...And a Sight of Beijing, Hold the Mao

A former 同事 (tong shi, co-worker) returned to Shenzhen for a week after having spent about a month or so traipsing around China. The traveling opportunity would almost be enough to make me jealous--after all, it's a chance to really see something of China, instead of just Shenzhen--but seems to involve a lot more walking, sweating, and running into other strange back-packers than I really have the desire for. (Among the strangest on-the-road tales was the one about a 40-something guy who's apparently traveling with a stuffed koala bear--a stuffed koala bear with definite opinions about weather, tourist sites, 等等, that only he can hear.)

The most interesting bit of information, though, came from Beijing. It seems Mao's tomb is closed, and Beijing's Underground City is also unavailable for viewing. In fact, it sounded like nearly all Beijing's tourist sites were "closed for renovations" while she and her beau were there--renovations apparently expected to last until after the Olympics. If the PRC really has shut down all the tourist sites in Beijing (except for the Wall and the ugly buildings constructed for the Olympics), it must mean someone didn't get the memo about basic marketing.

Add this to the recent visa restrictions over security concerns and all the areas where travel is currently restricted due to one disaster or another, and you wonder whether 2008 won't actually become a benchmark low for China's tourist industry.

Quick Notes: Da Bao, Di Li, Deluge

So the PRC has made a bold and positive move to protect the environment, and I'm already seeing the effects close to home. In a city where I rarely see blue skies and only see green or black water, I'm at least starting to see fewer plastic bags, thanks to a new policy requiring stores to use heavier strength bags and charge customers for them. Of course, a Google search on "china plastic bags" shows at least one US environmentalist criticism of the move, but the change is a great one as far as I'm concerned. Now when I go to buy juice or water at the 7-11 that's right next to my building's entrance, I no longer have to watch the shop attendants wrap a tiny plastic bottle in two or three plastics while fruitlessly arguing, "不需要包。真的，我家离这儿不远." (Bu xu yao bao. Zhen de, wo jia li zhe'r bu yuan. I don't need a bag. Really, my house isn't far from here.) The only downside of the ban is that I've always used the endless supply of bags the stores give me to line my garbage can at home, but I guess the brighter side even of that is that I can now buy a heavy-duty garbage bag for just 2 毛 (2/10ths of an RMB)--one that won't break the minute I dump out my coffee grounds.

Now the government just needs to find a way to get rid of the old flimsy bags at restaurants, where I'm still getting the same treatment every time I 打包 (da bao, carry-out) food.

Every month, the school calls a handful of each teacher's students to find out whether they're happy with classes. Every month, there are either students who are unhappy (usually because the teacher is 无聊--wu liao, boring) or students who are happy for very peculiar reasons: "The teacher is responsible" is one of the most common comments. This month, I got one of my strangest comments yet: "老师教学很好，地理知识也很好." (Lao shi jiao xue hen hao, di li zhi shi ye hen hao. The teacher teaches well, and his geographical knowledge is also very good.) For someone from a country where most students can't find Iraq on a map, this came as a big surprise at first, until I remembered that I live in a country where most of my students can only name five countries (in their native language, at that) and constantly confuse Australia for Japan when looking at a map.

Nersey and I have been discussing plans for construction of an ark. The rainy season (which was in May last year) has hit Shenzhen. In the past week or so, we've had three days of straight rain, three days of sunny weather accompanied by nighttime downpours, and a few days of mixed drizzly, cloudy and all around depressing weather. The rain has been heavy enough that I've had to stop using my living room air conditioner most day, since the drainage system is no longer working properly. Fortunately, all of the weather has thus far been accompanied by relatively steady winds, so I've been able to open the balcony doors and find relief.

Creepy Enough Yet?

在生命中的每一年，在一年的每个日子， 在一天的每个小时，在一小时的每一分钟， 在一分钟的每秒钟，我都在想你，念你，恋你，等你。
Zai sheng ming zhong de mei yi nian, zai yi nian de mei ge ri zi, zai yi tian de mei ge xiao shi, zai yi xiao shi de mei yi fen zhong, zai yi fen zhong de mei miao zhong, wo dou zai xiang ni, nian ni, lian ni, deng ni.

More and more I'm getting messages like the one above, now at the rate of one per day, mostly from one woman I met about four or five weeks ago. I'd played a game of Chinese chess with some of her co-workers at a restaurant, and we'd talked for a brief bit in a mix of Chinese and English.

The next week, I got a message on my phone: "Tonight look for you. You no come same place?"

Not taking much time to think my response through, I sent back "I was there earlier. I must have just missed you."

Minutes later, the reply came back: "Miss you too!" (Look up "miss" in a Chinese dictionary and you get 想--xiang--and it doesn't really have the meaning of "fail to meet due to timing.")

So now I'm getting regular messages like the one at top, the sort of sappy fodder that bounces around on instant messengers back home and on cell phones here in China--canned romantic sayings: "In a lifetime, every year; in every year, every day; every day, every hour; every hour, every minute; every minute, every second, I miss you, [love]*, [love]* you, wait for you." And this from a woman I talked to for about ten minutes. 很可怕的！(Hen ke pa de, really frightening!)

