Catching Up 1

Just prior to Spring Festival in January, I went with Sang and his friend to his tiny home village of Gu Fo Si (古佛寺) which is about a 10- minute drive outside Chang Ge, a town of about 100000 people an hour's drive southeast of Zhengzhou. The drive really should be an hour, but it actually takes about two hours because of terrible driving conditions, insane drivers in China and the fact that said bad driving conditions and insane drivers means that all vehicles drive extremely slowly to avoid massive fireballs of death occurring at regular intervals. As it is, more than 100000 people die in car accidents in China annually. I'd rather have a slow trip than add my name to the statistics.

Chang Ge is a well-known town in China as it was the chosen capital city of the famous Cao Cao, a major figure in Chinese history and ruler of the northern kingdom of Wei in the warring states period depicted in the famous novel "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms", which is one of China's four great novels. While many westerners would condemn Cao Cao for his cruelty, in China he is widely admired for his ambition. Cao Cao is particularly beloved here in Henan, where he spent a large part of his life.

The bus we took to get to Chang Ge was a revelation for me. Safety standards in long-distance buses for local trips seem to be totally ignored. The bus was a standard-size tour bus, however, the number of seats was roughly tripled in the same amount of space. I found myself inching and worming my way through a tiny corridor no larger than the width of my body turned sideways, climbing over bags and other assorted odds and ends before finally squishing my 6'3" frame into a sardine can that one might describe as a seat if only my knees weren't up around my neck. I have since learned in subsequent bus trips that conditions are often no better. In normal buses (i.e. with a normal amount of seats and adequate aisle room) the driver often sells extra "seats" to passengers willing to pay the driver directly instead of to the ticket office. These hapless people get little fold-up stools to sit on in the aisles. If these buses have an accident, I'm pretty sure that everyone would die simply because there would be no way to get out.

We arrived in Chang Ge in the early evening and took a taxi to get to his family's apartment in the town. Instead of going directly to his apartment, Sang took us to meet his sister at a local restaurant. The reason we were in Chang Ge, you see, is that his sister was getting married!

His sister was pretty excited to meet me and we had a great-tasting meal with a lot of dishes that I hadn't tried yet, including one that Sang claimed was a favourite of Chairman Mao's.

After dinner, we went across the street into a dimly lit apartment complex. Apartment buildings in second- and third-tier towns in China are all eerily similar and reminiscent of Soviet-style apartment blocks. In any case, every apartment building of this style that I have been to looks the same and feels the same - I'd be really hard-pressed to find any differences whatsoever from the outside or inside (apart from individual families' decorations). It's dirty, entirely made of concrete (including the inside), no lighting in the stairwells, and about 7 floors high.

Inside, their apartment is really well-furnished. They have nice beds, a couple of decent couches a flatscreen TV, a (fairly old) computer with good internet. A decent life, all-in-all. The only thing that was missing was heating. This was January and they had no heat. Most people in Henan are in this unfortunate position - far enough north that winters are cold at night, but not far enough north that the government thinks it's necessary to provide central heating. They put me under a mountain of blankets and got me a space-heater. That worked well enough, but during the rest of the day, living there was fairly cold. Of course, this was only preparation for what was to come when I visited his family's village.

That night, I got what is formally called Gastroenteritis, or more informally called the stomach flu. It bears no relation to influenza of course, but did cause me to lose my dinner to the wastebasket in several gut-wrenching episodes that lasted the entire night. The food from that restaurant was not kind to me. Sang and his sister took it very personally and insisted on taking care of me, delaying our departure to their village until later in the following day. I tried to explain to them that I had been getting different variations of this affliction twice monthly since my arrival (and have continued to do so up until now, several months later), but they felt they had somehow failed me as hosts.

I felt better in the early afternoon, so we took a smaller bus over to his village. By smaller bus, I mean a van with about 10 to 12 folding chairs nailed to the floor. For some reason, I thought of my friend Luke as I saw this crusty old guy leaning back on one of the chairs drinking from a hip flask with one boot hanging out the window. It cost me 4rmb to get in the bus (about 60 cents) so I guess you get what you pay for, right?

We got off the bus on the main road outside the village in front of his uncle's factory. Sang wanted to show us his uncle's Tibetan mastiffs. These dogs are HUGE! They are at least as large as great danes, but much wider and more muscled. They are also really cute, though Sang warned us not to get too close.

Sang's uncle manufactures metal wire of all types, so the factory as such was not all that interesting, but was certainly built fairly well and seemed efficient. This is in high contrast to the village itself, which we visited next (I talk about it in my next post).