Learning to Read Mandarin in Dali

After visiting Dali in 2014, I'm back for the summer, on a quest to learn 600 Mandarin characters in 6 weeks! Join me in the beautiful struggle

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大理再见 Goodbye to Dali

On my last night in town, before the awful prospect of a 35 hour trip back to the States, I threw a party with all my favorite people from Dali. It’s a big deal to be the host of a party, and I think I must have made some solid friends, because I messed up a LOT. Things that wouldn’t be a big deal in an American get together were a very big deal indeed. A brief list of my transgressions as narrated to me by my most straightforward friend Xu Jie:

I didn’t have enough chairs

I asked people to eat too early, before every dish was out

I didn’t rotate the dishes three times around the table on the Lazy Susan

I didn’t introduce everyone in a circle

I toasted too few people at the beginning

I then toasted too many people at once

And yet. And yet. It was a perfect sendoff. Lots of hugs, some presents, some fruit, some tears. I must have done okay, making friends at least.

Thinking back on my goals, spoken Mandarin definitely improved, unfortunately much faster than my written Mandarin. I did connect with some wonderful schools and teachers, so assuming I’m not too hamstrung by my still subpar written Mandarin, I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of program we can develop back in Colorado. Never did learn to cook Yunnan food, although I stuck with the drawing (you should see some of my early attempts...yikes.). Some highlights from my trip home.

Getting pulled off the bus at the Myanmar border, held for a half hour, and interrogated by a cigar chomping Chinese sergeant about my possible drug connections.

Taking a 7 hour overnight “hard’ seat” train to the airport in Kunming because the sleeper seats were sold out. No sleep was had

Being so tired when I got to Kunming that I accidentally locked myself in a secure bank ATM room when trying to withdraw money. Somebody had held the door open for me when I went in, but the door wouldn’t slide back open when I pressed the exit button. I tried not to panic. The room was small, so I’d left all my stuff on the other side of the glass 3 feet away, in the busy train station when anyone could walk off with it. I pressed the emergency button, and tried to convince the sleepy voice that I was urgently locked inside. Felt claustrophobic. Tried sliding the door again. Nothing. It had been 10 long minutes. Pressed the button again. Nothing. Banged my fists on the door in desperation. That was when I realized that it was a push/pull door, and it swung open.   

Having my flight in Vancouver delayed an hour after we landed when an elderly Indian women discovered her passport was gone after she went to the bathroom, and either she had flushed it down the toilet by mistake or it had been stolen. China Eastern airlines didn’t want the liability, so we waited for local police to come and thoroughly search the plane. Hope it turned up.

And then, eventually, I got home. English language, Mexican food, sunny Aurora. Still processing. It’s been quite a summer. 

[dalixiatian]

大理生活 Life in Dali

Although I did take a couple of trips, most of my time in Dali fell into comfortable ritual and routine. After the first two weeks of sunshine it rained every day, so outdoor adventures were few and far between. The town is a wild blend of locals, foreign travelers, Chinese travelers (the majority), and young Chinese artists and musicians who move here from the coastal cities for what’s called every my young Chinese the “Dalifornia life.” I tried to find my place in all this with routine. Same lessons, same paths, same restaurants, noodle shops, same people, same tea. I think that routine is where traveling somewhere becomes living somewhere, and it’s a process I’ve really come to value. 

I saw all 3 of the people in these drawings day after day, chatted with them, with their families. Part of it is that I like to talk to people. Part of it is that after 3 hours of Chinese lessons my brain was fried and drawing was soothing. Part of it was hating the feeling of being a tall white Westerner who wanted to take a picture of “local culture!”, although I’m way more interested in images of people than things, and would still like to remember. This was my solution, for better or worse. After a few weeks, I asked if I could sketch Lao Yi, Xin Deng and Jiang Yang, and then I made a copy of the drawing and gave it to them. Here are some of their stories:

The Oil Press: Lao Yi (Old Yi) and his wife run a shop with the green machine, which presses rapeseed flowers brought by local women into rapeseed oil to be used in local restaurants. The machines cost about $4,000, they had two of them, and the 1.5 gallon bottles of oil were sold for about $10. At the end of my time in Dali business dried up for Lao Yi, although I could never totally understand his explanation (he had a thick local Yunnan accent)). It wasn’t a lack of supply, and I wondered if prices were dropping, or if there was a new alternative. Why wouldn’t he just bank the oil for when he could sell? Like many other things in Dali, I felt like even as my language skills improved, my grasp of the local economy and local politics was out of reach. The pressed rapeseed was sold to recycle into plastic, so at least there was some bare income. 

