11: the national holiday

china takes only a few holidays, but they are serious about them when they do: national day and mid-winter festival are two of the biggest. the primary objective of both celebrations is to return to the home village and to visit with family; it's a wonder we don't feel it on the western side of the globe when this is set in motion.

national holiday marks the founding of the republic on october 1, 1949. it also conveniently coincides with the "mid-autumn festival" celebrated with the arrival of the harvest moon. everyone pools the workdays before and after to maximize the time away from work: this year the saturday before and the sunday following were deemed workdays, so that the time off started on sunday and ran through saturday for a full 7-day holiday.

this holiday is also widely anticipated as the last hurrah until mid-winter festival (which coincides with chinese new year, and usually falls in february)- it's another looong march between breaks. for our teachers' group, it's one of the peak travel times, too. except for this year: none of us had travel papers. our passports and visas were trapped in a bureaucratic logjam, that looked pretty insoluble. we were warned not to commit to any travel plans until visa documents were in hand. individual interviews with the authorities were arranged in each of our home municipal districts to try and help things along. my particular interviewer was incredulous: i see that you're an architect, but you come here to teach in a junior high school? you make so much money in the states, why would you do such a thing? my answer that money wasn't the issue for me left him speechless; he could think of no other way to approach the subject with his limited english. he sputtered a bit, shook his head in the patented chinese official "this will never do" manner, walked away, walked back, and eventually stamped my sheaf of papers. at least it was a quick meeting...

my plans were to meet with the rices in hong kong; paul had meetings scheduled there for a few days, margaret and the kids were to fly down from shanghai on sunday. if i was confined to china, they were going to have to cross over to see me; the prospect of finally visiting that city twinkling in the distance was far more appealing. the days ticked by, with no passports or news of them.

school had fallen back into the old routine as soon as i returned from the country weekend in gan's village. the internet connection to our dorm rooms was still fried, and lulu was letting me use her office computer to check email. my classes were reading chinese newspaper clippings and telling me what they were about; i had completed a roster of their "english" names. most students volunteered their own, that were usually phonetic permutations of their chinese names, or pleasant sounds like "puppy" and "rain". i downgraded a few who would be "superman" to "clark" or "kent", and discouraged one kid who wanted to be called "queer". but there were a few chances for mischief with those who asked to be christened by mr. bill; the most notorious was a rather large, scowling, angry girl. when i asked her what was her english name, a boy behind her piped up "she's football player!". she hurled her notebook at him like a frisbee, nearly severing his head. her english name is now "lorena".

an excursion downtown to my chinese classes marked the middle and ends of the workweeks, and gan usually planned some sort of dinner on friday nights. after dinners we now indulged in a new ritual he'd introduced me to: the chinese foot massage.

my first visit had me more than skeptical: up a grand flight of curving marble stairs, hostesses in long white gowns and debutante gloves welcomed us enthusiastically. what's this, are we here to get married? i saw that his niece was still with us, as we were ushered into a private room, and felt mildly relieved. the room contained four enormous easy chairs, with doilies and ottomans, and a blaring flat-screen television. that was doused pronto...

soon our technicians appeared, healthy girls each carrying a small wooden washtub filled with a steamy, dark herbal brew. the ottomans were pushed away, and we were each set down to roll up our britches and soak in one. so as to make best use of the soak time, the girls were back in about ten minutes to stand us in the tubs, spin us around and drop back onto the ottomans- so they could go to work on neck, shoulders, and back. i thought this was a long way from my feet, but they soon dug into muscles that i never knew were back there; maybe this was where catholic nuns learned their paralysis grips. it varies from place to place, but guaranteed in each session is a quick knee to your spine, a pull back on your shoulders and a resounding crack that has you seeing stars... and the shadow of a wheelchair in your future. and then you realize that already you feel better- tension and stiffness you thought normal are gone.

