Category Archives: travel

Voting with Our Feet (and other essential body parts)

Posted on July 19, 2015 | 3 comments

Recent retirees like me get a lot of health-related information—mailers, email reminders, targeted Internet advertising.  Fairly often, these messages tout the benefits of regular exercise. Walking gets mentioned a lot—helps our circulation, requires little special equipment, can be done anywhere, anytime. So, even in the heat of summer, I try to keep up a regular walking routine. Over the past several seasons, I’ve been doing a good bit of more targeted walking, too, participating in protest marches and fundraisers for causes I think are important.  One of those is global climate change; another is voting.

Last September, I joined hundreds of thousands in New York City to draw global attention both to the problems we’re creating with our profligate use of fossil fuels and to possible alternatives, including the low-tech, available-to-nearly-everyone switch to walking more and using our vehicles less. I got a walker’s high moving along with the varied and huge crowd around me, most in comfortable shoes, some with banners, others with slogans on their clothing, some coasting beside us on skates or bicycles, a few in wheelchairs.

This past week, I joined a smaller, more localized crowd in Winston-Salem, North Carolina to draw attention to the start of a federal court case considering the constitutionality of several restrictive 2013 changes in my home state’s voting laws. The weather was sultry—July in North Carolina can wilt even the most stalwart. However, organizers had ordered thousands of bottles of cool water, and we guzzled it down as we listened to speeches and songs before taking to the streets. We wanted to help reinforce the message that the U.S. Constitution has been repeatedly amended to expand, rather than constrict, the franchise. The 15th amendment gave the vote to male former slaves; the 19th enfranchised women; the 26th, ratified in 1971, reduced the voting age from 21 to 18, giving the ballot to 18 to 20 year olds, including young men subject to military conscription.

I’m most grateful that my tramps have so far been voluntary. Nowadays, a huge number of people are walking for more distressing reasons—the number of international refugees and internally displaced persons has reached a level not seen since World War II. In 2014, nearly 60 million people, about 1 in every 125, were in refugee camps or temporary shelters due to wars and ethnic conflicts around the globe. When armed conflict breaks out, many vote with their feet just to survive.

In Isabel Wilkerson’s 2011 award-winning saga, The Warmth of Other Suns, I read that nearly 6 million African-Americans voted with their feet during the period between 1915 and 1970. These participants in the “great migration” left the Jim Crow south for points north and west, pushed out by fear and discrimination, and/or pulled away by the lure of better opportunities and less blatant oppression.

During my lifetime so far, I have not been forced to vote with my feet because of wars or oppression. However, voting with a ballot is a right I no longer take for granted. Recent quantum leaps in the sophistication and prevalence of gerrymandering make it more difficult for me to cast a meaningful vote, as do both subtle and more blatant attempts at voter suppression. Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have made “voting with money” more prevalent, an emphasis I find distressing. The problem has gotten too big for any single citizen, candidate or political party to solve on its own.

At the New York City march, some carried placards proclaiming: “There is no Planet B.”  On a less global level, I wonder, if we destroy our country’s democracy, what “plan B’s” await us? Our union has become considerably less perfect over the past decade or so. Perhaps we can reverse the trend—some of us may have to vote repeatedly with our feet in protest marches. We’ll also need to engage our heads, our hearts, our hands, having serious debates about vital issues, registering and voting, resisting demagoguery and pat answers, listening to each other, working together. Let’s keep walking…

 

 

 

3 Comments

Posted in Quandaries and Rants, travel, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

An Inconvenient Spotlight–Tiananmen 1989

Posted on June 8, 2015 | 1 comment

A somewhat blurry video of an unarmed Chinese civilian approaching a line of military tanks near Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989 has become iconic for older Western China-watchers. The man wore a white shirt and dark trousers. He carried a small sack in either hand, as if in the midst of a shopping trip. He emerged from a large crowd and stood before the lead tank, maneuvering to stay in front of it as it swung right or left. Finally, the tank stopped. The civilian climbed up onto the tank and tapped on its turret. For a minute or two, he conversed with its driver, presumably asking him to alter course and turn back. After that, “tank man” climbed back down and disappeared into the crowd. Before long, the tanks began rolling again. Few are sure what later happened to tank man.

Parts of what many Westerners know about events at Tiananmen in spring, 1989, exist because the photojournalist who shot the tank man video footage was in Beijing to cover a historic diplomatic event—a meeting between the heads of state of China and the then-U.S.S.R.  He and other journalists shone a spotlight on multiple events that transpired in central Beijing that tumultuous spring. Footage and verbiage about Beijing protests in May and June of 1989 stayed part of Western impressions of China for years afterward. Whenever I’ve traveled in China post-1989, I’ve been cautioned to avoid mentioning Tiananmen. I comply. I’ve heard that security at Tiananmen Square is especially tight around June 4 each year.

