China curing

So, there I was lying on a massage chair with needles prodding, and then cups hugging me. Neither of these were the sites and experiences that I want to share, nor the best use of precious time. I've had these before and did not really wish to repeat them, but the final eight days of my China trip were slowed down considerably by a sore hip. 

Now, all of you will be thinking that I must have overtrained but it started when I was playing with the kids, as I do, probably a few hours after quite a lot of drinking and I tripped, as I do. At the time a grazed knee, hand and an incipient black eye were all I had to blush for. Overnight though I felt enough pain in my hip to reconsider even running the next day. In fact, even getting up was more than uncomfortable. It was an oddity because though my belly flop of the previous day was impressive, the impact was nowhere near where this horrid ache was coming from. It was not just a spot, but the whole lower part of my right hip and lower back were inflamed. 

I did an x-ray, because in China it is quite easy, which ruled out a broken rib but the pain remained and kept me from sleeping well or running. On our trip to Zhaoqing the pain eased - I could walk and be active without issue, riding bikes was painless, but running was not. It lingered till afterwards and I did want some treatment akin to a kiwi-style physio which is almost non-existent in China. I opted for 推拿 (tui na) which is a method of Chinese massage. The result, worse discomfort. Any gains in comfort I had with a vigorous trip out to Zhaoqing were erased.

I dallied on booking a physio for my return and missed out on a booking for Saturday morning. And so the day of our return flight, I decided on the acupuncture route. I am not a big fan of acupuncture or cupping even though I have had dry needling at kiwi physios, too. It is just that what I wanted was some form of non-aggravating massaged, and some prescribed exercises, not for hit-or-miss Chinese medicine (from my experience). But I wanted some relief for the flight and wanted something to change the trend in some way.

The Chinese doctor in this case did not instill in me much confidence by not asking about my symptoms, taking my pulse and then saying I had kidney stones on the right. I had already indicated to him my pain was on the right but no one had told him the cause so it made me recall how cold readers tell fortunes. Middle aged guy, pain near kidneys, well, why not guess a kidney stone.

But we went on, the needles went in, the cups absolutely sucked but the pain I had was noticeable lessened and not just from the relief of not being tortured any further. Reading more about kidney stones though, maybe he was onto something. The early signs of them are literally what I have been experiencing so it will be the first thing I explore on my return, and possibly my spectacular fall were either coincidental to them or might have dislodged one or two that have now re-lodged unhappily. Either way, I really want an answer and really want to lace up my shoes again to run! I hope both of these can be achieved when I get home. 

China travelling

I was glad that this trip to China gave me a chance to travel. And prior to this trip, the candidate destinations were those I hadn’t been before. But as Sam Gung’s passing went into the mix and people had to make decisions, and bullet train tickets during the Spring Festival period became fewer, the destinations became Shantou and, later, Zhaoqing. Both places I had been before; Shantou I’d been to pre-NZ return but Christy had been unwell so apart from the riverside and a few trips out for the local cuisine, it was unmemorable; Zhaoqing, I had a history with having visited way back in my first visit in 2000, and then with my sister in 2010. That all being said, I was happy to stomp their ground again.

Shantou was interesting if only because others would say that there was “nothing to see” – plenty of people were asking why we’d go. But there was plenty to see, and more importantly for us and the two friends who we went with, people to see. Guangdong, although synonymous with Cantonese and Cantonese culture, is home to a multitude of cultures. The majority culture of Shantou is actually more akin linguistically and culturally with Fujian Province further up the coast. And those areas speak a dialect of Chinese that is not identifiable in any way to Mandarin, Cantonese or Shanghainese. It probably split at least two thousand years from other Chinese dialects which in a western respect puts it well beyond where the Romans unified Europe. Most of those Romance languages have some similarity to each other, say French to Portuguese to Italian, which is analogous to China’s dialects in a way. But Shantou language is more distant. And thus its culture too is more distant, too.

Culture though is not that readily visitable unless you can speak with people and those were some people were the key sites to see! Our main guide was a previous student who had kept in touch with our friends. She took us back alley eateries, baristas as well as the best restaurants for Shantou cuisine.

