Would you open the box?

Turns out that my imminent trip to Guangzhou was not the only cloud on our horizon.

It rained every day we were in Guilin.

Preparing us for a British summer no doubt.

Many of our friends back home had told us that the weather had been miserable over the winter, more rain seemed to be the latest consequence of climate change in the UK.

I don’t mind rain, most of the time…and with an umbrella and our ‘stylish’  purple raincoats the only issue I had was drying out my sandals each day.

It was great to be cooler, to think about what to wear, not in terms of coping with extreme heat, but whether I might need a cardigan.

…and Rosa thrived in the cooler climate. She much prefers to be cold than hot and her slow love affair with ‘tea’ blossomed in Guilin. They sell it cold in bottles; red tea, green tea, jasmine tea, tea with loads of sugar in – she had two or three favourites within a few days of arriving, and tea + a cooler climate makes for a pretty whizzy Rosa : ) Not quite running up and down the five floors to our room but definitely complaining less about the altitude than Theo and I.

The day after we got back from Guangzhou Theo discovered that the rain storm that had started in the railway station when we were there had caused massive flooding. News reports stated:

‘The heavy rainfall in recent days has caused four deaths. A total of 110,000 people were evacuated and 25,800 people were resettled.’

‘The historic levels of rain across Guangdong province have come earlier than the region’s usual flood season, prompting concerns about the effects of climate change on the country.’

Maybe China would achieve its goal of being ‘the first ecological civilisation’ – two million deaths a year are attributed to air quality in China and they regularly experience ecological disaster – with the worst ever recorded being in the 1930’s when over a million people lost their lives.

As the largest emitter of CO2 in 2023 its efforts will make the biggest difference on the world stage, it looks like they are capable of it, but will they quickly enough? We had seen plenty of efforts in that direction, the electric cars and scooters, the miles of wind turbines and solar panels, and just a few days ago the launching of the first electric cargo ship…but we were only seeing a tiny fragment of a country, we had no real way of knowing. The world literally holds its breath.

It was a few days before I could get to the park and see my Tai Chi gang again, but when the early morning rain relented one day I set off early and to my absolute delight as I turned off the main road towards the small lake, I could hear Edelweiss man singing his heart out. I didn’t recognise the song but his unmistakable voice came to meet me as I walked down Qi Xing Lù San Xiàng Road.

I stopped and watched him play his flute and sing his new song, loving the fact that for him his life had been the same since we’d left, and would carry on after we had gone. Edelweiss man would still be singing by the lake in Guilin when I got back home, a part of me hearing his voice mingling with the bird song as I walked to my oak tree each morning.

The Tai Chi group had just started warming up when I arrived. The ones who remembered me were smiling and nodding, clearly pleased to see me. Just like last time they popped me in the middle of them all so I could see what was going on when the Tai Chi dance changed direction.

I loved those early morning walks and my connection with women who were older and fitter than me. They inspired me with their grace and strength and I had a few little ‘We Chats’ with a couple of them that I got contact details for (We Chat is China’s What’s App and it has a brilliant translate function making conversation easier : ) – I reckon if I lived in Guilin for a few months, and actually learned Chinese, I would make some good friends in that group.

We settled into our all too brief routine of going to our little shop to buy red bean porridge each morning. Rosa and I going to our Chinese lessons. Eating lunch with all the students and teachers, doing our homework, and then out for dinner with Pablo in the evenings.

I loved going to get our ‘hong dou zhou’ every morning and practicing some small part of my previous days Mandarin lesson on the lovely woman who got up at 4.00 each morning to cook the porridge…we have a plan to try and make it when we get home and inflict it on unwilling guests.

Marcelo was a new addition to CLI and arrived at the same time as we did. A 60 year old vegan, born in Brazil now living in Canada, currently in China studying Mandarin!

He is a surgeon who does most of his work in intensive care, quite some life experience he has had…

I had some great conversations with him about God (he was an atheist) and love, (he has two grandchildren) and hope! Where we find hope and where it’s helpful, and where it isn’t.

Pandora and her box eh?

I’m glad she opened it – I would have. Why not?! Curiosity is the reason we have so many incredible inventions, great explorers, stories of adventure and courage…what sort of God would make something that is forbidden to explore, or try and learn about?!

Anyway, back to hope!

I’ve heard two quotes about it while I’ve been here, Theo reading one out to me from his ‘History of China’ book and one sent to me by the Mayor of Glastonbury.

‘Hope is like a path in the countryside. At first there is no path but if enough people walk in the same direction a path appears.’ May 4th 1919 – Lu Xun

‘People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spiders webs. It is not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles and grit from the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out another tooth as she rises for another go.’

