Iowa Laoshi in the Middle Kingdom: October 2015

It’s “Golden Week” in China, which to me means a week’s vacation, and probably something more patriotic for the Chinese who understand what we are celebrating. I’m celebrating surviving yet another beginning to another school year, which is no small accomplishment.

Many colleagues recommended a holiday to the area around Guilin, specifically the rice terraces of Ping’An and the stunning karst landscapes around Yangshou. I read a guidebook to try to get an understanding of how these remarkable landscapes were formed, and I read about rain and CO2 and the formation of caves, which collapsed but are really still growing from the bottom. I read it aloud twice, then closed the book with a shrug. Don’t care that much, and it didn’t make sense.

This area is the subject of centuries of Chinese watercolors with good reason. One day we took a boat ride up the Li River to view some of the most dramatic scenery, and tomorrow we’re off on cycles to do the same, then take a bamboo raft down another river. It’s all beautiful, and beautifully relaxing, except when we try to see what a million or so Chinese people want to see, and are willing to be much more uncomfortable in the process than I am.

Here is what we are seeing:

My luscious passion fruit going into the cup

Today we took a 5-hour bike ride to some of the small ancient towns in the area.

The scenery on our bike ride provided an apt snapshot of China today, new and old. First I had the unpleasant experience of riding through the gauntlet of the morning rush-hour traffic in the city of Yangshou, which was terrorizing when I stopped to think about it, but I didn’t have time to be reflective, so no problem. I was too busy trying not to get killed or maimed, or both, if that’s possible. I will never watch the scenes from movies featuring a busy, chaotic Asian traffic scene again without wanting to feint. There were motorcycles, ebikes (stealthy, they make no sound), other lunatics on bicycles, cars, and the ever present “get-the-hell-out-of-the-way” buses. I felt like I was playing one of those video games where stuff pops out at you from all directions and you try to kill it before it kills you. I never understood why people found those fun, btw. It was incredibly loud, with several generations of vehicles and several vehicles that were hybrids of combinations of vehicles, with engines of tractors (loud tractors) attached to wagons, motorcycles attached to carts, and all of them loud, slow, and unpredictable. This part of China is noticeable less advanced than the Eastern coast where we live, and we saw that in the old beat-up jerry-mandered vehicles.

Anyway, I survived intact and was rewarded with blue skies, and a bucolic river scene complete with bird calls and not much else, and stupendous scenery. There are rice crops in several states of growth to accent the karst formations.

Along the way I saw young Chinese enjoying a day off from work, motoring along with electric bikes, or groups of the new middle-class, decked out in identical expensive biking outfits and identical expensive bikes. I also shared the road with older Chinese who were decidedly not middle class, but whose bodies showed the ravages of decades of carrying loads too heavy for their spines to support. These people’s bodies were right angles, with their point of intersection at the waist and the top half of their bodies absolutely parallel to the ground, except for their heads which were peering up in an effort to guide their steps. It was sad to see, particularly because there were also many people still carrying those loads, people whose future seemed sealed to the same angle of repose.

The road was periodically littered with red confetti paper, the remains of earlier fireworks used to herald the holiday, and as we rode through ancient villages along the path we saw ancient brick homes decorated with new door ornaments of red paper on either side of the door sporting calligraphy of matching couplets to adorn each side. We could have been riding through these villages a 100 or more years ago and the gardens, the homes, and the “free-range” ducks, chickens, and small children would have played the same roles in these people’s lives. Beside the ubiquitous rice fields there were mini-plots of various vegetables, soy beans, corn, and even cotton. The children who saw our white faces as we cycled through yelled a friendly and excited “Hello” to us, unlike the urban Chinese who are not impressed by our presence for the most part.

Having spent a week enjoying the scenery the area is justly famous for, I didn’t know I was going to get a bonus of a relaxed, slower pace of life (rush-hour traffic aside) and a view into the “real” China, which is far more a mix of old and new than the very new “China-light” that we live in at Suzhou Industrial Park, which is only 20 years old in total. I’m sure there are dozens more different perspectives on China, and I look forward to seeing more before we leave at the end of next summer. Here's what we saw along the way....