Journal Entry - June 10, 2007
It has been a long time since I was last able to get to the journal, so there’s a lot to catch up on. The biggest events have been the visit of Ruth (Gina’s sister) and Emily (our daughter), followed by the visit of our friends Alan and Paula from the cohousing community. Emily and Ruth arrived the weekend of April 21/22 and spent the first week here in Ya’an relaxing and getting used to being in China. During that week Gina and I still had all of our regular teaching responsibilities and followed our regular schedule of interacting with the students. Emily and Ruth generally followed our schedule, going with us to classes, lunch with students, and English Corner. The two new foreign women were very popular and made lots of friends.
After Emily and Ruth had had a week to settle in, we set out on a two week trip around southwestern China. Our first stop was Chengdu. It was just a stop over on the way to our next destination, but we had an evening to introduce Emily and Ruth to some of our friends there. The morning after we got to Chengdu we caught an early flight to Lijiang, a city in the mountains of Yunnan province. The people of Lijiang are mostly members of the Naxi ethnic minority. For the most part their culture is similar to the Han Chinese majority, but there are a few differences. Many of the women wear the traditional blue skirts and headdresses, there are ethnic dances, and there is a sort of writing system that seems to parallel the Chinese characters.
Lijiang has been heavily developed for the Chinese domestic tourist trade. The old part of the city is supposedly still all the original buildings, but it has been continuously maintained over the last couple of decades as a tourist attraction and it somehow all rings a little false. Despite the carnival atmosphere it was very interesting to see some of the Naxi customs and to wander the narrow winding streets. Because it was a holiday week for the entire country the town was full of Chinese tourists, with a small number of westerners mixed in, mostly looking pretty lost. Like all Chinese tourist attractions, the border between the artificial and the authentic was blurred. The official tourist venues are densely packed together, so it wasn’t hard to get from the crowds and the hawkers.
One end of the old town is on a hill, and against the side of the hill is the old compound of the family that ruled the area up until modern times. The buildings and grounds are quite elegant and beautiful, and we spent some time wandering around. There were many old things to see, some maintained and displayed, some gathering dust in storage rooms. It didn’t appear to be very popular, and we almost had the place to ourselves. It was very pleasant.
One of the attractions of that part of Yunnan province is a place called Tiger Leaping Gorge, a very narrow and deep gorge on the Yangtze River. According to the signs, the difference in elevation between the river and the top of the gorge is over 12,000 feet. We were at the bottom of the gorge next to the river, and wherever we could look up we saw snow capped peaks. There is a hiking trail on the north side with a number of guest houses and small restaurants. It’s about a two day hike from one end to the other, and you can have your pack driven to your guest house. This where most of the western tourists go. On the south side there is a path cut into the rock face. It’s paved, level, and only about a mile and a half long, and it’s much more popular with the Chinese tourists. Since we only had a couple of hours, Emily and I got a ride to the south side and walked to the end and back.
Apparently rocks periodically come loose and land on the path, and all along the way there are signs in Chinese and English warning people to walk next to the rock face under the overhanging rocks. There are minders with bullhorns to enforce this rule. The minders appear to be uneducated peasants, which means, among other things, that they only speak the local dialect, and they have developed an interesting method of telling the tourists to keep to the side. The bullhorns in China all have a “record” button, that records whatever is said into the mouthpiece for playback. As we were walking along, one of the minders motioned for us to come over. With gestures and a little bit of Chinese, he asked Emily to record the message on the sign he was standing next to. As we walked away, we could hear Emily’s voice reminding foreigners to “stay clear of the edge.”
After two days in Lijiang we caught a bus and moved on to the town of Dali about three hours away, another city popular with Chinese tourists. We arrived in Dali on May 1st, which is the day that the number of tourists peaks. The streets were crowded, but the Chinese tourists travel in groups and the main attractions are outside of the town. Unlike Lijiang, Dali had many more western tourists, including a number of westerners on more or less extended stays. There are many more western oriented businesses, and it was much easier to get a western breakfast. But as far as tourist activities, we were able to pretty much able to get away from the crowds.
The people in the Dali area are members of the Bai minority, which, like the Naxi, has a culture distinct from the Han Chinese majority. The first day in Dali we hired a car and went to an old “mansion” in a little town in the countryside where we saw a Bai tea ceremony and some traditional singing and dancing and then walked around the incredibly ornate buildings. Then we split up. Gina and Ruth continued on with the driver and went to a mountain top and another tea ceremony. Emily and I just walked out into the town and wandered around for a couple of hours. The streets were mostly empty, and we walked up and down narrow alleys, looking into shops and courtyards. As we were peaking into one doorway, an old woman walked up, invited us in, and then grabbed my arm and pulled me through the door. We found ourselves in a traditional courtyard house being chatting a very elegant elderly woman and looking at family pictures going all the back to the middle of the nineteenth century in the Qing dynasty period.
