China

Peninsular Villages – Zhanghu 樟湖

I got out of the yurt and went south to small towns beset by chronic mountain problems. While my gung-ho colleague Dan dealt with a bone spur, I walked around a village on the Min River. Zhanghu is a bad place for meeting Mormons. Don’t go there expecting a Salt Lake City Fourth of July atmosphere.

This happened twice early in the day: I stopped to talk to a local, and as I walked away, another local ran up and asked, “Did he interview you?” I didn’t find out what this was about until that night at a coffee shop in Nanping.

Okay, while traveling, I wrote two jokes.

1. Let’s say I’m a traveling salesman. What kind of expense account could I expect from a tribe of nomads?

In rural China, not many people can appreciate this joke. They just wanted to know where I am from, where I work, how long I’ve been in China, etc.

2. Let me teach you a country sales pitch. When you see a pedestrian, shout, “HEY!”

That night I was in a coffee shop with a view of the Min River’s bifurcated head, the confluence of two tributaries in downtown Nanping. One of the employees came over to talk every night, which gave me someone to look at while Dan dealt with his foot. She had told me that Zhanghu has a good Yuanxiaojie Festival, and tonight she told me why people had thought I was a reporter. The people in Zhanghu had severed a railway that passes through their town to protest against monetary mistreatment. In the end, their standoff became a national issue (that I never heard about), and they got their money (the explanation went no further). Now the people of Zhanghu are locally famous for their solidarity. They have also earned a nickname, Diao People, Diaomin (刁民). What else do you call people who devised a plan to gain national attention in circumstances where so many others have failed? The clever squeaking wheels.

or about thirty kilometers, most of the villages along the Min’s southwest bank were next to long inlets, snakelike coves where the river intersects a low valley. These sheltered habitats were all strung with farms for pearls, oyster meat, fish and aquatic squirrels. Most of the towns I passed through had two or three neighborhoods on small peninsulas connected by bridges.

Zhanghu is at a bend in the river where the Min becomes like a lake, about a quarter of the way to the Pacific coast. Boat traffic is regular but not enough to pollute the river badly, and even though it was Spring Festival, the fishermen and aqua farmers were painting, repairing, and commuting to work in boats that are paddled from a standing position. Local fish and shellfish probably taste great, but I never found out.

As in every other village I passed through, the little kids of Zhanghu usually went nuts when they saw me. They would follow me until I pulled out my camera, which is when the youngest children would immediately take flight.

I asked people about a nearby mountain that’s labelled on Google Earth, but they had never heard of it. Locals often use different names for things I find on maps or online, so beyond the most general geography, there’s little point in researching a place in the countryside. Even locally purchased maps offer only a vague guide to local roads, and if you assume ANYTHING about relative distances or directions, you’ll probably get lost. If you want to know where to go, ask a kid.

Travel from Nanping is so uncomplicated and cheap take a bus, walk around villages, stand by the highway (国道), and catch a bus back to town. For 120 yuan, we had a hotel with hot water right downtown. After I go off the bus in Nanping city, several groups of people from southwest China accosted me on Jiangbin Road and showed me the swords they were selling. I think they were supposed to be in ethnic minority regalia, but that look could not have been authentic; it was too much like the Flinstones, matched together in a thriftshop with some plastic Navajo jewelry. Anyway, they had such a basic, ground-up business strategy–approach random strangers on the street and whip out a sword. .

Yesterday, it’s hard to say a line you need tomorrow, words you can’t remember, but they haven’t been forgotten, knotted balls of stuff that you untangle in their hour, pretty bugs on paper that decide the flow of dollars charging down a hillside like a mighty horde of Alans, yeah, he had a house, but now he’s living as a squatter, hey, back in the day, they would have made him sell his daughter, you won’t see me on the streets, I’m living in the water.

© 2010 Pristine Soapbox.