Food

I still can't quite get over how I spent my Christmas eve with those village musicians and actors …

Anyway, today was a travel day: 2 hours on a mini bus from Yangshuo to Guilin, another 2 hours from Guilin to the dusty town of Longsheng, and the last leg was a 1 hour trip to Ping An. But to get to Ping An town, there’s another 25 minute vertical climb up granite steps.

On the way here, I could already see parts of the Long Ji rice terraces and bamboo forests. There is so much natural beauty in what I've seen of Guangxi, but the people here live under the kind of poverty that I haven't seen elsewhere in China. Man that's cruel, to live in the midst of an overwhelming wealth of beauty but have so few means.

Ok, on this transition day, I talk briefly about food. I haven't eaten anything all that good until today. I've tried local specialties like beer fish (which is basically an attempt to cover up the muddy sooty taste of bottom feeding catfish with beer, with very little success) and Guilin rice noodles, but nothing struck me fancy. Until today in Ping An, where, after spending all day on buses and eating biscuits, arriving after dark, tired and hungry, I stopped at a small place for dinner and saw some local folks eating a bamboo rice thing (pic above). And it was goooood. They stuff rice, local sausage, a yellowish yam, mushroom and carrot into a bamboo stalk, and cook it over open fire. Yummy!

That's all for today. I plan to be up before sunrise tomorrow to do a 3-4 hour hike through the rice terraces. The sun came out today for the first time on my trip, and it warmed up a bit, so hopefully tomorrow will be a good day to hike and take some pics.

Wacky Christmas Eve Funeral

My Christmas eve started with a river cruise and ended with a funeral. Let me explain.

I started the day quietly, taking it easy in anticipation of a long day on the bus tomorrow to Longsheng. I went on a river cruise in the afternoon on a bamboo fishing raft, and in the evening I went to see a Zhang Yimou choreographed outdoor light show called Liusanjie, performed by local villagers on their fishing rafts, which sounds dumb but was actually pretty cool.

After the show, I was wandering around town when I stumbled into, of all things, the red hat’d gold epaulette’d marching band that woke me up yesterday morning with their awful playing and endless firecrackers during their funeral march. (I know I'm now fated to join this marching band at some point on my karmic crawl toward insect-hood.)

This time, they were playing with a performing theater troupe. I started taking pics, felt really self conscious because this was a funeral dinner that spilled into the street, but people didn’t seem to mind or care or notice, in fact they smiled at me, so I kept at it, making my way towards an old guy playing (I think) the pipa. I smiled sheepishly at him when he looked over, and instead of throwing his shoe at me, he pointed his chin towards behind the stage. And so I made my way back there and chatted up the middle aged actors when they were in between scenes or doing one of their endless costume changes. (I couldn't follow the story, or the two dozen characters played by 4 pudgy actors.) I made myself warm around their charcoal fire, ate peanuts and bananas and oranges with them, smoked Guilin cigarettes with the troupe leader Mr. Huang, who explained to me that local funerals last for 3-4 days and always end with this dinner and performance thing the night before they bury the guy.

The band guys kept joking around about when this 3 day funeral was going to finally end and I kept taking pics because the actors kept striking poses. I felt kind of bad because the family of the deceased was watching all this horsing around and I thought for sure they were going to come behind that curtain to either tell us to shut the hell up or to kick our asses. But nothing happened. So I hung out with these merry part time farmers/musicians/actors until the clock turned twelve. Merry Christmas.

Boys and Girls

I rented a bicycle in the afternoon and rode about 15 km outside of Yangshuo. Before I saw the painted wall in a small village in the pic (above), my little bike ride was all giggly kids and old men with toothless smiles and farms; and I was all like, man the air is fresh and clean and wouldn't it be nice to have a little place out here with chickens and water buffaloes and grow my own vegetables, it feels good to get out of the big city, get in touch with nature and a slower pace of life. The painted wall put an end to all that real fast -- it roughly translates as: “having a boy or a girl is the same, both are your heirs”. It was a needed kick to the groin reality check; this trip through the countryside ain’t gonna be no idyllic pastoral, that's for damn sure.

