Cathy Mo

    I SPENT a memorable holiday in my hometown, Yulin, a prefecture in southwestern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

    I’ve lived away from the region since college, about 30 years ago. Now, when returning home, I find myself lost like a tourist rather than comfortable like a native.

    I’d never imagined, for example, such easy traffic during the Spring Festival rush period — until we hit the road heading west for Yulin on the eve of the Lunar New Year. During the seven hours on a Shenzhen-Yulin coach, we saw fewer and fewer cars after passing Guangzhou and Zhaoqing. It seemed most people had reached home by that time to prepare for the New Year’s Eve dinner and gala.

    At about 2 p.m., our coach was the only vehicle on the large, empty parking lot at an expressway rest area near Yunfu, a Guangdong city bordering Guangxi. The passengers, already starved and frozen, were in deep despair: The normally bustling roadside restaurants were all closed. As a result, most of us had to eat instant noodles bought from a tiny shop for lunch. Twenty minutes later, another coach approached and parked. After waiting to see how passengers from that coach would react when they got off, we happily discovered that it was a Yulin-Shenzhen coach carrying only two passengers! What happened next was amusing enough to be a lifelong memory: Drivers asked the passengers of the two coaches to exchange vehicles, then both coaches took a U-turn! It reminded me of prisoner exchanges between foreign countries sharing a border.

    “You guys are clever,” I said to one of the two drivers of the Yulin coach.

    “It’s the only way for drivers like us who don't want to miss the New Year's Eve dinner back home,” he replied. He explained that drivers of the Yulin-Shenzhen coach were Yulin natives and those of the Shenzhen-Yulin coach were Shenzhen residents.

    Yulin is Guangxi’s third-tier city, with an urban population of 970,000 and a history of more than 1,000 years. The region is known for its ample farm produce like garlic and sugarcane, herbs for making traditional Chinese medicines, and sub-tropical fruits such as long’an. Cement and porcelain products in Beiliu City also are famous. Well-known porcelain tableware with images of Prince William and Princess Kate at last year’s British royal wedding, for example, were made in Beiliu!

    Yulin natives speak a dialect with nine tones. Outsiders say it sounds like Vietnamese, but we locals don’t understand a word of Vietnamese at all. As I wanted to brush up on my dialect during the holiday, I used sentences I remembered when paying my bills at department stores and local markets. But quite beyond my expectations, I always got replies in Putonghua. I later learned that Yulin now has become a region with an increasing number of immigrants, and service staff who are willing to showcase their “service standards,” such as language skills.

    Many farmers still live up to their fame, as I knew 30 years ago. Yulin's rice, chicken and pork taste much more fresh, natural and delicious than what’s sold in big cities. However, more big brands are found in department stores than before. Most of them, and daily necessities, bear a made-in-Guangdong label and are more expensive than in Shenzhen. I bought a power panel for 60 yuan (US$9.45) but the button refused to stand up after the first press.

    I guess it’s a general rule for metropolises to sell substandard industry products to third- and fourth-tier cities while, in return, farmers sell out-of-season produce to urbanites!

    I found that 1 yuan counts much more in Yulin than Shenzhen. One-and-a-half yuan can buy two bunches of vegetables at a supermarket at around 7 p.m. One yuan can take you from the start to the end of a 25-stop bus route.

    My family’s new house is located in a suburban area facing a village. We could hear frequent big bangs of firecrackers on the eve and first day of the Lunar New Year. At first, we enjoyed it very much and took it as adding to the festive atmosphere. But at 5 a.m. on the second day of the New Year, one of my relatives from Shanghai couldn’t bear it anymore. He opened the window of his bedroom on the 10th floor, staring at the fireworks and ready to shout.

    His Yulin father-in-law stopped him. “Don’t interrupt the farmers, they are worshiping the land god at the time fortune-tellers picked for them,” the father-in-law said.

    Curious as the costly products, nosy cabdrivers and booming firecrackers were, I still had a lot to explore in my hometown when I left on the sixth day of the Lunar New Year. I really hope I can stay longer next time.