Reporter's log: An alternative vision of village life thousands of miles from home

I left Beijing for Guizhou province at the start of August thinking about a Gaelic football match. It's one of Ireland's national sports, a mixture of rugby and association football played at home and in Irish emigrant communities.

The county I'm from, Donegal on Ireland's northwest coast, was playing Mayo in a de facto All-Ireland quarterfinal that day. Before booking flights, I checked to see I'd be in Guizhou in time to watch it online and made sure my streaming subscription was up to date.

After a few hours' flight, I landed in a rural airport that reminded me of Donegal's. No need for a shuttle bus to make it from the runway. The single terminal, a timeworn structure not two minutes' walk from where the plane landed, was flanked by mountains and looked like it'd been left there by mistake. But it did feature a single baggage carousel, something we're yet to get in Donegal.

After checking into a hotel half-an-hour from the airport, I went for dinner with China Daily reporters and members of the local Party committee. I discovered I'm a tofu fan, something that for whatever reason I'd never tried back home. I enjoyed its fundamental absurdity. Though it's a jelly, it's more meat substitute than dessert. It went particularly well with the self-made soy sauce-ginger-lime-and-chilli dip that was to become a staple of my trip.

Donegal lost the game. The county, considered among Ireland's most disadvantaged and isolated, is forgotten by the places in Ireland where power is concentrated and decisions are made. The football team gives Donegal people the chance to let the rest of the country know it's still there. After this loss, they would be forgotten again.

The next day, I visited the village of Yaoshang. The enclave is home to about 2,500, a little more than my hometown, sunken in the middle of Guizhou's undulating mountains. As one of China's most remote villages, Yaoshang was once a punchline for parents elsewhere in the province: Behave, or I'll send you to Yaoshang.

I arrived at a guesthouse in the village for lunch. After making and eating fairy tofu, a local variation made from the leaves of a vervain family plant, I sat outside on the main drag in the sun. Small shops selling sweets and cigarettes and clothes, the essentials, lined the dusty street.

They were yet to reopen after the village's lunch break. Shopkeepers sat outside on straw chairs, chatting with their neighbors. In the guesthouse behind me, groups of men and women formed around tables where food was brought and eaten.

Waiters took plates back to the kitchen but the groups sat on, talking with each other as the day ambled. A horse-drawn cart passed by, the only traffic I saw. Across the street, children and their elders gathered for a Gelao puppet show, an ethnic tradition villagers have passed down over the course of their 600-year history. It was a community where people weren't forgetting.

eoghannorrismcneill@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 09/30/2019 page18)