The Life of a "Foreign Expert" in Zhangye, China

Video tour of Zhangye

2009-02-27T07:37:00.005+08:00

This is a video I recently put together from some of the footage of Zhangye I shot on my camera while living there. It highlights some of familiar places and people we saw in our daily routine, as well as a few of the odd and unexpected sights that were such a part of walking the streets of small town China. I made the video as part of a China presentation Nissa and I put on in her hometown's local library, which was surprisingly fun and well-received. It's seven months now since we left the country but China, and Zhangye in particular, continues to have quite a strong presence in our thoughts.

Fast Food in China Article

2009-01-21T07:22:00.002+08:00

A couple of months ago I was interviewed via e-mail for US-China Today, a student-run publication of the University of Southern California's U.S.-China Institute. The writer had stumbled upon my post about Pizza Hut in China. I just received word that the article is finished and on the website, and I have a small quote in the article (below the photo of Pizza Hut):

http://www.uschina.usc.edu/ShowFeature.aspx?articleID=3094&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

Update

2008-10-23T04:45:00.002+08:00

I've been neglecting this blog for many months now, and the reason is that in July I left China to move back to America. I'm living in Seattle now, and in the near future I hope to write a post or two to wrap up this blog and my experiences in China.

Sheep Skin Rafts

2008-07-05T17:30:00.003+08:00

In a recent bit of desert-themed traveling with Nissa, we visited Shapotou, a place that could only be described as a "desert theme park" outside of the small city of Zhongwei, Ningxia province. Shapotou is an area of natural beauty where the desert meets the Yellow River, and naturally has been turned into a ticketed tourist attraction outfitted with a zip line, camel and horse riding, sand dune sledding, dune buggies, a ski lift, and sheep skin rafting. We opted for the sheep skin rafting, which is just as bizarre as the name implies:

So for 80 yuan (around $11) each we had a river-rafting experience that would probably give PETA a heart attack. We enjoyed it, but I have to say the little inflated arms were a bit creepy.

Your days are numbered, sheep...

Fun at the Park

2008-07-05T16:35:00.003+08:00

Now that summer has arrived in Zhangye the weather has been beautiful (if sometimes overbearingly hot), and there are few better places to enjoy the outdoors in the city than Ganquan Park (entrance seen in the above picture). Before coming to China, I had a pretty predictable image of what a "park" is: shady trees, couples taking leisurely bike rides, picnic tables, excitable dogs, and quiet. Most Chinese cities have at least one park, but they tend to have a uniquely Chinese spin to them.

At our park, there is everything you might need for a relaxing day out in nature: whack-a-mole, shoot-the-balloon games, an artificial lake, paddle boats, artificial rock sculptures, a basketball game, archery, fishing, copies of the David and the Venus de Milo, lamb kebabs, men playing loud drinking games, music, a carousel, a haunted house, bumper cars, a small roller coaster, and a zoo. In other words, it's not really a place you go to listen to the chirping of the birds, but it's fun in it's own unique way (I wouldn't recommend the zoo though, which might be more accurately named the Prison for Animals). It's a nice place to have a cold beer and sit under the (artificial) shade, but not a place to walk your dog or take a bike ride. Dogs are not nearly as popular in China in the first place, and bikes are for getting around and carrying things like your groceries, your new computer, or your girlfriend. When I tell Chinese people that at home we put our bikes on our car, drive 15 minutes to the park, ride around the park for fun, and then drive home, they think that it's hilarious. In over two years in China, I have also never seen a Chinese person running for fun, even on the track on our campus.

But my favorite park activity is something that I had heard about in China, but not seen here until this year. It seems to be called buxing qiu in Chinese, or literally "walking ball." The idea is that you get inside a giant inflatable ball which is then sealed and put out to float around in a pool of water. You then have five minutes to walk, roll, or flop around in your giant tethered hamster ball, to the great amusement of onlookers (in this case the little girl's mother, who kept shouting "run! run!"). A couple of pictures:

Resources for Learning Chinese

2008-07-01T14:36:00.002+08:00

For those learning Chinese out there, I thought I would mention some of the most useful resources I have found for learning the language.

Websites
ChinesePod
By far my favorite Chinese lessons. The lessons focus on spoken Chinese and are in podcast form, so they are meant to be downloaded and listened to on your computer or mp3 player. Each lesson focuses on a pre-recorded dialogue, which is listened to and then discussed and explained by the two hosts (one native English speaker and one native Chinese speaker). The lessons are divided into five levels, so they suit any level of Chinese learner, and the topics are a good mix of the practical and the interesting. I particularly like ChinesePod because the lessons are well-written and teach Chinese the way Chinese people actually speak it (I'm amazed by the number of Chinese learning materials that fail at this), the hosts are personable without being over-the-top, and they've created a community around the website. By this I mean there are discussions around each lesson on the website where users can leave comments and questions, and the hosts of the lessons and other employees will personally answer your questions. The lessons themselves are all free to download, but you need a paid subscription to get the extra materials (including the written transcript of the lesson dialogues). I'm familiar with some of the audio lessons you can buy at the store (Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone, etc.) and have not been particularly impressed with them.

www.nciku.com
My favorite online dictionary. I particularly like the example sentences and the great tool for looking up characters by drawing them.

www.dict.cn
Another online dictionary that is actually aimed at Chinese people learning English, but is also great for seeing the words you look up used in example sentences (all with English translations).

Adsotrans
A useful site for reading Chinese, in which you can copy and paste several sentences of Chinese text and have them "annotated," meaning that you can see the definition of each word or phrase when you hover the mouse pointer over it. Much quicker than looking up each word in the dictionary individually. The only downside is that for words that have multiple meanings, the site makes the best guess of the meaning relevant to the sentence and shows you only that definition, so if it guesses wrong you are going to have to look up the word in the dictionary anyway.

Books
Oxford Starter Chinese Dictionary
The first dictionary I used, which is great for the beginner as it includes examples and notes about how to use words, lots of information on measure words, and sections devoted to things like talking about "time" or "musical instruments" in Chinese. Apparently there is a new version called the Oxford Beginner's Chinese Dictionary, which I'm sure is worth checking out. The dictionary I use now is the confusingly named Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary, which is excellent but not at all pocket size. All of these dictionaries use simplified Chinese characters.

Reading and Writing Chinese
A great reference book for learning characters, as it does the best job of any book I've seen of actually explaining the logic and meaning behind the characters. Be sure to pick up the simplified character version for mainland China and the traditional character version for Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Intensive Spoken Chinese
The first textbook I used, and an excellent beginner's textbook for learning the spoken language (the characters are included as well, but not emphasized). The first book in a series, which is followed by The Most Common Chinese Radicals and Rapid Literacy in Chinese. The last two are also recommended, and the series is widely available for a low price in the foreign language bookstores of large Chinese cities.

New Practical Chinese Reader
A five-volume series of textbooks that I have encountered through my Peace Corps coworkers, who have been supplied with the books for their language training. I haven't had the chance to use the books much myself but I've liked what I've seen. I'm not sure that they are available in China, and I haven't been completely satisfied with any of the more advanced textbooks I have bought here.

Drive-by Photography

2008-06-06T10:28:00.005+08:00

Today I wanted to simply post some photographs I took the other day of daily life in Zhangye, many taken during a couple of long bus rides through the city.

On the university campus, in front of the apartment building I live in.

Middle-schoolers in uniform and the not uncommon sight of a entire family on a motorbike.

The tuta, or "Earth Pagoda."

The bumpy and over-sized "bread taxis" that we have grown fond of.

The drum tower, right in the center of town.

Most locals now live in modern apartments but more traditional homes are still around.

Out of curiosity we took a bus to a village just outside of the city. A man in a small shop with an unusually large mustache waved us in, also out of curiosity, and we spent an hour or more drinking and snacking with some of the local farmers. They had many questions for us but I sometimes could not understand their thick dialect, so they resorted to writing them out on bits of paper and passing them to me.

Grounds for Divorce

2008-05-29T10:08:00.003+08:00

I was talking to a teacher who I am giving private English lessons to yesterday, and she made an interesting comment about divorce in China that I had never heard--a common reason for separation is housework. Many young Chinese have never been taught to do housework their entire lives, and when it comes time to live the married life the husband and wife have so many fights about taking care of the home that it ends in divorce. With the one-child policy and the particularly overwhelming Chinese love for children, many of the so-called "Little Emperors" are now spoiled at home, and not made to help take care of the home. There is also so much competition and pressure to get into the best high school, the best college, and get the best job possible that most parents consider the duty of students to study--and do practically nothing else. Many of the college students at this school are getting a part-time job for the first time, and others will work for the first time when they get their first job after graduation. The student who is giving me Chinese lessons has an uncle visiting Zhangye shortly, and asked me to please not mention the lessons to him--he told her to give up her tutoring and spend all her time studying, and she told him she would. A good many of our students must also hide the fact that they have a boyfriend or girlfriend from their parents, because the parents would never allow them to be so distracted from their studies.

Before she started talking about divorce in our lesson, that teacher asked me something that, as a 25-year old, sounded a little strange: "Do you know how to do household chores?"

After the Earthquake

2008-05-28T19:50:00.000+08:00

I haven't mentioned the earthquake on this blog since it happened, but I'm sure it goes without saying that everyone in Zhangye has been concerned about it and the awful devastation it has caused. Though a few cities in Gansu province did see some damage and even some casualties, we actually didn't feel it here and I've been following it only through news reports.

At the beginning of last week, there were three national days of mourning for the earthquake victims, including a three-minute moment of silence on Monday afternoon. All of the foreign teachers were summoned to take part in a gathering of students and faculty in front of the library during this time. It was both a solemn and slightly surreal experience. It was like any other moment of silence in that the crowd itself did not speak and stood with heads respectfully bowed. However, it was the loudest moment of silence I expect to ever witness--all across the country, horns blared in the cities, in the taxis, on the ships, and on the trains. CCTV broadcast footage from Beijing during those minutes, and our school had set up a TV and enormous speakers in front of library for the event. Two students simply held microphones up to the TV, meaning that while sirens went off in Zhangye, sirens in Beijing being broadcast on the television were amplified into our ears in an odd and highly distorted sound collage. I couldn't quite get my head around it, and from what I've been told it was simply a Chinese way of honoring and remembering the victims of the disaster. One could write an interesting paper just on the meaning and uses of noise in Chinese and Western culture. This was also the first time a national moment of grief was organized in China for anything other than the death of the country's leader, and in general the government response to the earthquake is praiseworthy.

The second incident that stands out in my mind is a recent donation drive to help with the earthquake relief effort. I wasn't on campus at the time, but the other foreign teachers were called by Miss Mao from the Foreign Affairs Office on short notice and told to meet at her office.
Once there, everyone was told they were to donate money to help the earthquake victims, and asked to write down the exact amount they were donating a pre-prepared list with all of our names on it. Once this was done, they were led outside where a donation rally was held in which Communist Party leaders and the bewildered foreigners placed their donations one-by-one into a box, to the cheers of a crowd of students. As each person approached the box, they proudly held up a sign with the amount of their donation, which was also displayed on an electronic screen. The foreign teachers had to oblige, but each hid their money and paper in their fist as they donated. One teacher had actually had to borrow money to donate, because he wasn't told it was a donation at all and didn't bring his wallet. They also were not told who was handling the donation (the Communist Party), or really much of anything about it. The event was filmed, and later shown on the local news, similar to other donation drives we have seen on television. Students have also been asked to donate blood and money in high-pressure situations. Just when you think you're no longer surprised by the differences between China's collectivism and the West's individualism, something comes along to remind you just how differently things are done here.

(There is also a good post about donating on Sinosplice)

Pizza Hut in China

2008-05-27T19:30:00.003+08:00

I was in Xi'an during the last few days, and for me personally one of the highlights of visiting a big city is the chance to eat real pizza. One would think eating at Pizza Hut would be a pretty cut and dry experience, but it's actually kind of interesting to see how it differs from going to an American Pizza Hut.

For one thing, it's "classy." The servers are well-dressed, the place looks really nice, and there are no groups of screaming children. Western restaurants are more of a fine-dining experience in China, even the ones that would never be considered as such at home. I'm reminded of a short story I once read by a Chinese author. A boy from a poor family was given some holiday money to spend on necessities, but decided to use it impress his girlfriend and take her out to an extravagant meal--at McDonald's. Awkwardness ensues when it turns out his mom is secretly working at the McDonald's to make some extra money for the family.

Pizza Hut also pretty expensive in comparison to Chinese food, so it caters to China's growing middle class, and a lot of the customers seemed to be working couples on a date. Despite the cost, Chinese spending habits were in full force around us. A nearby couple ordered fruit smoothies, salad, an appetizer, a desert, and a pizza, much more than they intended to eat. The other nearby table ordered drinks, chicken wings, meatballs, and three pizzas. With simply a large pizza to split, Nissa and I were the cheapskates of the place.

But my favorite image of pizza places in China, and unfortunately I don't have a picture (but try searching for "China salad bar" on flickr.com), is the salad bar. You are only allowed one trip, so there is usually one crafty young Chinese person making a salad skyscraper on their plate. By this I mean they load an enormous amount of vegetables on their plate in an attractive pattern that is painstakingly constructed over 10 minutes or more. The dedication and attention to detail is truly inspiring.

And finally, I leave you with this:

Chinese Food: Dumplings 饺子

2008-05-19T11:24:00.003+08:00

I love being invited to a Chinese home, because the invitation usually revolves around a home-cooked meal. One of my favorite home-cooked Chinese foods is dumplings, or jiaozi, which are made by wrapping amounts of meat and/or vegetables in little dough wrappings and then boiling them. Wrapping the dumplings is a fun, easy cooking activity that even the most culinary challenged can help out with, but there is a bit of an art to it and mine are inevitably very nankan (ugly). Unlike with most Chinese foods, dumplings can make up a meal by themselves and are usually not accompanied by rice or noodles. Everyone is given a small plate for vinegar and hot sauce in which to dip the dumplings.

The Chinese sense of hospitality is very strong, sometimes even a little overwhelming. When you are a guest in a Chinese home they will attend to your every need and you are unlikely to leave without being utterly stuffed with food. I can even find it a little too aggressive sometimes, such as when the host demands that I "eat! eat!" every time I put down my chopsticks. The above picture is from a recent meal Nissa and I ate with four Chinese friends. The plates of dumplings (the light-colored ones in the middle) were replaced numerous times as they were finished by plates of freshly boiled dumplings prepared by the woman of the home. Gender relations are much more old-fashioned around here, and generally the wife continues to cook while the guests enjoy the meal and the men drink and smoke. There was of course a large amount of food left over after the meal, and the hosts wouldn't have wanted it any other way, or they would feel that they appeared cheap. This also carries over into eating out, and with the exception of casual meals among good friends a Chinese person might order twice the amount of food necessary. A man with a job in business or politics especially might spend a good portion of his salary treating people to dinner. It honestly amazes me that the Chinese are so successful at saving money.

Chinese Food: Sweet and Sour Pork 糖醋里脊 and Home-style Tofu 家常豆腐

2008-05-07T11:03:00.005+08:00

A nearly unanimous favorite dish among foreigners in China is sweet and sour pork, known as tangcu liji around here. It goes by other names in other parts of China, probably with variations. It is one of the few dishes in northern China that resembles American Chinese food (though it reminds me more of the "General Tso's chicken" than the "sweet and sour pork" at home), and is also simply delicious. It is a little unusual for a Chinese dish as it is all meat and has a very sweet taste. Most Chinese meat dishes actually have quite a bit of vegetables. And the meat is always in small bite-size chunks because, of course, you must eat it with chopsticks. You never cut anything in a Chinese meal and generally don't eat anything with your hands.

I can't remember ever eating tofu in America, and it definitely never tempted me. It sounded like something you would only eat out of vegetarianism and/or desperation. But the tofu dishes in China are great, so I've come around on eating it. I also never realized the word "tofu" comes from the Chinese word doufu, meaning "bean curd." My favorite is probably the jiachang doufu, or "home-style tofu." It's more solid and has a milder taste compared to other tofu dishes.

Eating out in a restaurant in China is a little different than in a Western country. We often eat at simple and cheap family-run restaurants like the one pictured above. The street in front of our school is full of them. The meal for two pictured above was probably around 15 yuan, or about US$2. Unlike in the West, where everyone orders an individual meal, in China you order for the table. We typically order one dish per person eating, but we might get a little more or less depending on our hunger.

The dishes come out one at a time, whenever they are finished cooking. Because they are stir-fried it only takes about five minutes for the food to start coming out, so there are no appetizers or bread, and salad is rare in China. There is also no dessert. The dishes are all placed in the middle of the table, and everyone at the table shares all the dishes. Everyone has an individual bowl of rice (or sometimes noodles), and grabs some food from one of the dishes with their chopsticks and brings it to their bowl to eat it with the rice. Germ-conscious Westerners are sometimes uneasy with this at first, but it doesn't take long to get used to it and actually prefer it when eating Chinese dishes.

Instead of water, the default drink is tea, which is usually free and served automatically. Soft drinks are usually unavailable and if they are will be unrefrigerated, so I always stick with the tea. Beer (also unrefrigerated) is always available, in extra-large bottles that are meant to be shared.

I like the small, family-owned restaurants. Besides being cheap the food is excellent, and the small staff is usually quite friendly and happy to see you. Nissa and I have learned to cook a small number of Chinese dishes, but it really isn't much cheaper than eating out so it is difficult to work up the motivation to cook for yourself. Many aspects of life in China that were once novelty now seem routine, but eating out is one thing I can always get excited about.

Chinese New Year

2008-04-22T22:15:00.004+08:00

This past February was my first, and likely only, chance to spend the Spring Festival in China (I went home during my first winter vacation in China). The Spring Festival is the 15-day holiday that begins with the Chinese New Year, and is by far the most important holiday of the year, when practically all 1.3 billion Chinese people return home to spend time with their family. My friend Joy invited me to visit the home of her family and the families of some mutual friends in the area of Jiuquan (酒泉), a city roughly three hours from Zhangye.

Chinese holidays seem to mostly revolve around seeing family and eating, and I arrived on the evening of the Chinese New Year just in time for the large and excellent meal prepared by Joy's family. CCTV broadcasts a lengthy holiday show for the occasion, full of pop singers, acrobats, and skits that is the most-watched television event of the year, but I seemed to be the only one interested in it of the group.

Firecrackers are also a tradition of the holiday, to the joy of Chinese children and the dread of myself (for someone who doesn't like sudden, loud noises, China was a strange choice). The stroke of midnight on the New Year in China is the closest I ever hope to get to the sound of war.

The following day Joy and I took a bus well outside of town to the village where our friend Beth lives. Beth graduated from Hexi University and is now a teacher in her town. The people in Beth's family were as warm and welcoming as any I have met in China, and I really enjoyed my stay. Unfortunately, I could not say the same for the warmth of the unheated household--it was the coldest Chinese winter in 50 years, and we spent much of our time huddled around the cooking stove. I found her father to be a hard and silent man, but I gradually came to feel that he did like me. He was a farmer who only rested for five days during the year (for the Spring Festival) after all, a lifestyle that would leave me on the quiet side as well.

We passed the holiday much in the same way I usually pass time with Chinese people--chatting, eating a lot, pretending to understand the conversation, eating, and taking photographs. It was not action-packed but there was a simple charm to it that I appreciated. The Chinese I know in Gansu province always seem to act much younger than their age, and I don't when I've seen college students take that much pleasure in playing in the snow.

One of the moments that stands out in my mind was watching Joy play with a cat, an animal her own family had clearly never owned before. Not knowing how to pick it up, she firmly grabbed its front left leg and lifted it straight off the ground. The cat didn't seem too traumatized, however, as it did start to purr once she got it into her lap and started to pet it. But confused by the noise the cat was making, Joy exclaimed "he is very angry!" I told her it was purring because it was happy. "How would you know?" she laughed. "Are you a cat?"

When I left Beth's family after a few days, they seemed sad to see me go. Her two younger male cousins, who rarely spoke but spent much of their time around me, actually cried a little as I prepared to leave, which was touching and unexpected. Overall it was a relaxing and memorable experience, and I'm glad I didn't pass it up.

Chinese Food: Beef Noodles 牛肉面

2008-04-18T16:38:00.006+08:00

Whenever I am asked "why do you like China?", there are two things I never fail to mention: the people, and the food. I haven't done quite enough traveling to know for certain, but surely China has one of the world's finest cuisines. But "Chinese food" encompasses a huge variety of foods. Each region in China has its own particular cuisine, and even particular cities usually have their own specialties. If I go to a nice restaurant in town, the menu will have dozens or possibly hundreds of dishes, some unique just to that restaurant. Though we undoubtedly have the occasional craving for Western dishes not available in such a remote place, I feel that we are pretty spoiled in the food category in Zhangye. In Shanghai for example, I'm not alone in thinking the Chinese food is at best mediocre, though of course they have the advantage of a fantastic international selection. At any rate, food being as important as it has been in my life in China, I thought I might write a few posts describing some of our favorite dishes, starting with niuroumian, or "beef noodles."

This is a local favorite with students, as it originated in this province (the city of Lanzhou) and is one of the cheapest meals you can get, usually going for around 2.5 yuan (or around 30 cents US). I didn't care for it at first as it is pretty spicy by American standards (note the red hot sauce in the picture), but I got used to it and it eventually grew on me. It's also not particularly filling, consisting mostly of some thin noodles and small scraps of beef in a soup, but it makes a great late lunch. Below is an old video I took at a small beef noodle shop during my first year in China. My friend Andrew and I befriended the owner, so he was happy to oblige my filming of some noodle making. Towards the end he can be heard announcing excitedly, "Lanzhou hand-pulled beef noodles!"

Zhangye's First International Student

2008-03-29T17:22:00.006+08:00

Originally this post would have been about moving to Shanghai. I had it all planned out: I was going to study Chinese at a university in Shanghai that has a large Chinese program for foreigners. The semester started at the end of February, and when it ended at the beginning of July I was going to finally return to America, together with Nissa. I would find an apartment upon arrival, having made appointments beforehand to look at several, and easily find part-time jobs teaching English to support myself. Tuition was expensive, I would have considerably more personal expenses including rent, and it would make my relationship more difficult, but I was determined to use my last few months in China to learn the maximum amount of Chinese that was possible. I'm also planning to take the HSK in June, a notoriously difficult exam to test the Chinese ability of non-native speakers. So in February I moved to Shanghai, took a good look around, and after three weeks I left.

Finding an apartment and my first job were not at all difficult, and I would learn a lot from my classes. But there many problems which I was not willing to overlook, mostly with the school. During my research I had heard many positive things about studying Chinese through a school--small, interactive classes that quickly improved your ability. With 15 hours of class a week, surely I would learn more than I could on my own. However, after our language tests at registration they put me in an intermediate class with 20 other students, mostly Korean and Japanese. Definitely larger than I wanted and expected.

In addition, the teaching methods were Chinese in all the worst ways. The teacher taught by painstakingly covering the textbook line by line, page by page, with many repetitive and dull vocabulary drills. The teachers spent a lot of time lecturing, and we had barely any time to practice speaking. Even in a three-hour "Spoken Chinese" class I don't think I was able to open my mouth and speak Chinese for more than two minutes, and quite a bit of class was time was listening to and being influenced by the mistakes of my classmates. The classes were also poorly coordinated--the Reading textbook was quite difficult, Listening suitable, and Speaking ridiculously easy. The textbooks were mediocre and uninspiring--dialogues and stories about making friends in the dormitory or moral lessons about why you shouldn't be lazy. Despite the school's receiving a huge amount of tuition from us (we were also overcharged for the textbooks), the only equipment in use besides chalk was a single tape player which didn't work. In over two years of learning Chinese it was the first time I was bored.

I also felt some disappointment with Shanghai, a city I had loved during my first visit as a tourist. Language practice was more difficult because the local people were much busier, less friendly, and much less impressed by foreigners in comparison to Zhangye. Many people either insisted in replying to me in English or didn't want to acknowledge that I was using Chinese, using hand gestures to answer my questions. I would have to work a lot of hours to cover my expenses, and commuting around the city was very time-consuming and exhausting, leaving me less time to study. And of course I missed Zhangye for its blue skies, superior food, low prices, and the friends I had made.

Luckily I had the option of getting a 70% refund (and I had only paid them half at that point) during the first two weeks of class, so I quit and made plans to return to Zhangye. Along with simply liking it here it is an excellent environment for Chinese self-study, and of course my girlfriend is still here finishing her teaching contract.

