My host mother is obsessed with my socks. She keeps taking mine, including my Pizza Days socks, and giving me new ones while she washes them. And when I don’t wear her socks, she goes down to the village meeting house and complains to my professor.

“She’s so confused,” Xiao Zhou said to me. “She gave you socks, why won’t you wear them?”

I also don’t understand why Chinese people think they can make any situation better by giving you a pomegranate.

Our last night in Shaxi we went to the village meeting house to see a performance of traditional Bai song and dance. My host mother sat in front of me, and kept looking back every two minutes to make sure I was okay. When I got up to talk to Xiao Zhou at the other side of the room, Justin told me that she asked everyone in her general vicinity if they knew where I was and when I would be back. Then she told me I should dress warmer or I would catch cold. I’m sorry, I’m from upstate New York. At home you can ice skate on my birthday, but here I can catch cold by wearing flip flops in sixty-degree weather?

Bathing was so awkward.

I got home from lecture Sunday night and my host mother seized me by the hand and showed me a pair of plastic basins, into which she poured hot water from a thermos. I hadn’t seen a sink anywhere in the house yet and had been wondering how to shower/wash clothes, but didn’t expect to arrive at this crossroads so soon. My host mother handed me a bar of laundry detergent. “For my clothes?” I asked. “No. For your face,” she replied. We were right in the middle of the open-air “hallway” between the “kitchen” and “living room;” she and her brother were both looking at me. I sat down and started to rinse my face with only the water, but the brother unwrapped the detergent and put it in my hand. So, with them examining me closely, I washed my face with laundry detergent.

When my host mother went into the other room for a minute, I hurried and got a dab of shampoo from my room and started to wash the roots of my hair. She came back and tried to take the basin away from me, saying the weather was too cold, and I was trying to explain to her that I had shampoo in my hair, and then her brother came back out and tried to take the basin away too, and took a towel and started drying my hair as I was washing it. I managed to get all the shampoo out of my hair as I was wrestling with them, and slunk away to read the National Geographics I had found in the village meeting house.

If I thought my Kunming grandmother was overprotective, she has nothing on my Shaxi mother.

Since my ISP has been predetermined by Zhong Laoshi of the Tufts Chinese department to be on the Mosuo people of Lugu Lake, I wanted to spend my time in Shaxi learning about what I’m really interested in: farmers. My Shaxi mother and uncle are both farmers, but since they can barely speak Mandarin we are reduced to the communication equivalent of body language.

Yesterday morning my host mother took me on a walk along the river on the outskirts of the village. It was just about the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Even in Yunnan, at its tropical latitude, you can feel autumn. The patchwork fields were out of a storybook, with far-off villages dotting the mountain foothills. Everything had a dreary tint to it, perhaps because of the rain that hasn’t let up in four days, but that just made it even more majestic.

She dropped me off at the village school, where I met a few of the teachers. One teacher, whose English name was Victor, took me to his dormitory and cooked me lunch. Now I know my mother might be worried reading this post, but as I told Jess Bidgood, white women in China have about the appeal of Eleanor Roosevelt. He played me traditional Bai music, and found one of the gym teachers, who used to be a farmer, to talk with me about agriculture. I stayed there for hours, drinking cup after cup of tea. The gym teacher invited both of us to eat dinner with his family that evening. Victor also invited me to sit in on his classes that afternoon, but I told him I had better check in with my host mother to tell her where I was. Which I felt was very big of me, considering the opportunity I was passing up.

I ran into my host mother while I was walking home, and asked her if I could eat dinner with the gym teacher, expecting her to say alright. “Bu xing, bu xing,” she repeated. “Not okay, not okay.” “Weishenme?” I pleaded, why not? Because I had already eaten lunch with them. That should be enough. I didn’t need to eat dinner with them.

