China 2017

debs/ January 27, 2018

Given the assertion that being in Toronto is the gift-wrap to the gift that is my trip to Hong Kong, it must follow that Hong Kong is the gift wrapping to … two China mini-trips??

These were also trips about being with the people we went with rather than where we went so, again, I will spare you from the interpersonal details. But in this case, where we went inspired some serious inquisition on what I consider reality.

So bring your Tempo tissues and come along!

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To give some context, let’s consider my lived experience as a Chinese Canadian aka my reality.

When I travel, I am always so acutely aware that my Chineseness cannot be separated from my Canadianness and vice versa.  There’s a Cantonese term for the Chinese diaspora in North America called “jook-sing” (竹升) that, according to Wikipedia, refers to:

an overseas Chinese person who was born in a Western environment and/or a Chinese person who more readily or strongly identifies with Western culture than traditional Chinese culture.

 

Literally the words, 竹升, refers to the space between two segments of a bamboo shoot and…. here, Wikipedia explains this better too:

The stem of the bamboo plant is hollow and compartmentalized; thus water poured in one end does not flow out of the other end. The metaphor is that jook-sings are not part of either culture; water within the jook-sing does not flow and connect to either end. The term may or may not be derogatory.

 

I am a textbook jook-sing.

In Hong Kong, I rarely feel the distance associated with being a jook-sing.  I owe this to my hosts who are excellent eliminating any distance I feel with them despite not being blood related to them, not being married to the blood-related person I came with, and not knowing how to speak Cantonese fluently.  I am eternally grateful for this.

Meanwhile in China, it’s hard not to feel the distance between sub-populations.  Firstly, there’s a perceivable distance between the group of Hong Kong residents I went with and the locals we interacted with.  It only follows that there’s an even greater distance between me and the locals.  But oddly, even the lessor feelings of distance between me and the Hong Kong residents I went with were also amplified in China.

While I am visibly an adult of Chinese decent, I have the cultural and language proficiency of a toddler. My Mandarin vocabulary is a pathetic subset of my Cantonese–I probably speak French better than Mandarin! With my understanding of traditional social practices and relational hierarchies, or lack thereof, I was probably rude all the time and unaware of it. It’s like, if one interacted with my brain with a white body, one would be pleasantly surprised by my understanding of the Chinese.  But because I have Chinese hardware with Canadian software, I kind of feel like a … disappointment [1]. Needless to say, I navigate through this society as a Foreigner with a capital F.  (There’s literally a separate line-up for “Foreigners” at border control.)

[1] I recently saw a documentary on how Dominican Republicans of Haitian decent (who were born and raised in Dominican Republic) were deported “back” to Haiti, a country they never personally know… I was shocked and terrified because knew if Canada suddenly deported me under accusations for being Chinese, I really could not survive. China wouldn’t even consider me Chinese enough to take me.

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Mini-Trip 1: Sichuan

Barely 48 hours after the wedding, we were whisked away from Hong Kong and found ourselves in Sichuan for 4 days.

Pandas are a icon of the Chinese for Foreigners and Chengdu is the epicenter of such stereotypes. Naturally, Chengdu visitors have to go see the pandas.

Although I have certain concerns for ecosystems, I have very little affinity for animals as particular species or individuals.  Similarly, I have certain concerns for “humanity”, but very little affinity for individual humans (at least the ones I don’t know yet!). Therefore, an excursion to see pandas is kind of lost on me. Furthermore, I was so disturbed by all the panda merchandise… Panda-hats, Panda-packs, Panda-fans, Panda-arm-warmers, Panda-buses, Panda-lightposts–any noun that you know (or don’t know) can be Pandified–Instead of seeing an individual animal to spark a greater affinity for the species, I saw the monetization and increased my concern for humanity.

The next day, we ventured into the mountains.

In Germany and Austria, the trail maps over mountains look something like these…. but the equivalent trail map in China looks like this (pictured above)! I love how it looks like a Chinese painting, but it’s also functional and informative.

On the same day, we went to the Dujiangyan Irrigation System. The Irrigation System itself was not too shabby; the engineering and planning involved ought to be appreciated. I don’t have many words to add that Wikipedia does not already have. Nor do I have pictures because seeing other tourists take pictures so shamelessly was beginning to make me feel gross about taking pictures (a common theme on this trip).

So here I have a picture completely unrelated to irrigation, geography, and human ingenuity. The entrance to the park had this ornately decorated bridge with these lanky characters that are supposed-to-be-cute-but-accidentally-creepy floating around, trying to make a living of taking pictures with you.  This super-reminded me of that scene in Spirited Away when the spirits are entering the bathhouse through the bridge …

For the last two days in Sichuan, we took the high speed train from Chengdu to Chongqing.