The one at-length Tiananmen discussion I’ve had with someone from China occurred around our American kitchen table in autumn, 1994.  Then, our house sheltered my husband and me, our high school aged son, plus a high school exchange student from France and an international exchange teacher from southern China. I’ll call him Mr. Huang. During the period from 1984 to early 1989, we’d had nearly a dozen short and long-term visitors from the People’s Republic of China, but Huang was our first Chinese long-term visitor since the 1989 Tiananmen events.

The evening’s exchange of views was probably prompted by a televised American news clip about the debate over annual renewal of the U.S.’s “most favored nation” trading status with China.  U.S. media coverage nearly always included archived footage of June, 1989 events in Beijing. Huang paid careful attention to the footage and the TV commentary. So did the rest of our temporary international family.

Once the news clip ended, our French visitor commented, “It’s a shame that so many of the surviving protesters had to flee to Hong Kong or overseas. They could have helped a lot with economic development if they’d been allowed to stay and contribute without being threatened or jailed.”

Huang at first said nothing.

“From what we saw on television, there must have been a lot of casualties,” our high school aged son chimed in.

“What did you hear about the protests, Huang?” I wondered, hoping the teenagers might be more diplomatic.

“Not many people died,” Huang informed us. “Most of the ones killed were soldiers trying to put down a counterrevolutionary mob.”

“But most of the demonstrators were students or ordinary citizens,” our son retorted. “And we saw people who weren’t soldiers lying bleeding on the streets. We saw ambulances and stretchers. We heard gunfire.”

“How can you tell what happened?” demanded Huang. “You were thousands of miles away. I was at home in China. What I read in the newspapers confirmed that the soldiers were the brave ones. They were the main casualties. I’m glad not more of them were killed.”

“Your newspapers tell you only what they want you to hear,” responded the young Frenchman. “We saw the tanks and tracer bullets on television in France. We heard the explosions. How can we doubt what we saw and heard with our own eyes and ears? Were you in Beijing?”

“I’ve never been in Beijing,” Huang admitted, “but my father served in the People’s Liberation Army (China’s military) during the 1950’s. He was a brave soldier. He fought hard for our country. Our military would never harm another Chinese unless they were trying to destroy the revolution. Our military serves the people—in Beijing in 1989 they were only doing their duty to restrain counterrevolutionaries who wanted to bring down the government.”

After a few more exchanges, we realized that we would never convince each other. The media reports of the protests and any subsequent crackdowns by our respective communications outlets were selective and diametrically opposed. So were our respective backgrounds. By the end of the evening, all we could agree on was one underlying theme: good governance requires considerable self-restraint on the part of both governments and their citizens.

As media in both the U.S. and China become more invasive and more highly selective, I wonder where any more inconvenient spotlights might shine. Periodic violence erupts in both the U.S. and in China. Tiananmen happened. It had and has consequences.  It haunts those of us in the West (and perhaps in China) who were alive and paying attention when it occurred. However, the incidents leading up to tank man in 1989 are no more all of China than footage of gun murders or police riots in U.S. cities are all of the U.S. 

May all of us find ways to forgive each other and to forgive ourselves.

1 Comment

Posted in Quandaries and Rants, travel, Uncategorized

Tagged , , ,

China Musings: Views from a Different Well

Posted on June 1, 2015 | Leave a comment

In September, 2014, I set out to post a weekly blog entry during the school year about some of my experiences and impressions of China. Now the school year is winding down. In a few weeks, I’ll stop posting about China as regularly. I’ve tried to stay true to my own experience of China and Chinese culture(s). After the year’s posts are complete, I’ll occasionally revisit some entries to update them or clarify them. I may expand some or delete others as my experiences and knowledge change. Near the end of a year of exploring China and its many facets, I’m almost as puzzled by its vastness as I was at the year’s start, and just as intrigued as ever. Early in my attempts to set some impressions on paper, I remembered a Chinese folk tale that some of my Chinese students had told me, about a frog and a turtle:

The frog lives at the bottom of a well. The well supplies all the nourishment and beauty she needs.  From her vantage point, it’s possible to see a small disk of sky. This is what she knows of the world above. One day, a large turtle happens to hear the frog croaking as he passes by the top of the well. He stops to chat.  The frog invites the turtle to climb down the well to share in the bounty she has found there, but the opening is too small for the turtle’s shell.

