Journal - 09/24/2000

JOURNAL FOR 09/24/00

adoption site | contacting me by e-mail | Jiangmen main journal page | home page | Meredith's page

<== Last episode, our hero...
In our next thrilling adventure ==>

(09/24/00)
Jim: This is being written several days later than it took place - on the 28th, to be exact. Both Meredith and I have been under the weather, and it's been slower getting this out that I would have liked. Bear with us....

Jim: I want to make something clear that maybe isn't coming through clearly; the sort of thing that happened in Qingping is not universal, but it does happen. The picture to the left is of a few Chinese checking out the Babies on our trip through the Chen Clan Academy, and it shows the other side of the coin.

They always want to know Meredith's gender; one person asked me point blank how much trouble it was to do the adoption. When I told him two years, an incredible amount of paperwork, and between $15-20,000 US, he gasped. He couldn't understand how anyone could spend that much for such a thing....

Most of the people in Guangzhou, when we are out and about, who are likely to check out Meredith are women - middle aged and younger. Of course, not knowing any Cantonese to speak of, I have no idea as to what they're saying to her. Mostly the same sort of oh, you cute baby stuff that we'd say. We have caught a couple of 'cute baby' and 'lucky baby' comments.

The biggest problem in regard to travelling in Guangzhou, to be frank, is the steam heat. What it is like in a normal summer, I can't imagine. Since Guangzhou is subtropical, there's a constant hot haze. If you get out, out of the air-conditioning or away from a fan, you boil in your own sweat.

The first part of the day was spent in a trip to the 'Chen Family Academy'. Back around 1890, a wealthy trading clan in Guangzhou set up what can best be described as a central palace for the clan's family undertakings. Shrine to the ancestors, and special central family meeting place, place to educate the young in family policy and proceedures, you name it. Through war and revolution, essentially all that remains are the actual buildings. Most of the rest has been put together from this and that and scraped together or built over the last twenty years. The rest - well, there are two tablets left of all the the ancestor tablets that used to line the main reverence altar; there must have hundreds and hundreds, from the old photos.

The picture to the right is of one of the Doorguard Gods stuffing his pike into my back; these were on the inside of the main door coming into the plaza. A lot of the buildings and courtyards are very beautiful, and no descriptions that I can give really do them justice. Check out the photo travelogue for a really clear idea of what I'm talking about at http://www.marmotgraphics.com/jiangmen/0924.html for a really good idea of what things looked like.

In particular, check the travel photos to get the intricate detail of the place. As I said before, between the Japanese invasion inWord War II, the Chinese Civil War, the Cultural Revolution, assorted looting, etc., the only thing that is still here are the actual buildings, but they are magnificently opulent in a Chinese style. The wall panels everywhere are complex ebony carvings showing scenes from the family history and classic history. The roof tiles are incredibly opulent (but badly faded from age) scenes of dragons, monsters, fish, nobles, and so on.

This is the China I had hoped to see something of; it certainly was closer to that than the faded glories of the Six Banyan Temple yesterday. By the way, both cost 10 yuan ($1.20) to get in; enough to discourage the casual visitor in the poorer end of Guangzhou. However, it had a couple of problems.

First was that (as I said before), Guangzhou is very hot. We all sweltered and boiled alive in the terrible heat, and it was hard to pay attention to things where you (and your baby) are that uncomfortable. Shasha tried to move us through the exhibits at a good clip, giving us a brief idea of the place.

Second was the place was half exhibit of 'folk arts', half sales-floor. In truth, this was less of a example of the specific treasures that were in this building at one time, and more a museum of folk arts of the province that is housed in a building of some opulence and majesty - and that examples of that art are sold off to tourists at stiff prices. There's nice stuff there - silk rugs, paintings, bone carvings, jade, etc...but I got tired quickly of constatnly being shilled to buy things throughout the museum. The picture of the horses is agood example - note the 1800 Yuan price tagon it.

They also had example furnishings of the period - study for a scholar, a spinster's room, and a married couple's bedroom suite. This was not original to the site; it was scraped together from here and there, just like the other permanent exhibits.

