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Some of the towns I later visited had very sophisticated bus stations. In Gushan they even scanned the barcode on my ticket before I boarded. But Jinzhou just had a patch of bitumen with signs for each bus route. The ticket sellers would still stand by the waiting bus hollering the destination, of course. After checking my map, I decided the bus to Lianjiadian would take me in the right direction, and I still had time for a quick lunch before it was scheduled to depart.
The bus dropped me off at one end of the town's shopping mall (above). The train station is at the other end. At first I wasn't sure if this was really the town centre or not, but a quick walk proved that this was indeed the smallest town that I had yet visited. A few motorbikes and minivans were hovering around, ready to transport people to smaller villages in the vicinity.
Although I was thrilled to be in a town with no MacDonalds, there was absolutely nothing to do there, so I decided to press on to Xiangying which was the last stop on the bus route which I arrived on. As I was waiting for the next bus, one of the motorbike guys offered to take me there for free. Just for the novelty of giving a foreigner a lift, I assume. I decided I might as well go, insisting that I would pay the Y5 fare of course, and no sooner was it said than I was on the back of the motorcycle clinging to this Mr Bao, wondering why he had a helmet and I didn't, and answering the usual slew of questions that people ask foreigners. A common question at the moment is whether or not I will be going home for Spring Festival, and when I tell people that we do not celebrate this festival in my country I feel that I have done my small part to spread knowledge and understanding of other cultures.
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| My momentary tour guide, Mr Bao. |
Mr Bao suggested that I visit the nearby Guan Xiangying memorial. As it turns out, the town is named after this hero from the 1945 revolution. The memorial is a big building next to the house where he grew up, and contains lots of boring photos and historial facts. I wonder if anybody ever comes out to the middle of nowhere to visit it? It was locked when we arrived, but one of the locals led us to the house where the caretaker lives, and he let us in. He wouldn't even let me pay the price of a ticket.
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| Guan Xiangying's childhood home. | Mao Zedong visits Guan Xiangying in hospital. |
My plan was to try to go to Xiangying and look for somewhere to eat and stay the night. But the caretaker and the other local were sure there was no hostel there, and together with Mr Bao they decided that the best thing for me to do was go back to Liangjiadian. Not only did they give me this unsolicited advice, but they insisted on it. I'm not sure if this can be attributed to small-town culture, northern chinese culture, or both. In the end I gave in, and Mr Bao drove me back to Liangjiadian. But he stopped on the way to ask me exactly why I was so keen to go to Xiangying. "Just to have some fun," I joked. Well, it turned out that the reason he was asking was in case I wanted to hire a girl for the evening, and after my "have some fun" comment it took me a while to convince him that I didn't. No matter whether he knew a cheap place or not!
Back in Liangjiadian, he helped me book into the hostel. The owner was a Mrs Chen, who I addressed as "Auntie Chen". It was only at that point that I asked Mr Bao what his name was. "I thought you said your surname was Zhao!" interrupted Auntie Chen loudly, when he told me. It was like she was berating him, but that was just her way of speaking.
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| My attentive host, Auntie Chen. |
Auntie Chen didn't offer me free accommodation, but she gave me a level of service that no chinese guest would have received. She fired up the furnace, offered to prepare a basin of hot water if I wanted to wash my feet, and said that if there wasn't enough light in the room for me to read my book (only one of the bulbs wasn't broken) then she would go and buy another bulb and install it herself. In the morning I asked where I could go for breakfast, and she immediately escorted me to a small eatery, despite my protests that I only wanted directions and without even pausing to put on a jacket. And then while I was finishing off my rice porridge and steamed jiaozi, she suddenly arrived at the shop and paid my bill!
It reminds me of a time I rode my bike to a fishing village on the outskirts of the Development Zone and had lunch at a restaurant there. The restaurant owner wanted me to have my meal for free, and I had to force some money into her hand. In these cases, the foreigner is seen not just as a guest of the hotel or restaurant, but as a guest of China. Personally, I would rather go unnoticed, but my encounter with Auntie Chen made me realise that I would never be able to experience these small towns as a chinese traveller would. As in quantum physics, my mere presence as an observer would influence the observed reality.