Major update planned right now, let's see how far I can get.
Wednesday before last after class I met a BU student named Chris Rosenkrans with whom I've been emailing and who also happens to be studying in and around Kunming for the semester. He's a fellow undergraduate but he is currently undertaking a 5-year BA/MA thesis project that has had him researching in East Asia, C. and South America, Africa, and the Middle East; I'm envious of the clarity of vision that has allowed him to form such an ambitious project at this early age and I hope to take a page out of his book in the future. I met him at the anthropology museum of Yunnan University (the megalithic structure across the street from my more unassuming institution, Yunnan National Minorities University, aka MingDa), where he and a grad. student at Yunnan U (YunDa) were in turn meeting with a Professor Chen of the visual anthropology department. Chris interviewed Chen Laoshi about the Chinese Hui minority of Muslim traders as this is the topic of his research here. I also spoke with the Professor, asking him more general questions about the anthropological field work conducted by YunDa. I was intrigued by pictures of various ethnic minorities on the walls surrounding his office, particularly by images of the Wa minority, a transnational Burmese/Chinese group who in the past have been infamous for head-hunting, drug smuggling, and performing elaborate dance rituals involving gigantic drums made of hollowed-out tree trunks. My personal research interest at the moment is SW China's drum culture, including the ancient bronze drums (oldest in China) of the Dian culture that inhabited Kunming and surrounding area at the turn of the first millenium AD as well as the contemporary cultural significance attached to drums by the Wa, Dai, and Jinuo ethnic minority groups. This topic will likely comprise the independent study project I'll undertake in November. The Wa are rumored to have the world's largest drum in a village in Southwestern Yunnan, so I'm already planning a pilgrimage there. But more on this (way) later.
Chen Laoshi told me of a weekly film screening at YunDa on Wednesday nights, so that evening at 7:30 I went with some of my American classmates to check it out. We saw two short films made by Yunnan Arts University students. The first was a very "modern" stop-motion clay animation short dealing with the pressures that academic institutions place on young people; the youth were represented by amorphous clay androgynes who, fed up with school, run away to the city and encounter a Buddhist-looking statue bearing two kinds of fruit (a moment of comic relief came when the first intrepid sexless being ate both types of fruit, grew female and male genitalia simultaneously, then bid goodbye to his/her friends, following a sign pointing the way to Thailand; the four remaining clay blobs became one or the other sex and thus a suitable harmony was achieved). The second film was an amateur but charming and very touching documentary about a vivacious grandmother. I didn't understand much of the dialogue (in the films or subsequent short talks given by the filmmakers) but I enjoyed watching, and was grateful for my first real taste of a contemporary artistic community in Kunming.
On Thursday (9/27) morning we visited a drug clinic located in the Western Hills about 45 minutes outside of Kunming. This trip was of great interest to me as I've had several friends in similar institutions at home and one who recently died of an overdose. Overall the facility and treatment methods didn't seem too different from those in the U.S. People charged with drug possession and abuse in China must serve a mandatory interrment in the center, and many choose afterwards to live on-site, where they work and learn professional skills. The most interesting aspect of the clinic was that it incorporates a scientific research laboratory where alternatives to heavy narcotics are developed. Several years ago the lab came out with a pill they call the "June 26th Capsule"--the formula consists entirely of specially treated Chinese Traditional Medicinal (TCM) herbs. The capsule is non-addictive and has proven so effective in combatting remission cravings that the clinic has ceased to use Methadone or any other dependence-forming substances in their treatment. The doctor who gave us our lecture said that the June 26th Capsule is now being used in many drug rehabilitation centers nation-wide. I wonder how much of this is scientific fact and how much is propaganda; I'm very intrigued by the prospect, however, of an herbal treatment for hard-drug addiction, and would be curious to track its success in China over the next few years. Such a solution would be a huge breakthrough in the States, where heroin addiction often merely gives way to an equally nefarious dependence on Methadone and painkillers...
