The Village People

Who remembers discoing down to that musical group comprised of a policeman, an Indian chief, a sailor, a biker and a construction worker in the late 70’s/early 80’s? This blog entry has nothing to do with disco, that group or that era. I’m going to talk about the villages I visited during my runabout Winter break.

I’m dying to tell you how the first week of school went. I’ll get to that in a few posts. I just feel like, if I don’t write/post these travel events, I probably never will and they are pretty exciting!

The villages are the type that I described a few entries back, in The Demise of Sophie the Kid. The type where, unless I had an ‘in’ I would be deprived of experiencing. Tiny little villages that are so small, they are not even featured on the map of China.

Hong Hu (pronounced hong who) is a smallish township that serves as a hub to several even smaller villages, one of them being Bai Miao (pronounced ‘by miao’ – sounds like a haven for cat lovers, doesn’t it?) Dash, my former student and now friend, whose family lives in Bai Miao had invited me to her brother’s wedding. What an extravaganza that was!

After only a 2 hour bus ride from Wuhan I got off the coach and stepped onto the dusty streets of Hong Hu. A few minutes later, a yellow-jacketed Dash flew into my arms, long hair streaming behind her and tears of joy brimming in her eyes. She was ecstatic that I would come to her home! And I was delighted to see her.

She led me across the road and over a bridge, all while apologizing that she hadn’t used English very much these past few weeks and thus was having difficulty communicating with me. Never mind, Little Dash, we can speak Chinese as long as you don’t use your dialect and you speak slowly. I did not anticipate conversation to be an issue during this visit, and I was right.

The first clue to that effect was that we were going to ride to her village on a motorcycle. No, she did not pilot the bike and neither did I. Her uncle was waiting for us astride his machine, and all 3 of us were going to roar into town on that 150cc powered steed. Imagine it: this motorcycle is not big to begin with, and there is the uncle piloting and then me, twice as large as the uncle, and finally Dash sitting behind me, hanging off the back of the seat. No one took a picture (to my knowledge) but in my mind’s eye, it must have been quite a sight!

It was quite a ride, too. The winter cold had not yet abated and indeed this day was one of the coldest. My uncovered face and ungloved hands quickly turned red, my nose started running like a tap and my teeth started chattering. Dash was able to tuck her hands into my jacket pockets to keep them warm, and I, big as I am served as windbreak for her. She shouted at me as we sped past fallow fields that most everyone in her village owned a motorbike out of necessity. We went on in this fashion for several kilometers. I consoled myself with the thought that surely there would be some form of heat at our destination.

There was food and the greeting was warm and kind, but there was no heat source whatsoever once we got off the bike. Nowhere in the entire house was there a heater of any type to be found. Strange? Unusual?

After having gone to great lengths to describe to you the typical Chinese home and the construction thereof, you might think it would not be so weird for a home to not be heated, in spite of your western sensibilities. What I omitted telling you is that most homes do have some sort of heat, usually portable.

Most Chinese prefer to not run their heat pumps/air conditioners, if their apartment comes equipped with one. However they have no problem buying and using space heaters. In the more traditional homes they have coal burners that the family gathers around to keep warm. In Dash’s home there was so such luxury. My hands, red and cold from the motorcycle ride, remained cold and, at some point simply quit obeying my brain’s instructions to them. By the end of lunch I was unable to grasp chopsticks and feed myself. They did not warm up again the whole time I was there.

The stopover at Dash’s home stopped being fun after about 2 hours. Although it was great visiting with her for the short time we got to visit, that forbidding cold actually made me feel ill. Only upon hearing Dash say that there would be a hotel in the not too distant future did my misery lighten up a bit. But then, it was still several hours until we actually made it to the hotel, and it was not exactly a star-rated establishment. It too was a concrete shell with single paned glass windows that served only to trap cold.

Other than the short time we had together after lunch, Dash was busy with wedding preparations. She being the daughter in her traditional family, a lot of the grunt work was left up to her. Decorating the bridal suite, helping prepare food, coordinating visitors and entertainment, dealing with the caterers and seating the guests for meals was all on her list of things to do. At one point she said I should make myself at home and make use of the home’s only computer, located in the bridal suite.

I wanted to help her decorate, or clean, or arrange tables… something that would get my blood pumping to generate heat but, as honored guest I was not allowed to do anything. Even when I got Dash to relent and let me help her, other relatives stepped in and declared I should do nothing. That was quite a conundrum, I tell you. So, by invitation, I sat and froze and my mood got worse and worse.

It didn’t help that most of the people of that village, having never gone further than the hub-town of Hong Hu, had never seen a foreigner up close and personal. I was the object of curiosity: people unabashedly staring, the more audacious getting up front and personal, touching my hair and my clothes. Being as I towered over everyone there, my great size was quite the topic of conversation. Everyone had the same question: is ‘it’ a man or a woman? To everyone’s delight I spoke Chinese, and even got onstage to sing a song for the wedding. Nevertheless it was ennerving to be stared at and pawed to that degree.

I’ll describe the wedding in a separate entry, but for now I’ll tell you I was glad to leave this tiny community behind. Not that Dash, or anyone else was cruel to unkind to me. The cold and the conditions made this visit untenable.

Strangely enough, there were cars aplenty when we were leaving, both for the hotel on the night before the wedding and after the wedding itself. I couldn’t help but wonder: if there were cars to take people away from Bai Miao, why was there not a car to get us there, instead of us freezing astride a motorbike?

I would never convey to Dash or her family that I was in any way uncomfortable. When we parted she apologized for not having any more time available to truly make the most of my visit. I reassured her that I understand perfectly that she would be busy, and maybe during her brother’s wedding was not the best time to visit her home. I am welcome back and may actually return there… when the weather is warmer.

For now, I am in a heated vehicle, headed to the bus station, on my way to Shi Shou.

Whereas understandably, I was not the center of attention at Dash’s house, although under different conditions I suspect I would have been I was certainly the focal point of the village of Shi Shou. With no wedding and nothing else but daily life going on there, the big foreigner’s appearance was indeed the sight.

In spite of my best intentions I am going to have to write this in two entries. How do I manage that? No matter how I try, I always end up ‘talking’ much more than I envision. Maybe it is because I wish to make these images as graphic as possible.

Your next entry will be the visit to Shi Shou. And then I’ll describe the traditional wedding in a later post, once I catch up on everything else. I doubt seriously that tradition will change before I commit my experiences to ‘paper’.