Surreal Start

I woke at 8 a.m. in Yangshuo to the surreal: a funeral procession down the main street led by non-stop firecrackers and a 12-piece marching band dressed in red top hats and gold epaulettes. I got too close to the firecrackers and now my right ear is ringing. Shortly thereafter, I did find the perfect cup of coffee at Café Ming Yuan, but even that was somewhat surreal, since the place looks like an English tea room with floral prints on the wall, antique coffee grinders on the shelves, Victorian-like chairs and light jazz playing (although not quite in full stereo due to my temporary hearing loss) (hopefully temporary).

Day 1 in Guangxi

Day 1. It seems a bit unreal, this trip, where I did very little planning in the way of where I want to go and what I want to see, or what I want to accomplish. I know I will start in Yangshuo (Guangxi), and I know I want to visit the rice terraces in Longsheng, and then see some small villages in Guizhou, and be back in Shanghai in 2 weeks time, but otherwise I have no set itinerary or schedule, or even much knowledge about how to get from point A to Point B. I made no hotel reservations, and booked my flight yesterday at 6 p.m.

So far: I landed in Guilin at 6 p.m., it’s dark and raining and freezing cold, I have no idea how to get to Yangshuo, so I hop on a bus from the airport to the train station, ask around and find a mini bus heading to Yangshuo, there’s a homeless guy next to the bus trying to burn plastic bags and trash to stay warm, I give him some paper to burn so that we dont breathe toxic fumes while waiting, the bus finally leaves 1 hour late and then goes around town picking up passengers until it fills every seat, including 2 extras who sit on plastic buckets in the aisle, we finally head out at 10 p.m., but wait, we’re delayed at a train crossing for another 20 minutes, so I arrive in Yangshuo after 11:30 p.m., it’s below zero but the rain stops, I follow a few people with luggage heading out of the bus station and find my way onto West Street, look in on a few hotels after warding off about 7 or 8 people asking me if I want a massage with 18 year old girls, and here I am. (In my hotel room, not getting a massage, in case you’re wondering.) Serendipity has treated me well, one-half day into my wandering around walkabout trip into Southwest China.

Rather than feeling out of sorts, I have to say that this lack of an itinerary feels liberating. Not knowing where I have to be or when I have to be there, I’m sort of … detached from my own right brain, letting things happen, curious about how things will turn out rather than worrying about what and when is next, having no reason to get miffed about a 2-hour delay on the bus because , well, I don't really need to be anywhere in 2 hours time.

I do have some things I want to do. First, I want to make my way to small remote villages and see the Chinese countryside. I want to travel more within China (unlike my 3 years in Japan, where I didn’t actually travel much outside of Tokyo), and see the rural heartland. And, I want to take some good pictures -- I feel that my photography is not progressing. I’m getting a little better technique wise, but don’t feel like I’ve made any meaningful pictures. My recent pictures have been more slight-of-hand rather than good. There should plenty of good pictures being around the beautiful scenery here and the Guizhou hill tribes, so I’m curious to see what I can do.

A quick note on my packing: in my bag is my Canon 40D, Canon 16-35 2.8L lens, Tokina 12-24 lens, tripod, and a set of Cokin graduated neutral density filters. (I debated whether to bring my Canon 24-105 4L lens, but in the end I left it at home, I think that would have been overkill.) Why 2 wide angle lenses? Well, the 16-35 stops down to 2.8, so I have a fast lens for low light, if I end up staying with villagers deep in the hills. Not the ideal set up, but it's best I can do without the dreamy 70-200 2.8L... Anyway, with only 2 lenses and one change of clothes in my backpack, I’m light on my feet and extremely mobile (but yeesh I will probably start to smell pretty bad after a few days).

So, tomorrow I start in earnest. I will spend some time chilling out in Yangshuo town, see if I can find a decent coffee shop, and if the weather holds up, I’ll rent a bicycle and explore some neighboring villages. And then we’ll go from there (wherever there turns out to be).

Mom and Dad and Shanghai

I’m spending most of the Chinese New Year holidays riding around town on my rickety bike taking pics. And I’ve finally gotten around to posting some pics of my apartment (before, during and after renovation): here.

My parents said something interesting about my apartment when they stayed with me for about two months, towards the end of last year. They said that even though I live on a historic street, in the old French Concession, in a lane built in the 1930s, surrounded by local Shanghainese families, they didn’t feel like they were living in China. Maybe it’s the way I did my place -- I didn’t follow the Old-Shanghai-full-of-teak-and-a-Thai-Buddha-head school of decorating lane houses, and kept things fairly neutral. Anyway, now the pics are up.

Speaking of my parents and their recent visit, I found out that they each have some childhood history with Shanghai.