Upon returning, I had the problem of determining where to live, as of course I no longer have a school-provided apartment. It made the most sense to live with Nissa, but what would the school think about it? Our Miss Mao did find out, and summoned me into her office at the beginning of this week. I had no idea if she was going to kick me out or expect me to pay to move into my old apartment or what. It turns out she and the school don't care, but I have to simply go through the paperwork and be official.

I do still need to be part of some work unit or school to live in Zhangye, and studying Chinese in my living room doesn't quite cut it. So in classic Miss Mao fashion, she told me to write out an application--to study Chinese at Hexi University. So, to my great amusement, on paper I am Zhangye's first American "study abroad" student in the Chinese department of Hexi University. I'm tempted to attend Chinese department classes; maybe they won't notice me. I've been asked countless times in town if I'm a student in Zhangye, and finally I am.

Now that I don't actually teach at Hexi University it is easy to get a good two or three hours of study in during the day. I also have a private tutor, and am determined to learn just as much, spend less, and interact much more with Chinese speakers compared to Shanghai. On the side I tutor English and even teach Chinese to other foreign teachers. I also have a final chance to enjoy the wonderful local food. It feels good to be back.

Yunnan and Hong Kong Travels

2008-02-04T19:48:00.000+08:00

I've just completed almost a month of traveling with my girlfriend Nissa, and rather than writing a lengthy post about it, I thought I'd select a few pictures and just make some brief comments.

A familiar face in Chengdu.

About two weeks were spent in Yunnan province, including Lijiang, renowned for its picturesque streets, surrounding mountain scenery, and unique Naxi minority culture. It is getting a bit Disney Land-esque and is a shadow of its former self (as evidenced by reading Peter Goullart's fantastic Forgotten Kingdom), but still an enjoyable visit.

Not far from Lijiang lies Tiger Leaping Gorge, which boasts some of the most beautiful natural scenery I have ever seen. The first part of the hike was a strenuous 7 1/2 hour day that at times taunted our inadequate physiques.

The view from our guesthouse. US$15 for a pleasant double room on a mountaintop. The second day of hiking was much shorter and less exhausting than the first.

A change of scenery and some long-awaited tropical atmosphere in Jinghong (景洪), southern Yunnan. It is the major city of the area known as Xishuangbanna (西双版纳), a taste of southeast Asia and minority culture not far from the Laos border.

I'm often unimpressed by the food when traveling when I compare it to what I know and love in Zhangye, but Yunnan delivered. The cafes of Jinghong serve some delicious and unique Dai minority dishes.

In Xishuangbanna there is a Wild Elephant Valley, a protected area home to around 50 elephants. The entrance was a bit off-putting, with fake minority performances, a deer chained to a tree, and a bear in a muzzle for the entertainment of the tour groups. However, the jungle trail was pleasant and we anxiously awaited the possibility of seeing the elephants.

We opted to stay overnight in the unique tree houses in the middle of the jungle. It was remarkably peaceful, as we were the only visitors to stay there. The short and smartly-dressed hotel keeper told us that our luck must not have been good that day, as we had just missed some elephants who had come down to the pool. She promised to inform us if they spotted any more elephants.

After a short time, luck was with us. We saw the friendly hotel keeper racing up the stairs from the staff building on the ground towards our tree house. Two elephants had been seen, and she guided us down the path towards the spot. We watched in fascination as the mother and son, who were soon joined by the father, lounged in a muddy pool and drank their fill for an hour or so. The father had a less than graceful moment while attempting to walk across a thin tree trunk, and fell hard onto his stomach. Eventually they crashed their way back into the woods, but we spotted them again in the pool beneath our tree house as it became dark. We watched and listened for a long time but they were still out there drinking when we went to bed. It was certainly one of the highlights of the trip.If you get a little outside of Jinghong or any of the other small cities in the area, it is a good opportunity to see some of China's minority cultures still living a fairly traditional lifestyle. The dominant group of the area is the Dai (傣族). Traditional Dai houses, far and away more appealing than the gray and lifeless modern housing of Chinese cities, generally are supported on stilts so that livestock (or apparently in some cases, a car) can be stored underneath the home.
The Dai are Buddhists, and their temples bore a strong resemblance to those I had seen in Thailand and Cambodia.

On our last day in Jinghong, we decided to go for one last bike ride outside the city in search of Dai villages. As luck would have it, a local Chinese high school boy with the English name Alan was renting a bike at the same time as us and was happy to become an improvised guide to the area. He took us to some villages that were closer than we expected and that we had already completely overlooked, and we were invited into the home of his Dai classmate in the first village. The room we saw was quite simple and without furniture or electric light, though we were given low stools and there was a television and refrigerator, neither in use. We took Alan to dinner as thanks at the end of the day.We were reluctant to leave the Banna area, and we disliked the next brief destination, Guangzhou, in almost every way (other than its free delivery Papa John's pizza). Actually, we didn't really see the city, as we spent the day frantically organizing our onward transportation. China has been hit by its worst winter weather in 50 years right at the time when the whole country goes home to celebrate the Chinese New Year, which has spelled a disaster of such proportions that it's gotten decent coverage in the Western media, even the cover of Time Magazine. At the time we didn't know anything about this, and were surprised to find a scene at the train station resembling a refugee camp in a war zone. Later when we read the Chinese news we saw Guangzhou's train station specifically mentioned as holding 150,000 or more migrant workers who were spending days there waiting for the chance to go home to see their families. We worked it out, but unfortunately for my budget it involved plane tickets.

We found Macau, on the other hand, to be an extraordinarily likable and unique city. Its years as a Portuguese colony (under more harmonious circumstances than long-time British colony Hong Kong, it seems) have given it a pleasant European feel and lovely architecture, churches in particular. Though an expensive destination by our standards (it's also a massive gambling center increasingly on par with Las Vegas), the food was good and the city unusually clean and organized. It was a fun place to simply walk around, window shop, and enjoy free samples from the bakeries.

Unique incense sticks at a temple dedicate to the sea goddess A-Ma.

Our last destination was Hong Kong. It was a good choice for the last stop in that it's an exciting, world-class city that we had looked forward to seeing, but bad in that it was outrageously and stupendously expensive on our Zhangye salaries. The highlight for me was a fantastic Cantonese restaurant we stumbled into randomly. I never thought eel could be so delicious. Coming from the mainland, Hong Kong is shocking in its cleanliness, level of organization, diversity, and English ability. A bizarre thing happened every time we paused on the street while trying to find something: a local would immediately stop and assist in flawless English, oftentimes physically taking us to where we wanted to go to make sure we found it. This happened no less than 10 or 12 times, and when in doubt we learned to stop, look confused, and wait. This never happens on the mainland, where locals and even those in the service industry tend to be impressively ill-informed and though often friendly, will never approach you on the street on the (very reasonable) assumption that you don't speak any Chinese. As neither of us speak a word of Cantonese, we were able to take a break from Mandarin and enjoy being a world of fluent English again. Unfortunately for the earnest mainland English students who eternally ask us "how can I improve my English?", the best answer seems to be "let your city become the colony of a Western power for 150 years or so."

Letters to Santa

2007-12-25T14:19:00.004+08:00

During a recent Christmas lesson, I asked students to write a letter to Santa Claus. I explained that children in the West write letters to Santa to tell him what they want for Christmas, and why they deserve it. I expected some simple and not especially interesting letters asking for things like mp3 players, and some were like that, but many had a uniquely Chinese-student approach to the letter. For example:

Dear Santa,

I can't touch with you a long time, I don't know how to do recently. Forgiven me and I think you study hard to pass exam. The Christmas is coming, I wish you are very happy and get a lot of gifts of your parents and your best friend. There are not lots of gifts in my town so I can't send gifts of you. I will bring best wish of you. Happy Christmas!

Your best friend Hank

Dear Santa:

I know my wish is simple but it couldn't be put into my sock. I wish my grandmother has a healthy body and a happy smile like you. Thank you! Others said Santa is a tie [lie] But I believe you're always staying around us.

Your Pupu

Charistmas will come but I am not happy. I have a trouble. I have not a good gift to give my gf. I am worry about it. Can you help me? I need it very much. Happy Charistmas!

yours Andy

Dear Santa,

The Christmas will be coming. I have some whishes want come true and I believe you can help me to get them. Because you are very kindly and friendly, aren't you? I want to have a very good thing to protect my father's knees and a beautiful coat for my mother and some delicious bread for grandparents. They are soft for the teeth.

Oh yes, I only want to have a new cotton-shoes! Ha-ha! I believe you can.

Seriously,
Sabrina

Dear Santa:

Merry Christmas to you! I hope everyday is happy like today. I want to have a pair of shoes that keep warm and beautiful. Because the weather is very cold. My mother walks long time to work everyday, her feet often cool and pain. So I want to a pair of shoes that can keep warm for my mother. Please realise my dream. Best wishes for you.

Yours: Candy

Dear Santa Claus,

I am a boy who worry about all the thing happened in daily life, I don't know how to manage it completely. Especially, in the respect of emotion, I love a girl, but I don't know how much she love me, how to get her heart, head and heel. I don't know how to make her happy. I need some advices on it.

I don't know how to cope with the relationship between career and emotion. I can't control it easily. So I am very doubtful about it: St. Nicholas, you are the cleverest in the world. Can you tell me the best way to do it. I always think about it. It makes me nuts. I can't calm down. I think I will go crazy. Saint, please tell me what I should do. Finally, I give my best wish to you.

a boy

I liked the fact that so many students asked Santa how his life was, and that so many of them thought first of what their family needed. In the west we have an impression of Chinese having very strong family values and in my experience it is most definitely true. Probably one of the most striking things to a westerner about Chinese students is their sincerity and lack of cynicism, which is all the more apparent when they are using English. The average westerner is usually exposed to China through the occasional news story, mostly unflattering ones, and I often wish this could be balanced with exposure to the more undramatic, low-key and endearing side of China and its people.

Have a Merry Christmas.

AIDS Lesson

2007-12-17T11:49:00.005+08:00

Recently I gave a lesson to my freshman classes about AIDS, as that was the topic of the homework reading. AIDS and related topics like sex and drug use are not exactly common conversation topics in China; other than Little Ma's crude sense of humor, I can't recall a single time I've heard a Chinese person mention sex in the past two years. Seeing as the word "girlfriend" is enough to get giggles from a class, I was curious how my students would respond to the lesson.

My first surprise was how little they learn about AIDS growing up. When asked, some students said they learned a little about it in school, but many said they didn't learn about it at all. So I asked if parents talk about it and there was a loud, resounding "no." I asked if there is sex education in school, and apparently there is none. I again asked if they learn about it from parents, and there was an even louder, unanimous "NO." One girl said aloud "that's impossible." I asked how they learn about sex, and after a pause a few students said "from the TV" or "from the Internet." I know the government provides AIDS education (in fact the only two posters adorning the faded and cracking walls of my classroom are about AIDS, including the first photo above, taken by my brother Erik while in Zhangye) and an AIDS day is promoted on December 1st, but it seems AIDS education in China is not quite where it could be. Many Chinese believe you can get it from mosquitoes, for instance.

During the lesson, which I actually borrowed from another teacher, the students had to separate a number of activities into the categories of "high risk," "low risk," or "no risk" for HIV. For example, "sharing a toilet" or "kissing" should go under "no risk" while "intravenous drug use" and "from mother to infant" should be placed under "high risk." The homework was very informative about HIV/AIDS and they overall did very well with this. One of the activities included was "oral sex" (low risk). Many students asked me what this meant, which was probably one of the more awkward things I've had to do in the classroom. Not knowing the Chinese word and not wanting to get too graphic, I simply said "sexual activity using the mouth... if you don't know what I'm talking about, ask a friend." In one class a girl said in Chinese, a little too loudly, wo mei zuoguo! - "I've never done that before!"

There was also group work during the lesson that had the students discussing HIV/AIDS-related issues. One of the questions asked if HIV testing should be required for certain jobs. While answering this question, one girl told me in a quite serious, deadpan voice "yes, I believe HIV testing should be required for some jobs, especially whores."

I also learned from my students that testing for HIV is not common in China, as there is a stigma attached to it. If you get tested for HIV others around you assume you have it, and will avoid you. I've since read that those diagnosed with HIV also may be ostracized, even to the point of their family refusing to eat with them or doctors refusing to touch them. Condom use is not universal, as it is associated with promiscuity. Until 2003, condom advertisements were illegal in China, and one survey found that 60% of Chinese condoms are faulty. Needles are also sometimes reused in China, even in hospitals.

At the end of the lesson, I gave students the chance to write down any questions they had about HIV and AIDS or the day's lesson. A few examples:

Are there a great number of students having the sex innections [I think they meant "intercourse"] with the different sex in American?

Is it possible for them to suffer from HIV if two lovers have sex without using condoms?

This is the first time I heard someone talk about sex in the public. I being to realize the importance of sex.

Use a condom weather have a side effect?

I think though China is a feudalist society, when children are thirteen or fifteen it's time for parents to teach them something about sex, and to teach them how to make friends with boys or girls, or what to do to protect themselves.

Can you give a kiss to a girl if she is infected with HIV?

Once someone had HIV, did they have the equal rights to do what they want to do? Like go to school, contribute to the society. If the others, especially their relatives didn't understand them.

In America, when students grow up a adult, their parents are encourage (or allow) them to sex with somebody. Is it true?

Our country passed a law, people can get married during their university. Do you think AID will spread faster?

In American, are old people frightened with AIDS?

Is it common that in USA, the middle school students having a sexual experience?

In China, if you want to test HIV or AIDZ, you are thought a patient who get infected HIV. Many people around you will be away from you. I want to know what do the American people think about?

I heard there are many people having HIV in America. Is it true? Does the government find the better method to control the AIDS?

When did the first HIV appeared? Why did he have HIV? Did he has too much freedom to infect HIV?

In your country female's virgin is concerned a lot, isn't it? In college, if you allow to married with somebody? In America, what's the average age people get married?

I remember when I told other Americans of my decision to go to China, there were mixed reactions. Many people, especially family and close friends, were enthusiastic and sometimes envious. However, many people had a negative and usually ill-informed reaction: "China has AIDS," "China is full of poverty," "they put people in jail for no reason," etc. My girlfriend at the time's immediate response to the idea was "China is full of AIDS." In China, AIDS is often associated with the West, and I once read a story about an American dating a Chinese girl whose mother's first reaction was to ask "does he have AIDS?" In truth, America does have the bigger AIDS problem, with more than 1,000,000 people infected with HIV, compared to China's 650,000 (China also has more than four times as many people). During the height of Maoism and China's isolation, parents in the countryside would tell naughty children that the foreigners would come to eat them if they didn't behave. While American parents were telling children to eat up because "there are starving kids in China," Chinese parents were telling their own children to eat well because there were oppressed capitalist children "starving in the West." It's funny how much I appreciate the importance of education now that I'm not actually in school.

Links:
HIV/AIDS in China
HIV/AIDS in America
Sex statistics by country

Learning English the Manly Way

2007-11-18T09:07:00.001+08:00

After close to two years I still love shopping in China. You never know what curious things await you. Case in point, from the children's section of a local bookstore:

It's not that we don't have war-inspired children's toys and merchandise in America (I remember owning a pack of Desert Storm trading cards myself) or America could be considered a pacifistic country at the moment , but the learning English theme is interesting. But hey, if "guided-missile submarine" inspires a child to learn a foreign language, I'm all for it.

There was also an earlier post at Sinosplice about the same subject.

Zhangye Rock City

2007-11-16T10:21:00.004+08:00

Along with the English language, Western culture is making inroads in China. American movies, for example, are readily available on DVD in Zhangye and all over China. Many of the textbook readings for English students talk about Western countries and their culture and history. But one of the areas that I've felt is lacking is Western music. There are a few English songs popular in China, and a top five list would look something like this:

1. The Carpenters - Yesterday Once More
2. Michael Learns to Rock - Take Me To Your Heart
3. Celine Dion - My Heart Will Go On
4. Groove Coverage - God is a Girl
5. Emilia - Big Big Girl

Many Chinese students can sing these songs and any foreigner living in China will smile in recognition, but anyone reading this at home will think "huh?" Students are always surprised when I tell them the English songs they like are practically unknown in America (and no one would like them), and at home I haven't heard "My Heart Will Go On" for maybe 10 years.

Thus, this term I've made it my mission to introduce real Western music to the students. I wanted to start an English Music Club much earlier but never had a decent singer available to help out; this term my friend Stefanie is here, and "Zhangye Rock City" was started. Only 30 or 40 students show up per week, but we enjoy it and the students (mostly my freshman) are enthusiastic about it.

Picking songs is a little tricky, as they need to meet a lot of criteria: A) students will like the song B) we like the song, or at least don't mind it C) the words are sung very clearly, and not too fast D) there are not too many words E) the singing is not too low, as 90% of the students are female F) it was popular in the West, or at least can represent Western music. So as much I would love to go over a good PJ Harvey or Arcade Fire song, we stick to things like "The One I Love" by REM and "Last Kiss" as done by Pearl Jam. Last time we did "Do You Realize?" by The Flaming Lips. Chinese popular music tastes are quite firmly in realm of melodramatic love songs, so "Last Kiss" was particularly popular.

The way this works is we give the students copies of the lyrics, discuss the song, listen to it several times while singing along, and finally play it without the recording. Below are videos from music club of "Maps" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs and "Imagine" by John Lennon. The instrument that Stefanie plays is an American folk instrument called the Autoharp that she dragged all the way from California to northwest China. Suggestions for other songs to use in music club are welcome.

Just When You Thought You Knew Your Own Hair Color

2007-11-05T17:12:00.004+08:00

The other day my friend Nissa was asked to visit a local middle school to observe a few classes and talk to the teachers about education in America. During one of the classes the Chinese teacher was leading a class discussion about Nissa, and at one point asked her in front of the class "what do you call your hair color in America?"
"Red" Nissa replied.
To her surprise, the teacher responded "no, no, it is blond hair. Your hair is blond."
"Well yes, we have blond hair in America, but we call this hair color red."

And a small argument ensued with the teacher insisting that Nissa has blond hair. This is not the first time she has been told she does not have red hair (for reference, she is the witch in the last post). In the case of the middle school teacher, I could be wrong (and I wasn't actually there at the time) but I think this is a good example of "face" (面子 miànzi) in Chinese culture. The dislike of making mistakes or being proven wrong is a lot stronger in Chinese culture (and east Asia in general I'm led to believe) than it is in Western culture, i.e. "losing face." It's a common mistake for students to call blond hair "yellow hair" and I can envision the teacher having emphasized this beforehand, waiting for her moment in class to bring the point home, and then not wanting to back down when she was proven wrong in front of the class. But even when face isn't at stake I've seen similar situations, like a conversation I once had with a student:

Student: "Foreigners have blue eyes. Why are your eyes black?"
Me: "Um, actually my eyes are blue."
Student: "No they aren't. Your eyes are black."

It's funny how stereotypes and preconceptions can be held on to even in the face of clear evidence. Nissa told one of her classes that most foreigners (and we are always "foreigners" in China, never Westerners) have the same eye color as them and they actually gasped in unison. When you want a job as a foreign teacher in China it is required that you provide the school with a photo of yourself; those with white skin, blond hair and blue eyes will get a job considerably easier than those with darker features (not only black people but, ironically, Chinese-Americans) regardless of qualifications. Non-white foreigners face a lot of discrimination and even fear in China (a black journalist wrote about a shop assistant bursting into tears at the sight of her) but most Chinese, having never met one, are entirely unaware of this and would strongly deny it.

Chinese conceptions of foreigners are always interesting. They are also sometimes shocking or insensitive, but you can't really blame them in a country that is 95% the same race, the same hair color, the same eye color, and is considerably more conformity-driven than Western culture. Look at how much discrimination and close-mindedness exists in America despite our enormous diversity and high levels of education and prosperity. I can recall several moments from college when my educated, liberal friends made shocking comments about black people. But as an example of what I mean (also from Nissa's class, which unlike mine deals directly with cultural differences), students were asked what the differences between China and America were and a student replied "in America people discriminate and look down on minorities, but in China we always help minorities." Another said "China has 55 minorities, but America only has black people and white people." Needless to say, I'm not so sure about that.

Halloween in Zhangye

2007-11-04T15:53:00.002+08:00

This term I've had the pleasure of the company of two friends from America, Stefanie and Nissa. They taught in the city of Yangzhou last year and this year decided to come to this university to work on my recommendation. This has led to a lot more American-style fun lately, including a colorful Halloween last Wednesday.

As I mentioned a year ago, celebrating Halloween in China can be pretty memorable. Christmas has become popular in China (some stores and bars even have Christmas decorations year-round) but Halloween is still barely known in these parts. Not being within a thousand miles of a good Halloween costume store, we first had to make our own costumes, which involved a long, long weeknight on October 30th making a cardboard box into a witch's hat. We had earlier also done some pumpkin carving with Chinese characteristics; small, green Jack-o-lanterns fashioned out of souvenir Xinjiang knives.

At night we held a Halloween party for students, with decorations, the Monster Mash, apple bobbing, toilet paper mummies, a raffle and a cake walk. With 35 freshman practically bouncing off the walls with excitement in my apartment ("do you want to play a game?" "YEEESS!!!!") I was feeling a little claustrophobic, but the students had a great time and it all went pretty smoothly. Afterwards we went to see our friends at our favorite bar, China Fire, and shower them with candy.

However, my favorite part of the day may have been in the afternoon after we first dressed up. We each went to class in costume, which was cause for plenty of excitement and camera phone pictures with students. We also had some shopping to do, leading to the priceless reactions of locals to the sight of a witch (Nissa), vampire (Stefanie), and devil (me) getting money from the ATM....

...eating pasta at the nicest restaurant in town...

...shopping for produce.....

...getting assistance at the supermarket...

...deciding between eel and chicken in a bag...

...picking up some sausage....

...choosing candy for the party...

...buying imported liquor...

...checking out...

...and checking a cane and witch's broom at the bag check.

Chinese Students: Happy Every Day

2007-10-29T10:24:00.001+08:00

"What are English students in China like?" you may (or may not) have asked yourself. Well, this Powerpoint slide and accompanying e-mail from one of my freshman students should give you an idea:

Dear teacher :

happy weekend! just now ,i send a slide to you. it is my fist slide that i just study how to make it , although it is not a good , i want to send it my teacher , hoping you can have a good mood every day . there is a smile like sunlight . as matter of fact ,i do not be good at computer , later ,i must study computer well, making many

beautiful slides to send my teacher and friends , hoping they are happy.

every thing is best ! May success and prosperity crown all your undertakings.

all my best wishes for the future!

They certainly are endearing. And I may start signing future e-mails with "May success and prosperity crown all your undertakings!"

A Little Humor Today

2007-10-25T12:34:00.000+08:00

The Onion

The Chinglish Files
(one of my favorites is in the July archive, on July 5th)

Oh What a Nice Little Devil Your Child Is!

2007-10-22T14:20:00.000+08:00

The Chinese language is confusing. Like any language very different from one's native tongue, a person who has never studied Chinese might be tempted to say Chinese words "all sound the same." But to a native English speaker there is a glimmer of truth in that--Chinese has only 400 different sounds (monosyllables). By comparison, English has 8,000, a full twenty times as many. That means a whole lot of Chinese words have the same sounds, but they are distinguished by the four tones in Chinese (high and level, rising, falling and rising, and sharply falling). This is pretty interesting for the linguist or dedicated learner but a small nightmare for the absolute beginner trying to learn Chinese pronunciation. How important are tones? A few examples of words with the same sounds that are differentiated only by tone (the marks above the letters show the tone):

小姐 xiǎojie - miss/young woman/prostitute (in northern China)

vs.

