June 29th, 2007 Chris
About a month ago, Marc Ravalomanana, the president of Madagascar, offered the African Development Bank a prescription for aiding the rest of the continent. Among his recommendations: opening up trade, promoting private industry and an ongoing focus on infrastructure development.
The story caught my eye because of Ravalomanana’s audience. He was speaking in Shanghai. “We have to establish the right environment for foreign investment as well as for the private sector,” China Daily quoted him saying.
I pull this story out of the clip files now because in just over a week, I’ll be boarding a plane from Beijing to Antananarivo for a two-month trip to Madagascar. The trip is mostly a vacation (not that I’ve earned one), and a chance to see the girlfriend who went off to the Peace Corps just before I moved to China. While I’m there, a big question on my mind will be one Andrew Leonard of How the World Works asked a while back:
Why is China gaining wealth and emerging as a superpower, while Africa remains mired in persistent, worsening poverty? Why can’t Africa (or many underdeveloped regions, for that matter) be another China?
I’ve been hesitant to announce this trip for fear that alerting the blogosphere would set off some karmic chain reaction and somehow spoil the whole thing. I almost went in January, then canceled and ended up in South Korea where there was a prospect of work and a real paycheck. But it’s really happening now. My plane ticket should (is there a way to digitally knock on wood?) be waiting for me in Beijing, and all I have left to do in Dalian is finish up grades, take the GRE on Tuesday (half of it, anyway) and pack.
And say goodbye to all the truly fantastic people I’ve spent the past year with, most of whom won’t be in China when I get back. That’s going to be tough.
I’m packing my Chinese books, which I keep telling myself I’ll look at once a day. My teacher promised to look over my character exercises when I get back here in late August.
Here’s the plan: I fly out of Beijing on July 9, so I’ll head to the capital a few days before and crash on my friend Lindsey’s couch. This is where I spent my first few nights in China, jet-lagged and bedazzled, so there’s a sense of coming full-circle on my first year in the Middle Kingdom.
The flight goes through Bangkok, though not long enough to revisit to Khao San Road. I arrive around 8 a.m. in Antananarivo, bringing travel time to around 20 hours. This is one of the shorter routes to the island nation. Madagascar is about as far as it gets from anywhere.
Posts are likely to be infrequent over the summer. Madagascar is one of the poorest nations on Earth (despite being relatively peaceful and democratic) and internet access is a luxury where it exists at all. I am bringing the laptop, mostly to reacquaint the aforementioned girlfriend with DVDs and digital music, so I will keep writing and taking photos.
This might be a good time to add me to your RSS reader, since posts will likely come in a flood, whenever I can connect. Figure there will be something on the Chinese market in Antananarivo included, plus lots about beaches and lemurs.
I’m heading to Beijing next Thursday or Friday. If anybody in the capital wants to meet up and grab a beer/coffee/lunch, shoot an email to eyeseast at gmail.com. More soon.
Posted in roadside blogging | 5 Comments »
June 25th, 2007 Chris
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
—Douglas Adams, via Most Grave Concern
I need to read more Douglas Adams. Anybody who writes sentences like “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t” ought to be on my shelf, assuming I had a shelf and could buy such relevant books in Dalian.
I will be buying books, though. I’ve already started. Everyone’s advice last week confirmed what I really did want to do. I’m going to study Chinese full time next year. It’s looking like Dalian University of Technology will be the lucky winner of my tuition money, on the recommendation of my friend Adam, whose Chinese sounds frighteningly impressive until you hear his Japanese. I’ve a long way to go.
I actually decided all this a week ago, after all the great comments poured in, mostly from people I’ve never met except through blogging. Those interweb tubes are a comfort sometimes, warm like my overheating core duo processor. But I’ve been holding off on posting, in part because I couldn’t figure out how to put into words why I really want to learn Chinese. It’s too daunting a language to take lightly, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to learn it.
A few days after this post I keep mentioning, I was on the bus heading for Chinese class, when a worker on his way out of the city sat down next to me. He smiled when I said “Nihao,” showing teeth that looked like year-old candy corn in a face that could be described as “well-traveled” in the way old suitcases often are.
Well-traveled described nearly everything about him, actually. He was from Sichuan, now working in Dalian building skyscrapers he’ll likely never set foot in. When I met him, he and four cohorts were on the first, and shortest, leg of a long journey home. We talked about how much he made working construction—”too little”—and how much it would cost to get back to Sichuan—”too much.” There was more, plenty to complain about, but I hit the limits of my speaking ability.
I got off the bus and watched it continue north up Renmin Lu. It’s a long way to Sichuan.
