Painful home spa

Here I am back in Kunming for a few days before my last foray out into the field, Liangshan in Sichuan, to check out villages.  Before I left Kunming the last time, I moved in with a professor at Yunnan University named Peng Laoshi who wants to improve her English.  Her twin sons are both abroad in college, one in Thailand and one in Norfolk VA and I'm sleeping in their room.  It's a nice place, much nicer than my apt with the folks from IGERT, and I have a nice desk with a view, internet, and my own bathroom with heat lamps.  Pretty sweet.

Except for last night when Peng laoshi invited a few friends over to "drink tea," which is a much bigger deal than it sounds.  She's got a traditional tea setup, with the carved wooden table and tea-specific implements and tiny cups that are filled over and over again, each thimbleful a different expression of the fine aged black tea we are drinking.  She assures me it's like wine,and I guess if you have the nose for it, it could be true.  But I've had a cold the past few days and was coughing and sneezing a lot into my tea, which detracted from experience.  Well tea was just the beginning and it turned out that the friend who had come over with her 18 year old daughter was Penglaoshi's personal Chinese doctor, practiced in the arts of acupressure, acupuncture, cupping, and what I can only describe as scraping.  The scraping consists of lotioning up your skin and then well, scraping a blunt blade (in this case made of cow horn) across the skin over and over.  The skin gets red and then purple, and it's supposed to release toxins but it just looked painful.  Thankfully, I was not asked to participate.

I did get cupped.  The traditional way uses glass bells that are swabbed inside with alcohol, set aflame, and pressed into the skin.  As the fire consumes the oxygen in the bell it creates a vacuum that works like a glass suction cup on your skin.  A hickey machine, to this crass American.  The easier, "modernized" method uses a metal bell with a rubber gasket, and you create a vacuum by turning a built-in screw.  The ahem doctor was afraid to hurt me, but Peng Laoshi is pretty hardcore and kept saying to her, don't be scared!  So I ended up with two big round purple hickeys on either side of my neck.  Today it feels like a sunburn.

That would have been fine if I hadn't insisted on watching Peng Laoshi's back puff out under the glass bell and turn purple and splotchy.  It was really gross looking.  I have a notoriously delicate sensibility, actually, and suddenly I felt the old familiar feeling of the walls closing in.  I stood up quickly, because it would be just too embarrassing to keel over onto the tea table, and strode into the living room to pass out briefly on the floor.  Nobody saw, and I pulled myself onto the sofa and laid there, waiting for the room to stop spinning.  Soon enough Peng Laoshi emerged from the tea room to show off a series of purplish circles orbiting her spine.  

Resting? She asks me.

Yeah.  I'm not used to this.        

I should say, Peng Laoshi is pretty awesome and it's been fun living with her, even for just a few days.  We met because she is an expert on minority, particularly Yi, culture.  The Yi have a long history of living in the mountains and growing buckwheat, and when we met several weeks ago, she gave me a short primer on the history and customs of  the group.  At almost 5 million people and several "Yi autonomous prefectures" in Yunnan,  they far outnumber Tibetans and every other minority here, with but somehow their press is not as good.  Peng Laoshi is also very into everything traditional and Chinese, and loves to talk and share, which has been really interesting for me.  Sadly, I don't think I've helped her much with English.   

火把节 The Torch Festival in Hongqi Village

When John Z inadvertently bragged to me that his Yi friend had invited him to spend their most important, buckwheat-centric holiday, the Torch Festival, in his home village, I invited myself along.  This was several weeks ago and I put it on my calendar with a grain of salt, because these things don't always work out.  Well, this past Friday I set out from Lijiang to meet the guys at a village somewhere between Tiger-Leaping Gorge and Shangri-la.  Sounds pretty cool, right?

The bus dropped me off at a shopping center on the side of the road in the rain.  There were a couple guys on bicycles riding from Shangri-la to Dali who had stopped to have a smoke and get out of the wet.  No helmets or real bicycle gear besides those big ponchos that flow over the handlebars.  They set off eventually, and then the village head, who happens to own the roadside store, came out and invited me to sit by the fire and chat while I waited for my peeps.    When the guys arrived we walked down to Han Jingquan's village, about half an hour away through fields of buckwheat, potatoes, and surprisingly, oats.  Jingquan works for a hotel and met John in an interview about a training program he had been through.  He's a young, ambitious guy building his family a new house with his wages at the hotel.  The house is still under construction but John and I slept there on futons on the clean wooden floor.  

