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Published: August 5th 2010
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Water Buffalo
Used for labor, sorta pretty. The plus side of being laid up at home with a kind of horrendous stomach ailment (I'll spare you the details) is that I've finally had some time, now, to sort through some photos of my recent adventures and finally get around to detailing them on my blog.
Many of you have met Olivia (real name Zhu Dan), a close Chinese friend of mine and Tom's. Tom first met her about four years ago at the middle school where he taught, and since then we've become great friends. She helps us out with confusing things in China, and in turn we do our best to help her when she's in America (pursuing a Master's degree in Education!). In all this time, we had never had a chance to visit Olivia's hometown, so this time when she was home with family for a few weeks, we jumped at the chance.
When in China, Olivia usually lives in Beijing. Because of her work as a teacher, she holds a residence permit for the city, which is not exactly easy to come by. Migrants who live in the city without a permit are many, but they are literally second-class citizens, not guaranteed
Backyard Shed
Looks sort of like a museum diorama about life 200 years ago, but this is someone's home. the same privileges and protections as legal residents.
The rest of Olivia's family hold countryside permits; they live in rural Jiangxi province in a town called Gaoan. Here, they don't speak Mandarin, but a dialect of Hakka. That was Olivia's first language. Her second was a dialect of Cantonese, and her third was standard Mandarin. Her fourth language is English, which she speaks extremely well. So, when we arrived in Gaoan to meet her family, we mostly had to rely on her to be our translator: from Hakka to Mandarin, or sometimes to English.
We visited the old homes of a few family members, like a cottage belonging to her late grandmother, complete with handwoven baskets and a backyard water pump. We also went to pay respects at the graves of a few: we walked through a long rice paddy path and climbed up a small hill to find a grandparent's burial mound. Then incense was lit, followed by fake paper money. This money is supposed to be picked up by the spirit of the deceased to use in the afterlife! After that, firecrackers were lit "to signal they should come get their money," explained Olivia. We hurried
Rice Paddy Valley
Paths wind between the individual rice paddies. In the background you can see a few terraced paddies near the bottom of the hill. On top of those hills are some burial mounds. away from the graves with the sound of firecrackers echoing across the rice paddy valley. Her family does this ritual twice a year.
After respects were paid to the dead, we went to see Olivia's oldest aunt, who lives in a two-story farming house. Any ideas I had about quaint cottages, modest but tidy, scrubbed clean by industrious country folk, were out the door. The place was not in very good repair. Piles of garbage were heaped by both sides of the door. Wasps, spiders, and swallows nested in the eaves. As in practically every Chinese home, the TV remained on at all times. However, taking some time to understand China helped me realize these are not irreconcilable realities.
Why is there garbage piled up outdoors? We're even encouraged to simply toss plastic wrappers on the ground outside to later be swept into the heaps. Well, it turns out there's not really any garbage pick-up service in this countryside. What's the point of putting trash into a bin when it's just going to end up overflowing? Some people scavenge reusables and recyclables for a living, and they come by occasionally to thin out the piles. The television is
Country Rooftops
The view from the top of Olivia's aunt's house. On the left you can see a "modern" concrete building. an interesting phenomenon in Chinese life. Among houses with electricity, I doubt a single one is without television! The television set is one of the most important initial purchases in furnishing a house, and I guess many people's thinking is, simply, "We paid for it, and we're going to get our money's worth." And so, the TV stays on, all the time. The state of repair of the house itself is reflective of a sad situation in Chinese country life: the government has decided that China's rural areas must modernize, and part of this process is systematically replacing old homes with ugly concrete hulks. All land technically does belong to the government; civilians can only lease it for 80 years at a time. It's hard to maintain a sense of pride and caring for a piece of property when the government can take it away at a moment's notice. The next generation will almost certainly not inherit this home, and if they do, it is only a matter of time before the lease runs out.
While in Jiangxi, we also got to be treated as family guests, which, as is usually the case in China, means all the stops
Mutant Teletubby?
Spotted in a festival square outside of Gaoan. Currently haunting my nightmares. get pulled. Just about every lunch and every dinner was a feast of intimidating proportions, not unlike Chinese New Year celebrations, which also involve entirely too much food. We went rafting on a creek in inflatable dinghies, using paddles carved from large poles of bamboo. We climbed around a bit in a park called "800 Caves Mountain" (we poked around about four of these caves).
I came home to Kunming a bit early to handle some visa paperwork, but Tom stuck around a few more days. They visited another small village, I think where a cousin of the family lives, and apparently Tom was the first Westerner to ever visit this village (so they say). The village elder was brought out, much feasting was had, and drinking contests resulted in Tom putting everyone else under the table.
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Lynda Fitzpatrick
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Great photos
And wonderful writing too. I really look forward to each new entry. And this time Tom got a mention! Olivia's grandma's house is what I imagined lots of rural China to look like. I hope you took some pics of the concrete condo-like structures Tom described. Hope you are feeling better!