Here’s how the story begins:

If you are flying into Haikou from the west, you can see it. Sit on the right-hand side of the aircraft and look out of your window. It’s there. Viewed from above, this vast swathe of land may not look like much — fuzzy green vegetation, shadowy pockets of volcanic rock, incongruous veins of reddish brown soil — but in a couple of years it will make history. Locals refer to this area by its code name: Project 791. Soon, most people will know it as Mission Hills Hainan, the ­largest collection of golf courses in the world.

The scope of the multi-billion-dollar project is staggering. It occupies 80sq km of forest and shrubland — an area the size of Hong Kong island – in north-east Hainan, the island province long touted as China’s answer to Hawaii. Once completed, it will feature 22 golf courses, at a stroke doubling the number on Hainan today. It’s been in the works since 2006 and for more than two years, thousands of workers have been clearing trees, moving soil, building greens, fairways, clubhouses and luxury hotels.

And yet aspects of the project remain as mysterious as the island on which it sits. In fact, the man most closely connected to the Mission Hills venture in Hainan denies its very existence. [Continue reading]

The photos for the story were shot by Shanghai-based documentary photographer Ryan Pyle, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, Newsweek and other major publications. Be sure to look at the embedded PDF below to see how Ryan’s images looked in the magazine. I suggest the full-screen option.

Golf writer: Woods aloof

But Bloom native covering Shanghai tournament says focus makes Tiger the world’s greatest player

By MICHAEL LESTER
Press Enterprise Writer

SHANGHAI, China — Bloomsburg native Dan Washburn shadowed Tiger Woods around a golf course here during a November tournament, observing the superstar’s every move for stories he was writing for ESPN.com.

“I guess life was much simpler back then for him,” Washburn joked.

The Shanghai tournament preceded by less than three weeks Woods’s notorious Black Friday SUV crash that set off round-the-clock media scrutiny of the world’s greatest golfer and spawned reports he had cheated on his wife.

With Woods facing top rival Phil Mickelson in Shanghai, Washburn followed them for 18 holes, documenting their interactions (or lack thereof) with each other and fans.

Washburn, 36, wrote on ESPN.com that Mickelson came off as the good guy — outgoing and approachable. Mickelson won over both fans and media.

Woods, meanwhile, was the player most fans wanted to see. But Woods was standoffish, disappointing his admirers. He was described in one Chinese publication as “cold-blooded.”

“They didn’t exchange one word,” Washburn said of Woods and Mickelson. “There’s definitely a rivalry there.”

While Mickelson playfully chatted up fans at times, Woods kept to himself, said Washburn.

“He’s just so focused on the task at hand,” Washburn said of Woods. “The reason he is the golfer he is is that everything else is secondary.”

Washburn fired a few questions at Woods during a press conference, but he didn’t get any one-on-one time.

‘Smoking a cigar’

Washburn has also become preoccupied with golf.

The 1992 Bloomsburg graduate, who grew up on Market Street in town, doesn’t play the sport. But he did take lessons a few times.

(As a kid, he was always the designated cart driver, “smoking a cigar,” while his buddies golfed at area courses like Arnold’s.)

Washburn has become a guy U.S. media turn to for perspective on golf in China.

Besides ESPN.com, the freelance writer has had articles published in Baseball America, Golf World and Outside magazine’s Go publication.

Washburn said he has a cover story in the works for the January edition of Financial Times in the United Kingdom about efforts to turn Hainan, a tropical Chinese island, into a golfing resort. The U.S. edition of the magazine will publish the story in an inside section, he said.

“What Dan brings to his reporting is a perspective and an expertise to golf in a portion of the world that, by all accounts, is expanding exponentially during a worldwide economic slowdown,” said Kevin Maguire, ESPN.com’s senior editor for golf.

“Dan’s coverage of golf will certainly continue with great storytelling of the up-and-coming players from the world’s most populous nation.”

‘Less of a sports story’

On the same day Woods crashed his Cadillac Escalade, Washburn provided his insight on the future of golf in China for a story published in the Wall Street Journal.

“Golf will continue to grow in participation in China as the economy grows,” Washburn told the Journal. “But I don’t think it’ll become a mainstream game because of the resources necessary. It’s going to be an elitist and prohibitively expensive sport in China for the foreseeable future.”

Washburn has been writing about golf in China since 2005, and he has been researching the topic for a future book.

Golf is a relatively new sport there. It’s been played only about 25 years, Washburn said.

“It’s less of a sports story,” he said. “It’s a story that says something about the changes China is going through today. Golf is a very symbolic activity, symbolic of the country’s economic rise. It also runs up against many of the issues China is facing today. Land use issues. Environmental issues. The gap between rich and poor. It’s a very politically charged activity. ”

Asked if he is the media’s go-to guy in China when it comes to the development of golf in that country, Washburn said, “I’m reluctant to call myself an expert in anything.

“There are few other people, especially journalists, covering this issue. There are definitely people involved — architects, construction companies, executives. I guess I would be the person that people would call. Nobody else is doing these stories. It’s a window into China that not many people have thought of yet. It’s quite a unique topic that delves into so many issues.”

Meeting with love

A chance meeting in Hawaii with an ESPN.com editor led Washburn to the Chinese golf beat.

Washburn, in China since 2002, was visiting family in Honolulu, where his older brother Dave is an executive director for Habitat for Humanity. The Washburns’ father, retired Bloomsburg University education professor David Washburn, also lives in Hawaii since his retirement.

The editor, Jason Sobel, a nephew of a family friend, happened to be there, and Washburn discussed a possible job.

As a freelance writer, Washburn says he has to be persistent in pitching story ideas to editors, if he wants to stay busy and pay the bills. Sometimes editors approach him with ideas.

A chance 2002 meeting in Shanghai also led Washburn to his wife, Bliss Khaw, a native of Washington state.

Shortly after moving to Shanghai, Washburn arranged to have dinner with a guy who ran an English-only Web site about Shanghai. Washburn wanted to meet him and thank him for his help getting acclimated to the city.

The Web guy invited Bliss to dinner that night too. He knew Bliss because his nephew was in an orchestra with her.

‘Friendly town’

Like Bliss, Washburn had connections to Georgia, so the Web guy, turned match-maker, figured they’d get along just fine.

Washburn worked for The Times, a daily newspaper outside Atlanta. Bliss had lived in Athens, Ga.

During a visit home for New Year’s 2006, Washburn proposed to Bliss at the Inn at Turkey Hill near Bloomsburg.

They’ve been married since September 2006. (Bliss kept her maiden name.)

Dan and Bliss have no children. They have two dogs – mutts: Ozzie and Tux.

Bliss works in corporate investigations. Her job involves looking into Chinese firms for Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. looking to do business in that country.

Dan tries to get home at least once a year.

His mother, Sandy, still lives in the Market Street home where he grew up.

“Bloomsburg has some of the nicest people in the world,” Washburn said. “It’s a friendly town. Coming from a city like Shanghai, you learn to appreciate open spaces. One of my favorite things to do when I come home is to pick a small country road, and I just ride my bike. I just love that area.”

Washburn said a return move to the states is always in the back of his mind.

China’s most unlikely golf champ took his seat at a neighborhood restaurant in the dark, sooty suburbs near Beijing’s international airport and declared, “I like to drink.” Before long he was chugging cold Yanjing beer and gnawing on stewed pig intestines. He closed the place down, outlasting even the shirtless kitchen workers who were smoking cigarettes and playing cards at a corner table.

This is how Jian Chen unwinds the week of a tournament. But it’s a safe bet the 33-year-old was eating and drinking like this long before he ever heard of golf, a serendipitous discovery that happened less than a decade ago.

Chen’s rise from farmer to head waiter to obscure pro golfer — now, slightly less obscure — mirrors the random trajectories followed by the majority of the Chinese men who toil on their country’s domestic golf circuit. Most of them stumbled into the sport accidentally and relatively late, bringing personal histories almost unheard of in the Western world of contemporary professional golf. Read the story

The first time Tiger ventured to China, he met little Cindy Feng. As Woods returns to the Far East this week, she recalls how that meeting sparked an interest in golf for her and for a nation. Read the story

The cavalcade that followed Tiger in Round 1 of the HSBC Champions created a circus atmosphere. Despite the attention, Woods’ star isn’t nearly as high in China as one might expect. Read the story

Traditionally, fans at golf tournaments are seen but preferably not heard. That’s certainly not the case at the HSBC in China, where Tiger Woods and many in the field battle constant camera clicks and ringing cell phones. Read the story

Can China be the cure for all that ails golf with its inclusion in the Olympics? Although there are many positive signs pointing in that direction, the transformation of the world’s most populous nation into a golfing Mecca is far from certain. Read the story

Phil Mickelson surely earned some new fans in the Far East with his victory at the WGC-HSBC Champions on Sunday. But it was his interaction with the fans that “Lao Mi” will most be remembered for in China. Read the story

Here’s the product description:

Most of us will never know what it’s like to parachute out of a Cessna, tend goal for the Boston Bruins, burn rubber on a NASCAR track, scale Everest, or quarterback the Detroit Lions. So it’s our good fortune when dauntless literary journalists actually play the sports they cover—returning with firsthand tales from “inside the ropes.” Here, in the tradition popularized by George Plimpton, is participatory sportswriting at its finest and most far-out. Editor Zachary Michael Jack fields a dream team of today’s best sports journalists, hotshots, and rising stars in search of the game behind the game.