Our surgeon spends a good portion of his time giving families the worse news you can give…a terminal diagnosis with months, sometimes weeks to live. He sees hope as something that gets in the way of facing the reality that he has just described, he has seen it stop families preparing for the inevitable …from my perspective I think that perhaps hope is what allows those families the chance to get through the shock with their minds intact.

Yes we do have to face terrible news in this life, we all die. How we choose to face it, how we are able to face it, depends on our life experience.

If we stay hopeful right up to the end is that such a bad thing? …has the quality of our life been worse if we decided that a miracle might happen…?

Perhaps. I could see his point, if we can face the end and be calm then that’s probably the best way to die, but not all of us can do that and hope softens that cruel reality for those of us who need, or want it.

Thank you Pandora.

…and for me personally I have chosen to bring my daughter into this world, a world I love and do not want to see torn apart by storms, earthquakes and tsunamis – I do not want flooding and drought to kill millions of people. I love my family and friends… if I really thought it was too late for this planet, then what am I doing, what are any of us doing having families?! Surely our best efforts combined with the hope of what that might achieve are worth doing…?

In believing there’s a chance we can pull this off – humanity, one and all – I am keeping alive my ability to act and to think about the world I want to live in…looking for kindness and the good in us human beings. Not God exactly – more ‘let’s try and figure this out together!’

I find hope in the quiet of the busy streets in Guangzhou, in every taxi journey being an electric car. These are not rich people and the cars are not fancy, they are what ordinary people expect to drive. Of course the scooters are electric, it makes them virtually free to run and in any economy that has its people at the centre of what it does rather than the profits for the shareholders, good things can flourish.

Hope is an active decision made by brave people again and again and hope plus action equals the life I want for me and my family…

It’s amazing how deep the conversations can be walking to and from a Buddhist vegetarian buffet restaurant over an hours walk each away from CLI ：）

On the weekends there were activities and we were taken to a Club Med Resort as part of a government outreach/enrichment/cultural exchange event. The resort was in a  large park with several small lakes and when we arrived we were driven round in (electric) golf buggies to look at a lot of large sculptures dotted around the landscape, none of which were a patch on the nature surrounding us (my inner art critic was having a field day!) …until we got inside, and a carving of an old man reached inside and lodged there. His face was so detailed, every wrinkle and line brought alive in the wood. His eyes were full of love and compassion and I stood for ages taking in his gaze. I was glad to be moved by some art …and then we got to do some of our own, and mine was utter garbage : )

We did a print each, which was hard to get wrong, and then I had a go at ‘marbling’ on a piece of cloth. I had seen one hanging up that looked like a forest in autumn, beautiful I had thought, maybe I could go for something, sunsetty…?

The woman helping me prepared the liquid, gave me my palette of colours to chose from and then showed me how to put them on the water.

I chose my colours carefully and dropped the first one in…I don’t know exactly what I was expecting but staying where I put it was definitely part of my plan. The colour quickly went into a big blob and all additional colours joined it. I was given a stick and told to stir vigorously ‘quickly, quickly, or won’t work.’

It didn’t look like it was going to work whether I did it quickly or not! The swirling had the effect of my lovely colour choices merging rapidly in to a slightly yukky brown colour and then we were ‘plunging’ – pushing the cloth into the water to see what stuck.

It really wasn’t art – it was random luck and as we lifted it out I realised I didn’t have any left, I’d used all my luck on the trip through Laos…what I had was a revolting blobby hanky.

I had not swirled quite vigorously enough it would appear, and there were lots of yellow blobs and a few dark ones mixed in with the orange and reds.

Not even my sister or my step mom would want it!! Although it would make them both laugh so it might be worth giving it to one of them for the comedy value.

The woman helping me whisked my ugly baby away to get it dried and ten minutes later presented it to me in a wonderful box tied up with ribbon – so, be warned, if I offer you a beautiful brown box tied up with ribbon – best to politely decline, curiosity can be a terrible thing – once you open that box…the hanky is yours!

We were treated to the most incredible buffet meal at Club Med – salads, fruits, breads, Chinese and global specialities from all over the world, all cooked fresh at their own serving station – it was a feast.

There was even a drunk American who inadvertently provided us with some entertainment…

The days passed quickly at CLI, games of Mahjong with the interns,  trips to the supermarket for our favourite snacks. A trip back to the Buddhist cave temple where the fruit stealing monkey was still happily in residence. Long walks every day …and learning Mandarin.

My teachers were gentle with me, they knew the level I was at now. We used the HSK level 1 text book as our framework. I started to be able to write some characters and I understood someone talking to me for the first time out on the street. It is a VERY small achievement that I was ridiculously proud about – take the wins where you can, learning Mandarin is hard : )

We went out for a meal on Pablo’s birthday, somewhere we hadn’t been before. It’s a chain across China and there were some brilliant things about it. The cutest one (and the weirdest), was if you are on your own, or if you request it, they will bring you a life size cuddly doll/human to sit with you…it is a bit creepy looking but it’s clearly a hit with some people so who am I to judge.

