This past week has reminded me of the little things I take for granted: Eating the same breakfast casserole every year on Christmas morning, with fresh-baked blueberry muffins and orange juice; spending Christmas dinner joking with my siblings, telling the same stories and laughing just as hard; and an Internet cable running under the Pacific Ocean that connects North America to East Asia, that I never even thought about until an earthquake ruptured it sometime Wednesday.
The breakage of that cable has left much of China cut off from the World Wide Web for the past two days. Any sites not hosted locally have been unavailable or at best painfully slow. I’ve managed to see that I have email but can’t read it.
The first Christmas song I heard in China was Jingle Bells. It was stuffed awkwardly into the middle of a dance mix blasted throughout campus the first week of September that cut in and out as school officials belted out muffled orders to the just-arrived freshmen.
Now I hear Christmas songs everywhere: On buses, in malls, played far too loud from speakers in front of Pizza Hut at HePing Square. The cute-but-underpaid girls behind the cash registers at McDonald’s all have Santa hats, and the fat man’s face is on every store window, whether they sell Christmas kitsch or not.
I’m not much for this holiday back home. It’s just plain overwhelming. And that was true even before 2003, when I spent the month of December earning extra cash by working at a mall department store, selling gift cards, kids’ clothes and, for one day, ladies’ fragrance. It was there I learned that Christmas makes middle-aged women want to eat their children.
I also found out that Christmas is not, actually, a holiday made in America, or anywhere in the West, for that matter. On closer examination of one of those little stuffed bears in military fatigues–the ones that say “Support the Troops” or make some other cash grab at nationalism–I noticed that the flag on its hat was missing a few stars. About 34 short, if I recall correctly. On the back: “Made in China.” Just like everything else. I figure Santa’s workshop is down south somewhere, unless it’s moved to Vietnam. That’d be a smart move.
But for all the trappings of Christmas here, I have to keep reminding myself that the actual holiday is on Monday. Even with the snow, this place feels about as festive as finals week, which probably has something to do with the finals I’ll be giving next week. Or it could be that China managed to import all the worst aspects of this holiday and left out the good stuff.
One thing hasn’t yet crossed the Pacific, which I’ll be glad to be without. Stick this under your weirdly neutered holiday tree:
It’s times like this we’d all do well to remember the words of young Bartholomew: “Aren’t we forgetting the true meaning of Christmas? You know, the birth of Santa.”
(Update: Immediately after writing this post, I was accosted on campus by the girl pictured above-right, trying to sell me a Santa hat and an apple wrapped in cellophane for 6 RMB. I met the Chinese Santa today over at a private language school in town and had to get a picture. He was a good sport.)
China considers me a “foreign expert.” I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I have a little red important-looking booklet that says I am, with my picture inside and five characters that, said together quickly, sort of sound like my first name. Actually, it sounds something like, “Ke-li-si-do-fu.” Yes, that’s soy bean curd in my name. This is why I want a real Chinese name.
Anyway, whatever the reason for my supposed expertise, the city of Dalian honored me and a few thousand other foreign experts with a lavish dinner and at least an hour of the same speech repeated by as many local officials as could memorize it.
They also gave medals (made with real metal of some kind) to 23 said experts. I kept score from my seat in the back row: Japan got the most, with nine honorees; Canada was second with three. If I made this a national pride thing I might feel bad that the USA only earned one. Then again, South Korea, Germany, the Netherlands, and Israel did no better. Australia, Russia and Singapore got two each. Only one woman won.
Plenty of people who could have gone skipped out. Supposedly, there are around 10,000 foreign experts in Dalian. I’d guess (and I’m horrible at crowd counts) there were at best 2,000 last night. Only two of the five foreign teachers at my school came.
Two things brought me to this event: It was a chance to hear the mayor of Dalian speak, which I’m not embarrassed to be interested in, since this is the guy everyone credits with making this city look nothing like Shenyang. Actually, it’s quite a nice place.
