Originally published in Time and Tide Magazine, Shenzhen

Spring 2007 issue

by Bill Dodson

My companionYun wanted to visit the small north China city Anshan, in Liaoning province, then on to Dalian as part of our weeklong holiday. Anshan is about a two and a half hour drive to the northwest of Dalian, a lovely seaside city.

The reason Yun wanted to go to such an out-of-the way place was to visit an old friend. She would call the old friend a classmate. Classmates in China are nearly as vital to relationship networks as are childhood friends: people a person can count on to be there for help and support and just plain fun for an entire lifetime. Here, though, I learned that “classmate” can be a highly flexible term. In this case, Yun never went to school with the fellow; instead, she went to law school with the cousin of the Anshan fellow. But Yun, the cousin, the Anshan fellow – named Song – and a fourth character played together a lot during university years. Though how much time they all actually spent together still eludes me: was it one magical summer spent skimming stones on the shores of Dalian; or every weekend for years riding buses and eating noodles in roadside shacks?

Anyway, the fellow was stupendous in the way he hosted us in his small city: a personal pickup in the Shenyang airport, an hour-and-a-half’s drive’s away from Anshan; lunch at one of the very local, outdoor roadside restaurants that studded the highway, all with tables sheltered only by corrugated roofing material; dinner at his home made by he and his wife; an all-out shower, thorough scrubbing and massage at the mother of all massage palaces in downtown Anshan.

Those couple of days, though, discern a key learning about Chinese relationships: they reflect the depth of the relationship through the amount of attention they show you – the more they care about you or the perception you have of them, the more smothering they become in their attentions. It’s absolutely brutal to be on the receiving side of Chinese caring: physically, mentally, psychologically.

Conversely, Chinese expect the same sort of treatment from Westerners vying for their business. Chinese look forward to lots and lots of attention through eating and site-seeing and playing. As Chinese companies move from the sell-side of transactions to the buy-side, this important observation may become key to Westerners winning business in China.

However, Yun and I were able to escape a couple times while in Anshan to explore the surrounding area on our own. We spent an entire day climbing a chain of mountains outside Anshan called Qianshan. Qianshan is remarkable in the dozen or so temples the necklace of mountain peaks sustains: At the base of each end of the mountain chain would-be mountain climbers can buy cheap sneakers to scale the rough-hewn stairways that twisted round the slopes. Yun had only brought on the Anshan/Dalian trip a pair of street shoes, and so wisely chose to spend the US$1 to buy a pair of the sneakers. Other women preferred to remain fashionable, and so in high heeled pumps and dresses made their way up and down the ridges with some effort, but not enough to garner help from the men-folk. The men for their part were heaving with the exertion as much by the slope of the mountainsides as by their lack of exercise and recreational smoking. Nevertheless, all were in high spirits, cheerful, polite and encouraging to one another.

The next day we were also able to make a great escape on our own to Yu Fo Yuan, a grand temple built round a statue of Buddha carved out of rock from a mountainside. The story of how the Buddha got to its resting place is just as arresting as how the Buddha was originally carved. Yu Fo literally means Jade Buddha. The temple is named after the great lump of stone that was discovered in 1960 on a cliff side. Though not really of jade, the colored striations in the stone impressed viewers with colors typically found in jades: dark green, light, black, blue, yellow, and white. The patterns and layers of stone were such that it seemed to those who looked at the mountainside as though the Buddha himself had been impressed in the stone.

In 1992 the rock face was cut from the mountain as a mass more than eight meters high and weighing more than 260 metric tons. The stone was then moved to its current resting place with the help of the People’s Liberation Army, which provided men, a tank and trucks in the hauling. Four years later found craftsmen having completed a carving of the Buddha that worked with the other-worldly striations to bring his image into relief. In 2000, the city completed construction of the temple building sheltering the Yu Fo Buddha.

On the side of the stone opposing the image of the Buddha is an image of Guanyin, the Buddhist Goddess of Compassion. Guan Yin is not as well defined in the carving as the Buddha, and requires a bit more of a kind of Buddhist Rorschach test to make out its countenance. However, it is easy to spend an hour or more at the monolith making out all the animals and stories the swirls of color bring to the imagination.

Yun’s friend Lao Song was not to finish with us so easily, though. As is the way when Chinese host close friends he also drove us the two-and-a-half hours south to Dalian. There, he drove us the length of the Liaoning coast that embraced the city by the sea. The coastline’s resemblance to the California coastline was as stunning as the scenery itself. Lao Song ensured we were feted at a seaside restaurant on the beach with fresh catch. Great, rugged jags of rock jutted up from the beach surrounding the resort, giving us some sense of what the lunar landscape must be like. Sated, we drove into urban Dalian to our hotel.

Late in the afternoon we stumbled across a great outdoor marketplace called Tianjin Jie Marktet, near the train station at Changjiang Lu, next to the Holiday Innn. Every sort of knick-knack conceiveable was on sale: scarves, belts, ties, leather bags, DVDs, music CDs, Budda beads and more. The most wonderful find, though, was the outdoor eating market. Hawkers sold food from all over China from open stalls on which were laden huge bowls of fried rice, fried noodle, spicey crawdads and tofu salads. Fresh and cooked fish were arrayed on large greasy platters, as well as skewers of pork, beef, chicken and squid. My personal favorite was the stall that sold the crispy-roasted scorpions, spiders, centipedes and other creepy-crawlies.

At dinner we met Lao Song’s old friends at a neighborhood restaurant. All in their mid-forties, including Lao Song, my companion Yun assured me that the fellows we were meeting for the last supper with Lao Song were once slim, handsome looking men. Now, they were all chain-smokers, in their fifth month at least of pregnancy, judging from the ample paunches they absently nursed. A lot of playing with little exercise to balance all the extracurricular activities in which they indulged.

The evening was long and laborious, as these Chinese get-togethers can sometimes be for foreigners. The chambered room in the small restaurant was thick with cigarette smoke, and the non-stop chatter deafening. The conversation was so rapid-fire at times I found it difficult to keep up with what was being said, and so my interest and energy flagged.

Late that evening after dinner Yun and I waved goodbye to her “classmate”. There was no doubt in my mind that he felt Yun a very close friend from the way he hosted us. However, I did doubt I would be able in the near-term be able to survive another bout of caring with Yun’s friends. Weary, we walked back to our Dalian hotel, and looked forward to a few days rest and recuperation from the travails of relaxation, Chinese-style.

Copyright William R. Dodson, 2009