Tony's China Blog

Mapmaking

2005-02-01T13:02:00.000-08:00

We bought a nice little map in China to point out counties when we talked about them in class. I remember being a bit skeptical when they talked about how Americentric our maps are in middle school, with our country in the middle of everything and eurasia just squished off to the right side.

Of course the maps in China don't have that stereotype--China is perfectly centered. It made it hard for me to trace the Pilgrims' voyage off to the new world... they just sailed off the map and onto the other side.

In case you wondered, on my map Taiwan is (and likely always will be) the same color as the mainland.

My Favorite Breakfast

2005-01-24T18:03:00.000-08:00

So now that I am back in the States I am reflecting upon my favorite and least favorite things about China. And one of my favorites, despite some of the reports, is breakfast.

Chinese food, despite its popularity worldwide, is not famous for its deserts nor its breakfasts. There is a reason. When your cuisine eschews dairy products completely, these dishes will suffer. Cream and butter are critical to maintaining a solid base for breakfast and dessert! The most popular breakfast in China may be a deep-fried dough stick and some soymilk. Or it may be a bowl of watery rice gruel served with pickled mustard root and super-pungent tofu. Neither of these are anything to write home about (though I suppose I just did). I ate both occasionally, and came to appreciate them, though not to prefer them. Many people also eat dumplings for breakfast, which I wholeheartedly approve of. Dumplings are great because they can be eaten for any meal, but they seem best for breakfast, perhaps because you are avoiding consuming the previous two options that I just mentioned.

However, dumplings were not my favorite breakfast, not at all. My favorite breakfast was called dan bing. It isn't served in any restaurants (not that I found); it is only available from people on the street, who have charcoal-fueled griddles during the morning hours (and sometimes for an after-school snack). Onto these griddles, the chef pours a ladleful of watery batter. This batter is spread out into a thin pancake, like a crepe. Immediately, an egg (or two, for an extra 6 cents) is broken onto the crepe and scrambled with a squirt of oil, then pushed to the edges of the pancake. A small handful of scallions is added and then, if you are lucky, so are a few sprinkles of sesame seeds.

The crepe is then deftly flipped, and then a brushful of a mystery oily sauce is applied. Next comes the question, 'yao bu yao la?' (do you want it hot). I recommend the reply of 'yao' (I sure do!). If you answer affirmatively, some hot stuff is brushed on, and either way you get a sprinkle of some pickled vegetable that gives it a great crunch. For 6 cents more, you can have it filled with one of the previously mentioned dough sticks or a hot dog. I never ventured into hot dog territory (I suppose now, too late, that I should have, in the name of research), but the dough stick is pretty good if you want a little more greasiness in your breakfast than this already provides. I will miss these as much as any other food in China. Honestly.

Tour Groups

2005-01-21T04:25:00.000-08:00

We took a Chinese tour to Jiuzhaigou right before we left. We had been hoping to visit this remote national park that has bright turquoise lakes and mineral-laden waterfalls and is dotted with a few Tibetan villages, but it was expensive and hard to get to. Someone in marketing had decided that this was a fairyland, and every piece of literature we found written about it referred to Juizhaigou as such.

This is a very remote park. You can take an 11-hour bus from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, or you can fly into the brand new airport constructed among the villages two hours away from the main gate of the park. On a whim we checked out how much a tour there would cost. A tour was cheaper than buying the plane tickets and park entrance ourselves, and it included hotels, buses to the park entrance, and meals. So we took the tour.

The park was very beautiful, but it was like a preserve, with miles and miles of plank paths that no one seemed to ever use (most of them, though visible across the lake or street, were closed for the winter) and a new park road that was frequented by park buses that dropped you off at various scenic spots so you could snap your photos and get back on. These buses were equipped with decidedly non-Tibetan tour guides wearing Tibetan clothes. The real Tibetans waited at the major stops to try to sell you a trinket or take your photo for a dollar or two. There were many beautiful views, waterfalls, mountains, and streams, many of them with a glazing of ice that made it extra pretty. However, it was very cold.

We did a little walking, but the park wasn’t set up so that you could walk so easily. It was somewhat confining to be on the tour, but it was also cheap. We kept bracing for the time when we would have our shopping opportunities, and finally, on the way to the airport, we got them. We stopped at a semi-precious stones marketplace, then at a Chinese medicine demonstration and pharmacy, and finally at a food emporium. The tour guides inevitably take you to these places on all tours so that you can buy your souvenirs, and they get a kickback from the overpriced goods. We bought some dried yak meat.

Thanksgiving

2005-01-20T11:53:00.000-08:00

I'm back in the States, but I won't run out of things to write for awhile yet. So I will keep pounding out thoughts/ideas/revelations/anecdotes until I get bored and then I will let you know. Hopefully I will do this more consistently now. This post won’t be too much about China itself, but for those of you who would wonder how one could/would celebrate America’s best holiday (my opinion) in China, I wanted to give the blow by blow of Thanksgiving weekend.

We spent a fair amount of time with an Australian couple, David and Anissa. David is in China for work, he’s an engineer and in charge of a zinc processing plant outside Ningbo. Anissa taught with us as something to do while she lived in Ningbo with him. They have an apartment which is much nicer than ours, and David is an amateur mixologist when it comes to their living room bar. Both David and Anissa were very excited about celebrating Thanksgiving with us.

We were extra blessed by the appearance of Bryce, an old friend and my former rugby captain back in college, and his girlfriend, Missy. If you don’t know Bryce, many of the stereotypes you may hold of what the captain of a rugby team would look and act like hold true, though the fact that he is just a few months from getting his Ph.D in Classics perhaps will mitigate that view.

Also attending were Walter and Allison, Walter being our former co-worker. They are also fellow Americans and therefore have experienced the holiday before, though Walter can’t cook a thing. Lastly Kristin joined us. Kristin is the newest Native English Teacher at our school. She is from Singapore and of Chinese heritage. This can cause some problems in China, where the Chinese assume White = native English speaker and Chinese looking = Chinese speaker. Most schools would rather have a Dutch guy who learned some English in high school than a fourth-generation Chinese-American who grew up in the Ohio valley as their English teacher. But, I digress.

Back to Dinner. We were able to procure a turkey at Metro, the only store in the province that stocks them, and then only seasonally. We didn’t have an oven, which was a bit of a problem, but David and Anissa bought the largest toaster oven they could find, which was about a foot tall and two feet wide and deep. This just fit our 7-kilo turkey.

We added to our feast most of the usual sides: cranberry sauce can also be found at Metro so we ate that, potatoes are easy to find, and guys actually walk the streets here with carts fitted with some sort of a barrel sweet potato oven, from which they sell well-cooked sweet potatoes. We made a big salad, Anissa made two types of stuffing, and I boned and brined the turkey, stuffing it and then slicing it crossways to serve. Kind of like the turducken I made last year but a quarter of the work.

Perhaps a major difference between this and the typical Thanksgiving was that we had a fair amount of drinking—more than I’d ever done at this holiday at home. David had been planning the drinks for weeks and we had one that was like a long island iced tea, then something with cranberry juice, and then, of course, wine with the meal. And then I had to show Bryce and Missy some of the Chinese drinking games afterwards with beer. It was, all in all, a good time.

Chopsticks diet

2005-01-20T11:31:00.000-08:00

I'm back. A year abroad, and with a mixture of relief and sadness, I left China to the great white North of the US. After two consecutive red-eyes, my semi-delerious 7:10 a.m. flight from Indianopolis to Milwaukee (strange, but the cheapest way home by a lot) left me with one vivid epiphany: these Midwesterners are fat! There was something strange about that particular commuter flight--many of the passengers knew eachother and they were remarkably chipper for that early time. And about half of them were morbidly obese. Not that 60%-of-Americans-are-overweight obese, that "Wow, that guy is obese" obese.

This is in serious contrast with yours truly, who returned from China feeling healthy and 15 pounds, yes, 15 pounds, lighter. I was as shocked as you were. I am not a huge guy, and I used to hang 165 pounts on my (almost) 5' 10" frame, far from 'obese,' according to the body mass index calculation (see, now that I am home I can link to stuff again!) . Anyway, I did not honestly think I had 15 pounds to lose. In college, at that same weight, I had a nickname of "bony hips," coined by my rugby second row when I was a hooker.

So the question then became, "Why did I lose this weight?" I certainly did not watch what I ate in China. I never once thought, "I will eat this because it is more heathy." Ningbo food is almost invariably laden with salt and oil. We had plenty of lavish banquets where you ate for hours. I didn't try to eat less.

On the other hand, they don't eat a lot of meat. And neither did I, while there. But I think there is a different reason, one that I have taken too long to get into. Chopsticks. You may remember way back when I wrote about eating burritos in China (incidentally, they were the first food I sought out upon returning to the US. The story was that I ate so much I thought I would strain a muscle in my diaphram or at least throw up.

Therein lies the secret. There is a limit to how fast you can shovel food into your mouth with chopsticks. They force you to eat more slowly. And when you do that, you feel full faster and don't eat so much! So though I didn't try to eat less, I did nevertheless. I think it is perhaps interesting that the three foods I was most excited to eat upon coming home were burritos, Italian hoagies, and hamburgers, three decidedly non-chopsticks foods, that in fact don't provide any limitation to how much your can take with one bite.

Try it for a few weeks. Eat whatever you want, but only using chopsticks. I guarantee you will eat less. You can still eat steak, but you need to cut it into small pieces that you can easily pick up with chopsticks. If you are bad with them, even better! You'll lose even more weight!

Now if only I can figure out how to write a best-selling diet book on this brilliant idea.

Wireless Nation

2005-01-20T11:30:00.000-08:00

I wrote some time ago (okay, I wrote everything some time ago) that on a little venture into the mountains outside Yiwu, our companions looked at their cell phones with amazement when they didn't have any reception. At the time, I thought it was just a symbol of their absurd urbanness--these folks had never been out into the countryside before! What I learned over the following months was that, indeed, it is an incredibly rare thing to not have cell phone reception in China. We never wound up getting one ourselves (a decision that we regrettedonly a few times, though when we did, it seemed like a really big deal), but no matter where we were, it seemed that others were talking away.