The barista element took me by surprise – although a tea city, the coffee was probably the best I had ever had in China. We got take to one superb café, but stumbled on another which matched it.

My runs in Shantou were the most interesting of the trip. Shantou being a port city, it is close to the ocean as well as estuaries, so my runs also went along these. One my first run, I encountered the most surreal scene: As I approached a bend in the seaside promenade, I heard shouting, but not the argumentative kind. It was like a primal scream or loud, visceral sighing from different voices. As I approached there were middle aged men, topless, who may have just emerged from their swim in the estuary, one was stark naked dousing himself with fresh water, others were projecting their qi loudly into the bay. I ran past them with a mutual greeting, one even ran after me obviously infected by exuberance for running. The scream/sighing continued but I realised it wasn’t just coming from the men behind me but also from the bay itself. I spotted heads bobbing around in the water to see multiple men slowly cruising to shore with a life preserver, one of the reading aloud a famous poem from Mao Zedong, each verse being greeting with the qi explosions from the men on shore. With a bit of distance I took videos of this and no one could explain the middle-age man primal screams to me. 

River swimming is a thing, even in this so-called winter. You saw people swimming in the murky waters in Qingyuan and Zhaoqing. But it was Shantou that turned me into David Attenborough, trying to fathom where this all came from. And still do not know.

On another run, I bumped into another runner and had a nice conversation – the first I had with a fellow runner since arriving. The difference was probably that he too was a tourist having arrived a day later than me and also randomly looking for a place to train.

Our Zhaoqing trip was of a different nature because it was with family, ten of us in total, and we stayed in a 民宿 (minsu), which translates directly into “homestay” or “boarding with a local” but it’s more akin to Airbnb. We all went into a three storey renovated old building with all of us fitting into the four bedrooms. It had a “lounge” which was a table that you could play mahjong on. Since my trips in 2000 and 2010, it has developed quickly – no similarity to the place I went on each occasion. The constant was the main site, the Seven Star Crags, a series of large limestone towering peaks that emerge out of a lake area. Our minus was on a peninsula opposite now with a multitude of really good restaurants and cafes. The first day we mainly ate, drank and scoped out the place, especially Paifang Park, which we used hireable bikes to go to and from. Being a family trip, it was a good time to talk and I heard our niece, who is now an adult talking much more than I had ever heard before. The following day was a big day on and around the Crags. Christy and I were the only ones to climb one, the rest of the family happy to walk around them and use the boats to explore. One advantage of going with a family group is it took me out of my usual minimalist approach to parks – I would never usually shell out for a full ticket with all the boats, bells and whistles, but there was some benefit in this. The boat ride into a cave was actually worth it, and with older folk in our group, boat rides were a good way to break up the exertions.

Our final day was a site I had not been to, Dinghu Mountain (鼎湖山). It was a significant mountain because of it having a lake at the top, and also a significant Buddhist temple. For the average foreign visitor, it is not that interesting unless you really like temples. And although you can walk the whole mountain, we did this mountain with three shuttle buses up and three shuttle buses down. It is quite the carry-on with buying tickets, queuing and getting on and off.

We still have travel dreams in China. Despite an untold number of trips to China, I have not been to the North-East, home to some of my favourite cuisines, Xinjiang, deliciously dangerous, and we both want to go to Xi'an, me for the second time, Christy for her first. She also wants to see Qingdao, which is another city I have not visited. And we have barely scratched the surface of Hunan province. At this time still, travels outside of Qingyuan cost quality time in so the parents or family are either with us, or we travel closer to home. There is no rush though, even with an incredible four weeks of holiday we did not achieve all we wanted to do. The rest will wait for another day.

China dying

In mid-2023, Christy's grandfather passed away suddenly at the age of 100 (in accordance with the Chinese way to count age). It doesn't feel right to say that someone so old could die "unexpectedly" but in his case, it was against all expectation. My wife had made it over to China just days before it happened, and  Over a year later, as recounted in Crypticity's abound: Life and death of the villages.

