Observer, Volume 16, Number 18, Thursday May 25 1995

Observations


Winter term in China: A journey of feasts

By Linda Grashoff

Except for a few breakfasts, every meal we ate in China was a banquet. What wasn't a feast of food was a feast of experience.

A banquet is enjoyable partly because of the people with whom it is shared. This winter term I accompanied Danforth professor of biology David Benzing and 10 biology-major students to Yunnan, China, where they studied land use in this southwestern province. David (my husband) and the students were there mainly to study the vegetation and related environmental interests and concerns. Their stay--made possible by grants from the Minneapolis Foundation and the Ethel and Raymond F. Rice Foundation--included academically oriented trips to agricultural facilities, research institutes, tropical forests, and a sewage-treatment plant.

Our Chinese hosts were people from Yunnan University, with which Oberlin has an exchange program. The agreement includes the Oberlin-in-China semester-long experience and an arrangement in which faculty from Yunnan University study at Oberlin for a year. (Chen Jie, on the faculty of the Institute of Geobotany and Ecology at Yunnan University, is in Oberlin now.) Three people in the Yunnan University biology department took day-to-day responsibility for our comfort, entertainment, and well being: Xiao Heng (who spent 1993 in Oberlin on the exchange program) and Hu Zhihao, vice-deans in the biology department, and Wan Yaohua, another member of the biology faculty.

Part of what makes a feast effective is contrast in what is served. Everywhere in China the old and the new exist side by side. Near a temple we watched an old woman with bound feet and worker-blue clothing walk past two little girls wearing running shoes and bright yellow jogging outfits. In the cities we saw modern buildings rise with the help of external scaffolding made of laced-together bamboo. And along the same Kunming street where horses draw carts I glimpsed a young woman talking on a cellular telephone.

Here are a few more courses from our feasts, as noted in my journal.

Photo Credit: Linda Grashoff
While we were in Kunming--Yunnan's capital city of over a million inhabitants--the students, David, and I stayed at the Yunnan University Foreign Students Guest House and ate our meals together in one of the guest house's small dining rooms. David is standing at one of the gates of the guest-house courtyard.

Saturday, December 31.

As we jostle along in the university bus through the streets of Kunming and whiz onto the surrounding highways, I wish I could take photographs of our neighboring vehicles: bicycles with whole pig carcasses slung over the rear fenders and bicycles balancing open-weave baskets of live chickens, crates of vegetables, containers of limestone and coal, and building supplies, some longer or larger than the bicycles. Besides bicycles, vans, buses, trucks, and cars--including taxis--the roads are full of carts powered by water buffalo, horses, donkeys, and the front part of bicycles, as well as farm vehicles. A multitude of people--many carrying something, often at the ends of a pole shouldered across their backs--also walk on the roads, which are quite good. I haven't seen any potholes.

Sunday, January 1.

Today we took the university bus to the Kunming Botanical Garden and to two temples, one in Black Dragon Pool Park and the other called the Golden Temple. At the first, primarily a Taoist site, sophomore Kaelyn Stiles and I passed a small side temple--not much larger than an average American living room--that was Buddhist. We hung back because, unlike other temples we had visited, this one seemed to be a functioning temple rather than a tourist attraction, and we didn't want to intrude. But an old man inside the temple, dressed like a caretaker rather than a monk, beckoned us inside. He gave each of us a stick of incense and showed us where to light it and where to place it to burn. He seemed to be welcoming us into the culture. He poured oil from a Pepsi bottle into a small vase with wicks in it, then lit a stick and from it lit the wicks. Standing in the silence, I looked around: the small table in front of us had a lighted red candle on it and a can of sand that now held our burning sticks of incense. A few feet in front of that table was a larger one covered with a profusion of ceramic and gilded wooden Buddha figures, plastic flowers, and more lit red candles. Small round cushions with piecework cotton covers were on the floor near us, and boxes were piled along the tapestry-draped walls. With no windows, only the door let in daylight. Inside was darkness, closeness, oneness. What I was feeling was perhaps not so different from the religious feeling some people go to temples and churches to experience. A Chinese woman entered and knelt briefly on one of the cushions. After holding her hands together in what must be a universal gesture of prayer, she stood up and put money in a box on the corner of the large table. Kaelyn and I looked at each other, dug some money from our pockets, put it in the box, and walked out. We were there only a few minutes, but I was in a daze for hours.

At dinner tonight we were sillier and more boisterous than at other meals. This is really a good group. Jenna (Barbour '95) and Erika (Biga '96) learned a bit of Chinese today. The bus driver brought along his 14-year-old daughter to practice her English, but she taught more Chinese than she learned English. Besides teaching Jenna and Erika to count from one to 10 in Chinese speech, she taught them the Chinese hand signs for the numbers--very useful for bargaining with merchants.

Jenna and Erika are also learning some of the Chinese characters. They know the ones for Kunming and company, which appear in many of the signs in the city. (We're all able to distinguish between the characters for man and woman on the public rest rooms.) The Oberlin students jump right into things. They walk all over the city after dinner, talk and gesture freely to get what they want, and generally participate vigorously in their surroundings. David and I are more afraid of getting lost and of being misunderstood.

Monday, January 2.

