Suzhou, China

January 8 & 9, 2009

We have anticipated our visit to Suzhou for a long time. Elwin used to come to work in Suzhou before retiring from Philips Consumer Electronics. We also found our old friends, the Ai family, back in Suzhou with Ruijun Ai working for Philips as a manager. Ruijun and Susan got married when he was working in El Paso for Philips. Susan and I used to run around together as she was learning to adjust to her new life in America. We became best of friends. In 2002, the Ai's moved to the Netherlands to work at the Headquarter of Philips, and we lost contact with each other.

You can imagine the surprise when we got a phone call from Ruijun one day in December. Through a mutual friend, Gary McMahon, both Rui and Elwin's former boss, we were reunited. We talked on the phone and decided that we would go down to visit during the Spring Festival. It was a happy reunion to find the Ai's with 2 boys, ages 7 and 4. Bryan was born in El Paso and we were surrogate grandparents. He is now a 2nd grader and learning to speak English already.

Ling and her driver took us down to Suzhou from Dagang, and the Ai's arranged for us to stay at a beautiful hotel by the amusement park. We had lunch at a Xinjiang restaurant since Reijun and Susan grew up in Xinjiang and talked about their growing up years there many times. The food was excellent, and for the first time in my life, I had lamb; it was good. We then went to a silk factory for a tour. Suzhou is famous for their silk and is the silk capital of the China. Susan also took us to a silk embroidery wholesale market about 30 minutes outside of Suzhou. It was so fun to see ladies embroidering on a big hoop. Susan purchased a silk embroidered painting with 5 birds in a garden for our daughter Elaine since they met in El Paso and became fast friends.

On the second day, Susan took us to the famous Suzhou Garden. There is a replica of the garden in Portland, Oregon, as the two cities are sister cities. The garden in Suzhou was built by a rich merchant at the end of the Ming Dynasty. He was so paranoid of people murdering him that he built himself a big 2-story office, carved out of the side of the mountain with no apparent entrance. The only way to get in was to go through a cave. He built a palace house for each of his concubines and a beautiful study for his children, with windows on all four sides, so they could enjoy the nature. On one side, the windows had different colors of blocks to simulate seasons. Outside of the study was a pond with gold fish. It's called the rain drop pond as his children listened to the rain falling into the pond.

Other interesting buildings are the pavilions. One of them had 4 sides with each showing 4 different seasons: plum blossoms for spring, lotus blossoms in the pond for the summer, a bamboo grove for the fall and snow for the winter. It's hard to imagine that people 500 years ago enjoyed such elaborate living quarters.

While we were busy visiting places, Elwin was at Philips building working with Ruijun. Two things kept him very busy there. Philips has revived the "remote locator" that Elwin and a co-worker designed and produced 30 years ago. He had a lot to share on that. Another interesting thing was that when the people there found out Elwin was teaching English at Shandong University, they asked him to teach the engineers English. He was kept busy and also asked to come back to Suzhou to be their teachers. It's been very interesting.

We ended up with dinner at a beautiful vegetarian buffet restaurant. It was amazing to see all sorts of foods that were vegetables, vegi chicken drum sticks, and vegi steaks were a few of them. They also provided a hotpot with clear broth and various mushrooms, and other vegis, of course. Everyone ended the dinner with ice-cream sundaes.

It was a fun visit with the Ai's. We'll be back!