The Snack Cart: Xin Ding ran this cart and another like it next to the Three Pagodas, a popular tourist attraction outside of Dali. It was also right next to my language school, so I usually chatted with her and her cute 8 year old son, who was out for the summer. Unfortunately for our relationship, her wallet and my stomach, the snack food sold there -cold noodles and deep fried everything- was always a little much for me, These kind of carts operate in a legal gray area in China, without proper licenses, but Xin Ding seemed totally non-plussed. “The police are some of my best customers,” she told me.

The Noodle Shop: This shop was on the way to my school, and across from my favorite breakfast cart, so I’d usually stop and chat with the young owner and his wife. They’d eventually become some of my best friends in Dali. Jiang Yang has served a few years in the army, and used his severance pay to buy this noodle shop. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of US presidents and their involvement in China, and I always enjoyed talking recent and ancient history with him. Sometimes in the morning we’d take his scooter over to the local market and talk me through the ingredients he was buying for the day. On most days, he cleared about 300 RMB ($60), on a good day maybe 500 RMB ($80). When I met him, he told me he and his wife were actually selling the noodle shop. “I can’t see myself running a noodle shop for the rest of my life” he told me with a shrug, and this more than any else represents the generational gap in thinking with young Chinese folks. I gave Jiang Yang and Jiang Xiao this picture on the last week their shop was open, so they could remember. With the earnings from the shop they bought a motorcycle, which they’ll ride to Tibet next month, and then back to their hometown of Chongqing. Proving to me that I have yet to understands even my Chinese friends, when I asked Jiang Yang what kind of business he’d try to start in Chongqing, he said, “Maybe a noodle shop.”

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腾冲 Tengchong

This little town is a few hours south of Dali, right up against the border with Myanmar. I was talked into going on a Chinese style tour with two Chinese friends in Dali. I was alternately excited and dreading the trip for a week. (The rigidly structured photo and purchase oriented trips are hugely popular with older Chinese folks, and pretty close to the opposite way I usually travel). The experience started off with a pudgy travel agent telling me that since I was a foreigner, the price would be 30% more. When I assured him that I spoke Chinese and wouldn’t need a translator, he assured me back that people from Taiwan and HongKong were also viewed as foreigners and charged the higher rate. Great.

But mercy of mercies, my friends used the same travel agency for another tour a few days before, and had such an awful experience I received the following text message; “Ten million times over, do NOT transfer ANY fee to fatty travel agent. We will go ourselves!”

So we did! It was infinitely better, I imagine, and even so, traveling with a young Chinese couple was an experience. My friends hadn’t been married for very long, and in Chinese culture the leader of whatever activity usually makes ALL the decisions, from food to housing to transportation. The strain was showing for Jiang Yang, neither he nor his wife have had the opportunity to travel much in the past few years, running a noodle shop every day. A few times they got into the sort of performative argument you see all the time on Chinese TV. In their raspy Sichuanese dialect (they both moved to Dali from Chongching) the argument sounded more or less like two warlocks trying to curse each other in ancient Sanskrit. Not pretty. But that was the only not pretty thing, and when I finally said something (something like “I’m about to get on the next bus home”) we both apologized to each other and things took a really wonderful turn Like many new cultural experiences in China, I’m still not sure if I did the right thing, trying to help my friend save “face” but still laying down my limits. Looking bad, I think that was the moment, though, I felt like I’d really made a long term friend. Real friends you can get angry at. 

Two notable experiences from the trip. The first was the video above, from a restaurant serving food from the JingPo minority group in Yunnan and Tibet. Everything’s wrapped in leaves, you eat with your hands (although in a nod to modernity, we used chopsticks) to transfer to our hands, and the dishes used a whole lot less oil than I was used to! I’m explaining here what the food is, where we are, what we’re doing. The rain outside was pouring down, and afterwards we played mahjong, at one of those neat Star Wars tables that automatically sorts the tiles. I’d asked my Chinese teacher to teach me the week before, so I was feeling pretty confident. Wrong. Mahjong is one of the hallmarks of Chinese culture, and as my friend kindly explained, “We play from when we are small. That is why you are so very slow and you make so many mistakes.” I stil couldn’t think of a better afternoon.

