little monsters

(2nd-3rd/11/2013)

Location: Chengdu, Sichuan Province

 

'Things you see at Halloween? Monster, vampire, ghost...sexy nurse!'

                                                                                                                              -Student quote of the week

It's dark and stormy outside, with a cold breeze and a slate grey sky that promises rain. I've forgotten my coat, my phone battery is about to die and I'm in an aboveground tomb.

 

It can only be Halloween.

 

At the university it's been another interesting week of teaching. My second years, (having already covered Halloween in their first year) think they know everything and are in a silly mood. The lesson begins to slip from my fingers so I switch tactics and turn off the lights.

 

Several scary film trailers later, they're still young and innocent enough to be cowering in their seats, hands splayed over their faces, peering nervously through their fingers as ghosts, monsters and possessed victims appear and disappear off screen. I flick the lights back on and grin at my students, who stare back at me, cowed and unsure what I'm going to subject them to next.

 

Back in control, we watch and discuss Michael Jackson's Thriller. I split them into groups and get them to pretend to be news reporters investigating paranormal sightings at the University, interviewing students. The acting and conviction varies from group to group, but my last class perform spectacularly well- one group of six even re-enacting the abduction and consumption of a student by a monster. It's hilarious and just a tad gruesome, which means the students find it great fun- especially the boys who sometimes have difficulty focussing in lessons.

 

Halloween also means the start of my dealings with a new set of little monsters- my classes at Enoch International Kindergarten begin this week. I go prepared for a lesson on colours, big, bright pieces of multicoloured card clutched under my arms for the kids to jump on, handmade flashcards in my bag...and walk into the kindergarten to find forty under five year olds dancing along to Gangnam Style.  
 
Apparently they're rehearsing for a Halloween party.

 

My lesson on colours promptly cancelled, I instead get to lend a hand doing the actions to Incy-Wincy Spider and If You're Happy and You Know It. I throw balled up pieces of newspaper at Styrofoam skeletons and fill my pockets full of sweets ready to give to the children that evening. The parents turn up promptly at five thirty and watch their offspring strut down a makeshift catwalk in their Halloween costumes. There are robots and witches, wolves, monsters and princesses. One little boy is dressed as a duck. Words fail to express how adorable he looks.

 

The children perform their dances, destroy the skeletons and finish the evening by going on a treasure hunt in the play-area, before politely asking their teachers for sweets as they have been taught.

 

'Teacher! Give me candy!'

The weekend arrives unexpectedly quickly. The weather becomes grim and my plan to escape Chengdu is hastily shelved, the prospect of an hour's bus journey to a deserted ancient town damp with rain and choked with mud, an uninviting one. Instead I stay and see some of the things I haven't managed to get around to.

I go back to Jinli Street at night, the pathways lit up prettily with thin, red paper lanterns. I visit Big and Small Alley, two long streets full of expensive, interesting shops and restaurants, where you can buy a hot chocolate and watch victims have the wax removed from their ears by experts wearing headlamps and wielding tools that once belonged to Edward Scissorhands.

I visit People's Park and watch the dozens of people rowing their boats on the lake in circles, trying to avoid each other. It's rather like watching several sharks swim around your bathtub- there's not enough room and someone's going to get hurt but you can't look away. As I'm watching from my quiet, lakeside bench, three cleaners appear from the corner of my eye and decide now is the perfect opportunity to clean the area around my bench. Only my bench. No-one elses. Two more appear from the trees behind. A sixth slowly circles in from the front. I'm reminded uncomfortably of Thriller and make a quick exit.

 

And now I'm in a tomb. Technically it's the only aboveground tomb to be excavated in China and it belongs to Wangjian, the Emperor of Former Shu in Five Dynasties (847-918 AD). Like most tombs it was robbed of its treasures over time, and now only the stone coffin remains with twelve warriors on each side bracing it on their shoulders. Along the sides of the coffin are twenty four people playing musical instruments and at the end of the tomb is a statue of the man himself, seated in a chair and residing over his own half shadowed resting place for all eternity.

 

I'm not sure what creeps me out more- the poorly lit tomb with it's shadows and stone faces or the man I saw earlier having six inch needles thrust down his ears to remove the wax.

 

I end my weekend by meeting my friends for hotpot at a new restaurant near the Tibetan quarter. Successfully navigating the menu via the only English speaking waitress in the establishment we wait and watch as the bowls of spicy oil are brought to the table and gently heated. The liquid bubbles. And then from the depths of the bowl comes a dead fish. A whole fish with eyes and scales and there it is, floating around belly up in the bubbling sauce. One of my friends, R, announces she will be sick.

 

There is a quick conference around the table. The fish cannot be left in the bowl and so the poor dead creature is hastily scooped out. Now there is a new dilemma. There are no bowls or plates or dishes on the table. Nothing to put the fish on. Our only option is to squash it into the only free receptacle on the table... the napkin holder.

 

The fish stares at us with an expression I can only describe as depressed.

 

'Fú wù yuán,' I beckon the waitress over and present her with the dead fish awkwardly wedged in the napkin tray. 'Búyào. We don't want this.'

 

She looks at the dead fish I am presenting her with and then at our group. We repeat ourselves and make removing motions. Both the waitress and the fish look unimpressed.

 

Another waitress joins her and together they look at the fish squeezed clumsily into the napkin dispenser. There is a brief flurry of Chinese and eventually the waitress sighs, nods and carries it away.

 

We turn back to the still bubbling bowl. No-one volunteers to stir it again. Gingerly G pokes a long handled spoon into the bowl to check nothing else will float up at us.

 

It's Halloween and it's China.