now to the main event; helped to stand, spun around and plopped back into your easy chair, she goes to work on your now-tenderized feet. it's impossible to document every move- every masseuse has his or her own ritual- but for the next forty minutes you're in her hands. it always starts with a scrub and an oil rubdown, sometimes wanders up to pressure points in your calves or behind your knees, but always includes popping your toe joints, some vigorous limb-shaking, aggressive manipulation of every bone and tendon, and a thorough pounding of fists all over the place. the signature moment is when they go for the muscle that runs down the inside of your arch from the bottom: your mental image is of a hot wire with thousands of volts coursing through it, and she's digging in her locked knuckle for the entire length. you finally figure out you gotta just relax (or else you might scream), and suddenly it's all ok- just a tingling, warm glow that spreads up to your knees.



i think this must be the point i've reached above, though my face looks like i'm enduring a crucifixion. for more than an hour you sip tea and let them work on you- usually for about 40 kwai (5 bucks u.s.); how in the hell do they do it? walking out, you understand the marble stairs: you fell like fred astaire dancing down them. about once a week is all i can stand at the moment, but i'm looking forward to the full-body treatment sometime. i've also tried the special ear cleaning in another place: feathers and a toolbox full of implements they don't let you see. but what a difference when they're finished! seems they've figured out a lot of tricks in a few thousand years...

our first working saturday before the holiday was designated a thursday: we'd follow that day's class schedule. lots of bustle as students dragged luggage through school, ready to be picked up for the start of their vacations; by afternoon, we foreign teachers were still quiet and visaless.

at about 6pm, my cellphone buzzed with a text message: teachers from our district were to rush to starbucks near ke xue guan subway stop. our passports had just been released! our group leader had them in hand and would distribute them immediately. it was comforting to have it back in hand, but having made no plans, sunday was spent making arrangements and preparing to travel. paul made a reservation for me at the hotel where they were staying in kowloon; i was to meet up with them at midday on monday.

early monday morning, i joined up with next-door james and a few teachers from our neighborhood to make the trek to luohu station, and our first border crossing. from the railway station plaza, directional signs to hong kong lead you into what looks like a scruffy shopping mall; threading your way up escalators and past jewelers and chicken feet sellers, following strange and conflicting signage (must use lift leave country) you arrive at the foreigners' departure hall. just like an airport, you fill out a card and choose a line to have your passport scrutinized. past this gate and up some more escalators, you the rejoin the stream of chinese passport holders and emerge onto a glass bridge spanning several stories above a dull-surfaced, gray-greenish channel; this must be the "deep ditch", the meaning of "shenzhen" in chinese. while urbanization stops abruptly on the shenzhen bank- the hong kong side is what passes for virgin landscape here- what has to be sewage gushes into the channel from openings in both banks. this ain't the fountains of rome; the openings are fitted with elaborate metal grillage on the hong kong side; there must have been some desperate folks trying to make this crossing. the railroad bridge that parallels our crossing 100 feet to the west is similarly fortified with razor wire and gun placements; the border presents an ugly dissonance rare in my chinese experience to date. but i guess few people stop to check it out, rushing freely now in both directions.

on the hong kong shore, foreigners are again peeled off into a special line, this time to be body-temperature scanned, passing by a table of masked medical techs. cheery multilingual literature on bird flu and sars is available, if you so desire. further on is an arrival hall for foreigners: more cards, more lines, more perusal. past this barrier, you emerge into- what else? another shopping mall, this one considerably more upscale than on the shenzhen side, with atm's, moneychangers, and ticket machines for the suburban railway that will deliver you to center city for 35 hong kong dollars (about us$4.50).

the train equipment, the number of stops and the distance covered is comparable to metro north from port chester into new york city, but it runs at subway intervals. the landscape changes quickly from rural villages and farmland at the northern border to dense urbanity; hong kong is much more eager to build on the slopes and hilltops than their neighbors in shenzhen. occasionally, a turquoise bay pops into view; the train ducks underground for the final few stops, and you emerge from the terminal into the bustling streets of tsim sha tsui, near the kowloon dock of the star ferry.

