LETTER FROM CHINA
Searching for Shangri La
On a return trip to China, a Southwest New Mexico teacher finds pieces of paradise–but not where you might expect.
Story and photos by Joshua Wells
Editor's note: Long-time readers will remember Joshua Wells, a teacher from our part of the world who entertained and enlightened us in several issues with his letters home from China. That nation on the other side of the world is still a place of much mystery to most of us in Southwest New Mexico, even as it is becoming America's greatest economic challenger and most enticing market. In our ever-shrinking world, too, much of the recent runup in copper prices–bringing jobs to the Phelps Dodge mining operations here in Grant County–has been fueled by China's economic expansion and embrace of capitalism.
After his stint teaching in China, Wells returned home two years ago and has been living in Silver City while teaching science at Deming Middle School. Earlier this year, however, he returned to China for a five-week journey through Yunnan Province and beyond. To our delight, he once again shared his experiences in a "Letter from China." (This one, happily, wasn't sent until after his return to New Mexico, so his accompanying photos didn't take nearly a year to reach us in the mail as they did the last time!)
I've come to think of China as a "large, warm, nurturing, buxom woman," because the beautiful country and its people are so warm and friendly, and the land is beautiful and bountiful. It's been a long two years since I've been in her embrace. I had planned on a return as soon as I could, and once settled into my own flat in Shenzhen, I was reunited with five former students of mine over supper. All of them are heading off to the US, Canada and the UK for their university education. I'm immensely proud to have played a small part in their accomplishments. We catch up on the previous two years of our lives, diving with chopsticks into a banquet of dishes from a local restaurant I could never cook as well.
 |
Market day in Baisha, a peaceful little Naxi village. |
I've written in previous "letters from China" of the ever-growing
affluence of its coastal cities, and here in Shenzhen, a suburb of Hong
Kong, the glitz, affluence, opulence and construction boom continue at a
breakneck pace. Cheap labor comes from the poor towns and small villages
in the impoverished interior of the country; workers live in makeshift shanties
while they construct towering high-rise apartment buildings, new roads,
bridges and gleaming office towers in a city they will never be able to
afford to occupy. I found this same scenario repeated in all the bigger
cities of the interior provinces: Kunming, Nanning, Chengdu and many others.
This continuing trend of the Chinese to work 24/7 to modernize their country,
condemning anything over 30 years old to the wrecking ball (important temples
and monuments excepted) is what causes me to always want to head to what
I think of as the "real" China and venture to the interior of
the country. There the pace of life is slower, the people more laid-back,
and jackhammers don't wake you up at six in the morning!
My best traveling companion, an English teacher, has taken the summer off for us to head to Yunnan Province. It is reputed to be the country's premier province for its breathtaking scenery and ethnic diversity. Yunnan is known for its mild climate year-round, so traveling here we can avoid the scalding heat and humidity that are causing so much discomfort this summer all over China. The monsoons have caused massive flooding damage in many parts of China–much as our "monsoons" caused flooding this year back home in New Mexico. But we found Yunnan to be immune from that, at least for now.
All kinds of names have been given to Yunnan Province: "Garden of Heavenly Marvelous Flowers," "Hometown of Perfume," "Land of Eternal Spring"–such is the tendency the Chinese have for such overblown, flowery language, known as "Chinglish." But once we arrive, it becomes obvious that all these descriptions are true. There really is a flowery scent to the air, as everywhere you look flowers and massive stands of bougainvillea grow in profusion. We wander aimlessly for days in the older sections of the city, where the fascinating wooden buildings with small hole-in-the-wall restaurants serve up their over-the-bridge rice noodles and spring rolls in bamboo baskets. For three yuan a bowl, we jostle with the locals for street table space in this early-morning breakfast "rush hour." We gorge on mein, dumplings and spring rolls, filling enough to last all day.
In the mid-day heat, everyone and everything slows down. It is naptime. Shirtless men sit on the sidewalks playing noisy games of marjaan, chain-smoking, while the beer bottles pile up. The women clean their grills and prepare the meats and vegetables for "stick food," the nightly street-grilling scene. Good food at cheap prices–we live for this nightly ritual everywhere we go.
Our plan for this province is to village-hop ourselves northward to the famed Shangri-La in Tibet, and then head down to Burma. China still offers affordable travel in most places. All we can afford are the cheap chicken-and-pigs buses and even cheaper rooms. This is the height of the summer tourist season, but we are not competing with the Chinese or the foreigners for the dives we seek out. In one such dive, I did battle with a four-inch cockroach, almost big enough to carry off my backpack. We mutually decided to up the ante and stay in nicer, roach-free places!
The next stop is the traditional stone village of Dali. With a stunning mountain backdrop and a 40-mile-long lake, Erhai Hu ("Ear-shaped lake"), this preserved old city lies behind gray stone walls, fortress-style. Rushing mountain streams, some with koi, run alongside its cobbled streets. The local ethnic groups, the Bai and Naxi, sell local handicrafts of abundant silver to the hordes of eager tourists who have only an hour to walk and shop before being herded back to their buses. Dali has its own pace, we find, and it all centers around shopping and, well, more shopping.
With rented bikes, we head out to the local villages. Good timing and luck reward us with colorful markets. I have never met a local market I did not like, and my buddy knows better than to rush me through any of them. I stop and gaze at everything. I love the organization of markets anywhere. Here, in the produce section, I manage to position myself in a cluster of some little suited men who are selling piles of tobacco. All Chinese men smoke. They smoke a lot. In the countryside, it is customary to roll your own, so here is where the locals come to buy their tobacco. I think, If I sit among them like this long enough, they won't pay any attention to me. This could be a good photo moment, I think, sneaking out my little digital and snapping one.
