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wordschapter fifteenjinzhou redux
I spent 2 of my first three years (1998, 2000) in China in Jinzhou.
in this chapterfrom east to westI spent 2 of my first three years in China in Jinzhou. Jinzhou is in Liaoning Province, an area of China known as Dongbei (the North East). I wrote about it in the first six chapters of Chuck@China. I made lots of friends in Jinzhou. LOTS OF FRIENDS! North East Chinese people are the warmest, friendliest, most wonderful people in all of China. In fact, here's a song about how warm and hospitable Dongbei people are; Dongbeiren Duo Shi Huo Lei Feng. If you don't know who Lei Feng is, never mind. Then, in 2001, I left Dongbei to take up a position at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Hangzhou has its own benefits: it's one beautiful, clean, interesting city. I'm still here. But I really miss the people of Dongbei. There is an ancient Chinese proverb, as mentioned in chapter 13:
After having lived in Jinzhou, and Suzhou and Hangzhou, I took the liberty of amending the proverb slightly:
5 friendsIn my time in Jinzhou, I made many good friends. But none were better friends than Mike and Anna. I have written about them before on this website here, here, and here. And Mike's best friend is Peng Cheng. The three of us spent a lot of time together when I was in Jinzhou. During my last year in Jinzhou, Peng Cheng met a beautiful girl, Yang Qian. The five of us hung out together a lot in 2000 and 2001.
a wedding, at lastIn early 2004, I received a call from Peng Cheng asking me to come back to Jinzhou and participate in (finally!) the wedding of Peng Cheng and Yang Qian. I couldn't refuse. They had scheduled it for the May 1st holiday in China. Moreover, it had been 3 years since I had left Jinzhou to settle in Hangzhou. It was a no-brainer, I immediately accepted and began to prepare for my return to my "Chinese Home". Since the year 2000, China has adopted a national policy whereby the May 1st (Labor Day) and October 1st (National Day) holidays are a week long. They did this to encourage people to travel and spend the money they have been stashing under their beds. As a result, those two week-long holidays are a massive pain-in-the-ass for traveling. The Chinese like to travel in groups...no, make that mobs and so the tourist sites, the buses, and the train system is mobbed...no make that overrun by traveling hordes of Chinese tourists. The train ride from Hangzhou to Jinzhou, on the fastest train, would be about 18 hours of hell. I decided I'd fly. Luckily, one of the students in my adult class at Zhejiang University was a travel agent so I asked him to help me book a round trip flight. Jinzhou has a tiny airport so there were no direct flights from Hangzhou's beautiful new airport to Jinzhou. That meant I'd have to fly from Shanghai's Pudong Airport. No skin off my back...any excuse to visit Shanghai (2 hours north east of Hangzhou) I'll take. The problem was that Shanghai airlines only flies the Jinzhou route twice a week (not much call for JZ to SH). So that set the parameters of my trip. So I booked a roundtrip ticket - Pudong-Jinzhou. PVG-JZHIt was a mid-morning flight so I decided to head to Shanghai the day before. The Pudong Airport in Shanghai (PVG) is WAY out of town and can take - depending on traffic - 2 hours to get to from downtown Shanghai. I booked a room on Nanjing Dong Lu (E. Nanjing St.) near the Bund. One of my old Jinzhou students, named Weekend, was now teaching in Shanghai and she had called and offered to take me out to dinner. Her treat. (That's how Dongbei people are). Her choice? The Pizza Hut near my hotel. Gagghhh. Pizza Hut in China is no better than Pizza Hut in the U.S. It's just more shiny and happy and the Chinese like to think they are eating stuff American's like to eat. Whatever, it was good to see an old Jinzhou student down here in the southern part of China.
Now, I had purposely booked my room on Nanjing Dong Lu because I had plotted a plan to try a new way to get to Pudong Airport. But I wasn't sure how long it would take and if it was any quicker than the usual way (local buses and/or taxis hoping to miss the traffic jams). The plan involved taking the Shanghai Subway out and then transferring at the last subway stop to the new MagLev train that runs to the Pudong Airport. On the map it looks easy, but this is China, so who knows. Well, it was a breeze. From the moment I left my hotel room, locked the door, checked out, walked 100 meters to the subway stop, got on the subway, took it the 5 or 6 stations to the end, exited the subway, crossed the street to the MagLev station, bought a ticket, got on the MagLev, rode the 7 minute ride (it's a 35 minute bus ride from the exact same subway station) into the Pudong Airport, took exactly....lemme see....a little under one hour. And that includes the checkout, walking to the subway and catching a coffee on the way there. shangai pudong maglevThe Shanghai MagLev is the coolest deal. It's the world's first operational magnetic-levitation train. It is was designed and built with German technology. It flies (almost). We hit a top speed of 450 KPH (260 MPH) and it was smooth as silk. All in 7 minutes. In fact I videoed the whole trip. Wanna see it? I was an hour and a half early for the flight, so I chilled in one of the coffee lounges at Pudong. Then I jumped on the flight to Jinzhou. The plane was small, a fifty seater and it was only half-filled. Not many people going to Jinzhou for the May Day holiday. My seatmate was an attractive woman who couldn't speak any English, but she wanted to chat with me, so I worked on my Chinese. Turns out she's a Jinzhou native working for a fashion company in Shanghai and she was going back to visit her family. As we flew from the lush, warm, and green southeast to the dry, cool, parched northeast, the landscape changed dramatically. Endless shades of green were replaced by yellows and browns in the fields and mountains we flew over. And as we approached Jinzhou, the sparseness of the treeless mountains and the yellow of the fertile, but waterless loess