When we got to the village we had tea with the the family, with a snack of yogurt and oat flour zanba mixed with sugar.  We had time for a little walk up into the hills and then came home as Jingquan was killing a special chicken in our honor.  The torch festival is all about slaughtering animals and drinking, and so it began.  The next couple days were a blur of sitting by the fire, eating meat and buckwheat, smoking cigarettes, and drinking beer and liquor.  We went to a cousin's house and ate roasted corn with barley wine, and to an uncle's house and ate mutton and potatoes and drank Dali beer.  The highlight came when Jingquan's family killed their pig, first massaging it and saying goodbye, and then tying it up and slitting its throat in the house.  Before it was killed, Jingquan's father lifted it up and then placed it on a pile of pine needles, that were then set on fire outside the door, to make peace with the pig's spirit.  Then the whole family crouched in the doorway while the dad, carrying the squealing pig, walked circles around them, seven in each direction.  He brushed the pig's back over their heads and then laid it down on plank on the floor, and they held it down and killed it.  John and I sat there by the fire and watched.  Just wild. 

At five in the afternoon yesterday the torch-lighting began, and all the kids carry these bunches of burning bamboo and branches to their family's fields.  They plant a few burning twigs in the field to bless the harvest, and then throw the rest of the branches onto a big pile.  Then they play games in the field by the school.   Totally cute if you don't think about the whole "don't play with fire" thing.   

Our host seemed very proud to have brought us there, the first foreigners to ever stay in his village.  Most of the folks seemed to understand Mandarin but were too shy to speak it, for fear of saying the wrong thing.  Pretty weird I thought considering I sound like a slow kindergardener, but whatever.  We were surrounded by the Yi language which has a cool word for booze I think that goes "bbbbbbb" like when you blow bubbles underwater.   

Alpine meadow fun

On Sunday I hiked with an American and a Canadian, Alden and Dean, up from the Lodge to a ridge where we hoped to get a good view of the mountains.  When we woke up in the morning it was misting and cloudy, but we hoped for the best and set out with our day packs.  Dean in particular is a real maniac about photos, and wanted to get some good ones of the Himalayas to make the folks at home really jealous.  The trail took us through mossy oak forest, through an apparently abandoned camp with a few houses, and up into a blooming alpine meadow.  There were flowers everywhere, asters and orchids and lots of delicate and strange spongy things.  As we climbed further up the flora changed with the elevation, until at the top we saw these lumpy plants that looked like green coral.  Neat! We finally got to the ridge where we climbed along for a bit and peered over the edge, but felt a too chicken to go further, so we hung out a few minutes and then turned around.  We ended up climbing to an elevation of 13,500', which I'm sure is the highest I've ever hiked.  Amazingly, we weren't even cold.   It never did clear up all the way, but the clouds swirled in and out across the peaks,  offering a tantalizing and incomplete vista. 

Mingyong Glacier: Hanging with the foreign tourists

After working a couple days with Yanzong in Deqin area I declared myself on vacation, and took Saturday and Sunday off to go hiking and hang out with westerners at a trekkers lodge outside Deqin called Tashi's.  I sent Yanzong home to Shangrila Saturday morning and set out with a group of foreigners to Mingyong glacier, a day's walk away.  Our hike took us from Feilaisi at 10,300' down to the Mekong river valley at 6600', where we saw a couple villages full of vineyards.  Then we climbed again over a big hill and came down in the valley of the glacier (冰川 "ice river" in Chinese)。 It really did look like a massive, dirty, frozen river hanging in midair.  Totally wild.  The glacier wasn't exactly remote - you could drive to the foot of the mountain, pay your admission, and then ride ponies up the hill the rest of the way.  But by walking we got that sense of personal satisfaction and also skirted around the admission booth.  We bought ourselves warm cans of terrible beer from Mingyong village and caught a ride back to the lodge.

The group was two guys and three girls, two Americans, a Canadian, an Aussie, and a Moroccan.  

德钦 Deqin

Yanzong and I went out in the morning and stopped by Feilaisi, the site of a stupa and a viewing point for Mt. Khawa Karpo.  We had our cab driver drop us off at a succession of villages that climb up the mountain near Deqin, stretching from corn in the river valley up a couple thousand feet to high fields of yellow wheat.  The first village we came to, we met a family that was about to plant buckwheat into wheat stubble, so Yanzong and I invited ourselves along.  They had a walk-behind tractor with a plow, a 5kg bag of seed, and a small field just down the hill.  We watched them planting for a minute, a young man operating the tractor and the mother scattering the seed by hand, two small kids moving rocks out of the way of the plow.

We spent all day hiking down from Rezhinka (10,000') to Juxu (9,000') by the river and up again to a guest house at 10,500', talking to people on the way.  In Rezhinka almost every field is planted to buckwheat after the wheat crop comes out in July.  We saw lots of fields with a newly emergent buckwheat crop.  We met an old couple who invited us in, and gave us this disgusting cold sour bubbly milk drink to quench our thirst.   The man talked about running horse caravans down to Weixi to sell Tibetan salt forty years ago.   At that time he picked up a new drought-tolerant wheat variety that the government was promoting.  Now they have another new variety that tastes bad but matures faster, allows them to double crop.  On our way back up the hill we saw them again; he was making cheese.  

