As I lie here in bed, recovering, it seems like much more than four weeks ago that we set off for our spring holiday in the south of China. We had been looking forward for some time to escaping the cold. We had made arrangements to join a 4-day gathering of friends near Hong Kong, and we wanted to extend the trip, do some sightseeing, and see something of other parts of China.
The semester break in China coincides with spring festival, also known as Chinese New Year, the biggest holiday of the year in China. It is a time for festivities, fireworks, and visiting home and family. From the viewpoint of a visiting anthropologist, the kinship rituals are complex. One is expected to visit one's family and all of the older relatives. One is expected to visit the spouse's family, and all of those older relatives. Of course, one always brings a suitable gift when visiting. I have been told that a live chicken is always sure to be well received as a gift. I'm glad that my in-laws did not move to China with us...
During the previous semester, we had made friends with many students, and some of them had offered to house us and show us around if we ever visited their home area. We had become especially close with one group of seniors. One of these, whom we had named Carlos, invited us to stay with him during spring festival. Carlos lived in Guangdong province, in the south. His parents had a home in Maoming, a small city in western Guangdong, and Carlos had found a job in Guangzhou (AKA Canton), a very large city also in Guangdong. The plan was to take the train to Guangzhou, spend a few days there with Carlos, and then travel west with him to his home for spring festival, before heading off to Hong Kong. It was a simple plan, with little that could go wrong.
The preparations were made with care. I made a special trip to the train station in Zhuzhou to get the tickets in advance, but that's another story... Anne bought some little portable raincoats. The morning of our departure was uncharacteristically sunny. The phone rang. It was Carlos. His new boss had unexpectedly called him away, immediately, to work for several weeks in another province. Carlos was very sorry, but did not want to lose his first good job, so he would not be able to host us during the holiday. We assured him that we understood. We decided to go south anyway, as we already had the train tickets and didn't feel like staying in Xiangtan for two more weeks, cold and alone. We would take the train to Guangzhou, and let God guide us through His signs and servants...
As we were preparing for a late-afternoon departure by leisurely packing, changing bed linen, and sweeping the floors, the sound of a disturbance arose in the stairwell outside our apartment. I went out and found a large man, extremely angry and shouting something in Chinese. He was angry at me! Taalan came out of the apartment, and the man started lunging at Taalan, trying to hit him, with me in between trying to calm him down. As it turned out, Taalan had been throwing rocks into the puddles to break the ice and accidentally hit the man's son in the mouth with a small rock. The boy was bleeding and it was thought that the tooth had been broken. We decided to cancel the trip and to stay home until things were resolved. To move the story along, three hours later we had determined (by a trip to the dentist) that there was no problem with the tooth. We paid the medical expenses, and left the man with a department official still calming him down. We looked at the clock. We had 30 minutes before the time to leave, if we still wanted to go. Yep, let's blow this scene... We went into packing-frenzy mode, got everything together into five small bags, grabbed the passports and tickets, and caught a quick taxi downtown to the bus station.
From Xiangtan we rode the "quick" bus for an hour to Zhuzhou, where the train station was. On my previous trip to buy the tickets, I had taken the same bus route, dutifully noting the landmarks to be able to navigate smoothly and quickly from the bus station to the train station. As the bus wandered the streets of Zhuzhou, however, I became uneasy; the route was not as I remembered it. The bus parked at the bus station. Yes, it was a different bus station. Another defeat for carefully laid plans. We tried out something we had memorized from the phrase book -- huoche zhan -- train station. We were escorted to a fleet of motorcycle taxis. Now, these were not ordinary motorcycles, where you just hop on the back and the driver gets you there quickly for about half the normal taxi fare. These were standard motorcycles, but with big fiberglass frames around them, completely enclosing them. In the back, there was room for about two people and a couple bags. We hopped into two of them. It was the peak of rush hour and traffic was effectively blocked in every direction. We did, however, after a few daredevil U-turns, arrive at the train station with a little time to spare. We sat in the waiting room, ate something, and were escorted down the hallway and onto the train platform.