More than three dozen decorated writers take the field. Heirs apparent such as Tom Verducci, Jack McCallum, Melissa King, and Sam Walker join veterans Paul Gallico, George Plimpton, Davis Miller, Donald Katz, Tim Cahill, Grace Butcher, and James McManus in swinging for the journalistic fence. Together these thrill-seeking men and women capture the mojo of returning John McEnroe’s serve, taking a punch from Ali, paddling Jack London’s Alaskan river route, coaching the Phoenix Suns’ Steve Nash, umping Manny Ramirez. Forty eye-popping accounts offer the straight scoop as never before—not just in the field but on it.

From Zachary Michael Jack’s introduction:

For young sports writers on staff at major newspapers—a demographic represented in this collection by Greg Bishop, Corey Levitan, and Dan Washburn, among others—the opportunity to cover the rise of alternative sports was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be present at the creation, to a young man or woman covering a youthful movement rooted in “fierce individualism, alienation, and defiance,” as Harvey Lauer, president of American Sports Data, Inc., put it in his 2002 interview with American Demographics. For the participatory journalist, dedicated to the proposition that all sports are created equal, these were, and still are, heady days.

From ForeWard Magazine’s review of Inside The Ropes:

Several of these sports are individually demanding. Donald Katz writes about his participation in a marathon skating race in Holland (as well as the aforementioned fish-grabbing); Bill McKibben gives his take on cross-country skiing, while Dan Washburn raced dragon boats. Most of them would agree: this stuff isn’t as easy as it looks from the distance and safety of the stands or living room. Injury and, perhaps worse, embarrassment are constant possibilities.

This is from the “Contributors” section of the book:

You can purchase the Inside The Ropes on Amazon. You can also see a free preview of the book on Google. Here is a direct link to my chapter. You can also find my dragon boat piece on the Sporting Life website here and here. The full Sporting Life archive (including a two-parter on “the aforementioned fish-grabbing”) is here.

SHENYANG, Liaoning — I expected Mr. Shi to be waiting for me at the train station with a cold beer in one hand and an itinerary in the other. In the weeks leading up to my departure from Shanghai, and during my first month of traveling, he had been by far the most attentive and persistent of my contacts along the route.

He sent long emails and presented a detailed plan of attack for visiting the dozens of attractions Shenyang had to offer (even though every Chinese person I questioned leading up to my arrival in Shenyang had trouble naming one thing worth seeing in the city). He called me weekly, sometimes more often than that, his deep voice checking up on my current whereabouts and my estimated date of arrival in Shenyang. He wanted to make sure he was at the train station to greet me.

In Beijing, I finally had an answer for Mr. Shi. I would arrive on Saturday — at 2 a.m. I felt bad, but there were no other options.

“Mr. Shi,” I said to him over the phone, “we would be happy to get a hotel room that night. You could just meet us in the morning.”

“Nonsense,” his voice boomed back at me. “Saturday morning is still Friday night to us. It’s time to play. We will drink beer while we wait for you. It will be a party.”

There are stereotypes about dong bei ren, people from northeastern China: They are a hard-drinking lot — chuggers of both beer and bai jiu — and they are so amazingly gracious it makes you feel guilty. I can confirm both of these stereotypes to be accurate.

But Mr. Shi wasn’t drinking a beer when we arrived at the train station. There was no party. In fact, there was nobody. We arrived just after midnight. Whoever told us the original arrival time was wrong. But Mr. Shi was aware of this. We had discussed it. It seemed out of character for him to be late … for anything. It was raining. We waited for nearly 30 minutes, telling taxi driver after taxi driver, hotel tout after hotel tout, that we weren’t interested.

Mr. Shi has no mobile phone, so I called his home. His wife answered, and I knew right away that I had woken her up. But, of course, she was as sweet as could be. Mr. Shi, she told me, was waiting for me at the train station.

And, it turns out, he was. There are two exits there. He was at one. We were at the other. We found him, finally, and I apologized for calling his wife so late.

“It is nothing,” Mr. Shi shot back. “She is probably honored to be woken up by you.”

And with that, we headed off to a 1 a.m. dinner.

It is possible that I would not have received such preferential treatment from Mr. Shi had he not studied under my father back in Pennsylvania. The Chinese have a habit of heaping respect onto educators, and perhaps their offspring. But it is also possible that Mr. Shi and his friends would welcome with open arms any foreigner who showed even a passing interest in Shenyang. That’s just the way these guys operate. Give, and then give some more.

In his emails, Mr. Shi mentioned that my every need would be met in Shenyang. I’d have a free hotel room on the campus of Shenyang Normal University, where he teaches. I’d have a car and a driver. Meals would be taken care of. He could be my guide. I didn’t know what to say. I would have been happy sleeping on his mother-in-law’s floor.

But, Mr. Shi informed me at that first early-morning meal, things had changed. The hotel room was still mine. And there was another hotel room for Johnson and his girlfriend Lisa, who joined the trip in Beijing. Since I arrived so close to the start of the school year, however, Mr. Shi said his availability would be limited. Same thing about the car and driver. There was no longer a long set itinerary. And for some of the sightseeing, I might have to go it alone.

Frankly, I felt kind of relieved. I didn’t have high expectations for Shenyang, a city of some 7 million people. From everything I had learned, the city was an old industrial dinosaur, part of China’s rust-belt, with unbreathable air and a typical lack of character. Lonely Planet summed up the city with this sentence: “Shenyang is, for the most part, a sprawling mass of socialist town planning.” So, I told Mr. Shi that I appreciated his efforts anyway, that a hotel room is more than I expected in the first place, and that I am pretty easy to please. And I thought that was that.

Joining us at the early morning dinner table was Mr. Zhao, president of Shenyang Normal University’s international department. We didn’t share a common language, but that didn’t keep him from rattling off machine-gun style all that Shenyang and Liaoning Province had to offer. The first post-Liberation highways and airplanes were built here. In one of the Communists’ very first five-year plans, 56 of the 100 projects were based near Shenyang. Many important fossils had been discovered in Shenyang’s soil. And so on, and so on. He made Shenyang out to be a very happening place 50 or 50 million years ago.

It was almost as if he was trying to sell me on relocating to the city. And maybe he was.

“How long do you plan on staying in Shenyang?” Mr. Shi asked me.

“Well …” I began.

Mr. Shi interupted. “We were thinking six months. You could teach at our school.”

Assuming he had to be joking, I chuckled, before adding, “I was thinking more like three days.”

There was silence. And then Mr. Shi and Mr. Zhu began muttering to each other. I looked over at Johnson. Had I said something wrong?

I whispered to Johnson. “Were they serious about the six months?”

“I think so,” Johnson replied. “These people are famous for their hospitality.”

I first met Mr. Shi last summer in my hometown of Bloomsburg, Pa. He earned a master’s degree at the university there and served as my father’s graduate assistant. He then moved to Hartford, Conn., to assist in the teaching of Chinese at a group of public schools. His wife and daughter moved to Connecticut, too. But they all returned to Shenyang this summer. Mr. Shi’s visa-type stipulates that he must now stay in China for two years. I didn’t get the impression that would be a problem.

“I was homesick,” he said. “They had none of this.” He pointed to the food on our table.

I don’t remember much from our dinner last summer in Bloomsburg. But I remember Mr. Shi seemed genuinely interested when I told him about my plans for this trip. I remember Mr. Shi seemed particularly uninterested in the black beer my father and I ordered for him — Chinese men, it has been my experience, may like to drink, but they don’t trust liquids they can’t see through. And I remember the Mr. Shi in Bloomsburg seemed nothing like the Mr. Shi I met in Shenyang.

Perhaps, the Mr. Shi I met in Bloomsburg was too busy showing respect for my father. Or perhaps it is true that personalities don’t always translate well from culture to culture. For example, I am not exactly myself when thrust into Chinese situations surrounded by Chinese people — I am a confused mute who smiles and nods a lot.

The Mr. Shi I met in Shenyang was a leader, a respected intellectual who everyone, it seemed, listened to. A small man, Mr. Shi carries himself in a big way. He owns a subtle grace and style that, along with his booming bass, adds weight to his character. He is kind, smart and deceivingly funny, with a dry delivery that takes you by surprise. I often had to wait until he laughed, or someone else laughed, before determining whether he was serious or joking. Sarcasm is not something I have learned to expect from the Chinese. I really liked Mr. Shi. I think he would be an interesting person to get to know better — but I am not sure if that would ever be possible. I always felt there was something he wasn’t telling me, some nugget of information he was holding back, some punchline I would never be in on. Well, at least until he started drinking bai jiu.