小节 xiǎojié - (in music) one measure
vs.
小结 xiǎojié - summary

打算 dǎsuàn - plan/to plan
vs.
大蒜 dàsuàn - garlic

上海 Shànghǎi - Shanghai (the city)
vs.
伤害 shānghài - to injure

公里 gōnglǐ - kilometer
vs.
巩俐 gǒnglì - Gong Li (the actress)

眼睛 yǎnjīng - eyes
vs.
眼镜 yǎnjìng - eyeglasses
vs.
燕京 yànjīng - Yanjing (city name)

贵子 guìzi - precious (such as a child)
vs.
鬼子 guǐzi - devil (such as a child)

要是 yàoshì - if
vs.
钥匙 yàoshi - (door) key

杯子 bēizi - (drinking) glass
vs.
被子 bèizi - quilt
vs.
辈子 bèizi - a whole lifetime

病人 bìngrén - patient
vs.
兵人 bīngrén - soldier

You'll notice that this is not a problem in written Chinese because the characters for these words are completely different (though getting the thousands of different characters mixed up is another story). To my surprise I haven't seen too many funny or embarrassing misunderstandings, although being simply misunderstood is par for the course. Once a student asked me if the food her and her classmates had just gone through the trouble of cooking for me and Andrew was delicious and I said "no," to her surprise and her classmates' amusement. When she said xiāng (delicious) I heard xiǎng (would like) and thought she was asking if I wanted any more. I read a story about a foreigner asking for a banana (xiāngjiāo) cake in a supermarket and getting a bizarre look because he had accidentally asked for a rubber (xiàngjiāo) cake.

But one of the better stories I can remember about confusing tones came not from China but from a friend named Jenny in Thailand, where the language is also tonal. Whenever she referred to Thai boxing, known as muay thai, it would get a great reaction from the class. It's not always easy keeping the students' interest so she would refer to muay thai as often as possible in class, only to learn later that the way she was pronouncing it she was not talking about Thai boxing at all, but rather Thai pubic hair.

Any other stories/easily confused Chinese words out there?

Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting

2007-10-13T12:43:00.001+08:00

During my trip to Ningxia I visited the provincial museum in Yinchuan, which included an exhibit about Hui culture. The Hui are one of China's national minorities and Ningxia is their "autonomous region," a province in which an ethnic minority is theoretically given a lot of control in the provincial government (Tibet is also an autonomous region). There are plenty of Hui in Zhangye, and though quite assimilated into Han Chinese culture they are distinguished by the practice of Islam and the distinctive white hats worn by the men. Part of the fun of Chinese museums is reading the captions, which tend to have a very Chinese flavor to them:

And of the many pictures chosen to represent Hui culture, my favorite was definitely this one:

Daytrip to Inner Mongolia; or, "At the Ends of the Earth"

2007-10-04T17:48:00.004+08:00

This week I spent exactly one day in Inner Mongolia (a northern province or more accurately "autonomous region" in China, not Mongolia the country), in a town called Bayan Hot (or 巴音 Bāyīn in Chinese). I live in a fairly remote city, but this really felt like heading out into the middle of absolute nowhere. It was a journey of close to three hours to the city, the last half of which being through pure, desolate desert with almost no signs of civilization. It's a small place that I knew little about besides it being in Inner Mongolia, the main inspiration for going.

Besides the slow pace of life and a chance to see Mongolian writing on all the signs, the town provided one of the ample opportunities to view the dichotomies and contradictions of modern China. Immediately outside the town limits, one can see the traditional clay and brick housing common in northwest China:

Mere streets away, inside the town, I was a little taken aback when I turned a corner and saw this modern monstrosity of a building:

This stadium could clearly hold the entire population of the town, and seemed a bit out of place, as well as ill-used. I asked a couple of locals and they said it was already closed for the winter but in the warmer months they hold art shows and the like. I've read that the provincial government is prone to flashy displays of development in lieu of more practical spending, and a 60,000 capacity stadium has been built in provincial capital Hohhot that with the exception of the opening celebrations is unlikely to fill up. In the near total-silence of this small town it felt a bit surreal to stand in front of it, like an apocalyptic future in which most of the population had been wiped out. Near total-silence is surreal in China anyway.

The main attraction of the town is a Mongolian temple, which was similar in style to others I've seen as many Mongolians practice Tibetan Buddhism. One monk who I guessed to be in his 30's had an obvious affinity for Westerners, and once he discovered I could speak Chinese quickly engaged me in conversation. This turned into a fast-paced and passionate 40 minute lecture about his thoughts on the society around him that fascinated me as much as it gave me a headache; he didn't pause much and I could only catch around 30% of what he said. The main idea was that he's become greatly disappointed in the loss of basic decency and morals that has accompanied fast economic growth. He thinks people in China are interested in money, success, and the approval of others at the cost of everything else. Though he said there are still decent, honest Chinese people around, the whole society is promoting economic success as the be-all and end-all of life, and it's wrong. He also is disappointed in the attitude towards Mongolians like himself; he told me they are seen as stupid, slow and uncouth by many Chinese, and they aren't truly understood. It's true that almost every time ethnic minorities come up during conversation with a Han Chinese friend they have used the word 野蛮 yěmán, which means "barbarous" or "uncivilized" and have made several disparaging remarks (generally students, who also claim during class that there is no discrimination in China). This disillusionment with society inspired him to become a monk two years ago. He hoped I would learn Mongolian and travel to Mongolia proper someday, an idea I've toyed with anyway (the traveling part at least).

I've noticed a pattern of minorities opening up to foreigners in China, whether it was Uyghurs in Xinjiang or Tibetans in Qinghai. I suppose complaints to Han Chinese would often fall on indifferent or even hostile ears (I've heard comments like "those minorities, always complaining; they have it good enough") and we provide a fresh and interested source of conversation that is outside the system. The Chinese tourists walking past us during my talk with the monk paid little attention, the only exceptions being a student who giggled and wanted to ask me where I was from, and a woman who interrupted to ask the monk if she could take pictures. I think images of Confucian scholars and Tang poetry had given me the impression of the Chinese as quite thoughtful and spiritual, which wasn't necessarily on the mark. Whatever other virtues modern Chinese society has I wouldn't put deep spirituality at the top of the list, and famous temples are pure tourist attractions with guys in their new cowboy hats taking pictures of their girlfriend while she gives the "V" sign and smiles (more on that soon).

After leaving the monk I took a bus back to Yinchuan, and on the way out saw this billboard:

发展是第一要务
富民是第一目标
和谐是第一任务

roughly translated:

Development is the #1 duty
Enriching the people is the #1 goal
Harmony is the #1 mission

Chinese Words and Phrases 4: 和谐社会 héxié shèhuì

2007-10-04T17:14:00.001+08:00

Hexie shehui means "harmonious society," and is a phrase that pops up a lot in China these days. One of the current favorite government slogans, it was adopted by the Party in 2004. In the wake of such rapid growth China is experiencing well-publicized social problems including a large gap between the rich and the poor, environmental devastation, and protests by Chinese who have been forcibly moved from their land in the name of development. According to the government "a harmonious society is defined as a socialist democracy, with rule of law, social justice, honesty and credibility, balancing human activities and natural resources." If asking citizens to help build a "harmonious society" sounds vague to you, apparently the government agrees, as according to China Daily the government has recently decided to create "an index system judging social harmony." Hm. Today the terror threat in America is the color green, and the social harmony in China is around 6.4 out of 10. Another popular government campaign is the "8 Virtues and 8 Vices" or "8 Do's and Dont's," which I spied in English during my traveling:

I'm intrigued by the Party slogans, and the propaganda, much of which is perfectly well-meaning. You just don't see "Cherish Life; Give Up Drugs" painted in giant letters by the government on walls in America, or billboards encouraging you to "Carry out the Three Represents." Signs like these would be mocked to death in the West. When I first started studying Chinese I looked forward to being able to understand the signs, posters, and billboards, which are pervasive. The most common theme is probably the one-child policy, with signs reminding the populace that "Having a girl is the same as having a boy," "Carrying out the one-child policy is every citizen's duty and obligation" and "Girls are the builders of our future." I'm not sure how excited many Chinese get about getting behind the slogans anyway; for instance, Chinese bloggers who get their blogs blocked now sarcastically write about being "harmonized."

Anyway, whatever President Hu Jintao and the rest of the Party meant by Harmonious Society, I hope it wasn't this:

Ningxia Travels I: Capitalism Run Amok, Pyramids in China

2007-10-02T20:01:00.000+08:00

It is time again for the National Day Holiday in China, a time for the Chinese to reflect upon the founding of their socialist republic and the myriad way it has improved their lives. And what would make the dear Chairman prouder on the anniversary of his establishment of Communist China than sales, sales, sales!

I particularly like the man in the gorilla costume, let's see a close-up of that:

I've been in the city of Yinchuan for the start of the holiday and more than the pleasant museum and tranquil pagodas I can't help but notice the capitalist orgy taking place on the streets. Need a Nokia phone? A wedding dress? In the mood for audience participation, games, prizes, karaoke, or just silly dancing? The streets of a Chinese shopping district during a holiday are the place to be. Despite the sarcasm I do actually enjoy the oral assault and chaos you sometimes get in China, especially when I know I have a small, relatively sleepy city to return to. There is something to be said for the sight of adults old enough to have been through the Cultural Revolution giggling and fighting over the chance to thrown plastic rings at cell phones for a prize. Even during normal times Chinese stores know how to open or remodel in a grand way--giant inflatable archways, confetti, firecrackers, and for the really ambitious, cannons. Inevitably there is a also a mammoth stereo system playing upbeat pop or a stage with live karaoke singing.

As much fun as I'm having otherwise (is that a pizza buffet??) one of the main reasons to come to one of China's smallest and most obscure provinces is for a bit of history, in the form of thousand-year old pyramid-like tombs left by the Xixia kingdom. These are the centerpiece of the few remains of this fearsome and somewhat mysterious kingdom which at times rivaled the Chinese dynasties of the day, but was destined to be destroyed by Genghis Khan and the Mongols. In their heyday they controlled a sizeable piece of northwest China, including Zhangye.

In the end the real reason I came to Ningxia province is because no one else wants to. Traveling to and from a popular destination during a Chinese national holiday is between very difficult and a nightmare and only those with extensive experience in China can appreciate the feeling I had when I bought an overnight sleeper ticket for the train in less than four minutes. I also appreciate being simply a novelty rather than a target for harassment by vendors.

It rained heavily at the park today, and a group of us found shelter and entertainment listening to an elderly musician in a pavilion, which I probably enjoyed more than any of the ticketed attractions around town. Many curious locals have come up to talk to me and find out why I'm here; on hearing I was American one woman remarked "but aren't Americans black? Your skin is so white!" For the thousandth time a woman encouraged her shy child to "say hello to the American uncle!" and a woman suggested the violinist "play a song for our foreign friend over there." If willing conversation partners are one of the keys to learning a language, China might well be one of the best countries in the world to do it.

University Life in China

2007-09-27T14:21:00.005+08:00

As you might imagine, and as with pretty much every other facet of society, university life in China is quite different from that in a Western country. In some ways it feels more like a continuation of high school, and students are not nearly as independent and self-reliant as they are in a Western university. Ironically, the foreign teacher at this school who was least able to adapt and in fact quit a year early was the only one with a PhD and extensive university experience in America. In general the young and inexperienced teachers are successful in this environment. I've worked out a list below of some of the most obvious differences between university life at home and in China, in no particular order:

-Students are organized into classes by major, and given a class number and individual student numbers. They take all the same classes with these classmates, and have no control over their class schedule. At this school classes in the English department are around 35 students each. Some Chinese teachers call students by their numbers rather than their names.

-Changing one's major is much more complicated than in America, and involves getting permission from both departments and paying a fee. Choosing a major is also limited by your results on the college entrance exam and many of my English students would rather be studying something else. By the same token there are students with excellent English abilities in other departments who want to be English majors but can't because of exam scores.

-Each class has a class monitor, chosen by a class vote. The class monitor attends weekly meetings, passes on announcements to the class from the department, and is in charge of class activities. A student once asked me "how do you choose class monitors in America?" I explained that we don't have them, and in great confusion she asked "but who is in charge of the class?"

-Student dorm rooms typically have 5-8 students in rooms that would hold 2 in America. In this school the beds have thin straw mattresses and very little besides bunk-beds, the students' (few) possessions, and wash basins. The students do their laundry by hand, and typically wear the same two or three outfits. Males and females live in separate buildings and are not allowed to enter the opposite sex's dormitory buildings.

-Students have the same roommates for all 4 years, typically classmates that they also see in every class. It is extremely difficult to change dorm rooms and some students have falling outs with their roommates that affect the entire class atmosphere. However the drama is minimal compared to the nightmare you would get with American students in the same situation.

-Showers are in buildings separate from the dormitories and cost 3 yuan (less than 50 cents). For most students this is a significant amount and many students shower once a week.

-The school has implemented a new rule: it is mandatory for students to study in the campus classrooms from 7-9pm every night. Students who are absent and caught will be punished by having their exam grades lowered.

-Students must sign in around 7am every weekday morning, even if they don't have morning class. If they miss enough times they will be embarrassed by having their name read on the campus broadcast system. Students from families with money can and do bribe the people in charge of broadcasting and sleep in as they will.

-In English classes taught by Chinese teachers, it is typical for students to sit quietly and listen to the teacher lecture for the entire two hours, without the chance to speak a word of English. Both teachers and students (with some exceptions) will never speak English outside of class unless absolutely forced to (even with me many students want to use Chinese instead). In a three person English conversation with two Chinese and a foreigner, the two Chinese people will typically use Chinese when talking to each other. The result is that students can study English for 10 years and still be terrified of speaking to me in English. By contrast, even in high school I recall classmates using Spanish or French outside of class for the fun of it.

-Some textbooks are fine, but most leave something to be desired; there is a real textbook used at this school which has one word on the cover: "Listeing." I was able to change to a good series of reading books, but of the 40-odd stories in the first textbook I used, the most recent one was from 1971. Most were considerably older.

-Students (and Chinese people in general) are fond of performances. Campus entertainment usually takes the form of karaoke competitions and dance and music performances from students.

-With the dormitory situation, there is pretty much no privacy at all for student couples. Couples cuddle on benches or find a somewhat "secluded" spot in the grass, especially at night. I've seen what appears to be couples breaking up, simply standing off the side of a path because there is nowhere else for them to go.

-The dormitories are locked at 11:30pm, even on weekends. Two students once accompanied Andrew to a Christmas evening church service. It was so long that they missed their curfew and spent the entire night in an internet cafe, and were sick the next day.

-In order to have drinking water, students have big thermoses that they fill up in designated buildings that supply hot water. On the few occasions when the power has gone out in these buildings some students simply didn't drink anything because they didn't have money to buy water.

-Once per term each class has "duty week." This is a week when they don't go to class, instead cleaning up campus (sweeping, burning garbage) in their official school uniforms.

-Freshman have a week of military training, usually the first week of college, in which they wear uniforms, are drilled by soldiers, and do a lot of marching and shouting.

-My school has demolished the old library but not finished the new one. There is no library on campus at the moment.

-In general students don't get out as much as their Western counterparts. I once took some student friends to see Zhangye's famed "Great Buddah" statue, about a 25-minute walk away, and they were simply amazed I could get there so easily. They had never been that far away from campus before.

-There is a school broadcast system with speakers all over campus, which loudly plays news, the national anthem, and inspirational music. Broadcasts begin at 6am.

-Students stand up in unison to greet the teacher when he/she enters the room, and erase the blackboard for the teacher during breaks. Students rotate the duty of bringing the chalk and eraser to the classroom. When the student on duty forgets (which is often) I have no chalk or eraser, and someone then scrambles to get chalk from another classroom while others give me tissues to erase the board with. I've had to resort to cleaning the blackboard with a mop. I've tried hiding a cloth in the room for the times the students forget the eraser but it was soon stolen.

-Other than desks, small stools for students, the teacher's podium, the blackboard, and one electrical outlet, there is not so much as a garbage can in the classrooms. Occasionally the power is out and the outlet doesn't work, generally when I want to play music and really need power.

-Because of the crowded dorms and lack of study options, students often study outside. Because of the Chinese love of reciting out loud, this leads to the amusing sight of students reading books to trees.

-College students do drink, but not even approaching the amount that American students do. Drinking is not allowed in the dorms and due to money issues, curfews, and social norms students don't often go to bars. It is also almost exclusively males, as a Chinese female who drinks or smokes is not looked very highly upon. Working age males, however, drink much more than those in America, and it's an integral part of doing business in China. There are apparently some drugs available but I'm sure drug use is also much lower than in America (though apparently rising in the cities). Chinese drug laws are also much stiffer and include execution (incidentally China executes more people than all the other countries in the world combined).

-Pre-marital sex is considerably less common in China than the West. According to 21st Century (an English language newspaper for Chinese students), 15% of Chinese aged 18-21 have had pre-marital sex, and for the 21-24 group 39% have had pre-marital sex. The numbers are probably lower in a smaller, more conservative place like Zhangye. By contrast it claims that two-thirds of Americans under 18 have had sex. Because of living conditions it would be nearly impossible for a willing couple to have sex on campus in the first place. There is short-term off-campus housing available for students so those that are having sex often rent rooms for that purpose.

-The majority of college students have never had any kind of job before. In China a student's job is to study and they are not encouraged to earn their own money or pursue hobbies. Many of my students are getting their first part-time jobs tutoring younger students in English. Getting into a college is the result of a student's score on the college entrance exam; no other factors are considered and the pressure and preparation put into this exam are utterly unlike anything American high schoolers go through.

-It would unusual for a Chinese student to pay for college themselves. Generally they are completely funded by their parents.

-In almost every aspect of life Chinese students are less independent and self-reliant than Western students. Even with the means to do so I suspect none of my students would be willing to travel alone, even to a nearby city. Definitely not the girls. Students find it odd that I would even go out on the street by myself.

-Students seem to have little sense of note-taking, even in college. For the most part they scribble whatever I write on the board verbatim into the margins of their textbook and take no other notes. I questioned a student about her notebook and she told me "oh, I do have one, I just don't bring it to class because I'm afraid that I'll lose it."

-The student-teacher relationship is much more formal, with teacher as unquestioned master. A student was telling me a story about her middle school days. The teacher asked students to write down what they thought of her class. The student was naive enough to be honest and critical, and was asked to come to the teacher's home to be shouted at and criticized. It is also still common practice for teachers to hit students for misbehaving or performing poorly.

-Students at this school have an extremely limited knowledge of how to use computers. They have taken computer classes at the school, where they are taught a programming language that I've never heard of. I asked a student why it was useful and they said "oh we won't ever use it. But if we have this certificate it will help us get a job later." Many if not most students are unable to successfully use a search engine, send an e-mail, or get to a website when the address is already known, things which apparently are not taught in computer class. I once watched Andrew teach one of our students how to type in Chinese on a computer.

-A fairly high number of students wear glasses.

-No students own cars. Quite few teachers own cars; they are still for the wealthy. Only some students own bicycles.

-Especially in comparison to American students, Chinese students wake up early on weekends. A student once told me "sometimes we quarrel in my dormitory because I like to wake up early and do exercise with the window open on weekends, but my roommates like to sleep in late." "Late" turned out to be 8am; she preferred to get up at 6:30.

-The entire concept of education in China is different. Rote memorization is king and students are taught to copy what has come before; discussion, independent or creative thinking, unusual opinions, asking questions and certainly challenging the teacher are not encouraged. And it shows; on several occasions I've asked a student to help with some everyday task, such as sending mail to America or using a washing machine, and they were of little help because doing something unfamiliar was a bigger issue for them than the language barrier was for me.

-Foreign teachers are generally the only ones who place a heavy emphasis on the students speaking during English class; Chinese teachers sometimes deride this as "playing."

-Cheating is a much bigger problem than in the West, and is much more accepted. Students freely admit to cheating when asked. I've heard a story about a Chinese professor telling university students to "just copy from your sources. I don't want to have to correct all your English mistakes." I've had students copy straight from their textbooks (the difference is obvious) during class when all I asked them to do was do some free writing about what was on their mind, and not for a grade.

If asked to compare different aspects of American and Chinese culture, I can generally find positives and negatives of both. I didn't mean this list to be a list of complaints, but it's true that education is the one area where I can see no advantages to the Chinese way. Two of my students were shocked to come across a ranking of universities worldwide that listed Qinghua University (the best in China, which students make untold sacrifices to try to get into) at something like #180, and whispered in Chinese about how it was just a Western bias against China. Some of the problems lie with the difficulties of overpopulation (middle school classrooms typically have 60 or 70 students) and of a developing country, but some come from attitudes and ways of thinking that for the sake of Chinese students I hope eventually change. Also, I'm speaking from personal experience and not all these things would be true in all universities in China, especially if the problem is money (this is a third-tier university in one of China's poorest provinces after all). As a whole students here are not satisfied with their educational experience, and I find they usually agree with me when the conversation turns to criticizing education in China. However, I would also be interested in working in a better school in a wealthier city as a means of comparison.

When speaking Chinese with people in town, I am frequently asked if I'm studying abroad here. This first of all makes me smile, as I don't think Zhangye would be high on the list of destinations for a study abroad candidate. But it also makes me imagine life here on the other end of the classroom. I think I'll stick with being a foreign teacher.

(on a side note, for an overall excellent China read that partly deals with being an American studying abroad in China, in the early 80's no less, check out Chinese Lessons by John Pomfret)

Trapped in the Classroom

2007-09-27T12:52:00.001+08:00

I got trapped inside a classroom this week.

Currently all of my classes are taught in the same classroom. Because it has a TV inside it is securely locked with a security door that I have the key to. Inside the security door there is also an old wooden door which is now broken and has no handle, and has remained this way for weeks. On Monday this wooden door was closed and utterly impossible to open, and we had to find another classroom. Then, during my Tuesday lesson, a not particularly observant student tightly closed this door while I was speaking.

Sure enough, when it was time to end class and leave, the door could not be opened. Without the handle the latch was not going anywhere, and the class watched on with amusement as I struggled with the door. Students tried the door but it was no more willing to move than Excalibur from the stone. I asked if anyone had a cell phone and the class monitor was quickly on the job. The other students took the chance to take pictures of me with their camera phones (I'm teaching freshman who for the most part have never spoken to a foreigner before this month). Though we were on the first floor we couldn't escape through the windows, as they all had bars. At least no one will steal the TV. After the monitor made a phone call he started shouting out the window at passing students to get help, and trying to communicate with people in the hall by shouting at the small (barred) opening near the ceiling. The students repeatedly asked me if I had a key (after quickly consulting with each about how to say "key" in English); no, I did not have a key to the wooden door, and this was clearly not the problem when there was no handle and nothing to put a key into.

It also began to hail heavily, a very rare event in these parts and an appropriately dramatic touch. Finally a teacher came by to bang on the door really hard, to no avail. She also wanted to know why I didn't have a key. Eventually something she did worked and the door opened, allowing us to leave after waiting around like idiots for 10 minutes after class. I went straight to the English department to inform them about the door. I was assured that because the door has no handle it can't lock and there is no problem. After making clear that I had definitely just gotten stuck in the classroom with 35 students they said they were calling a repairman to take care of it. The door has still not been fixed.

Never a dull moment.

Sichuan Travels

2007-09-21T17:08:00.000+08:00

Finishing off my summer travels (in my usual timely fashion), I'll very briefly write about the end of the summer holiday when me and Danielle traveled through Sichuan on the way back to Gansu. The first destination was Zigong, which I chanced upon an interesting description of (at www.holachina.net). It was larger and more modern than what I had imagined, but it was a likable city with some noteworthy ancient buildings and a fun dinosaur museum. At the Wangye Temple I had my first and so far only proper teahouse experience, which was quite enjoyable but does not necessarily make for a exciting story.

Next we set up base in Chengdu and made a day trip to Leshan, a city renowned for having the largest Buddha statue in the world. It was worth braving the crowds to see the Buddha and the rest of the grounds were both attractive and practically deserted.

Chengdu was the last stop before returning to Zhangye. Three years ago I doubt I had even heard of Chengdu, but it is among the largest cities in China with a population of 11 million. Chengdu has all the hallmarks of modernity one would expect in such a large city, our chief interests being pizza and Western-owned bars with great music. Many large Chinese cities rub me the wrong way but I would include Chengdu along with Shanghai and Xi'an in the short list of big Chinese cities I could live in.

One of my favorite moments in Chengdu was in the square in the evening, with the giant Mao statue paternally watching over us. The square is undergoing major renovation including a stop on the city's upcoming subway system, and is now outfitted with a fountain system that by Danielle's account wasn't there last year. It's a flashy fountain with jets of water that dance and shift unexpectedly, but the real fun of it was watching the locals' immense joy over the fountain. Children and college students (who have their childish streaks anyway) got the greatest kick out of running up to the fountain and running away when the water shifted and sprayed them, with amused adults watching on. I'm not sure Americans could muster quite so much enthusiasm over a fountain, and it's often for the simplest of reasons that I love being around the Chinese.

