9/23 8:23am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_23?authkey=Gv1sRgCM-hqbX0uZ-l_AE
It's our last day in Tangshan. These big Chinese holidays usually come with three days of vacation, so even though not everyone had their first day off, everyone definitely gets the second day off. Except those in retail, I guess. In the morning we taxi over to 2nd Uncle's. He's taking off for the Northeast for work, so we figure we'd send him off. It's a pretty pleasant parting. We decided to walk back. This was very rewarding, in that it reminded me of the way things used to look in the area around where my grandmother lived, and where I stayed for a bit back in 1997. It basically looked like halfway to a slum, which is still fine to me, as it represents part of what China has been trying to rise up from on its way to greatness.
Lunch is all about dumplings. 1st Aunt makes two kinds -- chives and pork and also pure beef. Because of my intestine issues, I have a few chive dumplings and peanuts but otherwise abstain. They're really good, though. After lunch, Ranran is extremely motivated to play a game of: stretch this elastic band, and then take turns letting go of it at your partner. I don't have too much else to do, so I humor her for about two hours at this game. She's my cousin's daughter after all, so I ham it up with variations and go along with her feigned outrages.
Eventually, mom's high school classmates show up. One just to say goodbye, and the other to drop us off at Beijing. Recall that, thanks to some poor logistics, we weren't able to get sleeping berth tickets from Tangshan to Shanghai. So we decided to get them starting in Beijing. So this requires us to get to Beijing (east of Tangshan) and then head south to Shanghai. It would probably have been cleverer to get the tickets starting in Tianjin, which is an hour closer to Tangshan and to Shanghai, but we didn't think that part through. My mom's classmate's own car was too small, so he managed to convince a connection from his old job to pick us up. This guy was really doing a favor -- not only is it holidays for Mid-Autumn Festival, but it's also his birthday! He says he often goes to Beijing or Tianjin for his vacations, but still.
Even though it was kind of pricy, we bought out a 4-person room on the sleeping car, so that we wouldn't have a stranger among us and so we'd have extra storage space for our luggage. My parents waffled a bit on whether it was worth it, but with some deliberation and goading on my part, we went with it. Because the tickets originate in Beijing, and it's the holidays, this is technically the most costly hotel we've paid for since we've been in China. Oh well.
So now, around 10pm, the train has lurched out of Beijing South station and is aimed like a bullet for Shanghai. I think this one tops out at 250 kph. We'll be there by 7:30 am.
Showing posts with label tangshan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tangshan. Show all posts
Saturday, October 23, 2010
9/22
9/22 8:55am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_22?authkey=Gv1sRgCPiTv574sNSWwgE
It's Mid-Autumn Festival! It's 8/15 in the Chinese lunar calendar. This is as big a holiday as Thanksgiving, I'd say. Even still, some of my relatives seem busy with work. A sign of the times, perhaps. The first thing I do when I wake up is take a bite of mooncake. It's actually a really shitty one so I don't finish it. I mean, there's a piece of grit in it. Come on.
We head out to go visit another cousin in Tangshan city. With no cars for hire or friends driving, we take the bus this time. We first take a 3-wheeler to the bus station. Of course 3-wheelers are pure deathtraps, but they're very cheap (often less than half the price of a cab) and don't get snagged up as badly in traffic jam situations, squirting through disastrously tight spaces. The bus ride is tedious and bone-jarring over the awful Guye--Tangshan stretch. I'm genuinely curious if any of the windows on a bus has ever shattered in its track from going over such big potholes. We pass another bus that got into a fairly big accident with a Jetta. Half of the trunk was totally smashed in. That driver must have made a serious misjudgement. Doesn't look like a person could have been seriously injured, though.
Once we get off the bus, we wait a while for the daughter of my mom's mother's sister. We meet up and get picked up by Uncle Biao's brother. He drives us back to the aunt of my mom and her cousin. It is a good chance for their aunt to visit both of them at once. The engagement of my cousin in Beijing (the one from the Peking duck restaurant) is the topic of conversation basically the whole time. Here we have a pretty good lunch. I think I'm over the fever I had yesterday, but now have an intestinal ache that's bugging me. Maybe from the crabs I had last night? It puts me on the sidelines a bit.
After lunch, we make one last visit to another relative to drop off a gift we neglected to deliver earlier on the 18th. Then we wait for another bus back to Guye. I learn on the bus that my mom only lived on the farms in the outskirts til the age of one. Then she moved to where my grandmother lived til she died, several minutes' walk from where we're staying. She also pointed out to me where her commune was. It was only a few km from her home, but back in those days, that would still be a considerable distance from home. Even in this age of traffic jams and awful roads, that distance is so greatly shrunk. It's a bit startling.
Once we're back, we're pretty much headed straight into dinner. This time 1st Aunt is hosting it. Ranran manages to beat my high score in the air traffic control game. It's a good time until 2nd and 3rd Uncle get really sauced again and start debating the most random topics. My mom makes an excuse to leave early and we walk back to the apartment.
I don't even have many pics from today because of my ailment being a constant distraction. I'm hoping it cures overnight.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_22?authkey=Gv1sRgCPiTv574sNSWwgE
It's Mid-Autumn Festival! It's 8/15 in the Chinese lunar calendar. This is as big a holiday as Thanksgiving, I'd say. Even still, some of my relatives seem busy with work. A sign of the times, perhaps. The first thing I do when I wake up is take a bite of mooncake. It's actually a really shitty one so I don't finish it. I mean, there's a piece of grit in it. Come on.
We head out to go visit another cousin in Tangshan city. With no cars for hire or friends driving, we take the bus this time. We first take a 3-wheeler to the bus station. Of course 3-wheelers are pure deathtraps, but they're very cheap (often less than half the price of a cab) and don't get snagged up as badly in traffic jam situations, squirting through disastrously tight spaces. The bus ride is tedious and bone-jarring over the awful Guye--Tangshan stretch. I'm genuinely curious if any of the windows on a bus has ever shattered in its track from going over such big potholes. We pass another bus that got into a fairly big accident with a Jetta. Half of the trunk was totally smashed in. That driver must have made a serious misjudgement. Doesn't look like a person could have been seriously injured, though.
Once we get off the bus, we wait a while for the daughter of my mom's mother's sister. We meet up and get picked up by Uncle Biao's brother. He drives us back to the aunt of my mom and her cousin. It is a good chance for their aunt to visit both of them at once. The engagement of my cousin in Beijing (the one from the Peking duck restaurant) is the topic of conversation basically the whole time. Here we have a pretty good lunch. I think I'm over the fever I had yesterday, but now have an intestinal ache that's bugging me. Maybe from the crabs I had last night? It puts me on the sidelines a bit.
After lunch, we make one last visit to another relative to drop off a gift we neglected to deliver earlier on the 18th. Then we wait for another bus back to Guye. I learn on the bus that my mom only lived on the farms in the outskirts til the age of one. Then she moved to where my grandmother lived til she died, several minutes' walk from where we're staying. She also pointed out to me where her commune was. It was only a few km from her home, but back in those days, that would still be a considerable distance from home. Even in this age of traffic jams and awful roads, that distance is so greatly shrunk. It's a bit startling.
Once we're back, we're pretty much headed straight into dinner. This time 1st Aunt is hosting it. Ranran manages to beat my high score in the air traffic control game. It's a good time until 2nd and 3rd Uncle get really sauced again and start debating the most random topics. My mom makes an excuse to leave early and we walk back to the apartment.
I don't even have many pics from today because of my ailment being a constant distraction. I'm hoping it cures overnight.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
9/21
9/21 5:00am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_21?authkey=Gv1sRgCPiA9Pb-xYvQeg
3rd Uncle bellows into our shared hostel that we should try to get up and go hiking. It is dark and drizzling, and the power is out so there's no hot water. My mom yells at him that we should get up later and go back to sleep. I go back out and count sheep. The bed is a nice soft one, which lets me sleep on my stomach. At other places where the bed is very hard, I haven't been able to use that mode of sleep because my quad muscles are so thick that they raise my knees off the surface of the bed. So my leg is somewhat suspended in the air by the muscle and thus there's a lot of pressure going on. A couple hours later, 3rd Uncle says they've fired up the generator so we should all get into the showers. I'm of course the last in line, so the hot water runs out on me, and I'm freezing as I put my clothes on. Foolishly, I opt for a jacket and shorts, hoping that the sun will come out to match my anticipated temperature. Everyone tries to change my mind at breakfast but I rebuff them.
