[Dear Readers, my China entries are now complete. For a quick way to see all my entries on China in one place, you can visit the China category archive. Enjoy!]
Some final, random thoughts on my experiences in China:
Fujian/Kejia Food: Is very oily. Perhaps it was a function of being in a tour group and thus having to eat at proper restaurants with meals having more courses than you can count, but I was really put off by all the oil dripping from the food. Going inland made no difference. Also, many courses were soup based, and these courses increased as we went inland. I guess the farmers prefer soup based dishes in order to fill up their stomachs. Finally, there is a serious lack of dessert. The only desserts aside from fruit were fried pumpkin. However, in Xiamen we did manage to get the most famous of Fujian desserts. I don't know how to call it in English, but it's basically a sweet yam paste that's made with lard and is very delicious and fattening. Mmmmm.
Travel: The Chinese checkpoints at airports all had an obsession with waterbottles. Apparently someone tried to smuggle some sort of acid or something on board an airplane disguised as water. So every checkpoint will open up and sniff your water, or you can drink it for them. It's up to you. Also, when arriving you cannot leave customs without turning over your baggage claim tickets- another security measure. If travelling by road, be aware that many inland roads have been cut up by lorries, carrying heavy loads for the mining industry. The government repairs them quickly, but repairs initially involve tearing up the road surface to re-lay the tarmac. Thus, part of your journey may be on smooth and wonderfully pristine roads; another part you will be bouncing up and down on heavily damaged roads; and a final part you may be taking detours around roads under repair.
Environment: Oddly, very good and very bad. Every city I went to not only had recycling, but every single public rubbish bin on the street was divided into at least two compartments- one for recyclables, and one for unrecyclables. In Xiamen they were divided into as many as four- paper, plastic, cans and others. Frequently there were signs exhorting people to be environmentally friendly, too. It was quite astonishing to see how environmentally conscious China is. However, because of all the heavy industry, the air was very dusty and everytime I took a photograph at night, the flash would bounce off a cloud of otherwise invisible dust flying around.
Cross-Strait Relations: One of my most amusing moments was seeing a large sign on the coast facing out towards Taiwan, proclaiming, "One country divided into two, unite into one China." We could see a white billboard on one of the Taiwanese islands, which apparently reads, "Three nationalities." I'm not sure who they mean by the third. Both sides do get very competitive throughout the year, striving to outdo each other in terms of festivities, for example. The fireworks display during the Spring Festival goes quite insane because both sides will attempt to have flashier, longer lasting and more impressive fireworks. Quite a treat for the residents.
Culture: Unlike the Northeners, the Southern Chinese were friendly, warm and very helpful. I had gotten so familiar with the cold unfriendly Chinese from Beijing and Shanghai, who snapped at me and pushed instead of queuing, that to come to a warm place like Fujian and experience wonderful local hospitality was a surprise. For the first time in China, I felt like I had come home to my ancestral homeland. It goes to show how different the North and South of China are. Westerners tend to think of China is a monolithic society, just as Easterners think of America as a monolithic culture, but of course, both have very intense variations within the state. As someone whose roots lie in the neighbouring southern states of Guangxi and Fujian, I felt very much more at home in the warmer and balmier climate of South China.
I had a wonderful time in Fujian, even despite hating being herded around in a tour group. It's warm and friendly and accomodating. It's also throughly modern and advancing at a rapid pace. With so much exciting potential, I am resolved to return to South China often, and to one day live there for a while.
The trip came a full circle as our tour returned to Xiamen. At my suggestion (although some might call it a full blown tantrum at the thought of wasting our last evening shopping), we took in a cultural show in our final evening. The multi-talented troupe demonstrated various forms of local dances, as well as sang in the local Fujian (Hokkien) dialect. There was also some audience participation- and that's where things got a bit pear shaped, because out of four audient participation segments, and with an entire audience to choose from, the cast somehow chose me a whopping three times to go up there.
Attention hog that I am, I loved it all, of course. The first time was luck: I held one of the tickets that was randomly drawn, and so went up to play a local gambling game. I didn't win anything but left with a consolation prize of a deck of cards. Next time up, they were looking for volunteers to do a local dance, and despite having two left feet I managed to cling on to the girl and get the rhythm right. So far, so good.
