yangshuo

I spent the last two days in Yangshuo.  Amazing place.  And just what I needed.  I loved biking through the rice fields amidst beautiful scenery, and staying in a family-run hostel that treated me like a family member as well.  I will put up my pictures eventually, but they really don't do the town justice, because 1) I lack a pollution filter (yes, even the outdoor cities of "only" 400,000 in China have pollution.  trivia: China has 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities.  and they're mostly places you haven't heard of; if i recall correctly, beijing, shanghai, etc don't even make the list.), but really they don't do it justice because 2) to appreciate a place like yangshuo, you really have to be there and feel the atmosphere, hear the silence except for the occasional hum of a passing motorbiker, and soak in the quiet.  i felt the same way about the great wall and the swiss alps, for what it's worth.  it's a rare place in china, indeed, where you can get away from the noise pollution.

 

the typical thing to do in the area is to take an 8 hour boat ride down the li river from guilin (closest airport) to yangshuo.  however, the river's too low right now for the trip, which was actually not a disappointment to me at all.  i don't think you have to take the boat ride to appreciate the scenery, and that's been ratified by a few I've spoken with who've done it.  but i wanted to do something on the river, so i took a short local trip on a bamboo raft.  i shared it with a chinese man "david" in town for business from shanghai.  david was neatly, nicely dressed like any of our fathers would be, and he loved practicing his english with me.  i actually didn't mind his fatherly treatment of me or acting interested in the camera pics he had of his three year old son.

 

when we got on the boat, "david" asked me what the name of such a vessel was in english.  i shrugged and said "bamboo raft?  is there a special name in chinese?" to which he responded, "$%^&*.  in english, it means 'bamboo ferry.'" ... chinese, very literal language...  you'd know that of course by looking at any restaurant menu or the translation of any monument or building (one of my personal favorites is the "wall of accumulated elegance," a fantastically eroded sedimentary rock wall in the forbidden city).

"david" was able to do a decent job of translating what they have named some of the rock structures ("looks like a camel" - true, it did, "looks like a man" - umm, ok...).  At the beginning of the ride I paid for it with two 20-yuan bills, and the woman turned it over and showed me that the picture on the bill was exactly what i was looking at.  when i returned, she showed me the bill again, telling me what i had given her was counterfeit.  there must be a lot of counterfeit money in china.  everywhere i went in beijing, no matter what i was buying, they checked the bills for authenticity.  i managed to get through nearly three months in beijing without accidentally using anything fake.  a guy i met in yangshuo had been swindled out of 500 yuan by a taxi driver when he first landed in the country.  he had gone to an ATM, pulled out some money, and when he tried to pay the taxi driver, the driver just kept taking a bill, looking at it (evidently switching it with a fake 100 he had), and handing it back saying it was fake.  andy was amazed at the time he had received fake money from an ATM, until our hostel owner put it together for us that the taxi driver was switching the money with his quick hands for counterfeit bills.  later in the day when i bought some awesome handwoven shoes, i was chatting with the woman and asked her about the prevalence of fake money.  i guess all the shopkeepers down there can tell instantly by touching it.  i can tell the difference when i compare my fake 20 with a real one, but would never be able to tell the difference if i didn't have a benchmark bill.

 

anyway, "david" and i had no way of knowing that the 20 the woman claimed i gave her was actually the one i gave her, or if she had switched it with another one.  but i happily gave her another 20, and commented to "david" on our walk back that i didn't mind so much even if she was "not being a friend" ("friend" or "not friend" was the way david phrased "honest worker" or "criminal") because i recognized i was lucky and came from a rich country.  this led to a conversation about how in china the cities are so different from the rural areas.  for perspective, stuart tells me the average rural chinese person makes about 200 yuan per month ($27).  david began speaking about his extremely poor hometown in rural anhui province.  i asked him more about his hometown and his family, and it came out that his older brother worked for a building company.  i was fearful he meant one of the miserably cold, poor construction workers that live on-site in pseudo-tent structures that i saw every step of every day in beijing, but identifying with david and the way i pictured his life based on his appearance and the way he described his job, i was hopeful that he meant he was a manager or office worker of some sort.  but then i asked about his sister, and he said she was 25 (despite all appearances, my age ;)) and worked in a clothes factory.  he said she "sews clothes."  at that point i thought he could only mean she worked in a sweatshop, and so i fearfully asked, "oh.  it is a very very hard job then?" "yes"  "many long hours?" "yes, many long hours."  it was heartwrenching to realize the background david must have come from, and that he was perhaps the chosen child that was sent to college to go earn money for the family.  now granted, i'm making that last part up about being the chosen child, but it was hard for me to hear how someone i identified so much with was actually so totally different and had a family that lived in miserable conditions.  the night before at dinner i had talked with some people about how anything that necessitates labor in china is dirt cheap, because labor is practically free.  they had said that westerners don't care about the sweatshops and they only care about getting goods for the lowest price possible.  i told them i wasn't sure i agreed.  while that may in the end be true, to begin with in our heads the low price isn't linked with the exploitation of the chinese workforce.  when i see a shirt that's cheap, i don't think about it being cheap because the people that made it are getting paid less than a dollar a day.  it may be that we'd still decide to buy the shirt even if we were thinking about what made it so cheap, but at least at present the only thing that can be corroborated is that the image/reality has not been branded into our minds.  i'm not sure how that exploitation can be fixed (wait, didn't marx have some ideas about that? ;)), but obviously first the two have to actually be linked in our heads.

 

that night i asked the hostel owner if i could cook with the family.  we had a great time cooking the 10 or so dishes together, and i got to see how to make some of the delicious chinese food they'd served us the night before.  a highlight was the sweet and sour chicken (housemates, you can look forward to the fire alarm going off when i attempt to fry the chicken for it upon return, as i've never successfully fried anything i don't think...).  while i was helping them i walked out the kitchen door to the back where a few family members were, and saw a fully membered but defeathered bloody chicken lying on the ground.  they looked at me, and must've assumed that i was horrified, because they said, "not for you, for us to eat!"  (little did they know i have the food standards of a cockroach and would've sat right down and eaten it with them.)  after returning to cooking, i saw them chop up the chicken, bone, beak, and all, and put it into a pot for some homemade hot pot (they had cabbage, radish, and bone with skimpy chicken for their hot pot).  the grandfather came in later and took out the beak to eat.  i was shocked not by the chicken, but that the quality of the food that i was served as a guest was so far superior to what they ate themselves.  especially because the night before we hadn't even finished half of what they served us, and then the mother just lopped all the leftovers into one soupy mess, rather than clearing the serving plates to the other room so that they could finish it off.

i popped for the taxi ride back to the airport with my 3 suitcases for my flight to hangzhou, and as the plane crested the smog layer i was greeted with a beautiful blue sky.  i had an amazing time in yangshuo, but it definitely confronted me with the two major things that concern me about china: it's total disregard for the environment and the rural poor.