Photojournalism - Beijing

Having visited Beijing and the Great Wall a year ago, I haven't got much more to say on the subject. But this time around, I had a new camera in hand and the company of some wonderful photography mentors. A few of our best shots.

Grandpa walking with S--; Daddy walking with L-- on the Great Wall of China.

Front face of the Forbidden City

And within the Forbidden City...

Racism

I am so blessed to belong to a multi-cultural, multi-racial group of women here in Shanghai.  Admittedly, most of my close friends are American, with a few Australians and New Zealanders thrown in for good measure.  But I belong to a beautifully international Bible study.  The cultural majority leans toward American, but we also have a woman from Sri Lanka, from South Africa, from Japan, from China by way of Finland.  Two of the Americans have married Chinese men.  One of the Americans has married a black man.  Within this group, I am one of two women whose children are both American and only one race.

This is a Bible Study which functions as a church and family for each of us.  We worship together;  we pray for each other;  we study the Bible;  we share our struggles with China, with our marriages, as parents, as daughters and sisters, nieces and grandchildren.  We share life lived away from your homeland and your family.  We also share these things in full confidentiality, and so I'm afraid this story must be told on the surface to maintain the anonymity of the individuals.

A woman described the racism her husband has faced looking for work in China.  She tells that people will ask specifically the color of his skin - this over the phone, in simple requests for information on job postings.  She described the bewilderment and frustration they both felt.

This part of racism, I have heard before.  I know that racism exists, and many overheard conversations - with acquaintances and on radio and the movies.  This I know.  The next part of the conversation, I have never been privy to.

The other women in the group heard their sister's complaints with no surprise.  They had each faced racism many times, both here and in other parts of the world.  They spoke calmly, and they spoke surely.  They spoke with compassion, but they spoke with conviction that racism can not hurt them.  They encouraged their sister that God has a plan for her life;  that God has a plan for her husband's life;  and that negative people saying negative things can have no impact on that plan.  That this negativity will simply steer them safely away from the places where God does not want them.

This is certainly not a societal plan for facing racism, but an amazing perspective on making in through life when certain ceilings and obstacles will be unavoidable.  The words came so easily to them, that clearly each had faced this conversation before.  But this part of the conversation on racism, I had never heard before.

Impending Onslaught

The season of visitors begins tomorrow.

Dave's parents will arrive tomorrow afternoon, and the girls have been giddy with excitement for weeks.  They'll be in China with us for 2 weeks, and we'll spend 7 of those days traveling together.  It should be a wonderful time.

With less than 1 week to catch our breath, my parents arrive at the beginning of May.  They get to stay for 4 weeks, and we're all looking forward to the help, the time together, and the chance to travel to some new places.  They're gifting Dave and I with a few days travel sans children, and then the whole family will go to Xian and Yunnan Province on another 7 day trip.

With the weather we've been having so far, these travels should all be amazing.

Amusingly, between the two parents we may have visitors from St. Louis.

Also amusingly, immediately following my parents we will have visitors from Chicago.

These visitors are short and plan to keep themselves amused.  They will be no trouble, and we really enjoy house guests.  But we sure find it amusing that 8 weeks of guests through the year, and they all come at once!

Near State of Bliss

If it weren't for potty training, I would be in heaven with two little toddlers encircling my legs all day.

Feeling Sick

I just read an article in the International Herald Tribune, the global edition of The New York Times.  A problem which I had never heard of, and which makes me feel sick to my stomach.  I've included the article in full below, as well as a link to the story on the IHT's website.  I take issue with a few of the points they make, but clearly the problem is significant.  And the problem makes me sick.

China's one-child policy coupled with a strong cultural preference for raising male heirs has led to a lopsided gender balance in China.  Particularly in rural areas, boys can outnumber girls by 20% and the current generation has millions more boys than girls.  This problem alone is tremendous.  The problem I knew nothing about was the lengths people will go to gain their male heir.

