I went to 拜神

I went to bai shen (拜神) a couple of days ago. Which we should distinguish from bai shan (拜山), something that you’d do on qing ming (清明) in the mountains.

My dad’s brother and my dad’s uncle went back to visit the family ancestral homes and I gave them a call and asked if I could tag along. They live in San Francisco. I have no memory of everybody, but everyone was really nice. My dad’s brother, or my uncle, brought back two of his daughters, Queenie and Carrie. They speak the Kaiping dialect, though I think they don’t speak Cantonese. They seem really sweet.

My dad’s cousin, Auntie Hong, pinched my cheek and said, “Look, these two were born in America and they still speak the Kaiping dialect! And you were born here, Mei Mei!”

“Yes, yes, Auntie Hong…”

Here I am, fumbling around.

I dragged Shionyi with me because I was shy. I didn’t know anybody. And she took it as an opportunity to check out what overseas Chinese from Kaiping do to pay respects to ancestors. CJ told her to take a lot of photos but she thought maybe not… I told her go ahead and take as many photos as she wanted.

We got to enter the diaolou! I was so happy! There was a room full of birdcages. Another room was full of suitcases. This diaolou was apparently built by my grandpa’s grandpas. They came back from Canada. This is the first time that I’ve heard of overseas migration in my family outside of our generation.

This is the altar on the top level of the diaolou. The one of the right is my grandpa. I’m not really sure who the one on the left is, though we are most likely related.

My dad’s uncle tells me that they used to live in the diaolou when they were younger. My grandpa and the other grandpa lived on the top floors, one half for each, because they were the eldest.

This village is in the Chikan township, and during the Sino-Japanese wars, the Japanese sighted the diaolou of this village from the Chikan waterfront. My great-uncle says that when the Japanese saw the defensive watchtowers, which were constructed for bandits, they advanced into this countryside, thinking it to be a military base. They even shot cannons at the diaolou! There were two big holes in this diaolou. And from the outside, you can see the brick repair work for one of the holes.

荣桂坊 and Red Bean Soup

Last night we went to Rongguifang Village again, because Tony hasn’t seen it yet. We biked there together!

The ducks have grown a lot! Time passes by so fast. Last I saw you, you were so little.

We saw a couple of funny things on the walls in the Diaolou. After Tony read this poem-looking text on the wall, he muttered the Chinese version of “what the hell” and walked out of the room.

I asked him what it meant and he only translated “打飞机” for me.

I made the fish ball curry for dinner! And half caramelized onions with a green bell pepper again. I needed to save my reputation after my failed attempt at the 小炒王 at lunch.

Shionyi and CJ are not fans of the sweetness, but I am. Fine! More for me!

It was raining really hard for dinner. There’s the incoming typhoons in Guangdong, after all.

A bird’s nest dropped onto the ground. CJ picked it up! It was wrapped around and around like a big grass egg. CJ is so daring, I watched him stick two fingers in to look for baby birds or eggs. But it was empty.

A relative dropped by Tangkou to visit me. I was really surprised. But CJ said that if I told him that I was living at the old post office, he could find the Tangkou hostel really easily if he had a chauffeur familiar with Kaiping.

After dinner, Shionyi finished her red bean tangshui and we made latte art on our soups using coconut milk.

CJ projected Now You See Me onto a wall with Chinese subtitles and I ended up watching the whole thing even though I’ve seen it before, and then I went to bed.

Sanmenli (三门里) Village

The Kaiping Diaolou conservation people did a good amount of work on the village of Sanmenli. They paved the walkways prettily, they redid walls with qing bricks, and they painted ceramic wet paintings over peoples’ entrances.

When I was walking back out through narrow Venice-like alleyways, I came across the granny selling dried fruit again! Along with the good people who had directed me to Yinglonglou earlier. They lived near each other, or they were relatives, I’m not sure. The granny said, “Oh! Look! It’s the girl from America!”

