It took almost a year after the trip, but I’ve finally managed to finish the photo book for our China trip. In hindsight, I’m glad I procrastinated on this project, as Blurb, where I’m ordering the book from, only started offering PDF-to-book printing a few months ago, freeing me from the confines of its book-design software and just use InDesign to do whatever I want. You can see a preview of the book here. Oh yeah, and BUY MY BOOK! BUY MY BOOK! BUY MY … Actually, I don’t expect anyone other than me to shell out $85 for this book.

Speaking of the China pictures, Courtney and I each entered three in a photo contest by the Center for Global Initiatives at UNC. We got word yesterday that even though we didn’t win, we would each have a photo displayed at the UNC Center for Global Education starting Monday. I love ribbons-for-all contests.

Only in Japan: Ninja Santas!

Christmas doesn’t have quite the same significance in China, of course. It’s more like New Year’s Eve in the States: an opportunity for young people to go out and party. The streets of Xi’an, where we spent the holiday, were very busy in Christmas Eve, and the sidewalks were packed with people shopping or just strolling around. Our hotel held a huge party in the lobby, complete with musical acts, lots of drinking, and two young, skinny Chinese guys dressed as Santa. It was wild, and oddly charming.

John’s dad said that decorating for Christmas was a way for businesses to show that they are up-to-date and cosmopolitan. Western things in general were much in style: we saw plenty of restaurants and shops, even outside Beijing, with English names or French ones (Café Monet, Bonjour). One popular chain of clothing stores was even called Jeans West. Ordinary brands of jeans like Levis could cost hundreds of dollars, as they were seen as a status symbol, and coffee was more expensive than back home, as it, too, carried a Western patina. Clothes at the street market in Guangzhou bore English logos—not just brand names but random sayings and knockoffs of college apparel (we saw a Carolina sweatshirt—it was yellow—and an N.C. State one, which, if I remember correctly, was orange). I even saw a teenager in a Hangzhou restaurant sporting a Kevin Federline-esque trucker hat. Our hotel in Shanghai played Edith Piaf tunes—in French—as background music, and, along with tai chi, a popular form of recreation in the parks was ballroom dancing.

For dinner on Christmas night, our tour guide took us to a putatively “Western” restaurant in Xi’an. He meant well, I’m sure, but it was one of the strangest meals I’ve ever eaten. We were served a motley collection of dishes, starting with a minestrone soup in which in the only discernable vegetable was cabbage. Then it was on to steak frites, chicken piccata, thick-cut French fries with the skins on them, an omelet, and Chinese vegetables with fish balls. For dessert, we had apple cinnamon strudel, neatly cut into chopstickable slivers. Some of this was delicious—I have fond memories of the fries and the strudel, and the minestrone soup was polished off in no time—but the combination of dishes was distinctly weird. Author Fuschia Dunlop, who has spent years studying food in China, says this multifarious approach to Western cuisine is typical. The Chinese, she writes, lump all European and American cuisines together as “Western,” not distinguishing between, say, French dishes and Italian ones. In much the same way, Americans tend to regard “Chinese food” as one monolithic entity, not realizing that each region of China has its own distinct flavors.

Cultural appropriation definitely goes both ways. Here a frisson of the “mysterious East” can make many things chic: yoga, feng shui, sushi, half the tchotchkes at Pier 1, even religious icons like the Dalai Lama. (Someday I want to see Chinese film stars bragging about their private audiences with Pope Benedict XVI.) J In China, maybe, people feel stylish and cultured when they don those pricey Levis or sip espresso at the Seattle Coffee Shop in Guangzhou.

On the one hand, sure, this kind of thing can be shallow, especially when folks do things like get tattoos with Chinese characters they don’t know the meaning of, or, in Asia, unwittingly wear clothes emblazoned with English profanities. It can easily be worse than shallow, like when people treat China and Japan as though they’re interchangeable (especially insulting, considering the Japanese occupied parts of China during World War II). I know I felt uneasy to see Christmas stripped of even the pretense of religious significance. The holiday’s heavily commercialized in the States, but, even so, people get, on a gut level, that it’s about the birth of Christ. The narrative and the cultural freight of the Christ story resonates, even despite the shopping frenzy and the omnipresence of Santa. (This is how we can have bizarre syncretic Christmas carols like “Here Comes Santa Claus,” which contains the lines, “Santa Claus knows we’re all God’s children / That makes everything right / So hang your stockings and say your prayers / ‘Cause Santa Claus comes tonight.”) You either feel it, or, if you’re atheist or agnostic, you negotiate with it in some way, perhaps by reacting against it.

But in China, the prevailing spirit is, “Let’s put up some trees and go party!” Which, well . . . is kind of fun, actually. And in no way did I feel that the Chinese were disrespecting my religion with their Christmas festivities: they were just out to have a good time. Plus, I’ve hoisted my share of Cinco de Mayo margaritas without knowing anything about Mexican history, so I’m not one to talk. Maybe the desire to have fun, without thinking too hard about it, is the universal constant; just maybe, deep down, we’re all shallow.

• 50% creativity/originality
• 25% written expression (the caption that I will write for the photo)
• 25% relevance to theme of sharing travel experiences (whatever that means)

Here are some of my favorites (or, if you have a few hours to kill, go pick out something from my entire China trip collection):

Big Wild Goose Pagoda, Xi’an	Tian Tan Buddha (might be the front runner right now). There’s also a lighter photo of the same shot here, though I like this one a little more because the darkness accentuates the sunlight.
Dried duck and sausages in the street market on Lantau Island	Mother and child. General Yue’s Mausoleum in Hangzhou
Fish being air-dried outside the Lion Forest Garden in Suzhou	Courtney runs afoul of one of the guardian lion statues at the Big Wild Goose Pagoda.
How to get ahead in China.	A couple take a stroll on a frozen Lake Kunming at the Summer Palace in Beijing.