I keep exploring the market. I try the clothing section; I had always wondered just where those traditional blue suits come from, and here I find whole piles of them. The live-animal section offers great insights as to just what the locals don't eat, as everything else is in plastic tubs or cages: snakes, turtles, frogs, beetles, small crayfish, eels, dogs, always dogs, a few cats, rabbits, snails, live fish, sheep and pigs, chickens and geese, and some huddled rodents I couldn't identify.
My favorite section of all of any market, however, is always the "dried-up" animal section. Here you see the end product of the animals you just saw in the cages before–now they are dangling upside-down on hooks. It is not so hot today, so the flies do not swarm. I am with the same friend who helped me get over my Western food bias three years ago, when he explained to me why I shouldn't be repulsed by the venisoned cats and dogs. With little to no refrigeration, there really is no other way to buy meat here. With a modern city not far away, it is unlikely that quaint Dali will change; this place is a major tourist draw for the whole province. It has to retain its charm.
The next town of great charm and beauty, Lijiang, lies also in a beautiful mountain valley and is a World Heritage Site. The town's old section is a maze of narrow cobblestone streets, Venetian-like canals and preserved old stone houses, most of which have been converted to guesthouses, fancy outdoor restaurants or upscale shops offering the same tourist items as in Dali (no surprises here).
Satisfied with some good photography of the Naxi architecture–the graceful upturned ends of their gray-tiled rooflines–we board the local buses to explore the mountain villages. We soon find ourselves soaking up the feel of the Naxi Dongba culture. It is a world apart. The local women wear daily their traditional blue blouses and trousers with embroidered black aprons and large braided headscarves. The Bai and Naxi men wear their traditional blue suits and caps.
In one tiny mud village, Baisha, we can hear the discordant sound of a tiny orchestra playing to no one. We stop and marvel at these ancient men playing equally ancient traditional instruments. One ancient catches my eye. He stops playing and gestures for me to join the group. He smiles gently and hands me a stringed wooden instrument, shaped like a rubber mallet. Without missing a beat, I take the bow and play along with them. For a weiguoren (foreigner), they say, I play pretty well! Contributions are welcomed to their effort to reintroduce these instruments to the young people who do not care to learn the old Naxi Dongba music or to play it.
The landscape offers breathtaking mountain peaks; some are terraced to their summits with rice paddies. It is an engineering marvel and I can never imagine how water is retained for rice so far up.
Going farther northward, Tibetan influences become more evident. Villages with ornate Tibetan-style houses perch on the steep sides of canyon walls. We marvel at deep gorges and waterfalls amidst lush forests. The roadside stands offer no fruit (it's too cold here), but instead have dried yak, mutton and yak tails (the perfect gift for someone who thinks they have everything).
Many of the Buddhist monasteries in Zhongdian, a featureless city that straddles the Yunnan-Tibet border, and the surrounding area were damaged extensively during the Cultural Revolution. A few remain and offer visitors a glimpse of the self-sufficient life they offer. In the high meadows, surrounded by majestic high peaks, massive, two-storied timbered peasant homes, all built to face the sun, are intricately decorated with frescoes both inside and out. We hope that some of them are guest houses so we can avoid the nondescript city.
How could this ever be called "Shangri La"? We roam these streets for hours looking for any indication of paradise and searching for a reason why anyone would want to come here.
The famed "Shangri La" is actually located in the surrounding mountains: nature reserves, waterfalls, gold-domed temples, monasteries and glaciers. The locals are friendly but are not fools; they know this destination is a pilgrimage for many travelers and they will extract much yuan for you to access their paradise. They offer Jeep rides to remote monasteries, with yak and noodle soup lunch included; mountain trail journeys on horseback, with yak and noodle soup; glacier tours, with a yak and noodle soup lunch. In summer, the glacier isn't so impressive. In the winter, this area is buried in deep snows; now we are blinded by heavy rain. We eat all the yak and noodle soup as compensation. We cannot afford to stay with the villagers, as their guesthouse rates have tripled, so it's back to depressing Zhongdian.
Being the monsoon season, ferocious daily rains and thick fogs force us back to Lijiang and its surrounding villages. In the mud village of Baishui, I stop to take a photograph of a group of farmers making bundles of hay. One ancient must have wondered why anyone would want a photograph of this. It is the group's precision of movement that fascinates me. They move like a machine. The ancient walks over, smiles, and hands us some pear-like fruit, then gestures to the group to make a place for more workers. We put our packs down while he shows us how to tie the small bundles that would soon come out of the diesel-powered machine. After about three bundles, we catch the rhythm and are in sync with the group. I wonder, Do these people ever stop for breaks? Maybe the machine will run out of diesel and then we'll break. Seeing no break coming after nearly two hours of our stint as "guest laborers," we politely bow out.
On a hot and humid Saturday evening in HengYang, Hunan Province, I reunite with an old friend who is a student here, working on his MA in English at Nanhua University. To stay afloat and pay his tuition, he teaches English in a small private academy. He has told his classes all about his foreign friend who will come to China. He introduces me to them, a mixed group of teenagers, men and women in their forties and fifties, all eager to practice their oral English with the first American native speaker they have seen.
One young woman asks me what I think of her country and its people. I tell them how I find Chinese people to be warm, outgoing and friendly. That no matter how little they have, they seem to always reach out to make contact. I tell them my "big, warm, embracing woman" analogy. After I finish, I glance around the room to look at their faces. Some of the older women have wet eyes, and the men are smiling. One young woman stands and tells me in perfect English, "You make me feel very proud of our motherland. You make me proud to be Chinese. I hope you come back to our country."
And she should be.
They all should be.
And yes, I will return.
Joshua Wells lives in Silver City and teaches
science at Deming Middle
School.