We refashioned a memory. Mom, Ian, and I took a trip with Habitat for Humanity last May that we loved. It was a build in Bangkok that was very well-planned: Though the work was hard, our group stayed in a goodish hotel with wifi, hot showers, and great breakfasts; and we all built a house from the ground up, so we saw our progress. Our hotel was in a colorful neighborhood, so mom, Ian, and I were able to indulge our sense of superiority by escaping from the Habitat group at night and discovering small restaurants alone.
This is a memory shot: a picture from last May, when we were sweaty and happy.
So before a year had passed, we booked another Habitat trip—and that’s the trip we’re on now: a five-day build in Ghangzou, China. We didn’t know what to expect in that town we’d never heard of. Guangzhou happens to be the third largest city in China, population 12.8 million, but we didn't know what to imagine. We came for New Year's, on a build that went through the first week in January.
Mom decided to start with a solitary trip—she spent her first three days alone in Tokyo, planning to meet us on New Year's Day. I love how she grooves when she travels alone, so I need to excerpt an email she sent to me after day #1:
“[Annoying] that a couple sitting near me on the plane got on the same bus out of the airport and are staying in this hotel. They can't accept that I'm here on my own and that I don't want to go with them on an 8 hour tour of Tokyo tomorrow. I'll buy a disguise; wig, dark glasses, trench coat, and try to avoid them for the duration.”
Ian and I got into Hong Kong at 7 pm on New Year’s Eve, to the Shangri La, a hotel with a painfully eager staff. Hong Kong felt cosmopolitan and White, with signs all in English. When we went out to eat, our concierge wisely read our needs and sent us to a red lightish district, with leggy girls selling massage from bar stools outside clubs with names like “Fire Balls.” We walked until we decided on a restaurant called American Restaurant: Peking Food and had terrific seafood in bean sauce brought out to sizzle on a hot stone plate.
Ian and I toasted to our first good New Years together (long story why it’s taken us four years to celebrate a happy New Year’s together), but we have our “we're superior” game, which we were able to play for a good hour that night because we were sitting next to a travelling couple from Austria who would not look at each other.
On January 1, we took an old, slow train to Guangzhou (Ian was like a boy dejected when I asked to take the earlier train though it wasn’t the fancy one; the man is a boy who likes fast trains), and we watched the city turn to greener hills and finally arrived in the busy Guangzhou, taking a $2.00 half-hour cab ride to the hotel. Mom happened to arrive at the same time, and she came in looking like a woman waking from a month in an ashram—a glow around her, carrying long wispy things wrapped in Japanese newspaper. The wispy sticks were twigs burnt into the gentlest carbon filaments. She’d fallen in love with the patience of the Japanese: They whisper. They do not jaywalk. They listen and are humble. Mom willed to carry these twigs for the rest of the trip—a testament to still movement, I think.
So the three of us were now together, for a night at the Ritz. We went out for our first joint meal, in a 4-storied restaurant where we could not communicate but ate meat on a bone that we guessed was pigeon and slept in beautiful beds. That’s forewarning because I know what’s coming.
The next morning we met up with our Habitat for Humanity group at the train station. They were easy to identify: Americans sitting in a circle on their backbacks. There was a faithfully Christian black public advocate doing what she called her “lent”—a trip to help someone somewhere. She looked uncomfortable for most of the trip, holding her fanny-pack-wrapped stomach, choosing to wear the face mask that locals wear, eyes bulging over the rim of her mask with concern. There were a twosome of blond college Sophomores who dealt with daily anxiety by showing us pictures of their dogs. There was our favorite 18-year-old, Shannon, who wore torn fishnet stockings as pants, a cut shirt hanging low off her shoulder, and black Gretel (of Hansel and Gretel) braided extensions. She was there with Odie, her 22-yr-old boy friend who was not her boyfriend. He said he’d been carried out of Iraq on his mother’s back in a 5-day walk through the desert, so was now doing Habitat to “give back.” He and Shannon were tattooed (him: “Assyrian” across his forearms); they took frequent smoke breaks; Odie was a puppy dog in love with Shannon, but she told anyone who asked that she would not date him. They came from Toronto and had a innocence anchoring their outlawness; we really liked them.
This is Shannon:
Our two Chinese guides were Michael and Wesley, men in their late 30’s who had grown up in Guangzhou, spoke good English, and chose to make the occasional jab at the Chinese government, lending us Americans a sense of ease.
