Surpises in Yunnan

For months, I’ve looked forward to seeing a palette with something other than the dingy gray of urban concrete buildings that block an expansive view of a perpetually dingy gray sky. I’ve dared to  fantasize about “Yunnan,” the southwest Chinese province that literally is “south of the clouds.” Indeed, nothing about the mustard, clay, and cream-colored buildings against an azure sky has disappointed me here in Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan, where I have from downtown beheld the full circumference of the sun, day after day, and where I have seen a bright moon wax and wane against a star studded sky. Nothing about this land of “eternal spring” and blossoming meihua has disappointed me.

I’m here in Kunming for a ten-day language “camp” at Yunnan Normal University, along with four other Peace Corps volunteers and various other “laowai” who have chosen to end a long winter holiday studying the aspect particle “le,” complements of result, complements of duration and other such things—with and without labels.

What I didn’t expect was a laidback southwestern town, ringed by mountains, as dry as Boulder in Colorado, a town where Chinese drivers stop for pedestrians (sometimes) and honor red lights, a town with stunning culinary delights—including New Zealand pizza with feta cheese and walnuts served by an expat from Christchurch, including bowls of Kunming’s famous crossing-the-bridge noodles (Guoqiao Cheng), including a rich spectrum of ethnic and minority foods, and, I’m embarrassed to admit, the incredible Just Hot bakery, where we made up for six months of virtually no bread or baked goods in one or two visits.  I’ve so loved the vegetable-rich Chinese cuisine elsewhere that I was totally caught off guard by these temptations.

I may have read about but underestimated the humor in the “luohan,” sculptures of monks and saints smiling wryly and sometimes mischievously from various poses around the Bamboo Temple (Qiongzhu) up in the western mountains.

  

I knew about Lantern Festival concluding the two weeks of Chinese New Year but had no idea what it would be like to experience the Lantern Festival in Cuihu Park, a few blocks away from the International Student dormitory. Really, the park is a lake with a series of interconnected islands, a botanical wonderland even at night with a few brightly gilded temples lit up and crowds mulling around, sampling street food, pausing to listen to various minstrels, witnessing one ethnic dance after another, and beholding a sky periodically exploding with fireworks.

 I see why Foreigner Street is packed with expats who have chosen to escape the intensity of China’s east coast. Far away from Beijing, mainland authority is fainter here, possibly even more so when viewed from the perspective of someone who might be Dai or Bai or Hui.

I had no idea what a hiker’s paradise Yunnan is, although my spare time has been spent composing paragraphs with “jiran. . .na jiu . . .” and “suiran. . .danshi. . .”, not lacing up hiking boots. One day I hope to return to Yunnan, to Tiger Leaping Gorge in the far northwest.

What I really didn’t expect, though, was how poor I am at being humble in a language class with three twenty-somethings and one forty-something. It’s not the class. Our adorable teacher has surprised us with candid questions and personal reflections and has kept the time flying during four-hour afternoon classes. She is not to blame for my feeling pissy on those days when I just can’t catch the question, let alone answer it. I can revel in writing little passages and in memorizing them; I can delight in a growing vocabulary.  I’m enough of a nerd to enjoy grammar. But damn—I have as hard a time as ever discriminating between and among “mother,” “horse,” “marijuana,” and “#$!!” (depending on tone) or between “this year” and “which year” (again, depending on tone and context) or “buy” and “sell” (same story)—all of which puts a damper on dialogue, on conversation, the heart of learning a language. I’m tone deaf in the music room and, apparently, in some places in China as well.

But – why not practice patience, humor, and letting the pissy stuff go, here in Kunming as well as anywhere? I need to simply ting (listen)—and not let this make me ting (stop).

Credits:

http://buchmann.info/wp-content/gallery/kunming_cuihu/cuihu-park-2889.jpg

http://blogs.bootsnall.com/llew/files/2012/04/IMGP3256.jpg

The Brains of Dujiangyan

What makes their brains tick?

