She went there, to the south-east corner of
Gansu Province, China, in August 2010 to teach English for a year and the
following April my sister and I found ourselves on a country bus driving
through China’s driest province to the dusty little town my daughter called
home. She and her fellow gap-year teacher lived on the school campus – the
object of much friendly curiosity as the only two westerners most of the town
had ever seen.
Now there were two more.
Within minutes of our arriving, pupils jumped up and down to
look through the window and some came in to see us close up. Fortunately, no
words of ye ancient western wisdom seemed to be required from the oldest one or
her sister – all we had to do was pose for what turned out to be the first of
(very) many photo sessions.
During the next six days we were privileged to be asked out by
generous and genuine people to restaurants, and to private homes, to sample the
region’s delicious noodle-based and surprisingly spicy food.
But one invitation
appeared to have its own agenda.
We met our hostess (an English teacher who spoke very little English), and her husband who ‘works for the
government’, outside the school gate at 5.30 but it wasn’t until 9 o' clock that we
sat down to eat in a hot-pot restaurant, the only kind that stays open that
late. (Hot-pot is a kind of individual fondue arrangement where tofu and raw
meat and vegetables are dropped to cook in a pot of boiling soup.) For three
and half hours we had to sing for our supper.
First of all, we were startled to be ushered into a large, newly
built, empty hotel belonging, as it turned out, to friends of our hosts, escorted upstairs to a bedroom and photographed – perhaps,
we later speculated, to appear in promotional material as their international
clientele …
We – the party now including the hoteliers – were then
driven about ten miles away ‘to see a valley where there are beautiful flowers’. On the way we passed
dozens of cave dwellings, some definitely still occupied (I saw a line of washing high on
the hillside) but our hostess denied this and was keen to show us ‘the new
countryside’ and the houses recently built for the farmers.
When we stopped to look at the ‘beautiful flowers’ carloads of more of their friends arrived to check out the westerners, add them to their photograph albums, and follow them as they drove on.
When we stopped to look at the ‘beautiful flowers’ carloads of more of their friends arrived to check out the westerners, add them to their photograph albums, and follow them as they drove on.
Our next stop was a primary
school where, at seven o’ clock in a smoky staffroom, teachers were marking
homework.
We were invited to have a look round in the company of one of the teachers, a cigarette tucked behind his ear. The school was built in the 1950s and not much changed. A
board on the wall had Chinese writing with an English (?) translation underneath:
All the teachers trooped outside to be photographed in the
playground with us and our entourage plus three children who had appeared from
nowhere. As we departed, waving royally, my sister, a primary-school head in
rural Scotland, tried and failed to imagine a similar scene back home.
Finally (in the dark) we had to inspect a poly-tunnel which apparently was very eco-friendly.
We were conducted around it by a smiley man to whom, like all the other followers we acquired that evening, we were never actually introduced.
He turned up at the hot-pot restaurant (above, left) and
as a finale to the night was revealed to be, not the gardener of the poly-tunnel
as we’d vaguely assumed, but ‘he runs TV station’. Another line-up. Another
camera. Would we appear on Chinese TV? When I looked in the mirror back in the
hotel and saw the havoc wrought by leaning over the steamy, spicy hot-pot I could
only hope not.
We were conducted around it by a smiley man to whom, like all the other followers we acquired that evening, we were never actually introduced.
