China’s to-do list, according to my students

Anyone who’s taught in a Chinese university likely knows the perils of soliciting students’ opinions. There’s a predictability to it, you can almost guess the answer before it comes, and many will flat out refuse to register a thought. But us foreigners can be just as guilty of this, of refusing to engage, of thinking the Three Ts are secretly at the top Chinese students’ agendas, too. I’ve certainly made that mistake in the past.

“No one ever asks us what we think,” one of my students told me after class on Monday. I asked them one question: “If Hu Jintao decided you should be the next president or prime minister of China, what would be on your to-do list?” Here’s what they wrote:

• Improve standard of living (4)
• build more roads
• protect the environment (5)
• rebuild our lost civilization
• reform the college entrance exam (2)
• improve medical care for farmers/peasants (2)
• make the country more democratic (3)
• prepare for the 2008 Olympics
• control the population size (2)
• conserve water
• reduce/eliminate college fees
• change China’s relationship with Japan (2)
• limit the use of oil and coal
• education reform (5)
• help the poor (3)
• set the minimum age to marry at 25
• call on all children to play football (soccer)
• let foreigners play on China’s soccer team
• lessen the income gap
• cut taxes (2)
• Hope Project
• develop Western China
• protect endangered animals
• improve traffic
• make food safer
• give everyone a car
• pay more attention to polls
• give more funding to the army (2); to education (3); to scientific research (2); health care (3)
• take back Taiwan (4)
• make buses free
• expand Chinese culture around the world (2)

Links are mine. I lumped some things together, cleaned up the grammar as best I could, but otherwise tried to stay true to what the students wrote. These are all freshmen, ages 18-20, in an elective English class. They’re considered the best in their majors, but this is the first class they’ve all taken together.

I kept the brainstorming anonymous, because even empowered with opinions, I’ve met few students (I teach close to 300) who are ready to stand up and defend an idea that isn’t already widely accepted. Otherwise, two things strike me about this list:

It’s overwhelmingly domestic. Few suggestions even referenced China’s neighbors, and those were old strawmen, Taiwan and Japan. One student wanted to invade both, but only one.

There’s much to be done. Democracy got a few votes, but not as many as education reform and environmental protection. Every student had at least one issue of their own, and the overlaps were shallow.

What would you add? Has anybody else asked their students?

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Things we can’t talk about

It’s a rare Chinese cabbie that can speak English, but on my second night in China, while slumming it with friends in Beijing, our driver saw three westerners get in his car and my mother tongue came pouring out. He went right for the good stuff, too, or rather the bad stuff. He wanted to swear like a native speaker.

We took him through the basics: “Fuck that,” “Those fuckers,” “That’s bullshit.” It was international cooperation through cussing. He tried it out on passing cars on the Second Ring Road, who gave plenty of excuse for vulgarity.

I lost the conversation when it turned to Chinese, but my friend Lindsey, who has lived here three years, kept chatting with him. My mind drifted to the passing lights of the Beijing night and my future in China and other insignificant things until a familiar word brought my attention back into the cab.

Tiananmen.

“Was he there?” I asked Lindsey. “Yes,” she said quickly before switching back to Mandarin.

And finally we came to the driver’s real reason for needing those choice English phrases.

“That was fucked up,” he said of the 1989 massacre. “It was bullshit.”

—

Foreign teachers like to talk about all those things we can’t talk about. We joke about the three — “Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen” — and Falun Gong, and politics, and everything our students and employers like to pretend doesn’t exist. A year of this has left me exhausted. Something twitched in me last night, and I just said, “Screw it, I’m curious.”

OK, so I didn’t show BBC videos from 18 years ago, and I didn’t read Nick Kristof’s account of the massacre from China Wakes. Actually, we didn’t talk about it at all.

I wrote the date on the board: June 4. “Does today have any significance to any of you?” I asked 30 college freshmen. The oldest among them is 20, so it’s a matter of what they’ve heard, what they’ve learned in school, and what they’ve found on their own.

