Rambling around my ancestral Hainan
Chapter 13: Revisiting Haikou City
Continuing on my second trip in 2011, I drag my luggage to the KFC restaurant across the road for a quick breakfast before proceeding to the bus station. Near the station are some male and female lobbyists shouting destinations like Dongfang, Haikou, and Shilu to each passing pedestrian. They are offering shared cabs to these populous towns.
When I mention Haikou, one driver informs me his terminus: Haikou West Bus Station, Xiuying. His fare is 30 RMB. As it is only slightly more expensive than a bus ticket, I readily accept, and I am ushered into his vehicle.
Three passengers are waiting impatiently for a fourth; they are glad to be finally departing. I share the back seat with two middle-aged ladies, who are conversing with each other and the driver in Mandarin. An elderly gentleman is occupying the front seat. Catching this cab at ten-thirty will give me more time to shop in Haikou.
Cruising smoothly along G98 for fifty minutes, the taxi stops for fifteen minutes to queue and fill up at a petrol station. Because most cabs rely on cheaper natural gas, we get out as a safety precaution and wait. Many other passengers are waiting too. When our car is ready, we leave. Two or three minutes later, a road sign states the distance to Haikou: 46 km. At eleven-forty, we are twenty kilometres from Haikou. Another twenty minutes later, we reach Xiuying Bus Terminal. The cab driver is honest, collecting the 30 RMB owed to him and not demanding more.
At the station, another cab driver carrying a passenger enquires if I wish to share his cab. He quotes 12 RMB for my destination. The man with two cartons of beer gets off at Xiuying Barbette (Paotal). When we reach Longquan Hotel, I hand over the agreed sum.
To my disgust, the non-local driver asks for 20 RMB, claiming that it is a long distance. He is one of the few unscrupulous Chinese who ruin the reputation of other Chinese and Hainan. Such shameless greed of some errant cab drivers from many ethnic groups throughout the world, including Australia, is a bane of travellers and residents. They contribute to the commonly-held adverse stereotypes of their ethnic groups and nations.
Nangang (South Port) ferries crossing Qiongzhou Strait
Despite its name, Nangang (南港; South Port) is located twenty kilometres west of Haikou downtown. It is the place where I hope to see the loading and unloading of motor vehicles and train carriages by ferries plying the Nangang-Hai’an route.
Arriving from the port of Hai’an at the southern tip of Guangdong’s Leizhou Peninsula, a ferry will discharge its freight at Nangang. Originating thirteen or fourteen hours earlier from Guangzhou, the train carriages will inch to their first stop - the Haikou (Hainan-Guangdong) Railway Station at Xinhaixiang - to pick up passengers and then continue three hundred kilometres along the west coast to terminate at Sanya. Similarly, the trains from Sanya will make their way to Guangzhou via the same route.
Sun Yat-sen should be happy. The implementation of this project was the fruition of his dream, sketched a century earlier. The first railway-ferry service was inaugurated in January 2003 by Vice-Premier Wu Bangguo. Departing Hai’an, a ferry carrying a locomotive, two freight train carriages, and some trucks arrived at Nangang after fifty minutes. In September 2005, cross-strait tourist service began. Two kilometres southeast of Nangang, the Xinhaixiang railway station handled more than sixty thousand passengers monthly.
Fortunately for me, my hotel bus stand is on the Bus No. 40 route, which ends at the Xinhaixiang railway station. The bus is air-conditioned and half full. Because no change will be given, I extract the exact fare – four 1-RMB notes – from my wallet and slip them into the collection box. Travelling west along Haixiu Road, the bus turns into Changyi Road, and then scenic Binhai Avenue. The Binhai six-lane coastal highway impresses me. Running parallel to the straight northwestern shore, it is new, clean, and light in traffic. Sandwiched between the road and the beach is a long strip of parkway that has been prudently tended by the authorities. Their foresight is admirable, and I am immensely proud of their good work in rejuvenating the island that was once my home.
