Traveling in post-pandemic China - Not what I expected

                                                              Gisela Jia

My first encounters in Fujian 初识福建

On June 18th, I landed in Fuzhou. I grabbed my suitcase and backpack, full of over the count medicines for most daily illnesses, plus covid tests and medicines, and got into the car of Mr. Zhan. Xiao Zhan, as I called him, was in his 40s. He picked me up because his elementary school teacher Yubing who works in CCBG had told him about my arrival.

Infused in the aura of respect for teachers emitted by Mr. Zhou from my first sight of him, I affirmed my long-made plan for him to drive me to a place, which I could not wait for one more minute to see. Five years of being away from the land of China, the longest it had been in my life, my knowledge of it deepened, generating unprecedented desires to see unseen places, thanks to the long but quiet covid qurantine days and the learning it enforced on me.

Fu Zhou Chuan Zheng Xue Tang 福州船政学堂

Mr. Zhan drove me to an area of Fu Zhou called Ma Wei （马尾）, literally meaning Horse Tail. It is where Min Jiang（闽江） runs into the East Ocean, shaped like a horse tail. I got off at the old site of Fu Zhou Chuan Zheng Xue Tang, China's first ever naval academy. 

My eyes eagerly combed through all the remaining buildings, the trees, the coastal line, the model ships, and even the air. I was not much into how the Qing China built this academy, but how it was done tells us about Chinese children at that time, and maybe Chinese people in general.

The Qing Chinese elite was greatly startled by China's two defeats in the first opium war (1839-1842) and the second opium war (1856-1860). As they were defeated by the British and French navy, they saw the importance of having a navy of their own. A book of thousands of years old turned to a completely blank page. 

The site of Ma Wei in Fuzhou was selected. The man named Shen Bao Zhen（沈葆桢） was appointed to the difficult leading position. After scrambling for funds and securing it, he needed middle and high school aged children to join the academy. Which educated teenagers who were on the track of the Civil Service exam that started from the glorious Tang dynasty would want to study building and driving ships, and then fighting on them? 

Shen needed to go to friends' and relatives' homes, particularly those who were not well to do, to lure their 12-16 year old children away from chanting Confucius classics for the Civil Service exams to committing to his new naval academy. One of these teenagers was Yan Fu（严复), whose later work would set the drive for a modern China in motion. But when Shen Bao Zhen visited Yan Fu's home in 1867, his widowed mother only let him go so he could earn a few taels of silver monthly for his family by being a naval academy student.

When the teenagers entered the academy, on Day 1, they were taught, by British and French naval professionals, Math, Physics, Mechanics in English and French. In a few years, these teenagers became bilinguals who knew how to build ships, drive ships, and join ocean battles. 

How could this be possible? A random sample of teenagers picked up from the side lanes and allies of Fuzhou became the national navy leaders and thought leaders whose ripples we still feel and live with? Does this mean that you randomly pick another set of teenagers from Chengdu, from XiAn, from Hefei, and put them in the right environment, they would all become like that?

Stepping on the actual seaside slope where these children used to rise up early in the morning to chant their English and French texts as they chanted the Confucius Analects, I simply was able to ask the same question again as I did in NYC many times. No answer came to me from the still Ma Wei air, but my heart was more content.

Quan Zhou 泉州

The following day, I made to Quan Zhou and Xia Men. When planning the trip in NYC, it sounded like a fantasy to cover both cities in one day. All that it took to mess up the plan would be one delayed taxi ride, one delayed train ride, one hard to process payment for a train ticket. But I did it, because none of these happened.

A Didi taxi ride promptly took me to the Fu Zhou train station. The clerk at the ticket window quickly typed in my passport number to get me a ticket. She scanned my Ali Pay bar code and got paid. The train departed and arrived on the dot. I hopped into the first cab waiting at the Quan Zhou train station.

I wanted to see the major evidence that Quan Zhou was once the beginning of the Ocean Silk Road. The female taxi driver who drove me to Liu Sheng Ta 六胜塔 and Lin Luan Du 林峦渡 said she never learned about these places and enjoyed hearing me telling her about them. 

Lin Luan Du was the first foreign trade pier built in Quan Zhou, in Tang Dynasty, and reached its peak usage in the South Song and Yuan dynasties. Liu Sheng Ta was a Buddhism tower that served as a costal watch tower and light house. The taxi driver, to show her appreciation that she learned something from me, volunteered to walk around the sites with me under the hot sun, holding the sun umbrella for me, and waited for me patiently while I chatted with people I bumped onto.