My grandfather on my mother's side was born in Nanjing but grew up in Shanghai. My mom still remembers their old home near what is now known as Yuyuan Garden, and has vivid memories of climbing up narrow wooden stairs to their third floor flat. During my parents' recent stay here, my mom actually found the place -- it's now occupied by migrant workers and will probably be torn down soon. The current occupants were nice enough to let my mom walk through the building, and sure enough, that narrow staircase is still there.

After going to Taiwan with her family as a six year-old, my mom continued to live in Shanghai's shadow. Her father told her about his favorite Shanghai sweets, taught her how to make Shanghainese dishes, and took her to stores opened by Shanghainese emigres in Taipei. When she was here a few months ago, she had great fun going to the local markets every morning and buying all the produce from her childhood memories and cooking way too much food (and contributing to my current midriff largess).

My father also has some brief but significant personal history in Shanghai. He grew up in Anhui Province with a dozen brothers and sisters. His family owned land, but they were dirt poor, and my father studied his way out of the village. When he was seventeen, the Communists were about to overrun the country, and his father (a military judge in the Kuomintang at the time) decided to move most of the family to Taiwan. (A few of my father’s siblings stayed behind in China, mostly kids from my grandfather’s first wife. The ones that stayed behind really suffered during the Cultural Revolution, being landowners. And yeah, a guy could have a couple of wives back then!) My father wanted to follow the family to Taiwan, and the best way to do that was to join the KMT -- he got in primarily because he was a decent student.

On the escape route to Taiwan, he stopped in Shanghai for a week, and as luck would have it he ran into a schoolmate from Anhui while walking around Shanghai. My father had no idea what he was going to do once he landed in Taiwan, and asked his friend about his plans. His friend told him that he planned to enter the military university to study medicine. My father thought being a physician would be cool, and sure enough, after he landed in Taiwan, he took the entrance exam and got in. From there on, he became a doctor, met my mom, then a 20 year-old nurse, and they got married after he beat out a couple of other suitors.

("Your dad never said much", according to my mom, and "wore pointy shoes, had a weird haircut and played strange music too loudly." This was the product of my father studying in the U.S. for a bit, where he picked up fashion, shoes and opera. Despite these fey tendencies (and now I know where I get my fey tendencies), my mom married him. "I was a pretty gal", my mom says, "and there were more boys than girls in those days in Taiwan, and a surgeon was also chasing me, so your dad was lucky to have me!", as she likes to remind him from time to time.)

I didn’t know much about my parents' pasts in Shanghai until some dinner conversations during their recent stay. I don’t know why they didn’t talk about this stuff before. I think it has to do with being locked in to familiar familial roles. The last time I lived with my parents, I was in high school, a know-nothing pimply faced teenager. And I think that’s the way my parents kept thinking of me for the past 20 some years until they came to Shanghai last year when, maybe for the first time ever, they saw me as an adult. They lived in an apartment that I bought and own (well, not really, I'm enslaved to HSBC and that scary mortgage), they came to my company Christmas party and saw me in my role as a working stiff (my mom said to me after the party, slightly surprised, "I think your company people actually like you", well gee thanks mom why is it a surprise that I’m somewhat well-adjusted?), and they saw me come home after some late nights out with my friends (and beer on my breath). In their eyes, this time around, I was no longer the snot-nosed kid that they have to look after, but (somewhat of) a responsible adult who does his own dishes and laundry. (Well, ok, figuratively speaking, since my ayi actually does my dishes and laundry.)

And I in turn saw my parents as more than parents, for the first time. They were no longer just mom and dad who constantly nagged about cleaning my room and taking vitamins and getting flu shots and why I don’t come back to California and get a steady 9-5 job with an hour for lunch, maybe with the gub-ment cos it comes with a nice pension. I saw my mom as not just a mom, but a friendly, out-going, talk-to-anyone and try-anything-once woman with a joy for life that won over my Shanghai neighbors. I saw my father as not just a father, but a man somewhat insecure in retirement and so damn cheap that he prefers to walk than to pay 2 Kuai/US$0.25 to ride the bus, until he found out that he can ride for free as a senior citizen, and then he took buses everywhere but still complained every time he had to take a 11 Kuai/ US$1.30 taxi!

I guess it took both me and my parents looking at each other as adults across the dinner table to have our first adult conversations. Kind of silly how it took 20 some years and me moving all the way to Shanghai to get to this point. But hey, life is funny, what can you do.

