Wedding in the Wilderness

Picking up where I left off in my last posts:

On my third day in the village, my friend, the guy who had picked me up from the dirt road, shook me awake at around 9:30 (constantly breathing in smoke makes me tired and sleepy like something else). "Lee Mo" (my Chinese name), "Lee Mo, let's go to the wedding."

We first went to the house of the groom, just two minutes down the main dirt pathway that divided the village. We ate a meal for about thirty minutes, breakfast-ish. Then, everyone in the groom's party, including me, tromped fifteen minutes down into a little gully and then back up the other side to the nearest village.

Here, the groom's troops entered into the bridal family's house. Following local tradition, the bride's family had hidden a little bag of something that looked like parsley somewhere in the house, and the groom's troop's had to tear the house apart trying to find it. For about fifteen or twenty minutes, twenty guys tore through boxes and pots, turned over clothes and searched the wooden rafters while the bride's family looked on, acting innocent, as if they had no idea what we were looking for. Finally a shout went up. Someone had found it, hidden deep in a bag of rice.

"Okay, now they have to feed us," my friend told me. And feed us they did. A few minutes after the parsley search ended, I was roused by a demonic scream, and went outside to see what the ruckus was.

They were carrying a 200 pound hog towards the house. Both of the hog's legs were tied up around a wooden pole they were using to drag it, and he was screaming like he knew he was about to die. "We eat a pig at every wedding," my friend informed me.

They laid him on a tarp in a shallow hole freshly dug and cut his throat open. He continued screaming for a little while as the streams of blood gushed out of him. They collected the blood in big bowls about a foot in diameter as the pigs body deflated. After a few minutes of draining several pans of blood, they reached into the pig's chest and pulled out his heart.

According to tradition, you can tell how many boys and girls a newly married couple is going to have by looking at the heart of the the pig slaughtered during the wedding. I watched as they put the heart on a small wooden plate, and took it into the house. A bevy of old men congregated around the fresh heart, poking and examining in a very scientific manner. A few minutes later, the old men scattered and the heart was taken away. I asked my friend whether the old men examining the heart had determined how many children the new couple was going to have.

"Yes."

"Well, how many?"

He became perplexed a little, as if he hadn't ever really considered the question.

"I don't know." Apparently they figure out how many kids the couple is going to have, but they keep it to themselves.

And then we ate and drank and were merry. The local alcohol is basically fire water, spicy and about 40 percent alcohol, drunk from a bowl (I know this from my last trip to the area, on this trip I was enjoying sprite). Many of the men drank the fire water with one fist, while in the other fist they swigged green bottles of Chinese beer.

And they ate. Peanuts, potatos, noodles, pork rinds, beans, corn, crickets, and of course, fresh pork. It was all placed on a little wooden wicker table that we squatted around.

That meal went from about two in the afternoon until four. After that, we left the bride's house, now with troops from both families tailing the couple. Halfway in between the two villages, some of the groom's family were blocking our path. They forced the groom to drink copious amounts of the fire water on the pathway before being allowed to pass and return to his house.

We returned to the groom's house for another meal, but first that meal had to be prepared. During the prep time, my friend and I returned to his house to nap. That evening, the groom's house was so full, that some of us had to be feasted in someone else's house. Anyways, it was the same old story. Lots of food, lots of booze. After eating, about ten friends of the groom got into a row and, each holding a bowl full of that fire water, forced him to down each and every bowl. Then the bride and groom went around collecting donations from everybody.

After the meal, I went back to the groom's family's hut, and watched. They danced late until the night with old ladies in their long, blue cloth garments and tall black head coveringss, looking on. Before I left, I went over to this clutch of old ladies and toasted each and every one of them. I think everybody got a kick out of that.

But by that time, I was pretty tired, and I'm sure yall are even more tired of reading this. So I'll end it here, at the end of my all-day adventure.

PS - As some of yall may have heard, I'm going to be married in September. I'm considering including the pig slaughter as a part of my ceremony, but I don't know who would look at the heart to see how many kids we will have. Please let me know if yall think this is a good idea, and if any of yall know how to use a pig's heart to predict offspring.

Along the Edges of World

I was going to talk a little bit about the Philippines, but I have been encouraged to make these posts less "dissertation-ish" so I won't bore yall with the rest of my trip, other than to say that after the 'cruise' with Tao Expeditions we did a few more things: I scubaed on some Japanese ships sunk on September 24th, 1944 in an extention of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, we hung out in the highlands of the Philippines, and then wandered around Manila for a few days. No interesting stories, just "dissertation-ish" observations that can all be found in my mapvivo site:

http://mapvivo.com/journey/10984

After that, I returned to China, and Lisa returned to the US. In a few weeks, I had to start my internship, so I flew down to Kunming, but I still had about two weeks before my internship started. During that time, I had to find something to do. I feared traveling because it was Chinese new year, the largest annual migration in the world. Trains are jammed packed standing room only, and things become more expensive.

So I decided to get as far away from China without actually leaving China. I headed down to Xishuangbanna. This is one of the southern-most counties in all of China, sharing a border with Vietnam, Laos and Burma. I had been here before three years before, hiking with some of my Swedish friends.

Strangely, this part of China is doesn't actually have that many 'Chinese' people. In fact, Xishuangbanna is only one third Han 'Chinese' people, another third of the population is a group of ethnic Thailanders, and the final third is a mixture of different tribal groups.

I took the a series of buses out to some Thai villages, and then on, farther out, to a little village near the China-Burma border where the pavement ends. From there, I just started walking through the bamboo forests, further and further away from civilization. I had some idea of where I was going, a village called Yako. I just didn't know how to get there. Every time I meet someone, I asked them how to get to the village and they pointed me along the right direction. I ran into some guys, and I asked them the same question. They offered to take me half way there in their 'tractor' (it was really just an engine on top a piece of sheet metal and two wheels and two steering poles sticking out of it so the the driver could steer).

These guys were members of the Hani ethnic group, the same ethnic group as the people in the village Yako. The Hani are an ethnic group who live in the border regions along Yunnan, Burma, Laos and Vietnam. They live mostly on the sides of mountains (having been pushed out of the valleys by stronger ethnic groups like the Thai and the Chinese). They lived by slash and burn subsistence farming until recently when they started making (relatively) lots of money by growing tea for Chinese people. According to legends, the Hani used to have a written language that was written on cow hide, but their ancestors were once starving, and, they ate all the cow-hide books in order to survive. From then on, they forgot their written language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hani_people

The guys giving me a ride told me all this, and then we had to get out of their tractor. They had to chop down some rainforest before the day was over, so they pointed me on towards Yako and wished me a good journey.

I didn't walk but ten more minutes before a truck stopped an asked me if I needed a ride. I told him that I was going to Yako, and he said, "I live in Yako. Do you want to stay at my place?" And within a few minutes of talking to the guy I had been invited to a wedding the village was having a few days later.

As we drove along the windy mountain dirt road, through patches of tea farms hewed out of the rainforest climbing up the mountainside, that was how my journey to the along the edge of the Chinese and Burmese states began.

I'll try and write the rest of the journey soon...