Silence.

I added the year. “Does anyone know what happened on June 4, 1989?”

Blank stares.

I’ve embarrassed my students enough to know when they’re holding back. They stare at their desks, avert their eyes and suffer a sudden loss of all ability to speak English. Every student in this class was staring at me, dumbfounded, with no idea what I was talking about.

Which doesn’t really surprise me. It is, after all, taboo. The Net Nanny knows her job.

One student finally whispered as I passed, “Do you mean…Tiananmen?”

Today I asked one of my better graduate students on the way out of class what he knew about Tiananmen. He shrugged: “Maybe they had too much free time. I don’t really know what it was about. You know, I was small when all that happened.”

—

It’s possible I just did something monumentally stupid. I could get a call any minute now from the foreign affairs office for a proper dressing down because I brought politics into the classroom, though my contract makes no mention of any such rule (religion is the only subject specifically barred). Maybe they’re already processing the deportation paperwork.

But I doubt it.

First, my university has never shown any interest in what happens in my classroom. I’m certain no one was aware that I missed a class last month after spending a night regurgitating bad clams. If the department cared, they’d have given us books. And second, my students are the university’s best defense against controversy. While the younger students are curious, the older set tell me, time and again, “We (Chinese) don’t like to talk about politics.”

The interest gap might be worth pursuing, though. Before bringing up Tiananmen, I put my class of freshmen through a less controversial exercise: Pretend you’re the next president of China. What would you change? What needs fixing? Thirty lists came back, each with four or five bullet points, and almost no subject overlapping.

Build more roads. Lessen the income gap. Take back Taiwan. Reform the college entrance exams. Nothing revolutionary, but they’re thinking (I’ll give the complete list in a follow-up post). “No one else asks us what we think,” one student told me after class, the same one who knew what yesterday was.

There are reasons to remember Tiananmen, and reasons to forget. It’s easy to get caught up in the Three Ts, to snicker about controversy, to poke at Chinese nationalism and national forgetfulness. But it’s hardly the top issue for my students, who will have to figure out where this country is headed long after I give up and go back to a more familiar locale.

Who is talking:

Global Voices Online » Hong Kong and China: June 4, 18 Years Later

Eighteen Years Later, Memories of Tiananmen Massacre Online :: China Digital Times (CDT)

RConversation: On eBay: Tiananmen Massacre PLA Medal Watch

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My students fought the power–and won

My students can be a docile bunch. Simple questions get simpler answers, and complex questions yield 31 pairs of downcast eyes. Asking “What do you think?” is usually the most frustrating part of my day.

So I was pleasantly surprised on Wednesday when a student, who is usually talkative anyway, sought me out at a cafe near campus to tell me: “We went on strike today.”

All three of my undergraduate classes, 93 students total, staged a protest this week against the university’s plan to send its foreign language department to an auxiliary campus in Lushun, about an hour bus ride from the school’s current site on HeiShiJiao Street.

I should note here that no one from the English department has ever officially told me of this plan; I heard about it from students. When I asked the Foreign Affairs office, my liaison told me, “Maybe in September some departments will move.” He added that teachers would still live at the current campus, but they’d take a bus down to their classes. When I asked where his information came from, he said he too heard it all from students.

Whatever uncertainty exists in this plan, there was enough substance to spook my students into action. On Wednesday morning, they surrounded the administration building, and when the department heads walked out, they shouted at the administrators to let them stay in Dalian.

OK, so it wasn’t subtle or eloquent, and they’ll probably catch hell for it. But they won.

As one student, whose English name is Stream, put it: “We have struggled for this decision and we have succeeded.”

They argued, once things quieted down, that the university had told them nothing of moving to Lushun when they enrolled two years ago. The administration was effectively breaking a contract with them by relocating their department without consultation.

“Before we came to this university, we didn’t know we would move to another school, so we didn’t accept it,” Stream said.