There was a woman lying on her side barefoot on some steps, resting her elbow and head on a wooden stool and eating wampees. She looked really comfortable despite how hard the ground looked. Another uncle sat on a bright pink plastic chair.

The woman eating wampees had laughed, “If you’re from America, what the hell are you doing suffering your way back here?”

I had retorted, “Of course I have to come back! If I don’t know where I came from, how am I supposed to live?”

I had wanted to keep on going, but the woman with the wampees smiled and invited me to sit down and chat. She shared some wampees, and I took one. The granny told them about how I turned down her free dried fruit. I threw away the wampee skin and seeds and they invited me to wash my hands with their faucet on seeing how much I was scratching a bug bite on my arm. They had removed the top turn-y part of the faucet and they’d hung it on their door like a key to running water. I dried my hands on my shirt though they invited me to use their towel. I had to reapply on my mosquito bites some of the Zhengjinyou (正金油) ointment that Grandpa Deng took me to buy a couple days ago.

The woman with the wampees smiled a lot and said, “Come on, let’s chat!” The uncle got up and revealed that he sat on two pink plastic chairs, and he gave me one. He parked my bike about a meter or two away from me, but I sat with my back to the wall so that I could keep half an eye on my basket of stuff, which included my phone and money.

The granny had said, “The people around here are good. Don’t worry about people stealing stuff.”

I think maybe two years ago I might have trusted everyone completely. But now I think not trusting everyone completely all the time is okay. It’s not that you think that everyone is bad, and that your heart is pessimistic. Sometimes you just can’t afford to keep letting your life completely be up to the winds of nature. Maybe nobody would have stolen my stuff, but maybe my bike would have started rolling down the alleyway and straight into the fish pond! Who knows. Literally anything can happen. You are always better off being safe than sorry.

The villagers had talked to me for a good while. They asked me about where my parents’ villages are, about America, about my family, about my college tuition, and how I’m paying for everything. I was honest about everything. They asked me why I came back alone, and I was honest about that, as well. My family hasn’t been back to Kaiping yet because we haven’t been able to afford to! Coming back to Kaiping from overseas means on top of purchasing everyone’s airplane tickets, you will also hold a big dinner banquet in your village and pay for a lot of fancy souvenirs to show everyone your fortune and generosity. And since we haven’t “made it” yet, my mom didn’t want to go back and set us back several years just to prove a point to everyone that she is doing well. That it was all worth it.

“Is it nice in America?”

I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I do remember saying that it’s a lot easier to make money in America than it is here. And inside I kept thinking about the weather and mosquitos. If people left Guangdong for money, they stayed away from Guangdong because of the weather and mosquitos. At least that’s what my mom tells everybody else.

“Around here, we’re just whatever…” The woman with wampees smiled, gesturing to her alleyway. She was always really smiley, and she talked really slowly, much slower than anyone I’ve met from the countryside. Everyone else who speaks the Kaiping dialect speaks fast and with a lot of emotion. I used to think it was crude and unattractive, but for some reason I don’t think so anymore. I wish I could speak the Kaiping dialect fluently like Professor Tan or at least confident version of the Kaiping dialect like Nana. The woman with wampees spoke to me mostly in a Cantonese with a Kaiping accent. Usually, when you speak to a villager in Cantonese, they respond with Cantonese instead of the Kaiping dialect.

“Why are you here by yourself? You should have come with your boyfriend,” the woman with wampees remarked.

The granny responded, “That’s what I said!”

Around here people are really surprised that you go places by yourself if you’re a young woman. Meanwhile, back in the states, I know girls who climb mountains by themselves.

“What’s the use of having a boyfriend… I’m always flying here and there. Even if I do date, it never lasts.”

They laughed. It was really refreshing to hear that. The granny said, “Ah well. It’s good to date a few boys in your life, anyways.”

The woman with wampees smiled and said, “When I was your age, I was married with a kid.”