Again, you have to realize that during the Cultural Revolution (1967-76), China basically declared anything old as bad, and there was a massive national campaign to destroy it. If you didn't destroy your own old stuff, including family keepsakes, the RedGuard would raid your house and destroy everything at once and mark you down as 'politically unacceptable'. The scars of that period are everywhere in China; the major cultural artifacts of the past simply no longer exist for the most part, unless someone politically powerful managed to save them. Or they were well hidden. And more than a few that are still around aren't being maintained well, like the ceramic painted roof ornaments here.

As regular readers of my journal are aware, I've been spending a lot of time in recent months reading up on Chinese culture and history, and studying the Chinese language. So I came here hoping to see more of the Hanwen, the culture of the Han Chinese. What I have seen so far is an odd mixture of the old and new, and a problem in bridging the two. There are big gaps, and those are the ones that I'm trying to understand better.

Most of the Chinese I saw in the Chen Clan Academy were older folks; it feels to me as if the younger folks don't care as much for the older ways and traditions, and are more part of a quasi-Western-MTV sort of life, especially the better off younger people. It just saddens me to think of all of the old that was destroyed, and how much of it is going away forever. Or was destroyed by human caprice and fear.

Many of the adopting families in the group got their babies from an orphanage in the city of Zhaoqing, about a hour-plus to the West. The town is known since classical times for their production of these - inkstones, used for seals and the like; better gift shops carry them for $40-$200. A huge one was at the site, about eight feet long and four across.

As we left, we had more problems with people making fun of us and staring. Shasha waved down taxis for us; some were going on to the SixBanyan Temple, some were going back to the hotel, and we and a few others were going on to the China Hotel and the Hard Rock Cafe of Guangzhou. As wewere goingtoward a taxi, a mini-minivan pulled up dressed up like a Armored Car (a la Brinks) and armed guards shot out of it, waving their guns around. Thery were headed to a nearby subway entrance (probably to make some sort of pickup) and scared us somewhat with the gunplay.

In any event, after a careening taxi ride, we endedup at the very nice and posh China Hotel. It struck me as more of a 'business' hotel than the White Swan, but it wasn't nearly as big. We quickly found our way downstairs to the HardRockCafe, and had lunch with the other folks in our party.

The food was pretty good, and the shopping in the very nice stores at the China Hotel was fabulous. Susan dropped some cash on some very nice silk Chinese jackets and various other things as presents. Susan aslo bought a numberof T-shirts for some teenage kids who are Meredith's Godmother's children - a green fire-breathing Dragon on a black background. At this point, after a brief foray up to the small bookstore in the hotel for maps, we said goodbye to our travelling companions and walked over to the nearby Dongfang Hotel.

We had a very unpleasant experience in front of a local McDonalds (they have a half-dozen in Guangzhou) that we had to walk past between the two hotels. We were besieged by beggars.

The worst were a set of kids - a dozen or more from about six to eleven - with roses. They'd drop a flower in the baby's stroller regardless of my comments in Chinese to "take it away, we don't want it" - and they'd just smile and keep going with us, watching us. When we got directly in front of the place, right in front of two middle aged women who were acting as their fagins, they all demanded money LOUDLY. Now. I kept on exclaiming angrily in Chinese for them to get lost, I didn't want the damn flowers, and I wasn't going to pay them anything. There were other beggars, including old men, out front, hitting on the people going in and out of the place.

They started being really over the line; raising a loud PAY US PAY US stink, patting Susan on the behind, you name it. I was getting furious. At that point, Susan turned around and started taking pictures, and they backed off, taking the flowers out of the baby carriage as they went. The only thing that really stopped them cold fron the rude comments and following us were the security people in the lot in front of the Dongfang, who they were not about to mess with.

Side note: I'm a very generous person, and a soft touch of sorts. But you never want to demand charity out of me; I don't don't respond well. In the picture above, you'll see a couple of the kids on the left edge of the picture, holding roses.

One in the Dongfang, Susan and I spent an hour or so digging around in the many shops in the hotel for what we wanted - baby clothes and shoes for Meredith (Susan) and books and maps (Jim). Finally found two bookstores in the hotel; got a very nice set of atlases of the province for dirt cheap, more cheap maps, and some other odds and ends, especially a good cheap English->Chinese dictionary. What can I say? I'm predictable. But stuff printed in China for the Chinese is very cheap. I paid $14 for a dictionary that would have cost me $40 if I could find it in the US, and Chinese dictionaries that are any count are hard to find. Maps at a fifth of their cost, atlases at about the same.