Trains in China are vitally important for transporting the masses. There are hundreds of trains; they are run efficiently and on time. They can also be very crowded. We were on an overnight train, with "hard sleeper" accommodations. Soft sleeper is a little more comfortable and private, but much more expensive. A hard sleeper car is separated into sections of six bunks, three high and facing each other. An open "aisle" runs the length of the car along one side. The hard sleeper is well named – you can sleep on it, but it's hard. The "mattress" is about as thick as a pancake, and the train stops every hour or so, with jolts and noises. Even so, you have a little space you can call your own, you don't have to sit up all night like a sardine, and the kids can have fun climbing up and down the ladder and jumping into your bunk. We lurched into Guangzhou station at 6:00 the next morning, groggy, aching somewhat, with no idea of where to go, and wondering vaguely what God had in mind for us.
We wandered across to a big hotel and waited in the lobby for the cafe to open for the morning. While there we met a young Chinese man who lived in a nearby town. He spoke some English, and the first thing he said was that he was just coming back from a visit to Tibet. We talked for a while; we ate breakfast together; we told him our story; he showed us his videos of Tibet from a small videocam. He suggested we go to Shamian, the foreigners' enclave in Guangzhou. He helped us find the right bus and about 45 minutes later we crossed a footbridge into the old British colonial area, which is inside the city of Guangzhou but isolated on a small island on the Pearl River.
Shamian is decidedly scaled for tourists, with lots of fancy shops and restaurants. For example, one shop window displayed a large, intricately carved jade representation of dragons, priced at a mere 3 million yuan (8 yuan to the US$). Restaurants advertise their menu by setting tanks or crates of fish, shellfish, turtles, and snakes outside on the sidewalk. Cars are restricted on the island, the streets are quiet and tree-lined, and as we relaxed a little, Tariqa was promptly run over by a bicyclist. The front wheel caught her right across the ankle. Experience suggested that she had a mild break or severe sprain. We wandered around, piggybacking a screaming 5-year-old, imagining two more weeks of the same, and soon found a health clinic. They couldn't help, but gave us directions to a hospital and suggested that we first check into a hotel. We checked into the Youth Hostel on the island, and within five minutes Tariqa was bouncing around on the bed, the leg almost forgotten, no swelling, no bruising.
I wandered off to find the hospital for myself, to have my hands looked at. They had been turning purple for some time in Xiangtan from the cold, and during the last day had started to swell up and blotch attractively. I managed to get registered and up to the third floor to the skin section. A tall African man with a beautiful English accent introduced himself as a dermatologist. He diagnosed that I was having an allergic reaction to something, and that it was up to me to monitor over time what was triggering the reaction. I kept suggesting that it was the cold, but I don't know if he believed me. He prescribed some allergy medicine, which worked quite nicely over a few days' time.
By the way, there is a well-established adoption trade in Guangzhou, largely for couples from the USA. They stay at the swank hotel (cheap if you have a US$ salary), and wander around Shamian with their little newfound, black-haired children. It is quite sweet to see them on the streets. Apparently, it is much simpler, faster, and cheaper to go to Canton for a week and come back with a legally adopted child than to navigate through years of social-services red tape back home.
We spent two days at Shamian, basking in the sunshine and window-shopping. On the second morning Anne befriended a man while the children were playing in the park. We talked and he suggested that we visit his hometown of Zhaoqing, to the west of Guangzhou and noted for its scenery. I had seen Zhaoqing mentioned in the Lonely Planet travel book ("poor cousin to Guilin," they called it). He volunteered to help me get bus tickets for the next day, so together we rode the city bus back downtown. The small streets were incredibly crowded. All of the shops were bulging and beyond with goods for spring festival -- food, electronics, knickknacks, cases of dried squid, hanging lanterns in bright red... One good thing, from my point of view, is that fireworks are prohibited within the city. Bedlam reigned in the bus station -- actually, only one of at least three bus stations in downtown; it's a good thing that Curtis, as I gave him a name, had volunteered to help us. We managed to buy tickets; again, I carefully noted the landmarks. The next morning we made it to the correct station in good time, ate, and boarded the bus – a new, swank, express bus that showed a movie. Feeling relaxed, we watched the scenery as the concrete receded and the countryside of southern China slowly appeared around us.
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