Jia Yue’s deaf grandpa seems to understand something about pigeons and their little brains. The birds are his passion—and they fill all kinds of cages on the balcony of his apartment in Dujiangyan in western Sichuan. Most days he lets two of his beloved birds fly away—and usually they return. Where do they go and why do they return? And how do they know where to find his balcony? Once Jia Yue’s grandpa took some of his pigeons to Mongolia and set them free. He returned (by train, I think) to Dujiangyan, arriving a few weeks before the birds. Home they came. 

I don’t know what makes little bird brains tick, and I can’t fathom what made Li Bing’s big brain tick. Li Bing lived in Dujiangyan thousands of years ago, when the plains of Sichuan were ravaged yearly by a raging river. Li Bing literally moved a mountain, or part of one, to establish an irrigation and flood control system that has made Sichuan the rice basket for much of China for millennia. He split a river in two, created a bottleneck and a back area to relieve pressure during high river time and to store water without a dam. Without a dam, vessels could flow up and downstream--fish, too. No worry about clogging up a big structure with silt. The Min river has continued to supply millions of people with its valuable resources for well over two thousand years.

Li Bing pulled off this feat without gunpowder to blast away the mountain to create the second river channel. He designed bridges and other things for the area as well. He had the social and political skills to organize the thousands of laborers who brought his idea to fruition. Who knows what math was in his head--long before Newton developed calculus in the West.  Li Bing may have been a giant standing on others’ shoulders—but whose? Where did his ideas come from? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dujiangyan_Irrigation_System if interested in more details.

I remember that our Missouri Mark Twain was skeptical about any human’s ability to outsmart big rivers. Twain said, “The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.” And yet Li Bing struck a bargain with the Min River that still seems to hold. In Dujiangyan, this hydraulic engineering feat continues to serve a huge portion of the Chinese people.

Amazing, all this ingenuity flying—and flowing—in and out of Dujiangyan.

pigeon: http://smashmaterials.com/2011/28-beautiful-pigeon-photos/

Celebrating the Year of the Snake with Monkeys on Our Backs

I spent Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) touring in and around western Sichuan with a student and her family. When halfway up  Mt. Emei, I finally understood the phrase "monkey on your back." These thirty-pound thieves would fly out of nowhere, landing on our backs, trying our zippers and taking what goods they could. Lei Shu Yan (above) is about to lose his water bottle--just moments before I lost mine.

More amazing than the mischievous monkeys was the spectacular scenery on Mt. Emei, a series of steep slopes jutting into and above the mist. Amazing, too, is the legacy of Chinese Buddhism here.

The lower region of Mt. Emei has lush vegetation, crystal clear streams,
and numerous Buddhist temples and monasteries.

The higher we rose, the colder and mistier it got. Snow (visible above) and ice followed.

Waiting for us at the very top was the Golden Buddha, distinctly visible at sunset

. . . but not so visible the next morning when we joined throngs of others in the freezing cold to see the legendary sunrise. We needed crampons to descend the hundreds and hundreds of icy stone steps.
(Below see three of our party.)

 Earlier in the week we visited the seventy-meter Buddha carved into a mountain in Leshan--you can see his fingernails on the right. A single toenail could easily host a party of a dozen or so visitors.

The Buddha of Leshan lords over the confluence of three rivers--below is a bridge over one of them.

Throughout the week, JiaYue's family extended unbelievable hospitality. Her parents hosted numerous banquets on our behalf (she has just been accepted by several of the world's top schools for graduate school), several different "uncles" covered expenses for passes here and there, and her grandmother hosted the large extended family for days of feasting in nearby Dujiangyan, also home to a two-thousand year old successful engineering marvel, an irrigation program that made Sichuan one of China's rice bowls for millennia. We went to one awesome place after another for days. More on all that later.