According to the article below, kidnapping young boys - toddlers, generally, ages 3-5 years old - is quite common.  These children will be sold to families in different provinces who desparately seek a male heir.  The practice is so common that people in certain villages and provinces understand that many of the children playing on their playgrounds and attending their schools have been stolen, but the people in authority (and many others, apparently) have no real objection to the practice.

And according to people quoted in the story, the choice to buy a kidnapped young boy is one of saving face and gaining honor.  People say that they're not as good as the people around them if they don't have a son.  People adopt a son, and then force their daughter to drop out of school so they can lavish the boy with gifts.

The motive makes me sick.  The widespread nature of the crime makes me sick.  The acceptability of the crime makes me sick.

Chinese Hunger for Sons Fuels Boys’ Abductions

By ANDREW JACOBS

Published: April 4, 2009

SHENZHEN, China — The thieves often strike at dusk, when children are playing outside and their parents are distracted by exhaustion.

Deng Huidong lost her 9-month-old son in the blink of an eye as a man yanked him from the grip of his 7-year-old sister near the doorway of their home. The car did not even stop as a pair of arms reached out the window and grabbed the boy.

Sun Zuo, a gregarious 3 1/2-year-old, was lured off by someone with a slice of mango and a toy car, an abduction that was captured by police surveillance cameras.

Peng Gaofeng was busy with customers when a man snatched his 4-year-old son from the plaza in front of his shop as throngs of factory workers enjoyed a spring evening. “I turned away for a minute, and when I called out for him he was gone,” Mr. Peng said.

These and thousands of other children stolen from the teeming industrial hubs of China’s Pearl River Delta have never been recovered by their parents or by the police. But anecdotal evidence suggests the children do not travel far. Although some are sold to buyers in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, most of the boys are purchased domestically by families desperate for a male heir, parents of abducted children and some law enforcement officials who have investigated the matter say.

The demand is especially strong in rural areas of south China, where a tradition of favoring boys over girls and the country’s strict family planning policies have turned the sale of stolen children into a thriving business.

Su Qingcai, a tea farmer from the mountainous coast of Fujian Province, explained why he spent $3,500 last year on a 5-year-old boy. “A girl is just not as good as a son,” said Mr. Su, 38, who has a 14-year-old daughter but whose biological son died at 3 months. “It doesn’t matter how much money you have. If you don’t have a son, you are not as good as other people who have one.”

The centuries-old tradition of cherishing boys — and a custom that dictates that a married woman moves in with her husband’s family — is reinforced by a modern reality: Without a real social safety net in China, many parents fear they will be left to fend for themselves in old age.

The extent of the problem is a matter of dispute. The Chinese government insists there are fewer than 2,500 cases of human trafficking each year, a figure that includes both women and children. But advocates for abducted children say there may be hundreds of thousands.

Sun Haiyang, whose son disappeared in 2007, has collected a list of 2,000 children in and around Shenzhen who have disappeared in the past two years. He said none of the children in his database had been recovered. “It’s like fishing a needle out of the sea,” he said.

Mr. Peng, who started an ad hoc group for parents of stolen children, said some of the girls were sold to orphanages. They are the lucky ones who often end up in the United States or Europe after adoptive parents pay fees to orphanages that average $5,000.

The unlucky ones, especially older children, who are not in demand by families, can end up as prostitutes or indentured laborers. Some of the children begging or hawking flowers in major Chinese cities are in the employ of criminal gangs that abducted them. “I don’t even want to talk about what happens to these children,” Mr. Peng said, choking up.

Police Indifference

Here in Shenzhen and the constellation of manufacturing towns packed with migrant workers, desperate families say they get almost no help from the local police. In case after case, they said, the police insisted on waiting 24 hours before taking action, and then claimed that too much time had passed to mount an effective investigation.

Several parents, through their own guile and persistence, have tracked down surveillance video images that clearly show the kidnappings in progress. Yet even that can fail to move the police, they say. “They told me a face isn’t enough, that they need a name,” said Cai Xinqian, who obtained tape from a store camera that showed a woman leading his 4-year-old away. “If I had a name, I could find him myself.”