Mr. Shi was suffering from a fever when he met us in the rain at the train station after midnight. He still had a fever when he met us at the campus hotel the next morning, along with a van and a driver, to show us some of Shenyang’s sites. “This is an American car,” Mr. Shi pointed out immediately. “A Buick.”

Our first stop was the Xinle Ancient Civilization Site, where human beings settled some 7,200 years ago. There are a few holes in the ground called excavation sites and several un-ancient huts with thatched roofs, housing re-creations of what life might have been like way back when. My personal favorite was the “scene of copulation.” There is also a scattershot museum with paint peeling from its walls and ceilings. Wisely, Mr. Shi stayed in the car. “I am not interested in old things,” he said. “I will wait out here and smoke.”

Speaking of old things, per Johnson’s urging, we paid a little extra at the Xinle site to see what was billed, in Chinese, as the “best preserved body in the world,” a 300-year-old woman. And there she was, under a small pavilion with a thatched roof. She was lying on a table, inside a plastic bag with a few of those oxygen absorption packets you might find in a bag of beef jerky. She was covered by a glass dome, similar to how some diners display breakfast pastries or pies. I could have very easily removed the glass because it wasn’t attached to anything. But she was very dead. And she did look very old. Johnson took many photographs of her.

Shenyang, like much of former Manchuria, was occupied by the Japanese from 1931 to 1945, and the city is filled with buildings and monuments that serve as reminders of this period of time. Several buildings built by the Japanese still stand at a part of the city known as Zhongshan Square, which is really a circle, a scary roundabout with no traffic signs or streetlights, and hundreds of crazy Chinese drivers. Crossing the street was a challenge.

I was somewhat surprised that these Japanese buildings hadn’t been demolished decades ago. The Chinese claim that Japan has never formally apologized for war-time atrocities committed in the first half of the last century, and they use this claim as an excuse for a blanket hatred of all things Japanese. Well, not all things. Chinese people seem to really like Japan’s cars, electronics, music, food and fashion. It’s just all Japanese people that they hate. That’s all.

So maybe the Chinese feel a certain sense of nationalistic pride in the fact that they are able to dine and spend the night in a hotel that was originally built by and for the Japanese. Maybe there is an ironic revenge in the fact that a former Japanese security office is now a Chinese police station. Or maybe they just like the buildings. I know I did. Built in a classic Western style, I thought they were some of the best looking structures in all of Shenyang. As we left the hotel, I asked Lisa if she liked the building. “Yes,” she said. “But I still hate the Japanese.”

Standing at the center of the traffic circle, taller than any of the Japanese creations, was Shenyang’s obligatory statue of Mao Zedong. Mao’s right arm was outstretched, as usual, but to me it felt more like a victory pose than usual on this day. There were other human figures statued beneath Mao, and the Chairman appeared to be riding on their shoulders. They were peasants, laborers, intellectuals and soldiers — all bigger and stronger looking than any Chinese people I have ever seen — and they were leaning forward aggressively, proudly, happily. They had been liberated.

It was a gray day, raining. Mr. Shi and I stood in Mao’s shadow holding umbrellas.

“So, what do you think of this?” I asked him, gesturing to the Mao monument.

“Hard to say,” Mr. Shi responded. “What do you think of Mao?”

“I think most Westerners have a negative view of him.”

“Well, I am a Chinese so …,” Mr. Shi, as he often does, was choosing his words carefully. “You know, the New York Times called him one of the 100 most influential people in history.”

“Right.”

“So, at least he is somebody.”

“But, what do you think of him?”

Mr. Shi thought for a moment and said, “Am-, am- … What’s the word that means both good and bad?”

“Ambivalent?”

“Yes. Ambivalent. I am ambivalent.”

“Well it sure is a very” — I too struggled to find the right word — “communist statue.”

“Of course,” Mr. Shi said. He paused again, and then added, “You know, everybody makes mistakes.”

It was lunch time, and Mr. Shi casually asked me to name some of my favorite Chinese dishes. I named a couple off the top of my head — a mistake, I immediately realized. Because, not just for that lunch, but for every meal Mr. Shi and I would share during my stay in Shenyang, it became Mr. Shi’s mission to make sure the restaurant could prepare my favorite dishes, no matter how many times I protested, no matter how many times I told him I also like to try new things, no matter how many times I told him I simply named the first two dishes that popped into my head. So, at every meal, we had pork spareribs and lu fish. When they arrived at the table, Mr. Shi would point to the dishes and say, “Dan, these are for you.”

As we entered a restaurant for lunch, Johnson read aloud the English translation of the large Chinese characters fastened to the wall above the main reception counter: “Jesus is my shepherd.” Were we dining at a Christian restaurant? Yes. In fact, Mr. Shi told me that the place used to give out Bibles to customers, but soon after the local authorities found out, the restaurant owners were given “a hint” to stop doing so. “There is religious freedom,” Mr. Shi said. “But only in certain places. Some of my colleagues are Christian, but they keep it a secret.”

We dined in a private room, as we did for all of our group meals in Shenyang. And, from watching Johnson, I learned how a good Chinese boy is supposed to act at such functions. Lots of standing and sitting back down. Lots of acting as though you’re not worthy to be in the company of everyone else at the table. When Mr. Shi, or anyone else for that matter, would refill Johnson’s tea, Johnson would put his hands on either side of the cup and cower like a grateful beggar, nodding constantly and muttering “xie xie” — thank you — over and over again until the cup was full. I tried this a couple times, but Mr. Shi said I always thrust my hands to the cup too violently, too suddenly, making me look even more like a laowai.

Eventually, after some beer, the topic of conversation turned to my trip, and this website. Mr. Shi mentioned that he had seen one of my photos of two shirtless young boys in Shanxi Province’s impoverished Haoyi Village.

“You may feel bad for them,” Mr. Shi said. “Humanitarian. Sad in your heart. But there is nothing we can do for them.”

“OK.” I wasn’t really sure where this was coming from, or where it was going. I could have taken a similar photo in almost any town or city in China.

“We are learning from the Americans,” Mr. Shi continued. “Competition. Those who can get ahead, do well. Those who can’t, starve. There is nothing we can do.”

“So what form of government would you prefer?”

“I prefer socialism. But not the socialism we had. Everyone should be equal. You see, we just had a nice meal. And there are other people outside with nothing. That is unfair.”

We left lunch and headed off to the next site of the day. In the van, I asked Mr. Shi about changes he has seen Shenyang go through over the years. He began with the good: the city’s infrastructure. “Gas, electricity, water,” he said. “Ten years ago, not everyone had these things.” He stopped there.

“So what, in your mind, are some of the negative changes?” I asked.

“Too many cement and concrete skyscrapers,” he said. “It’s inhuman in a sense.”

Mr. Shi continued, “People are becoming worse. They care more about money than human relations. Moral degradation. Cheating everywhere. You” — he motioned to me, the laowai — “will be overcharged. Shenyang used to be famous for heavy industry. But many of the factories have closed down, gone bankrupt. So Shenyang is a city without an identity right now. They say they are going to turn it into the financial capital of the north, but right now that is just a slogan. Many people are out of work.”

Oh, Mr. Shi also said that Shenyang has too many cars. And that the city’s air quality was among the worst in the world … but it had gotten better recently. As a comparison, this is what Mr. Shi had to say about Bloomsburg, my hometown: “I love that town. So quiet, clean and peaceful. It is beautiful. It is the perfect town.” But Shenyang is Mr. Shi’s hometown. And, despite all its faults, he likes it there. In fact, his life in China is much more comfortable than his life in the United States ever was. In Bloomsburg, he figured out a way he could eat for $40 a month, living on rice, vegetables and pork shoulder every day. In Hartford, Mr. Shi and his family lived in low-income housing because his 20-something-thousand-dollars-a-year salary was, well, low.

In Shenyang, earning somewhere between $500 and $1,000 dollars a month, Mr. Shi’s family can spread out between two adjoined apartments. And in Shenyang, Mr. Shi has friends, connections — guanxi — things that, in China, are often worth more than money. Mr. Shi is in no hurry to return to the United States.

I, actually, was pleasantly surprised by Shenyang. It was cleaner than I expected. And, parts of it at least, seemed like a city. Not just another communist-cookie-cutter Chinese city. But a real city. One that you might find in another country, a developed country. Sure, the plastic palm trees that line the roads are taller than the real trees planted alongside them. But at least the real trees are there. They will grow. Shenyang appeared to be a city on the rise.

Shenyang Normal University’s campus is on the outskirts of town, where you might still come across a donkey in the street, or a tiny, brightly colored three-wheeled vehicle the locals like to call san lu beng, which translates into “three mules jumping.” The campus is new and nondescript. It is less than five years old, which, in shoddy Chinese construction years, means that it is about time for things to be cracking, crumbling and falling apart. And they are. The campus went up fast. It will go down fast, too. It was the same way at Shanghai University, where I taught. It is the same at apartment buildings across the country. Forethought, it seems, is still a trait foreign to the Chinese. But at least the hotel for foreign students and teachers had fake deer in the front yard, and sunflowers and trash cans that looked like soccer balls.