Jones Family in China

2007-09-20T13:09:00.004+08:00

At the beginning of my summer holiday, my father and 22-year old brother Erik came to China for a visit, a trip I had long anticipated. It was an eventful and rather successful two weeks, but I'm going to keep the write-up relatively short, especially since I write this blog partly for my family and half of them were there.

The start of the trip was near disaster--as I waited for the two of them to arrive in the Lanzhou airport, wondering why their flights wasn't appearing on the arrival board, I realized for the first time that the copy of the ticket I had said "22 Jun" instead of "22 Jul," nearly impossible to notice from the way the ticket was printed. My plan of buying their tickets from Beijing to Lanzhou really early had backfired, with the travel agent selling me tickets for the wrong month. To my immense relief they arrived on a slightly later flight; after some confusion in Beijing they were able to get same-day tickets on the same airline for cheap.

The first day was spent in Zhangye, where they were able to meet a number of my friends and see in person where I'm teaching and why I like it so much (the food by itself is reason enough). Their first meal was at China Fire, where owner and friend He Le cooked up some fish. I don't like fish in China because of the tiny, deadly bones, which combined with the spicyness make the dish at best annoying to eat and at worst lethal. He Le placated me by saying "oh, this fish has no bones." When it arrived with every bone intact, I brought this to his attention, to which he replied "oh, well it has far fewer bones that other fish." Chinese-style communication. In the top picture they are standing with my friend Little Ma's father, who is a painter and quite generously gave my dad and Erik a painting each as gifts.

After Zhangye we visited Jiuquan, a city similar in size to Zhangye where we were invited to visit the homes of my friends Joy (her Chinese name is 徐莉) and Beth (高彩霞). Joy and her uncle can be seen with my dad and brother in the second pictures above. During this stay, and throughout the trip, my friends insisted on calling my dad "Uncle" in English because using his first name would be rude. There something endearing about my non-English speaking friend Beth catching my dad's attention with "uncle" and leading him around. We were guests in one of Joy's English classes, a summer class she organized completely on her own by going door to door and renting a classroom. It took her a lot of work to convince the wary, mostly poor locals that their children would benefit from extra English class, and she made enough money for herself to pay off a decent amount of tuition she still owed the school. Knowing her situation I had insisted she borrow money from me, but all she ever took in the end was 10 yuan (about $1.20) to buy a train ticket at the end of last semester when she had quite literally run out of money. Nowadays Chinese people are often accused of excessive greed and concern for money, and I'm sure that sometimes it's true, but you don't have to look far to disprove most stereotypes.

After Joy's class we rode to her Uncle's house in a cart, powered by her cousin on a bicycle. I knew this was going to be serious "country living" and was looking forward to the stay, as well as the reaction of my dad and brother. Overall they enjoyed it, despite the perils of using the toilet: it was nothing more than a pit in back of the house, and to even reach it one had to run the gauntlet of two blood-thirsty dogs. At the end of its chain, the second and larger of the two was no more than a foot or so from the toilet, all the while barking and trying to break free and tear your face apart. Add to this a curious cow, whose large head comfortably fit over the fence and into the bathroom "stall" to see what you were up to, and the fact that a family member insisted on chaperoning any guest to the toilet at a close distance, and you have your ideal Chinese bathroom experience to welcome newly arrived foreigners. The bathrooms in general (Western, sit-down toilets are quite rare outside of classier hotels and homes) were a constant source of shock/amusement/photo opportunities for my dad and brother throughout the trip.

After Jiuquan it was back to Lanzhou for a flight and an unexpected hospital visit. My parents give to a charity called Smile Train which fixes cleft palates in poor children around the world, and my dad (who is a doctor) had a visit organized for us at the participating hospital in Lanzhou. We were met at the train station by head surgeon Dr. Lu and an attractive medical student with the English name Sara who would act as translator. They had obviously been confused by the e-mail I sent to Dr. Lu, as Sara was eagerly holding a sign that said "Welcome Dr. Dan." My dad and Erik were surprised and amused at the royal treatment we received, especially the banquet lunch with some of the higher-ranking hospital staff that ended in drinking games (one hopes they didn't have surgery in the afternoon). During the hospital tour my dad started to take a picture of a dental hygienist working on someone's teeth, but they made him wait while she awkwardly put on her mouth guard and cap. A doctor beside me said quietly to Sara "we wouldn't want the foreigners to think that..." but she stopped him and said "he can understand Chinese" while motioning to me. I gave a knowing smile.

Once we left Gansu, the trip became significantly more touristy and less unique, so I don't feel the need to go into detail, as plenty of travel writing exists about these places. We spent three days in Yangshuo, followed by shorter stays in Hangzhou, Xitang, and Beijing, including a day trip to the Great Wall. We did a four-hour walk on the Great Wall, starting at Jinshanling (金山岭) and ending at Simatai (司马台), a good choice that escapes the hordes of tourists that apparently descend on spots like Badaling that are close to Beijing. The least known of the places we visited was definitely Xitang (西塘), a fairly quiet little water town in Zhejiang province that was a nice change of pace from the large, modern Hangzhou. The pictures below are from the area outside of Yangshuo as well as the Great Wall.

Finally, I'll include a brief excerpt from the journal my father wrote about trip (which totals over 20 pages). I enjoyed seeing their surprise at all the little cultural differences I'm now used to (though still amused by), which have been put down in writing by my dad:

General Observations About The Chinese

Everyone:

They love to cook and love to eat and most of their life centers around food.
Their families are very close and they all respect one another including the kids.
They have very little in the way of possessions and are much happier then most of us.
They enjoy “taking a rest” after lunch and can stay up real late at night.
They love to do everything and share everything (including experiences) in groups.
They have tremendous pride in their locality and also in their nation as a whole.
They love to have visitors, especially foreign ones, and are incredibly hospitable.
They love to have their picture taken.
They are getting much taller.
They generally seem to be where we were at in the 1940-50s
They do not know how to form lines and wait their turn.
They never touch their food with their hands.
They squat rather than sit on the ground (like "animals & wild people").

Men:

Men love to play drinking games with each other using beer in shot glasses.
Men chain smoke
Men drive crazily.
Men sometimes are seen wearing their shirt with its bottom rolled up exposing their belly.

Women:

Women do not drink alcohol.
Women do not smoke.
Women ride on the back of bikes and motorcycles in a side-saddle manner.
Women respect themselves and their men.
Women are great cooks.
Women do all the cleaning and serving.
Women find lighter skin to be more attractive and some cover up completely outdoors.

Items that could be used in making squares for travel bingo in China:

- girl riding side-saddle on back of bicycle
- kid standing up between parents on motorcycle (no helmet)
- man with shirt rolled up over belly
- “welding mask” on woman to block the sun
- arm cuffs on woman to block the sun
- a women with an umbrella to block the sun
- public urination
- hacking up and spitting out a “lugie”
- a cow or water buffalo being walked along the roadside
- people playing badminton on the side of the road with no net
- “happy pants” on a baby boy
- hawker shouting “hello, water”
- a rickshaw
- a motorcycle/cart hybrid
- a bicycle extremely overloaded
- a cart or truck extremely overloaded
- poor “Chinglish” on a sign
- a bathroom with a Western toilet
- a person squatting
- men playing drinking games
- people doing Tai Chi
- a car passing a car that is passing another car

Bonus squares (automatic wins):

- any Chinese forming a line
- a car stopping for a pedestrian
- a bus that is not packed
- a bathroom with toilet paper
- a motorcyclist wearing a helmet
- a Chinese man wearing a green hat (means his wife is cheating on him)

Guizhou Travels

2007-08-31T17:00:00.000+08:00

note: if you are in China and therefore must use complicated means to actually read this and other blogspot blogs, I recently came across the best method I've yet seen

After my father and brother left I met up with friend/co-worker/bearer of confusingly similar name Danielle in Guizhou province. Before meeting her I killed a day in Tongren (铜仁). An opinionated woman who resembled Jabba the Hut told me about America over my bowl of local noodles. The only thing I understood was that America is not stable, unlike their stable China.

With limited options that night I wandered into one of the only places open, a karaoke bar. A birthday celebration was in full swing and I was eventually coaxed into joining the party, and even talked into singing Chinese karaoke for the first time. I was pleasantly surprised when the men in the group insisted I drink slowly the whole night. I obviously wasn't in hard-drinking Gansu anymore. A fake platinum blond with a cigarette in the group who exuded old Hollywood cool eventually made sure I went home in a taxi, informing me that "this place isn't stable."

The next morning I watched a blind fortuneteller under the shade of some trees for an hour or so and chatted with the elderly Chinese whose had noticed me. One of them asked me "are you American or Japanese?" Later in the conversation he became confused and said "in your country..... you're Japanese, right?" I was once told a story by another foreign teacher about a blond woman arriving at a school to teach and being confused with the new Japanese teacher. The school also later insisted on giving the actual Japanese teacher a spoon during the first banquet, despite her insistence that they also use chopsticks in Japan. The blind man talked with me for a short time and while making polite conversation I almost asked "are you often busy?" but stopped myself; "busy" (忙 máng) and "blind" (盲 máng) are pronounced exactly the same in Chinese and "are you often blind?" didn't seem like a very polite question.

After several hours on the bus next to a drunk 65-year old philosophy professor who looked like Professor Snape from Harry Potter and adored America, I was in Kaili (凯理) where I would meet Danielle. This was the starting point for our exploration of southeastern Guizhou, home to a wide variety of ethnic minorities, including the Miao (苗族) and Dong (侗族). We passed a couple of very pleasant days in the villages of Xijiang (西江) and Zhaoxing (肇兴), where a way of life completely different from that of the dominant Han Chinese could be observed. We only saw a glimpse of two of the area's many cultures (by official count there are 55 minority cultures in China in all) but each had its own language, style of dress, and architecture, and I found the trip much more invigorating than the many hours of anthropology classes I attended in college.

In Xijiang we encountered a group of about 20 French tourists led by a Chinese-speaking man from Cameroon, and some miscommunication while they ordered dinner led to the unusual situation of A. the man from Cameroon speaking to the Miao hostel manager in Chinese B. the manager speaking back to me in dialect Chinese because I could understand her (only slightly) better C. me talking to the man from Cameroon in English and finally D. him translating back to his friend in French. After dinner I ended up with my first translating "job," as I was asked to expand their English menu by about 80 dishes, a good challenge. Earlier we had noticed a spontaneous but full-fledged game of basketball had broken out between five of the French and a Chinese team in uniform, with a referee and practically half of the small town watching and cheering.

In Zhaoxing I went out in the evening alone and befriended an entertaining group of young Chinese - four likable girls, a portly man from the Bai minority who sang when he lost in our drinking game, and a charismatic man from Guangdong with a serious smoker's voice who had driven by himself all the way from Beijing. Though I couldn't keep up the conversation was much more stimulating than normal (in a year and a half the only time I've seen discussion and even disagreement about the Taiwan issue) and it was one of my more memorable moments of the summer.

The bus rides on winding, bumpy roads through this part of Guizhou were memorable in and of themselves, both for the beauty of the scenery and the curious things the locals brought on board. During one trip a man was standing in the aisle next to me when an unmistakable sound come from the sack he was holding tightly in his hand: "meoooowww..... meoowwww......" When the ride got bumpy this changed into a frenzied "meeOOWWW!!!! mEOOWW!!!!" On various bus rides we saw chickens in a sack, ducks in a sack (one of them tried to bite a baby), and enormous fish in a sack. During a stop for food on one bus ride we heard the yelping of a dog, and quickly realized it was coming from a large, moving sack across the street. The sack, with no visible air holes, was tied to the back of a motorcycle that had just ridden in. This was definitely dog eating country and when two men took the dog out of the sack we thought we were going to watch them kill it on the street right then and there. They didn't, merely tying it up where it could pant and drool as it wished.

Last stop in Guizhou was Chishui (赤水), which is so close to Sichuan you could probably reach it with a baseball and unsurprisingly was the start of Hot Pot country, a distinctive Sichuan meal popular throughout China. Me and Danielle were intrigued by a paper-burning ritual by the river in honor of a deceased relative. It was not a gloomy affair, with the family joking around with each other and one middle-aged man looking simply bored as he fanned himself and rolled up his shirt over his large gut. The city itself was small and quite pleasant, and allowed for a couple of outings to nearby waterfalls and surrounding bamboo forests.

Hunan Travels

2007-08-10T21:32:00.000+08:00

I'm now in the midst of about four weeks of traveling over my summer break, and wanted to make some comments as I go along. Most excitingly, my father and brother visited China for the first time and traveled with me for two weeks, but I'll write about that in more detail when I have the chance, probably when I return to Zhangye. For now I'll just talk about the past few days after they flew home and I left Beijing.

I ended up heading to a small place in Hunan Province called Fenghuang (凤凰; the name means "phoenix"). There is no train station in Fenghuang so I first had to head to the nearby city of Huaihua (怀化). As I waited for my train in the Changsha station a girl my age in over sized sunglasses took the empty seat next to me, greeted me with a confident "hello," and then stammered for about 15 seconds, managing only "speak...... China......?" I assured her I could speak Chinese (I was also clearly reading a book about Chinese grammar, dork that I am), and she immediately relaxed. As a college graduate she had probably studied English for 10 years; I have my serious doubts about China's policy of mandatory English instruction for all students. She was named Chao Lang (巢浪) and was heading to the same city, where she works in the construction business.

I've been having a hell of a time understanding the accents in southern China, even the normally standard Chinese of students, and conversation with Chao Lang was awkward and brimming with silence. Even so, it's not necessary for a Chinese-speaking foreigner to be clever, and she suggested we hang out while I killed time until my bus the next day. Actually, translated literally she said "why don't you come to my place and play." This sounds saucy indeed but in Chinese it's simply the way you talk about hanging out with a friend.

Even so I was wondering what this pint-sized girl, with her smoking habit, big earrings, and tiny shorts was up to. As it turned out not much; she took me to her apartment, which had five people in two bedrooms, introduced me to her co-workers/roommates (it's normal for your job to arrange your living situation in China), treated me to her roommate's cooking, and found a hotel for me. Oddly, 20 minutes after meeting me she had also suggested I could come down for next Chinese New Year if I didn't have plans. The Chinese are nothing if not hospitable.

The city of Fenghuang, from the road, looks like a hidden gem of ancient China - picture-perfect traditional architecture, a lazy canal, working class Chinese hiding from the sun in lampshade hats, picturesque countryside. It's not in the guidebooks, and I had only read about it 48 hours earlier on the internet. On closer inspection, it's quite a nice place but is oozing with Chinese tourists. I don't feel the need to go into the amusing spectacle of Chinese tourists, as I can refer you to a spot-on description I read yesterday on another blog I like. The site of boatloads of Chinese in identical orange lifesavers, singing in unison to the tune of a microphone-wielding woman in a token minority outfit outside of my hotel room window was humorous, followed quickly by very annoying. However, the advantage of the herd mentality of Chinese tourists is that if you move a couple of hundred meters away from the crowds you will be completely alone, and down the river I watched local boys swimming (many naked) and jumping gleefully from a bridge.

It hasn't quite been totally ruined but the town has been built up for tourism in a major way; a sign that said "No Jap!" in English and Chinese in one of the bars caught my attention. In the evening I was drinking imported Budweiser at imported prices when the woman sitting near me passed me a note in Chinese, along the lines of "are you also alone? Don't misunderstand me, I don't normally talk to strangers but if I'm not bothering you maybe we could have a conversation. Do you speak Chinese?" I liked that she didn't ask if I can speak Chinese until the end of the paragraph. I had seen her sitting by herself and casting glances at me. She was older than me and drinking by herself, and I thought she might be a prostitute. It turned out she was a kindergarten teacher. Her accent wasn't so difficult to understand, but liquor-inspired Chinese shouted into my ear over the sound of live musician with a full PA system was, and it was kind of a relief when she finished her glass of mysterious Miao nationality alcohol and we went our separate ways, accompanied only by the sounds of Chinese cover songs and the glow of tacky neon lights.

Chinese Words and Phrases 3: 自我批评 zìwǒ pīpíng

2007-07-19T18:15:00.001+08:00

Looking through old text messages on my phone I was reminded of something Andrew had passed on to me from a mutual student we've taught:

"Oh, Dolly [classmate] is very afraid to see our headmaster, you know the self-criticism only has 3,000 [characters], not 10,000, so she had to write the rest. She is very busy these days! Terrible!"

A self-criticism (自我批评) is a very Communist Chinese phenomenon that I know of mostly through its use during the Cultural Revolution, when as part of the political paranoia of the time people were obligated to make criticisms of themselves and their failings to uphold the ideals of the Communist Party, or in more extreme cases to confess their "counter-revolutionary" crimes. At that time this was often done in an atmosphere of intimidation and threats. Mao on self-criticism: "Conscientious practice of self-criticism is still another hallmark distinguishing our Party from all other political parties. As we say, dust will accumulate if a room is not cleaned regularly, our faces will get dirty if they are not washed regularly. Our comrades' minds and our Party's work may also collect dust, and also need sweeping and washing." Recently the governor of Shanxi province in northern China publicly made a self-criticism for the slave labor scandal in which hundreds of people had been kidnapped and forced to work in illegal brick kilns.

I never did find out what my student got in trouble for or what she had to write about. Another curious feature of Chinese education.

Qinghai Travels, Part V: Close Encounters with Knife-Wielding Mongolians

2007-07-08T20:34:00.002+08:00

When we returned to Xining I was still ill and needed a day to recover, and since we didn't arrive early enough for the day trip we had planned anyway it became a day of rest. The next day was set aside for Qinghai Lake (青海湖), probably the best known attraction of Qinghai Province. It is the largest lake in China and features blue, unpolluted water and the aptly named Bird Island, which has... lots of birds.

The lake is well outside of Xining with no public transportation, so despite knowing better we had to sign up for a Chinese tour group. This was the low point of the trip (disregarding the several days of bus riding) and I was only further turned off of tour groups. In a marathon of a day trip we spent 10 hours riding on the bus to spend a grand total of one hour at the lake. The distance was the main problem, but more irritating were the numerous stops at lame souvenir shops along the way. Before the lake we were also subjected to the Sun Moon Mountain, a hideously touristy Tibetan temple crawling with opportunists selling Chinese tourists the chance for a photo on a yak in a tacky minority costume. It was a big artificial yawn in comparison to the temples in use we had already seen. Referring to the Tibetan prayer flags covered in obviously Tibetan writing on the way in (it vaguely resembles Arabic), a man behind us on the bus asked a companion "is that writing Tibetan or English?" I would compare this to an American not being able to differentiate say, Chinese and Russian writing, after having had six years of compulsory Chinese study at school.

Having seen the ocean in my life the lake itself wasn't too thrilling, though it was indeed a very pretty lake. It was much too crowded with tourists, and the time was too short. Besides that it was far and away the most expensive day of the trip; Andrew even got in a protracted argument with a restaurant owner when he tried to shamelessly cheat us by charging 5 yuan each for tea. Before going to Qinghai every single Chinese friend asked us "are you going to Qinghai Lake? Qinghai Lake is very beautiful." When I replied yes but we were mostly interested in Yushu, they would nod blankly and say "oh," which is probably one reason Yushu was 100 times better: no one knows about it.

The last destination of the trip was Tongren (同仁), which stood out mostly for a reputation for distinctive Tibetan paintings known as Tangka. We were approached on the street by a young Mongolian man without a whole lot to do, and made a friend for the day who showed us around town and helped us. When we talked about the paintings he started telling us about how they were illegal but we could come back and buy them at night in the temples, and we had to clear up that we were buying new paintings for sale, and not antique hunting for the black market. True to our different personalities, Stephen went marching up hills by himself at the first temple, while me and Andrew relaxed in the shade talking to the Mongolian, whose Chinese name was Bateer. A Mongolian through and through, Bateer is in the habit of carrying a large knife on his belt at all times. When we finally saw Stephen again he shouted at us "that was flippin' awesome!" Apparently we had missed the best temple ever. But on the other hand, it was hot out.

Bateer took us to another temple complex where we could buy paintings. We were introduced to a monk artist and his entourage of apprentices, and soaked up the surroundings of his atmospheric workshop/home. I wasn't originally planning on buying a painting, but Stephen's enthusiasm caught on, and I finally broke down as I realized I would be returning to America with very little to show in terms of purchases. I asked the monk to explain the painting, but he would only say "it's too complicated," and in Chinese I was definitely going to take his word for it. Afterwards we had to be heading back to Zhangye, with Bateer (who was fond of us and still had nothing to do) hanging out on the bus until it was time for us to go. About two months later, that finally wraps up the story of the May holiday. I'll try to be a little more on the ball when I travel this summer.

Chinese Words and Phrases 2: 帮我一个忙 bāng wǒ yīge máng

2007-07-07T17:27:00.000+08:00

Bang wo yige mang means "help me out with something," generally prefaced by "could you..." and is a phrase to be wary of in Chinese. One of the unexpected bonuses of being a foreign teacher in China is the chance to be volunteered to help people you don't know improve their English. And thus a neighbor who is a chemistry teacher has dropped by with his 26-page research paper for me to look over before he submits it to a scientific journal. This is clearly a better use of my time than the 274 final exams I have to grade, and besides that makes for exciting reading. The title is "An Investigation on Synthesis and Photocatalytic Activity of Polyaniline Sensitized Nanocrystalline TiO2 Composites," and the first sentence is typical of the rest of the paper: "Polyaniline (PAn) sensitized nanocrystalline TiO2 composite photocatalystPAn/TiO2) with high activity and easy separation had been facilely prepared by in situ chemical oxidation of aniline from the surfaces of the TiO2 nanoparticles." I told him no on account of being too busy, leaving out the fact that I don't even understand it in English (my spellchecker backs me up by claiming most of these are not real words). Actually he's a perfectly nice guy who had me over for dinner the last time I helped him, but I have few outlets for sarcasm these days.

Qinghai Travels, Part IV: Turning Down a 15-Year Old Girl in Marriage

2007-07-04T21:39:00.003+08:00

The next day was taken up by a day trip to a town called Nangqian (囊谦), about three hours' ride through typically beautiful scenery in a van taxi from Yushu. Nangqian was even smaller, more remote, and more traditional than Yushu. The surrounding scenery was also even better, and we later regretted allotting only half a day for the place. Thankfully there are places like this that haven't been caught up in China's frenzied modernization drive, where there is no Construct the Nation Road or Liberation Street and women can be seen washing clothes in the river.

There was a colorful and attention-grabbing temple in the town which afforded great views from the top. Andrew wasn't too taken with temples and while me and Stephen explored and caught a few minutes of monks performing music, Andrew remained in his element outside, talking with a small crowd of people in Chinese. In the 20 or so minutes we had been gone, he had already received a marriage proposal to a shy, pretty 15-year old Tibetan girl. A jovial woman was half-jokingly (maybe) trying to talk Andrew into the deal. "Are you her mother?" Andrew asked. "No, her sister!" "Her close sister? [it's common in China to refer to cousins as brothers or sisters]" "Nope!"

While searching for a bathroom on our way out, we walked through an outdoor pool hall. The crowd of 96% young men all paused in their games to look at us, and if it were a movie it would have been the scene where we knew we had stepped into the wrong bar. A small boy came up to Stephen and begged in Chinese "Foreigner! Take our picture!" Several times Chinese people have said to me "I guess in America you call us foreigners, huh?" And then I picture an American pointing and staring at a Chinese person on the street and saying loudly to his friend "foreigner!!" He would look like an ass, but we are on the receiving end of this several times a day in China. Fair enough that we draw attention when there are so few of us, but I do resent the lumping of every single foreign country into one single "not Chinese" category, and tiresome comments like "foreigners have blond hair. Why is your hair the same color as ours?" After a year and a half I don't think I have been called a Westerner here even once, simply "foreigner."

Upon returning to Yushu we went out to dinner with Natalie, the woman from South Africa who we met randomly on the first day in town. She took us to an authentic Tibetan restaurant (which had been surprisingly hard to find during our stay) and we had a pleasant conversation over a decent meal.

