China Contrasts

April 3, 2009
a joint effort

Here’s the latest episode in our travelogue as we make our way around the globe. Our most recent stops were China and Japan. We arrived in Hong Kong on Sunday, March 29, a cold, misty morning for us after a month of tropical weather. Hong Kong is one of the most beautiful ports in the world; its sheltered geography and ease of access explains its centuries-old prominence in international commerce.

Today, under Chinese rule, it is a very modern, vibrant city. We were berthed in Kowloon, right next to the Star Ferry line that shuttles commuters from Kowloon, on the mainland, to Hong Kong Island. We stepped off the ship into a very upscale mall of luxury brand boutiques, with a four-star hotel anchoring the shops. Our first day was not free for the usual tourist exploration. The president of the University of Virginia, John Casteen, was in Hong Kong to meet the ship as our representative for announcement of a joint venture between Semester At Sea and the C. Y. Tung Foundation. C. Y. Tung founded the Oriental Overseas Cargo Shipping Company, a major international shipping company. He was a prominent benefactor of Semester At Sea. C. Y. Tung passed on, leaving his two sons, C. H. and C. C., to continue the family business. C. H. has become a very powerful figure in contemporary China. When China resumed control of Hong Kong in 1997 after 156 years of British rule, C. H. was chosen to be the first Executive of Hong Kong and was subsequently elected to a second term. C.C. is the C.E.O. of O.O.C.S. (a terse, but information-laden string of acronyms, don’t you think?). On our first day in Hong Kong, Georgia and I were part of a group of 50, mostly Chinese, people invited by C. H. and C.C. for lunch at the Ocean Club, their home for entertaining clients and dignitaries. Ocean Club is situated on Deep Water Bay, next to Repulse Bay, on the south side of Hong Kong Island. Imagine having all the money in the world and an eye for spectacular sea views where you might build a luxurious home – that is Ocean Club. The lunch was extravagant and speeches were made. We traveled there and back in a chauffeured limousine minivan with John Casteen. That night, we held a banquet aboard the M.V. Explorer for selected Chinese guests, Semester At Sea VIPs, and the UVA family on the ship. This hullabaloo was all part of the celebrations surrounding announcement of a new joint Semester At Sea – C. H. Tung Foundation Program in Sino-U.S. Relations that will sponsor Chinese faculty and students in future voyages.

Reggie with President Casteen and Dan and Anne Kinney who are shipboard faculty from the University of Virginia.

The next day, Monday, March 30, Georgia, Jackson, Jon Kastendiek, Sarah Swank, and I set out to explore Hong Kong. We took the Star Ferry over to Hong Kong Island and the peak tram up to the top of Victoria Peak for a grand view of the spectacular surroundings. We then had lunch over on the south side of the island at a commercial district called Stanley.

This photo was taken from The Peak in Hong Kong. If you look very closely you can see the MV Explorer with its bright blue hull, docked in the Harbor below.

We returned to the ship, got our luggage, and took a taxi out to Hong Kong International Airport for a flight on China Southern Airlines to Guilin, China. (Guilin is pronounced “Gwey-lin”). “Gui” is the Chinese word for osmanthus trees and “lin” is forest. These trees flower in the fall and the tiny blossoms are very fragrant and are used to make tea and liquor. Guilin is in Guangxi province. Guangxi is home to the Zhuang people, the largest minority in China. (The largest ethnic group in China (most of its people) is the Han.) We arrived after an hour’s flight on an Airbus 319 and were met at the airport by our China Highlights tour guide, Lifang Lu, a 27-year old English major, and our driver, Mr. Wang. Lifang Lu uses the English name “Anne”. Our vehicle is a 9-passenger minivan made in China by the Jin Sheng (“Golden Prosperity”) auto company. One of the first Chinese expressions we learned from Anne was “mah mah hu hu”, literally “horse horse tiger tiger”, but actually an idiom meaning “so-so”. She used it in reference to the food at our hotel, the Guilin Eva Inn. Anne took us to the hotel to drop off our bags and then to a ‘walking street’ or pedestrian-mall type avenue, where we had a dinner of chicken with noodles, sort of like Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, plus the local beer, The tab for the five of us was 45 Rinmenbi (a word that translates literally as “the People’s currency”). The units for Rinmenbi (RMB) are given in yuans. One RMB = 1 yuan. One U.S. dollar equals 7.4 yuan (RMB), so dinner and drinks for 5 cost about $6.