On my right, Holiday Beachside Resort nestles among dense rows of green coconut palms. My quick fleeting glance reveals the presence of eleven or twelve persons walking in the open ground or sitting around the tables, enjoying the morning breeze that also brings a fine saltish mist. Surprisingly to me, a black or dark-green canon, pivoted on the axle with two wheels, targets the sea. An incongruous sight, that relic in the midst of modern serenity is an implicit reminder of the gruesome war fought on this beach.
“Is that a real cannon used against the Japanese invaders during the Second World War?” I briefly ponder.
Slender trees about three metres tall are blossoming with clusters of white flowers; brown-coloured chalets with dried coconut leaf-thatched roofs blend with the beach sand. HNA Beach & Spa Resort is a collection of stately white buildings protected behind a security wall.
Next door is Haikou Sheraton. More constructions are imminent, which will convert this part of Haikou outskirt into upmarket residential blocks and low-rise townhouses. A townhouse here with a seventy-year lease should sell for at least a million yuan (about $200,000).
A kilometre or so before the bus terminates, a large field appears; a few white egrets are feeding near some relaxing cows. I resist the temptation of getting off to watch them; they would instantly fly off upon my unsolicited intrusion.
Located between Binhai Avenue and Yuehai Avenue, the train station shows signs of recent construction. About a hundred metres in length, its front building is architecturally modern. Its light-grey walls and grey-tiled roof are clean, without stains of ugly pigeon droppings. Indeed, no pigeon is flying or roosting; neither are there any house swifts. HAI KOU: the huge words in red between their two Chinese characters proudly declare, in brief, the name of this station.
Laid with light-brown road tiles, the car park is spacious – about a hundred metres in length and also in breadth; yet its occupants are only four buses, six or seven trishaws, and some motorcycles for hire. Milling around are forty or fifty people, some of whom are passengers who have just arrived in a bus. The open space should afford a sense of freedom to the residents, I mutter to myself. Awaken from her siesta by my footsteps, an unchained recumbent brown cow on the grassy ground nearby struggles to open her drowsy eyes to look at me.
I enter the front building. It has two levels, the second level being occupied by offices while the ground level is a huge spacious open-air hall with three convenient stores, the Ticket Office, China Unicom, and the Baggage Deposit counter. Besides the security officer, two other persons are in the ticket office. At the baggage deposit counter, a lady client concludes a transaction. The marble floor of the hall is polished and litter-free. Strangely, the station seems deserted; only a handful of people are moving around.
Walking along the corridor to the back building where the railway tracks are, I again see no one. I am surprised. I expect passengers to be milling to board a train. I expect goods to be loaded or unloaded. No staff, no one. There is nothing exciting here, no hustle and bustle to stir my emotion. No chance to photograph the faces and mood of local people.
Although the boarding gate is open and unmanned, I resist entering. I could gain a better view of the two stationary trains by doing so but I could also be arrested for trespassing. Nearer to me is a windowless cargo train that is greyish-brown and drab. Behind it is hidden a more colourful passenger train. I can make out the blue and dull-red colours of its carriages.
I exit and head to the right of these two buildings. There, I secure a better view. While spacious and clean, the two platforms are indeed devoid of people. The newly-transplanted two-metre palms on the nature strip by the platform again tell me that this is a relatively new station, which may boom when more residences are built in this area and more people are affluent and free to leisurely cruise to Guangdong or Sanya.
Back at the car park, I am told by a lady trishaw rider that the port is three kilometres distant by road, and not “near” for walking. Her distance estimation, slightly inaccurate, explains my inability to see any ferries, or train carriages being loaded onto ferries, from this station. Not knowing the way to the Nangang ferry port, I promptly hire her trishaw. The fare is 10 RMB. Along the way, she intends to pick up another passenger, something to which I object since the passenger seat is too short to comfortably accommodate two adults. A few seconds later, I silently regret my selfishness.