The big finale, though, was a re-enactment of a local wedding. Traditionally, of course, weddings are arranged by matchmakers- and so the dancers playing the matchmakers (all three of them) perched on the edge of the stage, looking out at the back of the audience, looking for a hapless groom. Being in the second row, I thought I was safe and concentrated on the events unfolding behind them on the stage. Next thing I know, a burst of laughter erupts around me and I turn my head to realise that the three matchmakers are looking... right at me.
Hiding under my hat made no difference; they came and got me and next thing I know I was wearing the sash and getting 'married' off to a girl I hoped was pretty (a very accurate sentiment, for in the old days men didn't meet their brides before marriage). I did the traditional bowing, got to raise her veil- and to my immense relief, she turned out to be quite pretty. Unfortunately, I can't remember for the life of me what she looks like.
As my cousin observed later, I've undergone basically all the proper rituals for marriage; even my family was there to bless the event. However, my grandfather, despite having long been nagging us older grandchildren to get married, was unimpressed: "I'm only interested in the real thing, not this kind of thing!"
"Plus the great-grandchild that comes with the real thing, right?"
"Exactly!!"
The Kejia (Hakka) are the famous 'Guest People' of China, a dialect group without a home, spread widely over China and anywhere there are Chinese in the world. As their name implies, they came to many provinces in China as late as 1000 years ago, driven to move by war and famine, planted themselves down, and to the annoyance of the locals, never left. As a result of their outsider status, and to protect themselves, their homes are famous as self-contained communities- the famous 'Hakka Castles'. Many were built in a circular shape, with rammed earth walls, and housing up to a 1000 people inside (depending on the size of the 'castle'). They usually have four levels, all facing a central open-air courtyard. The bottom floors are for daily living- the cooking, cleaning, and animal rearing are done here. The second floor are for the young and the elderly. The next two floors are the other residences, and for guests. These famous round (and sometimes square) buildings are very distinctive in China, and have long been a source of fascination for everyone else. The Americans even were convinced for a while they were secret missile silos, owing to their massive size and round shape with a hole in the centre, looking for all they knew like missile silos on their spy satellite imagery.
Basically, if you imagine a huge stadium with rooms instead of seats, that's what the basic model looks like. All have some unique characteristics, of course. The one we visited had an internal ring as well, with a hall in the centre instead of a large courtyard. The size varies greatly as well, as does their age. The newest were only about a hundred years old, but the oldest was over 1,200 years old- and has been continuously inhabited since it was built in the Tang Dynasty.
We had a typically Hakka lunch, a home cooked meal by a local chef who took great pride in his work, wearing a tie and dressing up for tour groups which pass through. Like all other peasant fare in China, it was extremely robust and filling, extremely fresh, and very oily. Hakka communities being self-sustaining, it was also grown around the corner, fertilised by local manure and fed by local farmers. It certainly gives a city person like me a new perspective on my food when one walks past fields reeking with human waste and sees vegetables growing in them, and knows that one will be eating vegetables that only a short time ago was in the same position.
We were given a tour by yet another young and pretty tour guide, who was extremely fluent with the architecture and history of the buildings. Why are so many of our tour guides young and pretty? Is it luck? I certainly saw some less attractive tour guides showing other people around. But they still looked pretty good. Perhaps it is because China has 1.2 billion people, and with so many people looking to get a leg up and advance themselves, they use every single means they have at their disposal- including, of course, their looks. With that many people, you're bound to have an extremely large number of attractive people working in the tourist and service industries, as those are the industries where charisma matters. Either way, I didn't complain. I talked with her for a while and learnt she was also born in the Goat year but just after Chinese New Year, making her roughly 10 months older. She had worked as a guide in the area for just over two years already, and had assumed I was a lot younger given my propensity for clowning around (my mugging for the camera when we were taking photos made a big impression on her apparently!). In fact, she was quite surprised to learn I am a teacher.
"I supposed you get on very well with the kids," she chuckled, "Do they see you as one of them?"
