having a friend who was right there next to us with a car but unable to take us because he knew the guy trying to rip us off and couldn’t steal his customer, we were told to wait for a child on a bicycle who would come and show us the way to Steven’s home. Incredulous, we waited. And sure enough, a kid on a bike showed up and led us through some alleys, fields, houses, and on muddy roads until we popped out in ZiGong and not too far from Steven’s house. He also told us that that guy charges locals 2 yuan a person for the same ride that he wanted 50 yuan for. Sometimes having blue eyes, a tall body, and white skin works for you, other times like this it doesn’t.
January 20th
A brief part of the gas station story: Steven said that the driver would have immediately given us a discount if he had spoken the local dialect. Instead, he speaks with a mixed dialect that made the driver think he was not a local, so he hiked up the price. Here’s the rub: China’s national language is Mandarin, which everyone studies in college. But every province has its own dialect, distinct and sometimes unintelligible from each other. And if that wasn’t hard enough, cities have their own versions of their province’s dialect. So Pengshan has Pengshan-hua, a variant of Sichuan-hua, which is different from ZiGong-hua, another variant of Sichuan-hua. Its maddening for me, and I suspect so are most Chinese.
Today Steven took us to his grandma’s house with all of his family, including uncles, aunts, cousins, and a great-grandfather, who was 97! He was incredible- walking around, drinking wine with us at dinner, and Steven told us can play Majiang, which I still can’t play well. Steven’s grandmother and grandfather (both 66) live out in the country outside of Zigong. When Steven said that she lives in a village, I didn’t believe him, and he turned out to be wrong. She doesn’t live in a village, she lives in the middle of the country-side with only two other houses nearby (who are also relatives). Driving out there was driving through rural China. A paved road became a muddy road winding through rice fields terraces and brick houses between fields or next to small lakes. The road eventually ended and we had to walk the last half kilometer to their brick house. Ducks and chickens wandered through the rooms, three pigs in the back awaited kitchen scraps, and a pile of potatoes and a pile of unhulled rice were in the storage rooms. We were given a brisk tour and the men and women began the rush of cooking. A long carp from the nearby stream was gutted and chopped on the steps of the kitchen, the guts washed out the drain on the wall. Smoke billowed out the glass-less windows from the wood fires under the two enormous woks; when I went in, I couldn’t breathe. I have no idea how they stayed in their all afternoon cooking. After cracking peanuts and talking with the great-grandfather, lunch was served. As I sat there, looking at all the food around us and the laughing, smiling enormous family gathered around, I marveled. I marveled at how these two Mechanical Engineering professionals and a pesticide store owner were gathered here with their families in the countryside. I marveled at how the 66 year old grandma was still slaving away in the kitchen, bringing out dish after dish. And I marveled at our food; how when I looked around, I think all of it came from these fields. The eggs from the chickens in the back whose coop had bunnies on top of them; the pork from the three pigs’ older brother (may he rest in piece); the rice from the flooded paddies, one of which was recently planted; the carp whose blood I stepped in 45 minutes ago; the chicken an unmissed friend to the hordes roaming around. Maybe only the tofu I couldn’t account for. Thinking of all this, I felt very cozy and serene. And 20 minutes later, very full.
The story of how the grandparents are out there is telling of the Chinese traditions. They used to live in town, but wanted to live out in the country for a healthier life. Retired life0time farmers, they wanted to return to what they had always done. And so now, their kids paid for the place and they are spending their time farming out in the country. I don’t know for how many people this is the case for, but it keeps people on the land and man, do they ever look healthy. Whatever it is, it is working for them wondrously.
After a rest, we took a walk to search for the Big Bamboo Steven had told me about, which Braving the rain, the fog, and Steven’s slippers for footwear, we took to the hills and clay trails. Cresting the hill, I realized once again the odd thing about walking in China. Back home for me, it feels that when you crest a hills or come to an edge, it is also the edge of civilization. Behind you is the last house or the last road and in front of you is……. Emptiness. But when you crest the hills here, you come to more fields, more brick buildings, more people. What’s endless here are the people on the land, the history of inhabitation. Its an oldness that you see everywhere you look, be it the deep ditch our red clay trail leads us along, or the old brick walls marking an old and abandoned farmer’s house that are crumbling back to the matching red clay earth. The rice paddies are older than I care to guess at, perhaps passed down generation to generation, an inheritance dating back through dynasties. Or maybe I’m now becoming too dreamy. But whatever the history, one cannot miss the feeling that here it goes deeper than arrowheads in the soil and pot shards on hillsides.
Our hosts had no sooner finished eating their lunch when they caught four chickens and immediately bled one by one on the kitchen steps. The forth got its legs and wings tied and went into a box. With dishes still on the table, the wives went to work plucking chickens and burning the excess off over a straw fire. I marvel at their tenacity. After our walk we packed up and everyone loaded up with gifts of fresh food from the grandparents: a backpack of eggs, bushels of potatoes, three gutted and plucked chickens, an alive chicken in a box, and two large turnips. It was a magical day and truly a remarkable experience.
January 25, 2012
The best way to describe a Chinese New Year experience is that I survived. Before I can explain, you must understand that the evening of December 31st is not a big deal in China. There were some fireworks in Pengshan, but by no means was it a momentus occasion. Christmas was a bit bigger, but only because of all the build-up that shops and our school created. Chinese New Year, however, is best described by the host of “Crossover” that we watched at Steven’s house at midnight the other night: “Chinese New Year to the Chinese is like Christmas to Americans.” It’s a big deal. Fireworks were for sale on every street the few days leading up the event, tent shops alongside were selling piles of Chinese wine, the grocery stores were all busy selling food. And when the morning came, we awoke to almost a steady stream of gunfire in the streets, or so I first thought. It turned out to be the long rolls of firecrackers that delight young boys to no end in the states. In China, however, boys never grow out of it; they only grow into it. And as they grow, so do the strands. In China, they sell rolls that have a foot wide radius of firecrackers. They were huge. And people set these off all day in stairwells, in the streets, in city squares, on shop doorsteps, anywhere possible. It was totally crazy;--and very loud. Especially the string set off in front of our door in the stairwell when the door was open.
