变态辣

I read a short Essay today by the renowned early 20th century Chinese author Lu Xun. The essay is called 藤野先生, or Mr. TengYe for those who don’t read Chinese. It is a story about Lu Xun’s time in Japan, and Mr. Tengye, a teacher that had a big influence on him. It also details the reason why he gave up medicine for writing. After watching a newsreel of a firing squad killing Chinese spies, and seeing Chinese people around cheering like it was a party, he realized that China’s biggest illness itself was this kind of behavior. Instead of using medicine to cure he would use his pen. He has since been lionized by Communists and Nationalists alike. I feel like he was successful in his quest to cure China of this disease.

What comes to my mind as an example of this is Tank Man. If you have an hour I suggest watching the awesome Frontline documentary about him. The Tank Man of course is the famous picture of a man standing in front of a coloum of red star-branded tanks during the 1989 Tiananmen protests. His identity and what became of him are still a mystery, but some suggest that he was just a guy on his way to work who found the sight of tanks in his city disgusting. If that interpertation is true, he is the embodiment of Lu Xun’s dream for a strong China. Someone who is proud of their country. Ironically, the aforementioned image is rarely if ever seen in China. Watch the documentary I linked to see a bunch of China’s brightest students ask if it’s a forgery or not. But also go to google.cn and google.com and search for Tiananmen square.

I have a lot of sympathy for Wen Jiabao. The guy has a really difficult job. I’m sure he grapples with the same issues that any foreigner looking at China’s human rights does. He has a lot on his plate though, and sometimes you need to focus on bigger issues, like people living in poverty. I’m just a little bit pissed at him right now for allowing the blocking of youtube, twitter, tank man picture, blogspot, flickr, and wordpress. It’s been 20 years since Tiananmen and the 60th aniversary of communist rule is coming up in October but do you have to make sure it goes without a hitch by blocking web 2.0 in it’s entirety? When is facebook getting the axe?  Let me watch my viral videos damnit.

I went to sleep in the afternoon yesterday and woke up an hour later to thunderstorms. I should have expected it given that the normally dry climate prompted me to pull my shirt up due to humidity. That was Saturday. It’s now Sunday night and still raining. The forecast doesn’t look very good. The rain here is a rare sight, I can only think of one or two times in the past 8 months that it has rained like this. The groundskeepers, who are assisted by a new class of students participating in “labor week” (mandatory) drench the soil here with fire hoses starting around the time when it stops being freezing. They litteraly flood great swaths of grass with inches of water. The kind of thing I feel like I would get in trouble for doing playing with the hose in the summer time.

The rain also makes me worry about my environment. Runoff is a problem in Del Mar, where it also never rains, but just imagine what it does in a place in China with even worse pollution. Last year when it rained like this there was a huge mudslide/sludgeslide that killed a bunch of people in Shanxi. I have been up in the mountains around us and I they’ve flush with vegetation, but I worry about people in other parts of this wonderful province. Last time, the mayor of the above-mentioned town and maybe the governor of Shanxi both resigned. I would hate to have that job. Between child labor brick factories, killers mudslides caused by negligent mining, and general mine disasters, the job has a short term.

I started a twitter today. You can find it at http://www.twitter.com/nickinchina. My mom asked me about it a couple weeks ago which got me thinking, and even Bill Simmons has one now, so I think it’s about time I got on board. I am going to use it to write down interesting things I see, funny Chinglish t-shirts, profound thoughts I have, or funny things the German teacher Matthias here says. If you’re wondering about that last one, here is a gem that happened before I got Twitter: “We Germans wait for DNA of cow who makes beer”. The best part is that I can update it from my phone via text messages. And the text messages here are really cheap so I can twitter all I want. I think this will be especially useful for when I am travelling this summer. I also seem to always come up with insights into life in China when I’m riding on the bus.

Speaking of travelling, this weekend is the China Open ultimate tournament. Yours truly will be playing for Beijing. I had so much fun in Korea that I could not afford to miss this tournament. I will probably not post until after that, but follow my twitter, because I will update that with my progress. I also hope to take some pictures with my good camera. May the Biantaila faithful hold me to it.

I recently returned to China after a week playing frisbee on beautiful Jeju Island, South Korea. This trip took me up progressive scales of devolopment in the world. Starting in Taigu, then to Taiyuan, then to Beijing, then to Seoul, then to vacation paradise Jeju. Every time I go somewhere like Beijing or Shanghai, I am struck by the contrast between rich and poor.