It sounds like incoming students will still be sent south. Dalian Foreign Language University is already there, and Medical University is set to move in July. Students and teachers from both schools have been complaining for months.

There are two problems with Lushun: It’s 45 minutes from the main university area in Dalian, and probably 90 minutes or more from downtown. Getting there is tricky, and it’s not as developed as the main city.

It’s also restricted. Because there’s a naval base at the southern tip of the peninsula, foreigners risk detention or worse going down there. Friends of mine have been fined and delayed by going where they shouldn’t, entirely by accident. It’s a sketchy situation.

My friend Kerrilee visited the new Medical University site with some of her colleagues from that school. While there, they planted what she called “memorial trees to remember our foreign teachers.” There won’t be many next year.

For students, studying in Lushun means isolation from a growing and dynamic city. It means going downtown to shop or visit friends is now a day-trip.

“We just did it for ourselves, and for our department and students, for everyone,” Stream told me. “Everyone doesn’t want to move. That is so remote a place.”

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Is there luck without the Irish?

The Tin Whistle has been sold.

I was sitting in Starbucks on Friday afternoon when my phone buzzed. It was my friend Matt, one of two guys who started the Irish bar downtown. He sounded distracted, maybe a little more emotional that usual.

“So, uh, I just wanted to say, uh, we sold the bar.”

“You what?”

“Yeah, we sold it, so this is our last night in the bar.”

And at that point I was sort of dumbstruck. Didn’t they love running the Whistle? Just a few months ago Matt was telling me about expanding, making it more of a restaurant. They’ve been serving Irish breakfast (eggs, bacon, sausage, tomato, baked beans) since the start of the year. “Who did you sell it to?” I asked.

“Some Chinese people. Anyway, this is our last night in the bar.”

I didn’t make it down to the Whistle on Friday for Matt and Eddie’s last night, and I haven’t seen either of them since. What I gather from people who were there is that they just got tired of it. The business was becoming a job, and neither left their homes in Ireland to spend all their time working. Eddie is on pension, and Matt does some part time consulting. Both realized a few years ago that living on Euros in China was a lot easier than scraping by on fixed income in Europe.

When I think about it, though, it’s not all that surprising to see them give up the bar. The place has been dead empty the last few times I’ve been in. Except for twice-monthly poker nights, there just hasn’t been much happening, and the owners were becoming a rarer site.

Matt broke his foot on St. Patrick’s Day, a few minutes after that poker tournament I almost won. He walked out of the bar sometime after 3 a.m., stumbled on the steps, and ended up in the hospital. He didn’t return for two months.

That seemed to take a lot out of him. It sapped his desire to run the place and kept him homebound for weeks. Eddie started showing up less and less, too, and they let another guy manage the bar for a while.

When I told people that the Whistle had been sold, the reaction was little more than a widespread shrug. I have a sentimental attachment to the place because it was the first bar I found in Dalian, and I have good memories there. I’m curious to see what becomes of it, but part of me doesn’t want to go back. I’m afraid of what it will be, and some memories are best left untouched.

The new owner used to work in the bar, and she’s a former classmate of Matt’s wife. For now, it will remain an Irish-themed bar, but I don’t know if you can still get Irish credit without Irish owners, though. It needs more than wood paneling and Guinness on tap. There might be rules about this.

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Apple Store Opens in Dalian

Whenever people see my computer, the first response is a quiet gasp, then an amazed stare, then the question: “Is that an…Apple?”

Shocking, but yes, I’m a Mac guy. I bought my black MacBook last August, and I love it.

And I’m stoked. A licensed Apple retailer opened today in Dalian, between Friendship Square and Zhongshan Square on Zhongshan Lu.

The retail outlet is a direct seller, and prices are the same as Apple’s online store, according to store staff. The walls yesterday were half-filled with iPods and accessories, while the rest of the interior was still being assembled. One iMac was up, but not running.

There’s some question of who can afford to buy a Mac, which is still about a third more expensive than a PC. Incomes are rising everywhere, but it’s still hard to find a Chinese person crossing over.