We drive over to the hiking point and get started. Fortunately, though it is still windy and cold, the rain has stopped. The first thing we have to do is cross a wooden suspension bridge. About 50 meters long and 10 meters over a very shallow river. It sways a bit and my hands are very cold, but I manage to get some cool panoramas. The end of the bridge has a pear tree that has dropped lots of pears. I lob a few into the water. The first half of the hike is all on granite steps and pretty easy. 12 zodiac animal statues line the early part of the walk. Someone has cleverly put a pear into the open mouth of the dragon statue. In Chinese mythology, a dragon carefully holds a pearl in its mouth. We all hike at different paces and I try to press mine, just to stay warm in the chilly wind. I can't seem to catch my breath and I'm tiring out faster than I should, whether or not I've been shirking exercise. Something is up, but I don't complain about it. After some more grueling hiking up steps, we reach the end of the easy phase. There's a very big golden Buddha statue on the mountain side. It was built in the last 15 years or so as a tourist attraction. Not that well made, but a nice rest break. Now we had to muster up courage for hiking to the Great Wall. 3rd Uncle tried to dissuade us from going in this weather as the path would be slippery, but we'd gotten this far, so we all decided to go for it. The hike was a lot slower and all on dirt and rocks. I struggled with the temperature, but managed to keep going. At last we got to the bricks making up the Great Wall. This stretch of the wall is not really in a heavy tourism area, so it has never been restored. All the bricks and mortar are original. It's about the same size as the stretches I've seen elsewhere. The wall tries to move along the ridges from mountaintop to mountaintop. The enemy would not only have to ascend really craggy slopes but also mount the wall to get into China. The China side of the wall has access stairs so I climb up those and land on the wall itself. As always, it's cool to see the Great Wall meandering from peak to peak, a testament to the great efforts of the people. This section is really worn down, which is good if only for seeing how old it is. We walk around a bit and duck into one of the guard tower sections. The wind still finds me, and I continue to chill down. After getting our fill of pictures, we start the descent. It's a bit slippery in places but overall very easy. We cross back over the foot bridge and head back to the retreat.
We stop off at a Buddhist temple to check it out. At this point, I'm feeling really weird and am zoned out of the whole tour that the monk delivers. I'm just thinking about getting some sleep or something.
Lunch was similarly rustic and good, but I'm really feeling beat down. The cat is back for scraps, and I pet it and give it a lot. It has really soft fur and doesn't feel bony. I'm guessing it gets a good amount of meat in its diet. I certainly give it a fair share. I excuse myself from the table to put on some pants, but just end up flopping onto my bed in the hostel. Don't really get any sleep, but the rest helps. I am in and out on the car ride back to Guye. I head straight to bed there, too. My mom comes in to check up on me and piles some blankets on. My parents go outside to fetch some food for dinner. They get chestnuts, dates, moon cakes, crabs, and mantis shrimp. We are planning to eat with Wang Yupo's family. He turns out to be stuck at work. He even has to work tomorrow, on Mid-Autumn Festival, which is rather unheard of. I register a low-grade fever on the thermometer and keep napping. Eventually, I manage to get up. The power is back on, so I guess the others didn't have to eat dinner by candlelight. I very agonizingly slowly eat some dinner, but decide to take it easy and go back to napping. The fever has broken somewhat but my stomach isn't in the best of moods.
A note on utilities:
As you've seen during the trip, we've run into some many instances of bad utility service. I'm not exactly sure how it works out, but the power and water companies basically do whatever the hell they want and cut off your utilities without notice. I think they do it to address their grid consumption needs, but it is really really inconvenient. At times the electricity will be out for hours at a time to the whole neighborhood. The company will usually turn it back on before dark. At other times, water won't run and you'll have to use whatever you happen to have sitting around. This is really inconvenient for the already delicate bathroom situation.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_21?authkey=Gv1sRgCPiA9Pb-xYvQeg
3rd Uncle bellows into our shared hostel that we should try to get up and go hiking. It is dark and drizzling, and the power is out so there's no hot water. My mom yells at him that we should get up later and go back to sleep. I go back out and count sheep. The bed is a nice soft one, which lets me sleep on my stomach. At other places where the bed is very hard, I haven't been able to use that mode of sleep because my quad muscles are so thick that they raise my knees off the surface of the bed. So my leg is somewhat suspended in the air by the muscle and thus there's a lot of pressure going on. A couple hours later, 3rd Uncle says they've fired up the generator so we should all get into the showers. I'm of course the last in line, so the hot water runs out on me, and I'm freezing as I put my clothes on. Foolishly, I opt for a jacket and shorts, hoping that the sun will come out to match my anticipated temperature. Everyone tries to change my mind at breakfast but I rebuff them.
We drive over to the hiking point and get started. Fortunately, though it is still windy and cold, the rain has stopped. The first thing we have to do is cross a wooden suspension bridge. About 50 meters long and 10 meters over a very shallow river. It sways a bit and my hands are very cold, but I manage to get some cool panoramas. The end of the bridge has a pear tree that has dropped lots of pears. I lob a few into the water. The first half of the hike is all on granite steps and pretty easy. 12 zodiac animal statues line the early part of the walk. Someone has cleverly put a pear into the open mouth of the dragon statue. In Chinese mythology, a dragon carefully holds a pearl in its mouth. We all hike at different paces and I try to press mine, just to stay warm in the chilly wind. I can't seem to catch my breath and I'm tiring out faster than I should, whether or not I've been shirking exercise. Something is up, but I don't complain about it. After some more grueling hiking up steps, we reach the end of the easy phase. There's a very big golden Buddha statue on the mountain side. It was built in the last 15 years or so as a tourist attraction. Not that well made, but a nice rest break. Now we had to muster up courage for hiking to the Great Wall. 3rd Uncle tried to dissuade us from going in this weather as the path would be slippery, but we'd gotten this far, so we all decided to go for it. The hike was a lot slower and all on dirt and rocks. I struggled with the temperature, but managed to keep going. At last we got to the bricks making up the Great Wall. This stretch of the wall is not really in a heavy tourism area, so it has never been restored. All the bricks and mortar are original. It's about the same size as the stretches I've seen elsewhere. The wall tries to move along the ridges from mountaintop to mountaintop. The enemy would not only have to ascend really craggy slopes but also mount the wall to get into China. The China side of the wall has access stairs so I climb up those and land on the wall itself. As always, it's cool to see the Great Wall meandering from peak to peak, a testament to the great efforts of the people. This section is really worn down, which is good if only for seeing how old it is. We walk around a bit and duck into one of the guard tower sections. The wind still finds me, and I continue to chill down. After getting our fill of pictures, we start the descent. It's a bit slippery in places but overall very easy. We cross back over the foot bridge and head back to the retreat.
We stop off at a Buddhist temple to check it out. At this point, I'm feeling really weird and am zoned out of the whole tour that the monk delivers. I'm just thinking about getting some sleep or something.
Lunch was similarly rustic and good, but I'm really feeling beat down. The cat is back for scraps, and I pet it and give it a lot. It has really soft fur and doesn't feel bony. I'm guessing it gets a good amount of meat in its diet. I certainly give it a fair share. I excuse myself from the table to put on some pants, but just end up flopping onto my bed in the hostel. Don't really get any sleep, but the rest helps. I am in and out on the car ride back to Guye. I head straight to bed there, too. My mom comes in to check up on me and piles some blankets on. My parents go outside to fetch some food for dinner. They get chestnuts, dates, moon cakes, crabs, and mantis shrimp. We are planning to eat with Wang Yupo's family. He turns out to be stuck at work. He even has to work tomorrow, on Mid-Autumn Festival, which is rather unheard of. I register a low-grade fever on the thermometer and keep napping. Eventually, I manage to get up. The power is back on, so I guess the others didn't have to eat dinner by candlelight. I very agonizingly slowly eat some dinner, but decide to take it easy and go back to napping. The fever has broken somewhat but my stomach isn't in the best of moods.
A note on utilities:
As you've seen during the trip, we've run into some many instances of bad utility service. I'm not exactly sure how it works out, but the power and water companies basically do whatever the hell they want and cut off your utilities without notice. I think they do it to address their grid consumption needs, but it is really really inconvenient. At times the electricity will be out for hours at a time to the whole neighborhood. The company will usually turn it back on before dark. At other times, water won't run and you'll have to use whatever you happen to have sitting around. This is really inconvenient for the already delicate bathroom situation.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
9/20
9/20 7:34am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_20?authkey=Gv1sRgCN2Nqdqm9fCgNg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GnhRJ-umnE
Got up early to work out a bit and burn off some of the eating out fat. Also I'm worried I'm gonna lose all my progress with kickboxing when I get back. Once we were all set, we took a taxi to the cemetary a ways from the apartment. 1st and 2nd Uncle came with us. When we got the taxi, we got a big stack of fake money, many sheets of paper coins, and some incense.
