Cannibalizing!

http://www.travbuddy.com/travel-blogs/86208/Finally-Great-Wall-15

We’re too lazy to post about the Great Wall, which was btw fabulous. But here’s our friend and co-hiker’s missive . . .

Café 1921 (by Jonah)

Café 1921 is a café that we always love to go to on Campus which is the nearest place to our apartment that has American food. It’s called Café 1921 because thats when the university was founded. It also has coffee, milkshakes, sandwiches, Chinese food, Chinese magazines, flags hanging from the wall, guitars to play, photos of American musicians, free wifi, a piano, and much, much more. Here are some photos. We usually go there because cleaners come in our apartment and clean the apartment, and we’re not allowed to be there when they’re cleaning our apartment. We also go there when we have no other place to go and eat. There’s also this other café kind of far away called the Muse café. The Muse café is not as good as café 1921. For example, the café 1921 is bigger, it has more stuff, and is more near-by. All though the Muse café DOES have better sandwiches than the café 1921. But that’s not the point. Were talking bout the café 1921, not the Muse. Anyways, I love the café 1921, just like most people do.

When we return…

It’s so strange how normal I find everything, even when it’s not. On my way to school, I pass a Buddhist temple, a hunchbacked beggar, and the Communist Police (complete with hammer-and-sickle armbands), all without blinking an eye. What’s wrong with me?

It’s going to be even stranger, though, going back to Milwaukee. Clean drinking water! Nobody spits! Unhealthy food! Crass commercialism! (well, more of it) Wonders will abound. We’ll be back on the 22nd. It seems like such a short time. See you then! (or some of you, at least. 😦 )

-Ivan

Chongqing

Daniel Liu & me @ South West University

Chongqing Municipality–a spinoff of Sichuan Province, now its own special administrative zone–is a hilly metropolitan area of 32 million people, most of them housed in skyscrapers. Landing in the plane, it looked like an endless sea of upended cigarette boxes. The cigarette metaphor proved apt since my second lecture was disastrous because I was visibly choking to death. Death was averted, but I lost my voice (and my train of thought) due to the pollution. The air is essentially a solid block. That said, they’re working on it–there are trees planted on the tops of most buildings, for example. My favorite part of Chongqing was the wedding that I attended as an uninvited guest. It was happening at a restaurant where we had lunch, and when I expressed an interest, my guide insisted that we go. The bride was wheeled down the aisle on a white fur crescent moon, which I suspect is not a traditional feature of Chinese weddings. But the couple did kneel at the altar in front of their parents, thanking them quite traditionally and ceremonially for raising them. This is nice–I hope my kids do that at their weddings, but I won’t hold my breath.

P.S. Dogged readers of this blog may wonder why I am the only one posting. The reason is that everyone else has turned against the blog, and the more I bug them about it the more resistant they are to it. I guess I can make them apologize for their stubborn-ness when they kneel in front of me at their weddings.

Three days after my return from Tiayuan . . .

I still can’t say it. Everyone here thinks I was in Taiwan.

All month I am lecture-touring around China. This week it was Taiyuan, way up north in Shanxi. Shanxi is one of the cradles of Chinese civilization. Indeed, the museum tags I saw simply announced that civilization in general originated in Shanxi, but that’s because the Chinese are like New Yorkers in their center-of-the-universe-assumptions. Hence the “Middle Kingdom” moniker. And fair enough: that museum was tres impressive. Many of the earliest artifacts had designs that reminded me of Northwest Coast Indian art, which makes sense if you buy the Bering Strait land bridge hypothesis.

Taiyun is a famously polluted city in the heart of coal country, although my guide told me proudly that the pollution had been reduced since they “dug an artificial river” through the center of town. This guide was a remarkable person. Like many women in China, her story is wrenching: she was the sixth daughter in an impoverished rural family that wanted only sons. Their status in the village was humiliating because of their girls. She grew up without enough food–simultaneously hating boys and wishing to be one. She turned out to be uncannily smart and became the first girl from her village to finish college, but her hands are still covered in scars from farm work and she has stress-based panic attacks. I think many intelligent women in China are whiplashed as they try to navigate between tradition (which rigidly devalues women, but also offers them a defined place in society) and modernity (which offers opportunities but also a sense of dislocation).

