Hi there! (Disclaimer: This is big ugly bulk mail, something I do not normally do but this situation is not normal. If you despise impersonal bulk e-mail, just wipe this puppy out right now and be done with it.)

I am writing to let you know that I am leaving for China in two days! Hanna and I will be visiting mainland China for a month. Her sister is teaching English in Fuzhou (on the south coast near Taiwan) and has invited us to visit her during her break between terms (Chinese New Year) this month.

Fuzhou is off the beaten tourist path... the guide books kind of skip it. It's a small city (takes less than 2 hours to walk across it) of 6 million, highly industrialized, fairly prosperous and it will be our home base for the next month.

I'm still mostly in denial that in 72 hours I'll be on my way to Tokyo airport. Not much has changed in my life of late to indicate that anything out of the norm is about to happen. I have been reading a lot about China and trying to remember a few key Mandarin phrases... like "Thank you" and "I seek public toilet." On the other hand, I have taken some extreme measures over the past five months to save up the money... like the LEGO moratorium and all the extra work.

Certainly I have no solid idea what I'll find or what will happen to me. I'm very much looking forward to exploring a place that the world's other 5 billion people don't usually go. I'm also grateful and blessed to be travelling with Hanna who is so optimistic, easy-going and patient.

I'll be gone between January 9 - February 13. It is possible that I'll be able to check e-mail every few days while we're staying in Fuzhou. No guarantee. The postal address will be:

Steve Ransom c/o Fraeda Scholz
Hwa Nan Women's College
Fuzhou, Fujian 350007
P.R. of China

Well, I'm glad I finally have something to "write home about." I am finally going to see the world. Thanks to you and all your love and encouragement! I hope you are well and may you have safe journeys too.

Hi Don---

It's noon here on Monday. Hanna and I arrived yesterday afternoon and we took the bus ride of our lives into town. The city is everything you imagine an Asian city to be, and more of it. Pollution, skyscrapers, bicycles, food vendors, giant billboards with party slogans, long straight roads, the constant roar of cars and trucks and buses. Clothes in every hue hanging from every window.

The Chinese have adopted every culture imaginable. In the river is an island with a giant building that looks like it was airlifted from the main plaza of Geneva and repainted lemon yellow. There's Christian churches with crimson crosses.

Lunch time... more to follow.

Whelmed---

Hi Don, Hi Dad---

It's late on Friday night here, I guess you're just getting started on the morning now. My culture shock hit hard yesterday and I refrained from adventures today, which was a mistake because I just moped in my room feeling completely friendless all day. Not good. Hanna is back on her feet and is shopping like mad. In fact, I'm seeing a commercial side to Hanna that I didn't know existed. Apparantly she spent 2-3 hours in a fabric store today, came back with four three-yard lengths of silk that cost about 90 RMB --- $12.

There's an amazingly odd smell everywhere. Sometimes you can recoginize it as sewage, other times it's something completely unknown.

This is not a third world country. Not by a long shot. We toured a massive bookstore yesterday and there was a sizeable section for programming languages. The school here will be getting broadband cable access shortly. There are so many skyscrapers here in the city, more going up all over. Progress is palpable and the west should be scared.

Traditional China is right here too. We passed one vendor with two baskets of live fish on her shoulder pole, followed by another selling cell phones. There is no supplantation of the old with the new. Same with the clothes: peasant clothes with the pointed straw hats right next to the leather jackets and three-piece suits. Mao suits (think Dr. Evil) are not abundant but still here too.

We visited the bank yesterday and changed our travellers checks. All first rate service. The teller even spoke English. Oh, and I picked up my new glasses too, which cost only $35 or so. I will have to go back, though, because the left lens is not quite right. I'm going to try it without the interpreter this time.

The rule of thumb here is that if it works, it's good enough. Lots of electrical wires dangling everywhere. No poles, just wires strung along walls and fences. In my bathroom I have to throw the electric chair switch to turn on the hot water heater.

Don't drink the water! All of the drinkable water is in a vast urn downstairs that has been thoroughly boiled and everyone has a giant thermos to carry it around in. On the other side of our courtyard is a ten-story dorm for some of the area's students (there are many universities in this neighborhood) and each of the rooms looks similar: probably about 450 square feet with four lines of laundry out on the balcony and eight giant thermosi on the shelf. So eight girls per room.