My hotel room was big, with an air-conditioned bedroom and an office and a bathroom with a Western toilet and hot water. Definitely nicer than my digs at Shanghai University. I was told if I decided to teach at Shenyang Normal University, I could have my own kitchen. And I told them, once more, that I was not interested in teaching again … anywhere … ever.

A variety of sounds wafted in through my second-floor window. Mostly, they came very early in the morning. And mostly, they were chants of some sort, either blasted by the campus PA system or shouted by freshmen, forced, as they are at most Chinese universities, to go through ridiculous basic-training-type military exercises designed to teach discipline. In an odd break from the norm, one afternoon the school speakers blared the theme from Star Wars.

I never completely adjusted to the school’s time schedule. As is the case at most Chinese universities, students have a curfew at Shenyang Normal University. Dormitories lock their doors at 10:30 p.m. The power goes off shortly after that. And, I learned the hard way, the entire campus locks up at 11 p.m. I spent most of my evenings at an internet bar down the road — where my website was mysteriously blocked, any attempt to load it would shut down all open browser windows. I usually stayed at the internet bar until after midnight. There were times I thought I would end up sleeping on the sidewalk.

One night, I was lucky to arrive at the gate at the same time as a car. It honked, the gate opened, and we both entered the campus. One problem: My hotel was locked, too. I pounded and pounded on the door. No answer. I called Johnson and Lisa on their mobile phones. They were both powered off. I went back to the security office back by the gate, and the guards — college-age kids, really — were all walking around in brightly colored bikini briefs. I communicated my problem to the kid at the window. He made a call, and told me to walk back to the hotel. Someone would open the door for me.

I walked back to the hotel. I waited for 15 minutes. I pounded on the door some more. I wondered if I understood the security boy correctly. And I walked back to the guards’ quarters. He said I needed to wait longer. The man who would unlock the door required time to get dressed. Evidently, he too likes to prance around in his underwear in the middle of the night. I walked back to the hotel, again. And this time the old man who lives in the hotel let me in, but only after closely inspecting me through the glass door with his flashlight. The following day, I learned which window went with the old man’s room at the hotel, and from then on I just knocked on that when I arrived after my curfew.

But, before I could do that, I still had to make it back on campus. Not an easy task when you can’t get the grab-ass-playing guards’ attention, which is what happened the following night. I had to scale a campus wall. And, as I was doing so, I think I figured out why Shenyang Normal University seemed so desperate to attract foreign teachers. Did I mention that this happened on a weekend?

On Sunday morning, we met a young professor named Lawrence, who drove us downtown in his new white Honda Accord. He took us to the second-largest wholesale market in China, which opens at 2 a.m. and closes at 1 p.m., and is very popular with the Russians. Lawrence, at Shenyang Normal School for 11 years, is from Dalian, a glimmering coastal city south of Shenyang on the Korean Gulf. Many Chinese consider Dalian to be one of the best places to live in all of China. I asked Lawrence to name something, anything, in Shenyang that he like better than Dalian. He thought about it for quite some time, and finally offered me this: “The roads are wider in Shenyang.”

We tried to find a place for lunch near the market, but Lawrence thought all the Chinese places were too dirty. After walking around a while longer, he turned to me and said, “How about McDonald’s?” So, McDonald’s it was. And I ate my double cheeseburger surrounded by fat Chinese boys eating theirs. China is quickly overtaking the United States as the most important player in the world economy. Give China and its spoiled only-children another 10 years or so of McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut, and they may very well give us a run for our money when it comes to obesity, as well.

Mr. Shi called me that afternoon and informed me that I had dinner plans.

“I will meet you in the hotel lobby at 5:25,” he said.

“Exactly 5:25?” I asked. I was waiting for him to laugh, for him to tell me he was joking.

“Yes,” he said. And then we both hung up.

Mr. Shi was on time, of course. And he walked us out to a giant black automobile.

“American car,” he said to me. “Lincoln Towncar.”

“Nice,” I said. “Whose is it?”

“It is owned by a construction investment company.”

“And what is your connection to the construction investment company?”

“A classmate of mine is on the board.”

“Ah. Guanxi.”

Mr. Shi looked at me over the top of his spectacles. It was a serious gaze, one that told me Mr. Shi was either about to scold me — or tell a joke.

“You are learning a lot about China,” he said with a slight smile.

During our drive to the hotel, I asked Mr. Shi about salaries at Shenyang Normal University. He said the average Chinese professor earns about RMB 3,000 ($360) a month.

“Extravagance is impossible,” he said. “But it is livable.”

“If that is the average,” I asked, “what does a first-year teacher make?”

“Maybe 1,400 RMB per month,” he said.

“Can a family live on that in a city like Shenyang? How do they live?”

“There is corruption,” Mr. Shi said matter-of-factly. “If you are not corrupt you cannot survive.”

“How can a teacher be corrupt?”

“You want to know?” Mr. Shi said — he was looking at me over his glasses again. “I will tell you. Sometime. But not now. Dan, you are a laowai. That not only means that you are a foreigner. That means you don’t know the rules.”

I told Mr. Shi about a story I had seen on the television news recently. Professors at a university in Guangxi Autonomous Region had been arrested, basically for blackmailing the families of potential students. They were denying qualified students admission to the school until they received a cash payment from the parents.

Mr. Shi looked at me. And then he looked at my notepad and pen. “Not only in Guangxi,” he said, and turned away.

At dinner, I met Mr. Wu, an administrator at Shenyang Normal University who also earned his master’s in Bloomsburg, and his wife. I also met for the first time Mr. Shi’s wife and daughter. They both said that while they enjoyed their time in Connecticut, they were happy to be back home. Mr. Shi’s daughter, a straight-A student in the States, enjoyed the convenience of transportation in Connecticut, but she really missed books written in Chinese. Mr. Shi’s wife said she never figured out how American hospitals and banks operated, so they just never went to those places. I assured her that many Americans have trouble figuring out the American healthcare system, too.

As usual, we were in a private room, with plenty of food and drink … and a karaoke TV. There were many toasts — even one to my father, recently retired, back in Pennsylvania — but thankfully there was no bai jiu, the vile firewater that helps northern Chinese get through all those long winter nights (and afternoons). But, later in the week, after I had returned from a short stay in Dandong, a city on the North Korean border, after Johnson and Lisa had headed back to Shanghai, there was one final dinner in a private room. The bai jiu flowed that night, and, as the Chinese saying goes, so did the truth.

I was dining with Mr. Shi and three other Chinese men, whose names and images Mr. Shi “requested” I not include on this website. “This dinner is just for fun, not work,” he said. One of the men, I was told, was one of Liaoning Province’s most famous poets. Another was one of Liaoning’s most famous antiques dealers. The other man was one of Mr. Shi’s best friends. He’s the one that bought dinner — an amazing feast that, of course, included pork spareribs and lu fish … for me — and the bai jiu.

Only three of us were drinking bai jiu that night. The poet said he had too much to drink with lunch, so he stuck to beer. The antiques dealer claimed to have recently undergone eye surgery, so he sipped on milk. (Note to self: Remember these excuses for next trip to northeastern China.) Interestingly, it was one of the non-bai jiu drinkers who uttered this gem: “Mao was a very intelligent peasant.”

I turned to Mr. Shi and asked, “Was that a compliment?”

“Hard to say,” was his response.

I felt unquestionably welcomed by these gentlemen. They presented me with a beautiful floral painting, painted, I was assured, by one of Liaoning’s most famous artists. And they all made numerous toasts — directed at me, the American they had just met — that, the way Mr. Shi translated them, seemed so eloquent and benevolent that I felt a bit guilty. I did nothing to deserve such treatment.

But this is just how these people operate. Generosity is not just a trait for them, it is a job. They seemed so sincere when they said things like “Dan, I hope we can be friends forever” and “Dan, this is your kingdom.” I didn’t feel worthy. I mean, I’ve never said things like that to friends I’ve known my entire life. Do these guys say such things simply out of habit, because it is their custom to do so? Perhaps. Would they say such things to any other foreigner who happened to be sitting at the table? Maybe. Do they have any ulterior motive in doing so? No.

So when it was my turn to toast, I told them I had heard rumors of northeastern China’s hospitality, and they had exceeded even my lofty exceptions. I told them they had set the bar high for all places I would visit after Shenyang. I told them they made me fee like a king.

There was another bottle of bai jiu purchased. And there were more things said. This time, some of the statements made me feel more warned than welcomed. The alcohol was starting to do some talking.

I mentioned that I was eventually heading to Ningxia Autonomous Region, a largely Muslim area in northwestern China. Mr. Shi told me to be careful. Things could be unsafe for me there. I told him that I had traveled to Muslim parts of China before, and I had felt completely safe.

“Forget Japan,” Mr. Shi said. “You are the arch enemy now.”

“Really?”