At the pier next to the water, there were a few stone tablets commemorating individuals and events related to this area. While trying to decipher the Chinese characters on a tablet, I found myself shoulder to shoulder with a man who also stared at the characters intensely. I asked him what some characters were, and he explained to me clearly. He was soft spoken and slow spoken, with a kind face. Upon my inquiry, he revealed that his hobby is to 拓片, to make rubbings of the texts inscribed on the stone tablets. He has walked through many neighborhoods in 闽南 (southern Fujian), and done hundreds of these. His focus has been on the content inscribed on family compound walls that carry family teachings. I asked him to send me some and received them on my way departing Quan Zhou.

While talking to him, a taller middle-aged man with an imposing look appeared. Upon hearing that I am a teacher from America who planned to bring students here, he was pleasantly surprised "Americans are interested in these?" "Of course. This is world history." He then moved on to tell me how the pier was built, how it was guarded, and why it is no longer used now due to the deterioration of the surrounding environment.

Then a third man appeared. This was a fast speaking 20 something year old with a big smile like a blooming flower. Upon hearing my background, he asked to take a photo with me amidst the stone tablets. He told me he had a friend in Lexington in the US. He asked me whether I lived in Lexington. Upon departing, he shouted at me "I will go to Lexington to visit my friend. I will see you in Lexington." Through photos he sent me through WeChat after our departure, I learned that he runs a tea company with a beautiful operation space high in the mountains where the tea trees grow.

After the Liu Sheng Ta and Lin Luan Du, I chose to go to Qing Jing Si 清净寺. It was a mosque for the Arabic community who settled in Quan Zhou for their trading businesses. A true sign of a commercial hub should show racial and religious diversity, as was the case with Dun Huang, a hub on the land Silk Road.

Although I have a Chinese face and speak fluent Mandarin, as long as I told someone I was from the US, they immediately and effectively registered me as an American. The female taxi driver asked me about my thought on news she heard that the US meddled with affairs of some countries, and I told her that I no longer follow current news closely these days. 

When I paid her my full taxi fare, plus a generous tip, and when I told her the places I would bring my students to along the land Silk Road during the upcoming two weeks, she had a very big smile. 

Like currents, world affairs shift, beyond my control. But I can take someone's taxi, pay the fare, and exchange some knowledge, so to bond, simply as humans. 

Xia Men 厦门

The driver took me to the train station on time and the train promptly left Quan Zhou and arrived in Xia Men. For the rest of the afternoon till late night, I was in Xia Men, driven around by taxi drivers from He Nan 河南.

I asked the first driver why he came to Xia Men from He Nan. "这里多美啊！"  (Look how beautiful it is here!) He looked at the beach through the window from his driver's seat, and then turned his gaze to 鼓浪屿 Gu Lang Yu island across the water. Makes sense, so I thought.

When I heard my second driver was also from He Nan, I asked the same question. He said 这里比老家好挣钱 (It's easier to make money here than my hometown). Reasonable, so I thought.

When I heard that my third driver, randomly grabbed from the street, was also from He Nan, I didn't ask why. I asked him what dialect he spoke at home to his children. He said he spoke to them in He Nan dialect, and they replied in Mandarin.  He complained subtly "When they went to He Nan to visit their grandparents, it is disappointing that they couldn't speak He Nan dialect to them". Well, he talked to the right person who promptly told him that that is what many children do in the US with Chinese and English.

After driving past Xia Men University, the cradle to generations of distinguished Chinese citizens, I devoted the rest of the day visiting Gu Lang Yu 鼓浪屿. Also during the past five years while being away from China, I learned that this is beyond being a beautiful island. 

After the Qing government ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895 through the Ma Guan Treaty 马关条约, Qing officials were worried that Japan would want to encroach on Xia Men. They came up with an idea to prevent that - they offered Gu Lang Yu to multiple Western countries to set up their embassies there. These embassies not only built beautiful villas to house their staff, but also hospitals and schools. These facilities then attracted some well-to-do Chinese and incubated a group of future Chinese leaders in medicine, education and literature. 

From this case, I learned that when cross-fertilization occurs, people benefit.