I had an interesting time trying to find a map of the City of Jiangmen, Meredith's birthplace. The owner of the main bookshop was Cantonese, and understood some Mandarin. I understood virtually no Cantonese, and little Mandarin. However, I managed to get across what I needed, and she was a colossal help, fining me some cheap atlases that I treasure.

Note: Any decent maps in China are in Chinese. Anything in English stinks for detail. You're better off getting the Chinese map and trying to translate stuff.

The shopping there was very good for both of us, and I'd recommend the shopping there (a maze of very small shops in a internal mall in the Dongfang) to anyone. Lots of clothing stores; we bought virtually no clothing for ourselves because it's darn hard to find stuff our size in the US, let alone China.

After getting lost in the maze while trying to find an easy way downstairs with a stroller, we finally got in a taxi, went back to the hotel, and collapsed. All of us were hot and tired, and we got a meal delivered from Danny's Bagels.

Susan started to notice before I did that Meredith was starting to get very distressed - and we quickly figured out what was going on. To spare you the grosser details, Meredith was finally ending her seven-day constipation streak, very painfully. She cried, and she grunted and gasped. Susan essentially coached it out of her, much like you'd coach a mother giving birth, and I was shocked and dismayed to see the results. Monstrously large and rock-solid. Meredith, who had been in decent spirits before this, was bleeding where this thing had split her open slightly, and she shuddered and gasped and fell into a deep sleep, utterly exhausted.

We have no idea what caused this. During the day, we'd noticed that her usual voracious, demandign appetite was slowing down; that moring, she'd lost breakfast all over Susan, and her poor tummy just bulged. Our guess is that she developed her patterns in the orphanage- eat it quickly and like it's going out of style, cause you don't know when your next meal will be.

That's going to sound horribly towards the operators of the Social Welfare Institute, and I don't mean it to be. She probably was fedon a strict schedule, and with a limited staff, they had to get the babies to eat like they meant it. The trick now is to teach her that she can trust us - that she will get food when she needs it. (We saw an older child who was being adopted, at the farewell dinner, that was behaving similarly.)

