April 24, 2007

Hi All,

Spring has arrived in Fuyang. Though it’s cool today, we have seen several bright sunny days lately with temperatures in the mid-70s. Some trees on campus are blooming, and the sky is a little less brown than usual. China has a serious problem with air pollution. It is a rare experience in much of China to see clear blue skies, and on most nights only the brightest stars are visible. This is one troublesome issue that is discussed quite openly in the English language press here. Some very ambitious goals have been set for cleaning up the air in Beijing before the Olympic games in August 2008. The English-language China Daily reports that progress is being made, but officials acknowledge that reaching those goals in the next year and a half is not a realistic expectation. The government’s position now is that it should not be judged on the level of pollution during the games, but by the measure of improvement that has been achieved.

A student changes her major

A new student has joined one of my classes. This would not rate a mention in a U.S. college, but here it demonstrates a remarkable degree of tenacity and persistence. It means she has managed to change her major. College students in China don’t simply choose a major in the way American students do. Students are assigned their majors as incoming freshmen, based primarily on their performance on the standardized college entrance exam and the availability of slots for students in particular colleges. Some consideration may be given to students’ preferences, but those preferences are frequently overridden. Several of my students have expressed disappointment at being English majors; they would have preferred to be studying law, history, or physics. And it does not appear that being skilled in English is a prerequisite for an English major. Most of my students have some knack for the language, but a few speak English so poorly that it is next to impossible to understand them, and I doubt that they understand much of what goes on in class.

We use periodic dictations to check their listening comprehension, and a handful of students will miss 40 or 50 words in a 60-word dictation. But my new student, Fiona, seems quite adept at English. She would have to be. To transfer in as an English major, a student must pass a rather tough English exam. I don’t know exactly what else may be required, but it doesn’t seem to happen easily, quickly, or often. Of my students who would have preferred a different major, none has accomplished the change.

Visit to the dentist

I made a trip to the dentist back in early January. I bit down on something hard during dinner one evening. I figured it was a piece of bone or a bit of gravel mixed in with the veggies. It turned out to be a large filling that had slipped its moorings and was sloshing around in my mouth like a castaway among the chicken and broccoli. There was no pain, and the hole where the filling had been wasn’t sensitive, but we were getting ready for a month of traveling during the winter school break, and I wanted to get it fixed. I asked Richard, the English teacher who is our watchdog and shepherd, about dentists in Fuyang. He took me to the municipal hospital. I’d been to this hospital once before and wasn’t keen on getting serious dental work done there, but I went with Richard, knowing I could hold off and go to a dentist in Nanjing, if necessary. We checked in at the admission window, which opened to the outdoors. We stood outside in the cold while checking in, and it didn’t appear to be much warmer behind the window. I paid a five-yuan fee (about 65 cents), which I was told was the necessary fee to see “an expert.”

We went inside and up a few flights of stairs. When we entered the dental clinic, it looked like a large barbershop with eight or ten dentist chairs in a long row. Only one chair was in use, and an expert was available. I gave him the loose filling and pointed my finger at the hole in my tooth while Richard translated. He looked and hmmmmed, cleaned up the filling and the empty cavity in my tooth, then stuck it back in place. The fit was so snug he had some difficulty getting it back out. He commented to Richard that it was a particularly well-made filling (credit goes to Gordon Hamilton, D.D.S., of Austin, recently retired). The expert dentist then put a dab of glue on the filling and stuck it back in. No drilling, no pain, no wasted time. About fifteen minutes from beginning to end. The fee for this service was 40 yuan (about 5 dollars). Our college pays for our medical expenses up to 100 yuan per year, and I had my 40 yuan back within the hour. Apparently the surcharge to see an expert wasn’t covered, so I’m out the 65 cents, but I’m not complaining. And the filling is still in place.