On a 24-hour train across the Gobi desert in far western China, hundreds of miles from any settlement or source of water, we had service. Floating down a river, atop a mountain, or on a ferry to an island, people were inevitably on their cell phones. China Telcom has done a remarkable job of covering the country. There are still some spots they haven't covered like that one village deep in the mountains, but not that many.

We visited some caves, miles from the nearest village, in sparsely settled and very poor Anhui province, (granted not too far from the Yellow Mountains, one of China's great tourist attractions), there was a sign, also in English for our benefit: "Mobile Phone access inside cave sponsored by China Telcom."

Before Leaving

2005-01-19T13:01:00.000-08:00

(So, as you can see, I wrote this a week ago, but just pretend I haven't come home yet)

Goodness, I stop writing in my blog for a month or so and this is what happens. I get so lost and far behind that I can’t possibly write about everything. So, briefly, our current situation: we are leaving in one week for the States! I am of quite mixed emotions regarding this. It will be very nice to be closer to my friends and family, and live somewhere that it isn’t a challenge to do almost everything, but I am rather sad about the prospect of losing the community we are in. The little shops across the street where I can get photos developed, have noodles, buy beer, get my egg-scallion crepe breakfasts made to order, have dry cleaning done, buy a fried-chicken sandwich, by people who know me. It is really easy for people to know you because you are the only foreigner patronizing their stores. So there is this neat ability to have an instant relationship/connection with each person you interact with. They will remember you, and since most shops in our neighborhood are basically the living room of the family who lives in the back or upstairs, the same people are always working there.

We also live half a block from a supermarket that is like a department and a grocery store mixed together. I’m not looking forward to needing to drive to Walgreen’s for stupid little things I need.

And many of our personal relationships with Chinese here are, sadly, at the time when they could really blossom into something legitimate, but they are going to wither because we are leaving. Our language skills are getting better and we can communicate a bit more with people. Since we’ve been split between two different schools for our time here and because we come as a pair, it has been more difficult to connect with people. It’s interesting how when I take a taxi with Erica (which is about 90% of the time), the cabbie rarely says anything. But on those rare opportunities where I am taking one alone, inevitably we at least engage in some small talk.

Oh, right, I was going to talk about the holidays. David and Anissa are the only people who we truly feel close to, here, and it was assumed that we would spend Christmas together. Anissa bought another turkey at Thanksgiving to stow until the end of December in anticipation of a Thanksgiving redux-type evening, except with a big plastic Christmas tree.

Ye gods! There is a lot of stuff to write. Should I mention that China is, in most places, a welcome respite from the holly-and pine bejeweled, Christmas music overload, buy! buy! buy! America that we avoided this year? But how, sometimes, you stumble into what is only describable as Xmas squared (sorry, I don’t know how to do exponents on this computer)? Where the music is four clicks two loud (as compared to the usual two) and blasting the most saccharine versions of our Christmas songs, with a few unorthodox additions (good tidings we bring, for you and your king?)? Where, in certain stores and homes, there are more Christmas decorations than you thought imaginable for a country who’s population contains only a small fraction who consider themselves Christian. Somehow, every store or restaurant with more then five front room employees seem to have decided that this year, all employees would be required to wear Santa hats. If they were extra trendy, it was reindeer antlers. Amazing.

Talentless

2004-11-22T09:38:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, we were invited at the last second (which is almost always the case) to a little event in one of the eighth grade classes we teach. They were having a little performance in honor of a Singaporean exchange student who had spent the past month with them. We went down to the class where they had managed to move their 56 desks off to the sides and created a decent runway for performances. The students were very excited about having us there, for in China, we foreigners are treated somewhat like I imagine small-time celebrities are treated back home. Most people are really nice to us even if there is no good reason, we are pointed at a lot, and people are just excited to see us. It has its pros and cons.
Anyway, we loitered in the back of the room and (I should have seen this coming) were asked if we could perform something.
Erica noticed it first: Everyone in China has a talent. Variety shows are huge, and people just enjoy sitting around watching others show off their talent. We went to a more formal performance a few weeks ago and watched students play traditional and modern instruments, sing, dance, do martial arts, and one strange performance where a student created a watercolor in five minutes while a two students ballet dances in the background.
And of course, a foreigner performing is something to get excited about! "Can you perform for us?" on of our top students asked. "Sorry," I said, shaking my head. "Are you sure? Can you sing for us" (they always want us to sing)? Nope. I’m fairly tone deaf, and no songs just come to me when I’m put on the spot (and sober). "Can you play an instrument?" Sadly, my violin lessons ended in fifth grade. "Can you tell a joke?" Not in mixed company, to minors! She sadly left. I felt bad. A few minutes later, she ran back to me and asked, quite hopefully, "Can you play the guitar?" I just smiled and shook my head.
The performances were nice. We saw a boy play the bamboo flute, then a boy played a far-from-perfect version of Edelweiss. Next, the Singaporean student was put on the spot. He looked panicked; perhaps he hadn’t been warned of this custom beforehand. He got up in front of the 60 of us and stood silently. Then he whispered something to the lead students, and they let him go outside the classroom. He hadn’t prepared anything! But he was quite nice about it, a few minutes later (after a comedy skit and a recorder performance) he came back and sang two quick songs about Singapore, one in English and one in Malay.
I still have no talent. I was brainstorming ideas in case they absolutely insisted, and all I could come up with was juggling pencil cases while I sang La Cucaracha. They probably would have been impressed. But I am so out of practice!

Two months ago, for Teachers’ Day, they did absolutely insist we perform. And though we were at a large banquet with 120 or so teachers, I had been fortified with several glasses of wine and they had a karaoke machine. Okay, we’ll do karaoke. The Chinese love karaoke. It was announced we would sing, and we went through the booklet. The English songs offered were either Kenny G instrumentals or songs we didn’t know. But we had to go through with it.
Finally, we found two songs we thought we could perform, songs that I knew some of the words to and figured we could read the rest.
We waited for the CD to start, and I was confused. This was a disco, dance version! Where are the power chords and sappy sentimentalism? Maybe they’d queued up the wrong song for us? Nope, there was the title screen, "Total Eclipse of the Heart." But to a dance beat! We thought we could maybe we could change the rhythm but then we realized there were no words on the screen. How were we going to do that? I tried making up some rhymes on the spot (they wouldn’t know the difference), but I am no free-styling MC. We gave up. I was really looking forward to the "And I need you now tonight/And I need you more than ever" bit… sigh.
We had the same problem (no lyrics) when we tried the glorious An American Tail theme song, "Somewhere out There." It always makes me think of animated mice, even in China.

Snack Foods

2004-11-03T14:11:00.000-08:00

Last week was a school-wide track meet, and two days of classes were cancelled so we could watch and participate in the event. I, on one evening’s practice, competed in the 100- and 200-meter dash, embarrassing myself in the former but winning the latter. I also competed with the English department in the 4x100m relay, which w as fun.
The event itself is an annual competition, and each class marched out together and carried a banner or did a short routine or repeated a chant before filing into the bleachers, where they sat for two days. Students ran by class, and track shoes were provided to the students (they didn’t have any large enough for my giant size 10 feet, though).
A week later, one of the staff members caught us in the wall and waived us into a supply room. We were handed a big bag of snacks each, a bag that for some reason they gave each teacher for the sports meet. Perhaps it was for sustenance to survive the ordeal, I don’t know. But if you are curious what Chinese people eat for snacks, I will list the contents of this bag below.
A bag of lemon flavored Frito-Lay potato chips
A bag of granola bar-sized puffed, sweetened ricecakes
Numerous little containers of peach gelatin/jelly with a small piece of canned peach inside
A bag of what looks like hard candy, individually wrapped, but it instead contains slightly sweetened beef jerky
A bag of Life Saver-sized candy that prominently features a Swiss chalet and milk on the front, and tastes somewhat like caramel
"Ming Zhu roast fish fillet": dried, salted, pale, fish, in a sealed bag
Peanuts: English ingredient list consists of "high quality peanut kernel, slat, anise, clove, sodium cyclamate, saccharine sodium
Walnuts with a sort of caramel coating
Pressed, preserved tofu in bite-sized chunks, slightly seasoned and preserved. Rather tasty.
Good*Vita Wheat Digestive Crackers. They are round and also advertise the inclusion of milk.
You can buy Oreos, Chips Ahoy!, Ritz, Saltines, Snickers, and some other familiar brands here, though of course they are more expensive, and are not as popular as these local foods, I believe.

Lefties

2004-10-26T13:05:00.000-07:00

Whenever we have dinner with new Chinese acquaintances, it usually takes less than twenty minutes for me to hear the common observation: "Oh you are left-handed! Left-handed people are very clever!" I always have to move my little chopsticks rest from the right side of the table to the left, and I always try to sit to Erica’s right on the circular tables to avoid the elbow bumping which occasionally occurs with my abnormality.
On the first day of class for our high school students, as I fielded questions from them and wrote on the board, in half of my classes an early question was "Why do you write with your left hand?"
No on in China is left handed. Okay, that is hyperbolic, but very, very few people are (allowed to be). Students are, essentially, not allowed write with their left hand, and if, like the rest of the world, 10-20% of them are natural lefties, that is unacknowledged, and those writing their compositions with their ‘off’ hand must just have very bad penmanship.
I talked with a fellow teacher the other day about this fact and she said, triumphantly, that one of her (150) students was left-handed. "Who?" I asked. She wouldn’t tell me. "You’ll have to see for yourself," was her reply, as though discovering this student for myself was important. I haven’t remembered to look. I think that perhaps it is not that lefties here are clever, but that they are stubborn, for if I was born here I’d be right handed too, with penmanship even worse than it is now.

One Child?