My mother's parents' ashes are in a shared grave. The tombstone is carved with their names and dates of birth and death. Pretty typical stuff. The cemetary is very tightly packed, but otherwise looks pretty recognizable. There's patches of dirt where you burn offerings to send into the afterlife. We emptied the incense pot on the grave, filled it with new sand, and then stuck in the incense. We unpacked the paper coins, which are simply stamped outlines on sheets of paper. In the old days they would have taken care to cut the coins out, but now the coin outlines are firmly attached to the paper, so that you're basically burning a solid sheet of paper. Even in 1995 I remember the quality being better. But it's the tradition that counts. We had a couple pounds of paper to burn so we had to get a serious fire going. As my 1st and 2nd Uncle put paper onto the fire, they said, "Mom, Dad, tuck away this money." Just a traditional utterance for sending the money to heaven. I had the set of paper bills with me. It seemed like it was 10 bills to a plastic wrapping, so I unpacked them all and stacked the bills together. I think the denomination was 1,000,000,000 or something. I saw some bills of the same design with 50 lying around the burn area. Of course, it's difficult not to hold back the tears at a memorial like this. I carefully fanned and refanned the money until it was really spread out, and then threw it onto the pyre. The fire was shooting ash several feet into the air, only to have the bits fly back down all around us. The air was cold and threatening to rain. Neither my dad nor I managed to say anything during the ceremony. He because the southern traditions are different; I because the ceremony was so serious to me. My mom talked to her parents some at the grave, and then spruced up the area around it. When the fire went out and all of the paper was burned, 2nd Uncle led a formal bow in front of the grave. And with that, we were done.
My grandfather died when I was still very young. I'm told he got to hold me, but I have no recollections of the man. My grandmother died in 2006, very shortly after my mom visited. With some years intervening, I think she and her brothers have come to peace with their deaths, so even though it was emotional, burning the paper coins was not a painful experience. A family beside us was also mourning their parents. There was a lot of crying and anguish, but after the paper was burned, cell phone calls were made and cigarettes were lit as the family made their way out. As meaningful as it can be, the event obviously has mostly ceremonial significance to some. I didn't take any pictures of the burning. But as we were walking out of the cemetary, I saw a dog curled up and sleeping on someone's grave. That was a message to me that there's life after death, perhaps not in the way the phrase is typically meant, but still nice to see.
After that, we went to a Bank of China branch to get another stack of cash for our upcoming costs. Because of however it is that foreigners open and maintain an account with BoC, the already surly tellers became even meaner and it took forever. I walked around on the street and went into a supermarket. I told myself I should try something I couldn't get in the US. And while there were a lot of things, one of the ones that stood out was this snack called Cat Ears. It was the spicy flavor. It was only 2 yuan so I got it and tried them out. It was pretty interesting -- a sweet and only mildly spicy chip. I would eat them again.
From the bank, we went over the home of Cao Ruiling, one of my mom's good high school classmates. We chatted for a bit and waited for our lunch party to show up -- Ruiling's husband, and Huo Yongjian (another classmate) and her wife. Once we were all assembled, we drove over to a nearby restaurant and had lunch. It wasn't amazing, but it was still pretty interesting. Cao Ruiling's daughter, husband and their baby son also came. While my mom is pretty close to these folks, I don't have but a few memories of hanging out with them. In fact, every time I see Cao Ruiling, I re-remember that she has a lisp. Since s is only an initial sound in Chinese, she'll say those words as starting with th. Since there is no th sound in Mandarin, it's probably a bit less noticeable than a lisp in English is.
After we got out of lunch, we went over to 3rd Uncle's. Even though it continued to drizzle slightly, we stuck to our plan of going to Baiyang Yu, the White Goat Mountaintop. This was about 100km outside of Tangshan, to the east. It had the ruins of some of the Ming-era Great Wall, and it'd be nice to do a hike to see it. 3rd Uncle was friends with a guy who'd started a facility that hosted motivational training seminars and the like, right by the mountains, so it was yet another free trip. The same driver who'd been ferrying us around the previous couple days was back in the saddle, and his loaf car looked spotless despite the adventures it'd been through. Because of the number of relatives going, one of 3rd Uncle's friends was driving his Jetta as well.
When we got there, we ate some a dinner prepared using mostly stuff grown on the mountain. Because of the relative lack of pollution, everything was grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizer, so it might be as close to 'natural' or 'organic' food as you could get in China. The dishes tended toward the rustic, like stewed julienned potatoes, but it was obvious the vegetables were fresh and things tasted good. Whiskey was served out of a teapot and once again 2nd Uncle got pretty drunk. His desire to do karaoke and self-judged ability increased as the dinner wore on, until we concluded and got up, at which point he said, "alright let's go to the karaoke hall."
Sure enough, the facility has a huge room dedicated to karaoke. When 2nd and 3rd Uncle do their first several songs, they're really bad as the alcohol was still in full effect. 3rd Uncle actually got better and better as he recovered a bit. I got pressed into doing a couple songs. Actually, I really only know 2 songs well enough to sing all the lyrics. The English songs were all crappy ballads that I didn't know, so I did Crescent Moon, classic love song, and Possessed of Nothing, a pioneering Chinese rock song that I learned somehow. I think I impressed my parents with the second one. That's just not that popular a song, especially on the karaoke scene. My dad got carried away with a slew of traditional songs about Tibet. Though Tibet is its own world, there are a surprisingly large number of classic Han songs about it. I'd say my dad ended up doing about 50% of the songs that night.
When he eventually gave up the mic, we all turned into our hostel-quality quarters.
A note on our driver:
As a driver who hires himself out for these everything-included day trips, it's conventional to include him in lunches and dinners. So whereever we went with this guy, we'd ask him in to have meals with us. I'm sure in most instances he'd be fine with getting food on his own, but in some cases, like when you're in a remote mountain retreat, it'd be putting him out of his way to feed himself. At this point, I think he'd gotten in 6 really good meals with the rest of us. I'm not complaining -- he's professional, doesn't barge into conversations at meals, hasn't drunk a drop when driving remains to be done, and only smokes outside. When we're doing something, he either hangs out outside or naps in his loaf car. To address someone like this, who is a hired hand, you use the term shifu, which is exactly the term you see used to refer to kung fu masters and the like. In this context, it is probably best translated to something like maestro. Anyways, for dinner tonight Maestro Liu got to have a bit of whiskey since he wasn't driving til the next morning. He seemed to enjoy it.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_20?authkey=Gv1sRgCN2Nqdqm9fCgNg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GnhRJ-umnE
Got up early to work out a bit and burn off some of the eating out fat. Also I'm worried I'm gonna lose all my progress with kickboxing when I get back. Once we were all set, we took a taxi to the cemetary a ways from the apartment. 1st and 2nd Uncle came with us. When we got the taxi, we got a big stack of fake money, many sheets of paper coins, and some incense.
My mother's parents' ashes are in a shared grave. The tombstone is carved with their names and dates of birth and death. Pretty typical stuff. The cemetary is very tightly packed, but otherwise looks pretty recognizable. There's patches of dirt where you burn offerings to send into the afterlife. We emptied the incense pot on the grave, filled it with new sand, and then stuck in the incense. We unpacked the paper coins, which are simply stamped outlines on sheets of paper. In the old days they would have taken care to cut the coins out, but now the coin outlines are firmly attached to the paper, so that you're basically burning a solid sheet of paper. Even in 1995 I remember the quality being better. But it's the tradition that counts. We had a couple pounds of paper to burn so we had to get a serious fire going. As my 1st and 2nd Uncle put paper onto the fire, they said, "Mom, Dad, tuck away this money." Just a traditional utterance for sending the money to heaven. I had the set of paper bills with me. It seemed like it was 10 bills to a plastic wrapping, so I unpacked them all and stacked the bills together. I think the denomination was 1,000,000,000 or something. I saw some bills of the same design with 50 lying around the burn area. Of course, it's difficult not to hold back the tears at a memorial like this. I carefully fanned and refanned the money until it was really spread out, and then threw it onto the pyre. The fire was shooting ash several feet into the air, only to have the bits fly back down all around us. The air was cold and threatening to rain. Neither my dad nor I managed to say anything during the ceremony. He because the southern traditions are different; I because the ceremony was so serious to me. My mom talked to her parents some at the grave, and then spruced up the area around it. When the fire went out and all of the paper was burned, 2nd Uncle led a formal bow in front of the grave. And with that, we were done.
