This morning Grandpa Deng prepared a western-styled continental breakfast for us! No congee. Laura asked if he could also make some eggs, and Grandpa Deng scrambled a few eggs for us… but it was really salty. We should have asked Nana to make them, because apparently she makes really good eggs.
The new intern Tony came down and I had introduced myself and Laura to him in English. He’s from Beijing so he speaks Mandarin and since he’s been in the States since high school, he speaks fluent English. He’s a sophomore at University of Virginia. I bet you are wondering if I am also an intern. Well, this is a very good question that I need to explain soon to Lynn and Katya at the Fellowships Office (and soon before my free VPN trial runs out and I decide that I am too cheap to keep paying for one!), because the Fellowships Office had no expectations of me becoming an intern at the Cangdong Project when they gave me my grant. However, I am certainly still happily doing my research project on the Kaiping Diaolou, and I am staying at the Cangdong Project’s facilities and hanging out with Nana and CJ and Rocky and their interns and visitors all the time. My mom has been telling all my relatives in Guangdong that I’m taking classes here, so I get a lot of WeChat messages that go like, “Mei Mei, do you still have to go to class on the weekends? Auntie can take you to Guangzhou and play!” Similarly, everyone here introduces me as an intern. Sometimes you just can’t explain too much. I mean, it’s awesome, because I think being a Cangdong intern would be awesome, and I love helping out (though I am never needed!), and being with this group of people teaches me so much about Asian-American history and Chinese culture All The Time.
Anyways, so back to Tony, a new Actual intern at Cangdong. I had introduced Laura and myself as “overseas Chinese.” But then Laura had said that she actually doesn’t like the term overseas Chinese, because it was a term that has been used pejoratively and imprecisely. Its political baggage and ambiguity makes her prefer the term “Chinese diaspora.”
“It’s the power of words,” Laura said. She then explained that it’s kind of similar to the way we still use the term internment camps for talking about Japanese internment. Internment was a term that was technically reserved for when someone is captured as a prisoner of war, when someone is on the enemy side during wartime and they’re detained without trial because they are a threat. But to Laura, there is a difference between that and incarceration or imprisonment without trial. And yet, we have ambigui-fied the word today.
Having conversations like this casually over breakfasts is definitely one of the biggest reasons why I’m hanging out with the Cangdong Project. I haven’t actually explained the Cangdong Project yet… sorry, I’ll get around to it eventually. But the days just run ahead of me, and I feel like August-me will be very grateful if I have a detailed blog of what the heck happened every day while I was using up my school’s money.
After breakfast, we all went over to Cangdong Village. Rocky’s friends also came along. There wasn’t enough room in Zhou Sir’s air-conditioned minivan for all of us, so Nana and Laura and I biked over. At Cangdong Village, all of us sweated in the ancestral hall as we watched (or for half of us, rewatched) a couple of videos about the Cangdong Project and a documentary clip on Asian-American bone remittances. Nana then gave an awesome tour of the village in Mandarin to Tony and Rocky’s friends and I tagged along so I could improve my Mandarin.
Here is the video on the Cangdong Project! CJ also stars in an interview as one of the architecture students from Guangzhou! A big thank you to whoever uploaded this, because nobody at Cangdong did. Youtube’s blocked in China. It has English subtitles. It was made by one of Professor Tan’s students.
I think Rocky’s friends are just touring and playing in Kaiping, so he took them to eat the most famous dish in Kaiping, Clay Pot Rice (煲仔饭). We actually ended up eating in an old Diaolou! We ate in the refurbished part of the Diaolou, but Rocky told us all to peek over in their their store room, and we saw an old, Diaolou-esque room with reliefs and columns and arches!
Hello there, Mr. Lion! You look like you’re made in Kaiping.
It did that flash rain again during lunch. Our bikes got rained on. But by the time we left the restaurant, (everyone else by van while Nana and Laura and I by bike) it was sunny and hot again. It felt like a sauna.
Nana made up a poem in English as we biked back to the Tangkou hostel.
“The wind is warm! The grains are golden! The butterfly is big! We are riding on the Guangdong greenway!”
Along the way, Laura asked if there were water buffalos (水牛) around. Nana replied, “Hmm, there aren’t as many around as there used to be.”
Right then, we biked past this one! Speak of the water buffalo!
A summer in Guangdong 