People who travel have always fascinated me. It’s part of why I like lighting out myself, to meet others who ditched one life for another. Mostly, this means I talk to a lot of backpackers who are here (wherever “here” is) because they can be. Take away the luxury of choice, and the trip gets much more interesting.
Last year, with utterly no Chinese ability, I’d have shrugged off that conversation on the bus, offered a “ting bu dong” and gone back to a book. I’d have done it on the cable car tonight, too, and in the taxi every weekend.
With what little of the language I’ve picked up, one thing keeps coming back. Without speaking Chinese, much of this country just doesn’t exist. It remains foreign, intimidating, inaccessible. It’s possible to live in Dalian without knowing more than “nihao” and “xie xie;” I’ve seen plenty of English teachers and IT workers do it.
But that’s just not interesting enough anymore. More to come. 别急.
Side note: Thanks again to everyone who commented before with great ideas and input.
Alex, Bernard, Jason, Kevin S., Rick, CLB, Chris Waugh (btw, I’m much taller than a bar of soap, though just as ivory white these days), D_sh, Yadira and Rob.
I think you all knew exactly what I wanted. Thanks for saying it.
Posted in self-indulgence | 3 Comments »
June 23rd, 2007 Chris
The eldest children in families tend to develop slightly higher IQs than their younger siblings, researchers were to report Friday, citing a large study that could effectively settle more than a half-century of scientific debate about the relationship between IQ and birth order.
Finally, evidence. Turns out it’s not biology, but the little niches that form within families that make first-borns just a touch sharper. We also tend to be more cautious and duty-bound.
I found myself nodding along with this story and picking out my siblings, going, “Yeah, that’s Mike.” Especially this part:
Another potential explanation concerns how individual siblings find a niche in the family. Some studies find that both the older and younger siblings tend to describe the firstborn as more disciplined, responsible, a better student. Studies suggest - and parents know from experience - that to distinguish themselves, younger siblings often develop other skills, like social charm, a good curveball, mastery of the electric bass, acting skills.
“Like Darwin’s finches, they are eking out alternative ways of deriving the maximum benefit out of the environment, and not directly competing for the same resources as the eldest,” Sulloway said. “They are developing diverse interests and expertise that the IQ tests do not measure.”
This kind of experimentation might explain evidence that younger siblings often live more adventurous lives than eldest siblings. They are more likely to participate in dangerous sports than eldest children, and more likely to travel to exotic places, studies find. They tend to be less conventional in general than firstborns, and some of the most provocative and influential figures in science spent their childhoods in the shadow of an older brother or sister (or two or three or four).
My youngest brother Mike taught himself bass, guitar and drums in about 18 months. My sister Katie, the only girl in the family, pulls down more cash than the other three of us combined cutting hair and will knock your front teeth out if you’re not careful. Nick is the charmer. He has, as our cousin describes it, “the ability to turn a bucket of B.S. into a bucket o’ gold.” I’m just a regular guy in China.
But at least I’ve got ‘em beat on IQ…
Posted in self-indulgence | 2 Comments »
June 21st, 2007 Chris
On the charge of forgetting history, 44 Japanese lawmakers and a contingent of “professors, journalists, [and] political commentators” plead, “Uh, what are we on trial for again?” At least, that seems the message of a full-page ad in the Washington Post, claiming to present the facts about comfort women (h/t: Global Voices):
“No historical document has ever been found by historians or research organisations that positively demonstrates that women were forced against their will into prostitution by the Japanese army,” the ad said under the title, in bold letters, “THE FACTS”.
“The ianfu (comfort women) who were embedded with the Japanese army were not, as is commonly reported, ’sex slaves’,” it said.
“They were working under a system of licensed prostitution that was commonplace around the world at the time,” the ad said.
Many of the women made more money than field officers “and even generals”, it said.
The ad acknowledged there were cases of “breakdowns in discipline”.
“Criticism for events that actually occurred must be humbly embraced,” the ad said.
“But apologies over unfounded slander and defamation will not only give the public an erroneous impression of historical reality but could negatively affect the friendship between the United States and Japan,” it said.
The Marmot’s Hole in South Korea is all over this, giving a point-by-point rebuttal. Lee Yong-soo might have her own facts to add. The 78-year-old Korean woman was hardly a volunteer or an entrepreneur, as she recounted to AFP earlier this year:
Lee said she was snatched as a teenager from her house in Korea, then a Japanese colony, and taken first to Pyongyang, then to Dalian and finally to Taiwan, where she was raped and tortured for around three years.
“I cried, ‘Mother, Mother,’ but they never stopped. They used electric shocks to torture me. They kicked me. They cut me,” she said tearfully in broken Japanese.