On the bright side, such messages make for great Chinese practice, as they're generally written for the nearly illiterate--a category I fit into pretty safely here.

*Both 念 and 恋 give me a bit of trouble for translating; both can mean "love," but the dictionary shows a whole slew of other meanings, ranging from "understand" to "feel drawn to."

On Shaky Ground

Following on the heels of the Sichuan earthquake* that struck last week come the aftershocks of suspicion, superstition, and blind nationalism. For the most part, my students have been in somber moods, having gone into mourning in their own personal ways, and of course the whole nation officially went into mourning earlier this week, with Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday being national days of mourning including work halts and observed moments of silence. (Interestingly, the Chinese way of observing three minutes of silence while en route apparently requires drivers to blare their horns, making for the loudest minutes of silence I've ever heard--deafening silence made real.)

For these people--and this is the vast majority--the Sichuan earthquake is to them what 9-11 was to most Americans. I've had students cry in class and talk about how helpless they feel; the whole nation seems glued to television sets, watching the news coverage of the crisis, so that the streets near my apartment are more than usually crowded with pedestrians clustered around the little television kiosks.

For some, though, this is a chance to show their true colors as conspiracy theorists, isolationists, racial supremacists, or worse. The rumors that have cropped up around the event range from the superstitious--clouds foretelling the earthquake or unlucky numbers or unlucky 福娃 (fuwa) like JingJing and YingYing causing disasters in China this year--to the usual beleaguered Han laments: the earthquake was caused by Xinjiang separatists, by the Dalai Lama, by Taiwan; [insert your country's name here] isn't doing enough to help because they hate Chinese; 2,000 years ago, Han Chinese invented an earthquake-prediction machine** which would have saved everyone in Sichuan had cultural imperialists not imposed Western seismographs on their country.

A few people, both Chinese and 外国的, have told me the earthquake was surely caused by the Three Gorges Dam. Who knows what category of confusion about geology to put that in?

Probably the nastiest little bone of contention I've heard debated endlessly by a few people in the last week is the size of Yao Ming's donation. In classes, a few students--usually rich, usually unwilling to talk about how much they donated--have gone out of their way to heap scorn on Ming, calling him a 香蕉 (xiangjiao, banana) and race traitor. Such loudmouths have gone out of their way to pester me about how much I've donated and, when I've refused to answer, verbally abused me for being an American capitalist who came to China to steal their money and women. Granted, I'm 一个人 (yi ge ren, single) and will make less money in five years than one of these men recently lost playing the stock market, but to such small-minded bigots, I'm American and, therefore, rich--rich and greedy.

So it's been a mixed week, showing me once again some of the best parts of living in China, and some of the worst parts of living in China. Now when people ask me how I feel in the aftermath of the earthquakes, I can usually only reply that my feelings are muddled.

*And, yes, suddenly I can access Wikipedia without using a proxy--and read "Tiananmen Square self-immolation incident"; maybe the earthquake took out the PRC's central censorship bureau. Oops, nope, the blocks are still in place for the 1989 riots.

**In reality, a Chinese inventor, Chang Heng, did invent the above 候风地动仪 (houfeng didong yi), which just showed what direction tremors came from after an earthquake had already happened.

The Olympic Torch Delay Hits Shenzhen

The Olympic flame came to Shenzhen today, more or less as had been planned. The intended route seemed a relatively convenient one for me, though not convenient enough for me to view it from my balcony.

The running route for the torch was set to go to the 海王 (hai wang, or Sea King) building which is just a few minutes walk from my place, and it was supposed to do so relatively early in the morning. Just before I went to look at the crowd and see whether I might be able to squeeze in close enough to see, I ran across the announcement that the relay would be starting a bit late, so I waited until around one o'clock to head there.

By the time I arrived there, the crowds were massive: probably fifteeen to twenty thousand people packed into a single block and swarming onto the streets. For some reason, rather than adding to the permanent fences built alongside the road to stop pedestrians, the powers that be had decided to use little movable barriers to control the crowds. Little to no police presence attended the event and people were pretty much left to do whatever they wanted: mostly clambering onto the roofs of bus stations, scaling light posts or trees in order to get a better view; a number of banners had been ripped down by these climbing attempts, and branches were ripped off trees in a few places. Most of the rest of the crowd's energy was devoted to trying to push through to find a better place, pounding drums, and chanting: "加油，中国，高兴" and what sounded like "一三" ("jia you, zhongguo, gaoxing" "yi san"--"Add gas (Go!), China, Happy" "One, three"); it seemed anytime someone decided to yell out a two-syllable phrase, the crowd just picked it up and screamed it for a few minutes.

Early on, I got caught up in one group's decision to push through the crowd, and I wound up opposite Children's World--a store about halfway between the 海王 building and the Haiya Baihuo overpass. I managed to get near the permanent fencing on the side of the road and, thus, stay out of the pushing contests.