Xiao Zhou told me that my host mother had only said that per routine, and I should disregard her and eat with them anyway. But as I was on my way to buy them cigarettes as a thank-you present, I ran into my host mother again. “Bu xing, bu xing.” I was almost in tears as I brought her back to Xiao Zhou, who, after an epic discussion on my character flaws and attributes, convinced her that since the family who would cook me dinner was not the same as the family who had cooked me lunch, I would not be too much of a burden.

Sometimes I hate traditional Chinese culture.

But thank god I ended up eating dinner with them, because it was the best experience I have had in China to date. I felt so welcome in the gym teacher’s home. He would speak Bai, and Victor would translate into Mandarin, and we spent three hours eating and chatting that way. All my malevolence towards China went right out the window, as I felt how rewarding it was to speak with them in earnest. The gym teacher invited me back to hear him play traditional Chinese instruments, and I regretted my time in Shaxi was so short.

I received a call from Xiao Zhou half an hour before I had said I would come home. My host mother was beside herself with worry. It was 7:30 at night, where on earth was I? Victor and the gym teacher walked me home, and halfway there we ran into my host uncle, who was out searching for me with a flashlight. He wordlessly brought me to my host mother, who made me call Xiao Zhou right away to tell her I was safe. She followed me into my room and made me change socks in front of her, because my old ones would “make me catch cold.” Then I sat on the bed as she personally rolled up my pants legs. She scolded me for my secret stash of crackers, and took all of my clothes to put in the wash.

It’s not the living conditions I mind here in Shaxi. I couldn’t care less that there’s no running water, or that the bathroom doesn’t have a door. It’s the lack of personal choice. I wish I could be allowed to hear that gym teacher play the erhu for me, without my host mother thinking I was too much of a burden. I wish I could communicate with her, because living in the countryside makes my two and a half years of Chinese feel like nothing.

In a small moment of freedom before bedtime, I shined my flashlight in on the pigs. The three of them were asleep, fat, and snuggling side by side.

I thought my frightening incidents with animals in China were over when I got off that mule. Then I was attacked by a monkey.

We hiked down from Jizu Shan and went to Dali, the center of the Bai people. It’s a touristy village on a lake, and also attracts a few westerners. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see much of Dali because I was too busy voting for Obama. The day we left Kunming my absentee ballot still hadn’t come, and I was heartbroken at the thought of sitting out my first presidential election until Alison suggested we just print out the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot, which ended up taking the entire afternoon. If I had to miss cormorant fishing on Lake Erhai with a bunch of Chinese tourists, at least it was so the world would be in better hands.

A small temple in some misty mountains was our next stop, and we hiked up there to spend the night. It’s also where there are lots of wild monkeys, and my professor brought a bag of peanuts hoping to attract them. I offered to carry the peanuts, and was minding my own business when we heard the stampede of about thirty monkeys coming our way through the woods. I can still hear the monkeys’ footsteps. One ran straight for me, leapt around my waist, and grabbed my bag of peanuts as I shrieked my head off. They all swarmed around the peanuts on the ground as I was ushered to safety by my friends.

The temple was so beautiful, though. There were grottoes and waterfalls, and we all slept in one room of this old inn. The next day we got to the next temple, one of the most important in Yunnan, that a local governor had saved during the Cultural Revolution. It was rainy and cold, and the mist turned into thick, impenetrable fog which we hiked through to get down to the Bai village of Shaxi. It was a surreal experience. We hiked silently in a line, wearing brightly-colored rain jackets and pushing past pine trees along a ridge high above the valley. Parts of the trail were collapsed by landslides, and we were all soaking by the time we got to the bottom.

In Shaxi we met the group of families with whom we are going to live for the next five days. My host mother snatched my bag as soon as we met and led me down an old cobblestone path past low-slung houses and muddy trenches until we got to her home on the edge of the village. It’s different in every way from my homestay in Kunming. In Shaxi, everyone is a poor farmer. My bed is next to the chicken coop, a plank cushioned with straw and an animal hide. The whole thing isn’t so much a house as a series of rooms accessible from a muddy courtyard, with bales of hay piled everywhere and ears of Yunnan corn drying on string from the eaves.