He mentioned the U.S.’s bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1999. He mentioned the U.S./China spy plane row of 2001. He mentioned the ongoing controversy surrounding Taiwan. Most Americans have probably already forgotten about the embassy and the spy plane. Most Americans probably don’t have an opinion on Taiwan. But the Chinese are famous for having long memories. Just ask the Japanese.

Later, when eyesight was blurry and speech slurred, Mr. Shi pulled me closer. He wanted to tell me something. It seemed serious. It felt like we were in a confessional.

And then he laid it on me.

The reason why he had to scrap his grand touring plan for me, the reason why there was no private car, no long drives into the Liaoning countryside, was not because I arrived too close to the school year. The real reason was because Mr. Shi showed my website to two friends of his, local government officials, and they did not particularly care for my words or photos. Not one bit. They said my work was “anti-Communist.” They pointed to my photo of two shirtless boys in Shanxi and said, “You want us to spend our money on this man for this?”

There was nothing Mr. Shi could do. And I could tell he felt bad about it. He told me he had already told Johnson about this, but he made Johnson promise not to tell me (and, like a good Chinese boy, Johnson didn’t). I didn’t know what to say. I muttered something like, “It’s OK. I really appreciate everything you were able to do for me.”

But, in my head, paranoia was starting to set in — and all the bai jiu wasn’t helping. Did this explain my site being blocked at the Shenyang internet bars? Will these officials now be monitoring my site on a regular basis? If I write about my time in Shenyang, will I get Mr. Shi in trouble? By staying a couple days extra to get some writing done, had I overstayed my welcome?

Dinner was finished, and all the drink had been drunk. As we left the restaurant, Mr. Shi said, “My friend would like to know if you need to go to a massage parlor.”

“No thanks,” I said, inferring that massages weren’t the only things for sale at this time of night. “I’m expecting a call from my girlfriend.”

Mr. Shi and I shared a taxi. I was leaving for Changchun, in neighboring Jilin Province, the following day and I needed some money. So we drove around for a while looking for an ATM. I asked Mr. Shi what he was doing for the rest of the evening, and invited him out for another drink. I would pay this time, I said.

“No thanks,” he said. “I am going home. My friend invited you to a wonderful place, and you declined.”

Then, he turned to the driver and told him to head to Shenyang Normal University. He spoke to the driver in English. The driver looked confused. So did I.

Mr. Shi shook his head and looked at me over his slightly crooked glasses.

“When I’m drinking,” he mumbled, “everybody understands English.”

Click here for photos.

Eighteen-year-old Miao Jiao — Jo, as I know her — is in limbo, hovering between two different worlds, two different eras. She attends college in Shanghai, an ever-changing city of nearly 20 million that buzzes like one giant neon light bulb. Her hometown is Hengshui, population 4,000, a tiny village in western Jiangxi Province, where the Miao family is one of the lucky ones — they have electricity. She said when she is in Hengshui, she misses Shanghai. When she is in Shanghai, she misses Hengshui.

If you live in Hengshui, you probably either work on a farm, in a coal mine, at a fireworks factory — or you don’t work at all. Until last year, Jo’s father, Miao Chang Xin, worked in sales for one of the many small local coal mines. But like so many small local coal mines in Jiangxi, Mr. Miao’s was mismanaged and went out of business. Now Miao, who had worked at the mine for more than 20 years, is jobless. At 43, Jo fears her father is too old to find steady work. He currently passes time at home making parts for a local fireworks factory on a small hand-operated machine. They pay him RMB 30 — $2.75 — a day.

Jo said several years ago her father had a chance to buy a house in a much larger city about an hour away. But he decided to stay in the village. Part of Jo wishes the family had moved when it had the chance. She thinks in a bigger place, her father would have been able to make the connections necessary to find another job. “It would be a more comfortable life,” she said.

The Miaos are a proud family. They wouldn’t let me pay for anything during my stay. Until Mr. Miao lost his job, they were one of the wealthiest in the village. It’s all relative, however. The average annual household income of a family in Jiangxi is less than $600 a year.

Jo’s mother, Zhong Hua Ping, is a teacher at the village elementary school, a run down structure with crumbling staircases and desks and chairs that look as though they pre-date the Cultural Revolution — or even the Japanese Invasion. Jo’s older sister, 20-year-old Miao Yan, also teaches at the school. In many parts of China, the job of primary school educator is one that does not require a college degree. Teachers in Hengshui earn about RMB 1,000 ($120) each month.

Also living with Jo’s family are her father’s mother, 73-year-old Liu Su Hua, and grandmother, Hu Ai Xiang, 88 years old and spry. In two days living with the family, I never saw Ms. Liu. She gets up early and comes home late from her job at a fireworks factory. Jo said her grandmother doesn’t do the monotonous, finger-cramping work for the money — workers at fireworks factories get paid very little, even by Hengshui standards — she does it because she enjoys simply having something to do.

Jo’s great grandmother always chuckled when she saw me. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I am 6-foot-3 and she is 4-foot-6. She was always handing me fans, worried that I was too hot. Or she was trying to hand me an umbrella, worried that the sun would burn my skin. She spent most of the day sitting on a small chair near the main door of the house, fanning herself. I saw her doing some laundry by hand (the family has an electric washer, but I never saw anyone use it). And I saw her sorting through the hundreds of red chili peppers drying out in front of the house, a common site in this part of China. Great grandma gets around pretty well, actually, but she doesn’t join the rest of the family at the dinner table for meals. She doesn’t like the electric fan that hangs from the ceiling.

Jo’s family has also taken on a renter since Mr. Miao lost his job, a young man who also makes parts for a fireworks factory. Jo also has an older brother, who went to technical school in Guilin, Guangxi Province, and works as an electrical engineer in Guangzhou. Jo says her brother makes a “so-so” salary and sends money home to the family each month. (If you are wondering, Jo says China’s one-child policy is “not as strict” in remote villages like Hengshui.) Two dogs also live with the family. Jo warned me about them during the hour-long drive north to Hengshui from the train station in Pinxiang, a small-by-Chinese-standards coal mining city where her uncle is employed as a driver for “rich people.”

“Oh good,” I said. “I like dogs.”

Jo did not respond.

Remarkably, all of the assorted family and non-family parts that coexist at Jo’s house can do so rather comfortably in terms of space. They live in a simple yet stately farm house that Jo’s great grandfather had built in the 1970s. The home — whitewashed walls, vaulted ceilings and a decorative Chinese tile roof — sits at the end of a gravel and dirt road great grandfather had built, as well. Gracefully painted above one of the main entrances are the Chinese characters qian cheng si jin: “Have a bright future.”

The house used to sit on its own, but over time other homes have encroached on its territory. The once private road is now used by most of the village.

Even with seven full-time occupants, there was still an extra bedroom available for me. Grandma and great grandma share a bedroom, and Jo and her sister share a bed. I asked Jo why, even with her brother’s bedroom vacant, she and her sister continue to sleep in the same bed. Jo appeared taken aback by the thought of the sisters separating. “We’ve slept in the same bed for 18 years,” she said. She said they sleep better side by side.

We arrived in Hengshui at 1 a.m. on July 27 and the cool mountain air was a welcome respite from the unrelenting heat that had become an unwelcome companion during The Trip’s first week. (Hengshui is located in what appears to be the foothills of a mountain range that Jo claims has no name.) The sky was clear and full of stars. I had to stop and stare for a while.

I occupied the sisters’ room. It had a ceiling fan and a mosquito net, and Jo’s mom — who woke up to greet me — had laid out for me a wide assortment of snacks, Chinese and western, in case I was hungry after my seven-hour train ride from the eastern part of the province. This was luxury living in the most unexpected of places. Atop a dresser, I noticed a container of contact lense solution. Both Jo and her sister use them. She doubts anyone else in the village has even heard of contact lenses before.

In the countryside, feet start shuffling outside your bedroom door very early in the morning. Before you know it, you’re told that breakfast is being served in the dining room and your presence is expected. Seeing Jo’s home in the light of day made me feel as though I had been transported back into a Shakespearean play, which I know makes very little sense — since I was in China — but anyway, that’s the first thing that came to my mind. Living with Jo’s family was like participating in some educational re-creation of how people lived in the old days, a Chinese Colonial Williamsburg of sorts. I can almost hear the tour guide now:

And over here is the kitchen, where old-fashioned people actually had to use hand-made blocks of coal to heat their pots and pans.

Here, this large concrete cistern is where people of the past collected all of their water for laundry, cooking and bathing. These metal buckets were what they used instead of the showers that all modern people have today.

Finally, over here — you’re going to love this — this hole in the cement floor is what old-time people used as a toilet.

“Ewwww,” the crowd would react. “I’m sure glad human beings don’t live like that anymore.”

But, in Hengshui, people live like this now. They likely will for decades to come. And many families, like Jo’s, do so in a very dignified manner. The dining room at Jo’s house is decorated simply. The furniture, used daily, is mostly family antiques — the Miao clan has lived in Hengshui for many generations — items that would likely earn a village fortune on eBay. The main entrance to the home leads into the dining room, and its two heavy wooden doors give the place the feel of a castle.

