Part of a series of posts detailing my adventures in China exactly one year ago (give or take a day or two!).
Extract from my journal:
Wednesday 7th March 2007
I’m writing this on Thursday morning, and yesterday was the maddest, most fascinating, most genuinely Chinese day of the trip. We woke early on the overnight train, and got off at Hankou, making our way through the chaos of the station into the Wuhan morning. After breakfast at the Riverside Hotel, which we’ll be staying at when we return to Wuhan, we headed out by coach to Suizhou – a “small” city of 2.5 million people. The coach driver got a bit lost once we arrived in Suizhou, but we got a taxi driver to show us the way to our hotel.
We then went to the school that we’d arranged to visit. It’s massive: 6,000 students, and they had a great bit banner across one of the school buildings saying “Welcome to Mr Greg Benton and Our Other Foreign Friends”, and a “reception” for us. We were ushered into a lecture theatre, where the pupils stood and applauded us as we arrived, and the headmaster made a speech in our honour. We were treated like celebrities, and bombarded with questions about life in Britain, giving Greg a chance to slag off British food in general and fish and chips in particular!
The attention lavished on us felt utterly bizarre and was strangely intoxicating, especially when we went to this square surrounded on three sides by tower blocks in which many of the students live, and loads of them came out on the balconies to see us! But we had other people and places to visit, so we had to move on. It was quite fun being treated in this way, even if I was told by a Chinese lad that I look like the President of Iran! (It could be worse: Laura was told she looks like Harry Potter.) The pupil’s English was very good, and they wanted photos with us and our email addresses – crazy.
We then headed out to have lunch with some of Greg’s relatives in a town called Lushan, which was even less developed. The toilet facilities in particular were very primative – concrete holes in the floor that seemed to empty directly into the river outside! But the lunch provided for us, which included many local delicacies, was amazing, and really tasty, especially this special pork dish. Greg’s brother-in-law paid for this great spread of food, and we were joined by his father-in-law, an old Chinese fellow who had been head of his village for many years, who was very pleased to see us.
After that, we went to a nearby nursery or kindergarten. The little children were really sweet, but rather nervous of us. They have already been taught a little English, and the teacher got them to chant “Ha-llo, how are yoo?” to us when we arrived! We found that the way to get their attention was with our digital cameras, which they were fascinated by. We gave them some children’s toys and picture books as gifts, as well as some sweets.
We then went up to Greg’s in-laws’ village, along a straight rough road. This really was rural, with chickens and waterbuffalo by the side of the road, and the paddy fields beyond. Eventually the coach had taken us as far as it could, and we got out to walk the short distance along the dirt track and across the rough bridge to our next stop, the Wushu centre, where the local boys go to learn martial arts.
On arriving, we had to wait outside a short while, and when we entered the courtyard – wham! All the boys were doing this demonstration of their craft, all doing the same moves in unison, each smack of the hand and stamp of the feet repeated a hundredfold. We then attempted to copy one of them doing these moves, which was a right laugh! The boys range from around four years old up to their mid-teens. The conditions are very basic, living in cold, rough sleeping quarters. In our money, it costs around £200 pounds for them to stay there the entire year to train.
We then went up to the grave of Greg’s grandfather-in-law. He was a guerrilla fighter in the Red Army against the Japanese, and head of the village afterwards. He suffered in the Cultural Revolution because he had kept one wardrobe that had belonged to the local landlord who had been overthrown. When Greg’s wife was a small child, soldiers had attempted to make her renounce him, her very own grandfather who had brought her up, but she had cried so much they let her off.
He died in 1993. Communists were supposed to be cremated, but he wanted to be buried, so his friends stole the body to bury it on the hillside behind the village in the traditional way. The Party, knowing that he was a lifelong loyal Communist, turned a blind eye. And so it was on this hillside, with the sun setting over the village and rice fields, that we watched as his family burned paper money for him to spend in the afterlife, and set off fireworks to scare off the evil spirits, and Greg and his father in law bowed to the grave to pay their respects to their ancestor.
We went back through the rough brick village houses, which has red signs and banners up on the doors for the new year period, to the home of another of Greg’s relatives for a banquet provided by his father in law. The food was specially prepared for us – they had slaughtered a pig in our honour a couple of weeks ago!
Two of the English teachers from the school we visited, one of whom was a friend and classmate of Greg’s wife, had come with us for the day, and it was interesting talking to one of them about the local religious beliefs. The family had a Buddhist shrine in their house, and the teacher I talked to was aware of Christianity, but knew very little of what it was about.
Many of the village wandered in to see the foreign visitors. Greg was the only foreigner who had ever been to the village before, so to have sixteen of us was a great novelty. One of those present was the Communist Party village secretary, a battleaxe of a woman who was trying to jolly everyone into drinking and rice eating contests. Greg kept on insisting increasingly tipsily that she was an amazing woman, the most amazing woman in all of China. But she didn’t take kindly to my refusal of the offer of more bijiu, the extremely alcoholic white spirit. When she wasn’t looking, I tipped most of mine into my rice bowl, since I’d finished eating. But then she filled all of our bowls with a big dollop of rice for a rice eating contest, gobbling hers down in seconds! My rice soaked up the bijiu, tasting absolutely foul, so my cunning ploy backfired badly!
But their hospitality and friendliness was amazing, despite the language barrier. Greg’s father in law was very sweet, smiling widely and bowing to us all as he saw us off on the bus as we headed back to the hotel in Suizhou. This day felt like a proper taste of China, rather than just a tourist visit, and for that reason is the highlight of the trip.