Ni Hao from China...

ni hao,

greetings! from rural China. sorry no pictures, but i promise they're
coming soon. i will try to describe as vividly as possible.

my first week in China i was in Beijing going to meetings with
professors and my college friends in fancy hotels and huge shopping
malls in beijing. that week i also interviewed a mother of a man who
has schizophrenia. she broke down as she spoke to me when she
mentioned the question she always asked herself: ' when will there be
help for people like my son and for families like us?' she really
feels that people suffering from mental illness are at the bottom of
society, with no way of competiting for jobs and a future and no
support from society. it's disappointing because the situation was as
bad as i expected.

i did hit up quite a few bars and clubs in beijing with my cousin and
his buddies on the summer Chinese language program at Beijing
University. apparently, they party a great deal. the clubs we went to
were populated greatly by foreign students and the rest were children
of wealthy politicians, businessmen, etc. i could tell by the audi's,
jaguars, and bmw's parked out in the lot. beijing's a fun city to
party all day and night in. hot pot is available 24 hours. the karaoke
place was the shit. it looked like a 5 star hotel fully equipped with
fountains in the lobby, an all you can eat buffet, and servants in
tuxedos who arrive literally at the push of a button.

after Beijing, I went to Xi An for a few days of training and the past
week and a half I've been living in a small town in the middle of
China called Tie Chang or metal factory. I'm in the county capital
today, which is the bigger city closest to Tie Chang. We took a day
trip here to take a shower...the first shower in about a week. we
rented out a hotel room for 2 hours and took showers. i made sure to
clean everything since i know i won't be doing anything remotely clost
to this for a while. it felt great to be clean. we also ordered some
meat dishes, which we could not find in the town. we've been eating
mainly noodles and rice for the past few weeks. after being in the
rural town, which had two small restaurants, one paved block, and a
few snack stores, this tiny city (with 3 or 4 major streets) seemed so
high tech and bustling. i was amazed to see paved sidewalks and people
in high heels. i can imagine what the villagers must feel when they
first step into this city.

It's been pretty nice living...well, the toilets here are like slits
in cement that you stoop over...basically permanent port-a potties.
it's actually more sanitary since nothing ever touches a toilet seat.
you just kind of hover. there's a communal sink in the corner of the
yard where they boil water with coal in the mornings. everyone has
these basins to hold water and we wash our hands, faces, and hair in
the basins or right under the faucet. we took our first "bath" the
other day. it was a joint effort. two girls held up a sheet to block
the view while the third one poured water on herself with the basin
and water from the faucet. it was quite an adventure. not having
running water down the hall makes getting ready for bed quite
complicated. after fetching a basin of water, one needs to do
everything in just the right order to minimize the number of times you
need to fetch water again.

quite often, we'd find strange looking bugs in our room. the first
night our room could have been a moth exhibit, with all different
sorts of moths of different colors and shapes. there are also giant
centipedes, beetles, and spiders of all sorts. last night we found a
giant moth...it had a wingspan of about the width of my hand and quite
a fat body. we failed to lure it out of the room so we just slept with
it. coexisting is something i've learned to accept with these
critters.

otherwise, the view is gorgeous here. we're surrounded by mountains,
often with mist hovering in the slopes, not much different than the
chinese painting i had in my room. i've taken many pictures that i
will put up when i get back. there's a river that runs by the complex
we're staying in that makes a constant rushing sound we often mistaken
for the sound of rain hitting the pavement. it's quite soothing and
every morning it makes me feel that life is good. many of the mountain
slopes are terraced and thickly growing with corn, and other fields of
crops. once in a while you'll see the farmers bent over tirelessly
working on the slopes. i can't imagine one family working so much land
on their own on such steep hills, and yet they've been doing this for
hundreds or thousands of years.

in America, i always imagine the people you find somewhere to have
setted the land not so long ago, and imagine what it was like for
them to break new grounds there. i would imagine people arriving from
all different places, there to do different things, and eventually
moving elsewhere when they grow up. but here, people were born here,
families were never really from anywhere else but here, and they fail
to see themselves being able to go much further than the county
capital. i asked the girl who works at the health office what she
would want to do if she could do anything she wanted. she said to find
a good job in the county capital like her brother who drives a taxi
there. i realize how much broader i've been taught to imagine. i see
so much more as possible than they do here.


