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.

Today’s Architectural Adventures Pt. 1

After lunch, Rocky left all of us to our own devices because he had something to take care of downtown. We went to Sanmenli to see Yinglonglou again, because I felt that I could explain a teensy bit about Sanmenli from my adventures a couple of days ago. Also since I had biked by myself, I had missed seeing the Canadian Village (加拿大村) just across the highway.

So there I was, back in Sanmenli, giving a tour based off everything that the Guan auntie and granny had told me last time I was here. I saw the Guan auntie with the wampees and her bird’s nest again! One of Rocky’s friends said that it was a swallow’s nest!

Laura had made the same remark that I had. She said, “That’s good luck.” But Guan auntie had just replied, “Ah, they’re all only superstitions…”

The Guan auntie was so kind. Upon seeing me thunder into her village with a big group of tourists, she still just asked me, “Did you find your way back to Tangkou alright the other day?” Of course. Her directions had been superb.

Some of Rocky’s friends bought stuff from the three little vendors outside Yinglonglou. Yinglonglou doesn’t receive very many visitors even though it’s the only free heritage site to tour. Rocky says that because it’s free, nobody advertises Yinglonglou in the brochures.

After reaching the actual Yinglonglou, I lost steam, or in other words I ran out of content to deliver. I turned the tour guiding over to CJ. As expected, he knows so much about all the architecture in this area! He explained that the reason why the bricks were red bricks on the bottom and qing bricks on the very top was because the red brick was a cruder, earlier version of the qing brick. It took awhile to develop the technology to bake a qing brick, which is denser and smaller than the red brick. We can see the difference in the size of the bricks. I could have also made the effort to read the Chinese-English plaque on the wall that explained how the third level of qing bricks was added in the early twentieth century.

CJ also explained in Mandarin to Tony that most of the Diaolou that we see in Kaiping are never made with bricks, but rather reinforced concrete. Brick is not the material for building tall buildings. This is why Yinglonglou, which is a watchtower!, is so massive. CJ had gestured towards the low houses around Yinglonglou, which were covered by qing bricks. (Old Chinese houses are actually made of qing bricks instead of just being decorated with them by the Kaiping Diaolou conservation people!)

No need to wait until the Spring Festival to enter Yinglonglou! There was an open window that showed us all an idea of how thick the walls are. They probably really are a meter thick!

I probably seem to be describing the Kaiping Diaolou Conservation people with a really negative tone. As in, I probably seem to be displeased with their efforts to turn Sanmenli or other places into places that attract tourists. And you know, there are always things to be constructively critical about. The idea of creating an environment that aspires to become some tourist’s imagination of an “authentic,” timeless southern Chinese village is odd, and the idea of using real people and places and changing their living narratives is uncomfortable. I think that Rocky thinks that rather than turning sites into tourist spots, turning sites into educational centers such as Cangdong village would be so much better. This is what I’m assuming from everything he’s said and done, though I have yet to ask him more what he thinks precisely.

I may be overly harsh on the Kaiping Diaolou Conservation people, though. Because if it were up to me, I’m not exactly sure how I would go about it. After leaving Sanmenli, Zhou Sir took us all to go to the Canadian village about a two minutes’ drive away.

The Canadian Village used to be the home of many Chinese who migrated to Canada. It used to have an original Chinese name, of course. But over time, as more and more villagers left for Canada and other places overseas, the village emptied and became known as the Canadian village. The last villager of the Canadian village left in 1951.

Last year there was a Stanford group of archaeology students and professors along with some Chinese professors who had a sort of retreat at Cangdong, I think. Rocky shared a video of their debriefing interviews on their stay in Kaiping and their experience at Cangdong, and there was a Professor of Chinese History named Matthew Sommer who described his impression of a lot of the Kaiping villages that he visited as “post-apocalyptic.” I think that’s a really good word to use. There was no other village where I felt that more strongly than at the Canadian village.

The Canadian village is gorgeous. It’s prettier than Sanmenli. Even prettier than the Rongguifang (荣桂坊) next door to Tangkou. The buildings here were so extravagant. There were doric orders and even a classical pediment with a faded orange maple leaf in the middle. Nana sent me a documentary episode on ifeng (you need a proxy that says you live in China to watch this… or you just need to be in China) of a piece on the Canadian Village. They explained that the Canadian Village invited westerners to design their buildings, which explains to me the added classical elements in this village.

The villa on the left was once inhabited by the Guan family member who built the Guan library in Chikan. Rocky explained that the Canadian village was at one point acquired by the government to develop however which way. However, the Canadian descendants of the original villagers didn’t give permission to touch the estates. But the overseas descendants also have zero interest in coming back to see what they’re like, because they’re so culturally disconnected from their parents and ancestors’ world in rural Kaiping. BUT, it’s a huge Chinese taboo to sell the ancestral home. It’s kind of a frustrating situation, because nobody really looks after these buildings, and they’re left to weather and get covered by plants. I think there might be a couple of guys assigned to kind of keep an eye on the village since it gets robbed every now and then, but even so… just look at all the plants that have grown over the villa’s front gates.

