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May 26, 2005 There's a canal on Beijing's south side, next to a street called Yongdingmen Dongjie, and every day dozens of vendors of produce form a farmers' market about half a mile long along the canal. When I had been living in Beijing about a month, one morning as I went walking by the farmers' market, I decided to sit down for a few minutes in a gazebo there. One of the half dozen Chinese in the gazebo greeted me. His name was Ma Hongguo, a man of 25 or so. He was studying English and wanted to know if I would help him. This was exactly what I was looking for, and I was glad to find someone who could help me with my Chinese. I visited him a few times around there mostly for mutual language lessons. Then one day he told me I could make some money by teaching English is his hometown, in classes he could organize there. I thought the idea of a brief visit to a Chinese village was great, but, not knowing at the time that I would be able to renew my six-month visa, I was reluctant to commit myself to spend the rest of my stay in a single village. Ma Hongguo said there was no problem, as his father-in-law had connections in the Communist party and could easily get me a two-year visa. Ma Hongguo also said I'd be able to stay rent-free in his house in his hometown. So I agreed to go. I visited Ma Hongguo and his wife two or three times in their Beijing house, on a road called Wanyuan Lu on the far south side of town. Getting off a bus there, I would have to walk half a mile through, first, a slum, and, then, a cornfield. There were perhaps 100 houses behind high pink brick walls along dirt roads, with brick outhouses across the way emitting a stench and marked with Chinese characters for 'men' and 'women'. Ma Hongguo's house was one of two in a walled enclosure, and consisted of two rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen in different buildings. The bedroom was 6 x 12, plastered gray and half-filled with a double bed. Ma Hongguo and his wife lived in the other half of the bedroom. It was there that Ma Hongguo, a sailor in the merchant machine on a one-year leave, and I discussed our plans to hold classes in his hometown, finally choosing a date to go. On the agreed-upon day, I took a bus from my hotel in Beijing's Haidian District to a circle known as Muxi Yuar, where I met Ma Hongguo. From Muxi Yuar, we proceeded to Beijing Nanzhan (South Station), within a mile of the gazebo where we'd first met. Buses also depart from Beijing Nanzhan, and buying tickets for 40 yuan ($5) apiece, he and I boarded a bus bound for Xiajin, a county in Shandong province. The bus looked ancient and rickety, but the driver said it was only 7 years old. Minutes later we were rolling southward on a four-lane divided highway. The highway itself was in good condition, almost like one in the US, but out the window you could see all the earmarks of China--spartan houses, jalopies, weather-beaten faces and scrawny shrubbery. Beijing is a municipality, something like the District of Columbia, and is politically separate from the province of Hebei, which surrounds it. So in a short while we had left the municipality of Beijing and entered Hebei. Next to Hebei on the south lies Shandong, our destination. This would be an all-day ride. Thirty minutes out of Beijing the divided highway ended, and we were down to two lanes, paved decently enough though, that continued all the way to Xiajin. All along the way we saw villages with tiny pink brick houses behind eight-foot pink brick walls, all without plaster or paint, except for Chinese writing--advertising and political slogans. There were no hovels, shacks or tents anywhere, but the villages were bleak and cheerless. Some featured stores and workshops. About midway between Beijing and Xiajin, we pulled into a quadrangle of adobe apartments, offices and stores with an inner courtyard. This was our rest stop. The toilets were absolutely horrid--privies with very shallow holes below, where you almost touch the piles of excrement within. As I was walking back towards the bus, I passed by a sty of half a dozen fat swine piled all over each other and covered with flies. A lone vendor in the courtyard offered cans of lukewarm soda and poor, cellophane-wrapped pastries, Long Johns without icing. Thirty gaunt, haggard men in faded, threadbare clothes were standing around. This was utterly depressing. Suddenly, though, a very shapely young Chinese lady in immaculate white shorts came out of one of the offices there, walked nonchalantly across the yard and disappeared into another office. Where on earth did she come from? After 10 minutes, we rolled again. Later the bus broke down. The twenty-five-year-old driver himself got down and worked on the engine. Fifteen minutes later he had it running, but his arms were black to the biceps with motor oil. He wiped them off very ineffectually with an old rag and started driving again, all as if this had been just a matter of course. Hebei and Shandong are rich, fertile farmland, with endless fields of wheat and corn networked by irrigation ditches and separated by long rows of poplars that serve as windbreakers. Huge piles of bundled hay dot the panorama. Cattle are numerous, but in East China, unlike West China, the fields are plowed mechanically, with tractors. I did see a donkey cart or two off to the side of the road. Passing through Dezhou, a city of 500,000, in the late afternoon, we made Xiajin about 7. Xiajin is a sad, dusty little place, where Ma Hongguo and I walked about a mile from the bus station to a shop maintained by his brother. Ma Hongguo said I'd have to spend a few days in a hotel, until he had arranged everything, which, of course, was no problem. I got a beautiful, spacious room in an elegant hotel in town for about US $11 a day. Xiajin (Summer Ferry) has the status of county. It's also a town, but I've never been able to find it on a map, even a large, detailed map in Chinese, and I don't know exactly why, since it is large enough. The town must have a separate name, but everyone just says Xiajin. Anyway, it's midway between Dezhou and Jinan, the capital of Shandong. My hotel was about a mile from downtown, where I had to go each day to get a newspaper. On the way, there was a small lake, covered with green algae, and numerous donkey