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June 25th, 2009
01:29 am - Bruce's Livejournal: not dead, but... undead?
Well, it seems that blogger (and everything related to Google except it's Chinese version) is currently being well and truly blocked. But when I came back to have a look at my good old blog here on Livejournal, it seems that it is no longer blocked by the censorious hounds unleashed--for the past two years or so--upon it by the Chinese government. Bizarre. The worst thing about maintaining a blog in China, then, is not that your blog will be blocked, as there are ways around this (example: I can send email to my blog on Blogger which will then be re-formed as a blog posting), but rather the uncertainty of not knowing how long you'll be able to keep up posting on that particular blog. As has been evidenced by my own sharp decrease in blog postings, there's also a morale issue: when you're running a blog that is popular and widely commented on by a wide variety of people, including friends, family, and acquaintances, it can be greatly discouraging to have to keep changing venues and thus losing potential views.
Ah well. Regardless, I must keep fighting the good fight against the CCP usurpers and their slavering censors!
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October 9th, 2007
01:25 pm - R.I.P. 2004-2007 Bruce's Live Journal
I'm sorry folks, but the Chinese government (and a website redesign by the LJ crew) have made posting onto this blog from China entirely impossible. Perhaps you had already guessed that fact, seeing as I haven't posted anything in about two or three months. May the scorpions of my belated wrath haunt the Chinese Communist Party's dreams for eternity.
But let us all move on.
I've created a new blog at: http://baihaifeng.blogspot.com
Let's hope the censors-that-be don't find and decide to block that one as well, or else I'll be forced to single-handedly bring down the entire Chinese government. ;-)
See you there!
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July 27th, 2007
11:09 pm - And The Skies Opened
Although I've reassured various friends over the past couple weeks that the flooding of Chongqing--which they've seen footage of on the TV, here in China,--has mostly been restricted to the countryside around the city proper (the countryside has much less infrastructure and so various villages and towns get routinely swept off the cliffside by massive mudslides and the like) it seems that Chongqing City now gets its due.
Throughout last night I periodically awoke to the booming of lightning hitting my hi-rise condo and those around it, but even in my dreams I hadn't imagined the almost apocalyptic scene that would surround me on my way to work this morning.
What I saw: A massive stone ball--one of the ones that keeps traffic out of the walking mall rolling down the street and knocking down pedestrians like tenpins; waterfalls plummeting off the sides of skyscrapers and cascading down stairways; water a foot deep running like a river through the middle of the mall; fountains exploding up through broken flagstones from the obviously flooded-to-capacity-sewers/storm drains; brilliant tendrils of lightning striking the monoliths above me. I felt like I was in the biblical end times, although I recall that those were supposed to be bathed in fire, not water. I have to wonder how things are out in the countryside, where they had already been severely flooded in previous weeks and the infrastructure is yet weaker.
Through this, I'm also currently battling a bad cold. I hope that none of my students try to come for class today.
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July 15th, 2007
11:13 am - Charming Moments from a Sinking Ship
Alas, our school here in Chongqing seems to be well on its way to the realm of the Dodo bird or at least the Cloud Leopard, probably due to the extremely timid funding of our promotional activities by our Singaporean boss/franchisee owner. To be fair, having a foreign assistant manager (me) without any prior management experience--and only six months of teaching experience--in charge of things probably didn't aid us much in surmounting the challenges of increasing our marketshare either. I've had a steep learning curve, not a lot of support or direction, and learned plenty of lessons the hard way. Fair enough. Perhaps I will be looking for other employment, come the fall.
But be that as it may, there are still some very charming moments to be had in this sinking school.
I was playing a game with my promotional class, last night, wherein one person says, "I like..." something, and everyone who likes that 'something' has to get up and change seats. A little girl, whose chosen English name is 'Care', was in the middle. She said, "I like Mao Zedong". No one got up.
Later after class, Care asked me if I would be her teacher for her class at Aston, and I had to say that it would very sadly not be the case (possibly costing us a customer). It seems that I have a coterie of such young admirers. One little girl who attends our summer C2 class always looks for me, but the last couple of days I took the opportunity to sleep in, and she was most disappointed. Another girl who likes basketball and has a very boyish haircut, I had mistaken to be a boy. In fact, I named her 'Matt' after one of my best friends back in the states. Only later one of my co-workers discovered that this was indeed a girl (if a tom-boyish one), and that she was yet another admirer of Bai Hai Feng (my chosen Chinese name).
Chinese word of the day: ke ai de (cute)
On a completely different note, I'd like to thank my friend Jenny for posting this for me, thus bypassing the ever more vigilant Chinese censorship apparatus. Perhaps we might yet devise a way to post pictures--thus far only available to those of you that possess Facebook accounts--from my life and adventures here in Chongqing.