The speeches, where they differed enough to be counted as plural, are barely worth recalling. A few interesting highlights came in the mayor’s remarks. He took the opportunity to tout the city’s economy:
Dalian’s GDP is up 15-16% this year, he said. Considering Beijing’s efforts to reign in local growth, that seems astronomical. Even in a good year, and China has had about 20 of them in a row, that is almost unbelievable. (If there’s an economist out there reading this blog, please help me understand this better)
Troublesome issues: Rising oil prices, a shortage of electricity in Liaoning Province, and a rising RMB exchange value.
He also hyped the city’s environmental efforts: “Dalian’s sky is bluer, the water is cleaner and the air is clearer.” I won’t disagree, but who in China are you going to compare to?
At the end of it he told us: “You are all heroes in the construction of Dalian,” praising our collective “professionalism, devotion and dedication.”
Considering I spend more time updating this blog than teaching some weeks, I hardly feel professional, devoted or dedicated to “the construction of Dalian.”
The second, and perhaps more immediate reason for coming, was a free meal in the best hotel in town, the Shangrila. These people know how to put on a banquet. I forgot to copy down descriptions of all seven courses, which we’ll blame on the wine that kept refilling itself. I remember several meats, abalone, a vegetable soup I didn’t really touch, and sea cucumbers (slugs, really).
I usually have a “try everything” policy with food, especially free food, but I hesitated a bit with the black and tentacled slugs. They have a texture somewhat like weeks-old Jell-O that’s been sitting in the back of the fridge, getting hard and rubbery, losing all its taste. I bit off half of one, dry heaved a bit, spit the unchewed mollusk out into my hand as discretely as possible and dropped it under the table, since I didn’t have a napkin handy. Then I drank more wine.
And I’m especially thrilled considering that CLB’s Dan Harris openly hates this kind of blog, an ESL teacher getting a first look at China. He says it right in the first sentence, and he’s said it before. He makes a good point:
More often than not those blogs seem to focus on how dirty an apartment is, how cheap their last meal was, how they saw some Chinese guy peeing on the street, how they are having trouble making friends, have too many friends, are treated differently because they are foreigners, miss the people back home (who invariably have trouble understanding why they are in China), etc., etc., etc. They also typically lack staying power.
Then he says some gratuitously nice things about me and this blog that really shouldn’t be repeated. I’m a writer with a writer’s ego, fragile and fickle, easily flattered and easier frightened, so such things go to my head.
It’s funny, though, because I almost wrote a post yesterday about the noodle shop on campus, and what a horror it can be sitting at a dirty table, listening to a dozen people slopping noodles down their throats, making the kind of noises my sister would make to tell me I’m eating too loud and making her sick. I endure this because it feeds me for 5 RMB, or about 64 cents.
In fact, everything Dan mentions as the pitfalls of teacher blogs are things I’ve considered writing–in some cases actually written but never posted–but eventually decided against. Sometimes a better blog post came up and I forgot what I meant to write, other times a subject is just overdone elsewhere, or everywhere. It happens a lot, including the last post, when J. and ESWN and James Fallows were way ahead of me. There’s probably little I can observe here that someone hasn’t already seen.
Paul Theroux said something about this in Riding the Iron Rooster. (I don’t have the exact quote, because the book is in my apartment, a 10-minute walk through the snow from here.) All travel literature, he said, is essentially about the traveler more than the destination, since everything has probably been covered before.
I don’t know if I agree with that. What I can say is that there is a far greater commonality in what is seen by observers than I expected when I started this project six months ago, and maybe that’s what keeps us all talking. We’ve all lived in shitty apartments with toilets that don’t work and paint falling off the walls, been stared at and told how great our Chinese is because we can say, “Nihao.” No one who commented on my student’s swipe at the Japanese sounded at all surprised.
We’ve all been through it. We’re all going through it. Not to be repetitive, but we’re all on the same bus.
There is a lie I tell myself every time I travel: My experience is unique, I want to believe, and the poorly written notes I keep in my leather-bound journal are somehow different from what every other observer has seen when passing through this part of the world. That my trip to Dandong is unlike Ryan’s or Dezza’s. That I get a new set of inane questions, not the dumb questions every foreigner seems to get. That I’m shivering in the snow with a slightly altered frequency than everyone else in Dalian.