Tuesday, March 31 dawned misty and foggy. We had breakfast on the top floor of our hotel, with views of the surrounding city and countryside. The breakfast offerings centered around typical Chinese fare, of course, which meant rice, dumplings, soups, and eggs, though the coffee wasn’t too bad. Our day was centered around a boat cruise down the Lijiang (Li River), the real tourist attraction for the Guilin area. The Lijiang is a branch of the Pearl River, which runs down to meet the sea at Hong Kong. This region of China is characterized by gumdrop-shaped karst mountains, and drawings of these hills are a prominent theme in Chinese art. A rendition of these hills adorns the back of the 20 Yuan RMB note. The boat trip is an ideal way to travel among them and enjoy their beauty, which we did, even though the day grew more foggy and rainy with each passing hour. At the end of our four-hour, 50-km trip down the river was Yangshuo, a small town that had been transformed into a tourist market, with coffee shops, souvenir stands of all sorts, silk merchants, and assorted other goods, including knock-off watches. I got two knock-off Rolexes, one for Jackson and one for me, for 100 RMB. We also got a great cup of espresso in Yangshuo.

This man is wearing a coat of feathers and is holding a stick with cormorants perched at either end. In this area cormorants are used for fishing. The cormorants have rings around their necks to keep them from swallowing the fish they catch and one of their legs is tethered to the boat by a string so they cannot get away. When a fish is caught, it is pulled out of the cormorants beak and deposited in a bucket. We watched a demonstration of this process and were amused by a cormorant that kept climbing into his owner's bucket to reclaim the fruit of his efforts.















Above: Each tour boat that plies the Li River has a full galley on board. They served a huge buffet of various Chinese dishes including one offering of snake wine which we did not try. This wine was fermenting in a large jar which also contained a pickled snake.

Above right: We found entrepreneurs in Asia to be quite resourceful when it came to marketing their wares. The man in this photo is no exception. He paddled this small bamboo raft up to the swiftly moving tour boat, tied up and is now selling curios to tourists located on the bottom deck of the tour boat.

That night, we had dinner at a popular Guilinese restaurant that was full of local people. The restaurant has hundreds of different dishes, and patrons walk around with a small card, point to a dish they want, and waiters write it down on the small card. After you have made your selections, you return to your table and the dishes are delivered. The substance of many of the dishes was a mystery not solved by inspection, but we ate them anyway and they were tasty. Some were rather spicy. Jackson made a big hit with the young girl waitresses when I sent him to select some desserts, and his confusion and cuteness amused the girls to the point where they were doubled over with giggles. There is not much more delightful than a gaggle of giggling Asian girls. The dinner tab for Georgia, Jackson, and me was 55 RMB. After dinner, we rushed over to the Lijiang Theatre to see the Dragon’s Nationality dance performance of a series of ethnic minority Chinese groups doing their traditional dances. It was an extraordinary performance, with the added highlight that the dancers dragged Jon up on the stage from his aisle seat and into their performance. Jon was a big hit as the reluctant, smiling, round-eyed hoofer. The dragon is a recurring symbol in Chinese culture. The Chinese view the dragon as their ancestor. Any important thing has a dragon associated with it. Emperors were believed to be the sons of dragons. Today the dragon remains a key male symbol and the snake is considered a dragon. The female symbol is the phoenix.

