On the Streets of Canton

Our trip ended in Canton, known for its duck and delicious teas and dim sum. Our Chinese friends, Liang and Sami, live here, in the city of Guangzhou. Our second to last day in China, they took us to Sami’s hometown: a small town in the countryside of Canton whose name I can’t remember.

I do remember the tea shop, though, where an astounding variety of teas and alcohols lined the shelves, and where the proprietor transformed the serving of tea into a form of high art.

Maybe it doesn’t look like much, seeing it on a picture, but you should have watched the delicate way he steeped each pot of tea, the finesse with which he poured it. We tasted green teas, fresh from the fall’s harvest, black teas, red teas—two or three varieties of each, and gunpowder tea and liver tea besides. Chad brought home a suitcase full of the stuff, and he’s been using it since our return to brew some mighty fine kombucha.

Many people have heard of Cantonese duck, and in Sami’s hometown we got to try the famous roast duck for ourselves, at the home of her parents. We could not understand them or they us except through translation, but they were gracious and smiling and oh so hospitable. Besides serving us duck, Sami’s mom served us lotus root, sweet potato tops, pickled garlic, and a variety of other dishes, all delicious. We felt truly honored as their guests, and our visit in their home is one of my favorite memories of this trip.

We also visited an English class and talked to the students about our lives in America. Like adolescents the world around, they were shy and self conscious and brimming with future. I am not sure how much they understood of what we said, but they giggled and looked down a lot, and one boy went out and bought us pickled eggs for a treat. That’s their teacher to the far right.

At one restaurant in Sami’s hometown, we saw dog advertised as a meal. We would never eat dog, Sami said. I think its cruel.

Some people eat it in the winter for strength, said Liang.

Although we didn’t try dog, we did try donkey—a donkey someone was in the process of butchering when we stepped inside this restaurant. Flavor? The closest comparison I could make was beef. My brother Chad, who owns a meat processing plant and has more experience, said it tasted like bison, only sweeter.

For breakfast the next morning—the morning of our last day in China—we feasted on dim sum at an elegant Cantonese restaurant. Dim sum, according to dictionary.com, is “a Chinese dish of small steamed or fried savory dumplings containing various fillings, served as a snack or main course.” We were served many varieties of dim sum. I especially loved the swan-shaped ones.

If there’s any resource China is rich in, that resource is the breath and tears and smiles and souls of precious human beings. We walked the streets of Sami’s hometown and later the streets of Guangzhou and glimpsed thousands of scenes from thousands of lives, far too many to process or remember. With many pictures and few words, I will let you experience some of what we saw.

We spent our last day in China in the city of Guangzhou. That’s East Tower and West Tower framing the pedestrians in the photo below.

Chad and I are country kids who don’t even know the U.S. subway system, let alone trying to figure one out in a foreign language. We managed, though. Send us back to the U.S—Chicago or Los Angeles or something—and we’ll already be pros.

Chad had spent pretty much the last of his money on tea the day before, and mine was gone even earlier. We spent our last day walking the streets of Guangzhou with Liang while he tried to find cheap things for us to do.

We visited a park…

…and walked through the Cheng Clan Ancestral Hall: art gallery and family meeting center.

We ended our afternoon with an early supper in a noodle shop…

…and flew out that same evening for America, twenty U.S. dollars and three Chinese yuan to our name. (And a credit card, of course.)

I will leave you with my favorite photo from Guangzhou: Canton Tower, located in the city center, with cosmos in the foreground. You would think, looking at this photo, that the thing had sprouted from a field, NOT that it was surrounded by cement, sidewalks, skyscrapers, people.

You would think.