Buckwheat seems like an important part of the system here.  Even at low elevation where you can often plant corn after wheat, some people substitute buckwheat if the wheat harvest comes too late.  It was amazing to walk a few hours and see the farming systems go from tall corn seedlings planted after wheat, to newly harvested barley, wheat, and emergent buckwheat, and then even further up where the wheat is green in a single season field.       

We also talked to a few people who raise bees, sometimes selling upwards of 1000 RMB worth of honey per year.  The beehives are hollowed-out logs that people will stick in the woodpile or lean against the side of the house.  

Gushon Village

From Weixi I went north to Deqin, the capital of Deqin County in the far northwest corner of the prefecture. Yanzong agreed to go with me and we set out at 8 am on the six-hour bus ride. We got into town in the early afternoon and decided to walk up to the village in the hills above the city and spend the night with a family.  She thought we should buy some fruits and vegetables and bring them up the hill and give them to the villagers in return for letting us sleep there. Sounded strange to me but I went along - hey, she's from here.  

So we picked up some cabbages and apples and hot peppers, a watermelon; about 50RMB worth of fresh produce and trudged up the hill.  Deqin is a similar altitude to Shangrila, about 10,300' and the village, Gushon, was 1000' above that. After a heart-thumping, sweaty hike straight up the hill, we ended up at Yanzong's youngest brother's wife's mother's house.  Her mother-in-law.  A very friendly, portly, Tibetan lady, the mother-in-law fed us blender-churned butter tea from bowls with hard chunks of sour cheese at the bottom. She set out a dish of zanba, toasted barley flour that you spoon into your mouth and then wash down with tea before it cements your jaws together. Weird, but nice.  Biting into the cheese I almost broke a tooth; I decided to wait for it to soften in the tea.  Even after sitting in hot liquid for ten minutes it was still tough to chew.  

Mother-in-law's house was large, clean, and quite beautiful, especially in contrast to the smoke-filled homes we entered in Weixi.  There was a cast iron wood stove with a chimney.  The back wall was a huge cabinet with  dishes, buddha statues, a commemorative plate featuring Mao's face, candles, and fake flowers.  There was also a big cauldron filled with water in its own little nook, with shiny ladles of different sizes, used only for water.  And the teapot sat in an ornate ceramic warmer filled with glowing coals.

We asked about buckwheat but this village hadn't planted it in fifteen or twenty years, because the elevation is too high, Yanzong says at almost 4000 meters the highest elevation village in Yunnan. In this village they grow mainly wheat, barley, potatoes, and forage turnip. We walked around a little and talked with some other villagers, were invited in, ate grapes and soft cheese dipped in sugar, and asked about farming.  One elderly man explained that buckwheat made the cows sick, so they stopped growing it.

So not such a great research site for ol' Fagopyrum, but it was cool to stay with the family.  The mother-in-law was really sweet, and  also in the house are her son and grandson.  The child's mother runs a shop down in the town and doesn't come home every night.  After a great dinner featuring wild mushrooms, Tibetan ham and barley wine, the grandson entertained us with his drawings of farm animals.  This mostly consisted of the boy asking what he should draw for us, and someone saying "pig" or "sheep" and him going  to his little table and laboring over the drawing for some minutes.  The he would show off the picture and everyone, especially his grandmother, would tease him about how skinny the cow was, and where are the udders?  He would squeal and laugh, and then rush back and draw another one.  

维西 Weixi, Lisu autonomous county

I said goodbye to Yanzong yesterday morning and rode a van down to Weixi alone.  She got a ride back to Shangrila with her younger brother,  who is directing the Yunnan Golden Monkey National Park project in Tacheng.   He's a very nice guy and an amateur photographer, so he showed us his photos of birds, flowers, and the mysterious YGM on his laptop.   We've been meeting up with him in the evenings, Yanzong chattering away in Tibetan and him obliging me with Chinese.  He's staying at the nice hotel down the street from ours, with a dozen other management staff, and will be living in Tacheng off and on for four more months.   

Arriving in Weixi I checked into a guest house downtown, only 30 RMB a night and wireless internet - not bad, I'm thinking.  I took a walk around the town to get my bearings and climbed to the top of a hill overlooking the town.   Weixi seems like a pretty average Chinese city, pop ~150,000, dirty and loud and reeking and busy and unhurried at the same time.  I guess I'm a little spoiled after Shangrila, but this place seems unremarkable and unfriendly by comparison.  Also, it's kinda boring traveling alone, especially when you can't speak or understand the language. Sigh.  

