Category Archives: China stories

Lament for a Town that No Longer Is

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Jinghong has changed. China changes quickly, so I knew to expect this when I went to visit friends in Jinghong earlier this month. But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. The area is less Sipsongpanna and more Xishuangbanna with each passing minute.

The Jinghong landscape now looks like any other Chinese town, with high-rise apartment buildings stretching for miles. I’ve only been gone a little less than two years — how does this happen so fast? I moved into an apartment two blocks from the Mekong River in 2006, mainly because I loved the quiet of a garden right on the riverbank where I could run and look at the water and listen to the birds and frogs in the early morning. By the time I came back from a visit to the States in 2008, the garden was gone, replaced with a new sidewalk and the shell of plans for new construction. Now, on either side of the newest bridge across the river stretch shops, restaurants, bars, and apartments. All covered in neon lights at night. The friend traveling with me commented that it reminded her of Disneyland. I was thinking Las Vegas. Either way, it is not the quiet Mekong River area I used to enjoy each morning. For that you will need to go south to Laos or Cambodia, I suppose.

Areas further from the river are just as bad. Sections of land that were once wide open fields for rice and other crops, dotted with villages of Dai wooden stilt homes, are now filled with 5-star hotels, shops, and an expo center (that is used for an event approximately once a year, thus far). Two-story shop buildings sell for $1 million US dollars. In a town where I paid about $100 monthly rent for a 3-bedroom apartment just three years ago. So far most of the new high-rise apartments are empty, though many of the units have been sold to investors from northern and eastern provinces. People who have never been to Yunnan, never visited Jinghong, have no idea what they have purchased in the form of real estate in Jinghong, and no notion of the true cost of their real estate “investment.”

Don’t get me started on the traffic problems caused by hundreds of new drivers who are used to getting around town on motorbikes and electric scooters. Car ownership is not inherently a good step forward — not when you’re talking about a small town with small roads and hundreds of thousands of people.

The clean fresh air that Yunnan is famous for is now dusty with construction and smoggy with exhaust in Jinghong. It could be any other town in China with a population of a few hundred thousand people, except for the facade of Dai architecture that the Han hope to capitalize on. Capitalize. A market freer than ever, while speech is still held captive. I scribbled this out in the Beijing airport on my way home, but was unable to post until I returned to the US, where Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube aren’t blocked.

Though I was perturbed by the blocked websites out of principle, I enjoyed the forced vacation from social media (only because it was temporary and not a regular imposition in my life) and felt like I had a more in-the-moment kind of trip since I couldn’t post and interact with people not directly in front of me. Still, at times my mind forms status updates, even when I’m not able to post them:

* 41 hours after the start of our 3.5 hour layover in Beijing, we were finally able to take off for Yunnan. Hundreds of flights cancelled due to fog, thousands of passengers stranded at the airport. You always think “It will never happen to me” — but sometimes it does.

* In my pocket are a few small green coffee beans from the trees on B Mountain – the first-fruits of the seedlings planted after the truck flipped during their transport (with me and three co-workers in it). Many emotions involved.

* The coffee roaster has made it to the cafe at last!

* Today I held a 7-week-old baby with one arm while using chopsticks to eat potstickers with the other hand. A latent talent revealed.

* I lost count of the mosquito bites I got while I was asleep each night of this trip, but the grand total of spider bites (or, more accurately, unidentified-Mekong-River-jungle-area-creature bites) while sleeping is 1.

You can build as many high-rise apartments as you want, but the jungle creatures will still find their way indoors at night.

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Trip to Yunnan

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Fall of 2006, Yunnan, China. My niece in Connecticut was 18 months old, and I couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing her again until she was almost 3. I missed the rest of my family, too — I was feeling the strain of being away for so many months on end. Part of being a sojourner on this earth (going where God leads when He leads, because nowhere on this earth is my home so much as His kingdom is) means going long stretches separated from dear ones.

It was inconvenient timing for a trip to the U.S. — work was busy, it’s expensive to travel at the holidays, and I was tired just thinking of adding another trip to my work travel schedule. But I needed to see family, to spend time together reconnecting and being rejuvenated in the bonds of love.

Fall of 2011, Kennewick, Washington. I’ve been away from Yunnan for 18 months. I can’t bear the thought of it being two or three years since I’ve seen friends in Xishuangbanna, since I’ve walked with them on the Mountain, since I’ve sat and had a good laugh and a cry with Lydia. It’s an inconvenient time to go — work is busy, it’s expensive to travel to China, and I’m tired just thinking of adding another trip to my work travel schedule. But I need to see my Yunnan family, to spend time with them reconnecting and being rejuvenated in the bonds of love.

