A barrage of Batiks
Trip Start
Feb 03, 2008
1
3
33
Trip End
Aug 16, 2009
Huang Guo Shu, Guizhou Province,
China
Sunday, February 10, 2008
She brings us through the high, sliding wooden doors of her lofty-ceilinged stone house. She's short but stocky and waddles a bit in her traditional skirts.
The entry room, a large area that seems to double as a garage, living room and shop, is hung all around with blue and white batiks-the signature craft of this area.
"I made them," she tells us proudly in hard-to-understand Mandarin, patting them and her chest. We nod and smile back.
Batiks are made by drizzling wax on undyed cloth in a pattern, then dyeing the cloth
Our old lady
. The waxed parts don't hold dye, so the result is a striking white against a dark background. Multiple applications of wax and dye allow for different colors to shine through. A guidebook we have says that the batiks in this Bouyi minority village are made by hand in the confines of their characteristic stone houses, but the repeats in patterns that we see seem to point toward some kind of factory manufacture. We don't dispute when she tells us that she made it herself.
We start asking about the batiks that are hung on clothesline around the high walls of her home, and as we ask about them, instead of finding another one in the stacks that line the walls, she takes the display pieces down and starts to drape them about us.
We had looked at the batiks in other places, Yangshuo for example, and generally expected the price to be low, so we figured we would bargain for all of the batiks together.
Our first mistake
Once we had selected six or so batiks of varying sizes and quality, she quoted us several hundred yuan-more than our hotel for four people for two nights had been
A batik shop/garage
. We chuckled a little and counteroffered, at which she started to scold us indignantly. This is highly unusual in China. Bargaining is a matter of course, and especially in tourist areas when talking about handicraft it is expected and even basically done for you. Our rule is, if there isn't a written price then there's no price at all really. And if there is a written price, take it lightly.
We chuckled more and went over the individual prices with her. She named them all, raising her voice to a shriek and wouldn't budge. By now neighbors, all middle-aged Bouyi women in traditional dress, were coming around to watch. They had big smiles too, as if they were anticipating a show.
Finally, after our fourth offer of a lower, more reasonable price (we figured they were worth 15 to 20 yuan each, we were offering 30 to 50 depending on the size) we decided to leave the house and try our luck at a store in the bigger town of Anshun where we could bargain a little.
Mom left first, then Dad
Buying batiks
. Dan turned around while we were still inside and asked the lady one last time to lower the price. At this, she started screaming, pushed him, and tried to shut the door of her house to trap us inside. She wasn't able to shut the door though, because it was a heavy, sliding door with bad runners, so she stood bodily in front of the opening and berated me and Dan simultaneously.
By now she was speaking so fast, and probably in dialect, that Dan and I weren't able to catch anything she was saying, but it was clear that it wasn't very nice. Dan managed to push past her, but, she and I being about the same height, she took me prisoner.
Now that a scene had definitely been caused-traffic on the alley way she lived in had stopped to look at the foreigners making a poor old local lady mad-we wouldn't have bought anything from her even if she had given us a better price.
My mom had already been led away by a neighbor lady to another batik shop. Dan finally pulled out his "teacher voice" and the still-complaining woman let me push through the door
Dan in Shitouzhai
.The neighbors now came to Dad, Dan and I like remoras.
"Thirty kuai," they whispered, "50 kuai."
It turned out that the whole street was lined with houses selling batiks. We were the only tourists in the village that day, which must have been why the older lady was so desperate for higher price.
After another half hour or so of bargaining and bartering with the neighbors, we had more batiks than we had planned on buying and had bought them for about the price we had wanted; success, but a little niggling guilt about upsetting an old woman who was just trying to make a buck, anyway.
***
This village, Shitouzhai, is a few kilometers from Huangguoshu and is mentioned in our guidebooks as a good place to go to see a traditional Bouyi village and buy some batiks
Field
. After our batik-buying, the village started to feel like a living-history museum, as if the women stripped off their modest skirts, headscarves and hand-woven shoes after the tourists went home and replaced them with blue jeans, diamante hair clips and high heels.
The entrance fee helped this impression: we paid 40 yuan each just to come in the village, so these people have got to be relatively rich if any of that filters down to the 400 or so residents.
The houses are all made of stone, and don't seem to have indoor plumbing. We weren't able to go into any of the houses, except the old lady's, but we noticed there were many public toilets, and women were washing their hair and clothes out on the street in buckets or in the pond by the village entrance.
It was an interesting place to wander around, surrounded by patchwork fields and lumpy karst mountains. We found a water buffalo up a staircase eating straw, some boys trying to blow each other up with firecrackers and a woman outside the village gate selling wonderful fried potatoes with chili
Jump rope
. There was another village across a field, at the foot of another mountain, and we saw some people zigzagging across with baskets on their back, so we thought we could go over there and see if that village, which wasn't famous, was the same as the famous one we had paid to get into.
We made our way through the local path across the fields of rape and other, unknown, plants, and were greeted on the other side by a man who clearly told us, in slow Mandarin, "Stop! Don't come. Please go!"
He repeated this a few times and gestured to the road, which looked dusty and pretty uninteresting. We turned around to pick our way back across the field.
A group of boys saw us and started shouting, in English, "Hello! Hello! Come! Come!"
Clearly a village of mixed sentiment.
One of the boys, about ten or eleven years old, ran down the slope to us and asked us why we were going. Then his English ran out, so I tried to tell him in Mandarin that a man had told us to go. The boy looked crestfallen.
"Don't go," he said in Chinese. "Our village is very good fun!" We apologized and pointed at the man, who was still watching us making sure we left
Field 2
.The boy and his friends then ran up to him, and started complaining as we walked back to Shitouzhai. Dan saw the man excuse it by making eating motions--had we misunderstood an invite to lunch?
Whatever it was, we went back to Shitouzhai, across the field, and called our taxi driver from that morning, who had said he would come back for us when we wanted to go to another waterfall, a smaller one upriver from Huang Guo Shu.
We ate more potatoes, drank some beer, and watched the villagers watching us.
***
The second waterfall was small, but beautiful. It was something of a bird park, with black swans, different kinds of ducks, and some peacocks eager to show their plumage.
The taxi driver was incredulous that we wanted to visit the smaller waterfall, he told us multiple times that it wasn't worth going to, but it was included on our ticket from Huang Guo Shu the day before so we were adamant we wanted to go.
After a half hour spent looking at the birds and smaller cascade, we went back to the taxi and negotiated for him to drive us to our next destination, about an hour away by car: Long gong Caves.