They had introduced themselves as the Guan (關) family. “The Guan as in closing doors, guan men (關門 ［traditional] / 关门 [simplified]).”

“Wait, Guan? Like the Guan family at Chikan, with the Guan and Situ rivalry?”

“Yes, that Guan. Around here, we’re all Guan. If you go to the south-side, it’s the Situ territory.”

I took the chance to ask about how it was when the Kaiping Diaolou conservation people came to work on their village. She said, “Eh, I mean, they gave us an offer that was good for both of us, so we accepted. They redid the walkways in our alleys, so that it’s really nice to walk on… they redid our electrical units and our water pipes so that everything’s hidden away and nice-looking. They redid our walls so that it looks really nice now. And they painted that stuff above our doors.”

I noticed a bird’s nest on the left corner of the painting. Just then, a bird fluttered in and baby birds burst in a choir of chirping for attention. The bird fed them and flew away.

“Oh! A bird’s nest!”

“Yeah… they’re yuan yang (鸳鸯).” I think that the woman with wampees might have been using yuan yang figuratively, because the birds in the nest were black and slim and looked nothing like the colourful ducks that I found on google images. She referred to them as yuan yang because there was a couple. After the first bird flew away, another bird that looked the same flew back in and the baby birds chirped enthusiastically for more food.

“It must be good luck!” I had said.

“What kind of good luck…?” The woman asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. It just feels benevolent.” I was embarrassed. I was just saying things. I actually know nothing about Chinese feng shui.

“I put a towel below their nest…” She gestured to a towel on the ground. “They poop a lot…”

“Oh…”

“I actually don’t really like them there… I have gotten rid of their nest a couple of times already. But they just come back. So I stopped trying…”

I eventually had to leave. The uncle invited me to eat dinner with them, but I said dinner was waiting for me back at Tangkou. They gave me extensive direction guiding on my way home.

“Just follow the highway. After about 8 km, you will get to a stoplight. Turn right and keep going until you see a pavilion that says Tangkou.”

They really knew this whole area very well! I set off.

The road back was long. I was so tired. But I had a lot of things to think about on the way back. Like, how the heck is Matthew Goss doing his whole fellowship thing by bike? Well, he’s used to it, I guess. I still have to build up some more leg muscles.

The weather is terrible this week for the farmers drying their grains. I saw some farmers still trying to save their grains for a sunnier day. They cover their grains when it rains, and then they uncover it as soon as the rain stops so that the grains don’t 0verheat, which would cause them to start “teething” aka sprouting! They’re seeds, after all.

In French, this frustrating weather pattern is called “les giboulets,” where it’s sunny and warm while rain falls at short but strong spurts all day long.

Grandpa Deng said that when the grains can’t dry, the farmers can’t sell them at full price. Grain that is not completely dry is worthless and only suitable for feeding ducks and chickens.

The Liyuan parking lot was empty. The northern farmers had taken in all their grains.

Trying to find Yinglonglou（迎龙楼)

This afternoon I decided to go to Sanmenli Village (三门里村) to find the oldest Diaolou in Kaiping, the Yinglonglou (迎龙楼).

This is the route that my offline maps app suggested earlier today:

When you see such a route, isn’t this the route you’d much rather take?

I decided to try this shortcut. I mean, when Nana takes me through small roads, we always find our way out. How hard can it be, just scurrying across the rice paddies and villages? About ten minutes into this shortcut that I imagine to exist, I came across a northerner farmer who warned me that there’s nothing ahead of me besides his fish ponds. I decided that I should follow the saying that some martial artists said in Wong Kar Wai movies: “It is better to advance than to stop.”

Well, when you insist on advancing on non-roads, you get this:

Grass! Fish on your left, ducks on your right! My maps app had long stopped locating me at this point. In the end, I’m not sure how much longer I took to get to Sanmenli, but I think it was way longer than if I had just gone by the big roads that made that big damned circle.

