High tech and hot pot, p.10
High Tech and Hot Pot, page 10
HEARTS AND THUMBS-UPS
ON OUR WAY through the villages, we cruise through what seem like antiquated surroundings in our silver Buick Excelle. Buffaloes pull plows through rice paddies; in roadside restaurants, bamboo steamers are filled with baozi (stuffed buns); and dogs and pigs wander around freely. Picturesque wooden farmhouses topped with dark gray tiled roofs stand next to functional two-story concrete buildings that seem to have come from a prefab catalogue. Very often, old and new completely fail to blend, as if there has been an anti-architecture competition, the winner being the new building that fits in least organically with the surroundings: explicitly permitted are purple walls, diagonal patterns with off-white tiles and barred windows for the prison look.
I woke up in a bad mood, and the view is not making it better.
“The villagers buy modern houses because they think it is what everyone is doing, so it must be good,” says Nora. “The people are sadly not well educated, have little self-confidence and don’t realize how valuable their traditions are. With our TV series we want to show them that even rich people would love a life like it is in a Tujia village—a rich foreigner like you, for instance.”
So, okay, I’m about to be exploited again. But, just maybe, here it will serve a good purpose.
“Tell me if you need to go to the bathroom,” she adds.
“Will do.”
“Do you need to go to the bathroom?”
“No.”
“You can take a nap now.”
“No worries, I like looking out of the window.”
“I hope you’re not bored.”
“I. Am. Not. Bored!”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
Chinese solicitude, however well meant, can sometimes really get on your nerves. Especially after being on the move for a couple of weeks, after a few nights with little sleep and on one of those travel days when my head feels bleary and new impressions are not proving to be a relief. Today, five lions could cross the road doing handstands and I would just think, So what? and be too lazy to get my camera out of my backpack. Overnight, it’s as if I’ve become a different person, someone lethargic and complacent.
Whoever thinks that long-term traveling must feel like being drunk in a hammock for sixteen hours a day hasn’t really tried it. The illusion that an interesting or even famous place is enough in itself to inspire that precisely predictable feeling of well-being disregards what a flighty thing one’s own mood can be.
On top of that, I’m with TV people—I don’t like being filmed. They won’t even tell me what they have planned for me, and most of the time they are speaking Chinese, laughing a lot, and only occasionally do I catch single words, such as “straight ahead,” or “Tujia” or “house.” In a car with four cheerful Chinese people, for the first time on my travels here, I feel lonely. But I try to hide my bad mood from the others.
Nora’s husband, a chipper guy in a beige jacket with a horse design on the back, nudges me regularly, pointing out the window and saying, “Beautiful.”
“He only knows two or three English words,” Nora tells me, and lays her arm over his shoulder.
In a place called Matouxi (“horse head river village”) we stop in front of a new wooden house with curved rooftop and colorful displays of the Tujia culture in the courtyard. We have an appointment with the mayor, a small man who certainly doesn’t look like a typical villager with his suit and patent-leather shoes, and who offers us expensive cigarettes but doesn’t smoke himself when we decline.
The camera’s on, and Nora does a short interview with him for Hunan TV. He says there are three hundred houses in Horse Head River Village and six hundred inhabitants. This year, no one here is living below the poverty line, but without new sources of money, the village will hardly be able to survive.
“Would more tourists be good?” Nora asks.
“Of course,” he replies.
Looking in my direction, he adds: “Couldn’t you do something about it?”
“We’ll see,” I say. Everybody wants something from me, and I just want to go back to bed and not have to talk to anyone, but nobody asks me what I want.
And then the folklore program begins.
First, we walk to a replica of an old rapeseed oil press. Three tanned men ram a tree trunk suspended from a roof rafter against a giant mortar. They swing it back and forth twice, and then ram with the third swing, accompanied by shouts of “Eeeja, eeeja, hu!” With every “Hu!”—which is very similar to the battle cry whooping of Icelandic soccer fans—some more drops of oil are extracted from the seeds in the mill.
“And now you,” commands Nora. “Put this on and join in.”
She gives me a plastic bag with pants and a sweater made of black silk—a traditional Tujia outfit embroidered in a colorful pattern of small flowers that bears an uncanny resemblance to my WeChat profile picture. Spectacularly overdressed, I join the tree-trunk rammers on the oil press.
“You have to chant louder; otherwise, people will think you’re not working hard!” says Nora, who is filming this with her phone. I chant louder.
Afterwards, we travel on to our next stop at a bridge. Women in red outfits and men wearing something similar to my clothing are performing some songs. Some of them have scribbled the text on their hands, and the best singer is wearing a headdress full of jingling silver ornaments. I am supposed to join them by singing half a verse for television. For someone with an average talent for languages and a singing ability somewhere between that of a soccer fan and a kid in confirmation class, this is an impossible endeavor. An old, wrinkly Tujia woman repeats the melody five times, but I’m unable to imitate the dialect of the lyrics and unusual tone intervals. She looks at me like an elementary school teacher who sees a child sweating over the sum of three plus three.
