Julia Benton

A woman selling firecrackers in Dengguan. Legend has it that long ago there was a terrible monster who ate people and their livestock on New Years. It was discovered that he was afraid of loud noises and the color red. At midnight on New Years eve, these things are used to frighten away the monster for the whole year. In the following weeks, it’s common to see kids celebrate by lighting firecrackers and throwing them one-by-one on to the street. Mini hand-held rocket launchers that launch 10 or 20 small fireworks are also popular with unsupervised children.

The third day of the New Year is designated for respecting the dead and decorating tombs. The two mounds are tombs and it’s common to see them on mountains in the countryside in small groups together. The red paper is residue from firecrackers and the shiny flower-like things are decorations that were sold in the nearby town.

I came back home for a few days over the New Year and my town was completely deserted. I knew people were nearby though because I could hear them setting off celebratory fireworks for three days straight.

I took the train two days before Chinese New Year and the station was packed. Luckily I booked my ticket right at 12 a.m. 60 days in advance when they first went on sale. I had a bed for my 14 hour train ride instead of a standing ticket like I had when I traveled last year.

Kunming convenience stores.

Yunnan province is known for its diversity and large Chinese ethnic minority population. 38% of the province’s population are Chinese minorities. The woman on the right is wearing a costume and maybe just finished selling handicrafts to Han Chinese tourists. I think this woman is Yi.

Kunming is a somewhat popular tourist destination and the other volunteers who I was at camp with and I were very excited to find a donut store. The donuts themselves were also very exciting to look at.

I spent the following week in Kunming, Yunnan taking Chinese classes.

All of the Peace Corps volunteers spent two weeks in Chengdu for training. We took Chinese and TEFL classes and had sessions on other topics like secondary projects, religion in China, and photography (I led those three!) We were so busy in classes all day that I only took one set of photos the entire two weeks. On our last night we had a “talent show” and pizza party. A lot of volunteers had especially interesting talents – here’s Haneen playing the guzheng, a traditional Chinese instrument that is played by plucking the strings. She has been learning how to play it for the past few months.

The next day my host family and a few other families went to enjoy nature at a park with a playground.  It seems to be one of the most exclusive parks in the city and my host family says they are lucky to have gotten a yearly membership pass. The park is about an hour drive from their apartment and we’ve gone together a few times before. Today was a sunny Sunday and the sheer amount of people and noise here was crazy. Families who had set up tables, tents, and blankets all over the fake grass were drowned out by the noise of passing cars on the highway overpass above.

After saying goodbye to my student, I went to spend the weekend with my Chengdu host family. It was nice being back at Sichuan Normal University where I had trained when I first came to China. While host sister Lillian (not to be confused with student Lillian) went to her piano class on the university campus I walked around a little. I was surprised that so much development and construction had happened in less than two years.

Lillian, one of my best student friends, invited me to spend a few days with her family in Chengdu, in an area of the city that I hadn’t spent time in before. We went out for chuan chuan one night. I think it tastes very similar to hot pot and mao cai except the vegetables and meat are on skewers.

A woman farming through the trees.

I finished classes around the second week of January and had a few free days before I started traveling. My wonderful Peace Corps sitemate Kyle, who had to leave China early, came to visit for the day to say goodbye and we discovered a great new hike. For the past year I had been going on walks in the countryside, wandering aimlessly trying to find a route that would go down to Dengguan and then loop back to my school through the farms. We finally found it!

The month of December was depressing, not just because it was cold, but also because the sky was gray from air pollution almost every single day. It is the worst feeling going outside and never seeing the sun. The smog is especially bad in winter due to an accumulation of fine particles from burning wood and coal, car emissions, etc. I took a picture of the sky from my balcony most afternoons in December. The numbers are the Air Quality Index sourced from the World Air Quality Index. To put it in perspective, southern California which has the worst pollution in America has bad air days around 90. It has been found that emissions from China cross the Pacific Ocean and contribute to air pollution in the Western United States.

A man brushes oil onto skewers of meat. The skewers will be dipped into spices, including cumin, Chinese five-spice powder, and spicy pepper flakes and then grilled. BBQ is a popular street food here and people like to eat it as a late night snack.

A family sitting in front of their house after lunch time. They live on my favorite bike path and this is the third time that I’ve seen them all gathered outside. Mom is camera-shy, the kids are indifferent, but grandma and grandpa get very excited.

A pretty goat sitting on ferns, tied to a tree.