JOURNAL FOR 09/24/00
adoption site \| contacting me by e-mail \| Jiangmen	main journal page \| home page \| Meredith's page
<== Last episode, our hero...	In our next thrilling adventure ==>
(09/24/00) Jim: This is being written several days later than it took place - on the 28th, to be exact. Both Meredith and I have been under the weather, and it's been slower getting this out that I would have liked. Bear with us.... Jim: I want to make something clear that maybe isn't coming through clearly; the sort of thing that happened in Qingping is not universal, but it does happen. The picture to the left is of a few Chinese checking out the Babies on our trip through the Chen Clan Academy, and it shows the other side of the coin. They always want to know Meredith's gender; one person asked me point blank how much trouble it was to do the adoption. When I told him two years, an incredible amount of paperwork, and between $15-20,000 US, he gasped. He couldn't understand how anyone could spend that much for such a thing.... Most of the people in Guangzhou, when we are out and about, who are likely to check out Meredith are women - middle aged and younger. Of course, not knowing any Cantonese to speak of, I have no idea as to what they're saying to her. Mostly the same sort of oh, you cute baby stuff that we'd say. We have caught a couple of 'cute baby' and 'lucky baby' comments. The biggest problem in regard to travelling in Guangzhou, to be frank, is the steam heat. What it is like in a normal summer, I can't imagine. Since Guangzhou is subtropical, there's a constant hot haze. If you get out, out of the air-conditioning or away from a fan, you boil in your own sweat. The first part of the day was spent in a trip to the 'Chen Family Academy'. Back around 1890, a wealthy trading clan in Guangzhou set up what can best be described as a central palace for the clan's family undertakings. Shrine to the ancestors, and special central family meeting place, place to educate the young in family policy and proceedures, you name it. Through war and revolution, essentially all that remains are the actual buildings. Most of the rest has been put together from this and that and scraped together or built over the last twenty years. The rest - well, there are two tablets left of all the the ancestor tablets that used to line the main reverence altar; there must have hundreds and hundreds, from the old photos. The picture to the right is of one of the Doorguard Gods stuffing his pike into my back; these were on the inside of the main door coming into the plaza. A lot of the buildings and courtyards are very beautiful, and no descriptions that I can give really do them justice. Check out the photo travelogue for a really clear idea of what I'm talking about at http://www.marmotgraphics.com/jiangmen/0924.html for a really good idea of what things looked like. In particular, check the travel photos to get the intricate detail of the place. As I said before, between the Japanese invasion inWord War II, the Chinese Civil War, the Cultural Revolution, assorted looting, etc., the only thing that is still here are the actual buildings, but they are magnificently opulent in a Chinese style. The wall panels everywhere are complex ebony carvings showing scenes from the family history and classic history. The roof tiles are incredibly opulent (but badly faded from age) scenes of dragons, monsters, fish, nobles, and so on. This is the China I had hoped to see something of; it certainly was closer to that than the faded glories of the Six Banyan Temple yesterday. By the way, both cost 10 yuan ($1.20) to get in; enough to discourage the casual visitor in the poorer end of Guangzhou. However, it had a couple of problems. First was that (as I said before), Guangzhou is very hot. We all sweltered and boiled alive in the terrible heat, and it was hard to pay attention to things where you (and your baby) are that uncomfortable. Shasha tried to move us through the exhibits at a good clip, giving us a brief idea of the place. Second was the place was half exhibit of 'folk arts', half sales-floor. In truth, this was less of a example of the specific treasures that were in this building at one time, and more a museum of folk arts of the province that is housed in a building of some opulence and majesty - and that examples of that art are sold off to tourists at stiff prices. There's nice stuff there - silk rugs, paintings, bone carvings, jade, etc...but I got tired quickly of constatnly being shilled to buy things throughout the museum. The picture of the horses is agood example - note the 1800 Yuan price tagon it. They also had example furnishings of the period - study for a scholar, a spinster's room, and a married couple's bedroom suite. This was not original to the site; it was scraped together from here and there, just like the other permanent exhibits. Again, you have to realize that during the Cultural Revolution (1967-76), China basically declared anything old as bad, and there was a massive national campaign to destroy it. If you didn't destroy your own old stuff, including family keepsakes, the RedGuard would raid your house and destroy everything at once and mark you down as 'politically unacceptable'. The scars of that period are everywhere in China; the major cultural artifacts of the past simply no longer exist for the most part, unless someone politically powerful managed to save them. Or they were well hidden. And more than a few that are still around aren't being maintained well, like the ceramic painted roof ornaments here. As regular readers of my journal are aware, I've been spending a lot of time in recent months reading up on Chinese culture and history, and studying the Chinese language. So I came here hoping to see more of the Hanwen, the culture of the Han Chinese. What I have seen so far is an odd mixture of the old and new, and a problem in bridging the two. There are big gaps, and those are the ones that I'm trying to understand better. Most of the Chinese I saw in the Chen Clan Academy were older folks; it feels to me as if the younger folks don't care as much for the older ways and traditions, and are more part of a quasi-Western-MTV sort of life, especially the better off younger people. It just saddens me to think of all of the old that was destroyed, and how much of it is going away forever. Or was destroyed by human caprice and fear. Many of the adopting families