Virtual China '98

Phil Koester's Group

April 2, 1998

Day 4

The early morning dawn woke me. I was at the wet market by 5:45, fifteen minutes before the market was to open. My goods were newts and newborn pigeons. The market opened and many Chinese people like me passed and headed either towards the vegetable section or the meat section. In the meat section they have many different animals avalible to eat. To ensure freshness, they are all kept alive until someone picks them out and then they are slaughtered for them. There are dogs, cats, owls, minks, weasels, chickens, pigeons, snakes, rabbits, fish, crabs, turtles, racoons, newts and opossums. I like to sit at the entrance so people looking for newts and baby pigeons will see me first. Today something very strange happened. There was a large group of young people wearing red shirts. Their skin was so strange. There were so many different colors of skin and hair. They also had strange eyes. One of these girls came to my stall. She had blue eyes and yellow hair. Her skin was white and her cheeks were red. She gazed sympathetically at my pigeons and I thought she was trying to pick one out for dinner. Then an adult came to her. She was Chinese and the girl spoke to her in a different language. The woman then turned to me and spoke in Cantonese. She asked if the girl could pet my baby pigeons. I laughed and asked why. The woman said that the girl liked animals. I laughed again and shook my head. They both walked away. I wondered why the girl wanted to touch the birds. Pigeons are just to eat. What was the point of petting them? I decided that the girl was crazy. I named her gwailo- meaning foreign devil.

Today was a very interesting day in fact it was the best day so far. I saw a lot of interesting things and learned many new things. We woke up at six fifty {well... we were supposed to wake up at six thirty). At around seven o'clock we left for breakfast. As usual the food didn't taste very good. After breakfast we went to our hotel for ten minutes and then we left to the wet market. It was quite disgusting, there were a lot of fish and dogs skinned and getting their heads chopped off. The smell in the wet market was really nasty, especially the dried food section. Walking through the town was very enjoyable because everything was so old and dirty. Then we went to the hotel again and packed our bags to put on the bus. Then we started our 50km biking to Sun Hing. We were riding very fast the whole time. We ate a horrible lunch on the side of the road. We had our lunch in small Styrofoam boxes; the lunch consisted off two dumplings, a ham sandwich and a juice box. Then we started the second half of our journey. We found this really neat village, we helped them out with some work and then we played basketball with some of the boys and the girls colored and Beth and Marie gave stickers to the children. The work we did was carrying wood to a house that was under construction. When we got to the second endpoint we had some ice cream bars with coconut on the outside. Then we had to finish the rest of our biking day. We reached the end point for the day and we were on our way to the hotel and dinner. When we got to the hotel we were expecting it to be really horrible but it was ok but not as good as the Peninsula Hotel.

Mr. Leung was born in the village Sun Wong, and he has lived there all of his life. He is only 20 years old, and he attended a local school next to his village when he was younger. He just graduated from high school, and he's looking for a job right now. Because he doesn't have a job, he's helping the other villagers with the farm work, and his dream is to be a furniture owner. When he has some free time, he watches TV, plays mahjong, and (I don't think it's true) he says he dates girls and takes them to the seaside (J for a romantic evening J ). He lives in the Sun Wong village with his parents, brothers, sisters, and uncles (but some of them might move to the city or to college). Normally his relatives come back to the village when they have ceremonies for marriages, funerals, and important Chinese festivals to celebrate. They believe in the Buddha, and they only worship in the house where they pray and celebrate festivals for the God Buddha. The old people enjoy their life in the village by relaxing, playing mahjong, and playing tin kau (another kind of game similar to mahjong). Mr. Leung says that the village people are satisfied with what they have in the village and how they live together in harmony.

To the village people, cameras and films are very expensive. That is the reason that when we took a picture of them they asked us to send it to them.

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