Exciting Tombs

“Happy Easter!” I say to the deskie in my dorm. (Of course, I didn’t really say “happy Easter,” but rather the Chinese equivalent.) “Happy what?” And the conversation continued, just as it had with every other Chinese person I had talked to that day. “Easter.” “Oh, we don’t have that holiday.”

 

It was a neat opportunity to share with a variety of Chinese what this random holiday that they know Americans celebrate is actually all about. One day, I certainly hope they stop saying that they don’t have that holiday. I hope they realize it’s the most important holiday of them all, and it’s for them, too.

 

But the Chinese have a different holiday (completely unrelated in the Chinese mind except in time of year). A week ago, they celebrated “Tomb-sweeping Day,” as it has been translated. The literal translation is actually “clear & bright holiday,” but that doesn’t help us poor foreigners understand anything about the day, so Tomb-sweeping Day is a more convenient name. Traditionally, it’s a day to pay respects to the dead. Nowadays, while they still do that, it seems to also be a sort of national Spring Cleaning Day. Haha! But hey, three days off is three days off… except, of course, when you’re in China and they consider a Saturday-Sunday-Monday holiday to be three days off. Let’s be realistic here, that’s only one day out of class!

 

Figuring I should probably honor this my first experience of Tomb-Sweeping Day in some way, but having no dead relatives buried here in China to go visit, I decided to go to the park. The park does happen to be for a dead person – some important person from the Qing dynasty, although he never actually was the emperor. And that important person (who’s name I can’t remember at the moment… obviously, he was very dear to my heart) is buried in a huge tomb in the park, with impressive buildings and walls around the area. The main part of the park costs 6 kuai to get in (about a dollar); the tomb area, with the walls, buildings, and a big mound of dirt that is supposedly his tomb, costs an extra 30 kuai. Clearly, the main part of the park was all the more I needed to see… but Chinese will be Chinese.  The first day I went, I was with a Chinese friend. He wanted to make sure I saw the “highlight” of the park, which happens to be that large mound of dirt, so I had to pay the extra 30 kuai. Convenient.

 

That’s why the second and third times I went to the same park during our three day holiday I went with foreigners. They had enough sense to not pay 5 bucks for a mound of dirt.

 

The most entertaining trip, though, had to have been the last one. We were just hanging out in the park in the evening, after dinner. In fact, my trips got cheaper each time, because the last time we didn’t go until after 6 p.m., so the 6 kuai part was actually free. Woot! But yeah, we were just hanging out, talking, wandering around the largest non-built-up, relatively natural looking area of land for kilometers. (Wow, that just doesn’t sound the same to say “kilometers” there instead of “miles.”) What we didn’t know… oops… was that the park actually closes, and the gates lock, at 10 p.m. Hehe. We happened to still be inside at that point, and no where near the gates to realize that they were being locked. Yeah, it was quite the surprise when we finally decided we were cold and ready to go home and… we couldn’t get out.

 

Climbing over the wall seemed like a good idea at first, but then we realized how high and smooth the walls were, making them superbly difficult to climb.  So we wandered around a bit to see if there might be another gate. That didn’t work either; we just got lost. (It’s actually a surprisingly big park.) Thankfully, in our wanderings we happened upon another lost soul, so we stopped him and asked how we could get out. He pointed us to the security office, but said he couldn’t go with us. What that gentleman was doing there that he didn’t want the security guys to know about, I have no idea. I’m just grateful he was there to assist us.

 

Sure enough, the security office had guards inside. They were surprised when someone knocked on the door inside the park, and then were even more surprised when it was foreigners knocking. They weren’t particularly thrilled to see us, but we just threw in a nice 不好意思！(I’m embarrassed), which is the most amazing phrase in all of Chinese. If said with the right facial expressions, this phrase can get a foreigner out of just about any potentially bad situation.

 

And it worked that night. They let us walk through the office to the outside world, and we were home-free. Whew.