in the group got their babies from an orphanage in the city of Zhaoqing, about a hour-plus to the West. The town is known since classical times for their production of these - inkstones, used for seals and the like; better gift shops carry them for $40-$200. A huge one was at the site, about eight feet long and four across. As we left, we had more problems with people making fun of us and staring. Shasha waved down taxis for us; some were going on to the SixBanyan Temple, some were going back to the hotel, and we and a few others were going on to the China Hotel and the Hard Rock Cafe of Guangzhou. As wewere goingtoward a taxi, a mini-minivan pulled up dressed up like a Armored Car (a la Brinks) and armed guards shot out of it, waving their guns around. Thery were headed to a nearby subway entrance (probably to make some sort of pickup) and scared us somewhat with the gunplay. In any event, after a careening taxi ride, we endedup at the very nice and posh China Hotel. It struck me as more of a 'business' hotel than the White Swan, but it wasn't nearly as big. We quickly found our way downstairs to the HardRockCafe, and had lunch with the other folks in our party. The food was pretty good, and the shopping in the very nice stores at the China Hotel was fabulous. Susan dropped some cash on some very nice silk Chinese jackets and various other things as presents. Susan aslo bought a numberof T-shirts for some teenage kids who are Meredith's Godmother's children - a green fire-breathing Dragon on a black background. At this point, after a brief foray up to the small bookstore in the hotel for maps, we said goodbye to our travelling companions and walked over to the nearby Dongfang Hotel. We had a very unpleasant experience in front of a local McDonalds (they have a half-dozen in Guangzhou) that we had to walk past between the two hotels. We were besieged by beggars. The worst were a set of kids - a dozen or more from about six to eleven - with roses. They'd drop a flower in the baby's stroller regardless of my comments in Chinese to "take it away, we don't want it" - and they'd just smile and keep going with us, watching us. When we got directly in front of the place, right in front of two middle aged women who were acting as their fagins, they all demanded money LOUDLY. Now. I kept on exclaiming angrily in Chinese for them to get lost, I didn't want the damn flowers, and I wasn't going to pay them anything. There were other beggars, including old men, out front, hitting on the people going in and out of the place. They started being really over the line; raising a loud PAY US PAY US stink, patting Susan on the behind, you name it. I was getting furious. At that point, Susan turned around and started taking pictures, and they backed off, taking the flowers out of the baby carriage as they went. The only thing that really stopped them cold fron the rude comments and following us were the security people in the lot in front of the Dongfang, who they were not about to mess with. Side note: I'm a very generous person, and a soft touch of sorts. But you never want to demand charity out of me; I don't don't respond well. In the picture above, you'll see a couple of the kids on the left edge of the picture, holding roses. One in the Dongfang, Susan and I spent an hour or so digging around in the many shops in the hotel for what we wanted - baby clothes and shoes for Meredith (Susan) and books and maps (Jim). Finally found two bookstores in the hotel; got a very nice set of atlases of the province for dirt cheap, more cheap maps, and some other odds and ends, especially a good cheap English->Chinese dictionary. What can I say? I'm predictable. But stuff printed in China for the Chinese is very cheap. I paid $14 for a dictionary that would have cost me $40 if I could find it in the US, and Chinese dictionaries that are any count are hard to find. Maps at a fifth of their cost, atlases at about the same. I had an interesting time trying to find a map of the City of Jiangmen, Meredith's birthplace. The owner of the main bookshop was Cantonese, and understood some Mandarin. I understood virtually no Cantonese, and little Mandarin. However, I managed to get across what I needed, and she was a colossal help, fining me some cheap atlases that I treasure. Note: Any decent maps in China are in Chinese. Anything in English stinks for detail. You're better off getting the Chinese map and trying to translate stuff. The shopping there was very good for both of us, and I'd recommend the shopping there (a maze of very small shops in a internal mall in the Dongfang) to anyone. Lots of clothing stores; we bought virtually no clothing for ourselves because it's darn hard to find stuff our size in the US, let alone China. After getting lost in the maze while trying to find an easy way downstairs with a stroller, we finally got in a taxi, went back to the hotel, and collapsed. All of us were hot and tired, and we got a meal delivered from Danny's Bagels. Susan started to notice before I did that Meredith was starting to get very distressed - and we quickly figured out what was going on. To spare you the grosser details, Meredith was finally ending her seven-day constipation streak, very painfully. She cried, and she grunted and gasped. Susan essentially coached it out of her, much like you'd coach a mother giving birth, and I was shocked and dismayed to see the results. Monstrously large and rock-solid. Meredith, who had been in decent spirits before this, was bleeding where this thing had split her open slightly, and she shuddered and gasped and fell into a deep sleep, utterly exhausted. We have no idea what caused this. During the day, we'd noticed that her usual voracious, demandign appetite was slowing down; that moring, she'd lost breakfast all over Susan, and her poor tummy just bulged. Our guess is that she developed her patterns in the orphanage- eat it quickly and like it's going out of style, cause you don't know when your next meal will be. That's going to sound horribly towards the operators of the Social Welfare Institute, and I don't mean it to be. She probably was fedon a strict schedule, and with a limited staff, they had to get the babies to eat like they meant it. The trick now is to teach her that she can trust us - that she will get food when she needs it. (We saw an older child who was being adopted, at the farewell dinner, that was behaving similarly.)