Bernice and Paul Noll Visit the Chinese Countryside - Page 1

We Ride our Bicycles to the Countryside

One day in 1985 in Chengdu, while we were teaching for the Chinese National Academy of Sciences at the Language Training School, Bernice, Shawn Chen, a Chinese teacher, and I decided to take a bicycle ride into the countryside. It was a hot, sunny day in Chengdu and we rode a long way out of town. When we saw a interesting unpaved side road we took it and rode some distance further. The road was really no more than a bicycle path. We would often just travel to see what we could see with no particular destination in mind. After a while we saw this house situated a little way off the road. We really wanted to visit a rural family and to talk with them.

So I asked Shawn Chen to go to the house and tell them that there was an elderly foreign couple who would like a drink of water and a rest. We knew that the Chinese would be hospitable and invite us but they would never invite us as they felt they were too poor to invite some foreigners to their home. This was a ruse to break the ice to meet them.