I’m still not sure who exactly is in my family. There wasn’t a formal introduction like in Kunming. I ate alone with my host mother, except for when the nainai, or paternal grandmother, shuffled in and wheezingly served herself some soup. The only other person I have seen is the didi, or mother’s younger brother, who is a farmer like she is.

There’s a constant sound of trickling rain and everything is damp and dark. My host mother is nice, she tells me to wear more clothing and eat and drink more. It’s hard to understand her. Everyone else in her house speaks Bai, and she’s the only one who knows a little Mandarin, but speaks in a heavy local accent. My shoes are wet from the rain, and I have no others to wear while they dry out. I huddle around my computer for warmth.

the further out of the Kunming valley we get, the more extreme the terrain is. Half the time it looks like desert, half the time the Himalayas. Finally, we arrived at the temple where we spent our first night. We ate dinner with the monks, in bowls we washed ourselves. There was a rule that no food should be wasted, so it was really unfortunate that I had served myself some fermented tofu.

We prayed with the monks before dinner. Prayer isn’t exactly my strong suit, but there’s something fascinating about Buddhist monks, and how they chant expressionless for hours at a time. The monks suddenly lined up and circled the inside of the temple in a procession, the back of which we joined. It was funny, a bunch of confused white people following chanting monks walking circle after circle around the temple, having no idea when it would end.

We took mules up to the top of a mountain to reach the monastery where we spent the next night. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I mounted my mule that memories of my childhood horseback riding accident came back. Every time he slipped on the steep path through the woods, all I could remember was my horse getting spooked and charging off through the trees with me clinging on for dear life until I got thrown off by a fence. I thought I had finally regained my composure by the end of the hour and a half ride, until I got off the mule and promptly burst into tears.

I can't describe enough how beautiful that monastery was. It was on top of a towering mountain, and beyond the mountain were other mountains, and on the other side were other mountains, and they were all rugged and misty and blue. It was freezing cold, and Tibetan prayer flags whipped around in the wind. The temple was built right onto the cliff, and a few of us woke up early to catch the sunrise. The local villagers were already out, reciting their morning prayers. I love it I love it I love it.

Saturday afternoon my family took me to KTV, or karaoke. Having heard various friends’ horror stories about their own experiences at KTV that lasted four, five, six hours at a time, I was a little apprehensive. Upon arriving at the complex, which was adjacent to the bus station, I was ushered into a private room with my Chinese mother, grandmother, three-year-old-sister, and her pet turtles. As in, two live turtles she had bought at the market that morning and was swinging around in a little plastic cage. My grandmother told me that since I was the guest, I had the honor of singing the first song. And the second and third and fourth songs, as it turned out. I alternated between Elton John and assorted Christmas favorites.

When I told my Chinese grandmother on Sunday I was going to meet friends to study, she wouldn’t let me leave the house without an entire picnic of items from the kitchen. We argued back and forth until I finally managed to leave the house with only a loaf of bread and a pomegranate.

I survived riding my bicycle in Kunming. I am one with Chinese traffic. To imagine that this summer I was too afraid of cars to even ride my bike in Medford…I don’t think I will ever think Boston drivers are crazy after having lived in China. I am fearless. Okay, so I have been walking the past few days since my back tire blew. But there are only five bike-repair stands between my apartment and school, and I’ve already been to all of them.

I genuinely love Sophie. I usually compare small children to kittens—they’re cute and small, but the novelty wears off very fast. But Sophie is like a miniature real person. I like everything about her, how she asks me every day if her outfit looks beautiful and how she comes to get her grandfather during the scary parts of Sleeping Beauty. Living with a family let me transcend my habit of treading water on the sidelines, and I’m so thankful that they helped me to understand more of Chinese culture. I will miss them. I will also miss the kid who practices piano every night somewhere in this apartment complex. It reminds me of my brother after dinner when we were in high school.