Carrying a rucksack, the poor pedestrian will be struggling for the next two kilometres. Near the port entrance is a row of stalls selling food, fruits, and trinkets to our right. But there are no customers. Without even looking at us, a few chickens are strutting aimlessly, occasionally pecking on the ground to retrieve fallen grains or seeds. The road is muddy and wet after a recent rainfall. Three trucks overtake us on our left. Fortunately, no dirty water splashes onto us.
Luck is on my side. I am standing at the car park beside the wharf at one in the early afternoon, a scheduled time. A ferry has just arrived and is discharging its buses and trucks. A convoy of six buses of various colours, obviously from different companies, emerges from the cavernous hull. Then, with the guidance of three port workers, the subsequent drivers carefully reverse their heavy vehicles out.
With huge wheels, some of the trucks are bearing extremely heavy cargoes. One is delivering a shipping container. Another is laden with three huge metal rolls, probably of steel cables or aluminium sheets. A third truck is overloaded with two stacks of small red jeeps and motorcycles. The latter are stacked into the available spaces above the jeeps and in-between them. A fourth truck transports three blue bulky heavy machineries that look like fuel tanks. A fifth is conveying some mysterious cargoes, hidden beneath a tightly-tied padded cloth cover. More buses follow. Monitoring these movements is a thrilling experience.
After half an hour, when the last inbound truck has manoeuvred out, the waiting outbound buses and trucks swiftly slither into the vacuum, an exercise that, surprisingly, takes only fifteen minutes. During the next fifteen minutes, some waiting cars, six-seat tour coaches, and passengers on the elevated road beside an upper floor of the administration building stream to the upper deck.
Some of the passengers, including seven or eight children, casually walk to the stern, above the heavy-vehicle entrance, to revel in perhaps their last sight of Hainan; for, like me, they might be visitors. Or perhaps they might be beginning their tour of the mainland. I turn, my eyes following the rail tracks to the train station. No train.
Across the railway tracks is a low boundary fence five or six metres from me. A small greyish bird flies and perches on its top wire. Although it is small in size and shape and has a short beak, it does not seem to be a sparrow or any bird that I have seen. Its behaviour is unusual: it lifts its tail upwards. I hastily direct my camera towards it. A minute or two, it flies off.
Professor Liang Wei identifies it as a female Oriental Magpie-Robin (Copsychus saularis). Now classified under the Muscicapidae family, Oriental Magpie-Robins are resident in Southeast Asia, India, and southern China. Because of their singing ability, they are being poached. In Singapore, they were common until the nineteen-eighties. They feed on insects and even small lizards.
No train is coming, and no train carriages have been loaded. I ask the last departing worker if any train will be loaded. He tells me to look towards the direction of the train station. I follow his instruction. Impatiently, I position my digital camera before my right eye, ready to click at any approaching carriage. Alas, it is a fruitless effort.
I hear the blast of a horn. I turn around. The ferry is leaving without any train carriages. The employee has mercilessly dropped a prank on me. I stare at the left side of the stern. More people line up to have a last look at Nangang. Some may even be enjoying a last laugh at me. An hour has passed so fast. I have an inexplicable happiness seeing ferries and ships in motion. They may be part of my childhood psyche, related to my first forgotten voyage to Singapore.
Passengers, buses, and trucks are swiftly arriving. I do not want to linger another hour. Like the second cup of hot chocolate, the pleasure may not be as intense. As it is only two in the afternoon, I have enough time left for the day. I decide to take a slow walk back to the train station.
On both sides of the short muddy road are ponds. Two are teeming with ducks, the complementary source of income for the stall-holders who live in huts behind their stalls. Judging by the small number of ferry customers, I suspect that the life of shopkeepers here is hard and frugal. Perhaps their income improves during school holidays. The short road joins Binhai Avenue. I turn right. I have not seen the luckless walker. He should have gone with the departed ferry.