They stare and stare! Us strange pale skins provide endless fascination for the locals. Although there are often a lot of Taiwanese businessmen here, there are rarely racial outsiders... in a city of 6 million. We certainly haven't seen any others outside of this school. Everyone stares. Those that don't have to go anywhere will follow. If you stand still long enough, you'll have a curious crowd. When I smile at the cliques of girls or wave, immediate giggling and blushing. Some of the boisterous boys like to tease us with the only English they know: "Hello! Hello! Hello!"

McDonalds is exactly the same here. As is Kentucky Fried Chicken. 'Nuff said.

We went to a banquet on Wednesday--banquets happen frequently for the simplist of excuses--and got a good whopping sample of Fujian fare. I ate something from about 15% of the dishes, which was really quite a bit. The lazy susan got quite a workout during those two hours. Fish balls: white fish meat pulverized and wrapped around a hunk of pork, floating in water. Some little bean curd and rice snack, wedged into a shell of bamboo like manicotti (only you don't eat the shell). Prawns with green pepper, peanuts and onions. Some tofu chunks served on the same plate as pork, fish and (I found out later) coagulated ducks' blood. Very long noodles in some red sauce. Lots of fish, some pork, not much green veggies nor rice. Desert was a sticky rice thing fried and dipped into a watery glaze; something like a gelatnous cinnamon roll.

We also saw Chairman Mao yesterday. Not his body, that's on display in Beijing, far to the north. No, we saw the 100-foot white marble statue of him in the city center's square, saluting the very red flag before him. He's still pretty revered around here even though he did some pretty nasty things. The official stance is that he was 70% right and 30% wrong.

We went into a shoe store and it was like Tantalous. There were mounds of brand name athletic shoes everywhere, all priced around 80 - 120 RMB ($10-$15). But none of the four hyperkinetic sales girls (nor any of the crowd that joined in the quest) could pull up anything larger than a 47: US size 11.5, still a full size off from what I needed. I did get a lot of amazed faces and everyone wanted to compare their shoes to mine.

Take your pick: the driving is either attrocious or perfect. The streets are thick with bicycles, hand carts, mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, pedicabs, cars and buses, plus pedestrians at every intersection. There are painted lines on the pavement but who knows why. The buses, and we've been in several, careen wildly between the motorcycles and bicycles and have no problem heading straight down the center of the road, just barely dodging everything including the oncoming buses. It's a lot of swerving, quick accelerating, dodging, but it seems to work. At least, I haven't seen anyone get hit.

We're still not ready to try cycling yet, I'm still trying to get the lay of the land in terms of our neighborhood here. But I do look forward to it.

So we're going to head into the farms tomorrow and I just learned that a visit to a tea house is in order for tomorrow night.

Sorry Don, no sign of any future Matrix movies. Yet. There are several DVDs here in the school's library that some fussbudget felt the need to annotate on the cover that the movie was "filmed in a theater." I did pick up the Star Wars Episode II video CD, dubbed in Chinese, for about $1.20. I think I prefer it.

Most of the walls here are cement and they can be changed in a hurry. One house down the street looks like they'll be open for business soon, converting their courtyard wall into a service facade.

Hundreds of tiny shops everywhere. Most serving food I dare not sample (things-on-a-stick seems popular) but others are very tempting. The baked goods will soon be sampled.

At present, I miss pizza most of all. There's a calendar in here that shows a happy family celebrating Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) with a big dish of Pizza Hut, but I hope I don't find it. I hope to hold out until I return. Maybe in another three weeks I will lose the urge.

News for now!

Howdy Dad, Don, Star, Wade, Cheri, Michael, Tim---

Life has been a little bit tougher here in recent days due to "ganmao" -- that is, the common cold. A gift Hanna gave to me a few days after arrival. I had to spend a couple days in bed while the girls went around town.

I'm still hacking and coughing, but I'm determined to get out and see some things. Yesterday we toured some of the temples and bridges of West Lake Park here in the city, with the help of one of Fraeda's students who speaks decent English and acted as our guide, and if you weren't fast enough at the ticket counter, as our paying host as well.