My grandmother asked me if we had the Barbie movies in the United States. I said I thought so, but I personally had never watched them. She nodded. “You don’t have time,” she said sympathetically. I didn’t have the heart to set her straight about my relationship with Barbie.

Tomorrow morning I leave for the countryside, where I'll be for the next month and a half. Chinese cities are great (well, no, they're not), but this is what I've really been waiting for.

Vocabulary I have Learned in Chinese This Semester:

(sound made by oil when cooking)
To conduct oneself in society
To raise children to assure one’s security in old age
Family happiness
Struggle
Conflict
Filial piety
A tendency to avoid problems and live a happy life
To forget all moral principles at the sight of profits
Hepatitis A
Hepatitis B
To help each other when both are in humble circumstances
College entrance exam
To poison
To smuggle
To shoulder heavy responsibilities over a long period ahead
To leave a mistake uncorrected and make the best of it
To be good friends despite great difference in age
Philistinism
To be too fond of drink
To not go back to one’s home for the whole night
Love and respect for one’s elder brother
Moral crossroads
Sparkplug
Self-cultivation
To lose face
“To tell the truth, I am rather disappointed with the nature of man.”

Sometimes when I eat, Sophie brings over all her toys and tells me they are for lunch. I must try each one with my chopsticks and give her feedback on her cooking. So far I have enjoyed the playdough more than the stuffed dolphin, but I think that’s just because I am a vegetarian.

It’s funny how whenever my family thinks I don’t like something, they ask me if I want sugar on it. I don’t know where they got this idea that Americans put sugar on all their food, but I certainly don’t like it on tomatoes and fried goat cheese.

My Chinese grandmother is kind of controlling. I love her, but it’s true. I think she likes to change tiny details of my plans just to show that she can. If I say I’ll be home at 6:30, she’ll say 6. If I want to sleep in until 8, we’ll haggle until I get her down to 7:30. If I want to read, she’ll trick me into going shopping (“we’re just going for a little walk”). My Chinese mother and grandfather are much more loose. So far I’m just amused by my grandmother’s antics, but if I were living here for longer I wonder if she would drive me crazy. Is she testing my American-ness? I like to test her too. I intentionally shock her with things like, “My parents are divorced.” “My mother likes to order takeout.” “I plan to put my career before a man.” “In America we do not think that wearing a t-shirt is the reason someone catches a cold.”

I came home fifteen minutes early from class yesterday, and the kitchen was filled with women. They were my Chinese grandmother’s friends. It was like having fifteen Chinese grandmothers at once. They kept urging me to sit down and eat even though no one else was ready, because in China you don’t wait for everyone to be seated, so I awkwardly picked up a jiaozi, and they kept coming over every thirty seconds to tell me to eat more and to try replace my chopsticks with a fork. There is nothing more offensive to a foreign exchange student in China than being offered a fork.

My grandmother got out the photo album I had given her and pointed to a picture of the Tufts econ department. “This is her house!” she said, and her old lady friends gasped. Then they started speaking in Kunminghua. The only thing I could understand, other than “she doesn’t understand Kunminghua,” was, “you let her ride her bicycle by herself?” I just moped by the fruit. Thank god pomegranates take so long to eat, and my grandmother was making me eat the entire thing. Otherwise it would have been me, a bunch of old ladies staring at me, and nothing to do but meet their eyesight.

Instead of lecture we went to a Wa village to get some more of that indispensable cultural immersion. I don’t really know what exactly the point was, but it started with a Wa man pointing to Justin, the only black guy on the trip, saying that since they both had dark skin they must share the same ancestry, and ended with Justin up onstage with a gong tied around his waist. Then we all had to chant one by one into a microphone and perform some kind of borderline sexual dance that involved a lot of hair-swishing and bending over, as Chinese schoolchildren looked on in boredom. One twelve-year-old even plugged his ears.

