REWIND: China

Another unit in my "rewind" series, giving you a taste of my trips until such time as I can post more in detail (likely when I return to the states)...

Arriving in Yunnan province, China (in early April) was different than most of the other arrivals on my trip-- for me it was a real homecoming, as long-time readers of this blog know. I spent almost 6 months in Yunnan during university studying Mandarin; learning about Chinese history, religion, and economics; and doing anthropology research for my undergraduate thesis in Anthropology, which focused on the storytelling traditions of the Lisu indigenous group in northwest Yunnan. The entirety of my visit to Yunnan this time around had a nostalgic, affectionate feel, as I revisited old haunts, met old friends and, in the last section, took my parents to meet some of the people who opened their homes and lives to me during my research.

Kunming:
*I spent almost a week in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, but it wasn't a particularly eventful week. I had lunch with old teachers; saw one of my friends from the semester abroad, Mike, who was in town doing research on a Fulbright grant; spent an inordinate amount of time in my old favorite restaurants and cafes (most significantly Salvador's, the best western-style coffee shop in the city, which had been the victim of a terrorist attack since my last visit.) I stayed in Mike's apartment for the duration of my visit, but he had to go back to the US unexpectedly to look at graduate schools. It turned out to be a great set up, though, as I caught the first serious cold of my entire trip and was basically flat on my back for most of the week, sleeping and watching internet TV but not having to worry about getting anyone else sick or dealing with a hotel staff/ loud hostelmates.

On campus at Yunnan Normal University, my home for spring semester 2007
Zhongdian
Once I started feeling better, I made my way to Zhongdian (also known in Tibetan as Gyelthang), a tourist boomtown on the edge of the Tibetan world, only a short trip from the border of the TAR (Tibetan Autonomous Region). I had been for a brief trip with my classmates during the semester abroad and had been deeply affected by the atmosphere, which truly is different than anywhere else, and the mix of cultures I learned about during our stay. My entry from that time ("Kham is Calm," which can be found in the 2007 archive of this blog) marveled at the amazing serenity I felt while exploring the Songzanlin monastery outside of town. I returned to Zhongdian hoping to reclaim that feeling and delve a little bit deeper into the world whose surface I had only brushed three years ago.

*I stayed in a guesthouse belonging to a bicultural couple, Mattieu and Kersan, he from Belgium, she from a Tibetan settlement a couple of hours north toward the border, who were friendly and very interesting to talk to. The guesthouse was beautiful, and every morning their cook/helper made me a traditional Tibetan breakfast of flatbread with honey, yogurt, fruit, and (instead of butter tea) coffee. I would sit out in the brisk spring sunshine enjoying the view of the new temple and town rooftops before starting my day.

*I went to visit that new temple, which the people of Zhongdian erected after their town because something of a tourist mecca, and took a spin around the largest prayer wheel in the world. Afterward, I happened get into a long conversation with one of the monks. He asked me a lot of questions about American life and told me about what it's like to be a monk and about his home life.

The largest prayer wheel in the world Prayer flags against a backdrop of spring cherry blossoms *I went back to Songzanlin Monastery, which had changed a great deal (including the addition of a large and obtrusive tourist gate and a price hike) but was still equally affecting and beautiful inside. There I made friends with a pair of monks, one young and one old, who told me they were grandfather and grandson. They were delighted to talk to me, the younger taking my camera for a spin around the prayer hall and the older admiring my girth (the subject of much unfortunate admiration in that part of the world) and engaging me in a simple political discussion. When I told him I was American, he smiled. "Bush, Dalai Lama" he said happily, showing me two clasped hands. "England, Dalai Lama; France, Dalai Lama"-- the clasped hands again. Then his expression darkened. "China, Dalai Lama," he said, and his fist drove into his open hand.

At the monastery
Grandfather and grandson
*During my first trip to I had met several members of Khampa Caravan, a Tibetan-run tour company that ensures that the money from its tours goes straight to the Tibetan community in the area (rather than opportunistic businesspeople who have flocked to the city to take advantage of the tourist boom.) I decided I wanted to make a day trip into the countryside outside of Zhongdian, and Khampa Caravan seemed like a good place to start. I contacted the company, and in the course of deciding on a drive north toward Deqin I made friends with the Caravan with whom I was corresponding, whose name was Dolma.