2004-10-26T13:02:00.000-07:00

Yes, China still has its one-child policy in effect. For the most part. There is a slowly growing list of exceptions to it (your parents were both single children, you don’t live in the city and your firstborn was a girl, you are a member of one of China’s officially recognized 56 minority groups), but still, the vast majority urban families have only one child. Surprisingly, even the rich and powerful seem to abide by this rule.
It is strange so see so many one-child families. Twins are priceless and highly visible here because they are such a lucky break for the parents. Especially twin boys! Since this policy has been advocated for 30 years (previously, Mao had encouraged parents to have as many children as possible), millions of families are also becoming one-grandchild families.
This creates a complicated dynamic, where the hopes and dreams of six people (both parents and both sets of grandparents) are pinned upon one (un)lucky child. This goes two ways for children. On the one hand, they have enormous pressure not to be a screw up, to make the family proud, to study, to be diligent, and so forth. On the other hand, as is the case universally with single children (I am thinking primarily of Italy because of my experience there), these kids get Spoiled! The children are usually waited on hand and foot. They no housework at all (we take an informal poll of our high school classes and no one ever does the dishes or cleans up), and are carried and even fed by doting grandparents beyond the age when they are perfectly able to do it themselves.
Are kids here happy? Sure. But from the people we’ve talked to, it seems that most of them wish they could bring brothers and sisters into the world. It would create a more natural family dynamic, and by extension, a more natural society.

A Republican’s Dream

2004-10-26T11:57:00.000-07:00

Walter, our sole remaining "Native English Teacher" co-worker (Erica loves that job title), had an interesting observation about China the other day. If Bush and the Republicans were able to institute their policies unabated, the USA would be a lot less like the USA we knew and a lot more like China today. We spent some time discussing this theory and found it held true over a surprisingly wide variety of issues.
One does not need to spend much time in China to realize that Mao’s dream is dead. They may call themselves the Communist Party, but there is little left to the communist ideal. The free market reforms have been wildly successful, judging by the number of new Audis and BMWs on the streets on Ningbo. We have a Ferrari/Maserati dealership. But bicycle is by far a more popular way to get around and most deliveries in town are still done on tricycles with big wheels and older men straining their calves on the pedals.
Allow me to enumerate the ways that China is a Conservative’s dream world.
Minimal environmental safeguards. Diesel trucks belch out unfiltered exhaust, a fine layer of black soot appears on any undusted surface within a week, and things never seem that clean.
Unfettered capitalism. As Deng Xiaoping said (and every single article reporting on the economic reforms he started in 1978 dutifully quotes) "To get rich is glorious." The businessman is the glorious man, his workers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and assistants, worthless.
No effective labor laws. Most employees are virtually owned by their bosses, who even have to give them permission to quit (and therefore look for a different job). You do what you are told. This leads to:
A seemingly endless supply of cheap labor. If there is a minimum wage, it’s negligible. You can hire a cleaning lady or street sweeper or migrant laborer for $4 a day, no problem.
Food, too, is cheap, cheap, cheap. If you don’t pay the farmers, busboys, waiters, or cooks anything, of course it will be!
Civil rights? What? The police and army have unfettered power. They need no judge to okay a home search. They do not have to testify publicly in order to convict you of a crime. You can be arrested and held indefinitely for no reason at all, just suspicion.
State-run enterprises seem to have made a strange slide from socialist to fascist. Instead of being run by the state, the state seems more run by them.
Schools work two ways: if you can’t get into the magnet schools based on your grades, you can buy your way in. Our school, best in the city, reserves 1/6 of its slots for the highest bidder—literally. As I understand, there is a dutch auction of those spots in the entering class each year. The free market!
So some things aren’t necessarily on the Republican wish list… especially the whole guns are illegal thing. And free and promoted abortions. But I look around me, and most of the things that I find unpleasant about China, I also find that they mesh quite well with the far Right in America. Amazing. If I had better information and sources, I could probably turn this into a cute article for slate.com or something. But instead, you few privileged readers will have exclusive access to this theory.

Reading List

2004-10-20T08:36:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you’ve become enamored with China. Perhaps you want to move here yourself and try out this whole living-abroad thing. Perhaps you are just interested in what authors have influenced and informed my China view. We are fortunate to have a very good English bookshelf in our dormitory, one that has at least a few dozen books that would be instantly confiscated if we were locals and somehow caught with them. I’ve been making my way through them, among the fluffier and usually non-China-related books that can let me escape the country for a few hours here and there.
My recommendations:
Evening Chats in Beijing by Perry Link is a fascinating/depressing book by a Princeton professor who talked with a lot of intellectuals before and immediately after the Tiananmen Square massacre. It gives an insight into the oppression that thinkers in this country face and makes you really hate those in the Party and in power.
River Town is a much lighter, though just as insightful book. Peter Hessler, who now covers China for the New Yorker, wrote about his two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English on the Yangtze River in a smallish town. He is very smart and connects his experiences with the greater societal structures here. It is an engaging read.
Iron and Silk, by Mark Salzman, is a fun book by another American teaching English. This one is a martial arts aficionado. His book is really interesting as well. Both this and River Town give a pretty good idea of a lot of the challenges and excitement that comes with being a foreign ‘Native English’ teacher here. It was made into a movie starring the author. This movie is on my must-see list once I come back home. A movie about the suburban white boy cum martial arts expert. I’ve got to see it.
Another good book on China that is depressing, for it talks about the horrible recent history of the Cultural Revolution, is called One Man’s Bible. I ran across it here and the author is Gao Xingjian. He’s a Nobel Prize winner, and his ‘fictionalized’ personal history includes a lot of fear, persecution and unhappiness. It is sandwiched in among sex scenes from a later life as a refuge in Hong Kong.
For something not as depressing (but still somewhat), try The Concubine’s Children by Denise Chong. It is her family history, from the first half of the 20th century mostly, when her family came over from Guangdong to Vancouver.

US Politics from Abroad

2004-10-14T07:41:00.000-07:00

Erica and I were bummed this morning when we had to work through the final presidential debate. So during our lunch break, we pulled up the NY Times online and read their commentary. Then, after teaching in the afternoon, we came home and read the punditocracy’s take on the debate: I generally read www.slate.com and www.dailykos.com for a slightly broader (if not more balanced) idea of how things played. Yes, I am a political junkie. Part of this comes from my general fascination with all things competitive, but most of it is, of course, a result of my infatuation with the removal of W. and his cronies from the presidency.
We have already signed and mailed off our absentee ballots for Wisconsin, and I spend up to an hour daily reading whatever I can get my hands on about the election and so forth. We gave some money to several congressional candidates and are trying to get money off to the Democrats and Kerry, but the links on their websites are coming up dead from China.
So what is the feeling here? Our tiny circle of friends includes two Americans and two Australians. The Americans are, unsurprisingly, quite liberal. So are the Aussies, so we have fun talking politics. The vibe here in our tiny bubble is positive, but what do we know?
The overseas vote has been discussed at some length by others, but in our time here and out travels elsewhere, I’d estimate the odds are about 20-1 that a young American traveling or teaching abroad (outside Europe) is liberal. Maybe I am being overreaching, but one who spends considerable time outside of our borders and realizes that we are global citizens tends to realize that the right’s idea of foreign policy is moronic.
I don’t know how the overseas vote will split, because for all us progressive youths living abroad, there are a fair amount of industrialists, as I like to call them... those business folk who are stationed here to keep an eye on the factory and do their importing/exporting. But outside the military establishment, those who are living abroad almost certainly lean Democratic.
As for the Chinese, they, like the citizens of EVERY SINGLE COUNTRY in the rest of the world, strongly dislike Bush. Could we, just this time, open the polls up to anyone who wants to vote, regardless of country of residence?

Execution

2004-10-11T08:06:00.000-07:00

On our most recent trip, a few-day vacation over the October (National Day) holiday, Erica and I went to Wuyishan, a mountainous national park, where we walked around and saw some great views, climbed some steep mountains, drank some of the famous local tea, and floated down the river.
Being in the mountains gave us a chance to eat some ‘mountain food,’ quite different from the food we eat in Ningbo that is so seafood based. In the resort town on the edge of the park were a few restaurant rows where tables were set up inside, limited alfresco dining was available, the cooks were outside, and a large table of the restaurant’s fresh ingredients was displayed streetside. We walked past a dozen of these setups, most showing us the same ingredients. Live frogs in a netted bowl, snails, cured pork and duck breast and small fishes were the major proteins available. A cornucopia of vegetables were piled on every table—a myriad of greens, okra, beans, peppers, tubers, and cucumbers were available for the pointing (a godsend for the Chinese-illiterate). Most notable were the healthy pink hibiscus flowers and wasp larva. The flowers were beautiful but the larvae leaned toward grotesque. You knew they were from wasps because a hunk of the comb was on display, complete with some capped cells and a giant inch long drone wandering around tending the squirmy grubs. We passed on the latter, but the hibiscus was fine in an omelette-type dish.
Erica and I dined on the flowers and added something green, a mixed fry of a half-dozen varieties of mushrooms on display, and some cured duck breast with bamboo shoots. We asked what the specialty was, or the local specialty, or whatever they understood from the garbled Chinese that came out of our mouths. They seemed to figure out what we were saying, and pointed behind us. Behind us?
We turned around and remembered the other standard display: The game in cages. Of course. Three one- by two-foot wire cages were stacked up to waist height. The bottom cage held a few clueless chickens. The middle cage held a sad, light-grey floppy eared bunny. The top cage held their ‘specialty,’ two birds, about pigeon sized but more grouse-shaped, grey with lighter head that had a black stripe running through the eye and a slightly curved orange beak. It was not in my bird book. We pondered for a moment, and asked how much. "45 yuan." We glanced at each other with raised eyebrows. Finally, I made the call and ordered its execution.
I had been thinking about this situation for awhile. I’ve recently felt a bit of guilt for being so detached from the actual slaughter of my meal. I am, to steal a line from Julia Child, an unabashed carnivore. However, being a child of the age that I am, I have barely experienced the death that is inherent in meat-eating. My best friend Ben gave up meat, essentially, it seems, because he is too big a wimp to handle the fact that it is dead animals. I deride him for that, but it is a honorable decision, one that many people would probably make if they spent time actually spent time on the farm/factory where their dinner lived out the end of their lives or thought and read enough about it.
In part from reading Jacques Pepin’s autobiography, The Apprentice, I realized that I had never really seen anything more ‘advanced’ than a fish killed for my supper. So in order to, in my mind, legitimize my meat eating, I almost felt like I needed to experience the actual moment when an animal went from ‘cute’ to ‘dinner.’ I successfully witnessed that at this meal.
Upon hearing our order, the chef walked over, grabbed one of the birds by its wings and twisted its neck. The bird seemed dead. I turned by back for a minute and then glanced back over to see it on the ground, helplessly flapping a wing and going around in circles. Apparently a few nerves were still functioning. The neck was given another twist, and life was over. The bird was dipped into hot water and the feathers were pulled out. It was then eviscerated, chopped into pieces, and thrown into the pressure cooker. 15 minutes later, we were eating it in a soup. I’d like to say it was amazingly flavored or that the experience of watching it die made me appreciate it so much more, but alas, it was only good. The bird was fairly scrawny, and though it imparted a nice flavor into the broth, the meat itself was a little dry and not particularly seasoned. Perhaps next time I’ll take it a step further and ask for the rabbit.

