Yingkou and Lei Feng

Herman Guerrero, back when we chatted around CNMICH board meetings, once commented that when I write reflections on education, I wear my pedagogical hat ’cause I use too many three-syllable words, forcing interested readers to grab the thick book, training folks to check their seldom used dictionaries!

We mean to point beyond the dictionary today to the atlas. Maps papered my walls at San Vicente Elementary School. Ditto here at the Shenyang Aerospace University. Creatures of the timeline in Western education, relying on the historical process in our thoughts, with the language grammatical tense following the past, present and future, we note that maps do the same with space. Cartographers flourish in the East as historians do in the West. The feng shui in China serves as a good example. It captures experience in situ, and organizes the same for order, aesthetic, and good fortune.

Now, I am inviting readers to locate Yingkou on the map. Space is the medium of reference in the east, devoid of tense distinction. In Putunghua, “I go” today, yesterday, and tomorrow, is perfectly normal, as “where” is the object of interest, rather than “when,” the focus in London and Chicago.

Yingkou is in the province of Liaoning, by the mouth of the Liaohe (Liao river) on Dong Bei, the northeast corner of China, about 100 miles from Shenyang. We went there over the weekend after our dream trip to Tahrir Square got canceled, for the warmer weather since the location is advertised as “not hot in the summer, nor cold in the winter; warm in spring and cool in autumn.” We did not anticipate the freak snowstorm that is wreaking havoc across a world still on denial about climate change.

Our interest in the magnesium capital of China is in its ancient history, its status in China’s industrialization, and its role in the maritime trade of the region.

Yingkou is host to a paleontological find that is reputedly 280,000 years old, though that hardly stirs a ripple among the populace. Archaeological discoveries tend to delight bespectacled archivists in the museum more than the mi xian noodle soup slurping taxi drivers eking out subsistence living.

Old Yingkou is at the bend of a delta plain by the river clearly seen as architecturally unsound by urban engineers for high rises. The city expanded outward rather than grow concentrically from downtown. The old location away from the shore made sense when Dong Bei defended itself from marauding Wokou (Japanese pirates) that raided Bohai’s shores. It became an international port with European architecture after the West humiliated the Qing Dynasty in the Treaty of Tianjin of 1864.

Its post-World War II train station still stand, though rapid traffic is now in its satellite cities. Noticeable to us in Liaohe Square is the old Catholic cathedral still holding Mass for the remaining faithful led by convent sisters while also running a residential social service for the elderly. The care for China’s elderly poses as this decade’s internal contradiction.

There are only two trains from Yingkou to Shenyang per day while the new satellite city of Dashiqiao has an on-the-hour-every-hour schedule, including the CH series that traverses the distance between warm Dalian south and icy city of Harbin in the north. Our returning train was from Yingkou to Tumen in Yanbian (Korea in China) reminiscent of the connection when the Korean Gogoryo Empire extended to Bohai.

The new housing developments are going vertical like the rest of the urban world. Ironically, it is the capitalist investments in these units that is collectivizing what the horizontally spread agrarian settlements could not thoroughly accomplish, thus a fertile ground for the communist overlay on China’s traditional communalism.

Old Yingkou is the administrative center. Downtown real estate did not skyrocket with the city expanding outward so the potential of its remaining a cultural center is high; with the CCP Presidium’s current policy shift on things cultural, this could only be an advantage.

We parked ourselves at a hotel a block away from the old rail station, fronted prominently by the statue of the 22-year-old PLA soldier Lei Feng, made an icon by Mao Tse Tong in promoting the image of the soldier as an altruistic doer (like the U.S. Seabee) rather than the mean and lean killing machine of recent vintage. In fact, Feng was struck by an electric pole while backing up a vehicle, his selflessness celebrated in his life rather than in his death. In contrast, our Hollywood gung-ho is the grunt beckoning comrades to step over his body flung on the barbwires of Tarawa!

China’s soul is in commerce, for better or worse. Chinese villages revolve around their Nong Mao Shi Chang, the public market, unfortunately being replaced by the malls of the urban centers. Gives us pause: on the local, what’s our Sabalu market story? Further, should we not egg Jerry Tan’s Saipan Air to look beyond Japan to Korea, and Yanbian/Dong Bei?

Now, should Herman Jr. (one of my SVES ex-students) be reading this piece, I trust he bothered to reach for the atlas and the dictionary for today’s geography and English lessons!

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Jaime R. Vergara (jrvergarajr2031@aol.com) is a former PSS teacher and is currently writing from the campus of Shenyang
Aerospace University in China.