Constructed over the railway line is the Binhai Avenue flyover, which is used exclusively by vehicles, and an adjacent pedestrian bridge. Standing on the bridge, I have the vantage view of half of the surrounding area, the other half being blocked by the slightly higher flyover. Binhai Avenue terminates in a deserted area that is pocked with ponds. (Later, I learn that the expressway was extended to form the Yongqing Avenue East that runs close to the Yingbin Peninsula west coast to Dongshui Harbour.) Half a kilometre off, the train station is now clearly within my visual range.
Nangang train-ferries, taking about an hour and a half to reach Hai’an, form an interim measure for cross-strait transport. In December 2008, the Guangdong and Hainan provincial governments announced their approval for a 26.3-kilometre bridge between Xuwen County in Guangdong’s Zhanjiang City and Chengmai County in Hainan, a work scheduled for commencement in 2012 and completion in 2020. I have not seen any map depicting the specific location of the Hainan terminus. It could be somewhere along the Chengmai Bay shore, west of Nangang.
At a projected cost of twenty billion RMB (US$2.9 billion), the two-level bridge would support a highway and a four-line railway for passenger and freight trains. (In comparison, the construction cost of the 26.7-kilometre Qingdao Haiwan Bridge, opened in June 2011, over Jiaozhou Bay was announced as 10 billion RMB.) With the proposed road and freight train speed limits of one hundred kilometres per hour, a car or freight train would take only twenty minutes to cross Qiongzhou Strait. On a passenger train with a higher speed limit of one hundred and sixty kilometres per hour, the travelling time is even shorter - a mere ten minutes.
Heartened by two decades of sustained economic reforms and construction-sector boom, the central and provincial governments felt confident in early 2010 to agree on an underwater tunnel linking Leizhou Peninsula and Hainan. Proposed in 1994, the project had an estimated cost in 2003 of twenty billion RMB (US$2.41 billion at the exchange rate then). In 2005, the Ministry of Communications held a conference on the project. Over the last decade, the Qiongzhou Strait Tunnel committee had conducted preliminary studies. Feasibility studies and geological surveys are now examining the underlying rock formations at the Qiongzhou Strait’s narrowest point, a distance of about eighteen kilometres. From this basic information, the nearest tunnel entrance and exit are, I surmise, near the vicinity of Nangang and Xuwen, the county directly north of it.
All these expensive ventures signify a China that is highly protective of its Qiongzhou Strait, treating it as its internal water. In its 1958 declaration, the capital used the straight baselines, claiming about 50 miles in length and 9.8 to 19 miles in breadth of territorial sea. In 1964, it excluded foreign military vessels from using the waters. Article 1 stipulates:
“According to the Declaration of the Government of the People's Republic of China concerning the Territorial Waters, the Qiongzhou Strait is an inland sea of China, which is closed to all military vessels of foreign nationality. Non-military vessels of foreign nationality to pass through the Strait must be subject to an application for approval according to the provisions of these Rules.”
Beijing does not tolerate a repeat of the December 1995 humiliation, when the People’s Liberation Army was powerless in the presence of U.S. aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in the Taiwan Strait after an absence of nineteen years. Earlier that year, Taiwan president Lee Ting-hui, promoting an independent-Taiwan policy, had further antagonized Beijing when he successfully obtained a U.S. visa and attended a Cornell University reunion on U.S. soil, prompting mainland missiles being fired into the Taiwan Strait.
Subsequent Sino-U.S. negotiations to manage the visa issue were protracted, and tension escalated, leading the mainland to repeat the show of force in March 1996. Three months later, two U.S. aircraft carriers were positioned close to the Taiwan Strait, again humiliating China. At its narrowest, the strait is about one hundred and sixty kilometres wide. An enemy aircraft carrier sailing through the midpoint is only eighty kilometres from Chinese shores.
Internationalisation of Qiongzhou Strait would empower enemy aircraft carriers, submarines, and other warships to position themselves only thirteen kilometres from Chinese land on either side of the strait. The Qiongzhou Strait Administrative Office was established to administer maritime movements. With both the Guangdong-Hainan Bridge and Qiongzhou Tunnel in place, foreign warships and submarines are not free to navigate without permission from the central or provincial authorities. For any accident or mishap is potentially a casus belli.