With about 15 in our group, we boarded the 2-hour bus ride to our village. We passed through mostly empty green land, dotted with the occasional beehive of what we guessed were factory towns—towering buildings that looked like modern condos. We learned a little about how this works: the small villages like the one we were headed to were often called “hollow towns.” The middle generation leaves home to work in factory towns. But those workers never consider their factory towns their true “homes”—the village remains home. That said, many of them only go back “home” about 1-2 times a year. In turn, the villages subsist as relatively empty, without many resources; they house the very oldest and youngest generations; there, grandparents parent the infants. We heard that China is trying to gradually bring more industry to the villages, in order to decrease this big gap between the factory towns and the "hollow towns."
We pulled into the land of our host hotel. Our hotel sat in a hot springs resort town—a small town buried in a valley with about a half-mile strip of neon-lit stores. It looked like a miniature Vegas, with the quirky detail that these stores only sold three types of things: elaborate stone carvings of natural scenes that were each about the size of a horse; bright, frilly bathing suits and pool floats for bringing to the hot springs; and liquor with animals like snakes and larvae in the bottles. Each store also featured, like American beach towns feature sunglass racks, an assortment of hanging meats, like rat and weevel, at the door.
Wesley and Michael gave us a slide show on our first night. The slide show explained that American ask for many things, but we should remember that this hotel gave us the things we actually needed: clean sheets and toilets you sit on.
But the cleanliness promise was wrong. In her room, Mom snuggled up to a hive of used tissues under her pillow; and Ian’s bed had the wildest scrawl in pencil beside the mattress, as if someone had gone crazy in his cold and solitude there.
It was fucking cold. We didn’t expect this. There was no heat, and that first night we shivered on beds that were made of something like woodchip. I’m pleading sympathy only because I know where this is heading.
The first day on the build: At 8 am, we drove about 45 minutes up the mountainside, out of the hot springs oasis, past the last spit of willage life (Wesley pronounced his V’s as W’s, and we liked his spirit, softening our own V's). We weached a walley nestled high in the mountain—the place we would be building. This was a hollow town of about 100 families. All people in the town took the name of “Chen.” They grew oranges, persimmons, chickens, green vegetables, and sweet potatoes, which they brought to market or ate. Everyone in the town knew each other, all named “Big Chen” or “Little Chen.”
We were there to help with a government subsidized project of replacing the old mud houses, which were unsanitary, with red brick houses.
On the first day, we moved bricks. The skilled laborers were gone for the holidays, and in this time and place, there seemed to be a permeable line between purposed work and work work, so Wesley and Michael had us move one pile of bricks to another location, just to keep us warm. We moved bricks for six hours that first day.
Lunch, made by one of the Mrs. Chen’s, was delicious: a tomato and egg mixture on rice was my favorite. We warmed our hands by the coals in a hut that housed another Mrs. Chen. She had dried sweet potatoes and set the slivers out like candy.
The men of the village seemed to keep themselves steady thru a stream of snake liquor and vodka. At the end of day one a fight broke out among two of the contract workers. They fought with fists until one of them came back swinging a hammer.
We were told that with the breakdown in communications among the work crew, we might not have meaningful work for the rest of the week.
It was freezing. With no heat, we layered under three blankets at night and I never took off my fur hooded jacket, but we still shivered and cursed our hotel. In the moring we drank loads of tea, but we dreaded the work in the cold—it really felt like a jail line, because the work felt purposeless and sunk in a desert landscape. So we dreamt of escape.
For a day at least, we took time off of “work.” Mom and I were too cold to work on day #3, and so we sat in the woman’s circle that day—the circle of Mrs. Chens who did not work in factories so tended to the fire.
Wesley dotted in and out as a translator, allowing us a bit of conversation in the women’s circle. The women wanted to play “guess your age.” They showed us their interest in this game by pointing to and laughing at my mother. Wesley translated: “How old is she?!” they dared. “66,” Mom said. They said they did not know why a grandmother would travel 20 hours to China to do manual labor. We played “guess your age” back. This woman was 80.
They guessed I was 40 and they wanted to hold my hands, which made me giggle.
But enough was enough with the fucking cold and the aimless work. Ian is a mindful American who prizes efficiency; he spearheaded our plans for escape. We explained our personal failures and our hotel dreams to the Habitat group and hired two men from the willage to drive us back late at night to the main city of Guangzhou…to the Ritz.
As we cozied in for steak and salad room service, I quickly imbibed a bottle of wine, giggling under the softest sheets…. In the morning, our savior Ian told mom and me that he had rerouted our trip home for a stop back in Bangkok, to that land we loved so much on our last Habitat build.
We've arrived. I'm writing this blog from a beautiful hotel in Bangkok. Part two to come.
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