Nora calls a crisis meeting. She suggests that I just join in for the final yell at the end of the song, a “Jiaaa jiah!” with a lunging step forward and everyone sticking out their right arms. After two takes, it’s in the can. Even the mayor, who just arrived by car, is grinning happily. Then he organizes the obligatory group photos at the end of the bridge.
“You have your husband tonight, so you won’t be lonely,” he says to Nora. “Who has got the German?”
“Hmm. Maybe the dog?” Nora replies.
Everyone laughs. I am just a dog joke on this trip. From the perspective of today’s grouchy mood, Horse Head River Village represents the dismal reality of what travel brochures try to promote as the “unspoiled charm of an authentic village with a cultural program typical of the region.”
Screw being famous; I just want to go home and hide, away from people and cameras.
But that’s not an option.
“We now have to look for a house that my husband can paint,” declares Nora, once we are sitting in the car again. “You can take a break.”
I look silently out the window at the ancient beauty of green fields and farmhouses in the afternoon mist.
“Stephan,” Nora announces a few minutes later.
“Yes?”
“You’re a writer, aren’t you? Don’t you want to write a poem?”
“A poem?”
“Yes.”
“About what?”
“The trees, the flowers, the animals.”
“No.”
“Are you bored?”
“No!”
Eventually, we stop in front of a particularly decorative wooden house built on stilts on a slope. Two bird carvings decorate the uneven roof ridge, clucking chickens roam around and an old man in a suit and with a walking stick is selling honey.
Nora turns on her cell camera and asks him how important it is for him to keep his house.
“I will care for it until the day I die,” he says.
“Why?”
“The first reason is that I don’t have the money to build a new one. The second reason is everybody says that it is an important cultural asset. And we agree.”
Nora’s husband, the artist, looks for a spot outside and gets out his ink, paintbrushes and paper.
“With those paintings, we want to raise awareness of the beauty of these old buildings,” Nora explains. He has already painted three thousand houses, and they have been exhibited in Beijing, Canada and Slovenia. “Actually, I gave him the idea. I think he does it mostly to please me.” They have been a couple for five years and married for three.
“Beautiful,” says the artist, as if he noticed we were talking about him. Then the Hunan TV guys interview him.
I go for a short walk and marvel at the huge water buffaloes the farmer is using to plow the rice field next to the neighboring house. Below, men are washing spring onions in the mud-colored river, and on the road a couple of yards above them is a propaganda poster declaring that the fight against poverty is the party’s main objective.
As it is getting dark, we move on. Our accommodation is a simple homestay in a renovated wooden house that gets its electricity from a couple of solar panels.
“Tomorrow, we have more than an hour of live broadcast, so have a good rest,” says Nora. “By the way, you can take off the Tujia clothes now.”
I read a bit more online about the Tujia people, one of fifty-five ethnic minorities in the country. Eight million Chinese people belong to the group, and their culture is more than one thousand years old. One particular tradition is still upheld: during the last month before a wedding ceremony, the bride wails for one hour every day. Initially, she does this alone, but after a couple of days, her mother, grandmothers, aunts and sisters join in for communal lamentations. Even on the day of the wedding, a couple of heavy sobs are expected from the bride if she wants to be considered virtuous. Some mothers even send their teenage daughters to crying workshops; after all, everything can be learned.
Are the Tujia men really that bad? Or are the women just bemoaning the loss of innocence? Both wrong: the women believe that following a strict prescription of advance wailing will ensure the marriage will not be a joyless one. Additionally, they are mourning the bride leaving her family and, traditionally, also the failure of the marriage broker to find a better groom (nowadays, however, the role of marriage brokers in choosing partners is greatly reduced). The more tears the bride weeps, the more riches are in store for her family. Yet everything needs a counterbalance: at traditional burials the Tujia people sometimes dance half the night, as they don’t think of death as a sad event.
• • • • • •
THE NEXT MORNING, a trip to the “Good Heart” rice wine distillery is on the schedule. The wine is 60 percent alcohol and made with a special mixture of seventy-seven herbs.
“You need a good heart to make healthy wine,” the owner says in explanation of the name.
My experience of tasting it tells me that, rather, you need a strong heart to drink it.
Back in the courtyard of our accommodations we meet an old bamboo basket maker and a weaver.
“He will show you how he works, and then we will have a little competition,” explains Nora. “Soon we will be live for half an hour on Yingke.”
Yingke is a streaming app for live videos, similar to Periscope, with an additional function that enables viewers to transfer money directly to presenters they like.
“Ready?” asks Nora. She switches her smartphone to video mode, holds it in front of her with a selfie stick and greets the viewers. The Hunan TV crew film Nora filming us with her phone, and a surveillance camera in the courtyard films all of us.
“San, er, yi—three, two, one. Go!” shouts Nora, and the competition begins.
The old man and I both have half-finished bamboo baskets in front of us roughly the size of a beer barrel but much lighter. Dozens of strips of wood point upwards, and now another strip of pliable wood has to be woven through the upright pieces. Whoever finishes a complete circle first is the winner.