Chang Ting 长汀

My most anticipated stop in Fu Jian brought me to the mountains in the western boarder of Fu Jian province. Nestled in it is Chang Ting. It is nicknamed "the Capital of Hakka people in the world". 

At the train station, I walked to a group of squatting taxi drivers who were chatting and laughing loudly. The one who gestured me to his car was middle-aged, bald, round-faced with a big smile. While driving to town, I asked whether it's true that it's a Hakka town. He said "当然了，这里都是客家人" (Of course we're all Hakka). "Really?" I couldn't believe it. "Are you Hakka?" I looked at him. "那当然了，我们祖祖辈辈都是客家人。" (Of course. My family has always been Hakka.)

I asked him to drive me to any hotel he recommended. He pulled his car in front of a hotel - 客家宾馆 Hakka Hotel. 

For the rest of my stay in Chang Ting, I kept on testing his claim. I asked the girl checking me in, and she said she was Hakka. I asked the young man who fixed my WeChat and sold me a Chinese phone number, and he said he was a Hakka. I asked the owner of a small roadside eatery, and she said she was a Hakka. At night next to the row of traditional style Hakka houses along the Ting  River 汀江, I asked a man who seemed to be a rickshaw puller, and he said he was a Hakka, but he emphasized, he was not from the town, but from a nearby village.  I asked him about the Hakka dialect he spoke, and he said his version is very close to the folks in this town, but both are somewhat different from some other folks from other towns. 

The only person I asked who was not a Hakka was the gate keeper in the town's middle school. He was from Quan Zhou. Upon hearing that I just visited Quan Zhou the day before, he let his surprise and disappointment come through that I didn't visit the ancient bridge and the Manichaeism religion temple.

I've been fascinated by Hakka culture for a long time. These are people who were forced to migrate from northern China in the span of 1000 years. In scattered communities across southeastern and southweatern China, they have managed to keep their language, which has direct ties to the central court Chinese language spoken in the north in ancient times. They have passed down and lived up to this saying that "宁卖祖宗田，不忘祖宗言" (We'd rather sell our ancestors' land but will not forget their language.)  Now scattered throughout the world, they come to Chang Ting for an annual celebration.

That said, however, I came to Chang Ting more for a person I got to know during the past five years. 

On picture, he looked so much like my dad - eyeglasses on a handsome face with the most gentle look. They were both from the Jiang Su area. My father was an ancient Chinese literature scholar, a professor and a prolific writer. This man was all of these,  and much more. My father's literacy and teaching career was halted for a decade during the Culture Revolution. This man's life was ended due to his involvement in the "physical" (vs. cultural) revolution. He joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), led the CCP, and was executed by the Chinese Nationalist Party (CNP) at the age of 35, in Chang Ting. 

To this day, on the CNP side, some people still call him 罪有应得 (deserving the treatment). However, growing up in the CCP China, to me, his name was not bright neither because he was called a traitor. The main evidence was that before he was executed, he wrote a long self reflection essay, to say how much he longed for a life of teaching and literacy translation and research, and could not understand why he was swept up in the revolution. Such "indetermination" was not a popular sentiment in parties.

But sifting through his life in many ways, including reading his lover letters, I came to understand him. In the seemingly benign Chinese literature and classics, there is one constant call to which every generation of Chinese who saw China in crisis answered, unequivocally - do something for your country, even if it means giving up everything you have, including your life. 

When he was a young man, the Qing government ended. What to do with China next? To follow the Soviet Union system? To follow the US system? The Japanese system? A system of our own? Many young souls searched and took sides, and countless lost their lives for it.

On the morning of June 18th 1935, he held a 唐诗三百首 (Three Hundred Classic Poems of Tang Dynasty) and read some of the poems. Then he walked from his prison cell, along the Chang Ting main street to the site where he asked to have his final picture taken, then was further walked down the main street to the site of his execution where he looked around and said "此地很好" (This is a nice place.) The last sentence in his long reflection letter is "中国的豆腐也是很好吃的东西，世界第一，永别了！” (Tofu in China is also a very delicious food - No. 1 in the world - Good bye!")

I went to visit his prison cell, the pavilion where he took his last picture, and the site where he was executed. I asked the Hakka eatery lady to cook me some local tofu. My Hakka hotel was next to the big compound where he was prisoned. While walking around these places, I held a thick book with letters between him and his first wife who died of a sudden disease, and between him and his second wife who fought to preserve his legacy. 

