Holidaze

I know this sounds ridiculous, but I think in a country with 1.3 billion people, not everyone should go on vacation at the same time. It's beyond me who's going to divvy up the national holiday vacation days, but as the Chinese middle class grows and the expansion of permissable vacation destinations (like the opening up of Europe this year to Chinese tourists), something has got to change--for sanity's sake, if not humanity's sake. Chinese tourists are at least equivalent to American tourists: Loud, pretentious, disrespectful, and often appear as if they believe that they are the center of the world.

I went to the native home of Kongzi (Confucious, as we Westerners like to call him). I had to pay a chunk of RMB to wander the grounds of his family mansion, actually the mansion built by his descendents, since during his time, Kongzi was a mere peasant and most likely lived in a little hut. Why did a man at the bottom of society (however he was at least a man) create a philosophy of hierarchy that kept him there?

Tai Shan was no better. By the time we elbowed partway to the top, we were sapped of any enthusiasm to take pictures. Upon trying to get to the top, Wei and I became so disgusted of the rear-end view of other tourists that we decided that no matter how famous Tai Shan is, it wasn't worth it.

The real highlight of the trip was actually finding Wei's relatives at his ancestral home in Shandong. His uncle is a county leader (magistrate, governor, mayor?) in a extremely average looking county south of Jinan, the capital of Shandong. Other relatives included a hospital director and a head of the county transportation bureau. On our way to the county seat, we passed through miles and miles of farmland. They had just taken in the corn, which lay spread out upon the road to dry, narrowing the two-lane road into a half-lane circus of trucks, cars, motorcyles, and bicyclists. At the pale dusk after sunset, both sides of the road were lit with red-orange bonfires of dried corn stalks. The smoke hung hazy blue as it drifted across the fields and spread into the horizon, creating a surreal multi-layered background that faded into a dream I had when I was eleven.

The "successful relatives" were a direct contrast to the other relatives we met the second day. One family had three children (two girls and a youngest boy), of which the youngest two didn't even have hukou, which they wouldn't get until their father paid the steep fine for going over the one child policy. Each of the two brothers were responsible for giving the father 100 RMB a year, but due to a sibling rivalry, one of the brothers was no longer giving his "fair" share. Of course this story was not apparent right away, it was revealed layer by layer, much the way the land was revealed to us through the bonfire smoke. In the afternoon we went to where the Wei ancestral forest once stood. It had been razed in the zealousness of creating more farmland for the Great Leap Forward in the late fifties. Wei's great grandfather's tomb still remained somewhere under the field. His 80-something year old great uncle marked the spot were the tomb should have been, and they burnt paper and incense with dried corn stalks in a furrow as all present kowtowed in respect for the dead. Even though Wei's great grandfather has been dead for decades now, I left that field feeling like I had just attended a funeral, if not for Wei's great grandfather, then for China's shattered history.