Around three-thirty, there was a bit of a louder roar well off in the distance: people got excited for a few minutes, but then the cheering and chattering faded back away. Twenty minutes or so later the torch finally arrived ... sort of. Since the crowds had pushed the movable barriers on both sides of the streets to nearly touching, the officials apparently deemed it unsafe for the runner to continue. So instead of watching the torch run past, I got to watch a bus and a van pass, preceded by a handful of men in uniforms marching. Ahead of the bus ran a bunch of people shouting at the onlookers and shoving back the barriers. I did get to see, presumably, the runner, sitting and looking tired and discouraged in the van as it drove past, and then the whole thing was over, the crowds pushing and shoving to get home.

May Day: Save Our Sense

I may have to make a trip out to 家乐福 (Carrefour) and pick up a fan just so all the shit flying around will have something to hit. I'll have to go within the next week, though, or else risk being labeled an "anti-China" reactionary protestor. The anti-protest protests have begun, targeting KFC, Carrefour, and the Body Shop--and probably a lot of others I haven't heard about yet.

I first heard about the Carrefour boycott about a week and a half ago, and at that time the stated reason for the boycott was a simple one: France allowed the Olympic Torch protests to happen, so boycotting a prominent French company would send a strong message. Unfortunately, there must not have been enough people joining in the boycotts, so late last week SMS messages started circulating: Carrefour gave money to the Dalai Lama (who, of course, is the leader of a "terrorist" organization).


Now May 1st is set for the beginning of an extended boycott against Carrefour. And the mob mentality may have set in. Shanghaiist.com just ran an article about a 22-year-old American who was atacked by a mob of protestors after coming out of a Carrefour in Hunan province (or "Fulan" as the locals would call it). I have some misgivings about the article, such as the atrocious English written by "an Ivy League university volunteer programme" who would presumably be here teaching English. More in keeping with the sort of attitudes I've been encountering every day as of late are some of the sentiments expressed in the comments section, such as "he should have known that he was taking risk to do the whole thing at this time and place."


The comment that probably drives me the craziest is "When news or rumors pop out like this, the first knee-jerk reaction of you guys is blasting evil China and Chinese." Fair enough, some of the 老外 commenting on the story are knuckle-heads, but so are some of the 中国人. But lately, in every class, I've had to listen to the woe-is-us diatribe of how the PRC is a developing country that everyone steps on and takes advantage of and doesn't respect, while at the same time having to listen to lecture after lecture on how the Han are superior to other people, due in part to their 5,000 year old history. The whole country seems to be suffering from a sort of collective Napoleon syndrome, and it just gets sadder and sadder with each new update. Hopefully, the whole thing will start to disappear after the May 1st holiday, when everyone has to work the weekend to make up for the luxury of two days off.
And, now, KFC has made the list of places to boycott: "Worth mentioning that a few days ago and compared to boycott French goods, the famous American restaurant chains KFC has also been included in the boycott list, the 'charges' is 'the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution to boycott Chinese Olympic.'" (That last link's a bit diffuicult to read, but at least attempting to be fair.) As an American, though, I'm looking forward to the boycotts for two very important reasons: 1) I can make a 不吃肯塔基 sign and parade the streets--"Don't eat Kentucky," which looks a lot like "Don't eat KFC"; and 2) I can finally start selling some 我是巴哈马人 T-shirts to other foreigners (What have folks from the Bahamas ever done to China, after all?).

Just Nod Your Head and Smile

I tried to discuss the Olympic torch relay in class last night. My goal was to try to get students to focus on the meaning of the Olympic flame itself and some of the motivations 外国人 (waiguoren) might have for taking part in such protests. I pointed out that it had been a foreigner responsible for one instance of the torch's being extinguished.

"No, there were no foreigners--Tibetan's children," they insisted. I said that many of the protestors (such as those who hung the handcuff Olympic rings, those who chained themselves to the Eiffel Tower, and some of those who caused the torch to be extinguished) were foreigners, not Tibetans. "Children of the outside countries, not Tibet's children," I clarified.

My students then showed me the one picture published in the newspaper, saying, "See, Chinese woman want save flame, Tibetan terrorize flame, Chinese, Tibetan, China, Tibet," pointing back and forth between the two figures. "What about other pictures?" I asked. "You're saying this picture isn't real?" they accused me. "No, just that there are other pictures," explained; this one incident isn't everything. They didn't believe me. So, for the record (on a blog that can't be accessed in China without a proxy), the guy below is whiter than I am.

And this guy's pretty pale too.
And I don't think I need to point out that there aren't many Chinese as dark-skinned as the guy in the middle of this picture.

Again, though, my students can't easily get ahold of such pictures. I had to go to the New York Times and BBC to get them, and Chinese searches just don't route that way. And of course my students wouldn't think to do an English search on the issue; after all, the Western media always lies. (As an interesting side-note, yes, Chinese police do dress as indicated the one page in the youtube clip, but the 保安--bao'an, or security/paramilitary guards that monitor my neighborhood certainly do dress in camouflage and boots; who knows which are actually being shown in that clip.)

So, I'm done raising such issues in class. It's too much to hope for that people will be able to put aside the People's Daily and Xinhua official lines long enough to even complete a sentence.