The next day was the epic return journey to Xining by sleeper bus, and after saying our goodbyes to the beautiful Tibetan girl in the hotel that had befriended Andrew (so many missed opportunities), we set off. This bus was in fact a sleeper, to our great relief, but we soon had other things to worry about. I'm not overly picky about cleanliness, especially in China, but the bus was absolutely filthy, and smelled. The blankets were so disgusting that we refused to use them, throwing them on empty beds where they were later claimed by other passengers. I already knew the road was rough, but the bus was in such poor shape that it shook dramatically for the entire 17 hour journey. It felt like being in a violent storm at sea, or asking a couple of friends to shake your bed for 17 hours straight. To top it all off I wasn't feeling particularly well, possibly due to the high altitude. Near Nangqian we had seen signs declaring over 4,300 meters and I was feeling a little lightheaded in that town. The supremely greasy rolls I had bought for the journey didn't go down well (I still can't look at similar rolls without feeling sick) and finally I had a hearty vomit or two on the bus. Fortunately I had empty plastic bags with me, but unfortunately (at least for Stephen and later Andrew) I was in the middle row and had no choice but to ask my friends to dispose of them out the window. Oh, the ups and downs of China. When traveling through her she's as fickle as a Greek goddess, but you love her just the same.

Qinghai Travels, Part III: The Tibetan Al Pacino

2007-07-04T15:53:00.003+08:00

note: yes, I am still writing about what happened in May. This is due mostly to my laziness in writing this blog lately, but I also have somewhat of an excuse in that the internet on campus has been down most of the time in the past week or two.

The day after arriving in Yushu we visited the Princess Wencheng Temple, one of the noteworthy sites of the area. Princess Wencheng was a famous Tang dynasty princess who was married to a Tibetan king named Songtsan Gambo (the enormous statue in Yushu was probably him, though I'm not certain) and thereby helped bridge the gap between the two cultures. The temple in Yushu is to commemorate her passing through the area, and apparently there are two Tibetan festivals to honor her.

On the bus to the temple we had an unexpected surprise: our fellow passengers were none other than the same migrant workers who had been kicked off the bus on the way to Yushu and presumed lost to the elements and wild dogs. They also got a kick out of seeing us again and we (rather, Andrew) had a friendly chat with them. We also slowly pieced together the story: there is a rare plant grown in the area (called 冬虫夏草 dōng chóng xià cǎo) that is used by upper crust Chinese as an aphrodisiac, and therefore sells for a high price. There is money to be made harvesting the plant, which is not easy to do, and there is a law preventing outsiders from coming in and profiting off it. Thus a permit is required to get in. That, or take an expensive taxi and sneak into town after you've been kicked off the bus after 14 hours, like those guys did. They were in fact not sightseeing at the Princess Wencheng Temple, but rather heading farther on to a place where there was work. They had also reunited with their super-shady baseball cap-donning boss.

The temple was certainly a pleasant, atmospheric place, quieter and more enjoyable than the more famous Ta'er Si outside of Xining. The cliff sides towering over the building were bursting with colorful prayer flags, and the surrounding scenery was not half bad. The monks living and studying in the temple were a friendly and curious group. I guess it shouldn't be surprising but in general the monks we met on the trip were memorably hospitable and kind. There was only one monk who could speak good Chinese at the temple, and at around 24 was the oldest. After a number of years of studying Buddhism the monks would graduate and move on. They were not allowed to marry, and if they did they would have to permanently leave the order.

After touring the modest temple we took a walk out into the surrounding countryside. The shy girl running a small store told us there was a primary school about a half-hour walk along the path, and we figured we'd see what was to be seen while we waited for the bus to return in the later afternoon. We did find the school, which was a poor, one-room schoolhouse with just one class of 50 students. The students were at different ages and levels, averaging around 8 or 9 years old, and there were only two teachers. The children poured out of the building after their lesson and took some long, curious looks at us, with a few of the braver ones coming up to say "hello". As with most of the area, they were all Tibetan.

When we returned to the temple to wait for the bus, a monk who was driving into town offered us a ride in his car, which we gladly accepted. He went out of his way to show us a nearby cliff carving of a Buddha, and was quite a cool monk. He was very fond of Stephen's sunglasses which he was borrowing, and seemed to be dropping hints that he wouldn't mind if Stephen gave them to him, but Stephen hadn't brought them all the way from America just to make a monk in Qinghai stylish. The music selection of the day was Buddhist chanting. When he dropped us at our hotel we decided to give him some gas money as thanks. As it happened there was a 20 yuan bill laying on the ground just in front of us. We weren't quite sure where it came from, possibly falling out of one of our pockets, but we gave it to the monk, who declared "money from Heaven!"

That afternoon we went to the bus station to buy return tickets, and met one of the more colorful characters of the trip, a middle-aged Tibetan man whose English name was Jerry. Jerry dabbled in officialdom, selling pet food, history, amateur philosophizing, and heavy drinking. If he spoke English I think he would have used phrases like "now let me tell you something" a lot. He spoke quite fast and excitedly so mostly the only one who could keep up with his Chinese was Andrew, who Jerry was fond of hitting with the back of his hand when making an important point, at least once spraying the ashes of his cigarette all over Andrew's clothes. He was straight out of the movies, especially in his all-black outfit and sunglasses, and Stephen eventually caught on to his resemblance to Al Pacino.

After a long conversation at the bus station, during which we learned his son was in India studying at the Dalai Llama's school, he decided to show us around town. By "around town", I mean hang out by the river and drink beer and baijiu (Chinese liquor). We were to have company: four Tibetan woman in their late 20's or early 30's, sitting on the rocks and singing to their hearts' contents. They were also wasted. Sadly, only one of them had learned to speak Tibetan, the other three knowing only Chinese. The three of us drank lazily but Jerry hit the baijiu at a brisk pace. The more he drank the more he talked (not that anything had been stopping him), and at one point he went into an amusing string of stories about war, which he acted out as he told them. He was actually a pretty intelligent guy, who had a lot of political opinions and made comments commending the US style of agriculture. 95% of our Chinese conversations are based on "can you use chopsticks?" and "are you used to the food here?" He was also sentimental about Tibet's lack of independence, and told Andrew he identified with Scotland. A young monk also joined us for a little while, and among other things we learned that the 4 big sins for his religion are killing, stealing, drinking, and sex.

When we left the river it was getting on in the evening and we had discussed getting dinner together, but by this point Jerry was drunk and increasingly annoying. We decided to part ways, but subtle hints were not working and he continued to follow us towards our hotel and into our room, jabbering the entire time. Though Andrew was by far the best able to speak to him he was also by far the most polite. He did get it across that we wanted to rest and be alone, and though Jerry agreed in words, he wouldn't follow through in action. He had been in war mode for the past couple of hours, asking me questions like "do you think I'm more of a scholar or a warrior?" Once drunk he had taken a liking to me, describing me as a leader, which I can only attribute to my superior beard-growing skills. Which reminds me: on the first day of the trip the three of us decided that none of us would shave, and thus a beard-growing competition commenced, and may the manliest among us win.

When we left the hotel we was still with us, so we had to resort to drastic measures. We had the advantage of him not understanding our native language, and organized a quick plan. Stephen called Andrew's cell phone, and Andrew answered and pretended to be making plans with a friend. He then explained we had to be at our friend's house for dinner, and really had to be going. Jerry said he would leave, yet refused to do so, talking all the while. Finally I reached the end of my patience and flagged down a taxi, and thankfully he didn't get in with us and we were rid of him. Al Pacino had been given the slip.

Video - Guzheng Performance

2007-06-14T19:17:00.001+08:00

A performance from my guzheng teacher:

And a performance from another student/teacher at the school, on an instrument called the xinzheng (新筝) which has the same range as the piano:

Scandalous T-shirts

2007-06-13T19:55:00.003+08:00

In China, English is not only a mandatory study subject, it's fashionable. It doesn't always matter how correct the English is or what it even means. I've seen wedding photo albums covered in sickeningly sweet, grammatically incorrect English phrases, and even in Zhangye many stores opt for an English sign. Clothing fashion is no exception, and students in particular like shirts covered in (often meaningless or totally confusing) English phrases. It is always news to my students if I point out that the English on their shirt is wrong ("Wild Bider" on a Harley-esque design, or a picture of Nirvana's late singer labeled "Kurt Codain," who the student had never heard of in the first place). Ramones t-shirts are surprisingly popular, though no one has any idea who they are, and likewise with shirts that say in big letters "Spy Who Loved Me." At least one of my t-shirt purchases was inspired by the Chinese English on the front (seen in picture).

Most of the odd English-adorned shirts can be chalked up to the generally abysmal level of English in the Chinese manufacturing world. However, there are those that turn my head and make me wonder if a mischievous laowai (foreigner) wasn't behind it. For example, today I saw a shirt that said in large letters "Peace is Good." That seemed harmless and superficial enough, but then I noticed the smaller letters "Sex is Better" in the bottom corner. Yesterday I saw a female student on campus with the large letters "Wanted: A Meaningful One-Night Relationship" on her shirt. And I remember my friend David from my training course in Thailand mentioning a similar phenomenon where he taught in South Korea, his example being a shirt that said "last night a world class surfer got off in me." One of the most popular t-shirt series amongst girls here is a brand that advertises "Relax: Choose Juicy," whatever that means. And lately one of my students has taken to wearing her new t-shirt which says "Baby Drink Beer." But one of the most noticeable was a shirt I saw on the street that said in unmissable block letters on the back "FUCKING CANADIAN." Apparently a freshman girl in the English department also has this shirt.

This reminds me of an article I read in 21st century, a newspaper for English students in China, about Westerners with tattoos of Chinese characters. Apparently many of them are incorrect or completely ridiculous. The only example I can remember was an unfortunate Western guy who had a tattoo that said "crazy diarrhea" in Chinese. So fair warning to anyone who gets a Chinese tattoo: beware the smirk on the tattoo artist's face.

Chinese Words and Phrases 1: 减肥班 jiǎnféi bān

2007-06-06T20:50:00.000+08:00

I'm going to try something new, which may or may not immediately succumb to apathy on my part (after all I am around a month behind on this blog). I don't expect there is a very high number of Chinese learners who read this blog, but I'd like to make a few comments every so often about a word I have come across and for some reason find interesting. It doesn't matter if you have any interest in learning the word or not; I'll try to choose words which are as "Chinese" culturally as they are linguistically. The first word I'm going to look at is:

减肥班 jiǎnféi bān
(note to the uninitiated): to the right of the characters is what is called pinyin, the official system in China for spelling Chinese words with the Roman alphabet. The marks above the letters represent the tone of the character: there are four tones in Chinese, meaning that each syllable must not only be pronounced accurately, but with the proper pitch in your voice. If this is confusing and you want to understand it, listen to this. I suspect that musicians and particularly singers make better Chinese speakers. So, a Chinese person just uses characters because they have them memorized, but those learning Chinese for the first time (foreigner teachers or very young children, who might not be as different as you would expect) need to see the pinyin of a new word to know how it is actually pronounced. There have been different systems for spelling Chinese words in the past, which is why Beijing was once spelled Peking and Daoism is usually spelled Taoism even though it is pronounced with a "d" sound.

Jianfei means "lose weight," and ban means "class," as in a class at school. So jianfei ban means "lose weight class," or if you prefer, "fat class." At our university, and presumably others throughout China, if you fail PE class you must attend the fat class. I came across this word because a student I know but don't teach has to take part. Ironically, she is as skinny as they come, weighing no more than 110 pounds. It came up when she spotted her classmate in the fat class in the park and mentioned it. Why is she in the fat class? Because her PE teacher told her that if she didn't give him a "gift," he was going to fail her. She didn't, and he kept his promise. In America you could maybe count to three before that teacher was fired, but in China bribery is common.

My students often talk of their desire to lose weight, though many would be considered normal or skinny in America. Chinese people are also fond of referring to the general fatness of Americans, and have asked me why I'm not fat. Actually, my impression is that in Chinese calling someone "fat" is not nearly as rude as it is in English. My students use the word in English a little too freely, and as a general rule are not very politically correct (recently a student instructed to plan the China village in Epcot Center said he would make the walls yellow to "represent our yellow skin"). Anyway, the jianfei ban also reminded me of the time in high school when the bottom third of the gym class in swimming speed got held back for extra swimming lessons, and I just barely did not make the cut. But at least they still called it gym class.

Qinghai Travels, Part II: You Should Have Come in July

2007-06-06T13:59:00.004+08:00

The impression of Yushu I had from my scant information proved to be accurate enough - a small, remote, and pleasant town with Tibetan characteristics. From the architecture to the hilltop temples and the huge (and I mean HUGE - take note of the bulldozer in the picture) statue of a legendary Tibetan warrior king, it had a refreshingly un-Chinese character. Like my travels through Xinjiang, there a slight feeling of not being in Kansas anymore.

As would be expected, Tibetans look, dress, and act quite distinctly different from the Chinese. Red-robed monks were everywhere, and it was generally agreed that Tibetans, with their cowboy hats and unpolished features, were much cooler looking than the Chinese. Many of the women were very attractive. Not necessarily more so than Chinese girls, but they were striking at the time for their differences. As expected we attracted attention on the streets from passersby, but there was a genuine friendliness from the majority of residents, and many come up to make friendly conversation. There seemed to be fewer obnoxious "hellooo!"s shouted at us than usual. Yushu is 85-90% Tibetan, although surprisingly most of the restaurants served the same Chinese cuisine we have come to know. And to our surprise food was twice the cost of food in Zhangye, because much of it must be brought in from long distances away. A theme emerged in the conversations we had with locals: there is a big horse festival in July. Most of the tourists come in July. The grass is greener in July. Why didn't we come in July?

One of my favorite aspects of the town was seeing monks going about their everyday business. From the typical images of monks we see in movies and the media it's easy to form a stereotype of them sitting in a temple all day chanting, but there was more life to these monks. Monks on cell phones. Monks on motorcycles. Monks shopping. Monks on escalators. Monks falling off motorcycles. Monks joking around, talking to us, having their dinner, taking a bus. All the while in their brilliant red robes.

The town was old-fashioned, even in comparison to Zhangye. The streets (and there were only about three of them) were lines with stalls with every manner of handicraft, and people would be pounding metal or carving wood on the sidewalk. And of course, it is quite a remote place. I mentioned that the bus from Xining is at best a 17 hour trip - Xining is the closest big city in any direction. Despite the holiday we were not anticipating running into many tourists.

There was also an unusually high number of beggars. During our first dinner in Yushu, after a few minutes a woman came into the restaurant to beg, obviously focusing on us. She stood for an awkwardly long time with hand outstretched before giving up in the end. When she left, another beggar came in and did the same. And then another. And then two monks chanting. They were tag-teaming us, with a replacement for each disappointed beggar who left. We decided to keep count, and during the meal we faced down 19 different beggars. Presumably word was going around the begging community that foreigners were in town. During the next meal there were 8 beggars, and this quickly dwindled down to almost nothing. Word must have gotten around that these were stingy foreigners. Qinghai is one of the poorest provinces in China, and it's possible that the widespread belief in Buddhism is a factor in the higher numbers of beggars compared to the more secular Chinese of our own Gansu.

During that first meal, we asked for a couple of safe dishes plus a request for a local specialty. After a long wait we were represented with two enormous plates of what we determined was yak meat, which was delicious but exhausting to chew. There was a group of teenage monks in the opposite corner, and we had a lengthy disagreement over their sex. Stephen was adamant they were girls, whereas Andrew was convinced they were boys and I was simply confused. After they left Andrew finally asked the staff and found out to his disappointment that they were girls, which Stephen was happy to bring up during the rest of the trip.

One of the attractions in Yushu we were aware of was the largest collection of prayer stones in all of Tibet. Prayer stones are stones which have Tibetan Buddhist prayers carved into them and are in large piles which grow slowly as worshippers add more stones. There are apparently more than 2 billion prayer stones at this site, which are arranged in walls around a temple. Me and Stephen took a walk around the complex while Andrew found a shady spot and some people to talk to in Chinese. Andrew had little interest in Buddhist temples throughout the trip, and could frequently be spotted in a shady spot talking to people in Chinese. Not every Tibetan could speak Chinese well, but there were more Chinese speakers than I had expected. There were several friendly and curious Tibetans hanging around that chatted with us, and asked to have their picture taken. They also informed us that we should have come in July.

After visiting the inside of the temple and continuing our walk, me and Stephen were surprised to see a foreign woman just older than us walking with a young Tibetan girl. She turned out to be a volunteer teacher in Yushu originally from South Africa, and the girl was her student. After a brief conversation we exchanged phone numbers with the woman, whose name was Natalie, and she offered to give us further help with our stay.

We felt it was time to go at this point and wanted to fetch Andrew. We knew he was just around the corner, but when we turned to get him a quiet Tibetan man who had been sticking with us awkwardly communicated that it was impossible to go that way. In Tibetan belief, you should always circle a temple clockwise. We were aware of this and had been abiding by it, but we didn't realize it was strict to the point where we couldn't turn around and walk back 50 feet. I tried to explain we were just getting our friend, but he firmly suggested we go around. So we walked all the way around the temple complex again to get Andrew. I envisioned him getting up to look for us and circling each other blindly for 30 minutes, but he was still in the shade where we had last seen him and we went back into the center of town.

That night we took a look around the area of our hotel, and settled on the Prosperous Restaurant/Bar as a promising place to get a drink. The owner was a large, opinionated Tibetan man who was happy to have conversation with us. From him we learned that the Tibetans and Muslims (the town had some Hui, a Chinese Muslim minority group) don't get along too well. Actually, he didn't call them Muslims, but rather "white hats" for the distinctive head ware of Chinese Muslims. The hats might be white, but according to the owner they have "black hearts" and can't be trusted. His bar also featured a prominent picture of the Dalai Llama, which we would see frequently throughout Qinghai. In the actual Tibetan Autonomous Region his picture is forbidden and restrictions on Tibetans are more severe, but Qinghai seems a little more relaxed. The Prosperous owner said this is because in the TAR most of the government is made up of Han Chinese, but in Qinghai much of the government consists of Tibetans.

Like some others we would meet, and some of the Uyghur I met in Xinjiang, he spoke of a general dislike of the Chinese. The Chinese government handily crushes any separatist sentiment in the vast and strategic regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and encourages an influx of Han Chinese to the areas, who are the main benefactors of the development in these regions. My students, who have only heard the official Party line, have a naive but sincere belief that China has a mission to help out these poor backward people and improve their lives for them. Some of my students talk fondly of their desire to find work in Tibet or Xinjiang and help out using their superior education level. The Dalai Llama has been painted as a troublemaker and criminal who wants to take from China what is rightfully hers. Western travelers carrying the Lonely Planet Tibet guide have had the preface ripped out while being screamed at by customs officials, as it was written by the Dalai Llama.

But among his other opinions, the bar owner didn't forget to suggest that we should have come in July.

Qinghai Travels, Part I: Eating Bitter

2007-05-23T16:26:00.003+08:00

"There was no good reason to go to Yulin and it took 10 hours to get there."

Since reading it I've always liked this line, which opens one of the chapters of Peter Hessler's River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. I believe the foreigners who get the most out of living in China are those who secretly get a kick out of the hassles, frustrations, and absurdities of living on the other side of the world. With this attitude in mind, I opted for a less comfortable but less predictable travel experience during this past May holiday. The first week in May is a national labor holiday in China, and through careful diplomacy me and travel companions Stephen and Andrew turned that into a 9-day trip through Qinghai (pronounced "ching-hi"), a neighboring province. I had never had any intention of visiting Qinghai, which is known for being a hostile home for Chinese prisoners sentenced to manual labor, when it is known at all. It is one of the poorest provinces in the country and perhaps 75% of its population lives in Xining, the capital and only large city.

What drew me to Qinghai the most was a small town of about 40,000 called Yushu. Yushu (玉树, "jade tree") is the Chinese name, but it is culturally and historically a Tibetan town with the name Jyekundo. It took 17 hours to get there (actually 29 if I include the initial trip to Xining), but we had a moderately good reason to go there. It is not in the guide books, but I stumbled upon a thread at Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree travel message boards which describes Qinghai as underrated, and a great place to see mountainous scenery and Tibetan culture. It's separation from the Tibetan Autonomous Region is somewhat arbitrary, and outside of Xining the area was and continues to be part of the Tibetan cultural sphere.

The first stage of the journey was getting to Xining, which due to my teaching schedule involved taking an overnight bus. Overnight buses are normally sleeper buses, but unfortunately only buses with seats were available to Xining, so we spent the first 12 hours of the trip sitting upright until 6am, enjoying the increasingly snowy scenery and the only genuinely humorous Chinese movie I have seen so far.

The next bus to Yushu wasn't until 4pm, so we bought tickets and took a walk around Xining. During a tense moment they were initially reluctant to sell us tickets at all because we were foreigners; we knew the area was closed to foreigners in the past, but has been open for some years now. There was some issue about coming into contact with dirt and bugs that we didn't quite understand at the time, but after a couple of phone calls and long glances they were satisfied that we didn't spend our days digging trenches with roll-up sleeves.

Xining is cleaner and more pleasant than our provincial capital, Lanzhou, but other than it's ethnic mix of Han Chinese, Tibetans, and Hui, isn't particularly noteworthy. We also used our time to visit Ta'er Si, an important Tibetan Buddhist temple complex outside of the city that we had hoped to see.

Ta'er Si was worth the visit, but was heavily touristed and didn't have as good an atmosphere as other temples we would see. We were alarmed to see a monk carrying an automatic weapon in one small temple, until we realized it was a toy to keep birds away. As we climbed one of the encircling hills to get a view over the area, we struck up conversation with an old Tibetan man. By "we" I mean Andrew, whose Chinese is considerably better than mine or Stephen's and is a good conversationalist. The many interesting conversations we got into during the trip would have had less depth or been non-existent without him.

The old man was performing the self-prostrations which are part of the Tibetan Buddhist faith. This involves kneeling on the ground and spreading forward until you're flat on your stomach, and then spreading your arms in an arc which marks the spot for your next prostration. It's a slow process which seems to cover fairly long distances and lengths of time. According to Stephen, who was the only one who knew much of anything about Tibetan Buddhism, it is to atone for one's sins. He had a thick cake of dirt on his forehead as he talked to us. He seemed to like Americans, remarking that Americans look after the Tibetan people. This was a fresh change from the usual bland "America is very developed" that I get.

Back at the bus station in Xining, boarding the bus was to be a heart-wrenching experience - despite our assumption, the bus was not a sleeper. That meant for the 17+ hours to Yushu we sat upright and awake, on a road that would sadden a civil engineer's heart to see. We were in the very front as well, but along with the extra leg room we were treated to a front-row view of the death-defying turns along the precipitous mountain roads. It was stressful at times. And thus we spent two nights in a row sitting on bus seats, and Chinese bus seats at that. It would be 60 straight hours before I slept, a record-breaking streak for me. For better or worse I took pride in "eating bitter" (吃苦 chīkǔ), a Chinese phrase for enduring hardship.

We did make it all the way to Yushu on that bus, which can't be said for the majority of the passengers. Around 20 of our fellow riders were migrant workers that had been organized by an untrustworthy-looking man in a cap and glasses who spoke in heavy dialect. In the early dawn hours of the next morning, perhaps 14 hours into the journey, we came to a small settlement that acted as a police checkpoint. After waiting a couple of hours (I believe the policemen were asleep) our bus was inspected and everyone (besides us and an obviously Tibetan family) was asked to get off. Things took a turn for the worst for the migrant workers, and after some meek protesting and a policeman declaring several times "I don't care," they were not allowed back on the bus, and we left without them.

This place was very much in the middle of nowhere, with nothing for miles upon miles upon miles. It reminded me of a Hollywood set for a Old Western ghost town. The buildings were empty and a good proportion of the inhabitants were large, vicious dogs on chains, one of which nearly frightened me to death when it lunged at me in my half-asleep stupor before I had noticed the chain. I had to wonder what on earth the motley crew of workers was going to do now. The bus was now mostly empty, carrying just the three of us, four Tibetans, and the boss of the workers, who was not about to hang around to see what happened to them. From what Andrew understood the reason the workers were not allowed to go to Yushu had to do with the same insect issue that nearly prevented us from buying tickets, and at the bus station had told us outsiders were not allowed in without proper documentation, which they obviously lacked.

As we made the final approach to Yushu, my lack of sleep was overpowered by increasing excitement, as the empty stretches of land and undulating mountains slowly became populated by Tibetans on motorcycles, Tibetans herding yaks, Tibetan prayer flags, Tibetans in colorful outfits, and yet more yaks. Nearly as satisfying was the lack of tour buses or huge groups of Chinese in matching red hats being led by a megaphone-touting tour guide. After a long trip, we had arrived.