Chen Fengyi, whose 5-year-old son was snatched from outside her apartment building in Huizhou, said she called the police the moment she realized he was missing. “They told me they would come right over,” she said. “I went outside to wait for them and they never came.”

When she is not scouring the streets at night for her son, Ms. Chen and her husband go to the local police station and fall to their knees. “We cry and beg them to help,” she said, “and every time they say, ‘Why are you so hung up on this one thing?’ ”

Many parents take matters into their own hands. They post fliers in places where children are often sold and travel the country to stand in front of kindergartens as they let out. A few who run shops have turned their storefronts into missing person displays. “We spend our life savings, we borrow money, we will do anything to find our children,” said Mr. Peng, who owns a long-distance phone call business in Gongming, not far from Shenzhen. “There is a hole in our hearts that will never heal.”

The reluctance of the police to investigate such cases has a variety of explanations. Kidnappers often single out the children of migrant workers because they are transients who may fear the local police and whose grievances are not treated as high priorities.

Moreover, the police in China’s authoritarian bureaucracy are rarely rewarded for responding to crimes affecting people who do not have much political clout. Mr. Peng said the police preferred not to even open a missing person’s inquiry because unsolved cases made them appear inefficient, reducing their annual bonuses.

There are exceptions. In a number of high-profile cases, the police have cracked down on trafficking rings and publicized the results. But such help remains rare, parents say.

Turning to Beijing

Mr. Peng says that boys’ abductions are a growing problem that only the central government can address. He and others have been agitating for the establishment of a DNA database for children and stronger antitrafficking laws that would penalize people who buy stolen children. “If the government can launch satellites and catch spies, they can figure out how to find stolen children,” said Mr. Peng, who helps run a Web site called Baby Come Home.

Chen Shiqu, the director of the Office of Combating Human Trafficking, a two-year-old government agency based in Beijing, said the problem of stolen children was exaggerated. He said that, contrary to parent advocates and some news reports, the number of cases was on the decline, although he was unable to provide figures to back up that assertion. “Just say they are dropping by 10 percent a year,” he said. He added that if parents were unsatisfied with the police response, they should call 110, China’s equivalent of 911.

Yang Jianchang, a legislator in Shenzhen, said he had been trying to get the central government’s attention, with little success. Two years ago, he said, a group of local businessmen tried to start a foundation to track missing children. But the government, which requires that the establishment of private organizations be approved, has yet to grant them permission.

Last June, after he sent a report on the issue to the central government and got no response, Mr. Yang started sending the Ministry of Civil Affairs a copy every month or so. “I just don’t understand why no one is paying attention to this problem,” he said. “We need someone in the central government who will fight for the rights of the people, someone who has a conscience.”

For the parents of missing children, the heartbreak and the frustration have turned into anger. Last September, about 40 families traveled to the capital to call attention to the plight of abducted children. They staged a brief protest at the headquarters of the national television broadcaster, but within minutes, dozens of police officers arrived to haul them away.

“They dragged us by our hair and said, ‘How dare you question the government,’ ” said Peng Dongying, who lost her 4-year-old son. “I hate myself for my child’s disappearance, but I hate society more for not caring. All of us have this pain in common, and we will do anything to get back our children.”

Buyers’ Remorse

In Anxi, a verdant county in Fujian where some of Shenzhen’s stolen boys are thought to have been sold, people focus more on the pain of the families without sons.

Zhen Zibao, a shopkeeper in the Kuidou, said that buying a son was widely accepted and that stolen children could be found in most towns and villages. She and other residents noted that when a daughter married and moved to her husband’s home, it often left her parents without a caretaker in old age. Then there is the dowry, a financial burden that falls to the family of a bride.

“If you have only girls, you don’t feel right inside,” said Ms. Zhen, who has one child, an 11-year-old son. “You feel your status is lower than everyone else.”

Although many Chinese still cherish male heirs, the Communist Party has largely succeeded in easing age-old attitudes about gender. In major cities, where one-child families have become the norm, many parents say they are happy to have a daughter and no son.