My grandfather died when I was still very young. I'm told he got to hold me, but I have no recollections of the man. My grandmother died in 2006, very shortly after my mom visited. With some years intervening, I think she and her brothers have come to peace with their deaths, so even though it was emotional, burning the paper coins was not a painful experience. A family beside us was also mourning their parents. There was a lot of crying and anguish, but after the paper was burned, cell phone calls were made and cigarettes were lit as the family made their way out. As meaningful as it can be, the event obviously has mostly ceremonial significance to some. I didn't take any pictures of the burning. But as we were walking out of the cemetary, I saw a dog curled up and sleeping on someone's grave. That was a message to me that there's life after death, perhaps not in the way the phrase is typically meant, but still nice to see.
After that, we went to a Bank of China branch to get another stack of cash for our upcoming costs. Because of however it is that foreigners open and maintain an account with BoC, the already surly tellers became even meaner and it took forever. I walked around on the street and went into a supermarket. I told myself I should try something I couldn't get in the US. And while there were a lot of things, one of the ones that stood out was this snack called Cat Ears. It was the spicy flavor. It was only 2 yuan so I got it and tried them out. It was pretty interesting -- a sweet and only mildly spicy chip. I would eat them again.
From the bank, we went over the home of Cao Ruiling, one of my mom's good high school classmates. We chatted for a bit and waited for our lunch party to show up -- Ruiling's husband, and Huo Yongjian (another classmate) and her wife. Once we were all assembled, we drove over to a nearby restaurant and had lunch. It wasn't amazing, but it was still pretty interesting. Cao Ruiling's daughter, husband and their baby son also came. While my mom is pretty close to these folks, I don't have but a few memories of hanging out with them. In fact, every time I see Cao Ruiling, I re-remember that she has a lisp. Since s is only an initial sound in Chinese, she'll say those words as starting with th. Since there is no th sound in Mandarin, it's probably a bit less noticeable than a lisp in English is.
After we got out of lunch, we went over to 3rd Uncle's. Even though it continued to drizzle slightly, we stuck to our plan of going to Baiyang Yu, the White Goat Mountaintop. This was about 100km outside of Tangshan, to the east. It had the ruins of some of the Ming-era Great Wall, and it'd be nice to do a hike to see it. 3rd Uncle was friends with a guy who'd started a facility that hosted motivational training seminars and the like, right by the mountains, so it was yet another free trip. The same driver who'd been ferrying us around the previous couple days was back in the saddle, and his loaf car looked spotless despite the adventures it'd been through. Because of the number of relatives going, one of 3rd Uncle's friends was driving his Jetta as well.
When we got there, we ate some a dinner prepared using mostly stuff grown on the mountain. Because of the relative lack of pollution, everything was grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizer, so it might be as close to 'natural' or 'organic' food as you could get in China. The dishes tended toward the rustic, like stewed julienned potatoes, but it was obvious the vegetables were fresh and things tasted good. Whiskey was served out of a teapot and once again 2nd Uncle got pretty drunk. His desire to do karaoke and self-judged ability increased as the dinner wore on, until we concluded and got up, at which point he said, "alright let's go to the karaoke hall."
Sure enough, the facility has a huge room dedicated to karaoke. When 2nd and 3rd Uncle do their first several songs, they're really bad as the alcohol was still in full effect. 3rd Uncle actually got better and better as he recovered a bit. I got pressed into doing a couple songs. Actually, I really only know 2 songs well enough to sing all the lyrics. The English songs were all crappy ballads that I didn't know, so I did Crescent Moon, classic love song, and Possessed of Nothing, a pioneering Chinese rock song that I learned somehow. I think I impressed my parents with the second one. That's just not that popular a song, especially on the karaoke scene. My dad got carried away with a slew of traditional songs about Tibet. Though Tibet is its own world, there are a surprisingly large number of classic Han songs about it. I'd say my dad ended up doing about 50% of the songs that night.
When he eventually gave up the mic, we all turned into our hostel-quality quarters.
A note on our driver:
As a driver who hires himself out for these everything-included day trips, it's conventional to include him in lunches and dinners. So whereever we went with this guy, we'd ask him in to have meals with us. I'm sure in most instances he'd be fine with getting food on his own, but in some cases, like when you're in a remote mountain retreat, it'd be putting him out of his way to feed himself. At this point, I think he'd gotten in 6 really good meals with the rest of us. I'm not complaining -- he's professional, doesn't barge into conversations at meals, hasn't drunk a drop when driving remains to be done, and only smokes outside. When we're doing something, he either hangs out outside or naps in his loaf car. To address someone like this, who is a hired hand, you use the term shifu, which is exactly the term you see used to refer to kung fu masters and the like. In this context, it is probably best translated to something like maestro. Anyways, for dinner tonight Maestro Liu got to have a bit of whiskey since he wasn't driving til the next morning. He seemed to enjoy it.
Monday, October 18, 2010
9/19
9/19 8:30am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_19?authkey=Gv1sRgCNWy7pHjg5KjnwE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrmM8hefT2Y
This morning, we got up and packed into the same loaf car. Today, 2nd Uncle, Yupo, and my family were going to visit Qinhuangdao, a city south of Tangshan. There my mom wanted to see another brother of her father's and his children. Yupon wanted to go because he was working on his own story about the period between the end of WWII and the end of the Korean War. Supposedly the old man was a war vet, so Yupo was looking to get some color to lend to his story. Qinhuangdao is only about an hour away, but the accent in that city is totally different. In fact, it sounds much closer to how people talk in Beijing -- quickly and with less expressiveness. Anyways, about the first thing we did was stop at a supermarket to buy gifts of alcohol and moon cakes (Mid-Autumn Festival is almost upon us). Then we went to their home and visited a bit, before turning around and heading out for lunch. On the walk over, we walked by what was apparently the largest rotary in the city, and definitely one of the biggest I've ever seen. It was a good few hundred meters across, with a little park in the middle.
Lunch was really good. The dishes were different to what we'd had before, and most of them tasted excellent. I have the write-up in the photos.
After lunch, we walked back. The sight of a TKD school got Yupo and me talking about my sanda kickboxing training. I think he was a bit of a kungfu nerd back in the day. He showed me once his caricatures of all thees different kungfu styles, like eagle, rabbit, snake, tiger, etc. He even asked me what stance you took in sanda. There is no such thing, but I guess I'll show him when next we meet. He stayed with the old grand-uncle a bit while the rest of us went to visit one of my mom's classmates. Relatives and classmates -- that's pretty much all we're here for. My mom got to swing by and look at this real estate deal that she couldn't close in 2008. I managed to use the internet a bit at her classmate's apartment. Her classmate gave us gifts of Buddhist bead bracelets. I took one supposedly made of obsidian. It looked cool.
On the way back to Tangshan, my mom made the driver stop off at Beidaihe, which is on the coast. It was a huge hassle driving through the densely packed village streets, but the sea looked nice. I love the sea. I picked up a stone to skip out into the waves. As I released and snapped my hand back, I felt the bead bracelet I had just received snap. I looked down and the beads quickly sank into the washing sand. I managed to hop into the water a bit and recovered one, and with a bit more inspection found two more on the beach. Easy come, easy go, I suppose.
We finished off the trek after sunset, so my Aunt had prepared a meal for us. She hand-made a first-rate won-ton soup. I haven't had a won-ton soup that good in the US, as a point of data. It takes forever to roll dough skins that thin, so I really appreciate her effort and admire her skill. She also bought a miscellany of meat from the corner stand, and those were good, too.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_19?authkey=Gv1sRgCNWy7pHjg5KjnwE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrmM8hefT2Y
This morning, we got up and packed into the same loaf car. Today, 2nd Uncle, Yupo, and my family were going to visit Qinhuangdao, a city south of Tangshan. There my mom wanted to see another brother of her father's and his children. Yupon wanted to go because he was working on his own story about the period between the end of WWII and the end of the Korean War. Supposedly the old man was a war vet, so Yupo was looking to get some color to lend to his story. Qinhuangdao is only about an hour away, but the accent in that city is totally different. In fact, it sounds much closer to how people talk in Beijing -- quickly and with less expressiveness. Anyways, about the first thing we did was stop at a supermarket to buy gifts of alcohol and moon cakes (Mid-Autumn Festival is almost upon us). Then we went to their home and visited a bit, before turning around and heading out for lunch. On the walk over, we walked by what was apparently the largest rotary in the city, and definitely one of the biggest I've ever seen. It was a good few hundred meters across, with a little park in the middle.
