By John Leggett-The Courier-Herald

(Note: Buckley Mayor Pat Johnson was recently a guest of the Chinese government on a three-pronged Sister City mission that featured her delivering earthquake victim aid funds raised by University Place and Lakewood to a tandem of Chinese cities and also signing a Sister City agreement with the city of Wanning. The story that follows has information used from her written account of her government-sponsored trek through central China and the Hainan Province, an island in the South China Sea.)

Upon exiting the plane in Hong Kong, Buckley Mayor Pat Johnson experienced one of the most traumatic moments in her life. Despite her years of education, she was suddenly illiterate - she could not read, she could not write and she most assuredly could not speak Chinese.

Until she met her government connection and interpreter Ron Chow in front of the Burger King at the Hong Kong airport, she was just another wide-eyed Yankee, wandering aimlessly in the fast-paced shuffle of one of the most bountifully populated cities on the Asian continent.

The ancient city is nearly 7 million strong, in a country of more than 1.3 billion people, or just less than 20 percent of the planet's 6.6 billion total inhabitants.

It was nearly midnight when the mayor and her host and escort pulled out of Hong Kong. This storied metropolis, which still has an enormous British influence complete with double-decker buses everywhere, was still ablaze with a neon.

Chow, who sits on Gov. Chris Gregoire's Commission for Asian Affairs, warned Johnson that China is a country of extremes; there really isn't much of a middle class and when they crossed the border into mainland China, she should be mentally prepared for the stark difference between the opulence of Hong Kong and the poverty-stricken areas found in much of China.

Her agenda during the first couple of days included visiting several cities in central China, which was heavily devastated by a 8.2, minute-long earthquake that displaced more than a million people May 12.

“In these tent cities there was row after row of little 12-by-12 foot blue tents, the inside of which reaches over 100 degrees,” Johnson said. “The conditions were the most deplorable I have ever seen.

“There was no running water with the exception of a trough that was to be shared by a hundred other people and a few sani-cans scattered around. Several of us were audience to an uncensored view of one of the area's schools just after the quake, where children had been killed when a ceiling caved in on them just as they were about to escape the horror. Their lifeless bodies looked like little dolls strewn amongst the rubble.

“In the cities effected by the quake, few of the buildings were spared and when we were walking through the streets there were many people salvaging, cleaning and stacking the bricks so that they could be used to rebuild with later. The Chinese do not waste anything,” exclaimed Johnson.

This philosophy apparently was also implemented when it came to the cuisine that the Chinese upper crust consumed. Almost everything cut up into small bitesized chunks of chef's surprise because the majority of those seated at the table employed chopsticks, which the mayor divulged she was not very adept at using, so a fork would usually materialize beside her plate at some point during the festivities.

The mayor acknowledged that were times when she wasn't sure what she was eating, but found most of the food to be quite edible the better part of the time and there was always soup.

“It was considered impolite if you didn't slurp the soup much to my relief. You just had to be sure to keep the bowl close to your mouth,” Johnson said. “The one time I inquired as to just what the tasty morsel I was eating was, my interpreter told me to trust her, I didn't really want to know.”

While the food was OK, Johnson said that the drinking water was another matter.

“You cannot drink the tapwater if you are just visiting the country, because even the tapwater in America has bacteria, but just as we are immune to the unavoidable particulates in our water, they are immune to theirs…..but visitors aren't.

“I only bathed with the water over there, but I am kind of surprised I didn't get sick through osmosis, because I have never taken so many showers in my life. Everywhere I went it was over 90 degrees with 90 percent humidity. The only thing I could compare it to is if you were to go into your bathroom, turn up the heater full blast, then taking a piping hot shower,” she revealed.

Another thing Johnson had to watch was her libations and drinking toasts at all of the banquets she attended. “I'm not much of a drinker - you know just socially, when my husband and I will drink a couple of glasses of wine once in a while at the most.”

Her hosts advised her not to even bother trying to keep up with her fellow banqueters, or she would quickly become intoxicated. “I had to keep telling myself ‘small sips' with every toast because they would give a dozen or more toasts at every meal and if you didn't watch out you could get drunk very quickly, because as soon as you put your glass down, there was a cute little waitress right there to replenish your cup.”

After her time in central China, Johnson moved on to the Island of Hainan, the second largest island in China, after Taiwan, located in the South China Sea, close the equator.

Buckley's sister city of Wanning, a relatively small city by China's standards with a citizenry of 65,000, is on the eastern side of the island. Its people are trying to bolster the tourism industry by building golf courses and resorts to compliment its already existing, beautifully festooned botanical flower gardens, a must-see for travelers.

Additionally, Wanning is cautiously moving toward being more than banana, pineapple and rubber plantations. The people are proud of the fact that they are not smothered with as much air pollution as the rest of China's provinces.

Johnson said one of the more intriguing parts of her trip was speaking English with a group of Chinese students who had gleaned all of their information regarding how Americans live from their television sets.

“During a question and answer session with them, they all wanted to know why Americans disliked them so much,” Johnson said. “I told them that Americans don't really dislike them, but they are just frustrated by the fact that a lot of the jobs that once belonged to them have been shipped off to Mexico, India and of course China, because the products are cheaper to manufacture in the third world countries.

“They also wanted to know why it was so important for Americans to own guns. I explained to them that not every American elects to possess a gun, but that bearing arms was one of the paramount and inalienable rights written into our bill of rights and Americans maintain that if one of the original rights is extracted, then others won't be far behind. Of course with their government, which does not allow them to have guns at all, I wasn't quite sure they were able to grasp that concept, even after I endeavored to explain it to them,” said Johnson.

Buckley's mayor confessed that while Americans take their rights for granted, there was plenty about the Chinese culture that she found difficult to envision - including adult couples only being allowed to have one child, there being no such thing as nursing homes and the fact that there is no such thing as a department of welfare and unemployment.

“Everyone who is physically able to work is assigned a job in China and the old and infirm are watched over by their families. You would not believe how many times I saw people simply sweeping the streets and highways, who looked like they could hardly stand….with little straw brooms. Even if you are forced to subsist in abject poverty, you will have a function.

“Put it this way. There is no freedom of speech over there and I am a talker, so even though I wasn't okay with a lot of what I saw, I felt like I was wearing a muzzle most of the time. Not only did I not know the language, but even speaking through an interpreter I had to be very wary of what came out of my mouth. I truly did not wish to offend anyone and besides I was a visitor.”

While she found her trip interesting, Johnson was happy to arrive home.

“It was a picturesque Northwest day, the mountain was out in all its glory and I was once again free to exercise my freedom of speech,” she said. “Believe me when I tell you, we Americans sometimes don't know how good we have it.”

John Leggett can be reached at jleggett@courierherald.com.