The turtle then tries to describe to the frog some of what he has seen—wide expanses of sky stretching to far horizons, a sea so broad and deep that it maintains its level despite the most massive floods or droughts. The turtle invites the frog to climb out and travel with him to view this wider world. The frog considers, then decides to remain in the security of the well, enjoying a more predictable life, viewing the sky from the well’s bottom.

I like to think that, like the turtle, I’ve seen a bit of ocean during a fairly long life so far. However, I’m aware that, like the frog, I can still see only parts of a larger sky—my views have been colored by my culture, my “American well,” and the times during which I’ve lived.

Most Americans and Chinese I know tend to view the world from different wells, shaped by our respective cultures, our personal and cultural histories. My aim with this year’s set of “China W(a/o)nderings” has been to show the small disk of sky that I can see, perhaps to broaden its edges a little, and to nourish conversations that may over time broaden the edges of other wells, too.

Leave a comment

Posted in Everyday Wonders, travel, Uncategorized

Tagged , ,

The Dujiangyan Weir–Civil Engineering that Lasts

Posted on May 18, 2015 | Leave a comment

Civil engineering is not one of my skills. Even trying to understand basic maps, diagrams, and schematics can leave me scratching my head in confusion. So I’m sure that I cannot appreciate, in the same way a trained engineer would, the elegance of the design of the Dujiangyan Irrigation Projects site (also translated into English as the Dujiangyan Weir). 

A “weir” is a manmade structure to redirect a river’s flow. It is less restrictive than a dam, allowing water to flow over or around parts of it. I’ve visited the Dujiangyan site twice during travels in the area—in 2004 and again in 2009.  Through a guide’s explanation and through direct observation,  I developed a sense of awe for the crafters, builders and maintainers of this irrigation system built over 2000 years ago. The Dujiangyan weir is now the only remaining no-dam irrigation project in the world. It continues to provide both irrigation water and flood protection despite nearly 2300 years of wear and tear, countless downpours and droughts, and numerous earthquakes, including a very serious one in 2008.

The project was started in 256 B.C., during the Warring States period that preceded China’s unification. It was masterminded by area governor Li Bing and his son, with financial and manpower assistance from the state of Qin (pronounced “chin”), which a generation later consolidated its power over the country we now call China. The aim was to relieve the periodic flooding of the Min River, at the same time providing irrigation water to farms in the fertile surrounding plains.

The system includes three main parts: a “fish mouth levee,”  splitting the river into two parts at the head of a fish-shaped island, one part a deep, narrow inner channel, the other a wide, shallow outer one; a broad opening, “flying sand weir,” that allows excess water, plus silt and sediment, to swirl from the inner to the outer channel; and a “bottleneck channel” that distributes irrigation water through a narrow aperture toward area farmland, while holding back excess water to prevent flooding.  This final channel was constructed before the availability of dynamite. It was hewn out of its surroundings by successively heating and cooling its rock walls, probably through bonfires and drenching with river water, until the walls cracked and could be chipped away. Digging this part of the channel took eight years.

During dry periods, about 60% of the river’s water flows through the inner channel and bottleneck channel, providing much-needed irrigation water. During heavy rains, the proportions are reversed, with about 60% flowing harmlessly down the outer channel, protecting surrounding areas from flooding.  Although I do not understand all the engineering involved, I’m impressed at the combination of natural and artificial features that have kept this system working through earthquake, fire, and flood.Since the project’s initial construction, several surrounding temples have been built to honor Li Bing. Several pedestrian bridges now span the river to make it easier to take in the scope of the project.

In 2004, I visited the site with a group tour on our way back from mountainous northern Sichuan. On that trip, our tour bus was partway down the mountain slopes when lightning started flashing around us. Thunder boomed closer and closer, echoing off the surrounding peaks.  At the highest practical speed, our bus driver hurtled down bumpy roads through the gorges upstream of the weir. When we reached the flash-flood-safe area of the irrigation project before the rains hit, everyone heaved a collective sigh of relief. We cheered our driver, who was the most relieved of all.

In 2009, after the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake, a local friend drove me out from her home near Dujiangyan to see the weir. Damage from the earthquake to the temples and to one of the bridges was still being repaired, but the structures in the river itself were completely restored after only minor impact. The Dujiangyan Irrigation Project is an important tourist destination for both domestic and international tourists. My lasting impression of the dikes, levees and river are of clear, rushing water, plus an engineering feat that continues to show remarkable beauty, practicality, and endurance.