Lunch was really good. The dishes were different to what we'd had before, and most of them tasted excellent. I have the write-up in the photos.
After lunch, we walked back. The sight of a TKD school got Yupo and me talking about my sanda kickboxing training. I think he was a bit of a kungfu nerd back in the day. He showed me once his caricatures of all thees different kungfu styles, like eagle, rabbit, snake, tiger, etc. He even asked me what stance you took in sanda. There is no such thing, but I guess I'll show him when next we meet. He stayed with the old grand-uncle a bit while the rest of us went to visit one of my mom's classmates. Relatives and classmates -- that's pretty much all we're here for. My mom got to swing by and look at this real estate deal that she couldn't close in 2008. I managed to use the internet a bit at her classmate's apartment. Her classmate gave us gifts of Buddhist bead bracelets. I took one supposedly made of obsidian. It looked cool.
On the way back to Tangshan, my mom made the driver stop off at Beidaihe, which is on the coast. It was a huge hassle driving through the densely packed village streets, but the sea looked nice. I love the sea. I picked up a stone to skip out into the waves. As I released and snapped my hand back, I felt the bead bracelet I had just received snap. I looked down and the beads quickly sank into the washing sand. I managed to hop into the water a bit and recovered one, and with a bit more inspection found two more on the beach. Easy come, easy go, I suppose.
We finished off the trek after sunset, so my Aunt had prepared a meal for us. She hand-made a first-rate won-ton soup. I haven't had a won-ton soup that good in the US, as a point of data. It takes forever to roll dough skins that thin, so I really appreciate her effort and admire her skill. She also bought a miscellany of meat from the corner stand, and those were good, too.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
9/18
9/18
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_18?authkey=Gv1sRgCKO0uPralvT0Gw
I'd like to talk about spin a little bit. Spin is not a single concept, but very similar patterns applied to different contexts. Spin is where you keep a certain amount of emotional distance from various things, and you use that to your advantange. A very honest, plain-spoken person will only have one emotional viewpoint on any given thing and only ever voice one opinion of that something. If he's nice, maybe he'll take after the proverb about saying nothing about things he doesn't like. I think this is a good way to go about life, and perhaps most Americans live abide pretty closely by it. The average Chinese person, however, applies a lot of spin. If you were a fly on the wall of three different living rooms where a Chinese person is recounting a story to three different friends, you'd likely hear three totally different stories.
Let's factually describe a hypothetical event. Some friends are asked out to dinner by a business acquaintance. He generously provides a tea he likes to be brewed for the whole party. Friend A really likes the tea, and compliments it quite a bit. The hosts sets out some packets of the tea and offers them to anyone who wants to take some home. Some time later, friend A tastes his tea once again and then pockets one of the packets.
When talking about A, people present at the dinner might say of him, "he likes to pretend he really knows his stuff about tea. He was just going on and on about that tea so he took a packet for himself. Now he's going to show off with it at his next dinner and tout how good his tastes are." Who knows, that might lie close to an honest opinion of friend A's behavior.
In some other setting among a different circle of friends, when comes up, the same person from above might say, "oh, A is really into tea. He liked this red tea that we once had. That was a good tea."
As you can see, no matter what your emotions are on a subject, when doing spin, you should always view the situation in a different light. Having gone to so many different dinners with so many subsets of folks, I've seen the same things treated well and poorly in turn, praised and slagged depending on what the speaker was trying to get across. Obviously, some people have more spin than others, but overall, spin is clearly detectable more so in China than in the US. I don't know if I'm ready to label the average Chinese person as slimier because of his spin-doctoring, but I am observing that he does it.
In the morning, we packed into a loaf car to go to my mom's old home. It's where the brother of her father still lives. The poverty in which they live is reminiscent of what I saw in Guangxi. I mean, they have plenty of money, but their attitudes and habits are such that they live in conditions that are like poverty. My mom's uncle is 82 and his mind is perfectly healthy. But he took a spill last year and his legs haven't recovered quite yet. There's some nerve damage that makes it very hard for him to walk. In America, even at that age, his children would likely get together and figure out what kind of physical therapy program he'd need, or what kind of live-in nurse they might try to hire. Here, all his children are busy with their own lives, and so his care is left to his wife, who's perambulatory but not bushy-tailed at her age. In the family, there is enough cash to treat him and to make his life better for years to come. But the attitude here is that he took that fatal fall that is going to leave him bedridden for life, as though there are no options. It might seem cruel to an outsider, but this is probably the way people have been thinking for centuries here. It's these sorts of attitudes that will take the longest to Westernize, if they ever will.
We left there before lunch, even though my mom's uncle's wife insisted on cooking something for us. She was very nice. After scrabbling out of the unpaved country roads in the loaf car, we went into Tangshan city to have lunch before visiting another relative. By keeping lunch limited to ourselves, we were taking off some of the money burden of the relatives who were being visited, who are obligated to host for the visitors. My 3rd Uncle knew a guy who opened this Sichuan restaurant in the city. It specialized in dutch oven cooked fish soup. That dish was amazing. The details are with the photos.
After lunch, we visited my mom's brother's youngest sister, who also lived in Tangshan proper. We hung out for a long time at their home, which was mildly annoying because there were a lot of smokers. While there's a lot of smoking everywhere, I don't have to stick around it for long usually. Even at a web cafe, I could get better air. Finally, we got off our asses and went to the dinner restaurant, bringing our own steamed crabs with us. Chinese restaurants usually don't have problems with you bringing in some of your own dishes. Some have wised up and started taxing outside alcohol, though.
Dinner was extremely over-ordered. Eventually, it got up to triple layers of plates. I didn't stick around to see that with my own eyes, though. I had been lobbying all day to visit my cousin Yupo, who I'd missed in the initial gathering of relatives. I heard second hand about how many dishes there were, left uneaten. Also about how hammered my 2nd and 3rd Uncles got. That's typical for them. Even before I left, about 2/3s into the dinner, about 5 people drinking had put back a couple fifths of 100 proof rice whiskey. And they apparently kept going on brandy and some beer they ordered. I'm sure my uncles soaked up a lot of that total. On the long ride back to Guye, one uncle had his head bowed the whole time, passed out, and the other had his head slack and tipped all the way back, sleeping. Truly tweedledee and tweedledum.
A couple of us took an early taxi for the hour ride back to Guye. At night we finally got ahold of Wang Yupo, who hadn't come up to dinner last night because of the terrible traffic around here. Even tonight he got back pretty late. The company van just couldn't get through the traffic jams fast enough. He has to get up at 6 and gets back at 9. Too many people with cars. Yupo came over in his scooter and picked me up. I think the last time I was on a motorcycle or scooter was 1997 when I was back here. It was at night and only a few minutes or so, so not too scary. Of course neither of us wore any gear or helmets or anything like that.
Anyways, I brought as his gift some DVDs for his daughter, Wang Xinran, or Ranran for short. She's just started first grade this year, and is still bounding with that young kid energy. Fortunately, she hadn't seen at least one of the cartoons I'd brought her. According to her pops, it doesn't matter how little English she knows; she'll keep watching something over and over. Yupo and I started chatting about stuff, and Ranran kept coming over asking about this and that. I showed her the air traffic control game on my iPhone, and she liked that quite a bit. When I last left China, Yupo was dating his wife but still single. What a difference 8 years make. Since then, Yupo's hair has thinned out enough to warrant wearing it really close. He's married that girlfriend and been having a family. His work as an electrician at the train plant has been pretty steady, if a bit hard with all that commuting. It's decent money, which is good. Still, it's not his dream job. He's always wanted to be a director and still pursues that interest by writing in his spare time. He's not terribly good at typing Chinese, so he still writes in shorthand, and if a story is worth it, he has his wife type it up. She teaches elementary school (the very one their daughter goes to) and thus has decent computer skills. I don't actually know her full name. When you're friends with someone much more so than his wife, you can call the wife 'sao zi.' I'm not sure what it means, but it it's basically a title for a friend's wife.