Missing in Action

2004-10-07T07:25:00.000-07:00

Sorry for being so derelict in my posting. My excuses are 1) my laptop got stolen from our room and I’ve been in too pissy a mood to write much lately. 2) I’ve went on a(nother!) vacation, a shorter one, that messed up my rhythm, 3) We’ve been really grumpy at work and too busy deciding whether to quit or not to think about the quirks, anecdotes, and little things that make life here fun and enjoyable, if not infuriating 4) I can’t access my blogging site anymore, thanks, most likely, to the kind government censors, which originally blocked me only from reading blogs hosted from blogger.com, not from posting. Now it seems to be blocking both.
So, with the kind help of my father (who I would like to apologize to for having claimed that he didn’t read everything—in fact, he does, and is my biggest fan!), I am back online.
I am also grumpy because I had written something I was really happy with about Xiahe, a Tibetan pilgrimage site that I visited alone last month, and tried to post it several times before losing it with our computer. However, I found a good article about it (http://travel2.nytimes.com/mem/travel/article-page.html?res=9807E4DD143EF935A25750C0A9659C8B63) that I’d suggest you read if you want a taste of how I spent three days last month. Just substitute in a slow and bumpy bus ride and slightly dumpier accommodations for the author’s, and you have a good sense of my experience.
Phone Bill
Our phone stopped working this morning. It wasn’t much of a surprise; it seems that we had neglected to pay our phone bill. For the past three months. No big deal, this happens all the time, and in fact, we kind of figured this would happen. It is interesting here in that you don’t actually receive a bill for your monthly charges. In fact, no one ever reminds you to pay anything. You just learn (sometimes the hard way) to walk down the street and pay it.
We had an annoying debacle when we first moved here. We had to wait almost a month before receiving service. Another month or so passed before we began to wonder how we would pay our bill, with no checking account and most places not taking credit cards. Nothing had come in the mail nor were we particularly clear how the mail system worked. So we did what we would learn to do more frequently—ask the questions. It has come clear to us that we are almost never told anything unless we ask—important information, like holidays and schedule changes, included. So we asked our co-workers, who apologized for not telling us (not that it was their responsibility). You don’t receive a bill, you need to walk to the nearest Agricultural Bank of China and hand them your phone number, and they then tell you what you owe. Then you pay them.
You receive a fa piao, or official receipt, that shows what your charges are in terms of national, local, and international calls, but it does not give a breakdown of your calls. If you want that, you can’t get it from the bank, you need to go to the phone company’s office downtown (with your ID, I think), and request it.
So when our phone was cut off, we figured that it was because we’d been lax in paying the bill. I walked down the street with a fistful of money (China doesn’t make any bills larger than a 100 yuan note, about $12, which causes headaches for us when heading out on vacations as we find ourselves carrying an inch-thick stack of cash on our various forays, in case we come across something to our liking).
I walked down the street (our nearest Agricultural Bank of China is on the corner of the next block, about a three-minute walk away). I slipped my phone number under the bullet-proof glass—funny, because guns are essentially illegal here—feeling slightly like a robber slipping them a note telling them I had a gun. Anyhow, she punched my phone number into the computer and came up with our info. 445.55 yuan.
I paid her, and, despite her two computer monitors and fancy receipt-printing equipment, she deftly flicked a few beads on the abacus located at her right fingertips and calculated my correct change: 54.45. Ten minutes later, our phone is back in service.
Notice that there are two digits after the decimal point. Outside of the supermarkets and market, most things are rounded to the nearest yuan ($0.12). Some transactions involve a tenth of a yuan, a jiao ($0.01), which, though worth more than our copper coin, are treated about the same. Inexplicably, however, there are still fen, which is a tenth of a jiao, in circulation. Except that the only time you’ll ever see one is when you pay your phone bill or buy a new propane tank for your kitchen.
Unless, your first week here, you are buying vegetables at the market and some unscrupulous person gives you fen as change instead of the yuan or jiao you were due, and you carry them around cluelessly for the next week and are constantly rebuffed when try to spend them like jiao, but who can fault you because they are actually larger (though thinner) than jiao, and finally you ask someone who has actually lived in China for more than a few days and they inform you of the fact that you have been scammed. Theoretically, of course.
Conspiracy theories:
After spending enough time here and reading enough about the ways in which China and the Party work, I start to feel that every little strange thing about China is perhaps not just a quirk, but instead a calculated plot to maintain the one-party rule, to oppress the masses and keep them down. I believe it was Mao who said that religion is the opiate of the masses (quoted to me most recently by a Chinese hippie a few weeks ago), but he and subsequent cadres have devised more than their share of opiates or, to be less subtle, barbed wire fences. It gets me suspicious of everything. For instance, paper seems to be unusually expensive and hard to come by here. Why is it that those in charge of us seem obsessive about not giving us paper? Perhaps to keep potential rabble-rousers from dispersing their Rightest thoughts to a wide audience! Erica pointed out that there are a lot of people in China and it is not widely forested, but I like my theory better.
And these tour groups that run rampant. Tours are by far the most popular way for locals to see the sights. Sometimes, it seems that there are no independent Chinese travellers, and all are a part of the touring masses, with the same colored hat, following someone holding a limp colored flag, seeing the same things, following the same route, and buying the same souvenirs. Why is this? The government’s doing, no doubt. They advocate for these tours, making the package deals often absurdly cheap by giving giant discounts for bulk purchase of plane tickets and entrance to the scenic spots. Why would the government be interested in keeping people in tour groups? They are less harmful this way! The won’t feel like independent citizens and therefore won’t act as such. Just another way of keeping the proletariat down.
And why don’t our local buses run past 7:30 at night? They don’t want poor people (who can’t afford the taxi ride home) away from home after dark, where they might cause some trouble. It all adds up when you have no trust in the benevolence of the government in the State you are residing.

It is no secret that living here you have a warped sense of what is news. When we occasionally watch the English language TV station, there is really only one type of story: How great China is and how exciting it is to watch it emerge upon the world’s stage. The last ‘news’ program I watched, they reported (I'd like to claim ‘with bated breath,’ but to their credit, that wasn’t the case) on China’s entry into the UN’s international aviation organization, or something of the sort. I had never heard of said organization and doubt that I will again, but it was dutifully mentioned how China was admitted by a vote of 174-2 (who were those two dissenters? Human-rights aware countries who were willing to accept less-favorable trade relations in exchange for their conscience, perhaps?), and, lest one wonder what took China so long to be admitted, that this was China’s first attempt to to gain admittance. Hooray! News of that calibre is what makes me reluctant to watch the news. I wonder how many political dissidents were arrested that day? For a taste of it, chinadaily.com.cn is a great place to check up on all the nicely censored day’s news from China.

Chicken parts

2004-09-09T09:21:00.000-07:00

Erica says that perhaps I should write less each time I post, and then maybe I will post more frequently, and make this more interesting. I will try that strategy. Maybe. But I must admit that when my own father admitted that he hasn't gotten around to reading everything I have written, I maybe need to revamp my system.

Yesterday, we took the trek across town to Metro, the giant German-run megastore that carries, among its bulk and surprisingly not-super-value goods, a variety of foodstuffs that are unavailable anywhere else in the province. We stocked up on legitimate cheese (Edam and gouda), sour cream (the first time in a few months we've seen it) canned olives and capers, as well as canned tomatoes and smoked salmon (Chinese made, we'll see if its any good). There is frequently a wide variety of fresh herbs available, but this time there was only stale-looking parsley and oregano. Next time.

What I found most interesting about this last visit was the chicken section. Chinese value their chicken parts differently than ours. A variety of chicken parts were available, and of them, the most expensive cut was the wing--the part of the wing that has the two small bones and that nice bit of meat in between. The next most expensive was the wing drumstick, followed by the real drumstick. One could buy the whole leg for a few cents less a pound (but not the thighs alone), and the cheapest cut of the chicken was--if you hadn't guessed already--the boneless, skinless, breast. Which, you should all be able to admit by now, has the least flavor of the entire chicken. Long live China, which knows the chicken much better than we.

Zhangye/Matisi

2004-09-06T01:05:00.000-07:00

I took a 10-hour train ride to Zhangye, an entirely unnotable city except for the fact that it houses the Largest Reclining Buddah in China. This didn’t put it on anyone’s must-see list, but it was pretty big. Something like 23 meters long, and 10 meters tall. An annoying thing about traveling in China is that it seems that the capitalists have gotten hold of the tourism industry and realized that, since any particularly known attraction has monopoly power (there aren’t any competing Largest Reclining Buddahs in China), the demand curve is fairly inflexible, so they can raise the prices significantly, yet still see only a small drop in attendance. At least half the sights we have visited have seen a serious bump up in admission. The Buddah was listed in the guidebook as costing about $2.50, but it was up to $5 when I came. It seems insignificant, and to us, the rich Western tourists, it isn’t so big a deal (though we are still paid a Chinese-ish salary), but to local Chinese, it can take quite a bite out of the pocketbook.

I then took a bus to Matisi, some Buddhist temples carved into the side of a sheer cliff. The area was beautiful, and the rickety three-hour bus ride there was very interesting. We passed through numerous small villages along the way and it was harvest time for the wheat and straw. We saw the locals out in the street threshing, bailing, and harvesting the wheat. At times the bus had to drive slowly because the wheat stalks were laid across the road so traffic would help break the kernels from the stalks. Aside from that technique, it was clear that many of the villagers were harvesting wheat the same way that they had been doing for thousands of years. The wheat was cut with a scythe, beaten/stepped on/trampled by hand or by livestock, and, after the straw was removed, the remains were tossed into the air, where the heavier wheat would drop straight down and the chaff would blow off. Some had a tractor that would do the trampling, and a few had a fan that would aid in separating the wheat from the chaff, but many had no mechanization at all.

