Shantou Village – Surprise Visit – Back to Xiamen
The visit to my grandma’s home village turned out to be a heartwarming experience. Her son’s place was small, dark and filthy. My 70ish-year-old uncle is a man of few words, and mostly just smiled as he listened to my mom chat with my other cousins. My cousin told me her Dad grew up with many hardships as he became somewhat an orphan after my grandma left for Singapore when her husband passed on. They are farmers, and he goes out to tend to his oxen every day still. His neighbours teased him that he was better dressed (covered with an unbuttoned shirt and sandals) that day. Heh.
Mom chatted with them over cups of Chinese tea and dozens of lychees (in season now!) while I listened and be the unofficial photographer. Pretty routine life it seems – tending to the fields when the sun rises (about 4.30am onwards in summer), taking afternoon breaks when it gets too hot to work, and back to plowing and harvesting until dinner time. There’s TV in the more modern and bigger houses of my uncle’s kids, and a couple of provision shops (one has a billiards table) where neighbours gather.
After a day at the relatives’, we headed back to town for dinner – yummy lamb steamboat – before calling it a night.
By divine providence, a relative of our relative happens to be visiting the village those two days and was heading back to Xiamen the same day as us. We arranged to take his SUV back to Xiamen for the same price as the adventurous coach ride (RMB200 per pax). Not only that, he brought us through another route (non-expressway) where we went through other towns and saw more sights. And because of this, mom and aunt managed to pay a short visit to an auntie, who helped my mom at her stall when she was staying at her son’s place in Singapore for a short period of time! It was an unplanned visit, which was not thought possible as we didn’t know if and how we would be passing by her place. It is to their pleasant surprise that we made this stop (but later to my slight dismal as seen by the huge suitcase below, containing 6 1.5l of bottled honey and pi pa gao and tea etc that I have to lug around through HK back to SG... see the tape that is around my mom's arm? Thank God they gave us that roll!).
Finishing off the China leg of our journey is a well-deserved meal at a restaurant near our hotel. Looking forward to the next leg in Hong Kong!
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