But back to monkeys. Who knew I'd have two "monkeys on my back" when navigating the insanely crowded trains and buses back to Beibei. The first "monkey" was what is sometimes euphemistically called "traveler's revenge," something that can be explained by my non-stop feasting, some of it on street food, and something that resulted in perhaps 35 trips to the pot the night before. With squat toilets on crowded, swaying trains, I dared not ingest one drop of anything the morning before leaving.
 
The second "monkey" was the very hospitality I just raved about. Consider JiaYue's grandma. I could write a book about this sweet woman, but my eyes grew rounder and rounder as she made a dozen trips from the kitchen and elsewhere to our stash of backpacks and luggage, bringing us more and more gifts to bring home, including many bags of her frozen home-made tang yuan and jiaozi, both of which I love. Then the big box of juices she thought I'd like. Then the four books the very sweet "brothers" gave me—one each of the four great classics of Chinese literature. Each one maybe half the size and weight of a typical dictionary. (Under any other conditions, I'd be thrilled to have these particular tomes.) Then Grandma emerged with a big plastic container of toffee candies and some bags of delicious dried meats. The other family members looked very somber as Grandma kept padding back with more, but they felt helpless to stop her.

So, in my totally dehydrated and weakened state (because of my first "monkey"), I shouldered my backpack, grabbed my suitcase and wondered where I'd be able to stash the ungodly colossal plastic bag with the broken zipper holding all this incredibly sweet Chinese hospitality (my other "monkey"--dear as it all was).

I shouldn't have worried. We did have to navigate some long stairs in several train stations, but it somehow worked out. Everyone else had more than they could carry, and at least there were no live ducks peeking out of my bag.

Home in Beibei, I can begin to reflect on the scores of sacrifices JiaYue's family members made on my behalf and how patiently they tried to help me understand their sentences and how vigilantly they looked after my every need. It's 2013. The Year of the Snake.

Chunjie - AKA Spring Festival or Chinese New Year

The Gregorian calendar isn't the only one around, and, according to the Chinese lunar calendar, winter is over and spring is around the corner. Spring festival, also known as Chunjie or the Chinese New Year, is a festival with thousands of years of customs embedded in it, so it's not just one thing. From a US perspective, it has elements of Christmas (big holiday, gift giving, holiday lights and decorations), Thanksgiving (giving thanks, feasting with family), Fourth of July (firecrackers), Halloween (All Saints Day), Memorial Day (remembrance of other dead relatives), and more.  Simply put it's a homecoming extending for many days before and after the new year, which is February 10th in 2013. Here comes the Year of the Snake.

I did join the billion plus travelers moving hither and thither via public transport, but it didn't seem that much crazier than usual to me. The train stations I have visited are always packed: When it's time for a train to load, the crowd presses so tightly on all sides that I think I could lift my feet and just be moved along. That said, I live in western China and might find the Spring Festival travel season ("chunyun") even more intense in the east.

Off the train, though, I have witnessed elements of "chunyun." I see people carrying not only suitcases but also mud buckets, sometimes on either end of a bamboo pole. I assume the mud buckets are full of food--fruits, sweets, dried meats. I had to book my train tickets early because of "chunyun" and know of Peace Corps volunteers who were out of luck when trying to make a last minute plan. I found that ATMs frequently ran out of cash. I see everywhere the infamous plaid plastic zip bags--full of gifts, no doubt. And, of course, all over are shops overflowing with red envelopes and all sorts of red banners, red lanterns, and red paper hangings. The streets are lined everywhere, even in Beibei, with millions of lights--not just white lights. Beibei's main thoroughfares had little red globes bobbing like pumpkins every foot or two between festoons of purple and yellow lights, thousands and thousands of them. Spectacular.

But Beibei is not where I'm spending the festival itself. A student kindly invited me to her home near LeShan, where I'm joining her extended family. Her "brothers" a "sister" and I are tackling nearby Mt. Emei (Emei Shan), one of the four sacred mountains for Buddhists and a spectacular site for its biodiversity and views of things cultural (over thirty temples) and natural (the Tibetan plateau not far to the west, the Sichuan basin to the east) and thieving monkeys.