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July 3rd, 2007
03:08 am - On the Manipulation of Governments
So let us say that you wished to bend a particular government around the pinky finger of your chosen issue--in this case I'm thinking of the natural environment, its degradation, and the reversal of such.
Governments, much like individual people or individual organizations have differing priorities, personalities, and leverage points. The US government, for example, is most highly concerned with the continued promotion of its influence abroad, as well as with its popularity at home. Not with *total* popularity, however, let it be said, but at the very least a popularity with core constituencies that have proven in past to be capable of keeping said government in power. The US government wants to be prom queen, feels it deserves to be prom queen, and can pretty much be manipulated accordingly. The most important thing to remember is that she has to think it was her idea in the first place, but that's just 'social engineering 101'.
The Chinese government, on the other hand, has different priorities. She hasn't been the prom queen for quite a long time (six hundred years, perhaps), but she really, really feels she deserves to be recognized once again. Like the US, she's full of mispent pride, but unlike the US, she's in the position of up-and-comer, so she's willing to work a bit harder for the top prize. That's a good motivation that can be used well, if other causes can be hitched to it (human rights and environmental protection come to mind).
What are the Chinese government's priorities?
1. Stability (currently sermonized under the heading of the 'Harmonious China' campaign that President Hu Jintao ushered in last year) as only general stability can allow the populace to remain distracted with their own entrepreneurial goals, and continue to allow the CCP's (outwardly) singular grasp on the reins of power.
2. Increasing the 'face' or international perception of China as a world leader, when it doesn't conflict with priority number one.
3. Increasing wealth, when it doesn't conflict with priorities number one or two (although it sometimes does conflict, and a culture of corruption allows plenty of discord to arise).
If, in one's quest to promote human rights or ecological stewardship, you can find common ground with any one of these priorities, that can be a strong leverage point.
Additional problems:
Guanxi culture--a culturally embedded system of favors that to Western perspective might also be called nepotism and corruption--means that while the above priorities matter most to the central government officials in Beijing, these priorities may mean little or nothing at all to local officials, and many a well-intended memo or national constitution dictated from above has been completely disregarded at the provincial, county, or local level.
'Mei Banfa'. I can't count the number of times I've heard: "But we never did it that way before...", and in general, many otherwise smart and educated people seem to be risk-adverse. I think that China's "Can't Do" attitude must have been inherited from the stagnancy of the Mao years, as well as fostered by an education system that rewards memorization rather than problem-solving skills. This is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of doing any business in China, and it should be taken into consideration for even the smallest of endevours. On the other hand, this provides a very instructive example of what the future results of the "No Child Left Behind" act (in the US)will be.
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June 14th, 2007
11:21 pm - The Riot
I saw my first demonstration, earlier this week.
I was heading to Carrefour to buy supplies with which to cook an aubergine guvech. I saw, lined up in rows perpendicular to the store entrance, many men and women carrying red banners on bamboo poles. These were mostly young people, but many ages included, their clothes marked them as middle class. Perhaps most were young workers, a few years out of college and finding it difficult to meet their aspirations in the Chinese rat race, so I imagined.
Where were they marching to? What were they marching for? I asked my friend who was with me. She wasn't sure, but reading the slogans these marchers were carrying, it seemed they might be asking for better wages, or the reduction of a government tax on their stores. Something like that.
And then they began marching, without great fanfare. But from the corner of my eye, I saw a large contingent of police coming--perhaps as much as a hundred of them--in their pale blue.
It's never particularly clear, in a riot, who starts what, or where. What the outside observer usually can detect is just a disturbance, like the whirlpool that forms when you pull the plug from a tub of water. Perhaps the police were attempting to grab at the demonstrators, or perhaps they weren't. I'm sure there were overly enthusiastic people on both sides of that divide, ones who wanted a fight and whose blood was hot and ready. However it began, the whirlpool rippled outward with an amazing organic speed. Police surged forward and demonstrators surged forward, and my friend and I fled down the steps into the gelid, marbled depths of Carrefour.
It just doesn't pay for a foreigner to be observed observing a Chinese riot. The government spends a lot of time and energy pretending that there haven't been thousands of riots in China each year, for the past however many years since their gestapo grip began to slip.
This may be a vast walking mall, where I live, but each day I see the riot police surveillance van with its incongruous and rather useless green camo coloring easing itself past the McDonalds, and Starbucks. China may be booming, and may be transforming itself for the better at an unprecedented rate, but for all that, it is still a police state, and keeps a fragile peace.
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June 7th, 2007
08:42 am - The Fish
Below my window
Streams of fish spill
Down like a golden stair
Under rain, and
Over stone.
Honored history devoured
By a fat, red carp
Left these little fish to flee
Under stone, and
Over sea.