• One thing that we noticed throughout our trip was how active the elderly in China seemed to be. At every one of the cities we visited, there were always sizable groups of senior citizens in parks and other public spaces, dancing, singing, exercising on the public workout equipment, practicing tai chi, or just hanging out. There was a park right across the street from our hotel in Guangzhou, and every day, it’s filled with old people doing all sorts of activities, including a small group that had set up a tent with audio equipment and was singing Cantonese operas. We could hear it from across the road as soon as we walked out of our hotel.
• One of my aunts, who is extremely active despite being in her 70s, told me that she was a member of an organization of retirees and that the group has so many activities scheduled every week that “it’s busier than when I was working.”
• With China’s population getting older, many people are being pushed into retiring earlier than in the past in order to free up jobs for the younger generations, and some of my relatives are no exceptions (one of them told me, “Right now, it’s great to be young in China.”). As this story reports, that is creating some problems as China has virtually no pension system. In the past, it was expected that the children will take care of their parents in their old age. That expectation is still there, and as is the case with my extended family, the children are still living up to that responsibility.
• While riding on the subway one day with one of my aunts and her husband, both of whom are retired, I mentioned how active the old people in China seem to be. My aunt and uncle said that the main thing is that retirees are able to organize into large groups and keep each other busy. I think that’s partly due to the extensive public transportation system and well-maintained and often-used public spaces such as parks, making it easier for the elderly to get around and meet up. In America, many senior citizens have no real way of going anywhere without someone giving them a ride. In China, there are buses, subways, and many more walkable streets.

• In general, the people in China do seem to be better off than they were 10-15 years ago. We were mostly in big cities, which have a much more cosmopolitan feel to them than the last time I was in China. Many of my relatives have changed homes since we last saw them, and every one of them is in a better (in some cases, much better) residence than before. We did go to one small town, Yangshuo, and spent a lot of time driving past countryside villages, and even there, the quality of life seems to have improved drastically. Gone are most of the old, one-level village shacks, replaced by a growing number of highrises and a plethora of two-story homes that bear a striking resemblance to suburban family homes in the U.S. Imagine that: The prototypical dream home in America is peasant housing in China.

Viewing Shanghai from the air, you can tell where the development (and highrises) begin.
• The rate of development is incredible. When we landed in Guangzhou, our airport was located in what used to be a village on the remote outskirts of the city. Many places that I or my parents remembered as rural areas have been absorbed into the city as it pushes outward, and the same thing is happening around all the big cities we visited. At this rate, maybe in 20 years China will consist only of a couple dozen megametropolis and their suburbs.
• The rapid development has made real estate a more precious commodity than ever. Almost all the highrises on the side of streets lease out their first floors as commercial space, and residential spaces occupy the upper levels. One of my aunts took us to a big toy market where they have gone from not being able to give space away years ago to now charging an arm and a leg for the space barely larger than  a cubicle. One of my cousins took us around Panyu, one of those former villages that have become suburbs of Guangzhou, where the main industry has gone from fishing to real estate.

A common sight in China: Businesses occupying the street-level floor of residential buildings.

• Our tour guide/driver in Shanghai told us this tidbit: Because of the Chinese government’s arbitrary effort to keep oil prices stable, gas prices in China didn’t jump much when prices in America shot through the roof, and when prices in the States plummeted, China’s gas cost didn’t fall much either.
• The economic crisis is definitely a concern here. The impact hasn’t been as great as it is in America, but it’s on people’s minds. It’s in the news daily, and it was a topic of conversation everywhere we went. Every one of our tour guides talked about housing values falling as a result of the economic downturn (which kind of made us feel a little bad in the “sorry our country’s poor lending practices is screwing up your economy too” way). Over dinner, my cousins ask us about how we are being impacted and admit that there are worries about layoffs at their companies. In my home province of Guangdong, there are towns where factories that rely heavily on exports have shut down or cut back severely.

There are plenty of famous sights in China—the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Terracotta Warriors—but perhaps the one thing that can most change your outlook is the food. John and I were spoiled rotten with great food in China, as we sampled regional specialties from across the map and feasted night after night in the epicenter of Chinese cooking, Guangzhou. But restaurants in China, I found, have little in common with those in the States.

You Will Be Assimilated

Restaurants in China are multi-story affairs, laid out in such labyrinthine grids that you may possible require a map to find your way to and from the restroom. They are staffed by what seem like hundreds of waitpeople, all of whom wear smart little jackets with Mandarin collars and tags that identify them by number instead of name. It unnerved me, the first several times, to notice that the woman pouring me tea was designated “No. 367”: I felt like I was dining inside a Borg cube. After awhile, though, I began to see the advantages of the situation. No individual waiter was assigned to any table, so whoever was free could, and did, bring the dishes over as soon as they were ready. And no one interrupted with unnecessary “pleasantries” like “Hi, my name’s Kimberly and I’ll be your server tonight,” or the ghastly “You still working on that?” In China, a waiter is an interchangeable set of hands used to convey your dinner from the kitchen to the table, and little more. It speaks to the differences between China and the States: in China, efficiency is valued most, and it’s acceptable to view the servers as cogs in a machine, whereas here, we acknowledge the servers’ individuality more, often at the cost of forced familiarity.

In China, we often ate in a private room with just our tour group or family. These rooms were pretty nifty, and often contained a flat-screen TV, some couches, and a tea table along with our group’s tables. At the fancier places, we even had our own private restrooms.

Dining in China is, strangely, like eating Chinese food in the United States in that everyone eats a little from several communal dishes instead of ordering his own meal. The food is placed on a lazy susan in the middle of the table, on which the drinks, chopsticks, and napkins are also placed. There are a few new etiquette rules that go with this style of eating, such as checking whether anyone is serving themselves before rotating the lazy susan, or, if you have germophobes in your group, making sure you don’t accidentally use your eating chopsticks to serve yourself with. [Note: if you’re in China, you’ve got worse things to worry about, microbe-wise, than infinitesimal traces of American spit.] When a desirable dish is placed on the table, it also makes for a kind of poker-cum-roulette, leaving you thinking, “How much of that pine cone fish can I take without looking greedy? But if I don’t take a lot, will there be any left by the time it works its way around the table again?” Meanwhile, the little old grandma across the table is eyeing that same fish hungrily, while her son’s trying not to betray too much interest in it, lest he tip everyone off and they take extra.

“If it walks, crawls, swims, or flies . . .”

How do you ensure that your seafood is fresh? Pick it out of the tank yourself.

