Keyi Village

My friend Peng Laoshi brought me out to an Yi village in Honghe called 可邑 Keyi village, at 6,800'. It is home to the Axi branch of the Yi where she has been working for 10 years. She has come out for a conference and a presentation she is making with a couple colleagues on what I am not entirely sure, but something about improving local administrative capacity, working with the local people to preserve traditional culture while encouraging economic development. She's giving the presentation to a group that includes foreigners from NGO's and has hired a translator, and seems like she has brought me here to help the translator out. He's a student in international politics, kind of a know it all but I'm getting better at dealing with these guys. We left Kunming yesterday at around 3pm and arrived here a little before 6. The hall where she's doing her presentation has an exhibit of the tools and articles of daily life: farming implements, builder's tools, wooden cookware and hemp clothing. They grow and eat a lot of corn - making bread, mixing it with rice, and making noodles. They're labeling the exhibit so I helped the translator come up with the English. For some things I was a little lost - for example what do you call a goatskin worn with a strap by the old folks that they use for sitting on? A backside apron? Anyway, I'm taking suggestions.

The fellow who described the museum object is a young teacher who was really nice, and we talked a bit afterwards. I asked him about buckwheat of course, and he told me that some people grow it, he thinks. Not all that promising. There's a buckwheat wine industry in the next county called Luxi 泸西 about 50km awayl. He also says there are small home factories that produce alcohol for sale; no brand name and no packaging, he says, not like in the US. It's a little backward here he explains. you just bring your own container and fill it up. He has never eaten buckwheat himself, though, and doesn't know which kind they grow. Then we talk about the NBA. He watches every day during the season he says. You know yaoming? In houston? We go through his favorite teams and I try to hear the names of American cities in Chinese- is the basketball team the Atlanta Hawks or the Falcons? I can't keep them straight. We've got the Milwaukee 公鹿 gonglu, not that exciting.

I got the chance to walk around a little after that and took some photos and found a little buckwheat growing interplanted, on the edges of the fields in the village. There's been a wind storm and a lot of the corn is lying flat, but the buckwheat looks pretty good. I saw at least two kinds, one that seems wild but allowed to grow, and another that looks planted. The wild one had been cut at the base for fodder- very vegetative and relatively small leaves, possibly 3" x 3". THe other kind had huge leaves, maybe 7" x 7".

In the morning we walked around in the town's sacred forest, which was really beautiful. It was full of big trees and medicinal plants - my hosts also saw and picked some big edible mushrooms, argued about what they really were, and ended up throwing them away. The presentation seemed to go well, although I still can't figure out exactly what Peng Laoshi does, and then we watched a crazy video of this religious ritual where the men and boys strip down, paint their bodies with bright designs, and dance around and burn a big effigy in the woods. Then we had lunch. The villagers danced for us and played instruments, and we ate goat meat and drank Yunnan wine. Then we returned to Kunming.

Back in China

I arrived in Chengdu on Tuesday, after a long couple days on the plane. I had never been here before and ended up at a place I had seen a brochure for last year in Shangrila, called Sim's Cozy guesthouse. It's a great place - big and full of travelers but extremely cozy, as advertised, and amazingly cheap. The couple who run it are a man from Singapore and a woman from Japan, and it caters almost entirely to the global trekker scene.

I came here to meet with a scientist from the Chengdu Inst. of Biology, and I did that on wednesday. He's a funny, youngish guy and introduced me to his lab who were all very sweet. I felt a little sheepish because the professor made a couple of his students present their work to me in English, which really put them on the spot but they were all very good-natured about it. I like Chengdu. It feels smaller than Kunming, and the vibe is lively, but laid back. People on the street have been really friendly. Well after our meetings they took me out to dinner, which was delish - spicy but not quite painful. The lab group seems to really enjoy each other and there was cutting up and teasing over dinner and it was very relaxed. Turns out the next day began a three day holiday so it's a good thing I came to meet them my first day in town. And so then I was free to play.

I found a group of American tourists at the guest house who wanted to see the big buddha at Leshan, some say it's the worlds largest but you get a lot of hyperboyle out here. We hired a van through the guest house and drove a couple hours to the site. Somehow we had forgotten about the holiday that began that day, and we didn't leave as early as the recommended 7 am. The big budda was jam-packed. We waited in a line like they have at Disneyworld, but the only thing at the end of the line is the buddha's big toenail.

The next day I went to the Panda Breeding center. Sichuan Province is the "Home of the Panda" and this center was the first place to breed them live in captivity. There are about 100 pandas there, rolling around eating bamboo all day. The adults are solitary but the adolescents and babies are kept together, and climb on each other and play. It was pretty amazing to see so many of them, and hear them crunching on bamboo. How can they eat that stuff? In other news, this blog is blocked in China and I'm using a proxy to get it out, but I can't seem to upload photos directly. So please bear with me and check out the link below:

http://picasaweb.google.com/scratchfarmer/Chengdu?feat=directlink

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.