Experiences

Big Noses In The Back Again!

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Bus to Dali
As we pulled ourselves up into the luxury express bus we felt that we were living large…we wouldn’t have local color but we would have comfort for a change. Jana, looking at the TV monitor up front says, oh we’ll have a TV. Oh goody I said sarcastically…another Chinese movie. Then Jana said, “Guess where we are sitting?” Where, I asked looking around? The “Big Noses” are in the back again, Jana gasped!!!

But the road was good and we enjoyed the three hour trip through beautiful terraced valleys dotted with Naxi villages with red brick houses and swooping rooflines. Most houses had big double gate/doors with brass handpulls. We noticed some solar panels and saw one satellite dish on top of an official looking building. Listening to Hotel California by the Eagles, we incongruently flew past women walking slowly by the sides of the road carrying heavy loads of wood and brush on their backs.

The bus dropped us off by the highway near Old Dali before it proceeded up the road five miles to the New Town. Horse carts waited to pick up travelers…we asked to be taken to Yu’an Garden or Guesthouse Number 4 as it is called by the locals…a lovely compound with garden, free internet, homey laundry lines and showers and squat toilets down the walkway. The first chilly night we walked down the street to Marley’s Cafe and, huddled next to a charcoal fire with two other tables of western travelers, ate a delicious chicken soup.

We have discovered that after a day of bumpy bus rides, smelly squat toilets, freezing showers, hard beds in unheated guesthouses, frustrating efforts to communicate, hacking and spitting, ever present acidic gas that burns your nostrils and throats from the burning charcoal used for cooking and heat, a bed will do wonders.

Koor Yi…Ok Ok

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Monday December 16
OK, OK, OK, (koor yi in Chinese) the woman taxi driver giggles as we pull out of Old Town Lijiang on the way to the bus station. Ni hao (hello)! xiexie pronounced shishi (thank you)! we said to each other Goodbye, How are you, she said. She taught us the words for banana (sansha) and apple (pepo), earthquake (juluna) or to that effect. And then that was the end of the Chinese discussion! She did, however, get through to us the fact that all the buildings we were passing were newly constructed as a result of the 1996 earthquake…it was hilarious watching her body language as she tried to communicate that many people were killed and injured! Her fee was twice as high as it should have been (12 yuan or about $1.25) but we figured the extra 6 yuan was for the entertainment! And we were grateful when she rushed into the bus station to find out that the next bus was leaving within the next 10 minutes.

We wonder from time to time how the Dutch couple we met in Lao could have gotten the idea that Chinese people are not nice…maybe their food is a little oily but we have found the people to be nothing but friendly…they have a great sense of humor if you extend yourself to them and they look for every excuse to practice their English with you.

Conversation With Roland

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Had a final dinner at familiar and cozy Sekura’s Cafe in Old Town Lijiang…splurging on Western food…sharing our beer with Roland, a 30 year old economics teacher in a university in Singapore. (Surprisingly and to his delight Jana guessed his age…so many young Asians look much younger than they are.) Roland had attended the University at Flagstaff Arizona and a small business college in Whitewater Wisconsin.

We immediately fell into a discussion about the likely future of China…the cities will eventually be fine but what will give the Central Government trouble, everyone agrees, will be rural China. There is great unequal distribution of wealth…but as Jana says…where isn’t there? Roland said that conservedly 95% of all food, whether horticultural or animal, are genetically altered and we agreed that China will never export food to the United States because of it. A chicken develops from embryo to full grown fryer in six months, he says. Safe ecological methods, it seems, is a luxury of rich nations. Roland has done some consulting for various environmental groups and says that the Philippines has done the most of any Asian country in terms of using ecological methods like crop rotation etc. instead of the overuse of fertilizers. But the bigger problem, Roland says, is that more efficient methods of agriculture do not rise to the surface because of individual initiative as in the United States. China, because of it’s centralized government imposes one unified model, regardless of local needs and conditions, that is communicated to all the villages via satellite TV.

