Notes From Xi'an 西安随感

Groom's Favourite Uncle Getting Into Character

After being away from Xi’an for a week over Christmas, we returned to Xi’an for a week before happily setting off again – it is always good to take a break or two from city life. This time it was down to my wife’s village for a pre-Spring Festival visit. It was an especially important trip to make, as I am not going to be around for the New Year celebrations themselves – the one time of year that the extended Chinese family do get a chance to be together. I will be off visiting my own family back in Great Britain.

We also needed to head back to the village as one of Ling’s relatives was getting married. No matter whether or not there is love between marrying Chinese villagers – and there is often a distinct lack of it – I always enjoy being part of Chinese village marriages, if for no other reason than that they are full of local people, local customs and local food: aspects of Chinese life that I do not experience every day.

Tables, chairs, bowls and chopsticks are rented, while the home’s courtyard fills with family, neighbours and friends. The ritual of beating down the bride’s bedroom door – almost literally – is followed before she is carried off to her future by her soon-to-be husband. At this point the bride is leaving her family to become part of the groom’s home, although, not before the couple host a banquet in the front yard, a custom that requires the individual toasting of nearly every single guest. After this, and depending on the distance between the homes, a fleet of black cars conveys the couple and accompanying entourage to a location close to the groom’s family home, where a sedan chair will be waiting.

Uncle About To Carry Bride

The in-laws, dressed in traditional costume, parade around the garishly decorated chair, while a drum beat sounds their new daughter’s arrival. The bride is often quite unceremoniously hoisted from the car and placed within the sedan chair, where family members carry her home, rocking the chair wildly as they go. En route, a few surreptitiously positioned members of the groom’s family will stage a mock defence to keep the bride away: a custom that can lead to tempers boiling over. On arrival at the new home, a quite procedural kind of wedding ceremony follows, although, this depends on the love that actually exists between the couple.  Then the real eating begins. At this particular wedding, with Spring Festival just around the corner, it meant even more food than normal, and particularly more meat.

At this time of year both the preparation and eating of food is high on everyone’s agenda. Staple foods include pigs’ intestines, pigs’ ears and pigs’ trotters. In our own celebrations back at home, or here in Xi’an, most of us will be stocking up from our local supermarkets. Not so in the village. Pigs are slaughtered and winter vegetables are harvested in great quantities from the fields. Tofu and noodles are freshly made at home in huge fire-lit woks, while bowls are filled to the brim with steaming rice soups and heaving chunks of potato.

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This time last year I offered a “Contemporary Chinese Nod Towards the Ubiquitous New Year Calendar“. This year, I will continue in a similar vein but this year the images will come from a recent trip to the small canal town of Xītáng, which is located not far from Hángzhōu.

We took a Christmas break to the Eastern canal towns and thoroughly enjoyed doing so. It was cold but not too cold to happily wander around, though, we were lucky we had the sun on our side. Being the winter season there weren’t too many people around, which was also good. I really did enjoy taking it easy by the waters of Xītáng, but I was also impressed with the thought that has gone into developing the city of Sūzhōu, compared that is to many other Chinese cities – Hángzhōu and Xīān included.

*With this not being a “real” calendar the images all come from Xītáng during our visit in December and are not representative of the different seasons that the months below might suggest – and as someone recently questioned.

JANUARY - A whole bunch of dedicated art students braved the cold to enjoy some fresh days and produce some fine work.

FEBRUARY - The boatman drink a lot of tea this time of year, but it was a pleasure to watch a few of them still manoeuvre their boats rhythmically down stream.

MARCH - This is a tourist town but it is still a good spot to take it easy, especially this time of year - and certainly between monday and friday - when there are few tourists around.

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Heading Home

I will start this slightly more personal Note From Xi’an, about a recent trip back to my fiancee Ling’s family village, differently and in reverse. I will begin with a track from the Bob Dylan album ‘Bringing It All Back Home’. The song is ‘On The Road Again’ and I was listening to it as I sat looking out at the fields disappearing into the evening light as we left parents, second parents, second brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts behind us, heading back to Xi’an.