Nets of silk and rough-spun
Thought are thrown down
To catch a catch of wet gills
Under sea, and
Over hair.
Fat-bodied beetles scuttle
Across the sleek surface
Of dreams warned away
Under hair, and
Over tongue.
When the sea comes to
These dreaming fish at last
Open mouths fill with salt
Under tongue, and
Over teeth.
Below my window
A clamor slams up
Like a joyous ocean
Of angry fish heard
Under teeth, and
Over rain.
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May 30th, 2007
06:52 am - Eyes, Mouths, Ears
I recall the powerful lamps trained onto cat skulls and milk conchs, illuminating gaunt art-student fingers scratching away at creamy sketch paper with 3B, HB, and 6H pencils in the quiet darkness of the Scientific Illustration room. Even the treacheries of pen & ink hatching, or the threat of carbon dust painting cannot quell my nostalgia for those days.
I've begun teaching my own 'Sketching 101' for a friend of mine, intending to impart all that half-forgotten lore: blind contour, value, cross-hatching, negative space. Sci Ill this isn't, but Miss Liang is certainly talented. And teaching these skills to another has awakened a hunger for the feel of graphite on paper pulp, the connection between eye and hand and object that could sometimes make me more than just human. I remember what it was like to be a creator, once, rather than just a passer-on of figments. I've neglected the drawing, painting, and writing I've spent so much time honing--perhaps to turn my attention to the sculpting of events rather than space.
On the other hand, I've devoted much time to studying Chinese, and that's coming along. Wo juede wode zhongwen haishi bu tai hao, danshi wo shiyishi he zai shiyishi. Xianzai wo keyi ge chang 'Kangding Qing Ge'! (Translated: I think my Chinese is still not very good, but I try and I try again. Now I can sing the song 'Kangding Love Song'.) That's a traditional song that specifically mentions one of the high-altitude Tibetan cities I visited last fall, and I've taken a liking to it.
'Pao ma liu liu di shan shang, yi duo liu liu di yun yo...'
If it weren't for the dastardly devices of the governmental censors, I'd be able to imbed the song directly into this blog, but alas, you my readers will be forced to imagine yourselves in the world before web 2.0 and googlesearch it for yourselves. So it goes.
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May 23rd, 2007
06:41 am - In Search of Maolan (3)
The next day we reached the village of Banzai after much consternation and bureaucracy resulting from a directive to protect Mao Zedong-related historical sites from marauding foreign. tourists/terrorists. Banzai is a collection of ancient stone--and newer cement--above a valley of rice fields, mountains gathered like teeth along each side. A great grandfather of a tree, some hundreds of years old, perhaps, folds his crooked lines and shade over a wide cement wall painted crimson with a golden hammer and sickle to commemorate the day, many decades ago, when the Long March stopped here in this innocuous minority village to rest a little and confer. Such historic titans of modern Chinese history as Mao and Zhou Enlai slept in the town's old school--recently turned into a small museum, and perhaps this was what the park wardens were worried Jon and I would attempt to sabotage.
Yao's grandma had an infectious laugh for a woman who has survived a century of China's modern hardships, from the Japanese Invasion (which preceded the Long March through these parts) through the Cultural Revolution, and now an age of rapacious, no-breaks, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics. We ate salt-cured pork and drank homemade rice liquor with Yao's extended family that evening. The frogs were croaking in the rice fields and inside we were beset by a Yao cousin who wanted to exercise his magazine-acquired knowledge of American geography.
The next day we climbed the old road through the karst mountains and jungle... if we had followed this centuries old path of worn stones to its conclusion, we would have arrived in Guangxi province after about a day's hike. A stone rampart atop the mountainside commemorated where Chinese and Japanese forces did battle, sometime during the Second World War. A butterfly found itself irresistably attracted to the bright blue of my jeans. In the afternoon we hiked (and hitchhiked) under a hot sun, trying to reach the next town--since there would be no buses to Banzai that day. Halfway on our journey, we climbed off the road, into the underbrush, and found a waterfall-fed pool to swim in.
That night, having come back to Libo and the hotel we had spent our first night in, we discovered that the touristic excesses of China's 'Golden Week' had been at work, and the price had undergone a 200% increase. What to do?
We did what any intrepid explorers would do, and asked our new friends if they knew of any cheaper options for us, resulting in our spending the night in a high school girls' dormitory. Now I know that this raises many questions, but before you imagine all manners of possible debauchery, let me assure you that the normal inhabitants of said dorm room were away on vacation, and Jon and I had the frilly-pink mosquito-netted beds and posters of Chinese pop-heartthrob, Jay Zhou, to ourselves.
