9/13

9/13 9:20am CST

http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_13?authkey=Gv1sRgCKuOkKS418XsogE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMJYt_frjnI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgwRxj2KGPo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEGMQ97B_Z8

I'm taking this day to describe my dad's ancestral home. It's a term that means where your parents lived. We got here in Pingnan, my dad's hometown, yesterday, but I wrote enough about the first half of the trip. Now I relate leaving a modern China and stepping back into the past.
When we were riding the train through northern China, my dad remarked on the poor places where people were living, "When they talk about becoming 'great,' China will never achieve it until these areas are raised up from their poverty." I wonder if he sees his hometown the same way. I mentioned previously that some of my mom's classmates, including Lin Jin, are pretty well off. He might have come up from the same area, and might have only worn one pair of pants per semester in college, but now I'm sure he sleeps with the windows shut and the AC blasting every night. For him to drive us back to my dad's hometown and to stay overnight -- that will be like stepping between two worlds. I don't think anyone I know in America has truly known how my dad's relatives live. I hope this post illustrates that accurately.

Just outside Nanning, the highway scenery could be mistaken for Tennessee, if I drugged you and woke you up in the car. If you go a couple more hours, though, the hills take on a craggy aspect like those along the river in famous Guilin. This isn't surprising as Guilin is only 200 km from here. Banana trees crop up. The road gets worse and worse. If I woke you out of your drug coma at this point and told you it was Vietnam, you might believe me. I have pictures for the Tennessee part and videos for the Vietnam parts. Eventually, the highway ends and the country road begins. We drive through these parts, and I note how different the people look from up north, and certainly from in Tibet. After some more travel on the country road, slowed down by bouts of heavy rain, we reach the dirt and slab roads. We go some more along these, braving a loaf minivan stuck on a muddy stone bridge over a creek, until we finally reach my dad's ancestral home. It's a walled house with an iron gate, on the side of a very narrow dirt road. The road used to be wide, but has narrowed as people expand their homes. Inside the wall is two halves, the past and the present. In the past half is a one floor tile-roofed remnant of a house. It houses a truck and a little car, along with some young chickens. In the present half is a 3 story concrete house, built my dad's older brother.

This is one of the best houses in the village, and yet it leaves so much to be desired. In describing and showing it to you, I wonder how I will deal with keeping up the ancestral home. Seeing this place for the first time profoundly makes me think about how this place is a physical manifestation of my family bonds. At the same time, I think it'll make you question how you think of your own standard of living.

I have few relatives. There's my mom's side, and then my dad's side. My dad is Southern Chinese, and follows southern traditions of maintaining the ancestors' land. The three spots of land maintained by my uncle are all within a few hundred meters of each other. Ideally, this land will be kept for eternity by the sons and sons of sons of our family. As long as this land stannds, it ought to remain in the Mao family. As I said, the present half was built by my uncle. The past half is what my father has neglected to develop. Some day, it might pass to me or my cousins for development. I'm not sure, looking at it, what I should do.

When we get to the home, we all eat dinner. It's one I'm not especially hungry for, and I'll describe why later. After dinner, we go on a bit of a tour of the house. My uncle built it himself, using some contracted laborers for some parts. He's very proud of it, and for good reason. For a man who never went to college and was discharged from his teaching position for having a second child, he's done well with his lot. This is one of a few houses he's built, and since it was for himself, he made sure it was nice. "My son told me to only make it two floors [all they really need, really], but I heard the neighbors were going to make 3.5 floors, so I had to have 3.5 floors, too." The ceilings and high and the rooms are generously sized, but the floor is bare concrete and dusty everywhere. Nonetheless, it could be finished to an incredibly refined level. It just hasn't yet. We talk this over on the roof of the 3rd floor. I'm too chicken to walk up to the small poop deck roof, which makes up the 3rd and a half floor. My uncle points out over the neighboring houses. He says to me, "all these homes on this side of the road -- these are the people named Mao." There's only been a few times where I've felt such a strong sense of family. It fascinates me that for so long the Maos have been able to stay here in this small village, ever expanding and taking to the modern world. My dad describes his past from this high viewpoint.
"Over there is the creek where we used to bathe every night. It's now so small because people have been diverting it to water their farms. It used to be so wide. And that house with the curved wall over there -- that's the old home you visited in 2002. All those mountains in the distance -- those have never changed." Standing here on the roof of the house that my uncle built, next to a tract of land kept for my grandfather's other son, I keep thinking about what will happen next. About what it might take to keep this house, this monument of the Mao family, alive and well for the next half century. My participation would be hard. It doesn't make financial sense, and it makes less sense trying to participate in such a marginal part of my life half a world away. It still bears thinking about.

The pictures illustrate the poverty, in a specific sense, that my relatives live in. See for yourselves.

In the afternoon, during lunch, we got the call that another one of my mom's classmates was flying to Nanning to meet her, that night. So we had no choice (well, we did) but to go back to Nanning asap. And thus take leave of our relatives.

10:20pm CST

I regret forgetting to take some pictures that I should have, and for the whole taking off as suddenly as we did, but we have to keep going with the vacation. I know in some part it was because it was so hot, humid, and mosquitoey at my uncle's, that my parents and Lin Jin didn't really want to endure another night. I can't say anything bad about that, as the weather was really hard to bear. Though staying through it and living at my uncle's for even one night makes me appreciate how hard things must have been in the past for them, and how much better things are now. It's only when you get a taste of better things that you can't go back to the past.

So we took a slightly different route back to Nanning that ended up taking 3.5 hours instead of the 5 hours the other way. We ended up slightly ahead of my mom's other classmate who was flying in from Guangzhou. This guy was so enthusiastic to meet up with old friends that he bailed on seeing his daughter off on her return flight to America so he could schedule things this way. Such is the enthusiasm these college classmates have for visiting each other.

So the classmate flying in, Chen Dexin, was picked up by yet another classmate. They arrived to the restaurant where we'd decided to have dinner some 20 minutes after we did. The classmates chatted uproariously about various things. It was also a good dinner, whose highlight wasn't a dish, but a cat who'd learned to try to beg from the outdoors tables. The waitstaff kept shooing it away, but it'd run and come back every time. I really wanted to give it some scraps, but I knew it'd be better for it to survive some other way. The restaurant had fish tanks out front that you could visit and set up dishes from. Like you could ask for shrimp cooked a certain way, and one person would jot that down while another fished out the amount of shrimp you specified. Some of the animals seemed like they probably shouldn't be sold and eaten, like the sturgeon, but I wasn't going to dwell too hard on it.

After dinner, we went back to Lin Jin's apartment. He's rented the first 4 floors, hilariously, to a massage parlor. It's all aboveboard and advertises itself as a foot massage parlor, but quite entertaining to see into the big windows for each room at the clients getting massages. It makes you wonder if there's a back room somewhere. Nanning has had a big graft and sex trade crackdown, so this shop is probably keep clean. The 5th and 6th floors he keeps for himself, even though he has quarters at his job. He comes back here every so often when he needs to crash in this part of the city. The apartment is pretty modern and has AC, which will make it infinitely more tolerable to sleep in.