our group of teachers, after 2 full months in china, stood blinking like rubes in the big city- more london than asia. the whole world had changed in 30 minutes. we'd forgotten how many things we'd learned to do without across the border, just because figuring out how to ask for it was more difficult than it was worth. anything was possible here: signs in english, bookstores with english titles, pubs with western food. while china has made huge progress, crossing the hong kong border is a transition nearly as profound as crossing our own border with mexico. we had a quick lunch together, then went our separate ways. the hotel guangdong, where the rices were staying, was only a few blocks away.

i let margaret take all the pictures of our time together in hong kong, and haven't gotten copies of them yet, so i'm lacking in visual aids here. hong kong is as beautiful and exciting and accessible as i remembered it; our biggest excursion together was a day at disneyland, which was a lot more fun than i expected. we had some great meals and big laughs; wednesday evening i put them on the shanghai express, the 24-hour sleeper train to home, and returned to my own side of the border. thursday was laundry and more travel plotting, friday morning i was back at luohu station to travel in the other direction: about an hour north to guangzhou.

i had no idea what to expect of guangzhou; all i knew was that it was the old canton, and was historically the most outward-looking of chinese cities. people in shenzhen spoke disdainfully of it as "too many people", "too old", and "too dirty". to me that was sounding pretty good- i was feeling a need for a dose of history. i'd read about shamian island, where the europeans had made their treaty port settlement, similar to the french concession in shanghai and gu lang yu island in xiamen. i'd found an internet listing for the victory hotel on the island, made a reservation there, and set sail.

the one-stop, high-speed train ride north had less drama than the one to the south; it's pretty much a conurbation all the way up, with only a few rural glimpses. this is also the main line of the mighty chinese rail system; beijing, shanghai and other major city trains also follow this route. huge construction continues most of the way to guangzhou: it looks like an entire new line is being built parallel, with heroic new concrete trestles leaping obstructions. armies of yellow-jacketed workers shuffle along the heights in conical straw hats, carrying lengths of rail slung from bamboo poles across their shoulders; this could have been the construction of our own transcontinental railroad, circa 1869.

the train pulls into guangzhou east station, which looks pretty much like what i'd just left. i found a newsstand with a map in english, located shamian island, and set out in a taxi to find my hotel. it was about a 30-minute ride, first down boulevards scaled for mayday parades, and later through more textured neighborhoods with jazzy buildings from the 20's and 30's. glimpses down side lanes gave promise to lots of "old china" to be found here. i'd barely noticed that we'd crossed any water, but we pulled up a tree-lined street to the victory hotel.





it was a big old neoclassical stone building, with an arcade and columns and arches, facing the waterway that separates the island from the mainland. the interior had obviously been gut-renovated, but the room was great, particularly the bedding, with a big down comforter and huge pillows. and it was exactly half the price of the one not nearly so nice in hong kong.

10: trip to national geographic

gan picked me up from my school gate in his jeep wagoneer; i had chuckled at his choice of vehicles when first i met him, and assumed it went with his cowboy hat and affection for things western. i hadn't thought that it might be a necessity...

our first destination was to be the city of huizhou, about an hour north of shenzhen. the friday evening traffic was dense, but i was enjoying my first foray beyond the city limits. by dark we had arrived at the restaurant where we were to meet some of his high school friends for dinner: a broad, multi-story building on a quiet block with an enormous printed banner that covered the entire facade. the banner was floodlit, and bore an alpine image (surely photoshopped) of mountain pastures and a smiling flock. the discreet english caption, lower right corner, didn't beat around the bush: nice sheep. guess what we had for dinner?