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May 15th, 2007
03:15 am - Interuption--The World is Flat
Nevermind that the owner of the Chongqing Aston, a Mr. Lee of Singapore, is a big fan (as am I) of that precocious book, "The World is Flat", but I have this phrase on my mind for an entirely different reason. That reason is the state of my life here in Chongqing.
Can I say that my nest here in Shapingba is so very far from America when, due to the use of Jon's dad's Slingbox, we can receive all our favorite shows (notably: The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Scrubs, and Heroes) recorded straight off the Papish home tv? How about the fact that within a one to five minute walk from my front door I can find about five KFCs, four McDonalds, a Pizza Hut, and a Starbucks? (I must admit with sheepish eyes and reddened cheeks that I've been patronizing these establishments, far more than I would normally do so if I were in fact living in the US). Or how about the foreign food supply store where from now on I'll be buying my black olives, pasta, refried beans, mustard, etc (I'm instigating a plan to get them in touch with the foreign food supply store in Kunming where I bought root beer, in the hopes that root beer may only be a five minute walk away)?
Oh yes. I am loving the flatness of the world.
There is this idea of nationality--and from it, nationalism--that can be a very dangerous idea indeed, for the smooth workings of our interconnected, flat, world. And I wonder how I'll apply this idea of flatness to the idea of my own identity. Am I American, or am I a citizen of the world? I do love my homeland. But do I love the variety of the world itself more? I don't know that there should be a conflict between duty to one's home country, and duty to one's world, but a conflict there will nonetheless be.
I watch the hypernationalist tendencies of Americans, French, Japanese, Turks, Chinese... and I see a trend that is only going to become more aggravated, a self-inflicted wound only more thickly salted, by globalism. As someone caught between a desire to save what is special about remote regions and cultures unaffected by the Coca-Cola revolution, and a desire to share experiences--blogging to you from China is itself a globalist activity--and blend for myself a life from the best things I find, I don't know what answer is right. Perhaps there is no answer that is best. Some beautiful, irreplaceable scenes will be lost from our world as we struggle to paint the beauties and despairs of our present and our future. This is the cost, a sometimes horrible cost, for persisting in a life that seeks complexity and change. Our question is how to shed the old skin and don the new, in such an efficient way that the nutrients of our past are not lost or desecrated.
The ease with which we meld our minds, to create new values, to find new wealth, to explore ideas together, is also the irritant that inflames conservationists, conservatives, despots, terrorists, and religious leaders, all of whom have built their own power (or seek to create their power) from an established heirarchy and an established culture that is, of course, endangered.
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May 11th, 2007
04:56 am - In Search of Maolan (2)
Day 2: isn't terribly interesting, merely a long bus journey through the mountains south of Guiyang to the (somewhat) remote city of Libo near the provincial border. I'll skip that, only saying that arriving in Libo we almost immediately met a young Buyi boy who befriended us and offered to take us to his home village, out among the karst mountains and green rice fields. Our reply was most certainly, 'certainly'!
Day 3: Our attempt to reach the village, Banzai was thwarted many times that day, I'm sad to say. But that's life as usual in China, as we old expats know. If you have a stated goal there are sure to be any number of bureaucrats, enraged donkeys, broken buses, lazy park wardens, and terrible curses sure to stand in your way. In our case, we had finally found a bus with an up-to-date permit to take us up through the mountains of verdant mold which rise like hungry teeth on each side of Libo's valley and half an hour of that jolting trip brought us to a newly-erect guardhouse full of guards whose only job was apparently to wait for unsuspecting laowai tourists and tell them to return to town to get the proper permit because the region was 'special for Mao' and this permit (obtained for 5 yuan, less than $1) would somehow vouch that we wouldn't attempt to destroy or vandalize the revolutionary (communist) memorial there. Ai you!
So back we went--must to the consternation of our newfound young highschool friends who had imagined that a day spent with laowai must be a day of fun and games and free english tutorial--and got our permit, and at last arrived at the hometown of our friend, Yao. There we were met with the fragrance of fresh-grown rice fields and water buffalo dung, as well as a healthy flock of young kids who knew how to say 'hello' and nothing else. Cute, though.
A great tree stands over the village, shading the giant painting of a golden sickle and hammer on red, tribute to this village's contribution to the Long March of the Chinese Communist Party through this remote reaches. It didn't seem that their aid for the central (and only) party of government had netted them anything else, however, aside from a lonely museum building that used to be the village school (our friend Yao had been taught where Mao once slept, a giddy joy indeed).
Yao's mother, father, sister, and grandma welcomed us into their home for the night. We dined on homemade rice wine and sides of pig that had been curing, hung from the ceiling above our heads. Grandma Yao was a particularly delightful woman, with a warm cackle and only about four teeth in her head, she had survived just about all the horrors of modern Chinese history, from the Japanese invasion through the Great Leap Forward famine and on into this contemporary era of capitalist excess. And yet she could still laugh. Perhaps she was past capability of remembering, as her grandson told us.