A primary colored scene across the street from the main bus station in Zigong. The big advertisement is for a new apartment complex, blue signs point to a hotel up the street, and red letters announce that the local hospital is nearby.

I’m still struggling to relax and just accept it when I see something that doesn’t make sense to me. In this picture, a man has collected branches to make a small bucket fire on the sidewalk of a busy street. Two women read newspapers while standing nearby and a boy plays with a stick. 

On New Year’s Eve at the Yibin College track, students release lanterns to bring good luck in the future.

Here’s a dead dog for sale at the market in Yibin. According to traditional Chinese medicine, dog meat will keep you warm in the winter. Since I’ve been here, people (and news articles) have tried to convince me that dogs are only eaten by a small percentage of people in the southern areas in China like Guangdong, Yunnan, and Guangxi – provinces with eccentric food traditions and large ethnic minority populations. However, it seems pretty apparent that the consumption of dog meat is a relatively normal thing in Sichuan as well. It seems like eating dog meat is much more popular with the older generations and many of my students see dogs as pets and friends. I’m pretty sure that these dogs didn’t come from a large dog meat farm, rather they were stray dogs.

Students practice popping which is a surprisingly popular dance style here.  I didn’t know what anyone was talking about when I was first told that people were popping. It turns out it’s a robot-like breakdance that originated in the Bay Area in the 60s. A lot of college boys like to play the guitar and pop dance and the girls like to learn K-pop dances.

The smog has been terrible lately and is the worst on winter mornings. The media reports on especially bad days in Beijing, but they fail to mention that the rest of the country is also grey almost every single day. I think in the past two months we’ve had only one blue sky day.

Reilly’s college is called Yangtze Normal University and she lives on the new campus outside of Fuling, Chongqing. It’s the school that Peace Corps’ volunteer Peter Hessler wrote about in his book River Town. It was so fun visiting her and getting to explore the campus! They have a big art building that we wandered through. I snuck into this clay class where students were making replicas of the Crouching Venus sculpture. The classroom had a few Crouching Venuses on tables, work stations for maybe 30 students, and red space heaters scattered around it.

A mini park layout found in a classroom. These are really common to see because new things are constantly being built.

Wulong’s Fairy Mountain is a few hours outside of Fuling so we took a day trip there. The karst mountain landscape was beautiful. We walked along a paved path amongst photo-happy tour groups and later took a snack break on a big fake rock. Here, the group is looking at an outline of a mountain that resembles a dragon.

A boy enjoys a snack while hanging outside the window of a mini bus-van.

I went to go visit one of my Peace Corps’ friends who lives in a smaller city about two hours outside of Chongqing. I took a bus from Dengguan to Zigong, to Chongqing, to another bus station in Chongqing, to Fuling, and then to her school’s campus. It was my first time in Chongqing and I got so lost navigating from the bus station I got dropped off at to the bus station with buses going to Fuling. When I arrived in Chongqing, I asked many people which bus would take me to the next bus station I had to go to. It turned out that no one actually knew, but still tried to help me, and so I spent a full day riding buses aimlessly back and forth all over the city. Chongqing is a megacity with 30 million people, so getting lost was a big deal and this was one of the most stressful days I’ve had. I get lost almost every time I go anywhere new because there aren’t perfect maps or apps and no one knows where things are because most aren’t traveling for leisure like me.

Stalks of bamboo tied together outside of the school.

Hanging meats and spicy pork sausages become more common to see in the wintertime. Sausage is a traditional food to eat during the Chinese New Year reunion dinner and some are prepared and left up to hang months in advance. For the special dinner, families get together to celebrate, usually at the most senior family member’s home. Many of the traditional dishes symbolize good things for the new year like good fortune and prosperity and are reserved for special occasions like this.

A duck in a shopping basket at the market.

There are two elementary schools down the street from my campus. This is the better-looking one that is about 5 minutes away. It is separated from farmland on all sides by a brick wall.

Men wrangle giant balloons that will be used to advertise the opening of a new bakery in Zigong. The color red symbolizes good fortune and joy.

The son of one of my best friends here is excited for our fancy hot pot lunch. He loves reading and Cecily likes to buy hard-to-find kids books for him online. They have the Chinese language versions of The Magic School Bus, Berenstain Bears, and Richard Scarry’s Busytown books.

When I first moved here I thought this poster on the side of a building in Dengguan was just another advertisement. After my reading improved, I realized it was a one-child policy propaganda poster: “Mother only gave birth to me.” I don’t completely understand the exact meaning of the words on the side bars, but it translates to “stabilize low birth level, develop villager autonomy.” They need to update this poster now that China has established a new two-child policy. The consensus about the new policy amongst most students who I have talked to is that the new policy is very good. The old policy was also very good. The government has made good policy decisions for them. Many people want to have two children, though they are worried that they might not be able to afford it.