Winter vacation

The winter break between semesters was especially long this year. We had our last class sessions of the fall term on December 29, and classes for the Spring term didn’t begin until February 26. We lazed around Fuyang for a couple of weeks, calculating students’ grades and resting up from the 1,200 guests we’d entertained at Christmas. We went to Beijing in mid-January, where we met our son Vic and his wife Beth who flew in from New York City. It was their first trip to China, so the Great Wall and the Forbidden City were must-see items. We revisited several sites in and around Beijing that Kate and I had seen on a trip there in August. The Forbidden City and the Great Wall were equally impressive on the second look.

Beijing

I’ll just note a few things about Beijing sites that I didn’t mention in my January 2007 Update. For one thing, there is a Starbucks coffee shop inside the Forbidden City. No joke. It’s been open since 2000, and its presence there is a matter of controversy. Some members of the People’s Congress and at least one high-profile Beijing news anchor are lobbying hard to get it removed. They regard the Starbucks as an unwelcome foreign intrusion into one of China’s most historic landmarks. It seemed that way to me, too.

It was cold enough in Beijing for the lake in Beihai Park to become a frozen rink for ice bikes. I’d never seen one of these before, but then lakes don’t freeze in Austin. It looked like the frame, handlebars, pedals, chain, and back wheel of a bicycle, with the seat moved back over the wheel. The wheel was flanked by outrigger runners, and the handlebars turned a moveable runner in the front for steering. I suppose the tire was studded for traction. Anyway, there were lots of them in use.

Beihai Park is said to have been the site of Kublai Khan’s palace when the Mongol emperor had his capital in Beijing, though no visible trace of it remains except for a large jade jar on display. The White Pagoda, located on an island in Beihai Lake, was built in the 17th century for the occasion of a visit from the Dalai Lama. That welcome mat, of course, is no longer out.

We’d been concerned that it might be miserably cold at the Great Wall, so we packed all the layers we could stuff into our suitcases and then wore them all. It was a clear sunny day at Badaling with great views of the Wall zigzagging through the mountains. It was cold, but not too windy, and we managed to stay fairly comfortable. Nonetheless, we were glad for an air-conditioned bus on the ride back to Beijing. (Air conditioning, or “air-con,” in China refers to both heating and cooling.)

Xi’an

We took an overnight train from Beijing to Xi’an. We had “hard sleeper” tickets, which usually means open bunks stacked three high, but we had a small section with just four bunks stacked two high, so we had a semi-private place to share with Vic and Beth. Our main objective in Xi’an was to see the terra cotta warriors, and we bought tickets for a tour that left from our hotel. We climbed into a small bus with ten or twelve other people and quickly discovered that three of them were recent graduates of Davidson College in North Carolina, the same small Presbyterian college Vic and Beth had graduated from in 2004. We took photos of the ad hoc alumni gathering, with the terra cotta warriors in the background.

It was about two weeks before the Lunar New Year when we got to Xi’an. The central part of the city is enclosed by old city walls that are still largely intact. We climbed up to the top of the wall for a better view of the city and found that preparations for the Lunar New Year were underway up there. Workers were stringing lights, painting signs, and assembling large silk lotus flowers for the Spring Festival celebration.

We spent an evening prowling through Xi’an’s Muslim quarter marketplace and sampling the foods. A great deal of the cooking was being done outside on the sidewalk or on the street. We came to place where the cook was stirring an enormous pan of what appeared to be potatoes in a brown sauce. It looked terrific, so we went inside and ordered a bowl of it, along with a few other dishes. We never did figure out what the “potatoes” were, though there was general agreement that they looked better than they tasted.

There are lots of English-language signs in China, some easier to understand than others. Riding through Xi’an in a taxi, we spotted a sign over a small store that looked like the work of a lawyer to me. It is a general principle of rule enforcement that you can’t impose a penalty for conduct unless notice has been given that the conduct is not allowed. The sign read: No Drugs, Guns, or Nuclear Weapons Allowed.