I get a lot of, “You can run Windows on that,” too. Why would I do such a thing? Ick.

Dragon Star Apple Store

#5 Zhongshan Lu, Dalian

dl_applestore@126.com

0411-82656523

The photo above was taken with my laptop’s built in camera, because I forgot my real point-n-shoot at home. Cool, huh?

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Dalian’s clean, but is it really open?

Part of what drew me to Dalian over bigger, possibly more lucrative cities was it’s reputation for being more livable than first-tier locales like Beijing and Shanghai. “Clean and open” is almost an unofficial slogan, and I find myself using it quite often. The descriptors require a caveat—”by Chinese standards”—but compared to other places I’ve traveled in the Middle Kingdom, Dalian holds up.

Chinese may not see it that way, though. Samuel, a well-traveled IT worker who hails from Benxi, laid it out for me in English corner Wednesday night.

“In other cities, you work for a few years, you get a house, start a family, you start to say, ‘This is my city,’” he said. “In Dalian, even if you live here, have a family here, you’re still not Dalianese. So, I don’t think Dalian is open.”

I turned to the two women at the table, one from Changchun, the other from Yinkou. They nodded in agreement.

This had me curious, so I put it to my oral English students today. Sure enough, Dalian people have a reputation of looking down their noses at newcomers.

This could all be unfettered snobbery, the same sort displayed between Los Angeles- and San Francisco-ren and probably shared in most moderately-successful Chinese cities. But maybe it’s bigger.

“The Mongols and Manchu became Chinese after invading,” Samuel said (a dubious claim, but common enough). “The best advantage of China is to merges, to bring the best together.”

Other insights about Dalian, from non-locals:

• Women here are tall, beautiful and have great (white) skin
• Prices are rising faster than income
• Dalian people are perhaps a bit too friendly with the Japanese
• Bus and taxi drivers are rude, indifferent, possibly crazy
• The local dialect is (surprise!) a mess to understand

I’m leaving my own commentary out of this as much as possible, except to say that Dalian has treated me well, for the most part. I’m more curious about other cities. Is this just a Dalian thing?

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Rite of Passage, my ass

I tend to believe that some folks just don’t fit in China. It causes endless unhappiness, with no real reward, for some, and in that case, maybe it’s time to move on. No reason to stay if you really don’t want to.

The same principal, I suppose, applies to food. In my stomach. Let’s say, last night.

Something in those a-bit-too-slimy clams or dry fish-like slices of brown meat just didn’t want to sit still last night, and I spent the small hours of the morning coaxing the poison out of my system. I’ll spare any more intimate details of the conversation with my maroon toilet (that, thankfully, is flushing this week), except to say it was vile and chunky.

Food poisoning came as a surprise, though, since the restaurant looked nice enough, and certainly clean. Eight months in this country and I’ve had no real health problems (this is me knocking on wood), so maybe this was coming. Looks like I’m not the only one, though. (h/t CDT).

Still, anybody says this is a China “rite of passage,” you’ve got an ass-kicking on the way.

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Another Chinese Fake: My poker skills

To be honest, I never really thought spending two years in the same newsroom with Loughrie would do me much good. I mean, he’s a good guy and all (in his own way), but he doesn’t really have the kind of moral framework you want rubbing off on you.

Last night, though, more often than I should admit, I was thinking: “WWJD.”

“What would James do?”

Check. Raise. Fold. Yeah, I’m talking about poker here, nothing cosmic. But when I had a pile of photocopied 100-RMB bills in front of me and the guy across the table said “All in,” what the hell else was I supposed to conjure up?

I almost didn’t play at all. I didn’t even think I’d go out. There are always excuses to stay home and mope, so I dragged myself to the Tin Whistle. The game was a fund raiser for the Wolfhounds, Dalian’s ad hoc Gaelic football team. I keep meaning to join, but that means regular practices and running and not being lazy. And I haven’t decided how not-lazy I want to be this semester. I figured I could do more for the team as a piss poor poker player than a piss poor footballer.

