I Was A Mangshi Mahjong Groupie!

From Kunming, we flew to Mangshi where another younger brother lives, and had lunch (yes, more mijiu) and then went to go play mahjong. One of the things that happens when one’s Chinese host “loosens” up from the host/guest relationship is that the traditional roles emerge, and I was sort of relegated to keeping David’s bank, peeling fruit, and other girl things while smoking and drinking (mijiu) went on for hours and hours, with PLA guys dropping in and out of the game and my Very Conservative Host raking in a haul. Last June he said that he was not good at mahjong, this time he’s a pro.
After they finally finished playing cards (the purpose of which was to sober up from lunch) David’s younger brother (no name, just younger brother) launched one of those Chinese drinking games that made them STUPID, and on the long, winding mountainous road to Tengchong, well, you can imagine...I was so glad it was David and not me who was tossing cookies!
The tropical South is amazing, exotic, with the women wearing Burmese dress, and banana, papaya, mango and coral trees in profusion. We ate baby bees, ant eggs and caterpillars for dinner. The ant eggs provoked an allergic reaction for David, just like shellfish. (This trip is rather hard on David). Mangshi has a funky feel, like Key West , the Bahamas and Jamaica, and I really thought we needed to be hearing Jimmy Buffet music as we were driving through. We crossed the Salween river, and I got the WW2 lecture from David, another WW2 fanatic, about the fierce battles that happened during what my host refers to as the Anti-Japanese War.

We visited a wetlands area in Tengchong, the Chinese execution of which is to slap on a pair of muck boots and wander through the floating marshes. Lots of glee from David and Zhao, who had never participated in this activity before, and I provided great entertainment (no mijiu this time) by falling in and struggling out...and if you can imagine a bottom-heavy foreign woman trying to get off of a big wet marshmallow, you can laugh along with the hundreds of visitors who were watching and filming. This geothermal land of hot springs and dormant volcanoes is reputed to have a tree-climbing fish, but as with so many of China’s native species, it may as well be a myth for all that anyone has seen of it in the last 60 or so years.