Chengdu, Sichuan; Giant Panda Breeding and Research Center

From Xi’an, we flew to Chengdu in Sichuan Province, which is home to the Giant Panda Breeding and Research Center. There are roughly 1,000 pandas remaining in the wild, most of them in Sichuan Province, and there is real concern that pandas are facing extinction. China has established eleven panda preserves in an effort to secure their habitat and maintain the species. Pandas at the Breeding and Research Center have produced a number of cubs, but not yet enough to significantly increase the population. We made an early morning trip to the Center to see the pandas at feeding time, when they are most active. For the adult pandas, being “active” consisted of plopping down in front of a stand of juicy young bamboo and eating. The feeding area is quite close to the visitors’ viewing area, so we were able to see several pandas up close. From the adult pandas’ feeding area we walked around the corner to a playground for yearling pandas. These one-year-olds were about the size of a child’s large stuffed panda; there was an employee in the enclosure with them, and she was able to pick them up and boost them onto poles and platforms with apparent ease.

There have been pandas in China for at least 600,000 years, maybe much longer. There is a continuing debate as to whether pandas are bears, a variety of raccoon, or a distinct species of their own. The familiar black and white giant panda doesn’t look much like a raccoon, but the less known and much smaller red panda does. Admission to the Panda Center was 30 yuan (less than 4 dollars) and one of the best bargains we’ve found in China so far.

Buddhist Nunnery and Wenshu Temple

By chance and good fortune, we wound up in a hotel within easy walking distance of some interesting sights in Chengdu. There was a Buddhist nunnery quite close by and the large and well-maintained Wenshu Temple just a bit further away. Many temples and monasteries in China charge admission fees, and some folks complain that the temples have become more tourist attractions than centers for religion and meditation. There may be something to that, but if tourism helps to preserve ancient temples and monasteries that otherwise might not survive, I’m happy to be the tourist. I suppose it must be possible to see so many temples that you would lose interest or get bored, but I’m nowhere near that point.

There was no admission fee for the nunnery, which was home to a small, active group of nuns. A few were demonstrating Chinese calligraphy for an audience of visitors. Others were preparing food in a kitchen in the back. A rather large group that included several nuns and others whom I presume were local people were seated on round cushions on the floor and singing or chanting in a temple. There was a large dining room, austere in its simplicity, with rows of long narrow tables with benches to sit on. A similar room seemed intended for study and contained a variety of small tables and mismatched chairs.

Buddhist temples do, in fact, have enough similarities that some tourists might not feel the need to see every last one, but there were a couple of nice features that set Wenshu apart from many others we’ve seen. One was its hospitality to birds. Throughout the grounds there were little handfuls of rice and grain around statues and on the tops of flat posts.

Another was a large open-air teahouse that seemed to be a popular gathering place for local people. I went to the window where tea was sold and saw a sign listing several varieties of tea in prices ranging from 2 yuan to 10 yuan per cup. I knew how to order two cups of tea (“wo xiang yao liang ge bei cha,” in case you’re in that situation), but I didn’t know one variety from another. The accommodating lady at the window promptly brought me two cups of the 10 yuan kind. What she gave me, in fact, was two cups with dry green tea leaves and tiny white flower blossoms in the bottom, with saucers and lids for the cups. I looked around for the hot water and finally noticed that there were men with pots of hot water constantly circulating and filling and refilling teacups. There was no limit to the number of refills, and some folks seemed to be settled in for the afternoon. We went back the next day, and this time when I ordered liang ge bei cha, I handed the lady a ten yuan bill, angling for the less pricey five yuan stuff. It looked and tasted just like the ten yuan stuff; same green tea leaves, same little white blossoms. Foreigners in China are often thought to be easy marks, and it’s often true.

Vic and Beth left from Chengdu on their way back to the States. The first leg of their trip was a flight to Shenzhen, China’s high-tech showplace city on the mainland coast above Hong Kong. They spent an evening there with Mike Dausch, a college friend and groomsman in their wedding. Mike has been teaching English in Shenzhen for about three years or so. From Shenzhen, they ferried over to Hong Kong for their flight to Honolulu, where they lazed on the beach for a couple of days before flying back to New York.

