A Family Portrait

The invitation was a bit complicated: One of my wife's students at our university in Beijing was going to be visiting her boyfriend and his family over Spring Festival. Would we care to join their gathering in Zhongshan, a town in Guangdong province, and see how a real Chinese family celebrated this most important holiday?

"Sounds wonderful! But what exactly do people do on the Chinese New Year?" we asked.

"Eat a huge meal during the day. And then watch television and make dumplings at night."

How could we turn down such hospitality? We accepted gratefully, on the condition that we be allowed to sleep at a nearby hotel, since we certainly didn't want anyone to give up their bed for us. I was even more intrigued when I learned that Zhongshan was only an hour from Macau and that it was a Special Economic Zone. This would be an opportunity to see a wealthy part of China I knew nothing about.

And so on the morning of Spring Festival eve, we boarded a special minibus in Guangzhou for the hour and a half ride. The bus was owned by the town of Zhongshan itself and it was much spiffier and more comfortable than any minibus I had ever seen in Beijing. We were headed into the heart of the New China. The Lonely Planet dismisses Zhongshan as "an industrial city, there is little to see or do here." But I don't think this does justice to an interesting place.

The outskirts of Zhongshan certainly are flat and dull -- a marshy landscape dotted with new office buildings that are modern without being particularly attractive. There are clusters of factories. An amusement park. Everything is sparkling clean and very middle class, and nothing looks more than a few years old. But the center of town is old and atmospheric, a long narrow main street whose faded colonial architecture is clearly Portuguese in origin. There are old churches turned into shops, and second-story balconies with wrought-iron railings that look as if they should be peering out upon the Mediterranean. Turn a corner and you will see a decaying mansion where a family from Lisbon might have lived two centuries ago. Our Chinese friends were surprised that this was the part of town we found most interesting. They kept trying to direct our attention to the new buildings, all the glass and glitz and steel. It was difficult to explain to them that as Americans we had seen plenty of McDonalds and "industrial parks." But we had seldom seen such fabulously atmospheric colonial decay.

The family we were visiting lived in a block of new apartments about twenty minutes from the old part of town and they were exceedingly nice. From the moment we arrived they pressed food on us and there was a great deal of smiling and taking of photographs. Hospitality is a much more formal art in China than it is in America, and Gail and I did our best not to act too much like barbarians. But it was a cultural strain to be so smilingly polite. We had been told a gift was in order, but not something too expensive, so we had brought a box of imported chocolates and a bottle of wine. Was it appropriate? We hoped so, but it was impossible to be sure. The family in return wished to give us a very lovely porcelain horse. But there was no way we could get such a delicate sculpture back to Beijing unbroken in our backpacks, and it was difficult to decline their gift. In the end I mumbled some nonsense about how the horse would be ours, certainly -- and thank you, so very much! -- only we would let them keep it for us, please, so they could think of us whenever they saw it. It was awkward.

The Spring Festival feast was delicious, and we all ate too much. Occasionally something would slip loose from my chopsticks and I felt awfully clumsy, particularly with the soup course -- but you try eating a fish in broth with chopsticks. I'm sure they made allowances for us a foreigners, but it must have been as much of a strain for them as it was for us.

After dinner, the father insisted on taking a group photograph. I did my best to keep a straight face when he arranged us in a formal pose that seemed to me like something from another century, the elders seated in chairs in front, with the children standing at the back. At the last moment, he hurriedly arranged some potted flowers in front of us, to lend the frame an added formality. Then he set the automatic timer and hurried into the picture himself. We stared into the red light with smiles frozen on our faces until the flash went off.

The Westbrooks and the family

Looking at the photograph now, I see a modern living room of the new middle class China, and two cultures side-by-side. Polite but tense; separate worlds that are trying very hard to understand one another.

Next week: "Guangzhou"

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