One Dolma rounded up several of her Tibetan friends, and we all drank strong Tibetan wine and talked into the night as the Lhasa Cafe emptied around us. During my first trip to Zhongdian I had met a few Tibetans who I was told had been educated in India, but I never really thought about what this meant. Discussing my new friends' life histories, however, I started to understand the amazing strength Tibetan refugees in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces must have. Each of the men pictured below left his home in the Chinese countryside between age 11 and 13. He took a bus to Lhasa (3 days), then walked-- yes, walked-- over the Himalayas for 17 more, often with no food and little to drink. He then had to sneak over the border into Nepal, bus to the Indian border, and hope to claim refugee status there. If he succeeded, he could stay in India until his education was complete 5-10 years later, never seeing his family and recieving letters a few times a year if he was lucky. If he didn't (as in the case of the gentleman in the middle of this picture), he would be sent back to Lhasa, where he would have to start the 17-day walk all over again.

As the liquor flowed, we began trading songs and stories from our respective cultures. The cafe was empty by this time, and I got goose bumps as the voices of my new friends, strong with drink, soared in unfamiliar melodies punctuated by whoops and handclaps. (I will be sure to post some of these stories, and possibly a video with one song in the "real" entry on Zhongdian later this year.)

My new Tibetan friends
* My day trip up near Deqin was wonderful. The weather was gorgeous, the scenery stunning, and my guide well informed. We drove first up a major pass overlooking Napa Lake, then down to what locals call a "hot" valley, where prosperous artisan villages create amazing crafts, from cast iron pots of wooden sculpture to beautiful brasswork. The enormous traditional houses were bordered with cacti, certainly not an item I had had on my list of "things you would find in Tibet." The amazing day, which deserves its own entry, ended with a tortuous drive to an ancient monastery and a beautiful nunnery.

Napa lake in the spring
*Giving in to the impulse I would be fighting (and still am) for many months to do and see everything possible, no matter the stress, I arranged before I left Zhongdian to participate in a short (very short) "homestay experience." The program, new for its type in Zhongdian, was a form of ecotourism, connecting me with a farmer in a very small village outside town. He picked me up and drove me through countryside teeming with yaks and goats to his house, where I met his family, learned about his enormous 3-floor wooden house (which he built himself, over 2 years), and ate fried potatoes and butter tea. It was a too-brief, but despite the squeeze I had to make in order to catch my sleeper bus that night, a peek into daily life untainted by mass tourism (thought certainly tourism in some way) was well worth the effort

The unbelievably adorable daughter of the man at my brief homestay outside ZhongdianNujiang

I had to catch said sleeper bus because... I was due to meet my parents in Dali, 8 hours away, the next morning! Dedicated readers of this blog will be familiar with the Nujiang valley, where I did the anthropology research that made up my undergraduate thesis. I was very excited to return 2 years later, with my parents in tow. I missed the place and wanted to experience it again. More importantly, I missed the friends I had made during the tumultuous but incredibly rewarding time I spent there. And I was thrilled that I had the opportunity to share my unique experience, and this side of China (which few people get to see) with my parents-- in short, to introduce my American family to their and Pumi and Lisu alternates.

*After an exhausting but amazing trek up the valley from Dali (10 hours in a van, but what scenery!) we spent my mother's 60th birthday in Fugong, the geographic and culture center of the Lisu tribe in Yunnan. I took my parents to the market, walked them around town, and introduced them to Mr and Mrs X, who had nursed me to back to health when I had fallen ill with dysentary 2 years prior. Things went similarly wonderfully south in Liuku. After my cell phone was stolen in Taiwan, and all my Chinese contact information with it, I had been sure I would not be able to track down the numbers of all the friends I made in Nujiang. But a mixture of luck and guanxi (the complicated net of Chinese reciprocity that connects everyone socially and practically) connected me with everyone I could have hoped to see. The reunions were truly lovely.

