China Pt. 2: Henan Province

     I have a thing with public transportation. Don't ask me why. Maybe it's just the feeling I get when I think that the hundreds of other people sitting around me are all separate individuals, going to hundreds of different places to do hundreds of different things; yet they're all interconnected, everyone traveling together for however brief a time. Maybe it's because trains look really cool. Either way, for me there's a certain draw to taking public transit. Which is why when I found out that there was a bullet train that went from Beijing to where I was going to be staying in Henan Province, I got really excited. Little did I know, China's train system is not quite what it looks like from the photographs. Nothing in China is.

      The Beijing train station is the most hectic place I've ever been, which is saying a lot. There are little to no signs that are not in Chinese, and the tickets are half in Chinese and half in English, yet completely incomprehensible English. Somehow, the ticket had printed with my last name being “William” instead of Senn. As the security guard checked my ticket, passport and visa, I was thankful that he couldn't read English. Somehow we found our gate, and waited. There was one non-Chinese person that we could see in the entire seething mass of population. He was a German-born Brazilian who had an accent that I would have sworn was Australian. He was spending the summer backpacking around Asia. As the vast numbers of people began to descend the steps onto the platform, we bade goodbye. When we boarded the train, there was no seat unoccupied. In fact, some had set up portable folding chairs in the aisle ways.

      Speeding through China's abandoned towns and half-destroyed cities is unreal. The pallor of the air surrounded the buildings. Rows and rows of identical skyscrapers stand together in large groupings. Gray is the color of everything. Sickly rows of vegetables and rice paddies cover the rural landscape. Ancient pagodas and temples lie in disrepair near the rusty skyscraper forests. Eventually, we came to cross the Yellow River. It's unmistakable. The golden waters snaked along in every direction.

      Everyone in Beijing had told us that Zhengzhou(Pronounced Chen-Cho), Henan(Huh-Nan) Province was a small, rural city. What they had meant was that it was a city of 9 Million. A small rural city the size of New York. The train station was clean and modern, much more so than that of Beijing. The surrounding buildings were clean and modern looking, and it was obvious that aesthetic was something the city had really put a lot of effort into. Due to a confusion at the station, our guide had not been able to meet us there. Henan Province is one of “those” places, where non-Chinese people don't really end up. There are no major tourist attractions, it's far away from the nearest major city-center, and it is still one of China's most impoverished regions. Somehow, we communicated enough with a taxi driver to take us to the hotel where we had our reservations. We had decided to stay at a Holiday Inn, which was my mom's pick after I chose the courtyard alley hostel in Beijing. We noticed that certain cultural aspects were much different here. For instance, we left a tip at the restaurant where we had eaten dinner; it's not common in Chinese culture(It was actually illegal to tip up until the mid-90s), but in Beijing, even in the smaller, more out of the way businesses, it had been accepted without question. The waitress came running after us, screaming something in heavily accented Mandarin, handing us back our money. In Zhengzhou the natural language is Qin, a dialect of Old Mongolian, but as Mandarin is the government language, everyone in the cities speak it. Even in Beijing the accent is heavy. Every sentence is ended with a hard “AR” sound. My mom and I eventually dubbed Beijing Mandarin as Pirate Chinese.

      Crossing the street in Zhengzhou was no easy task. In fact, crossing the sidewalk alone was pretty difficult. Due to the difficulty of obtaining a car and drivers license, many citizens have taken to riding electric mopeds. The problem: it seems that there are little to no laws governing the traffic of electric mopeds. They can ride on the street, or on the sidewalk, in any direction, at any speed, with any number of people on them. Walking across the sidewalk involves advanced preparation, intense listening, very fast running, and lots of luck.

      When we first arrived at our hotel, we were surprised to find our guide waiting outside our room. She introduced herself as “Yo-Yo” which was pronounced Yuyu. It is customary for Chinese who study English in college to take an “American” name for themselves to use with foreigners. We had already met a man named Star, a girl called Apple, and several “Bobs” so we were surprised that she kept her actual name when she introduced herself as Yuyu. Or so we thought. A few days after we met her, she informed us that her Chinese name was Han-Wei, and Yo-Yo(Yuyu) was her American name. Yo-Yo was one of my favorite people I've ever met. Her laughter filled an entire room, and her smile beamed through the pall of the air. She lives in an apartment with her husband, daughter, and mother-in-law. She loves children, and at the time was trying to save up enough money to pay the government fee to have a second child.

"Transitions"

      Zhengzhou was clean and modern, to an extent. Once my mom commented to Yo-Yo that she thought it was more beautiful than Beijing. She replied something along the lines of “You cannot say that!” We weren't sure if she meant we couldn't really think her small town of 9 Million was more beautiful than Beijing's 23 Million, or if we were really not supposed to say that. Either way, we dropped the subject.

     The Zhengzhou Zoo was an entertaining place for a vegetarian who values animal rights. Turtles are kept in an open container, where people throw money on their backs for good luck. Some turtles are literally pasted in cash. You can go fishing in the pond, and keep your catch for 1 Yuan, or around 15 Cents US. Salamanders, gold fish, and turtles were all available for sale; inside containers shaped like Angry Birds. Our guide swore that the tusks on the elephant were fake, and that they had been removed by the government and sold. She also said that the tiger wasn't really making that sound, they were just playing a recording of it to make you want to go look at the tigers. There's a good chance she was right, it was China after all. And of course, we saw the pandas.

"Off the Beaten Path"

      We went to a cloth market outside the city. This was one of my favorite things we did in all of China, not because I wanted to buy cloth, but because we got a glimpse of “Old China.” But an Old China that's still living, and still a part of daily life. We were pretty far off the beaten path. Women sat in rows with foot-pedal sowing machines making clothing to order. Rows of zippers and bolts of silk hung over the dirt pathway. There I was, meandering through a cloth market in rural Henan Province. It felt surreal. Afterwards, our guide took us to a great food-street, where I bought some tofu stir fry, served in a plastic bag with chopsticks.

      The next day, we flew out of Henan, and took a 2 hour flight to Guangzhou, our last city we were to visit before flying home. We bade goodbye to Yo-Yo, and the small rural city of Zhengzhou. As our flight broke through the layer of haze, we saw a blue sky for the first time in nearly 2 weeks. I silently hoped that some day I'd be back in that airport, heading to a crazy little cloth market outside the city.