Let me preface the telling of this adventure story with a little background information. The large country where we live consists of half the people living in the cities, and half the people living in rural areas. The people in rural areas are the peasant class. The peasant class consists of mostly farmers. Just 15 years ago, the peasant class made up 80% of the population. There has been a mass migration from the farms to the big cities. Most of this migration is due to the poor status and potential of the farming peasant class. Many of this class leave the farms to take construction labor jobs in cities where they are often exploited by construction bosses making tons of money off of this nation's ridiculous development rate. These migrant workers live in tents or in small makeshift dormitories on site, eat ramen noodles 3 meals a day, and often work 12 to 14 hour days for meager wages. Their wives and children are back in the village on the farms, and they send almost all of their meager wages back to their families. In spite of the harsh conditions of the migrant workers here, their situations are still considered better off than when they lived on the farm. (If any of you read the Bill Simmons Grantland blog, he puts his side-notes and off the cuff facts in neat footnotes. Because there are so many side notes needed for explanation here and I don't know how to do footnotes, I'll just put them in parentheses.)
Being a university student, I meet students every day whose families are from the peasant class. You can always tell because when you ask what their parents do, they hang their heads and say "peasant farmer" or "worker" ("worker" meaning migrant worker). For many of these students, they are the first in their village to attend university, and they would do anything to not return to the village. Their hopes are to get a job in a big city where they can help break the cycle of poverty that has run their families for generations. This is all of course until they meet an American, then all of the sudden their village is the best place in the world, and we have to come and see it. Some of them even say their village is very famous for odd reasons. (Side note: local fame in East Asia is usually for some odd historic reason or because of the climate and natural surroundings. And EVERY place, no matter how tiny or remote, is famous for something. "In the late Shang Dynasty the Emperor once drank tea that came from our village." "In the warring states period, there was a man from our village who killed a tiger with his bare hands." "Our village is the hottest place in East Asia." This is actually the most popular of all fame reasons. If you were to listen to East Asians, you would think the whole place was a giant furnace where Satan himself vacationed. Ironically, they usually announce how hot their village is while wearing 6 layers of clothes in the freezing cold. To explain how silly all of these fame reasons are, imagine in America if we we said "President Rutherford B. Hayes once said the word 'mountain' which is English for the Spanish 'Montana' which is the state I'm from, so its very famous.")
So I was naturally very surprised 2 years ago when one of my friends announced to me that he hates the city and when he graduates, he wants to go back to his village. This was the first time I had ever heard a student say that he loved the village. He was the first one from his village to graduate from high school and to go to college, but he wanted to go back to the countryside and farm after he graduated. One day I asked him what exactly his family farms. He responded "everything." I then clarified my question, "but what crop do they take to the market to sell?" He told me "My parents don't really sell anything. We just eat whatever we grow and raise." Subsistence farmers. My friend's family is one step of human anthropological development beyond hunter-gatherers. This left me curious. This curisosity turned morbid when I bought a van a year ago and told this student I wanted to drive to see his village.
Both Shelley and I have been to the village before. Any one who has been to an East Asian village knows the experience. It goes something like this:
- No one speaks anything close to a written language.
- The livestock at times have better living conditions than the people.
- You will be force fed weird meats which you will have no idea what they are until the chef starts pointing to parts of his body to show you what part of the pig you are eating.
- Your best hope is that they kill a chicken, chop it into 200 small pieces, cook it in a soup, leaving 10% of the meat, 100% of the bone, both feet, head, and comb. This is the best-case scenario.
- You will be fed a feast upon arrival. You will pick at this feast during the first meal. Then you will proceed to pick at this exact same feast, reheated in a wok, for as long as you are there. (Side note- There is always an obligatory McDonald's run when you get back from the village which consists of 2 extra value meals to put back the calories that you have lost from either not eating at all, eating 20 calories a day in white rice to be polite, or eating a lot and getting diarrhea.)
- You will use the bathroom in an outhouse which consists of a hole cut between 2 stones. You will hear your poop land on other poop, and you will hear flies buzz.