“After I returned home after the war, I did not tell anyone about what happened to me,” she said.
She said she has been staging protests for 16 years outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul to demand an apology.
“Japan forcibly took me away. I am a living witness. I will tell my story wherever,” she said. “I demand the prime minister of Japan apologize.”
That was after Shinzo Abe’s memory failed him. He recovered, but the condition seems to be spreading:
‘No massacre in Nanking,’ Japanese lawmakers say
About 100 Japanese governing party lawmakers denounced the Nanjing Massacre as a fabrication on Tuesday, contesting Chinese claims that Japanese soldiers killed hundreds of thousands of people after seizing the Chinese city in 1937.
…
Toru Toida, another member of the group, demanded that photographs portraying the Japanese military in a negative light be removed from Chinese war memorials. “We are absolutely positive that there was no massacre in Nanking,” Toida said.
So much for a spring thaw in Sino-Japanese relations. Seriously guys, what are you thinking here? This kind of thing makes otherwise sane Chinese students want to kill you.
Murrow had it right: This just might not do anybody any good.
Posted in News | 1 Comment »
June 19th, 2007 Chris
On certain days, according to certain people, Dalian has a population somewhere around 2 million. The next day, if you ask someone else, more than 6 million live in the city. So, really, how many people live in Dalian?
Well, Alex finally did some much needed digging for our new site and posted the breakdown. Turns out both numbers are right, sort of, because Dalian isn’t really just Dalian. Consider:
Zhongshan District (ä¸å±±åŒº zhÅngshÄn qÅ«),
Xi Gang District (西岗区 xīgǎng qū),
Sha He Kou District (沙河å£åŒº shÄhékÇ’u qÅ«),
Gang Jing Zi District (甘井å区 gÄnjÇngzÇ qÅ«)
and slightly further afield:
Lushun Kou District (旅顺å£åŒº lÇšshùnkÇ’u qÅ«),
Jinzhou District (金州区 jÄ«nzhÅu qÅ«)
plus Kai Fa Qu (å¼€å‘区) and Jin Shi Tan (金石滩 jÄ«nshÃtÄn) lying within the region of Jinzhou District.
The Dalian Region further consists:
Wafangdian County (瓦房店市),
Pulandian County (普兰店市) and
Zhuganghe County (庄河市 zhuÄnghé shì). Note the Chinese character ‘市’ means city, in English these would be county-level cities.
There are also some outlying islands, Chang Hai County.
What does it add up to? Two million in what I’d properly call the city. Six million in Greater Dalian. A full explanation is at DalianDalian.com.
Posted in the Dalian life | 3 Comments »
June 18th, 2007 Chris
It’s good to be from a country that makes a national pastime of taking the piss out of its political leaders. Enjoy!
Make your own at Current TV (via Teaching Online Journalism)
Posted in self-indulgence | 1 Comment »
June 15th, 2007 Chris
Danwei reports that Wikipedia is unblocked. I just checked and it’s free and clear in Dalian. Here’s Dalian’s entry.
Posted in News | No Comments »
June 13th, 2007 Chris
For the second time in a week, a fire broke out yesterday at Dalian Fisheries University, where I live and have taught since last September. A dozen researchers watched their living quarters be consumed by a fast-moving blaze while they stood in their laboratory across the way.
The best guess of everyone on scene was that bad wiring sparked the blaze. That’s how another fire started last week in the library: a poorly maintained electrical panel, according to my students. Yesterday’s fire took two minutes to spread through several dorm rooms in the southwest corner of campus. No one was hurt.
Three women were in one of the rooms that burned. According to people on scene, they went out a window and climbed across a narrow ledge to an adjacent rooftop to wait for rescue. Much of what they owned was destroyed.
I was at a cafe down the street when the fire trucks came barreling through the neighborhood. Smoke was visible, and the smell of charcoal spread throughout campus as sirens wailed from Heishijiao.
I legged it up the hill to my building—lungs punishing me; I’m completely out of shape—to grab my camera and voice recorder. I slowed to a fast walk, and it hit me how calm everyone was. There’s a fire on campus, firemen are blasting water at a burning building a few hundred yards away, and everyone just looks bored. How often does this happen?
A burly, thuggish man stopped me just past the gate, a hundred yards or so from the burning building. I could see one red truck and its crew spraying water over the blackened frame. My eyes aren’t good enough to pick out details at that range, though. I inched forward, and the man—he wore no uniform, and showed no other purpose except to keep prying eyes away—put a hand on my shoulder. I moved around him and kept taking photos at full zoom with my point-and-shoot, careful to keep the camera out of his reach.