In Tengchong, with the rainy season still in full effect, we went to some of the local hot springs. All the springs around here have been built into resorts that weren’t here 20 years ago. One of the attendants told me when she was little they would just come here and swim. Now the entry ticket price starts at around $30 USD.  Locals get a discount, but it’s still steep. I wonder what sustainable development would looklike with the local Tengchong community? Like in so many places in China, the ones opening the resorts and hostels and cafes are often from out of town. That’s true for all 3 of my best Chinese friends here. Only one friend I’ve made is a local Dali resident, and she’s thinking of moving. After all that reflection of development....the springs were still amazing. The hottest pool went to 43 degrees Celcius (109 Fahrenheit), although the old local lady I talked to scoffed that 43 degrees was bathwater, and she could go up to 60 degrees celsius (140 Fahrenheit). Fierce lady, “lihai!” 厉害，we’d say with admiration.

[dalixiatian]

成都 Chengdu

After my lessons in Dali ended, I flew to Chengdu to meet with a promising school partnership. The meeting went well, and I hope we can continue to work together in the coming years! I was also excited to visit my old home. I did NOT miss the summer heat. Stepping off the plane felt like one of those game shows where you get slimed, if the slime was over 100 degrees and humid. Even the torrential monsoon rains every night only helped a little bit.

I got to visit a couple friends from my old ultimate frisbee team in Chengdu, who started a bamboo bike making business, Simple Bike. They make each bike one at a time, using cured bamboo, carbon and natural fibers, and a whole lotta attention to detail. If you want an amazing road or mountain bike no one else in the country has, they’ll ship to the US! 

I made a couple of my favorite sketches here. I also got to use my stone seal 青田石, with my English name as well as my Chinese name An BoXing 安博行, in traditional zhuanshu seal script 篆书. The bamboo chair is from People’s Park in the center of Chengdu. One of my favorite places, still a community gathering space to sing, dance, drink tea, play cards. T

The qingtongqi mask 青铜器 is from the SanXingDui museum outside of Chengdu. The archeological treasures have been coming out of here since a farmer accidentally uncovered an ancient city wall in the 1920′s. The collected artifacts singlehandedly proved a disputed theory about the ancient Shu Kingdom in Bronze Age China. No one was even sure they existed, but this style is unlike anything else seen in other Chinese civilizations. In fact, the style reminds me a lot of Pacific Northwest Native American art. My Chinese friend says it’s probably Martians. 

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成都跳舞比赛 Chengdu Dance Battle

One of my friends from my time in Chengdu runs a couple popular dance studios with his wife. When I was visiting they happened to be opening up a new studio, and invited me along. After the official ribbon cutting, the dancers stayed around for a cipher n dance battle. This is THE hip-hop dance community in Chengdu, and it’s wild how the hip-hop culture really crosses race and class lines all the way here in Chengdu. I was talking with an MC from Xinjiang Province, part of the Uighur minority group, who identified so, so strongly with the b-boy culture that pushed back against oppressive official policies. Harlem in the 1970′s and 80′s, Xinjiang Province with the Han authorities today. A dance battle judge from Japan broke in with his read on “whaddup G” meaning G-d instead of gangster, recognizing the God in the other, and my buddy -a rapper from Atlanta- rounded out the conversation thinking about how the b-boy instructor with a gash from a bar fight and the little girl studying hip-hop dance in his studio could share the same language. Not so many cultures have sprung up overnight, with a shared spoken, visual, and movement language. One more American movement gone global, and this one deservedly so.

[dalixiatian]

韩语上课 Chinese Lessons

Monday- Friday, 3 hours a day, I was here with Lu Wenfei, my inhumanly patient Chinese teacher. Right now we’re talking about all the fruit at the local market, what’s local and what might be imported from Thailand or Hainnan Island. Having classes this often really helped me step up my vocab, and ask all the grammar questions I hadn’t been able to ask friends. It was continuous speaking and listening in Mandarin for 3 hours, which at the beginning seemed like a tall order faor someone who hadn’t spoken much in a couple years. My teacher’s neutral northern accent made things much easier, and the last couple weeks were more about complicated vocab and culture. 

Lu Wenfei also taught me how to play mahjong and arguably the most popular card game in China -Fight the Landlord, 斗地主- both of which led to some great encounters with middle aged and old Chinese folks. I was careful to bow out after a round or two. Fight the Landlord is notorious for being a big ticket betting game, and when I told some Chinese friends I’d just heard a guy won $10,000 USD last week (not in a casino, mind you, but on the street), they shrugged and said that sounded about right.