Still, in many rural areas, including Anxi County, a resident whose first child is a daughter is allowed to have a second. Having a third child, however, can mean steep fines as high as $5,800 and other penalties that include the loss of a breadwinner’s job.

A boy, by contrast, can often be bought for half that amount, and authorities may turn a blind eye if the child does not need to be registered as a new birth in the locale.

In some cases, local officials may even encourage people desperate for a son to buy one. After their 3-month-old son died, Zhou Xiuqin said, the village family planning official went to her home and tried to comfort her and her husband, who was compelled to have a vasectomy after the birth of the boy, their second child. “He said, ‘Don’t cry, stop crying, you can always buy another one,’ ” Ms. Zhou recalled.

Ms. Zhou and her husband, Mr. Su, the tea farmer, were still in mourning in October 2007 when they spotted a child at a Buddhist temple in their village, Dailai, a picturesque hamlet of 800 people nestled in the fold of steep mountains. “The boy was eating candy like he was hungry,” Mr. Su recalled. “Everything he was wearing was too small for him.”

A man with the boy claimed to be his father. He said that he was from a nearby town and had three sons, but that he needed money to take his ill wife to the hospital. “I asked how much,” said Mr. Su, an earnest man who works long hours in a clothing factory when he is not tending his tea plants.

After some quick bargaining, the price was dropped to $3,500 from $4,100, and a few hours later, after borrowing money from friends and family members, they took the boy home. They named him Jiabao, which means “guarantor of the family.”

Their love for their new son was boundless. They bought him new clothing and had their daughter drop out of middle school to take care of him. They did not think much of the fact that Jiabao did not understand the dialect spoken in that part of Fujian and seemed indifferent to the local cuisine. Mr. Su insisted that he never imagined that the boy had been stolen.

Last August, Mr. Su learned the truth after the police in Sichuan Province arrested the man who had sold them the child. The man, part of a ring of seven people who had abducted 11 children, had sold four of them to families in their township. The man, according to the police, has since been given a 12-year sentence.

By the time the couple got home from work the day they got the news, their son and the three other stolen children in their village had already been taken away by the police. The couple was inconsolable. “We were lied to, we were swindled,” Mr. Su said as his wife’s eyes welled up.

There was, however, a small consolation. A sympathetic policeman in Sichuan, the province where the boy was stolen, helped put them in touch with his birth parents. The two couples have since been in frequent contact; Mr. Su said the real parents held no grudge, acknowledging that the family had cared for their son well.

The father was so grateful, he told Mr. Su he would be on the lookout for local families who had two sons but were too poor to care for them. “He said that way I don’t need to deal with child traffickers anymore,” Mr. Su said.

New Sandals

Cognizant of the fact that the compensation we receive as expatriates could lend itself to significant growth in our personal savings, I have placed myself on a bit of a "spending freeze."  With the spending freeze in mind, and the onset of lovely spring weather, I searched the house this afternoon for my sandals. Last summer I had two pairs of sandals, both purchased on a dime in the states, which served my every need.  They went from the playground in shorts to dinner in jeans to a wedding with a skirt.  For a dime, my summertime footwear had been covered.  Remembering the happiness granted by these sandals, I sought them out this morning to begin another year.  And another year in sandals would make bring them to having been bought on a nickel - a very thrifty nickel.

The sandals were nowhere to be found.

We live in an apartment.  And although the square footage of this apartment tops the square footage of our first house, it is still an apartment with no basement, no garage and no attic for dumping unused items.  Storage must be rather cleverly hidden away.

There were only a few places these sandals could be.  And I assure you, they were not any of them.

Distraught, I headed to the internet.  A girl can not go a warm spring or a hot summer without a pair of versatile sandals.  And since guests arrive in just over a week, I still had time to order some new sandals and ship them to the in-laws' address before they pack their bags.

I jumped to my old stand-bys for affordable, versatile and stylishly sporty clothes and shoes.  Ann Taylor Loft, Eddie Bauer, Old Navy and The Gap all left me hanging.  I found plenty of strappy things which looked none too comfortable, and cost much more than a dime.  I found plenty of flip flops which looked far too sporty to cover all of my bases.  Nothing fit my in between - thick, comfy sole and a suede or leather strap slip-on sandal with the versatility for all (or nearly all) of my potential summer outings.