So I’m going to China for a two week visit. Internet monitoring and blocked websites in China being what they are, I won’t post here or on Facebook until I return the week before Christmas.

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Bloggiversary

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Two years of blogging, as of today.  173 posts.  Two continents.  Many lessons learned—at least for me, I don’t know about you.

I began the blog during the early days of helping friends start up Mountain Cafe in Jinghong, China.  Too many odd happenings and funny anecdotes throughout each day behind the counter of the coffee shop to pass up the opportunity to post it all online.  From there the blog morphed into a place for me to tell stories of village trips, report on my progress in learning a minority language, discuss the progress from cafe to coffee growing.  I posted cute conversations with waitresses and customers and village kids.  I wrote thoughts from my travels through Yunnan, Burma, and Laos, including the road trip where I ended up sideways in a ditch with my elbow sticking through the glass of the truck’s passenger-side window.

When my plans for coming back to the States began to take shape, when the idea of writing Lydia’s story became more and more persistent and I couldn’t ignore the story any longer, I worked on blog entries to explain my decision process, to express clearly to myself and others why I was making this transition.  The blog has become an important part of the way I interact with friends and family.

Keeping up with regular posts throughout each week has helped me grow in discipline as a writer.  Being able to write about topics apart from Lydia’s story has given me a good outlet, as well, for pieces that come a bit more naturally to me.  Developing a novel, working on a character arc, practicing dialogue—this is all new to me, and it’s difficult.  Writing for the blog is a way that I can keep my confidence up on those days when the novel overwhelms me.

It’s a good, good feeling today, looking back on two years of blogging.  Thanks for joining me here.

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Upon the Resignation of My Passport

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Giving up my little red truck and changing my car personality was hard, and now I’m dealing with switching to a new passport.  More literally than with my truck, that passport defines my identity, at least in the computers of national governments around the globe.

In early April 2001, a pickpocket took my wallet while I was waiting for a city bus in Kunming, China.  I lost my passport, two U.S. bank cards, my Bank of China deposit book, a full card worth of pre-paid milk cartons from my corner store, and about $7 worth of Chinese currency.  One very disappointed petty thief went home that evening to find such a small amount of cash in my wallet, I’m sure.  The cards were useless to him, and I quickly notified the Chinese bank to put a hold on my local account.

The greatest trouble, of course, came from the stolen passport.  I had to file numerous police reports in Kunming, post a notice in the local paper (I love Chinese bureaucracy, where I have to pay for a public announcement that I’m the victim of a crime), fly to Sichuan to the American consulate, and apply for a new passport.  This was five months before U.S. travel security was forever tightened, and I was given a very unofficial looking passport with handwritten information in the front and my oh-so-very-not-digital photo glued to the third page.  It was valid for ten years, though, so I continued to travel with it as long as I could, to save myself the time, energy, and money of getting a new digital passport book. Passports are expensive, darn it—I paid for ten years, I want my ten years.

The layout of the pages in that special passport of mine is unlike the standard issue and caused wrinkled brows and phone calls to supervisors just about every time I went through immigration at an airport or border crossing (and if you’ve read my blogs from China, you’ll know this was often).  Towards the end of my time in Asia, the official seal on the front cover was completely worn off, and I’d have to announce my U.S. citizenship to the officers as I went through the line, rather than just hand them an easily identifiable blue passport with gold embossed eagle.  Officials in Asia would repeatedly tell me, “You should get a new passport, this one’s too old.”  But no U.S. official ever said a word about it, so I figured that if my own country doesn’t have a problem with it, I’m not going to worry about the guy sitting in a hut on the border of Thailand and Laos.

But when I came back home this spring, I had no excuse for not sending it in.  I had plenty of time to wait the four to six weeks for it to be processed and returned, and I wouldn’t lose a current Chinese visa by getting a new book.  It was time to advance to the digital passport age.

The new passport is just one more tangible way that my identity is being redefined at this point in my life—and not just because in the new photo I have long curly hair instead of the short spiky cut I wore during my student days in Kunming.  A well-used, nine-year-old passport carries with it documentation of nine years of trips.  Nine years of memories.  Nine years of experience.  Twice I had a new set of pages added to that passport because I’d run out of space for visas—I have to admit, my pride is just the tiniest bit pricked by trading in that thick book for a thin one.  When you’re standing in an immigration line in Asia with a passport as worn and fat as mine, everyone around you knows that you’re no inexperienced traveler.  You’ve been around a while.  You’ve been in and out of this country and others, who knows how many all together.  Now I’ll be back to that same flimsy, empty document I had when I started.