Leave a comment

Posted in travel, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Du Fu’s Thatched Cottage

Posted on April 27, 2015 | Leave a comment

China probably does not have a “National Poetry Month,” like the one celebrated in the U.S. in April, but poetry is taught in schools across China from an early age.  Most university students can recite some famous Chinese poems from memory. China reveres its poets, especially ancient ones.  During some of China’s more turbulent periods, poets gave voice to people’s hopes and concerns. They wrote about nature themes; they wrote about history, about dreams, about loss, about transcendence.  Du Fu, an itinerant poet who lived during part of the Tang Dynasty (712-770), was witness to one of its most disastrous episodes, the An-Shi Rebellion, which started in 756 and pitted the emperor at the time against several powerful warlords.

The rebels captured the capital of Chang’an (modern Xi’an), forcing many, including the emperor and the poet, who’d been living there for a decade, to flee.  Du Fu later moved to Chengdu, where friends helped him build a modest thatched home near a small stream.  There he wrote many of his most famous poems. His life was difficult. Bouts of relative poverty plagued him and his family. Social conditions continued to be unsettled in many parts of the country. After Chengdu, he lived in several other locales and was often on the road for extended periods.

In 2009, one of my best Chinese students of English went with me to visit Du Fu’s cottage and the park surrounding it.  Having her to serve as translator increased my appreciation of the poet, his poetry, and the park.  The existing cottage is a replica, reconstructed several times, most recently during the 19th century. It is a modest dwelling, with an actual thatched roof. The furnishings are sparse. One room is devoted to a gift shop/library with collections of poetry and calligraphy for sale.  I bought an English translation of some of Du Fu’s best known verse. Unfortunately, I don’t know any Du Fu poems by heart, not even in translation.

As I recall, the cottage is a fairly small part of a larger oasis of greenery in part of Chengdu. There is a hall of poets, with statues and inscriptions describing the life and work of other leading Tang and Song dynasty poets, including Li Bai, Wang Wei, Su Shi, and Lu You. In one section of the park, the sidewalk has been inlaid with short quotations from some of China’s most famous poets.  “Rebecca,” my student, tried translating a few of them for me, but poetry is notoriously difficult to render into a different language.

A number of Du Fu’s poems have been posted online in English versions.  One of my favorites is  “Lone Wild Goose,”  a poem he wrote near the end of a life disrupted by war, poverty, and frequent relocations:

Alone, the wild goose refuses food and drink,
his calls searching for the flock.

Who feels compassion for that single shadow
vanishing in a thousand distant clouds?

You watch, even as it flies from sight,
its plaintive calls cutting through you.

The noisy crows ignore it:
the bickering, squabbling multitudes.

There’s ample evidence that Du Fu’s troubles in later life made him more empathetic toward many of China’s peasants, whose lives had also been disrupted by the fighting and chaos of the period. But life was not uniformly severe. There’s also evidence that Du Fu and Li Bai (701-762), his slightly older contemporary, the most famous of Tang poets, were at times able to spend evenings together among their fellows, drinking wine and challenging each other to poetry competitions.

 

Leave a comment

Posted in Spiritual musings, travel, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Earth Day in China

Posted on April 20, 2015 | 1 comment

During the several years when I was in China in late April, I never noticed any hoopla about Earth Day, celebrated in the U.S. around April 22.  This holiday, founded by environmentalists in the United States in 1970, has yet to catch on in China.  A couple of times, I’ve broached the subject of environmental activism to some of my Chinese students and colleagues. Over the past generation or so in China, there has been increasing interest in ecological education, as the Chinese economy begins to mature and its natural environment becomes more polluted.

I have mainly benefited from industrial progress in the U.S. for much of my lifetime, so I can find it awkward to discuss “earth friendly” development with Chinese friends.  After I’d given a somewhat glib critique of China’s polluted air at an evening Q&A session several years ago, one younger Chinese colleague retorted:

“Your country spewed great plumes and spurts of toxic chemicals into its air and water for over a century before you began efforts to clean up your dirty industries. What right do you have to criticize us when we’re still just getting started on our development?”

Reaching a consensus on steps our respective governments and cultures can take to reduce our harm to global air and water resources can be tricky.  The trade-offs between economic development and wise resource stewardship are not always obvious.  Citizens in both countries register alarm at some of the damage we’re causing, but what we can do to reduce the harm is not always readily apparent.

Progress toward mutual efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in our two countries got a boost in November, 2014, when Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Barack Obama signed a historic agreement with ambitious emissions reduction targets for both countries. The U.S. pledged to reduce its emissions by at least 26% below 2005 levels by 2025; China promised to cap its emissions by 2030, and earlier if possible. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, coming from industrial, residential, and vehicular sources, are leading contributors to air pollution, as well as likely facilitators of global climate change. If early progress is made toward achieving these goals, it will help further advance broader international agreements at a global climate summit to be held in Paris in December, 2015. (You can read more about the U.S.-China agreement at http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/china-us-agree-to-limit-greenhouse-gases/2014/11/11/9c768504-69e6-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html.)