This year, I have had the weird privilege of having attended a New Zealand funeral and a Chinese 葬礼 within a couple of months. My Uncle John passed in the first month of this year. For me, it was a surprise, but apparently his heart surgery three years ago had a three year warranty and that it wasn’t necessarily unexpected that he would pass. Though I in all honesty did not have much time with him as we always lived far from where he lived, he always impressed me as a vigorous, kind person. My second cousin Michael, his son, did a great eulogy, talking about his father, who had passed in front of an unnecessarily complicated jigsaw puzzle after making a dryer than usual Christmas cake. You could say it was a good death in that he had a clearly good life which was taken while enjoying life.

My Sam Gung was different. Sam Gung, A Gung's younger cousin, had been struggling for years. Sam Gung was literally a neighbour in the hometown so I knew him well. He was an educated man; he was the one that the village trusted to put into characters the words of ceremony. When big things happened, he was the one who wrote it in beautiful Chinese characters. He was one of the older people who didn’t have any hesitation in welcoming me and speaking with me. When I was back previously he had been struggling with more than one obvious medical condition, and his wife was in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s. And now, a heart condition had struck him hard.

When we arrived, he was expected to pass at any moment. On one day when I had planned to be out with a friend, his family had brought him home from the hospital, and I was asked to come home earlier just so I could see him before anything happened. The “bringing back from the hospital” element is something cultural – I am not sure how often it happens in New Zealand, where people don’t have as many qualms about the elderly dying away from home. That day I didn’t manage to come home much earlier, but still I saw him. Whether he knew who I was depends on how compassionately you ask.

He was expected to pass quickly, and as he was close clan, there was some caution about planning travel. His immediate family members had, three years earlier, dropped everything when A-Gung passed to attend the funeral. But a few days later he was still alive and, according to some, even doing better.  

Three days before our expected trip to Shantou, there was quite the kerfuffle where members of the family had got anxious and wanted him to go back to hospital if he might pull through and make it to the year of the Horse. There was a cultural practicality about this. If he were to die on Chinese New Year’s Eve he might have no one attend the funeral. And it might have the double blow, culturally, of being inauspicious to 探亲 (visit relatives) of a grieving family during the Spring Festival period. So the argument was either to stay the inevitable course with him at home so he can have a village death, and accept whatever consequences with the timing, or to send him back to hospital and hope to buy a couple of weeks but also have the risk of him passing in the cold sterility of a hospital bed.

The latter side won, an ambulance was called late at night and the very next day died.

This was the first time I had been in China for the full process of someone dying. The evening of his passing, proceedings began with the clan gathering at the family home, the following day the body was brought to the home so he could rest in state. The children of the deceased and their partners have white hats or belts, and the children face the body for throughout the day and the night. Guests come in, light incense, bow three times before the body and then stand the incense in a stand before the body. Spiritual money is burned, too. During the three days, there are no speeches, eulogies, no photo collections or songs. I always find it incredible that the village people have enough to talk about for hours and hours. I talked with a grandson of Sam Gung for about an hour, but I was lucky as I didn’t know him and he knew barely anything about me. All the while, people come in to burn incense and there are firecrackers to notify the dead.

The family would stay up through the night but we are distant enough to have a night of sleep. The next morning there are the road rituals for the deceased to be able to be removed from the house and transported to the crematorium. For the road rituals I saw again the Daoist priest from A Gung’s memorial ceremonies. He did his thing and we walked around the coffin three times, and then waited for the equivalent of a hearse to take the body to the crematorium.

The crematorium was a half hour drive from the village so we had two buses ride along with the hearse and then waited our turn. Unseen by us, the body is prepared with flowers and put in a crematorium casket, and after some time, we’re called to the Farewell room, where we walk around the casket three times, and then he is taken into where he will be reduced to ashes. The family wait in a building similar to a bus station waiting area for an hour and then are told it is time to collect. Some members of the family go to check the ashes and bones are his. I was not part of that. And then these were interned into an urn and wheeled over with an umbrella cover to a small concretion designed for final rites. (An umbrella was maintained over the urn until it was buried.) The family then again burn incense, before it is taken to the bus for the ride to the village burial spot where his ashes would reside for a year. (There would be another ceremony to relocate him to his final, final resting spot at some stage later.) It was an interesting hike to a non-descript space for the burial spot, through brush and up a hill. His urn was placed and buried then incense was burned, and then an odd rice throwing ritual. And then that was that. We walked home.

