Field Trip: Xinzheng

My friend/student/teacher Xue Yufeng wrote last week, “There’ll be a one-day tour this Saturday to Xinzheng, Zhengzhou, the hometown of the Yellow Emperor (or Huangdi) The tour is organized by our department for all the female staff as a celebration of this year’s Women’s Day (last Sunday). Every year on the Qingming Festival on April 5, there would be a grand ceremony there to commemorate the Yellow Emperor, one of the two most important ancestors of the Chinese people. I talked with the dean Shi Fuqiang who is in charge of this tour about your interest in Chinese culture, and he agreed that if you WANT to go with us, you’re welcome! If so, you and he and the driver most probably will be the only three gentlemen to protect about 30 female teachers in our department.”
How could I resist this invitation?  So it was that Saturday morning I boarded the bus with the women and a few men of the Foreign Language Department for a field trip.We first went to Mt. Shizu, the center of the world to the Chinese.We started on a concrete road and soon reached the dreaded steps. If I felt a bit challenged by a two kilometer staircase, all I had to do was see some of the elderly Chinese stolidly making their way up and I was reinvigorated. The peak had a shrine to the Yellow Emperor and his most important wife who by legend taught Chinese women to make silk.
We lunched at a place that, I was told, was once an old peasant home. In Chinese style we split into different rooms where eight people were seated at a round table with a lazy susan. The usual cascade of dishes appeared, starting with delicious fried vegetable balls and continuing with a couple of green salads, a cold noodle salad with shredded carrots, buns, fish, meats, vegetable dishes, mixed mushrooms, sweet potatoes, scrambled eggs with wild mushrooms, a kind of tortilla which we filled with any of the above.  I stopped counting the dishes at 16 but there were more. Each one was new stimulus for commentary and critique. Soups always come last. The Chinese believe they help digestion, and for this meal we had three, fish, chicken, and noodle.
Our afternoon destination was the shrine of Huangdi in Xinzheng, a large plaza dedicated to the legendary first emperor. Workers were busy getting the place ready for a huge festival coming up. The square with the image of the emperor was closed for construction. One of the most important elements of life in China is guanxi which basically means connections. It's the same as America, adding in networks, pull, and having a friend in the right place.  An administrator of the shrine was a former student of the Assistant Dean coordinating our group. Negotiations ensued with the local tour guide, the official descended from her office, the barriers were opened, and we made our way across the square to the giant image of Huangdi. We paid homage which means everyone posed for pictures in front of the statue (as I’ve previously written, the Chinese take to cameras like giddy American teenagers. We did group pictures everywhere we went on this trip).
Whew! When we pulled back into Kaifeng after a long day I was tired and a bit achey. I figured I’d drag myself back to the apartment but Yufeng suggested a massage at her favorite place. There ensued an hour of manipulated bliss which would have cost me all of 20 yuan had Yufeng not insisted on treating me (you have to be very adept in China to win the check). Massage fans, prepare to groan: the cost translates to $3.00. You can bet I’ll go back!More adventures to come. Stay tuned…