As promised, a (first?) post with a bit more depth about my time in Oliver's hometown of Sunwu, Heilongjiang Province.

I'll begin with the material. The apartment was fairly average as Chinese apartments go - two bedrooms, a small living room, one bath and a kitchen with two-burner gas stove. While I was there, Oliver and I shared one bedroom while his parents and grandmother shared the other. The running water was out of wack meaning the bathtub was in service as the main reservoir for the house, but other than that it was great. You can check out the pictures below. And as I said before, his mom made us some great food. A typical day began with a breakfast of zhou (rice porridge, better than it sounds) or soft boiled eggs alongside the abundant leftovers from the previous day. For lunch and dinner we had food that ran the gamut of Chinese cuisine - spicy doufu, small meat+veggie balls called wanzi, peanuts, doufu skin (sort of a noodle consistancy) stir-fried with vegetables, chicken dishes, dumplings and so forth. All of this eaten with a big mantou bread roll in the left hand, much better than the rice those southern Chinese like so much :) In the evening, I sat around watching Chinese TV dramas while talking with his family and munching sunflower seeds. All in all I couldn't have been happier.

The first thing you might notice upon walking out of Oliver's apartment building would be the huge pile of coal directly beside you, being shovelled towards the burner by a middle-aged Chinese guy caked in black dust. Walking between a local noodle shop and another apartment building, one emerged onto a street lined up and down with folks selling their wares - fruit, meat, doufu, mantou (bread), and a dazzling array of Spring Festival fireworks and decorations. The town of Sunwu was, like most places I've seen in China, a microcosm of the country's rapid devlopment. Here stood about eight to ten main blocks with multi-level buildings, apartments, restaurants and businesses, and then right across the street (inhabited) wooden shacks slanted sideways from the wind. Oliver told me how he had lived in one such home for most of his lifetime, only moving into their small but comfortable apartment about eight years ago. As I walked past the alleys leading between these dwellings towards the edge of town, I inhaled air thick with the taste of coal-smoke from each family's individual coal stove. Within hours wiping my nose left a black streak on the tissue.

One of the things that strikes an American suburbanite is the definition found in many cities abroad. After a ten minute walk, we literally reached an edge to the city - a last row of houses, a fence, and then fields and forest beyond. Here was no lingering infection of farmland and forests by occasional housing developments or newly minted retail strips, but rather a stark demarcation of town and country. The landscape reminded me a bit of Michigan, with low rolling hills and lines of trees breaking up the fields, but a farmer driving his herd of oxen across the snow quickly dispelled the image. We made our way up a low rise no more than a kilometer from town and I looked out upon a path in the snow that continued to the horizon. Turning back, I was faced with a simple memorial to those Chinese who died fighting Japan during the Second World War, dedicated in both Chinese and Russian to the heroes who fought "for socialism and to liberate the nation." The squat obelisk stood over a handful of weatherworn tombstones. At the foot of a second nearby marker commemorating the dead of the Chinese Civil War, a few scattered ashes of paper offerings mixed with the snow. Even with Oliver and some other Chinese students nearby, it seemed a lonely place.

That came out longer than I expected so I'll wrap up here with an intent to finally get around to viewpoints and what people were like in a future post.

Oliver models the living room.



Dinner, though sadly this picture is of the one meal we ate at his house that was takeout. Some sort of egg casserole in foreground with doufu behind.



On the streets of Sunwu.

The edge of town.



The long and winding road.