Undercover Laowai: Ji'An

I've done a bunch of traveling without posting lately, so the time has come for updating.

There are multiple places that I am going on this trip that I am not sure if foreigners have ever visited before. For these undiscovered locales, I will go incognito to unearth their history, customs, and reasons for anyone else to visit. [WARNING: CUTE PHOTOS OF CHILDREN AFTER THE JUMP]


What We Know About Ji'An Before Going
Chinese Meaning: Ji'An (吉安) means "Lucky Peace" - doesn't sound very adventurous
Population (unweighted): 4.8 million people - this would rank between Atlanta and the Greater Boston area for 9th largest metropolitan area if it were in America
Population (weighted for China): 91st largest city area in China - the United States equivalent of Scranton, Pennsylvania (home of The Office!)
Location: 27ºN - similar to that of Tampa, Florida but further inland. Hot in the summer, not below freezing in the winter

My Findings:
A Lesson in Chinese Culture
By going to a smaller Chinese city, not as a tourist but with a family, I was exposed to many things that I had heard about but not actually seen before - including why it is still better to have a son than a daughter in traditional China.

Our first stop was the house of Susu's third eldest sister, who Susu and I refer to as Sanjie 三姐 (Susu is the youngest of four sisters). At first, I thought they just lived on the sixth floor of their apartment building. Wrong. Sanjie's husband's (who I call jiefu 姐夫, meaning older sister's husband) family owned the whole building. They lived on the sixth floor. Jiefu's younger brother, along with his wife and children, lived on the fifth floor. I never saw anything on the fourth floor. The third floor was the communal eating and play area. The second floor was for Jiefu's parents. Honestly, there was enough room for Susu's parents too - if they ever wanted to leave Taiwan to live there - but that just isn't how it works I guess.

Jiefu's younger brother had two cute kids. If you're not from China, I know what you're thinking, "isn't there a one child policy?" Well, with the advent of prenatal ultrasounds, easy access to abortions, and the traditional advantage to having boys, the number of boys born for ever 100 girls has risen from 111 in the 90s to 120 nowadays (http://on.msnbc.com/wY8Qpv). To offset this a bit, the Chinese government allows couples who have a girl to have a second child (or third or fourth or fifth, if all children are girls).

The first child in this family is Yo-Yo (the pinyin would be "you you", but that is a little misleading), a two-year-old girl who occasionally seems wise beyond her years before throwing a temper-tantrum. She knew a fair bit of Mandarin, quickly learned to high five and some of my white-boy dance moves, and used candy to barter for goods and services. I was so impressed until she would pee on the floor or something else to bring us all back to reality.

Yo-yo's younger brother, we simply called Didi (弟弟 meaning younger brother). Only four months old, he's what my former English teachers Mr. and Mrs. Plott called a little ball of id (Freud reference). No one has any idea what he's thinking - or even if he is capable of thought at that age - and our only objective is to keep him from crying. I'm pretty sure this isn't just Chinese culture, but universal.

In addition to these two, Sanjie has one on the way as she is two months pregnant. This had the women of the household, plus grandpa, Susu's second oldest sister (二姐 Erjie), and, of course, me on rotating babysitting duties. In this way, the Chinese system is pretty sweet. Here we had five women and two men juggling two children, and when Jiefu and his brother came home they took on some responsibility too. Their mother never had to take care of both children simultaneously alone during my stay. Even taking a kid just for a couple hours at a time wore me out more than working full-time. I took more naps in five days here than I took all semester at school.

Sidenote: I have no idea if these women work regularly when not pregnant or nursing small children. In America today, it is almost necessary for both parents in a household to work. Perhaps these women will go back and work after the kids have grown up a bit, or maybe rural(ish) China has the traditional family roles America had sixty or so years ago. Regardless, it was nice to see these children and their mother have such a good support group around them.

Big Family, Big Holiday, Big Food
With so many people in the house, we had huge meals thrice-a-day. The grandma of the kids, who I called Ayi (阿姨, meaning Aunt), did much of the cooking for breakfast and lunch - although one morning I made French Toast for the whole fam. Her Hong Shao Rou (红烧肉) was freaking amazing. HSR is basically pork, with lots of fat on it, with some great spices. In Shanghai, they add lots of sugar and it's very sweet. Down here in Ji'An though, it is much more savory. I'll see if I can steal a recipe and post it up here, although I'm fairly certain it would be impossible to replicate in America, you just can't get meat that fatty.

Every night we went out for huge dinner celebrations with different groups of friends and family. The largest dinner night came with Jiefu's government buddies, who work for the city of Ji'An, who treated me to dinner at a Peking Duck restaurant. It was the largest "Lazy Susan" I've ever sat around in China. Usually with more than ten people they break the group up into smaller tables, but here there may have been 30 of us sitting around a massive round table.

While my Chinese has improved significantly, the Jiangxi people speak with a thick accent and found that they could ask exceedingly difficult questions through my translator/cultural advisor Susu. Also, I find it is more difficult to speak Chinese after a few ganbeis (干杯, dry cup, "Cheers!") of baijiu, an extremely potent alcoholic disinfectant beverage. As is usually the case, the food was great... the Peking duck was the best I've had outside of Beijing (where the chef was from and trained). Here's a photo of the whole crew:

As you can see, I kind of tower over the people in this photo. In Shanghai, I don't feel exceptionally tall. There are many foreigners, plus the nutrition there is comparable to that of Western countries, so I think the average height in only an inch or two shorter than that of America. Ji'An however is different. It is much more difficult to go undercover when I am a head taller than every man. It was also amusing to see Susu, who might be 5'2", be an above average height woman down there. People always ask me if I feel like a giant in China, in Ji'An I finally did.