In a surprisingly American move, one of China’s beloved New Year past times is to watch the Chinese New Year TV performance. It’s a huge event and I am pretty sure that most of China sits in front of the TV New Year’s eve day and watches part, if not most, of it. The little I saw (we were preoccupied with the Australian Open), I was very impressed. The traditional Chinese New Year day goes along these lines: get up, eat a very large meal, watch TV, eat another very large meal, watch more TV, then go out to watch epic fireworks.
Seriously, Chinese New Year fireworks are totally epic. As soon as it started getting dark, the fireworks began. Remember, we were in the city of Zigong, a small Chinese city but by all definitions, a city with high rises and houses and parks and flammable things. But no matter, everywhere was in-bounds for fireworks. Walking through the streets, you would walk up to an intersection where someone had put a large block of artillery shell fireworks that were going off with traffic driving around it. People were shooting Roman Candles out of their windows in the high rises. M-80’s, or bigger, were randomly going off. Between the long strings of firecrackers echoing through the streets and the tank shots of M-80’s that would make you want to jump out of your shoes, it sounded like the city was a war zone.
Once the fireworks began, we went to a nearby square where Luke and Alex’s students were shooting off fireworks. Imagine all kinds of people standing around a city gathering ring, shooting artillery shells, rockets, bees, artillery boxes (or batteries- I like the sound of artillery batteries) into the center. Every 20 minutes, someone would light a long string of unwound firecrackers, hold the other end, and run around the circle being chased by their exploding tail. A very funny sight. I was immensely entertained just by this preliminary showing of New Year cheer, but little did I know what was to come.
We went downtown to see Steven’s family at the Buddhist Temple next. The place was packed and the air filled with incense. It was very cool and beautiful. Around the second story of the three tiered temple, I looked around at the city exploding with fireworks and breathed in the scented air and thought, “this is really China.” We rushed home before midnight, which I was a little disgruntled with, thinking that downtown was the best part of town, but Steven had other plans. From the stairwell, you could look out and it looked like the city was in the midsts of an air-raid. The horizon in every direction was constantly flashing and smoke filled the air. Every now and then one of the blasts would be nearby, a green plume glimpsed through the trees on the hill. I could imagine that this is what London must have felt like during the Blitzkreig. I noticed the most humorous thing between blasts. The stairwells in China are equipped with sound sensors for the lights. When you want them to come on, you stomp a little louder in the stairwell. But on New Year’s night, a nearby firework would set all of the lights on in a neighborhood of stairwells, and after the blasts subsided, they would all turn off. Only to turn on again a few moments later when the next round of fireworks began. And so on and off, on and off, on and off the stairwells of China went throughout the night of New Year’s/
The trip home was for the surprise birthday cake that Steven had miraculously bought for me in Zigong. It was very sweet and delicious, but we had fireworks to see, so we ran out and down the street to the square in front of the sports stadium, where what felt like most of Zigong was shooting off fireworks. The run over felt like running across the front lines- explosions booming overhead, echoing blasts between buildings. We found high ground and watched in American awe (because no one else was nearly so enraptured) at the completely astounding and staggering amount of fireworks that went off all around us. The most remarkable moment was when I looked around and in all directions you could see fireworks going off all around the city. It truly felt like all of China was out celebrating. We did our part by firing off the biggest Roman Candles I have ever seen, which I would like to dub “Roman Grenade Launchers” because they were actually a tube of artillery shells wider than the regular launchers in America. Totally awesome. And so for my 25th Birthday, all of China celebrated by shooting off enough fireworks for a small world war. Thank you China.
For my birthday, we continued with our normal state of business: get up, eat too much food, watch tennis or basketball, eat more food, watch more tennis (the Australian Open was always on in the afternoon) and then rouse ourselves to go out and go shopping. You probably don’t believe me, but yes, our favorite pastime in Zigong was to wander downtown and go shopping. Steven bought me a knit hat and we ate at McDonald’s (for the ice cream of course). We wandered home late and watched Chinese love shows late into the night, laughing at what we didn’t understand and marveling at how that one girl was so mean she broke three guys’ hearts on the show. It looked like she got kicked out. Thank you to all of you back home who sent me warm birthday wishes. All of your words meant a lot to me and made my day very special. Thank you.
We finished our time in Zigong watching tennis and eating delicious food. I struggled with how traditional his family is. His mom would cook for hours and we would eat as she finished cooking, almost never eating with us. I realized today that because of the language barrier, we were stuck in this whirlpool of them offering things to be nice and us accepting them to be nice. It is hard to refuse when you don’t speak the language very well, and just how much you have to refuse was illustrated to us when Xiao Ming came yesterday and I thought she got into a fight when she was refusing some food. No, it turns out, you just have to fight that hard when you don’t want something. And so now, we have departed the amazing and truly generous hospitality of the Zhu family a little rounder than when we arrived. Thank you Steven’s family!
And now we are on a bus going across Sichuan as the traveling continues. Next is Lijiang in Yunan, but we won’t be there until after this 4 hour bus ride, a 9 hour train ride overnight with only standing “seats”, and then another 5 hour bus ride in the morning. Wahoo!