A few hundred meters before we reached the official park, a dozen people clambered off the bus, leaving only a Chinese couple and myself on it with the driver. We drove up to the entrance and were forced to purchase five different tickets, tickets for the various attractions inside (like “Ethnic Dancing Program”). We visited a small complex of cliff temples, and after a few minutes, the rest of our busmates cheerfully clambered back aboard. Quite suspicious.
The main cliff temples were, of all things, closed! I was really upset, but I went on a nice little horseback ride to a waterfall and the surrounding countryside was very nice. The horseback ride was a little disappointing—it loses a bit of its excitement when your horse is led by the reigns by a local teen the duration of your journey. There was no mention of the temples being closed, and they happily sold me a full-price ticket at the entrance to the area. Outside the temples a row of souvenir stalls were still occupied, to catch the stray tourists who wandered over to be disappointed. One woman adamantly attempted to sell me a group of pictures showing the artwork and shrines inside that I was unable to see. I refused out of principle.

2004-09-05T19:04:00.000-07:00

Zhangye/Matisi
I took a 10-hour train ride to Zhangye, an entirely unnotable city except for the fact that it houses the Largest Reclining Buddah in China. This didn’t put it on anyone’s must-see list, but it was pretty big. Something like 23 meters long, and 10 meters tall. An annoying thing about traveling in China is that it seems that the capitalists have gotten hold of the tourism industry and realized that, since any particularly known attraction has monopoly power (there aren’t any competing Largest Reclining Buddahs in China), the demand curve is fairly inflexible, so they can raise the prices significantly, yet still see only a small drop in attendance. At least half the sights we have visited have seen a serious bump up in admission. The Buddah was listed in the guidebook as costing about $2.50, but it was up to $5 when I came. It seems insignificant, and to us, the rich Western tourists, it isn’t so big a deal (though we are still paid a Chinese-ish salary), but to local Chinese, it can take quite a bite out of the pocketbook.

I then took a bus to Matisi, some Buddhist temples carved into the side of a sheer cliff. The area was beautiful, and the rickety three-hour bus ride there was very interesting. We passed through numerous small villages along the way and it was harvest time for the wheat and straw. We saw the locals out in the street threshing, bailing, and harvesting the wheat. At times the bus had to drive slowly because the wheat stalks were laid across the road so traffic would help break the kernels from the stalks. Aside from that technique, it was clear that many of the villagers were harvesting wheat the same way that they had been doing for thousands of years. The wheat was cut with a scythe, beaten/stepped on/trampled by hand or by livestock, and, after the straw was removed, the remains were tossed into the air, where the heavier wheat would drop straight down and the chaff would blow off. Some had a tractor that would do the trampling, and a few had a fan that would aid in separating the wheat from the chaff, but many had no mechanization at all.

A few hundred meters before we reached the official park, a dozen people clambered off the bus, leaving only a Chinese couple and myself on it with the driver. We drove up to the entrance and were forced to purchase five different tickets, tickets for the various attractions inside (like “Ethnic Dancing Program”). We visited a small complex of cliff temples, and after a few minutes, the rest of our busmates cheerfully clambered back aboard. Quite suspicious.
The main cliff temples were, of all things, closed! I was really upset, but I went on a nice little horseback ride to a waterfall and the surrounding countryside was very nice. The horseback ride was a little disappointing—it loses a bit of its excitement when your horse is led by the reigns by a local teen the duration of your journey. There was no mention of the temples being closed, and they happily sold me a full-price ticket at the entrance to the area. Outside the temples a row of souvenir stalls were still occupied, to catch the stray tourists who wandered over to be disappointed. One woman adamantly attempted to sell me a group of pictures showing the artwork and shrines inside that I was unable to see. I refused out of principle.

2004-09-05T08:06:00.000-07:00

Chinese Tourism
In August, after I bid farewell to Erica and she headed back to the States, I had 10 whole days to myself! I decided that I would visit a few of the sites which, while not must-sees, seemed quite interesting.

My first stop was Heavenly Lake, Tian Chi, an alpine lake a few hours north or Urumqi, in pretty-far west China. This was an interesting place. It is really popular with Chinese tourists, though there are not too many Westerners in this area so they are rarer. Tian Chi was a place where the differences between Western backpacker tourism and Chinese tour group tourism were most visible to me.

Tian Chi was described in our Lonely Planet as a place where one could take long hikes into the hills, meet some local semi-nomadic people, stay overnight in a yurt, and get some solitude sitting lakeside in the evening.

I have no idea how it is sold to Chinese tours, but I envision something along the lines of “Come to Heavenly Lake! Beautiful Scenery! Motorboat rides! Take pictures dressed up like the locals or just take pictures of the locals themselves and goats dressed up with sunglasses! A beautiful view of the lake, just two minutes from the shuttle drop off point! If you are feeling sprightly, a slightly different view just a ten-minute walk away! Take a picture sitting on a horse* (*actual riding of the horse will cost extra) or sitting on a stuffed camel!”

And it is quite popular with the Chinese tourists. I found one of the few non-tour buses to the lake and bought a ticket, which only involved a bit of difficulty because I was the only one who did not want a return ticket that evening. But I got a ticket and was dropped off with the hundreds of other tourists after a 2 hour bus ride that climbed up a valley for the last hour or so. From here it was only another 15 minutes in a shuttle van that brought us up another 100 or so vertical meters. It was neat to be climbing, climbing, climbing and then suddenly walk over a low ridge and find yourself at lake level, surrounded by mountains with a view across the lake to a single snowcapped peak off in the distance. It was less neat to be surrounded by a few hundred other people enjoying the same view, along with some of the abovementioned activities.

I admired the view for a few moments, and then started walking to the right, not in the direction of viewpoint #2. After five minutes I had left all but a tiny handful of adventurous other tourists behind. After 25 minutes I was all alone. after an hour, I had come across the small village and the local who rents out yurts. It was very peaceful, aside from the motorboats which stopped running around 4:00 p.m., when everyone else went home. A group of four other backpackers arrived a few minutes after me, and the five of us felt alone on the lake, aside from the local shepherds tending their sheep and cows on horseback. I took a few hikes up into the hills, enjoying the views and the peacefulness (often quite hard to find in China), before rejoining the masses the next afternoon.

2004-09-05T08:04:00.000-07:00

Muran, a girl
In the spring, as the semester was winding down, we were invited to see a movie with the 11th graders at Xiaoshi. None of the other teachers were going, but they gave us tickets and we made our way over to the theater. We asked what it was about. “I think it is about a girl who is dying,” was the response of one of the teachers. Not much of an inspiring tale, in my opinion, but we had heard that watching movies in the theater in China can be a fun experience, so we went. This movie was called Muran, a Girl.

We took a bus to the theater, right downtown, which bizarrely shares a building not only with a coffeehouse but with the ‘Breastfeeding Educational Center.” We found our seats in the large, half-full theater for this matinee showing just before the film started rolling.

We were fortunate because there were subtitles, but even without it would have been fairly easy to follow. I will attempt to summarize the plot as quickly as I can. The first shot was of a tombstone set among rolling green hills, with Muran’s name on it and the years of her life, roughly 1982-2000 (I forgot). Cut to a scene, 8 years earlier, where a cute little girl is packing up to move to the big city (Beijing) with her positive, stoic-yet-supportive father. He is going to look for work, but Mom must stay in the countryside because she couldn’t get permission to move to the city. The painful separation between Muran and her mother is dwelt upon. Muran saves a baby bird. She loves baby birds.

Cut to Beijing, where we meet capitalist Uncle, who is doing okay fixing cars, but not well enough to afford his own. A moment of comedy occurs when he jokes about his Santana (the ubiquitous Volkswagen that is inevitably black and commanded the lion’s share of the market here until recently) only to reveal his tricycle with a cart on the back.

Once in Beijing, Muran is made fun of for her country accent, she climbs up to the roof of some building on a dare and then gets in trouble but bonds with some little girls who accept her as one of them. Mom visits. Her departure is a cause for many tears to be shed.

Flash to 1999 or so. Muran has a tough year. First, she is voted out of her class monitor position because she refused to participate in the morally wrong act of watching the soccer match with her classmates during class time when the teacher was out. Then she stays alone after class to study with a very nice boy (Muran is weak in math), but people baselessly suspect they are up to no good and she is criticized in front of her peers. There was a dance contest, where Muran led one group in the elegant countryside-inspired routine, but her friend/nemesis with some money led the rival group in a hip, urbanish routine. The city routine won, but Muran kept a positive attitude!

Her uncle employed her father in his garage, but mistreated him some and Muran found out and got very angry.

She starts feeling pains in her loins, and though pregnancy is suspected by all (though she was pure with the boy), she goes to the doctor and he finds out she has ovarian cancer. She spends the last 45 minutes of the movie dying, but keeping up her spunky, optimistic outlook up until she dies. The end.

Uncle loses his business, but has an epiphany where he realizes that though he is rich in money he was poor in family. Or something.

This movie was, completely unsurprisingly, made with the full cooperation of the State. Erica was choking back tears and upset about the emotional manipulation, but I found it funny. I don’t know if it was based on a true story or not, but it was a great movie to think about.

I have looked for copies of this stunning film in the bootleg DVD shops, but to no surprise, I haven’t come across it yet. I also looked it up on the imdb, but no dice there, either. A shame.

2004-09-05T08:02:00.000-07:00

Canals

Ningbo, though I don’t believe it is technically on the Yangtze River delta, is still on very flat land. There are mountains a 30-minute drive outside of town, but there are really no hills or even bumps in the city proper. Ningbo is located at a point where two rivers meet. The larger river has a different name, and for some reason, people here claim that Ningbo is where three rivers meet. I got in an argument with another foreign teacher a few months ago about whether two rivers merging to make a third consist of three rivers meeting or just two meeting. Of course, I was on the correct side.