All the staff sang to Pablo …and they danced too. Someone in a mask came round and juggled pasta and another man did some close up magic at our table, and the food was fantastic.

It was a bit like ‘Pizza Hut’ but with way more gimmicks. The food is always the same, a big pot of delicious sauce on the table bubbling away and then you put whatever you want to eat in it and take it out when it’s cooked…veggies, tofu, mushrooms, pasta strips, and there’s loads of different salad bits and dressings to go with it – I ate a face full of peanut sauce : )

We made the most of our time in Guilin, like everywhere else we’ve been on the way back we were here for a shorter amount of time…

I have a game I play on my phone which one of my besties introduced me too. I love it, and I hate it, because when I have five minutes I WANT TO PLAY IT!

It’s so addictive.

Human beings are so skilled at marketing and manipulation, making sure we go back to our screens as often as possible, if we turn that same focus on the climate emergency then we will sort it out super quick.

To be fair to the game it has played its part in keeping me sane on one or two particularly terrifying bus journeys but my will isn’t as strong as its pulling power, so it had to go!

When we arrived in Guilin I deleted it, for about the fiftieth time. Sometimes I only last a few hours – sometimes a few days. Here in Guilin I wanted to focus on learning Mandarin, and making the most of the people and the place, so it went. It takes me three days to stop noticing the pull to play it, a bit like any addiction, when I give it up it takes a while to work its way out of my system.

I know I will load it back again when I get back on the road – it actually helps me write this blog to have something to do in between bursts of writing, but it does take up part of my life, no doubt about it.

I wrestle with it – is it okay to play games? Yes. Are there better things to do with my time? No doubt, no doubt, no doubt…but not always on a train journey through the Kazakh steppes or on a sleeper train late at night when I’ve woken up for a wee. Then it’s quite comforting and lots of fun : )

I had a goal with my Mandarin now – I wanted to pass the HSK1 exam – I don’t actually know what HSK stands for but I do know it’s the first rung of a very high ladder and in order to get off the ground I need something to aim for. I will feel like I have properly achieved something if I pass that – I have my work books and I have the answers so I can check when I’m back at home doing my online lessons – maybe by Christmas I will be able to say a bit more than, ‘zǎo shàng hǎo’ and ‘nǐ jiào shén me míng zì?’

The two best things about being in this beautiful city were both about Rosa – watching her decide to be brave with the language. Trying to talk to people a little, loving how that affected her confidence every time she did it.

…oh, and she got to be an extra in a new big budget Chinese TV series!

It was incredible luck, and timing, but Rosa is writing that blog…me and Theo just got to witness her shine in a new and different way.

I loved how she was with the child extras who wanted their photo taken with her. I loved how much she enjoyed having her hair done and getting into costume …and after she’d done her part (a foreign journalist taking photos of the star of the show making his great speech), her description of what it had been like to do it was so down to earth and honest, stardom wasn’t going to her head : )

Quite suddenly my journey back to Guangzhou was just around that corner.

My confidence that they would let me on the train and that we’d get our visas, slowly eroding as the days passed.

Logic told me that the photocopy of my passport would be perfectly fine to get me onto the train but I couldn’t get a paper ticket security blanket this time, I’d used our passports to buy us tickets for both journeys when we went to Guangzhou to hand in our applications, but this time I had to book on line.

This ‘going off and doing it in my own’ business wasn’t new to me, I did it nearly every day we arrived in a new place but this was different, if something did go wrong I had no one at my back to look out for me, or  to go through it with. I’d got used to this team effort way of life.

…and I was going to China’s fifth largest city by myself, that was a bit daunting. How would I feel approaching that imposing sky scraper where our passports were being held? At least I knew when I got to the 26th floor not to move the sign…

On one of my morning walks to the park I remembered Shirley, a Chinese woman we had met on the ferry to Kupang. She was travelling alone all over the world and she told us about her recently travels through Afghanistan. If she could do that, I could do this.

I did know I was the best person to go. I had the phone and did more of the logistic stuff than anyone else, plus the train fare there and back cost $50 each – not money we wanted to spend!

When I went to book the train tickets there were hardly any left. The early morning train was okay but the earliest return train wasn’t until late in the afternoon and there were only standing tickets left.

Oh well! I’d sat outside a toilet before, I could do it again.

I thought about what it would mean for us if we pulled this off. Going through Russia again, where our credit cards and phones didn’t work – where there was no eSIM network. Just ordinary Russians leading their lives…and if we got the visas we didn’t have to swim the 480 km across the Caspian Sea.

I sent a silent prayer to Pandora, my new found goddess of hope, if reward was measured in hard work we should get our visas and that most elusive thing of all, a smile from Igor…