Distraught at the prospect of ruining my spending freeze, I picked out the top two choices.  Nice enough sandals, the cost of buying them both full price and adding on delivery brought my summer footwear to over $50.  Now I know that many a girl will glad pay that much for shoes - but I am not that girl, and especially when on a spending freeze.

And then I blamed China.

This is a standard resort for me.  If I can't solve a problem, more than likely it is China's fault.  I know how to fix my problems in America.  I know when and how to buy sandals in the states.  But in China, I'm at a loss.  I threw up my hands in frustration and filled Dave's ears with complaints for so long that he decided to search the house for the longed-after summer sandals of a year ago.

I told him it was in vain.  I was positive he was wasting his time.

Five minutes later, he returned to the living room with 4 pairs of sandals.

I didn't even know I had four pairs!  What a lucky girl I am!  And as quickly as that, China is a fine place to live again.

36 Hours in Shanghai

A recent New York Times article has created much buzz in Shanghai.  It seems that most people have heard about it, although few have had the opportunity to read it.  The Times has a regular travel segment called "36 Hours," and in March the NYT spent 36 Hours in Shanghai.

I did a quick google search, and found an article written in October of 2006.  Not what I expected, I read that article first and then moved onto the more recent article.  The difference between the two was quite interesting.  The initial article read like a typical guide to Shanghai - visit the Bund, tour the French Concession, and check out the skyscrapers of Pudong.  The second article still took the typical - eat fancy food on the Bund, and ride to the top of the World Financial Center.  But it also delved a little deeper, into sites I hadn't discovered until I'd been here for a few years.  Maybe a second trip deserves a deeper look?

Or maybe the city just needs more than 36 hours.

What We've Been Reading

A friend loaned me the book Raising Global Nomads: Parenting Abroad in an On-Demand World by Robin Pascoe when she learned that we expect to live abroad for a few years still.  I dropped L-- at a friend's birthday party last weekend and brought the book to a Starbucks, where I began to read.  The first few chapters brought tears to my eyes, as I began to realize how typical my experience and my feelings are for mothers raising their children abroad.

The author defines "Global Nomads" as "anyone who has ever lived abroad before adulthood because of a parent's occupational choice."  She describes the emotions surrounding the sudden moves of expatriates, the cycle of culture shock, and the challenge of negotiating a work-life balance.

Reading this book, I began to realize that although my fears are real and entirely normal of people in my situation (fears of bad schools, unsanitary food, and unsafe medical care, to begin), they are also being overcome by people in my situation every day.  The next location will be no more (or less) difficult than this one.  The community will be every bit as strong as supportive, and likely my children will thrive.

One piece of information I did find quite interesting was the author's opinion on labeling.  She and her experts find value in labeling these children as Global Nomads, or Third Culture Kids.  The labels help children to realize that they fall into a category, and that their experiences, their emotions before and after moves, their fear of repatriation, and their general homelessness are entirely normal.  She believes that the best adjusted global nomads are those who have been familiar with the term for a long time.  Dave and I discussed this, and place it in the same category as the adoption.  At this point, we do not plan to involve Mei Mei in adoption support groups because we do not wish to identify her specifically as an adopted child.  We plan to raise her as we will raise our other children - as our child, who happens to be adopted.  We feel that the same attitude will serve our global nomads well.  We will raise them as our children - children with good brains, weekly chores, and a strong sense of family.  But as members of this family, they will be global nomads and the knowledge of that category may well do them good.

For anyone looking for insight into the roller coaster of emotions and challenges behind raising children abroad, this book is a good read.

Weekend in Guizhou - Monday

The nicest hotel in Anshun also happens to be the only hotel in Anshun. And being such, it does not offer many of the amenities that we are used to. For instance, this particular hotel did not offer a clean bathtub, functioning air conditioning, or an outdoor view through the window. But it did offer a clean bed in a dark and quiet space, so we all eventually slept.