In the land of the living, there remains his wife and the thorny issue of how you care for someone with Alzheimers who relied on her husband at home, and has never known life outside of the village.

China racing

Any given Saturday. Or Sunday. In New Zealand adults have running races to run, and groups to run in. It is normal for grown-arse men and women to put on colourful clothing, and supershoes, and neglect other important duties and run for themselves, with peril to their knee cartilage, and run with other adults, and children, early in the morning.

This is not so in China. There are prescribed ways to exercise: old ladies can dance together in “square dancing’. Taichi people do taichi things. Old people do back/front catching, and extreme hamstring stretching. And young people, now have gyms. Adults running in groups or competitions is not really a thing (yet). It is truly when you live in other countries that you can really your own cultural assumptions.

Oddly, running marathons is a thing in China now, but these are run by city councils to stimulate tourism. Anything shorter than a half marathon barely exist, because they are not stimulatory to tourism and there are no grass-roots organisations that would run them. ParkRuns don't exist (yet). 

To be clear, New Zealand itself went through a process where Athletics New Zealand used to run the show, and that it was focussed on producing champions (which China is too) but not organising anything beyond those needs, and potentially feeling challenged when there is demand and initiative from the broader society to have events beyond the youth and elite. In that time, other events struggled for recognition without the Athletics NZ approval. It was only after a lot of effort that non-Athletics NZ events would be recognised.

So, in China right now running events are mainly for the youth and elite, and now marathons for the tourism income for the general runner and tourists. But in a running sense for a general runner this is back-to-front: no one should have a marathon as their first event without having raced shorter distances, and ideally in anyone’s training they should have variety, and the chance to test themselves without the whole-hog of a marathon.

Before my current trip to China, I did look for any running events apart from the marathons that are springing up in all Chinese cities, and I was initially very disappointed. I just could not find a single event similar to what we have, a dime-a-dozen, in little New Zealand. I hadn’t been in China for the November Guangzhou marathon, and I wouldn’t be in China for the March Qingyuan marathon and it appeared that in province of Guangdong there was nothing shorter in between those two dates outside of elite running races. With some patience though, I found one single event, a 10km race “no less”, in Qingyuan where I was going to be, a week after my arrival. I told a running relative-in-law but he affirmed what I already knew in a very unencouraging way: it was a tourist thing, and that virtual races are where China was at. But I was not discouraged. I entered into a 10km race and thus on 8 February 2026, I ran my first race outside of New Zealand.

It is through my participation I gain new respect and appreciation for the event-craft of those in New Zealand, and realise that these often shoe-string or community oriented events are run on collective learning and culturally moving runners and organisers together to a better way of running. In China, they are not there yet. My race showed everything that I should have known about a race organised by a city council, not a experienced race organisation, and with runners long deprived of event.

I arrived at the event, had my bags x-rayed and my body fondled with security wand, before doing my usual prep of bathroom, bag drop, bathroom, warm-up, bathroom and preparation to enter the starting chute. But there was a full stage act with singing in the process, with some instructions between songs. It was a cool morning that encouraged some hustle about the place. I heard that runners should hang out to the left and wait to enter the starting chute. I did while another song was song and 30 minutes before the scheduled start time, the gate suddenly opened and there was a charge toward the front of the start chute. I was pretty nimble but only got into the second row of racers, behind a lot of “Ayi” aunties and a guy with a flag with a long metal pole who had managed to react a bit faster.

In New Zealand there is both the implicit and explicit instruction that faster runners should “seed” themselves toward the front, and those who are going to have fun and potentially walk it to head towards the back. In the nascent running culture of China this was not the case. And the organisers indulged it: the event photographer took photos of the people at the starting line, and those aunties really could pose. Another bunch of twenty somethings pushed in front of everyone to take their own start line photos and then stayed there.

With thirty minutes to wile away in the cold, apart from giving the evil eye to those who have no place in the front row of a 10km race, you could only jog on the spot and discreetly stretch in a way that didn’t both others. You could also watch the security who had fenced a metal barrier about 20 metres away from the start line. They fiddled with it and then five minutes before the start line they dismantled it and then these adult men came forward and held hands to form a human barrier in front of the starting line, which was also a starting ribbon.

