Delve a Little Deeper

“It’s hard to find countries that are really exciting, you have to go out of the big cities; you have to delve even deeper”

If you want to learn about a culture, leave the city, journey to a remote village, and learn what there is to know. Vera, whose adventures as an embassy worker I have been recording for the past couple weeks, traveled to remote parts of Asia and discovered life beyond cities and cars and fast food chains and was exposed to a way of life she had never expected to find.

            “No matter where you go there’s a McDonald’s,” said Vera, commenting on the loss of culture in countries around the world. But in a small village (in Asia, for instance), things are different.

At one point in her career, Vera worked at a consulate in Shenyang near the North Korean border. “The only foreigners in town were the people from the [United States] consulate and the Japanese from their consulate,” she said, remarking on the lack of outsiders. Imagine a very small farm village with no cars on the roads where, every time it snowed a little, you and nearly a hundred others went to clean it up. And not with a snow blower… “I was there it was winter and I got up in the morning, my apartment was up on the third floor, and I heard this scraping and wondered ‘where in the world is this scraping coming from?’ and I looked out the window and there must have been a hundred Chinese people down there. It had snowed during the night and they had these little dustpans and they were picking up the snow off the street!” Vera said she “was shocked to see them with dustpans and kitchen brooms.”

Now think about walking into a restaurant the size of an average kitchen where the food is beyond affordable. “They had restaurants that the whole thing was probably as big as this room here and the food was so cheap that we would go to lunch or to dinner and we would just take turns picking up the check for everybody because it was probably about five bucks!”

Can you imagine it? No fast food chains or crowded streets? It seems a whole world apart, doesn’t it? And the irony is, this kind of adventure is not what Vera had envisioned at all when she first started traveling for the U.S. government. At the beginning of her career, all she had wanted was Europe. And yet these small villages were what held some of the greatest appeal to Vera.

When she was working at the consulate in China, Vera and the counsel general’s wife, who was from Taipei, would go traveling to small farm villages on the weekends. There were no restaurants in these villages and their beauty salons were barber chairs set up outdoors when the weather permitted. “[We’d] go into people’s homes and have tea with them,” she recounted, commenting on her ability to mix with native people. Vera could not speak Chinese, so she would simply smile while the Consul General’s wife spoke with the people. Afterwards Vera would listen to her retell the stories. The hosts “would talk about family, crops, et cetera. Nothing political, of course. But just observing things can reveal a lot.” Vera had a talent for being able to mix in with any culture. Well, nearly any culture. As we will see, this was not always the case…

            My name is Jillian DiPersio and I am a sophomore at Windham High School. After learning the stories of my own grandparents, I have been interviewing the elderly. Through my research and interviews I have been able to dig up some incredible bits of history from the lives of local residents, as well as learn about people who are the products of a different generation. If you or someone you know would like to share your stories, please contact me at jillian@dipersio.com.