Xichang
Tuesday April 26, 2011 - 8:11pm
I got back yesterday from a great trip to Xichang, aka “Satellite City”. It was a very random trip that was decided within 30 minutes that I would leave 4 days later. The director from Xichang happened to be stopping by Mianyang taking an English couple around to different sites. She had heard that I wanted to go see our organization’s other sites around China. She offered for me to come to see an AIDS training and a children’s health training in a mountain village. I agreed and the plans were made for me to leave 4 days later.
Xichang is known as the “Satellite City” because the weather is so beautiful and clear. You can imagine that out of all the cities in China, they chose Xichang as a place to launch their country’s satellites. This city is special because it sits at a higher altitude than most cities (1550 m) and is surrounded by mountains. Year-round the temperature is approximately 30 deg C (warm!). The skies are clear and blue unlike most cities in China choked by smog, which can’t go that high over the mountains to the city center Xichang!
Besides the beautiful weather, Xichang is in a prefecture of this province called “Liangshan” (“Cold mountains”). Liangshan has a particularly high number of minorites, the majority minority being Yi. The area I’m in now is dominated mostly by the Qiang minority which depending on place, is greatly outnumbered by Han (regular) Chinese people. Anyhow, it was a really cool to observe and be immersed in a new minority’s culture. Walking around Xichang, many women and men wear the ethnic dress (colorful skirts, vests, and a head wrapping). It was so common that me and my one of the teammates I came with were embarrassed to take a picture of them. So we had to sneakily take pictures of them in their everyday lives.
Where I am now, it’s rare to see someone walking around in Qiang ethnic dress. It’s very bright and flashy, and maybe because of that they prefer to wear normal clothes. Many say the Qiang minority has mixed in well with the Han Chinese in terms of language and appearance. It’s hard to tell the minority apart from a regular Han Chinese person. And I believe the Qiang don’t have their own language.
However, anyone can see a distinct difference from an Yi person and a Han Chinese. Their skin is much darker, weather-worn, their noses prominent and broad, and as mentioned sometimes they dress in their Yi costume. In addition, the Yi language is so different than anything I’ve ever heard before! It sounds like a tribal tongue, maybe something you’d hear in Africa. There are many theories about where the Yi language came from, some suggest from India, since their social structure is also similar to the caste system.
Overall, I very much enjoyed Xichang. One of the other things that I appreciated while observing, was our organization’s team there. Each team in each site has a different dynamic. And I really liked this team’s feel. The leader focuses heavily on building relationships with the local people and her time and commitment in Xichang (for 8 years) has paid off greatly. She now has 3 local staff helping out with the site in Xichang. The long-term team is only the leader (originally from Taiwan) and the 3 local staff. Having a majority of “local” people felt really good to me. Instead of the majority (7/9) speaking Cantonese-accented Mandarin (like my team), everyone is speaking the local dialect (which is quite different from Mandarin), and it makes it that much easier to learn and adjust to the “outside” (people and environment outside of our organization).
I also observed a lot about team leaders. Being able to compare our team leaders at my current site and the site in Xichang was really eye-opening and good for me to take note of in the future. My team leader now is very Type A, you could say. Extremely organized and prompt, has high expectations for herself and others. Our team leader (actually two, a couple), strictly focus on admin. They don’t go on the field, that’s our job (7 others). They mobilize outside teams to come in, they organize our activities, from buying our train tickets, booking our van to travel places, writing official letters to the gvt, meeting with gvt officials, to organizing a training for women’s health. I think this method is really smart, only after seeing Xichang’s leader running on fumes trying to handle admin and full-time on the field. She was simply so busy that a lot of admin stuff slipped, that was quite important. And since she’s so busy, you can think about the little contact she has with her supporters.
But I also liked Xichang’s team leader for her effusiveness. At a training, my current team leader would never dominate the conversation at a dinner table, which is often with high-level officials (often men). But Xichang’s leader always, always takes the rein in lunch and dinner conversations. She’s exuding with a loving and serving heart from JC, she will try hard to direct the conversation to something Xtn-related, whether it be through bringing up Sun Yat-Sen or mentioning that we are f-ful Xtns. She tells us that this is an excellent opportunity to speak truth and light into their lives.
Well, that was certainly longer than I intended. Hope this epic entry was as fruitful and interesting to you as it was to me.