I mentioned the book I had been reading, “The Coming Collapse of China,” and Roland laughed…saying yes, for every opinion you will find economists agreeing or disagreeing largely because of the lack of reliable statistics. China’s problems, the book says, could be solved with political reform but the Communist Party will never let that happen. China insists it’s GNP is growing at 8% but many believe the figures are cooked in order to get that rate, Roland agreed. Yes, the GNP is growing now, but my book says the banks are going broke because the central government is spending at breakneck speed to bring China into the 20th Century world market…last year it joined the World Trade Association. Can that kind of growth be sustained at the same time that the unemployed workers in rural China, who are already demonstrating on a regular basis, cause bigger trouble for the country? And are China’s reserves really as big as they say they are?

Than we lapsed into more esoteric subjects like evolutionary biology and creationism which requires faith…and the personhood of the chimpanzee…which was the subject of Jana’s son Jordan’s Master’s thesis…a huge leap which, Roland thought, also required faith. We ended with a discussion of the probable end of the species…at the very least a stimulating end to the evening.

When we returned to Mr. Yang’s Inn at 11pm Mr. Yang, who has taken very good care of us for almost two weeks, was waiting up for us so he could close the gates…Welcome Home… he said with a smile.

The next morning as we were leaving for the bus station, Mr. Yang told us in his limited English “to take care.” We will miss this gentle man who brought Jana two eggs instead of one to eat when she was sick.

And we will miss Fifi the Lijiang dog and Debu the Beijing puppy who loved us enthusiastically and unconditionally.

Chinese Mysteries

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The Chinese have incredible confidence in themselves…and consider themselves unquestionably the most superior people in the world…mostly due to their long history. We Westerners are the barbarians. (So we don’t need to think we are “all that” as my teenage Latina friends would call it.) And in China, Jana and I have noticed that we are continually being hidden in the rear of the restaurants, buses or whatever.

Hacking and spitting; bad hair on the men who hold cigarettes between their teeth and between their fingers like we hold a pen.

Why is the huge sign on the number 11 Middle School written in English? Because China has recently joined the World Trade Organization and it wants Western tourists to come visit their schools?

What is the Chinese Welfare Lottery? Never found out.

Old rusted framed-in but unfinished buildings…often covered with sheets of dirty canvas.

Internet everywhere…the Chinese ISP is even free on my laptop…love the sound of emailers giggling at their funny messages in the internet cafes.

Signs Everywhere…English Teachers Needed

Conversations…Guy in CD shop with university education; didn’t know what I meant by the term Communist Party…but later found out that he probably just didn’t want to talk about it. He said it was not true what westerners think…that people can say what they want and can talk. The people are told by the Communist Party that the Falung Gong is a cult that leads people away from conforming to their country (they really mean the Communist Party). They are also told that Falung Gong makes some practitioners commit suicide…and when I told one waitress that those people are committing suicide to protest against their government I saw a veil lower over her eyes but she didn’t say anything.

Western Tourists
Met a Canadian couple in Kunming that travel to Mexico every year and stay in bordellos where they can park their recreational vehicle in a fence enclosed area ($2) where they feel safe to sleep at night. I wondered how they tell where the bordellos are…

Chinese Tourists
60’s clothes; smart sophisticated looking girls…probably from Beijing. Platform leather; tennis shoes with stretchy upers, ankle length leather boots with leggings or long skirts-many of them leather. Sweaters to rival those of the Europeans.

Cultural Guffaws
Jana remembered a story about her husband John’s grandmother and grandfather in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950’s. His grandfather asked a Chinese man on the street a qustion…”do-ee youee knowee whereee weee can….” when the Chinese man turned to John’s grandmother and said “lady, what’s wrong with your husband that he speaks so funny?”