So in addition to these two rivers, there are many canals throughout the city and the countryside. Shaoxing, a few hours over, is famous for its canals, and there are several cities in the general Ningbo-Shanghai area that consider, or considered, themselves “Venice of the East.” Ningbo has no such aspirations, but we cross a few canals almost every day on our way to school or the market. The canals here, unfortunately, are not utilized for much. Only rarely will we see a boat in a canal, and even then the odds are that the long-hulled wooden boat holds two uniformed, hard-hatted workers who are dutifully scooping leaves and detritus out of the canals, leaving behind a film of gasoline from its two-stroke engine.

There are still some in town who wash their clothes in the canals, and there are always a few fisherman using either cane poles or an elaborate netting system, where two long poles are crossed and a square net is tied to the ends, and the net is then lowered into the water by a rope tied to the apex of the poles. Otherwise, these canals are not used, or even noticed by most. Once we saw a few men in a boat with a pile of snails in the center. Ningbo is regionally, perhaps nationally famous, for its river snails. We’ve had them a few times, they are usually stir-fried in a sweet brown sauce, and not bad, though if the tips of the shells are not broken off (no doubt by the lowest-ranking member of the kitchen staff), the corkscrews or meat can be embarrassingly difficult to extract.

2004-08-30T08:32:00.001-07:00

Welding at Night

Before coming to China, I never spent much time around construction sites, and when I did, it never seemed like anyone was dong much. This is not the case in China. Here, construction workers almost always live on site, in temporary shanties that allows the work to continue 18 or so hours a day. It is here that I have learned to identify, from blocks away, when someone is welding at night.

Welding, for those of us who are unfamiliar with it, produces an extremely bright light. Which is why people wear welding masks. Here, most people who weld use some type of facial protection, but it is often far from what we would consider safe. My favorite solution, which we have seen on numerous occasions, is a piece of cardboard with four holes cut into it—two holes for the eyes and two smaller holes where the ear rests of the sunglasses can poke through. I don’t think that would pass OSHA standards, even under the Bush Administration.
This light is so bright that it casts light onto buildings several hundred feet away. One would never notice this during the day with competing sources of light, but in the darkness, it looks like lightening off in the distance. It is one of my favorite little discoveries in China. “Is a storm coming?” one of our fellow foreign teachers once asked as we saw a flicker of white light off in the distance. No, they were just joining a few pieces of iron down the street.

2004-08-30T08:19:00.000-07:00

Language Predators

One night we were strolling through Tianamian Square, watching the kite flyers, the trinket vendors, and the locals and tourists out for a walk under the bright lights that illuminate the square perpetually. A man came up to us and asked where we were from. Guarded, we replied. “That’s a wonderful country,” he responded. “I’d like to visit some day.” He then continued asking us questions, making small talk, and attempting to guess where Erica was from (no one ever guesses that she’s multiracial). After a ten or so minute conversation, he said thank you and left.

Many, many people see English knowledge as their way to earn lots of money or out of the country to study or live. There are a lot of young people desperate to learn English.

The typical classroom in China has 50 students. One can learn what is taught to him, but there is little opportunity to practice oral English in school, unless you are at a fancy school like ours with foreign teachers and smaller (25-30 student) classes. So what do you do to practice and polish your English? You find a foreigner on the street and talk to them. It is already almost impossible to walk down the street and not get a child or young man, usually, saying “hello” to you and then laughing or acting very proud when you answer.

We call these people who want more than a “hello” language predators. This is a term coined by our good friend Joe, and it is a fairly common phenomenon. It is really surprising at first, when someone comes up to you and just starts making small talk, trying to initiate a conversation. Depending on the mood we are in, sometimes we have patience for them and sometimes not.
There were many of them in Beijing, and the initial reaction to people who are overly friendly is of course guarded. What are they trying to sell me? How are they trying to get me to part with my money? And frequently, they are trying to get us to look at their art and then buy some. But sometimes, they are just trying to get us to spend a few minutes talking to them. This is a crazy country we live in.

2004-08-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

(Food) Highlights from Hangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, and Xi’an

We took off with Ben and had a nice 10-day sojourn throughout Northeastern China. We hit the highlights—West Lake in Hangzhou, The Bund and Yuyuan Gardens in Shanghai, as well as cocktails in one of their fancy new skyscrapers in Pudong (the new area of town). In Beijing, we visited the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, and Tiananmen Square. In Xian, we saw the Terracotta Warriors. All were nice, though perhaps the Great Wall was cooler than I’d expected and the Terracotta Warriors were not as neat. For the latter, I had expected to see an uncovered vault with thousands of warriors in perfect formation. Actually, the warriors had originally been in a chamber, but that has long since deteriorated and now they are covered in dirt, with many shattered and in various states of excavation/restoration. Still, there are a lot of Warriors and it was pretty spectacular.

Tianamen Square was surprising in that it is a huge, wide open square, and not only that, it is not hemmed in by imposing buildings or fences—it is ringed by wide streets. I had always envisioned the student protesters in ’89 trapped by walls of buildings Kremlin-style, but in fact, it seemed so unenclosed.

Ben struggled a bit on our trip. It is tough being a vegetarian in China, or probably most places if you aren’t cooking for yourself. I don’t sympathize with him, mainly because he, in my opinion, doesn’t really have a decent reason for not eating meat besides he’s grossed out by it because it was once alive. Or something like that. But, of course I wasn’t going to force him to eat meat so the burden came upon Erica and I to ask everywhere we went if there was meat in something. And there frequently was. Additionally, he thought he got warts on his food and then sprained his ankle a few days later.

In Beijing we had Beijing Duck which was excellent. I can still taste the duck, which was roasted in a fruitwood oven, the skin smoky and fatty and crisp and succulent. In China, the meat is beside the point, almost, on the duck. It is all about the skin. And the skin is so good! In fact, in Ningbo, when you order Beijing Duck, you don’t even get the meat, only the skin. I have no idea what happens to the rest of the carcass, and I don’t care that much. In Beijing, after the crispy skin, still attached to the breast meat, is served with thin pancakes, scallions, and plum sauce, the rest of the bird is cooked into a savory broth and enjoyed subsequently.

We also went to a fancy vegetarian restaurant for Ben’s benefit. Here, he had vegetarian Beijing Duck, one of those mock meat styles where you eat wheat gluten and tofu pressed into the shape and texture of meat. It is a strange situation when you really think about it, and even more interesting when you are spending more for the fake duck than you do for a real duck. I wonder which is more of a drain on the natural resources of the planet.

In Beijing there was a food street right in front of our hotel, where hundreds of things were skewered, ready to be fried or grilled. It was mostly for tourists, so I am curious about the frequency in which Beijingers eat starfish, scorpions, and grasshoppers on sticks. But they were there, unappetizing, but available. I had a China staple, squid on a stick.

We were in Hangzhou for only an afternoon, where we took Ben to our favorite activity, tea. You order a tea (Hangzhou is famous for some of its local teas) and then pick and choose snacks, dumplings, noodles, and buns from a big buffet. You then can linger for hours on your mild caffeine buzz and enjoy the scenery and food. A very pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

In Shanghai, we took Ben to our favorite place to eat, a cavernous cafeteria where you just pick out your own pre-made foods. Shanghai has two amazing dumplings that are unique to it. Both have a predominantly pork filling, but the meat part is swimming in a steaming hot broth, which makes the dumpling exciting, excellent, and potentially dangerous. The trick is to bite a corner of the dumpling and slurp out the juice as you eat it, or else you are in danger of squirting burning hot liquid on your cheek, shirt or in your eye. One type is steamed in bamboo trays and one is kind of fried, like pot-stickers. Both are excellent. Also at this restaurant are little crayfish in a very fragrant sauce, stinky tofu (a regional specialty), and many other little bites to eat.

Xi’an was our first foray into the more Muslim reaches of China. Here, we ate regional specialty called paomao lamb soup, that involves taking two pieces of dense bread about the size of a solid bagel and tearing it up into hundreds of small pieces into a bowl. After you are finished (it took us over ½ an hour and we were hungry!), the waitress takes your bowl away and fills it up with slow-cooked lamb and broth and some vegetables. You eat it with pickled garlic. It was excellent.

We failed in our attempts to find a famous dumpling house that had 20 types of dumplings, and instead ate some tasty kebabs (the first of many) and street food, which is always nice and cheap. Next time. And I hear there is a famous type of noodle from Xi’an, called belt noodles because they are long and thick. Sadly, we did not come across them. But there was a very tasty dish called roujiabing that involved filling a pita-type bread with some cumin, hot peppers, and chopped slow cooked fatty pork. Excellent.

Once we went further west, the Chinese food was replaced by more Muslim fare. Western China has similar food to Central Asia, and we ate many meals of laman, a dish that consists of noodles with bits of lamb, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and whatever other vegetables are handy. It is tasty, and we enjoyed this departure from typical Chinese food, though after a few weeks of it no doubt we would be looking for something different. Additionally, we ate lots and lots of kebabs. These kebabs were almost invariably lamb, raised on the great grasslands of Western China, and they were almost without exception excellent. The general attitude towards meat and fat is different here, and almost every kebab we ate had four pieces of meat and one piece of fat, second from the bottom. The fat was always tasty and one would receive baffled stares if he left the fat on the stick. These kebabs were deftly roasted over a charcoal fire and brushed with a nice spicy sauce that left your lips tingling but didn’t diminish the natural taste of the meat. We really enjoyed the abundance and taste of the kebabs.

Additionally, the Uyghur bakers in this region are excellent. We were shocked to find bagels available on the street! Although they were occasionally stale, when we found fresh baked bagels (always dusted with sesame seeds) we were very excited. If only cream cheese were somewhere to be found. Uyghur food also has a nice flatbread, decorated with pinprick designs, and looking somewhat like a focaccia. It was great to have good bread products after many months without.

One moment in our culinary experiences stands out. We went to Lake Karakul, about five hours west of Kashgar, an extremely isolated place a few miles from the Kyrgyzstan border and just a few hours from Pakistan, but miles from any legitimate settlement, really. There was a smattering of tourists who would stop by to enjoy the views of the snowcapped 24,000-foot peaks that loomed over the lake. The land was barren, with some rolling rocky hills but few shrubs and grasses that could survive in this area. Around the lake was a piddling town with one hotel and some yurts, nomadic homes made of skins strapped over a portable wooden frame. These yurts were inhabited by people who definitely did not consider themselves Chinese.