Foreigner in a Chinese Barber Shop

2007-05-21T17:38:00.001+08:00

A Chinese-speaking foreigner named Ben in the city of Fuzhou has taken on an interesting experiment - step out of the coddled foreign-teacher role and work as an apprentice in a Chinese barber shop for a month. He has asked to be treated like one of the Chinese workers, and like the others works 11-hour days, 7 days a week, with 3 days off during the month. His current blog posts are fascinating reading and give a small window into the life of working class Chinese. I will actually provide the link to the Sinosplice post about it (where I first came across Ben's blog) as John of Sinosplice has provided clearly organized links to the posts written up till now.

http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2007/05/21/barber-shop-antics

Guzheng with Western Characteristics

2007-05-18T14:24:00.001+08:00

Andrew pointed out to me a video featuring the guzheng (古筝), the ancient Chinese instrument I was making an attempt at learning. Although there is now a guzheng sitting in my apartment (music department friend Sarah, seen in the picture, bought one and practices in my home) I seem to have given up on it. I don't think I have the patience for learning a new instrument at this point. Also, I found out that the guzheng is an instrument for girls.

The video is about a Chinese woman residing in America who was classically trained in Beijing on the guzheng, but has been influenced by experimental musicians in America and has applied this knowledge to the guzheng. Almost as interesting as the video itself are the comments I am seeing left by the Chinese who have watched it, which I will attempt to translate:

She can't even play one section well! Don't slander classical music!

Rotten. How is it she is considered a musician.

Very disorderly; guzheng should not be used for experiments. Sounds awful (the Chinese phrase, 难听死了, would translate literally as something like "difficult to listen to to the point of death").

This is simply disorganized playing.

What irritates me the most is the English amongst the Chinese.

It looks like this is causing some controversy.

Before I give a false impression of my Chinese ability, I did have to look up words like "slander." And there are a few comments which I don't quite grasp, despite understanding the words. The video can be found here. More traditional guzheng performances can be found by searching for "guzheng" on YouTube.

Marco Polo, Pizza Thief?

2007-05-13T20:11:00.001+08:00

It's a well-known fact that China was once the most advanced civilization in the world, and the 4 great inventions of ancient China are said to be the compass, gunpowder, paper making, and the printing press. However, the quite nationalistic Chinese are fond of making claims of inventing all manner of things, some of them rather dubious, but amusing. For instance, I read an article a while ago about recent archaeological discoveries which led to wild Chinese claims about inventing skiing. Having been to a Chinese ski "resort," I rather doubt that. But I think my favorite so far was yesterday, when I was hanging out at China Fire and talking to the owner, our friend He Le. He will soon be offering pizza, and we had a conversation along these lines:

He Le: "You know where pizza comes from, don't you?"
Me: "Italy."
"Nope." I knew where this was going.
"Then, where?"
"China," his face now beaming. "You know Marco Polo? His statue is right outside." There is a prominent street near the university that is known as both European Street and Marco Polo street, and features a unmissable statue of the man, who rumor has it lived in Zhangye for a year when it was an important silk road trading post. It is possibly the cleanest and certainly the whitest street in Zhangye, and resembles an enormous model set of ancient Greece or Rome.
"Yes, I know him."
"Well, when he was in China, he liked to eat nang, from the Xinjiang area." Nang is a kind of bread made by the Uyghur people, which is circular and has a raised crust on the outside, but otherwise bears no resemblance to pizza. "So when he went back to Italy, he missed it, and he described it to friends so they could make it for him. They didn't know what to put on the top, so they put meat and other toppings, and it became pizza. So pizza went from China to Italy, and then it was re-introduced to China!"

Well, at any rate, pizza will be coming to China Fire.

Chinese History with Chinese Characteristics

2007-05-11T15:11:00.001+08:00

As I was digging through the piles of paper in my bedroom, I came across a list of the "Century's 20 Top Historic Events in China" I once asked a student to copy for me. She had to study the list for a class, and I found it interesting for the heavy Communist Party influence that would go unnoticed by Chinese students who have never heard recent Chinese history from any other perspective. It's full of great Marxist vocabulary like "reactionary," "feudalist society," and "bourgeois," and references to foreign countries include words like "aggressive" and "humiliation for China." Though "the convening of the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh CPC Central Committee in late 1978" makes the list, certain major events are conspicuously absent. Mao is not mentioned after 1945, and the only reference to the Cultural Revolution is "the downfall of the 'Gang of Four' and the end of the 'Cultural Revolution' in 1976 marked a new development stage for China." An online version of the list can be found here.

A Heroic Death on CCTV

2007-04-26T12:49:00.003+08:00

Just when I thought things were the most predictable this term, I had one of my more memorable "only in China" moments last week. Lili from the English department office called my cell phone late Wednesday afternoon and told me "there is someone from CCTV here looking for a foreign actor. Are you interested in having a try?" CCTV stands for China Central Television, and is the Chinese national television network. At first the words "token foreigner" flashed through my mind, as I have seen the sometimes clownish roles given to foreigners on CCTV.

"Well, what do they want me to do?" I asked, though I knew better than to expect to get such a wealth of information.
"I don't know" she replied.
"I'm across town. What time do they want to meet?" Another silly question.
"Could you come to my office right now?"
Long thoughtful pause. Well, I guess I didn't come all this way to lead a boring life. "Sure, I'll be there soon."

When I arrived they simply took my picture, shook my hand, and went on their way. White face, blue eyes; he passes the audition. They had first recruited Phillip, the foreign teacher from Manchester, and apparently he was shooting the first night, so they took him away to parts unknown.

I got the story from him the next day--they were filming a Tang dynasty drama for CCTV1 about an hour outside of Zhangye and, for reasons that are still unclear, wanted some young male foreign faces for some very small bit parts as soldiers. I'm no expert on the Tang dynasty, but I would venture a guess that the number of British and American soldiers on the fields of Chinese battle was minimal. Phillip was given a short but dramatic role with speaking lines that ended in his execution. Ironically, the one with the least interest in learning Chinese was given the speaking role, and he had to get his lines translated so he could say them in English. It all gets dubbed over when they go back to Beijing anyway, and a foreigner is a foreigner.

The next night Phillip was busy and they needed two foreigners, so Andrew was roped into taking part by Lili ("Dan needs some help..."). Andrew tends to shy away from anything involving either an audience or the English department calling to ask "are you free this evening?" but he reluctantly agreed. We met outside the English department at 6pm, and I was told by different sources that we would be home by 2am, 12am or between 9:30 and 10:30pm. Phillip had returned at 4am so I didn't have my hopes up.

The filming took place in an area outside of the city called Danxia Dimao (丹霞地贸), which we had been to before as part of a foreign teachers' trip. They had built a full set on and around the hills, which was very professionally done. The name of the television show is 神探狄仁杰 (shén tàn dí rénjié), and is apparently a popular show comparable to a Chinese Sherlock Holmes. Di Renjie is the name of the man character, a portly man with a thin, earnest sidekick. A website with pictures of the show can be found here. I was told by students that older people in China like the show but they weren't interested. I'd like to think I've participated in the Chinese equivalent of Matlock.

I'm glad Andrew was there and I had someone to talk to, because we were in for a long night. When we arrived they got us into costume--fancy Tang dynasty soldier uniforms, tights, and shoes that were much, much too small. The "dressing room" was the inside of a truck which was open to the world. There were one or two people in charge that were friendly to us and would check on us every once in a while. We were told they would do a few scenes before ours, and we just had to shao deng yixia, "wait a moment." My heart sinks when I hear this phrase in China, because "a moment" generally means between 20 minutes and an hour and a half. Chinese people have a tolerance for waiting that far surpasses that of the typical Westerner, and if the wait is truly just "a moment" no one will feel it necessary to even mention it.

There were a lot of people involved in the filming, plus some curious onlookers gathered on a hill, and the place had a bit of a carnival atmosphere. The actors were wearing their various costumes and make-up, and there was a crew of giggly Chinese girls that could be seen chatting excitedly or playing childish games during the downtime. We didn't have to ask who the director of the whole production was--he made his presence known. Equipped with a full camouflage outfit and an inflated sense of self-importance, el generalissimo could been seen stomping around and occasionally screaming at people. The two main characters were also easy to pick out, but they carried themselves with dignity and professionalism.

Filming is known to be a slow process, and combined with the slow, deliberate pace at which most everything happens in China, the wait eventually became agonizing. It didn't help that we were outside on a cold night with almost nowhere to sit and wearing uncomfortable shoes. Around 10pm we still had no idea when we would film or even what our roles were. Around this time they called break for a meal, which was bad news--nothing would happen for a good hour-and-a-half.

Me and Andrew weren't hungry so we took a wander around. Way on the outskirts of the set was a lone man building a fire, who was so isolated we wondered if he was actually a nomad and his costume simply the clothes he prefers. It turned out he was a Uyghur from Xinjiang, so he was ethnically not Chinese at all, nor was it his first language. He didn't say as much but I imagine he would have trouble fully integrating with his Han Chinese workmates; China is indeed a fairly conformist society. Us three outcasts having a quiet talk by the fire was probably the highlight of the evening.

The hours continued to pass with no further sign of what we were even doing there. The night grew colder, and I gradually became less amused until really all I was looking forward to was going home. Sometime after 2am Andrew and I decided to check if our ride home was even there; a carful of Chinese people along for the ride had brought us, but due to the cold (and probably boredom) had been sitting in the car for hours. Sitting in the warm car was wonderful, but soon someone came to announce that our scenes were coming up next.

"Next" was a relative term; they had started work on the scenes we were involved in, but we had to wait another half hour in the cold before anything happened. Andrew was up first, and they explained his role around 5 minutes before he had to film it. It wasn't one of the more challenging scenes. All he had to do was be still and look dead--the entirety of his shot was him lying against a wall while the hand of his killer removed his helmet and revealed his foreign-ness. Probably the coolest part was that he had a stunt-double, a Chinese man with a helmet who gets violently thrown against the wall just before Andrew's shot.

To prepare him for his scene they gave Andrew a wig and a small dose of fake blood. While shooting the scene the victor had difficulty pulling off the helmet in one smooth motion, and it took a number of takes. The crew laughed and talked amongst themselves about how the foreigner's nose was too big--it didn't occur to anyone that the helmet was too small. Andrew finished his scene sometime around 3 or 4am, and I was told I was next.

They immediately packed up that scene and setting up in another spot, which meant another long wait. It was something like 4:30am when I began filming, and by that point I just wanted to get it over with. I also played a soldier who is killed and will get around 5 seconds of airtime. My scene was ever slightly more action-packed--someone slices a sword just in front of my face, at which point my helmet splits open (pulled apart by strings held by men on both sides side). There is blood running down my face (applied beforehand), I do my best expression of surprise/just-been-sliced-in-half-by-a-sword, and fall over, dead. When I was finished it was 5am, and we drove the hour home in silence.

I wasn't in much shape for my classes from 8am-12 and just cancelled them and slept until 2pm. Overall, I didn't enjoy the experience as much as I had hoped and I resented the total lack of respect for our time (I was surely the only one with work at 8am and they could have done our scenes much earlier). But, it was something that will never happen at home and I'm glad I went and have the story to tell. They were filming the third season which doesn't air until next year, but I'm amused to think that one of these days a Chinese national television audience will have a glimpse of two hapless foreign teachers in Zhangye.

Gansu photos

2007-04-22T22:12:00.000+08:00

If you go to www.flickr.com, search for "Gansu" and click on "most interesting," there are some really amazing photos of this part of China.

Video - A Long Way From Home

2007-04-19T12:42:00.006+08:00

Recently I purchased some video editing software which, together with an anti-virus program, set me back 7 yuan (just under $1). At least in a place like Zhangye there is not just pirated software and movies, there is only pirated software, freely available on the shelves of the electronics stores. The only drawback is that the program is entirely in Chinese. However, I lucked out and found video tutorials in English on the company's website, and after some trial and error I figured out how to use it. I'm also somewhat familiar with computer vocabulary in Chinese, as my Windows and Microsoft Word are in Chinese. This can be a hassle sometimes, but on the other hand I like the challenge. Anyway, I've put together some of the early videos I took with my digital camera in China and made it into something presentable. All of it was taken in Zhangye during my first term of teaching.

We are the Village Green Preservation Society

2007-04-15T19:40:00.001+08:00

I'm sure I've mentioned my students' "duty week," one week each term during which they attend no classes and instead don their matching school uniforms and sweep the campus or burn garbage. In this peculiar Chinese tradition of unpaid-labor-as-education, there was a day set aside last week for the English department to plant trees in light of a recent environmental holiday. We were not forced or particularly encouraged to take part, but me and Andrew are usually up for anything silly, and so we were out in front of the library at 8am just like the students. To our slight embarrassment, we were shuffled onto a special bus for teachers and rolled past our students, who were walking en masse with humongous flags. Especially with their matching blue outfits, they resembled the least-threatening invading army in the world.

As it turned out, "promoting environmental awareness" looked a lot more like "free labor for the new Zhangye park," and "planting trees" looked a lot more like "digging a ditch." Because of the novelty factor for me and Andrew, the two of us seemed to be the most enthusiastic in the morning, grabbing our shovels and practically taking the lead while everyone else eased into the day's work. It didn't take long to figure out we were digging through farmers' fields--I mentioned in the last post that the government often repossesses people's land for its own use, and in this case the government of Zhangye had given these farmers money in order to put up a new park. We were assured the payment was adequate and everybody was happy to give up their land.

The Zhangye work philosophy often seems to be get twice as many people as you need working half as hard, and especially with the English department consisting of 90% Chinese girls it was not exactly the toiling under the sun I was expecting. Our students are fond of "chatting" and "taking a rest," activities at which they excel, and before long there was a lot of relaxing and lounging around. The digging of the big ditch branched out into digging big holes in the ditch, followed by an extensive lunch break. It was clear the work was just about finished by noon (there must have been over 500 students), but the leaders weren't interested in letting the students go back early and we mostly spent the afternoon goofing off and getting sunburned. We never did get to plant any trees.

The Chongqing "Nail House"

2007-04-12T22:23:00.001+08:00

Here's an interesting story that's being talked about in China:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/26/news/house.php

As the article talks about in further detail, a strong-willed woman is refusing to vacate her home, which has been cleared for demolition as part of the development of her area. A historic Chinese law protecting private property was recently passed, fanning this woman's flames of discontent. The taking of people's land (all land is owned by the government in China, and some complain the compensation for their forced relocation is not enough) is one cause of social unrest, resulting in occasional riots and show-downs with the police. The most interesting part of the story is the photograph - a lone, rebellious house, perched atop its own island in a demolished neighborhood.

Learning Chinese Doesn't Make You Crazy

2007-04-08T20:19:00.004+08:00

疯

As time goes on, I feel that learning Chinese really isn't as difficult as people make it out to be. In the beginning things like pronunciation, tones, characters, and measure words are all big problems, but at the intermediate level I think it's probably a lot more difficult for a Chinese person learning English. Remembering two or three thousand individual characters to read a newspaper (and I'm definitely not there yet) may sound like an impossible task, but there's a logic to it all I think is really interesting. For example, a student recently sent me a text message in Chinese, and there was a character I didn't know, which looked like this: 疯. That might look complex, but when broken down is actually pretty simple and easy to remember. The outer part of the character is a shape that represents sickness and is seen in characters like 病 (sick), 瘦 (thin), and 疼 (ache). The inner part is the character 风, pronounced as "feng," which means "wind." When I looked it up it turned out to mean "insane," and is pronounced "feng," exactly the same sound and tone as in "wind." So, part of the character suggests the meaning (having to do with "sickness") and part of it suggests the pronunciation. Instantly remembered, whereas a Chinese student learning the English word "insane" needs to remember what probably seems like an arbitrary sound to them. Incidentally, now I know how to say "lunatic" (疯子) and "mad cow disease" in Chinese (疯牛病).

Full words are usually made up of two characters, and already knowing the meaning of two characters can make them extremely easy to remember. A student of English must memorize "confident" arbitrarily and know how it's different from "confidence" and "confidently," but in Chinese they all translate as one word, 信心 xìnxīn, to "believe" in your "heart." "Be careful" is 小心 ("small heart"), "everybody" is 大家 ("big family"), "archeology" is 考古 ("examine" and "ancient"), "computer" is 电脑 ("electric brain") and "safety" is 安全 ("peace" and "entire" or "all"). Names of machines and fields of study are generally very logical and simple in Chinese, such as "refrigerator" (冰箱, "ice box") or "physics" (物理学, literally "things-logic-study"). Verbs never conjugate in Chinese ("is," "was," "were," "are," and "am" are all the same word), nouns have no plural form, and I don't know the statistics but I'm sure Chinese uses a much smaller vocabulary than English. Also, Chinese grammar is far and away simpler than English grammar.

The sentence the student sent to me was roughly "Dong Yang [my Chinese name, 冬阳], I'm having a hard time, I don't know what to do about the TEM4 exam, I don't think I can do it, I'll soon go insane." The Chinese education system is very exam-intensive, and stress-inducing. My students are so worried about this upcoming national exam that when I asked them to make statements using "I hope..." back in December several classes said "I hope I pass the TEM4!" Learning English can be quite a burden for them, and I hope we as foreign teachers and representatives of the English-speaking world can provide some small amount of motivation and encouragement for them.

Chinese Small Talk

2007-04-05T22:21:00.001+08:00

Saying "hello" can be more complicated in China than where I'm from. Hello in Chinese is 你好 nǐhǎo, which isn't complicated to say and is an easy greeting for acquaintances and strangers (and never have I so often talked to strangers). However, when greeting friends Chinese people don't like to say nǐhǎo, instead using their own brand of rhetorical questions. But rather than "how are you?", they especially prefer "have you eaten yet?" or "where are you going?" I've heard of uninformed Chinese students in Western countries asking everyone in English if they've eaten yet. Of course, sometimes it's 9 p.m. and you know exactly where your friend is going when you run into them, in which case I usually just go for the awkward smile and head nod. Also, incredibly obvious comments go over well. I would say by far the most common greeting from a friend you've made plans to see is "you're here!" When it's time to get going, it's general practice to announce "I am leaving," and small restaurants that are familiar with me will almost without exception say 走了zǒule, "so you're leaving" as I head out. Today while I was eating lunch a woman I recognized entered the restaurant with her friends. I finally realized she was the woman who sold me my cell phone. Our entire conversation, which she started, was literally "so you're eating food!" "Yep, I am eating food." These little exchanges are certainly nothing new to me, but I continue to get a kick out of them.

A Minor Inconvenience, Unwholesome Zhangye

2007-03-31T19:19:00.001+08:00

I broke my bed today. Not for any exciting reason - I moved from a lying to a sitting position too aggressively, and heard a loud crack beneath me. You see, I don't sleep on a mattress, but rather a series of inexpensive wood planks with a bit of padding over the top. It leaves something to be desired in comparison to the typical American bed, but I've really never been bothered by it. I do have an entire spare bedroom with a bed that is not only larger but has a thick (yet surprisingly unyielding) mattress, but I've become somehow fond of the "plank bed." Whatever the reason, I find amusement in these small inconveniences of living here, and I can't say I was too bothered about it.

Though provinces such as Gansu are being left behind by the frenzied development of places like Shanghai and Guangzhou, I feel that Zhangye has moved up in the world just in the year I've been here. There is a new dance club called Babi in the center of town, and I went for the first time last night with Danielle and Stephen. It out-classed any of the previous clubs I've seen here, and was on par with places I've seen in bigger cities in China. As we entered the place, it was hard not to notice the club's scantily-clad, cross-dressing male dancer in the spotlight. Later in the night, a singer came out onto the floor to perform. She had a fierce confidence to her, such that when she approached a man sitting at a front table while singing he practically shrank back in fear. She had such a large frame and deep voice we thought she was another cross-dresser, but ultimately decided it was a legitimate female. When another customer presented her with a bottle of beer, she made a show of lifting it into the air and pouring it all over herself, to the cheers of the crowd. And in a later performance, she came onto the dance floor brandishing a whip. In class this week, we had gone over the words "innocent" and "naive." Zhangye is not as innocent as it appears at first glance.

Propaganda and the Evils of Corruption

2007-03-25T19:58:00.004+08:00

The rewards of learning Chinese while living here are obvious: forming more varied friendships, eating and shopping with ease, integrating more deeply into the culture, and seeming less like a space alien to the local people. But there is another reward particular to this country that is easily overlooked, yet still fascinating: understanding Party propaganda. China is well beyond the era of the Chairman Mao "loyalty dance" and spiteful diatribes against America and the capitalist "running dogs," but one doesn't have to look very far to see the omnipresent, paternal guidance of the government. There are slogans and life advice painted in gigantic characters on walls throughout China, which are generally uncontroversial but intriguing nonetheless. These vary from the relatively harmless ("look to the future, improve education," "don't do drugs," "love the people, serve the people") to the slightly creepy ("the reason you can relax is because we have everything under control"). On top of a building in the town square is a sentence spelled out in 10-foot high characters, which I've been curious about since the beginning and have finally learned says "Carry out the Three Represents [a policy that essentially says, or at least strongly implies, that the Communist Party is China], construct a Well-Off Society [an economic policy]."

Near the wooden pagoda in the square there is a set of propaganda signs, such as an illustrated series for children about President Hu Jintao's "8 Virtues and 8 Vices" (the first virtue is "enthusiastically love the Motherland"). Andrew spotted one of the most entertaining ones, shown in the picture. It's about corruption, and warns of the slippery slope a hapless proletarian might descend into. This is shown visually as a big, Inferno-esque dollar sign with increasingly dangerous levels of corruption. The entry to the dollar maze says "first time being treated to a meal." The second level of corruption is "first time entering a music hall." Andrew is marking this spot with his finger, as it seems we are at the second level of corruption in China. Presumably, there is hope for us yet. The third one is "first time in a sauna," followed by "first time receiving gifts" and finally a sudden, dramatic leap to "first time embezzling public funds." Oh, naive briefcase-toting cartoon man, if you only you knew what you were getting yourself into.

Last week there two women from the government handing out fliers in front of the campus, and a long series of posters along the front wall. It turned out to be a campaign against cults and false religions, with cartoons touting advice such as "all cult leaders claim that they are God, but in reality they are just people." Andrew set about reading one of the fliers with the assistance of Joy. It didn't go so far as to name examples, but apparently these cults (in Chinese, literally "evil religions") trick students into giving them all their money, inspire apathy by convincing them of the coming of Armageddon, perform false miracles, and even kidnap, rape, and murder.
But as Andrew pointed out, the only people who seemed interested in any of it were the two foreigners.

Lantern Festival, A Friend Visits

2007-03-18T23:44:00.003+08:00

My first weeks back in Zhangye have been pretty relaxing, as my students have had their assigned cleaning duty, when they clean the campus for a week instead of going to class. I passed two of my students wearing red arm bands, who instead of cleaning had volunteered for the job of patrolling campus with clipboards in search of students playing hooky. A couple of weekends ago, me and Andrew had a visit from a friend named Daisy, who was an English student last year and now works as a teacher outside of Lanzhou. We shared a Big Plate of Chicken and "played" together along with her friend Rose. There are many awkward English phrases common here that come from translating too literally from Chinese.

While I was with them, Daisy and Rose made plans to make dumplings with Yang Lili, a teacher in the English department also known as Isabella. Daisy assured me I was also welcome, but my arrival at Isabella's apartment made her incredibly nervous and self-conscious. She said she had never invited a foreigner to her home before, even her co-teacher, because her cooking wasn't good enough. She also said she was embarrassed because the food wasn't ready, and when she has guests she only allows them to come when the food is finished. She was hardly able to talk about anything besides my being there, even joking several times she should break off her friendship with Daisy. When the first round of dumplings was finished, she insisted me and her husband should start first, but her husband immediately got up to take care of some office business without taking a bite. Despite her constant self-deprecation the food was, as with every single time a Chinese person has cooked for me, delicious. The focus on your foreignness is one of the frustrations of living in China, especially coming from a diverse country like America. It's refreshing when I do meet people who interact with me as if I were just another of their friends, Daisy being an example.