When that first passport was stolen in 2001, I only lost a couple of Chinese and Indian visas.  This time I’m losing fourteen Chinese student, tourist, and employment visas.  Seven entries to Laos for visa runs and vacation.  Innumerable stamps into Thailand, from four ports of entry.  Stamps for Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, South Korea.  Full pages for Vietnam and Myanmar. Getting this new one could easily seem like trading in my old life of travel for a blank one of no stamps, no history, no stories of hassles and hang-ups represented by the document that I carry.  I’m trying to choose instead to look at the possibilities, the newness and cleanness of this passport, and the future journey its stamps will record.

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Over and Out

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Immigration officials on the Lao border stamped my passport with one last re-entry to China, and I’m down to about four weeks before heading to Texas. I don’t want to have a public countdown of the days, either here on my blog or on Facebook—nor do I feel compelled to bore you over the next four weeks with reports like “Today I gave away my couch.”

So I’m signing off this China blog. I’ve posted all my thoughts on leaving that are worth posting, and I don’t want to wear out my welcome in your newsfeed. I’m grateful to all of you who have supported and encouraged me over the years by regularly checking and commenting on my website, first with my photos and my amateur stab at podcasting, and later with this blog. It’s been a great outlet for me to share about life and work, and I hope it’s been a help to you, too.

From April until some time in the summer I’ll mostly be in Texas, with visits to family and friends in North Carolina, Connecticut, New York, Oklahoma, and elsewhere along the way. I’ve worked on most of the book research with Lydia in hours here and there over the past few months and will continue to develop the project as I visit folks in the spring—but writing in earnest will begin this summer. My current plan, God willing, is to spend a year with friends in Alaska and Washington. We’ll see how it all unfolds.

I hope to resume blogging once I get semi-settled somewhere this summer. But for now, find me by e-mail or Facebook. Zai jian.

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Reflecting on “If”

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Final entry in the series…

We will be a blessing to them, they will be a blessing to us—that’s what serving others looks like, and everybody involved feels great in the end. Or at least that’s what I thought on my first visit to China, over ten years ago now. And ideally, it’s still how I would like the world to work, though I see now that the reality of serving others is not that simplistic.

During that long ago trip, I went with a group to volunteer in an orphanage for the morning. I anticipated holding babies, feeding them, playing with them, caring for them, showing them love. And I was in the middle of doing all that when one of the older boys from the orphanage came to where I stood along the row of cribs and pulled on my sleeve. I finished feeding the baby in front of me and followed him down the hall to a narrow room with one child-sized bed in it. Seated there on the floor, tied with a piece of twine to the leg of the bed, was a toddler.

Shaking off my shock, I went to the little boy and stooped down to him. The twine was wrapped tightly around his waist, his arms and legs left free to move. I couldn’t untie the knot and needed to go find a pair of scissors. I said as much to the little guy in English, not knowing any Chinese at the time. But as I stood to leave the room, panic flashed across his face, and he grabbed at my feet, clenching my shoelaces, sobbing. He didn’t know that I had just said to him, “I will be right back”—all he knew was he didn’t want to be left alone.

I sank to the floor and cradled his head and arms across my lap. Motioning with improvised sign language, I sent the older boy for help. While we waited for him to return, I stroked the little one’s head, speaking comfort to him in a language he didn’t understand. He clung to my legs and shuddered as he cried.

The older boy came back with help, and the twine was soon cut loose from the toddler’s waist. After he was freed, I reached out to pick him up and hug him close—but instead of climbing into my arms, he pushed me away, refusing to let me hold him. Then he was whisked off, and I didn’t see him again.

I was crushed. That’s not what was supposed to happen. He was supposed to let me hold him and love him, and both of us would feel better. Why would he push me away? The first verse of a sad song that has played itself for years, always with the same refrain.

People desperately need help, and we desperately want to give them the love that we have experienced. Having known that love so deeply ourselves, we struggle to understand how, sometimes, people can look straight in the face of goodness, acknowledge that Jesus is good—and still not want anything to do with Him or us.

Amy Carmichael’s booklet If is a series of meditations on “Calvary love” written for her coworkers in India. I pull it out and reread it from time to time, and one verse has stood out in recent days as I think back on several people in particular from my years in China.

If in dealing with one who does not respond,
I weary of the strain, and slip from under the burden,
then I know nothing of Calvary love.