Outside one yurt, we stopped to watch a woman weave cloth on a loom that spread 25 feet across the earth, the warp anchored by stakes on either end. This was a Kyrgyz family, and the woman on the loom invited us in for dinner (for a small fee). We happily accepted, and came back a few hours later, where she made a laman, as everyone in these parts seemed to. She peeled and sliced the vegetables and cooked them with the meat over their wood-fired stove. Then it was time to make the noodles. She pulled out a big ball of dough that probably had 5 pounds of flour in it, pulled off a sufficient amount for the night’s meal, and started working it. I was curious how she would make the noodles, as we have seem some extremely deft hands, but she reached into a box in the sparsely equipped hut and, to our shock and amazement, pulled out a pasta maker! Stainless steel with a hand crank and variable thickness settings, much like the one I have at home. I have still not gotten over that.

After our experience there, we headed further east and after I bid adieu to Erica, I headed halfway (30 hrs on the train) back to Ningbo, to Gansu province. Here the food was slightly different. In Xiahe, where there is a sacred Tibetan monastery, I ate the classic Tibetan food, yak butter tea. I don’t understand where they get off calling it tea, because it is much more a dough than a tea. Essentially, it is yak butter mixed with roasted barley flour and sugar. Not bad, and it would probably make a decent cookie if cooked at 350 degrees for 12-15 minutes. On the other hand, I wouldn’t really want to eat it more than once a month (or year).

Lanzhou was the last city I visited before I got bored and tired and decided to head back to Ningbo. It is famous for its roujiabing, and I missed my last opportunity to go to Xi’an and see some sights that I had missed before because of it. I had just stumbled into town and was trying to check out bus schedules around 4:00, and I came across a bus that was almost full. “Come on, let’s go, only 30 kuai!” they yelled (quite a good deal). I was game, but I had not yet sampled the roujiabing. “Sorry,” I said, “but I need to eat roujiabing before I can go.” They yelled at me to hurry. So I hustled off to the food street and had a great one, greasy and fulfilling. But by the time I returned the bus had sold its last tickets and headed off. I had missed the ride. No big worries, I just walked to the airline office and bought a plane ticket home for the next morning.

2004-08-29T01:18:00.000-07:00

Last Day of Camp

The night after our fabulous performances, my bestest friend Ben flew in all the way from Ireland, and we had a nice night eating and talking and celebrating the end of camp. Alas, we needed to go back the next day. Ben came with us, and the first mode of business was the photo taking. We aligned in many different formations—first the older kids, then the younger kids, then the Hong Kong kids, then the girls, then the boys… all in the heat. Everyone was relieved to be able to go inside after that was over.

The rest of the morning was fun; we had the students make cards for an animal board game, with sayings like, “A snake eats you, lose a turn,” while a few at a time made snacks and potion to celebrate. The kids got a kick out of the Sprite, which we tore the label off of and labeled “spider juice.” The excitement occurred when they poured it and discovered that not only was the bottle green, so was the soda (food coloring is not a common household item out here)!

Anyhow, they had their party, and we broke for one last lunch. After lunch the Hong Kong kids had to go home, and there was much hyperbolic crying among the girls, who seem to always get quite emotional at these sorts of events while adolescents. We bid them farewell among the tears, and then went back to the cafeteria to wrap things up. This was the Closing Ceremony, which was apparently different from the ceremony that had been held the prior night. This wasn’t fun, it was official. A table was covered with red felt, and a microphone was set on the table. We sat behind the table, flanking Principal Shi, and the students started trickling in. Since the Hong Kong students had already left, we were down to 28 students. Curiously, parents had been stopping in throughout the day and picking up their children despite the departure of the camp bus back to school immediately following the ceremony. So as we looked out on the crowd, there were no more than 16 students left in the building, along with Ben, and two sets of parents who decided to stick around and watch.

You really can’t understand a Chinese Ceremony until you’ve been to it. They involve incredibly boring speeches that go on and on to a crowd that doesn’t pay attention nor pretend to play attention. It is some sort of a training for a society that won’t listen to you anyways and asks you to follow stupid rules for no good reason. So to this motley and sparse crowd, the Principal gave his remarks talking about the importance and greatness of everything and responsibilities and successes and the such. It was extra boring to us, of course, because we didn’t understand anything he was saying.

Now we were expected to say something official, and we told the kids how much fun we had, etc., and we handed out some prizes to the students who could answer some simple trivia questions from the camp (“What do you call a baby butterfly?”). Of the remaining children, many were not our best students, so we did not follow the every-child-gets-a-prize system, surprising our most stellar student when she answered a second question correctly and we invited her up to claim another prize!

We finished, and things ended, everyone got into the old school bus and headed back to school. Finally, free for the summer!

2004-08-28T06:49:00.000-07:00

(Second to) Last Day of Camp

It has been quite a long time since I added anything to this page, and I apologize. The first reason is that summer was crazy—I was either teaching a bunch of crazy kids (cursed independent thinker/actors from Hong Kong who didn’t do as told!) summer camp, or I was traveling around China, where I couldn’t access this site without the computer getting upset at me. Honestly, I did attempt to update a few times but was unable to.

Enough with apologizes. I will give you a quick rundown of my summer. I last left you with summer camp, which ended on a high or low note, depending on how you look at it.

Summer camp was a moderate success, in that we were able to keep tabs on most of the kids. The heat was scorching, and perhaps the best/worst part of the camp was the last two days, of which I will briefly elaborate upon now.

We spent several days at the end of the camp preparing a culminating performance, at part at the request of our principal(s). Erica ambitiously had the older children write and perform their own play about Harry Potter, and I had the younger children perform Jack and the Beanstalk. We spent several hours practicing, making props, and stage directing (I have ruled out ‘director’ from my list of potential careers). Both groups of kids pulled the play together and did a good job, which is more than can be said about the rest of the organization.

Day 14 was the performance day, Day 15 was the closing ceremonies. Day 14 was unusual in that the kids were on a field trip for part of the morning and that our Hong Kong boss, Rosanna, was there. We had hoped to have a bit of clarity about the fall semester from her, but about ten minutes after we started meeting with her, our on site boss, Principal Shi, walked into the room and kidnapped her for a meeting.

The kids then showed up, and we went to our separate classrooms to rehearse. Of the younger kids, two did not show up. Since everyone else had come as a group with their counselors, I didn’t worry. I asked the students, and they said that Carl had gone home and that Little Amy was asleep in her room. Since neither of them had speaking parts in the play, I didn’t trouble myself with their absences.

We hoped to see Rosanna for lunch, but she did not show up. Still meeting. We ate our standard school-issued lunch—a chicken leg braised in five-spice soy base, cold fried little fish with a sweet soy sauce marinaide, a stir-fried kale-like vegetable, and a tofu stir-fry. We were lucky throughout the camp to have a private room with A/C for our lunch; we shared it with Michelle, our office manager, and a Nigerian man who taught English at a separate summer camp also being held at the same location.

After lunch, we had the standard summer xiuxi, or nap. In Ningbo, especially in the summer, everyone has their siesta, us included.

But ours was short because we had the play to set up. When xiuxi was over and the kids came down to our classrooms and we headed up to the stage together. The TV cameras which had been promised earlier in the week had fallen through, and that brought down their spirits a bit. But we headed down to the stage in the hot dining hall, and clustered under the ceiling fans that provided some relief. Erica had instructed her students to wear their Witts-issued t-shirts, bright orange and made of polyester.

The props were set and we waited for the principals to grace us with their presence. And we waited more. Finally, after a 20 minutes of steamy waiting, we gave up on them and started the play. The plays were good; the kids did a nice job even without any interesting people in the audience. Erica’s students wrote a play about Harry Potter coming to Witts summer camp. An evil student lures Harry and Ron into the girls’ bathroom and then attacks them, only to be defeated and turned into turtles by the Witts students (with a little help from Hermione).

I was watching the performance and taking pictures when one of the counselors came rushing in all flustered and counted the students, then counted them again. Then she had a heated exchange with another counselor, and stormed out and came back a few moments later with pieces of paper that she handed out to each student, shouting something at them in Chinese. This was all occurring while the students were performing. I finally asked what was going on. Somehow, during the performance, someone figured out that two students were missing (Little Amy and Carl). But they didn’t know which students were missing. And no one actually asked me what who was missing, instead they insisted on having each kid write down his/her name and then compare that to the list to figure this out. There is definitely, at least in the circles we run in, a tendency for people here, when there is a problem, to do something right away, anything, just to do something. And thinking definitely does not count as doing something.

A few minutes later Little Amy wandered into the room. She, like both principals, had missed the entire performance. She had been sleeping in her room. I have no idea why no one woke her up all day.

2004-07-19T04:03:00.000-07:00

Summer Camp

So it has been ages since I last sat down and wrote anything. I feel derelict, and in my vague defense I have been exceedingly busy. I can't even muster up an amusing anecdote from Summer Camp, which we are in the midst of teaching at the moment.

Erica and I are whisked off to camp each morning in the oldish, blackish VW Santana, the most common vehicle in China. The driver is maniacal, swerving in and out of traffic, narrowly averting numerous accidents on each 15-minute trip. It is not comforting.

We travel with Michelle, our new office assistant, who is nice and usually helpful. We hold our classes at the "Green School," so called because it is in the countryside (mostly), near the mountains, and has on-site orchards, fish ponds, and preserved-egg making facilities and so forth. The kids spend four hours a day with us and a few hours doing green activities like "loach-grabbing," "picking of the fruitage," and paper cutting.

Camp really deserves its own book. We planned our lessons along the themes given by our principals. Erica is teaching Magic and Wizardry, which is in line with the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings themes that the advertising offered. I teach Nature and Science, where we go out and catch bugs and pick weeds and then talk about them. For better or for worse, some shrubs right outside our classrooms are infested with bright green fuzzy caterpillars, which look really neat and have been stuck into jars. Unfortunately, these caterpillars sting (a new vocabulary word for the session), and leave painful welts if you brush their colorful 'fur'.

