Asianbabies

Day 1: April 6^th, 2012: Moving in

First thing we did is to walk to our host family’s house and greet them after we met and talked with Louie. Our host family lives in a three story house, that is apparently used as a hotel. It is a very nice house, but it has no heat or air conditioning in it. At night the house is extremely frigid, and during the day the house can get hot. Luckily, since we live in a modern style house, the family has heat blankets that we can plug in and warm our beds with at night.

Upon walking into the front gate we saw a little girl with a bowl haircut standing with her mom washing a bowl in their courtyard patio. There were two men smoking on the patio and talking. Everyone looked very nice and said “nihao” to us. The little girl was not very friendly upon first greeting her. Sally, one of my classmates, gave her a present of drawing pens and paper. AT first the little girl was too shy to accept the gift, but Sally kept insisting that she take it. Finally she accepted it and was very satisfied, but was so shy that her mom made her say thank you to Sally.

As I looked around the patio I noticed a lot of animals. Including the family dog. The have a cute little dog that follows them around everywhere, and is more like a cat than a dog because it has a lot of independence. The dog seems very happy in the village. It is orange and white and has a tumor on its belly that looks very painful and sore. Apparently the dog has been sick for a few years.

They also have turtles and fish for pets. It appears that they don’t eat them, they are just pets of the family. The turtles are really cute, they just swim and walk around in their tank, same with the fish. I stuck my finger into the turtles cage and they began to crawl up the cage to try and reach my finger. Then the little girl came and stuck her hand into the cage and started poking their shells.

After some casual conversation with the little girl, who we quickly named “guai guai”, which means cutie or darling in Chinese, her father Dawei, and her mother, we went into the house and greeted “Aiyi”, our host mother. We called her “Aiyi” a term that means Auntie in Chinese, it used for women who are older than you. She is Dawei’s mother and “Guai Guai’s” grandmother or “nai nai” in Chinese. Traditionally the wife is supposed to move in with the husband’s family.

The first thing that I noticed upond entering the house was the big flat screen TV that they had surrounded by three living room style couches. The family’s favorite activity was to watch the TV. Dawei especially liked to watch basketball. On the last day we talked to him about players from the NBA. This was the most conversation we had the whole time with Dawei, other than “Haochi?” “Haochi” and the occasional “Ni hao”.

Upstairs there was another common area with three couches, a coffee table, and a TV. There were four bedrooms with two beds inside each of the rooms, which then made it apparent that we were staying in a hotel. We decided to all sleep in one room together in order to keep warm at night.

Aiyi cooked us dinner for every meal. Dawei would also help cook sometimes. Our first meal consisted of pancakes, vegetable dishes, salad, cucumbers, porridge, chicken, and tofu. Our other meals were very similar to this meal. We had jiaozi one day, which means dumplings, they were different than the Jiaozi that I have had at Beijing University and in restaurants in the city. The Jiaozi tasted very sweet and fresh. Each morning we had scallion pancakes and an egg dish that is sort of like an omelet. I am not used to having scallion pancakes in the morning for breakfast because they are very greasy. Usually in the morning I eat cereal or fruits in America. The first night after we ate dinner, our host family thought that we didn’t really like the food because we didn’t eat much. It is true that the food they served us is not something that I would order if I went to a restaurant, but it wasn’t that bad. When I didn’t immediately reach for the other dishes on the table, Dawei told me not to be shy and to eat more. Aiyi also thought that we were all on a diet. From then on I am pretty sure we all made an effort to eat more in order to be polite and show them that we really did like the food and appreciated that they hosted us and made us food. For one of the lunches we ate some leaves that we had picked from the fields. It is usually not eaten in America, it is considered a weed, but in China people eat it during springtime and use it for traditional Chinese medicine as well.

The family did not eat with us for any meal. In fact the first dinner that we had, they took their dinner out to the living room where the TV and couches were and ate their dinner in front of the TV. I think that if we had gotten to eat dinner with them, that we may have talked to them a little more, since a lot of conversation happens around the dinner table in China. People get together to eat but also to talk. I think that they wanted to treat us as guests and wanted to give us our privacy. They also ate our leftovers when we were finished.

Upon interviewing the family about who does the household chores around the house and who cooks, it seems that they all play a big effort. Dawei says that he does everything around the house, including cooking, which I noticed. He also cleans the dishes and cleans a little bit. Aiyi said that she washes the clothes, cooks the food, and cleans around the house. Dawei’s wife works in Changping at a jewelery shop and leaves early in the morning and comes back around 5pm in the evening. She seems very exhausted when she arrives home, but I still see her washing the dishes.

I tried to help my host family with cooking but they insisted that I was the guest and that I shouldn’t help with much. Eventually they let me take the plates out to the table during lunchtime. I really wanted to learn how to cook some of the food but I didn’t want to urge them too much. I also helped them with pouring the hot water into their hot water thermos. They heat the water outside in a pot on top of a burning coal and then pour it into their thermos for tea drinking and water drinking. The tap water is not drinkable in China and has to be heated and kept this way. It is even done this way at Peking University, but since we live in hotel there as well we have not had to this task ourselves.

