Lunar New Year in Zunyi

  Zunyi City, China
Wednesday, February 6, 2008

The balcony bursts

We seem under siege.

Blasts from all quarters rip colors into the chilly night sky. Flames shoot from upstairs windows and the ground is blood-red.

War above our apartments

Shop fronts and restaurants are deserted, the shutters pulled, the doors padlocked.

The water is shut off, inexplicably, mysteriously.

The town's train station, bus station, are crowded with throngs of people bundled up and huffing steam, wanting terribly to leave.

Unexpected blast

But who is attacking us?

It's not the locals, their blasts of firecrackers (Lit. "smoke flowers" in Chinese) are to scare away the evil spirits, not the slightly strange foreigners who have moved in downstairs. The cracker wrappers, always red, litter the ground in Rorschach patterns all over town.

Watching the Roman Candle

The barricaded shops are a product of the season-everyone's gone home to celebrate the holiday.

The water, though; the throngs, however, those are the direct effect of a different opponent: Nature.

Southern China, in which we still live, although we are now considerably farther north than where we were in Foshan, was hit this year with the most severe cold weather in the last half-century, according to the local news.

Even in Foshan, before we left, it was tremendously colder than it was last year.

My mother and father came from the United States right at the beginning of the cold snap. Even though they live in Alaska, in an area where the snow piles up enough to create Beth-high banks of snow, they spent their time in Foshan trying to devise new ways to keep warm.

My favorite: Dad used my long Mt. Emei walking stick to "toast" his jeans and our underwear over the gas-heated stove.

On the street

We were lucky, though, because we had somewhere to burn gas and bundle up.

Millions of travelers heading to distant provinces to celebrate the all-important Chinese New Year crowded transport hubs, stalled by snow and ice.  

There they waited, hundreds of thousands together, standing in front of the stations, hoping to buy tickets or simply use the tickets they'd already bought.  Station halls themselves quickly filled up, so these would-be travelers had to wait outside. In Guangzhou they stopped cars from going to within several blocks of the main train station.

Air travelers were also affected by the weather.

While we were waiting for our flight to Guiyang we watched a group of travelers who wanted to go to Hangzhou, and who had been waiting for more than a day for a flight to leave. When they heard a different flight to Hangzhou was leaving, and that they weren't going to be on it, they started to protest en masse. Security came in legion, but mostly waited while the travelers shouted and complained.
 
The unusually cold weather did us a good turn, however. We found that we were some of the only people venturing about Guizhou province as tourists, ensuring us a uniquely solitary experience at some of the major tourist attractions in the area.

Zunyi was also half-deserted, though you wouldn't have thought so from the crowd to get on the train at the Guiyang train station.

Brilliance in his hand

We arrived in the evening two days before the New Year's celebration started. Our new boss was there to meet us, along with...the police?

Turns out, the school's van wasn't big enough for all of us and the luggage, so our boss had enlisted the help of a cop friend to take us to our new apartment. I watched our suitcases being loaded hoping this would be the only time my parents see me drive away in the back of a police cruiser!

As when moving anywhere, the first thing we wanted to do was start to nest in our new apartment. Sacrilegious as it is, we did most of this outfitting at Wal-Mart, since that was the only place in Zunyi we knew how to get to. (Wal-Mart is pronounced, roughly, Wal-ar-mar, in Chinese.)
 
We also explored a bit around the area by our new school, Interlingua. Zunyi is famous in China for being the site of the Zunyi Meeting, a stop along the Communist Party's Long March at which Mao Ze Dong's leadership was officially cemented in the party.

Our school is near the site of this meeting, on an avenue lined with grey bricks and traditional roofs.   Most of this was closed when we walked through, but I'm looking forward to exploring it now that we are more permanently situated.

My parents at the Communist Memorial

We had our own long marches along our new street in search of beer and fireworks-our prevailing entertainment for the first days in Zunyi.

Dad and Dan had a mission-fueled by Dad's childhood memories-- to stuff cherry bombs in apples and oranges and set them off. Dad also lit up a big box of the blooming-flower type fireworks on a bridge near our house, along with other assorted fireworks

Dad's box of fireworks 2

It was impossible to compete with the locals though, who were setting off firecrackers throughout the day, from car backs, apartment balconies, roofs, and just on the sidewalk, for the duration of the holiday.

One day, fireworks saved for later, we decided to go to a pagoda on the hill behind our apartment complex.  The map we have of Zunyi showed the hill, but didn't show any way to get there, so we just walked along our street and then turned onto a street going uphill.

We asked a few people we passed if we could get to the pagoda that way, and they replied, oh yes, you can.

One old man, as we left the houses and started through a small farm field and onto a thin path through the brush, told me that yes, we could get there that way, but then said something I didn't understand until about 20 minutes later.

He must have said: "You can go that way, but it is dangerous!" The trail went straight up the hill, without any switch backs, and was slick with mud.

Our stick-to-it-ive-ness was buoyed by the fact that a family was following us, and their kids kept cheering us on. The family eventually passed us, but one of the boys kept coming back down the trail for us, and motioning us on, as if worried that we would randomly make our own trail and get lost in the sparse brush.

At the top, as we climbed over a wall with the family that had beaten us climbing, and started to feel pretty silly; the other side of the hill had a perfectly good, well-kept cement path with stairs (even partially accessible by car).

Pagoda on Phoenix Hill

At the pagoda my parents fully realized their status as foreigners in China.  They were both asked for photos by the family who beat us climbing the hill, and later my father was asked by myriad groups for his picture.

One guy he had his picture taken with that day saw him later at a store, and ran across the store to give Dad a big handshake. During the picture taking, he had his arm firmly around Dad's shoulder and a big, serious smile on his face.  

Once we were tired of the pagoda, we went down the nice path and came out at a memorial to the workers of China (tying into the Long March theme).

There, a group of men in dark clothes paid for a professional photographer to take their picture with my parents. Ah, paparazzi.

My parents as Celebrities

My parents liked Zunyi, and it was exciting for Dan and me to start to get acquainted with our new home.

After a few days we decided to explore a little farther afield, going to Anshun, a town in middle Guizhou province. We were on our way to the largest waterfall in China, Huang guo shu.

New Year Fireworks1

 

New Year Fireworks 2