The most startling aspect of Chinese restaurants, to American eyes, is the live animal markets many feature at their entrances. The fish tanks in Beijing and Shanghai didn’t bother me, but I was in no way prepared for the vast array of animal life on display in Guangzhou. The Chinese have a saying: “If it walks, crawls, swims, or flies, the Cantonese will eat it,” and this was borne out by several of the restaurants we visited. One in particular, nicknamed “the new fishing village,” boasted a veritable aquarium of the damned. Most of its ground floor was occupied by rows upon rows of fish tanks, containing sea bass, grouper, sturgeon, eels, big prawns, little prawns, minnows, krill, and fish I’d previously only seen in tropical tanks. And then there were the turtles, the frogs, the snails, the sea urchins, the sea cucumbers, the forest of fish heads staring up from a bed of ice, and, my favorite, the gators. Other places we ate at displayed cages of live ducks, chickens, pheasants, and morbidly obese rabbits. The rabbits, truly Jabba-the-Hutt-like specimens of bunnidom, were kind of cute in their grumpy, immobile way. Their expressions radiated the message, “We know you are going to eat us, and we are not amused. At all.”

Worse, though, was the restaurant in Wuxi that offered dog meat. Posters advertised perfectly normal-looking slices of meat, served with a little parsley garnish atop a nice platter, and then, below that, a photo of a golden retriever. I had long wanted to dismiss accounts of Chinese dog-eating as mere nasty stereotype, but, after seeing something like that, it was impossible to ignore. In my time in China, I ate—and, more often than not, enjoyed—crane, sturgeon, eel, snails, “duckfish,” shark’s fin, abalone, sea cucumber, beef tendons, the meat which attaches to a cow’s stomach, and oogy, gelatinous “thousand-year-old” eggs. I munched the fried leg of a waterbird no one knew the English name of, holding it upright like some grisly lollipop with the feet still attached. (They were delicious. I ate four.) I kind of regret never having tried the gator. But had I been offered dog, I couldn’t have touched it, not even in the name of courtesy.

In this age of political correctness, I know, I’m supposed to get over my squeamishness and regard dog-eating as just another arbitrary cultural practice. After all, a Hindu might be repelled if I served him beef or an Orthodox Jew if he saw me eating pork. And I in no way fault the Chinese for eating dog. I don’t find it morally wrong. But neither does it feel like arbitrary distaste on my part when I tried not to look at the photo of that nice blond golden retriever as I munched my Wuxi ribs. It felt like a deep, primal taboo, like something bad would happen to me if I so much as touched the dog meat. In this day and age, it’s strangely comforting to think we still have such taboos.

Freshness is King

The other side to this omnivorousness, of course, is that Chinese food is incredible. I grew up in New England, where I used to think we had good seafood. We do, but China has fantastic seafood. I never ate better fish, prawns, or lobster than I did in China. The fish melted in your mouth and tasted subtly sweet, like the fresh water it swam in. The shellfish was succulent, likewise sweet, with the perfect amount of yield between your teeth. With food so fresh, Chinese cooks don’t have to do too much to it to make it taste good. All over southern China, we were served delicious shrimp that had simply been boiled, and fish that had been steamed with a little soy sauce and ginger, and it was wonderful.

Coming back to the States, then, it was disinspiriting to enter the meat section of Harris Teeter, with its geometrically-proportioned hunks of pork, beef, and chicken in identical Styrofoam packages, all pallid and odorless and doing their best to convince you that you were merely buying protein, and not the flesh of something that had lived and breathed. We Americans pay a high price for our squeamishness. One could never serve here, as is common practice in China, a simple boiled chicken, cut into pieces with maybe a little ginger sauce for savor, as a restaurant dish. It would taste like flavorless nothing. Here we have to fry our chickens, rotisserie them for hours, or cover them in sauce or stuffing to make them palatable.

There’s a lot to be said for the Chinese way of doing things. If you’re going to eat animals, why not own up to the fact, and get them live or freshly-slaughtered? You’ll get a far better meal, and you won’t have hide behind the mincing sterility of the meat section. If only that were an option here.

During our three-week trip around China, we took basically every form of transportation available: plane, bus, taxi, private car, subway, train, cruise ship, and even a rickshaw. My impressions of some of these forms of public transportation:

Plane

I’ve raved about the quality of air travel in China before. The in-flight service provided by Chinese airline companies are head and shoulder above their American counterparts. Every domestic flight we took in China, ranging from one to four hours, had in-flight entertainment (with free headsets) and frequent drinks service. As long as your flight time was around the time of a meal, you were served one on the plane, no matter if your flight lasted four hours or two. Even the flight from Guilin to Guangzhou, which lasted less than an hour, served a snack and bottled water (keep in mind that when you take away the time needed for the plane to reach cruising altitude and then to descend for landing, one hour is barely enough time to push a cart down the aisle and distribute food). And some of the meals were actually pretty decent, with offerings like beef noodles with a cold side dish of squid :-)

In general, the seats and leg rooms on Chinese planes were just slightly smaller than American planes, but only by about an inch or two. Our flight from Xi’an to Shanghai, however, had the roomiest economy seats I’ve ever seen. I could almost stretch out in my seat without having to tuck my legs under the the seat in front of me.

The staffs on the planes were all extremely nice. One of our flights even added the personal touch of introducing every member of the crew over the intercom, along with how many years they’ve served, and each member gave a polite nod as his/her name was announced.

The biggest negative I saw about flying in China was the overhead compartments. They are a bit smaller than on American planes, so even certain carry-on suitcases might be a tight squeeze. Furthermore, people seemed to travel with a lot more irregular-shaped luggage. And many people did not stored their personal item under the seat in front of them. As a result, the overhead compartments are often stuffed, with little space.  So get in line early if you want to make sure you have overhead storage space for your luggage (and the line formation process at the gate can be a bit unruly as well).

Taxi

I think this is by far the simplest way for a foreign traveler to get around within a city. There are always tons of cabs around in big cities like Beijing or Shanghai, and they are extremely cheap. We took a few taxi rides during this trip, and each was no more than 20 yuan (less than $3). On one occasion, we booked a cab for an hour to take us to a tourist attraction, wait there for us for about 30 minutes, and then take us back to the hotel. The total came out to about 100 yuan (about $15).