There is now a fast train from Taiyuan to Beijing, taking only 3 hours, rather than the often times 12+ hour overnight train of the past. The new train gave me the opprotunity to see Shanxi and Hebei countryside during the day, which I have missed on past train rides to the capital. Of course there was nothing too shocking, I live in Taigu, which although now sells Heineken and Carlberg beer in the town supermarket, is still relatively poor outside of a small few. What really shocked me though was the trip back.

I flew into the Beijing airport and hung around the east side of town with friends while I was waiting for my train. Foreigners buzzed around the many foreign restaurants, and the well-dressed, well-heeled, Chinese people were shopping at the expensive malls. But eventually I had to move west, to the Beijing west train station. This particular station serves pretty much all of western locales, Shanxi being one of them. But once I came out of the subway there were no more foreigners in sight, I did not see one in over 2 hours of being there. The dress was decidely Shanxish, see my earlier post for a detailed description, and I felt almost like I had emerged from the subway in a different country.

I guess my real beef is the way that China is potrayed in the Western news. Tourists, reporters, important people, can all go to Beijing, Shanghai, and Xi’an and see a very rapidly developing country, with fast trains popping up everywhere, and say wow this country is doing great for itself. But so much of the population is farmers, who live on dollars a day. So when I take this fast train that must have cost billions of dollars, I am wondering, do the poor watch the news and feel happy? Or what about when an olympic athlete has millions of dollars invested on him or her, to get a piece of metal? Does the person even have a tv or a radio to watch this stuff? Mao led the peasants to take control of the country, now it seems like his party takes for granted who helped them get where they are.

This past weekend I went on hike with a bunch of friends, affectionately dubbed “the swim guys”, because of their passion for the taigu pool. I had a bought a tiny barbeque at Wal-Mart a few weeks ago, and apparently it inspired all of our students to do mountainside grilling. Anne had just gone the day before and I was going to go on Sunday. The weather wasn’t perfect, there was a little bit of a dust storm brewing, and the weather was slightly nippy. By the time we got halfway up the mountain though, I could care less, I was really hungry. The swim guys were prepared though, packing more kebabs than one could possibly imagine. I kept looking into the bag of lamb kebabs and they never seemed to dissapear. I lost track of how many chuan (串) I ate, and quickly lapsed into a food coma. Notice how the character for kebab looks like a stick with meat on it. We spent a few hours cooking and taking pictures and goofing off. It was truly a great day.

We decided not to climb any higher however, lest we be weighed down by all the meat in our bellies, and headed home. It was bittersweet, because most of the swim guys are seniors, which means they have no classes, they already took the test for grad school, and they only need to write a “thesis”. I put thesis into quotation marks because I’m not really sure how serious it is. Most students I talk to haven’t started it yet. Imagine just starting an honors project paper in April. The real pressure for most of my friends seems to be finding a job. And for that reason, they are all going home. Being at home gives them numerous advantages over school. Privacy, internet, and home cookin’ are the most often cited. It’s really interesting. Imagine if every Oberlin grad peaced out their senior year second semester, I think it would be sad. But such is the job market and the education system here.

Today for April Fool’s day Anne and I took our classes outside to play duck duck goose and capture the flag. Great Success!

Here are some pictures of barbecue action. The haze is caused by pollution or the above-mentioned dust storm, I’m not really sure what causes it. And yes, Shanxi does look like Mars.

Mountainside Barbeque

My lesson plan for the last week was a lectue about American college sports, the NCAA tournament, and why it is so exciting. Then I gave everyone a blank bracket and had them fill it out. Promising the winner in each class dinner with me and the overall winner another special prize which I haven’t come up with yet (I’m thinking a basketball maybe). It was a great success, and even the girls were into it, which can be a little bit difficult. The football lecture didn’t really capture too many girl’s imaginations.

I am writing this post to brag about my own bracket:

It probably won’t end up this way, but right now I am #72 overall. That’s in the whole world. Aren’t I awesome?

Unfortunately I can’t watch the games because microsoft silverlight 2.0 doesn’t support powerpc macs. I have to borrow someone else’s computer to catch the action after midnight tonight. I need to talk to my friend working at microsoft and see if he help me out.

Now I need to start scoring the 110 brackets my students made. I’m sure I can just throw out the ones who picked Florida St. to go all the way (go Badgers!) , and definately the one who picked Cornell to go all the way (silly grad students).

Edit: March 21

15th place!