we were a bit late, and his four friends had already gathered in a private dining room on the third floor. an enormous 2-tub hot pot was already bubbling at the center of the table; we were offered the grilled appetizers- kebab things and lamb chops- that they had already started on. and then the raw meats destined for the cauldron started rolling in; trays of razor-thin lamb in rolls and florets, and varieties of sliced vegetables. the 2 compartments of the hot pot could have been labelled "hot" and "really hot"; this was a muslim restaurant, and they didn't scrimp on the silk road spices and peppers that roiled in the brew. meat and vegetables into the pot, swizzled until done; i think i was the only one to venture into the "really hot" side. gan's friends were duly impressed, and brought out the baijiu (clear rocket fuel distilled from rice) to further test my mettle. they all had some english, and were curious about and generous with this blue-eyed stranger that gan had brought along to their regular gathering: no one would let me pay for a thing.

after dinner, they led us to a downtown hotel where they had reserved some rooms for gan and i to spend the night; they were now residents of huizhou. we took a stroll (make that a hike) around the lake that is the centerpiece of city, an ancient pleasure garden of islands and bridges, pavilions and a pagoda, mysterious in the dark, but cheerfully lit with winkie lights and filled with strollers enjoying the evening breezes, and enjoyed some "beer on a pier" before turning in.



the next morning, we were up early and on the road just after 7am. the outskirts of huizhou are now home to many of the factory compounds that germinated in shenzhen and the special economic zone: boatloads of shoes and apparel are ground out from hundreds of grim, walled compounds of multistory production and housing blocks. as we moved further into the countryside, the buildings gave way to the ghosts of what had been agricultural communities: faint outlines of terraced hillsides surrounded crumbling villages of what resembles adobe, with traditional barrel-tile roofing, garnished with stands of banana and bamboo, often rudely punctuated with tall, flat-roofed houses of concrete, faced with bathroom tile in weird colors and patterns. muddy ponds for fish culture ringed each village. there were no real trees to speak of, only a green fuzz carpeted the hills, overlaid with an occasional veil of kudzu; sapling trees- presumably for pulp and fiber- bristled from the ridges.

by 8am, we approached what gan called his home town; a hill on the left, spiked with a pagoda, he pointed out as his high school. we motored down the main drag between new "shop houses": tall concrete rows with commercial space on the ground floor and two or three living floors above. these owner-occupied structures are now ubiquitous in china, and the commercial space can shelter anything from fancy restaurants to toxic waste sorting facilities, cheek by jowl in the same block. at one intersection, a man on the right waved to gan, and we pulled over and parked to the left; time for breakfast; the waver was one of his brothers. after a quick bowl of porridge, seated on low sidewalk stools, we passed thru the nearby "wet market" and accumulated some greens, some peppers and some pork whittled from the hanging carcass; these were for his mom and the lunch she was preparing. we left the brother "in town" and set out for the farm.

the roads had gotten progressively narrower as we got further from shenzhen; just past the village, we turned into a paved lane barely wide enough for a cart. within a few kilometers, the pavement stopped and we threaded up a winding dirt track. soon we were on a single-rut path... the jeep groaned and climbed higher, as we threaded our way up a narrow valley. how in the hell did you get to that school you showed me? he said it was a boarding school, and he only biked this on monday and friday, a long ride nonetheless. how in the hell do your mom and dad get around now? motorbike; they're both in their 70's.

i'd first seen the homestead in the background of pictures gan was showing me of the weekend house he was building. was that a caretaker's house? no, that's where he grew up, and where his mom and dad still live; his getaway was the family farm. about thirty minutes further up the valley, through a crossing of the bamboo-lined stream, it came into view.





our arrival didn't seem like any big deal; lots of roaming chickens were outraged at the intrusion, but the gaggle of children playing by the outbuildings barely looked our way. no sign of any grownups- mom must be working in her garden; gan says she likes having all the kids around. only one is family, the rest were neighbors who like mom's company, and her cooking. we had a quick look around the old courtyard house, a typical "hakka" dwelling built just before he was born (in the 60's) then moved on to tour his new house adjacent.