Tonight David and I had dinner at the home of Chen Jie, his wife, Zhao Yi, and their 7-year-old daughter, Nan-nan. One of Chen Jie's colleagues, Mr. Lu--who speaks English--was also there. When I asked Nan-nan, through Mr. Lu, what she likes to do in school, she answered, drawing. This was good because the presents I brought Nan-nan were drawing supplies from the Co-op Book Store. I asked to see her drawings, and she showed me pictures with much detail. One had the sun up in the corner just the way my kids (and I before them) drew the sun when they were young.

Chen Jie's mother and brother cooked the meal. Everything was delicious: thousand-year-old eggs (which are not a thousand years old) and spiced mung-bean sprouts, corn prepared with sugar, green fava beans with pork, hot-flavored mushrooms, spicy tofu, salted beef chips, broccoli with shrimp, Yunnan steamed chicken, batter-fried lotus-root slices, purple sweet sticky rice, sticky white rice in syrup, Yunnan ham with Yunnan cheese, regular steamed rice, tangerines, bananas, almond cookies, another kind of cookie, Yunnan rose wine, kiwi-fruit wine, and coffee.

Thursday, January 5.

After breakfast we left for Xishuangbanna, a geographic, political, and cultural area south of Kunming, extending to the Laotian border. The bus has all of us plus Professor Hu; his wife, Dr. Wei, a traditional Chinese physician; Professor Xiao; Tanya Lee, a Shansi rep serving in Kunming; a video-camera crew of three; and the driver.

Photo Credit: Linda Grashoff
In a rain-forest preserve in Xishuangbanna we crossed a river four times. Three bridges had a bamboo railing, which the first person across helped hold up for the others to use. Maybe because this bridge was wider then the others it didn't have a railing--a scary travel arrangement for a nonswimmer like me.

The mountains were very high, to my flatlander eyes, and many were terraced. The road is in much better condition than the road to Monte Verde in Costa Rica, where David and I traveled on an alumni-association trip in 1992. There the bus seemed to tip-toe in and out of pot holes laid end to end for the entire route. Like our Costa Rican driver, our Chinese driver takes every opportunity to pass someone on a curve going around a mountain where you can't see the oncoming traffic. Unlike the Costa Rican driver, however, he honks first.

Friday, January 6.

David and two students had intestinal problems today. They're taking Dr. Wei's traditional medicine, with good results.

Where we stopped for lunch people were killing pigs across the street. The cries were awful. I may not eat any more pork this trip. Or ever.

Saturday, January 7.

We're in Jinghong, the capital of Xishuangbanna. This morning we toured an agricultural institute and adjacent botanical garden. The director is another of Professor Hu's friends (he seems to have friends wherever we go; many are his former students). This institute works to increase the quantity and quality of several commercial crops of the area, including vanilla; Bixa, the vegetable dye used to color margarine; the oil of the rubber-tree seed, and jling-jling oil. We walked around sniffing (including eucalyptus), tasting (including cinnamon), and poking (a rubber tree).

In the evening we went to a park and shopping area, where we ate dinner outdoors. Something very delicious was wrapped in lemon grass. The cuisine of Xishwangbana shares some features with Thai food. Many of the villages in the area are populated by the Dai people, whose culture is similar to Thai culture. After dinner we walked around the park and watched traditional dancing. Visitors are invited to join in, and some of the Oberlin students did. Jenna played a Chinese game in which two people clack together a pair of bamboo poles. People on the sidelines chant (translated) "Open, closed; open, closed; open, open, closed" while one person jumps between the poles. Jenna says she learned the game as a little girl in Maine.

Wednesday, January 10.

This is a familiar pattern on our daily bus trips: David calls up to Professor Hu, sitting three seats in front of us and across the aisle: "Professor Hu, was that [Latin botanical name] we just passed?" And this, from Professor Hu: "Professor Benzing, do you see the [Latin botanical name] on the side of the road?" The two botanists share a world that the students are closer to understanding than I am. It's not only music that is a universal language.

Friday, January 13.

We've been heading back toward Kunming since Wednesday. First stop of the day was to take photos of clouds below the line of mountains. The scene could have been a poster. The Yunnan professors told us that, with the elimination of much of the area's rain forest, the low-lying mist that we found so beautiful was disappearing, and the sun's drying effects are becoming more intense. As the fog cover diminishes, drought-sensitive plants will disappear, and the habitat will become increasingly arid.

Wednesday, January 18.

This was our final day in Kunming. Last night David gave a banquet in the Yunnan University guest house to thank our Chinese hosts. We broke out all the little presents we brought from Oberlin and the Mao Tai liquor that David bought in China as a special gift for our hosts. The centerpiece of the spectacular food was sesame noodles as I have never had them in the States: they had more hot spice and pieces of meat. Joining us were Jonathan Lassen '94, a teacher in Kunming (and son of Oberlin's Protestant chaplain Manfred Lassen), and three 1993 Oberlin graduates: Tanya Lee and Heather McGray, Shansi reps in Kunming, and Suzanne Lamb, a teacher in the northern Chinese city of Taigu. That all four could speak Chinese seemed to relax our hosts.

Professor Xiao and Mr. Wan rode the bus with us to the airport today. We said good-bye to Professor Hu on the Yunnan University campus. I think he had tears in his eyes. Putting his fingers together, he said, "We should maintain contact."

Linda Grashoff is alumni editor of Oberlin Alumni Magazine

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