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Nuodeng 诺澄

This might have been my favorite town of all, went on the recommendation of a Chinese friend who knew the area. It’s about a 3 hour drive from Dali to the nextdoor town of Yunlong, and then a 15-20 minute taxi ride up the hill. Nuodeng is tiny, maybe 1,000 people, the taxi driver said. The town’s claim to fame is an old salt well that’s been in constant operation for more than 1,000 years. Turing the Ming, Qing, and Song dynasties, a salt tax was collected for all salt sold (making the few merchant families quite well off), and then the salt headed up and out of town, on the Old Tea and Horse Road (茶马古道) headed on to north Yunnan and Tibet. It’s not the famous silk road, but if you’re interested in learning more there’s a great brief explanation on this blog. 

Nuodeng is also famous for it’s cured ham, which was recently featured in a famous Chinese food documentary show. Inevitably, when I asked local people in Dali if they’d been to Nuodeng they said they’d never heard of it, and then when I asked them if they’d eaten Nuodeng Huotui (Cured ham), they’d say “ohhhhhhhh”.

Mostly, I liked that it was ancient, and still, and built on hills so steep that not even a bicycle was used. all vehicles were parked on in a courtyard down the valley, and everyone walked. I met some new travel companions on the bus, a local farmer in Dali taking a vacation (my husband’s just home playing cards!) and a Chinese student from Kunming who’d just finished her masters in finance. It rained everyday, as is the case during the rainy season. We talked, ate the Nuodeng ham with everything, and I hiked up the hill to an incredible old 3 story pagoda, where I made this sketch.  

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喜洲 Xizhou, Yunnan Province

Xizhou is about 20 minutes north of Dali, on the banks of Erhai Lake. It’s notable for a couple reasons, mainly because it’s a center of the 白族 Baizu Minority group in Yunnan Province. They have their own language, holidays (I missed the big one by a day, a massive fire themed night party), and food. Dali tourism materials show a happy young cartoon girl and boy in traditional Bai clothing (both characters much lighter skinned than any Baizu people I’ve ever seen in real life). In a country where 99% of the citizens are of Han Chinese descent, nice to have some diversity in the mix. 

My friend took me to a silkworm artist workshop, where pods are spun out into silk, dyed, and then used to make incredibly lifelike tapestries that take from six months to more than a year to complete, and cost  $2,000-$30,000. I did not purchase one. 

[dalixiatian]

大理, 风花雪雨 Dali, Land of Wind, Flowers, Snow, and Moon

Dali’s a small (actually small, not just by Chinese standards) city in Yunnan Province, southwestern China, right up against the border with Myanmar. I first came to this city 4 years ago after living up north in Sichuan Province, and I told myself if/when I got a chance to come back to China, this would be the place. It’s beautiful, even with the breakneck speed of tourist development. It’s so beautiful, in fact, that there’s an old Chinese idiom meaning romantic language (above) that started right here in Dali! In the picture, you can see the 苍山 Cangshan Mountains one one side of Dali, and 洱海 Erhai Lake on the other side. Last year the Chinese president -Xi Jing Pin- visited Dali, and declared the lake was too dirty, and the tourist development too fast. As a result of this one day observation, the district closed at least 1,400 guesthouses with subpar plumbing systems, and are basically digging up the entire city this summer to put in all new water lines, septic tanks, waste management systems, etc. Unthinkable speed of public works project in the States.

Anyway, I’m extremely to be here this summer with a few goals:

Professional:

Improve my written and spoken level of Mandarin

Develop possible sister school partnerships with the high school I teach at back in Aurora, CO

Personal:

Learn to cook Yunnan/Sichuanese food

Make some solid local friends

Finally start sketching or watercolor drawing

TIme will tell. The process of getting a visa was predictably convoluted -at one point the main issue was that the hair in my passport photo was too tall-. As with many bureaucratic boondoggles, though, thinking “this too shall pass” keeps me sane, and one week after I planned, I landed in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. I was worried that my spoken Mandarin would have faded a lot in the past 4 years, but I sat next to someone from Shanghai on the plane, and having a little light chitchat made me feel loads better. 

I’ll need to figure out how to structure my time. 3 hours of classes a day, plus a few more for character self study. I’ll be staying in 2 different hostels. I’m a little nervous about being about English speaking travellers while I’m trying to speak Chinese, but hopefully most of the guests will also be young Chinese folk. We’ll see.