On one wall is a large, colorful calendar and some decorations that are holdovers from Chinese New Year. Another wall has black-and-white, unsmiling headshots of deceased family members, a traditional Chinese way of honoring the dead. Great grandfather is there. So is grandfather. And grandma is there, too, beside her husband, even though she is alive and well and working long days at a fireworks factory. They didn’t want grandpa to be lonely on the wall. These photos — which feel more like mugshots — are taken when relatives reach a “dying age,” which I believe explains the long faces.

“My grandfather died three years ago,” Jo said as we looked at his photo. “He loved me very much. And I miss him very much.”

The wall facing the door features a portrait of another deceased and beloved man, Mao Zedong, whose visage has become more and more visible the farther I travel from Shanghai and the closer I get to Mao’s home province Hunan. With his Mona Lisa smile, Chairman Mao looks down on the dining room table. Beneath him is a large color poster of a tropical beach scene — no one in Jo’s family knows where the photo was taken. I asked Jo why it was important for the family to have Mao’s portrait placed so prominently in the home. “Because he built the new country,” was her response. Then I asked her to explain a smaller photo of Mao shaking hands with several other Communist Party officials. “I don’t know who they are,” Jo said. “I don’t know much about history.”

Nearby hang two large maps, one of China and one of the world. I asked Jo if she wanted to visit other countries.

“No,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Not enough money.”

“But what if you had money. Would you want to travel somewhere?”

“I’ve never thought about it.”

The two dogs at the house were a mother and recently-born son. The mother was a thin mutt, its breed hard to place. The son was black, a cute floppy puppy that looked like it had some Labrador in him. Neither was particularly friendly. Whenever I tried to pet them they would growl and scurry away. I noticed that both dogs had tape wrapped around the middle of their tails, and asked Jo if there was any Chinese significance to the practice. “I think the men just got bored,” she said.

That morning, Jo and her mother took me to a nearby coal mine. Jo’s mom was born and raised in the village and is rather well connected. Either she knows people from childhood, she taught them or she taught their children. We had no problems wandering around the Yao Ye Chong Coal Mine for an hour.

Coal mines are always dreary places. Everything is black, or covered in black or soon to be covered in black. The whole place appears to be preparing for a funeral. And in China, that’s not far from the truth. Work conditions are among the worst in the world. Accidents happen all the time. In 1989, a cave-in killed several Yao Ye Chong miners.

In 2003, China’s rate of deaths to production of every million tons of coal was 130 times that of the United States. In 2002, 6,995 coal miners died in China. The United States had 27 deaths that year. The rate of deaths is not reflected in the rate of pay, however. Yao Ye Chong’s miners, who often live in dirty dorm-style rooms at the mine, make RMB 60 ($7.50) a day. Workers who stay above ground make half that. Still, there are always people who want jobs in the mines. It is, after all, one of the only gigs in town. There are not enough jobs to go around.

We stayed above ground. And, although the workers we saw there might avoid a fast death, they are surely living a slow one. But, sooty, skinny and exhausted, many still managed a smile. We were welcomed into the manager’s office for some green tea. It was the only room in the place with a ceiling fan, and several workers, mostly drivers, gathered on the benches, smoked cigarettes and told jokes. Jo recognized one of the workers in the room as a former classmate. She had heard that he worked there, and that he was already married with a child. She didn’t say anything to him. He didn’t appear to recognize her.

After tea, we walked behind the coal mine, toward a small Taoist temple on the top of a hill. Along the path was a one-room building made of brown clay bricks. Laying on a plastic tarp outside, were bundles and bundles of pink firecrackers. This is a small fireworks “factory,” some tables and chairs, where workers — all women, mostly young ones — put together commercial firecrackers by hand. This is what Jo’s grandma does all day. This is how many fireworks that end up in America are made.

At the temple, modest and recently rebuilt, an older woman was doing the same work. She was making firecrackers inside the temple. Jo’s mom paid her respects at the alter, kneeling and praying and stuffing some money in the donation box. Jo and I, neither of us particularly religious, followed suit. “Just make a wish,” Jo whispered to me. Our generosity was celebrated with the lighting of some incense sticks, some candles and — of course — some fireworks.

“I don’t know why if the village wants to build a school, few people will give money,” Jo said as we left. “But if they build a temple, everybody gives. There is a sharp contrast between here and the big city. I don’t think people in small villages understand the value of education.”

Jo just finished her second year as an English major at Shanghai University. She has had me as a teacher for five of her six college semesters. As a freshman she had very short hair, a boyish cut that many teenage girls in China still have. Now she has wavy neck-length hair, lightened to a dark auburn color. She usually pins it back on one side with a barrette. Her dress is fashionable, if at times a little conservative. There is a city woman wanting to break out of this village girl. I asked her about her hair.

“My mother said girls in college should grow their hair longer.”

“Why?”

“More beautiful, I guess.”

“Does she want you to find a boyfriend in college?”

“We don’t discuss such matters.”

Jo, in fact, has been secretly seeing a boy for two years now. (Don’t worry, all of the people who this is a secret to cannot read English.) He is a former high school classmate who lives in Pingxiang. They don’t see each other often, but sometimes rendezvous in Shangli, a town between Hengshui and Pingxiang. Usually they just send text messages on their mobile phones. When Jo and I went to an internet bar in Shangli one night, she received a message every couple minutes or so. Her sister doesn’t even know about this relationship.

“Do you love him?” I asked.

“To some extent, yes,” she said.

We talked about this during lunch, with other family members nearby. English was our code language.

During meals, the dogs get the scraps. Often, instead of spitting bones onto the table, as is the Chinese custom, Jo’s family just spits them onto the floor. I tried to throw mine to the puppy, who I had grown fond of even though he wouldn’t let me pet him.

“We don’t consider them pets,” Jo said.

Jo’s mom said they were like guard dogs.

“We often kill the little ones,” sweet little Jo said. She then paused, as if for dramatic effect, and added, “And eat them.”

“Quite delicious, I think,” she continued.

My heart dropped to the floor. And the dogs started tearing at it.

Jo went on. “This one had a sister several days ago.” Pause. “We killed it.” Pause. “And ate it.”

“Why did this one get spared?” I asked, pointing to the cute black dog I wanted to take with me on the rest of my trip.

“We will probably kill him before the new year.”

Pause.

“And eat him.”

I realized with every bone I dropped to the floor, I was helping to fatten this puppy up for slaughter. I felt sick.

“We often kill little animals,” Jo said.

“And eat them,” I said. “I know. I know. Do you eat cats?”

“No,” Jo said. “It is not our custom. When cats die, we hang their bodies from the willow trees. That is our custom.”

“How long do you hang them there?”

“Until they are gone.”

And on that note, we headed to a fireworks factory. Well factory is not really an accurate description. This was a hilly, grassy area dotted with 20 or so small brick buildings, each one housing a different stage of the fireworks making process. On this day, the workers were making “Red Devil Rockets,” which according to their English packaging come with “blue stars with crackles” and “silver ran.” The owner of the Bang Fa Fireworks Factory told us they were originally supposed to be shipped to America, but now they are only being sold in China.

Jiangxi and Hunan provinces are considered the top producers of fireworks in China, where firecrackers are a way of life. In Shangli town, a short drive from Hengshui, there is a big gold statue on the top of a hill of Li Tian, the hometown hero credited with the invention of fireworks. (So, if you’ve ever been blasted out of a solid sleep by some firecrackers outside your window — and if you live in China, this has happened to you — you have this guy to thank.)

But, not surprisingly, working at a fireworks factory is not safe. Every year, hundreds of works die in fires and explosions. Especially during the hot summers, the sweaty shacks that house workers and explosives become ticking time bombs. All the workers I saw were female. Some old, some very young. Jo told me that she saw a rule painted on a wall: “No workers under 16 allowed.” But Jo’s mom saw one of her students working there. She was 12 years old. Of course, her family needed the money she earned at the fireworks factory to pay for her to go to school.

The Bang Fa factory employs 80 women and girls. They do the construction, the labeling, the packaging and the boxing — and they do it all by hand. It’s an assembly line without the line. Workers get paid about RMB 20 ($2.50) for a long day of work. The owner and his wife invited us inside their office. We ate watermelon and drank lichee juice and then went on our way … but not before they insisted I take with me a bag full of Red Devil Rockets.

On my final morning in Hengshui, Jo and I traveled by bus and motorcycle taxi to nearby Yilong Cave, yet another natural wonder made to look as unnatural as possible. The Chinese like to doll up their caves with fluorescent lights and flights of stairs. And after the 4-km-trek through the cave, oddly, visitors are treated to a variety of carnival acts. There is a 4-year-old girl who rides a motorcycle — no hands, no helmet — inside a spherical cage. She then does a really long and tall tightrope walk … without a net. It was sad.

But the rides to and from the cave were spectacular. Motorcycle taxis are fun because they look so funny. They come with what look to be beach umbrellas attached, to protect driver and passenger from the sun. The pole for the umbrella is right in the center of the driver’s line of sight. When you get off a bus, motorcycle taxis swarm. From above, it must look like the running of the beach balls.

