Visiting 水楼 village

[hapatofu]

Yeah, another friend of mine who accompanied a friend of his on a visit to a Guangdong village recommended hiring a driver and van, who can (hopefully) also act as interpreter between Mandarin and local dialects. 

Prices at the hotels are quite high this time of year and Gaoye is a bit out of my budget. Parklane was giving me trouble with the bookings so I chose another on Elong called Rongfeng 榕丰酒店, it's 160 per night and the photos and reviews looked OK. If it's nasty, oh well. Won't be the first nasty place I've stayed in. Traveling around China is usually not the place for luxury vacationing. I'll report back on the hotel.

[hapatofu]

Just wanted to make a quick update to the thread that I made it to the village! Actually it was not so difficult to find -- it's just off the main road (S273), the first right after the second gas station. My boyfriend and I spent the late morning and early afternoon there and got to see the actual house where my mom was born and spent the first decade of her life, and we got to meet her childhood friend, who she hasn't seen since she left China in the late '50s, and her mom, who fed my mom when she had nothing to eat. In the house we discovered some old photos that were molding away, one of which is of my mother, uncle, and grandmother, who I'd never seen a photo of. And all the cookies and candy and money business turned out OK, at least in my estimation. At least nothing was terribly awkward or embarrassing, and nobody asked me to pay for anything, and everybody accepted my gifts with little to no pushing.

As far as the hotel I mentioned, for future reference to anybody planning a trip to Taicheng, I can recommend it as a budget option. It's decently clean, the water is hot and water pressure high, and the location is fantastic. The only downside is it has the standard hard-as-a-board Chinese-hotel mattress, which is a bit of a letdown from the plush cushiony mattress in the Shenzhen hotel I was sleeping on prior to this. I made a mistake with the character though, it's 裕丰酒店 and it's right next door to the Taicheng Qiche Zong Zhan (inter-city bus station), which makes it very convenient for finding minivan drivers as well as taking buses to Kaiping, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, etc. 

After the village we went to Kaiping to see some diaolou but by the time we arrived everything was closed. Walking around outside and looking at the buildings was still nice. We will try again tomorrow. 

We caught the last bus back to Taicheng and walked around the entire city (forgot to take the map and got lost, oops) looking for a place to eat. We walked through the shopping street, and eventually decided to stop and buy some fresh squeezed juice from a stand, and asked the guy there where to eat. He pointed us down the road to a dim sum place called 迎喜 (Yingxi) which was completely packed (and it was big), quite tasty, and we filled up for 84 yuan, which is probably the cheapest proper-restaurant meal I've had on this journey.

I will post some photos when I have access to a faster Internet connection. 

[lachinatown]

Thank you for the update. This is the kind of feedback we need, helping others.

When you have time, can you please clarify the maps as to the locations of the villages.

[hapatofu]

I am back at home base, in Chengdu, so I can upload photos and clarify locations. What is the best way? As best we can tell the spot of my mom's actual house is 22.357652,112.799533 and the surrounding buildings would be Shanyuan village. (Also, although the village is just up the road, neither of the clerks at the bus-station-adjacent hotel nor the three or four drivers we talked to among the many congregated outside had heard of Shanyuan or Shuilou!)

I noticed most of the villages along the main road between Taishan and Dazhen had gates with the name of them. It would be such a fun project to spend a few months in the area just mapping all those small villages. I unfortunately was driven into and out of the village so I didn't spend any time on foot exploring the surrounding area, one of my regrets about the trip.

Another thing I noticed is that on a road just west of the S273 (actually the road splits off from that road and heads to Kaiping), there was a sign for 李边村. Are these 边村s some kind of border demarcations for clans?

I'm uploading a photo of the village per FayChee's request! Beautiful weather in the afternoon. My mom's house in the small cube with the car parked in front of it. It sure was musty inside -- who knows how long it hasn't been opened, and it leaks when it rains. (If you click the image, it gets a lot bigger and clearer.)

[FayChee]

Wow! Thanks Hapatofu! I love seeing anything about the Villages......it's like being there myself. You have a nice big village compared to my dad's. My dad's village has only 8 family's and 31 resident's (possibly less by now). Your houses look pretty new and well kept too.

Thanks again. If you have any indoor shots, can you post them too?

Fay Chee

[lachinatown]

Could be since 边 (bian) means edge or boundary

[hapatofu]

Yes, I think a lot of the houses have been torn down and rebuilt completely. Some just stand there empty, but some are lived in, and have been upgraded with electricity, plumbing, and phone lines. My mom's house is the only one that is still in its original condition because nobody's been living there for decades (even that one had electrical wiring added so that two small lights could be hung). When I was growing up my mom would always tell me about her friend who had the biggest house in the village. It was made of bricks and was several stories. That friend was there to greet me, and her mother still lives in the house. I was amazed at the condition! Obviously some of it has been renovated, because there is a new kitchen with sink and CNG stove, and a bathroom with pedestal toilet, but they said the main rooms and walls and wood fittings are original. On the other hand, the house adjacent to my mom's belongs to her cousins (or some other relatives) who live in the U.S. now and they came back and rebuilt the house but it seems everything was just torn down completely and built with modern materials, so it's lost any of its historical "charm." Nobody lives there, either. Everybody told me I could rebuild my mom's house and live there (well, I don't think I could handle living in such a small village -- even Taishan city would start to feel small to me after a few months, I think), but if I did I'd want to do it in a way that would preserve some of the originality of the building. Doesn't seem like that's a popular method here though -- even the preservation work done on those UNESCO "world heritage" Kaiping watchtowers is embarrassingly sloppy.




