My Trip to China, May - June, 2007
I could try to give a day-by-day summary of what we saw and did during this amazing trip, but that wouldn’t come close to conveying the experience and probably wouldn’t be very interesting to anyone who wasn’t there. So instead I’ll try to make some general observations and write about the things that made the deepest impression on me.
Our hotels were generally comfortable, some shabbier than others, but all shared certain aspects. The beds were generally quite hard (a plus in my opinion) and the bathrooms well supplied with soap, shampoo, toothbrushes and toothpaste, combs and towels. A couple had condoms as well (China’s population control policy at work). The bathrooms were all Western style although sometimes getting an adequate supply of toilet paper took a little ingenuity. In fact, the first self-guided excursion my friend Marie and I took was to a small shop near our hotel in Beijing where we bought two rolls of toilet paper that came in quite handy on some road trip bathroom stops.
The tap water in China is not drinkable, but just about all of the hotels provided bottled water and they all provided electric kettles (in one hotel it was listed as the “eclectic kettle”) for boiling water and making tea. We always had an ample supply of bottled water on our bus, so that was not at all a problem. Tea and sometimes instant coffee were provided in the rooms and sometimes we had fruit as well – bananas most of the time, but also loquats, dragon eyes (in the lichee family and quite delicious), Chinese pears, tangerines or apples.
The food, contrary to what everyone had told us, was really not that different from the Chinese food here, especially in the Chinatown restaurants. There were a few exotic ingredients that aren’t usually found on the neighborhood menus, like lotus root, dragon fruit or certain vegetables, but even those are easily found in the Chinatown markets. Most of our lunches and all of our dinners were served at round tables for 8-10 people with a large lazy susan in the center. For some reason the chairs were often arranged in a square around the circular table. That sometimes made it a little confusing to identify which place setting belonged to which person. Cold appetizers (vegetables, pickles, nuts, tofu) were served first and then the main meal that might include pork, beef, chicken, duck, fish or seafood dishes, vegetable dishes of bok choy and other types of spinach or cabbage, cooked lettuce, tomato and egg, tofu, steamed buns, sticky white rice, noodles and usually some kind of soup. Sometimes the chicken or duck was served with the head artistically displayed on the platter. And fish was often served whole, again with the head and sometimes the tail fins as well flanking the plate. In almost every case the meal ended with watermelon, sometimes accompanied by cherry tomatoes. We became so conditioned to this signal that the meal was over that when it wasn’t served most of us sat and waited, not sure if the meal was over or not.
Breakfasts were all buffet style, with both Chinese and Western choices available. The Chinese choices included congee (a watery rice or millet porridge that is mixed with vegetables or meat), fried noodles, fried rice and buns. There were usually spicy or savory pickles of some sort on the Chinese side. True to my nature I tried everything and particularly went for things that I hadn’t tasted before or couldn’t immediately identify. All of them were delicious, but I can’t tell you what some of them were! At the served meals I quickly got a reputation as the “official taster” who would try anything and report to the rest of the group. I got nicknamed “Mikey” at one point, after the kid in the Life Cereal commercial who would “eat anything.”
We visited several museums during our trip. All of them were beautifully laid out so that it was easy to see exhibits without feeling crowded or hurried. For the most part there were excellent explanations in English and, in Shanghai, an excellent audio guide. We had a chance to meet the Assistant Director of one museum and he spoke to us about inter-museum cooperative projects and the attempt to reach out to schools (a bit of a problem since the curriculum is dense and challenging, the exams are highly competitive and museums are viewed as a “frill”). There are free days at some museums and reduced rates for seniors. The exhibits that we saw were all ancient cultural relics, although the Shanghai Museum did have a special exhibit of American art (from the Guggenheim collection, I think).
We had many interesting lectures on a variety of subjects ranging from religion to rice. My personal favorites were ”China’s Yesterday and Today” with Dr. Yao Bao Rong in Xi’an and “A Thousand People Are Making a Thousand Maos” with Professor Zhang in Changsha. Both of these speakers were particularly engaging and both included anecdotes from their own lives to underscore their points. It was interesting to learn that the past five or six years have seen the emergence of a Mao “cult” despite the Chinese Communist Party’s position that the Cultural Revolution was a disaster for China and that Mao is now in official disfavor. We saw evidence of “Mao worship” in one farm home where a statue of Mao stood next to the ancestor altar and on at least one of our tour buses where the driver had a little statue of Mao on the dashboard.
We also learned about traditional musical instruments, major religions (complete with a denial that the Chinese government refused to recognize the Cardinal appointed by the Pope but had instead appointed its own choice to lead the Catholic Church in China), the 56 ethnic minorities who represent about 10% of China’s total population (ethnic Han people make up the majority), rice farming and development, silk processing and the Three Gorges Dam Project. With very few exceptions I did not get the impression that the speakers or our guides were giving us an official "party line." We heard comments about the government's failure to adequately address certain problems such as health care and the high cost of university education.
