More stuff on China
Ok, so I've lost count as to how many days I've been in China, but I know that I have less than a week left.
I just returned from Szechuan (totally mispelled) yesterday. I went to a city that is about 2 hours outside of Chengdu, meaning, I was literally in the middle of nowhere. The city that I went to has some of the most incredible scenery that I've ever scene. The place is pretty much all mountains and streams and I guess pandas oringated from the region that I visited. It's incredible because techinally Szechuan is no longer considered to be the foothills of the Himalayas, yet the effects of the Himalayian mountains can be totally seen and felt. Anyways, enough about mountains and such.
I can't remember the name of the city that I just went to, but it is suppose to be my ancesteral home. And it turns out ALOT of my relatives live there. When we got to our hotel last Sunday we were greeted by over 30 relatives, all of whom I had no idea even existed. And as I later found out, over half the people in city are named Gao (the other half are named Yang), and are in some way or another related to me...apparently, transportation and travel is still in its infancy in this part of China.
Here are some other interesting tidbits from my trip:
1. My great grandparents used to own alot of land, infact my great grandfather was a landlord and got killed by bandits when my grandpa was fairly young. I also found out that during the Cultural Revolution my great grandmother was tortured and beaten to death because our family owned lots of land.
2. My relatives are also really, really poor. My family now only owns enough land to cultivate and feed themselves with not much left over, the rest were taken by the government and divided among the other villagers. In terms of poverty, I'm not really sure how to explain the depth of which poverty exists in this part of China. For instance, I make more money in 2 weeks than most of my family makes in a whole year...its amazing how much waste we have in our lives and how much we take things for granted and can live without when forced to.
3. Chinese people are also very collective and familar. Everything my family and I did while in Szechuan was done with the WHOLE family, we never spent any alone time other than to sleep. My relatives even followed me into the bathroom, which is really uncomfortable when its one of those open squatting things. On this trip I remembered how indivualistic I can be at times. For over 4 days I had absolutely no time to myself and I could feel the energy drain from me earlier and earlier each day. But I also realized how important family is and how strong my relatives hold that bond between kin to be true.
4. I also ate more unrecognizable food on this trip than any other time in my life. My relatives raise and grow all their own food and don't waste anything. And since I didn't want to be rude, I put things down my stomach that I had no idea where it came from or what part of a something that it was. Although I did pay for this as I got a mild case of food poisoning towards the last couple days of my trip.
5. It also turns out Chinese people hit on girls in pretty much the same way as Americans. For our trip we had a driver drive our family around to places and the driver kept wanting to talk to me. First, he said really bad things about Bush and our war on Iraq which made me really upset, but I didn't really want to say anything (see point number 6) and then right after that he said something to the extent of how fate has brought us together and so we're now friends or something like that. Then I went for a walk on my own (refer to point 3) and the driver followed me and was like, "follow me." Of course I was really hesitant, but since I had no excuse for saying no, so I followed him to our car and he started playing music for me and asked me if I knew what the words meant, which I didn't. (Thankfully then my dad and some other people got worried about me and started looking for me.) So that was the first full day in Szechuan. For the rest of the trip he kept saying how we're not so different, asked me if I had a boyfriend, asked me if I thought he was overweight (which translated in English is the equivelant of if I thought he looked good), making general conversation I didn't understand, and also took a picture of him and me together (and put his arm around me)...I don't think I've ever looked more uncomfortable than in these moments of correspondence.
6. I also understood about 15% of what people around me said. It turns out the language barrier was huge for my whole family as the dialect in Szechuan was really different and not everyone knew how to speak Manadrin well. So most of the time I just smiled and nodded, which was awkward at times because I should have responded during some key nod moments.
I think that's all I want to write for now as I'm sick of typying, I haven't used this much English in almost 2 weeks and its starting to exhaust me :-)
I just returned from Szechuan (totally mispelled) yesterday. I went to a city that is about 2 hours outside of Chengdu, meaning, I was literally in the middle of nowhere. The city that I went to has some of the most incredible scenery that I've ever scene. The place is pretty much all mountains and streams and I guess pandas oringated from the region that I visited. It's incredible because techinally Szechuan is no longer considered to be the foothills of the Himalayas, yet the effects of the Himalayian mountains can be totally seen and felt. Anyways, enough about mountains and such.
I can't remember the name of the city that I just went to, but it is suppose to be my ancesteral home. And it turns out ALOT of my relatives live there. When we got to our hotel last Sunday we were greeted by over 30 relatives, all of whom I had no idea even existed. And as I later found out, over half the people in city are named Gao (the other half are named Yang), and are in some way or another related to me...apparently, transportation and travel is still in its infancy in this part of China.
Here are some other interesting tidbits from my trip:
1. My great grandparents used to own alot of land, infact my great grandfather was a landlord and got killed by bandits when my grandpa was fairly young. I also found out that during the Cultural Revolution my great grandmother was tortured and beaten to death because our family owned lots of land.
2. My relatives are also really, really poor. My family now only owns enough land to cultivate and feed themselves with not much left over, the rest were taken by the government and divided among the other villagers. In terms of poverty, I'm not really sure how to explain the depth of which poverty exists in this part of China. For instance, I make more money in 2 weeks than most of my family makes in a whole year...its amazing how much waste we have in our lives and how much we take things for granted and can live without when forced to.
3. Chinese people are also very collective and familar. Everything my family and I did while in Szechuan was done with the WHOLE family, we never spent any alone time other than to sleep. My relatives even followed me into the bathroom, which is really uncomfortable when its one of those open squatting things. On this trip I remembered how indivualistic I can be at times. For over 4 days I had absolutely no time to myself and I could feel the energy drain from me earlier and earlier each day. But I also realized how important family is and how strong my relatives hold that bond between kin to be true.
4. I also ate more unrecognizable food on this trip than any other time in my life. My relatives raise and grow all their own food and don't waste anything. And since I didn't want to be rude, I put things down my stomach that I had no idea where it came from or what part of a something that it was. Although I did pay for this as I got a mild case of food poisoning towards the last couple days of my trip.
5. It also turns out Chinese people hit on girls in pretty much the same way as Americans. For our trip we had a driver drive our family around to places and the driver kept wanting to talk to me. First, he said really bad things about Bush and our war on Iraq which made me really upset, but I didn't really want to say anything (see point number 6) and then right after that he said something to the extent of how fate has brought us together and so we're now friends or something like that. Then I went for a walk on my own (refer to point 3) and the driver followed me and was like, "follow me." Of course I was really hesitant, but since I had no excuse for saying no, so I followed him to our car and he started playing music for me and asked me if I knew what the words meant, which I didn't. (Thankfully then my dad and some other people got worried about me and started looking for me.) So that was the first full day in Szechuan. For the rest of the trip he kept saying how we're not so different, asked me if I had a boyfriend, asked me if I thought he was overweight (which translated in English is the equivelant of if I thought he looked good), making general conversation I didn't understand, and also took a picture of him and me together (and put his arm around me)...I don't think I've ever looked more uncomfortable than in these moments of correspondence.
6. I also understood about 15% of what people around me said. It turns out the language barrier was huge for my whole family as the dialect in Szechuan was really different and not everyone knew how to speak Manadrin well. So most of the time I just smiled and nodded, which was awkward at times because I should have responded during some key nod moments.
I think that's all I want to write for now as I'm sick of typying, I haven't used this much English in almost 2 weeks and its starting to exhaust me :-)
posted by chen at 9:33 AM
1 Comments:
Chen - you are so fricken cool to me right now...
For real.
:)
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