Lisu with their bags and baskets in Fugong
My Fugong Family meets my real family-- Mr and Mrs X, me, and my parents


Nujiang scenery
*The highlight of the Nujiang trip was a 2-day stay with the Xiong family outside Lanping. Long time readers will remember Limei, my Pumi translator who attached herself to me during my stay in Liuku and with whom I stayed in the countryside at the very end of my time in Yunnan. Limei's family had long been inviting mine to come and visit, and this was an experience I wanted my family to have. So this time I brought my parents, too-- and an important gift, a sit-walker for Limei's mother, who is unable to walk due to debilitating arthritis.

Those two days were powerful in a way I'm not sure I can explain, especially not in a round-up format like this one. In depth description will have to wait until the full-length entries. But suffice to say that living with a peasant family for 48 hours was a remarkable experience for my parents (and for me, too, although I knew what to expect.) We ate meals cooked over an open fire from chickens slaughtered hours before; we slept in the simple wooden house lined with newspapers; we peed in the potato fields. At night a group of Pumi from the village descended, curious to see the visitors, and after many rice wine toasts took to singing and dancing around the fire and insisting that we join them. And the family was so, so grateful for the walker. They cannot treatment or surgery for Mrs. Xiong, who suffers terribly and gets around by dragging wooden stool across the ground. When I left, they called me their seventh child. "You are our American family now," were their parting words.

Dinner with the Xiong family

Xiong life
Our blended family together (My parents and I are wearing the traditional clothes we were given as gifts)
Mrs. Xiong playing a traditional Pumi instrument

*Our last stop was Lanping, where we arrived in time for the Sunday market, an amazing blend of vegetables, medicinal herbs that Yi and Hmong women bring from the high mountains, trinkets, practical items, and exotics (like jade from Burma.) A visit to the market was one of my favorite parts of a weekend in Lanping, and it was wonderful to be able to share this with my mother, who came along to wander.

Burmese jade traders
Some of the wares(note the porcupine quills)

I think these women are Yi, although they might be Hmong-- some kind of hill tribe wearing head gear I'd never seen before
We were reluctant to leave the market, but time was short-- we were due at the Dali airport to leave for Vietnam!

Laomudeng Disaster

Ah, the challenges of updating a blog while attempting to maintain one's academic life as a senior in college. Not an easy thing to do, as evidenced by the pace at which I have been posting here. Nonetheless, I think it's about time for a new entry.

So, I left off around the middle of my time in Nujiang. I had been suffering from what was in all likelihood dysentary and was prescribed an assortment of pills only identified by their Chinese names. Ultimately, I called the SIT doctor in Kunming to ask if these pills were okay to take, and it was a good thing I did because several of them could have caused major liver and kidney damage. He recommended the right pill in time for me to make a trip to Laomudeng, where Xiao Cui's family lives. Laomudeng is a Nu stronghold high up in the mountains of the valley, about three hours from Fugong. The drive was spectacular and both tortuous and torturous (word play!). I remember writing in my private journal that it would have been easier to drive on if they had just left it as a mountainside instead of trying to civilize it into a road--an hour and a half straight of jolting in potholes, hairpin turns, and general unhappiness. We soldiered on, however, to a small town called Bijiang, which used to be the size of a city but has since been largely abandoned. The peak of the mountain upon which Bijiang perched afforded a remarkable view looking back over the valley toward Fugong from a beautiful little pagoda.

The Bijiang pagoda overlooking the valley


The spectacular view of Nujiang Valley from Bijiang


Found outside the pagoda-- this statue of Mao now salutes the sky, as it has been pulled down. By nature or by human hands, I don't know. But I found it very intriguing.


While we were in Bijiang, I saw a tall man walking down the street-- a man with blonde hair. I asked some of the people around who he was, and they told me he was a doctor with UNICEF, there doing relief work. Would I like to meet him, perhaps give him a hug? I politely declined. But, alas, we were destined to meet.