Almost everywhere we traveled the people were very welcoming and friendly. We got lots of smiles and “hellos” in English and often someone in a park or on the street would approach to welcome us to China and practice their English a little. English is a required subject in China starting in primary school, so even the littlest ones waved and said “hello.” We had several wonderful encounters apart from the scheduled activities. In the People’s Park in Luoyang we chatted with a strange little man named Water Lee and also met a young woman who was an English teacher. On the three hour train ride from Wuhan to Changsha we shared a four seat section with a delightful young woman named Wang Lingling, a graduate student in Comparative Literature who quoted from “Jane Eyre”, Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Address (“A house divided…”) and shared opinions on family, education, politics and the things that made our countries the same as well as the things that made them different. And an elderly gentleman in the park in Shanghai stopped to talk for several minutes about where we had traveled in China and how we liked it. And there were other encounters as well, too numerous to list.
Besides these informal meetings, we had several scheduled opportunities to meet people in the places we visited. Students at the Xi’an International Studies University took us in small groups of two or three to tour the campus. During the Yangtze River cruise we had an onshore excursion to Fengdu where we visited a woman who had been relocated from her farm to a new home because of the Three Gorges Dam project. And on the way to Shaoshan, Mao’s birthplace, we pulled off the road and literally walked in and spent about twenty minutes with an elderly couple who had been sitting in front of their home and invited us in. The woman, in her late 70s, was ready to make tea for all 28 of us.
Several of our lecturers and guides spoke about the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor in China as the country shifts from a socialist economy to a market economy. We saw farmers plowing tiny plots of rice paddy with water buffalo, just as their ancestors had worked hundreds of years ago. It is backbreaking work. We saw hutongs (alleys) in the cities where people live in single rooms around a shared courtyard and buy their vegetables and fruits from vendors who lay out their wares on blankets in the street. We saw many people who seemed to be very poor, including a few beggars especially in Shanghai. And we also saw brand new high-rise buildings and unbelievable traffic jams despite efforts to limit ownership of private cars. But the only time I saw children who seemed unwashed and somewhat neglected was in the Sunday market at Kaili. Every city has many colleges with total student enrollments in the thousands. And many of the new housing developments (huge enough to dwarf anything New York City has to offer) include recreation facilities. Laundry hanging on small balconies was a common sight, but so were air conditioners. In the countryside every scrap of land is planted with corn or wheat or rice, evidence of the difficulty of feeding this huge country. In the cities, stores are often one-car-garage size spaces with no front door or window (gates secure them after business hours) crammed with wares. The proprietors can be found sitting on chairs or stools on the sidewalk in front of their stores, eating breakfast or lunch or chatting with other storekeepers while they wait for customers. And traffic is horrendous, despite efforts by the government to curtail private ownership of automobiles. Licenses are very expensive, as is parking (underground in the cities) but cars are a status symbol and apparently lots of people are willing to make the financial sacrifice.
There seems to be a cultural aesthetic that encourages attention to detail and beauty. Every city, even unbelievably huge Chongqing with its population of 33 million, has tree-lined streets, flowering bushes along the highways and beautifully laid out parks that are used by the people for morning exercise and evening socializing. We saw tai chi practice, line dancing, ballroom dancing, exercise groups, walkers and runners (walking backwards seemed to be popular), skaters, kung fu instruction for little kids and card games. Here in New York there are lots of people who use the parks for individual exercises – running or biking – but I don’t know of any parks that are used by so regularly so many people in such organized activities. The exercise and dance groups are self-organized. Someone brings a boom box with an exercise tape or music and the group just forms. For the most part the tai chi groups are also led by volunteers or are not actually led at all, but simply come together to practice, although we did see more formal instruction in some cases. We saw individuals practicing very traditional arts, inscribing poems on the pavement in classic calligraphy using brooms and water. It seemed very Chinese somehow to take so much care to make something beautiful that would dry and disappear in the sun. Walking in the park in the early morning, watching the different groups, was one of the best parts of the trip – a chance to really see daily life and even to participate in it.
We traveled by train, bus, ship and airplane, covering a large swath of the country, visiting eleven cities, plus numerous day trips to other towns and villages. It is impossible to accurately describe everything we saw and did because everything shifted so rapidly from very new to very old, from very rural to very urban, from mountains to flat farmland to rivers, from almost familiar to totally alien. I took over 1200 pictures. many of which are posted here. They're organized in separate theme-related sets, so you can look at the ones that interest you most, or take your time and see them all a few at a time. Some photos appear in more than one set since they seemed to belong to more than one category. This was an amazing experience and maybe you’ll find a few photos that will help you understand how amazing it was.