If you don’t speak Mandarin, then it’s a good idea to take along a piece of paper with your destination written on it. Some of the hotels we stayed at even provided little cards that had the hotel address on one side and a list of popular tourist attractions on the other, in Chinese and English, so you just have to check the box and show the card to the driver.

A common sight in Beijing: the trapped cab driver.

A couple words of warning about taxis:

• If the traffic is bad where you are (like Beijing, for instance), you aren’t going to dodge it by taking a cab. So be sure to ask at the hotel how long it’ll take to reach a place before getting a cab. In some cases, it might be faster to just walk or take the subway.
• Riding in a cab in China can be a harrowing experience as traffic patterns in big Chinese cities are insane. Just keep repeating to yourself that the cab drivers know what they are doing, and keep your eyes up at the buildings and not on the cars coming right at you.

Bus

Passengers packed onto a bus. But at least they can watch TV.

Aside from the tour buses we were on, we took one short ride on a public transit bus in Guangzhou. It was surprisingly pleasant and wasn’t very crowded. Of course, we also saw plenty of buses during our trip that were stuffed to the gills, especially during rush hour. In general, though, the bus system seems to be in much better shape than when I last visited China 13 years ago. The buses seem much newer. They are clean and conditioned, and many even have TV screens to keep you entertained. The buses have very few seats — only a single column on each side in the front half, and a ring of seats around the edge of the back half. The aunt with whom we took our bus ride said that’s designed to allow for a wider aisle, making it easier for people to get off a congested bus. It also helps pack them in as well. Of course, I won’t recommend foreign travelers to try the bus alone, considering how difficult it can be to figure out the routes.

Subway

We were aching to try the subway during our trip, but couldn’t find the time to do it until we reached my hometown of Guangzhou. We took the subway from Guangzhou to the suburb of Panyu one afternoon. The Guangzhou subway system, opened in 1999, was one of the best I’ve seen, in China or the U.S. The stations and the cars were very clean. The stations had automated ticketing machines (residents also can use transit cards that also worked for other forms of public transportation) and provided clear signs in both Chinese and English directing you to the right location. The cars were spacious, and not too crowded during our ride (though we were told it does get packed at other times). There were electronic displays showing the subway line and the next stop, and each stop is announced in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. So as long as you can figure out what stop you want, you won’t have much trouble getting there even if you don’t speak Chinese.

Train

We took a one-hour train ride from Guangzhou to Shenzhen. Before that, the only time I had traveled via train in China was a trip to Changsha back in the 1980s, and it was not a pleasant experience. The car was jam-packed, and people were sitting, standing, and sleeping everywhere. It was loud. There was one cooler of water for the whole car, and the restroom was filthy.

Our ride from Guangzhou to Shenzhen, however, was the polar opposite. Of course, it helped that we bought tickets for a soft-seater car, which, as I’ve read, is a big improvement over the hard-seater. A soft-seater ticket for our one-hour trip cost 70-some yuan (about $10-$12). The car was wide and the seats were comfortable. They were kind of like airplane seats, but with more leg room and there were some booths, too. There was no overcrowding (not allowed) as everyone had a seat, and there was space for both large and small luggage. Smoking is not allowed, and the car was kept clean as a janitor came through every so often. One of my cousins did tell us later on that while trains going between big cities are much-improved, the routes to smaller, less touristy places still lag behind.

The only downside to our train experience came at the station. There were long lines at the manned ticket booths, and half the automated ticket machines didn’t work, creating long lines there as well. There was a security checkpoint, but it was not very orderly or supervised. You put your bags in the X-ray machine, then go through the turnstiles by inserting your ticket, and pick up your bags on the other side. The result was that your bags were often coming out well before you went through the turnstiles, which meant somebody could easily make off with your stuff.

The boarding process was very chaotic as well. The waiting room was inside the station, but when it came time to board, you had to go through a long hallway and up an escalator before you reached the boarding platform. That’s fine if there’s not a lot of people, but this is China we are talking about. So we were caught up in a swarm of people that pushed us all the way up to the platform, clutching tightly to our tickets and belongs all the while.

On one of our five days in Guangzhou, we visited the Nanfeng Ancient Kiln in the nearby city of Foshan, an area famous for its ceramics. Courtney and I were both very excited about this trip because of our fondness for pottery and because our relatives had told us before we came to China that we would get the chance to make some pottery at the studio at the ancient kiln.

Excitement found us before we even set foot inside the studio. At the entrance to the attraction, we came across a local television crew that was filming a special about the ancient kiln and Foshan pottery. The director spotted Courtney, and next thing we knew, two of the assistants were racing over to ask her to be in the special. I guess they wanted a Westerner to show that the kiln is famous worldwide. So Courtney spent the next half hour or so playing the part of an intrigued tourist, walking through the entrance and taking pictures. Then the director would ask her to do the same routine over again, and again, and again. As she said later, “I felt like Milhouse in the Fallout Boy episode.” Meanwhile, the pack of relatives who accompanied us were thoroughly enjoying watching the family’s newest daughter-in-law being a “star”. We must have had about five or six cameras clicking away and a couple camcorders rolling, and my dad was looking quite the part of the director as he translated the director’s instructions for Courtney. Even after the TV crew was done with Courtney, they followed our pack for a little while longer as we finally entered the kiln. One of my uncles found out that the show is supposed to air around Chinese New Year and got the business card for the director, so perhaps we’ll be able to track down a copy of the show.

The kiln itself was very cool. We saw a kiln about 100 feet long — called a Dragon Kiln — that utilizes wind to help the firing process. There was also a pottery museum on site with a lot of interesting pieces. In addition, we stumbled upon a “potterfall” — a waterfall made of huge pots.

Courtney and I make pots at the Nanfeng Ancient Kiln while our relatives look on.

The highlight we had come for, however, was definitely the studio, which was huge and probably could accomodate 100 potters at any one time. Courtney and I each paid for an hour on a pottery wheel (which costs 30 yuan, a huge bargain). We each got a hump of clay and set about making pots while our relatives oohed and aahed as they looked on. I made a pitcher and a bowl, while Courtney made a couple jugs/vases. After we finished, we carve our names on them, and the studio will fire and glaze them for us. One of my uncles will pick up the pots when they are done and send it to us, which will make a great souvenir.