Yupo once had a last ditch effort to get into the moviemaking business. After he graduated from his vocational school, he snuck up to Beijing to audition at the Central Institute for Performance Arts, which would radically boost the viability of his acting career. He went through a couple rounds of auditions, having to make excuses about why he would be away for a couple days at a time. Ultimately, he didn't make the cut, so he had to go back to life as usual. He told me this in confidence some years ago when he didn't have anyone he could share it with. While he was doing these auditions though, he met another hopeful who ended up washing out. This friend stuck it out in Beijing and kept at it one way or another, and eventually landed a job as a script editor. Now they're hiring and the friend has a spot for Yupo. It's a big leap. Yupo has a job and home that supports his wife and kid. If he were to take on this job in Beijing, he's not gonna be able to give up after a few months and come crawling back to that electrician job. He's worried he's not gonna be able to come through on the occasional writing assignments, as writing to someone else's topic as opposed to one's own ideas is much harder. He's going to be living alone in a city that's at least 2 hours away from his family. All serious considerations. Still, it is a good pay raise and would be a real stepping stone to other opportunities in the business. Sadly, I can't relate at all to switching between industries that differ that much, and from a job I tolerate to one I might genuinely like. Yupo's got til about the end of the year to decide.
After hanging out with Yupo and playing with Ranran for a while, I headed back home. I think it was a good talk. There's only one more thing on my checklist -- in 2002, one night we were walking around at night just hanging out, the four of us cousins. Yupo, me, Wang Peng, and Wang Kang. I spotted a vendor broiling lamb skewers over his coal brazier and asked to stop and get some. Yupo ordered the whole set and handed them out to us. I got out some money to pay, but he stopped me. Over all the dinners we'd been invited to, where friends and relatives have paid for, this one moment was the most genuine. Yupo told me, "no matter how much time goes on, no matter how much distance separates us, we're still family, and from one relative to another, it doesn't matter who pays." It's not like it was a lot of money, but it would have made more sense for me to pay rather than him. Still, the idea means a lot to me and I think it's the basis from which I think about my family in China. So yeah, before I leave, I need to make sure to drag him and maybe his family out to have some of lamb skewers on me.
At this point, it should be clear that I'm closer to my mom's side of the family than my dad's. One reason is that I've simply spent more time with them. In 1997, I lived in Tangshan for almost 2 months, and didn't even go to my dad's old home. Another important reason is the language barrier. My da bai's wife and my da gu -- they can't even speak Mandarin. They can understand it reasonably well, but I can't talk to them. For these two reasons, I've never had a really meaningful conversation with my Guangxi relatives. I wish I could have, but that is left for future visits.
The superbly observant will have noted that Wang Peng and Wang Kang, sons of sons of my mom's brothers, have the surname Wang. While I am surnamed Mao because of my father. So why is Wang Yupo, son of my mom's sister, also a Wang? Simple -- his father is a Wang, too.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_18?authkey=Gv1sRgCKO0uPralvT0Gw
I'd like to talk about spin a little bit. Spin is not a single concept, but very similar patterns applied to different contexts. Spin is where you keep a certain amount of emotional distance from various things, and you use that to your advantange. A very honest, plain-spoken person will only have one emotional viewpoint on any given thing and only ever voice one opinion of that something. If he's nice, maybe he'll take after the proverb about saying nothing about things he doesn't like. I think this is a good way to go about life, and perhaps most Americans live abide pretty closely by it. The average Chinese person, however, applies a lot of spin. If you were a fly on the wall of three different living rooms where a Chinese person is recounting a story to three different friends, you'd likely hear three totally different stories.
Let's factually describe a hypothetical event. Some friends are asked out to dinner by a business acquaintance. He generously provides a tea he likes to be brewed for the whole party. Friend A really likes the tea, and compliments it quite a bit. The hosts sets out some packets of the tea and offers them to anyone who wants to take some home. Some time later, friend A tastes his tea once again and then pockets one of the packets.
When talking about A, people present at the dinner might say of him, "he likes to pretend he really knows his stuff about tea. He was just going on and on about that tea so he took a packet for himself. Now he's going to show off with it at his next dinner and tout how good his tastes are." Who knows, that might lie close to an honest opinion of friend A's behavior.
In some other setting among a different circle of friends, when comes up, the same person from above might say, "oh, A is really into tea. He liked this red tea that we once had. That was a good tea."
As you can see, no matter what your emotions are on a subject, when doing spin, you should always view the situation in a different light. Having gone to so many different dinners with so many subsets of folks, I've seen the same things treated well and poorly in turn, praised and slagged depending on what the speaker was trying to get across. Obviously, some people have more spin than others, but overall, spin is clearly detectable more so in China than in the US. I don't know if I'm ready to label the average Chinese person as slimier because of his spin-doctoring, but I am observing that he does it.
In the morning, we packed into a loaf car to go to my mom's old home. It's where the brother of her father still lives. The poverty in which they live is reminiscent of what I saw in Guangxi. I mean, they have plenty of money, but their attitudes and habits are such that they live in conditions that are like poverty. My mom's uncle is 82 and his mind is perfectly healthy. But he took a spill last year and his legs haven't recovered quite yet. There's some nerve damage that makes it very hard for him to walk. In America, even at that age, his children would likely get together and figure out what kind of physical therapy program he'd need, or what kind of live-in nurse they might try to hire. Here, all his children are busy with their own lives, and so his care is left to his wife, who's perambulatory but not bushy-tailed at her age. In the family, there is enough cash to treat him and to make his life better for years to come. But the attitude here is that he took that fatal fall that is going to leave him bedridden for life, as though there are no options. It might seem cruel to an outsider, but this is probably the way people have been thinking for centuries here. It's these sorts of attitudes that will take the longest to Westernize, if they ever will.
We left there before lunch, even though my mom's uncle's wife insisted on cooking something for us. She was very nice. After scrabbling out of the unpaved country roads in the loaf car, we went into Tangshan city to have lunch before visiting another relative. By keeping lunch limited to ourselves, we were taking off some of the money burden of the relatives who were being visited, who are obligated to host for the visitors. My 3rd Uncle knew a guy who opened this Sichuan restaurant in the city. It specialized in dutch oven cooked fish soup. That dish was amazing. The details are with the photos.
After lunch, we visited my mom's brother's youngest sister, who also lived in Tangshan proper. We hung out for a long time at their home, which was mildly annoying because there were a lot of smokers. While there's a lot of smoking everywhere, I don't have to stick around it for long usually. Even at a web cafe, I could get better air. Finally, we got off our asses and went to the dinner restaurant, bringing our own steamed crabs with us. Chinese restaurants usually don't have problems with you bringing in some of your own dishes. Some have wised up and started taxing outside alcohol, though.
Dinner was extremely over-ordered. Eventually, it got up to triple layers of plates. I didn't stick around to see that with my own eyes, though. I had been lobbying all day to visit my cousin Yupo, who I'd missed in the initial gathering of relatives. I heard second hand about how many dishes there were, left uneaten. Also about how hammered my 2nd and 3rd Uncles got. That's typical for them. Even before I left, about 2/3s into the dinner, about 5 people drinking had put back a couple fifths of 100 proof rice whiskey. And they apparently kept going on brandy and some beer they ordered. I'm sure my uncles soaked up a lot of that total. On the long ride back to Guye, one uncle had his head bowed the whole time, passed out, and the other had his head slack and tipped all the way back, sleeping. Truly tweedledee and tweedledum.
A couple of us took an early taxi for the hour ride back to Guye. At night we finally got ahold of Wang Yupo, who hadn't come up to dinner last night because of the terrible traffic around here. Even tonight he got back pretty late. The company van just couldn't get through the traffic jams fast enough. He has to get up at 6 and gets back at 9. Too many people with cars. Yupo came over in his scooter and picked me up. I think the last time I was on a motorcycle or scooter was 1997 when I was back here. It was at night and only a few minutes or so, so not too scary. Of course neither of us wore any gear or helmets or anything like that.
Anyways, I brought as his gift some DVDs for his daughter, Wang Xinran, or Ranran for short. She's just started first grade this year, and is still bounding with that young kid energy. Fortunately, she hadn't seen at least one of the cartoons I'd brought her. According to her pops, it doesn't matter how little English she knows; she'll keep watching something over and over. Yupo and I started chatting about stuff, and Ranran kept coming over asking about this and that. I showed her the air traffic control game on my iPhone, and she liked that quite a bit. When I last left China, Yupo was dating his wife but still single. What a difference 8 years make. Since then, Yupo's hair has thinned out enough to warrant wearing it really close. He's married that girlfriend and been having a family. His work as an electrician at the train plant has been pretty steady, if a bit hard with all that commuting. It's decent money, which is good. Still, it's not his dream job. He's always wanted to be a director and still pursues that interest by writing in his spare time. He's not terribly good at typing Chinese, so he still writes in shorthand, and if a story is worth it, he has his wife type it up. She teaches elementary school (the very one their daughter goes to) and thus has decent computer skills. I don't actually know her full name. When you're friends with someone much more so than his wife, you can call the wife 'sao zi.' I'm not sure what it means, but it it's basically a title for a friend's wife.