Within the city is a commercial attraction called Hongya Cave with multiple levels of shops embedded on the side of a cliff overlooking the intersection of two rivers and bridges to cross them.  It was quite a sight to behold at night considering skyscrapers are merely canvases for advertisements.   There were also multiple sketchy stairwells that lead to no where or to the back-end of restaurants… so we were forced to use their elevators.

But one does not simply “use elevators”.  In overpopulated and underserviced areas as these, forget about your cute North American formalities like “lining up”.  There are perpetual crowds of people swarming the elevator door. You will either be part of the current of human bodies, or pushed out of it altogether. Of course, in such conditions, our group of 6 got split between two rounds of elevator service…. and the group that got in hurdled instructions at the group that couldn’t get in as the elevators doors closed. When I finally got (pushed) in the elevator, I realized I was not supporting my own weight … I was suspended at an angle, packed between bodies.  As the elevator descended, I thought of it as a homogeneous cube with the density of human flesh.  And I wondered why haven’t I ever thought of elevators as mere meat-moving machines.

Outside of Chongqing, we visited Wulong Tiankeng (Three Sky Bridges).  This was supposed to be 3 hours from the city … but with traffic and road closures, it took us 5 hours to get here.  Since it would take another 3-4 hours to get back, our “day-trip” here only lasted some 2 hours.

I find that half the experience of traveling to new places for a short trip is interaction with the local logistics and infrastructure.  Not only did our day trip to the mountains on our last day turn into an experience of local traffic jams… On this trip, we also completely missed our first flight to Chengdu, we almost missed our high speed train ride, and almost missed our flight back to Hong Kong.  It felt like we were on the Amazing Race.  There were various lapses with signage, wayfinding, security, traffic (both human and car), etc. which contributed to poor time management.  Yet if all of those things were factored in, there isn’t really much to time to enjoy the place we were at before having to consider the adventure required to get to the next place.

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Mini-Trip 2: Guangdong

We returned to Hong Kong for no more than 10 hours before heading out to the Mainland again, this time to Guangdong.

This time, we were going with Yin Wan Education Fund to a rural area near Shaoguan to run some programming for local high schools.  We packed a bunch of gifts, books, and goodies in Hong Kong, crossed the Hong Kong to China border again, and loaded everything (including ourselves) on this bus.

We took the opportunity to road trip all the way to the high schools.  On the first day, we were mainly on the road, driving from Shenzhen to northern Guangdong.  Bright and early on the second day, we hiked up Elder Peak in Danxia mountain range to watch the sunrise.

With all the crowds waiting for it, taking a picture of the sunrise was too much of a mainstream thing to do … but at the same time it was too pretty not to take a picture … these emotions bred a picture that’s a mix of pretty sunrise and social commentary.

Luckily, hiking down the mountain was much less crowded.

That night, we arrived at the town closest to the schools we would be visiting the next day.  We toiled long and hard that night to come up with several educational carnival-style mini-games.
… And on Christmas morning, we ran an opening ceremony for a new location of Yin Wan Education Fund.

My favourite game that we came up with was “Mixed Feelings”.  We took words associated with emotions, scrambled their letters, and got the kids to rearrange the letters and spell the words.  Except our emotions were overwhelmingly negative at the time made this game (aka the night before the event) and the only emotions we could come up with besides HAPPY were SAD, ANGRY, BORED, SHOCKED, ANNOYED, SCARED.

It was rather stressful to man a booth all by myself.  Although we were playing English-speaking games, I had to explain the instructions in Mandarin.  My Mandarin is so terrible, the kids didn’t even understand my pathetic attempts…. I tried to make up for it by smiling. really. hard.  (pictured above)

We ran such games once in the morning, and then again at another school in the evening.

Our last day, we traveled back south towards Hong Kong.  We stopped by Yingde on the way back. There was this epic multi-storied cave.

Having been to Iceland not too long ago, seeing this made me sad. I really appreciated how they didn’t monetize their natural attractions in Iceland…. meanwhile, they were really milking it here with the unicorn-vomit coloured lights, photographers advertising over megaphones, food stalls inside the cave….

I guess monetizing natural attractions is a function of population, and I can’t really compare Iceland to China in this respect.  And to be honest, we saw how even Iceland is getting more and more commercialized… so it’s probably also a function of time.

Party-poopy remarks aside, Yingde was really pretty.

We found our last meal in China at a restaurant that grows their own vegetables.

All in all, being in China through my jook-sing lens gives me very conflicting views of the place.  On one hand, there is a sense of reverence since the connection I have with this land that is thousands of years deeper than the connection I have to where I was born. However, for that same reason, I take it much more personally when I am seeing things that would be faux-pas if I were in North America unfold shamelessly before my eyes.  Cognitively, I am aware that what I consider offensive is a product of how I was socialized. Viscerally, that social conditioning is so hard to overcome.