For as I wrote almost nine months ago, we then drove back to Laomudeng, intending to walk through the village to Younger Sister's natal house. But during the walk I fell off the steep retaining wall along which the path ran, right into some poor Lisu family's yard. It was a very scary moment, as for awhile I wasn't sure how or where I was hurt. Eventually I realized that I wasn't able to put weight on my left foot and that I was feeling dizzy from what was probably a mild concussion. The lovely strangers into whose yard I had fallen invited me in, arranged me in their living room, and went to get the UNICEF doctor from Bijiang. The living room was a sparse, concrete box. I was lying on the only piece of furniture, a couch running along the back wall, and the only other thing in the room was an enormous TV/DVD system, in front of which a little Lisu child sat. I groggily lay back, drinking some hot water and eating a bowl of rice that was brought to me. In my haze, I heard the unmistakable sound of Rufus Wainwright's voice, and I was sure for a minute that I must have more than a mild concussion, as I seemed to be hallucinating. But when I turned my head, I realized that the Lisu child was watching the Chinese version of MTV, and Rufus Wainwright was performing on a music video. It was a truly bizarre moment, both surreal and transcendant. Here I was, 15 hours from a decent hospital, lying on a stranger's couch in a place where people spoke a language I didn't understand, with nearly no one of my ethnicity miles around. And then there was this reminder of the extraordinary power of globalization reminding me that no matter where you go you're never really far from America.

Eventually the UNICEF doctor showed up. He told me he only had EMT training but was able to guess that my foot wasn't broken and put it in an improvised splint. He also referred me to some Canadian friends of his living outside Fugong, who could provide me with crutches and generally help me out during the next week. I would later find out that these friends were illegal missionaries (Fugong is filled with them), but regardless of their reason for living in Nujiang they were incredibly generous with me, even offering to let me live in their house for awhile.

The ride back from Laomudeng was, to be quite frank, awful. It was, of course, just as bumpy going down as it was going up, but this time I felt every tiny vibration in my injured foot. To make things worse, the county had started a construction project on the road in the middle of the day, creating a blockage for almost two hours. This is an example of the sort of thing that happens in China all the time but would never happen in America. I was furious and sore by the time I got back to the hotel, but Older and Younger sister were very good to me, bringing me food and telling me stories. They would care for me similarly for the next couple of weeks, as would Foster Dad and his wife. Although it was a scary ordeal that made my last few weeks in China infinitely more difficult, my fall actually resulted in a much more intimate connection with the Lisu friends I made in Nujiang, an idea that has ultimately played a central role in the thesis I'm writing this year.

The intricate criss-cross pattern of a wall in a traditional Lisu home near Laomudeng

A Lisu Wedding

One of the wonderful things about having a local translator/ friend is that one gets access to all sorts of everyday cultural events that one wouldn't be able to experience as a run-of-the-mill tourist/visitor. Case in point: Xiao Cui, my Lisu older sister/translator was invited to a traditional wedding on one of the days that we visited her village outside of Fugong to hear stories from the town's elders. Having just read a book about Han customs ("Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village" by Yuxiang Yan) in which Han wedding traditions are detailed, I now have considerable perspective on the way Lisu and Han customs were combined within the wedding I attended. For example: the wedding was held in semi-traditional Lisu building with woven floor and concrete walls. But the invitations were lucky red, with a "double happiness" character (if you've ever seen Chinese New Year decorations, that shape of very common). Similarly, there was a table set up out front where every gift of 10 or 50 or 100 yuan was carefully written down on a list (which, I learned in the Yan book, is for purposes of reciprocity), but then guests were greeted in a recieving line by the wedding party in traditional Lisu dress and prevailed upon to drink a cup of Lisu beer.

Of course, everyone at the wedding had other things to do besides pay attention to the waiguoren (foreigner) in their midst-- plus, I wasn't feeling all that well, as I had had stomach upset for the past week or so. So I made myself comfortable in a corner and watched the proceedings. There isn't any particular moment in which a Lisu couple is officially married (no vows, for instance): they just have a big party, everyone celebrates, and by the end of the day they're married. At least, that was the impression I got after repeated questions. The party was basically everybody milling around schmoozing and eating big platters of traditional Lisu food in little circles. The platters were made by going through a buffet line of enormous proportions. The picture below will give you an idea of how much food there was/how many people they expected-- the silver vat on the left is completely full of rice:

Traditional Lisu wedding feast. The food is put together buffet style into platters. Several people sit or squat around these platters and eat the food either with their fingers or (nowadays) using chopsticks





I didn't end up staying at the wedding for very long, as after my first shot of Lisu whiskey (whew, strong stuff) my stomach started to rebel. Also, I think I might have insulted them by not offering a gift, but the situation was just too complex. At that point my spending money was very limited, as I was waiting for a wire from my teacher in Kunming (to my chagrin, my AAA check card, which had worked in almost every ATM throughout Yunnan, was not accepted at any of the three ATMs in Fugong city, and I was forced to borrow money or waste a day taking the 4-hour bus to Liuku and back to Fugong.) If I did offer a present, I would not know what amount would be appropriate and what would be insulting, and I could not afford to be generous. Instead, I took a motorcycle cab back down the winding river road to my hotel, where I proceeded to feel nauseous and contemplate the day's photographs.

The groom in traditional dress


The bride in traditional dress


Father of the bride in traditional dress

A Fugong Family

There are three counties within Nujiang Prefecture-- Lushui (of which Liuku is the seat), Fugong, and Gongshan (Gongshan's county seat has a different name, but everyone pretty much just calls it Gongshan.) Since I'd already spent more than two weeks in Lushui county (mostly in Liuku), and because Liuku was currently horribly hot and humid, I opted to stay there only as long as it took to get in touch with a woman who had helped me during my ISP. She recommended some people who might be able to find me a translator during my stay this time around in Nujiang, given that Xiong Li Mei (who helped me during ISP time) was in classes taking final exams and was thus unable to accompany me to northern Nujiang. With a phone number clutched in hand, I rode the four and a half hour bus to Fugong, the middle county, alone and, frankly, pretty scared. I had forgotten my guidebook and had never been to Fugong before. I had no idea how I would find out where to stay, find my way around, make the beginnings of a life which are neccessary to do anthropological research. I looked out the window at the countryside, which was green almost to the point of ridiculousness, and silently freaked out.

On the way to Fugong




The incredible greenery of Nujiang


When I stepped off the bus, I had neither map nor hotel recommendation, only a brochure I'd been given at a travel agency in Liuku with listings of some places to stay, but no addresses, only phone numbers. I went inside to the bus station desk and asked about the nearest hotel, only to be told that the station itself doubled as a place to stay, for Y50 a night, or about $6.50, the cheapest around. For awhile after I had settled in I considered changing hotels (the place was clean but very worn and a little bit shabby), but it ultimately didn't seem worth it.

Fugong city as it turns into village on the nearby mountainside


The night I arrived in Fugong, I called a contact Lu Laoshi had given to me, and he insisted on taking me out to dinner with a coworker of his, a Lisu woman a little older than I. Unfortunately, she was to return to Kunming for summer term classes the next day, but after an awkward dinner where I picked (my stomach wasn't feeling excellently, having yet to recover from my Kunming upset) and they watched me pick (they had already eaten), my new Lisu friend brought me to a local teahouse, where we drank locally brewed beer and I heard several traditional Lisu stories from her and her friends.

Unfortunately, the local beer did very little to improve my stomach situation, and I spent the next day or two feeling rather cruddy (which would, sadly, become a trend.) I was also really sad that my new friend had to leave so fast, as it seemed like we got along winningly. Luckily, the man who had introduced us had another woman in mind to help me instead. Xiao Cui was a 30 year old traditional dance teacher in the local Cultural Bureau, with an 8 year old son, a husband working outside Nujiang (a fairly common familial set-up), and a 19-year-old half sister living with her. Over the next few weeks Xiao Cui, who I called jiejie, or "elder sister" and her meimei (younger sister) became part of my Lisu family. They took me to the village where jiejie grew up to meet their grandmother. They took me to their cousin's traditional Lisu wedding-- more on that in a separate entry. And when I was sick, they brought me rice, bread, and Sprite (which was, sadly most of my diet for the better part of two weeks.)