The little house with the maple leaf pediment really makes this village feel post-apocalyptic and otherworldly. Canada chose its flag in the middle of the twentieth century. And yet, these are already ruins. In photos, it’s easy to isolate a scenic building and crop out wandering tourists with their selfie sticks. But when I took these pictures, it was really, really quiet and lonely all around. Our group wasn’t that big — Nana, CJ, Tony, Laura, me, three of Rocky’s friends, and Zhou Sir, our driver. There was the sound of some cicadas and ducks in the distance. Nobody lived in these once-glorious Chinese-western mansions getting slowly tucked into the earth by wildlife. CJ described the old gated villa as: “the perfect location for filming horror stories.” Very Romantic stuff.

I wonder how long the people lived in their buildings before they left. It’s as if they all left not a year after their house warming parties. Everything in the twentieth-century happened so darned quickly.

As I was taking a photo of this cool wall with the square pilaster thingies, CJ asked me, “Do you know what this wall is?”

Nope! Didn’t have a clue!

“This is a wall purposefully built in front of the entrance of this house. It’s called a zhao bi (照壁). They put a wall in front of the entrance because their house faces their fields. In feng shui, a house that faces a field is vulnerable to all sorts of evil spirits flying in from the wide, open space, so they built these zhao bi as supernatural defense.”

I would have guessed that it was really well-preserved wall to a garden shack that fell apart! Always learning lots and lots from CJ Laoshi (老师).

Here is a close up of a pretty stucco relief, which, like at Zilicun (and basically everywhere else), feature local fruits or gourds and other symbols for fortune and prosperity.

I also stuck my phone inside one of the broken windows to snap a photo of the inside. This family left behind so much stuff, as if someone had given them a plane ticket and said, “Leave Guangdong this minute!” I asked CJ why there was so much stuff left behind, why they looked like they left in such a hurry. He explained that when people left in the 20s or 30s, they must have been leaving violent or chaotic situations, and they must have thought that they would only be leaving temporarily and that they’d come home soon. I’m not sure about this particular house, though. I really doubt that all of this stuff has been there since like 80 years. But CJ told me about a story that Professor Tan once told him about a family that left. The mom had said to her children, “We’re leaving! Let’s go!” And the children thought that they would be back soon so they didn’t really take anything with them. Little did they know that once they left for Hong Kong or America or wherever, they weren’t able to come back for many, many years. Professor Tan had brought one of the children back to his childhood home, and when he opened the door to his room, he started crying at the sight of the untouched, dust-covered room that he left all those years ago.

–

On our way out, Zhou Sir and I ganged up to steal pick some mangos! They were so big, though they’re not ripe yet!

Zhou Sir looks so excited that the mango dropped into my sweater net. I was so relieved it didn’t drop on my head. We picked two more and then we all scurried back to the van before someone yelled at us. But who would have, anyway?

 

A good start to a good day!

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!

Laura

Rocky came back today! CJ also came back from his home in Zhuhai. Still waiting on an incoming intern named Tony Wang from Beijing who’s going to come back later tonight. He’s an international student at University of Virginia. I think he’ll speak Mandarin with everybody but he’ll have to speak English with me! 😭

There is a girl named Laura who also speaks English! She arrived from Hong Kong with Rocky. She is a Ph.D. student in archaeology at Stanford, and she’s currently taking Cantonese at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. She’s also an overseas Chinese, second generation, I think! Her family is from Taishan. She lives in LA!

She gave me an egg tart from KFC. They apparently have those.

Laura’s really cool! She cooked Japanese fried chicken and we all had dinner together: Grandpa Deng, Nana, CJ, Laura, and me. And then Shionyi will come back in a couple of days. She went back to Wuyi University to graduate, and she’ll visit her home village for a couple of days before coming back to Kaiping.

很快就很热闹啦! It’s soon going to be very lively again!

But Laura showed me some really cool websites this afternoon. She showed me this internet archive of papers by a man named Him Mark Lai. Here is the website: (himmarklai.org). It’s super awesome, because he wrote a lot of papers on Guangdong history and Chinese-American history IN ENGLISH!

She also showed me this website that organised all these Chinese cemeteries. (List of Overseas Chinese Cemeteries by Terry Abraham of the University of Idaho) Nana and Laura and I were talking about Chinese festivals and holidays, and how some overseas Chinese may have lost some traditions. I had said that our family doesn’t celebrate Qing Ming, and Laura had asked, “you don’t have a Chinese cemetery?” I had said, “No, I don’t think so.”

It’s funny because all three of us spoke in both Cantonese and English, with none of us being total masters of both, but each of us knew enough of both Cantonese and English to hold a pretty robust conversation amongst each other.

(And later, when Laura was in the kitchen with Grandpa Deng, it was even funnier, because Laura speaks pretty well the Taishan dialect (she speaks her county accent better than I can speak mine!!!), which is a dialect similar to the Kaiping dialect, and Grandpa Deng speaks to her in the Kaiping dialect, while she speaks to me and Nana in English and Cantonese, and Nana and I speak to her in English and Cantonese!)

Laura then explained to me and Nana in her halting but accurately accented Cantonese (sprinkled with some English) the history of Chinese cemeteries. “In the beginning of Chinese migration in America, white people didn’t want Chinese people buried in their cemeteries. (They also discriminated against prostitutes, Jews, Russians and many more.) This forced early Chinese immigrants to create Chinese cemeteries.”

She then looked up Bakersfield, California on that Idaho website. We actually have two Chinese cemeteries!

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.

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.