On the first night we went on a walk with Dawei to the church. It was easter weekend for the time that we stayed, and everyone in the village is Christian. The church that they had in the village was very small and homey. It only had wooden benches to sit on and to place the bibles on. I am used to seeing very extravagant churches back in America, but this style that they had in the village makes much more sense to me. It is more intimate and original, the benches were probably made by some of the village people, and all of the people know each other. The pastor told us that they don’t actually have a meeting time for the services. Instead they hold the meetings based on when people come and if a lot of people come at a certain time then they hold the service. This makes sense for a small village of people that know each other and have more relaxed style of life.

When we were at the church there was a room next door where the kids were. They seemed to be waiting for their parents who were in church. The kids were very feisty and upon the site of us started yelling, “wai guo ren”, which is not an uncommon phrase for foreigners to here in China, as it means “foreigner”. The kids would not stop yelling this phrase though and kind of seemed obsessed with the fact that we were foreigners. They probably don’t have as much exposure to foreign people as people who live in the city do. Especially in Beijing because Beida has a really large international school in it and a lot of international students.

That night Dawei taught us how to play Majiang, which is a game that I have always wondered how to play. I have seen it around the United States, but people don’t play it right, they only match the tiles together. It is actually a popular game on the computer with the incorrect rules. At first the game seemed extremely complicated, but then I realized that it was just the technique to make it so that the game was fair, and then when we learned the playing part of the game, it wasn’t hard at all. I enjoyed this game a lot. As we played Dawei came around and helped all of us with our tiles. I think that I will play it again when I go back to America, and hopefully teach some of my friends how to play it if I can remember the rules in the beginning of the game on how to make the game fair for everyone.

The next day we woke up around 8am and ate breakfast. Dawei told me that he wakes up around 7am or 6:30 am. The time can vary because sometimes he goes out and does work in the field and then comes back for breakfast, so he can wake up as early as 5 am. Aiyi made us breakfast again. The food just kept on coming. We would finish a plate of scallion pancakes and sure enough she would come back and refill the whole plate. I was very well fed the whole weekend because of this. It was the first time I ate three meals in a day for three consecutive days. Being a college student in America, I usually skip breakfast because I don’t have enough sleep and I have to get to class on time and it results in a huge rush where I don’t even have time to eat breakfast. They are sure to eat three meals a day because they have a lot of physical labor to do as work and the way of life is slower in the village so they are sure to make time to eat.

We went out into the field and helped with a few things. We weren’t allowed to help with everything because honestly one of the women said that they would have to fix the damages for weeks. We just don’t have enough knowledge and skill to farm the way that the villagers do. Even Guai Guai who is only about four has started helping out in the fields with her grandma. We are just amateurs. So the only job that they let us help out with was watering and picking the weeds that we later had for lunch. We watered the two big cherry trees. The cherry trees required a lot of water. We had to first fill up water jugs that looked like old plastic jugs that the villagers had used for drinking water and then recycled for their farm work. This is very clever and practical that they recycle their belongings. Upon sitting in one of the offices, I saw that a sprite bottle was being used as a vase for a flower. I like this way of life a lot better, it is much more practical, and it is using just what we need, and not anything more. We filled up about four jugs, two big ones and two small ones, and then in order to carry them up the hill, we put them onto a stick and had two people carry the stick from either side. Upon carrying the stick the villagers kept signaling for us to push the water bottles towards the center, really close together so that they wouldn’t fall into our hands or slip off the stick as we carried them up the hill to the cherry trees.

After watering the cherry trees we went with guai guai and aiyi and the rest of the groups to pick the “weeds” to eat later. Guai Guai was very smart and picked a lot of the plants. I was really amazed with her knowledge and skills. It seems that it is just a part of life and the common knowledge of the villagers here. It is something that they grow up learning and knowing as they get older. This is something that I never learned growing up in the modern lifestyle that I did, so unattached from where my food comes from. I admire this lifestyle because it is so much more intimate. I felt so happy in the village because it felt so relaxed and so friendly. There was feeling that I could touch in the air that people emanated just from their smiles and kind hello’s.

The people were much nicer in the village than in the city. Some of them would say “Nihao” right away or even “Hello” and some of them would stare at us or watch us go by, but as soon as we said nihao they would smile and say it right back, as if we had been old friends. The most basic things are fun here and enjoyable. I watch Guai Guai having a wonderful time riding on her tricycle all by herself as Sally and I crack open walnuts and eat them. The walnuts taste nice and sweet, and surprisingly tasty for walnuts. I almost thought they were a new kind of nut that I had never tasted before. There is a playground that all the children play on and the workers play cards around it. The children have a lot of fun on the simple playground. I have even seen adults playing on the playground. In the middle of the day one day we took a rest on the playground and there were a few kids playing. One of the boys was very vicious, yelling “wai guo ren” at us and saying that he was a general and that they were being invaded. We tried to play a game with them, but then just ended up chasing them around and becoming a part of their game where we were the enemy. The little boy was yelling and pretending to shoot guns at us, and then he almost spit on Sally. The parents started to yell at him, maybe telling him not to spit. Then we made a treaty with them, but we still could not tell if this little boy liked us or not. He seemed to be acting out a character that he had seen on TV and it turns out that he was. The little angry boys companion would just laugh and point at us, for a reason that we could not understand. But we were playing along with them the whole time.