2001, NANCHANG,
CHINA
“You went to China and spent half your time in Nanchang?” I could see by my friend’s expression
that she thought I’d gone off the rails. To her it was as if a tourist from China planned to linger only a day or two in New York and San Francisco,
with the core of her trip played out in Des
Moines, Iowa. The
city of Nanchang, about five hundred kilometers
northeast of Hong Kong in Jiangxi province,
certainly wasn’t competition for the glitter of Shanghai
or the charm of Suzhou.
My friend, Elizabeth, her three-year-old daughter Isabel, Elizabeth’s friend
Judy, and I had traveled together from New York City, and had reluctantly cut
our time short in the tourist meccas, because Elizabeth had things to do in
Nanchang.
The major part of our
trip was as a group of four, but, in traveling with friends, I nearly always find
little pockets of adventure on my own, and this trip was no exception. The
Lonely Planet guide to China
dismisses Nanchang
as “nondescript,” condemning its streets of boxy concrete buildings as “color
deprivation at its worst.” So we were startled when, on the ride in from the
airport, a Western-style department store of several stories suddenly emerged
like a mirage of brilliant light in the desert of darkness. All glass and
glitter, it bustled with customers, even at eight p.m.
More surprises awaited
us at the Gloria Plaza Hotel. We had arrived on December 20th, and had looked
forward to escaping the madness of Christmas in the States. This was China,
after all, so we were unprepared to hear strains of “Away in a Manger” as we
entered the hotel. In the lobby we gazed at a table loaded with stacks of
stuffed animals, gift-wrapped boxes and a Plaster of Paris Santa Claus
featuring painted two inch-long eye lashes. Gingerbread houses were draped with
blinking white lights, extravagant sweets were for sale, and Elizabeth pointed out a chocolate delicacy
labeled “Youlog.” Someone had worked hard to make us Westerners feel at home. The
jolly sounds of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” followed us through the halls
each time we left our rooms.
The dining room
resembled a poor man’s Trader Vic’s, complete with touches of thatch on the
ceilings, and replicas of wooden boats tacked to walls. The buffet dinner was
tasty, and offered ample choices of Western and Chinese fare. The servers―renamed
"Betty", "Carrie", "Ron" and "Susan",
for the convenience of us Westerners―were friendly and helpful. I joyously gobbled up delicious cabbage
hearts, and tried cracked hardboiled eggs swimming in soy sauce, which were
terrific. But we all passed on pig's blood, goose intestines, sliced pigs ear
with jelly fish and some kind of cat braised, I think. I wanted to expand my
cultural horizons but, not yet, Lord.
The next morning I woke
as the light of day pushed through ragged openings in a blanket of smog. My
friends were still asleep, and I didn’t want to wake them, so I decided on a
solo foray into the neighborhood. Although the area near the hotel had an
industrial feel to it I passed a few apartment houses, some of which featured
carcasses of small animals hung, like laundry, on balconies. Hmm. How different
“animal carcasses” sounds from “beef,” “drum stick,” “steak,” and the like.
Perhaps some “roasts” or “short ribs” would land on the hotel’s menu for the
pleasure of us Westerners who don’t care to eat cats.
As I meandered, I
discovered that the streets were busy, even at seven in the morning. Some men
and women pedaled along the streets, carrying impressive loads of sugarcane and
boxes or bags of mysterious cargo on their bikes. A man squatted over a grate
in the sidewalk to brush his teeth. He looked satisfied at finding a practical
solution for caring for his teeth, rather than someone to be pitied for his
apparent “homelessness.” As I thought about that, a pile of slimy, bloody,
fresh-caught fish grabbed my attention. I stepped past the mass of creatures
pathetically struggling for life, and picked my way carefully down wide stairs,
slippery with water sluicing toward the river I could now see below.
At the bottom of the
steps men and a few women swabbed decks or unloaded their catch. Dozens of sampans, about the size of rowboats,
their wooden bodies topped by straw-covered bonnets, jammed the harbor. Boats
just like them had been taken out on the waters of China’s seas hundreds of years
earlier. I felt I had walked back in time, where the basics of life never
changed. Later back in the hotel, Judy and Elizabeth were anxious to go out,
but first we all wanted lunch. In the dining room, we were warmly greeted by "Carrie",
a waitress who had gone out of her way to befriend us the evening before. After
breakfast while I waited for my friends to make a brief stop in the restroom, "Carrie"
and I chatted. She surprised me by confiding that she didn’t like her job, and
planned to resign soon. Perhaps she would work in her husband’s business, she
said. But that was a problem, because her father did not get along with her
husband.