A non-governmental boost toward paying attention to China’s environment came recently from a former CCTV (Chinese state television) reporter, Chai Jing, who in 2015 produced an independent hour-plus documentary about air pollution problems in China. Chai’s TED-style documentary, “Under the Dome,” also provides historical context from different parts of the world. It cites Britain’s “killer smog” of 1952 (4 days of heavy air pollution in December that year that killed an estimated 12,000 people). It also chronicles Los Angeles’s smog problems. In the period just after World War II, smog in Los Angeles was just as dense and harmful as Beijing’s smog is today. A photograph taken of one of L.A.’s freeways on Christmas Eve, 1948, shows extremely limited visibility. Strict emissions standards strictly enforced have lessened smog there, even as the number of vehicles on area roads has increased.

Chai has said she produced her documentary out of concern for her young daughter, who was born with a benign tumor that may have been caused by pollution. Chai’s presentation was posted to the Internet and had received over 100 million views in China before it was removed from Chinese websites.

It may be slightly ironic that two high-profile recent public events in Beijing—the 2008 Olympics and the 2014 APEC summit (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), at which Obama and Xi signed their historic agreement—contributed to increasing expectations among Beijingers that cleaner air is possible.  For both events, polluting industries in surrounding areas were temporarily scaled back or shut down entirely.  Motor traffic into the city was severely restricted. Officials wanted to have “blue sky days” while Beijing was in the international spotlight.

When Earth Day comes around this year, I’ll do my part by increasing my efforts to be more sparing in my use of a car.  I’ll invest more in carbon offsets to reduce the impact of my airline travel. I’ll eat lower on the food chain more often.  I’ll revel in the “blue sky days” that still predominate in the part of the United States of America where I live. In addition to personal lifestyle changes, I’ll work harder toward public policy modifications in my town, county, state, and country to help protect the environment. I’ll think of Chai Jing and her daughter, of my own children and grandchildren. Each of us can do something to move toward a more livable planet for future generations of humans.

1 Comment

Posted in Quandaries and Rants, travel, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Sandstorms, Yellow Air in Xinjiang

Posted on March 30, 2015 | Leave a comment

When the weather finally began to warm during the year when my husband and I taught English at a small desert reclamation college in the desert in far northwestern China (2006-2007), at first we rejoiced. The days grew longer. Siberian iris began poking up along the edges of campus walkways. After months of bundling up in layers of heavy clothing whenever we ventured outside, we could finally wander our campus with only a light jacket. Spring was just around the corner, and were we ready! Still, earlier in the year, some of our best students as well as some of the veteran teachers had warned us about spring’s 6-8 week period of “yellow air” in our oasis town in western Xinjiang. We were not ready for dust storm season.

March winds in Xinjiang pick up dust from the Taklimakan desert and blow it around, occasionally in strong storms. The year we were there, we heard about a severe dust and wind storm that had derailed 11 train cars negotiating a mountain pass. Over thirty people were hospitalized. There were several fatalities. Dust storms stir up a ubiquitous haze that can last for weeks, until an infrequent rain comes through to settle the dust.

By Beijing time, the sun in late winter and early spring rose about 9 a.m.  It was typically 11 or even noon before sunlight pierced the haze enough to form shadows.  The red disk then shone weakly for a few hours before disappearing into the westward haze bank about 4. We only experienced two dust storms directly, both of them mild—the first came up suddenly in early afternoon while we were in our apartment preparing for afternoon classes. The school’s alarm system sounded, followed by an announcement that our Foreign Affairs Officer and minder soon phoned us to provide an English translation for:

“Afternoon classes are canceled today. Please stay indoors.”

At the height of the storm, our efforts to take pictures out our apartment windows were fruitless. The camera’s flash went off, but all that showed in the resulting photograph was a foot or so of murky brown air. We couldn’t even see the willow trees in the quadrangle between our building and the apartment blocks a hundred yards across the way.  The storm abated nearly as quickly as it had come up. By sunset, the air, though still somewhat murky, had returned to stillness.

Before the year we spent in Xinjiang, we’d only seen a sandstorm from a distance. On an earlier trip to parts of northern and central China in 2002, we’d just boarded an airline flight heading south out of Beijing when one of that season’s storms rolled in from the northwest. We could see an orange-brown haze spreading toward the capital. Fortunately, our plane was well aloft and out of range before the sandstorm began to affect the city. On the following evening’s television news, we saw that the storm had briefly cut visibility to a few yards, had left a heavy coating of grit on cars, buildings, and roads, and had caused respiratory problems.

