Week 3, Kunming: Trip to Xiao Shujing

For a second I thought that I had gotten away from Jesus Christ. "Goodbye for now, mega-churches!" I had thought to myself last time I left school, cruising past the suburbia-entrenched mall-sized Christ behemoths that hover outside Colorado Springs. And then again, a few months later, I had waved so long to the other side of American religious life, found in Seattle's myriad of spiritual (or decidely un-spiritual, if you subscribe to the thriving Atheist community) factions, all living together in harmony, believing whatever they want--that is, unless it's politically incorrect and/or offensive to the other religious communities, and/or if you make fun of the Unitarian pastor. That makes a big family of everything from Questionable Satanism ("Demonic... or Demonic Hoax?") to the followers of, yes, that same white-robed maybe/maybe-not-son-of-God who adornes the Jumbo-Trons of Colorado Springs' faith stadiums...


...as well as the church of a small Miao minority town by the name of Xiao Shujing.

But really, it shouldn't be a surprise to find the cross in China, where the tally of both registered and estimated unregistered Christians reaches the tune of maybe 40 million (no doubt a significant number, but still something of a drop in the pan for China's population). But big pictures aside, here is Xiao Shujing, a small village tucked into the creases and folds of the crop-studded hills outside Kunming, where most of the houses are made of stone and mud, where cows and chickens and pigs and oxen watch from their tethers and pens, and where people go to sing in church on Sundays.
And they sing well. They sing so well, in fact, that their choirs have gathered enough national acclaim to earn a gift from the government: inside each house you can catch the flicker and whine of a television. And then there are the cellphone towers, three lanky metal skeletons looming over the town, just beyond the hillside.

You know, I don't think the past ever quite saw the future coming.

-S