I dined with a variety of officials, including one fellow who extolled the virtues of Joseph Stalin and the Taliban. I nodded politely, of course, and concentrated on my longevity noodles–which were, I might add, the most delicious noodles EVER. Fresh handmade deep green noodles with garlic and grassy herbs . . . yum! I thought I might lose weight in China, but au contraire. Anyway, I’m glad that the cult of Stalin in on the wane throughout China as a new generation emerges.

Next week is Xi’an, the week after that Chongqing, and then Dalian. All are about 3 hours away by plane, and all will involve nonstop banquets and the formal bestowal of plaques, certificates, and/or pens (i.e opportunities for me to make weird American social blunders). But still: hey hooray. Interesting times, and not in the sense connoted by the old Chinese curse.

Some photos from Janet and Evan’s visit

Here are some photos from Janet and Evan’s visit here last month—mostly on Gulangyu island. The seafood restaurant shots are from there (including the tubs full of live critters to pick to eat), and the other restaurant ones are from our dinner out with Angela’s colleague Shao.

Frankie’s Heritage Circuit

Qinzhou SWI (orphanage)

Qinzhou U

So Frankie & I (that’d be Angela) did a whirlwind tour of Qinzhou, her home city on the Gulf of Tonkin. It’s not exactly a tourist hotspot, so getting there–via taxi, airplane, shuttle bus, and more taxi–was half the, um, fun. She was ambivalent about the whole enterprise, but as a slavish follower of adoptive-parents-advice books I felt that we should re-visit her orphanage and “finding place.” To make it festive I squelched my miserly impulses and booked a room at the fanciest hotel in town: the White Dolphin. It was, as expected, something of a gilded Motel 6 (i.e. “breakfast buffet” consisting of leftovers from last night’s dinner buffet; gold faucets but no reliable hot water, etc.). But we had fun, and there was a very cold pool which was refreshing after hours in the tropical heat.

Qinzhou is a small city with a very Vietnamese flavor; people are not as open as in Xiamen, although their reticence is, I think, mostly because no one speaks English. The traffic is hypnotic, nonstop, and trance-like. The orphanage turned out to be just down the street from our hotel, so we were able to take pictures in front of the courtyard, although we did not try to go in. To my relief it seemed okay-pleasant, crowded with worker bicycles and decorated with red paper lanterns.

Frankie’s “finding place,” near the gate of Qinzhou University, was part of a small, leafy campus. We wandered briefly through the searing heat, before beating it back into the city where we ate a shamelessly American lunch at McDonald’s. That evening, Frankie met a chubby little Chinese girl in a polka-dotted bikini who turned out to speak impeccable, if foul-mouthed, British boarding-school English; everything was “bloody hell” this and that. They had fun swimming until they turned to prunes.

Overall, it was a fine trip, though I probably violated a lot of adoptive parent heritage trip rules. Time to put away the advice books, I guess.

Images of Xiamen

This gallery contains 19 photos.

The Chinese operetta (by Jonah)

Our English speaking Chinese friend had these tickets to a Chinese Operetta, but she was busy that day, so she gave them to us. My mom said it was in a part of campus we haven’t been in before, so she said we might not be able to find it. But our English speaking friend pointed in a direction in a different part of the campus and said it was a really old and beautiful part of the campus and had two really old red roofs. But by the time we thought we saw where it was, we showed the tickets to a random Chinese person on the streets, and he pointed to a building we were right by. So, we went in there and sat down in our seats. We thought we were in a big hurry, but we weren’t. We thought it started at seven, but it started at seven thirty.

Our seats were high up, but they were centered perfectly. Then an English speaking Chinese person who works there said that we should move to V.I.P. seats instead, which I thought was weird because we were not V.I.P.’s but I guess it was O.K. because I knew she worked there, because she was wearing a badge which all the other workers were wearing. It was centered perfectly, and it was on the third row! But then these older people came and made us leave, so we went back to our old seats. The workers were there wondering why we weren’t in our V.I.P. seats. Then we told them that the older people came and told us to leave, so they led us to front row V.I.P. seats! So then that’s where we ended up sitting. I thought it was kind of weird but I guess they would automatically give V.I.P. to westerners since we were the only westerners in the whole entire hall. And TRUST me. It was PACKED with people. So then, we realized that the people sitting next to us did NOT look like V.I.P.’s. I thought they were mainly people who had some connections with one of the actors or directors.