Lacking the capability to be witty in Chinese, I merely laughed in response. I'm lousy at flirting in a language I am fully proficient and familiar with the colloquialisms and slang; I had no hope in a language I only use for conducting business transactions, arguing with taxi drivers and ordering food.
I wandered out of the hotel in Zhangzhou and found myself behind a young, pretty girl in a tight white outfit. As we stopped at the zebra crossing and waiting for a pause in traffic, I quietly admired her from behind. I continued admiring her as we crossed the road, turned to our left, and walked to the end of the street, where she abruptly walked into a small nondescript entrance and up a flight of stairs at the back of the room. It appeared to be a lobby of some sort, and I backed away and looked at the sign by the door. I easily recognised the characters for "24 hrs", "living" and a character I felt fairly sure meant "dormitory" or "apartment". I glanced up the street and suddenly realised the entire street was lined with hairdressers and sex shops selling the lastest in sex toys, pornography and other such paraphanelia. Taking in the lobby in front of me in a new light, and recollecting the girl had walked out of my hotel at 5pm in the afternoon, I suddenly appreciated her in a new light.
I walked on and soon lost myself among the street vendors and bright neon lights of the city's shopping district. Zhangzhou, despite being far inland, seemed as bright, modern and bustling as Xiamen, if much smaller. I was surprised by the number of smart boutiques and lifestyle shops that lined the busy streets. Up above me from a balcony overlooking a street, loud music and the exhortations of an aerobics instructor were clearly heard from the street. The influences of several different cultures could also be seen in the variety of stores, catering to a populace flush with new money and hungering for different experiences and ideas. I saw Japanese-style shops selling cute little trinkets, home furnishings shops with equipment on display more modern than anything I remember seeing in the UK, 'Crate and Barrel' style stores with sleek yet functional home appliances and equipment, and clothing stores that offered the latest from both the fashion houses in Europe and the exciting new generation of Chinese designers, all for a people aspiring to a lifestyle that was unknown in China less than a generation ago.
China, in my mind, was always a land trapped in time, frozen first by the decision of the Ming Dynasty to turn her back on the world, and then by the Communists who attempted to construct a post-modern utopia. Thus China's cities seemed to me to be monolithic soviet-style communal blocks, and China's countryside to be 18th century houses wreathed in mist amidst terraced hillsides growing rice and wheat, furrowed by bullocks driven by boys sitting crossed legged and playing Chinese flutes. Even when I visited Beijing and Shanghai in the 90s, the two cities were still a mixture of the very old and very new, and in any case could be easily dismissed as exceptions, the political capital and the business capital of China. No more. Money is flowing about everywhere in China, and the noveau rich were out in force. It's only a matter of time before it reaches the innermost regions of China.
I don't mourn for the loss of any cultural heritage or feel nostalgic for a past I never really knew. What we perceive as our traditional culture and past is the product of centuries of slow evolution, with traditions discarded and adapted as time went by. Ultimately, people are very pragmatic, and do what it takes to survive. Tradition and culture are our own adaptations to the world around us that give it meaning and allow us to survive- a short hand that keeps us doing the things we need to do, and gives our own lives richness and meaning. Each and every one of these traditions we cling to, started out for a reason. Social advancement, health, cosmological significance- it all has a reason, and we must understand and respect and remember our past, but it should never hold us back from fulfilling our lives here in the present. So when I see China advancing at its current massive rate of progress, trying everything like a child let loose in a toy shop, I don't fear a loss of distinctiveness or heritage. I'm excited about the possibilities and the exciting future that the people of China are going to have. It's the beauty of tomorrow: anything is possible.
80 years ago, my then-3-year-old maternal grandfather left the home he was born in and came with his parents to the Nanyang (Southeast Asia). He has no living memory of the house, nor of the quiet little village where his parents grew up and were married. Over the years, my great-grandmother frequently reminisced about the large family home she left behind, about the farm they had, and the relatives she never met again. Until this day, that was all my maternal grandfather- or any other member of the family- knew about Yongchun: stories told by an old lady who spent most of her years living in a tiny little apartment above a shophouse in China Street, Singapore.