I had a China-tastic weekend. We all piled into my host grandfather’s Mitsubishi to take Sophie to the suburbs where she played "constructively," in English of course, with the six little girls of an American missionary family.

Me: Are you going to celebrate Halloween now that you live in China?
Girl: My mommy says Halloween is Satan’s birthday.

We took two of the girls to go bowling, because that’s apparently what you do in China at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. On the way, there was some sort of detour, for a reason that escapes me, to what can only be described as a talent show for the elderly. I shrank back along the sidelines until I was seized by a 65-year-old man with a crumpled sheet of paper bearing what I later determined to be a shoddy English translation of some weird Christian hymn.

Man: I am overseas Chinese. I live Burma. I am doctor. You know? You know?
Me: Yes. I know.
Man: Do you know the river of no return?
Me: Um. No.
Man: OK. You sing with me onstage.

My host grandmother finally, after a million years, noticed that an old man was trying to drag me onstage and came to my rescue. Then we went bowling.

No matter what I do, I can’t eat my food at anything but lightning speed. It’s an American thing. My grandmother is always telling me, “man man chi,” eat slowly, but in a matter of minutes my meal is gone, while the others haven’t even served themselves rice. When they try to spoon more greens into my bowl, I protest, “wo zhende chi bao le.” They all put their chopsticks down, pause a minute, and direct me to the fruit bowl, where I am supposed to eat one tangerine after another until the rest of the family has finished.

My grandmother likes to feed me fruit. I don’t mind, because I happen to be a big believer in fruit, but it’s kind of funny how she sits there, watches me eat a banana, then tries to give me another one. I have gotten used to evening conversation over a pomegranate. Every morning, my grandmother tries to stuff my schoolbag with apples, until I explain to her that the added mass actually makes riding my bicycle even more miserable.

I am really at wit’s end with this whole bike-riding thing. I have to keep looking for new bicycle-repair stands so the shopkeepers don’t think I’m a complete asshole who keeps breaking her bike. Instead of marching into confrontation with the school rental place, Xiao Zhou and I decided it would be better if I just rode her bike, which she never uses. Which was great, until halfway home when the chain fell off. Then a policeman yelled at me for riding in the crosswalk while I was in the middle of a busy intersection. Honestly, aren't there bigger fish to fry in the realm of Chinese traffic law than a hapless foreign exchange student on a bicycle?

China is one big puppy parade. Puppies scamper down the mossy steps of old temples and chase each other between the legs of octopus-tentacle vendors. I don’t know why they never seem to grow old, but they must send the elderly dogs into a doggie nursing home (my vegetarian euphemism for hot pot...). Puppies in China look like they had sprung alive from the pages of a Chinese comic book: small, fat, ridiculously furry, and with a certain googly-eyed stupor. I love to watch the old ladies who walk in the park in the morning, practicing taiji exercises as they stroll surrounded by puppies.

There is an old German Shepard named Xiao Hu, or Little Tiger, who belongs to the guard of our apartment building. She likes to eat sweets. My grandmother gave me a handful of coconut candies to feed her.

One thing that kind of bugs me about China is how everything is staged. Everything is one big spectacle. Come see our Elephant Reserve and roam with wild pachyderms! Come see our Minority People! Chinese culture show! Taijiquan! Natural Wonder! Village that can only be reached by cave but has an enormous lot in which to park your SUV! I say this with all due respect, but Chinese people are a little obsessed with their own culture. These shows aren’t even for Western tourists, as I had originally presumed. No, it’s simply what Chinese people like to do in their free time. They like to file into a room with stadium seating, be served tea by people dressed in cheap, brightly-colored costumes, and be entertained by a hyper emcee who practically yells into the microphone. Even the decorations for Mid-Autumn Festival and Chinese New Year have cute little cartoon characters—it’s hard to take them seriously. The building across from our apartment is a wedding complex. You can look into the window and see Chinese families eating food while a stupid-looking performer swathed in tacky red cloth and sequins reenacts some long-lost tale of heroism.