The game was no-limit hold ‘em, starting with 16 players at two tables. A few went for too much too early, and I got a good flop or two that put me ahead. An old golf pro used to tell me: “If you don’t know what you’re doing, fake it.” Works for poker, too, I guess.

Somehow I made it to the final table. I had a wad of paper cash (no chips to be found in Dalian) in my back pocket, which I kept promising to lose so I could go flirt with the Italian girls. It was somebody’s birthday, and they didn’t mind my Chitaliano. I kept saying that, figuring I’d be out in a round or two, then taking the next pot.

It went on like this for hours. Around 1:30 a.m. there were two of us left, me and another equally unlikely player. Martin didn’t come to the final table with much. He got there because someone got too ambitious or didn’t have the cards or something. Hell, I don’t even know how I got there, so it’s no use speculating. But Martin hung in, and he let me knock out Jim, who brought the most money to the final table and who everybody figured would end up with something.

We went back and forth more times than I can count by recollection. I had a big lead, so I figured it was just a matter of time. Then he went all in on a flush draw, clubs. I had a pair of 2s. Both our hands were balanced on the river card. I dealt it: 2 of clubs. That gave me three 2s, him a flush. We started calling him Lazarus after that. He just wouldn’t die.

Two hours into St. Patrick’s Day, the Irish were singing Pirates of the Caribbean songs (Yo-ho and something about rum), and we were still playing.

I went for broke a few times after that, and I won every hand on the last card. When I needed a jack, a jack came up. It happened three times in a row. We were even, then I was ahead, then he took one and I took the next. At 2:30 a.m. we contemplated splitting the pot. Four hundred each would be a good night’s take. He held out, went all in on the next hand and brought me down to a minimal pile again. One more finished it.

How did Martin win? Hell if I know. I’m typing this up with a hangover and trying to figure out how I played five hours of hold ‘em last night and finished second in a field of far better players. My friends back home will testify: I don’t really do this sort of thing. Gambling ain’t me. My worst nightmare, I’ve often said, is a no-limit game with Loughrie and a few of our old editors. Deal me out.

Look how much happier Martin looks with all that fake cash.
Shoulda been me.

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Storm o’ the Century

Another cold welcome back, this time in the more literal sense. I couldn’t post last night because the strongest storm to hit Northeast China in 56 years knocked out power at the coffee shop where I get my Internet.

I’m hiding today. I ventured out for food this morning and had to settle for McDonald’s because half the shops on HeiShiJiao are closed after last night’s storm. Some are barred and boarded up, with smashed windows and damaged facades. All classes were canceled, and street was almost as deserted this morning as it was a month ago, when most people were home for the long holiday and the university was all but shut down. I can’t blame people for staying in. The wind hit hard, and with my scarf sitting uselessly on my apartment floor, my neck felt like I’d done a dry shave with a dull razor before I lost all feeling in my face and hands.

The snow has been light in this part of town. We got a dusting last night around dusk, just before I got indoor. It was all fine powder, like desert sand, the kind that swirls and billows, then lunges for exposed skin and stings like nothing else. Where there wasn’t snow, a thin layer of frost–too thin to see–covered the pavement, making even a short walk tricky. At one point I stood firm, dropped my weight, and still the wind pushed me. I slid about a foot over the cement tiles. One gust almost toppled me, sending one foot under the other mid step. Only my laptop acting as a counterbalance kept me on my feet.

I hate cold. I was in Thailand a week ago, sweating and happy to do so. This is miserable. If there’s anything that would convince me to leave Dalian, a city I’ve grown fond of, it’s the winter winds. They were so loud last night I dreamt I was running from howling zombies through strange hutongs. (I realize I’m a bit old to be having nightmares about the undead, and there was a point in my dream when I tried to rationalize it all away, to no avail.)

