Josh Feola

I love Yunnan. I've been here for almost a week and the buzz of being back hasn't worn off. I'm glad to have arrived with the person who was my best friend during my Fall semester here, but perhaps more glad to have been on my own for the majority of the time, exploring old haunts with new eyes, new perspective.



After arriving in Kunming on the 15, we set about meeting up with some laopengyou. Stopped by the Minzu Daxue dorm and called Zhang laoshi (above), doorman, volunteer Chinese teacher and pro bono TCM doctor. Zhang came promptly and invited us back to his house for tea (he is quite the aesthete in this respect), dinner, and an Olympics hang sesh.

We also looked up our MinDa friend Xiong Hui. I always get the sense that he is dropping whatever he's doing to meet us, but he seemed to enjoy our company, and we ended up hanging out with him every day for the next few days. Xiong Hui is a certified religion head, making for interesting conversation: in the space of the three months I spent in Yunnan last year, he was successively obsessed with Tibetan Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism. His newest phase is missionary Christianity.



And I ate it Cause I'm so at it, pt II: shared a couple of weird/great meals with Marianna's and my host families, respectively. Pictured: feast of bees and some kind of worm thing. The bees actually weren't bad.





On Monday the 18 Marianna and I met Xiong Hui at Minzu Daxue, the university where we lived and studied. It was nice revisiting the campus, which surprisingly hasn't changed much. I'm way into the colorful chalkboard drawings.





MEMORY LANE FOOD. Breakfast was some old school favorites: this weird peanut sauce/churro/burrito thing and a street crepe. My daily jam last year, I missed it, my stomach didn't.



Street food-->street dude. I swear I left this bleach blonde homeless musician (and his dog) in EXACTLY the same spot last December. Glad to see they're still holding it down.

On Monday afternoon Marianna took off for the greener pastures of Hong Kong, leaving me and Xiong Hui to mull over my future. After a conversation with Kyla Raetz, another SIT alum who's spent the last two months in Yunnan, my appetite was whetted to wander around the province. So I made a snap decision to eat my already-bought plane ticket to Chengdu, check out of my hotel, and head north to Dali. My eternally hospitable companion literally walked me to my bus.











Six hours later I was at the Linden Centre, a renovated Bai courtyard complex in the town of Xizhou, about 30 minutes outside Dali. I visited this place last year, when its proprietors, Brian and Jeanee Linden, showed me around the still very unfinished lot. Invited back as their guest, I was blown away to find it open, fully furnished, and breathtakingly beautiful. One of the nicest places I've ever stayed (see shower above), I am really starting to see their vision take form. The Centre is intended as a sort of cultural retreat, offering classes in traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting, meditation, and sweeping views of Xizhou's Bai-maintained rice fields. It is also an art space in its own right: the Lindens deal Asian antiquities and contemporary Chinese art at their gallery in Wisconsin, and have an impressive selection of their collection on display at the Centre. I only spent one night here but it was enough to become excited about watching this place develop and expand: the Lindens are already renovating a second complex elsewhere in Xizhou, which I visited, and plan to branch out to other locations in SW China. Definitely something to keep an eye on.





Shaxi. I missed this place so much. I've been upset about the prospect of not returning ever since my planned LE pilot crashed in March, and I can't believe I almost passed through Yunnan without making the trek out here. Another brief stopover (only one night!), but so worth it.

Upon arriving, I called up Afeng, the Taiwanese owner of the local guesthouse with whom I ate Thanksgiving dinner last year, and friend of friend Li Min Mo. Afeng not only agreed to let me change some USDs at her guesthouse (I was in a bit of a cash crisis upon arriving), but also gave me a room at a discounted friend's rate. I'm always astounded at the hospitality I receive in Yunnan.

After dropping my bags I immediately headed out to see my old friend Laozhang, patron of Shaxi's premier kafeiguan, and spent the rest of the evening chatting with him, his wife, and Zhang Xi, a Guangzhou newcomer to Shaxi's foreign-Zhang-owned cafe scene. I'm surprised at how much Chinese I've retained from last Fall with practically no practice in between, and how much I can express with such limited means. We stayed up for hours drinking tieguanyin and talking about Olympics, Chinese myth, religion, human origins, writing systems, and Shaxi news. Definitely one of the highlights of the summer.





The next morning I took a spin around Xingjiao temple, which is undergoing mural renovations. As this was the topic of my research paper last year, and something I'd like to continue studying in the future, I was interested to keep tabs on the progress. I also visited Lu Yuan and Sam Mitchell's Shaxi Cultural Center, a guesthouse-cum-educational resource on Shaxi's history and culture that was also under construction when I visited last year. It is looking good, if still a bit unfinished. I especially liked the bulletin board crammed with Shaxiren.





Also hung with some Shaxi bebs, my main crew last year. Word of my return must have spread quickly because in the space of the 12 waking hours I actually spent in Shaxi I saw loads of familiar faces, all greeting me with Ni hui lai le! and Ni meiyou huzi! So happy I came back. I already want to return.

Unfortunately that afternoon I was on the move again: another contemplative 12-hour travel day (my raison d'etre recently) by mini-bus, public bus, taxi, shuttle, plane, taxi, back to Minzu Daxue in Kunming, where Xiong Hui had been waiting for me through an hour-and-a-half flight delay. He'd booked me a room at my old dormitory, arranged for my bedding to be delivered, and accompanied me to cop a dinner of street fried potatoes (not pictured). What a dude.