I love China, but sometimes I think it wants me to appreciate its culture so much that it drives me away.

And then there are times like yesterday, when we drove for hours to reach a forgotten temple in the woods, surrounded by Hui villages and fishing ponds, and even though it was sunny in Kunming, a misty rain started to fall as we entered.

My bicycle has been causing me to lose face. When the pedal fell off as I was riding, I repaired it. When the chain fell off as I was riding, I repaired it. But when the brake came off in my hand as I was trying to stop, I decided it was the last straw. Tomorrow I am going to march into the bike rental shop of my university and give them a piece of my mind (or more likely just cower behind Xiao Zhou).

Riding through traffic in Chinese rush hour is a nightmare. Really, I think I would rather someone just chop me up and feed me to the poor. Chinese drivers are mad in the most original sense of the word. If a police car pulls up to check out a crime scene (well, that’s an exaggeration of what Chinese policemen actually do), drivers will just honk at it to move out of the way. The bike lane is useless because taxis pull up out of nowhere and nearly throw you over your handlebars. And Chinese pedestrians just flop into the road like dead fish. Literally. I was once almost killed by a man who absentmindedly put a bucket of fish in the road as I was trying to pass.

Thank god we’re leaving for the countryside soon, because if I were in Kunming much longer I’d have to go into a home for frustrated bicyclers.

Beside my emerging issues with road rage, I really like my homestay. My family is very gracious and I feel bad that I can't do more to reciprocate their kind gestures. I've been so used to living on my own that my basic routine is wake, go to school, come home for lunch, go back to school, come home for dinner, work, sleep. But we have had a lot of chances to talk. If you had told me when I was a high school senior sitting through AP Spanish that I would soon find myself living with a Chinese family in an isolated province speaking their language, I never would have believed you.

the father in my house is gone because of the One Child Policy. He left shortly after Sophie was born, disappointed that she was a girl. Sophie is the smartest three-year-old I have ever met. How could that be a disappointment? But now it's as if her whole life is now a mission to prove her father wrong. The amount of resources Chinese parents pour into their only children is incredible. There are no cousin, uncles, or siblings anymore, just the relationship between the generations, which is fiercely tight. Sophie is lucky to have grandparents that take such good care of her while her mother works, taking her to English Corner every thursday night and buying all the educational toys and computer programs they can find, in hopes that she can carry on the family torch.

my grandfather is such a good cook. He's a Hui, a Chinese muslim, and he doesn't quite look Han. He seems to be mid-sixties, and you can still see that he was handsome. I admire how much energy he has. Today he cooked the eggplant dish I love so much, with tofu this time. It tastes like ginger and garlic. I want him to show me how to make it, but I'm afraid I won't remember.

I went to a Chinese zoo today. It made me want to cry. Everyone was in a pretty somber mood. Lions and tigers are stuck in cages and look like they have no more will to move.

I’ve moved in with my host family. I am with a young, single mother who lives with her parents and her three-year-old daughter in an apartment in downtown Kunming. My host grandmother likes to keep me at arms’ length, putting a blanket around my chair when I’m doing homework because “I might catch cold.” The grandfather does the cooking and plays with the three-year-old girl, Sophie, who happens to speak perfect English. No one else in the family can say a word, but of course the toddler strolls right into my room an hour after I move in and announces, “my name is Sophie, what’s yours?”

It’s kind of bizarre living with a family that speaks only Chinese and a toddler that only wants to speak English. But Sophie seems to have made an executive decision to help my Chinese by flatly refusing to translate anything her family asks her to. Of course, she addresses me nonstop in my native tongue—“where are your slippers? Why are you in bare feet? You’re eating too much pomegranate,” but when her grandmother is trying to explain to me where to lock my bicycle, Sophie glares up with arms crossed, and shakes her head.