I sat with my shoulders and legs aching and a heavy arm holding a soon to be sleeping Ling close to me, listening to Dylan’s perfectly loaded lyrics. The words were soon sending a smile across my face, the more so as I thought about their relevance to my own particular little qíng kuàng (situation). I glanced down towards Ling with a wry grin before continuing to watch the fields roll by into the darkness, Dylan’s words resonating ever deeper. The exact reasons, the lines I could exchange with his, I won’t of course fully articulate here. Suffice to say, in-laws are in-laws at the best of times but in the China village they are another field of rice altogether.

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With the Summer most certainly now with us and holiday fever beginning to break out around the city this week, helped of course by the Dragon Boat Festival gliding onto the calendar, it was nice to start off on a Monday with a siesta and a picnic. There is a good spot in Qu Jiang that has a Ma Jiang table housed within a Chinese Style gazebo, surrounded by trees, a pond and a boardwalk, and very few people: perfect for a take-away (dàizǒu-带走) picnic. It does always amaze me actually that it is often so quiet and peaceful there, given the intensity of the masses gathered in most other areas of town at the same time, but hey, happy days.

Tuesday was a bit more active, with a Yellow River Soup Kitchen trip to a mountain village in Lantian to distribute donated clothes, toys and Zòng Zi (粽子). With these trips occurring a bit more frequently recently, due to the increased levels of donations and contacts on the ground, the process is getting smoother, though it is of course still reliant on the good will of a number of volunteers to supply vehicles, drivers, friendly faces and helpful hands.

The weather was great, the people in the villages appreciative and welcoming, and the landscape really quite beautiful. What is maybe lacking in material items and income is certainly not lacking in nature, whether the environmental kind, or that related to character and spirit. Those good contacts that have now been made in this particular area mean that another trip will soon be forthcoming, and this time it is going to include a sports day program of fun and games at one of the local schools. All is well.

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Just a brief travel note to highlight the joys found a few kilometres outside of central Xi’an, in amongst the Qin Ling Mountains. A mountain range that stretches East to West, marks a natural boundary between China’s North and South and is easily accessible from Xi’an’s city centre. There will also be a quick nod at the end towards Oscar’s Café/ bar.

In the last year or two, whether by bike or bus, I have increasingly edged further into the mountain landscape that surrounds this great city. Last weekend, we headed out again to a mountain forest park. The park here is great for an escape into nature; the climb isn’t too brutal and it’s set in beautiful pine forest surroundings. There are an increasing number of those concrete crafted picnic spots, but they are seemingly learning to incorporate more wood into the production process than has been seen in other Chinese nature retreats. Also, even if the view at the top is itself hampered by those same forest pines it is fantastic being on the mountain, knowing that Xi’an is only a couple of hours a way in reality, miles away in feeling.

For this particular spot, get yourself on the 19 bus going East, where that bus stops get off and get on the 4-08 (not 408), which heads south- west. It will take you directly to Xiang Yu Sen Lin Gong Yuan 祥峪森林 – Xiang Yu Forest Park, just outside the small town of Dong Da 东大, still in Chang’an Qu 长安区. It is only about an hour and half outside of Xi’an. Or, find your way to the new university campus area and pick up the 4-08 there, or… just ride a bike, a san lun che 三轮车, a motorbike, a moped, drive or rent a car. (I have the number of a driver we used while we were out there, who also said he would take people out of Xi’an to the mountains – if I remember, for about 70 Yuan- a cheerful and chatty chap- his number is 15929979803) (more…)

One thing that has increasingly struck me on visits to my fiancée’s isolated hamlet is how increasingly un-isolated it is becoming. First, the Xi-Han high-speed road dissected a local valley. At the beginning it was just an impressive stretch of glistening black tarmac without a car in sight, last year the odd car or lorry appeared every once in a while as a distraction from hours in the fields, this year it wasn’t possible to have a sequence of time where there wasn’t a vehicle on the road- the almost silence was deafening.