Last night was made all the more unsettling by fireworks going off around the city. Most are all noise and no light, so it’s hard to tell where they come from and they sound too much like gunshots for my taste. Some exploded over the ocean and then echoed between skyscrapers, creating the illusion that things were blowing up all around.

News reports are saying this storm could last three days. Stay tuned.

Update: The storm seems to have abated, for now, and we have a sunny sky. It’s still cold, but the wind has calmed. Unfortunately, there’s also a report that several people died as a result of the weather:

In Shenyang and Jinzhou, two markets collapsed from the weight of the snow. Three people were killed and seven others were injured, the report said. Shenyang officials ordered all roads closed except for emergency vehicles.

Gusting winds were also blamed for the collapse of some 1,100 “ramshackle” homes in Liaoning Province, authorities said.

About 1,000 travelers were stranded at Taoxian International Airport in Shenyang on Sunday when 144 flights were canceled, Xinhua said.

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Beer, bad wine and baijiu

Catching up. Internet is hooked up in my room, but the connection is shaky. Pretend this was posted last Thursday.

I’ve long marveled at the power of alcohol. It has been shown to grant super-human strength, and I have seen it reduce Captain America himself (in the guise of my old roommate on Halloween) to a half-dead rag doll, unconsciously squirting the contents of his stomach onto the sidewalk. It fueled Hemingway and Kerouac across continents and through novels until it finally washed them away.

Last night, I watched alcohol turn a respected and well-dressed office manager, a man I estimate to be in his early 40s, into a giddy six-year-old girl. I have never seen it do that before.

What combination of beer, bad wine and baijiu did this to him is unknown. He downed at least a liter of Tsingtao to show his great friendship to the foreign teachers at Dalian Fisheries University, even though we’d never met him before. His sloppy gropes and the beer spilled from pouring glasses to the absolute brim, I’m told, were also signs of affection. I concluded that some part of his psyche must have been transformed when he began playing with Will’s beanie, first stealing it away and laughing hysterically, then plopping it down on Will’s head like a beret. This seems like something no grown man would do, but it might be cute if performed by a six-year-old girl.

The office manager, who wore a black leather jacket the probably cost a month’s pay, was in good company in that haze. This was the semi-annual teachers’ banquet, with food and booze on someone else’s tab. All sense of restraint was left somewhere back on Heishijiao.

My department head, I think, started drinking the moment she arrived. She’s usually so tightly wound she nearly leaps at every request, not out of any apparent desire to see it fulfilled, but in fright of what could happen if it isn’t done. She’s rather like a small animal in that way, always shivering, startled by everything, generally harmless. It’s possible that simply being free from responsibility for one evening had some intoxicating effect on her.

The foreign language dean didn’t hide her inebriation. She confessed it to me several times during the night, leaning in to say, “I’m drunk,” then asking me complicated questions about the educational system in China. I was more honest with her than I’ve been in the five months since I arrived in this country. She took it well, and maybe she’ll even remember some of it. She also told me Chinese food is the healthiest in the world.

I lost count of the toasts. The ritual of drinking oneself into stupor, and the mutual efforts at alcohol poisoning to show what good friends you are is well documented. It’s much the same as happens in college dorms across America, and probably elsewhere. To drink a beer quickly without feeling its effects shows you have great testicular fortitude. This is not unique to China.

After several hours of this, the floor was slippery and I was feeling a bit awkward about the office manager’s hand that kept gripping my thigh, but Will and I only encouraged him by staying another hour. We figured other teachers would stay, too. Almost no one did. Karaoke was the only logical solution.

If I look at the situation that unfolded upstairs objectively, I might conclude there was some element missing, or at least something out of place: Three men, aged 25, 31 and 40-something, danced with no apparent rhythm or coordination, not with each other but on the same empty dance floor, while four middle-aged women played cards and payed no attention to the blaring music or occasional deadpan singing. This went on for a strange hour.

In that moment, actually, it didn’t really make sense either.

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