- It will be freezing cold, and there will be no way to escape it, in spite of the fact that you are in the hottest place in East Asia.
This is what I was expecting going to my friend's village. Looking back, I still do not know what out of body experience I had that led me to initiate the trip to his village. I would never volunteer myself to go to the village. Either way, I committed, and my wife sent me on with her best wishes... until a week before, when she decided she didn't want to be home by herself for that long. There's always room for more in the village! This meant that Max would also get to go, much to the joy of my friend who begged me to bring him before. Then, since I was driving my friend home for free, we had other friends come out of the woodwork and ask if we could drop them off in their villages on the way to my friend's village. When asked where they lived, they could not tell us. (Side note: it is not uncommon for East Asians to not know where exactly they live. One time I was walking with a friend trying to find a park. As we walked looking for the park, he said "wait a second, I used to live in these apartments." I said "great, so we can find the park." He said, "No, I don't know where the park is." You have to consider that most of these people ride buses to get places, they don't drive themselves. Therefore, they have no idea which street they live on. This is made even worse when they live in a remote village, where there are no street names. Before, they have just rode a bus to the dirt road and waited for a family member to pick them up on a motorcycle. It is not unusual for me to know more about local and national geography than the students here.)
Shelley and I woke up last Saturday morning at 6am, sat up on our beds, and mutually thought to each other "what in the heck are we doing?!?!" It was too late to back out. Our friend(s) would be waiting for us to pick them up in a little over an hour. We had to pack the car with Max's crate, 2 bags, hidden snacks that we would sneak when no one was looking to supplement the slop we were going to pick at for the next 5 days, google directions (which we didn't really trust), and a map just in case the google directions didn't work (which we also didn't trust). The plan was to pick up our friends at 7am, drop one friend off in her village at 9, drop another friend off at her village at 11, move Max from Shelley's feet in the front seat where he gets ancy and constantly places his head on my gas pedal foot to his crate once we could drop the back seat of the car, and proceed to drive to my friend's village.
Here is what happened on the drive:
6:45am- pick up 2 friends
7:00am- arrive at gate of school to pick up friend whose village we are travelling to.
7:03am- call friend to find out where he is. Find out he was asleep, and although I told him 4 times the day before that I would pick him up at 7, he didn't think it was possible because it was still dark outside.
7:30am- Friend finally comes to the car, we leave.
9:30am- Arrive at friend 1's village to drop her off.
10:30am- Leave friend one's village after we find out that she has to catch another 3 hour bus to get to her home in said village, leaving us searching for a bus stop that neither she nor we, nor anyone who we asked knew existed. After finding this bus stop and telling her that no we do not have time to stay in her village and wanr (pronounced "waahr," literally translated as "play," actual meaning is "hang out," actual experience is "sit around for hours and hours on end watching East Asian TV and eating sunflower seeds"), we finally get back on the road and head to friend 2's village to drop her off.
10:45am- Friend 2 announces to us that she has decided that she is going on with us to our friend's village who we are going to visit because she too wants to wanr. Thus, our plans on getting Max's head off my foot are cancelled for the next 12 hour drive.
11:30am- Stop in friend 2's "big brother's" village to drop off her stuff. Her big brother turns out to be a 40-something year old man in a jump suit that looks too much like a criminal to not be one.
11:45am- Decide to stop and eat lunch at friend 2s "big brother's" village. Big brother ends up treating us to lunch and then continues on to do his shi (pronounced "shur," literally "thing," meaning "an errand," actual experience is "something vague I can say I have to do which obligates you to allow me to leave you because I don't want to be with you anymore." Or I suspect in his case "a drug deal.")
12:30am- Back on the road, bellies full.
4:00pm- Hit the end of the highway, have to stop and ask directions because both Google and the map have failed.
7:00pm- arrive at the last thing close to a city near my friend's home.
9:00pm- arrive at the county where my friend lives. He told me if I could get him here, he could get me to his village. He didn't count on it being in the dark, and new roads being paved. He finds the road and says "in 30 minutes we'll be in my village."