And yet I’m never really surprised when I find someone writing about the exact same thing I’m about to post. In this case, I was ready to publicize my latest epiphany on Chinese bus-riding, a harrowing ordeal for anyone involved, when I checked the Granite Studio and found a well-timed post on Public Manners in China. J’s post cites Atlantic editor James Fallows, via ESWN. This topic has gone round plenty.
Theories abound as to why people in China don’t seem to acknowledge the existence of other human beings, at least in public. I asked a friend recently: “Do the Chinese actually care about each other?” I didn’t get a clear answer.
Fallows lists the same three culprits I would have: Living under the strain of the world’s largest population probably fosters a certain necessary indifference to others’ humanity. Scraping by, underpaid and underfed, in a country gaining wealth and prestige probably doesn’t help anyone’s psyche. And let’s not forget the Cultural Revolution, which I’ve been guilty of underestimating before. Thirty years is not so long as to forget every thread of society being ripped asunder.
And like Fallows and J. and everyone else who can catalog all these issues, I’m no closer to dealing with them when I try to get on a bus without resorting to something better suited to a karate dojo or a wrestling mat. I’ve had people trip me, yank me out of the way, wedge me out of a seat (yesterday). In Shenyang an older woman braced herself against a railing and slammed me backward into another while we tried to get onto a train platform. Then we had to get onto the train itself.
Fallows believes this is all going to make him a worse human being.
What I do know is that if you exist in this culture, you are shaped by it. I’ve only been exposed to it for a few months, and I’m already responding. After a previous stint in Japan, I realized that I had started bowing while talking on the phone, like the locals, and beginning the typical utterance with sumimasen ga, or “Excuse me, but.†And now….You think you can shove past me in the line at the airport or at the bank? Think again, buster. Since junior high school football I’ve never used my elbows intentionally, as weapons, as I use them now.
I’m hoping he’s wrong, but the fact that three of us all have our own analogies for the techniques required–basketball, football, jiu-jitsu–and now used without hesitation, just to board public transit, makes me worry that he just may be right.
Anyway, here’s my novel experience to add to the fray, written yesterday when I couldn’t get online:
I was standing in line for a bus, trying to maintain some feeling in my fingers, when it hit me: I’m standing in a line, a real line, in China.
No one queues here. No one lines up. No one waits their turn. The usual way of getting on a bus involves shoving, wedging, elbowing, sometimes head-butting your way through a dozen or so people who don’t really care that you’re alive and would rather you weren’t so they’d have an easier time getting seats. People fan out around the door, coming from all angles to squeeze through that one-meter opening. I once stood shoulder to shoulder with a man about my age and roughly the same size (pretty average American build). Neither of us was getting seats, but as we stood there, he tucked his shoulder down, slightly, edging just ahead of me. I saw him doing this and started to counter it, to secure my own place in the scrum, until I realized that neither of us was possibly going to get a seat. The bus was already crowded, and we were at the back of the crowd. We’d get on, because bus drivers here show little concern about over-packing their coaches, but no way in hell would we sit anywhere.
So, today, freezing in the snow, I found myself momentarily back in the West, saying, “Hurry up, already. Why the hell doesn’t this line move?” And then, “Wait, this is a line. Y’know, I’ll take this.”
The last time I woke up to a landscape suddenly white was 16 years ago, in February, I think. I was in 2nd grade. I remember my grandmother, who grew up in Minnesota, looking out the window in disgust. “We moved to California to get away from snow,” she said.
This time, I find myself less eager than back then to rush out into the sudden winter. Maybe the past month of cold has made me less welcoming. Maybe I’m 25 and not 9.
I wanted to see it, though. On my way out I passed a Russian in his underwear. I trudged down the concrete stairs, zipped up my jacket with gloved hands, tucked my scarf under my sweatshirt and pulled my beanie down over my ears. I stopped at the window. The snow is still fascinating when it’s outside.
“Where are you going?” the Russian asked in the usual, unfriendly way. I ignored him.
“Where are you going?” he asked again, more forcefully.
“Out,” I said, like I always do, and walked down the remaining stairs.