These little critters jump on unsuspecting tourists, quickly rip open any flimsy bags, and unzip  backpack pockets if you don't move quickly. One man had a big bag full of dried noodles and other picnic goods, hoping to avoid the high costs of food higher up, and a monkey tore into all of it, with his family members watching aghast.

The sites of Mt. Emei are so spectacular, though, they warrant their own blog entry. Next time!

Oreos with Chinese Characteristics

Sweet tooth though I have, I never really liked Oreos. That’s not the case for most of my Chinese students. Typically, they have been spared my silver-filled sweet tooth and tend to prefer fruit to any kind of super sugary dessert . . .unless that dessert happens to be an Oreo. They’ll eat one of those in a flash. But what’s an Oreo in China? To be sure, it’s still a mass-produced chocolate cookie familiar to Westerners, but it has Chinese characteristics.

Oreos, cell phones, high-heeled boots, red-rimmed eyeglasses—all of these products that might be familiar to Westerners—somehow have some distinctly Chinese characteristics in China, if not tangible ones (like the Chinese characters on the package of Oreos or the green tea filling in some of the cookies), less tangible ones (like the social context in which they are produced).  So, what’s the social context—far beyond the factory alone to the larger culture –in which Oreos are produced? As most people know, Deng Xiaoping famously characterized China’s emerging economy as a market economy with socialist characteristics. I’m not sure how socialist it is, but one of the characteristics of Oreos is the consumption rate. It’s huge.

If asked what the primary Chinese characteristic is characterizing anything in China, including its most phenomenal feats and failures, socialist or not, I’d be tempted to name one thing:

Scale.

Scale is perhaps the single most distinctive characteristic I observe in China—whether the scale of the mass-production of sweet things like Oreos (100s of 1000s of tons of them a year, I gather), the scale of a feat like the Great Wall (a very old thing that runs over 13,000 miles, according to one survey cited on Wikipedia), the scale of a failure like the famine following the “Great Leap Forward” (possibly resulting in as many as 43 million deaths, again according to Wikipedia),  a culture that is five thousand years old (imagine that—what other culture comes even close?), or simply the number of people standing ahead of me in the Chongqing train station, people heading home for Spring Festival (“chunyun” has been dubbed the largest human migration in history).

http://www.csmonitor.com/Photo-Galleries/In-Pictures/China-s-chun-yun-peak-travel-season#250365

 Scale is a characteristic that might warrant both celebration and commiseration . . .as Wen Jiabo suggested in a 2003 speech delivered at Harvard, “Any small problem multiplied by 1.3 billion will end up being a very big problem, and a very big aggregate divided by 1.3 billion will come to a very tiny figure." 

Zui. ---est. Biggest. Smallest. Longest. Oldest.

Scale: The number of strokes in my Chinese name (29). The power generating capacity of The Three Gorges Dam (22,500 MW). The length of the Yangtze River—or Chang Jiang (3,988 miles). The Dujiangyan Irrigation Project (the oldest and only surviving no-dam irrigation system in the world, thousands of years old). The number of victims in the Nanjing Massacre (200,000, arguably 300,000).

The number of red envelopes produced for Chinese New Year in 2013 is, I’m sure, colossal. The number of hukou certificates is unprecedented—hukou is the ancient system of household registration considered a stabilizing element by some and something akin to apartheid by others. The number of cars on the road is more than Henry Ford could have ever imagined, and, not surprisingly, the scale of air pollution in Beijing is also unprecedented. The number of bright students taking the gaokao, China’s grueling nine-hour university entrance examination, was 9.5 million in 2012. The number of Google- and weibo-blog users are enough to remind us all that times are changing.

I don’t think we can really appreciate anything about China’s past or future, its feats or its failures, its current challenges, without understanding this:

Scale.