Until today. We returned to Yongchun to find that, like all other villages, prosperity had transformed the village into a fast growing, prosperous town. Yongchun has an unusual number of residents who emigrated abroad, due to local bandits and government soldiers (it was the corrupt Guomindang running around), and as a result, the descendants of those emigrants who prospered abroad have returned to invest in the land of their forefathers. These descendants are spread all over Southeast Asia, and vastly outnumber the current residents of Yongchun, Despite not being a major town, Yongchun has her own skyscraper, full-fledged orchestra and massive public infrastructure- stadia, concert halls, and conference centres.
We picked up a local official who we had managed to contact via the Singapore-Yongchun association, and she acted as our guide, and helped us find the street where, she said, a very large house still existed where an Ong family (my mother's maiden name is Ong) still lived. True enough, it was there, and my great-grandmother was right: it was, for a peasant house in the 1900s, massive, with several internal courtyards and multiple wings. Thinking back to the tiny, rickety apartment that my great-grandmother lived in, it was no wonder she eloquently waxed nostalgia about the family home in China. We were welcomed in as long-lost relatives, and while my grandfather engaged in a long discussion with the residents so as to establish our exact relationship (very important), we looked around. It was very impressive. As with all China, modernity coexisted with tradition: charcoal burners next to digital washing machines in the kitchen, satellite television resting on an ancient cupboard. One of the family was so prosperous he had built a modern multistory apartment block for the family next to the house, and was so proud of it he wanted to give us a tour (we didn't have the time). I was amused by how the pigs lived in the same shed as the toilet, split by just a wall. It made sense to have all your waste and smells at the same location. It being a working day, only the very young and very old were home, so I didn't get to meet anyone my age. Still, it was exciting experiencing such a tangible and living connection with my past. We didn't stay long, but it was undeniably life-affecting to come face to face with the past one only knew in legend. My grandfather was the happiest, beaming broadly the rest of the trip.
A brief digression- prosperity has transformed rural China so quickly that these building projects have sprouted up in the middle of the villages or towns, leading to a mixture of modern buildings side-by-side or, more often, in front of tiny traditional houses and alleys. Driving down the main thoroughfare, it looks like you are in a city; make a turn off and suddenly you are back in the country, with farms and homesteads around you. It's a curious juxtaposition that exists everywhere. Even in Xiamen or Quanzhou, both of which traditionally were major cities, you can see still see small houses if you peek down an alley way, engulfed by major city blocks. In Yongchun, we stopped at a stall along the main road to buy some fruit. We asked for some mandarin oranges, which the seller didn't have. "Wait a moment!" she cried, and mounted her bicycle and dashed off. Our local guide explained that her farm was just a black away and she's go pick some from her trees and be right back. True enough, a few minutes later she was back, her bicycle basket laden with hastily picked oranges. After such effort, we were inclined to just buy some, but our guide pronounced them not as good as another stall a black away, and ushered us away to buy them there. Aiyah, jin pai seh (very embarrassed), but our guide was right. The other stall did have better oranges.
Final note: the patriarch of the house and my grandfather had the same great-great-grandfather, and their great-grandfathers were brothers. Thus I shared the same great-great-great-great-grandfather as some of the people in that house.
... I can hear the roar from Boston.
The greatest comeback in baseball history- against the Yankees, to boot!
World Series, here we come!!!
"The Most Scenic Mountain in Southeast China" read the travel brochure.
I seriously detest building your entire holiday around a package tour, for they offer you little freedom. They are a great way to cover a lot of ground quickly, but you never get to truly experience the local culture, and instead are herded from place to place with inevitable stops at tourist traps selling 'unique local specialities' along the way (which inevitably turn out to be cheap trinkets and pointless crap). Your guide's priority is to keep life as smooth and uneventful as possible, thus negating the possibility that you will experience all the wonderful misadventures that make travelling so much fun.
I softening from this position somewhat, however, when we arrived in Wuyishan and cast my eyes upon our young, fair skinned, doe-eyed guide, Ms. Liao. Suddenly the tour became a lot more interesting. Eye candy seldom hurts.
To be fair, she was very professional and took us on an excellent tour of one of the mountains and sent us off on an enjoyable trip down Nine-Bend river (where I even tried my hand at punting- ha! Who'd've thought I'd get a chance to use those skills in China?), along with the obligatory stop at a tourist trap selling the usual local speciality (in this case, tea). The mountain was spectacular, although I had other things on my mind. The moment I reached the top I pulled out my mobile and rang one of my friends in the USA and asked her for the baseball score!