Amity Teachers Winter Conference

Kate and I stayed on a few days in Chengdu for the Amity Teachers Winter Conference, a gathering of about 45 Amity teachers. Support for the teaching of English is only a small part of the work that the Amity Foundation does in China. The Winter Conference traditionally includes a tour of Amity projects, and this year the emphasis was on Amity’s work with people who are visually impaired. Amity helps to fund cataract surgery, which restores the vision of many elderly Chinese. Amity also provides vocational and self-sufficiency training for the blind, training which helps to restore their independence, their ability to earn a living, and their self-esteem. We met two blind men who had received training from Amity. One was an elderly man who lived with his family in a remote rural area. His work was simple; he split lengths of bamboo into thin strips, which were wholesaled to others who coated them with incense and sold the finished products. The second was a young man, perhaps in his thirties, with a wife and two small children. After losing his sight in an accident, he had been unemployable and dependent on his family for support. He had been trained by Amity as a massage therapist and now has a successful practice in the city of Luzhou.

Chinese weddings are often celebrated in hotels. One morning we came down to the lobby of the Amity Conference hotel to find a bride wearing a white Western-style wedding dress, a tuxedoed groom, and lots of friends and family. The bride, who should have been the star of this event, was abruptly upstaged by a second bride and her entourage who swept into the lobby with a shower of balloons and confetti. Adding insult to interruption, the second bride was prettier, shapelier, and more vivacious, and she was quickly in command of the entire lobby area. Each bride was flanked by two friends, one holding a large tray of candies and the other holding a tray of cigarettes. As friends came to greet and congratulate the brides, they helped themselves to candy and cigarettes. Those who took cigarettes would have them lit by the brides, each of whom held a lighter for this purpose. Chinese friends tell me they have never seen brides with cigarette lighters, so this may have been a local custom.

A compulsive activity at every gathering of Amity teachers is the search for Western food. We hit the jackpot in Chengdu at Peter’s Tex-Mex Café. Burritos, enchiladas, chips and salsa, and margaritas. It might have been just so-so by Austin standards, but it was five-star fare over here. And they had peanut butter pie for dessert.

World’s largest Buddha

From Chengdu, we took a day trip to Leshan, home of the world’s largest Buddha. The big guy was the life work of Haitong, a Buddhist monk who began carving the face of a cliff in 713. It was finally finished some 90 years after Haitong’s death. The seated Buddha overlooks the confluence of the Dadu and Min rivers and is some 230 feet tall. Honestly, that’s about all I’ve got to say for him. He’s real big, but sort of boxy and graceless, and has a weather-beaten paint job that looks a little cheesy.

There seem to be very few sights of interest in China that can be approached directly, without climbing a few hundred stairs and passing through several hectares of gardens, ponds, and statuary. From the entrance to the Grand Buddha Park, it took us more than an hour to reach the Grand Buddha, and the time we spent getting to the giant Buddha was much more satisfying than the main attraction. I prefer Buddhas who are serene and sublime; this guy had a little too much in common with Big Tex, the oversized yokel at the entrance to the State Fair. Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Kunming, Yunnan

From Chengdu we flew to Kunming in Yunnan Province. Yunnan is a popular tourist destination and is home to several of China’s 56 ethnic minority groups. In Kunming we saw the clearest, bluest skies we have seen in China, with none of the dull smoggy haze that hovers over other Chinese cities. Kunming is a large modern city, but for us it was primarily a launching point for trips to Dali and Lijiang, two smaller and very old cities. We did, however, take in the thousand-year-old Yuantong Temple while we were there.

Dali

We went first to Dali. From the walkway of our third-floor room in a Dali guesthouse, we had a good view of the city and also of the snowcapped mountains above the city. The Bai people are believed to have lived in the Dali area for about 3,000 years and are the largest minority group in the region. Tibetans, Naxi, and Yi people also live there. Restaurants feature Bai and Tibetan specialties and the distinctive clothing of the Bai women is seen everywhere.