From the bus, it is easy to fall into a trance looking at western Jiangxi’s lush rolling mountains. They glow when the sun hits just right. Bamboo forests and rice paddies are two of the most striking shades of green I have ever seen.

For two days, village life suited me fine. I liked the pace. I liked the people. But I had to leave.

The bus to Changsha would be passing through the village any minute, or at least that’s what the rumor was. There are no schedules. If I wasn’t on the side of the road to flag it down, the bus would never stop.

As I was heading out, great grandma was saying something I couldn’t understand.

Jo said, “She wants you to take an umbrella.”

Click here to see photos.

On money: I have reached the point where coins turn into paper. In Shanghai, if you are holding 1 yuan or less in your hand, you are holding coins. In smaller places I have visited in China, coins are almost non-existent. Everything is paper money, even for really small denominations. Anyone know why this is? Are coins too heavy to transport to the rural areas? If you know, let me know.

On etiquette: It’s OK to spit on the bus here. Just make sure you rub it into the floor with your foot afterward. (This is actually much better than what I’ve seen in other places.)

On the bus to Changsha: I made the mistake of telling the ticket taker where I was from during the two-hour drive to Changsha, Hunan Province.

To every other passenger who boarded the mini-bus along the route (I was the first) he would say: “Hey! It’s an American! Look! Look! See his big nose? He’s an American!” He seemed to make the other passengers uncomfortable.

By the way, the ring tone on his mobile phone was “Right Here Waiting For You.”

Hey! Hey! Bryan Adams is Canadian! He has a big nose, too!

Haoyi village, with 4,000 shy and skeptical inhabitants, is an odd, isolated place surrounded by corn fields and coal mines. It is located an hour north of Linfen in southern Shanxi, a gritty, blue-collar province famous for coal, power generation, metal refining and other heavy industries. Called the “Coal Warehouse of China,” Shanxi is responsible for as much as one-third of China’s annual coal output, according to some reports.

Yet, Shanxi remains one of the poorest provinces in the country. In June, the average urban household had a monthly income of RMB 649 ($79), according to official government statistics. Rural Shanxi families earned an average of RMB 900 ($110) — total — for the first six months of 2004.

More than half of the men in Haoyi village work in the coal industry, but many Shanxi coal mines and coal-burning power plants are losing money. It often costs more to produce the energy than they are allowed to charge for it. The government keeps prices low, so showpiece cities like Shanghai and Beijing can afford to feed their rapid growth.

“Do you smell it?” my friend Peter (Liu Yi) asked as we walked along the dirt road that stretched from where the minibus dropped us off to the village, which is set behind the main two-lane road and in front of a jagged set of tall, brown hills that looked more like really big piles of dirt.

It was impossible not to smell it. The stench of burning coal is hard to ignore. It lingers — heavily — making any place under its gray cloud stink like one big road repaving project that never gets completed. Haoyi’s villagers live with the smell every day of their lives. And, eventually, it becomes the smell of normalcy.

But Peter, 24, a graduate student at Shanghai University, is never home long enough to get used to the smell. He spends most of the year in the comparably cleaner Shanghai — a scary thought — only returning to his village twice a year. When Johnson and I visited, Peter had already been in Haoyi for seven days. He remarked that he had yet to see a blue sky.

“There were more blue skies 10 years ago,” he said.

The haze that hovers over Haoyi serves at least one useful purpose — partially obscuring the depressing smokestacks that huff and puff among all the corn. Haoyi’s sky is a sad one, gray, drab and lifeless. The only color comes from the bright orange flames that spit from some of the smaller stacks. They glow through the murk, a dozen setting suns dotting the horizon.

The factory closest to Haoyi sits on the banks of the Fen He River, now a small brown trickle in a wide silt-filled trench. As a child, Peter used to swim in the river. Now, the water might come up to his ankles. If somehow it managed to rise back to its previous level, Peter still wouldn’t swim in the Fen He. Too polluted, he said. China’s economic boom has brought with it more privatization. Coal companies are popping up all along the river.

“You used to be able to bathe in the water,” Peter said. “Now, it is very inconvenient. It makes me sad.”

Human beings have inhabited Haoyi for more than 3,000 years. Originally it was called Zhang Jia Zhaung — or “Zhang Family Village” — and ancestors of Peter’s mother, 44-year-old Zhang Lin Ai, have been there since the beginning. The village changed its name about 1,000 years ago, during the Song Dynasty. A man named Zhang Hao Yi was a very popular general.

Walking through Haoyi is like stumbling upon a once-grand civilization, now crumbling to the ground. Gray brick buildings and walls, stained black and brown from coal and dirt, flank muddy dirt lanes. Many villagers live in dwellings dug into the mountainside, called yao dong, brown brick facades stuck onto walls of dirt. These were homes I would have expected to see in the American West of the 1800s, not in the 21st century, not in the country with the world’s fastest growing economy.

But there they were. And people were living in them. Families. With children. And chickens. And laundry in the front yard. Peter told me that, if I wanted to, I could have one of the abandoned yao dongs further up the mountainside for RMB 500 ($60) … a year.

“Or less,” Peter added with a slight smile. “Actually, this is a rich part of the county.”

Coal is piled up everywhere in Haoyi. Every home, every building, has its own stash. That’s what is used for cooking and heating. Nowadays, most of it is what they call “coal mud,” a bi-product of the coal-burning process that is less effective than the real thing. Because many illegal coal mines have been shut down by the government in recent years, pure coal is too expensive for the villagers. Peter’s family has a large pile of real coal outside of their home. It’s spillover from local coal trucks, and each family member hauls it back from the main road by the bucketful.

I tried to smile a lot as we first walked through the village on our way to the Liu family home. I tried to smile, because most people seemed scared. People peered out of doorways and windows. But when I got close, they would disappear. Those on the street would slowly backpedal. Children would run away. Some just cried.

There were no playful “Hello”s, no clumsy chuckles, no stupefied smiles. This was the strangest reception I had ever experienced in China. A woman shouted something to Peter.

“She said you are the first foreigner in the village,” Peter said. “Don’t worry. They are just shy. Like me.”

Back in Shanghai, whenever I call Peter he is reading, or he has just finished reading, or he is about to read. Peter was my Chinese tutor for a short time back in 2002 and 2003. He is studying for his master’s degree in History. His emphasis is Religious History, specifically the relationship between God and government. He doesn’t get out much, and I’m not sure if he wants to. I have dragged him to bars a couple times in Shanghai. He always seemed out of place, quiet and uncomfortable.

Of course, back then I had just moved to China. I didn’t realize the money spent on each beer we drank would be considered a nice daily salary in the small village Peter grew up in. I understand Peter so much better now.

Peter’s family lives in part of what once was a dignified estate, owned by a local doctor. After the Communist Liberation in 1949, the government seized the land and everything on it. Now, the one-story home is split up into several dwellings. Peter’s family occupies what used to be the doctor’s barn, three odd, arched rooms with brick walls and stone floors — and the peculiar feeling of living in a tunnel. The place has character to spare.

Within eyesight of the home is the village’s tiny Christian church, a white-tile building topped with a large rusty metal cross. Peter’s mom is a regular there. In fact, after Peter marries, she has plans to become a preacher. Religion is a topic Peter and his mother butt heads on. The more he studies religion, Peter said, the less likely he is ever to be religious. But Peter’s mother still tries to recruit him into the fold, as she does with many people in the village, as she did with Johnson. She talked to him for hours one night about God, and why he should let Him into his heart. She cited several instances when villagers who prayed regularly survived serious traffic accidents.

“It’s not about how much you know about the Bible,” she told Johnson. “It’s whether you let God into your heart. I don’t understand much about the Bible, but I can still accept God in my heart and He will bless me.”

There is another section to the Liu family home, built just four years ago, and it is the antithesis to its rounded neighbor. It is all angles, square and boxy, with four large rooms: a kitchen with coal-powered burners, a living/dining room with a small black-and-white television that receives one channel, a storage room with huge bin full of wheat grain and Peter’s bedroom, with a lone poster hanging on the wall, of Bruce Lee.

I knew nothing of Peter’s interest in kung fu before this trip. I knew little about his quirky sense of humor, either. At random times during my two-plus days in the village Peter would suddenly break into a kung fu pose, turn to me serious and straight-faced and say, “Tiger” or “Crane” or “Snake,” depending on the move.

Johnson and I shared Peter’s bed, and Peter slept on a cot in the dining room. We woke up early, if not to the sounds of cutting and cooking in the nearby kitchen, then to Peter’s ear-splitting wake-up call: “Dan! Johnson! Time for breakfast!” Breakfast, usually some kind of noodles, is important in the countryside, Peter explained to me. Villagers usually start working in the fields at sun-up, and then return home at around 8 a.m. for a meal. They eat a lot, because they need fuel for all the fieldwork. “But Peter, we’re not doing any farming,” I protested after one early-morning call. Peter didn’t seem to care.