After the kiln visit, we went to lunch at a local restaurant that served up some unusal dishes — crane soup, fried sturgeon, and a fried water fowl that nobody really knew the name of — and they were all delicious. My uncle Kangtai also brought along three bottles of wine — a regular riesling, a powerful (80 proof) rice wine, and a sweet-tasting but stronger-than-you-would-think osmanthus wine.

In the course of Chinese history, there is a littany of great artists who did their best work while drunk. So naturally, after everyone in our party, ourselves included, got tipsy at lunch, it was time to make more art. We proceeded to my uncle Kangtai’s art gallery in Foshan, where my dad and his three brothers created two traditional Chinese brush paintings — one of grapevines for my parents and one of peonies for Courtney and me. My uncle Zhongping, the youngest of the four brothers, did the paintings. My uncle Zhaohua, the oldest of the four brothers, composed lines of poetry to accompany each painting. My father, the second oldest, wrote the poems on the paintings in traditional Chinese calligraphy. My uncle Kangtai, third in the pecking order, would mat the paintings once they dried. It was an amazing experience watching Chinese brush paintings being made. The four brothers then wrote their respective contributions on the paintings and signed their names with personalized seals. It was also a lot of fun as my relatives, who are usually loud anyway and were all still tipsy from lunch, laughed and joked throughout the afternoon. The result was two beautiful paintings, a great time for all, and a day we will not soon forget (thanks in part to al l the photos and videos that everyone took).

My uncle Zhongping painting grapevines.

Our trip was action-packed, at times too much so. There are things I wanted to write about but just didn’t have the time or energy at the end of the day. So I’ll probably be posting addition reflections about the trip in the coming days. I’m also in the process of uploading almost 20 GB of pictures. It’s a good thing I’ve got three days before returning to work. Settling back into my daily routine is going to feel so boring for a while after the last three weeks.

Today is the last day in China for Courtney and me. We’re flying out of Hong Kong for the United States first thing tomorrow morning. It’s been a whirlwind of a trip, and it hardly felt like two-and-a-half weeks (more like one week). We arrived in Hong Kong yesterday from Guangzhou, with a messy, frustratingly complicated stopover in Shenzhen. Guangzhou was very fun and very tiring, as we spent five days catching up with relatives, all of whom treated us to sumptuous feasts. We laughed, we cried, we ate, we drank. It made me yearn to come back to Guangzhou soon, and definitely sooner than another 13 years.

Today, we signed up for a one-day tour of Hong Kong, which included the big Buddha on Lantau Island, the Tai O fishing village, and a couple other sights along the way. The sights themselves were pretty enjoyable, but the travel in between was a pretty second-rate operation. We boarded the tour bus at our hotel at 8:15 a.m. The bus then swung around to a couple other hotels in Kowloon to pick up tourists. Then the four of us and a couple others from the group were told that we will be changing buses to join up with a different group. So we got off on the side of a street, met the tour guide from that second group, waited for her bus to circle around the block, and hopped on.

That wasn’t the end of it. We then spent most of the next hour and a half going all over Hong Kong to pick up tourists from various hotels, including a stop at Disneyland Hong Kong. By 10:30, we had been on the “tour” for more than two hours, and only 20 minutes of it were for actual sightseeing.

The trek to Lantau Island had yet one more twist: Because land access to the island is restricted (the way I understood the explanation, it was to protect the elderly, I mean, the environment on the island), we had to get off that second bus and board a third bus, which has special access to go to the island and take us to the Buddha statue. As we switched buses, we were told that at the end of our visit, we will be taking a cable car ride back down the mountain, at which point a tour guide-to-be-determined will meet us and take us back in yet another different coach (or two coaches, depending on what the tour company can arrange, they said). The whole one-day tour thing seemed like a pretty second-rate operation, and I’m amazed they don’t lose tourists from the group on a regular basis. Or maybe they do, and the hills of Lantau Island are home to semi-feral humans who got lost from their tour groups.

Things improved once we stopped changing buses and actually got onto Lantau Island. Our bus took us up a steep, narrow, winding path barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass through. The scenery along the mountainside was beautiful, as we looked down onto deep gorges and open bodies of water. The residential buildings on the island, however, were pretty old and dilapidated. We are told that as part of the protection for the island, there are no plans to do any development there. Therefore, there are no job opportunities there, limiting the number of residents and forcing the young people who live there to eventually leave the island for jobs in the city.

Our first stop on the island was Tai O, an old fishing village dating back about three centuries. On the surface, the village was very charming in the “quaint old way of life” way, but in reality, fishing is a dying, and almost dead, industry for the people here. There are no fishing boats in the village and only three shrimp boats, and fishing barely provides a subsistence income for the people here. Nonetheless, there were a lot of seafood — both live and dried — for sale as we took a short walk through the village’s main market.

After a half hour at Tai O (and we could’ve stayed there for half the day exploring its many nooks and crannies), it was on to the Tian Tan Buddha statue. While the commoners have to walk up 268 steps to reach the Buddha from the parking lot, our tour bus had special access to take us up a side road right to the base of the statue. It was pretty impressive. Inside the structure are oil paintings depicting the Buddha’s path to nirvana, a hall of remembrance where people can buy a spot for the names of their deceased loved ones to be displayed, and two tiny bone fragments, supposedly part of the cremated remains of Gautama Buddha. After a short spin at the top, we rode back down to the monastery at the bottom of the steps, where we had a delicious vegetarian meal and then took some pictures of the statue from afar.

Intersection of Dundas Street and the Ladies’ Market in Kowloon.

Then came the really exciting part of the day — a ride on the Ngong Ping 360 cable car back down the mountain. The lift offers a 25-minute, 5.7-kilometer ride that goes over the mountainside, the bay, and finally the Tung Chung area on Lantau Island. It was an awesome and sometimes a bit frightening view as we glided high over the impressive landscape. The car was designed so that there are vents under the seat, and you can hear and feel the strong winds. The lift stations are designed so that each one pulls the car up before it goes into a descent, creating the kind of anxiety you get when your rollercoaster train is approaching the top of that first, humongous drop.