The Talking Sheep Lunar New Year Entry

My (non-denominational) god it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything. So much has happened in my normally unhappening life in the past few months that I don’t know where to start. And things kept happening, so my no blogging hole got deeper and deeper as time went on. The bleeding gots to stop. So here is a quick update in an attempt to catch you up.

Ok, after I moved in to my renovated apartment with my favorite butt cleaning water spraying toilet seat, my parents (pic above left) came to visit for two months from San Diego, we had a great time living together for the first time since my high school days (I was a band nerd in high school by the way, I played the french horn, which was one step above the tuba in the instrument glamor hierarchy, way below the violin and trumpet and saxophone and even the cello, those guys got all the girls, well ok all the band girls that is), and my parents living here basically acted as an industrial strength stress test of my newly renovated apartment, what with my mom cooking up a storm and thus stress testing the kitchen, and my subsequent eating like 2 pigs and thus stress testing the sewage system, my dad playing his new er-hu and thus stress testing my new neighbors' patience, me sleeping in the study and thus stress testing the guest day bed (a fake Mies Van Der Rohe), multiple showers a day and thus stress testing the water softener and filters as well as the guest bathroom, the cold Shanghai weather and thus stress testing the floor heating system, and my apartment came through the stress testing pretty well except for the room thermostat for floor heating not working properly and gaps appearing in certain areas of the wood flooring, oh and most disappointing was the way the butt cleaning water spraying toilet seat not always functioning well, so these things need to get fixed (note to self), and after my parents left, right after Christmas, I decided to take a week long trip to Chiang Mai and Hanoi, discovered Air Asia, a discount airline that flies all over SE Asia, had a great time flying around the mountain roads in Chiang Mai in search of temples on a scooter held together with duct tape, no helmet, and had an equally great time in chaotic Hanoi eating unbelievably good beef and chicken pho noodles and drinking unbelievably good sweet black strong Vietnamese coffee, took about 1,000 pics on this trip, most of them crap, finally coming back to Shanghai after New Years, but then the weather got nasty in Shanghai … [ok, taking a deep breath now]… it actually snowed for like 8 straight days, with taxi drivers telling me that they haven’t seen this much snow since they were kids, like 30 years ago, but that’s only when I did manage to hail a cab with this bad weather, and I wore my winter boots from Michigan for the first time in about 15 years, good thing one’s feet do not get fat like the rest of one’s body, my boots still fit, and with this friggin cold weather my floor heating held up ok, after I plugged up a ventilation hole above my washer/dryer unit, damn I hate cold weather, and in the middle of it all I took a business trip back to the U.S. for a few days, during which, for the first time since I left California 5 years ago, I felt like a foreigner in the U.S., like, shit, what the hell am I doing here among all these weird people, I thought to myself, and can I ever come back and live this kind of life, I thought to myself some more, but maybe it was because I spent the whole time in Orange County, anyway when I got back to Shanghai, I finally went to kendo practice for the 1^st time in about 4 months, and almost had a cardiac arrest cos I’m so out of shape, but damn it felt good to be wielding my mighty powerful bamboo stick and getting in touch with my bad ass samurai self, well less bad ass and more big ass these days, and don’t look now, Lunar New Year is upon us, so here I am, on the second day of the Lunar New Year, with the city about 1/3 full, with everyone else traveling back to their homes visiting their families, and me sitting at Boona Café with a roomful of Europeans also left behind in Shanghai, getting kind of bored after spending the last 2 days watching cock fighting, Taiwanese variety shows and Jamie Oliver cooking shows on Discovery Channel, hey I think Jamie Oliver is all made up and fake, a product of Food Network marketing, he's like the Wizard of Oz of cook-ery and chef-ery, damn I gotta stop smoking, but ok, I’ll give myself until the end of the holidays next week, hmm how the hell am I going to amuse myself until my friends get back to town.

Ok ok, now that I’m all caught up, I’m going to spend my next few posts going into more detail on what has happened in my life over the past few months, namely my parents' visit, so don’t worry too much if you weren’t able to follow everything in that mess above (or didn’t feel like reading it, or gave up 1/2 way through), which by the way was inspired by one of my favorite Haruki Murakmi books where a talking sheep from Hokkaido spoke with no punctuation, but at least I was kind enough to punctuate, and, and, ok ok, I stop...