Those crazy people in Yingtan.......

Wow - what a crazy day. I left Shanghai on the night train to Yingtan on May 9. I thought my ticket left at 6, but when I got to the train station, I realized that it actually wasn't until 9pm. Dang. I would have gone out shopping or to an internet bar or something, but because I had my luggage and it had begun raining, I decided to just hang out at the train station. The Shanghai South train station is a relatively new train station- I have never seen a train station like it in all of China. Most train stations in China are pretty disgusting places - they usually stink like sweat - people spit on the ground everywhere, some people stay in them for a long time, etc.... So I was really surprised by how clean and nice Shanghai's station was. It was arranged in the shape of a huge disk, with a large center area where you wait for the trains, ringed on the outside by the shops. The trains come below the waiting area, and they have glass doors going to them, so it feels a bit like you are in a gigantic vending machine, which dispenses humans instead of candy. I don't know if that is a very good description, but it was an interesting place nonetheless.

I think that night trains are my favorite when travelling (as long as you have bed tickets). They are nice because it makes it so that you don't need to book a hotel room, and they are fairly comfortable and cheap. My train trip to Yingtan was a whopping 169 yuan, or less than half what I paid for my hotel in Shanghai! Plus, trains are a great opportunity to meet people from all over. On this trip, I started talking to a person who was travelling to Nanchang. When I explained my plans for the summer - planning on visiting the countryside to research governance issues - he was really surprised and said that he didn't think that people would tell me the truth. I think that he is probably right - it will be really difficult to understand the truth about what is going on in these villages, and I don't see an easy way around it. For example, if I am interviewing a villager about their elections, they will probably invariably say they are run wonderfully. They will want to put on the best face possible for the foreigner. If there is something negative, they probably would be unlikely to share it with me, especially if it deals with "sensitive" topics such as the quality of their village elections or corruption. This research would be a lot easier to do if I was Chinese......

Anyways, I actually slept fairly well on the train, but the guy on the bunk across from me was snoring quite loudly - so when I did wake up, I couldn't get back to sleep. However, I woke up at 4am, which wasn't bad because I was arriving at Yingtan at 5am anyways. I just got a hotel by the train station, it it seemed fairly ok, but about half an hour after I got in, and was trying to get a little bit more sleep, the phone rang, and it was the management asking if I wanted them to send a prostitute to my room! I actually got pretty upset with them and told them not to phone me like that again. I'm thinking that in the future I'll try to stay at a bit nicer hotel, even if I have to pay a little bit more - most hotels by the train stations tend to be seedier.

Anyways, at aroun 8am, I went to find breakfast (here they have the breakfast foods I'm used to in China - doujiang (sweetened soy milk), youtiao (fried bread strips), and even baozi (steamed buns), which I believe is a northern thing. For some reason, in Shanghai I couldn't really find anyone around selling these in the morning. I'm sure they were around - I just didn't know where they were. At least here they are easy to find.

My original plan had been to go to Zixi, which is closer to the border with Fujian, but I figured that Yingtan would be good enough, so I set out to find government offices to explain my project and for contacts to visit the countryside. One disadvantage to my project is that nobody understands why I would want to go to the countryside - rural areas are looked down as being backward and almost every Chinese person is trying to LEAVE the countryside. Anyways, I had found their address on the internet, and went out to search for it. Yingtan is not a large city, so I decided to walk there. Along the way, I met Rainman (I love the English names Chinese people choose), who was one of the seemingly ubiquitous English leeches in China. However, I was glad to have his company as travelling alone is quite lonely at times, and having someone to talk to is nice even if you feel a bit like you are being used. Rainman is a train conducter and was just in Yingtan for the day. Anyways, when I got to the address, the government offices were not there. Hmm....... So we asked some people were they were, and they said that they had moved in the last 6 months, close to the railway station. So we went off to where they had said the offices were, and the office wasn't there. Anyways, Rainman left, and I went to an internet bar to find the correct address. By now it was around 1 or 2pm, and I was pretty frustrated by the entire excercise of trying to find this place. But I found the correct address, and went there - it turns out that we had walked directly in front of it twice but that it wasn't super well marked so we had missed it.

So, when I first got there and explained what I wanted to do, I was introduced to Lu Juan, a woman working in the Statistics department. I don't know why the guard thought that I should talk to Lu Juan, or why the statistics department would be the dept to help me set up in the countryside - I was expecting the Civil Administration (minzheng) or mabye Education people to help me out. Anyways, after talking with me for about 5 minutes, Lu Juan decided that she could help me out, and also that we were "friends", and that she wanted me to meet her friends as well. I'm like......ok............... So we go down the street to a Karaoke Bar, and suddenly I'm in a Karaoke bar with 10 other Chinese people who are trying to get me to sing every single song under the sun. After that we went out to dinner. Another lady who works for the stats dept offered to help me out as well, so I think that I should be able to get into the countryside by next week - it will just take a bit of time to figure it out.

So, I'm thinking that this summer I will probably only examine two villages in depth - one here in Jiangxi, and then one in Fujian. After that, if I have any time, I think that I will take a real vacation and go somewhere interesting in China that I've wanted to go to - maybe Guizhou or Yunnan. I don't know.