Yupo once had a last ditch effort to get into the moviemaking business. After he graduated from his vocational school, he snuck up to Beijing to audition at the Central Institute for Performance Arts, which would radically boost the viability of his acting career. He went through a couple rounds of auditions, having to make excuses about why he would be away for a couple days at a time. Ultimately, he didn't make the cut, so he had to go back to life as usual. He told me this in confidence some years ago when he didn't have anyone he could share it with. While he was doing these auditions though, he met another hopeful who ended up washing out. This friend stuck it out in Beijing and kept at it one way or another, and eventually landed a job as a script editor. Now they're hiring and the friend has a spot for Yupo. It's a big leap. Yupo has a job and home that supports his wife and kid. If he were to take on this job in Beijing, he's not gonna be able to give up after a few months and come crawling back to that electrician job. He's worried he's not gonna be able to come through on the occasional writing assignments, as writing to someone else's topic as opposed to one's own ideas is much harder. He's going to be living alone in a city that's at least 2 hours away from his family. All serious considerations. Still, it is a good pay raise and would be a real stepping stone to other opportunities in the business. Sadly, I can't relate at all to switching between industries that differ that much, and from a job I tolerate to one I might genuinely like. Yupo's got til about the end of the year to decide.
After hanging out with Yupo and playing with Ranran for a while, I headed back home. I think it was a good talk. There's only one more thing on my checklist -- in 2002, one night we were walking around at night just hanging out, the four of us cousins. Yupo, me, Wang Peng, and Wang Kang. I spotted a vendor broiling lamb skewers over his coal brazier and asked to stop and get some. Yupo ordered the whole set and handed them out to us. I got out some money to pay, but he stopped me. Over all the dinners we'd been invited to, where friends and relatives have paid for, this one moment was the most genuine. Yupo told me, "no matter how much time goes on, no matter how much distance separates us, we're still family, and from one relative to another, it doesn't matter who pays." It's not like it was a lot of money, but it would have made more sense for me to pay rather than him. Still, the idea means a lot to me and I think it's the basis from which I think about my family in China. So yeah, before I leave, I need to make sure to drag him and maybe his family out to have some of lamb skewers on me.
At this point, it should be clear that I'm closer to my mom's side of the family than my dad's. One reason is that I've simply spent more time with them. In 1997, I lived in Tangshan for almost 2 months, and didn't even go to my dad's old home. Another important reason is the language barrier. My da bai's wife and my da gu -- they can't even speak Mandarin. They can understand it reasonably well, but I can't talk to them. For these two reasons, I've never had a really meaningful conversation with my Guangxi relatives. I wish I could have, but that is left for future visits.
The superbly observant will have noted that Wang Peng and Wang Kang, sons of sons of my mom's brothers, have the surname Wang. While I am surnamed Mao because of my father. So why is Wang Yupo, son of my mom's sister, also a Wang? Simple -- his father is a Wang, too.
Friday, October 15, 2010
9/17
9/17
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_17?authkey=Gv1sRgCOCO17fH3O3i8QE
NOTE: I've been told the vocabulary describing relatives is pretty dense and tedious at the end. Feel free to glaze your eyes over that section.
We get up and drive to Tangshan. Mom's cousin, Uncle Biao, is once again ferrying us there in his Buick.
Tangshan has always been a coal town. There's big 100+ ton coal trucks that drive around and ruin the roads. The highspeed road from Beijing down to Tangshan is fine, but once we're local, things slow to a crawl as we deal with major truck traffic and pockmarked roads.
Around noon, we stop off at my mom's mom's younger sister's place in Tangshan city. This relationship is called lao yi in Chinese (youngest sister of one's mother). My mom's lao yi is Biao's mother. Biao is closer to my age than my mother's because of the age difference between the two sisters -- something like 13 years. When my mom's lao yi spoke, it reminded me quite a bit of how my grandmother used to talk. We have a really quick meal and keep going on to Guye district, around which most of my mom's relatives live. While it would be nice to have longer visits with each relative, geography and our timetable make it such that we have to pry ourselves away before getting sucked into any long meals, which you must know by now, is the currency of Chinese hospitality.
We make it to my da yi's apartment (da yi == oldest sister of one's mother). This is where I lived before when I came to China by myself. My da yi, her husband, and my cousin hosted me for most of the time that I spent in Tangshan back in 1997. After unpacking here, we head over to my 2nd Uncle's apartment. Everyone is supposed to be meeting up for dinner. We wait for a long time, but because of the huge uptick in cars, the traffic back into Tangshan has become really bad. My da yi's son, and probably the cousin I'm closest to, Wang Yupo, can't make it into the dinner. This is disappointing, but we proceed to have a fairly tame (by my uncles' drinking standards) meal among the rest of us. I get to meet Yupo's daughter, who was born the year after I last visited. It is also good to reunite with the bevy of uncles and aunts that took care of me while I was over here. The only highlight of the meal worth sharing was a dish of pork brains. I thought it might be kidneys at first, but nope, it was brains. I stared at them for the whole meal, trying to muster the courage to eat one. It wasn't the taste that I feared, but the whole Critonesque fear of getting kuru or something. Eventually, I half a quarter lobe. It tasted fatty and porky, so quite good. But it didn't taste different enough from pork belly that I would risk eating it regularly. I bet fried, it would taste like bacon.
I apologize for freely mixing English and Chinese terms for relative relations. The Chinese relative naming system is pretty complex, and I'd say more relevant than the Nth cousin, x-removed system that exists in English. I describe this just for your entertainment, not to be of use with my story.
First, Chinese has different nows for older and younger siblings. Relative to you:
older-sister: jie
younger-sister: mei
older-brother: ge
younger-brother: di
Sibling seniority:
From the days when multiple brothers and sisters were born to one family, naming by rank makes more sense. It's going to be irrelevant with a couple more generations under the one-child policy. So the eldest brother is called da ge (big older-brother) his siblings. The eldest sister is da jie (big older-sister). The 2nd eldest brother is called er ge (2nd older-brother) by his younger siblings and er di (2nd younger-brother) by his older siblings. The 2nd eldest sister is called er jie or er mei. Then going down the line, each sibling gets labels like that. Usually, older siblings will address younger siblings by their name or nickname instead of by their label. They would only use the label when describing the relationship to someone else. When a younger sibling addresses an older one though, they have to use the label. Exception -- the youngest brother gets the label xiao di (little younger-brother) and the youngest sister gets the label xiao mei. Addendum -- when I led off the examples, I left out that the oldest brother can still be junior to older sisters, or vice versa. To older siblings of sex A, the oldest sibling of sex B is called da di or da mei. But again, this doesn't come up much since by convention, they would be referred to by name. Addendum 2 -- in the South, a variation can be used to describe a family's sons. You could say something like "that family's a er" to mean that family's second eldest son. Note that patrio-implicitly, daughters don't even figure into this ranking. "a" is merely a commonly used exclamation sound.
Mother-side conversion:
How you address aunts and uncles on your mother's side comes from your mother's relationship to them and the corresponding labels. Mother-side uncles use the term jiu, and mother-side aunts use the term yi.
Mother, you:
da ge/di, da jiu
er ge/di, er jiu
san ge/di, san jiu
da jie/mei, da yi
er jie/mei, er yi
Note that since there's only one term for uncle on your mother's side, the term you use doesn't preserve information about the uncle's relative age to your mother. That gets washed out. Finally, another deviation:
Mother, you:
xiao ge/di, lao jiu
xiao jie/mei, lao yi
lao literally means old, but is used informally in very different ways. Here, the meaning is simply the youngest uncle/aunt.
Mother-side grandparents:
Mother, you:
mother, lao lao [again, this literally would be old old, which makes no sense]
father, lao ye
Father-side conversion:
On your father's side, the nouns are different -- shu for uncle, gu for aunt.