Our hotels were generally comfortable, some shabbier than others, but all shared certain aspects. The beds were generally quite hard (a plus in my opinion) and the bathrooms well supplied with soap, shampoo, toothbrushes and toothpaste, combs and towels. A couple had condoms as well (China’s population control policy at work). The bathrooms were all Western style although sometimes getting an adequate supply of toilet paper took a little ingenuity. In fact, the first self-guided excursion my friend Marie and I took was to a small shop near our hotel in Beijing where we bought two rolls of toilet paper that came in quite handy on some road trip bathroom stops.
The tap water in China is not drinkable, but just about all of the hotels provided bottled water and they all provided electric kettles (in one hotel it was listed as the “eclectic kettle”) for boiling water and making tea. We always had an ample supply of bottled water on our bus, so that was not at all a problem. Tea and sometimes instant coffee were provided in the rooms and sometimes we had fruit as well – bananas most of the time, but also loquats, dragon eyes (in the lichee family and quite delicious), Chinese pears, tangerines or apples.
The food, contrary to what everyone had told us, was really not that different from the Chinese food here, especially in the Chinatown restaurants. There were a few exotic ingredients that aren’t usually found on the neighborhood menus, like lotus root, dragon fruit or certain vegetables, but even those are easily found in the Chinatown markets. Most of our lunches and all of our dinners were served at round tables for 8-10 people with a large lazy susan in the center. For some reason the chairs were often arranged in a square around the circular table. That sometimes made it a little confusing to identify which place setting belonged to which person. Cold appetizers (vegetables, pickles, nuts, tofu) were served first and then the main meal that might include pork, beef, chicken, duck, fish or seafood dishes, vegetable dishes of bok choy and other types of spinach or cabbage, cooked lettuce, tomato and egg, tofu, steamed buns, sticky white rice, noodles and usually some kind of soup. Sometimes the chicken or duck was served with the head artistically displayed on the platter. And fish was often served whole, again with the head and sometimes the tail fins as well flanking the plate. In almost every case the meal ended with watermelon, sometimes accompanied by cherry tomatoes. We became so conditioned to this signal that the meal was over that when it wasn’t served most of us sat and waited, not sure if the meal was over or not.
Breakfasts were all buffet style, with both Chinese and Western choices available. The Chinese choices included congee (a watery rice or millet porridge that is mixed with vegetables or meat), fried noodles, fried rice and buns. There were usually spicy or savory pickles of some sort on the Chinese side. True to my nature I tried everything and particularly went for things that I hadn’t tasted before or couldn’t immediately identify. All of them were delicious, but I can’t tell you what some of them were! At the served meals I quickly got a reputation as the “official taster” who would try anything and report to the rest of the group. I got nicknamed “Mikey” at one point, after the kid in the Life Cereal commercial who would “eat anything.”
We visited several museums during our trip. All of them were beautifully laid out so that it was easy to see exhibits without feeling crowded or hurried. For the most part there were excellent explanations in English and, in Shanghai, an excellent audio guide. We had a chance to meet the Assistant Director of one museum and he spoke to us about inter-museum cooperative projects and the attempt to reach out to schools (a bit of a problem since the curriculum is dense and challenging, the exams are highly competitive and museums are viewed as a “frill”). There are free days at some museums and reduced rates for seniors. The exhibits that we saw were all ancient cultural relics, although the Shanghai Museum did have a special exhibit of American art (from the Guggenheim collection, I think).
We had many interesting lectures on a variety of subjects ranging from religion to rice. My personal favorites were ”China’s Yesterday and Today” with Dr. Yao Bao Rong in Xi’an and “A Thousand People Are Making a Thousand Maos” with Professor Zhang in Changsha. Both of these speakers were particularly engaging and both included anecdotes from their own lives to underscore their points. It was interesting to learn that the past five or six years have seen the emergence of a Mao “cult” despite the Chinese Communist Party’s position that the Cultural Revolution was a disaster for China and that Mao is now in official disfavor. We saw evidence of “Mao worship” in one farm home where a statue of Mao stood next to the ancestor altar and on at least one of our tour buses where the driver had a little statue of Mao on the dashboard.
We also learned about traditional musical instruments, major religions (complete with a denial that the Chinese government refused to recognize the Cardinal appointed by the Pope but had instead appointed its own choice to lead the Catholic Church in China), the 56 ethnic minorities who represent about 10% of China’s total population (ethnic Han people make up the majority), rice farming and development, silk processing and the Three Gorges Dam Project. With very few exceptions I did not get the impression that the speakers or our guides were giving us an official "party line." We heard comments about the government's failure to adequately address certain problems such as health care and the high cost of university education.