The stage had just seats and desks with name tags on it (written in Chinese characters of course), and it started with people in suits sitting down. These guys with cameras kept getting in front of us and then moving out of the way. Every once and a while this guy would shine a light on us or take a picture of us. Only two guys in the middle had microphones, in which they said the names of the other guys sitting down, and the other guys would stand up and the audience would clap. But then these ladies in identical suits came along with music playing in the background and gave the guys in suits this pile of fancy boxes wrapped in a ribbon, and then the ladies would go off stage and these COMPLETELY random people would come along. And trust me. They were completely random. They had like dyed hair and baggy shirts. The guys in suits would stand up and give the completely random people the boxes with ribbons wrapped around it, and then they would turn around and everybody would clap. And trust me. The completely random people wouldn’t even smile, but they WOULD do a small bow. Then, one of the guys in the middle made this extremely long speech, and everybody in the audience would start talking, and talking, and nobody actually paid any attention to whatever the heck he was saying. And we couldn’t even UNDERSTAND what he was saying because it was all in Chinese. Even the other people on stage were thumbing through these books and even THEY weren’t paying any attention to what he was saying. And then the women in fancy suits with the same music playing in the background came again and gave the guys in suits these giant awards and then they gave them to these other completely random people they would turn around and the audience would clap, they would do a small bow—exactly the same.

Then, the operetta started. The play was supposed to take place in the late nineteenth century. It started out with this lady dressed up really fancy, this old man with a long beard and these ladies holding puppets. Then these ladies on the side would do this dance where they pretend to be puppets on strings. My mom read online later on that that dance was a special dance to Fujian province (the province we are located in in China), and it was originally from old Operas in Fujian province, China. Then the old man with a beard’s stick that he would always carry around with a cloth on the top with Chinese charecters broke so he fell to the ground. The dressed up women were talking in Chinese how to fix it, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying, and neither could my mom. Then she would say stuff and everybody in the audience laughed, but we didn’t. But I thought it was a little funny how everybody laughed, but we couldn’t understand what they were saying. Then, the next scene was where this guy came along and sang this long song in Chinese which seemed to me a little more middle-Eastern than Chinese. Every time people are walking, then they made these click-clack noises, and when something silly happened then it went ‘DUIN!’ Then the middle-eastern looking guy ran into this girl who was at the beginning and they were riding around on each other in this weird way. Then the dressed up lady ran into the police where they had this really long conversation, and then they brought out their big and fat policeman with a mustache and they kept taking, when the dressed up lady got a hold of the policeman’s gun, and then everybody was scared of her all of a sudden. So the dressed up lady and the old man in the beard (who was all of a sudden fine) were in prison, and the police guard was drunk, so they got a hold of his key! So then the old man with the beard and the dressed up lady were free and the police were looking for them. Every once and a while the two girls with the puppets would show up and talk to each other using the puppets on strings. So the police were trying to find the dressed up lady and the old man with the beard. The dressed up lady and the old man with the beard knew that the police were coming, so the old man with the beard hid and the dressed up lady put on a Buddhist cape and got in a praying position and pretended to be a Buddhist statue. So, when the police came along past her, they looked at her and he was stupid enough to not figure out that that was the person they were chasing the whole entire time. Then, when the police men looked away, she stole one of the policeman’s stick and when the policeman turned around she set it on her arm holes and was back in her praying position, but the policemen didn’t notice. So, they kept searching. Then, the middle-eastern looking guy and the girl at the beginning were still riding on each other in a weird way back to where this was going on, so they got rid of the middle-eastern looking guy because he was trying to kidnap her and they were all fine!

P.S.: That’s just really what we THINK the plot was.

Kunming (Yunnan), mid February 2011

This gallery contains 36 photos.

Before heading to Xiamen, we spent a week or so in Kunming, in Yunnan province. Here are some of the photos.