Spring Festival Travels: Spring Festival With Friend Near Shanghai Feb. 26
Hi!
It's been a while since I last wrote in Chongqing, and since then I've been all the way back to Shanghai and out to western China again. It's been nice to hear back from many of you while I travel! I'm now in Xining, Qinghai Province and I'll be heading back to Shanghai and Zhoushan in a few days. I have one more expedition left before I get on the train back east.
On February 16 Mary and I flew east from Chongqing to Shanghai. It felt strange to travel through airports in China after growing accustomed to bus stations and roads. On the flight I read the Chinese national English language paper, the China Daily, which is always unsatisfying and sometimes infuriating. The front page news was a story about China, India, and Russia meeting to declare their mutual commitment to world peace, and a story about how some college students are paying fellow students to pretend to be their significant other over the Spring Festival holiday to please their families (the article suggested they really shouldn't be doing this). The only news about anything really happening in China was a story about how packed train stations are with people heading home for the holiday - bad news for me. The foreign policy article had a note at the bottom about an editorial on the same subject. Like the news article, this editorial commented that this was really a very good thing indeed.
The Shanghai mass transit system is wonderful (except later when I was physically assaulted by a mass of people getting on the subway from the People's Square) and we got through the city and out by bus to our friend Xiao Sheng's area quite easily. On the way through Shanghai I stopped at a train ticket office and bought a train ticket to Xi'an, the closest I could get to Lanzhou given the Spring Festival rush.
Xiao Sheng's (full name Chen Sheng Feng) family lives in the countryside a half and hour outside the city of Haiyan, southwest of Shanghai and north of the Hangzhou Bay. This is a quite prosperous countryside with large, solid two-story houses spread across the land, with farm fields in between and factories here and there. The landscape was mostly gray and green - cloudy skies and gray buildings, and the lush green of the fields. There are muddy tracks and tree-lined concrete roads. The view out from the second story balcony of their house at night was wonderful.
Xiao Sheng's family includes his two parents, his grandfather in his early 90s, his older sister and her husband and three-month-old baby. Two sets of aunts and uncles and their children live just 50 meters away, and his older sister lives with her husband near his family a couple kilometers away. His family are farmers, and his sister's husband's family owns a small clothing factory. Their house is large and very spare, with high ceilings, and they leave everything open to the outside when they're home. A pig lives in one ground floor room, and next to that is the kitchen, then a couple large rooms for sitting during the day and having big dinners. A balcony runs the length of the upstairs connecting rooms and there are extra empty rooms. Xiao Sheng uses one as a tennis court. I was stuck by how little stuff Xiao Sheng has accumulated. His room had more or less a bed, a bedside table, a desk with a stereo system and his CD and MP3 players, and posters (and his own bathroom). I'd say probably his stuff was at school, except I've seen students' rooms and even as seniors they share rooms with three other students and their only personal space is their bed and small shelves over their desk (for comparison I had my own room and a huge common room last year).
Xiao Sheng's family was very kind and welcomed us in all their Spring Festival (New Year's) celebrations. I came away with a really strong impression of the value of family, and what it's like to live closely together in a rural area. We ate large dinners, all together with the extended family on the New Year's Eve, and in various other groupings other times. In between meal we biked to a nearby town, walked around, and mostly just sat around. One of my best memories was an afternoon sitting and reading on the second story balcony. Xiao Sheng's grandfather's 12-year-old granddaughter from his first marriage wandered upstairs and very patiently talked to me in Chinese. We eventually moved back downstairs and sat around eating sunflower seeds and drinking tea in a lazy sort of way with her mother and Xiao's Sheng's mother.
After dark on the New Year's Eve the countryside around their house lit up with fireworks. Quite substantial fireworks going off everywhere. After an evening watching CCTV programs at his sister's house we went to her husband's family's factory and were treated to a huge fireworks display of our own. We stood in the corners of the courtyard as her husband and a relative set out large cardboard boxes with fireworks in tubes inside and lit them off. I stayed the night at his sister's house and managed to lock myself in the bathroom for a couple hours in the morning (there was no doorknob on the inside as in turned out ...). Unfortunately due to poor communication his sister and her husband thought I'd locked myself in the evening before and spend the night there.
This was an incredible experience in a quiet way. It meant a lot to spend time with Xiao Sheng and understand the world he comes from - to get to know his family, and see their interactions and the pace of their life. I'm really glad that I came all the way back from western China, because I learned things from this that now amount of travel could have taught me.
On the 19th I got on a bus to Shanghai and spend the late afternoon at the Shanghai Museum in its new building with its fine collections of Chinese ceramics, calligraphy, painting, and more. I then walked down Nanjing DongLu (East Road), a bunch of neon lights and American fastfood chains, and ate dumplings on the boardwalk overlooking the Huangpu River. They have boats going up and down the river with huge football stadium-sized TV screens showing advertisements. I think that's all I need to say about Shanghai. At 10 o'clock I got on a train west to Xi'an, soft sleeper because that was all that was left.
I think I'll write the next part in another e-mail so you aren't overwhelmed!
