Postcards from China

During the 1993-94 school year, the foibles of which you can read at China Grunge, I taught all of the Fuzhou University Foreign Language Department’s sophomore (2nd year) and senior (4th year) students, over 160 young people in all.

I’ve heard tell of a few of them in the nearly 12 years since then–and in case you’re reading this, “Julia,” the student who wrote last year through my site’s Contact page about her new life in Germany, please write again: you forgot to include your e-mail address!–but during my recent week-long visit to the city of Xiamen, I was able to get together with about 10 former “4th year” students who live there for dinner and learn what they are doing now.

Of the two fellows who live in Xiamen and were able to make it to a gathering, one is now a policeman in Xiamen and the other a “sales executive” (he travels a lot) for a high-end Chinese jewelery manufacturer (and got married just a month ago–congrats!).

Of the gals, one describes herself as a “stay-at-home Mom”; a few work for trading or shipping companies; one is the manager of a particular department in a travel agency, overseeing “outbound” travel packages (rather than in-city Xiamen tours and arrangements, that means); one now works for the Chinese tax bureau in Quanzhou.

Another gal is the owner of her own trading company, and doing quite well–she drove us back in her stylish new Honda sedan to the apartment we were staying in after dinner that evening. (This is the student “Helen” who jumped in to help me negotiate commerce with sellers in a vegetable market back in 1993. I guess she had that go-getter spirit even back then.)

Another of my former female students and her husband have opened and are running three import-export companies. I’m not clear on why they have two in China, but the third is registered in Hong Kong, mainly for what I’ll describe as “tax shelter” purposes.

Here are a few photos from one of the “reunions”:

One day during the recent Spring Festival, we went with some friends to visit the nearby Chao An Temple.

Chao An’s is an interesting story. Or stories, I should say, for I found some variation between what the locals told me and what I read summarized in a Xiamen area guide book.

First, here’s what the locals told me:

During the Song Dynasty–no, earlier than that, someone said; no, definitely later, countered another–a man who became Emperor belonged to what the locals whom I was with know only as the “Mo Ni” Buddhist sect. But for some reason, rather than, say, appointing other members of this Mo Ni sect to Imperial Posts, he decided that the sect had become too powerful and needed to be stamped out, and so it became open season wherever this sect was centered–maybe near Xi’An?, someone suggested–on members of the Mo Ni sect.

They were nearly successful, but a small remnant mangaged to escape, and they came to take refuge at this Chao An Temple near Anhai in Fujian Province. And now, it turns out, this particular temple is the last in the world associated with the Mo Ni sect.

In his book Amoy Magic, however, Dr. Bill Brown, who has been living and teaching at Xiamen University since 1988, offers this account of the “Anhai Manichaean Temple,” one of the “last bastions of Manichaeism, ‘The Religion of Light’–an esoteric combination of Gnositicism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity”. In Dr. Brown’s version of the tale:

Emperor Taizu, who ruled from 1368-1398, banned the Religion of Light because “ming” ( ), the Chinese word for “light,” also happened to be the name of the Ming Dynasty, and…the emperor decreed that only he could use the name. Thus was the world’s very last stronghold of Mani’s light extinguished, though locals continue even today to worship the Manichaeist deity in the Cao’an ‘Thatched Nunnery’ (which some take to be the popular Goddess of Mercy). This temple also boasts the last Manichaeist carving in China–of two angels holding lotus flowers and a cross (a combination of Greek, Persian and Chinese mythology).

It appears that the Persian’s followers made their way into China in the late seventh century, at the same time as their arch rivals, the Moslems and the Nestorian Christians. The Manichaean Temple was built in 1339, after villagers had spent 26 years carving statues of Mani all over the cliffs of Huabiao mountain…. [T]he statues are unlike any others in China.

In any case, there have been some changes here since my Wife’s childhood. She remembers the land surrounding the temple grounds being a “forest” where you could wander through the trees, but now the forest has been razed to create more farmland, and to make some space for parking and a line of tables selling trinkets and snacks along part of the path up to the temple buildings.

Some additional temple buildings have also been going up; it’s not longer just the small temple half carved into a rock where you can burn your incense and koutou to the Buddha.

But it was in this small temple building where my Wife decided to have a go at the “prayer sticks.” You pray, and then toss these sticks to the ground three times seeking an answer to your question. Each stick has a “top” and a “bottom” side–heads or tails, we’ll call it.

If you get a “heads-heads” response, the Buddha is laughing at your for your silly mortal request. If you get a “tails-tails” answer, it’s an emphatic “no.” If you get a “heads-tails” combination response, it means yes, and that’s of course what everyone is hoping for. But you have to pray and toss the sticks three times per request–and the Buddha’s answer is essentially based on a “best out of three” approach–meaning that you have to get the “heads-tails” combination on at least two of your attempts. And if you go three-for-three on a “Yes” answer, well, there’s no question of the Buddha’s intent.

My Wife asked two prayer questions this way at the temple.

The first was whether she should “step out” now from being just a stay-at-home Mom, which she’s done since we were first expecting our first child, and return to work, perhaps in our own self-employed venture.

The Buddha answered “Yes” three times.

I’m not sure why on earth the next question occured to her, but she asked the Buddha whether our oldest daughter should attend kindergarten whole days in the fall (as opposed to half days).

Again, the Buddha gave a three-for-three “Yes” response.

The odds of getting two three-for-three “Yes” answers in a row is, well, you figure it out.

She was on quite a roll, and I kicked myself later for not thinking to ask her if I should bet a seven-point spread favoring the Steelers in the Super Bowl the next day.

One night not long ago, my Wife was looking through a stack of magazines here at the family home in Anhai for some bedtime reading and happened upon this particular publication:

The cover photos–alluring forbidden women in bedroom attire mixed with police detentions, guns, and SWAT team photos–and the main stories in the rag are sort of “True Crime…with Chinese Characteristics.”

The typical story: a public official or businessman has a mistress on the side, and in order to keep her sufficiently in fur and diamonds (or risk losing her to a bigger fish, one assumes), he turns to a life of crime–bribery, embezzlement, graft, theft, overcharging foreigners for airlines tickets, or whatever. In some cases, he turns to kidnapping or murder to cover his trail. But in the end, he is caught and sentenced to jail or death.

Some of the stories are actually as “boring” as a shipment of DVDs arriving in Xiamen and–gasp!!–its procurers trying to sneak it through customs without paying the appropriate taxes. But even these ho-hum type stories are accompanied by photos of models in lingerie or the like with “come hither” expressions on their faces, and it’s obvious that most of these have been lifted from Japanese magazines or advertisements–in one, you can even see that they didn’t completely crop the advertising copy for some line of cosmetics.

A few of the police pictures look brutal–some of the folks being arrested look a bit roughed up–but I’m not sure that some of these weren’t also lifted from movies or the like. A police officer in one of the pictures looks suspiciously like a minor character actor I’ve seen in some Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige films.