10:00pm- find second road and he says "In an hour we'll be in my village." (At this point I have been driving for so long that I am delirious and am not realizing that he is breaking the laws of time and space by increasing time as we decreased distance.)
10:30pm- arrive at the last road to my friend's village. 3 kilometers left to go!
10:30pm- drive through a river. scared awake.
10:37pm- hit a boulders on the road that only a Hummer can climb. Shelley decides she's out and walks the rest of the way. Actually that was good because everyone had to get out of my van to get it up the hill, including the dog. My friend and his younger brother had to push my car while I gunned it over the boulders.
11:00pm- arrive at the top of a mountain. I have just driven the last 3km in 30 minutes, landed the bottom of my car on a rock, gotten stuck 3 times, and all of this I find out later on on a cliffside that I couldn't see because it was dark. When I turned the car off, it literally breathed a sigh of relief, just like those puttering lemons on cartoons when they stop. I never told Shelley this, but I was scared it wouldn't turn back on.
That's right, 16 hours later we arrive. Google's drive time was 12 hours.
Since 3 hours ago we had decided that we would press on the last "little bit" to get to his village and eat dinner there, we were promptly sat in front of our first meal at 11:15. Shelley in a moment of exhaustion and delirium grabbed a piece of meat and ate it. As she did this, she asked "what is this?" Pig liver. She slowed her chewing, bravely kept a smile, and swallowed. (I kept repeating the phrase "crowns in heaven" to her throughout the trip, which she did not like.) We were back in the village.
Here are some pictures of the trip:
In spite of the length, the drive was beautiful at stretches. We were always on some kind of cliffside road overlooking these amazing mountains.
This was our bedroom. They did not have a full sized bed. Nor did they have mattresses.
This is the family living room. Yes that is a concrete floor. Yes that is a fire in the middle of the family living room.
The village was actually quite pretty. It was nestled in the middle of mountains near the border of Burma. In fact, at some heights you could see into Burma. Their family actually lives half in East Asia, half in Myanmar. They visit frequently. When I asked if it was easy to go, they responded "There are a lot of back roads. We can take you if you want. Only an hour." Judging by my friends' sense of travel time, my guess was 6 hours. I considered it and then considered Burmese druglords, Burmese pythons, and Burmese prison. After realizing that there was literally nothing good in Myanmar, I decided against illegal border crossings. However, one of the more humbling parts of the trip for us was when his uncle told us that the situation in Myanmar is very bad right now. There is a civil war, and the people are very poor. Everytime he goes now the village makes blankets and sends food. How amazing and convicting? These people don't even have a salary. They are subsistence farmers. Yet, they still see themselves as rich and are so content. No wonder my friend wants to return their after he graduates.
One of the cool things about my friend's family is that they are of a minority ethnic group called the Lisu people. Because they are of an ethnic group, they look different, dress different, and believe different than the rest of East Asia. The Lisu are Christians. Converted years ago by foreign workers in Myanmar. This village had a church:
They told me they don't really celebrate any holiday except the Sabbath. Each Sunday they worship 3 times at the village church. We attended all 3 and it was a great experience. We also had to sing for everyone at all 3, unexpected. Neither Shelley nor I have singing ability, but after every song the whole congregation shouted "
XIAMOOOOO" which means "thank you." It was a really sweet experience.
It is villge life, and there were animals everywhere. I tried my hand at goat herding.
On the second day there, we went for a hike into the valley. The diversity of land there was amazing. As we got down into the valley, we were shedding layers of clothes. We were literally in the jungle. We came across a sugar cane patch and I got to try raw sugar cane. It is like gnawing on wood, with the exception that you can suck on the sugar water in the wood. The next day, we climbed to the top of the same mountains and had to start a fire to stay warm. It would go from 8o degrees to 40 degrees, banana trees to alpine pines depending on the elevation.
