Guiyang

I am thankful on a daily basis that I spent a semester in China last year.  It has made a lot of transitions a lot easier; I already speak enough Chinese to scrape by, I've lived in the culture for a good chunk of time before, and a million other things.  I had an awesome community when I was here before, and so my memories and impressions of China were very positive ones.

I've also been very thankful that I came with the particular program that I did, CSP with Best Semester.  Our classes covered a huge range of things, from Chinese society to language to history to culture, and we also did a lot of travel -- which is maybe something that is more important in China than it is in the US.  They have so much history, and it's so deeply tied to the places, that it really helps to be able to say, Yeah, I have been to Xi'an and Beijing and Shanghai.  China is very different in different places, but the Chinese are fiercely proud of it and so when I can say, I have lived down in the south and now I live in the north and I love China -- it means more.  When I can say, Yes, China is beautiful, I have been to Guilin, it adds weight to my words.

Besides all of those well-known cities, we traveled to one other place when I was in CSP -- a province called Guizhou.  We were there for about four or five days, doing manual labor on a cattle ranch.  In some ways, they were rough days.  We didn't have electricity unless we were in the main building and the generator was working, the plumbing was based off of rain water, and we were always cold and a little wet.

But I loved it.  It was also the place where I first thought, I cannot imagine not being here.  We had the privilege of hearing a Chinese sister's story of what motivated her to move from a coastal province to Guizhou, which is reputed mostly for being poor and miserable.  And when it stopped raining, it was refreshingly beautiful.  We had adventures there that we didn't experience anywhere else.

                                            eating noodles in a small village in Guizhou


And so I am very grateful to CSP for taking us off the beaten track into Guizhou.

I was reminded of this when I was reading Amy Tan's book The Kitchen God's Wife and hit this paragraph.

I remember when we finally arrived in a bigger city, Kweiyang.  We were going to stay there for a few days, so the air force could fix the truck and get more gasoline before the long, hard drive to Kunming.  Wen Fu knew a saying about Kweiyang, something like this:  "The sky doesn't last three good days, the land isn't level for even three inches."  That was because it rained all the time.  And the city is very bumpy.

There is a third part to that proverb, and no one has three coins to rub together. 

I know the city as Guiyang, not Kweiyang, and I wouldn't have made that connection except that we had discussed the proverb.  And I love not only having the connection of knowing where that is, having been there and seen the rain and the hills and the poverty, but remembering that place with affection as a beautiful land when the sun does shine, and as a place where the Father is at work.  Where His children are laboring for eternal riches.