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May 9th, 2007
10:30 pm - In Search of Maolan (1)
I need to get back into the habit of writing. I did very well last year, but for whatever reason, this year I've been much more focused on face-to-face, rather than Web 2.0, communication. Can we blame my cute co-workers? Or perhaps the new difficulties of writing to a blog that has now been blocked by the Chinese censors? If I were as devoted to writing as I ought to be, neither should be a real excuse. I've been lazy and distracted.
So to get back to writing as I used to, I present a synopsis of the week past, in which my compatriot--one Jonathan Papish--and myself decided to set off for a remote part of an underdeveloped (and thus extremely interesting) Chinese province.
Day 1: Catching the early morning train from Chonqing to Guiyang I realize that somehow in this city I've magically become a morning person (I wake up at the crack of dawn due to the hubbub of the mall and surrounding building construction), and Jon is a good example of the nightowl I used to be--or normally would be--as he zombie-walks beside me.
On the train we find ourselves surrounded by English-speaking Chinese. A good coincidence that helps us in more ways than one. I often revert to anti-social silence (reading or thought) on Chinese trains, if no one around me speaks English. The difficulties of maintaining awkward conversations in Chinese that revolve around the same few topics (where do you come from, do you like China, do you have a girlfriend) just isn't worth it. But with a young college couple, Jon and I get to converse and learn some Chinese card games. I chat with a mellow military contractor from Beijing for a while, the mountains of Guizhou province begin to pile up around us, our noisy iron snake slithers across vertiginous bridges and down through the rotten core of these ridges and peaks.
Arriving to the cool breezes of Guiyang, a provincial capital city of a region traditionally (and still) seen as a Chinese frontier, our new friends called up a friend of theirs who runs a hotel. You just have to love Chinese hospitality when it pours forth. The difference between being identified as a friend (even a very new friend) and just a stranger is the difference between night and day, the difference between a (relatively) smooth, easy, and cheap trip, and on the other extreme, being told that there is no roof to shelter a waiguoren head and in general cheated at every turn. Did I ever truly travel alone in China? I have to credit a multitude of friendships, perhaps extremely brief, that made it possible.
I'll end my description of the day (two Sundays past) with a mouth-watering Guiyang delicacy called 'Si Wa Wa'. For those of you with Facebook, you can see the pictures I've uploaded there, but I'm afraid that the difficulties of getting past the censors won't allow me to post pictures directly to this blog for the time being.
Si Wa Wa consists of many small dishes--peanuts, bamboo shoots, pickled cabbage, etc. etc.--arranged on the table along with small rice pancakes. Picking through your options you load up the rice pancake like a small taco, choosing whatever complementary tastes (sweet, sour, spicy, salty) your mouth desires, roll it up, and dunk it in some sauce before devouring. The pancakes are extremely small, but you get quite a few of them for your yuan. Delicious, and a nice departure from the spicy cuisine of Chongqing.
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April 27th, 2007
11:51 pm - Days of Spring
I know I've been very bad at updating this journal of late. I do beg apology, but things aren't entirely likely to get much better this next week either I'm afraid. Golden Week is upon us, and to all who live in China this means a week of trembling beneath the horde of tourists as all of China gets one of its few vacation times.
Jon and I will be traveling down into Guizhou province (which you may have recalled was an area I enjoyed last fall) to explore the karstic cliffs and minority villages of that mountainous place.
Yesterday I just got back from a one day jaunt down to Chengdu, a most lovely city I may have mentioned previously. The women are just as beautiful as in Chongqing, but the streets are a sight better planned, I would say. I also enjoyed copious foreign food. How much could I enjoy in just one day, you ask? (1) Large ground-beef burrito. (2) Slice of peanutbutter pie. (3) Indian dinner with many curries, lassis, and peynir. I gorged myself upon the nectars of heaven, I tell you, and now it's back to the same old/same old. Sigh.
Two or three days ago I went down to Ciqikou old town, the usual sort of tarted-up tourist neighborhood you see in most Chinese cities. The rose-petal and sunflower seed candies were tasty--and so were the silkworm snacks--but what was most memorable about that evening was getting away from the manufactured glitz of the tourist strip and its faux age.
Down by the riverside we went among the boat-people, fishermen on the Jialing river. Barred from fishing the river between February and May, I had to wonder what they did with themselves during that time? Just play cards and mahjong on their wicker boats? It seemed there wasn't a veto on hunting for river eels among the rocks of the shore, however. A young girl with long, strong legs swished her long net through the shallows and caught three wiggling, wriggling black eels as we watched. River eels or baby river snakes, my Chinese friends weren't sure which. Bats swooped and dived overhead, catching dinner of their own and reminding our stomachs of a wish yet to be fulfilled.
