Christina in China

Before I go further, I guess I should write a little about this crazy place I’m living. I may have blogged before about this, but the word that epitomizes my China experience so far is “contrast.” Jiangyou fits the bill there, too. Like I mentioned before, downtown Jiangyou is called Zhong Ba. It’s like any other city–big by West Virginia or western New York standards but small by China standards. There are big billboards and ritzy department stores, places selling bootleg DVDs and computers, places with shoes or jewelry or clothes or anything you want. We even have a KFC, but we aren’t big enough for a McDonald’s. I can’t say I’m sad. And, as you may suspect, there are restaurants everywhere–from fancy restaurants with cloth napkins to hole-in-the-wall joints (where I eat), where you order whatever you want, grab a pair of chopsticks, and eat, spitting the bones on the floor or on the table.

There are people everywhere here. China is the most populous country in the world, and Sichuan is the most densely populated province in China. And with people, there is traffic. All kinds of traffic. On a Jiangyou street, there are green official taxis, some private cars, city buses, public buses (like a Greyhound, except a minibus), motorcycles, motorcycle cart-type things, bicycle cart-type things (like a rickshaw?), bikes, gray skinny minivans that will take you back and forth from campus for 1 yuan each way, farmers toting baskets with vegetables or fruit or grains on their backs or on a cart, people walking, people, people people. There are clear traffic lights and traffic patterns. Technically. But a double-yellow line means nothing if the coast is clear…or if the coast isn’t clear, but you think you can make it while still missing the other person by at least six inches. There are two main rules: 1) Every person for him/herself, and 2) The biggest vehicle has the right of way. Sichuan drivers also like to honk; I think it’s a way of confirming their own existence or something, kind of like how Samuel Beckett characters talk all the time or how Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” A new phrase to paint on the side of taxis: “I honk, therefore I am.” I haven’t yet seen a car with a seatbelt. So you hold on to the handle, say your prayers, and enjoy the ride, basically.

I enjoy just walking down the street, seeing the women carrying babies (with a conveniently-placed slit in the bottom of their pants so that the babies can do their business at will), watching men and women carting dirt and gravel, looking at the people near campus that sell fruits and vegetables or that roll wontons (called hun dun), seeing them putting rice or corn out to dry on a bamboo “tarp” they put on the sidewalk and spreading it with a rake, seeing people selling shao kao–Sichuan barbecue, which is shish kebabs of meat, green beans, green onions, peppers, lotus root (crunchy and quite good), and what looks like some kind of potato. It’s certainly different here.

I like the bustle of things, but it’s also nice just to relax a bit, drink some tea and relax by the canal downtown, despite the fact that people always walk by, wanting to shine your shoes for 1 kuai (slang for 1 yuan, kind of like how “buck” is slang for “dollar”), give you a massage, sell you peanuts or orange, clean your ears (yes, this is true–they carry around these strange metal rods), etc. Chrysanthemum tea is becoming a favorite. People drink a lot of green tea here–loose leaf, strong green tea in a clear glass, without any sugar. But chrysanthemum is my favorite, with (obviously) chrysanthemum flowers floating in the glass, along with red dates and other flowers. It’s quite beautiful and has a good, mild flavor. It’s about 3 or 4 kuai for a bottomless glass, which is nice and relaxing to drink under an umbrella while reading or writing.

The other day, I sought out some more (relative) peace and quiet. The school is outside town, near the fields. I went on a walk away from the school and turned left on a random road, then walked down that road for about forty-five minutes. It was a dusty, dirt-and-concrete road that snakes around beside the rice fields. It’s a very soothing sound, the sound of the rice swishing in the wind–a mix between the rustling of trees and the swaying of grass. A good sound to listen to. The farmers were out harvesting the rice, which they do by putting the long-grasslike blades into stalks and drying them until they look like something Americans put on their porches at Halloween or Thanksgiving. When the stalks are dry (I think–I’m obviously no expert), they take the stalks and smack them against a large basket. To get the rice free, I think. Then they eventually gather these into larger bundles and burn everything, as they dry the rice and the corn on every bit of spare concrete in town.

Not to say that this road was particularly quiet. There were still occasional vans and motorbikes, construction workers building, children laughing, the sounds of life. It was odd, though, how different it seemed on that road than on the main road going to the school. Everyone looked at me, of course, as I was probably the only foreigner to travel that way in a while, to look at the brick or concrete farmers’ houses, to walk out near the baijiu (hard liquor) factory, to watch a man forming clay roof tiles and pots by hand. I almost felt bad about looking at them, even though they were blatantly staring at me. I said “nimen hao” to the children that were amused at seeing me, and one little girl smiled and waved back, her eyes crinkling and hand flapping over on itself in a clumsy motion.

I almost felt like I was invading, intruding on the place where they lived and worked and raised their families, in a way that I rarely feel like I’m intruding on campus, with its students that come and go. Sometimes I’m far from excited to see the way people live here. It’s not pristine, with trash thrown in the river, vehicle exhaust spewing out of cars, smokestacks from the nearby coal-burning power plant pouring smoke into the air. I was almost sad to the farmers doing the harvesting with a machine, and then I realized that who am I to say that people should harvest all their rice by hand, straining their muscles to whack the thick stalks and loosen the rice? It’s stupid to think that people should do everything by hand, for the sake of being “quaint.” People have a right to machines and motorbikes and things that in many ways will make lives that are harder than I can imagine a little easier. And yet it’s upsetting to see some of the environmental devastation here, with trash thrown in creeks and the smokestacks belching out pollutants. Not to say that the Chinese aren’t taking good steps, offering money for recycling paper, plastic, glass, and other things. In many ways, the recycling programs are better here than in the U.S. But modernization, what some call “progress,” is both a curse and a blessing.

In Chinese, jiang means “river,” and you means “oil.” So the name of my town, essentially, is “river oil.” Contrary to what I believed at one point, there is a river, the Fujiang, running through town. The “oil,” according to Eunice, is natural gas, which Jiangyou is supposed to have a fair amount of. I think of rivers as natural, of oil as a pollutant, something unnatural, foreign, and that is what Jiangyou seems to me. On a clear morning, I can look out the third floor of Building 9 and see the blue mountains in the distance, an outline that’s jagged and beautiful against the gray sky, that makes me want to hop a bus and go to them, where the air is clearer and I can see them up close. Usually, though, it’s smoke from the smokestacks and from the steam engine trains that I see. It clouds the mountains and the sky until I can’t see anything but smog and dust, few blue skies, few stars. But in a way, when I do see blue skies, they’re all the more beautiful.

Tags: China, Environment, Jiangyou, Traffic

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 11th, 2005 at 11:52 am and is filed under Jiangyou. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.