Eric's Beijing Diary

Yesterday morning, we finally got off the bus after almost 13 hours. I was definitely ready to finish that ride. We stopped at a restaurant in Lishi and had lunch. Lucy then led us to the bus station where the village shuttle would take us to the foot of her mountain. The village shuttle is not a scheduled run. It takes off in the morning as soon as the bus is full, then makes the run and comes back to do the same thing again. When we got to the station, it was not there, and there was no way to know for sure when it would be back. So we tried a couple of taxis. But they had seen me, and they were asking ridiculous prices. I told Lucy that we should just wait for the shuttle. All this while, a crowd was gathering around us. I was a bit surprised by this, because Lishi is not a village. It is actually a pretty good sized city. But apparently these folks had never seen a foreigner, and they were having a look. Jean was a bit frustrated with this, and finally dispersed the crowd. It's a good thing, because we were causing a traffic problem. The whole thing was pretty innocent, but it was an accident waiting to happen. The shuttle finally appeared, and took us to the end of the line. We had planned to hike the rest of the way to her village, but Lucy got on the phone and rounded up her brother and some friends, and they came and got us on their motorcycles.

I really wish I had a picture of Lucy's childhood home here in the village. I don't, because I have been having all kinds of trouble with my camera. I bought a pair of batteries in a hurry just before I left, but they were dead in a few minutes. I bought another pair. Same problem. I repeated that process a couple more times before giving up. I don't know if the problem is my camera, or the batteries. When I get back to Beijing, I will get some good Duracell batteries, and see if that does the trick. In the mean time, no pictures. Disgusting. I don't feel too bad, because I will be back, but it's still frustrating, because a picture is worth a thousand words, and it would take many thousands of words to do this place justice.

Lucy's family lives in a cliffside earth cave called a yaodong. These caves resemble the cave homes in Yan'an, a few miles to the West in neighboring Shaanxi (not Shanxi) Province, where Mao and his cohorts were holed up after they had completed the Long March in their escape from the Goumingdang. In this case, they are brick-lined caves cut into the side of the mountain. The village is a series of terraces on the mountainside. Terraced fields, terraced dwelling places--the whole place is one big bunch of terraces. Hundreds of them. This is very dry country. It reminds me a little of the Badlands in Western North Dakota. But it's also a little bit like Eastern Oregon. And in other ways, quite different from both of those. It is very unique country. Lots and lots and lots of coal. Lucy says that if ten lights are on in China, nine of them are kept on by the coal in Shanxi Province.

In front of her home is a small courtyard. The toilet is in one corner. It's a slit in the ground--an angular concrete trough which leads down into a pit from which they can draw nightsoil for the fields. It doesn't have a door, but it does have a doorway. You just kinda peek around the corner and make sure nobody is using it. Tobacco leaves are hanging on the outside wall of the house, drying in the sun. The front of the house is a lattice work, which forms the framework for the windows, which are paper. Sorta like the paper doors in Japan. The outside courtyard is pounded earth, and the inside floor is concrete. Her home has three rooms. Three brick arches side by side. They do have electricity, but it's very expensive, so they must use it sparingly. The cooking is done with coal (not surprisingly). The flue for the stove leads through a carefully designed network of passage ways laid out beneath a platform, which is called a kang. The kang is made of brick, probably sunbaked, but I don't know for sure.

Last night I was very tired, because I hadn't gotten very much sleep. We went to bed a little early, but not before listening to Lucy's mother sing a song for us. She made it up as she went along--sorta like rap. It was a song about three people who came to her village to visit her. Lucy's mother is a very kind woman. Like most of the villagers here, she cannot read, and does not speak much Mandarin. She speaks the local dialect of this county. But she is a very creative woman. People in the village are impressed with her. They are also impressed with her daughter (Lucy), because she speaks the local dialect, Mandarin, and English, and she speaks all of them quite well.