while playing on the forms and materials of the traditional house, this one sets off in some new directions: it is approached by a shaded verandah to the south (which mom finds handy for laundry), and instead of a courtyard, the entirety of the structure had been opened up as the central living space.







after sufficient admiration of his work-in-progress, gan asked if i'd like to visit the family shrine. a steep 15-minute walk up the valley behind the houses (even the jeep was useless here), we came to the two rooftops in a clearing. the gurgling stream we'd heard during the climb separated the two structures: an open shelter on our side of the stream, facing into the three-walled shrine on the other.







it seems the shrine had only recently been rebuilt; during the cultural revolution, the zealous village schoolmaster had enlisted some of his students to pull it down as a worthy project. chastened by time, the same schoolmaster was one of the organizers of the reconstruction. as we wound our way back down the valley, smoke was curling from the chimney of the old house: mom was in the kitchen preparing lunch.

gan and i had tea in the big courtyard, while mom did her magic; she brought us a basket of wild berries to tide us over. it seems dad was off on his motorbike to help a daughter with a construction project in another town; with the arrival of the brother from town, we would only be four for lunch.



the lunch table was laid out for the adults in the smaller courtyard that served as a kitchen; giggles and chatter from deeper into the house let us know the kids were eating, too. we sat on low stools as mom loaded the table; a few chickens pecked at the floor, glared up and clucked at us accusingly. the head and feet of one of their siblings draped over the edges of one of the larger bowls, the remains steamed and seasoned with ginger. there were also three small fish, snagged from the pond in front, that were frolicking in a waterjug by the door the last i saw them. there were green beans from the garden, stir-fried with chunks of smoky, fatty bacon that they love so in guangdong. there were greens steamed with garlic, and a dish with the pork that we'd brought out, and i'm sure a few other things i've forgotten. gan let mom know that we's enjoy some of her home-made wine, too; she ladled some out of another crock in the back and brought us a small pitcher of her brew. herbed and spiced, it was similar to the sherry-like rice wine i was learning to enjoy. gan told me later that two snakes that mom had found in the pond out front had been marinating in- and seasoning the crock of wine from which we'd drunk. in a few months, when they were "done", the snakes would make a delicious meal, too.

it was during the meal that gan pointed out two rough-hewn boxes cradled in the rafters over the kitchen door: mom and dad's coffins. the hakka people like to be prepared, and are quite matter-of-fact about death (as the chickens on the floor could certainly attest). while on the subject, did i care to see grandma's grave? she'd died recently, and had just been placed in a new tomb up another valley behind the house. gan had hired some workmen to embellish the site, and wanted to check on the progress while here.

the grave was about twice the distance from the house as the shrine; we took the jeep until the road really ended, and then made another uphill climb. from the cleared site of granny's grave we could see grandpa's on a facing hillside, perhaps a mile down the valley. a feng shui master had picked this spot, in the valley where the gan family had been settled for some 700 years. you could again make out the contours of fields no longer in cultivation, and the sites of abandoned homesteads. population of these hidden valleys is shrinking, as youngsters flee to the cities of modern china.



once back to the homesteaad, gan had one more request: could mom cut him some bamboo? no questions asked, mom gets her wicked knife from behind the door and sets about her business. a few minutes later, mission accomplished:



gan wanted the bamboo for an arrangement in his office; mom then trucked out a number of her crocks for his selection. with this bit of business done, it was late afternoon and time to return to the real world. gan assures me this was not a typical sendoff:



all things considered, i have to say the gan household took me pretty much in stride. cousins further down the valley, however, were another matter. as we stopped at homesteads to deliver moon cakes (for the upcoming holiday) on our trip back down to the pavement, most children could not have been more surprised if a dragon had stepped from the dusty jeep...

as dark fell, we edged back into the "real" world, through the mountains that overlook the bright lights of shenzhen, and it's more than eight million inhabitants...

next: national holiday