The Faces of Diplomacy
or, the blind man's dream
Part II of "Developing Pains"

[Note: This is part two in a three-part expose on the politics and culture of development work in rural China, as witnessed first hand on a Jane Goodall Institute--Shanghai Roots & Shoots project in rural Anhui Province, July 2006].

Read Part I: Our Re-Education Vacation

Stay Tuned for Part III: Coming Out

If they'd known he was coming there would have been fireworks. But they didn't, so instead there they scrambled just to make tea in time for our meeting in the headmaster's office.

As we called the international summit to order, I ran my toes between the ripples of earth, troughs of green mold and brown ridges of soil. This was the perfect place to discuss my government's interest in rural Anhui, and just about everything from the impact of the cultural revolution to how to develop eco-tourism.

I didn't have much to say, having only been invited by accident when the town's accountant noticed I was blond and nearby. She must have thought I was part of the diplomatic staff. Little did she know that I too had only just moments earlier stopped helping another volunteer teach kids how to paint, that I too had no idea why this junior consular staff decided to take it upon himself to be the second foreigner ever to visit her town.

This second J_s_u_, a Latter Day Saint of girth and smiles and sweaty t-shirts, had just flown in from the stink city that morning to investigate our project—a bunch of high school and college kids in rural Anhui doing poverty alleviation. (I write this in retrospect and my temples yawn in astonishment at just how rare an opportunity this was).

This newcomer, who we started calling Big Qiao, because he my beautiful sister, set to marry Sun Ce. Myself, little Qiao, I was going to marry Zhou Yu. Oh, wait, this is a story about our observations of nascent inklings of shovel sashayety. It's about being part of Condoleeza's forward reaching diplomacy. Big Qiao wanted to see a project that "couldn't have happened five years ago." That official justification aside, Qiao probably just needed time away from his desk, or because he was still a boy scout at heart.

Oddly enough, he was also the only person on this trip in his 30s. Not just in our contingent either. He was the only thirty-something I'd seen since we left the county seat.

Local leaders didn't trust this thirty-something much more than I did. To the neighboring town's mayor, regional accountant, village head, and our old friend the headmaster, Big Qiao's unannounced arrival could have been a huge loss of face. They did everything they could to regain control of the situation. We on the diplomatic staff tried to control our giddiness at the thought that this was probably the biggest international event in the history of this village—ever. And we asked lots of questions.

As we learned at our meeting, the reason I hadn't seen any other reform generation-aged people (gen x-ers to my America audience) is because the rest of the middle aged villagers had become part of China's 100 million-plus floating population. Fully 60 percent of the eligible workforce was now in cities like Shanghai day laboring for five dollars a day. (If only that meant as much as it did when Henry Ford paid his workers the same).This left the village with an interesting mix of the very young, the elderly, the feeble, and the insane. All of them are desperately poor, the worst off living on less than $100US per year.

Part of the goal of this trip was to identify these neediest village residents and administer aid. The headmaster thus led us into the hills.

We first visited a family of seven—two grannies, gramps, man and wife, great uncle, and an infant—who lived in a Ming Dynasty home, built when the family moved to the region eight generations earlier. This house was a living tomb. "Long live Mao Ze Dong thought" was slathered in red across the ornate archway. We passed hanging hunks of meat encased in preservative hairy green mold and a small-scale casket factor in a side room. Like other households we would visit, the family was eviscerated, its middle generation toiling in the cities to send back pittances.

We ate lunch at the third house. By then we were soaked and it has started to storm. Curious enough, along the way, we stopped at Yang Shan Village's one claim to fame, a stand of natural rocks that seemed to jut out like foundations of a bridge over the valley. "Legend has it," said the headmaster, "that these stones were placed here by the immortals." Whether it was the same eight Taoist adepts who left human form in antiquity I didn't ask.

Lunch turned into a small fiasco when our group tried to pay the equivalent of $20 American dollars to the family who made our food. They even purchased two cases of beer, which we rightly refused. The family's protestations and our insistence turned into a small scuffle, with members of our group actually forcing the bills into the matriarch's sweaty mitts and then holding her back when she threw them back at us.

When I tried to buy some tea at the last house, the family again refused my payment, even when I couched it in terms of a donation for their granddaughter's school supplies. After butting heads for close to twenty minutes and trying all manner of roundabout ways, I finally told him that I would make a donation to the headmaster instead. I still trusted the headmaster at the point, but soon my opinion would change. Either it wasn't just that man's back that was crooked, or that he was working at the behest of superiors who acted just a bit slaunchways.

My first inkling that things were off came when I realized that this tour and the tour the day before had one major difference. Whereas the first half of our group had actually seen the poorest of the poor, we seemed to be visiting the headmaster's friends, even one of the teachers at the school. Every household had livestock, televisions, and home-made satellite dishes made of woks, tin cans, and other scraps. Perhaps the headmaster thought he was avoiding an international incident, but lunch might have set better if the family had been desperate enough to take our money without a scene.

That afternoon during my daily afternoon "cleaning" meditation, my eyes would not stop watering. My right eye felt like it was full of sand. Tears welled and streamed. By nightfall, I was in severe pain. The next morning was even worse. I was in no shape to teach my art course to the local kids. Our intern doctors looked at me.

Diagnosis? "Sand eye."

CuTetracyclinelene cream and closed eyes.

Blind for the day, eyes swelled to the size of ping pong balls, throbbing with pressure and sensitive to light, I lingered on straw mats in our communal boudoir nibbling on potato chips. A dozen attendants—volunteers resting between classes—were at my beck and call. They served me food and read me the Chinese version of Jane Goodall's "My Life With the Chimpanzees." Then, when they thought no one else was listening, they began to share with me their philosophies and inner-most dreams and insecurities. I felt like a priest hearing confessional. Few of the blind are so lucky.

Our intern doctors said that if my eyes weren't better by the next day, I should ride back with my American buddy, even suggesting I fly back to Shanghai with him after the six hour car ride to the provincial capital of Hefei. The headmaster offered the village doctor.

The headmaster may have gotten chewed out for not informing the leaders that Spate Debarment higher-ups would eventually see what few foreigners get to see, but no one lost face. The only problem is that, as we'll see in the next installment of this series, I wasn't the only one who seemed to have lost site.

Through small patches of mobile phone signal, arrangements were made for we two ancient Chinese beauties to hightail it out of this place my "sister" described as a place that "even a chicken daren't shit."

Read Part I: Our Re-Education Vacation
Stay tuned for Part III: Coming Out