Sandstorms have long been a feature of springtime in northern China. According to some sources, they have gotten worse in recent years, despite large-scale efforts to plant shelter belts of trees and grasses to stabilize the soil and sands of the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts, whose surfaces are stirred up by spring winds.  A multi-decade effort to transfer massive amounts of water from China’s well-watered southern provinces toward the more arid north has not yet reached Ala’er. In our small town in Xinjiang, responses to the storms seemed to be a combination of resignation, irrigation, grass and tree planting, and staying indoors.

On an afternoon in early May, the skies darkened once more, but this time they brought thunder and rain. I was amazed at the number of umbrellas suddenly springing open in this place of rare downpours.  After a couple of hours, first of drenching showers, then of gentler drizzle, the skies cleared.  That evening, the sunset featured streaks of rainbow colors against a crystal blue background. The season of yellow air was finally over.

Leave a comment

Posted in travel, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Lantern Festival in Yangshuo, 2009

Posted on March 2, 2015 | Leave a comment

Lantern Festival marks the end of the formal Spring Festival holiday. It occurs on the night of the full moon, two weeks after Chinese New Year (Spring Festival).  In 2009, for me it came near the end of a travel-filled interval spent in various parts of Sichuan, Chongqing, and Guangxi.  Lantern Festival in Yangshuo would be my last hurrah before retracing my steps to return to my teaching post in Sichuan for second semester.

Yangshuo, Guangxi is a “backpackers’ paradise,” a formerly smallish town along the Li River south of Guilin that has over the past couple of decades gotten a huge influx of tourism.  The town sits among lovely karst formations that have started to attract serious rock climbers. Having benefited (or suffered, depending on your perspective) from successive sets of outdoor-oriented expatriates who came, saw, loved, and settled in it, Yangshuo has a much more international flavor than most Chinese towns its size. While wandering its streets one afternoon, I even saw and heard at a distance a dark-skinned American man, a most unusual sight in any Chinese town I’d been in before.

My husband Jim and I spent the night of Lantern Festival in Yangshuo, at the West Street Hotel, a wooden structure with balconies overlooking the main tourist street. The previous spring, Jim and a hiking companion had lodged there briefly and found it adequate and reasonably priced.  It was sort of a “Trapp Family Lodge with Chinese Characteristics.” Our room came with a Western-style bathtub, with exposed pipes running to it from the solar hot water heater on the roof. Yangshuo, in addition to its rock climbing appeal, is also the site of several backpackers’ hostels and a center for area hiking and bicycling. It is the southern terminus of most Li River cruises. Cruise passengers may opt to stay overnight and get a “Western” breakfast at one of the local restaurants catering to tourists, but most board buses for a same-day return to Guilin. Any foreign visitors, however long their stays, got to run a gauntlet of souvenir hawkers and local craft shops. We could view a staged demonstration of the early stages of silk production. We could attend concerts or dramas. Nearly everywhere, there was an abundance of English signage.

As dusk fell on Lantern Festival Day, the streets filled with revelers, the sky once again filled with fireworks. Nearly every building had decorated lanterns hanging from its eaves. Some were plain spheres of red paper. Others were decorated with riddles, or crafted into animal shapes. We watched from our balcony as two small “wishing lanterns” rose amid the fireworks displays. They were not attached to anything, and were dwarfed by the other displays as they drifted skyward.

Later in the school year, a student would present us with such a lantern as a gift, so we got to see one close up.  Our gift lantern was collapsible, with thin metal rings at the top and the bottom. Each ring had several slots where straight pieces of metal or wood could be inserted to form something like a lampshade. The exterior was made of shiny red paper, which covered the sides and the top. The bottom ring was open, with a smaller ring at its center, into which the wisher would insert a stubby paraffin candle. To use a wishing lantern, one first made a silent wish, then lit the candle and held the lantern up to the sky.  After a little while, the air inside the lamp would heat and draw the lantern upward.

During our Spring Festival travels, we’d seen other wish lanterns here and there. The greatest concentrations, though, came closest to the evening of Lantern Festival. I’ve heard that use of the lanterns has lately been discouraged because of fire danger and the dangers to structures and livestock—no one can ever be sure where a lantern will come down, or whether its candle will have burned out by the time it does.