Seemingly calm, the water of Qiongzhou Strait was a sea of war and blood when the Communist, Kuomintang, and Japanese crossed to capture and re-capture Hainan over the last century. Although separated from the hinterland, the island was strategic to these contending armies. It will attract increasing attention from the central policy-makers.
With leaping economic and industrial development, Hainan became more reliant on energy and power from the mainland. Eels would have been electrified when three thirty-two kilometres long seabed cables were laid in 2009 linking the power grids of Guangdong (via the Gangcheng transformer substation in Zhanjiang City) with the grids of Hainan (via the Fushan transformer substation in Chengmai County). This was the first cross-sea power grid connection project, which started in February 2007. The cables emerged from the seabed at Linshigang (Linshi Port), about twenty-five kilometres southwest of Nangang.
As I tarry on the pedestrian bridge, staring at the visibly liveless train station, I envisage a Hainan positioning itself for a future as a prosperous and populous society attracting more migrants from the cold and crowded mainland. The flatland on both sides of the railway track is green with hundreds of coconut trees, and distributed with farms and ponds, one of which is the home of four white geese. The vegetable stakes are covered with climbing vines of green leaves, which have not yet produced the colourful flowers of perhaps long beans, bitter gourds, cucumber, or winter melons. I move on. The train station is only a kilometre off.
A peep at one of the farms lining the country lane reveals a pond filled with water hyacinths. Their light-purplish flowers, scattered here and there among the dense foliage, are their distinguishing traits. Not only an excellent food for ducks and pigs, they also help purify waste water. Besides ducks and geese, other wild birds, which Liang Wei identified as Chinese pond herons (Ardeola bacchus) and Yellow bitterns (Ixobrychus sinensis), make their home around the nearby ponds.
Two or three hundred metres before reaching the train station, I spot three herons feeding at the ponds on my left. They are extremely fidgety, flying off as soon as I approach within fifty metres of the banks. In flight, they reveal their broad white wings and reddish-purple back. About half a metre in length, they have white wings and bellies, yellow legs, and yellow eyes but red upper parts. Their red and reddish-purple colours signify their summer breeding plumage. At other times, their bodies are light-brown.
Chinese pond herons inhabit the wetlands like rice fields, marshes and mangroves, and pond and river banks where they feed on fish, crustaceans like crabs and prawns, and small amphibians like frogs and worms. They are a freshwater species of the heron family, Ardeidae. They range from Manchuria in the north to Hainan in the south and from Taiwan in the east to India in the west. But they winter in Southeast Asian countries from September to April. They silently and motionlessly stalk their prey.
That is also the behaviour of a small yellow bittern in the pond on my right. Standing about twenty metres from me, she is so intensely focussed on the tiny fish hiding among the stems of a clump of water hyacinths in the shallow water that she is oblivious of my presence. As she moves slowly when stalking her victim, her neck is retracted, making her cigar-shaped. But when she extends her neck to strike her prey, her neck - like the giraffe’s neck - seems out of proportion to her body. Indeed, the length of her neck seems identical to the length of her body. From outstretched beak to tail, she can achieve up to thirty-eight centimetres in measurement.
Residing among reeds, especially in freshwater ponds, rice paddies, and marshes, yellow bitterns are often seen walking on floating hyacinth or round lotus leaves, searching for amphibians, insects, and molluscs. Their necks, backs, and wings are brown in colour, darker than the rest of their bodies. On the yellow bittern that I have just observed are five brown strips running from its throat to its belly. The smallest of the bitterns, the yellow bittern, like the Chinese pond heron, is also a species of the family of Ardeidae, the herons. It is native to South and East Asia, Southeast Asia (including Singapore), Russia, and the U.S.A. Seventeen of the seventy-five species of bitterns in the world are found in Singapore.