We got back to the hotel around 4 p.m., relatively early compared to other return times on this trip. We’ll take a stroll around the streets near the hotel tonight before turning in early so we can get up in the morning for a long journey back to the U.S.

We’ve spent a lot of time the last five days visiting my extensive network of relatives. During these visits, we saw neither the glamorous neons nor the awe-inspiring historic landmarks, but were treated to an eye-opening experience all the same. We saw how the average Chinese family lives. In general, they live in small quarters. All of the homes we visited are not much bigger than the living and dining rooms of the average American house. Every square inch is maximized in functionality. Tiny bathrooms doubled as shower stalls, balconies are turned into kitchens, and kitchens converted into extra bedrooms. A coffee table can be pulled from one corner of a small living room to another to serve as the dining table. Bathrooms are not one square millimeter bigger than they need to be in order to serve their purpose. There are no garages, basements, attics, or crawlspaces to store useless junk. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be much, if any, useless junk lying around these homes.

We have an amazing view of the Pearl River from our hotel room. As I sit in front of the window gazing at the silhouettes of countless residential highrises in the background of the river’s brightly lit bank, I can’t help but think about the way the families that occupy each of the tiny, innumerable flickers of light in those buildings live. Then I think about the way we live in America, and I can’t help but feel a bit ashamed about my plans to move out of my “small” single-family home of 1,100 square feet in a couple years and into a bigger house more suitable for raising a family. In China — which contains a quarter of the world’s population — that’s enough space for at least two families. In America, that feels like barely enough space for a family of two. It also makes me want to clean out some of the useless junk sitting around in my garage when I get home.

This post is going to be relatively short as I’m exhausted from today’s festivities in Guangzhou. In the morning, we went out in search of a Starbucks supposedly near our hotel, according to Google Maps. After wandering around for an hour or so, we realized that Google Maps had put our hotel at the wrong location, and that the Starbucks was actually much farther away. Denied in our quest, we turned back and got Courtney a coffee at a place called Seattle Espresso next to the hotel, which actually was pretty good.

After a sumptuous lunch with several of my aunts and uncles in a restaurant situated within a beautiful park, one of my uncles took us on a walking tour of the old “West Gate” district of Guangzhou, a place that used to be the heart of trade and business with the rest of the world. The heavy interaction with foreigners resulted in a unique mix of Chinese and Western styles in food and architecture. We visited a restored house from the golden age of this area, which featured a cute courtyard with a stream that used to run all the way out to the Pearl River. Back in the day, the residents in the West Gate district would sail along such streams all the way from the river to their mansions.

After that visit, one of my aunts and one of my cousins decided to take us in search of the Starbucks that eluded us this morning. After spending 20 minutes trying to hail a cab, without success, they decided we would take the bus instead. After a 15-minute ride, we were in the vicinity, and a 15-minute walk led us to the Starbucks. It is located on Shamian Island, where the foreign concessions used to be. As a result, the island has many charming Western style buildings, including the Starbucks. It sits on the site of an old church that had burned down and was rebuilt in the old style. The coffee tastes the same as in the U.S., but they were also selling China-themed coffee mugs, which we just had to buy as a souvenir.

The real festivities began in the evening. In part as a long-awaited reunion with family and friends, and in part as a delayed celebration of our marriage, my parents put on a banquet in the hotel restaurant, with all family and some old friends invited. There were probably at least 70 people in attendance, and it was loud, boisterous, and a lot of fun. Think Klingon party meets My Big Fat Chinese Wedding, and add in a ton of delicious food and picture-taking, and you have a decent idea of what the night was like, and why I’m too tired to write any more for now.

Our last morning in Guilin had us climbing to the top of the Solitary Beauty Hill, a 66-meter-tall karst hill within the city of Guilin that offered an eagle’s eye view of the city, making its incredible, mountain-clad setting all the more obvious to the eye. As we began our ascent, we saw a bunch of workers with hammer and chisel chipping away on the steps that lead up to the top. They were carving out new grooves in the steps, which had been worn smooth by the heavy amount of foot traffic they’ve received. Considering how many steps we climbed to get to the top, this seems like a huge undertaking.

Our last stop in Guilin was the Reed Flute Cave, a cavern with impressive stalactite and stalagmite formations. The most amazing part of the cavern was a pond that reflected all the rock formations hanging from the ceiling above so perfectly that it seemed like the lake was a hundred foot deep, with an undersea kingdom of rock formations poking up. In reality, the pond was about the depth of a finger.

We then had to bid a reluctant farewell to Guilin and its laidback lifestyle and beautiful surroundings. We boarded our flight to Guangzhou, my hometown, where we will spend the next week and catch up with relatives whom I have not seen for 13 years. I was both excited and a little bit nervous. When we walked out of baggage claim and into the lobby of the airport, we spotted a group of about 10 or 12 of our relatives waiting and waving at us. As soon as we got close enough to hear each other, everything that followed became a blur. As the conclusion of our organized tour, we had a cruise on the Pearl River, but we were on a tight schedule. We were set up for dinner beforehand. It was 6:20 when we got to the restaurant, our ship departs at 7:45, and it was almost an hour drive from the restaurant to the pier. We hurriedly downed some Cantonese food, then climbed into our van. Our driver flew through traffic and somehow got us to the pier in time to board the ship with eight of my relatives.

We spent the hour-long cruise catching up with family and taking in the beautiful night views along the banks of the Pearl River. Though I spent the first 10 years of my life in Guangzhou, I have only relatively faint impressions of the city by now, and what impressions I do have are way out-of-date. I remember Guangzhou as a cosmopolitan city, but nowhere near the degree I saw on the cruise tonight. The river was lit up with neon, not only from the buildings on the banks, but also from other ships. I even saw a ship with a huge TV screen on its side. The entire river was lit up with an array of colors, and it was a great way to spend New Year’s Eve.

As I mentioned before, there is a Chinese saying that “Guilin’s scenery is best among all under heaven.” However, there is often a second part added to that: Yangshuo’s scenery bests even Guilin’s. We got to see that scenery for ourselves today as we took a four-and-a-half-hour cruise down the Li River, the “mother river” of the Guilin/Yangshuo area.