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April 13th, 2007
09:38 am - Nan Shan Drama
I'm not sure I wish to go into too much depth, but there are certain melodramatic elements that are slowly being teased from the Chongqing Aston song, much to my displeasure. Cliques, claques, clocks (I'll be teaching time to the youngsters tomorrow) are arranging themselves in most inauspicious angles. Angles, a favorite mispelled word here, I find.
The famous dish served on Nan Shan was 'Spring Chicken', certainly more spicy than the English expression that brings to mind, that drew wayward young lasses up the slopes of Nanshan. I think that the golden statue of an eagle falling upon a grey devil-snail at the summit of this mountain--just south of Chongqing--was just an afterthought for them.
After leaving the mountain, Jonathan, Iris, Anna, Tomato, Rossa, and I then somehow arrived at a theme park without a theme. Actually, this was a priceless bit of Chinglish: the park was called "Non Topic Park". Essentially it was a half-assed attempt at building a fourth-rate version of Disneyland out of a cheap ideas and rotten cement. Taken in whole, this was an amalgamation of creative failure on a scale I'd never seen before. At least we weren't charged for entry (and perhaps should have been warned away by the fact that even the ticket-happy Chinese entrepreneurs didn't think this was worth charging for).
I will say that I'm feeling quite lonely these days. There may be some good friendships shaping up here, but my fifth sense for drama is also a-quiver, and after a year or so of successful avoidance of such--notably by keeping a firm sense of my priorities and intentions, and a firm veto on romance--this isn't a welcome feeling.
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April 9th, 2007
06:34 am - Occurences in the dusky city
Tired to death today, because last night my co-workers and I hit up a duck restaurant, a bar, and finally my first experience of K-TV (Chinese Karaoke booths). I did some justice to Hotel California, Yellow Submarine, and--I'm embarassed to admit, let me say that the English-language choices were a bit limited--a few Backstreet Boys songs before getting four hours of sleep and coming into work. My kingdom for some Smashing Pumpkins, enough said.
I'm learning some local phrases--every part of China has its own dialect, phrasing, and traditions; not quite the monolithic culture that Westerners often expect--important phrases of course. Things like, 'da wang' which means 'to oggle the beautiful girls', or 'ge lou zi' which means something like 'damn you'. My lovely, mischievous coworkers are making sure I'm well-prepared for life in the big city.
I'm also currently learning some of the challenges I have in store for me here in this assistant-manager position. Yesterday two boys were fighting, and I had to hold the one boy in place for ten minutes when class should be starting (he was kicking, clawing, and biting me). This school also needs a major boost in terms of promotion, because it seems that we aren't as well known as the competition, and currently have low enrollment despite a rather hefty decrease in the tuition we're asking. It's my job to try and be creative with this, finding ways to get the school name out there.
The other foreign teacher, who'll be under my direction, is a really nice guy from New Jersey, Jonathan. At least I'll have some good company for this particular adventure.
Speaking of adventures, last week I was at a restaurant in 'Ciqikou Old Town', a tarted-up tourist district digging into the barbequed fish when the owner, a stout woman expelling copious clouds of cigarette smoke, sized me up and decided to try and match me up with her niece (who is apparently tall for a Chinese girl). At first we were all kind of joking, but then we realized the woman was quite serious when she called up her niece to ask how good her English was. Well, there may be a blind date as a result of this, or may not. Either way, just an example of the strange events that can befall one in China.
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March 31st, 2007
06:59 am - Monk Soccer
Discovery Channel Asia was filming a documentary about soccer-playing monks, here in Chongqing. Their idea was to have a game between the foreigners who lived in the area and the monks of a nearby temple, and film it. So the Aston guys had been invited and when they asked if I wanted to play soccer with monks, who could resist that?
'Shaolin Soccer' this was not, and the foreigners won easily enough, but I think it was a good game, good competition on both sides.
I was taking pictures of the action (those'll be posted sometime soon) and had a nice discussion with the reporter from Xinhua, and as a result was quoted in the national news story. I've copy/pasted the story below, or you can check the link to the Xinhua website. They mispelled my last name, but I guess that's inevitable.
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http://english.people.com.cn/200703/31/eng20070331_362730.html
Buddhist monks play soccer, not Kungfu, with foreigners in west China
Kungfu is well known among China's Buddhist monks. The Shaolin Temple, situated in central China's Henan province, has even long been regarded as birthplace of Chinese Kungfu for over 1,000 years.
But unlike Shaolin, monks in the Huayan Temple, one of the most famous Buddhist temples in west China's Chongqing city, like soccer more than Kungfu.