Lijiang

After a couple of days in Dali, we took a bus to Lijiang, the historic center of the Naxi people. Like Dali, Lijiang is situated in a valley below snowcapped mountains. Lijiang is a maze of narrow, twisting, cobblestone streets lined with merchants, artisans, and restaurants. Because tourism drives much of Lijiang’s economy, many restaurants have menus with English (often fractured English) translations and featuring Chinese approximations of Western dishes. We saw many Naxi women in their traditional everyday blue clothing, plus a group dancing in the city square in more festive apparel.

One evening we went to a performance of traditional Naxi music played by an orchestra that used old instruments and produced music that was said to sound much the same as it would have sounded a thousand years ago. This music has been lost in much of China, but is being preserved in Lijiang. Many members of the orchestra were more than 80 years old, and they had buried their instruments during the Cultural Revolution to keep them from being destroyed.

Baisha

From Lijiang, we took a day trip to Baisha, a small village that in the 12th century was the capital of the Naxi kingdom. The oldest part of the village is preserved as a museum. The working part of the village includes a winding marketplace, some artists and artisans, old adobe-and-plaster homes and buildings, and a scattering of chickens, dogs, pigs and cows. Walking along Baisha’s dirt and cobblestone streets, we could see something laid out to dry on reed mats in courtyards just off the street. Several people invited us to come into their courtyards for a closer look. There were few, if any, other tourists in town that day, and we were shown extraordinary hospitality. One woman was using a heavy white cloth to strain the liquid from a large ball of thick heavy dough. When we stopped to watch, she invited us into her kitchen and gave us a sample of the mantou (steamed bread) that she was making. Her kitchen consisted of a brick stove and a bit of counter space in one corner of a large, sparsely furnished room. Batik is one of Yunnan’s main cottage industries for sales to tourists. There were a few batik shops in Baisha, with dye vats and drying lines in back. We were also invited to the back to see where and how the work was done.

An aside about water usage

In Dali, Lijiang, and Baisha, there was water flowing in stone-paved waterways along the edges of many narrow pedestrian streets. The water was diverted from streams fed by snowmelt from the mountains above the cities. The water appeared fresh and clear, and people would dip buckets of water from the streams to use for mopping and cleaning and for washing fruit, vegetables, and clothes. This is just a sample of the ingenuity the Chinese have demonstrated for centuries in diverting and redirecting water in useful ways. The Chinese dug canals more than two thousand years ago that are still in use for moving freight by water. In rural areas, hillsides are routinely terraced to capture rainwater and prevent erosion. Terraced plots may be as narrow as three or four feet in width, and each terrace includes an opening to allow any runoff to flow into the next lower level. Chinese farmers seem to have created very effective systems of irrigation by directing the natural flow of water—whether rainfall or diverted stream or river water—through plots of farmland. Sometimes the water is routed below the surface of the soil through perforated lengths of bamboo. The system seems to work well; the plots we see are nearly always uniformly green and lush. A great deal of China’s farm work is done by hand or with the aid of an ox or water buffalo. The narrow terraced strips on hillsides would be completely unsuited to farming with tractors and mechanized equipment. We rarely see tractors in the fields, and the few we’ve seen have been smaller than those commonly used in the United States.

Other uses of water in China are seriously at odds with the seemingly efficient and ecologically friendly uses we observed in parts of Yunnan Province. Many of China’s rivers are badly polluted with raw sewage, industrial waste, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides. River water in some areas has been declared unsafe to use for irrigating crops, though there are no alternative sources, so the contaminated river water probably is being used on crops. There have been outbreaks of hepatitis A in China from contaminated water and foodstuffs. Tap water is not suitable for drinking anywhere in China unless it’s boiled first. In many places where we have been, including the campus of our college, streams and creeks are routinely where trash and garbage are dumped.