Nine-Bend River was fantastic as well. We started upstream and went downstream, thus tackling the nine bends in reverse order. The rocks, cliffs and mountains have all been given names by the locals over the years, each with their own extremely eloquent description- Inkstone and Brush, Eagle's Beak, Jade Princess, The Three Sisters (the Youngest Pregnant), Clothes-drying Mountain, Monk carrying a Nun and so on. The names are sometimes updated- our boatman pointed out one sharp cliff that looked like the prow of a ship and said it was the Titanic (a big box office hit in China). Oh, Jack!
Sadly, Ms. Liao resisted all my attempts to flirt with her in my broken Chinese. To be fair, she probably didn't understand half of what I was trying to say. However, she did take my cousin and I to her aunt's house, where I met two of her cousins. One is Fujian Province's only female certified tea expert, and she was only too happy to give us a long lecture on tea whilst we sampled some of the best tea from the Wuyishan area. They are a family of farmers, but lived in the town because the government had moved all the farmers out of the mountains and given them homes in the town when the mountains became a protected area. The farmers commuted daily to their farms up in the countryside, and were happy in their clean, multi-storied houses with all mod cons. They also showed us sacks of wild mushrooms which they picked in the mountains at 3 am in order not to tip off other farmers about where the best locations for finding them are. These mushrooms they sold exclusively and directly to their customers, bypassing the shops, as they only had limited quantities. We bought some; they are very incredible.
Wuyishan really had only two industries, farming and tourism. Everyone I met there worked in some way for one or the other, but they all seemed relatively prosperous and increasingly so. As I would discover, this is true for everywhere I visited in China: unprecedented prosperity was arriving everywhere and transforming the lives of the Chinese people dramatically.
I traded email addresses with Ms. Liao and her cousins and promised to return one day. As we didn't have time to climb the highest peak of Wuyishan, but instead tackled one of the easier and more touristy peaks, I think I have unfinished business there. No, I'm not talking about Ms. Liao!
Xiamen, as far as I can tell, has only one claim to fame: it's the home of the famous Overseas Chinese patriot Tan Kah Kee. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Tan, he is basically the second most famous and revered Overseas Chinese after Sun Yat-Sen. Born in Xiamen, he left to seek his fortune in the plantations of Malaya, and worked his way up from nothing to become the extremely wealthy owner of a great variety of plantations. A great philanthropist, he donated primarily in the field of education, endowing countless schools across Malaya, Singapore and China. Disgusted with the corrupted and incompetence of the Chiang Kai Shek regime, he broke with them and turned to Mao Zedong's Communists, basically bankrolling the Chinese Communist Party with his immense fortune. He was able to see the fruit of his investment as the CCP conquered China, and probably most fortunately, he died in 1961 at the ripe old age of 88, before the Communist revolution started turning really sour in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward and before the Cultural Revolution.
We spent the morning looking around at the immense campus that Tan built, contained a number of schools and universities- it may be perhaps described as a mega-campus. It also contains a beautiful park he built, where his mausoleum is located. It's filled with carvings that depicts scenes of education, hard work, Chinese history, and the Chinese revolution that Tan worked so hard to see fulfilled. The carvings are not just decorative, but are meant to be educational, especially for the villagers who lived in the area. Around his mausoleum are intricately carved scenes depicting his life, and I was very happy to see the Singapore River shown in one scene- he spend a lot of time in Singapore and his legacy lives on in many schools and buildings.
Apart from that, the tour through Xiamen was basically highlights of the Xiamen Special Economic Zone. We drove by factories, light industry, assembly plants, the port, and so on. Xiamen, unlike the other Chinese cities I've visited, really has little else to offer but a very modern and prosperous city, with little to distinguish it from the cities in Taiwan just across the Taiwanese Strait. In fact, if the signs had not been in Simplified Chinese, it could very well have been Taiwan. I've never been in a Chinese city that didn't have the weight of history hanging over it, but Xiamen for the most part feels like it's only been here a very short while.