Qionghai & the village

Qionghai is the 3rd largest city in Hainan province - it has 440,000 people living there. According to a blurb a journalist uncle gave us, they estimate 550,000 ex-Qionghainese live overseas (especially in vietnam, singapore and malaysia). Wow, that''s an interesting stat, I think they include the 50++ of us wong's living in sydney too.

Anyway, we left the airport to go to Qionghai. On the way, we stopped at a truckers cafe and had, you guessed, hainanese chicken. I was rather disapointed by this since the chicken was tough but at least the veges were nice. The food prep area was, well, disgusting, so we tried not to look at it. At Qionghai, we stayed at the most posh hotel there, the LongWan International hotel (a 4 star, but expensive relative to Aust [Y1180 = A$200]. Weird setup rooms, they had GLASS bathroom walls - slightly opaque but still risque!

We expected a rest arvo since we were really tired, but this was not to be. After a short rest, we were dragged to the village and what did we see - a banner proclaiming "welcome back Choon Peng Wong"and the WHOLE village + headman lined up to greet us. Papa was so excited to see his old house that he was practically incomprehensible - running around proclaiming this fact or some other fact, not letting us see and absorb the sights and history. Here was great Cheow Kengs bedroom, here's the inner sanctum, here's the bathroom, here's the gunports on the surrounding walls, here is the original original house etc etc.
Uncle Yue brought fireworks and ignited them ...when we weren't there. What a sight and sound show! We tried to video/photo it but too many bits were flying around (including part of the floor - concrete chips as missles?).
Many photos plus a speech and more photos. In all, we only spent about 1.5hrs there. Quite annoying. Jen & I tried to make a map, but Papa kept telling us he had one already (which I haven't seen, so I made the assumption he lost it :-). It's obvious that they did a major cleanup before we arrived as the headman spoke to papa and asked for donations to repair the road into the village :-). Not to mention the geese/duck farm inside was too clean :-)
Jen saw a strange butterfly which landed in her hair - the villages ooed and aahhhed over it since it was the largest butterfly they ever saw. Papa thought this might be an approval from the ancestors for us and we all took this as a good sign..
Later we went to the river, papa mentioned that things seemed to have changed a bit. We tried to get a cute village boy for a photo but he was too shy. Biffa had his share of photos too, and even tried to drive a cute tractor/truck thingy.

Trying to rush us away, uncle finally ushered us to the van for a drive to great-great-great-grandmothers grave - this was surrounded by a pineapple field - very peaceful until the fireworks were brought out. Mark almost got exploded by us since he video'd it from, well, maybe TOO close and from hiding behind a tiny vase!!!
It's interesting to note the burial customs here - they bury people EVERYWHERE in large conical mounds with a smoke urn on top. Richer folk have stones or even stiles in front. GGGGM even had a burial marker ( a big stone carved pole). We saw these mounds everywhere in Qionghai.

Finally, exhausted us drove back to Qionghai town where we visted uncle's home - it's an old shop converted into a house - the street was under repairs and was blocked off - yet motorbikes ignored the sign, dodged the earthmover (while under operation!!) and barely missed the kids playing on the dirt. More chaos I guess. Dinner was yet again HCR (Hainanese Chicken Rice) plus a really nice pork dish. Uncle's family were quite shy, the oldest girl knew some english from school but couldn't really converse.
By the way, Hainan is a special admin zone, so families here are allowed to have more than 1 child. If your first is a girl, you can try for more kids till you have a son. Nice scheme eh, helps balance the male/female ratio issue china has.

We wanted to go shopping but were so tired it was lights out at the hotel that night.