A Chinese word we learned: OK is Koor Yi

Conversations In Tiger Leaping Gorge

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Wednesday Dec 11
In Old Town Lijiang, Bob joined us for breakfast at our hotel at 9am; met Li at her hotel at 10:30 for minibus trip up the gorge. Bus had no shocks so was a very bumpy miserable ride; Bob uncomfortable on narrow road overlooking the gorge. Drove all the way to Walnut Grove, which is the beginning of the Gorge and had lunch there before the trip back…everyone else but the driver and I got out and walked a couple stretches. Caught the driver rummaging through our stuff couple times while waiting for the walkers. Later Bob said that Li had warned him not to leave money in the bus while they walked.

Talked to a young French walker on his way through to Walnut Grove…he had been working for six months in a L’Oreal factory near Shanghai in order to learn Chinese. I asked him about a working visa…said he thought he was on tourist visa…his supervisors obviously paying off the immigration officials to allow him with his engineering background to work in the factory. His Chinese was great though!

On the way back, Li told us a few things about the minority people…that for the Naxi the Snow mountain is God…that when couples divorce the woman is no longer desirable by other men but that if her husband dies she is desireable. Marriages are popular in the winter.

For the Yi people, the sun is God so they live on the top of the mountains near the Sun God…but they are lazy and when they get money they drink alcohol. There are 30,000 Naxi people in Lijiang.

She went on to say that the government is poor but the leaders get all the money from tourism. The sons of the leaders get to go to school in your country, she said. Almost all the businesses in Old Lijiang are run by the Han Chinese she said…the Naxi are able only to rent out a room or two in their homes. The Naxi also drive the taxis.

Thursday Dec 12
Sakura was trying to heat up the restaurant with a charcoal burner but it produced so much smoke we had breakfast across the canal while listening to Blues Music in the Delta Cafe.

Later, Jana and I went to Sakura’s Bar and…partnerless…watched “American Sweethearts.” A group of very loud Chinese tourists came upstairs where we were watching the movie…we had to turn up the TV to earsplitting volume in order to hear. Seems to be a trait…talking in movies, concerts…any public entertainment venues…

Friday Dec 13-14
Bob took a bus to Kunming and then flew to Chiang Mai Thailand.

Pissing Match In China

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When Bob took a box of purchases to the Old Lijiang post office they asked him to take everything out one by one. This had not happened when we sent boxes from China before. Bob had spent a lot of time carefully packing many fragile items, so, frustrated, he asked them to take the things out since they were the ones that wanted to see the items…a mistake. Then they told him to put them all back in, which he carefully did…but in a huff….another mistake.
Then they told him the box would have to go to the Customs office and they would also take the items out. This concerned Bob because how were we to know some things would not be taken out of the box-and why did the box have to be searched twice? Never question. When Bob told the clerk these things she went to get her supervisor who then told Bob he would have to take the box to the Customs office himself. Bob figured this was a punishment for questioning the clerks. In the meantime I had filled out a form and as we picked up the box to leave, the supervisor wanted 3 yuan for the form. Bob told them that the form was not needed anymore so he gave it back to her and we left. Bob finally walked to the main post office in new town to mail the box home…with no trouble and no more searching. Want power…be a bureaucrat in China!

Echo & Li…Competitors

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Monday Dec 9 2002
In Old Town Lijiang, we are woken up by a knock at the hotel door at 8am. Two couples from Taiwan were on their way to Zhondian with a driver and wanted to know how we found the city. Then we breakfasted at Sakura Cafe.

Later, we moved to Mr. Yang’s Inn, a brand new beautiful guesthouse right on the canal where, playing with Fifi, his Lijiang dog and Debu, a pure white 3 month old Beijing puppy, we saw a large group of young people with chef’s hats on walking through the streets…we followed them until they ended up at an orphanage with children whose parents (600 people) did not survive the 1996 earthquake and more than 16,000 people were injured. Turns out we had happened onto a celebration.