there are seven of us students here: me, this girl from stanford, a
harvard undergrad, two med students from taiwan, and two grad students
from Xi An (big city in China). the grad students come to the rural
villages quite often for research on the rural mutual health care
program there and they know the area pretty well. they are like our
chaperones. the two med students from taiwan know are my age but know
so much more medicine than we do. they go right into medical school
from high school. one of them is pretty obsessive compulsive and
carries his own chopsticks, bags of medication, and his own syringe.
they're quite amusing.

the local dialect is a bit difficult to understand, but if i ask them
to repeat things, i'm usually able to figure it out. the word for
'child' is the equivalent of 'doll' and they use it no matter how old
the child is. i like how they can call a 40 year old son, 'my doll.'

people here are extremely friendly. the village chief has our fellow
students over for a huge feast almost every day. (amusing note: he
apparently also gets drunk at noon everyday and comes home to sleep it
off). when we arrive, people would by reflex start bringing out stools
for us to sit on and ask if we've eaten. a 13 year old boy i met who
was the son of the owners of the restaurant we eat at gave me a
picture he drew. he said it was the best one he's done. i asked if he
wanted to be an artist when he grew up. he said no. he wanted to
change some things in this village. i asked what things. he said all
the things that are behind the times. he said he wrote to yao ming
many times but he doesn't think the letters ever reached him. people
here are pretty into the NBA.

the children here are so mature for their ages. 10 year olds would
tend the shop and 5 year olds would serve as waitresses at
restaurants. the kids raise the younger kids. the look in their eyes
are even different. they look at things with the same scrutiny and
understanding as adults, not so much of the wonder and innocence i'm
used to seeing in schoolchildren. even toddlers seems to stroll around
on the streets like old men sometimes.

people move slower here and they sit in the same place everyday.
things are so regular. it's hard for me to imagine staying in such a
place for all of your life, not to mention all of your family's life,
generation after generation.

in terms of the health conditions, so many things go untreated here
because people have no money. there was a woman i met whose husband
has been bedridden for years but they gave up on treating him because
they ran out of money. during our interview with her, we heard a weak
moaning in the back room, which i assumed to be her husband. when they
can afford it, people here get IVs and injections when they get a bad
cold because they're so desperate to get well soon so they can go on
working in the fields. time is precious to them. some women who work
at a paper folding business work from 7am till 10pm with two 30min
breaks for meals during the day. their job is to fold yellow paper in
3 and tie a stack together with red string. the paper is for people to
burn in their worship at the temples.

as expected, they don't know much about mental illness here. they
assume mental illness to be "going crazy" or something like psychosis
is what they describe. surprisingly, however, most beleive they can be
brought back to normal with treatment, which is good. they seem to
have a great deal of faith in medical technology, but their faith in
the care that they themselves are able to obtain with their income is
another story. they're big fans of drugs. if they can afford it,
they'll buy drugs for everything, even the smallest cold. i was sick a
few days ago and the health official kept telling me to go and get an
IV. i really feared going to the town hospital knowing what little
training the doctors had.

most houses here are made of dirt and wood. the floor is dirt, the
walls are dirt, and the ceiling is dirt, with some wood crossbridging
wood planks. some of them are quite large but even the big ones are of
similar material. they sit mainly on small stools of hard wood that
hurts my butt after many interviews in a row. it's usually very dim
and i don't think there's many electric lights in these houses.
there's always the smell of mold or damp wood. no matter how poor the
household, there is always a decorative floral design made of stone at
the center of the top of the roof and the edges of the top rim is
always sloping upwards. there is always words of poetry written on
each side of the door, traditionally specifically written to protect
the house from harm and bring it good luck. these things are a given.
they seem to give the area such character and shed light on the
livelihood of the people despite their difficult and quiet lives.

for the next few days, the 7 of us and the health official will be
going to the most remote village in the township. we'll be living at
the village chief's house and sleeping 3 to a bed. no cell phone
reception there, no phone lines that call out internationally, no
stores to buy bottled water or other things, 1 hour drive from the
safety of our town. i'm not sure what it'll be like.

i wish i could send some pictures, but it's hard to do that at the
internet cafe.

i might be able to write again in a few weeks. but i do have email
access at the town via a phone line. it's quite amazing actually.
write back and let me know how you're doing!

bev