You have to watch yourself with these people. They take friendliness to the extreme. Today we intercepted a couple of random girls on the street who were willing to stand there and stare as I thumbed through the phrasebook. When they finally understood where we wanted to go, they decided that personally leading us the 15 blocks there was the right thing to do. We caught on a few steps later and dismissed them with much "shee-shee" (thank you), waving and smiling.

I've finally found a way to set goals here. This is so me. When I first came here, I found that everything was whelmingly interesting and when presented with choices as to what to see next, I was clueless. What did I want to see? Well, being that I knew nothing and everything was new, I had nothing to anchor to. But in a small amount of culture shock, I found myself missing... drum roll please... the board game Settlers that Michael Calabrese introduced me to last year. It wasn't a wild craving, but just a mild pang. But I decided to put myself out there, and at present I'm creating my own version of the game out of materials available only in China.

So the game pieces are little miniture buildings and old coins with the square holes and the board is being created with Chinese art pieces and photographs. It's coming along nicely, and it gives me a reason to go to the Bird and Flower Market and haggle over the price of five miniture houses and four miniture pagodas. I think it's coming along very nicely. Now to find a "robber."

Anyway, Hanna initiated a perfect China experience today by inquiring at a mattress sales/portrait drawing stall about getting her picture drawn in pencil. (I think these are typically only purchased for funerals, but I didn't say anything.) The communication was difficult, but luckily about fifteen more Chinese-speakers stopped to help while passing by. Eventually it looked like the price was going to be 500 yuan ($63) so we moseyed on. Four blocks later the artist caught up to us, and in very rudimentary but ecstatic English, asked us to come to his studio/home. He had many large paintings on the walls, several of the still-revered Chairman Mao. We struggled to communicate for a while before the help arrived... the artist's father and someone else. It was time for introductions and we had to establish that Fraeda was "miy-miy" (little sister) and Hanna was "jyen-jiao" (big sister). Then there was a pause. Who the hell was I? I whipped out my phrasebook, tried the word for "boyfriend" to furrowed brows, tried a second time, tried again, and they got it, to great applause and laughter. "Yes, bowvene! Bowvene!" the unknown guy said. Yes, I'm her bovine. Thereafter, discussion began in earnest. The artist wanted to do the portrait for free because we were international friends. He showed us a picture of two other white people and seemed disappointed that we didn't know them. It took a long time to approximately arrange a pickup time and to suggest the size... I frankly hope they do a nine-foot tall oil painting of Hanna and have it hanging next to Mao when we return just to see the look on her face.

I'm really surprised I haven't seen a bike wreck yet. The cyclists all do at least one take when they ride by to see foreigners in a world that's overwhelmingly Chinese. I wonder what they're thinking, if anything but shock. One man did a triple take today. No kidding. I keep expecting someone to ride into a tree while staring. The other day in a store... all right, I must admit it was a Wall-Mart... one toddler saw us and went number one right there on the floor. (To his credit, toddler pants here do have nice open ports to expediate such ocurrances).

Tomorrow we're taking a bus ride to Xiamen, a quaint port village of 1.2 million about four hours from now. If anyone was expecting me to get to the Great Wall or the Three Gorges or Tibet or Shanghai, sorry to disappoint you. We're seeing the real thing, not the tourist track. And we're here on a student budget. Fraeda gets paid about 200 yuan a month... about $25. Yuan goes a long way with the basics and even some decent art items or books. Most computer or camera stuff, however, is rudely priced similar to US equipment.

So Xiamen is just a wee bit more touristy, not for us white people, but for the Taiwanese, who have put a lot of money into this province and created a lot of jobs. You would never think that there were warships in the Straits if you saw how friendly the mainland is to Taiwanese... businessmen. Money heals many wounds.

We'll be in Xiamen through the weekend and I doubt I'll stop at any Internet cafe (which are everywhere) so if you don't hear from me for a few days, that just means I'm having too much fun. I hope you're all well and I'm sure I'll be home far too soon. Oh, and if George Bush has done anything really dumb recently... I don't wanna know. Thanks.

Love---

Hi y'all---

I know I haven't written much in a while, and I want to record some of my thoughts, so please prepare yourself for a lengthy account about my visit to China. I thought about breaking this into chapters, but it seemed that a rambling non-linear account was more what I was in the mood for.

My time in China is drawing to a close rather rapidly. I've gone through some definite phases during my trip here and right now I'm entering the "but there's something else I want to do" phase. Every night I keep coming up with more ideas of what I want to do.