Almost everywhere we traveled the people were very welcoming and friendly. We got lots of smiles and “hellos” in English and often someone in a park or on the street would approach to welcome us to China and practice their English a little. English is a required subject in China starting in primary school, so even the littlest ones waved and said “hello.” We had several wonderful encounters apart from the scheduled activities. In the People’s Park in Luoyang we chatted with a strange little man named Water Lee and also met a young woman who was an English teacher. On the three hour train ride from Wuhan to Changsha we shared a four seat section with a delightful young woman named Wang Lingling, a graduate student in Comparative Literature who quoted from “Jane Eyre”, Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Address (“A house divided…”) and shared opinions on family, education, politics and the things that made our countries the same as well as the things that made them different. And an elderly gentleman in the park in Shanghai stopped to talk for several minutes about where we had traveled in China and how we liked it. And there were other encounters as well, too numerous to list.
Besides these informal meetings, we had several scheduled opportunities to meet people in the places we visited. Students at the Xi’an International Studies University took us in small groups of two or three to tour the campus. During the Yangtze River cruise we had an onshore excursion to Fengdu where we visited a woman who had been relocated from her farm to a new home because of the Three Gorges Dam project. And on the way to Shaoshan, Mao’s birthplace, we pulled off the road and literally walked in and spent about twenty minutes with an elderly couple who had been sitting in front of their home and invited us in. The woman, in her late 70s, was ready to make tea for all 28 of us.
Several of our lecturers and guides spoke about the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor in China as the country shifts from a socialist economy to a market economy. We saw farmers plowing tiny plots of rice paddy with water buffalo, just as their ancestors had worked hundreds of years ago. It is backbreaking work. We saw hutongs (alleys) in the cities where people live in single rooms around a shared courtyard and buy their vegetables and fruits from vendors who lay out their wares on blankets in the street. We saw many people who seemed to be very poor, including a few beggars especially in Shanghai. And we also saw brand new high-rise buildings and unbelievable traffic jams despite efforts to limit ownership of private cars. But the only time I saw children who seemed unwashed and somewhat neglected was in the Sunday market at Kaili. Every city has many colleges with total student enrollments in the thousands. And many of the new housing developments (huge enough to dwarf anything New York City has to offer) include recreation facilities. Laundry hanging on small balconies was a common sight, but so were air conditioners. In the countryside every scrap of land is planted with corn or wheat or rice, evidence of the difficulty of feeding this huge country. In the cities, stores are often one-car-garage size spaces with no front door or window (gates secure them after business hours) crammed with wares. The proprietors can be found sitting on chairs or stools on the sidewalk in front of their stores, eating breakfast or lunch or chatting with other storekeepers while they wait for customers. And traffic is horrendous, despite efforts by the government to curtail private ownership of automobiles. Licenses are very expensive, as is parking (underground in the cities) but cars are a status symbol and apparently lots of people are willing to make the financial sacrifice.
There seems to be a cultural aesthetic that encourages attention to detail and beauty. Every city, even unbelievably huge Chongqing with its population of 33 million, has tree-lined streets, flowering bushes along the highways and beautifully laid out parks that are used by the people for morning exercise and evening socializing. We saw tai chi practice, line dancing, ballroom dancing, exercise groups, walkers and runners (walking backwards seemed to be popular), skaters, kung fu instruction for little kids and card games. Here in New York there are lots of people who use the parks for individual exercises – running or biking – but I don’t know of any parks that are used by so regularly so many people in such organized activities. The exercise and dance groups are self-organized. Someone brings a boom box with an exercise tape or music and the group just forms. For the most part the tai chi groups are also led by volunteers or are not actually led at all, but simply come together to practice, although we did see more formal instruction in some cases. We saw individuals practicing very traditional arts, inscribing poems on the pavement in classic calligraphy using brooms and water. It seemed very Chinese somehow to take so much care to make something beautiful that would dry and disappear in the sun. Walking in the park in the early morning, watching the different groups, was one of the best parts of the trip – a chance to really see daily life and even to participate in it.
We traveled by train, bus, ship and airplane, covering a large swath of the country, visiting eleven cities, plus numerous day trips to other towns and villages. It is impossible to accurately describe everything we saw and did because everything shifted so rapidly from very new to very old, from very rural to very urban, from mountains to flat farmland to rivers, from almost familiar to totally alien. I took over 1200 pictures. many of which are posted here. They're organized in separate theme-related sets, so you can look at the ones that interest you most, or take your time and see them all a few at a time. Some photos appear in more than one set since they seemed to belong to more than one category. This was an amazing experience and maybe you’ll find a few photos that will help you understand how amazing it was.
posted by Knit Me A Poem at 7:59 PM
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