The presence of these wild birds underscores the adequate food supply in these ponds here. Although I cannot see them, the fish betray their existence by the simultaneous rings of ripples on an otherwise smooth water surface. Nibbling the luxuriant grass by the bank of the next pond, a brown cow lifts her head and glares at me as I stand near her to admire the serene scene. She is telling me to blast off from her precious patch. Her sister is busy munching. A beautiful mongrel, a rare sight, however offers me a nonchalant look-over, and then turns her head in silent disdain.
My day is fulfilling; the four bird species that I have seen - white egrets, yellow bittern, Chinese pond herons, and Oriental Magpie-Robin - attest to the rich avian life at Nangang.
Baishamen Park, Qiu Jun, and Hainan’s tertiary institutions
Hainan University (海南大学; Hainan Daxue) is not to be confused with Hainan Normal University (海南师范大学; Hainan Shifan Daxue). Gazetted in 1949 as a public institution, the latter is located about five kilometres south of downtown. It opened a campus in Guilinyang town in 2008.
Hainan University, however, began two years earlier as a private university with three faculties - agriculture, medicine, and humanities and science - at the initiative of Hainan officials and civilians with donations from local and overseas Hainanese. Because of its pre-communist root, the Hainan Military and Political Committee submerged it in 1951 within Southern University, which headquartered in revolutionary Guangdong.
Re-established as a separate university in 1983, Hainan University merged with South China University of Tropical Agriculture in 2007. It now has three campuses: the main one at Haidian Island, the Chengxi campus at Xueyuan Road (eight kilometres south of Haidian campus), and the Danzhou campus (six kilometres southwest of Danzhou downtown).
Spread over seven hundred and forty-one acres of land, the three campuses employ about one thousand four hundred academic staff to teach graduate and undergraduate courses in agriculture, engineering, natural sciences, economics, management, law, literature, and philosophy to more than thirty thousand students.
Being the only passenger left when bus No. 19 stops at Baishamen Park, at the northern tip of Haidian Island, which is only about five kilometres from east to west and four from north to south, I wait until the driver informs me that it is the terminal. As I alight, I express my thanks (“Xie xie ni”). His response is unexpected and rude.
“Bu yong xie wo. Wo bu yao xie.” (“No use thanking me. I don’t want thanks.”)
I am shocked. In my years of travelling in public transport, I have rarely encountered an answer as curt. The worst is a non-response to my “Good day” or “Thank you”. Is the uncivilised young man in his thirties expecting a tip from his passengers, or implying that it is a better way of expressing appreciation? Judging by his accent, I conclude he is one of those rare economic opportunists from the mainland ruining the charm of my ancestral home. I ignore him.
Created only recently, Baishamen Park has an interesting central feature: a large elongated and irregularly-shaped pond, more like two ponds connected with a narrow water channel, where water sports are welcome at the rounded northern end while the southern end is packed with tiny islets of marshes, dense with cloistered coconut palms, flowering shrubs, and overgrown creepers. These islets are homes to numerous bird species because I see and hear more birds here than in Haikou Evergreen Park.
Throughout the well-maintained park, the trees, including the ubiquitous coconut palms, ornamental tropical palms, and frangipanis, are evenly and thinly distributed. It is safe for me to wander on my own because overlooking the park are some posh modern residential blocks, some with more than fifteen floors.
Two birds, similar but not identical in appearance, are reposing on the street lamp and electric cable beside a walkway. They are slightly far off; one seems to be a yellow-vented bulbul. My concentration is distracted when I lift out my camera from my T-shirt pocket and adjust its settings. One of the two flies off when I approach the lamp post. Identical to the remaining mysterious bird is a sparrow-like brown bird with a long tail that flies and poses on the pavement edge in front of me. It is a long-tailed shrike, Professor Liang Wei later says. The black bands across its eyes are its prominent features. Nearby is a tree about four metres in height. On its branches sit three other long-tailed shrikes.