On the way we passed a group of men building a traditional Naxi structure…with pegs…no nails. They had a roast pig on the spit…a traditional way to celebrate the birth of a new building, we are told.

Dinner at Sakuras…a western hang-out…guy at table next to us was from Eugene. I said we made a big mistake going home in February! He laughed and said he wasn’t going home until spring to avoid the Oregon winter.

Bob arrived in Lijiang from Dali by 1pm on bus but we didn’t connect. We were communicating via email; he told me to meet him the next day at noon in the Square. Bob couldn’t follow my directions to our hotel so he got one of his own in a Naxi Family House for Y80 or about $10 per night; tiny but very clean with 24-hour hot water.

In the meantime, Jana had gone to one internet cafe and I had gone to another at Sekura’s because there was no room for me. Thirsty, I drank a 40 oz beer while answering email…and feeling quite good, I emailed Jana and told her she should join me in another beer. Later she told me she laughed out loud reading my email.

Tuesday Dec 10
Breakfast in the cold courtyard of our hotel…Naxi fried bread with chives, rice porridge with pork, steamed bun, eggs, stir fried cabbage and coffee. I worked on my journal sitting in my heated bed while Jana washed her hair.

Later, Jana and I ran into Echo and invited her to eat with us…meeting Bob in the town square. Jana and I didn’t know it, but Bob had arranged for us to meet with Li, a Naxi minority woman Bob had hired to take us to the gorge the next day and to take us to a Naxi music concert after dinner. Echo, a city-bred Chinese Han from Beijing, bristled when Li walked up to our table in the restaurant. Li tried to talk Bob and I into watching a Chinese play instead of listening to Naxi music…the previous client of hers from Illinois liked the play much better than the music, she said! Echo, whispering in my ear, insisted she just wanted the higher commission on the play but we persisted in getting to listen to the music. I would find out later that Han Chinese look down on the ethnic minorities…feeling very superior to them. And Echo was horning in on one of the few jobs Naxi people can get that isn’t scut work…as tour guides.

Then there was a mixup on the seats at the concert…some Chinese patrons made us get up and give our seats to them…then Bob questioned whether we actually had Y50 seats…so Li offered for us to move up to the front. But as the concert had already started and we didn’t want to disturb the others, we declined.

Don’t know why we bothered with the consideration…others were coming and going and talking out loud with each other as they pleased during the whole concert.

Zhondian to Baishuitai

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Friday Dec 6 2002
There were no street lights so we walked the equivalent of several blocks to the Zhongdian bus station in the dark to catch the 7:50am bus for Baishuitai. While waiting for the bus, we ate a steamed bun with chili and garlic purchased from a girl at her little stand.

I sat with the luggage while Jana finally figured out which bus was ours. We boarded the local “delivery and distribution” vehicle; aisles and roof full of sacks of unknown contents…but no chickens.

Many colorful ethnic minority folks, some of them the big-hatted Yi, got onto the bus as it climbed higher and higher across the mountain passes above 3200 meter Zhuandian. As families got on the bus everyone already on would greet them and smile.

One man and his family got on in the middle of a very small village…he sat in front of me and turned around from time to time to look at me. I nearly jumped out of my skin when he suddenly turned and yelled “hello” right at me! I laughed and he laughed. He opened a small round tin of yellow powder and sniffed it up his nose…what do you think it is I whispered to Jana…dunno…might be some kind of stimulant she said under her breath. He was fascinated with my face and kept looking at my writing. Two Chinese women so far have told me I look Chinese but I don’t know if that is why he was looking at me. Jana and I showed him pictures of our families. It was so cold on the bus you could see whirls of everyone’s breath condensing into the air.

The family got off the bus in a desolate place with the woman carrying the heavy sleeping blankets on her back and disappeared into the mountains….to visit relatives or going home we wondered?