The first phase wasn't shock, but something close to it. More like being out of sync. I found that there wasn't anything in China that upset me, everything here had enough parallels in my home world that I could relate and understand. So the first few days were fine... getting the lay of the land, understanding how to survive the language barrier, finding the food wasn't as bad as I feared...

But then the second stage hit. About a week into the trip, I started to feel really ungrounded. I felt that I wasn't here for any reason, there was nothing here for me, and I felt very alone. For I had no friends here besides Hanna, and she was more interested in reuniting with her sister than hangin' with me. And here, there were none of the distractions that could keep away that terrible lonely feeling. No pizza, no chocolate, no LEGO, no newspapers I could read, not much Internet, no phone calls from friends. So I spent two days in bed, just crying and waiting for the trip to be over.

I did find the library here in the teacher's dorm and I have since read several novels, sometimes way into the morning, to keep that lonely feeling away. But the instant I started to think better about the trip, I entered the third phase: ill.

Was it a cold? Was it the water? Was it the pollution? I'll never know. It took almost two weeks to get completely over, and when you're only here for four weeks, sniffling for half of them is a real drag.

The fourth phase was project devotion: I was able to distract all my anxieties by focusing on a goal. I browsed shops with only one thing in mind, getting pieces for a board game I was recreating. I spent a few days home assembling the pieces. But by the time the project was completed, I was ready to be done with it and to actually live in China.

Now I'm in the midst of the fifth, and inevitably, last phase: some degree of comfort.

On my first outing into downtown Fuzhou, I brought a large day bag with water, food, aspirin, antacid, the first aid kit, a travel guide, a breath mask, a phrase book, hand sanitizer, a camera, paper and pens and a small rock that said "Courage" on it. And Yoda.

When I went out today I only brought the phrase book, the camera and Yoda. (Yoda has been starring in many of my photographs.) So I'm way more comfortable in walking around this very alien place.

For better or for worse, I have only four days left before I fly home. And now I'm really excited to be here. So for me, being here for only 21 days would not have been enough.

Much has happened since I last sent out an e-mail. Do not feel neglected... I haven't written in my journal at all either.

The trip to Xiamen, just a few hours south of here, went very smoothly. We've done two bus trips now and letting the arrangements just happen for each one is a challenge for me. I'm not nearly as concerned about planning things out in advance like my mother is, but here, it's ridiculous. You cannot buy tickets in advance. Reservations may or may not stick. There's no sense in getting worried about it, you just stand in a crowd and hope they're going your way. Then someone you haven't met grabs you and leads you into the middle of the street and at that moment a bus pulls up and there are just enough seats. How it happens, you never know. You just go with the flow.

There are some things that we can manage by ourselves and the phrase book, but then there are plenty of things that require a native speaker. And so several of Fraeda's students have been helping out. Now, it's really tough for Chinese people to say "no." (In fact, the word is not in their language. "Don't have" is, but that's another story.) So questions like "Can I get home?" or "Will I die on this bus?" are useless. You need to ask questions that they can't wiggle out of to get more useful answers, questions like "How many months will this bus take to get there?" Or "How long has this driver been driving?"

It seems that negotiating in Chinese is a very complicated process. I can ask our translator "what does this say?" And she'll consult with her friend (they like traveling in pairs) and they'll chat for a while and then the translation comes. And it's only a tiny phrase. It's odd. Actually buying something takes fifteen or twenty back-and-forths. And places where bargaining is allowed, all transactions take at least five minutes.

The bus ride to Xiamen was very pleasant. We chose the "luxury bus" which was only 20 yuan more ($2.5) and luxury it was. Big padded seats, a bathroom (with a toilet) on board, snacks and drinks served, plus a full movie (Star Wars 2 - Attack of the Clones, of course). The smaller buses we've been on, in contrast, have zero leg room, apparently flat tires, a Video CD player that skips badly, and the capacity limit is set by Newtonian laws, not related to the number of seats.

The road to Xiamen was nothing less than a beautiful interstate highway. In terms of road construction, it was perfect. That's part of China... brand new technology right next to stuff centuries old. China can develop very quickly because they're not trying to develop everything at once. It's much more piecemeal, such as the grand but ugly new shopping center they just opened near here. Amazingly modern--but just a block away is what most would call squalor.