Anyhow, today I walked up to a few villages just outside town, to see what's the real deal on Buckwheat.  Everyone said the next village up probably grew it, until I got to the top and they still didn't.  Seems like there's a wild relative that people don't recognize as buckwheat, that is an agricultural weed cut green for fodder.  Also amaranth is planted for pig feed (hence the common name pigweed I'm just realizing), and people occasionally eat the greens and grains too. 

The agricultural  diversity I saw today was frankly quite amazing.  In one day, almost totally on foot, I saw four field crops I didn't recognize, which besides for mulberry and the Chinese medicine in Baoshan, hadn't yet happened to me yet in China.  In one village, Yutang （鱼塘）, people planted fields of rice, soybeans, corn, sunflowers, radish seed, rape, buckwheat, potatoes, burdock, some kind of lily, another broadleaf minor grain I had never seen before, amaranth, an annual oil crop called qigui, and walnut, huajiao, and guava trees.  In another village a vining crop grown vertically called shanyu (山芋), or "mountain tuber".  That's not counting the vegetables in home gardens, also quite diverse.  And those were just the things I saw growing today, on July 15th, 2008.  So I did see a little buckwheat, but only in very small patches.  One guy I talked to today summed up the situation: "bu mai, bu zai" - if you can't sell it, don't plant it.  He was a young, sad Lisu guy in Zhanzikou, the highest altitude village, drinking moonshine by the bowlful from a one-liter Coke bottle at 10 am.  I tried some, but decided to stick to tea.       

Photos:  Pile of pine needles for compost and a few pigsties in Zhanzekou, Weixi city, a donkey, the crazy mountain tuber, and one series of fields in Yutang showing radish, sunflower, corn , beans, rape, and walnut trees.

Finally, a rant about dumb china: The guy running the guest house called me at around noon today while I was out in the villages, wanting me to come back at once and properly register, because last night he didn't know what to do with a US passport.   He said, and I believe this, that he doesn't get foreigners at his guest house, and didn't know what to do.  When I got back in the afternoon, he came into my room and we filled out this laborious residency form for half an hour.  Then he had to call in a co-worker from the Education Bureau to recopy it because he can't read or write English and for some reason didn't like the way I had filled it out.  Then we all went down to the police station to register officially (this is for three nights at a hotel) and I took the passport to a copy shop.  Finally we got back to the hotel and he said, oh, the girl who let you in didn't know the price for foreigners is more; 50 RMB a night, because you know, so much trouble.  So much for never having foreign guests.  I wanted to laugh, shout, slam the door, throw him out the window.  But what do you do, this is China, and it's only an extra $2.95. So I paid.  

 

海尼 Haini village

Yanzong and I left Shangrila for Weixi county on Friday afternoon, arriving in Tacheng town in the evening. The drive took about four hours with several stops, taking us from an elevation of 11,200' to 6,500' in the span of about 60 miles. It was pretty awesome to see the landscape, particularly the farmland, change so dramatically.  We went from pasture, barley, and rape in Shangrila to fields and fields of corn from 9300' on down.   Also potatoes, sunflowers, and soybeans, and finally down in the Jinsha river valley (which becomes the Yangtze) rice paddies ringed with taro and beans. 

Saturday we went down the road a few miles and interviewed farmers in a few villages, all part of Haini administrative village.  We were invited into homes with fireplaces in the center of the room on a platform that you sit on.  Unfortunately no chimneys or other ventilation so I teared up pretty fast.  The folks were very friendly and answered our questions and offered us tea and very fresh sunflower seeds.  Yanzong was elated.  She's been fun to work with - an ethnic Tibetan from Deqin area, always laughing and singing.  Her English is great, and my only complaint is that she prefers to speak Tibetan even when the people we are talking to can speak Mandarin, and aren't Tibetan either but they understand the language.  Well a small price to pay.  She's been very game to hike around and is willing to ask the same questions over and over for me.  She has training in economics and has worked on projects in this area, so she asks some of her own questions as well, which has been a nice complement I think. 

Photos: Scenes from the road.   A blurry photo of yours truly with an ethnic Malimasa couple from Haini. Bitter buckwheat = marginal crop. An old man picking squash out of his corn field, who talked unintelligibly about the Cultural Revolution. One of the villages we visited had a small working stone mill with a water wheel grinding corn.    Yanzong and I walked along a concrete pipeline for a hydropower station that is still under construction.  Every other village seems to have a cinderblock producer, and you see workers pressing them out onto the ground, and little rows of blocks drying by the side of the road.    Two women weeding rice, a little patch of buckwheat(!) in the foreground.