Fishing
I have always enjoyed fishing. When I was young I used to frequent the
farm ponds around Mt. Gilead, Ohio searching for bluegills and small mouth
bass with my Zebco and rubber worms. As I grew older, I discovered the joys
of fly-casting. Although I was never a particularly successful fly
fisherman, I did enjoy standing in the rivers and streams of the southwest
United States flailing around and hoping to land the occasional trout. It
was a contemplative pursuit to stand, dazzled the sun, trying to place the
fly in a precise spot, especially when aided by a flask of Kentucky’s
finest.
When I came to China, I hoped to bring my hobby to the Middle
Kingdom. Within the eighty pounds of gear I was permitted to bring, I
managed to stash a lightweight rod, reel, and small selection of flies.
Unfortunately, I found that most of streams in Guizhou Province were
hopelessly polluted and devoid of life. And even though I consulted some of
my more proficient fishing buddies and the websites of several fly shops, I
have yet to find a fly that will hook the elusive Chinese mudsucker that
inhabits the ponds around here. The few times I have ventured out all I
have managed to catch are small, curious Chinese children.
I realized that if I were ever to catch any Chinese fish I would have to
give up my high-fallutin’ fly fishing ways and resort to Chinese methods. I
began to actively seek out Chinese fishing buddies who would initiate me
into the mysterious ways of Chinese fishing. As luck would have it, my good friend Dai Jin of the Liupanshui CITS office is married to an avid fisherman, who is also a genuinely good guy. A few weeks ago Dai Jin, her husband, Yin Wei, and some of their Chinese friends invited us to go fishing. It proved to be an interesting day.
They met us on a Saturday afternoon and we drove to a fish pond not at all
far from where we live. In China, the fish ponds are all stocked with a
specific type of fish. I think the first fish pond we went to was stocked
with tilapia. Actually, I’m not at all sure that it was stocked with
tilapia, as I have never seen a tilapia. But it was stocked with a fairly
good sized, finny, exotic looking fish that I like to imagine was tilapia.
The only reason I know this is because I saw another person catch one of the
fish.
When the Chinese fish, they really don’t like to give the fish a fair
chance. Each person has four or five rods and they chum the water with
bait. Not to mention that the ponds are really small and people line up
shoulder to shoulder around them. I’m sure to the fish, it must seem like
swimming around in a jungle of hooks and bait.
The Chinese would like to
fish with automatic weapons, explosives, anthrax spores, and weapons of mass
destruction. Unfortunately, the expense and the fear of bodily harm keeps
them from doing this. Instead, they mostly fish with long, collapsible rods
with a bit of monofilament, a bobber, hook, and bait attached. None of this
reel silliness. The bait is usually pellets of what looks like guinea pig
food or a powder that is mixed with water to make a bread dough-like
substance.
I thought that Ms. Dai’s husband, Yin Wei, would have the
standard complement of Chinese fishing implements but he had several pretty
sophisticated rods and spinning reels. His friend Tao Tao had a similar
arsenal. Well, they fixed me up with the cream of the crop and I proceeded
to make a horrible mess of things. You see, the Chinese have perfected the
art of casting when standing shoulder to shoulder with a man who already has
four lines in the water. In the West, we flail and fling the lure way out
into the water. In China, you just kind of flick the bait and bobber out a
little ways. You may only get it five feet into the pond but you will avoid
getting tangled with your neighbor’s many lines, which is the most important
thing when it comes to maintaining harmony and avoiding chaos.
Call me chaotic, but I made a classic sidearm cast aiming for the far part of the
pond and got tangled with everything in sight. With many “Duibuqi’s” on my
part and many “Meiguanxi’s” on the part of everybody else at the pond I
managed to extricate myself before doing the same thing all over again.
After about an hour I had a decent grasp on the art of the flick cast, but
then Yin Wei and Tao Tao, having not caught anything either, decided to move
on. I’m sure on the inside they were gnashing their teeth and longing for
their PLA days when they could have just tossed a couple of sticks of
dynamite in the pond and be done with the whole issue of this damn foreigner
and his chaotic casting.
When we left the first pond, we all got into Yin Wei’s brother’s car, which
he had borrowed, and drove a long way out. After driving for about 45
minutes, we arrived at a village that was claimed to be a suburb of
Liupanshui even though I couldn’t see a connection. We drove through
increasingly narrow and winding streets until we arrived at the back of a
Stalinist-style apartment block. Yin Wei and Dai Jin got out of the car and
an SUV full of their friends and relatives pulled up behind us. We all
walked down several flights of stairs and through some alleyways. We
finally arrived in some open fields that were located in back of a factory
that seemed to specialize in producing a fine black dust.
In the midst of the fields and covered with a film of dust, were two fish ponds. There was not a single person standing around these ponds, they were free of people.
I guess that Yin Wei and Tao Tao had decided to get this laowei and his
chaotic casting technique away from where he might do permanent damage to
Liupanshui’s fishing yang. To ensure order, this time I was assigned a
typical Huck Finn style rig with five feet of monofilament, a bobber, and a
hook tied on the end. They must have figured I could do no more damage with
this set up. I thought, “There is no way I’m going to catch a single fish
on this rig.” Within five minutes, I caught a fish.
The fish in this pond weren’t pretty, but they were biting. In 20 minutes
or so, I caught six small, brown sucker fish that were covered in a fine
black dust. Not to single myself out for my fishing prowess because
everybody else including Becky, Ms. Dai, Yin Wei, Tao Tao, Tao Tao’s wife
and their infant son were catching these fish. The only people who weren’t
catching fish were a group of hangers-on playing cards by the edge of the
pond. After the feeding frenzy cooled down, possibly because there were no
more fish left in the pond, we stayed watching our bobbers until dark. We
then paid for the five pounds of fish that we caught (ain’t nothing for
free) and headed out.
We all drove back to Liupanshui in the dark. On the outskirts of town, the
true outskirts this time, we stopped for dinner. The restaurant we stopped
at specialized in dry chicken pot. Dry chicken pot is like chicken hotpot
except the chicken is cooked up and served in a wok with no soup. As you
eat the chicken you add soup and vegetables and it gradually becomes hotpot. It was really tasty.
We also gave the owner of the restaurant our fish to
clean and cook. In about 20 minutes we had piles of crispy little fish to
go with our chicken. Although a respecter of the rights of fish, I am
normally a catch and release fisherman to avoid the hassle of cleaning and
cooking the fish I catch. I really didn’t know how to go about eating the
fish so I asked Yin Wei. He just picked up a whole fish with chopsticks and
bit the head off. He then proceeded to gnaw away the rest of the fish,
bones and all.
I am, admittedly, not a fan of cranial meat so I tried to
pussyfoot my way around the rest of the fish. Yin Wei caught me and told me
that the head was the most delicious part (of course). I sucked it up and
bit off that head like a man. It was crispy, brainy, and left a film of fine,
black dust in my mouth. The four beers I had gambeied helped in the fish
head eating department quite a bit. In the end, I ate a couple of more fish
heads, helped polish off a couple of crates of beer, and then we all headed
home. In the immortal words of Ice Cube, “It was a good day”.
I hope to go out again with my new fishing buddies as soon as the weather
permits, probably sometime around June. This time I have promised to bring
my fly rod to show them the way that Americans fish. Tao Tao claims to have
seen pictures of people fly fishing up in Xinjiang province. But quite
frankly, the prospect of fly fishing in Guizhou scares me. We will have to
scour the countryside far and wide hoping to find a pond with plenty of
space so that my fly flailing won’t permanently alter the balance of fishing
in Shuicheng county.