When I pointed to the charred building and asked what happened, he said, “Nothing happened,” and told me to leave again. Nothing to see here.
Around back, smoke kept pouring out one window. Punched out panes and frames lay at the foot of the dormitory, barbecued and thrown to the ground by the heat inside. Students and workers gawked in silence.
The smoke continued after the fire crews left. Residents of the wrecked building gathered around the crumbling doorway while a few pulled on galoshes and went inside to search out what remained of their belongings.
One fished out a soaked and soot-covered yearbook from his scorched and now water-logged dorm. He and his hall mates flipped through the heavy pages, laughing at the memories and that they survived. A few feet from their wrecked quarters, they were all smiles.
Others let their sorrow show. The women who’d escaped out the window were somber; one cried on a friend’s shoulder. Some of the residents had large amounts of cash in their rooms; all of it burned. One man, who lost everything but the clothes he was wearing, stood dumbfounded at the scene. A department manager consoled him, then opened her purse and handed him a wad of 100-yuan notes, all she was carrying.
But the mood was light for the situation. “We’re not inside,” one of the researchers told me with an uneasy grin as he pointed out his room. A black halo ringed his window. “We just watched.”
—
I have more pictures and audio of the fire’s aftermath. I’ll post it and possibly make a Soundslides tonight if technology cooperates. At the moment I can’t upload anything directly to my server and GarageBand doesn’t like the audio file my cheap voice recorder spits out. I’ll work on it, though. Stay tuned.
Posted in the Dalian life | 2 Comments »
June 13th, 2007 Chris
There’s a sweet little plugin making the rounds this week that will get you Flickring like new. John at Sinosplice tipped off Ryan, who stuck it up on his site and Lost Laowai. Now I give it to you. Isn’t the blogosphere wonderful?
Oh, and Net Nanny, my earlier sentiment still applies.
On a side note, I was talking to Alex, Rick and Kerrilee over a beer last night, and we were trying to figure out just when the block came down.
If memory serves correctly (no guarantee of such things) we reasoned that it was around 11 a.m. local time last Friday, since two of us were uploading photos right about then. By our reasoning—and this is only the supposition of idle minds and alcohol—the GFW’s work flow might involve a meeting in the morning, word passed to censors and ISPs, then the block coming down shortly thereafter. We’re pretty certain it started with the Xiamen protests. Can anybody corroborate any of this?
Posted in News | 2 Comments »
June 12th, 2007 Chris
OK, so I try not to do this too often, but I need some advice from the blogosphere, which is full of people far smarter than me who’ve apparently got things far more figured out. Enough vaguely directed flattery? Alright, here’s my quandary:
I’m staying in China another year (at least), and I have no desire to teach another semester at my current university. This probably isn’t a shock to anyone. I have two options on the table.
I could study Chinese full time. A month or so ago, I tossed around the idea of going intensive on the language over coffee with Alex, and he turned it around and said he was planning on doing so himself. DongCai, where Alex just enrolled, is my top choice right now, or Dalian University of Technology. Both are close to my current neighborhood, and I’m consistently impressed by my friends who study at both colleges.
Cost: 8,000 RMB per semester, plus housing.
This would be intense, maybe working on the side, plowing all energy into getting good and functional, if not fluent, as fast as possible. Haven’t done anything like it in years.
Work. I have a job offer, of sorts, from a tech company in Dalian, doing marketing and research. The job would entail coaxing companies to set up outsourcing centers in China and giving their managers all the information necessary to sell said decision internally. This would be (gulp) a real job. It pays better than teaching, though less on a per-hour basis. The two prime benefits are flexibility and learning. “You basically get to invent your own career,” one of my potential coworkers, who is Swiss, told me after I interviewed.
The downside is that working 40+ hours a week would pretty well sideline language study. I’m sure I’ll keep improving, but I don’t expect to be close to fluent if I go this route. (It would also make freelancing difficult, but since I’ve barely sold anything all year, that hardly seems worth considering at this point.)
In my head, this is all coming down to a question of how committed I am to China. I told myself before I came that I’d stay through the Olympics, come what may. I went through this same pounding-my-head-on-a-wall process a year ago, when I ultimately decided to turn down a Peace Corps invitation to Cape Verde in favor of teaching in China.
A better question, which I keep trying ask myself, is what’s more important/useful/practical to learn now, language or business, and on that one, I’m utterly stumped. I still have every intention of returning to journalism at some point, sooner rather than later, so all this goes into the context of what’s likely to make me a better writer and reporter down the line.
Thoughts anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Posted in self-indulgence | 13 Comments »
