HONG HU CITY

Old and New Together.

What can one say about Hong Hu? Firstly let me clarify something. When I say Hong Hu, I am in fact referring to Xin Di, which is the governmental centre, the one 'village' within the wider area to which the term Hong Hu applies.

How does one describe Xin Di? Words alone fail to do justice. It is not the 'traditional' Chinese city of one's imagination nor is it a modern city either. It is somewhere in between and this photograph to the left does, I think, capture the real essence of what the town is like. Drab modern type buildings interspersed with much older brown brick (shacks) homes, and dwellings thrown together using wood, corrugated iron and tarpaulins.

With and Without Water - Hard Choice. This little river runs into the Yangtse but it blocked by a lock.

Some shots of the levee which runs at least 25 kms each side of Hong Hu.

The city is currently undergoing a tremendous modernising reconstruction.

Most dirt laneways (tracks) that intersected with the main road in the CBD have since my arrival been replaced with concrete roads, at the expense of the varieties of home businesses that were conducted out of makeshift dwellings. On every street, buildings are being torn down to be replaced with those that are more modern and aesthetically pleasing.

With the completion of the new levee, the the back end of town has been transformed from a waste land into a garden both literally in that vegetables are now grown in some stretches, and by the planting of tree plantations.

Despite the constant mention by students of the Chinese concern for the environment, rubbish is more plentiful in Hong Hu than people, and dirt and dust more persistent than the IRS. When you combine these three elements with the amount of rain received on a regular basis, the city is awash with refuse.

Hong Hu is a combination of both old and new in age and style. It will not be long I think, before it will be completely redeveloped. The dirt poor rub shoulders with the rich and the occasional beggar, and all walk on the cracked roads, the uneven tiled footpaths and the mud, and all dodge the trucks, buses, cars, motorcycles, bicycles and each other that race madly about the place paying no apparent heed to safety or traffic regulations.

A foreigner finds road traffic chaotic and in a little country town, it would be correct to say, that it is down right dangerous. You do however get used to it.

It is a shock to the system when arriving on the footpath of your desired destination, to realise that not once did you look out for traffic while crossing that busy Friday night intersection. It is then that you realise that you are finally acclimatised to life in China.

The top and bottom photos on the left side of this photograph are two different views of the same building and it sits opposite the building in the bottom right photo. All are situated by the canal in which sits a variety of house boats.

Photo left is just one block past Longkeduo supermarket toward the levee. Photo right is two blocks in the other direction in Ai Quo Lu. Two different streets in the city.

Farmers behind my apartment preparing for planting.

Life here is not egalitarian. High School students have to pay for their education. If you pass the entrance examination, you will only pay 3000 yuan for the year, but if you do not, it will cost between Twenty and Fifty thousand yuan. Only about 500 students will qualify for the low fee.

What is most disturbing is the number of students from rich families, who have no interest in school, no respect for anyone, and no self discipline. Before the new principal arrived there were numerous spontaneous and organised fights among students.

One student during discussion in class was talking about his family. When it came to questions about his sister, he was positively embarrassed, for at 14 years of age, she does not go to school, because her parents cannot afford it.

June 1st is Children's day in China. Photo taken in People's square beside Long Keduo supermarket.

I have mentioned beggars, and there are some regulars, but generally they seem to do the circuit.

I once worked out that it is possible for a beggar at the bus station to earn 4000 yuan a day, if each passenger on each bus for any given day, gave the usual one yuan donation.

It can be a profitable life. Some of course are obviously genuine, but there is sufficient testimony of modern day miracles in that some crippled beggars have been known to 'rise up and run' when confronted by angry townsfolk. One little regular, a girl of about 6 years of age, gets about the place in rags begging the odd yuan or two.

Her parents own a store on the Hong Hu side of the Chibi crossing. She accosted me at the dry cleaners one day, but I pretended not to understand her. The ladies at the store told her to go away, but she was persistent. Finally they told me to give her one yuan.

I held up a 100 yuan note, the sight of which sent them into fits.  No No No! they chorused in English. So in Chinese I said : Two hundred?, then 'Three hundred?.  Finally I gave her one yuan. On Christmas day 2003 while waiting at the barge crossing I noticed this little girl smiling at me.

Father is Sharpening knives. Mother is inside at the sowing machine. This is their home and business.

Although she looked familiar, I did not recognise her, but when I heard her telling her parents about the day she begged from me, I finally realised who she was. Her parents own the store.

It constantly amazes me when I see young teenagers and those well past the retirement age, slaving away at dirty and laborious jobs, all the while smiling and seemingly enjoying themselves.

I guess for the old folk, life is better now that it ever was, but I wonder about the 'poor' young ones. If big burly young men in the west had to pull or push carts as overburdened and weighty as some of the old men and women here do, the union would have them out on strike.

My brother and I once helped an old guy get his cart out of a ditch, and believe me, we were surprised at how much that cart weighed. It's fine while it is moving, but starting and stopping are something else entirely.

