China and its Discontents

Archive for the ‘Hubei’ tag

“I’m Seeing My Grandsons for the First Time”

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It was a rather interesting flight from Beijing to SF yesterday. First, we were stuck on the tarmac for three hours because Beijing was too windy. Yes, too windy. I was seated in between a woman from Shanghai, and another from rural Hubei province. The conversation was quite interesting, given the regional pronunciation differences. Mandarin speakers from Shanghai change every zh and sh sound (the sound in jump and ship respectively) into simple z and s consonant sounds. This can be confusing, since Mandarin makes ample use of all four sounds, and the tonal nature of the language and relatively small number of consonant-vowel combinations (far fewer than in English) mean that more words are saddled onto half as many sounds.

The woman on my right had a very strong rural accent, even more difficult to piece together than the Shanghai accent. She didn’t know how to write pinyin or English to fill out her customs and entry form, so I helped to fill it out for her. She was seeing her two grandsons (4, and 8 years old) for the first time. Her son had left in 1994. She told me he played badminton. I assume professionally, but I’m not sure what money can be made from that in the US (in China, badminton sponsorships are commonplace). One of the questions on the entry form asked for an estimate of the value of all things on her person. I asked, “100 kuai, 200 kuai?” 200 kuai. All she had with her was $30 worth of clothing and a piece of paper with her son’s address and phone number. We were separated into two different lines during the customs process – I hope customs was able to get in touch with her son.

Traveling halfway around the world is a strange experience – your night becomes day and day becomes night. Added to that was my lack of sleep for the past two days; I couldn’t tell which way was up. Strange then, that I went to bed in San Francisco only to naturally wake up at 7 AM. I heard a rather strange sound for Saturday at 7: chants and songs. Outside was a line of marchers stretching down for half a mile. I decided it was a good day for a morning run; I was also curious about the marchers. It turned out to be for the Coronation of the Virgin Mary – they were walking from here to the Mission, on a 9-hour march.

Running on the path next to Colma Creek, I realized why running suddenly seemed so much easier: my lungs were no longer wheezing from the pollution. I took a loop around town, running from El Camino to Orange Park, walking to Ponderosa, and then running the rest of the way to Orange Library, through Alta Loma back to El Camino. The run got me thinking about some of the differences between here and what I would have seen on the same run in Beijing. Here is what surprised me, in no particular order:

  • Dogs higher than a foot.
  • Asian-looking people who don’t respond to me in Mandarin.
  • Parks that are empty at 7:30. Also, no old people practicing Taiqi, playing classical instruments, crooning into a microphone, or line-dancing to pop songs.
  • Public art installations at Orange Park. A couple new ones including two giant insect wings painted blue and a strange sheet of steel.
  • Birds on electric wires.
  • Canadian geese resting on a grassy field.
  • Empty streets.
  • Quiet.
  • Suburbia that is not reserved for the wealthy and wasn’t built within the last year.
  • People with tans.

Written by Will

December 11th, 2010 at 12:33 pm