For instance, my friend Little Ma opened a new guitar shop in front of the school yesterday, and invited me to come at 10 a.m. for the grand opening. As expected, he wasn't there, and one of his friends said in very loud, slow Chinese "go have a seat inside". I spent a pointless hour sending text messages on my phone, during which time Little Ma never showed and none of them said a word to me, despite knowing me for most of a year. Little Ma is also fond of calling me "the foreigner" when talking about me with other people.

Plenty of people want to make friends with us, but far fewer are interested in forming any kind of substantial friendship and really getting to know us. We also get random invitations from strangers. For instance, the other day Miss Mao arranged a mysterious lunch with a friend who wanted to meet the foreign teachers at Hexi. We were sure we were going to be talked into something, perhaps English lessons for a middle school son or daughter. The lunch was extravagant, round-table style with a rotating middle for the dishes, and the men were all wearing suits, but it turned out they just wanted to have lunch, play drinking games with us and take some pictures. Which was fine, but it struck me how little interest they had in actually talking to us, since we all spoke some level of Chinese. The meal ended with a kind of Chinese (or likely Mongolian) game where a girl in a colorful minority outfit presents you with a scarf and sings, insisting you drink until she stops.

Though I unfortunately missed the Chinese New Year, which apparently is a fun time to be around Chinese people, the Spring Festival holiday associated with it lasts two weeks, and I caught the last few days in Zhangye. The last day is known as the Lantern Festival in English, and big portions of the city were decked out with dozens upon dozens of red lanterns and decorations. The square was Ground Zero, and had become something out of a Dr. Seuss illustration. Zhangye swelled with people, many coming in from the surrounding countryside to see the lanterns. For a day Zhangye was the nightmare I feared China could be like, with so many people it was a struggle just to get around. Chinese people love firecrackers, and all evening we were surrounded by a cacophony of noise. It sounded like a war zone, and with so many children setting off fireworks, I was sure somebody was going to lose an eye. The restaurants were so busy that when we sat down for dinner late in the evening, they had run out of water (which must be boiled). When Daisy went back to Lanzhou the next night, there were so many people at the station they wouldn't let non-ticket holders in to see off their friends (though me and Andrew, playing the ignorant foreigners, got in). Daisy presumably had to find a place to stand for the 8 hour overnight trip, and I heard of another girl who didn't use the bathroom on a long-distance train ride because there were too many people. According to the interesting Chinese Lessons, China is the only country in the world to recognize to effects of traveling in overcrowded trains as a psychiatric condition, and those who commit crimes while suffering from "travel psychosis" are spared the death penalty. So the Lantern Festival was exciting, but also an assault on the senses. Actually, I guess you could say that about China as a whole.

Zhangye, Year Two

2007-03-15T19:16:00.002+08:00

At the train station, Andrew and our friend Joy were waiting for me, a pleasant surprise. We joined the other original “daughters” Sarah and Fiona for dinner, a welcome re-introduction to Zhangye and its food. After feeling poor in America, I was happy to the pay the 30 yuan ($3.75) bill for the five of us. We had never been there and the restaurant staff were beside themselves over Andrew’s conversation skills, and after being away for a month it was funny to be back in the midst of all the curiosity. The next day we started up our traditional Friday foreign teacher dinner and caught up with each other. We went to China Fire afterwards, but our friend He Le was not there; sadly, it seems there was some kind of big fight outside of his bar during the Spring Festival, and he had to go to the hospital. Apparently he is out and doing fine, but he hasn’t returned to work yet, and we don’t know the details of what happened.

Gary, Andrew and Stephen went home quite early but me and Danielle stayed longer. This meant that there was a decent row of empty beer bottles at a table with only two people, and several newly arrived customers asked in awe if all the empties belonged to us, so I told them that Americans are very lihai, meaning fierce or excellent at something. Danielle is beloved by Chinese people, especially Chinese men, and when I was in the bathroom a group of friends in their 20’s invited her to their booth. So we stayed longer and drank more than planned, playing Chinese drinking games and teaching them an American one that always goes over well. I bought a mobile phone immediately before leaving Zhangye in January, and several of them asked for my number, and at the end of the night they insisted I share a taxi with them. It’s good to be back.

Trainsitting

2007-03-14T15:00:00.001+08:00

I had top bunk on the train the next day for the 30 hour ride, which is less than ideal, as there isn’t nearly enough room to sit up in bed. There are seats by the windows in the aisles, but the Chinese thing to do is to hang out on the spacious bottom bunk whether or not it’s yours or you know the person. When I eventually descended to have my instant noodles, the three passengers hanging out on the two bottom bunks drew me into conversation right away, especially an older retired man who was with his wife. These conversations can be remarkably similar, so you get well-practiced at it and appear to have effortless Chinese skills, at least for the first 10 minutes. In order of likelihood, you will hear the following questions in the first 5 minutes of meeting a random Chinese person:

1. Which country are you from?

2. How long have you been in China?

3. Are you used to living here?

4. How old are you?

5. Where do you study/are you a student?

6. Are you married/do you have a girlfriend?

7. How much money do you make?

8. (in my case) Zhangye? Where’s that? Hm. Oh yes, Zhangye. Why would you want to go there? You should go to a big city, they have lots of foreigners.

I’ve heard of a foreign teacher who made a t-shirt with the answers to the common questions, just to make things easier. After a while, the old man remarked “our countries have a lot of communication now. Not like before—you don’t remember, you’re too young, but we were enemies,” adding emphasis by pounding his two fists together. “Mao Zedong—do you know him?—he used to say America was our enemy.” He said current president Hu Jintao is a good leader (enormous surprise there), and when he brought up Iraq I was very emphatic about how much I disagreed with the war and disliked Bush, that in fact quite a few Americans dislike him. He turned to the young man sitting next to me and said “Americans can say whatever they want.” Eventually those two had their own conversation about Chairman Mao, which unfortunately was too difficult for me to understand. During this time the old man split a small bottle of potent baijiu with me, quite pleased that I could drink the stuff without making a face. His wife also insisted I take handfuls and handfuls of peanuts. Out of politeness you should refuse these offerings at first, and in fact I don’t really like peanuts, but a Chinese person will give it to you anyway.

“Chatting” would definitely be one of the top pasttimes in China, and on the train passengers are quick to make new friends. To my surprise the young man asked if I had any Chinese books he could borrow, and as it happened I had just bought a Chinese/English edition of a book called Six Chapters of a Floating Life. He returned it the next day, and judging from its appearance it had accompanied him into battle at some point during the night. I remember watching in horror as my first Chinese tutor back in New York asked to see my book on characters, and immediately wrote in it and twisted back the pages as harshly as possible.

Sometimes when I study Chinese I do it in public, increasing the chances that curious onlookers will try to talk to me instead of staring and moving on. On the second day of the train ride, I was looking over a book on Chinese radicals I bought in Beijing when the young girl next to me, who had been sneaking glances for a long time, finally started up a conversation. Zhangye was actually her hometown, but she was going farther to Dunhuang where she worked at a travel agency. English had been her major but she hadn’t used it in three years, so she would pepper her Chinese with very occasional English words, i.e. “wo qu le Beijing zhao gongzuo le, gen wode younger brother.” At one point we were talking about the stereotypes people have of our cultures, and I was explaining that American movies exaggerate, and we don’t really all have massive incomes or shoot at each other on a daily basis. She responded “yes, from watching your movies I feel that America is very dangerous. And that black people are very frightening!” China is not the most racially tactful place I’ve seen, and they are fond of referring themselves as having “yellow” skin. After a couple of hours I didn’t have much left to say, so she retired to her bunk, and the last I heard from her was when she offered me a drink, excitedly pronouncing one of the English words she remembered: “Pepsi Cola!” And somewhere a Pepsi executive got his wings.

In Beijing

2007-03-13T19:20:00.001+08:00

My arrival back in China was greeted by a smoggy, washed out Beijing sky. My first time in China, I allowed myself to be completely and utterly ripped off—300 yuan ride from the airport from a “taxi” that wasn’t a taxi, which dropped me off at a midrange hotel that was 250 yuan for the night, and a tea excursion with strangers I met in Tiananmen Square that set me back 700 yuan, or close to $100. It’s nice knowing what you are doing—this time I caught the bus from the airport for 16 yuan, right to the hostel I had booked for 60 a night.

As I expected I couldn’t get a train ticket for the next day, in fact for the next four days, so I found myself with a few days to kill and no plans, which isn’t a terrible thing in Beijing. I had only spent one day the first time, so I took the chance to explore during the day and get a feel for the city, as well as visit a handful of temples, art galleries, bookstores, and the like. Beijing is known for its hutong, back alleys of traditional Chinese housing which are slowly disappearing, which were infinitely more interesting than Beijing’s modern side. Olympic fever could be sensed everywhere, with the Chinese government’s soft spot for slogans was being fully indulged, i.e. “My games, my happiness.”

While walking back dejectedly after failing to find a minor site listed in my guidebook, a woman started shouting at me on the street. This is nothing unusual and I pressed on, but when I turned around it was clear she wasn’t trying to sell me anything, and I gave her the benefit of the doubt. She was a short, animated woman standing outside of a mosque and wearing Muslim headdress and a broad smile, and was just hoping to start up a conversation. I found her very difficult to understand, which is too bad because she was trying to talk about Iraq and I would have found it interesting. Then she repeatedly came back to a sentence, “shangdi zhanqilai,” wanting to know if I agreed. It meant “God is standing” or perhaps “God stands up,” and though she was persistent, acting out “stand up” in case I didn’t catch that, I never did figure out what she was getting at.

That night, my last in Beijing, I was determined to go out to the bar district and have a good time, because the previous couple of days I had done nothing but walking and sleeping, generally passing out by 7pm from the jetlag and exhaustion. I decided to have a beer at the hostel bar first, as the atmosphere wasn’t half bad and prices would be much more reasonable. There was a guzheng at the side of the room, so I decided to give it a shot and see what I remembered from my lessons in Zhangye. As it turned out, not much without the book, but nonetheless one of the hostel workers was intrigued, and asked me to teach her something. Wang Dong, or Daphne as she also introduced herself, wasn’t exactly a natural but she got a kick out learning part of a song. And I suspect she also just wanted to practice her English, which was slow but workable. She refused to speak Chinese and I at first refused to speak English, a not-uncommon occurrence.. After asking about my taste in music, she remarked “when I listen to music on the guzheng, I think of the wind on the sea and very peaceful things, it is nice. But you like to listen to the rocky music, it is very noisy. You seem to me like a quiet person, I’m not sure why you listen to very noisy music.” After talking for maybe a half-hour I realized she was at work, not just hanging out in her off-time, and she eventually went off to make tea. And we have the idea that Chinese people are the ones who work too hard.

By then it was getting late to go all the way to the Sanlitun area and have to come back, so I figured I might as well stay there and make an actual attempt to meet people, which is most of the fun of staying at a hostel alone. I surveyed the room—two girls speaking Japanese, three Western girls at a table, and a group of about a dozen guys crowded around a foozball table. The table of three girls struck me as friendly enough, so I eventually walked over and said “Hello. So, sitting by myself is starting to get very boring. If you don’t mind if I join you, that would be great, and if you do, that’s fine. What do you think?” Smiling, one of them stopped me by the end of the last sentence and said “have a seat. And, don’t ever introduce yourself like that again. Seriously, I would give that a 5.2.” And after a moment, “that was harsh, wasn’t it? Sorry.” They were English, Irish, and Belgian, and saying farewell to Asia after spending months of backpacking together, heading back to Europe by train the next day. We shared stories of tempting death in the traffic of Southeast Asia and the pitfalls of countries with no more than one ATM machine. Besides Irish we all headed to bed relatively early, and last I saw the dozen or so guys had moved from crowding around the foozball table to crowding around her.

America

2007-03-12T23:05:00.002+08:00

When I arrived in JFK airport in New York City, I had been abroad for just over a year in Thailand, Cambodia, and China. I hadn't slept during the 13 hour flight from Beijing, and had barely slept the previous night in soft seat class from Shanghai to Beijing. Depending on Daylight Savings Time there is a 13 hour difference between New York and China--I left China at 1pm on January 21st, and arrived in America at 1pm, January 21st. I was excited to see my family, but was also feeling a little exhausted and apprehensive. The first thing that struck me, besides the English in the airport and Caucasian overdose, was that I could see small changes in my family. I had never been away long enough to see differences, and my 10-year old brother Matthew in particular was noticeably taller and more mature. My other brother Erik, 21, was away for job training but my grandmother also came along from Long Island to see me. The entire first day in particular felt surreal, as I observed America with the eyes of a quasi-outsider. Little things struck my interest that just aren't seen in China, such as my father trying to give a tip to a man who retrieved a bag I had left behind. Prices were even more shocking than expected, and Americanisms like "buddy" truly stuck out.

From the airport, we drove the 3.5 hours back home. My hometown of Binghamton, New York has the unique talent of triggering no emotional response at all. I had come home for the people, not the place, though I'm very fond of our house itself. It's really just the city I don't care for, as the surrounding countryside is nothing to criticize and positively bursting with nature in comparison to China (the picture is from a local park). I don't mind my "plank bed" in Zhangye, but my bed home was fantastically comfortable. The comforts of home were immediately apparent--a well-stocked refrigerator, television I wanted to watch, and high-speed Internet. In public, I could buy bus or train tickets with ease, and bathrooms had toilet paper and had not only been cleaned, but probably pretty recently. I over-indulged in food I had missed, particularly anything Italian, but after the spice of China much of it lacked punch. Our eating habits are exceptionally different from the Chinese, and dramatically less healthy. "Dessert" as we know it is just about non-existent in China, and I sometimes wonder what food Chinese children beg their parents to give them. I had never second-guessed it before, but I was constantly wondering why as a nation we have so little real interest in keeping a healthy diet. People looked different to me as well. Besides the obvious weight and health problems in America, much more obvious to me now, American features looked almost alien, and I noticed something that Asians have always focused on--we have big noses.

I spent four weeks in America. Most of the time was spent relaxing at home, but I also traveled every weekend to see some of my friends who had left Binghamton (which includes essentially all of them). I covered a fair distance, from the subways of New York to the grad student apartments of University of Notre Dame to the palm trees and Spanish influences of Miami. The Miami trip was the least expected, as a family trip to the Everglades enabled me to also visit my farthest close friend. My best friends remain those from high school, and time with them was short but well worth the journey. There were reminders of what I liked about America that I had left behind--playing live music, crossing state lines for a Shins concert, enjoying a cold Guinness in a pint glass, good conversationalists.

However, my interest in China never faded while home. I studied Chinese, I read about China, I watched movies about China. "I guess it's all China all the time?" my mom remarked at one point. I researched China Studies graduate programs, something I still have a serious interest in. As expected I also had a few China encounters. Interestingly, while Chinese citizens often overreact to a Chinese-speaking foreigner, the handful of Chinese in America I approached in Mandarin showed only faint surprise and interest. Only one mirthful old woman, from Xi'an and just visiting family in America, was happy to have a conversation with me in Chinese. While we visited family in Florida I also met an aunt's friend and her 3-year old adopted daughter from China, who had left at age 1 and didn't speak Chinese. She was certainly a child of America, interested mainly in playing with the cat and getting dessert. When her mother asked what she wanted to learn in Chinese from me, she shouted only "cupcake!" with arms outstretched towards the kitchen. The irony of me teaching a Chinese girl the Chinese language did not go unnoticed.

I said goodbye to my family in Florida, taking a flight from Tampa to New York in time to catch my plane from New York back to Beijing. I had been away a long time and there were friends and family I didn't have a chance to see, but I was also ready to go back. America feels like home and I'll probably be back for good, but in the meantime China has a powerful hold on me yet.

Shanghai

2007-02-13T11:53:00.002+08:00

I was expecting reverse culture shock when I flew into New York City and returned home, what with all the Americans, skyscrapers, and Western food. It turned out I didn't need to get all the way back to America to feel like I wasn't in China--in comparison to Zhangye, Shanghai was really something else. I've heard mixed reviews from other foreigners, who have complained of Shanghai's crowds, unfriendly people, and high prices, but I fell in love with the place. It's the most cosmopolitan city I have seen in China, one where in places you could almost pretend you are in the heart of a European capital. One of the best-known sites in Shanghai is the Bund, a stretch of buildings along the Huangpu river built by Europeans in a grand style that made me think back to London. And just across the river stands Pudong, one of the few sets of imposing skyscrapers in mainland China, which has risen very recently from the surrounding swampland.

During the previous year I had eaten non-Chinese food no more than a dozen times, and the three of us delighted in Shanghai's international cuisine, including Indian, in one case being treated to a crazy and unexpected dance show by a jovial Indian bartender. Stefanie and I also indulged in a shameful ham sandwich gorge-fest in our hostel's restaurant, but I felt I owed it to myself after not being able to purchase cheese during the past year.

Me and Nissa being small-town folk back in America, Stefanie had to show us a thing or two about being high class, and brought us to the Westin hotel. Judging from just the lobby of the place, it was probably worth more than the city of Zhangye. We sat down for desert on an upper-floor restaurant, and despite being amongst fellow foreigners, still stuck out like the proverbial sore thumbs. As we got up to leave after finishing our daintily presented delicacies, I had a bit of a coat malfunction, and awkwardly stood beside the table looking at my inside-out sleeve. Then I noticed Nissa too was proving no match for her jacket, and looking as helpless. Stefanie shook her head in severe disappointment and ushered us out of the restaurant while we still had some shred of dignity, but not before we grabbed the uneaten bread from a nearby table on the way out.

One of the weirder sights we saw in Shanghai was the Bund sightseeing tunnel, a mysterious "ride" that brought unsuspecting tourists under the river from the Bund to Pudong and back. Do you remember the scene in the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory movie in which they take a hallucinogen-inspired boat ride? It was a lot like that, without Gene Wilder on a bad acid trip and giant centipedes. My two companions, young at heart as they are, were beside themselves with delight during the 5-minute ride and beyond. On the way back, the only other person in our car was a stone-faced middle-aged Chinese man in a suit, who seemed to be contemplating his direction in life. I had the funny notion of him riding to his job as an investment banker like that every day, with bright neon lights dancing around him and a dramatic voice making announcements like "meteor shower" in Chinese and English.

Though certainly an end in and of itself, the sightseeing tunnel also magically transported you to a group of attractions, namely an aquarium or a sex museum. Obviously, we chose the sex museum. I would be interested in accompanying my students on a field trip there, seeing as the revelation that I've not only dated a girl before but more than one was enough to audibly and instantaneously shock 35 students. On the way out, Nissa was asked by a woman with a European accent just where they might have put the toilet paper in the bathroom, as they seemed to have neglected her particular stall. Nissa had to explain that there is no toilet paper in the bathrooms here, so you have to bring your own, leaving the women in complete shock and confusion, albeit one tissue richer.

I had been looking forward to experiencing Shanghai nightlife, and on one of the nights we decided to try a bar in the French Quarter listed in the Lonely Planet guide that had a Ladies' Night with free drinks for females. The two-floor bar was completely and utterly packed with Westerners who also owned the Lonely Planet guide, with the DJ pumping out trash like Wham! that I thought I left back in senior prom where it belongs. We had invited a stray Australian girl from the hostel who was by herself, and the four of us found the remaining free floor space in the back where we could dance in peace. At one point Nissa left to use the bathroom and jokingly said to me "now don't go off dancing with any other girls." As soon as she was gone, an intoxicated women in her early 30's snuck up behind me and danced with me like it was her last night on Earth for about 45 seconds, and then said "thank you" and walked away into the crowd. Of course, free drinks for the ladies quickly turned into force-feeding me mixed drinks when the bouncers weren't looking, as quickly as possible before the free drinks ended at midnight. They weren't strong by any means, but quantity has its effects, and the last thing I remember that night is seeing the bottom of a couple of empty tequila shots.

On our last night in Shanghai, I suggested that we try a noted jazz club called the Cotton Club, which was also in the French Quarter, which seemed to be the Greenwich Village of Shanghai. It was my kind of atmosphere, and I would probably be a regular if I lived there. We had a table just a few feet from the stage, and as the band was setting up Stefanie recognized the guitar player from a picture of the place in her Lonely Planet Shanghai guide. When she went up to talk to him and get him to sign it he had obviously not seen the picture, and was obviously not sober: "whoa, what book is that? Cool. What's your name? Stefanie? My name's Greg. I've had a lot of wine!" The band was excellent, with a mix of Western and Chinese members, and an ideal end to the trip. The next day we took a train to Beijing, where I would catch my plane back to America and Stefanie and Nissa would meet two American friends coming for a two-week China experience. China was starting to feel rather familiar, and really couldn't picture America feeling quite the same again.

Yangzhou

2007-02-07T03:19:00.002+08:00

Upon saying "sayonara, Zhangye" (never mind...), we embarked on our 30 hour train ride back to Yangzhou, where Stefanie and Nissa live and teach, and we spent almost, but not quite, 1 day. We had planned a further full day, but that was on the silly assumption that you can count on buying cross-country train tickets whenever you want, and we decided to cut a day from Yangzhou rather than Shanghai. I had the chance to meet two of their favorite students, Frida and Brack, for a noodle dinner, during which Frida excitedly toasted us with soda and Brack wrote a poem by Li Bai about Yangzhou onto the learning-Chinese notepad I always carry. Anyone who fears the rapid rise of China needs to meet more of its English students. We also met up with Megan, who teaches in Yangzhou at a different school and also came to China through Pacific Lutheran University in Washington State.

Stefanie was at this time on an amazing streak of losing valuable possessions, and went off with Megan for a while to buy a new cell phone. With what time we had, Nissa then took me on a tour of Yangzhou, which turned out to be a pleasant, mid-sized city. The famous dish of the place is the Yangzhou Fried Rice, and Nissa was annoyed to find their favorite fried rice place had closed and been totally gutted and demolished in the space of the last week, a common discovery in China. A lady emerged from this wreckage and promised to lead us to another place, and after a weird 10 minute walk through questionable back alleys, we arrived at the place, which had no less than three greeters, none of who seemed to be actually serving food. The highlights of the evening tour were the canals of the city, including duck boats that obviously have captured Nissa's fancy. The rest of the night was low-key, involving a trip to a bar, a mockery of a pool game, and very inexpensive wine. Luckily we got back to their hotel rooms just before 11, and didn't have to climb over the fence, as there is apparently a curfew ("wear narrow shoes for the fence," I was warned). I didn't have the chance to see a whole lot of Yangzhou or meet the young, artsy French couple I've heard about (mostly through great Stefanie imitations of their accents), and the next day we were off to Shanghai, "Whore of the Orient."

Guests in Zhangye, More Camels

2007-01-30T22:58:00.002+08:00

I'm now back home in Binghamton, New York, for a month during the extensive break we receive for the Chinese New Year/Spring Festival. But before I go into that, allow me to recap my last two weeks in China, which were spent with Stefanie and Nissa, my American friends I met up with in Xi'an in October. Around the time I finished my final exams, they came up to hang out for a week or so in Zhangye (or the "desert" as they've been fond of calling it), partly to see me, but mostly to ride the camels in nearby Jiayuguan. The two-humpers do have their charms, I'll admit. They also wanted to see what my school is like, and meet my friends, especially Andrew. People from Britain seem to grossly underestimate how many American girls like their accents.

I was mildly worried about entertaining friends for an entire week in Zhangye, which has exactly one tourist draw (and the Buddha was not even taking visitors, as it turned out). They braved a soft sleeper train compartment with chain-smoking middle-aged men in purple underwear for 30 hours to get there, so I figured it had damn well better be a good time.

Much of the time was spent as a foursome with Andrew, who was gracious enough to allow Stefanie to stay at his place, and was often in a state of bewilderment at our American slang, pop culture references, and peculiarities. Stefanie is a master of humorous accents, and at one point Andrew had to admit "I'm ashamed that you can do a better Scottish accent than I can." Somewhere in the midst of his mastery of Chinese language, his renditions of "Scotland the Brave" on harmonica and accordion, and his quaint use of words like "bloomin'" and "good job!", he won a place in their hearts.

Most of the items on our to-do list involved food, from Big Plate of Chicken to Spring Rolls, and there was involved discussion at the end of the week about which meal was the best. Some of my students, namely Art, Roger, Hope, and Ann cooked for us one evening, which was old habit for me and Andrew but a novelty for Stef and Nissa, who live in hotel rooms and aren't allowed guests. They excitedly told us English jokes and stories about elephants in freezers and the like, and we ended by treating them to rousing sing-alongs of 90's classics. I don't know if this sounds very exciting to everyone back in America, but don't underestimate the entertainment of a sing-along after a year away from home. At other points they met a few other students we teach or are friends with, including Joy, who was of course elated to meet them. I wish I had pictures of the way she walked down the street with my friends, holding hands and smiling away. At one point she stopped and looked very closely at Nissa's face, and proclaimed "your eyebrows... they're yellow!"