Going over another pass we looked down to see some small buildings and some sheep roaming deep in a canyon. It reminded me of one of my father�s summer sheep camps in Oregon with a cook’s wagon and the sheep dogs hanging around the campfire…warm and comforting…deep within a small solitary place with the mountains looming all around.

A colorfully dressed Yi minority woman with a huge rhomboid head piece got on the bus with her husband two small children. A man and his little boy with shaved head and tuft of hair in front got on…I wanted to stick his dirt encrusted feet and body into a nice warm bathtub. The father sang/chanted a wonderful ethnic song the entire time he was on the bus….completely unselfconscious…seemingly oblivious of everyone around him…lost in reverie.

Jana remembered that it was almost Pearl Harbor Day. The bombs fell on the Philippines on December 8, the same day as they fell on December 7 in Hawaii on the other side of the dateline. We talked about the War that seemed so close to us now on this side of the world. Jana described what she knew about the war in the Philippines…the country where she spent two years in the peace corps after college. The topography of the countryside in and near Baishuitai where the local Naxi cultural people live reminded her of the sub cultural group-the Kankanai-in the mountains where she taught English.

When we got off the bus in Sanba, at the foot of the Baishuitai Plateau, a Chinese tourist from Taiwan that had been sitting on the bus in front of Jana paid Y10 or $1 of our entrance fee into the limestone terraces because the clerk had no change. “No, No,” I yelled as he disappeared up the hill on his day trip from Zhongdian to see the stone terraces.

Saturday Dec 7
We hiked up the hill and behind the Stone Terraces. The gorgeous pools of blue/white water is full of calcium phosphate and forms crystals as it runs over the edge of the beautiful stone �terraces� that are resplendent in the sunlight. The area is considered very sacred by the Naxi (pronounced Nashi) people who live in the town. Jana was blessed by incense as an old man showed her how to throw rice into a hole in one of the terraces as an offering-the privilege for doing so, 1 yuan.

We had lunch with Audrey, a young Naxi woman. Then Jana walked with her to another village and down a ravine to a waterfall. On the way back, the two of them walking together seemed to catch the imagination of a farmer they were following who was switching his cows up the deep ravine to the village. The farmer turned and wanted to know what time it was in America. Jana thought it was about 4am there since it was about 4pm where she was in China. Then the farmer and Audry talked…she gestured to Jana that China and America were just opposite each other. Jana was touched by the old man’s interest in the idea of the time difference and the fact that they were on opposite sides of the world with light on one side and dark on the other.

The electricity was out that night in the village so Audry cooked us a small dinner of vegetables rice and meat with charcoal and we ate by candlelight in her little one room cafe that also served as her home/bedroom. We admired her entrepreneurial spirit and desire to be independent but I suspect that it has also caused her grief because as we were leaving the next morning I asked her how she got the scars on her nose and face. She answered “fighting” as she raked her fingernails through the air.

We stayed the night a few feet up the street in a little unheated guesthouse that we never did find out the name of but was owned by Audry’s sister-in- law. We were in the middle of three rooms and became concerned about the knotholes and spaces between the slats that counted for walls when the other two rooms eventually became occupied by several young Chinese men later in the evening. In the middle of the night I chose not to walk up the hill at the back of the guesthouse to a smelly outhouse with squat toilet but instead used a small red pail with a lid provided for such use in the room.

We were told the bus to Lijiang would leave in the dark at 7:30am (all of China is one time zone) but at 9am we were still sitting by the stove in a cafe where the bus was to pick up it’s local travelers to Lijiang. The cowboy driver-complete with cowboy hat-leaned on the horn to let us know we should get on the bus…then he turned off the motor and we sat for another half hour before taking off with no breakfast.

On the way we visited with a small well-dressed young woman from Beijing whose English name was Echo who had gotten on the bus just outside Baishuitai. Later we found out that the reason the bus was so late leaving was that she and her fellow travelers had asked the bus to wait for them in the morning so they would have time to climb up to the limestone terraces!