"Carrie" explained
that soon after her marriage her husband had visited her father’s heater
factory, had taken a close look at how it was run, and promptly opened his own heater
business. The competition meant that her father was able to eek out only a
meager living. With only a short pause, "Carrie" looked at her shoes
and murmured, scarcely above a whisper, “I know my husband loves me, and I love
him.” Then, inexplicably, she looked up at me and asked, “Do you think I should
get a divorce?” I wasn’t about to play instant-Oprah, so I was relieved when my
friends appeared, just in time to save me from an awkward response. Still, I
couldn’t help wondering what I had missed in not continuing the conversation. Even
the few comments we exchanged provided a glimpse of the culture unlikely to happen
on a proper tour with a proper guide.
For our afternoon
excursion we settled on the Tianning
Temple where we joined
other visitors and a few monks in long brown robes praying at altars. The more subtle statues were painted in gilt,
others in a garish orange-yellow. Three-year-old Isabel followed the example of
local people, kneeling on a low bench, and bending from the waist with palms
together. We adults were more restrained. Brilliant cerise sticks of incense
and fat red candles burned beneath larger-than-life golden replicas of Buddha.
Renditions of fierce dragons sent Isabel into shrieks of delighted fright.
Our time as tourists in
this allegedly dreary, boring town passed like a blink, we had not been out in
the evening at all. My friends decided to call it a day, but I wanted to see
what, if anything, went on after dark. It was about nine when I decided to
explore a side street toward the back of the hotel. I discovered numerous
pocket sized restaurants, and a few cooks at work right on the street. They
stood over small fires, and juggled long-handled woks, as they tossed greens
into the air. I had walked three blocks when I noticed a building with a wide
doorway, where a number of twenty-something, dressed-up men and women
congregated. I approached and they giggled at me. A man slightly older than the
rest of the group stepped forward and in halting English asked what I
wanted.
I asked, “Is this a
hotel?”
“Dancing,” he said. That
response made me eager to go inside, but the charge, the equivalent of twenty
dollars, was too high for a visit of only a few minutes. I explained my
situation, and the man beckoned me to follow. Up several flights of winding
stairs we went, and at each landing I was surprised to see paintings or
sculptures of glamorous naked ladies. Perhaps this was a brothel? A strip
joint? Nothing so exotic, I discovered, on arriving at the third floor.
I entered a hall where
tables and chairs formed a half-circle in front of a small stage. No one was
dancing. Adults and children of all ages, eschewing the available chairs,
crowded close to the stage. I joined them. A middle-aged man in a suit, shiny
with wear, held a blank sheet of paper aloft in his left hand. He turned it
this way and that, so that we could see that it had no bulk, then rolled it
into a cylinder. A moment later a green, silk scarf materialized in his right
hand. Slowly, he poked it inside the end of the cylinder. Next he pulled a pink
scarf from the opposite end, and unrolled the paper to show that it was once
again a simple flat sheet. Adults and children laughed delightedly.
Someone pushed through
the crowd and asked in English whether I would like a drink. I was sorry to
decline, but it was after ten, and I held out the faint hope that, back at the
hotel, I could persuade my friends to return with me. I wondered how many entertainments
we might have missed each night, right at our doorstep, in this city where
Lonely Planet claimed there was nothing to do. As I walked out toward the
stairs, I thanked the man who had escorted me to this delightful entertainment.
As we reached a landing,
he paused and began to twist his hands together. Clearing his throat, and
looking over my right shoulder, he said he had something to ask me. After
apologizing several times, he finally blurted out that he wanted to mail a
teapot to a friend in Michigan,
but the postage was prohibitive. Would I mail it for him from Seattle? He had been kind to me and I wanted
to say yes. But I could imagine myself at an airport, claiming that a stranger
had given me an item to carry on the plane. What a scenario for unexpected
consequences! I declined, but asked how much it would cost for postage from Nanchang. Forty dollars,
he said. I guessed the tea pot had cost less than five dollars, which made the
situation seem preposterous. Still, I felt sad that I could not comply with
what seemed a small favor. The mystery of the tea pot still intrigues me.
On the way back to the
hotel, I was passing another club when a woman standing at the entrance gestured
to me to come in. I stepped to the doorway, and paused just long enough to see
a large hall, where there were several dozen of what appeared to be church
pews. On a stage at the far end a tiny
man in a Santa Claus suit raced back and forth, with the pace of a frenetic
talk-show host, spewing fast patter into a microphone, while periodic bursts of
laughter erupted from his audience of perhaps a hundred people.
So much for my
“gray-on-gray” trip to Nanchang.
All those small happenings took place along one street of perhaps three blocks.
At odd moments I find myself picturing a return trip. I could walk more
streets, find a fluent English speaker, and conduct in-depth interviews of each
person I had met.
Or, instead of all that,
I could explore some “nondescript” U.S.
city, such as Des Moines, Iowa. There’s no telling what delights I
might encounter in such a place.