 

Anything could be in there.

pandas and papier mâché

Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, Sichuan Province (26/10/2013)
Location: An hour and a half bus ride from Chengdu city centre
Famed For: Being a 100 hectare conservation base dedicated to breeding giant and red pandas

'I think your queen is like giant panda.'

                                                                                                - Student quote of the week

*-*-*

I've been to many strange and quirky museums over the past twenty five years. There was the time my sister and I got taken to Gnome World, Cornwall (now sadly just a garden and shop) and that inexplicable trip to the Cumberland Pencil Museum, Keswick. The visit to the Cat Museum, Amsterdam (it was that or the Torture Museum) and the less said about the time I almost got dragged into Barometer World by a member of my family who shall remain nameless, the better.

 

Chengdu has a wide range of museums, some of them good and some of them...peculiar. Sichuan Provincial Museum falls firmly into the former category, with it's marble floors, interesting cultural exhibits and highly detailed information panels presented in clear English. It has an entire floor dedicated to minority cultures in China, displaying beautiful traditional costumes, intricate jewellery, bowls and jugs and bird claw cups, religious artefacts including two ancient leather bound books of thin yellowing paper- one on healing leprosy and the other on the application of curses. It has a room with special lighting to display the beautiful, delicate paper puppets used in traditional shadow play, and an entire exhibit dedicated to Buddhism, hundreds of different models in gold and silver shown in front of intricate tapestries depicting hundred armed women with eleven different faces.

 

Chengdu is also home to Du Fu's cottage. Du Fu was an ancient Chinese poet, the Eastern equivalent of Shakespeare I'm reliably told (though he's not Shakespeare because no-one can match the Bard and I'll stop myself now before I get up on my English literature soapbox). His cottage, set in a tranquil garden, is ringed with walkways lined with paper lanterns and several of his poems, carved into large smooth rocks, lie scattered in the grounds. There's a lot of incomprehensible signage and a lack of quaint old costumed interpreters but it's worth visiting from both a literary and a historical perspective, and gives you a little insight into the mind of a man who lived in abject poverty for most of his life, and who, (like most poets) went from one tragedy to the next.

 

Then there's the Panda Museum, part of the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, which is a strange mix of science, dust and bad modelling. There are amusing tableaux of pandas peacefully coexisting with a range of animals fresh from the taxidermist, as well as birds, fish and several small dinosaurs (though these are clearly a combination of plastic and paint.) We pass one scene of a butter yellow, papier mâché sabre-toothed tiger attacking a horse that was clearly at one point a pantomime costume.

 

There's also a wonderful oil painting depicting trained tigers, lions and pandas in body armour attacking warriors from an enemy tribe. There's a panda chewing on what looks like a spleen. Imagine Kung Fu Panda directed by Tarantino and you have some idea of the carnage. The information panel beside it cheerily informs us that in ancient China, pandas were trained by the emperor for use in the army. Apparently, much like Hannibal used elephants to battle the Romans, the Chinese were taking over the world with black and white balls of fluff.

 

The exhibits then inexplicably take a turn for the macabre. Here are the intestines of a panda preserved for eternity and strung out behind the glass in rubbery coils. Here is the first ever panda raised in captivity and now stuffed for your pleasure, glass eyes staring blankly out at the visitors. Here is a two day old panda cub floating in a jar of formaldehyde. Fortunately, before you exit there's the obligatory picture of Jackie Chan holding a baby panda to comfort you as you leave and look for the live exhibits.

 

At the base there are a dozen or so large enclosures with a handful of pandas in each one, each panda impossibly cute and cuddly and completely focussed on sleeping, chewing as much bamboo as possible and sleeping some more, whether in the trees or sprawled out lazily on the raised wooden platforms that dot the enclosures. There's a nursery for the infants, and they too are fast asleep, tangled together in a group and unaware of the lines of tourists staring at them through the glass, cameras snapping away to get the perfect shot as the security guards hurry everyone along. One of the cubs snuffles in it's sleep and snuggles further against it's sibling.

 

It's very difficult to imagine their ancestors being trained killers.

At the research centre there's also an area dedicated to preserving the endangered red panda, cat sized fluffy creatures, with distinctive thick red fur, striped tails and sharp white teeth. The nursery is set up so that visitors can stroll through the middle of the enclosure on a set fenced pathway and get close access to the creatures who are just as lovely as the giant pandas but much more active.

One of the red pandas suddenly appears on the pathway. There is a moment of blind panic as K and I look at each other and the escaped panda casually strolling across the path. Then it goes through a deliberately designed hole in the fence and we are relieved to realise that this is part of the base design, enabling the animals access to all parts of their enclosure and giving the visitors an even more intimate experience.

Then K hisses my name. 'Rachel!'

I look up from watching the pandas to see a huddle of Chinese tourists staring at me. Whilst this is normal in China, their complete silence and the look of utter horror on their faces is not. I glance around but can't see what has everyone so worried. I don't appear to be in danger.

K points at my feet.

It's only then that I notice the chubby red panda sat sniffing my ankle boots with interest. Keeping one eye on the tourists and the other on my footwear it sits on it's haunches before licking it's belly fur. There is a final sniff, a chirrup of farewell and the stripy tail flicks over my boots in goodbye before the panda casually pads back to it's pen.

The Chinese tourists break into hurried babbling, shaking their heads in wonder and pointing at my feet. I pay them little attention, ecstatic at getting so close to such an endangered species. It's only as we're leaving that we pass a small sign, the size of an adult's palm and half obscured by foliage.

'Red panda are dangerous. They are attack you. Please no chase.'

I am left to wonder how close I came to losing my ankles.