Hospitable Hosts
In spite of -- or due to, or with no correlation/causation whatsoever to -- their short stature, the Jiangxi people were very welcoming of me throughout my stay. Starting with Jiefu picking the two of us up at the train station and taking us out to breakfast, he started a running theme for the week. Refusing to take my money for anything.

His family took me into their house, prepared me food, took me out to dinner, and served me unlimited quantities of the finest Chinese red wine (surprisingly good) and baijiu (still rather terrible). The only way I could seem to pay them back was by losing in Mahjong... although I did win twice during the week (my first two wins over an extended playing time, um, ever).

I couldn't even sneakily pay for things. When I asked where I could go to get a good massage, he thought it would be a good idea to treat everyone to one at his favorite place. When we got there, I tried to sneak out and pay, but he had pre-paid.

Basically Jiefu is number one on my list of people to buy American things for to ship back to China at this point. Maybe a good beer mug or something would do the trick.

Tourist Spot
Furthermore, Jiefu treated Sanjie, Erjie, Yo-Yo, Susu, and me out to a day in an old town on the outskirts of Ji'An.

Neither Susu nor I had any idea what this place was all about when we arrived, so we had to pick up clues as we went along. Unfortunately, she can read traditional Chinese and listen to the speed-talking tour guide, so she was able to come to conclusions much faster than I.

Sanjie and Jiefu in front of a drum

Susu and I jumping, Yo-Yo trying

Erjie and I trying to coordinate a pose in different languages

Not a bad result

Big drums? Big bells? I've seen these before in Beijing. Maybe this used to be some sort of ancient southern capital.

I don't care how old this city is, no capital can have streets this thin

Alley width: two-and-a-half women's shoulder widths across

Don't know if I should have done this, but it amused Yo-Yo

Around this time, I learned that this was a small town of about 40 families, all with the surname Liang. How did they know who to marry? That must have been a real process. Simplifying it somewhat was that many of these boys became war heroes (more on this later) so they could find women from around China and convert them to Liang-ism.

I can't help posting pics of Yo-Yo, she's too darn cute

The building we're standing or squatting in front of is actually a church (which surprised the hell outta me... how did Christianity find this place?). The balcony above Yo-Yo's head in the first picture has an interesting story. When it was time for an unmarried woman to wed, but she had not yet found a lover, she would climb up to the balcony with a red ball. All eligible (see: unrelated) bachelors in town would stand below. She would toss the ball and the man who received it would get her hand in marriage. I hear the spontaneity can spice up a relationship, but this sounds extreme.

Yo-Yo thought that by giving me her ticket, I'd give her Susu's camera

Nice photo by Susu Zhang

Even on vacation, gotta stay in shape

So we're wandering through here and I'm kind of wondering what the big deal is. They have a few old buildings and streets, but where is the hook? I soon found out. There was one man who lived here briefly, who needed a town full of soldiers. His name was not Liang. I'll give you one guess who.

Mao! (Pictured above with Erjie and hair) Of course, I should have known.

Sidenote: Mao's name in Chinese literally means hair, fur, or feather (毛, mao2). I'm sure that's how he could sneak up on people. A man with a name so soft must be a benevolent leader, right?

This was the place where Mao launched his famous February 7th Revolution. I'm still not 100% what that was, but it sounds like he met with the most powerful other Chinese communists and they agreed to attack Ji'An against Chiang Kai-Shek's forces - Chinese fighting Chinese despite Japanese occupation. From reading The Dragon and The Foreign Devils, I learned that even though he was invited to a meeting with FDR, Stalin, and Churchill, Kai-Shek proved very unreliable and unorganized. He was getting help from America to fend off the Chinese while Stalin was giving Mao weapons to fight against him. Then Kai-Shek used American weapons to fight Mao. It was one of our first mini-wars against communism, but Kai-Shek only said he wanted democracy to get our weapons... he was kind of a power hog. So basically -- HEY LOOK, WEAPONS!!!

Lenin and Marx were at the February 7th Revolution in spirit

Mao in painting form

And that pretty much wrapped it up, after that we headed home.

Recap

The undercover part of this adventure ended pretty fast. At the train station, Susu told me, "hey, I just learned how to say 'Laowai' in Jiangxi-nese! Oh well. I got many stares and made people run into each other in a crowded alley. I'm kind of used to that by now and I soak it up. The surprise was that Susu's family soaked it up too. Had they been uncomfortable about the situation, it would have been pretty awkward. Instead, they were cracking jokes and smiling through it all - they're just great people.

A really pleasant trip all-around... because I knew great people here. For those of you who plan to come to China for more than a month, I would only recommending staying here overnight on the way to somewhere else and only if you know someone to stay with (you could always drop my name). But that being said, if you get that rare opportunity, you will be treated very well by all around.

Next up,

Hong Kong!

Stephen "Scuba" Lauer