Notes From Xi'an 西安随感

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…)