One day after breakfast, Peter’s parents decided to take the day off. Peter said it was in honor of their special guests. Family friends visited, as well, to chat — and to check out the white man they had heard rumors about. One woman, a friend of Peter’s mother, kept looking at me and laughing. “I am so surprised to see a foreigner,” she said. “The only foreigners I have seen were on TV.”

I can’t be sure exactly how much jasmine tea I drank that morning — I think it was a lot — because Peter’s dad, Liu Chang You, 46, never let my glass get below two-thirds full. After every three sips or so, he’d pick up the pot and pour. Mr. Liu’s hands were thick and strong, with black outlines around each nail.

Peter’s home, like all the others in the village, has sporadic electricity. And more than a couple times during our stay, we had to bring out the candles. Water comes from a well down the road. Washing of faces, hands and all other body parts is done using washcloths and water basins found in a few rooms of the house. I never felt completely clean in Haoyi.

The toilet — no doubt Johnson’s favorite part of home — is outside, a hole in the ground, with two wooden planks on either side for feet. The hole was filled with what you would expect, but also rain water and hundreds of little white maggots squirming about. It was all surrounded by a low brick wall, and looked very similar to the living quarters of a goat that occupied the stall next door.

“I’m not using the bathroom for two days,” Johnson proclaimed upon his inspection of the facilities. “How can people live like this?”

Johnson asked the question while Peter was standing next to him. Peter just smiled, and likely thought to himself, “Ah, the Shanghainese.” Among many Chinese, Shanghai natives have a reputation for being a bit pampered. Johnson has spent all of his 28 years in Shanghai, but I wouldn’t call him pampered. He grew up in modest accommodations, for Shanghai at least. His family always had a shower, but not hot water. He’s no stranger to squat toilets — like many Chinese, he actually prefers them in many situations — but this one was too much. He couldn’t stand the thought of all those little creatures — and God knows what else — swimming around beneath him. He couldn’t stand the stench. And mentioned it every time we walked past it.

So he held it. For almost three days.

I had little choice in the matter. I ate something, somewhere, that did not make my stomach very happy. In fact, it made it downright angry. This was a recurring theme for the next several days, and I now have much of the research complete for my first book: “Squat Toilets for Whiteys: Your Guide to Maintaining Balance and Avoiding Backsplash.”

There was very little privacy when using the toilet outside of Peter’s home. For one, the wall was not built for a man my size, making it only to about the middle of my thigh. So, if I only had to go No. 1, the neighborhood kids — who began to monitor my every move, mysteriously emerging from their homes every time I emerged from Peter’s — would get a peep show. I tried, as best I could, to angle myself so only the goat could see.

But on more than one squatting occasion, I would stand up to find a little girl standing about 20 feet away, staring at me. I would wave. She would wave back. And then run away.

(More on Johnson: While pampered is not a word I would use to describe Johnson, protective is definitely a word I would use to describe his family. His parents were not pleased with his decision to join me for a portion of this trip. I don’t think he ever officially got their blessing. In fact, one of their arguments when trying to discourage his departure was this: “Johnson, there is a good chance you will die on this trip.” Johnson receives daily text messages on his phone from his family. And if he doesn’t respond immediately, there are more messages, and they grow increasingly frantic. Interestingly, Johnson’s younger brother expresses just as much concern as his parents. He ends every message with, “Have a good rest. And be safe.”)

Peter’s parents’ combined income is about RMB 2000 ($240) per month, which puts them right on the cusp of being considered “rich” in Haoyi. There are some families with newer homes, bigger homes (often the former residences of warlords from pre-Liberation days), satellite dishes and air conditioning — of little use when there is no electricity — but there are no other families with one child in graduate school and another in college.

Eighteen years ago, Peter’s parents used to work together on a government-owned farm. Now, they are entrepreneurs of sorts. Peter’s father sells household items out of the back of a tractor that he drives from village to village every day. Peter’s mother sells clothing from a booth in a nearby town. She brings in the most money.

And much of the money goes toward educating their three children. Peter’s 19-year-old sister, Liu Ying (Lucy), is a sophomore English major at Xinzhou Teachers College in north Shanxi. Liu Xiao Ying (Shannon), 14, Peter’s other sister, is in the process of studying for the all-important high school entrance exams. She limited herself to 15 days of summer vacation, so she could take preparation courses that last a grueling 15 hours a day.

Shannon would like to get into the same high school her brother and sister attended, No. 1 Middle School in Hongtong, a town 15 kilometers away. Tuition is RMB 2,000 ($240) a year.

Peter estimated that about one percent of Haoyi residents continue school after the age of 15. They usually get a job in a local farm or coal factory. That’s what Peter’s parents did.

“That’s why our parents want us to study more,” Peter said. “Their parents couldn’t afford school. My parents have an unhappy life here. All their hope is in us. They want us to get out.”

But as progressive as Peter’s parents seem when it comes to education, they can be rather old-fashioned — frustratingly so for Peter — when it comes to other topics. Take Peter’s love life, for example.

At 24, Peter is already rather old to be single by Haoyi standards. In the countryside, most people get married by the age of 20. Wait much longer than that, and all the available village girls are taken. “And if I can’t find a wife now,” Peter explained, “that means I am a bad guy or I am poor.”

But Peter does have a girlfriend. He’s been seeing her for four years. They met while they were both studying at Shanxi Teachers University in Linfen. And if Peter had to guess right now, they will probably eventually get married. But she is old — the same age as Peter — and she is not from Haoyi. She was raised all the way up in the northern part of the province. These things do not sit well with Peter’s parents.

I was in the same room when Peter and his mother had one of their all-too-often-for-Peter’s-tastes talks on the topic. It was long and loud and Peter’s face turned bright red. He just couldn’t get through to her: Why can’t they just be happy because he is happy?

“Do they have someone else picked out for you to marry?” I asked.

“Yes!” Peter screamed, his face getting red again. “You can see her! She’s from my village!”

In the end though, Peter said this is ultimately his decision. And his parents will eventually respect it. Then, there are more country traditions to deal with. Peter must pay a dowry of RMB 20,000 ($2,400) to his future in-laws, who will then use the money to buy the couple a television, a washing machine, a fan, some bed quilts and maybe even a motorcycle.

“It means I bought my wife from another family,” Peter said.

Peter’s family would be responsible for making or buying furniture for the newlyweds. The parents of the groom pay for the couple’s house … if they choose to stay in the village. After that, according to the countryside code, Peter stops being his parents’ responsibility. And they start being his.

“In the village, you have two duties,” Peter said. “Support your parents until their death. And see that your children get married. If you can do these two things well, you are a successful man.”

Peter said he likely will never move back to Haoyi. He’d love to settle down in Linfen and teach history at his old college. He thinks the RMB 2,000 monthly salary he would earn would allow for a comfortable life. Teachers can buy apartments on campus for RMB 40,000 ($5,000). And he’d be happy to be back in Shanxi.

“I like it here,” he said. “All my friends are here. I don’t like other provinces, because I know little about them.”

We spent a little time in Linfen when we first arrived in Shanxi. Linfen is a city of 300,000 people or 700,000 people, depending on whom you ask. (”That happens in China,” Johnson explained. “We don’t have statistics.”) It looked like any other small Chinese city — gray and gloomy — but at least appeared to be trying hard set itself apart from the pack, misguided as its efforts might be.

There is a very old and relatively famous temple in Linfen, Yao Miao Temple. Over the past several years, the city government has spent much time and money trying to surround the temple with as much touristy kitsch as possible in an effort to attract more visitors to the area. It’s not a bad idea, when you think about it. If there is one thing Chinese tourists love, it is kitsch (and maybe brightly colored hats).

But the area now known as Yao Miao Square is like some sort of Bizarro world. There is a slightly smaller scale replica of Beijing’s Tiananmen, complete with bumper cars in what would be Tiananmen Square. There is also a huge topographical map of China that comes with an 8-inch wide Great Wall. I walked the course of this trip on the map — and it seemed long even then.

There is a carnival-type atmosphere at the square, but no customers. Vendors slept under umbrellas. The softball toss and the bust-a-balloon-with-a-dart game remained untouched.

There are even more attractions under construction, including a scaffolding-enshrined creation that looks designed to be the tallest temple in the world.

I pointed to the temple, to Tiananmen, to the giant topographical map, and asked, “Why?”

“To make money,” Peter said. “See, now you don’t need to go to Beijing, Dan. Here it is.”

Click here for photos.

One shirt says so much: In the countryside, you don’t change your clothes much. People wear the same things day after day. That’s what I did. Lucy and Shannon had matching T-shirts that I saw so often I felt obligated to share with you. Here is what the shirts said (all of this text somehow fit on the front):

INTERNATIONAL BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS
IS THIS WAR? IS THIS CALL UP? I DON’T WANNA BE A SOLDIER
I DON’T WANNA DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE
WE HOPE ETERNAL WORLD PEACE

Don’t we all.

By the way, aren’t some of those lines from a song by The Clash?