Tyler
It's been a while since I last wrote in Chongqing, and since then I've been all the way back to Shanghai and out to western China again. It's been nice to hear back from many of you while I travel! I'm now in Xining, Qinghai Province and I'll be heading back to Shanghai and Zhoushan in a few days. I have one more expedition left before I get on the train back east.
On February 16 Mary and I flew east from Chongqing to Shanghai. It felt strange to travel through airports in China after growing accustomed to bus stations and roads. On the flight I read the Chinese national English language paper, the China Daily, which is always unsatisfying and sometimes infuriating. The front page news was a story about China, India, and Russia meeting to declare their mutual commitment to world peace, and a story about how some college students are paying fellow students to pretend to be their significant other over the Spring Festival holiday to please their families (the article suggested they really shouldn't be doing this). The only news about anything really happening in China was a story about how packed train stations are with people heading home for the holiday - bad news for me. The foreign policy article had a note at the bottom about an editorial on the same subject. Like the news article, this editorial commented that this was really a very good thing indeed.
The Shanghai mass transit system is wonderful (except later when I was physically assaulted by a mass of people getting on the subway from the People's Square) and we got through the city and out by bus to our friend Xiao Sheng's area quite easily. On the way through Shanghai I stopped at a train ticket office and bought a train ticket to Xi'an, the closest I could get to Lanzhou given the Spring Festival rush.
Xiao Sheng's (full name Chen Sheng Feng) family lives in the countryside a half and hour outside the city of Haiyan, southwest of Shanghai and north of the Hangzhou Bay. This is a quite prosperous countryside with large, solid two-story houses spread across the land, with farm fields in between and factories here and there. The landscape was mostly gray and green - cloudy skies and gray buildings, and the lush green of the fields. There are muddy tracks and tree-lined concrete roads. The view out from the second story balcony of their house at night was wonderful.
Xiao Sheng's family includes his two parents, his grandfather in his early 90s, his older sister and her husband and three-month-old baby. Two sets of aunts and uncles and their children live just 50 meters away, and his older sister lives with her husband near his family a couple kilometers away. His family are farmers, and his sister's husband's family owns a small clothing factory. Their house is large and very spare, with high ceilings, and they leave everything open to the outside when they're home. A pig lives in one ground floor room, and next to that is the kitchen, then a couple large rooms for sitting during the day and having big dinners. A balcony runs the length of the upstairs connecting rooms and there are extra empty rooms. Xiao Sheng uses one as a tennis court. I was stuck by how little stuff Xiao Sheng has accumulated. His room had more or less a bed, a bedside table, a desk with a stereo system and his CD and MP3 players, and posters (and his own bathroom). I'd say probably his stuff was at school, except I've seen students' rooms and even as seniors they share rooms with three other students and their only personal space is their bed and small shelves over their desk (for comparison I had my own room and a huge common room last year).
Xiao Sheng's family was very kind and welcomed us in all their Spring Festival (New Year's) celebrations. I came away with a really strong impression of the value of family, and what it's like to live closely together in a rural area. We ate large dinners, all together with the extended family on the New Year's Eve, and in various other groupings other times. In between meal we biked to a nearby town, walked around, and mostly just sat around. One of my best memories was an afternoon sitting and reading on the second story balcony. Xiao Sheng's grandfather's 12-year-old granddaughter from his first marriage wandered upstairs and very patiently talked to me in Chinese. We eventually moved back downstairs and sat around eating sunflower seeds and drinking tea in a lazy sort of way with her mother and Xiao's Sheng's mother.
After dark on the New Year's Eve the countryside around their house lit up with fireworks. Quite substantial fireworks going off everywhere. After an evening watching CCTV programs at his sister's house we went to her husband's family's factory and were treated to a huge fireworks display of our own. We stood in the corners of the courtyard as her husband and a relative set out large cardboard boxes with fireworks in tubes inside and lit them off. I stayed the night at his sister's house and managed to lock myself in the bathroom for a couple hours in the morning (there was no doorknob on the inside as in turned out ...). Unfortunately due to poor communication his sister and her husband thought I'd locked myself in the evening before and spend the night there.
This was an incredible experience in a quiet way. It meant a lot to spend time with Xiao Sheng and understand the world he comes from - to get to know his family, and see their interactions and the pace of their life. I'm really glad that I came all the way back from western China, because I learned things from this that now amount of travel could have taught me.
On the 19th I got on a bus to Shanghai and spend the late afternoon at the Shanghai Museum in its new building with its fine collections of Chinese ceramics, calligraphy, painting, and more. I then walked down Nanjing DongLu (East Road), a bunch of neon lights and American fastfood chains, and ate dumplings on the boardwalk overlooking the Huangpu River. They have boats going up and down the river with huge football stadium-sized TV screens showing advertisements. I think that's all I need to say about Shanghai. At 10 o'clock I got on a train west to Xi'an, soft sleeper because that was all that was left.
I think I'll write the next part in another e-mail so you aren't overwhelmed!
Tyler
posted by Tyler C-R at 8:08 PM
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