The cruise took us down a winding 83-kilometer section of the Li River from Guilin to Yangshuo, a tiny hamlet situated in the karst hills. The scenery along the river was simply amazing, even on this foggy day. Chains upon chains of karst hills, which resemble the scales on the back of a dragon, line both sides of the river, and each time the river bends, a new formation comes into view. Many of the formations along the route are named based on what they look like, such as Yearning for Husband Rock, Guanyin Peak, and Nine Horses Painting Hill. The light fog enveloping much of the hills today added a special mysterious quality to them, and it’s easy to see why ancient Chinese people believed that mystics lived in these hills.

Just as interesting as the mountains was the scenery of daily life along the river that unfolded as we cruised downstream. The Li River isn’t just a tourist attraction, it’s also the home and lifeblood for many people who live right on its banks. We saw small farmhouses, people washing clothes right on the shores, orange growers digging on the banks for their groves, water buffaloes and home-raised ducks, and boats and shoreline stalls selling pomelos.

The most interesting sight had to be the souvenir peddlers. As I mentioned, fleecing tourists is a major industry in China these days. On the Li River, however, this is not as simple as shoving a pack of postcards in the face of a passing tourist, and the craft is taken to a whole new level. Souvenir hoarders drift on the river on narrow rafts made with four bamboo poles — just wide and long enough to hold themselves and a crate of merchandise. Pushing themselves along with long poles, they stake out certain points along the river. When a cruise ship goes by, they steer their rafts parallel to the ship, latch onto it by tying their rafts to a pole on the ship that seems to have been put there for that exact purpose, and start walking on the outter ledge of the ship while showing souvenirs to the passengers on the other side of the window. Not a single cruise ship goes by without at least a couple of these little rafts latched on to it like remoras to a shark. After a little while, these remoras break off from their “shark” and push themselves back to their original spot to wait for the next cruise ship t come through.

After coming ashore at Yangshuo, we fought our way through a chaotic pier flooded with the more conventional type of souvenir peddlers. Our tour guide had warned us beforehand to watch for pickpockets, and this was very good advice, as Courtney spotted a couple guys who definitely looked like they were eyeing the bags of passers-by. We made it through the chaos without losing anything, then walked through a long street of souvenir stalls to get to our hotel. After freshening up, we took advantage of the free afternoon to go back to that street to check out the stalls. There were a couple interesting sights:

• There were several stores called “Zhang Fei Beef”, named after the famous character from Romance of the Three Kingdoms. We checked one out and found that it was selling packs of cooked beef — not beef jerky, but snack-sized cooked beef of 20-some different flavors. As curious as I was about this, the thought of pre-packaged, unrefrigerated, cooked beef dissuaded me from giving it a try.
• There was a little bar/coffeehouse that offered a Western menu. It was kind of like a place for expats, although I can’t imagine Yangshuo having a big expat population. The thing that caught our eye was a sign on the outside saying: “We don’t serve Star Buck (sic) coffee. We serve real coffee.” With that kind of challenge, Courtney felt that she had to rise up to defend her beloved franchise’s honor and sample the coffee offered within. She got a coffee latte and proclaimed it good, but not better than Starbucks. It was definitely an interesting little place, though.
• We bought a couple of painted snuff bottles as gifts. The impressive part was that the girl at the stand wrote the names of the people who will receive these on the inside of the bottles in a matter of a couple minutes. She says that one of the small bottles takes her a couple hours to paint, while something more elaborate, such as a placard she showed us, takes days to finish.

After a relaxing afternoon, we attended a showing of “Impressions Liu Sanjie”, a show based on a popular Chinese movie from the 60s about the mountain songs that the local ethnic minority sings as part of its courting rituals. The show is directed by Zhang Yimou, and it certainly was in line with his other works in terms of scale. Set on the Li River, it utilized the river and karst hills backdrop perfectly and played heavily on interesting lighting and reflections. We got seats in the president-level boxes, which meant comfy chairs, binoculars, snacks, tea, and a thick blanket to protect us from the chilly night winds blowing in from the river. It was an entertaining end to a very relaxing day. I can definitely get used to Guilin, but alas, tomorrow is our last day in this beautiful and serene place.

Although we flew into Shanghai before starting our tour of the Hangzhou-Suzhou area and drove back there after the tour, we didn’t really have a whole lot of time to spend in this famed jewel on the coast. After dinner and a quick walk on the bund the night before, we spent this morning seeing a couple places in Shanghai. We started with a trip to Yuyuan Garden, another one of the very cute gardens that are a trademark of this region’s architecture. What was most exciting, however, was that we spotted a Starbucks right outside the garden, and Courtney was able to run in and get her first cup of Starbucks coffee in China. We also picked up a trademark Shanghai snack — little dragon buns — at a stall outside the garden on our way out. That stall is famous for these buns, which are actually more like pork dumplings. We got a freshly steamed batch, and they were gone very quickly.

Nanjing Road. Think mega-mall, with all expensive, Western brands.
We then visited Nanjing Road, the most famous shopping street in Shanghai. We spent about half an hour walking around there, and it certainly was hopping. However, I found it to be rather uninteresting. In all honesty, if you were looking for an authentic Chinese shopping experience, this would be the last place you would go. It’s filled with huge department stores and boutique shops selling all Western brands, often for much more than what the same products would cost in the United States. I certainly didn’t travel so far to do the kind of shopping I could’ve done in the local mall back home.

We then headed to the airport for our next destination — Guilin, which is famous for its natural scenery. There is a Chinese saying: Guilin’s scenery is best among all under heaven. We weren’t going to get to see too much of that scenery today, however, as our flight arrived too late for any sightseeing. Of course, we didn’t need to go to any designated tourist attraction to see the sights we went to Guilin for. As soon as our van left the airport and hit the road to Guilin, we could see the karst hills that the region is known for. Villages sit at the foot of towering karst mountains covered in lush greenery, even in the depth of winter. Even the city of Guilin itself is situated right at the foot of various peaks and hills.