Nora commentates like a sports reporter in Chinese and English. She screams and fools around without remaining still for a second. On her screen hearts and thumbs-ups are appearing.
My weaving skills exhibit more enthusiasm than precision, which might have something to do with the rice wine. After almost a minute, I’ve completed nearly a quarter of the bamboo circle and am pretty proud of myself. I glance to my right—the pro, a little man with a weather-beaten face and plenty of laugh lines, has finished long ago. China versus Germany: 1–0. The pro helps me make my basket look something like a basket.
Nora asks me my opinion of village traditions. I stress how much I appreciate Chinese traditions, particularly as a foreign tourist, and tell her I wish people would appreciate the value of old cultural techniques more.
I have to use some self-control not to look at the screen the whole time because the program has an automatic beautifying function that gives us all large eyes and perfect skin. Heart, heart, thumbs-up.
We move on to a weaving chair, where an old lady shows me how to weave blankets with traditional patterns. Nora screams her comments; I notice that I’m getting a headache from the alcohol.
Half an hour goes by in a flash, and afterwards, Nora checks the statistics to see how many viewers we had: up to 34,000 at one point.
“Later the video will be shown on other channels, and then there will be considerably more viewers,” Nora promises.
She makes another film with me, an interview for a news portal called Tiantian Kuaibao, which means “every day quick news.” This time the interview is about me: my previous travels and my experiences in China until now. I talk about my books, my favorite countries—Iran, Greenland and Nepal—the casinos in Macau, the cats in Shenzhen and the unconventional meal in Wenshi. I don’t mention couchsurfing.
“Are you going to write a book about China?” asks Nora.
“No,” I reply.
Nora says good-bye to the viewers and looks somewhat puzzled at the statistics. “Strange—only six viewers. There’s something wrong, usually it’s at least eighty thousand.” She calls the editor responsible for the program and they talk briefly. Nora seems troubled.
“There’s a new law since the beginning of this month,” she says after ending the call. “Interviews with foreigners can no longer be broadcast live, only after a time lag of ten days. The material has to be checked.”
“Did we say something controversial?”
“You said something about eating dogs. That’s a tricky subject.”
“Why?”
“In a number of Chinese regions it is normal. The people there shouldn’t feel they are doing something wrong. Maybe the editors will cut it.”
“Have you ever had problems with censorship?”
“Once an African-American talked a lot about politics and criticized Trump. That wasn’t allowed on our show. We don’t want to fuel the conflict between America and China. We have to be careful.”
On my cell I discover a new friendship request. “Hello, my name is Nature. I saw the live interview with you,” a woman writes. “Nice to meet you!”
Her profile photo shows a palm pointing towards the camera. It is difficult to say whether it is a friendly gesture or a defensive one. Her right eye is hidden by her fingers, and her left eye looks intently at the viewer, so intently that you could get nightmares from it. As she was one of six viewers, she must work for the censorship department of the broadcaster. I decide to delete her request.
From: Yang Berlin
Hey, how’s it going? You famous yet?
To: Yang Berlin
I was on an internet TV show!
From: Yang Berlin
A dating show?
To: Yang Berlin
No, about the traditions of the Tujia
From: Yang Berlin
Oh, I see. Boring
• • • • • •
AS FAR AS schools go, I thought I had developed a certain routine. Until my appearance, that is, at the high school in Yuanguping, a village consisting of some 40 percent houses and 60 percent building sites for more houses. We meet roughly a hundred schoolkids, all between twelve and fourteen years old, on a basketball court in the schoolyard. Nora and the Hunan TV crew accompany me to the middle of the court. After the teacher greets me in English and introduces me to the kids, my trials begin. I feel a bit like the kung fu novice in The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.
The first trial: Shake hands with one hundred schoolkids. They introduce themselves in English, and I answer, “Hello, my name is Stephan,” and we both say: “Nice to meet you.”
One hundred hands is an awful lot.
The second trial: Sing a song. The kids gather around in a circle and I get a headset mic and a loudspeaker to hang around my neck, which looks like a very old Walkman portable music player and distorts my voice badly.
“Could you sing a song for us?” asks the teacher.
“Unfortunately, I can’t sing,” I reply.
“Then sing something with the kids!” She calls two girls to the front who proceed to sing a Chinese song to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Because I don’t know the words, I just hum along a bit.
The third trial: Learn da lian xiao. This is a dance with a bamboo stick with red and yellow pom-poms attached to each end. A boy shows me how to hit the knee and foot with the stick in rhythm; the result reminds me of Bavarian folk dances. The kids applaud.
The fourth trial: Act like a sergeant major. The kids form a number of lines in front of me, and then I’m supposed to say, “Up,” “Down,” “Left,” or “Right,” and they have to crouch, jump up, and turn ninety degrees left or right as quickly as possible. The ones who make a mistake are out. They react pretty promptly but are not always right, and at the end there is only one boy remaining. He is then granted a wish.
The fifth trial: Grant the boy’s wish that I play basketball. A hundred kids gather around me to watch five free throws. Twice I miss, twice I hit the rim and once I make a basket: massive applause.