Some young people of course land on their feet either by good luck or 'knowing the right person'. Some have even adopted the American dream, and are making themselves rich by becoming Amway and similar product salesmen. Most of the unfortunates if not bound to the farm, become laborers. There are of course the apprentices who will one day have opportunity to work for themselves. The hairdressers are the most striking.

While not hairdressers, these two landed on their feet managing a fruit shop / Liquor store. Smaller one is 15 and the other is 18 years old. We have a lot of fun trying to communicate.

At the risk of being politically incorrect and being labeled discriminatory, when you see most of these young men, their hair colors, their clothes and their demeanor, you would take it for granted that they are 'gay'.

Of course in China, most people have no idea of what the concept entails, for most young people have no idea about sex at all. Most will be virgins when they marry, and most will marry after finishing university.

Hong Hu like any Chinese city, contains areas in which the tourist might feel a little 'insecure'. It is not necessary. They are normal places, just tucked away out of sight, and which can be bypassed without realising that they are there. It took me quite a while to notice the main entrance to one such place, and to my surprise it was like a rabbits warren of every imaginable piece of clothing you could buy.

Long Ke duo supermarket at the top end of town is where I do most of my 'supermarket' shopping, and I even have a membership card that gets me a three percent discount on purchases. As for the rest of my shopping, I do it in the street behind the supermarket.

Top left and right are views of the same place but from opposite directions. Left bottom takes down a laneway (right bottom) wherein are sold a variety of products.

Left side top and bottom are of longkeduo supermarket. Top right is the new 'People's Square'. Bottom right used to be another supermarket but now a clothing store.

I once took Qin Chao my boarder with me, and he freaked. He kept saying 'We must leave this place, it is dangerous. These people are thieves and criminals.' Of course any unfamiliar place in which a Chinese person finds himself is automatically filled with such people. In this street I buy my eggs, meat, fruit and vegetables.

One street off the main city street and running parallel is my favourite shopping street. These are opposite views of the street. Bottom left is my student's uncle's restaurant. Top right is also a restaurant. The other two are unknown. Bottom right is brand spanking new, but I still can't figure it out.

It is also the street in which my former student Wang Xi, has an uncle with a restaurant. His mother also 'controls' the 'mini hospital' further up near Longkeduo.

The street runs from behind 'People's Square' down to the markets off 'Ai Guo Lu' ('Love street'  - but which I call Waiguo lu meaning Foreigner street). Intersecting midway is 'Peoples Street' (Ren Min Lu). Detouring a block up Ren Min Lu, I buy my freshly baked cookies, which I order in advance.

People's square was, when I first arrived, a trash heap, but was quickly renovated. Like Lotus Square located one block away back toward the school, it is a focal point for a variety of activities. In an upcoming edition devoted to 'activities', I will give you a more in depth description. While Hong Hu backs onto the Yangtsze River, it has another river running underneath Lotus Square. It is controlled by a 'loch' at the levee. During the winter months it is dry, but during the summer months it fills right up.

I find it fascinating either way, and even more fascinating when I observed that after 5 months of containing no water, it was not until it began to fill, that a retaining wall was built in the river so that a retaining wall could be build on the bank. That made sense! It is normal! It doesn't matter! That is how things are done in China.

Various shots of 'Lotus Square' which sits over the little river. Bottom left shot has some shadows and light areas in the foreground. They are in fact batches of rice drying in the sun. The Yangtsze river is behind the camera.

Additionally, there are numerous canals, each controlled by lochs. They are all very nice looking, but as the smell knocks you over if you get with 30 metres of them, they are not worth the 'look see'.

One day while waiting for the bus up by that other place opposite the vegetable stands near the toilet on the canal, on the corner one block up from the new supermarket and in the same street as the other school not far from the temple, I decided to walk behind the hedge to have a 'look see'. Oh how I wished I hadn't! And it was only 30 metres from the public toilet as well!

Finally renovating the public facilities outside my apartment

Being a country town, Hong Hu has not been blessed by too many foreigners, and so it is understandable that some people go into shock when they see one.

Although such incidences are rare now, I do still occasionally run into someone who has never seen a 'white ghost' before, and who finds it necessary to stand and point and shout 'Foreigner! Foreigner!'. I sometimes think I would like to hand them a card written in Chinese which reads: Do you really think people here are so blind and stupid as not to realise that I am a foreigner?

I remember the day a woman rushed out of a store, head down. She ran straight into me. She immediately commenced to apologise in 'Dui buqi!'. As the words began to form on her lips she looked up, then screamed! Literally! She screamed, backed away and immediately went red as she realised the puerility of her behaviour. I on the other hand just laughed.

Cooking Alfresco up near the Da Jiudian.

It is common for people to 'pass the word along' that a foreigner is approaching. Heads turns, mouths fall open, and then disbelief follows when they hear in fluent local dialect: 'Ssshhhh! I'm not a foreigner, I'm Chinese!'.

Occasionally they even apologise, although admittedly they usually laugh and say 'No you're not!'. I'm not sure what annoys me most; the people who run away, or the ones that grab their toddlers and push them in my face to make them say hello.

Men playing checkers up the road.