One of the most stiking things coming from Japan to China is the fashion. Sure Japanese people have tons of money to throw away on (real) Louis Vuitton purses and the hottest selvedge jeans, but there is some legitimate fashion happening in China too. A couple of things that I have noticed here Shanxi that I have incorporated into my warddrobe include the following:

Keys on the belt loop

I see this more with older men, but all the fly guys have their keys hanging from a clipy key chain off their right hip. Bonus points if you have a crap load of keys. There isn’t really a more satisfying feeling that strolling up to door where people are waiting, cigarette in hand, whipping this big chain of keys of your belt loop, and saving the day. Thank you, key man.

The perm

This is worst one I could find on google image search in the first few pages. Every once in awhile one of my students will do this to their hair and I cry a little bit inside. Seriously. I can’t even understand wearing this hairstyle if you were the coolest rockstar in the world, much less a college student. As I write this I keep scrolling up to that picture to get another look at it. Yikes.

I have my best pictures from Japan up on my picasa for all my fans who haven’t seen them yet:

Tokyo - Fukuoka - Nagasaki

I miss China. I watched a really good documentary on PBS yesterday called “Please Vote for Me”. It was about three eigth year olds campaigning to be class monitor. Here is the website for the particular program. Check your TV guide I’m sure you can find it on your local station. The show was hilarious, sad, inspiring, adorable, and terrifying at the same time. I was just watching it the whole time with my jaw wide open. These kids were so terrible to each other. My favorite moment was when the kids were in line for lunch and one kid says to other, “I don’t think I’ll vote for Luo Lei because he beats us up to much”. Upon hearing this, Luo lei gets out of line and pointing at the speaker, says “If I didn’t beat you, you kids would never listen to me”. Once again, they are all just 8 year olds.

Young people in China are so interesting. I love to compare and contrast my English major undergrads and my graduate students, as they have radically different outlooks on their education. The most interesting, and arguably most frustrating for me are the “Angry Youth”. It’s basically the equivalent of an internet troll. Super-nationalistic, they shit up the comments on any website having to do with China.

In the last year, China experienced snow damage, big earthquake, Peking Olympics, launch of Shenzhou 7 Mission and financial crisis. The power of CCP is extremely strong and Im personally the fan of President Hu :）
Compared with President Hu, italian and french presidents act like clowns and their appearances are also close to clown…
No insult, just my personal feeling.

This was posted in this article from the economist.com. Now seriously, I read a few comments below this, and it really has nothing to do with the conversation that’s going on. I noticed that the 3/5 of the most commented articles are about China. In some ways for me it’s downright scary that people who think like this are running around. Or at least that’s what I thought when I read this article from the New Yorker. But really now I realize that most young people in China are just trying to get a good job and live a happy life. Sure they love China but they are respectful and don’t rub/stick it in your face. The are proud of their culture. If you could hear my students tell me about the specialties of their home province or all about Chinese new year you would know what I mean.

And that’s the beauty of actually living in China. I had this thought when I was in Shanghai as well. Most of what we read in the Western media is written by people who only have part of the picture. The same is true of me but I believe that my picture represents a wider swath of the Chinese populace. For example, in an episode of 30 Rock from this season, Steve Martin gets Jack to invest in a company with just the words “China and Wind Power”. This joke to me represents the view that comes out the most. People backpacking through Shanghai and also big shot analysts who live there really only see the richest part of China. I felt the same way; As I stood along the Bund I thought: wow! China is really developing fast! But alas, the reality for hundreds of millions of people is not what you see in Beijing or Shanghai.

I just thought about the whole Sarah Palin “Real Virginia” and “Real America thing” I guess I sound like someone who advocates for the “Real China”, but just like America, there is no such thing.

Someone pointed out to me that after awhile people stop posting on their blogs. It makes sense, if one is having a good time, they are too busy/distracted to write on their blog, but if they are upset they need to write.  So if you are reading this and wishing I would post more, be happy that I am having a good time!

Taigu is pretty cold right now. The low today is supposed to be -8 centigrade, and quick calculation tell me that is 17 degrees Fahrenheit. I heard once that the body will adjust to different environments; if you live a tropical place, your blood will actually get thinner. I think that being in Beijing and Hong Kong this summer did not prepare me well for the dry and blistering cold of Taigu. I watched the Leonids meteor shower the other day, and I only saw about four before I started shivering and went inside. I was wearing my beanie, a sweatshirt and my jacket. Although my weather report tells me it is colder in Oberlin right now than it is here, I think this is colder.