Except this time there is snow on the ground and my footsteps would show exactly where I was going. I found myself thinking about an LA Times story I read my students this week about Somali refugees preparing to seek asylum in America:
Staring at pictures of snow-covered roofs and hearing stories about waking up to find a frontyard covered in white, the Somalis (who’d rarely felt temperatures below 60 degrees) peppered the instructor with questions.
“How do I save my family from this … snow?” asked Hassan Mohammed Abrone, 41, a father of two who was already trying to embrace the American lifestyle by wearing a Statue of Liberty baseball cap and a pair of secondhand Nike Airs.
After hearing a description of coats, scarves, gloves and long underwear, another student, Lelya Yussuf, 23, asked: “How can we walk while wearing all that? Isn’t it too heavy?” In an effort to explain snow to people who have never seen it, the instructor asked students to imagine how it would feel to live inside a refrigerator. But the analogy fell flat for some, because they’d never heard of such an appliance.
“How do I save my family from this…snow?” I’ve been asking myself that question all day. Except that most of my family is back in California, where it’s about 62. They need no saving from the snow.
I trekked over to Dalian University of Technology, where I’d heard someone sells or gives away donated American textbooks from a San Francisco non-profit. I didn’t find it. But I did find Chairman Mao, standing resolutely in the cold, showing unwavering revolutionary zeal as the snow piled up on him. Must be good to be made of stone.
There is something gratifying, though, about finally getting real snow, not just the occasional flakes that don’t stick to the ground but always find a way between my scarf and hat to sting my face. This is the stuff you make snowmen out of, that crunches under my hiking boots, that doesn’t feel quite as cold as the wind I’m sure will come back. It feels like the genuine winter I expected when I signed up for a year in Northern China.
About two weeks ago I posted an entry about one of my students, one of my best students, joking about killing “those who do not remember history,” a reference to the Japanese. That post provoked the best discussion this blog has seen in its short lifespan, and I’ve been thinking about ways to follow up. The comments, eight of them, a record for this blog, came in over a week, and I’ve been meaning to respond, to keep the discussion going, because it’s one I find deeply fascinating.
At the root of it, I think, is a question of history and identity, concepts I’ve found compelling since my undergraduate days in Santa Cruz. I’m still getting a handle on Chinese ideas of nationalism and self-awareness.
Two comments in particular struck me as worth following up in a separate post:
I think that IHT article says as much about the weaknesses of Wikipedia or the failures of democratic/participatory systems as it does about Chinese revisionism.
I also have problems with the tone of the article. Why is the failure to mention the Malay connection from 4,000 years ago so significant to the writer?
I go back and forth on Wikipedia. I’d never use it as my only source in a column, primarily because it can be made incorrect so easily, and there’s never any guarantee that someone will fix it. That’s all for another post, though.
And I get that Howard French isn’t winning many popularity contests among China expats these days. And Dave’s critique on TPD makes some strong points. Put all that aside for a moment.
Here’s what I see in the Wikipedia article, and here’s what I see in my classroom every day: Students hate to stand out. They don’t want to give an opinion on anything remotely controversial, they don’t want to stutter their way through a wrong answer and lose face in front of their peers, and they don’t want to show off too much and embarrass the rest of their classmates who haven’t studied.
They equate uniformity with safety.
Now, before anyone leaves a comment saying that this happens everywhere, think back to grade school. Remember the kid who always knew the answer, who always had his hand up first? Is that kid’s Chinese counterpart in any of your classes?
There may be a debate happening about Taiwan or Mao or the one-party system going on in Chinese circles. I don’t expect to ever be in those circles to find out first hand. But I’m not in elite networks in any other country either, and yet I know or can easily find out what debates exist, where the lines are (generally) drawn, who’s on whose side.
Here, politics doesn’t seem to exist in the public sphere, so when Wikipedia becomes available, I suspect there is a deep reticence to include mention of all the complexities that come with national icons who nearly ruin nations, provinces that may or may not be under your control, or a government that can’t be fixed from outside but hasn’t fixed itself from within. The debates are happening, somewhere I’m sure, but whether they are ever acknowledged in public remains a separate matter.