We spent one more day wandering around Dali. It’s an old walled city lying on a narrow plain between a high mountain range and a large lake. The main attractions are the lake and a set of three pagoda towers outside the town. The town is also famous for stone work and the characters for &ldqou;stone city” appear everywhere. There are stone cutting and polishing shops and galleries, and polished stone decorations everywhere. The old city walls are partially intact, and the old city gates have been restored. Many of the houses have elaborate decorations, especially on the gables. It’s a very picturesque place.
After two days in Dali we caught a train to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. There we had one day, which we spent mostly walking through the main park in the center of town. The park was full of small groups of musicians and dancers creating impromptu performances. They were doing everything from traditional folk songs to selections from Beijing opera. The groups were adhoc collections of musicians and dancers, performing for free, and the quality ranged from pretty good to very polished and professional. At one point, a woman approached Ruth and asked her to “sing an American song.” She then proceeded to demonstrate by launching into Jingle Bells. Ruth and I started to sing and Gina joined us. A crowd gathered. After Jingle Bells the woman wanted Happy Birthday. After that her repertoire “American songs” was exhausted, but the crowd had grown and wanted more. We gave them Silent Night, and then Gina and I sang a campfire song called Swinging Along. We were enthusiastically applauded for our efforts, but we were somewhat embarrassed to be taking listeners away from the regulars, all of whom were much more polished performers than us, and with a little effort were able to pull ourselves away.
The next day we caught the midday sleeper train back to Chengdu, arriving at 8:00 AM the next day. After a day seeing a a few more of the sites of Chengdu, Ruth got on a plane for Beijing to spend her last four days in the capital, Gina got on a bus back to Ya’an, and Emily and I took a bus into the mountains of western Sichuan. We visited a couple of small towns, ending up in a place called Tagong that Gina and I had been to back in October. There we stayed at a friendly little guest house.
Western Sichuan province is almost entirely Tibetan, and Tagong is a monastery town in middle of yak country. Emily and I only had one day, and we spent it walking in country. We were surrounded by grass covered Tibetan hills, yaks, and Tibetan cowboys. At one point we stopped to take some pictures of a ruined farm house when a woman and child waved us over to the house next door. The woman invited us into her house, introduced us to an old man, and served us tea and a sort of hand mixed porridge called tsampa. Very few people in the countryside of western Sichuan speak Chinese so the entire encounter was conducted without anything that one side said being understood by the other, but we managed to communicate well enough.
The next day Emily and I got up to catch the morning bus to Ya’an and found ourselves in a blizzard. It was snowing so hard that we could barely see across the street. The bus was late, perhaps not coming at all, so we ended up in the sort of improvised taxis that most of locals seem to use to get around, with six people in a car meant for four, driving like mad on unpaved roads, switching cars whenever the driver had somewhere else to go. Eventually we made it through the snow, over a 14,000 foot pass, caught a bus, went over another pass, and back home to Ya’an.
Emily stayed another week seeing things around Ya’an, meeting students and making friends. We saw her off at the airport in Chengdu on May 19th. The next day we met our friends from cohousing Alan and Paula at the same airport and took them back to Ya’an for a week. Alan and Paula were taking advantage of our being in China to do some traveling and were at the start of a three week tour. We were back into our busy teaching schedule, so we weren’t able to be dedicated tour guides. Instead, we arranged for a friend of ours here who speaks excellent English to show them around. They went to several places and got a taste of the China that one doesn’t see on the packaged tours. After several days, they continued on to their next stop, Yangshuo in Guangxi province.
Since our company has left, we have been more of less living our ordinary Chinese lives, teaching, interacting with students, studying Chinese. Last weekend we went with Lynn, a student of Gina’s, to visit her hometown, Pengzhou. We stopped on the way at Dujiangyan, a city that is the site of an ancient irrigation system. Instead of going into the tourist park that showcases the irrigation system, we walked around the town near it, wandering through an old neighborhood. Then we went to visit Lynn’s father at his general store. The hills near Pengzhou have deposits of clay and we went to see several pottery and tile factories near Lynn’s father’s store. Then it was on to Lynn’s mother’s new apartment near the center of the city, where we had dinner and played mahjongg.
Now we’re back in Ya’an and the weather has turned hot and mostly sunny, near ninety degrees most days. Many of our students have some classes that don’t run for a full semester. Our classes all run for the full semester, and since the students have more spare time to spend with us, we are busier than ever. We’re getting close to the time that we have to leave here and return to Massachusetts, so the moments are more and more precious every day. We’re starting to pack and our thoughts are turning towards our real home.