We also visited China Fire no less than four times and otherwise showed the girls what life in Zhangye is about, but certainly the highlight for my two friends was the day trip to Jiayuguan, a tourist draw 3 hours from me I wrote about when I visited back in May. It was their first visit to the Great Wall of China, but more importantly, their first camel experience. During our hour-and-a-half tour of the fort (7 hours round trip on the train; didn't arrive till 4pm), we clambered over stairs and the reconstructed Great walls, the two of them barely controlling their excitement as we searched the horizon for two-humpers. They were ready for the day, not only researching the diets and life expectancies of camels on the internet but preparing a "while on the Great Wall" to-do list that included "play nose flutes" and "do the sexy dance". When at last I spotted the camels, unrestrained joy poured from their hearts, and we quickly descended the stairs so they could, at long last, mount their camels. After the 10 or 15 minutes riding around the area on camels and taking photos, we eventually made our ways back to Zhangye having accomplished what was, from the sound of it, one of the highlights of my friends' entire lives. A couple of days later we said goodbye to Zhangye, and continued our planned journey to the east of China.

New Year's (in my Least Favorite Chinese City)

2007-01-23T19:45:00.002+08:00

I've been too busy to write in my blog lately, so I have a little catching up to do. Going back several weeks, to the weekend after the one in which I went skiing, I spent the weekend in my least favorite Chinese city, Lanzhou. As you may or may not recall (rather, as you probably don't recall), Lanzhou is the capital city of Gansu, the province I live in. It's the only big city in Gansu, with perhaps 1 million residents. I've had a general disinterest in Lanzhou when I've been before, but after my most recent trip I've decided I really don't like it, for the following reasons:

1. polluted - Lanzhou has some of the worst air pollution in China, which in turn has some of the worst air pollution in the world. Visibility was shockingly bad at times. Statistics vary but I've seen one source give it the distinction of worst air quality in the world.
2. unfriendly - in Zhangye I get a sense of well-meaning curiosity when I go out in public. In Lanzhou I don't like the way people are looking at me.
3. unsafe - in the past 6 months I know of two foreign teachers being stabbed in Lanzhou. And on one bus ride in the middle of the afternoon, a fight broke out inside the bus. The bus stopped and let them out, and as we rode away we watched about 10 young men beating the hell out of one guy who was crouching on the pavement. I've never seen anything like it.
4. too large - we spent hours upon hours on buses that weekend just getting around the city. I spent 35 yuan on a taxi ride from a club back to the university we were staying at - a typical taxi ride in Zhangye is 3 yuan.
5. dishonest - my dislike of the city was sealed when I was almost massively ripped off as I tried to leave. I couldn't find my bus at first, because I didn't realize it was in the back parking lot. Normally the various workers hanging about are helpful and point you in the right direction, but this time an unscrupulous bus operator led me to the wrong bus, namely, his. I was a little alarmed to see I was on a sleeper bus, which was also empty, and even more so when he started telling me we'd be leaving at 8pm and wanted my ticket. I told him no, my bus leaves at 2pm, and he told me that bus had already left because it was full. I decided to have a look for myself, and at that point he did actually lead me to the right bus, which I caught by only a couple of minutes. If that had been my first month in China I might easily not have known better.

Anyway, moving on, the reason I went to Lanzhou (Danielle, Stephen, and Phillip went as well) was to attend a formal dinner for all foreign teachers in Gansu on Friday to celebrate the impending (Western) New Year. The food was nice enough, but not really worth the 8-hour trip, and at that point I found it more than a little odd to be surrounded by 100+ foreigners in one room. Danielle and Stephen convinced me to stay and attend the New Year's Party being held by Peace Corps volunteers on Sunday night, so it turned into a long weekend.

Saturday night was the most enjoyable part of the weekend for me. We treated ourselves to the first genuinely good pizza I have had in China, and had a decent time at a bar with a few of their Peace Corps friends and an amusing young Chinese man named David. He was fluent in English to the point that he could keep up with our conversation, got our sarcasm, and even swore, all very unusual.

We ended the night at a dance club, something I've actually warmed up to over the course of the past few months. I'd like to think that I am now simply unimpressive on the dance floor, rather than an absolute disaster, just another unexpected result of my life in China. At any rate, after we split a bottle of Jack Daniels I was feeling pretty confident, and meandered away from my group and towards the attractive Chinese girls. At first none of them seemed overly concerned with me and my 3 repetitive dance moves, but before long a particularly good-looking girl I hadn't seen "accidentally" bumped into me and started dancing with me. I never did rejoin my friends. She was a tease, periodically going over to dance with other guys with a sly smile and making me win her back. Eventually my friends left, but I was about 60% confident I remembered the name of the school and could find our friend's apartment in the dark, so I stayed. Once it got pretty late she left, but before that we exchanged numbers. At that point I realized I needed a cell phone, as I seem to be forming a habit of giving girls in other cities my apartment number in Zhangye and never talking to them again. There was afterwards a mystery about what her name could possibly be - she had written it so carelessly that even Chinese people couldn't read either character.

At that point in the weekend I was obligated to stay for the New Year's party, or rather the "white trash" party, as all the Peace Corps parties apparently have a theme. It was pretty much as I imagined, with cans of imported Pabst Blue Ribbon, everyone imitating a hick Southern accent, lots of Lynyrd Skynyrd songs, toilet seats hung on the walls, dirty messages in the bathroom, and a general drunkenness and lack of clothing, including a guy wearing only underwear with toilet paper sticking out. And yet despite the charming atmosphere, I managed not to have a good time. I counted myself out relatively early, but I didn't miss much of the party, as it ended with a big trip to the hospital because a volunteer turned out to have appendicitis. I'm not sure it's possible to have a normal Western holiday in China.

Spitting

2007-01-02T14:46:00.004+08:00

Winter has by now come to Zhangye, and with it, Chinese snot rockets. It’s no secret to anyone who has been outdoors in China for more than 20 minutes that Chinese people like to spit. And they do the job, too—no quiet, subtle spit, but rather a nasal-cleansing, monstrous loogie, the preparation of which can be heard a kilometer away. The floors of buildings, including restaurants, are by no means out of bounds, and women join in too. The spitting I can nearly get used to, even laugh at a particularly powerful one, but the snot rockets still bother me. This is a special treat of wintertime, in which a pedestrian feels that a normal spit won’t get the job done, and keeps one nostril closed with his finger while the other launches a mucous missile onto the pavement. But you’re unlikely to see a Chinese person blow his or her nose, especially at a meal—that would be rude.

Skiing with Chinese Characteristics

2007-01-02T14:35:00.002+08:00

Since Christmas fell on a Monday, we decided to celebrate over the weekend. Danielle and Stephen being as ambitious as they are, we ended up traveling 9 hours to the city of Hami in the province of Xinjiang, mostly to see our British friend Tracy and to go skiing. This was well worth the trip. Hami is perhaps slightly bigger than Zhangye, with a similarly small foreign population (meaning you can count them on your fingers), and an eccentric group at that. Two are married to Chinese – an American girl who addresses her own husband as “Mr. Tian” and seems to speak at least some Chinese, and a 60+ year-old man who is married to a 35-year old Chinese woman, and who speaks approximately 8 words of Chinese from the look of it. However, since she was taught English by her smart-ass husband, she had one of the best Chinese-English senses of humor I’ve seen. She seemed a feisty woman, and in fact not only yelled at Tracy to “go back to

England

and find your own husband!” recently in a fit of jealousy, but started a short fist-fight with her.

Skiing outside of Hami was definitely Skiing With Chinese Characteristics. Me and Stephen at least were well amused to arrive and see this ski “resort” we had traveled so far to reach—a total of one slope, which was no more than a quarter of the size of the smallest bunny hill I’ve seen in America. Which was probably just as well—I may have been the only person in the place who had skied more than twice, and the well-to-do Chinese women who arrived seemed interested mostly in giggling, falling a lot, and getting personal assistance from the “fit” employees (to use a British-ism/Tracy-ism). I would call them ski instructors, had I seen any instructing whatsoever going on. There was also tubing on offer, which was generally agreed to be more fun than the skiing.

That night we went out on the town, and Tracy made plans to meet a Chinese women she knows and her group of friends. This was at a rather up-scale dance club, in which there was no dance floor and everyone danced in their little personal space around their table. Danielle fixed her eyes on a Chinese guy in the group, and Stephen simply likes to dance, so I began to feel a little bored. Tracy then practically pushed me into dancing with a small group of attractive girls, which was suddenly going quite well—until approximately 3 minutes later, when it was time to leave. The obviously interested one asked in (Chinese-)English, “your phone number is how much?” as I left, but I’ll add another check to the “missed opportunities with Chinese girls” column. Zhangye is unfortunately so small, conservative, and aware of the smallest move we make that I think girls here are off-limits (and married by 20 anyway). And everyone knows where we live - one off-balance girl having my phone number is probably enough (more on that another day). The second bar we went to was dull for me and Stephen, who mostly contained our irritation at the stunning beauties in the group being spoken for and watched the recreational activities going on around us in confusion.

The main activity of our last day in Hami was for the four of us to get massages. Not just a massage, but a three-hour marathon on the 15^th floor of an expensive hotel, which would be Tracy’s style. So, I sat in a robe and long underwear for hours as a cute but rather young-looking girl soaked my feet. Now I know how to say “ticklish” in Chinese. I’ve never done that before but supposedly it’s very expensive in America; here it ran us about $9 each.

We returned to Zhangye at about 5:30am on Monday morning, Christmas morning. We were offered the day off but it was much too complicated to rearrange our final exams; hopefully I won’t make a habit of working on Christmas day. It didn’t particularly feel like Christmas, though a number of students stopped by my home with gifts, including a scarf from me and Andrew’s friends “the daughters”, which they knitted themselves. And what is Christmas without eating Beef Noodles with Andrew and two of the daughters. In the evening me, Gary, Danielle, and Andrew celebrated at China Fire (where else lately), where I fought off a sudden case of home-sickness, followed by fighting off the urge to inflict physical harm on a few excruciatingly annoying new Chinese “friends” who had had a bit too much Christmas cheer.

More fun than Christmas itself was the English Department’s Christmas Party the week before. The Party, which included 50 guests and the renting out of an entire restaurant/bar/music hall in town, was moved up to Thursday solely so that me and Danielle would be able to attend. It turned out that it was also the first day the place was open, so they had likely moved up their first day of business simply because me and Danielle were going to be gone during the weekend. Certainly you’re never starved for attention here. Though I must admit we did help the party along—I’m always willing to sabotage the poor music, and Danielle got the dancing started as per usual. A few of our students came to sing songs for us, which was sweet, including a very endearing student of Danielle’s whose name is Bamboo. That’s a new contender for my favorite English student name, along with recent favorites Accident, Black, and Jedi, or rather Jedi Dawson Shi. The food was tasty, the dancing was genuinely enjoyable (dancing with my students, who are almost my age…. appropriate?), and we only had to sing one song (My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, chosen by our fair Scotsman).

Peace Corps and Amity: Volunteers of a Different Color

2007-01-02T14:09:00.004+08:00

I’ve been behind on my blog lately, partly due to the end of term and exams, and partly due to being too busy with things I should write about in the blog to actually have the time to write about them. So going back a couple of weekends, there were foreign visitors to Zhangye, as in Danielle and Stephen being visited by other Peace Corps volunteers in our province, and Andrew and Gary being visited by a friend also in China through their organization, Amity. The Peace Corps teachers can be seen in the pictures - Emily and Thomas, me and Danielle, Cary and Stephen. I spent a little bit of time with both groups, and this is a brief run-down of the activities:

Peace Corps:

Friday

-met volunteers around 6pm, at a bar
-dinner, with drinks
-back to Stephen’s apartment, to drink

Saturday

-met them at Danielle’s apartment roughly 5:30pm, where I was apparently just in time for the drinking
-went to dinner, then a bar
-dirty dancing at Hot Ball Place
-a round at another bar to end the night

Amity:

Sunday

-went to Gary’s apartment, and listened to him and their friend Rae perform religious hymns
on the piano while we gently sipped homemade wine and discussed watching a movie from perhaps the 1950’s called Miss Marple

Being around Peace Corps teachers is like being at a frat party; being around Amity teachers is like being at church. Our Chinese friend He Le, owner of our new favorite bar China Fire, was at Gary’s apartment, being his usual entertaining self. We decided he would like Sex and the City better than Miss Marple, and in the interest of politeness I won’t repeat some of the funniest lines, but at any rate by the third pair of breasts nothing was disproved about the preconceptions of “easy” Western women.

So me and the Peace Corps teachers thought it would be fun to dance American-style at the dance club, in which boys actually touch the girls rather than keeping a safe 18-inch barrier between themselves and anything with breasts. However, we realized only too late that we were opening Pandora’s Box on this one. We immediately received loud cheers and whoops from the men, who formed a circle around us while we danced in the middle, exactly like the kind of scene from a movie that seems so cheesy because you’ve never seen it happen in real life. This circle drew closer and closer, like a pack of hyenas closing in on a wounded gazelle. There was nary a female in sight, besides the pole-dancing girls manning their usual stations. Emily, one of the visitors and an attractive blonde, had to actually sit most of the night out due to the unwanted attention. Very much to my dismay, I was also receiving too much attention—from men. Particularly Red Sweater Vest Man, an unwanted friend who happily bounded up to me every time I got on the dance, or rather into me. You need to build up a tolerance for discomfort when living in another culture, but I still have a line somewhere, and it was definitely crossed. It would seem Reform and Opening has yet to cover “dirty dancing in small provincial towns”.

Italian Noodles, Chinese Fire

2006-12-14T19:16:00.001+08:00

Lately we seem to be seeing a lot of He Le, the young and charismatic owner of the bar China Fire. Last Saturday he invited us to invade his bar in the afternoon to cook Western food, and stay all night to hang out and drink. The menu included spaghetti, steak (of sorts), fruit salad, fish, and kebabs. I haven't had pasta (or "Italian noodles" as it is known here) for around 11 months, so I was pretty thrilled. He Le provided the spaghetti and other ingredients that you can't find here, and was suspiciously unwilling to give away his source. I suppose somewhere in the back alleys of Lanzhou there is an illicit trade in Oregano.

China Fire is getting well ready for Christmas, and luckily Stephen was able to provide us with accompanying music on his iPod. It turns out I love Christmas music when it hasn't been shadowing my every step for 8 weeks. We've become fond of He Le; when he has a free moment, he loves to come over and play cards, chat, and encourage drinking games. His girlfriend also seems to be among the friendliest and most approachable girls I've met in Zhangye.

My Chinese teacher Lina was also in attendance, and was responsible for probably my favorite moment of the evening. As is her habit, Danielle was overly excited about something or other during a drinking game, and said "shit!". So Lina (who is an extraordinarly polite young Chinese woman) said "Danny is always saying 'shit'. What does 'shit' mean?" Maybe you had to be there. Altogether I spent around 7 hours at China Fire, and in fact we were there last night, only to be invited again tonight for Danielle's birthday. I think my social life in Zhangye is probably more enjoyable than at college.

Chinese "Friends" in Bars

2006-12-06T17:03:00.001+08:00

With the addition of two young American Peace Corps teachers in Zhangye this term, the "Friday Nights for Foreigners" tradition that began last term has been much more lively. We always meet for dinner on Friday, and this term we generally end the evening bar-hopping on European Street. Yes, that was "bar-hopping"; Zhangye, with its nearest international neighbor being Mongolia, has a cooler bar scene than my American hometown. In particular we've come to like two: "Gary's Friend's Bar", with the owner's girlfriend being a generally agreed front-runner for Most Beautiful Woman in Zhangye, and China Fire. China Fire has a good logo to go with a great name: the place is covered in posters with a flaming huo, the character for "fire".

Strange and amusing things usually happen when foreigners stay up past the time that decent people go to bed in Zhangye. Last time I went out, we attracted an unwelcome, but not unusual, amount of attention at Gary's Friend's Bar. This was, of course, focused on Danielle, who is not only foreign but a young female with blonde hair. She was double-teamed or triple-teamed this time, with a guy on each side, one of whom Gary was sure was Japanese. To this he would only respond confusingly, in English, "I am Japanese guide-o!". By the end of the night, Danielle told me "I think I've been told 'I love you' more times tonight than during the rest of my life combined". I had my own new best friend, who was drunk and mostly repeated the same conversation about seeing me play guitar at Hexi University, occasionally adding emphasis by playing air-guitar and saying "very beautiful!" in English.

Stephen also got a lot of attention, as his beard and long hair also make him a particular novelty. The owner of the bar, Gary's friend, insisted he looked like someone, whose Chinese name didn't make sense to any of us. Finally he found a photo in a magazine: Viggo Mortensen, best known for playing "Aragorn" in The Lord of the Rings. Apparently worried that the hero among us might be under-armed, he fetched a large and expensive-looking dagger (from where, I have no idea) and insisted that Stephen accept it as a gift. Someone soon pointed out that "hey, you look like him too!", referring to the poster of Kurt Cobain on the back wall. To anyone who has felt embarrassed about not being able to tell Chinese people apart, I assure you that they can't tell us apart, and are probably less embarrassed about it. As the swarming of weird, drunk Chinese men began, Stephen, who normally leaves early because his school is farther away, asked "is it usually like this after I leave?", and we assured him it was nothing out of the ordinary.

In an earlier night at the "Halloween Bar" (giant fake spiderweb on the wall), Danielle attracted a particularly persistent friend. As can be seen from the picture (which Danielle may or may not appreciate me putting on the internet), he had had a fair share of alcohol, and was getting a little too close for her comfort. Interacting with locals who pay no attention to the language barrier is generally a good thing, but possibly Danielle finds an exception in sweet nothings being whispered into her ear in unintelligible Chinese, peppered with the occasional "I love you" in English. But then again I could be wrong.

Live in Zhangye Prison

2006-12-06T16:16:00.004+08:00

As probably goes without saying, performing rock music inside a prison to a crowd of Chinese criminals was memorable. For some reason, none of the Chinese people I was with seemed to find it as amusing as I did. The daily stares from Chinese people haven't fazed me for a long time, but as we walked through the room towards the stage, I couldn't help but feel self-conscious about a few hundred convicts turning in unison to watch my every move. The performance was on a rather official-looking stage in the cafeteria, with a red banner about World Aids Day; it seems the prison has a decent entertainment budget.

I hadn't practiced with them for months, and even on the stage I had not the slightest idea what songs we were playing. I finally asked Little Ma what song we were going to play first, and he just said "don't worry, we're playing the songs you know". For some reason the Guitar Club is not keen on learning new songs. The music went over pretty well with the audience, which included the guards at the front, and Little Ma knows how to entertain a crowd (not that I ever know what he's saying). The power went out during the middle of a song, which was slightly awkward (I'll refrain from making any cheesy comments about our "rocking out" here), but otherwise things went well. A few of the inmates actually performed, with mixed results, and I was unfortunately talked into a poor performance of an English song. I refuse to sing in front of a crowd of three in America, yet in China somehow I'm willing to sing in front of more than 200 prisoners. And Hotel California reared its monstrous, outdated head again, with just me and Little Ma playing guitar. I hope there aren't any serious long-term effects on my taste in music from my stay in China. But I think my favorite moment was near the end, when my friend encouraged the crowd to join him in a sing-along of a song that everyone but me seemed to know by heart, and I was treated to the spectacle of dozens of hardened young men singing their hearts out to a daydreamy Chinese song from the inside of a prison. Just when I think there are few surprises left in Zhangye...

A Very Chinese Ticket Hall

2006-11-30T22:36:00.000+08:00

Anyone who has traveled in China will appreciate this:

http://pinyin.info/news/2006/typo-of-the-day/

Jawdropper, Showstopper, Collarpopper

2006-11-30T20:01:00.001+08:00

Little Ma, the "rock star" of Zhangye, called me this afternoon for the first time in a while. He told me he wanted my help translating something that was in English. The idea of trying to translate Chinese for someone sounded exciting, although I was sure I was in over my head, whatever it was. That's him in the picture, which is from an earlier night at a dance club (and Gary can be seen doing what he does best in the background). When I arrived at his shop, there was an amusing scene: Little Ma and several of his friends hunched with furrowed brows over a big, fancy effects pedal for electric guitar, which had instructions and markings that were entirely in English. It was an elaborate, complicated effects pedal which would take me a couple of long afternoons in a basement to master even in English, so I wasn't of much use at all. Oddly, the Chinese for things like "flanger" and "effects parameters" haven't come up in my textbooks yet. However, I did get the chance to pick up a few useful guitar-related words along the way. I'm meant to go back tomorrow afternoon for practice, and then perform with his band at 3:00. I asked where the performance was, and he laughed and said at a jianlao, a word I didn't know. So, I looked it up in the dictionary: prison. Apparently a policeman invited him to perform there (he seems to know a lot of people). He also mentioned 1000 something-something which I didn't understand, and I can only hope he meant there would be one thousand inmates there. This should be interesting. I've been getting bored of his guitar shop, but maybe he's worth staying friends with after all.

Beef Noodles and Hot Pot: A Very Chinese Evening

2006-11-30T18:59:00.002+08:00

On Tuesday night a man that me and Andrew have befriended invited us to come down to his noodle shop, and I will describe the night to give an idea of a typical evening of hanging out with Andrew and his Chinese friends (who, due to his previously mentioned conversation skills and friendliness, are numerous). We started off with a couple of bowls of Beef Noodles, the specialty of his and many other small noodle shops. Beef Noodles originally come from the capital of this province, so our students are proud of them and easily excited by their mere mention. Andrew had the idea of us watching him make the noodles and taking pictures and video of the process with my camera, which more than pleased him. When asked if that would be ok, he loudly said something very similar to "Of course you can take pictures! I am very happy!" I've always wanted to get a better view of the noodle-making, and it turned out to be picture-worthy in all its noodle-wacking and cauldron-bubbling glory.

After cleaning up (I decided against documenting the dish "washing" process) with his wife, he took us out for a second meal further down the road. His mother-in-law also came, a jovial and meddling woman who I found amusing. She spent much of the evening trying to talk us into letting her fix us up with a wife or two, possibly her unmarried daughter. Despite our protests and excuses, our friend (who I'll call Little Liu, as in the Chinese habit of putting xiao, little, in front of a friend's surname) insisted on taking us for hot pot. However, it was a simple place with a hot plate for every table and not the usual two-hour extravaganza in a fancy restaurant. The owner of the place, who had a used-car salesman cheesyness I kind of liked, was delighted to see two foreign and Chinese-speaking customers. He soon requested a picture with us, and jetted off to borrow a camera. He presented us with a plate of fruit (gifts are not unusual, but in all cases previous have been something I don't want), and tried very hard to treat us to some beers with him. But it was a school night, and we are, of course, responsible teachers.

After saying goodbye to our Chinese friends Andrew suggested a quick stop for naicha, "milk tea", at a place we like in front of the school. I had been fairly quiet during the evening, because Andrew's Chinese ability is well ahead of mine and I think and speak too slowly even when I do understand the conversation, and liked the idea of ending things in English. It's actually Andrew who usually carries the Chinese conversations, and there are few pauses. This didn't last long, however, as a man who was obviously drinking with his friends got wind of Andrew's Chinese, and was especially amused by a few words of Zhangyehua (Zhangye dialect) we could muster. He invited himself to sit down with us, and this time we didn't get out of drinking, as he had bottles ordered and glasses poured before we had time to protest. We insisted on leaving after just a few glasses (and mind you, in China they drink beer out of shot glasses), but he managed to exchange numbers with Andrew and promise to invite him out to eat sometime. Luckily he didn't take to me, mostly asking me what I was thinking about so quietly and why I insisted on saying things to Andrew in English. In those four hours, me and Andrew paid exactly 4 yuan, for the milk tea, which is the equivalent of 50 cents US. On the walk back home, Andrew complained about the hassle of having given this stranger his telephone number. And then we thought about that for a second, and marvelled at having a life in which the big annoyance of the day was agreeing to being taken out for a free meal.