Secondly, on my first visit a few years ago there was only a mud road from the nearby town through neighbouring villages to this small hamlet, now there is a smooth line of concrete not only connecting these small villages to a larger town but the smaller villages to each other. Though, we have in fact just used some of the stone and brick fragments left over from one of the ubiquitous house rebuilds, even here in the hamlet, to help level the still rough track outside the family home. The engagement of a local girl to a laowai (foreigner) doesn’t seem to have meant that the couple are excluded from local chores, in fact over time it might just make me more responsible for them. One of the pressures that does seem to have come with engagement and impending marriage is the responsibility laid upon my shoulders, maybe literally if all else fails, to help rebuild the family home. (more…)

With on-line / pre-paid/ high environmental cost airline tickets tucked away in my gmail database somewhere, this year’s experience of Chinese New Year may well be somewhat different to last year’s. Although, bus stations/ train stations and a trip to the in-laws can only actually be forestalled and not avoided completely; Beijing for New Year- deep Southern Shaanxi a week later.

Here are a few extracts from last year’s Notes, just to remind me what Chinese New Year is all about and to get me in the spirit of it all. Plus this article about the ‘real-name train ticket system’ that is being piloted this year.

Chinese New Year at Xi’an’s Southern Bus Station I.

Chinese New Year is fast approaching and people in their masses are heading home. Yesterday I wandered down to the bus station to buy a ticket for my girlfriend who is also returning home for Spring Festival, a few days before I join her. No problem I had thought, a bit of a wait then I would arrive back at the flat a knight in shining armour, clutching a much sought after ticket when she returned from work. However… read on (more…)

A couple of things that stood out on the Chinese culture front last week. The first, was listening to a Chinese colleague outline her lunchtime ritual. She noted how she goes from school to her car across the road, which she pays to park, then drives straight down the street to her daughters school, also where her husband works. This whole process takes under 10 minutes. Her and her husband then have lunch with their daughter, before retiring to a school provided dormitory for a siesta. She then drives back here for afternoon classes before returning again to meet her daughter after she finishes school. They wait at the school while their daughter does her homework and plays in the pleasant surroundings of the near-by university campus. They then drive home, about 5-10 minutes by car.

Why do I note this? Maybe back in Britain or in the States this scenario seems oh so normal. But, this is a nation of cyclists, bus catchers and walkers. No longer.

One of the great things about living in China, and particularly here in Xi’an, as it is less developed than Beijing for example, is that it places many of the norms of our own societies in sharp contrast. The society here maybe in the process of going down the same route we took, but by doing so from a different starting point or time period, it sharpens the focus from which we view not only the changes here, but our own norms of behaviour.

Just weeks ago this lady cycled down the road at lunch time and then home in the evening, with her daughter on the back of her bike. Now, she makes 5 journeys a day in her VW Golf. I suppose this is all-good for the economy and is being increasingly supported by many major nations, particularly here and in the United States. These are the realities of the principles that underpin our societies. It is just that they seem to me a little crazy really, and that is without taking into account the environmental costs.

Secondly, I was sitting in a small fast-food restaurant doing a bit of studying when a young lad, your average looking student, sat down at the table just across from me. He began to chomp and slurp his way through his lunch, as if oblivious to any of the evolutionary etiquette that has emerged over the last however many centuries, in various parts of our various societies.

Now, I am quite used to this really, living on the street I live, which is not inhabited by the wealthiest of people and has an abundance of hole-in-the-wall restaurants. I have also stayed a number of times in rural village communities where the old noodle suck and slurp is going strong. I can actually manage a good noodle slurp myself and even recognise the benefit when the noodles are piping hot. However, there are levels, it doesn’t matter how you cut it, listening to this guy eat was no different from listening to an animal munching, noisily at its trough, every open mouth(ful) chomped, sucked and slurped over. Quite amazing.

This, of course, may well not be a bad thing, certain levels of etiquette go far too far and I particularly enjoyed eating with my right hand in India, but…

…I wished this bloke would just shut the —- up!

