China 2001: Butler University/Freeman Foundation Student-Faculty Fieldwork Trip
Modified 29 June 2001
Today we had a day trip to Songkou, a city in Meixian (one of the seven counties of Meizhou). Songkou is about 50 kilometers away from Meizhou City, and was a flourishing port on the Mei River that historically used to flow through Chaozhou and ultimately out to the Pacific. Many overseas Chinese who emigrated during the late Qing dynasty and Republican period may have started their journey in Songkou on a riverboat. The old city streets of Songkou still show evidence of this former role, and there are many overseas Chinese who still maintain ties to this area in Mei County. But today I wanted to talk about what the students have experienced in doing their fieldwork here in Meizhou. As you can see from the picture, there is a certain social procedure that needs to be followed in order to conduct research in a particular place. Pictured on the right are the students sitting in a reception room at a local township government office near Songkou. China is still a Communist country, and for a foreign group to visit or do research in a particular place, local government offices must approve their trip. Before we visit a site, we usually have to stop by a local government office and explain to them what we are doing (many times, this has been done "behind the scenes" by our host, Prof. Fang Xuejia). The students have learned a lot just from interacting with local government and party leaders as we visit a particular site.
Because local cadres are involved when we visit a particular place, this means that we also have to follow certain "secular rituals." One of these involves drinking enormous amounts of tea! At the local government offices, we drink tea with the cadres as we explain who we are and why we want to visit a particular area, and as they introduce us to the area. At each stop that we make, we also have to sit down with people to drink tea -- not to do so would be rude. In this particular village, we visited a senior center on our way to see some ancestral halls and weilong wu, traditional Hakka homes. Pictured on the right are the students having tea with some of the members of the senior center. Drinking so much tea also means that the students have been exposed to local bathrooms throughout rural China!