Had I lit a wishing lantern in Yangshuo, I’d have wished for a peaceful end of life for my mother-in-law, who was in her late 90’s and suffering from a variety of illnesses and ailments. Earlier in the holiday, my brother-in-law had emailed us that she was suffering from pneumonia and had again been hospitalized near their New England home. Perhaps some benign spirit heard my wish anyway—she died peacefully a couple of weeks later.

 

Leave a comment

Posted in holidays, travel

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Beasts of the Chinese Zodiac, Chinese New Year

Posted on February 23, 2015 | Leave a comment

Anyone who’s ever been given a place mat at a Chinese-American restaurant likely has seen pictures of the animals of the Chinese zodiac:  mouse/rat, ox/bull/buffalo, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep/goat/ram, monkey, rooster, dog, pig.  Unlike the roughly monthly zodiac familiar to readers of American newspapers, the Chinese zodiac works in lunar year increments, generally running from mid-January-to-mid-February of one year to mid-January-to-mid-February of the next.  To further complicate matters, the Chinese zodiac also cycles through five “elements” of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, so a complete cycle takes 60 years. At Chinese New Year, typically called “Spring Festival” in China, merrymakers usher out the previous animal’s year and usher in a new one.

The first time we spent Chinese New Year in China, in 2007, we ushered in the “Year of the (Metal) Golden Pig,” an especially auspicious year, according to China fortune tellers. When we returned two years later, we experienced the transition to the “Year of the Earth Ox,”  a more middling kind of year. Fortunes have been made and lost over the interpretation of the various Chinese zodiac signs.  Some years are reputed to be luckier than others, and slight ripples in the overall birth rate can be attributed to parents working toward having a child born in a “good” year. A chart of a 20th century cycle of years, with their attributes, is part of the China travel website http://www.travelchinaguide.com/intro/astrology/60year-cycle.htm.

Most animals of the Chinese zodiac are familiar to anyone who’s ever spent time on a farm or lived in the countryside.  One exception stands out—the dragon.  For Chinese, dragons are good, rather than the evil creatures portrayed in much of Western mythology.  Chinese mythology credits dragons with inhabiting and taming major rivers in China, the northernmost being “Heilongjiang,” or “Black Dragon River.” Being born in a dragon year (which most recently occurred in 2024) is considered lucky.  Emperors of China’s dynasties often had dragons embroidered on their clothing. Only the emperor’s residence was allowed to have dragon symbols on its rooftops.  As a guide explained to me on an early tour in Beijing, a dragon is considered to have the attributes of nine different animals:  the head of an ox, the horns of a deer, the eye of a tiger, the teeth of a leopard, the antenna of a shrimp, the mane of a horse, the scales of a fish, the body of a snake, and the claws of an eagle.  A royal beast, indeed.

In 2009, we spent New Year’s in various parts of Sichuan. Our friend Jean Wang and her husband were able to meet us in Ya’an, where we were teaching at Sichuan Agricultural University. We got together a few days before the new year’s celebration. Official New Year would occur on Monday, January 29.  We all went to see the pandas at nearby Bifengxia, then spent the night in our Foreign Teachers’ Guest House, where there was a spare apartment for Jean and her husband due to the holidays.

At New Year, we spent a couple of days visiting lots of Jean’s in-laws, necessitating most of a day’s journey by bus and then taxi. One contingent of relatives lived in a compound high enough in the hills to be off a car-friendly road.  We carpooled in an uncle’s van as far as we could go.  Afterwards, several of the younger cousins roared the remaining half mile on the motorcycle one of them had parked at the foot of the last hill.  The rest of us walked.

The noise level and the smoke density from firecrackers were less intense than what we’d experienced two years before in a more urban area, but we got to see more of the traditions of a Sichuan countryside Spring Festival—curing and cooking sausages, sweeping out the house and family compound, burning paper money to bring good fortune, visiting first the male relatives, then the female side of the family. What did not change from our previous experience was the quantity and variety of food. A Thanksgiving feast may be the closest American equivalent.  Any notion of vigorous physical activity during the day or two after Spring Festival is pretty much a lost cause. 

Sadly, we did not get a chance to meet Jean’s family at the holiday. One of the casualties of the increasing mobility of younger generations of Chinese may be the chance to see everyone’s relatives each year. The New Year holiday can also be the occasion for some tourism, either once the official extended family visits are over, or in their stead if family visits are not practical. We made up for the fact that we could not visit Jean’s family by visiting one of Sichuan’s best tourist sites, not far from where her in-laws lived.  We spent a day in Leshan, Sichuan, home of the world’s largest pre-modern statue, a seated Buddha. Even in midwinter, the “Big Buddha” of Leshan is impressive. It is over 230 feet tall, overlooking the confluence of several rivers of southern Sichuan. 