Behind me, a middle-aged couple quicken their pace and pull ahead. Later a teenage girl cycles by. Radiating throughout the park, the network of tiled pathways judiciously provides stone benches at regular intervals for weary visitors to rest. As expected of a Thursday, I see very few adults. At the fairground beside the eastern edge of the rounded pond, some teenage school boys and girls are amusing themselves during their class excursion. Some are enjoying themselves in their two-seater colourful pedal boats, attempting to control the direction of their round craft shaped like large life-buoys. Some are spinning on the huge Ferris wheel in front of the row of residential condominiums.
What marvel is at “Year Ring Square” or “Emotional Story Wood”, or even “Go Beyond The Limit”? These are some of the names tantalisingly engraved and painted in red on two decorative stone panels embedded into the sides of the path along the western edge of the pond, where I am standing. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to savour all these sights.
An uncluttered light-brown tiled square nearby attracts me. No one is there. On the sides of four commemorative cubes, each about two metres in length, breadth, and height, are both chiselled figures and bas reliefs of a lady and three men and notes about them. A gentleman in his fifties is pushing his bike. At my request, he graciously reads out in Mandarin the names of those people. I recognize three: Xian Furen, Su Dongpo, and Hai Rui. But who is Qiu Jun (1421-1495)? I do not have the linguistic facility to ask him further. I thank him.
From the square, I can see through the rows of coconut trees. The open sea is just across the road. This road curves with the contours of the coast, permitting drivers and tourists with limited time on their hand to relish a scenic view of Qiongzhou Strait. By the kerb is a single line of tall palms. The wooden stakes supporting their trunks suggest their recent transplant. Nearby is a huge life-size white statue in honour of communist martyrs. On its back, a black plaque provides the information. This is a monument dedicated to: 悼白沙门上的烈士 (Dao Baishamen Shangde Lieshi; Mourning Baishamen’s Superior Martyrs). The date - 1950 March 31 - marks the final battle fought on this beach between advancing mainland communists and defending KMT forces for control of Hainan. A few young girls are posing in front of the sculpture.
I cross the road. Fortified by a long stretch of recently-erected head-high wall, a strip of reclaimed beach front is undergoing development into a coastal park, where three ladies are laboriously spacing periwinkle saplings into the tilled fresh soil. The glossy periwinkle leaves are distinctive, and their solitary slightly-purplish flowers beautiful. The wise planning will beautify the landscape, although it is presently in a state of chaos. Wooden planks for retaining wet cement during the wall construction are lying on the ground, ready for collection to be used elsewhere.
On the beach itself, a temporary hut lies near a pool of water, which will later be filled with sand. The uneven soil will be levelled and building debris cart off. More than thirty people, ranging from primary school students to adult visitors, are scattered along the shore.
Studying accounting and finance in Hainan University, the young undergraduate is reading a book under the shade of an umbrella. Does she know the exact landing site of the two young Guangdong students who had swum across the Qiongzhou Strait six years earlier? Unfortunately, she hails from the northern part of China and has not heard of the 2005 Guinness Book of Record feat. She refers me to a man wading in the sea, in water reaching up to his waist.
Holding firmly onto a rake, the gentleman in his fifties is trolling the sand for clams, which he then cast into his net. He has probably three or four kilograms worth. When he drakes the area nearer to shore, I loudly shout my inquiry. He is unaware too. But here was the spot where some children had drowned, he says. That is not the answer I am seeking.
On my way out of Baishamen Park, I pass the Ferris wheel. The fairground is probably a permanent fixture because a rollercoaster is almost ready to rattle daring riders. Nearby is the gated compound of the apartment blocks. They are modern and new. Their external walls are clean and fresh, their spotless white paint blending very well with the reddish-brown tiles of their straight-inclined roofs. Like the units along Binhai Avenue, each flat here, with lease of probably seventy years, would also cost more than a million RMB ($200,000), which is beyond the means of most local residents. Who are their occupants? I am envious.