This is unthinkable in New Zealand where a starting line is a commonly understood line on the ground unobstracted by anything that you cannot cross until a start signal. In China, whether by unfortunate precedent, or suspicion of the common people, a barrier whether ferrous or flesh must be erected to prevent premature starts.

Perhaps for the same reason, there was no countdown to start, or so I thought. Actually the stage with the speakers was about 100 metres away from the front of the start chute. Even with my average Mandarin I couldn’t make out much of what was being said on stage. And I don’t think I was the only one with no clue, because all of a suddne, the security guards let go of each other, the ribbon broke and the aunties charged, and it wasn’t only be who was flat footed at the start. The event photo shows that about five seconds from the start a woman in jeans was leading and that was because she was the fastest to react to the sudden start.

Pre-race, I didn’t know who would be racing in such an event. The North River riverside, which is a beautiful perfect place to run, had sparse utilisation by runners, nowhere close to what you’d see on Tamaki Drive, so if only the local casual runners were running, I might do the awkward thing of winning. Alternatively, with a whole bunch of strong runners from over Guangdong, starved of races, the race could attract the best of the sub-elite best and I might be in the pack.

What happened? Well, once the initial charge was complete and the aunties’ photo moment was completed, it was clear from my watch that even at my initial unsustainable adrenalin-fuelled downhill pace I was in not in the top 30, it was more of the latter. In New Zealand you expect to see a few people who are far too optimistic in the start and such was the case, I settled into my race plan pace and ground my way to the mid-20s. The course was interesting: It started with a downhill section to a fairly flat road, with out-and-backs downhill then uphill back to the road, then a huge downhill, run-around, then running back up the hill, then after a bit of road, an uphill stretch to the finish line. I had thought my Glen Eden hill training would put me in good stead but these runners seemed hill-trained, too, and I only had a marginal advantage.

The intrigue came after the midway point I got to a point in the course where I should have completed three out-and-backs on side roads but I could clearly remember only doing two. I started to doubt myself, that I may have completed missed a required turn. Countering those doubts was the fact that I was never really separate from other runners, and also should have noticed a turn on a well-marked course. I did the final third with the thought that it was almost impossible that I would be running a full 10km. During that time I grinded past a few runners to find myself in 21^st, a single place out of the prize money. But about 500m out, one of those I’d bested earlier bested me, smoothly overtaking and leaving me in the dust. Another that I had grinded past I heard galloping behind me in the last 100m, the uphill finish. I probably put in my best ever sprint finish, uphill, I’ve ever done. This runner managed to do even better passing me, to some laughter from the spectators just to rub it in, and pip me by a few seconds.

I went through the finishing line in 23^rd place out of 1000 runners, and was greeted by a person putting not a finishing medal but a number around my neck. I was then greeted by a person with a QR code telling me I had to scan it. This I hadn’t seen before and I was unsure if this was part of their verification of result, which didn’t really make sense because the bib had a magnetic strip to record times. Nonetheless, while trying to catch my breath I complied, scanned, and then had to fumble to enter information: full name, passport number and then bizarrely my bank account number. It was at that point that Christy went over and relieved me of my phone so I could proceed up. In almost any race in New Zealand, next would be to grab a cup of water or electrolytes, if not a banana. There was none after the start line so I went to get my bag from the collection point. Apparently any drink had to be purchased, so we did and then did the walk down to the car.

My phone confirmed what my watch had already stated: I had only run 9.3km. I wasn’t sure if my 23^rd was actually the case until a lot of checking afterwards revealed that the course route had been changed at some point in a pre-race message, but without highlighting the change nor that the course would be 9.3km, not 10km. This was a relief – I didn’t miss anything. Even with the unexpected short course, I still probably would have run it the same way, and had paced it pretty well. In the end, I do think it was a so-called “peak performance” – I genuinely wouldn’t have been able to run it much faster than I did. The final 100m I would have been the fastest finish I’ve ever done in any race and it was uphill. So despite the head-scratching organisation and the “scare” of possibly having missed a corner, I’m very happy with my effort.