Exciting news! I am going to Shanghai next week. An Oberlin and Shansi alum invited all of us teachers to her house for Thanksgiving. I can’t wait. The tickets were super cheap, only $140. Plus the five of us are going to be traveling together which should be super fun. I will write more about it when I come back. Or maybe I will do my first ever post from a Starbucks.

Taiyuan is the capitol of Shanxi province, an at only a one hour bus ride away, an ideal getaway for me. The preferred method of travel is by bus. A ticket costs 12 yuan, about $1.75 and the ride is usually quite an adventure. If you’ve never gone 80 in a tour bus packed to the brim with people, I would recommend it, it is quite a thrill. In previous posts, I talked about going places in Shanxi, and the crazy stuff you see on the road. These bus rides certainly do not disappoint in that regard. My favorites are the tractors putting along with insane amounts of cabbage stacked on the back, or sometimes a pig or two.

I went to Taiyuan yesterday. The first place I went was McDonald’s, but after that I checked out the awesome Shanxi Museum. The building is monolithic from the outside (you can see pictures in the linked gallery below). Inside the inverted pyramid though is a very cool museum filled with Engrish-friendly exhibits about Shanxi province for the past 300 million years. This would be lame, but Shanxi is actually a very interesting place, and it bordered by the yellow river, so the province is literally regarded as the cradle of Chinese civilization.

To add to the McDonald’s in my belly, we had Pizza Hut for lunch. Pizza Hut in China is incredibly fancy, although still somewhat casual. The menu is huge and expensive. The most interesting thing to me is the salad bar. Uncooked vegetables in China are extremely rare, probably because of sanitation issues, so a salad bar is something really special. However, the only real vegetable at the Pizza Hut salad bar is lettuce, and maybe cherry tomatoes. The real kicker is that you can only make one trip to the salad bar, so people walk away with these massive heaps of lettuce and dressing trying to the most for their 36 yuan (5 dollars). Rip off? Yes.

After that we went for the America trifecta and hit Wal-Mart. I almost bought a $20 hat at a nike store, but I’m glad I waited because I got one I like better for $1 at Wal-Mart. The store is absolutely brilliant, a perfect hybrid between what Wal-Mart is in America, and a Chinese supermarket. Apart from my wonderful beanie, I bought two containers of Skippy crunchy peanut butter. Life is good in Taigu.

Please look at this gallery, it is a collection of pictures from the past few weeks, all taken with my iphone. The picture quality is pretty good on the phone, but things come out blurry at times. It is so convenient to have a dictionary, phone, ipod, and camera in my pocket all at once, especially when going on a trip like to Taiyuan, and I used all four of those functions yesterday!

From Some fall pix from Taigu

Well, as you may have gathered from my last post, I have been without computer for over a month and a half. It was a long and stressful process, and I will describe it in detail below. The story offers some insight into the way things work in China that I will definitely keep in mind if this happens again. 

It started with my computer not charging, and after it ran out of batteries I was screwed, so I called Apple tech support and got a list of places to take my computer to get serviced in China. I am an idiot, and missed that there was a place in Taiyuan, one hour away, and thought that I would have to travel six hours. Of course there is no mail-in service here. Luckily, right before I was about to go on a six hour trip I found out that there was a second page to the list of service centers. Cool, so I go to Taiyuan.

I went the day after national day, and the guy who fixes the computers took the whole week off, great. So I left it at the apple store there. The next week I called and they said that the guy had it and they were going to send it to Beijing. Awesome! But first I need to send them my receipt. My receipt? It’s in America! Well, too bad, we need to see it. Is a copy okay? No. Then later they call back and say a fax is okay. I make my parents find the receipt and give it to them. A week has gone by at this point.

Two weeks later, I wonder where my computer is. So I call Apple and they say we don’t see any parts being ordered for it. Oh brother. I call the place where I left it. Oh, it hasn’t left Taiyuan yet because of some shipping issue. I eventually got moved up the ladder on Apple customer service until a very helpful person, who still took three days to get back to me sorted things out. She told me the part had been sent on Friday, and I got an email that the computer was fixed on a Tuesday.

I shudder to think of how long it might have taken had I not called and bothered all these people about the speed. So the moral of the story is, if you want something done in China, you need to go to people besides the primary contact, even if it means going over their head. This is what is going on right now with me trying to figure out when I can leave this winter. I need to talk to 3 people before I can get a straight answer. Oh well. 

And for something completely different here is a gallery of my students carving pumpkins last week:

New Album 10/29/08 1:04 PM