Father, you:
da ge/di, da shu in the North, da bai in the South
er ge/di, er shu/bai
xiao ge/di, lao shu/bai
da jie/mei, da gu
xiao jie/mei, lao gu
Father-side grandparents:
mother, nai nai
father, ye ye
When addressing strangers or non-relatives of a different age, it is polite to use the terms:
shu for uncle
a yi for aunt (a just being the same exclamation sound)
nai nai for elderly woman
ye ye for elderly man
It is awkward for people seeking to be friendly to use the terms Mr. and Mrs., which are reserved for formal business type relationships. One more note -- one thing that's tricky about the mother-side and father-side relationships is that different people have different titles for the same relatives. For example, you call your mother's eldest sister da yi, but your cousin who's the son of your mother's brother calls the same aunt da gu.
A note on the Tangshan accent:
The Tangshan dialect is for the most part very similar to standard Mandarin. They have weird rules that transform and lilt the tones of certain words, along with a batch of commonly used slang terms. A slang example --
yesterday, today, tomorrow.
Mandarin: zuo tian, jin tian, ming tian
Beijing slang: zuo tian, jir, mir
Tangshan slang: lir, jir, mir
sound/tone change examples:
Mandarin: fang4 jia4 (to go on vacation)
Tangshan: fang3 jia2
Mandarin: tai4 (excessively, extremely)
Tangshan: tei2 or tei1
While tei is totally permissible under Chinese phonology, that sound in any tone doesn't exist in standard Mandarin. It's interesting to see the Tangshan dialect reach out and fill in the hole.
I'd say you have to have a certain mastery of spoken Mandarin before you can easily coerce phrases that on their face aren't intelligible because of all the wrong tones, into contextually correct phrases. This is easier when dealing with accents in English because there are far fewer homonyms in English compared to Chinese.
To illustrate the overall effect the lilt gives to Tangshan speech, I would compare the difference in accent to how the Beatles sound to us American speakers.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_17?authkey=Gv1sRgCOCO17fH3O3i8QE
NOTE: I've been told the vocabulary describing relatives is pretty dense and tedious at the end. Feel free to glaze your eyes over that section.
We get up and drive to Tangshan. Mom's cousin, Uncle Biao, is once again ferrying us there in his Buick.
Tangshan has always been a coal town. There's big 100+ ton coal trucks that drive around and ruin the roads. The highspeed road from Beijing down to Tangshan is fine, but once we're local, things slow to a crawl as we deal with major truck traffic and pockmarked roads.
Around noon, we stop off at my mom's mom's younger sister's place in Tangshan city. This relationship is called lao yi in Chinese (youngest sister of one's mother). My mom's lao yi is Biao's mother. Biao is closer to my age than my mother's because of the age difference between the two sisters -- something like 13 years. When my mom's lao yi spoke, it reminded me quite a bit of how my grandmother used to talk. We have a really quick meal and keep going on to Guye district, around which most of my mom's relatives live. While it would be nice to have longer visits with each relative, geography and our timetable make it such that we have to pry ourselves away before getting sucked into any long meals, which you must know by now, is the currency of Chinese hospitality.
We make it to my da yi's apartment (da yi == oldest sister of one's mother). This is where I lived before when I came to China by myself. My da yi, her husband, and my cousin hosted me for most of the time that I spent in Tangshan back in 1997. After unpacking here, we head over to my 2nd Uncle's apartment. Everyone is supposed to be meeting up for dinner. We wait for a long time, but because of the huge uptick in cars, the traffic back into Tangshan has become really bad. My da yi's son, and probably the cousin I'm closest to, Wang Yupo, can't make it into the dinner. This is disappointing, but we proceed to have a fairly tame (by my uncles' drinking standards) meal among the rest of us. I get to meet Yupo's daughter, who was born the year after I last visited. It is also good to reunite with the bevy of uncles and aunts that took care of me while I was over here. The only highlight of the meal worth sharing was a dish of pork brains. I thought it might be kidneys at first, but nope, it was brains. I stared at them for the whole meal, trying to muster the courage to eat one. It wasn't the taste that I feared, but the whole Critonesque fear of getting kuru or something. Eventually, I half a quarter lobe. It tasted fatty and porky, so quite good. But it didn't taste different enough from pork belly that I would risk eating it regularly. I bet fried, it would taste like bacon.
I apologize for freely mixing English and Chinese terms for relative relations. The Chinese relative naming system is pretty complex, and I'd say more relevant than the Nth cousin, x-removed system that exists in English. I describe this just for your entertainment, not to be of use with my story.
First, Chinese has different nows for older and younger siblings. Relative to you:
older-sister: jie
younger-sister: mei
older-brother: ge
younger-brother: di
Sibling seniority:
From the days when multiple brothers and sisters were born to one family, naming by rank makes more sense. It's going to be irrelevant with a couple more generations under the one-child policy. So the eldest brother is called da ge (big older-brother) his siblings. The eldest sister is da jie (big older-sister). The 2nd eldest brother is called er ge (2nd older-brother) by his younger siblings and er di (2nd younger-brother) by his older siblings. The 2nd eldest sister is called er jie or er mei. Then going down the line, each sibling gets labels like that. Usually, older siblings will address younger siblings by their name or nickname instead of by their label. They would only use the label when describing the relationship to someone else. When a younger sibling addresses an older one though, they have to use the label. Exception -- the youngest brother gets the label xiao di (little younger-brother) and the youngest sister gets the label xiao mei. Addendum -- when I led off the examples, I left out that the oldest brother can still be junior to older sisters, or vice versa. To older siblings of sex A, the oldest sibling of sex B is called da di or da mei. But again, this doesn't come up much since by convention, they would be referred to by name. Addendum 2 -- in the South, a variation can be used to describe a family's sons. You could say something like "that family's a er" to mean that family's second eldest son. Note that patrio-implicitly, daughters don't even figure into this ranking. "a" is merely a commonly used exclamation sound.
Mother-side conversion:
How you address aunts and uncles on your mother's side comes from your mother's relationship to them and the corresponding labels. Mother-side uncles use the term jiu, and mother-side aunts use the term yi.
Mother, you:
da ge/di, da jiu
er ge/di, er jiu
san ge/di, san jiu
da jie/mei, da yi
er jie/mei, er yi
Note that since there's only one term for uncle on your mother's side, the term you use doesn't preserve information about the uncle's relative age to your mother. That gets washed out. Finally, another deviation:
Mother, you:
xiao ge/di, lao jiu
xiao jie/mei, lao yi
lao literally means old, but is used informally in very different ways. Here, the meaning is simply the youngest uncle/aunt.
Mother-side grandparents:
Mother, you:
mother, lao lao [again, this literally would be old old, which makes no sense]
father, lao ye
Father-side conversion:
On your father's side, the nouns are different -- shu for uncle, gu for aunt.
Father, you:
da ge/di, da shu in the North, da bai in the South
er ge/di, er shu/bai
xiao ge/di, lao shu/bai
da jie/mei, da gu
xiao jie/mei, lao gu
Father-side grandparents:
mother, nai nai
father, ye ye
When addressing strangers or non-relatives of a different age, it is polite to use the terms:
shu for uncle
a yi for aunt (a just being the same exclamation sound)
nai nai for elderly woman
ye ye for elderly man
It is awkward for people seeking to be friendly to use the terms Mr. and Mrs., which are reserved for formal business type relationships. One more note -- one thing that's tricky about the mother-side and father-side relationships is that different people have different titles for the same relatives. For example, you call your mother's eldest sister da yi, but your cousin who's the son of your mother's brother calls the same aunt da gu.
A note on the Tangshan accent:
The Tangshan dialect is for the most part very similar to standard Mandarin. They have weird rules that transform and lilt the tones of certain words, along with a batch of commonly used slang terms. A slang example --
yesterday, today, tomorrow.
Mandarin: zuo tian, jin tian, ming tian
Beijing slang: zuo tian, jir, mir
Tangshan slang: lir, jir, mir
sound/tone change examples:
Mandarin: fang4 jia4 (to go on vacation)
Tangshan: fang3 jia2
Mandarin: tai4 (excessively, extremely)
Tangshan: tei2 or tei1
While tei is totally permissible under Chinese phonology, that sound in any tone doesn't exist in standard Mandarin. It's interesting to see the Tangshan dialect reach out and fill in the hole.
I'd say you have to have a certain mastery of spoken Mandarin before you can easily coerce phrases that on their face aren't intelligible because of all the wrong tones, into contextually correct phrases. This is easier when dealing with accents in English because there are far fewer homonyms in English compared to Chinese.
To illustrate the overall effect the lilt gives to Tangshan speech, I would compare the difference in accent to how the Beatles sound to us American speakers.
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