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 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

Up the Valley-- Sidetrips from Liuku

I forgot to post this picture last time, and I like it and the girl is adorable, so apropos of nothing:

Lisu girl in traditional dress, Liuku


As mentioned in my last entry, I went on a few side-trips during my time in Liuku, into the countryside. Both times we went up the Nujiang Valley (there is no where to go but up-- Liuku is located at the bottom, the very mouth of the valley.) The first trip we took was to Luzhang, a small lower-to-middle class village perched way up in the mountains on the side of the river. We visited Xiong Li Mei's relatives (most people here refer to people who are not blood-related as "cousins" or "sisters" so it's hard to tell exactly how people are or aren't related) in their modest home. I got to hear about both Lisu and Pumi culture, as interestingly the husband and wife are a mixed marriage, apparently something that doesn't happen often. But I was told that their daughter was being raised Lisu (in this situation, children are allowed to choose their ethnic identity at a certain age) because Pumi culture was so far away in Lanping (7 hours by bus.)

At the slightest mention of my interest in minority culture, the mother in the family called her older relatives (she called them Auntie and Grandma, but again you never know) and her daughter, they brought over the traditional clothing they save for special occasions, and they gave me an impromptu Lisu song-and-dance performance in their living room. And then, out of the blue, the auntie decided to give me the embroidered and beaded bag she was wearing that she had made herself. Almost all Lisu people carry a bag of this kind or varation, with specific embroidery and colors, as a method of self-identification in a time when most of them don't wear traditional costumes. The old woman just took her cell phone out of the bag, unhooked it from her shoulder, and handed it to me. When I told her I could never take that from her, she just said "I can make another one." It's not the most beautiful thing in the world, because Lisu are so poor-- they can only afford cheap plastic beads. But I don't care. The whole thing was pretty wonderful.

The Lisu family I visited in Luzhang, in full Lisu regalia (of that region. Here in Fugong the headpieces look different) Also note the classic poster in the background.


While we were visiting Luzhang, walking the winding road as it meandered along incredibly verdant cliffs, it started raining. Hard. Very hard. As I wrote before, as we were driving home there were rocks, serious rocks, in the road that had fallen from the mountains above. It was clearly not a safe situation, and so I was kept from going up the valley to Fugong and Gongshan during my ISP. I was furious and frustrated at first, but I just spent longer researching in Liuku, and on the second to last day we took a real trip a full 2 hours up the valley to Chengang. Chengang is a small town in itself, but really it's just a base for a series of small and very poor Lisu villages between 15 minutes and an hour a way by foot. The weather was finally decent that day, and so the ride up the valley was positively gorgeous.

Scenes from the lower valley







(I am especially proud of this photo because it was taken out a minibus window)


When we got to Chengang, it was time for lunch so we found a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant and ate there. Xiong Li Mei did some hardcore social networking for me (I never would have had the guts), and got our server to agree to take us to his home village a 15 minute hike up the mountain. And so we went, past the singularly most disgusting communal bathroom I have ever seen (I won't go into detail, but I've been in China for 5 months now and it still holds that title. And that's saying something, which you'll know if you've ever used a Chinese public toilet.) We passed several small streams and rice paddies before arriving at a very small, very shabby traditional Lisu house.

The Lisu house I visited in Chengang


Traditional Lisu houses are two stories tall, with the bottom story reserved for livestock. They are made out of woven wood and reeds, mostly. The walls are more flimsy and have a criss-cross pattern, while the floor is woven like tiles, warp and woof. Unless the owner is particularly rich, the room inside doesn't have any more furniture than a few simple wooden stools and some blankets to sleep in. A san jiao (literally "three legs" because, well, it has three legs) or traditional stove, sits over a fire, and by that Lisu cook food, boil water, and keep warm.

Inside the house, with the nainai (grandma) who lives there


And her husband, holding their bibles, probably smuggled in from Myanmar


As you might guess from the above picture, the people living in this house are Christians who celebrate both Christmas and the Lisu New Year, Kuoshijie, which fall within a week of each other. They also offered me some alcoholic cornmash, the beginning of traditional Lisu whiskey (which I recently tried at a Lisu wedding I attended, more on that later, but WOW that is strong stuff), but as Christians they don't drink. This kind of fine-line between what's permitted because of culture and what's not permitted because of religion is what my thesis is turning out to be about. I find it fascinating.