carts were on the streets. One day I saw a naked three-year-old defecating in the gutter. The town featured perhaps 100 stores for cheap textiles, like oilcloth and calico, but no grocery stores. Across from the hotel, there was a marketplace, but there was little or no chicken or other meat, only endless piles of watermelons, cucumbers, wax gourds, yams and peaches. Preferring to go hungry to eating fruit and vegetables, I barely got enough to eat around there. Downtown stood a sizable department store, but with very poorly stocked shelves and showcases, and no electrical lighting. Many people in Xiajin had never seen a Caucasian, and once word got around that I had checked into the hotel, I had a constant succession of visitors dropping by. When they heard I was going to teach English there, they were unanimous in their approval, but the lessons were not meant to be, as things turned out. One evening Ma Hongguo invited me to have dinner at his parents' house, which was another spartan pink brick dwelling, but larger than Ma Hongguo's place in Beijing. His elderly parents' living room had a cobblestone floor and a lavatory. It was furnished with a rattan table, two rattan settees, a 12-inch television and a bookshelf with about 50 paperback books. Twin privies stood in the yard, against the 8-foot encircling wall in front, which formed a rampart with the walls of all the other houses on the block, opposite another rampart on the other side of the 10-foot-wide dirt lane from the nearby street. At night, this lane was so dark you couldn't see where you were going. Ma Hongguo had been expecting that the local school would let him use one of the classrooms for our classes, but they refused to do so. This was our first setback, but Ma Hongguo was able to find another tentative place a couple of days later. The next setback came one morning when Ma Hongguo informed me that, despite the fact that he had promised me free rent, I'd have to stay at a hotel all the while I was in Xiajin, but that he knew a hotel where I could get a room for $5 a day. The catch was that it had only a privy. I told him that I was very annoyed that he had failed to provide the free rent he had promised. So he came back in the afternoon to tell me that I could move into the rent-free place after all, but it turned out to be his parents' house that he was talking about. He didn't have a house in Xiajin; they did. He had prevailed on his father to let me stay in their house, but I didn't want to intrude on the elderly couple, who apparently had agreed only reluctantly. I told Ma Hongguo that I would accept the cheap hotel instead, provided only that he get me the two-year visa he had promised me. I said, "Don't do another thing until I have the visa in my hand." He was already putting up posters around town, advertising English lessons. The next morning I met Ma Hongguo and his father-in-law, the man who was supposed to have influential connections in the Communist party. I don't generally judge a person by appearance, but Ma Hongguo's father-in-law was as dark and wrinkled as a prune, stood about 4'-9" tall and weighed 85 pounds. It was very hard to picture him as one of the pillars of the community. Moreover, Ma Hongguo had told me that getting the visa would require bribing someone. I was really exasperated with this whole affair, but I agreed to provide a bribe of 500 yuan ($40). So Ma Hongguo and his diminutive bureaucrat of a father-in-law and I got on a bus back to the city of Dezhou, where after eating youtiao (deep-fried breadsticks) bought from a vendor on the street, we got on ancient black bicycles that we rented from a bike shop and cycled three or four miles to an apartment building, a large brick building very much like one you might see in the inner city in a place like New York or Chicago. In the building lived the father-in-law's Communist contact. We went up to his old-fashioned efficiency apartment, not a bad place at all, and met a more genuine looking political functionary, a typical Chinaman about 5'-8" tall, with smooth, light skin. He penned a letter of recommendation in cursive Chinese on a mere piece of paper he tore from a tablet, not the piece of letterhead I was expecting. I was thinking to myself that the man we should bribe is the man who stamps passports, not the man who recommends that a visa be granted. Anyway, Ma Hongguo and his father-in-law and I then cycled to a public park, where they told me to await them while they went to pay off the official, who apparently didn't want to receive the bribe in my presence. I met several Chinese youths in the park, most of whom had never met a Caucasian. Eventually, my two companions returned, having concluded the payoff, and the three of us cycled to Communist headquarters. This was a modern office building with typical Chinese office-workers, dressed in pleated slacks and polo shirts, walking around the halls inside. It looked for all the world like the State Employment Office in Honolulu, with its largely Oriental staff, except that, out in front, instead of a parking lot full of cars, there was a rack full of bicycles. Much to my surprise, the officials who received us there were highly impressed with the letter, and asking for the phone number, called the author of the letter to confirm that it was genuine. They deliberated for about an hour, but despite the letter of recommendation, they finally refused to grant me a visa without my having a genuine promise of employment. The next day, I was on a bus back to Beijing. I had spent about a week in Xiajin, and though the English classes proved to be a fiasco, I am glad to have had this little misadventure. I did obtain two more six-month visas, for a total of a year and a half, but I never did find a way to renew them within China proper. I made three visits to Hong Kong, which is the portal to the Middle Kingdom (the meaning of 'China'). Incidentally, I saw Ma Hongguo about a year later, in the shipyards in the port city of Dalian, where I had come on an outing with my landlady from Beijing and her boyfriend. Ma Hongguo's leave of absence had ended and he was back at work on the tall ships. My companions and I were getting ready to sail across the Bohai to Tianjin. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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