soil stretched out below our wings. I was back home again in old Jinzhou. When we landed, the woman and I exchanged cell phone pictures on the tarmac. (You take my picture with your cellphone and I'll take yours with mine. It's an Asian thing.) Here's hers (my cellphone takes shitty pictures): back in jinzhou cityWhen we walked out of the airport, Mike and Xu Bo (another old friend) were right there waiting. I was back in Jinzhou. We piled into a car Mike had arranged and they offered the woman I had met on the plane a lift into town. Which she gladly accepted. Yes, I was back in Dongbei - home of the warmest-hearted people in all of China. First, we dropped the woman where she was going. Then they took me to my hotel. Pre-booked by my Jinzhou friends and pre-paid for. When they found out I was coming back to Jinzhou, one of Mike's friends, who remembered me well, had recently bought a hotel and he graciously told Mike and Peng Cheng that I could stay there free-of-charge while I was in Jinzhou. Again, the warmth of the hearts in Dongbei have no equal in China. First, over to Peng Cheng and Yang Qian's new riverside apartment. For Jinzhou, it was plush. My two old friends would be livin' large. Then off to a real Dongbei dinner. In Hangzhou, the dishes are a bit above tiny - in Jinzhou, each dish is huge. And 10 dishes were ordered. The amazing thing is that they had remembered all of my favorite dishes: jiang jiao gan dou fu, guo bao lou, ba si di gua, di san xia, da di hui chun, and liang fen. Man, I was in heaven again! Heaven ain't in Hangzhou - it's in a Dongbei restaurant in the company of Dongbeiren eating wonderful Dongbei food from large plates and talking about normal stuff. No pretension. No discussion of money or cost or economics. (The first topic of conversation in any conversation in southeast China is "How much money...? " and "Who's paying". ) We just talked from our hearts. That's the Dongbei way. the prodigal son's dinnerThe next day I had insisted on hosting a dinner for my best friends in Jinzhou. Jinzhou's American Prodigal Son had returned. The wedding was still a day away. I knew the Jinzhou customs whereby I should not be allowed to pay for anything. But my friend's had already arranged everything already - free hotel room, dinners, lunch, etc. This is the Dongbei way. So I arranged my own dinner for my closest friends. With no help from my friends. I have become a Dongbei Ren. I went to the restaurant ahead of time and paid the tab. Then I called my closest Jinzhou friends to tell them where we would meet. It was almost a repeat of my last supper in Jinzhou when I left in 2001. But a different restaurant, since the Roast Duck restaurant was now closed. Peng Cheng and his wife were prepping for the wedding, so I gave them a pass. A couple of other friends were out traveling for the holiday. But I was thrilled that most of the folks who had come to my "last supper" in 2001 came to the "prodigal son" supper in 2004.
Chen He was a bit upset when he went out early to try to pay the and was advised that I had taken care of it long before any of them had arrived. (This is off the radar for the southern Chinese where I live now.) As the dinner broke up, From there, everything becomes a blur. jinzhou power plant crew reduxThe day after the wedding started with an invitation
from my great old friends from the Jinzhou Power Plant. I'm saving the wedding for last. Meanwhile, read on: When I was living in Jinzhou in 1998, I did business English training for the engineers and staff there. The power plant is owned by a Hong Kong conglomerate and have a (for Jinzhou) progressive management style. They had an in-house English training department which tapped me to do some "foreign teacher" lessons. The staff was smart, friendly, energetic (to the max!) and warm. We quickly surpassed the students-teacher relationship and moved to a friends-friend level. At the prodigal son's dinner, Vivien and Theresa had attended and Vivian asked me (told me) that she and her new husband had arranged a lunch-time party for me the next day. Many of the old Power Plant gang would be there. (Had I said no, I'm certain they still would have had the party.) I couldn't say no. Indeed, I wanted to see them again. Interlude: I've written about this crew before in
these pages. For background, go
here. So I arrived at Vivian and her husband's new apartment (albeit a little late). Vivian and her husband had prepared a feast in their beautiful new apartment. But the food was secondary - I was shocked to see so many of my old power plant "students" from more than 4 years ago. And, they told me, that 4 or 5 more would have been there as well, but were now abroad (in Bangla Desh) or out of town (in Tangshan) running other power plants owned by the conglomerate. Four years gone by and we still connected. It was truly a touching moment. Go here for a brief video of the occasionNear the end of our celebratory meal, my phone rang. One of my oldest (literally and figuratively) friends in Jinzhou was calling. It was Chen He. I had known him almost from the time I had set foot in Jinzhou. He had been at the "Prodigal Son" dinner with the whole group but he wanted one-on-one time with me. Would I meet him at the teahouse he was at? I couldn't refuse. "Sure", I said, "give me 45 minutes". At the table, we did our last ganbei's, moved to the living room to take some pictures, and said our goodbyes, not knowing if and when we would ever get together again.
Everyone walked me out to the street (another Dongbei trait) and I hopped in a taxi. Goodbye, JPP friends. Wo ai nimen. The taxi arrived at the tea house a few minutes later, and Chen He and I spent the rest of the afternoon drinking coffee and tea with him and, as the Little Prince might say, discussing matters of "great consequence". And that's all I am going to say about that. Now, I have skipped a day here. And it was the most important day of my trip back to Jinzhou. It was the day of Peng Cheng and Yang Qian's wedding. But if you want to read about it, you must go to the next chapter: |
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