A Buddhist monk soccer team of the Huayuan Temple played an international match on Friday against a team made up of foreign teachers and students from nearby universities.
The monks, in red T-shirt and monks' pants, lost the match 5-1 in a soccer ground of Chongqing Foerign Languages School.
Monk Dehui, a team member of the monk team, said after the match that they like the game and they can play better if they have more time of training.
"Our team was formed on April 18, 2006, and we don't train much," he said. "But we like soccer. We are improving and I believe we can play better. In fact, this is the sixth match we have played with the foreigners."
Huayan Temple's chief monk Daojian said that soccer can help the monks get strong mentally and physically. "We need exercises to keep us strong and fit. The exercises can be either traditional or modern, like Kungfu or soccer. Soccer can enlarge our social scope and can also promote Buddhism."
Bruce Bremeise, a photographer of the international team, said: "It is very nice to play soccer games with Buddhist monks, who are very polite. Buddhistm is a peaceful religion."
Bremeise, who comes from the United States, said he would post pictures of the game on his Blog in order to let more people better understand those monks and their soccer team.
Source: Xinhua
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March 28th, 2007
05:47 am - The Towers of Chongqing
To facsimile the informational email I just sent out...
I had underestimated the amount of time it takes to get from Shanghai by the sea to Chongqing of the upper Yangtze. 'Maybe eighteen or twenty odd hours by train', I thought. 'I'll start off this afternoon, and I'll be there by midmorning the following day.' 10am, I figured was about right. But 10 am the next morning came and went. We were still trundling through Hunan province at that point. I took a look at the map and despaired. 'Oh well, perhaps the train will arrive in Chongqing by 10 this evening'. 10 o'clock that evening we were darting swiftly through the karstic mountains and narrow canyons of Guizhou province--beautiful scenery, but not reassuring to my feeling that I might have accidentally gotten onto a 'train to nowhere'.
But 10am on the third day of travel (today) found us jogging up the homestretch along bamboo-lined river shores.
I'm sure I'll have a lot more to tell about Chongqing at a later date, when I've spent more than part of a day in this remarkable city. Built on a penninsula of high ridges and canyons caught between the confluence of two rivers, the Jialing and the Yangtze, towering offices and hi-rise appartments cling to the cliffsides, and the roads which twist and turn and tunnel their way through the hills are free of bicycles--the city, perhaps like San Francisco, has much too much vertical change to allow such transport. An oppulent city that has grown to rival the traditional Chinese centers of trade and manufacturing, Chongqing is a separate city-state, like Beijing or Shanghai, although it was once a part of neighboring Sichuan province, and shares its tastes for firey spice in its cooking. From what I've seen so far, the girls here are also quite spicy and beautiful (la meizi, as the Chinese would say). :-)
My apartment is quite different from my last: on the nineteenth floor of a highrise condo tower, I definitely can't complain about the amenities which include a large screen tv (good sound system), Western bathroom amenities--flush toilet and an enclosed shower--a large kitchen, nice furniture overall. I can't complain about the great views out over the city, nor the oppulent gardens below the condo complex. Best of all, the Carrefour supermarket (a French chain of superstores) is directly below the condo building. Yes. If I have a late evening craving for cheese, I can hop in the elevator and get some. Now is about the time when I should let loose with some manner of villainous exultant laughter, but wait! There's more!
It seems that there are only going to be two teachers here (at least for this first five months). The Chongqing Aston is still fairly new, with a small number of students (maybe 150?). They don't currently have a LSO (a sort of foreign assistant manager for the location), and as the other fellow who is coming doesn't have any experience teaching in China (much less at Aston), the two temp-manager fellows who were here when I arrived seem to be keen on the idea of promoting me to that position. I've expressed my interest in that idea. Less teaching hours (15) but more responsibilities related to promoting and developing the school. I may get a chance to use my creativity after all!
With that position, I would get my own single apartment, in a neighboring condo tower right across the plaza.
So we'll see how things go. Sometime in the next month I'll also have to make a run to Hongkong to get my tourist visa changed to a working visa (another long journey by train). That should be an adventure in itself!
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March 24th, 2007
06:58 am - Onwards to... Chongqing?
I've been having a rather terrible day, here in Shanghai. Trying to get subway tickets, I was mobbed by a mass of Chinese who had just disembarked from the central train station, and they literally tore the handle off my suitcase with the combined pressure of their bodies as they all tried to buy tickets. I think the crucial moment was when I decided to help a couple Dutch businessmen (tripling my subway ticket order, so they'd not have to worm their way to the front of the line). People power takes a new meaning in China.