Here's my mom's house on the left and the rebuilt house of our relatives on the right, so you can see the contrast. That's me in the blue jeans.



Interior of my mom's house. There's a lot of trash in there. It was hard to get a full-room shot that wasn't blurry because of the low light (only one window and a small light bulb).



This is a (newer, I'm presuming) watchtower that is on the S273 (main road from Taishan to Dazhen).




Here's the dim sum restaurant in Taishan that I mentioned in an earlier post. You can see some people looking over at us, wondering what these foreigners are doing in there. Haha.

[hapatofu]

Interior of the "fancy" brick house -- you can see there's a TV and refrigerator ...


... and a toilet, which impressed me so much I had to take a photo.


Interior of the rebuilt house of our relatives.


Same as above.

[FayChee]

Great pictures Hapatofu! I like seeing your mom's house and the contrast with the more recent. Those boxes look like they may hold something interesting. I hope that you keep you mom's house intact, it has so much character and a cherished link to the past that the others will never have. When I go to my dad's village and touch the walls and doorways, I will have touched the many generations before me. I would never trade that for untouched walls.

Fay Chee

[laohuaqiao]

hapatofu,

I'm glad to hear that you found Yuanshan village, without too much problem.

Most car service drivers/taxi drivers in Taishan are not local; so, it is not unusual that your driver did not know Shuilou. Fortunately, Shuilou is just off the main road, not difficult to find.

That wooden platform over the bed in your mother's house is the attic. Typically, parents sleep in the bed while their children are up in the attic. There should have been a ladder to climb up to the attic.

[FayChee]

Hapatofu,
I hope you go back and explore your mother's house more. Those boxes in the attic look like they may hold interesting things from the past.....and the large bowls and urn under the bed are treasures.........

Fay Chee

[hapatofu]

Well, it's not clear who really has say over the house. Actually, until about a month ago, I would have never imagined it even existed. Chengdu seems very keen on tearing everything down and building new stuff. When my mom casually mentioned that I could see her house if I went to the village I was quite stunned. Apparently somebody in the village has asked if her son could rebuild and live in my mom's house, and my mom said that it's not her house because it would pass down to the male relative, her brother. On the other hand, she said her brother wouldn't care about the house at all. I assumed when they left in the late 50s that they were just giving up the rights to the house or whatever. As far as I understand property laws in China are such that when you "buy" property you are actually only leasing the land rights from the government for 70 years so there's no such thing as property passing from generation to generation. But maybe it's different in the countryside. I don't know.

[hapatofu]

Oh, yes, there is a ladder there, and it's in the picture, though it took me a moment to spot it when I looked at the photo again because I managed to capture it just at the angle that it looks like a long bamboo pole (the rungs are hidden in the photo). My boyfriend actually climbed up it to try to get to the trunks so we could see what was in them, but he decided that the attic was too unstable to support his weight.

That is one of my regrets of the trip, not getting into those boxes, especially after my mother saw the photo and confirmed those probably were hers/her mom's/brother's. On the other hand it would not have been good for somebody to break a limb or something. But I was thinking if we'd been smart and not so rushed we could have moved the ladder to the opposite wall and from the ladder reached the trunks and brought them down. Oh well. My mom says it's probably "just junk" inside.

I don't know if my mom and her brother slept up there. I always had the impression they slept in the bed with their mother, and sometimes, apparently, her "bed guests." Their father was in America their whole lives.

[hapatofu]

I hadn't even noticed those things under the bed until you mentioned them. I guess there was so much clutter, and those just kind of look like normal things you see in China so they didn't stand out to me. 

I really would like to go back, now that I know where it is. But my mom's cousin, who holds the key, doesn't have warm relations with my mom -- well, there's just no relationship there -- and initially she said she wouldn't come to even unlock the padlock on the door so I could see inside. Eventually some of the villagers managed to persuade her and she came, but I don't think I helped warm the relations because I turned down her invitation to go to her house -- I kind of wanted to go, although it would have been awkward as we really didn't have a language in common -- but we were pressed for time and BF really wanted to head to Kaiping to see the watchtowers. 

[FayChee]

Hapatofu,
Thank you for sharing the story of your trip. Maybe you can smooth over the uneasiness with your mom's cousin by writing a 'Thank You' letter, and explain the situation the way you just said it. You could also wish her a Happy Lunar New Year with all the nice things to say, and maybe include a few Yuan too. If this doesn't work, at least you tried.

Fay Chee