It was so hot! My gray Center for Learning in Action t-shirt had big dark spots. All the trucks that drove by kicked up huge clouds of dirt and dust flew into my eyes. I was so tired, too! My legs were wobbly, and I was weakly keeping on. I kept thinking, “MY GOD, I’m not even halfway there. How in the world am I making it back?” It’s too bad that buses in China don’t have that bike clamp thingy that the buses in America have in the front.

This was the route I probably ended up taking:

I had to take a break at this tiny gas station that had refreshments and stuff, but I didn’t buy anything, I just sat on their chairs outside and I drank my water and watched their birds caged under a banyan tree. There are a lot of banyan trees. Shionyi, one of the interns who recently came (maybe a couple weeks before I arrived) to the Cangdong Project, was the one who taught me that villagers place a good banyan tree at the entrance of their village as a feng shui principle. “As the banyan tree has deep roots and flourishes widely, so the village also will last and grow with many children.” The Chinese version is actually pretty different, but ehhh I can’t remember the exact lines, and this translation is the basic essence!

There’s a lot of trash in China. It’s hard to look at. It made me really depressed the first two days. When my uncle drove me from Guangzhou to Kaiping, and he tossed my grass jelly cup in a bush on the road, I was appalled. But he said, “It’s a trash can! I saw a lot of trash there.”

It was Rocky who explained to me that it’s just different. Most children here aren’t used to being raised to live sustainably by the margins like children in the west might be. But damn, there is a lot of trash everywhere. I wonder what westerners feel when they come and find this zen countryside spilling over with trash everywhere? Every picturesque fish pond banked by woods of bamboo has some floating garbage… In fact that fish pond in Cangdong is outright being used as a trash can / organic waste basket. Professor Tan says that the villagers are throwing their trash in the fish pond because the trash collectors stopped collecting trash from Liyuan (which is just across the way from Cangdong Village) and they’re throwing trash in their fish pond as a form of protest… How are the fish holding up with all this trash, anyway?

Anyways, I finally arrived at Sanmenli after asking many people for directions.

It’s a nice village.

They have this bright sign here. On the left, it says “Cultural Heritage Day 2016 Main Theme– ‘Let cultural heritage harmonise with life today.” On the right, it’s a two-line rhyme that says, “Cultural Heritage is a priceless treasure, You and I need to protect it.” I guess that I can find Yinglonglou if I enter between these two banners. And I did! I asked some people hanging out in the alleyway, enjoying the shade, and they were kind to say it’s just further down. I creeped in together with my bicycle…

Voila!

I feel like I remember it to be paler in pictures. At the top of the Yinglonglou they have the normal Chinese “qing zhuan,” (青砖) or “pale/blue-green/grey bricks,” ugh, I’m not sure how to translate it, I’m sure there’s a technical translation for this material.

And then the rest of the building is made of these red bricks. The bright red bricks surprised me a bit, reminding me of when I finally saw the Coliseum. Contrary to the brown or stone-y colours I saw in pictures, I thought the Coliseum looked blood red. I always pray that the real thing looks different from pictures. Because otherwise why the hell should I have togo all the way to the real thing when it just looks the same as the pictures?

I mean, I know, red bricks are not exactly GROUNDBREAKING, I know, I know. But I thought that everyone around here used the qing bricks.

A granny was selling dried fruit snacks at the entrance. There were three little stands like this. It’s about 16:40-17:00 at this point, so I guessed that everyone was wrapping up business. The granny told me that the Yinglonglou isn’t open for guests except for the spring festival, which passed already. She said that they haven’t finished cleaning it up yet.

She explained that she’s been living in Sanmenli for many, many years. She said that whenever there were storms or bandits, the ancestors of the village would all take refuge in the diaolou.

I had wanted to ask her about the process in which they made Sanmenli into a tourist location. But she turned the questions on me and asked me where I was from and stuff, but she kept reasking things I answered already… She insisted on selling me dried fruit, and even giving me free dried fruit but I didn’t take any. I continued my way and looked around the outside.