May my love and service for others always be fueled by a love for Christ, by an understanding deep within me of what He did on the cross. Then, at the end of the day, whether those around me respond with loving acceptance in return, or whether they shrug me off indifferently, still I will know I have loved well and done what is pleasing to God.

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What to do with our talents

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As I was jotting down some ideas for this series, I realized that one of the topics I wanted to include was covered in a short essay I wrote a couple of years ago when the café first opened. I reread that blog entry and found that the way I expressed myself then is still the way I would express myself today. Rather than retread that ground with a separate essay, here are the salient paragraphs from July 7, 2008’s entry:

One of the lies of the enemy is that to be obedient to what God calls us to, we will end up living in one of the worst places we can imagine, doing work that we find distasteful or boring, basically trying to get by being someone we are not. We fear that whatever we most don’t want to do, that is what God will ask us to do.

The truth is, following Jesus is hard—it is the way of the cross. And He does want me to be someone I am not—someone holy and sanctified and loving and good. And He died and rose again so that I could trust Him to make me all those things.

But He doesn’t want to change the things that make me Rebecca, doesn’t expect me to give up the interests and abilities and talents that He Himself gave me before I ever drew a breath. He wants me to lay them at His feet, offering them up as a beautiful sacrifice, and trusting that He will use them and me for His good purposes. So whether I eat or drink, or make things for others to eat or drink, or learn a minority language or teach English, or whatever I do, I will do all to the glory of God.

Add to that “whether I live in Asia or America, whether I write children’s stories or travel essays.”

Here’s to the past few years of living and working in China, sometimes within my talents and giftings, and sometimes very much beyond them. And here’s to the next chapter—may it be full of the joy of knowing that it’s only by grace that I have any chapters at all.

Next in the “Finishing Well” series:  ”Reflecting on ‘If’“

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A Few Cooking Resources

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As a follow-up to the story I posted yesterday about learning to cook while in China, I thought I should mention a few of my more commonly used resources. I found myself wanting to mention them in the previous post, but decided not to interrupt the flow of the story by including too many details.

For breads and cakes, I have worn out my Betty Crocker’s New Cookbook. I learned a while back that if you can start to get a feel for the right proportions of dry and wet ingredients in a recipe, you can adapt it to your own flavor preferences, and this standard cookbook has some solid, basic recipes that I’ve tweaked over and over again to make breads and cakes with my own flair. Betty Crocker is also where I tend to turn for basic information about meat and vegetable preparation—it’s just a solid resource book.

A few years back, a roommate introduced me to More-with-Less Cookbook, by Doris Janzen Longacre. For someone living overseas, this book is a must. So many simple, yet delicious recipes. I love that the recipes don’t start with a can of cream of mushroom soup or a block of Velveeta or any number of other American recipe staples that I can’t get here (and really shouldn’t be eating on a regular basis in America, anyway).

My favorite online resource is allrecipes.com, in large part because of its ingredients search function. I can search for recipes that include ingredients that I have on hand, as well as excluding ingredients that aren’t available to me—a big deal if I’m trying to find a recipe that, say, uses cocoa powder instead of baking chocolate. And, again, if you get a feel for how to use the right proportions, this site is a good place to read through several similar recipes for ideas and then strike out on your own.

Several people have asked me over the years about writing up some local recipes, and I just haven’t had time to do it in addition to my other work (with the exception of a blog entry I posted last year of Lydia’s mom’s steamed fish). Chinese cookbooks abound, if you’re in the mood for Cantonese or Sichuan or some of the more popular cuisines. But recipes from Yunnan are a bit more hard to come by, so I was quite excited when a friend gave me a recently published cookbook called A Taste of Shan by Page Bingham, with recipes from the Shan State in northern Myanmar, just across the border from where I live. The Shan of Myanmar have ethnic (and therefore, culinary) ties with the Dai of China, so this book will be a treasure to me in days to come, when I need to whip up something to remind me of southern Yunnan.

(Thanks, Emily, for More-with-Less, and thank you, Erin, for A Taste of Shan.)

Next in the “Finishing Well” series:  ”What to do with our talents”

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Desperate Times, Desperate Measures

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In college, I cooked with a coffee maker. I cooked a lot of coffee, but I also cooked a lot of hot water for instant oatmeal and ramen noodles in my dorm room. On days when I was feeling exceptionally adventurous on a culinary level, I might make Pillsbury cinnamon rolls in the kitchen on our hall.