The way most of Fuzhou is laid out is consistent. Next to the sidewalk is a series of shops, most of which is the size of your typical garage. Above them are five stories of apartments. These are generally dull buildings, fairly new, in moderate shape.

But behind these buildings are blocks of residences, mostly brick buildings held up with cement. Now these things are old and cool. They're crammed in there and cars can't get in. In fact, you can reach with your fingertips from one house across the street to the other. The streets back here are a veritable crazy maze and it's so easy to get disoriented by trying to find your way through.

Let me just remind you so that you get the picture that in China there are people everywhere. Always. In these backstreets, people will be out in the street doing the wash, shelling their oysters, playing cards, or just hangin'. When a foreigner (moi) walks buy, it's staring time. Everybody stops what they're doing and just stares.

The teenaged boys love to play this game: you see a white guy go by, you say, "Hello?" and if the white guy turns or waves or says anything back, you and your friends laugh your asses off. I don't quite see what the fun is, but it's nice to be such an easy source of entertainment.

Xiamen was different from Fuzhou. The city was newer, ritzier, cleaner, and far too modern. There weren't many bicycles in Xiamen, it was motorbike and car happy. The buildings were generally taller and newer and fresh.

There's something about modern Chinese architecture that is just incredibly dull. They have these giant buildings, maybe eighty stories tall, all mirrored glass and some zany angles but somehow they just fall flat. Maybe it's the Feng Shui... symmetry is very important in Feng Shui.

The older buildings (and I must say that I've had my share of temples by now) are far more interesting. Many layers of fancy carved wood, the clay tiled roofs with the side peaks, all sorts of writing and symbols and carvings. You've all seen the Forbidden City so you have an idea what these things look like, but most of the ancient buildings we've been in (about 200 years old) are far more crammed with things to look at than that Beijing palace.

So Xiamen. It was on the ocean so we walked on the beach and collected shells. The air was crisp and fresh. We were joined by a bunch of Fraeda's students and their friends and Fraeda brought the digital camera. You can see some of the pictures we took at http://www.efn.org/~crazystv/Xiamen/

We had an interesting surprise on that trip. After staying in a hotel for two nights, one of our entourage, Ken, invited us to stay in his home outside of Xiamen. This was a time to worry for me, but my companions were for it. Ken whipped out his cell phone and put in orders. By the time we got to his place, his parents had dinner prepared and the rooms made up. It was obvious that new supplies had been purchased. Ken even whipped out a baggie of brand-new toothbrushes, in case we weren't prepared.

Chinese and food: a force to be reckoned with. I have never seen such tiny people eat so much food. The meal that was served at Ken's house was unbelievable. Dozens of dishes, all full to the brim. The kitchen is not huge, just room for four or five woks on the wood or coal fired stove. The dishes were both more and less exotic than I feared. A dish of broccoli or snap peas or even a little fried rice with chicken bits is more common than I expected. But I am unaccustomed to meat in general and a lot of the seafood put before me was worse than I feared.

In the US, if you order shrimp at a seafood place, you get some breaded pieces of crunchy salty meat. Here you get the shrimp. No disguise. It was swimming around a few hours ago. The worst is the prawns (or at least I think they're prawns). They're orange, they have innumerable legs and antennae and they're looking at you with their dead black eyes. I couldn't do it.

At least the octopus was chopped up into nice pleasant sucker-covered cubes. I could manage that.

In general, the food, which I feared most of all before coming here, hasn't been all that bad. I can eat any vegetable product, and there's always plenty of rice. All of the baked goods are enjoyable. You can even find chocolate cookies and crackers. It's not real chocolate, unless you pay the extra money for the imported Snickers bars, but it's close. Also they like a lot of tofu products here (that is to say, they like to eat absolutely everything... but cheese, haven't found much of that...) so there's plenty of protein available.

The home dinners are the toughest because our hosts put the best they can afford in front of us and look at us with expectant pride. So you just swallow yours and whatever else is served.

..continued from part 1...

Across from Ken's house is a giant Kodak factory where 5,000 employees make the single-use cameras that we use at weddings. Tough to buy them around here, but not impossible. 60% of Fujian's industries are private, which is a long way from the massive state-run industries of the 60s and 70s. You can see empty factory buildings along the river in Fuzhou.