Hainan University’s main campus is a kilometre south. The trishaw driver drops me off at the Renmin Avenue entrance. Her fare is only 3 RMB. Surrounded by the sea, the location is idyllic. Behind the gate is a huge boulder on which are indented and painted in gold four stylish Chinese characters. They read: Hai Nan Da Xue.
Beside it is a large lake, the size of four or so football fields. Although green with algae, it is the university’s most charming feature. Space is certainly not an issue here. Trees, bushes, and some patches of young mangroves dot the irregular periphery. In the centre are two tiny mangrove-covered islets. An egret is flying high across the water, a picturesque scene. As I walk along the narrow path on the right side of the pool, I faintly perceive a small dull-bodied fish like a gourami near the surface of the water. There is interesting aquatic life in there.
Two concrete benches sit at the bushy edge. Near one is a black-and-white bird on the ground searching for food. Only about three metres from me, it is unafraid even when I slowly approach to photograph. It must be accustomed to the hundreds of humane people, especially students, treading this path daily. Like its back and the area around its head and face, its upper parts are black while its underparts from the breast downwards are white. Its black wings have a horizontal white stripe. When it flies to perch on the back rest of the bench, its iridescent bluish-black back becomes clearly evident to me. About fifteen centimetres in length, it is a beautiful bird, an Oriental Magpie-Robin, I later learn from Liang Wei. I hear some birds singing behind the clump of bamboos. But, try as I may, I cannot see them.
I walk on. The three buildings on my right are new but ordinary, one having six storeys, another having eight storeys, and a third that is circular in shape, presumably a small sport stadium. Surprisingly, I meet very few persons when I expect hordes of students. Perhaps this is the vacation period. The “2 号教学楼” (2 Hao Jiaoxue Lou; No. 2 Education Building) is, however, a startling modern-looking building, Cubist in design. A second startling thing is a grey granite Confucius statue that stands on a square pedestal in front of another building. His right hand is holding a rolled-up book while his left hand is raised to his chest in a praying position. But his head is slightly larger and out of proportion to his life-size body.
Zhao Ding is not a familiar name to a small group of people I encounter. Two girls, presumably undergraduates, do not have a clue. They, however, point to the direction of a huge statue nearby. At the intersection of two streets, Su Dongpo stands prominently on a square pedestal that is two-metre high and plastered with maroon-coloured tiles. On a small marble plaque at the base is his nom de guerre in traditional Chinese: 蘇東坡. The statue is carved from six or seven blocks of sandstone. Piled on top of one another, it is about four metres tall. In his late sixties, the famous poet has a few wrinkles on his face.
Have I asked the wrong people? Perhaps the statue of Zhao Ding is not located here but in Hainan Normal University. I give up. I do not know it then: the statue of Zhao Ding is only a hundred metres away.
A small squirrel is scurrying over the covered drain safely close to a tree trunk. It is foraging. As I approach, it scampers up that tree, and vanishes among its thick foliage. A few minutes later, I see a bird that looks similar to the one I have just seen. It is chasing after some insect hiding among the short, mown grasses by the side of the pathway. It bravely ignores my presence. Unlike the Oriental Magpie-Robin, its face - the area around its eyes - is white. This is a White Wagtail (Motacilla alba), although it has not wagged its tail for me. To undiscerning observers like me, the two birds, alike in appearance, belong to the same species. They do not.
Despite the large student population, the wildlife is rich: the squirrel, egret, Oriental Magpie Robin, White Wagtail, and the gourami-like fish. I am sure that the ubiquitous yellow-vented bulbuls and long-tailed shrike can also be spotted here. I hop onto an electric trolley bus, which charges 1 RMB for conveying passengers within the campus. I drop off at the Haidian Wuxi Road entrance, where a few recent graduates with their families are snapping photographs of one another against the backdrop of a rock and the clock tower. It is two-fifteen in the afternoon, and time to travel to Qiongshan.
Copyright 2015
Photos
Chapter 13, Page 419 - 433
Nangang, Baishamen Park,
Hainan University
Copyright 2015