We passed through a small village with children lined up by the sides of the road with musicians playing some music and waving some flags. Echo told us that young men spend two or three years in the army and they are welcomed back home this way because their army service is considered very important to the country.

Yangshuo

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Friday November 29 2002
The annual Fish Festival began today. The fish festival celebrates the Cormorant fisher birds who dive for fish from fishermen’s boats they perch on but because of their small throats and a metal ring put around the throat by the fishermen they cannot swallow the fish. The fishermen then take the fish out of their mouths; it is amazing that the birds don’t fly off with the fish.

There was a dragon parade through the town; Jana and I watched some Chinese rock singers and a beer drinking contest; guy from Britain entered but didn’t win, he said, because the beer was warm and hard to swallow. We will run across him a couple more times on the tourist trail. We watched great fireworks in the country that invented them late into the evening on the roof of a restaurant.

One of the many signs for English teachers seen in China: Wanted teachers of English, ASAP, for one month to one year, free bed, food, air ticket, free Chinese lessons, 2500 to 4000 Yuan a month payment, work visa, call 1-390-773-7533 Contact Owen at Buckland College.

Saturday Nov 30
Walked to the bus station with our backpacks to catch a bus back to Guilin so we could catch the train to Kunming by 11:30am. The “Hard Sleeper,” which was about half the cost of a “Soft Sleeper” meant six beds in a compartment with no door. There is supposed to be no smoking on the trains in China but the men smoke anyway and the smoke drifts into the compartments. Our compartment contained a Chinese couple (he with cell phone and large voice) and a nice Chinese guy (all with no English) on one side and Bob, Jana and I on other side.

A friendly Swedish couple in a nearby compartment was good for some interesting conversation about their socialist government which they said works very well there. In the compartment next to us was an older mother and a child with it’s grandparents. The child wore knitted garments with a split crotch for potty-going. No diapers are worn by babies in most of Asia. Maybe we should ask Asian mothers about potty training…probably wouldn’t work in the West, however, because Asian mothers keep their babies with them constantly.

That evenng we went to the dining car for dinner. After ordering (and paying before the meal) we waited a good hour for dinner. When the train made a stop and the waiters debarked we became concerned and asked the new staff for our dinner. They were prepared to ignore us until a nice Chinese man eating at the next table spoke rather strongly to the wait staff about our situation. We think the old staff worked a scam…taking off with the money themselves. We ended up with a nice meal but don’t know if the new staff was stuck with the cost of the meal or not…one of the many mysteries we will witness in China.

The next day as I was walking back down the aisle from the filthy and foul smelling squat toilet at the end of the carriage, I heard hacking, caughing and spitting. I looked up to see the old grandfather next to us spitting on the rug in the aisle. Grossed out again!

Westerners Go In The Back

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Thursday November 21 2002
Reading “The Coming Collapse of China,” a book written by a Chinese American economist…a dissenting opinion…he gives China five years to get their banking system in order…which he doubts will happen.

At breakfast at small noodle shop up the street in Hong Kong, seated at back table again. Waited for the waiter to clean off all the surrounding tables and then he finally came to take our order…hmmmm.

Arranged for Chinese Visa; Bob told the ladies that he picked Jana and I up off the street; another lady who heard this stuck her head out a door to see who it was that was picked up! Bob’s sense of humor will get us into trouble yet.

Took the Star Ferry from Kowloon across the bay to Hong Kong Island and took a cable car to the top of Victoria Peak for an incredible view of the city. Rode a double decker bus on it’s route through the city center; got off and tried to find a dim sum restaurant…but Bob was steered to a Japanese sushi restaurant instead so we figured he must be pronouncing dim sum wrong. Finally found dim sum (pronounced din sin in China) restaurant. Managed to order a few dishes from the waitress but never did get the rice.

By the time we boarded the ferry back to Kowloon it was dark and the buildings were lit…Christmas lights beginning to go up…rivals New York & San Francisco.