The moment you come back from China, friends and relatives shower you with millions of questions, trying to reality check their ideas about this country with you. What did you eat there in the country of dog meat and all the weird stuff? Are workers in villages paid with a bowl of rice per day? How did you handle the smog?
While China is more than able to shock foreigners, it mostly impresses with its sharp contrast of bustling cities and hi-tech modernity – and the virgin countryside where life has not changed much for the last 1,000 years. So, as you pack your bags, get ready for contrasts like wandering between skyscrapers along the streets that are so clean you can eat off them, and then seeing villagers skinning slaughtered dogs at a local market.
Arriving in Shanghai, China’s biggest city with a population of 23 million people, you are taken aback even as you board the Maglev train from the airport to the city, going more than 400 kilometers per hour. Setting foot in the very heart of the city feels like stepping into Futurama science fiction cartoon, with skyscrapers of all shapes and colors and huge spaces around you.
Somehow, even in this busy area, Chinese find a way to fill it in with cozy small parks, fountains and flowers that sometimes make you forget you are in the city. And, just to get that question about the smog out of the way – no, it is not an issue in Shanghai, at least no more than it is in Kyiv.
Just a stone’s throw away from the bustling financial center you find another China – the old city where streets are so narrow and maze-like that it takes an effort for two people to pass. The laundry is hanging everywhere just above your head and locals are cooking on stoves, squeezed in their tiny balconies. Unlike shopping malls outside the old city, shops here are so tiny some of them have space for just a chair and a basket of fruit, or baozi – stuffed steamed buns – for sale.
As you take the metro and go away from center, you find the Shanghai where most people live – fields of pillar-like residential buildings, which seem to never end. However, diving into the cozy streets between the buildings you realize that it is here that you can see a regular day of the Chinese: neighbors playing a traditional table game of mahjong, elderly women knitting and gossiping loudly, children running around in flocks and old men selling juicy sugar cane sticks on every street corner.
Another reality awaits you in rural China. We chose Yangshuo district in the southern province of Guanxi, a mountainous place amid the Li River, so beautiful it has inspired Chinese painters and poets of ancient and modern times. The place is believed to be one of the most picturesque areas in the whole of China and is depicted on the 20 Yuan banknote.
While Yangshuo is crawling with foreign and Chinese tourists, it is the villages around the town that show you the other side of China.
Here, in a village market, you might get an answer to that dog eating question – yes, in some areas people do eat dogs. A butcher stripping the slaughtered dog of its fur is certainly a sight to remember.
As I rushed from the market wondering if I am going to get sick, I thought about pigs and cows, which are lovely animals as well. I do eat those, so I guess it’s kind of strange that a skinned canine would make me so nauseous.
Other things locals do are much more pleasant to watch. Besides, it does not seem that people here are poor and starving, like friends back home imagine.
The ancient Fuli town specializes in making traditional paper fans of all sizes and colors. Mashed-up paper is poured onto special canvases to mold the shapes of fans. Canvases are then carefully placed outside most houses to dry in the sun.
Inside the house there is usually a person busy peeling dry paper fans from their molds, painting them and attaching wooden handles. When a woman saw us staring through the open door to at the process, she started gesticulating inviting us in her house. She got on with her work, chirping about what she was doing. She clearly couldn’t care less that we don’t understand a word of her Chinese.
The neighboring ancient village of Xingping has a different specialty: people there grow oranges. A compact village squeezed between the mountains and the Li River, it uses every plot of land in and around the village, even up in the hills.
Walking up to these gardens makes for a lovely hike, and you will also be rewarded with a marvelous view over the area, with its rice paddles, the jungle stretching on the opposite side of the river, and the mountains on the horizon.
Kyiv Post staff writer Svitlana Tuchynska can be reached at [email protected]
