Ting bu Dong

One of our reasons for travelling to China this year was for Lillia and me to practice our Chinese.  Both of us have learned a ton since our previous trip.  I made a big push to learn to read, and that really paid off.  I now know a little over a thousand characters, which may sound like a lot, but it’s nowhere near enough to, say, read a magazine article.  It is enough, though, to read a Chinese map, or a menu, or street signs, billboards, and business names.  I also learned a lot of new words, every day.  If you know how to pronounce one character of a two-character word, it makes it easy to look up that word.  I won’t go into the mechanics of this; just take my word for it.

Another thing that paid off was listening to Popup Chinese.  My one-year subscription was the best $99 I ever spent.  We watched a lot of movies on the long-distance buses, and it was amazing how many phrases turned up that I learned from Popup.  Mei shi, mei banfa, wu suo wei, zenme hui shi, all these everyday conversational phrases that elementary textbooks don’t seem to cover.

What I still lack, however, is listening comprehension in conversation.  So often, I would ask a question and then get an unexpected high-speed barrage of words back.  So, I would be left standing there like a deer in the headlights, synapses firing way too slowly as I struggled to decode what had just been said.  Lillia, however, would often get it right away.  “Mom!  She says there aren’t any more tickets for the 9:30 bus!  You have to take the 11:00 one!”  And I would give myself the “doh!” forehead slap, and think, yes, of course that’s what she said;  it just took me too long to process.  After a few situations like this, when I didn’t understand something, I’d ask Lillia, “did you get that?”  And, more often than not, she did.  I have no doubt that however hard I study, Lillia’s Chinese will far outstrip mine in a few short years.

Finally, Some Pretty Pictures

Okay, the trip was not an unremitting parade of misery.  We did see some pretty things.  Here are some of them.

We'll start in Kunming.  These are lotuses in Green Lake:

While in Kunming, we made a day trip to Shilin, the Stone Forest.  This is scenic area of bizarre karst formations.

Here are Tom and Lillia in one of the narrow slot canyons there.

This is a Chinese mosque in a Muslim area south of Dali.

Near the mosque, an old largely abandoned Buddhist complex.  It was full of amazing sculptures and carved and painted doors.

(Look out behind you, Lillia!)

This is a qilin, known as kirin in Japanese.  This is the same critter you see on bottles of Kirin beer.

In the same area, minority women in a market.

A side street in Dali.

A riverside house in Lijiang Old Town.

The Zhongyi Market in Lijiang.  Does anyone know what that long white-tipped pink thing is?  I've never seen it before or since.  If you know, leave a comment.

Mangosteens and other fruit at Zhongyi Market.  Mangosteens are one of my favorite fruits and I hadn't seen fresh ones in thirty years.

More Zhongyi Market.  Lovely mangoes.

A Tibetan temple in Lijiang.

At the same Tibetan temple.  I love the kid sticking his finger in the Buddha's belly button.

Instead of staying in the tourist ghetto of Lijiang, we stayed in the charming nearby town of Shuhe.   There were plenty of tourists there too, but it wasn't overrun like Lijiang.  Here are some riverside cafes in Shuhe.

One of the soggy but cute yaks in the fog and drizzle of Yak Meadow on Snow Mountain.

Wildflowers at Yak Meadow.

Scene from the bus from Lijiang to Shangri-La.

World's largest prayer wheel in Shangri-La.

The Zhu Family Mansion in Jianshui.  Jianshui wasn't on our original itinerary, but we added it to break up the long trip from Kunming to Yuanyang.  It turned out to be our favorite place.

Sewer covers in Jianshui.  And here I thought Japan was the only country with decorative manhole covers.  The amazing thing was that we saw no two alike.

This was our favorite restaurant in Jianshui, and probably our favorite of the whole trip.  These jugs were full of homemade wines.

And finally, the Yuanyang rice terraces.  I couldn't stop taking pictures here.  Most of these were taken from the roof of our guesthouse.

Wow.  If this was the only post you looked at, you'd think we had a great trip.

Conversations with interesting people

One of the nice things about our trip was the long conversations we had with people we met at hotels or on buses.

One of them was Joe, a French-Canadian marketing guy who has been living in China for twelve years.  He had lots of stories about great business ideas he’d had that were outright stolen from him. He bemoaned the fact that he was “addicted to China” (his exact words).  I tried to probe the nature of this addiction, which was inexplicable to me, given his experiences there.  But he was never able to articulate his reasons.  He said when he first came to the Lijiang/Shuhe area, where the air is so clean and the landscape so beautiful, he felt tremendously relaxed and rejuvenated, and immediately moved there.  He’s been there for two years now.

Casey was a young mother from Shanghai who was staying at our hotel in Shuhe.  Lillia had great fun playing with her seven-year-old son.  Casey had recently left her job to help care for her parents-in-law, who are both dying of cancer in neighboring Jiangsu Province.  Her father-in-law has stomach cancer, and her mother-in-law has lung cancer, though she had never smoked in her life.   Casey was pretty convinced that the toxic environment in eastern China was at least partly responsible for their cancers.

Tina was an Austrian woman in her early thirties who has been living in Shanghai for the better part of a year, studying Chinese.  When her boyfriend finishes his Ph.D. in Austria, he’s going to join her there.   She says that on a really good day in Shanghai, the pollution index is more than double the worst pollution ever recorded in her hometown near Vienna.  Even so, she too seemed addicted to China, although she didn’t put it that way.  But she’s wondering what to do when she wants to have kids, which she’ll have to do soon.  Is it right to raise kids in such a toxic environment?  She told us about the joke that was going around Shanghai this spring when all the dead pigs came floating down the river: “Isn’t China a great country?  You can smoke all the time without ever having to buy cigarettes, and now when you turn on the tap, you get free pork soup!”

Elaine was a thirtyish woman from Shenyang in the Northeast, vacationing in Yunnan with her parents.  She had gone to college in Canada and had stayed on for a total of ten years.  Then she returned to China to take a job in Beijing.  She has been there for two years, and now plans to get back to Canada as soon as she possibly can.  She said the pollution in Beijing this year was so much worse than she had ever experienced before.  Also, she was a little tired of the mind-set in China right now.  She said everyone is just focused on making money, to the exclusion of everything else.  Maybe in twenty or thirty years people will start to care about other things, she said hopefully, but right now it’s all about the money.

It was amazing how all these different people came around to the same themes.  There seems to be an awful lot of discontent in the Middle Kingdom these days.