By Jolene Farley
Hills residents Wendell and Kathryn Erickson returned from a nine-day tour of China earlier this month. The couple visited the cities of Beijing and Chongquing, cruised the Yangtze River with a stop at Wanxian and visited Shanghai.
From 1965 to 1986, Wendell served as a state representative in St. Paul. In 1987 a professor from China stayed in the Ericksons' home for three weeks as part of a Minnesota and China teacher exchange program that started when Wendell was Chairman of the Education Committee in 1985. This visit "made them curious."
While in office, Wendell also hosted the Secretary of Education from China for a breakfast during the secretaryÕs visit to the Twin Cities.
Then this year, "We saw the trip advertised, and the price was right so we decided to give it a try," said Wendell.
Before leaving on May 25, the couple had to be vaccinated for typhoid and Hepatitis B and make sure their visas and passports were in order. They took a 13-and one-half-hour nonstop flight from Detroit to Beijing.
When asked about differences between China and the United States, the Ericksons mentioned medicine.
Natural healing, using herbs and acupuncture, is widely practiced in China. The Chinese think Americans are too impatient and want a cure too quickly, according to the Ericksons.
The couple doesn't recall seeing a single Christian church while in China. During the 19th century, missionaries were sent to China, but the country has remained mostly Buddhist.
Children's Day is celebrated on June 1 in China, and the Ericksons say it was interesting to see parents bringing their one child to eat at Pizza Hut or McDonald's. They said the lines were about two blocks long. In China the government limits each family to one child, usually a boy.
Young people in China are taught English as a second language. "I was surprised how many of the signs and billboards had both English and Chinese on them," Kathryn said.
Chinese cities are modern but have a lot of poverty. Markets consist of "tens of thousands of shops about the size of a single-car garage" Wendell said.
Merchants pull down a door to close at night, and the Ericksons suspected the merchants live in their shops. Everything is bartered for in the markets. The Ericksons were advised to start at one-third of the asking price and meet somewhere in between.
The population of China is about 1.3 billion with most people in the larger cities. The eastern edge of China is part of the Gobi Desert, and other parts are very mountainous so few people live in those areas.
The Ericksons stopped at Sandoupiong for a tour of the Three Gorges Dam site, a controversial immense dam that is the largest hydroelectric and flood-control project in the world. The 366-mile-long lake created by the dam will displace 1.2 million people, flood 69,000 acres of land and submerge most of the Three Gorges by the year 2009, when the dam is scheduled to be complete.
Citizens have very little power to protest in China, according to Wendell. Some of the affected rice paddies and fruit orchards have been in existence for thousands of years.
"That is why we thought it was important to get over there before these sights were flooded," Wendell said.
"They (the government) is doing everything possible to get the Olympics in 2008 and to join the World Trade Organization," said Wendell. "Everywhere you go there is propaganda. They try to portray this as an advantage to the United States."
The couple also walked on the Great Wall of China. Built for defense purposes, the wall is 3,000 miles long and is the only manmade object on earth visible from space. The wall was constructed by slaves, beginning in 221 B.C., with additions until the 16th century.
As mementos of their trip, the Ericksons purchased some silk, a jade locket and some hand-painted kites for their grandchildren. They were limited in the amount of luggage they could bring on the plane so they didnÕt buy a lot.
This is not the first trip abroad for the couple. They traveled to Scandinavia twice and toured France, England, Canada and much of the United States.