In the countryside, sprinkled in with the farms and homes are these small crumbling foundries with tall brick smokestacks. These are the mini-industries Mao Zedong forced on the country in the Great Leap Forward fifty years ago. He had the farmers build these things and smelt down all their iron pots and fixtures to make steel. It failed massively and millions starved. Now all these facilities are in disrepair and generally ignored. You can see spots where the bricks were extracted for other use.

We visited a functioning brick factory. I believe that there are a lot of resources that you can just use if you need them, but I haven't got a straight answer on that. You'll see piles of bricks or coal or gravel just lying around. It's impossible to see how this country is communist on the surface. Occasionally you'll see the serious-looking party memos posted on a building with lots of prices set on a chalkboard grid.

I went LEGO shopping today. So far I haven't seen any LEGO outside of Hong Kong but today I struck the jackpot. No, not LEGO, but pirated LEGO. The box photos are the same, but the company has been changed to "Enlighten" and the pieces are chinsy and the colors are twisted. I purchased a set in the pirate theme... perfect.

I've started to have fun shopping. Apparently bargaining is essential because the prices quoted can be 1000% of the actual price. Bargaining can be fun if you're in for a good long ride. It involves a lot of acting... shock looks, strong gestures, bluffing. Hanna's done very well, but I'm still amazed at how cheap so many things are compared to their counterparts in the US. So the quoted price is good enough for me.

The LEGO set was 20 yuan... or about $2.50. The LEGO equivalent would be a $30 set. Hanna did the best when she bought perfectly good name-brand running shoes for $10 each. Makes you wonder about profit margins. I would have bought shoes but they weren't able to find any in the towering piles that were my size. Waah.

We spent one day on Gulang Yu (Island) just offshore from Xiamen. Back in the days of the Opium Wars, all of the foreign powers had mansions and embassies here. Xiamen was one of the first so-called treaty ports, concessions forced upon the Chinese in the 19th century. Every time the Chinese resisted a foreign invasion, the emperor signed away another port. Xiamen, Macau, Hong Kong and Shanghai all started as treaty ports. There wasn't much where Shanghai was built in the 1860s and now there's 14 million people there.

Now Gulang Yu is a tourist destination and the European and Japanese buildings are preserved as a reminder of the foreign domination. There's also a giant statue of the emperor who conquered Taiwan. Pointing east with his sword. His work is not yet done.

New Year's Day here was celebrated January 31 with a bang. China celebrates the fact that they invented fireworks by practically blowing up the city. The explosions began early in the day and have lasted for seven days now. From strings of poppers to monstrous earth-shaking detonations, the sky was thick with gunpowder smoke.

The odd thing is that everybody tells us that fireworks are not permitted in the city. (There seems to be a sort of Orwellian twist to "not permitted" as if it should, but doesn't, mean "doesn't happen.") Admittedly, things were even louder when we visited the village in the countryside. Still, Fuzhou's audio bombing exceeds anything I've ever endured before.

We visited a student in her home in Ming Shing. I haven't found this place on any map so I wouldn't be able to tell you where it is, but it's less than three hours west of here. Being in the countryside was nice because the air was very clean and we could actually walk into something resembling uninhabited wilderness.

Tombs are dug into the hillsides and we were able to walk on a path among them. Apparently tombs and not houses are put into the hills because of the beliefs surrounding feng shui. Americans might enjoy the privacy of a scenic hillside house, but the Chinese think differently. Tombs need to go on the best sites for two reasons: you're dead a lot longer than you're alive, and happy ghosts mean good luck for the descendents.

Makes me think of similarities between American cemeteries and landfills.

The New Year holiday, called Spring Festival, is something like Christmas. There are some religious implications, but mostly it's about visiting relatives, eating big meals, decorating the house and gifts.

In Ming Shing, we saw that the religious bit is still kicking. There were several processions each day, carrying big pink plastic buddhas and other iconic items, with a clanging band and of course accompanied with the frequent lighting of bombs. They would carry the gods into the temples, of which there were quite a few.