Up early to stop at a village on our way to the airport for our noon flight, we were all a bit groggy from our frontier village dinner the night before and our sticky hotel room sleep. There was plenty of minor fighting and groaning over whose turn it was at the toilet.

And then L-- retched on the bed. Dave and I turned our parent mode to full gear, caring for a sick child, quickly facing dehydration as no liquids would remain in her body, while trying to keep everyone in good spirits and guided toward the door for check-out.

At the hotel's buffet breakfast, we stocked up on white bread and clean water for the backseat of the car where L-- slept and I served as caretaker. S-- and Dave grabbed steamed buns and boiled eggs as well, making a nice picnic for themselves in the front of the van. As L-- rested and began to hold down her fluids, we made some quick decisions. Were we to head straight to the airport, we would arrive 1 hour early. A few phone calls learned that we could not change our flight, and so could not arrive home any earlier. The airport had no useful amenities - nowhere to lie down, no Pedialyte or even Gatorade for sale, and certainly no fresh air. So, we thought, why rush? The last stop on our itinerary was only a few miles off the road to the airport, and so we stopped at 8:30am to tour Tunbao Ancient Village.

L-- spent her time snuggled into the stroller, holding her water bottle close and never more than a step away from one of her parents. We hit the village at a wonderful time, when the shops had yet to open and the children were making their way to school. Rather than being hassled by pushy trinket hawkers, we received simple smiles as shopkeepers set up their wares. Rather than being pushed by other tourists, we were the only guests in town and simply watched as people readied themselves for the day.

This made the perfect setting for me to hang back from Dave and the tour guide, and focus my lens on the town and its people. As I skipped most of the tour, I don't have much narration to provide for the pictures. The location was beautiful - Tunbao is a very small village located among the karst hills and rapeseed fields of Guizhou. The stone village with slate roofs has a lovely green backdrop in many directions. And for your interest, the people of Tunbao are not a minority. They were originally a group of families who moved to Guizhou from Nanjing during a wartime hundreds of years ago. These families kept close to each other, maintaining their close family ties and their way of life inside the walls of their village.

Under Contract

Thanks for the thoughts and prayers - our house is UNDER CONTRACT.

With a little luck, some practical steps and the hand of God, we will only make 1 more mortgage payment.

Whoopee!

Weekend in Guizhou - Sunday

The quintessential form of American travel is the roadtrip.  I spent many childhood hours sitting on the red vinyl back seat, next to my brother in my parents' station wagon as we drove across hours across the states.  We would sleep in the car, eat meals as picnics on the side of the road, and spend hours watching the rural landscape fly past our windows - staring at tractors pulling combines, watching crowds of cows calmly munching grass, and feeling mildly jealous of a life lived far away from everything.

As expatriates living in China, we miss the opportunity to offer our children many of our 

own childhood experiences.  And although I have yet to offer my girls a drive across the flat state of Kansas, I found a lovely substitute in the southern Chinese province of Guizhou.

We spent much of Sunday in a rented van with our bag of books and stickers, our music blaring from the CD player, and our peanut butter and jelly picnic lunches stowed in the back.

The drive from Guiyang to Huangguoshu Waterfall took us two and a half hours and 

worlds away from the congested and dirty cities of China.  While the portable DVD player kept 

the girls entertained, my husband and I spent the drive with our eyes glued out the windows at the pastoral landscape.  A far cry from the agricultural scenes driving across Kansas, we watched small villages clinging to the sides of sudden karst hills.  We saw land split into small plots, being worked by hand by individuals carrying buckets of water or following a single water buffalo.  The seasonal crop was rapeseed for making rapeseed oil - also known as canola oil.  The plants were in full bloom, filling the scenery with a patchwork of bright yellow flowers.

The scenery only began more dramatic as we drove further and neared the waterfall.  Hills terraced with yellows flowers quickly rising and falling again into river valleys.  Thin stone paths winding in between plots of land, wading through streams and guiding up and over hilltops.  Babies snuggled close to their mothers, tied tightly to their backs in brightly embroidered handmade carriers.  Children racing on their bikes down country roads; children walking alongside grandpa and a water buffalo; rows of little explorers navigating the hills and valleys of their world.

