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Yunnan
IT DOESN'T LOOK LIKE CHINA TO ME
by Russell Johnson
AUDIO-MP3
Bai Wedding
- Dali, China
We are at a
wedding, in China. But it doesn't look very Chinese. This is a
Bai wedding on the shores of Lake Erhai in Yunnan Province. Yunnan
is in the far south near Thailand. It is one of the most un-Chinese
places in China. In fact, aside from Han Chinese, there are 25
tribes who live here. I got to this wedding by following a truck
filled with people.banging on drums and honking on little horns.
I didn't know these people and except for "Ni hao, "which
means "hello," I don't know a word of Chinese. My translator talked
to the groom who invited me to be a guest at his wedding.
The lanky groom
greeted me at the door to a courtyard, handing me a cigarette.
In fact he greeted every male guest with cigarette. I don't smoke
and every time the groom saw me not smoking he gave me a new cigarette,
which I promptly stuffed into my jacket pocket. In fact it later
became rather a joke.as he figured out what I was doing. He snuck
up behind me and stuffed cigarettes behind my ears. He even tried
to stick one in my mouth. I ended up with a pocket full of loose
tobacco and rolling paper.
The bride wore
a brilliant red dress with a little crown on her head. Red means
good luck. The groom wore a new suit.with the labels and price
tags still attached. That, by the way, is very Chinese. I was
in Beijing last fall on a business trip and while the bosses wore
their designer suits western style, the flunkies who were following
them around wore them with their tags still attached.
 I
didn't really understand what was happening at the wedding, but
there was lots of dancing and lots of good food. The women wore
very colorful red outfits.regular dress clothes, by the way, not
special costumes. People wear native dress here every day, not
just for special occasions and tourists. You go to a market here
and you find an enormous variety of traditional costumes.worn
by women. The men are pretty drab. I have always wondered why
male humans are so drab while the males of the rest of the animal
kingdom are so flamboyant. Maybe the human genome project will
discover that we have some kind of a drab gene and that will get
fixed.
At the wedding,
the crowd was segregated by both sex and age. The women sat on
one side of the courtyard and men on the other. The younger men
wore street clothes while the older men wore their old blue Mao
suits. You don't see many of them in Beijing or the larger cities
these days. And women not only dress better than men, they do
all of the work as well. I took a two-hour boat ride thorough
a beautiful marsh off Lake Erhai. Women were stoop harvesting.
An elderly woman was poling our boat. All you see men doing around
here is fishing, smoking and gambling.
Island Temple, Lake Erhai
Yunnan Province,
China ranks as one of my favorite destinations primarily because
of its diversity. There are some 25 "minorities" as the Chinese
call them, which are remindful of the various tribes in a Tolkien
or Star Wars fable. They range from the mountain people of the
Tibetian Plateau, to a matriarchal tribe where the women live
alone and only allow men into their house to procreate, kicking
them out in the morning.
There are the
Yi, who live in what is called The Stone Forest, a spectacular
karst stalagmite landscape. The Dai, who live near the Thai border,
hold a yearly festival during which they build homemade rockets,
have them blessed, and fire them off into the heavens to awaken
the rain gods. On occasion they blow themselves up in the process.
This diversity
also extends to the terrain. In the north are the white-capped
mountains and pristine rivers and gorges of the Tibetian Plateau.
China claims that Zhongjian was the prototype for Shangria La.
At the other end of the Mekong, which runs through Yunnan before
entering Thailand, Laos and Burma, lie the jungles of the South
that look, feel and taste like Thailand. In other words, the food
is spicy and wonderful.except for grubs and scorpions.which are
tasteless. You eat them for their texture.
 I
was the official guest of honor at a dinner in Xishuangbanna.and
I really don't know what I sampled although most was delicious.
If you happen to be a guest of honor you will, of course, be presented
with the ceremonial fish head. I picked around it a bit and sampled
some gristle behind the gills. I couldn't deal with the eyes,
however, but my hosts apparently found my acceptance of this token
of honor sufficient. Most of the rest of the unrecognizable dishes
were very tasty. I sampled a particularly good piece of meat,
which I was told afterward was donkey. I was told that I also
feasted on that traditional staple that the Chinese euphemistically
call "ground goat." Now, that doesn't mean goatburger or the opposite
of mountain goat. Ground goat means shorter than a goat.otherwise
known as dog. The dish that I really loved was seemingly the favorite
dish of Yunnan Province. There aren't duckponds all over the place
for nothing. Yunnan duck is not the same as Peking Duck, which
I find greasy and digusting. Yunnan duck is marinated in spices
and slow-barbecued in ovens you see all along the road.
Delicious.
I left the wedding.
Had an appointment with some cormorant fishermen. I paid my respects
to the bride. The groom poked cigarettes behind both of my ears
and doubled over with laughter.
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