Our host bought a couple of fireworks boxes and took them with us to the roof. At first I thought these were like the "gift boxes" we can buy at the Red Devil stand in July, but no. He put a match to the box, stood back, and then skyrocket after skyrocket leaped up and exploded in spectacular balls of light right over the house. I imagined my dad, standing by with the garden hose, grumbling about illegal bottle rockets. He would have had a fit with this stuff. Mounds of burnt red wrappers were drifting around in the breeze.

We visited a big temple in Fuzhou on New Year's day and discovered another thing they like to burn was incense. Worshippers would light maybe thirty incense sticks at time and take them with them on their rounds among the giant iron Buddhas. We couldn't see the back of one courtyard the smoke was so thick. Chinese must have tough lungs. They smoke a lot of cigarettes (the new opium), they don't filter their diesel emissions and they love incense.

If you really want to pray, you don't settle for a chinsy incense stick. You cash in for a 6-foot, 50-pound, 10-inch diameter lurid pink incense sausage on a pole and you light that puppy. It burns for days of course. Whenever I would see one of these things smoking away, I wondered if the family was really pining for good luck or if they had a lot to atone for.

Something that stood out for me in Ming Shing is that our hosts said that they very seldom wander on the paths in the hills, which I think was the only place I've been that was actually abandoned. Chinese like being close to each other and the huge role of the family is untouchable. Our hosts' relatives were all over the place in that town; we met the aunts and the uncles and the grandfather and many cousins.

The one-child policy, implemented in '85, will be changing how huge the families get. The house we stayed in had five floors, but only the first three were built out; they wait on the other rooms until they need them. Some families are experimenting on renting out rooms to distant family or even strangers.

The results of the one-child policy have yet to be seen in the population, but there will be shifts. The loophole is that for 10,000 yuan ($1,250), you can pay the fine for an additional child. Since Chairman Xingpeng announced in the eighties that "It's glorious to be rich," there's been a capitalistic stampede for money... and permission for more children. Soon, only the rich families will remain big.

Carrying on the family name is amazingly important here too. Since this only happens through men, daughters are highly undervalued. For farmers, they are allowed a second chance at pregnancy if their first resulted in a girl. Why? Because the government is not happy with the infanticide rate. Politically, there has been no difference between the sexes since the Revolution, but some old customs die very hard.

Maybe it's the huge population (1 in 6 people live in China), maybe it's the tight family structure, maybe it's the confidence that comes with 6,000 years of indigenous culture, but I have to say that I have not met an unfriendly person here. I have received a great many gifts and e-mail addresses from people I've hardly met and can hardly communicate with. I find it amazing how welcome I've felt here. There are a few cultural things that, on instinct, seem like rude gestures, but they're not. Even the beggars are friendly.

Today's great surprise: Chinese Opera. They were performing on a stage in the new gaudy yellow Italian plaza-like shopping center near our home. It was all there: the huge head dresses, the long sleeves, the crazy face paint and the wild gestures, all set to cymbals, blocks and strings. It was a total flashback for me to 10 years ago when my friend Jesse and I were involved in a Chinese Opera production called "Dou Erh" at the U of O. Very fun, and nice to feel that we did a decent job compared to the real thing.

There're a hundred adventures every day here. There's a dozen things that stick in my mind every day, and there's a lot of humorous things that jump out at me, like English signs that read "Entrance not permitted you be sloppily dressed." Or "The customer is the king / The king is in my heart." There's no way I can relate most of it, and if you think this e-mail is long, I tell you it's only the best I can do with the time given me.

I wish I could stay longer. Tomorrow I pack all my new possessions and gifts and on Sunday we fly to Hong Kong. Hanna and I will spend a few hours in the downtown there but then it's off to Tokyo and San Francisco and Portland and Eugene. And then who knows what. I still don't have any clear idea what I want in my life but I think I know now that there is so much more life to learn about.

One final picture. We're walking along on a downtown sidewalk. There's a man sitting on a bucket selling fish. The fish are laid out in rows on the sidewalk: no towel, no newspaper, just fish on cement. Someone's arguing with him, and to make a point, he prods one of the fish and it flops around a bit. Fresh enough?

Thanks for listening to these ramblings and I hope you've found them interesting. Hanna and I will be hosting some kind of get together upon our return so if you're interested in experiencing some of our souvenirs, photos and stories, let me know. I won't be checking e-mail before, oh, probably Tuesday, but I should be home Monday night. Phone there is (541) 344-9285.

Thanks! Love from China!