We reached the parking lot for Huangguoshu Waterfall and prepared ourselves for a few hour hike.  The path to the waterfall is a simple trail with some steps and hills, and the walk out to the waterfall itself took us over an hour.  We threw our lunches and our children into our backpacks and started down the path.

Huangguoshu Waterfall is a popular destination for Chinese tourists, but although plenty of people shared the walk with us, we rarely felt crowded or mobbed.  We never saw another westerner, and our girls' blue eyes and blonde hair turned plenty of heads.  But most people had come to see the waterfall, which everyone viewed as more dramatic than our children.  People would wave and say hello, but otherwise left my girls alone.

At 2- and 3-years-old, my city girls love the chance to walk on their own, stopping to investigate a spider and its habitat, or picking it sticks and leaves.  The simple path kept them happy the entire walk, and the waterfall left them breathless with excitement.  This jawdropper falls 77.8 meters and is 101 meters wide.  Apparently the river flows strongest and falls most dramatically in July and August, but it still looked mighty impressive from our spring vantage point.

But the best was yet to come, from our children's perspective.  The path continues straight on through a water curtain cave, taking each walker directly behind the waterfall.  The cave dripped with water and stalagtite, with low ceilings and crooked walls.  Our girls became convinced that a monster lurked just around the corner, and spent the entire walk in a combination of giddy excitement and tortured fear.

On the way out, we stopped for a picnic and for a few colorful photos.  Chinese tourists visit Guizhou province both to see this waterfall and to explore minority cultures.  Although the waterfall does not fall in or near any minority villages, the locals saw a place to make a buck and offered costumed young ladies to pose for pictures.  They found our kids so interesting and lovely that we got our photos for free!

Back in the van to continue our roadtrip, and the girls 

immediately fell asleep.  Just as planned, we all spent the next hour in serious nap time.  Everyone awoke feeling refreshed, and ready to hike to the next destination.  Another shorter hike took us to the bottom of The Dragon's Mouth, a waterfall dropping out of Tian Chi Lake where it has just left the Dragon Palace Caves.  This waterfall may have been less picturesque than Huangguoshu, but the power in the tons of water barreling through this small mouth still left us astounded.  

A breathless climb to the top of this waterfall led us to the most enchanting part of our trip.  We climbed onto boats with an adult life jacket on each seat.  The girls wrapped them around their bodies like warm blankets and we entered the Dragon Palace caves, named because the caves look like the crystal palace where the dragon lives.  No longer did we fear the monster around the corner - now we worried that our crew would awaken the dragon in his home!  The majesty and wonder of the caves frequently allowed the girls to forget the fearful dragon.  The curators of the cave and the river had cleverly named many of the outcroppings of rocks with whimsical names like Monkeys Watching the Moon and Groves of Grapes.  But while the rocks had names livening our imaginations, and sometimes red or green lights dimly illuminating them, they were left otherwise untouched and the natural beauty of the place worked with the girls' imaginations to create an amazing world of monkeys and dragons while we rode through the quiet caves on our simple boat.

After a beautiful and exhausting day, we overnighted in the nearest town.  Anshun has a population of 2.6 million people - the population of our hometown in America, St. Louis, Missouri.  Or Orlando, Florida;  Lisbon, Portugal; Manchester, England.  But this city had no downtown, no highrise buildings, and no theme parks.  It felt like a frontier town, with the roads still being paved, goods sold under tents in the street, and rarely a concrete building rising higher than 2 stories.  There were no sidewalks and few trees, and our guide advised us to stay in the hotel.  So tired from our day exploring the Guizhou countryside, we had no trouble following her instructions.

We Have An Offer!

After sitting on and off the market since mid-September...

After originally trying For Sale By Owner nearly 2 years ago...

After holding crummy renters and then sitting vacant...

After I began to lose faith...

We have an offer on the sale of our house.  Will keep you posted...