Photo by Randy Green
If you are just joining us, welcome! This series of articles is about an trip I made during the summer of my first year as a foreign teacher. I was already pretty happy with my new life but this trip confirmed the feeling that the expat life - lifestyle, outlook, and freedom - was for me. Thanks, Angeline (Jia now) and Ellen (Li Qin) for being the companions and guides that made this possible. This trip remains a favorite memory. Twenty years later - okay, 19 years - and we are still friends. To date, I have been to Hainan three times and it is still my idea of a tropical paradise.
Touring China’s Hawaii: First Morning
The first full day of my Hainan Island vacation began with lots of sunshine and fresh ocean breezes. The overnight rain was gone, leaving the air fresh and particularly brilliant. What would life look like to a person, I wondered, if this scene of white-blue sky and lush tropical greenery was the first thing you saw each morning when you looked out your window?
Saying goodbye to her classmate, Ellen and I met Angeline and her family for breakfast on the 31st floor of a beautiful hotel Dr. Ding had selected. Taking the elevator to the top, we enjoyed a large and diverse breakfast buffet in a revolving restaurant. The entire top floor of the hotel was almost imperceptibly rotating so we had a spectacular view of the harbor and the city while we ate. From this height, it was difficult to identify the city as Chinese; it might have been any large metropolitan city in a tropical or semi-tropical setting, with lots of construction and many new highrise buildings. The breakfast buffet featured both Western and Chinese foods and they were made even more appealing by the enchanting view of the harbor and the Century Bridge on this bright, sunny morning.
In my journal, I noted:
Dr. Ding was right; Hainan is the “Eastern Hawaii”.
After breakfast, we said goodbye to our new friends. I would not see them again until Angeline and I returned to Haikou at the end of the week to fly back to Zhengzhou. Next, Angeline, Ellen, and I rendezvoused with Ellen’s father and driver for the one-hour journey down the east coast to her hometown, Qionghai.
Her father spoke not a word of English beyond a few simple phrases Ellen had prepared for him but we never had a communication gap. I was his first foreigner but, with Ellen and Angeline as interpreters, we were quickly comfortable with each other. The trip, on a good, new highway, was in relatively sparse traffic – sparse, at least, after a few months in Zhengzhou. That day, periodic brief morning showers alternated with bright sunshine. Seen through the windshield, the scenery was breathtaking. It was as lovely and lush as any movie depiction of a tropical paradise. Seeing rice farmers with their water buffalo in the large rice paddies, I had to remind myself, though, that this was not a movie. This was how people actually lived on Hainan Island.
Speeding past, I saw many such farmers in rice fields. On Hainan Island, rice was still grown the old-fashioned way (with mostly manual labor) and I saw miles and miles of rice paddies but almost no machinery. Instead, what I observed was water buffaloes and traditional conical hats and amazingly blue skies, albeit skies that were periodically full of rain clouds. Ellen said that the typhoon had brought lots of rain but no one seemed concerned. Today, it was the pleasant, light type of rain that never lasts too long or falls too heavily. On Hainan Island, it seems that even the rain takes it easy.
Upon arrival in Qionghai, we went directly to their home and met the rest of Ellen’s immediate family. This included grandmother (“A Po”), age 90, Ellen’s mother, her fifteen year old brother Alexander, and Wang Li Jun, a shy and lovely eighteen year old girl who was living with them. Li Jun was the daughter of father’s partner, the co-owner of their small touring boat. They were a simple, pleasant family who did everything possible to make me comfortable and welcome. Of course, I was quite a curiosity in their neighborhood - probably the first foreigner ever for most of the neighbors - but everyone was polite and didn’t intrude. They only watched intently from a distance.