Those gun holes are so small! Well, the mass of this Diaolou makes them look extra small. There must be like NO light… The granny had said that the walls are a meter thick! I am not sure about that. I’m gonna have to ask Professor Tan if she knows, when she comes back.

Zili (自力) Village

I visited Zili Village! Look at these details! The lion carrying a coin in his mouth is from Mingshilou (铭石楼). The stained glass in the bottom middle and the bed decoration on the bottom right are also from Mingshilou. The bed decoration is interesting! I’m not exactly sure what’s going on but it looks like some people are on horses and there’s some construction going on and there’s a pavilion… The stained glass on the left is from the Lanshengjulu mansion (澜生局庐).

Here are some of the references to streamliners in the decoration throughout different buildings in the village.

When I got to the rooftops, I finally got to snap the online Kaiping tourist guide photos of the Diaolou. They really do integrate well into this landscape, don’t they? As the rivulets of sweat stung the skin on my neck in the staircases up and down the Diaolou, I thought about my paltry research question on when the first western inspired Diaolou was and why. I’m glad that I found the Cangdong project, and that they’ve let me tag along their operations… without them, I would not have had such a quick and thorough orientation into southern Chinese village life. And southern Chinese village life is so full, so rich! By rich I certainly don’t mean moneywise… but I mean it is so rich in terms of human connections and traditions and sustainable living. Southern Chinese villagers know how to live with nature. Life revolves around the earth. It’s kind of like The Good Earth except like, I actually like it.

So I wonder if to build architecture that isn’t out of touch with the landscape, you yourself have to first be in touch with the land. I had read in the UNESCO report that the Diaolou were mostly built by local builders that looked off photos or drawings. What do I mean by “in touch with the land”? Well, I’m not so sure. But everyone around here is giving me a pretty good idea: the way everyone has a garden that overflows, the way everyone knows all the plants, the way everyone thinks about their health and how they can be healed by food.

I kind of ran out of time at the end, but I was getting tired of being cooked alive in the subtropical atmosphere anyways, and these kinds of museum-like experiences always take it all out of me.

Zili Cun had a really good documentary that I have to hunt for in their WeChat archives. The girl locking up the exhibit explanation panels kindly let me in to snap a ton of really helpful information panels!

I’ll finish off with this close up of a lotus flower from their pretty lotus lake. Overall, Zili Village is extremely picturesque. But I think they changed a pretty large amount of things to set up the village to be so pretty and tourist-friendly. People still live in Zili Village. Real villagers from before this place was a tourist site. The villagers own “Peasant Family Restaurants” catered to the tourists in Zili Village. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’m actually not sure how I feel about all of this. As in, my whole being here, experiencing all of this… it’s hard to think straight.

As I was leaving Zili Village along with some other straggler visitors after closing time, some aunties called out to me, selling drinks for 4 RMB and I’m like hecks WHY when I could get a drink for 1 RMB in Tangkou?! But then I felt a sour, distressed feeling and I backtracked and ended up buying some grass jelly from a granny because I felt bad. 4 RMB is actually already so cheap and they work so hard, and they had their village invaded by us. I doubt they had much of a choice. I’ll ask CJ or Professor Tan about it when I can. I wonder if the villagers in Zili Village get paid for this change in their lifestyle. If they are unhappy with the way things are, I wish I could make things slightly less deceitful by buying some grass jelly from them. In any case, I need as much grass jelly as possible. I am breaking out so badly. It’s so damned hot.

~

On one hand, I feel like I have every right to visit where I was born, but at the same time I feel like this world is so removed from me, and we are all so inextricable from our current socioeconomic realities that every move I make feels a bit sour in some way. I have more than everybody here, and yet everybody is still sharing with me. I’m not yet sure how to deal with this. How do I give back? What is the right way to be in this space?

~

The Bodhisattva sits in a lotus flower.