Chinese New Year (Guo Nian) seemed to have come and gone but on returning to Xi’an it is obvious it is still in the process of going, pleasantly. Back in the village, my girlfriend is actually from a small village outside town, New Year was spent trying desperately not to eat a feast of fine proportions at every home in the neighbourhood. However, when the neighbourhood consists of fields and homesteads drifting off into the far distance and when everyone seems to be a second father, an uncle, a sister, an elder brother or an aunty this can prove quite difficult. Even harder, having arrived at the destination where you have actually planned to have dinner, is to politely find excuses for why you cannot now eat all the delights laid before you. In areas of China where maybe the selection of food on offer is not usually of the widest variety, come Spring Festival things are different. Fish are found, pigs and chickens are killed and even the odd dog finds its way to the plate. This is the time of year in China to treat yourself and, as best you can, everyone else around you.

As an aside and with reference to the subway system that is being built here in Xi’an, it is marvellous to have returned to discover Chang’an Lu (the main southerly tributary from the city centre and the south gate) free from a couple of sections of subway related road closures that have been causing disbelief and despair for months. These closures seem to have coincided with a noticeable increase in car use over the last year or so and have accordingly led to a noticeable increase in the number of minor accidents. I will refer back to these issues in later notes but it is enough to conclude here, with the observation that people maintain the habit of crossing the road and swinging out of junctions as if cars were still a strange anomaly here in Xi’an, they are not. This week I am able to trundle down the street on my bike with an absentminded holiday attentiveness, next week I will not be able to do so but then I will be back at work.

* This is not my picture but I like it.

New Year in China isn’t just what you celebrate but where you celebrate and what it tells us about what we already know but maybe don’t always quite see, that China is a country of migrants. Though, it is not as it is in many western countries a migration of national peoples. Here it is a migration from the country to the city, from small town to large, most often within the same province, although ofcourse the general mass movement in recent decades East and South has been huge.

Having spent the previous Spring Festival (CNY) in Xi’an, I saw a modern city with a very large population become quiet over a fortnightly period. Streets usually bustling with people were strangely, at such a festive season, quietened. Restaurants I was used to frequenting, closed. The train and bus stations were fit to burst with an annual magnitude far exceeding reasonable fore planning. Though, I might add, the ease and general peace that received these time–delays, queues and the simply huge numbers of people in transit is an example to us all. The stoicism that these delays and conditions are met with is nothing short of inspiring for most of us now so used to credit-card bookings and us Brits used to our fair share of train delays. I will stop though from making any further sweeping statements about matters of reliability and forbearance here in China, or elsewhere, and just simply acknowledge that this is a pretty crazy time to be travelling in China, mental preparation may be as important as the packing checklist.

This year I have visited my girlfriend’s village and nearby hometown. A small town that come evening has a friendly, seaside promenade feel, even in winter and even though it is probably over a 1000km from the nearest beach. (Though during this visit we discovered that the wide but slowly drying river running through the middle of town is to be damned and a water park developed between the two town-boundary bridges). However, the masses that I have witnessed on the streets here this time compared to previous visits has been phenomenal.

As my bus pulled into town the sheer number of motor bikes and pushbikes parked on the sidewalk created a sparkling, star swept vista of chrome and coloured metal; resembling a massive second-hand market of 2-wheeled vehicles rather than being simply the exterior of a supermarket, where bikes were being left while shopping was being bought. It is an image I will not easily forget, not just because of the sheer quantity of bikes but because it reminded me of a life somewhat passed in many parts of China.

In some of the slower developing areas here you actually see some of the things that maybe you still expect to see upon arriving in China but actually do not necessarily find. In this case, roads here are filled with bicycles and not the electric mopeds and 4-wheeled Hondas and Audi’s of downtown Xi’an, though the bicycle is certainly rivaled by the motorbike. The masses have returned and they are doing so all over China and they are doing it by plane, train and a variety of automobiles.

* This photograph isn’t mine but I like it.