Vanessa's Journal

Feb. 9

Today I woke up in Lao Fan’s house. It was beginning to feel like I was in some sort of surreal movie where every day you wake up in a different bed and look around and have to figure out where you are. We had a huge lunch again. I was enamored with Lao Fan’s tiniest granddaughter, who is not quite 3 years old. She is adorable. She has the longest eyelashes of anyone I’ve met and has the most precocious personality. At one point, her mom asked her to find out whose hands were bigger, mine or hers. She put her precious little hand up next to mine, which was literally one-tenth the size of my hand, and then correctly concluded that her hand was smaller. She loves to be the center of attention and loves to eat lots and lots of candy. One time Lao Fan was telling her she might get in trouble from her mom from eating so much candy, so she hid them in his pocket and zipped it up so no one could see. She also likes to break open walnuts. I watched as Lao Fan taught her how to do it by banging on them with the end of a screwdriver. She didn’t even want to eat them, she just kept breaking more. 

After lunch, we took some formal pictures of Lao Fan’s 80-plus-year-old mother. He wants to make a formal portrait of her for their family to have for future generations. That was a special process to be a part of. He has such a huge family and it was difficult to keep track of all of them. They seem to almost make up an entire village in and of themselves. They kept inviting me for more meals, but at some point, we all had to go back up to Wuyipeng. It was such a nice stay and it was hard to put an end to it.  But off we went up the mountain again.