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

Kunming, Again

The next two weeks of my stay in China were a mix of procrastination, vacation, and stomach flu. When I first arrived back in Kunming, by myself for real after 5 months of a support network of Thai and American friends, parents, etc, I felt pretty intimidated by the prospect of another five weeks alone in such an alien place. My intimidation wasn't for no reason-- although my ISP experience was wonderful and fulfilling, it was also (at times) horribly frustrating and lonely. I wasn't feeling quite up to facing that with no one to text sarcastically to (after a wonderful mishap which allowed us to hang out for a day, Diana went off to Hong Kong and then Taiwan to finish our her summer), so I tried to make some Nujiang resource connections in Kunming (mostly failing, unfortunately), ate a lot of American breakfast food at Salvador's and other coffee shops on Foreigner Street, and took a mental vacation. During this time, I caught up with Kevin (the Thai-American-Chinese Grad student I'd become friends with over the semester), made friends with an exchange student named Ben from Virginia, had dinner with Lu Laoshi, and met John's girlfriend (and John) at longlast, and had Dim Sum with my Chinese teachers/friends.

My Chinese teachers, Gao Laoshi (age 26) and Zeng Laoshi (age 28), who became good friends of mine, at Dim Sum during Kunming v. 2.0


I looked upon the time as respite from the looming darkness of Research Mode, and for that reason I may have been guilty of staying just a little too long. It was so very tempting-- getting to see John again, and meet his lovely other half, was really nice, and Ben and I had some crazy adventures together, going to the Buddhist temple complex down the street from campus and seeing a Buddhist funeral, using the pool at his apartment, trying and failing to watch "The Graduate" in Chinese.

Part of the temple complex down the street from campus


Unfortunately, that was when stomach flu part 2 (which would eventually extend to parts 3, 4, and 5) set in, and I was forced to stay in Kunming an extra 3 or 4 days, as the prospect of being sick on a 10-hour bus ride was not particularly appealing. That part was pretty frustrating, as I was already a little bit mad at myself for procrastinating so long, but there was nothing to be done about it. I spent my days alternately venturing out to take pictures and enjoy the city and sitting in my room shotgunning Pepto and reading a bad John Grisham book. At least I got to take some nice shots of Kunming street life and my environment there as a whole:



Kunming streets




The little-old-man er hu player who always played at the entrance to Foreigner's Street. He just looks like he should be an erhu player. I think it's the fu manchu.


Green Lake Park


Finally after several days of frustration bordering on boredom, after exchanging my bus ticket three times, I was able to hop a sleeper bus to Liuku. As Liuku in the summer is pretty much as hot, humid, and unpleasant as a place might possibly be, I only stayed there one night, long enough to get hooked up with someone who might find me a translator in Fugong. And then I was off again, to the last part of my journey-- thesis research in Nujiang valley all by my lonesome.

Plagued By The Plague

Here I thought I was in a great place to start blogging again in earnest, but of course these things never work out as planned.

Chiefly in my way: a fairly horrendous stomach sickness. Said bacterial menace has kept me partially to totally out of commission for upwards of 2 weeks and has been resistant to: countless Immodium; the BRAT diet (which here consists basically of mini-muffins, bananas, white rice, and fake packaged bread which they call "france bread" when I can find it); two rounds of Cipro (the all-purpose travel antibiotic engineered to wipe out anything residing in your tummy); and a Chinese IV treatment with replacement fluids and antibiotics. And yet my stomach continues to rebel. I gotta tell you, I'm pretty ready to throw in the towel, regardless of what a sad, disappointing, and frustrating ending that would make to this wonderful adventure.

But you gotta quit sometime, and I'm not sure how much more intestinal fortitude (pun intended) I have.

Now for Something Completely Different

I know you are all expecting a new recounting of our Provincial adventures, but I'm afraid that will have to wait. I've been out for the last 36 hours with horrendous food poisoning, the worst stomach sickness I've ever had. As my mother pointed out, I was able to stave it off for 10 weeks, which is great, but it was hard to remember that when at times the night before last I had both ends working simultaneously, if you get my drift. I'm exhausted and, to be honest, a little bit daunted: we were supposed to begin our month-long independent study project today but me, Ashley, and Lisa (who are also sick) stayed an extra night here in Lijiang to recover. Unfortunately, I've had so much to get done that there hasn't been a whole lot of time to rest. Tomorrow I will head to Nujiang Valley (on the 9:30 bus... I really should have opted to go later)-- hopefully there will be internet there, but I'm unsure. I'll be able to give you the full story of our field trip then. Until then, I'll leave you with my newest Argus column.