Students put on a performance of Tibetan dances in the rain. Plastic stools had been set up around the makeshift stage and onlookers in the back stood on top of them to see past the umbrellas.

Every Tuesday after I finish teaching my classes at the Zigong campus, Matthew and I host an ultimate frisbee club. The same group of students comes every week and it has been really fun playing with them. None of them had ever touched a frisbee before and many thought that frisbee was just a game that people in movies played with their dogs. Here Matthew is blocking Ryan and Phyllis.

The busy Dengguan street on a rainy day. From left to right, a truck carrying stones, the school bus, two vans that drive people back and forth between the small towns, two people wearing ponchos on a motorbike, the man who sells tasty peanut snacks under an umbrella on Fridays, and the mail truck.

I’ve been working on a “pictures of the grey sky” photo project and have been spending a lot of time lately on my balcony looking out the window. This is the view looking down from my balcony.

On Tuesday nights, I lead the university’s English Corner for an hour and a half outside of the school library. It is open to students from all majors to have time to chat and practice English. It is usually the same 40 or so students and a handful of newcomers each week. For the final English Corner of the semester, we moved into one of the classrooms and had an English music sing-a-long. I have enjoyed talking with these two students each week and they performed a fantastic rendition of Owl City and Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Good Time.”

The sophomore students are required to take PE classes once a week and they get to choose one sport to play for the entire semester. The sports offered are ping pong, badminton, basketball, soccer, tai chi and aerobic dancing exercises. The classes end up being somewhat divided by gender: only boys choose basketball and soccer and only girls choose tai chi and aerobic dancing exercises. For most of the classes, final grades are determined by the outcome of one game at the end of the semester, but for the tai chi classes, students are graded on the fluidity of their movements and how slow they can move (the longer it takes them to do one routine while still moving, the higher their grade).

The power in my entire town has been going out pretty often lately – at least once every week for a few hours. One time the power went out right before dinner time and I ventured down the street in search of food. The town was almost completely dark. The restaurants had identical candles at every table and people were eating their dinner by candlelight. (The students all said, “so romantic!”) Some of the convenience stores that sell battery powered desk lamps had turned all of them on and customers were given a desk lamp to carry around with them as they shopped.

This street in Dengguan is lined with small tea houses and in the afternoons is filled with men playing mahjong. I like to go on loop walks through the narrow streets.

I’m teaching both freshmen and sophomore oral English this semester and my sophomore class has been more topics based. We just spent a few weeks discussing the environment and now we’re talking about art. All of the students chose a specific kind and/or time period of Chinese art, literature, or music, researched it, made a poster, and prepared a short presentation. I was really hoping that some people would choose more contemporary art, but all 80 students chose traditional arts and crafts. Calligraphy and paper cutting were the most popular. Here, Mandy, Agatha, and Rowling are talking about New Year’s couplets, two line verses that express happy thoughts for the New Year and are used as door decorations.

There is a small street behind the Zigong campus that has rows of cheap restaurants where the students eat most of their meals. The students call this street “gutter oil alley.” Gutter oil is a completely disgusting, food safety problem in China. Chinese food calls for massive amounts of cooking oil and instead of buying normal cooking oil from a market, some street vendors and smaller restaurants will buy black market oil that has been reprocessed from garbage. People will collect oil from restaurant fryers, sewer drains, slaughterhouses, etc., bleach it to make it look normal, and then sell it to these cheap restaurants. Doing this is against the law in China and many of my Chinese friends are horrified by this trend, but using gutter oil is so widespread that people feel like they can’t do anything to change it.

Outside of the bus station in Yibin.

The last week in November was my university’s second annual “Foreign Language and Culture Week.” During the week there was an opening and closing ceremony (below) where students spoke and sang songs in Chinese, English, and Japanese, an English speaking competition, an English singing competition, and an English movie dubbing competition. 

The new head of the English department has been holding so many English speaking competitions this semester (like one every other week) to “get students motivated and excited about learning English.” The students all participate and seem to try very hard, but the same few best students win every single time.

A man on the side of the road in Dengguan had two cages of fancy birds for sale. I had never seen him before so maybe he was a traveling bird seller. People came over to admire and poke at the birds and I’m pretty sure they were being sold as pets.

A girl sleeping on a Zigong city bus between the yellow poles.