…
Lately, when I’ve had questions about Chinese identity, I’ve poked my head into the Granite Studio. As usual, J. got me thinking with his comment here:
I think the kind of self-censorship, as seen in Wikipedia, has a lot to do with national pride as well. There’s still not the tradition of self-criticism (ironically, enough) of the historical narrative in China.
It’s such a huge part of American graduate history programs: the rewriting of the narrative in ways ever more critical of past events. And this angers many people in the US as much as in China. (Witness the recent Florida bill to mandate the teaching of history “without interpretation.”)
People want to believe that they come from a noble past and the historical record doesn’t always shake out that way. Self-censorship and selective memory become the key means to preserve that noble past.
If the Chinese ever do start taking a hard look at their own history, in a public way, I’d love to be here to watch.
Everything hurts today. Stiff, sore legs; sunburned face. Every bend brings a groan.
It’s that good kind of pain that says, “Damn. Yesterday was good.”
Skiing was a last-minute decision, and like all last-minute decisions, I was unprepared. I’m out of shape. I don’t own anything resembling alpine attire. I haven’t buckled a clunky set of ski boots, rode a chair lift or stared down a mountain and thought, “as fast as possible” in exactly 10 years.
The last time I wore skis was my freshman year of high school, when my family still took vacations together, six of us crammed into an SUV for a trip to Mammoth. And we barely got on the mountain that last trip. It rained most of the time.
It all comes back though, like riding a bike, for lack of a better analogy. The first run was awkward, my turns required that snowplow move that beginners do as they make slow S-shapes down the bunny slopes. But after that first run, damn, I could go all day, faster and faster, just find me a bigger hill.
That proved to be the biggest challenge: making a quarter-mile of man-made snow into something worth skiing. I spent most of our three hours out there on the steepest of three runs, first carving through powder then skidding down the ice as the shadows came later in the day. I loved it.
It was all the better because there were 20 of us, almost all expats, going up together. That made it 20 RMB cheaper and the crowded ride up that much more like a demented version of my old family vacations. Except nobody passed around bongs and beer on the family vacations. Maybe that’s not the best comparison after all.
Anyway, it was just what I needed, and the aches today are something I looked forward to yesterday.
Oh, and a hat tip to Valehru, who organized the trip. Thanks for getting us all out there. Video is coming soon.
I shaved my head for the second time since coming to Dalian. Now, that wouldn’t be news anywhere else in the world. If it were a prelude to joining the military or the monastery, maybe, but really, how exciting is a haircut?
Exciting enough that Will, the Canadian teacher here, heard about it in his class, and students were still talking about it (in ways I would hear) a week later. Back in September, a sudden loss of about a pound of curly blond fluff was my first claim to fame in my backwater fishing college.
At one point, three girls from my Oral English class cornered me in the library to tell me, “We’ve decided that we liked your hair before, but this is also very handsome.”
Just for added entertainment, I let my friend Naoko do the trimming. I mean, how bad can you really mess up a shear-job. Let’s just detail the damage in pictures, shall we?
My sister cuts hair for a living. She’s very good at it. If she sees these pictures, I suspect she’ll either be laughing for a week or cursing my perpetual lack of taste and style.
For 20 minutes Naoko hacked at my scalp with the clippers. She pulled at a chunk of hair and swooped the buzzing blade under it. She never stopped laughing.
At the end, I took the clippers back and re-did the whole haircut myself.
That’s a direct quote. From the best student in my worst class. She’s referring, of course, to the Japanese.
I spent this week reading my grad students a story from the Washington Post about a month ago, just before the US population hit 300 million people. It makes a good opener for a discussion on over-population in general, especially when I can write “300,000,000″ on the board, then put a 1 in front for China.
When the U.S. population surpassed 200 million on a census clock in 1967, cheers rang through the lobby of the Commerce Department, and applause interrupted President Lyndon B. Johnson’s celebratory speech.
Four decades later, however, 300 million seems to be greeted more with hand-wringing ambivalence than chest-thumping pride.