I felt, with no doubt, a sensitive heart who would embrace a love life with letters, words, poems, students, good drinks and food. But that door was not open to him, as he was born in the 1899 China, falling squarely into the 100 year window during which young souls felt compelled to find a path for their country. 

This man is 瞿秋白 (Qu Qiu Bai). As with the teenagers who rose up to take English and French classes while having not even learned the alphabet, I am intrigued by Qu Qiu Bai because of his courage and the mystery of its source in a common human being.

In Psychology, there's a phenomenon called Cognitive Dissonance, in which we justify things we've done so to make ourselves feel better or experience less of a "dissonance". "I've done these things in my life because I should have done these or I had to do these." That was not Qiu Bai. He said, in his self-reflection letter that his life was "a comedy show". 

On the other hand, he could have easily saved his life by showing a gesture of despising or regretting his past to his opponents. He didn't show an ounce of that sentiment. He had no hesitation to take the consequence for his past.

The next morning, when my train was departing for XiAn from Chang Ting station, I felt an unprecedented satisfaction for Qu Qiu bai. He spent the last 41 days of his life in Chang Ting, indirectly sensing the local Hakka culture through the food sent to his prison cell. He lived in the corner of a large compound where the Chang Ting students steeped in classical learning used to go to take their Civil Service exams. It was all good karma, except that his life was desired to be ended by some of his country fellows. 

On the Silk Road 

I spent the next 12 days with CCBG students and parents, trekking through the exact same spots along the ancient land Silk Road as we did in 2018 and 2019: Xi'An 西安 - Lanzhou 兰州 - Dunhuang 敦煌 - Turpan 吐鲁番 - Wrumqi 乌鲁木齐.

After all, this was five years after 2019. The world experienced a big trauma. Chinese people experienced a big trauma. There had to be some traces, physical and psychological, somewhere.

I anticipated lingering covid cases that would infect our members along the way. Emergency plans were made to have the infected member to be isolated from the group but not left alone behind in any city. I was expecting glitches in services as the service people are getting back on track to serve again. I was expecting sales pitches to get me to spend more as I heard the phrase 不景气 (economy not good) from most people I interacted with starting from Xiao Zhan who picked me up at Fuzhou airport.

But I experienced a different picture.

In my big train ride from Fuzhou to XiAn, I transferred in Wuhan. Upon being asked about the transfer train schedule, the young woman in train station uniform frowned  "这个车会晚点" (This train is delayed.)  "多长时间?"  I asked worriedly. “六分钟” (six minutes).  While departing Urumqi, I asked the young man at the hotel front desk to call a cab for me. He nodded but gestured me toward a nearby sofa and said "这个车您需要一点时间到，您先坐那里等一会，车来了我叫您" (This taxi needs a bit time to arrive. Please take a seat there. I'll tell you when it's here.)  I asked "多长时间？” (How long will that be?)  “三分钟” (Three minutes.)

On the beautiful night at Gu Lang Yu, I stepped into a store, with creative local candy and honey designs I had never seen. I wanted to buy some to bring home, but told the clerk I had a long journey up ahead and didn't want to carry it. Upon learning my departure port of Fuzhou, she said, she would ship it to my Fuzhou hotel on my way back to the States. I said "Ok, but do reminder me of this a few days before I come to Fuzhou again because I can forget to tell you where I still stay." In the heat of the Dunhuang desert, I received her WeChat reminder. When I arrived at my Fuzhou hotel on 7/6, the package with their brand name 苏小糖 (Sue's Candy) was waiting for me at the front desk.

On the morning of checking out of the XiAn hotel to move westward along the Silk Road, I found I had already cumulated a pile of stuff that I couldn't squeeze into my suitcase. Practically before boarding the bus for the train station, I handed the pile to the front desk, and left one sentence, "Please keep these for me and I will later instruct you to where to mail them." It was not till days later I thought of this pile, and WeChatted the hotel. Again, on 7/6, this pile sat nicely in a box, right next to Sue's Candy in my Fuzhou hotel.

The consistent sales attitude I encountered was: What do you need? What's the obstacles to your getting this? The price - ok let's look for the ones with discounts. The weight - ok let's get it to you without much carrying. My solutions don't work - ok I understand.

