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It has already been a whole week since my classmates and I left Shanghai on a four-day trip to Jiangxi province. When I first arrived in Shanghai I tried to escape the preconceived notions I had, which were few, as I didn’t know much about China. Even still it is something that is impossible to escape no matter how much you know or don’t know. Despite this, I still feel very positive about how I integrated my first month in China with what I understood and with what I didn’t, without too much noticeable culture shock.
This was able to occur for several reasons. I like to think that it is in part simply in my personality. Since I was eleven years old I’ve actively put myself into situations where I’m different and away from my home. And so to a certain extent I feel that I’ve developed my own mechanisms in dealing with being in a new culture or environment. The other reason is how similar Shanghai is to what I already know.
It’s definitely China. There’s no doubt about that. The people are different. The food is different. The language is different. But it’s also Shanghai: incredibly western, incredibly friendly to foreigners, easily accessible, brimming with raging capitalism, and despite frequent warnings about cleanliness, it’s no dirtier than Philadelphia in my own, admittedly biased, opinion. All of these things combined make it easy to ignore thoughts of communism or semi-authoritarianism.
Jiangxi province is not Shanghai. During the trip it was something I was constantly facing, both directly and indirectly. On the busses, I wasn’t interacting actively with China but passively, watching the scenery and people zip past the window on seemingly empty stretches of road. And while I slept, listened to music, stared out the window or chatted with friends, in the back of mind I was constantly processing what I had just seen or what I was currently seeing. It was these one to two hour periods of time that really defined what the trip was for me. Without it I might have just found myself in sensory overload lacking the time and energy to get a grip on what I was witnessing.
Jinggangshan (井冈山) was our first stop. Looking back on the trip as a whole it was a great place to start. As we drove into the city, everyone seemed to be from somewhere else. Tour busses and giant plastic torches lined the streets. It wasn’t quite what I imagined “the Cradle of the Chinese Revolution,” would look like. And even as I write that I once again find myself realizing I really had no idea what to expect.
The people on the streets were a mix of Chinese tourists and locals, who for all intents and purposes seemed to be doing rather well—if not thriving for such small town—off of both tourist money and I imagine government money.
After the other cities we visited it is very apparent that Jinggangshan is especially lucky to be such an historic city. For such a small town, which seemed to have no actual industry besides tourism, to so well off and be as well maintained as it was is pretty incredible.
What I found to be most interesting, and have noticed other places as well, is the Chinese’s love of lining their museums and/or tourist locations with pictures. Even in Shanghai it often seems as though they care little for the history itself and more about the idea of it. This struck me as being especially interesting for such an important place in communist history.
Walking through the museum in Jinggangshan there was hardly any textual narrative about the town’s importance. The walls were packed with photos or painted images of important men and women (mostly men).
Given my lack of knowledge about China I imagine that I’m reaching. But here it goes. It’s clear that China has a strong sense of self. It’s apparent even when looking at how the Chinese name their country, 中国 or center country. But recently, over the past several hundred years, history has not been kind to China and repeatedly it has found itself being the loser in situations. Whether it be the collapse of the Republic after Sun Yat-sen, or under the brutal rule of the Japanese, or during the Cultural Revolution, it seems as though China simply can’t catch a break.
The lack of text in the museums made me think that perhaps writing it down locks the event too solidly into history, even when it’s something positive. When it’s written it’s too easy to see what came before and after. Moving directly from Mao’s great victory to the years of hardship, domestic unrest, and death. Providing photos and images rather than text, allows for it remain obscured to a certain extent while still being specific.
Despite the obscurity and vagueness in the museums everyone was there for one reason. I was able to talk to one man during my time in Jinggangshan. He was standing off to the side waiting for the rest of his party to finish taking their photos. Like many of the Chinese I have met he was very friendly and willing to take some time to help me with my homework assignment. He helped me figure out the characters for Mao Zedong and wrote down where he was from. He laughed at the final question, which was “why are you here in Jinggangshan,” and simply wrote, “for the 90th anniversary of the communist party.”
There was simply no other reason to be there. Despite all the hardship and difficulty, the Communist Party has made China strong and pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty.
The next few cities passed in blur of sweat, running around and bus rides. It was the last city that put a good book end on the trip for me. Yingtan (鹰潭), where we slept our third and final night, has a population of a little over a million, which is fairly small by China standards.
This city had a very similar feel to Shanghai despite the huge difference in size. Unlike the previous city Jiujiang, Yingtan had a positive and hopeful feel to it. Even after eleven p.m. (when almost everything shuts down) there were still people wandering around buying street food and sitting down outside of small restaurants for a couple of beers.
My friend and I wandered around Yingtan till the very early hours of the morning. We ended up in a neighborhood that didn’t seem to be the greatest. Though at two-thirty a.m. it’s often difficult to tell.
The streets were deserted and silent. We rounded a corner and were faced with yet another street kao rou place, which seem to dot every Chinese city. There were around twenty people all loudly enjoying the food and company. Our stomachs waking up for breakfast caused us to eye the food that had likely been sitting out since early evening the day before. We walked about 30 feet past it planning on going back to our hotel.
We stopped and looked at each other. Some of our best experiences in China have been at these random gatherings of people and food. So we turned back and within minutes we had gathered a small group of Yingtan locals around us. And despite only knowing about 180 words of Chinese and them knowing only a handful of English words we were able to have an interesting conversation filled with lots of gesturing.
The young waiter, twenty-two years old, asked us about the price of things in America. We told him the exchange rate was 6.5 RMB to 1 USD. His face fell a little with that information. We asked him if he liked Yingtan. “Bu xihuan,” he responded quickly. His reasons were interesting if only because of what he thought the solution was. There were too many people, he said, and not enough work. He gestured to the people behind him.
“Where do you want to go?” We asked. Shanghai he answered. More people, more work, more money. We tried to explain to him that Shanghai wasn’t perfect. There were plenty of people in Shanghai who lived hard lives but he was emphatic that Shanghai was where he wanted to be.
He stood up and left us for a while and was quickly replaced by a woman in her thirties, likely a prostitute, who asked us where we were from and what we were doing here in China. After that brief conversation she gave us her number and paid for our drinks, hopped on a motorcycle with two men and drove off.
Again it was only a few minutes alone before we had company, two older men, mid 40’s, both overweight and with their shirts off and smoking cigarettes. The waiter came and sat across from them and we asked them the same questions. They didn’t want to leave they said. They had jobs. They liked the city. But also their family was there and that seemed to be the biggest reason. It wasn’t long after that they started packing up the tables. We bid our friends goodbye and thanked them for talking with us.
That hour-long conversation stands out vividly in my mind. Sitting at a table my friend sitting across from me. The sad face of the waiter to my left looking off into the corner while one of the older men talked about why he didn’t want to leave with his friend nodding his head in agreement next to him. It was such a clear display of what many Chinese feel today and how they live their lives. Throw in the prostitute, who is now one of millions of women working in China following the collapse of the strict Communist morality that reigned under Mao, it is yet another sign of how much China has changed in twenty years. The country peasants want to move to the city and the urban workers want to move to bigger cities, all in search of a better standard of living. In a societal climate where the lao bai xing are all searching for greener grass in bigger cities it will be very interesting to see whether the Chinese government is capable providing at the rate that the people expect.