My Fugong translator, Xiao Cui (on the left) and her younger sister


For sick I was, and everything seemed to aggravate it in some way, whether I ate bland porridge or fried rice (admittedly a bad idea.) For almost half a month I was able to eat almost nothing, and IV treatments and two rounds of Cipro (as long-term readers of this blog will remember) did nothing. Around this time, Xiang Yang Jiang, the man I shall refer to regularly as Foster Dad made his appearance. He was another cultural scholar I met through the guanxi (relations/connections) system, a friend of Lu Laoshi's friend. But as soon as he heard I was sick he stepped in and became more than a scholarly source. He and his wife would regularly show up at my modest hotel room. "Put on your shoes, we're going out!" they'd say, then bring me to a restaurant and make me sit there until I ate a whole bowl of rice porridge. Foster Dad often gave me fatherly lectures, with topics like "The Importance of Your Health" and "Just Exactly How Unneccessary and Space-Wasting All That Stuff You Brought Here Is." If it hadn't been for the fact that I realized that this was the only way he knew to be fatherly toward me and to the fact that I generally found his behavior interesting and/or entertaining, it would have driven me crazy. As it was, I was occasionally tempted to say "For Christ's sake, I'm in China on my own, let me make my own damn decisions!" Luckily, I don't know how to say "For Christ's sake" in Mandarin. Harhar.

Doing research in Fugong involved a combination of talking to officials in the Cultural Bureau, exploring the splendid once-every-five-days market that took place on the Main Street (and warrants its own individual blog entry), and travelling to the countryside around Fugong to interview elderly sources about life fifty years ago and all the stories they could remember. I would get into one of the motorcycle cabs (modified cycles with rickety red cabs on the back, also known as "cyclos" in some places) with my translator and a collection of gifts (usually rice wine, soda, and an assortment of snacks.) We would whiz down the road that curved with the river, stopping at some village 10-25 minutes outside of town (Fugong has about 10,000 people living in the city and about 80,000 in the countryside) to climb down or up the valley slope to somebody's one-room bungalow. I eventually had intervewied the four oldest residents of Xiao Cui's home village. One man and one woman (called nainai and yeye, grandmother and grandfather, out of respect) were so aged that they weren't sure exactly how old they were-- they were born before the idea of keeping track of time in a linear (rather than cyclical) fashion had come to the area. The man was, by his estimation, around 80. And the woman thought she was probably older than 100-- she says the 80-year-old man was about around 8 or 9 when she got married. It was incredible to hear from them about what life was like during Dynastic China away from the Imperial Eye, about the turbulent times of the Cultural Revolution. I felt so privileged.

The 100-year old nainai


Nainai's traditional Lisu house-- note the woven floor, the lack of furniture, the open fire


When I began to feel a little bit better, I started to take trips to outlying areas of Fugong county-- Laomudeng, center of Nu culture(which gets its own entry, and where I fell off the 5-foot ledge), to farther villages, to a traditional wedding (again, its own entry), and on a sight-seeing expedition to the local geological attraction. Shi yue liang is an enormous hole in one of the local mountains, apparently almost 30 feet tall in person. From far away (which is the only one can view it without undertaking a backpacking expedition), it looks like a big,misshapen moon peeking out of the greenery (the effect is caused by the perpetually misty sky showing through.) That's where it gets its name, too-- "Bright moon in the mountain."

Shi yue liang, the so-called "bright moon in the mountain," about an hour outside of Fugong, and source of many Lisu and Nu folkstories


I ended up spending more time than I bargained for in Fugong, ultimately, due to my extended bout of gastric distress (which was finally mercifully cured by discovering the correct and more extreme anti-biotic-- $1.00 for a bottle) and the fall that left me on bedrest for a week. But it was a good thing, too, because I started to blend into Fugong's everyday existence (which is not to say that I did not get stared at constantly). One of the things I liked to do most was wander the streets and see what surprising things I encountered-- a streetside shoemaker, a small footbridge across the roaring Nu River, a teahouse with Christmas lights festooned across the small patio glowing in the dusk, an old woman in traditional Lisu dress bringing her day's crops from the fields, an old Lisu man smoking his bamboo pipe on a stoop. Fugong never failed to surprise me.

The streetside shoemaker


Wonderful old Lisu man with his pipe


Lisu bags tied to a tree on market day