Family Tales

but only if we get to go to the town of Lijiang.

As most everyone reading this blog site should know, Wendy and I traveled to China just about two years ago to pick up our daughter, Betsy Ye. We spent three days in Hong Kong followed by a little over a week in Guangzhou (formerly called Canton). Although I loved Hong Kong and it’s people, I found China proper to be depressing. It felt way too much like a country run by your local department of motor vehicles under contracts negotiated by the UAW.

I know that it’s pretty feeble to judge an entire country based upon a single week’s stay in only one of it’s city, and normally I would withold judgement simply for lack of data points. However, by traveling to Hong Kong first, we gained one very good control group from which to analyze our experience; namely, the stark and dramatic differences between the two cities ca not be laid at the feet of the people themselves because they’re both populated by essentially the same ethnic group, Chinese. There were, in fact, very few Europeans or non-Asians of any kind in Hong Kong at all, much to my surprise. Being a former British colony, I naively assumed it would be populated largely by Britishers with the odd Indian bookkeeper imported for a dash of color. Not so.

To summarize my disappointment, we left Hong Kong (Kowloon actually) by train from a modern, attractive train station where everything worked for a 2 hour trip through the countryside bound for Guangzhou. Trains are a wonderful way to see a place up close, so we had plenty of opportunity to watch the standards of construction decline the further inland we sped along. By the time we arrived in the Province capital, we disembarked into a brand new train station where 3 of the 6 urinals were out of order with one spewing water onto the floor and out into the hallway. Guangzhou is probably the only place that I’ve ever been where there were potholes in the sidewalks, but that’s about what I expect from union work. There’s truth in the saying, “Good enough for Government work”. Lest you forget, dear reader, in China virtually everything is government work. At least they have reminders such as Lijang of a time when their culture could build beautiful towns.

Rant over.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 1:08 am and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.