On Sunday (9/30) my new friend Marianna and I took a plane to Jinghong, the primary (basically the only) urban center in the southern Yunnan prefecture of Xishuangbanna. We had a week off, as did the majority of the nation, to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China by Mao Zedong on Oct. 1, 1949. We didn't do much celebrating: on the 1st we found ourselves in a dusty village called Mandian, where we stayed in a local Dai minority guesthouse and trekked through the jungle to an unpolluted and thankfully uninhabited waterfall. Banna is densely tropical, a completely different ecological and cultural environment from the more cosmopolitan Kunming. We experienced the immense ecological diversity in Mandian and at Sanchahe Nature Reserve, a nationally protected park famous for housing about 150 wild elephants. We didn't see any of these, but we did "experience" the tropics here, hiked around the bush bordering a small tributary of the Mekong river, picked small leeches off ourselves (no socks, bad idea) and declined to have ourselves photographed with muzzled bears and lizards. In busing around the region throughout the week I noted that most of the environment has been transformed by China's recent economic boom: in most places the giant, broad-leafed arborescent flora has been displaced by the far more profitable rubber tree, now a major force in the Banna economy. We also visited a tea plantation in a small village called Nanluoshan, about 20 km west of Jinghong. Yunnan is the only region in the world that produces Pu'er, an earthy black tea that is very popular (and given its rarity, expensive) in China.
For me, the highlight of the trip was an excursion we made to the town of Damenglong. To get there we rode a bus on an extremely worn-out, decrepit dirt road 4 hours south. Damenglong is only a few kilometers away from the Burmese border so that added an extra dimension to the already ethnically diverse character of Southwestern Chinese village culture. In Damenglong and the neighboring hamlet of Man Fei Long (a 2km hike away) we visited several Buddhist pagodas, complete with statues of the reclining Sakyamuni and overlarge footprints left from a mythohistorical visit the Buddha himself made to Xishuangbanna somewhere around 500 B.C. It was interesting to note the differences in Buddhist practice here: in Banna, Dai and Bulang peoples practice Theravada Buddhism, a form of the faith that predates the Mahayana school that predominates in China. Indeed, Damenglong had the cultural feel of Southeast asia: almost every sign in the town was in Dai characters, closely related to the Thai language, and some of the people we encountered didn't even speak Mandarin Chinese (virtually no one spoke English). I valued this short visit not only because it allowed me to grasp party of Yunnan's diversity, but also because I came at a time when Damenglong and the surrounding region are in transition. The atrocious road in and out of town is currently being converted into a modern superhighway that will connect China, Burma, and Thailand, an infrastructural development that will undoubtedly precipitate irrevocable socioeconomic changes in the town and the region as a whole. I wouldn't be surprised if the next time I'm in Damenglong I encounter, rather than a refreshing void of English-speakers, a battery of backpackers freshly arrived from Bangkok, taking a brief respite before seeking the greener pastures of Northwestern Yunnan.
Marianna and I arrived back in Kunming at around 1:00 am on Monday (10/9) morning, and as we were U-locked out of our dorm until 6, we killed the early morning hours at a (speaking of irrevocable socioeconomic changes) 24-hour McDonald's. Caught a few hours of shuteye then jumped back into the day, writing my paper on Banna (dwelling mostly on my disenchantment at the ecological degradation wrought by economic expansion and the gross commoditization of "ethnic" culture I witnessed at Sanchahe and a Sunday morning market in the town of Menghun) and packing in preparation for leaving the dorm. Yesterday afternoon I met Mrs. Shen, an English teacher at Kunming College of Science and Engineering and the homestay mother with whom I'll be living and sharing all my meals for the next two weeks. I grabbed my bags, the small Han drum I picked up on a semi-drunken mission to a local music store, and my SIT-loaned bicycle and headed for my new home, already slightly nostalgic for the freedom of MingDa dorm life.
On to the next chapter: badminton with my new Chinese little bro, increased isolation from the comforting retinue of American English-speakers I've enjoyed thus far, a tighter curfew, and the anticipated charms and pitfalls of receiving hospitality CHINESE STYLE.
Zaijian (later),
Jsh
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