news

Week one

This will be my travel journal, to be updated at least once a week.

My dad and I arrived in China on Saturday the 26th with basically no plans for the month ahead.

We climbed off the cramped plane into the humid, glowing night streets of Shanghai at night (and, of course, promptly got lost.) We went through the requisite schlepping-the-stuff-around-looking-for-the-hostel stage of the trip, eventually collapsing in the nearest borderline-ripoff hotel we could find. During the first couple of days, I had bought a censored book, learned that “niu” (cow) is Chinese slang for badass, eaten amazing fried dumplings, written several bad poems, gotten lost, and watched the World Cup in a smoke-filled noodle shop. We found the youth hostel we had been looking for, took lots of cat pictures, avoided the Expo, and looked like stupid tourists (most probably because… we were being stupid tourists?)

Now we’re staying on a small farm in Fengqiao Village, a rural area on the outskirts of Shanghai. It’s ridiculously humid and beautiful here (not all that hot, though). It’s a strange juxtaposition between the old and the new- the location, the people, their home. They have ducks, chickens, geese, fish ponds, and enough farmland to feed the family and give some away to friends. Most of the people in the area have the same arrangement, except for those who work in the nearby clothing factory (RMB150 per 15-hour day). It’s family homes, rice fields and lotus ponds, occasionally interrupted by an apartment building or scrap metal foundry or factory. Our host’s parents live with him in a run-down old cement building- the kind you expect to see when you hear “rural China.” It’s the place where the food is cooked, where the food is eaten, where the tea is drunk, where the conversation happens- all of the living happens down there. But right next to the parents’ house is the family’s newer, huge (three stories) white Western-style house, with barely any furnishing or decoration. That’s where we sleep, but other than that, no one spends time in it.

The grandpa of the family is quite a character. He kind of reminds me of a leprechaun. Only a really excitable Maoist leprechaun. He was in his late teens during the Cultural Revolution, a part of the fist-pumping armbanded mass of that generation. Apparently, he saw Mao Zedong speak in Beijing. He still has all his armbands and buttons and little red books.

We’ve been here for two days, but haven’t started working yet. So far, we’re just sort of hanging out- eating, playing with the kids, going to visit the pigs, exploring the area on bikes, looking for fireflies (I had never seen them before), listening to Grandpa rant about the cultural revolution, playing guitar. It’s very mellow, and to tell the truth it’s also a little drifty and awkward. It’s a very different way of spending time, because most of the family is at home all day. The grandparents are retired, and the kids are on summer vacation. The dad and his brother are unemployed except for keeping up the small farm (The mom goes to work in downtown Shanghai.) They’re also a lot less dependent on media for entertainment. The kids watch cartoons a little and the parents read the newspaper, but you never see anyone absorbed in a book or listening to music or watching a soap opera. So without tasks to do on the farm, I’m not really sure what to do with myself.

All that aside (or included, I’m not sure yet), I’m really glad we decided to come here. The whole family is nice and inclusive, happy to answer stupid questions and take us along on whatever they’re doing. They’re really into sharing culture- they seem just as curious about ours as we are about theirs, so there’s a lot of interesting back-and-forth there. The conversation is mostly about food and politics. It turns out the mom is from Guangzhou- when we can’t figure out the Mandarin or English translation of a word we just can just speak Cantonese. It’s really nice for me to have someone there with a common fluentish language, and it turns out she’s quite sweet. It’s probably cutting into Mandarin learning to be using Cantonese so much, but ah well…

My English is definitely suffering. I caught myself using the wrong “there” earlier.

Sorry, no philosophical musings today.

c: Natalie