Being a foreigner in a little country town has both its advantages and disadvantages, not just for me, but for local businesses. If the barber shop is empty when I arrive, it will be full by the time I leave.

Empty stores will fill with 'browsers', dead days at the 'massage' shop will suddenly do a roaring trade, and of course it is the pinnacle of prestige to be able to boast that the foreigner has given his 'royal warrant' to a particular business. When a shopkeeper is honest with you, you never bother to shop elsewhere for that particular item. In the markets I have a half dozen stalls from which I always buy the same products.

The drawbacks of course for the locals is that my presence can stall traffic as throngs of people block footpaths and roadways, and once at the local theatre where the Shaolin Monks were giving a demonstration, I had to be asked at intermission to return to my seat because the crowd that had gathered around me was impeding free movement within the cinema.

The drawback personally, is that every so often as I try to join in as a spectator at some public event, I get hounded for conversation by every adult and child that wants to speak to the foreigner. I have found it helpful to keep moving 'around and around' so as not to give anyone the time to pluck up their courage to approach me. More and more I find myself becoming oblivious to people around me in an effort to avoid eye contact. If you don't look at them, they will not interrupt or impede your progress.

Not exactly a penthouse, some people still prefer to live above the rest.

Quite a lot of people call out 'Hello!' as you pass by, but if you reply with 'hello' they burst into the giggles. These days I always make sure that I answer in some other fashion. A lot of people of course like to greet me with the Chinese greeting 'Ni Hao', which means 'hello'. I had noted for quite a long time the extreme pleasure it gives them to do this, before finally discovering that they were mimicking my accent. In fact for a whole year I was frequently saying 'green beans' instead of 'Hello!'. It's all in the way you accentuate the syllables.

Every word in Chinese is different, but their sounds (less intonation) are shared with three others. In Ping Ying, (Chinese in roman letters but not phonetics), the words are identical, except that they each have a different accent designation. 'I come from Australia', is - Wo lai zhe Ao Da Li Ya!. Wo = I /me: Lai zhe can mean both - come from AND breasts. It took me a long time to say it correctly.

Dry Weather - Fine Blue Skies

I once had a student whose name was Xiao Bi. The first time I said his name, everyone went into hysterics. Because I 'intoned' the words incorrectly, I had in fact used some extremely 'obscene' language in reference to the female anatomy.

Despite all attempts to learn the 'exact' intonation, I failed, and so we agreed that in class I would call him Xiao Xiao. (Xiao = the 'ow' of 'how' with a 'sh' sound on the front and can mean small, little or young). I had another student whose name was Xiao Xiao, whom I loved to call  'Xiao Xiao Xiao'.

Toilets in China. I thought about not including this but here it is anyway. Taken by one of my students while fooling around with friends. This is about the cleanest you can expect. Note that these ones have no doors.

Apart from getting the intonation correct, another problem that faces foreigners in little towns, is identifying toilets,  a place where no sane westerner should ever desire to go, but which unfortunately is absolutely necessary.

It took me six months to recognise one public convenience (which I shall never use) and a full year to spot the one that I was passing three or four times a week. In the larger cities they are not so difficult to find.

You merely keep your eyes open for the 'man/woman' picture, but in the smaller places, they are only identified by Chinese characters. It was a year before I could leave my apartment for more than two or three hours at a time.

My sheer delight at having used the (uptown) local convenience was only surpassed by the sheer excitement that spread to everyone in the street, as word was passed along that the 'waiguo' not only used it, but was able to ask in Chinese: 'how much?'. Of course, not everyone in town bothers to pay the 50 jiao (half yuan) and it is impolite to show surprise or to stare when one encounters a person (man, woman or child) doing what comes naturally, especially if they give you a nod or a wave. I have also learned to scan the background in potential photographs. Nothing is more disappointing than to have an otherwise perfect photograph reveal some 'unwanted' background event when displayed in large size on the computer screen.

Country life in Hong Hu

In the final analysis, Hong Hu is a place to be experienced. All I have been able to do here is to give you by word and picture, some insight as to what you can expect. I'm sure as you have read this article, there were subjects about which you would like me to have written more, and I will. Just not today.

R.P.Bendedek
rpbendedek@hotmail.com

Note: Some photographs disappeared from the original file when Magic changed servers necessitating some substitutions in this updated file. (Aug 2007)

ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHS

Some areas are notably more rich in building design

This is a view of a major intersection 3 blocks from Long Ke Duo supermarket. It is now a vacant lot after all the buildings were pulled down. The town is undergoing extensive renovations.

A view of the canal and the park. I could wait forever for a clear day to take this shot.

Looking from the Levee road across the river to an island.

The River/Canal running under Lotus square and controlled by a loch. Full in summer but empty in winter.

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R.P.BenDedek is the pseudonym of the Author of 'The King's Calendar: The Secret of Qumran' (www.kingscalendar.com), and is a guest columnist at Magic City Morning Star News. An Australian, he currently teaches Conversational English in China. Other Stories can be found at:  http://www.kingscalendar.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi?action=viewnews&id=128