Fujian/Xiamen Trip, and Other Doings

Hello! This is the first time while I’ve been in China that I’ve felt that I have too many things to do and not enough time to do them in, so I’m going to keep this update really short. I have a dictation on Monday, a paper/project due next week about our trip to Xiamen that I haven’t started yet, about 100 pages of reading to do for our “Core Class” on Wednesday, and this entry to write—a lot to do by the standards of the past 7 weeks. And tomorrow almost the whole day will be spent volunteering at a charity carnival benefiting kids with heart disease, followed by dinner with my friend Katherine and her grandparents who are visiting Shanghai…then Monday – Thursday, MY DAD WILL BE HERE! I am very excited to see him, of course, especially since it’s a surprise (for him, too, as he only found out he was coming to China on Wednesday/Thursday, and he’s leaving 7 AM Saturday morning Boston time). Meaning this will be a fun but crazy week! Then a week from this Monday/Tuesday I’ll go Hangzhou with all the other international students at ECNU (we number in the hundreds, so this should be interesting….). And then when we get back we have like a week before our midterm…and then Thanksgiving…and then November is basically over and I have like 2 weeks left, during which I want to go to Nanjing at some point….Basically, with 5 weeks left, December 13 looms large.

So, by update, I meant “you get to listen to me stress about how much fun stuff I have to do.” Sorry.

The original purpose of this post was to write about what I did/saw in Xiamen, not make a to-do list/schedule. So back to last weekend and our trip to Xiamen…

Xiamen was warm, sunny, small, clean, and beautiful. We spent our first day on the island of Gulangyu, where the foreign embassies/rich people’s villas were located when Xiamen was known as Amoy, and was an important treaty port. Gulangyu was definitely the cutest place I’ve been to in China yet; it felt a lot like Bermuda with Chinese characteristics. The streets are narrow, and no cars or motorbikes or even bicycles are allowed on the island. It was quiet. The buildings were a medley of different Western styles, surrounded by palm trees and gardens. There were tons of tourists, but it didn’t even matter because there was a beach and freshly squeezed orange juice stands and warm sunshine (I got a bit of color…perfection) and delicious food and I bought a very colorful summery skirt…clearly, contemplating Gulangyu has robbed me of any ability to write or think coherently. Suffice to say, it was a very pleasant night/day.

On Saturday, we hopped in a van and, along with our incredibly Zen, nice driver and our sweet guide Ann, made our way out into the countryside of Fujian Province. Our destination was Yongding, a village known for its tulou (“earthen buildings”). The tulou come in three varieties, either round, square, or “five phoenix” which is like square but different (hard to explain). They were built by the Hakka people, ethnically Han (according to the Chinese government), but with their own culture and history. The Hakka have been migrating around China since about 200 AD, purportedly from the north-central region (around Xi’an, in the area known as the cradle of Chinese civilization) to the southeast…they’re sometimes referred to as “the Jews of China” because of their extended migrations and encounters with persecution. Their history is disputed; some call them the descendants of the Han Dynasty, the “true Han.” From what I can gather, all people know for sure is that in around the 13th-14th century the Hakka arrived in the Fujian Province region and began to build their massive tulou dwellings. The tulou are fortified, massive dwellings, designed to house hundreds of members of one family group/clan. They have thick outer walls (up to 2 m thick at the base) that are reinforced to protect against tunneling under or attempts to burn them. Inside each tulou are a series of smaller inner rings, built as more housing was needed. At the center is the ancestral temple. The tulou are striking because they’re a lot like castles, as their purpose is to protect the occupants from attack from bandits or violent enemies of any type. However, the tulou are for families, and show none of the class differentiations of a castle. There is no keep. There are just hundreds of rooms arranged in 4-story tall rings, allotted to clan members according to their needs/status (young couples got one room, old people lived lower down so they wouldn’t have to climb so many stairs, etc.). I definitely had fun exploring them and taking pictures, even if there were a TON of tourists (the tulou were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008).

Even more than seeing the tulou, however, my favorite part of Saturday and Sunday was getting to see some of rural China. Fujian is 82% mountains, according to our guide, and the drive to Yongding was absolutely stunning—terraced fields, winding mountain roads, small villages. It was also very refreshing and relaxing just to get away for a bit from the hustle and bustle (and bad air) of urban China. One of my favorite moments was buying pomelos (if you’ve never tried one, try one soon, because they’re amazing) from a guy sitting along the side of the road that ran through the middle of the pomelo tree orchard (field?) where the fruit had grown. It just felt so natural. And the pomelo was delicious (once I finally cut it open).

After a fun evening of karaoke with our teacher Huang Laoshi on Sunday, on Monday we had a chill day in Xiamen. Ben, Katherine, Erika and I went on a very leisurely scavenger hunt (no one else wanted to do it, so we weren’t competing against anyone) in the morning, after which Huang Laoshi treated us to dim sum (yum!) for lunch. After lunch, Erika, Katherine and I rented bicycles and biked along with beach for a little while before we had to go back to our hostel and go to the airport. All in all, it was the perfect “vacation from vacation” as I dubbed the trip…not at all intellectually taxing—in fact, not taxing in any way—but just very relaxing and pleasant.

The rest of this week was very routine. Two highlights: Thursday, my tutor and I went on a walk instead of having normal tutoring, and during our walk my tutor started talking about how awful the current system is in China, and how stifled she feels by the Communist Party. Basically, she said, getting ahead in China requires everyone to fake enthusiasm for the Party, even though everyone knows that Marxist ideology doesn’t apply to modern China anymore. It was an incredibly, incredibly interesting and intense conversation. She wasn’t talking about these things from a theoretical standpoint; she was speaking through her own emotions, from her own experience.
Friday night I went out for Italian food with some CIEE friends, as well as this group of Italian girls my friend Erika knows (Erika is Italian but living in the US). It was SO fun! The Italians were incredibly friendly and fun, and the food was amazing (homemade pasta…mmmmm).
That’s all folks. Back to studying for my dictation…