The statue was built more than a thousand years ago at the insistence of a Buddhist monk who had seen a vision of a Buddha to protect sailors, many of whom were drowning in the treacherous currents where the rivers joined. So much stone was moved and thrown into the river during the lengthy process of excavating the site and carving the statue that the river currents were changed, so the area did in fact become safer for boats. On the blustery day when we visited, few other tourists were in sight. We took pictures of the four of us at the fence overlooking the Buddha’s massive head,  then threaded our way carefully down the cliffside stairs to the Buddha’s base. There we took another picture—Jean beside the Buddha’s big toe, which was taller than she was.

 

Leave a comment

Posted in holidays, travel

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Spring Festival in Lipu

Posted on February 16, 2015 | Leave a comment

The first time we spent Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) in China came at the end  of a long mid-winter break during our year of teaching in far northwest China. We’d lounged away most of our holiday at the beach resort town of Sanya on Hainan Island, the “Hawaii of China.” As the Lunar New Year got closer, we decamped to spend a few days with a Chinese friend who lived in the neighboring province of Guangxi (dubbed an “autonomous region,” home to several ethnic minority groups). Getting to our friend’s town took a short plane ride to the city of Guilin, then a slightly longer bus ride on a comfortable long-distance bus.  One of our fellow bus passengers lent us her cell phone to alert our friend to our arrival in his town, Lipu.

We pulled in on the evening of Valentine’s Day, several days before that year’s actual New Year. Our friend, who I’ll call Mr. Huang, and his brother met us at the bus station, and loaded us and our luggage into his brother’s pickup. The brother, despite a bit of alcohol-induced weaving, managed to drive us without major accident to Huang’s new townhouse, where we hastily unpacked.

We then hailed a “tricycle taxi,” a motorized partly open conveyance, distant cousin to a riding lawnmower, for a brief ride to a dumpling feast. Classmates of our mutual former student had gathered at “Mark’s” aunt’s house to celebrate his 21st birthday. The occasion was a chance for the high school chums to spend some time together—most were now enrolled in universities far from Lipu. We ate delicious homemade boiled dumplings, drank tea or beer, swapped stories of student days and of everyone’s adventures since they’d last been together. Finally we were too stuffed and tired from feasting and travels to stay awake. Huang phoned for another taxi, we shoehorned the three of us into its single seat, and sputtered our way back to his house, where all of us fell into a satisfied sleep.

The following days were crammed with New Year preparations.  We bought red envelopes for money gifts for the children. We bought lucky couplets, large-character Chinese calligraphy on long red paper streamers, to paste beside and above the doorways of homes. The day we put up couplets at Huang’s was windy. Our exertions with couplets, ladders, saw horses, glue and brooms were worthy of the best slapstick comedy. Luckily, no one fell off a ladder and got hurt. We bought local delicacies. Huang’s wife cooked pork with taro, a regional dish—rich and a bit greasy. We bought or made pyramid-shaped envelopes of sticky rice with fillings, fried tofu, fresh water chestnuts, several varieties of winter greens, eight treasures rice pudding. On New Year’s Eve, the extended family gathered in early evening at Huang’s mother’s house. We ate and ate and ate. A neighbor took pictures of the dozen or so of us—Huang, his wife, his sister and brothers and their spouses, each with a single nearly-grown child.

After the feast, Huang, his wife, and we two foreigners retired to Huang’s house, while Huang’s son stayed on with his grandma, closer to Lipu’s “downtown.”  Huang told us it would be good to take a nap before it got too close to midnight. We awoke about 11, just as the first of the fireworks went off.  We turned on the Chinese television New Year’s Eve gala, broadcast from Beijing.  By midnight, the local fireworks were so deafening that we could no longer hear the sound track of the televised gala, nor could we hear each other.  Though it was a clear night, the sky was obscured by a thick haze. Periodically, the steady din of strings of firecrackers bursting nearby was punctuated by a louder burst of overhead fireworks from downtown. We got a little sleep between 1 a.m. and 6, when the fireworks started up again.

Toward midmorning, dragon and lion dancers maneuvered along the streets outside, bobbing and weaving amid the heaps of red paper detritus from the previous night’s spent firecrackers. Still more firecrackers went off around the dancers.  Huang and his wife presented us with matching piggy banks in honor of the advent of the “Year of the Golden Pig.”  Too soon it was time to start the succession of taxi, bus, and plane rides that would return us to our teaching posts. Our ears would eventually recover, but subsequent fireworks displays on American Independence Day would always seem muted by comparison.

Leave a comment

Posted in holidays, travel

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,