“When we hit 100 million, it was a celebration of America’s might in the world,” said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California. “When we hit 200 million, we were solidifying our position. But at 300 million, we are beginning to be crushed under the weight of our own quality-of-life degradation.”
I’ve been using current events lately as a back-door kind of way to actually talk politics with my students. Using another country as a proxy–the US is a good one, but I’ve used Kosovo, too–seems to get around their unwillingness to give an opinion about anything happening in China. (Peter Hessler described doing this in River Town, which is where I got the idea, and I have friends who do the same thing.)
Their big question this week: Should America try to limit its population growth? Does America need a one-child policy or a freeze on immigration?
It was a split decision, and that always makes me happy. It means they don’t know what the Party line is, and maybe they’re thinking a bit on their own. What more could a teacher want?
But the interesting discussion came later. Walking out of class, I was behind a group of my students, and one girl dropped back. She’s leagues beyond any of her peers, in both ability and interest, and I never mind talking to her. She has traveled some, too, and tends to bring up unique ideas in class (like raising the price of gasoline in Beijing during the Olympics to reduce traffic and smog, along with more long-term solutions).
“We were discussing how to limit the population in Japan,” she said. Japan doesn’t need to limit its population, I thought. It’s anemic. But OK, sure, I’ll go with this.
“How would you limit the Japanese population?” I asked, nervous about the answer I’d get.
“To kill those who do not remember history.” And that’s what I was afraid of.
She continued, telling me about rude Japanese customers at her old job and other such gripes. “Do you know any Japanese people?” I asked. She didn’t. I decided not to mention the three Japanese teachers working at the college, who are good friends of mine. She added that she really just hates the government, not the people. Sure.
In fairness, the Japanese have plenty to atone for in Dalian and northeast China, starting with a half-century of occupation that ended with World War II. Another Japanese friend of mine came here in part because he felt he owed something to this region that his country had so mistreated. He’s 65, so it’s within living memory for him.
And his memory seems uniquely undiluted here. I found this story in the International Herald Tribune. Unsurprisingly, the Japanese aren’t the only ones “who do not remember history.”
According to the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia (blocked at the moment) “Mao Zedong’s reputation is unsullied by any mention of a death toll in the great purges of the 1950s and 1960s, or for what many historians call the greatest famine in human history,” Howard French writes.
When I read this, I can’t help thinking of all the times my students have told me, emphatically and without a moment’s doubt, that Taiwan is, and always has been, part of China. There’s just no debate in their minds. Or if there is, they bury it so deep that no one would ever know, lest they be labeled as unpatriotic. Maybe this is only a front when foreigners are around, but it’s widespread enough that I’m pretty sure it runs deeper.
The English-language version of the encyclopedia speaks of a Japanese shipwreck off Taiwan in 1871, in which 54 crew members were beheaded by Taiwanese aborigines. Japan demanded compensation from China, only to be told that Taiwan was not within China’s jurisdiction. The Chinese-language entry on Taiwan, meanwhile, is silent on the jurisdiction question.
Similarly, the English-language Wikipedia mentions the settlement of Taiwan by aborigines who are genetically related to Malaysians, about 4,000 years ago. It also places the first meaningful settlement of the island by Chinese in the 16th century.
The Chinese version of Wikipedia, though, merely speaks of cultural affinities with Malaysians and speculates about the possible exploration of the island by Chinese as far back as the third century.
All this makes me think of an essay I read months ago. One that still deserves attention. Blogger Kyle Davis makes the case for why the Chinese people don’t just put up with censorship, they want it. It keeps anyone from having unpleasant discussions about just how their government might not always do the right thing.
What continues to amaze me is how deep the conformity runs and how ferocious the indoctrinated jingoism can be. What does a government have to do to make an otherwise gentle and in all other ways intelligent young woman joke about genocide?
Why does my student say, even in jest, that we should “kill those who do not remember history”?
. (I don’t have the exact quote, because the book is in my apartment, a 10-minute walk through the snow from here.) All travel literature, he said, is essentially about the traveler more than the destination, since everything has probably been covered before.
, which is where I got the idea, and I have friends who do the same thing.)