Max loved the village. (He did not want to look at the camera in this picture so I had to hold his head to keep him from sniffing around.) The truth is, he seemed made for it. He stayed away from the chickens, made friends with the other dogs, and accompanied us on every hike we went on. It is amazing how 2 more legs helps agility on steep slopes!
On our last day in the village, my friend's mother (pictured here with her grandson who was strangely dressed in pink all weekend) made me a Lisu shirt. She is quite the seamstress. She never once measured me. The shirt fit perfect. It was quite a unique and special gift. I'm not sure when I'll wear it, but it is a nice memory.
After 3 full days we left. We were dirty, smelled like a campfire, and exhausted. Not just our bodies from the hiking and uncomfortable sleep, but our brains. Most of the people in this village couldn't speak the common language that we know here, so we had to use my friend as a translator all the time. I was having my 2nd language translated into their language. (Side note- There are times when you realize you've hit some point that says you've lived here too long. Driving 16 hours in a 1 liter van was one of those points. Knowing what pig liver looks like was one of those points. Having my broken East Asian translated was another one of those points.) We stopped in a small tourist town on the way back which was chock-full of coffee shops and bakeries catering to westerners. We gorged ourselves, slept like babies on the first mattress in 5 days, and then made it home on day 6. On the way home, we stopped at the very first McDonald's, even though we had gorged ourselves the day before on much higher quality, better tasting western food. It was a must-do. And lucky we did, because we hit the curly fry jackpot. It was like a double bonus for travelling. (On a side note, it is amazing what being overseas will do to you. I never want McDonald's in America, but in East Asia, I never don't want McDonald's. After being in America for a while, the sign that you are settling back in to East Asia is when you start craving McDonald's.)
After 28 hours on the road, Shelley and I vowed that we had done enough village trekking for the rest of our lives. This was Shelley's 5th village trip, my 3rd. We were convinced that we could not get more village than this last trip. We have experienced peasantry at its worst and its best. This trip was a little of both sides. We were living in mud huts. It was dirty, and I had to hold it for 6 hours one night because it was too dark to find the outhouse without risking tumbling down the mountianside. On the other hand, the food wasn't that bad with the exception of the pig liver. They produced an amazing amount of fried cauliflower which I could eat if I didn't want anything else. Also, they never forced us to eat anything. If we didn't like something, they didn't make us eat it. If we did like it, they cooked more of it (hence the copious amounts of cauliflower). The people were by far the sweetest people I've met in East Asia. They were also the most functional and loving family I had seen in East Asia. They did not earn much of a salary, but they had more than they needed and they were so happy. (Side note: What we would consider functional in America is a distant dream in East Asia. Dads never tell their kids they love them. Spousal and child abuse is common. Grandparents raise the kids while parents go to work in a different city. Brothers and sisters steal from each other. Parents' love for children is determined by their success in school. I once saw through a window a father berading his 6 year old girl as she did her homework... at 11pm at night. My friends' family on the other hand was loving and caring towards each other. They smiled constantly at each other. His younger brother and sister-in-law just had their first kid and when he walked in, his dad, with a huge smile, proudly announced "He's a daddy!!!" This was certainly out of the ordinary.) I certainly understand my friend's life and worldview so much more having gone, and that made the trip worth it.
We're not talking about little fire crackers, we're talking about the same fireworks that you have to hire professionals to light in America. We're talking the kind of fireworks that everyone drives to see on the 4th of July in America, only lit by a 10 year old using dad's cigarette. Is this safe you ask? NO IT ISN'T SAFE!!! New year's first, safety second. I had a fireworks show outside of my window. By that I mean a flash of lightning hit us at the 14th floor where a firework had just exploded right outside of our window sending beautiful green and gold sparks bouncing off the windows. People were shooting off fireworks in the courtyard below us with buildings all around. 
Hmmmm... the 2 year old is a little young, so maybe just Roman candles for her this year. 
The aftermath of the night before, every street and sidewalk is covered by these papers from firecrackers set off the night before.
The town square was hopping on New Year's Day. Unlike our holiday where everyone spends the day at home with family, they go out look at whatever there is to see. 
