Continuing with the TBT series from my China, 1991 experience... One of the great perks of my parents job at Sun Yat-Sen University of Medical Science was how often students would take them out for day trips to show them the countryside and in turn, practice their English. And as the honored son of these honored teachers, I was also blessed in this way. The most memorable time was when my parents most prominent and influential student decided to do this. She was a professor at Sun Yat-Sen and a top surgeon thus had access to much more than any of the others who took me out. We started off in a small van with just myself, her and her daughter and her daughters friend (and a driver of course) and we began by visiting a school friend of hers who was the head surgeon at a hospital in a suburb of Guangzhou. I put the words countryside and suburb in quotations because that is what I was told they were but all I ever saw was one continuous gritty urban sprawl from the university at the center of the city to anywhere is the so-called countryside. When I later went on a long trip from Guangzhou to Beijing I saw what the actual China countryside looked like. Anyway, at the hospital where my hosts school buddy worked we toured the place and then had lunch with the local Communist Party top government official who brought his niece along. I was then asked where I wanted to go next. To their dismay, I told them I would like to see a small village and the government guys lackey had the arduous task of setting this up. See, he was not allowed to take me anywhere that made China look bad so... this whole rigmarole was very entertaining to me. So after Mr. lackey made many heated phone calls with who knows whom... we were finally off through the nonstop gritty urban sprawl and eventually we ended up where that sprawl ended. A small factory and attendant village. The place was completely empty for a few minutes and just as I was about to ask where all the people went to, a group of cute, healthy looking and nicely dressed children came running to me and then proceeded to show me around the place. Others then started coming out and after Id looked around and taken a few photos I was lead back to our van and... that was it. I had a few other Potemkin Village experiences while in China but this one was my favorite. The children whod been cleaned up and dressed for my benefit were after all children and I had a great time with them. But of course the bleak reality of the place was impossible to dress up.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 16:36:36 +0000
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