After bidding the old couple goodbye, we rode the 2 hours back to Liuku and had a little goodbye gathering for me-- I was going back to Kunming the next night on a sleeper bus. It was lovely, we went out with the same motley combination of office workers, soldiers, and math teachers as before. We had hotpot, which involves an enormous boiling vat of oil/broth and a million different kinds of meats and vegetables, which you put in one at a time and let cook. Kind of like Chinese fondue. I also got to hear several different Lisu and Pumi stories that night-- a good place to leave off. (Well, except for that cell phone pickpocketing which would come the next day.)

My goodbye gathering


And, in case you were wondering:

The inside of a sleeper bus (the nice kind)


Next time: SIT says goodbye-- Adventures in Xi'an and Beijing

The Unexpected Roommate and the Unicorn: Adventures in Liuku, Take 1

It's strange to be writing my blog entry about Liuku Trip 1 when I'm back here now, doing Nujiang Trip 2. Says something about my blogging skills, too.

Anyway: when we left off I was on a bus from Lanping, where I had a Western friend, along with several other Chinese friends, some of whom spoke English, to Liuku where I didn't know anybody and had never been before (a first for me.) Luckily, it didn't stay that way for long. As soon as I got off in Liuku, two people appeared eager to help me-- a Lisu man and a Pumi girl about my age. They got me into a hotel (at Y45, or $5.50 a night a little more expensive than I'd have liked to be paying, but less than I paid in Lanping with Tania) and had dinner. The Lisu man had things to do so he got my cell phone number and went his way, promising to bring me to his Lisu village outside the city sometime in the next few days. I was left alone with the Pumi girl, Xiong Li Mei, who was to become my closest friend in Liuku and also my ad hoc translator. She sort of... clasped on and never let go, which wasn't exactly a problem for me, although it occasionally was a little bit suffocating. She stayed with me in my hotel for the first three nights, not needing anything, not even a toothbrush, just curling up and falling asleep-- until I convinced her I really could stay in a hotel by myself.

My friend/guide, Xiong Li Mei, in traditional Pumi dress


It turns out that Xiong Li Mei's story is pretty remarkable. She grew up herding goats for her family, who live in the countryside outside of Lanping, where her mother is crippled but they can't afford a wheelchair. Until the age of 11 she didn't go to school, but she wanted to learn so badly that she kept bothering her parents until they brought an older brother home to herd in her place, and sent her to school. She had to stay in the equivalent of kindergarten for 3 years because she couldn't read, but once she gained literacy she completed first grade through 10th or 11th grade in 6 years. Now she goes to a vocational school in Liuku. Pretty amazing.

The hotel I stayed at was nice, if not particularly remarkable. The one thing I wasn't really big on were the cockroaches. Insects don't bother me most of the time (except in extenuating circumstances-- see below), but cockroaches kind of creep me out. I ended up having a peacable relationship with my cockroaches, however, as long as they kept out of the way while I showered and didn't get into my stuff. I'll admit (although it will make some of you think I'm crazy) that I talked to my cockraoches some. I made deals with them about not bothering me while I was peeing, not coming up onto the bed to steal my mini-muffins. That was the only time of day I spoke English.

The city of Liuku itself is fairly boring, Chinese stock, but the setting was beautiful with the Nu river roaring through and big emerald mountains (You can't really see it in these piectures, but I don't know if I've ever seen a place as green as Nujiang valley) looming all around. The Lisu population was also really interesting to see for the first time, mostly in Western/Han dress but with the Lisu bag, very characteristically colorful woven, stitched, or beaded, acting as a nametag to the world that said "I am Lisu, hear me roar." Or something to that effect, anyway.

Liuku, a city of mountains and a big ol' river




A Buddhist temple on the outskirts of the city


The first night, Xiong Li Mei took me to her vocational school, where her classmates, who are all studying music/art/minority skills (they get tested on things like piano playing, dancing, singing) welcomed me by singing songs from their respective minorities (Nu, Lisu, Pumi) and playing the piano. They were all really, really really excited to meet met (more on that in a minute.) But it was a really cool way to start out the experience, feeling just a little bit like a celebrity, or at least someone important and worth getting excited over.

The next week and a half was a whirlwind of research, mostly faking it: I've had a cloud of amateurishness riding me for months now, and that was the beginning of it. I spent a lot of time feeling like I had no idea what I was doing and worrying about what would come out of it. The anthropological experience is so infuriating sometimes, which is something no one told me about beforehand. The whole thing is based on finding contacts through other contacts, a chain of people-who-know-people which is actually perfectly suited to the "guanxi" (relationship) structure of Chinese society. But what was so frustrating was how many of said contacts were duds. Out of ever four phone numbers I procured, two were out of order, one was incorrect, and maybe, if I was lucky, the fourth person could help me. Oh yeah, and: the first night in town, I managed to lose my cell phone in a cab, and with it the chance to go with the Lisu man I met on the bus to his village (I never saw him again.) Big bummer. Double bummer: the aforeblogged pickpocketing of the phone I bought to replace said lost-in-taxi phone not two weeks later.

