Henan Province Firsts:
Meeting a Hero, Going to China's First Buddhist Temple, Being the First Foreigner to Visit my Friend's Village

(Hopefully pictures will come soon...an ugly peasant gangster and his band of misfits stole your narrator's new camera's USB cord among other things while he was sleeping)

The train trip from Shanghai to the provincial capital of Zhengzhou was a pleasure of train travel. I arrived to my friend's arms the next morning feeling mostly refreshed, though not entirely caught up on the sleep I'd been ignoring the past week as I finished teaching classes and packed everything into the backpack again. (Still a rushed affair). Though I brought my qin to class to give my students a listenlisten, I decided at the last moment not to bring it up north. It's just too heavy.

My friend was in his home province doing some work for the
ChiHeng Foundation, an HIV/AIDS outreach and education organization dedicated to helping MSM and AIDS orphans. He was checking to see that they were going to school. Most of the HIV/AIDS cases in Henan were the result of illegal blood selling programs. In some cases, entire villages were infected and the government expects it to get worse.

We went to the local hospital to visit what my friend described as "a hero". I had little idea who she was, except that she worked with Henan's AIDS orphans, her husband was sick, my friend didn't want me to tell her I'm a journalist, and I couldn't "ask too many strange questions."

We brought her a case of milk and surprised her while her teeth were still in the sink. She was gracious and down to earth and spoke heavily accented Mandarin faster than your narrator could listen. We went to the cafeteria to drink special "Henan noodle sauce" and eat baozi. Her husband was tired and went back up to the room. Not too long after, a woman came and sat down at the empty spot. We were talking about the orphans she'd just visited. Suddenly the woman said, "Oh, you're Gao Yaojie, I recognize you from the newspaper."

When we went back to the room, Dr. Gao gave me two of her books. She told me the stories of the orphans pictured at the front of the book. She showed me the pictures of the fresh graves mounds of an already crowded village cemetery. They brought tears to my eyes.

In one of the books, there were excerpts from an interview. Dr. Gao was asked if she thought she was a hero. She replied that her life was a sacrifice, but she was not a hero. She was a sacrifice so others wouldn't have to be sacrificed. She described her most important trait as being able to tell people "things are not good" when everyone else says "things are good."

I then knew why my friend considers her a hero.


White Horse Temple

Somehow my friend and I managed to fit in a visit to White Horse Temple about 25 hours from Zhengzhou before heading back to the city for a drag show. White Horse Temple is the depository of the first Buddhist texts brought back to China from India.


Backpack and a Keyboard Sponsors Your Narrator as First Foreigner to Visit a Friend's Chinese Village

I didn't really want them to slaughter two of their precious chickens for me, but what could I do? I was the guest of honor in Wang Lou Xiang (Wang Building Village).

With a population of about 1,500, Wanglouxiang was about ten times bigger than your narrator's village of Fenwick, Michigan, USA, but still about as small as Chinese villages come.

We got off the bus and walked along the dusty road to the center of town. My friend stopped at every crowd of folk to say hello. "I have to say hello," he told me. "We're all surnamed 'Wang,' so we're all somehow related. I have about twenty people I call "grandma" and about fifty "aunts". Some people call me "grandpa" because they're three generations younger than me.

We stopped first at his grandmother's home. She was leathery and beautiful. She'd been out in her vegetable garden and came in to pour us some tea. The east side of her house was plastered with posters. There was a statue of a Chinese god alongside Guanyin and Amitabha.

We got the key to the village temple and I kowtowed to the local harvest gods. We took photos with the village kids. I met my friend's parents and his uncles and his aunts and his neighbors. We went to his parents' fields and looked at where the government was going to put in a new highway down the middle of it.

We spent the night preparing dumplings and the chickens his father and uncle slaughtered for my coming. During dinner, we talked about US-China relations, my ability to comprehend between 30-90% of their banter, Edgar Snow, my future memoirs, the progress of the village (just change, I said) that an American could come there, our favorite American founding fathers, North Korea, Confucius, Lao Tze, and Buddhism, among other things. We all agreed that we were friends, that we were earthlings, that some sort of true Chinese culture resides in these northern provinces. I learned the polite and correct hand gestures for receiving baijiu, the noises I should make when indirectly answering a question about how tired I felt (being indirect is the Chinese way). I managed to drink only one small glass of baijiu (Chinese rice wine) while his uncle drank ten or more. I was intoxicated enough from my fever.

Now it's Shandong time! (Shandong being your narrator's home province).