So after quite a few near hits, as pertains to the job market here and my new assignment, it looks like I'm back with Aston (the company itself is reputable, my previous problems were really with the local management alone, and mysteriously dried up when a higher representative showed up in town), in the thriving city of Chongqing, the third city-state municipality (given status in China similar to a province/state). This is not a bad location as far as I know (I haven't been there), especially as it is quite close to the scenic southwestern provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou.
I most likely will have to make a Hong Kong run to get my visa changed to a business visa, however. Yikes, I feel like I, myself, am contraband.
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March 22nd, 2007
05:26 am - A few observations
I haven't posted in a while. Partly that may be due to the newfound difficulty of posting onto this website from China. *cough* goddamn government *cough*. There certainly won't be any pictures arising from the smoking, seething abyss of my censoring, not any time soon.
Instead we get this:
I watched a middle-aged man (who certainly should have known better) seated on a bike, methodically torturing a puppy that had been tied up to the curbside fence. Push back, push forward *puppy screams*. Witness the Confucian heirarchy in action--emperor abuses empress, empress abuses servants, servant abuses wife, wife abuses child, child abuses pet. It goes something like that.
Barbershop girls (whores, that is) sit in shop windows, bathing in the violet light of a midnight sun. The whole effect is something like the nocturnal viper ensconced in her cage at the reptile house. Either way, you're lucky to catch even a glimpse of beady eyes before the slitherous thing strikes.
I went into a corner store to get some Vanilla Coke--my drinksome addiction of the moment--and a (probably drunk) fellow greeted me in some manner of French, after which he attempted a few other bits and pieces of various languages, eventually settling on English after I'd told him I was indeed a 'meiguoren' (American). Then he went off into a shouting spree in English and Chinese, yelling something about how he was an asshole (in Chinese) as I paid for my coke and left.
I've heard this story a few times: People who wished to visit or study in America, but the current "security" situation has more or less paralyzed the visa approval process for the past six years. In the interest of continuing the brain-drain that powers American industry, American graduate school programs, and to some extent the tourism industry, we really should agitate for our congress people to stop sitting on their thumbs and let some bloody foreigners in, already. Our country was founded on a freedom of movement, and yes, immigration. It shall surely wither without this vital influx. People who would otherwise be spending their money, and utilizing their brainpower for the good of America, will instead take their capital to New Zealand, Australia, or Canada. Shall we let the Kiwis profit from our loss? Nay, I say!
In other ridiculousness, I spend a few days visiting my friends up in Lianyungang. Strange, that as much as I used to complain when I lived there, I've gone back to visit three times already since I left. I did see some former students as well, but for the most part I don't think they recognized me without my beard. I'm just not Karl Marx anymore without it.
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March 14th, 2007
12:34 am - Yay for Proxy Servers!
And if this works, it's just one more sabot (shoe) thrown into the mighty censorship engines of the People's Republic. I am sad, though, that probably none of my Chinese friends will be able to read my LJ again.
In any case....
I was just thinking about the Chinese olympiads, today. Someone mentioned them as "childhood deprived athletes". Yes, that's probably true. They've probably been trained since childhood so show off the power of Chinese brawn. But really, what Chinese child does have a childhood as we know it? From the moment they hit 'school age' these kids are at school from dawn to dusk, and studying well into the night, before collapsing into about four or five hours of sleep and then repeating the process. No kid in China has a childhood. And to what purpose? The result is a boring, uncreative, naive populace that somehow managed to sleepwalk its way past its exams.
I believe the only kids in China likely to have played games in the sun are the children of the lowest peasants and minorities, who have no hope at all of advancement in society, and so are not subjected to the same degree of educational competition as the rest. But I guess they'd best enjoy their childhood while they have it. It's a long life of hard labor and extreme poverty they've got to look forward after childhood is past.
A bit of a dilemma. And unfortunately, the US seems to be following China's example, in terms of the direction of its educational system. Oddly, China seems to be moving more towards creative teaching that stresses problem solving rather than rote learning (but just for the children, the xiao huangdi (little emperors), of the upper class) in the future of it education system.
But for the future of US education, I see the past and present of Chinese education: more tests, less teaching, in a vain attempt to retain or regain a competitive educational edge long since lost to the Europeans and the better Asian economies, without addressing the systemic problems that have actually given rise to children not interested in learning.
Systemic problems? Parents who aren't involved enough in their children's education. Communities that collectively do not value education. Rich children who feel little incentive to work hard at anything except play. Schools and teachers whose attempts to create an interesting educational experience are not adequately funded. Teachers who are not adequately supported by the educational heirarchy when it comes to defending their teaching style against aggressive parents, and on the other hand, some less than adequate teachers who can't be turned away because there simply isn't enough incentive to create a positive supply/demand for teachers.
Lots of problems to face, in either country.
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