Be that as it may, I did manage to talk to over 70 informants in the 3 weeks I spent in Lanping and Liuku, which is pretty damn good if I may say so. In Liuku I talked to government officials, scholars, went to two vocational schools and a middle school, started conversations with people on the street. I talked to many of Xiong Li Mei's school friends, and got to see her school more thoroghly. It reminded me in a lot of ways of a summer camp-- the dorm rooms looked like camp cabins to me; the outdoor warmth of it all (Liuku is pretty much never cold, although I was there in warm season).

A dorm at Xiong Li Mei's school


At the school, I was treated as a major VIP-- actually, throughout the entire city it was that way. I was the only white person I saw for the entirety of my time in Liuku, the only save Tania and some friends in from Lijiang in Lanping. People openly gawked when I walked down the street. I was treated with huge cheers and endless questions about America at Xiong Li Mei's school, people were dying for my phone number, they wanted to know my taste in boys (which was an odd and embarassing question to answer in front of a class of 35.) When I went to the school to teach a class or two of English (I felt very clever for coming up with a curriculum regarding "how to tell a story" and then asking the students to tell me one they knew) people crowded around in the halls to see me speak. It was very, very surreal.

I felt like a unicorn, as in "You really exist?" Xiong Li Mei would tell her classmates and relatives about her new foreigner friend and they actually wouldn't believe her, would insist she was joking. I imagine it will be that way when I go to visit Xiong Li Mei's home village in a week or so. I will be the first white person her parents have ever met. They have also never seen a computer-- Xiong Li Mei has asked me to bring my laptop along.

I also interviewed a Pumi singing expert, a Lisu historian, a Lisu Cultural Bureau worker (who has also helped me find contacts this trip), and many random friends I met along the way. People were drawn to me by my skin, like a beacon, especially those who could speak any English. A shopkeeper, a teahouse owner. One night Xiong Li Mei and I went out for drinks with a math teacher, two soldiers, and two office workers, all about our age. That was a lot of fun, and I got stories into the bargain. Another night I went with Xiong Li Mei to a square alongside the river to watch the people dance, as they gather to do in many places in Yunnan (see my photos of Lanping.) Eventually, she convinced me to join in, which was fun for the short time before I went home and collapsed (field work is really, really tiring.)

Another day, I went with the Cultural Bureau worker to a Lisu church (as I may have mentioned before, many people, especially Lisu in the Nujiang area have been converted to Christianity for generations, since China lost the Opium Wars and missionaries poured in.) It was an intensely interesting place to be, with people coming from the city and the countryside. The entire service was conducted in Lisu language, including a beautiful hymn the assembled people (about 75) learned from scratch, building part by part until they eventually sang in 3-part harmony. With the music swelling all around me I felt this odd combination of closeness and distance and was aware of the forces that conspired to make the occasion-- imperialism, missionary work, smuggling (the Bibles are brought in from Lisu territory in Myanmar.) Fascinating.

A Lisu church (that's Lisu language in the middle)


Worshipping inside the church


It rained every day I was in Liuku, which was extremely frustrating because I was continually being told that I shouldn't be going up the valley (where the other two Nujiang cities of Fugong and Gongshan are) during a rainy period because of the danger. But then Xiong Li Mei and I went to a little village called Luzhang one day for a day trip, and I saw the danger for myself when it started to rain while we were there. On the minibus ride back rocks from the size of tennis balls to shoe boxes were scattered across the road. Not really a fan of the idea of one of those landing on car in which I am a passenger. I was really mad about not being able to go to Fugong and Gongshan, however, and sulked for a few days before regrouping to work my resources and figure out what I could do, which included the aforementioned English classes, as well as another field trip into the countryside.

On the last day before I was scheduled to depart for Kunming, the sun finally came out and I was able to get some nice views of the city not veiled in rain. I took a walk with some new friends to take pictures. That night, the city was filled with flying ants, which I'm told is fairly common after a protracted period of rain. Butterfly-sized bugs everywhere, and I do mean everywhere, I looked. At least 250 around every street lamp, and I really wish that was an exaggeration. Flying around doorways, clustering at the riverside, invading teahouses and convenience stores, waddling on the street. Every step I took I crunched body casings and antennae under my feet. Wings brushed me on all sides. I felt like I was bathing in bugs. It was truly disgusting. It is a credit to the Sanitation Department that there was not a flying ant to be seen by the next morning.

Next time: Liuku fieldtrips up the valley.