That’s right, I’ve decided to grab the bull by the horns and ride my bicycle in Kunming, a sort of carpe diem moment for me. Also, my host family lives a forty-five minute walk from my university. Within the first twenty feet of riding, one of my pedals fell off. I just looked at it in disdain. At least the Chinese drivers did not make roadkill of me today. Perhaps tomorrow.

Home-cooked Chinese food is infinitely better than restaurant food. They don't feel the need to drench everything in oil. My host grandfather cooked me eggplant with cloves of garlic that I simply could not get enough of, and I don’t even like eggplant. There was boiled spinach, familiar enough. And thin tofu strips with slices of red pepper. They mercifully kept the hot pepper on the side so I did not have to choke on everything I ate. I was so confused. Why was it so good? I didn’t even have to supplement my meal with hidden crackers after everyone had finished.

The first morning, I woke up (to Sophie pounding on the door, “wake up, wake up!” It made me miss Shay) to find breakfast already laid out on the table for me. Sophie and my grandmother sat across from my plate, watching expectantly. It was seven o’clock in the morning, and they had painstakingly arranged the ingredients for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a serving of potato chips, and a red apple. My grandmother looked very pleased with herself.

My bed here is a lot more comfortable than my hard dorm bed, with a big squishy comforter, though bus station lighting seems to be a general trend in China. Also, I have discovered that my family stored their bootleg B-movie DVDs in my closet. Surviving Christmas with Ben Affleck last night, Lord of War with Nicholas Cage tomorrow?

But bootleg movies aside, since I was pretty nervous coming into my homestay, I am truly thankful about the family I am with. They are all very wonderful to me, if a little overprotective--I think I can deal with a 6 p.m. curfew for the time being. My Chinese has already improved drastically. There really is no substitute for living with a real Chinese family. I’ve talked to my host mother so much that sometimes I don’t even notice I’m talking in Chinese. Until Sophie comes along and tries to feed me dried prunes or whatnot and I jump at how strange English sounds to my ears.

I hope my host mother doesn’t mind putting up with my kindergarten-level comparisons. That’s all they make you do in Chinese class, dumb comparisons about Zhongguo versus Meiguo. “Oh, Chinese broccoli is spicier than American broccoli, how interesting!”

Last night was my host grandmother’s birthday so we went out to one of those hospital-sized restaurants that are so common in China, where families can rent their own private rooms. I ate peanuts, fried goat cheese, a slightly greasy tofu dish, and pumpkin fritters. Being a vegetarian is very convenient because not only is Chinese meat sketch-tastic, but not eating it reduces the number of dishes which people can randomly spoon into my bowl. Which they do, quite frequently. Also, whenever people turned their heads, Sophie would grope my food. My grandmother would catch her, than transfer whatever she had fondled onto her own plate and give me an even more generous serving of the tainted item. And then she would scold me for not eating more, and other people would join in the fun of heaping food into my bowl, or just shout words of encouragement from the sidelines. The whole thing was very complicated.

On the way there, we all piled into the Volkswagen of who I am 99% sure is my host mother’s younger brother’s fiancé. They insisted that I sit in the front passenger seat. Not only did they insist that I sit there, but Sophie insisted on sitting on my lap. Not only did she insist on sitting in my lap, but she turned around and stared at me the whole drive there. It baffles me that my host mother won’t let me go outside without a million layers of fleece, but she lets her three-year old daughter roam around in the front seat of a moving vehicle in a Chinese city on the lap of a foreigner. Obviously I have a lot to learn.

Xishuangbanna is less a part of China and more an extension of Southeast Asia, and I wanted to quit school and stay there. The streets of Jinghong could not possibly have fit any more palm trees, and the local Dai language was above every Mandarin sign. Burmese men in sarongs hawked jade and fruit. Instead of noodles, the vendors sold steamed bamboo, and there were practically seconds between when ripe mangoes, papayas, pineapples, and bananas were plucked and when they were sold right on the street. Courtney and I found a little alleyway that led to creaking huts, squashed around a damp courtyard hidden by banana trees, where we spent most of our nights.


