The Heroes of the Shanxi Revolution

Shanxi has Excellent infrastructure and superstructure

She is shy, she has that constant smile on her face making you wonder when she is really smiling and when she is just being a tour guide. Short and always attending to something, that is Yoyo, 33, – real name Li Jing –who plies her trade in Shanxi.

Despite her diminutive stature, she is a giant. She has been guiding tourists for 10 years since she graduated with a master’s degree in tourism management from Shanxi University, the same university from which she got her English degree earlier.

Tourists, like these friends can be hard to manage

10 years ago Shanxi was best known for its coal and heavy industry its tourism potential undeveloped and overshadowed by the neighboring Shaanxi province with its famous terracotta warriors.

Realizing that coal does not last forever, Shanxi started investing in tourism and Yoyo has seen it all changing.

“Local government policies concentrated on heavy industry, there were no proper facilities such as hotels and restaurants and most of the tourism service staff were from the villages and not well trained.

Shanxi Gems: The Grottoes in Datong

“The biggest challenge was transportation: it used to take 8 hours to drive from Taiyuan to Mount Wutai now it is just 3 hours,” she said confidently as she sat next to me on a tour she was managing.

And I did notice what she was saying. There were tens of bright red buses about the road ferrying all shades of tourists to and from iconic places in the province. The roads have been shortened by burrowing straight under mountains with some tunnels feeling like 6 kilometers. The road signs come in English and Mandarin and the tour buses get priority passes on the toll gates.

Yoyo added that government efforts such as organizing tourism expos and liaising with big tourism agencies in Shanxi and Beijing have helped to publicize Shanxi.

She teased Beijing and Xian saying they were mere ancient capitals, but Shanxi is where one can see how ancient common people lived.

A tour Guide, not Yoyo, tries to rally her party

And she is right Shanxi has enough sites to be a tourism powerhouse at the level of Egypt or Peru with 3 UNESCO blessed heritage sites such as the Pingyao Ancient City, Mount Wutai and the Yungang Grottoes.

From just English and French tour guide services to 10 foreign languages including Japanese and Korean.

All this has paid off, as confirmed by Ma Bin, who is in charge of propaganda in Shanxi’s second biggest city, Datong.

Ma says now 12 airlines are flying into Datong and there is a 15 percent annual gain in tourist numbers.

The mystic Wutai Mountain

Most of the tourists are Chinese, but Japanese, Koreans and Europeans make a significant number too.

“More still needs to be done, tourism staff needs to be trained in foreign languages, we need to develop more tourism products and services unique to Shanxi,” says Yoyo.

She contends that tourism cannot replace coal, but has high hopes for the future and believes Shanxi can focus on handicrafts, light industry and wine and vinegar making to boost the economy vis-à-vis tourism.

When she is not dealing with tourists, Yoyo trains tour guides at Taiyuan Tourism College. She is so busy that she and her husband have differed having a baby to at least 2017, much to their parent’s horror.

 

Earning about 300 RMB per day, the job is not particularly lucrative, but her dedication to the industry makes her a real hero by any definition.

An Obituary to a Cute Rabbit I Enjoyed Eating.

It has happened to me before, so I know how this works. It ends well.

I was young, my mother told me to slaughter a chicken so that it could be prepared for dinner. I did the needful: tied its legs, pinned its two wings together and with my left hand on the legs and the right one on the winds, I sliced the knife into its neck.

The chicken gave the best fight it could, blood gushed from the snapped neck and jettisoned about a meter into the air as if it was all this time waiting to escape. I pinned it down and waited till all its palpitations and wriggles died.

I still see the look the chicken gave me as I carried it to its death, I was sure I quit eating meat after that encounter. It was a haunting experience. I sat and thought and thought of what humans do to creatures. Yanking fish out of the waters, denying it of air then slicing the asphyxiated beings into fillets.

Things have to die for us to live

It was wrong. I am saying was. I was young and foolish. I gave the chicken back and went to play, when dinner was served, I had forgotten about the chicken until halfway through the meal. I was holding its bone, sweet bone, I did not throw it away or freak out, I crushed the bone and separated the bone from the marrow and enjoyed the feeling of smoking the sweet gooey marrow and funneling it down my alimentary canal.

Fast forward to 2015, I was at a hotel high in the rainy highlands of Shanxi, dinner was served. I did the usual trick sampled all dishes to triangulate and zoom in on the finest dish.

I found one. It was a full platter of grilled brown meat…golden brown. The meat was so delicious, I can safely declare it as the best meat I have had in all my stay in China. Right amount of salt, not too hard, not too soft. Not gamey and if at all it was as a result of spice then that spice is one to be hoarded or copyrighted.

I kept on pushing the rotating table around so that the meat should pass by me as frequently as possible, my whole attention was on it.

‘This meat is wow, what meat is this?’

I am a foodie, so what? 

I asked my Italian-Canadian buddy who asked the waiters who told us that the meat was actually wild mountain rabbit.

Rabbit. One of the cutest species alive. I paused and in that moment went back to the naïve old days of the chicken dilemma.

I had read of a rabbit so rare and only found in China whose numbers are now just around a thousand. I also read on how some Chinese folk love to eat the endangered: Tigers, rare salamanders, Pandas…. Could this be it?

Even if wasn’t that endangered species, what was the rabbit doing before it was caught? Just nibbling on vegetation and making cute faces with its whiskers? They had to yank off its fluffy skin? They had to break its bones and leave it in some hot oven until the bloody carcass turned brown?

I reached form more rabbit. Bit into the meat and closed my eyes as if to direct some sight power to my taste buds. It was still nice. Still hammered it more than the catfish that was begging for attention in the platter or the other special dishes provided.

This hare, or rabbit had to die, to quote comedian Bill Burr, for me to live, and in this case, for me to feel really good.