The family’s house was quite interesting and some of its features reminded me of the oldest parts of historic New Orleans. All the houses on their block were connected. There were no yards separating them or even spaces to walk between them. In Zhengzhou, for population reasons, land was too valuable to allow it to be underutilized. Here in Qionghai, a city of 450,000, that was also a factor, as it is in any large city anywhere, but living in a typhoon zone was another reason for connecting all the houses together into one stronger unit. Or perhaps it was their gregarious culture which did not make personal space and privacy so high a priority.
Their house, in the center of a block-long building, was tall and narrow with no grassy lawn in front. It was three stories high, and the first floor served as the garage, storage, and recreation area, plus it contained their large, open dining room. I learned that their meals were prepared in a small kitchen building separated from the house by a narrow alley. (This arrangement is imminently practical. I remember descriptions of homes in Colonial America where the wealthy families had a separate kitchen building. This kept cooking noises and odors out of the dining room and minimized fire hazards as well.) Immediately behind this detached kitchen, I could see an open space filled with vegetable gardens, and coconut palms, bananas, and other lush tropical foliage.
At the front of the house, the outer door was a wrought iron gate like a European elevator door. Wrought iron offered strength and beauty as well as ventilation - shades of old New Orleans. Once inside the house, there was a second wrought iron gate at the bottom of the steps leading to the living and sleeping quarters upstairs. If needed, this inner gate could also be locked at night. These were simple, peaceful people who recognized that the best way to keep their life simple and peaceful was to keep intruders locked out – again, just as in the older sections of New Orleans.
Later, I recognized another similarity. Many years previously, I had visited the Cayman Islands, located south of Florida in the Caribbean Sea. On Grand Cayman, I also saw some houses built with the living quarters on the second floor and only minimal functions below. It was explained to me that, during hurricane season, they must be prepared for high water. Such arrangements minimized water damage. Perhaps the same reasoning applied here on Hainan Island as well.
I was on vacation and everything was pleasant and relaxed but I got the feeling that this leisurely lifestyle was not reserved for special occasions and foreign visitors. This was the way they lived every day. I had been told that Hainan Island was famous for having the longest average lifespan in all of China. Grandmother A Po certainly seemed typical of the elderly people I saw. Ninety years old, she was still lively and alert, actively participating in meal preparations and telling stories and attending to the youngest children.
After getting settled, we had lunch at a neighborhood restaurant which offered a variety of wonderful seafood dishes. Some items were familiar, like crab and shrimp, and some were completely new, but all looked delicious. However, before starting, everyone had to prepare their own bowl of dipping sauce. In front of me, a tiny bowl sat next to the small saucer-sized plate and I was instructed in how to prepare my dipping sauce. Like the sauce for a hot pot meal, the dipping sauce here was also mixed according to personal taste and daring.
Back in Zhengzhou, I had told Ellen the story about my Rolla introduction to “red poison”, the fiery hot red pepper flakes used to spice up any dish. Now, in a delightful enunciation error - I presume it was an error - Ellen began to refer to my favorite seasoning as “rat poison” and the name stuck. In addition to the “rat poison” to keep one’s taste buds tingling, they showed me how to use the juice of a local citrus fruit, a golf ball-sized lime, the source of all that is bitter and tart in the Hainan Island taste spectrum. It must be added with discretion but its juice does mitigate the effect of the red poison. Finally, as an alternative to the red poison, there was the tasty and slightly less lethal “yellow poison” - which still offered a kick that Texas chili heads would love. Just as in west Texas, it was also true on Hainan Island that, “If you get a cold sweat on your forehead, it’s just right!”
Everyone made up their own dipping sauce and we began to eat. It was a long and pleasant lunch as we relaxed and got acquainted with each other.
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Thus ended the first exciting-yet-tranquil morning of my sojourn in Hainan. Tune in next week as the story continues.
As you enjoy my tropical adventures, think how great a cup of coffee would taste to accompany reading them. What a adroit segue to my weekly plea for spare change as I direct you to my Buy Me A Coffee page. Any and all contributions will be most gratefully received. In addition to my son’s college fund, this is also a measure of how much support TEL has among readers and subscribers.