Celebrating the New Year in Dali

We traveled from the Amity Conference in Chengdu to Kunming, Dali, Lijiang, and Baisha with our friend (and fellow Amity teacher) Ruth Klavano. Ruth left Lijiang to return to her college in Lanzhou, Gansu Province. Kate and I had a few more days, so we went back to Dali and stayed through the Lunar New Year on February 18. In the days before the New Year, we saw many people in Dali painting the doors and entrances of their homes, nearly always in a uniform shade of reddish brown. Others were airing and cleaning furniture, or carrying in new furniture, for the holiday.

During the day on New Year’s Eve, the city’s main marketplace was extremely busy, especially with sales of fireworks and fresh flowers. It is customary to place long, narrow, vertical banners on either side of one’s door for the New Year. The banners contain a variety of good wishes in large Chinese characters. The best ones are hand-painted by skilled calligraphers, usually old men, who do a land-office business during the weeks leading up to the holiday. On New Year’s Eve, the banners were going up. They are pasted onto the doors or walls like wallpaper. Also on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, families and shopkeepers were lighting large sticks of incense at their doorways. Sticks of incense about four feet in length were lit on either side of the door and would burn far into the night. We could smell incense burning throughout the city.

We wandered through the food market area of Dali, which is outside of the tourist zone. It was completely packed with people buying and selling fruit, vegetables, cuts of pork, sausage, fish, eels, live chickens and ducks, along with plucked and dressed chickens and ducks with the heads and feet still on. The heads and feet are integral parts of a surprising number of Chinese recipes. There were tea vendors, herb and spice vendors, and people selling jugs of fresh-pressed vegetable oil. Schools and businesses all close down, and everyone goes home for the Lunar New Year (the Spring Festival). The New Year is welcomed with family feasts, and it appeared that everyone wanted fresh ingredients, so all of Dali was grocery shopping on New Year’s Eve.

Stores started closing early, around 4:00 that afternoon, and with the shop closings the fireworks came out. No one lights a single firecracker in China. They light off strings of firecrackers that are several feet long, sometimes in big rolls that stretch out twenty feet or more. They hang strings of firecrackers from tree branches or poles, dangling the bottoms of the strings in metal barrels to amplify the noise. As the sun went down on New Year’s Eve, Yunnan’s bright clean air became thick with the smoke and burnt powder smell of the fireworks, coupled with the smoke and scent of burning incense.

The fireworks went on all night long. The Lunar New Year, or Spring Festival, is a family holiday in China (the Chinese compare it to Christmas in America), so there is not an emphasis on big rowdy New Year’s Eve parties. Instead, families eat well and shoot off fireworks, both the noisy kind and the bright showy aerial kind.

On the morning of New Year’s Day, February 18, there was a parade in Dali that came down the street right in front of the guesthouse where we were staying. The parade was led by men carrying a large banner, followed by a children’s band. There were several groups of women wearing very colorful native costumes, and the big finale featured nine dragons. The dragons consisted of a brightly painted papier maché heads and tails, connected by long bodies made of silk and held aloft on poles with rounded tops. Of the nine dragon crews, five were men and four were women. The dragons ranged in length from twelve carriers to twenty. Chinese dragons represent spiritual power and are considered to be wise and benevolent, though capable of mischief if their advice is not followed. Nine is a significant number when dealing with dragons. According to Chinese tradition, there are nine types of dragons, nine special characteristics of dragons, and nine ways in which dragons are represented in Chinese art. There is a large Nine Dragon Wall made of ceramic tiles inside the Forbidden City and another in Beijing’s Beihai Park.

Back to Fuyang

After the New Year’s Day parade, we caught a bus back to Kunming, then flew the next day to Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province. We took the train from Heifei to Fuyang. The train was packed, and our tickets did not assure us of a place to sit down, but we were lucky and found hard seats for the trip home. We had a few days after our return to prepare for the beginning of the spring term.

There are lots more photos you can see at our gallery on Flickr.com.

There is more information about our work and life in China on our home page at the Mission Connections page of the Presbyterian Church (USA) Web site. You can learn more about Amity at the Amity Foundation Web site.

Shalom y’all,

Don and Kate Lindsay
Fuyang Teachers College
Fuyang, Anhui 236001
Peoples Republic of China

The 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 244