Our tour guide Lewis, a member of the Zhuang ethnic minority that resides in the region, told us that there is a saying among the people of Guangxi Province, where Guilin is situated: You go to Beijing to look at walls. You go to Xi’an to look at graves. You go to Shanghai to look at skyscrapers. You come to Guilin to look at the mountains, and if you think about it, it really is true in a lot of ways. Also, he pointed out something that we definitely noticed during our two-day stay in the area: Things move at a more leisurely pace here, and for the better. After more than 10 days of being constantly on the go, running from one place to the next, and having every minute of the day filled with some sort of scheduled activity, our stay in Guilin was like a vacation away from our vacation.

After dinner, we took in what was called a “ethnic minority song and dance show” on our itinerary. It turned out to be part dance and part acrobatic performance, and it was very interesting, especially the acrobatic elements (is the human body supposed to bend like that?). Then came the most relaxing and fun part of the day: We took a stroll down the main street in Guilin, one side of which becomes a pedestrian-only shopping street at night. We got out there a bit late and most of the big stores were closed, but there was a long row of tents hoarding various souvenir-type stuff, along with stalls selling local cuisines. We walked along the tents for a while, bought nothing, and sampled some freshly squeezed sugar cane juice (the guy sticks a long sugar cane pole in a device, presses a button, and out comes delicious juice). It was the most relaxing evening we had on this trip.

The region we are in — Hangzhou — is famous for its water scenery, and we saw plenty of it today, and not all just on the ground. We awoke to a gray, chilly morning with a light drizzle, which, because of the geographical features of Hangzhou and the waters of the West Lake, created a fog that obscured much of the skyline. The rain could not spoil our plans for the day, however.

We set off for West Lake, the attraction that has been drawing people to Hangzhou for centuries. We took a cruise around the lake and sailed past some of the man-made islands. The lake is renowned for its beauty, but much of the scenery was obscured by the fog. Fortunately, West Lake is also known for its beauty when it’s foggy. An official from centuries ago once compared the lake to a woman whose beauty is apparent no matter what clothes she wore, and on this day, she wore gray.

A statue at Lingyin Temple.

After the cruise, we visited Lingyin Temple, one of the most famous Buddhist temples in China. It featured many impressive bronze Buddha statues, including a hall containing the likenesses of the 500 Buddhist “saints”. The walk from the front entrance to the main buildings went past rocky hillsides with Buddha reliefs. The rain had picked up in intensity by this point, yet there were still tons of people in the temple, offering incense, praying, and snapping pictures. The most interesting sight at the temple for me, however, was a basketball court in one of the courtyards, which sparked the image of monks playing pickup basketball in their robes.

We then paid a quick visit to the mausoleum of Yue Fei, a Song dynasty general who is an iconic hero among the Chinese people. After lunch, we headed to a village famous for producing Long Jing tea. As expected, this was another stop on the itinerary designed to get the tourist to spend some money. However, this was actually kind of enjoyable. The top-grade tea the village offered, which it does not export and therefore is not available anywhere else, was only about $20-$30 more expensive than the Long Jing tea my parents usually buy, which is of a lower grade. Courtney also sampled some tea candy and various dried snacks in the giftshop.

The watertown of Wuzhen

The afternoon consisted of a lot of driving as we went from Hangzhou back to Shanghai. Along the way, we stopped into Wuzhen, a small watertown that’s almost Venice-like. Fortunately, the rain had let up by now, though the sky was still a dull gray. We took advantage of the last few minutes of sunlight to stroll along the town’s narrow, stone-covered road. The buildings were charming, but also very old and at times almost dilapidated. Yet this was’t just some historic area preserved for posterity’s sake. In fact, many people still live in the town, a lifestyle I simply cannot imagine.

A couple more hours’ drive from Wuzhen took us back into Shanghai. We had dinner at a restaurant right next to the Bund, then took a quick spin in this historic area. Our tour guide showed us the lookout point where we could see all the skyscrapers and neons across the Huangpu River. He said this spot used to be the most romantic in the Bund.

The view from the Bund.

It’s hard to believe, but today marks the halfway point of our trip in China. The time has simply flown by, but we’ve had a lot of fun. Here’s hoping the pace slows down a lot, as we are a couple days away from returning to our hometown of Guangzhou and staying there for a week.

As I mentioned before, traffic in China is a bit more … umm … chaotic than in the United States. To get an idea of what it’s like to be driving, or just riding, through traffic in China, imagine the traffic pattern coming out of a toll station on a U.S. interstate, where you have about 10 lanes of traffic merging back into two lanes, and none of the 10 lanes exiting the toll station are marked clearly, so you have cars jockeying for position and cutting in front of each other without any clear lines to follow. Now quadruple that amount of traffic, add in a bunch of pedestrians walking across those 10 lanes, and toss in a bunch of scooters and bicycles, and you have Chinese traffic.

Judging by the way people drive here, China must have the toughest driving skills test and the easiest traffic rules test in the world. In the week or so that we’ve been in China, we’ve seen:

• Our behemoth of a tour bus make a U-turn through three lanes of on-coming traffic in Beijing.
• Said bus making a three-point turn in the middle of a busy intersection.
• Said bus backing up for what seemed like 100 yards into a narrow alley, with cars parked on the side, and brushing up against branches and Christmas lights on trees.
• Various vehicles that we rode in coming within a foot of pedestrians or bicycles.
• Cars, scooters, and bicycles going down the road the wrong way.
• Our minivan making a left turn on red (and our driver telling us that it’s legal to do so here).
• Our minivan, along with all the cars in front of us, passing on the right — and on the shoulder! — on an interstate.
• About 20 cars ahead of us using the shoulder of a highway as another lane, forming a line into a toll station.
• Our van nearly squishing a car between it and a concrete wall at a roundabout.
• Our van making a four-lane pass in the blink of an eye to get from the left-most lane to the exit ramp for a gas station.

Despite all this seeming recklessness, however, we only saw two accidents, a sideswipe/fender-bender mishap in Suzhou and a bigger spill on our way back to Shanghai where a tractor trailer went off the side of the hill on an on-ramp.

If you go to China, remember:

1. DON’T DRIVE. Just don’t. Taxis are extremely cheap anyway.
2. Don’t look at the traffic when you are riding in a vehicle driven by someone else. Just trust that you’ll come out of this ride unscathed.
3. Before getting into a car, pray, burn incense to Buddha, go visit a mosque, and do whatever other acts of karma-building you can.