The immense affinity I've felt with Yunnan these past few days has put me back in the mindset to pursue a Fulbright grant to continue my Shaxi research. So today I went to Cache Electron to meet with Shen Haimei, my host aunt and an anthropology professor at Yunnan University. I was beginning to drop the idea of applying for a Fulbright due to lack of Chinese skills and solid affiliation with a Chinese university, but today's meeting changed that entirely. Shen laoshi is currently researching gender, ethnicity, and identity in Bai villages around Dali, and has recently written several articles about pilgrimage trails uniting SW China with Tibet and India--precisely my research interests. She was extremely excited to hear about the report I did last year and my plans to continue with it, and was more than amenable to giving me a letter of affiliation with her department at YunDa. Funny how things fall in to place sometimes.



Also peeped some cool Kunming street art. Kunming has an active and diverse contemporary art scene, another factor drawing me to this place.



And this guy, Kunming's logo, a tiger untowardly approaching a bull. Shoot outs to Dian culture and Bob Murowchick.

OK so I have about 10 days left in Asia and I still don't know what I'm going to do with the rest of it. And domestic flights can be booked a day in advance so I still don't have to. Later!


Josh

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One day last year at Brighton Center's notorious Dragon Chef I received a fortune that read "Write the events of your life in a journal." I've never kept a regular journal in my life and I didn't take this to heart at the time but for some reason I've been compelled to write daily while I've been in China. It feels like a good thing to do and I think in retrospect I was just being lazy. Paradoxically, the daily dose of writing I get has made me less disposed to additionally sweat out a blog post in one of these packed, tea soaked internet cafes. But here I am and I'm just going to pop off some recent events and impressions kicking around my mind. (Also I apologize for any repetition as I can't read my previous posts, China has banned blog READING but evidently not blog writing.)

The day after I flew into Kunming we took a 2-day field trip to the smaller southern city of Tonghai. On our first full day there we visited a small village where old women with traditional bound feet performed a dance for us. I've seen pictures and read about foot-binding but to see these women in person--and to see them move so gracefully--was an intriguing and slightly repuslive experience. To think that these women endured such pain for the pleasure of their future husbands made me wonder if it hurt them still to dance in old age. But they seemed happy and represent the last vestiges of a culture where having 3-inch "golden lotus blossoms" (the traditional euphemism for expressing ideal foot size) is still a matter of great pride.

It was also in Tonghai that I climbed my first temple-filled mountain (see above). China is packed full of these. Being an fan of mountains, Buddhism, and exercise I'm very into these excursions. I went to a site in Kunming called "Golden Temple Scenic Spot" that was heavily touristed and so less appealing, but most of the temples are sparsely populated, serene, and mist-shrouded like exoticized accounts would lead you to believe. I've never been a practicing Buddhist so I wouldn't say I've been properly meditating but certainly walking around in such places has put me into a meditative state. Also the healthy amount of walking and fresh air (Yunnan is extremely underpolluted as China goes) I've been getting has facilitated a lot of introspection that spills over into writing and of course meandering blog posts.

Anyway another random highlight: we had dinner with some state officials in Tonghai and they encouraged (rather, enforced) us to drink with them, handing us shots of baijiu (rice liquor) and yelling "Gan bei!" which literally means "empty the glass" but in practice means "We're going to keep this up til you pass out." After a few gan beis I steeled myself up sufficiently to eat one of the sauteed wasps that had been passed around on a barely touched plate all night. Of course I'm vegan and wasp doesn't exactly meet the criteria for what I usually choose to eat but in the heat of the moment I decided that since I've been stung by one wasp I can eat one wasp. Kind of a selfish rule but now I think if I come across any fried scorpions four of them will go too. Otherwise I've found it very easy to avoid meat, dairy, and eggs. I've learned how to say "I don't eat meat, I eat vegetables" in Mandarin but I've yet to finesse "does this suspicious broth by chance come from mutton"? The food is great and very inexpensive (as are the 23 cent fake Nike socks with reverse swoops I'm wearing as I write this, incidentally), lots of fresh vegetables, leafy greens, tofu and bean-paste cakes. I haven't yet entered my homestay so I've been moderate my own food intake; I may need to stretch my stomach in preparation for the stubborn hospitality I've been told to expect.

The other day we received a lecture from Mr. Huang Cheng, an 88-year-old man from Kunming. This actually isn't the first lecture we've received from an octagenarian and like the venerable Professor Guo who lectured on Taiji, Mr. Cheng's English was perfect and his anecdotes confusing. He was to give us an oral history of his life, an interesting one as he was born the son of a powerful general and came of age at the beginning of the Mao era. He served as a translator for G.I.s in Japan during WWII and so valued the opportunity to "practice my English with young Americans once again." He was a jovial and humorous man, and he spent most of his lecture telling us stories that seemed only tangentially related to his own life. It was only after some direct questioning that we found out he was imprisoned for 19 years during the cultural revolution. This was because of his American affiliations and because he suggested openly that China should "pay more attention to technology." Some of our questions about his time in prison didn't translate well. He answered us by saying that we're too young to understand the desparation of China at this time. Perhaps this is true; I'm not in a position to question a man who was in prison for nearly as long as I've been alive on this point. But Mr. Cheng's talk reinforced the impression I've been getting of the incredible resilience of the Chinese spirit. I'm almost desensitized to the atrocities committed during the last 50 years in this country after reading and hearing about them so much but still the people seem indomitable, industrious, and content. How much of this is an inherent cultural characteristic and how much is the result of a seasoned state propaganda machine I have yet to discern. (Not likely to any time soon.)

That was all over the place, I'll try to make my next post more organized and interesting. I don't have the patience to put pictures here but I've managed to upload some onto my Flickr account, username is End Times. Hope you're all well and enjoying the Fall... I've been good about responding to email so don't hesitate to write if you have a minute.


-Josh

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