The next morning (Wednesday, March 31), we were driven to the nearby ‘pile of silk’ or ‘silk brocade’ mountain, one of the gumdrop hills in Guilin. Guilin has two rivers running through it – the Lijiang (or Li River) and the Peach Blossom River. We climbed up the many stone steps, stopping to enjoy the views. It is a big tourist attraction, and many Chinese tourists were there. Quite a few of them not only wanted to take our photo, but to be photographed with us. Indeed, it was a common occurrence for us in China to have people photographing us or asking to be in photographs with us.

We surmised that Jon's popularity in part might have been due to his stage debut on the previous evening.

We then visited Reed Flute Cave. As you might expect, given the karst landscape around Guilin and its fundamental limestone composition, there are a number of caverns in the area, the largest of which has been transformed into a tourist attraction. China has really transformed the Guilin region into a tourist mecca, with this place being a Chinese version of Luray Caverns in Virginia, only, quite frankly, better. It is easily as large and as colorfully illuminated.

In the afternoon, we went to Jiangtou village, a small and ancient village out in the country about an hour’s drive north of Guilin. The wooden structures there are 800 years old. The town was founded by Zhou Dunyi, a poet-philosopher during the Song dynasty. Many of China’s leaders trace their origins to Jiangtou, including Zhou Enlai (known better to us as Chou En Lai), ally of Mao Zedong (Chairman Mao) and the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China, from 1949 to 1976. It was a genuine glimpse of pre-modern, pre-autocratic capitalism China, a look at peasant life in a village set among rice paddies and dirt lanes.

Our last day in Guilin (Thursday, April 2), we visited the Guilin zoo to see the pandas. Goodbyes to Ann, our guide, were poignant. We all fell in love with her. She was sweet, patient, smart, and pleasant, with a charming sense of humor. She taught me the meaning of a number of Chinese characters. I constantly pelted her with “What does this one mean?” questions and she answered them patiently. One of my favorites is the Chinese character for “art” – it composed of two other Chinese characters, one meaning “beauty”, the other, “mathematics”. Thought provoking, n’est pas?

We were dropped off at the Guilin airport and caught a 1:15 PM flight to Shanghai aboard China Eastern Airlines, arriving about 3:30 PM. The M.V. Explorer had sailed from Hong Kong to Shanghai while we were off in Guilin, and we took a taxi from the airport to the ship. It took a bit of a wrangle to convince the Shanghai taxi driver and his airport colleagues that all 5 of us were used to cramming into one car with our luggage. After a few blocks, he stopped the car to get out and look at his tires. When he got back in, I said “flat?” and he looked at me in consternation, shook his head, and then laughed and said “yes”.

The formal announcement of the Semester At Sea – C. Y. Tung Foundation Program in Sino-U.S. Relations was made that night at a very large banquet aboard our ship, with C. H. and C. C. Tung in attendance. I gave a brief talk on the Jefferson’s interest in public education and the founding of the University of Virginia,the Academical Village as a model for Semester At Sea, and global education. Afterwards, C. H. Tung came up and gave me a big smile and shook my hand warmly.

Friday, April 3, I had a scheduled Faculty-Directed Practicum (FDP) for my nutrition class, and about 30 of us met up with Shengping Zhang (“Ping”), my teaching assistant in BIOL 106: Nutrition for several years. We took a chartered bus and Ping led us through several local Shanghai markets, where students took notes on the many items available so they could write up their field reports. We all then had lunch at the South Beauty restaurant, on the 10th floor of a modern building on the east side of the Hungpo River, which runs through Shanghai. The Hungpo is a tributary of the Yangtze River, one of the two great rivers in China (the other is the Yellow River). It was a magnificent, though very expensive meal, with an array of more than a dozen different dishes of all sorts of food. After returning to the ship by bus, we gave Ping a tour of the M.V. Explorer, and then she, Georgia, Jackson, and I had a last few hours to visit one of the shopping districts of Shanghai, where I bought some red silk lanterns. The M.V. Explorer and us departed for Japan at 2000.

Two days later, on Monday, April 6,we arrived in Kobe, Japan.