I don't know what was better, being practically in Burma or meeting the other people who were just as awe-struck as us. We met an American motorcycler who had been detained for a few hours that afternoon for taking a picture of the border, and ran into the same pairs of Spanish, Israeli, Dutch, French, and Belgian backpackers in the cafes that dotted our section of town, getting to know all of them.

Courtney and I had taken the overnight bus from Kunming, settling down a 16-25 hour drive that we in fact made in fewer than 9 (causing us to wonder, at 4 in the morning, where on earth we were and what we had gotten ourselves into...cue nap on bus station bench). We decided to first check out one of the backpacker cafes we had heard about (after waiting until a more reasonable hour) and see what this town had. The Forest Cafe was a hole in the wall that served us muesli with fresh fruit; Sara, the famed owner, was a petite Han Chinese woman with cropped hair and a loose sweater over a peasant skirt. She offered to take us on a trek later that week, and tried not to laugh as she gave us directions to the elephant reserve (which was completely worthless) (which had no elephants) (which led me to follow the elephants' cue and thereby after swear off any place visited by Chinese tourists).

so Courtney and I rented bikes and spent a day riding around--Jinghong quickly turned into a series of huts and squatter farms lining pathetic roads. We swerved down a dirt path and found the Mekong River. I suddenly had visions of Martin Sheen and armored rafts, but quickly regained my composer as we rode along the banks. SO BEAUTIFUL.




The whole time I couldn't shut up, going on about how I loved Asia, was ridiculously happy, planned on purchasing a bike as soon as I returned to Boston, wanted to open a pineapple plantation, blah blah blah. I'm sure Courtney wanted to shoot me.

The next few days we explored the rest of Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture (as it is called), staying as far away from Chinese tourists as we possibly could--which consequently led us to be dropped off by a bus in a town the middle of nowhere, with naught to do but explore shanty farms until we were chased away by a farmer's dog (and his son, incidentally, who also barked).

every night Courtney and I went cafe-hopping, ordering smoothies, dinner, and deserts and the different backpacker havens. It was like living in a small, happy town--waving at our backpacker friends across the street, meeting up and deciding to all go to the next cafe, sharing stories about what to do and not to do. Trying different combinations of juice--orange and lemon turned out to be simple, yet the most refreshing.

In between activities we would often sit on the porch of our little hut, welcoming other pairs of backpackers as they moved in and out. There was a really nice sense of solidarity. One time at a cafe while I was using the computer, the waitress came over and handed me a potato.



The last few days we spent on our trek, which started out along the Mekong and swerved up into the (green, lush, misty, just kill yourself) beautiful mountains where we passed Dai, Ake, and Aini villages. We spent the night on the floor of a Dai family's hut, in a village perched somewhere really high up, wherever it was. It was us, Sara, and four other European backpacker pairs. We saw so much--all I can do is gush. The view was incredible. We followed the Mekong until we swerved onto the other side of the mountain peaks, where we saw rice paddies, tea terraces, and rolling mountains forever. As I was crossing a pineapple farm, I fell on my face in front of a Dai woman.


Anyway, the whole experience made me think. I'm studying abroad in China more to make the most out of a Chinese requirement than because this is necessarily the place I've been dreaming of. Chinese cities are hard to love. They are invariably gray and damp and filled with car exhaust, and there are no Westerners and quaint old buildings have been torn down in favor of drab apartment complexes. But no matter how sarcastic the tone of my blog is, I don't want anyone thinking I don't like it here in China! Because it's not the cities I ever really love when I travel abroad. Spending that week in the tropical countryside, seeing old buildings, old people, so many ethnic groups, was a transformation of how I feel about China. I can't wait to travel more.