To me, the epitome of being a grown-up was cooking. So when I moved from the dorm to an apartment for my last semester at school, I made the grown-up purchase of a rice cooker that would also steam vegetables. I couldn’t have known at the time that those were the forerunner of many meals to come for me—I was just thrilled to fix dinners that required something slightly more involved than dissolving packets in boiling water.

My first few years in China were marked by suitcases and care packages full of cake mixes and Martha White muffins. Man, I love Martha White. Just add milk and you’ve got muffins in 20 minutes. Eventually I realized that I could bake a much greater variety of breads and cakes, as well as never run out of ingredients, if I went local. Flour, sugar, yeast, baking powder, salt, butter–all of these can be purchased locally, so why not begin experimenting with baking from scratch? My first attempts weren’t very successful (i.e. appetizing) because Kunming and Lincang are both at high altitude, but by the time I got to low-lying Jinghong I could make a batch of muffins using only local ingredients and fresh fruit in just a few minutes more than it would take to mix up a package of Martha White.

In due time, entrees followed. With a crock pot and a wok, a world of endless possibilities opened up right there in my kitchen. I began using fresh ingredients to make spaghetti sauce, vegetable soup, chicken curry, and other standards that now populate my repertoire, including my own fried rice that I find tastier (and less oily) than a lot of what I can buy on the street.

My proudest achievement, I must say, has been to make enchiladas completely from scratch, including rolling out the tortillas, peeling and boiling tomatoes for the sauce, cooking and shredding the chicken. It’s an all-day affair, and I’ve only done it a handful of times, but it is worth it. Totally worth it.

When I look back at my progression in China from a box of mac and cheese mixed with a can of Rotel mailed from home to chicken enchiladas with my own tomato sauce, I can do so with a sense of gratitude for the opportunity to learn these skills. Preparing a meal and serving it to guests brings me satisfaction, and I’m not sure I would have discovered this unless I’d come to a place where the convenience of mixes and packages was removed from me to a great extent. Though I may not cook completely from scratch as much back in the States as I do here, at least now I have the confidence to try new meals when the fancy strikes.

Next in the “Finishing Well” series:  ”A Few Cooking Resources“

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Out of the Limelight

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I’ve always known that I prefer small gatherings of people and quiet conversation over large crowds and a lot of noise. In general. There are some instances where I make exceptions, like if live music is involved. But on the whole, I like to keep it low key.

And I don’t like to be the center of attention. Put me in the background, let me do behind the scenes work, but please don’t make me be front and center. I like to be anonymous—which sounds a little ridiculous as I’m getting ready to post this online for anyone to see.

But living in China the past years has put me in a position where I can’t always be in a quiet, subdued atmosphere—too many neighbors with karaoke machines cranked up to the limit, constant construction and remodeling in the various apartment complexes where I’ve lived. And I haven’t been able to remain anonymous at all. I always stand out like…well, like a white lady in a crowd of Asians.

It’s been a challenge for me to find ways to have private, one-on-one conversations with local friends, as people tend to travel more in packs (or as twos and threes, at the least) than as individuals, and as conversations in villages may be interrupted by any number of people wandering in uninvited and having a seat to listen.

Community based living (as opposed to American individual based living) is not my ideal lifestyle, not the way I would prefer to function on a regular basis. But learning to adapt, to go beyond what I’m comfortable with, has been a way that God has grown me in His grace. Not only to depend more on His goodness to get me through situations I find unpleasant, but also to have more grace for others when I see them in social situations outside of where they would wish to be. Forgiving a sharp word or an unspeaking glare comes a lot easier when I remember the countless times friends and strangers have patiently overlooked my rude remarks—or my silence when I should have spoken. In that way, the community based living I’ve experienced these past few years is a lot more like what Jesus and Paul say in the New Testament about living life together as the church than the way I once tended to live my quiet, isolated life.

At this point, though, I crave being able to walk down a street without crowds staring at me, without my presence being announced, or to go to the grocery store without the other shoppers gawking at what on earth I might possibly need to buy. These things bothered me when I first moved to China, but then they became so commonplace that I stopped noticing. Until, that is, some Asian-American friends pointed out that being in public with me in China is a different experience than being out on their own. The past couple of years, I’ve begun to desire being inconspicuous again, to not have my every move watched and judged—or at least, to have people not be so obvious about the fact that they’re doing it.

But, having said all of that, when I get back to the States, if you run into me in Kroger, please stop and say hi. Please don’t feel the need to pretend like I blend into the produce section, for the sake of giving me my personal space. But please, for the love of all that is good, don’t gape at the contents of my shopping cart.

Next in the “Finishing Well” series:  ”Desperate Times, Desperate Measures“

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