The only person who made some efforts to sell to me was my massager. Two parents gave me a gift of a 2-hour foot massage at our Dunhuang hotel. I only got to the salon at 11pm after I finished my day's work. My massager was a middle-aged lady who spoke Mandarin at a fast speed with a local accent. She first persuaded me to switch it to a full body massage, then from 2 to 2.5 hours, then to add  Gua Sha 刮痧. Each time I came up with an excuse not to follow her lead, she had a paragraph to argue against that. Amused by her well composed and targeted paragraphs, I laughed on the massage table so hard that my body shook up the table with visible nosies.

While she massaged my head and neck, she declared that I had a lingering "cold", and then I found myself having mucus running out of my nose in an embarrassing quantity. She said "that's good". After the massage, I found my nostril path completely cleared up and that for the first time in weeks I breathed normally. Indeed my doctor in NYC prescribed me a nose spray and it had not seen such a clear effect. 

Upon departing in the hotel yard lit up by the desert stars in the early AM, I took a careful look at her face - thin, wrinkled, with a big and energetic smile. I found myself walking away with a respect for her, as she added a mystery to my mind - how did she do that?

After such a smooth journey, I would not say that Chinese people have bounced back. I would say that Chinese people have further matured. As one of them said to me, after having gone through months of quarantine, it felt so good just to be able to interact with people, including customers. 

A local travel agent who served us so well had a slogan attached to his profile - 面包会有的，一切都会有的. (We will have bread and things we need. ) I learned that his travel agency went bankrupt, and some staff were merged with the current agency. If our business was a small chunk of his Mian Bao (bread), he earned it, squarely, with his super professional ways of dealing with every train and bus schedule, ticket, variation and option.

Trading is beautiful. It is a universal language. Who can NOT bond through a fair trade, which implies our mutual needs and trust? 

Once there's trading, then there can be friendship.

Before we arrived in Lanzhou, our local guide Mr. Zou got very excited. He stayed up late at night to search for poems and songs to go with our Huang Tu Gao Yuan 黄土高原 visit. “我要把你们带好，为中美民间友谊做一点我力所能及的贡献” (I want to do my best for your group. That's the least I can do to add to the friendship of the Chinese and American people.) 

I've found that Mr. Zou was not alone in speaking like this. Mr. Zou is not affiliated with any organization, government or non-government. He spends his days and years, alone, either driving an explorer across vast deserts, or in his apartment studying Tang-ka, a type of Tibetan Buddhism art work. I concluded that his "friendship talk" came from the heart of an individual, and individuals with the heart to connect accounted for the existence of the Silk Road, land or ocean. 

Ending thoughts - 

On my long train ride from Fuzhou to XiAn, I entertained my long-time question that I never have an answer for - How did a man named Ying Zheng 嬴政 who lived > 2,000 years ago come up with a vision to unify such a vast land while he was only moving around on horse carriages? 

On my long train ride from Lanzhou to Dun Huang, along the He Xi Corridor, I entertained a similar question - how did Han Wu Emeperor 汉武帝, who also lived > 2,000 years ago, get the vision of snatching the land west of Lanzhou, then, west of the He Xi Corridor, and then west of Dun Huang? 

Although my mind can never catch a glimpse of their mind, the fact is that their vision is currently the reality we live in.

While at Chengdu airport transferring to Fuzhou from Urumqi, I caught this scene. A young traveling Chinese couple, holding hands; behind them is a big display board showing all the places they could get to with one flight - 青岛，广州，兰州，长沙，大理，济南，南京，甘孜.  Of course people can get to anywhere they want these days, but to this couple, these are places in their country. 

Among the bouts when China was in the form of multiple little countries, there was a 五代十国 Wu Dai Shi Guo (907-960 AD) period. A young man named Jiang Wei, a talented literary scholar tried to exit the border of his kingdom (currently in northern Fujian province) to seek more opportunities in the Wu Yue Kingdom to its north (currently in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces). But he was caught at the border, and according to the law, he was executed. Before his death, he left this poem of humor - 黄泉无旅店，今夜宿谁家？(In the underworld of the dead, there're no inns. Where should I lodge then tonight?) 

On the morning of 7/7, I departed for NYC at Fuzhou airport, with my full suitcase of medicine I brought from the states. Unexpectedly, it was not used at all.

On this trip, I connected, reconnected, sometimes lightheartedly, and sometimes not so. History has taught me to no longer take for granted a sweeping trip across such a large land called China.

Here ends my report. Hope it is somewhat informative to you. May your travel this summer be smooth and fruitful.