Erica's room is big, covered in camouflage paint, and the inside is full of graphic photos and diagrams about how to survive a chemical weapon attack. Baffling. There are lessons on hands, people fleeing disaster, and visual aids: gas masks, scary vials of white powder, and disassembled minibombs. We managed to remove most of them before the classes started.

Oh, and classes. So they have been good at times and painful at times. The students are alternatively cute and horrendous. We live in the age of cell phones, and a half-dozen students carry them, with one particularly homesick student calling home every break.

There is the child who writes DEATH on his owl mailbox, the ADD child who is either bouncing off the walls or incredibly focused on something, and of course the kids who bounce off the walls. These kids are surprisingly destructive, breaking, flooding, scratching, and gluing more things than I would have imagined. We are unsuccessfully trying to grow beans to learn about the parts of the plant, our problems due in part to the above activities.

We've worked nine straight days at this camp and are ready to tear our hair out. We've got six more. And it is hot out. mid 90s and humid every day. I've never praised AC much before, but here I'd die without it.

Tony

2004-06-18T22:43:00.000-07:00

Medicine

Last week I finally used some of our connections at Xiao Shi to start pursuing the “I want to be a doctor” part of my life. Our connections at that school are numerous, and as much of Chinese society depends on such ‘guanxi,’ it has served us well. We need to be careful asking favors at school, though, because sometimes we aren’t really even looking for a favor, but wind up with one. Like if I ask how much jade should cost, the next thing we know they are trying to arrange the school car to take us to some crazy market and insist on buying it for us. And I didn’t even want jade, I just wanted to know how much it should cost.

But this time, I did want something. Chinese medicine is still very popular here, and I was very curious about how it worked. Allan, our liason who left after a month because he had cancer has returned for two weeks in order to get some Chinese medicine to complement his treatment.

Our friend Andy gave us a book about it before we left, and I read all about the various elements, organs, and energies that are all balanced in a healthy person’s body. The book also described many traditional herbs and how they work to put your body back in balance, but what it lacked was the actual doctors office where Chinese medicine is practiced. We had been to a few pharmacies that were part of a tourist town or museum, but never to an actual working hospital. And I wanted to go.

We were told in passing that one of our co-teacher’s husbands was a Chinese medicine doctor, and I asked her if we could visit him. Of course, she said, and she could come along as our translator! Very exciting. Her English name was Snow.

Snow met us at the front of the large Western hospital that was right next door. This large building is somewhat of a landmark—maybe it was the only building in town more than 6 stories tall until ten years ago? She led us around back to the Chinese medicine hospital. From the outside, this looked like a normal hospital. From the inside, it looked like a normal office building. There was a wide hall, with doors opening into offices. Snow walked down the hall, squinting at the nameplates next to the doors, looking for her husband’s office. She didn’t come here often, clearly. Finally, we found his office, and though he wasn’t around, the door was open and a dozen or so people loitered, standing or sitting in chairs along one wall of the room. There was an observation table against one wall, an older computer that was not turned on, and two desks pushed together facing each other. On one, there was a small piece of equipment to take blood pressure, but it was not used while we were there.

We waited with the rest of the patients for him to come back. Snow told us that he is still building up his client base, and that he specializes in diabetes, which is increasing in China like it is in the rest of the world. His patients generally came in weekly for a quick check up to determine how well their treatment was going and for a new week’s worth of drugs.

The other patients in the room were generally elderly. He strolled in wearing a doctor’s white shirt, but without a stethoscope. He sat down and the crowd of people moved towards him. There was no line but apparently an established order. Patients sat down, gave him their green books which were probably case histories, and he looked at them, took their pulse, and jotted something down in his notebook, something on their case history, and then wrote out a prescription, all by hand. Each patient took less than five minutes. And of course everyone was hovering over their shoulders to see what everyone else had.

The tests in Chinese medicine are very basic and observational. A traditional doctor looks at your tongue, your coloring, and takes your pulse. From this, he can decide what is out of whack in your body and prescribe traditional medicine (mostly plant material, but occasional animal or mineral) to make you feel better.

I wasn’t there solely to observe; I wanted to have my persistent nasal drip checked out. Some say that Chinese medicine is best for those who have problems that are low-level and persistent, and cannot be solved by Western medicine. My ailment fulfilled all three of these criteria.

I watched a few patients being helped, and then I sat down in the chair to face him. I explained my condition. He took my pulse, glanced at my tongue, pondered for just a moment, and then gave me his diagnosis. We had to look it up in our dictionary together. I have too much phlegm! So that was a let down. Of course I do! He asked if I wanted any medicine to help me with it, and of course I did. So he scratched out a prescription and we were on our way.

Downstairs, the hospital had one of the set ups that is so classic to China. I had to take my prescription to one window, where a man added up my herbs on an abacus and told me how much I owed. But I couldn’t pay him. I had to walk down to another window, hand them the piece of paper he had given me, and pay them. But they couldn’t give me my drugs, they could only stamp my prescription and send me to the actual pharmacy, where the pharmacist took my prescription and filled it.

There were five or six pharmacists working in a heavily scented room, with woody, earthy, and ginseng lingering in the air. Behind the counter were a few aisles of large wooden cabinets. Each had numerous drawers, each filled with a different ingredient. A young woman took my prescription and started to fill it. She laid out five one-foot squares of light brown paper on the table and started heaping on my prescription. She’d measure out a few large handfuls of most ingredients on a primitive scale (like the one the blindfolded Justice holds), then scatter them roughly evenly over the five squares. I had ten ingredients in my prescription, including three types of wheat, a wood of some sort, orange peel, bottom-grade ginseng, and some green sticks. When she was finished, she folded up the squares of paper and handed them to me. I was to take them home and make myself some tea.

So that was the visit. To make the tea, in the morning I put the medicine in a pot, cover it with water, then simmer for up to an hour. I strain and drink the dark colored liquid, which tastes bad, and return the solids to the pot. In the evening, I use the same solids for a second batch, which being weaker, tastes slightly better. I have not found any positive effects yet, but it is supposed to take a few weeks to be effective.

2004-06-18T22:36:00.001-07:00

2004-06-18T22:36:00.000-07:00

Medicine

Last week I finally used some of our connections at Xiao Shi to start pursuing the “I want to be a doctor” part of my life. Our connections at that school are numerous, and as much of Chinese society depends on such ‘guanxi,’ it has served us well. We need to be careful asking favors at school, though, because sometimes we aren’t really even looking for a favor, but wind up with one. Like if I ask how much jade should cost, the next thing we know they are trying to arrange the school car to take us to some crazy market and insist on buying it for us. And I didn’t even want jade, I just wanted to know how much it should cost.

But this time, I did want something. Chinese medicine is still very popular here, and I was very curious about how it worked. Allan, our liason who left after a month because he had cancer has returned for two weeks in order to get some Chinese medicine to complement his treatment.

Our friend Andy gave us a book about it before we left, and I read all about the various elements, organs, and energies that are all balanced in a healthy person’s body. The book also described many traditional herbs and how they work to put your body back in balance, but what it lacked was the actual doctors office where Chinese medicine is practiced. We had been to a few pharmacies that were part of a tourist town or museum, but never to an actual working hospital. And I wanted to go.

We were told in passing that one of our co-teacher’s husbands was a Chinese medicine doctor, and I asked her if we could visit him. Of course, she said, and she could come along as our translator! Very exciting. Her English name was Snow.

Snow met us at the front of the large Western hospital that was right next door. This large building is somewhat of a landmark—maybe it was the only building in town more than 6 stories tall until ten years ago? She led us around back to the Chinese medicine hospital. From the outside, this looked like a normal hospital. From the inside, it looked like a normal office building. There was a wide hall, with doors opening into offices. Snow walked down the hall, squinting at the nameplates next to the doors, looking for her husband’s office. She didn’t come here often, clearly. Finally, we found his office, and though he wasn’t around, the door was open and a dozen or so people loitered, standing or sitting in chairs along one wall of the room. There was an observation table against one wall, an older computer that was not turned on, and two desks pushed together facing each other. On one, there was a small piece of equipment to take blood pressure, but it was not used while we were there.

We waited with the rest of the patients for him to come back. Snow told us that he is still building up his client base, and that he specializes in diabetes, which is increasing in China like it is in the rest of the world. His patients generally came in weekly for a quick check up to determine how well their treatment was going and for a new week’s worth of drugs.

The other patients in the room were generally elderly. He strolled in wearing a doctor’s white shirt, but without a stethoscope. He sat down and the crowd of people moved towards him. There was no line but apparently an established order. Patients sat down, gave him their green books which were probably case histories, and he looked at them, took their pulse, and jotted something down in his notebook, something on their case history, and then wrote out a prescription, all by hand. Each patient took less than five minutes. And of course everyone was hovering over their shoulders to see what everyone else had.

The tests in Chinese medicine are very basic and observational. A traditional doctor looks at your tongue, your coloring, and takes your pulse. From this, he can decide what is out of whack in your body and prescribe traditional medicine (mostly plant material, but occasional animal or mineral) to make you feel better.

I wasn’t there solely to observe; I wanted to have my persistent nasal drip checked out. Some say that Chinese medicine is best for those who have problems that are low-level and persistent, and cannot be solved by Western medicine. My ailment fulfilled all three of these criteria.

I watched a few patients being helped, and then I sat down in the chair to face him. I explained my condition. He took my pulse, glanced at my tongue, pondered for just a moment, and then gave me his diagnosis. We had to look it up in our dictionary together. I have too much phlegm! So that was a let down. Of course I do! He asked if I wanted any medicine to help me with it, and of course I did. So he scratched out a prescription and we were on our way.

Downstairs, the hospital had one of the set ups that is so classic to China. I had to take my prescription to one window, where a man added up my herbs on an abacus and told me how much I owed. But I couldn’t pay him. I had to walk down to another window, hand them the piece of paper he had given me, and pay them. But they couldn’t give me my drugs, they could only stamp my prescription and send me to the actual pharmacy, where the pharmacist took my prescription and filled it.

There were five or six pharmacists working in a heavily scented room, with woody, earthy, and ginseng lingering in the air. Behind the counter were a few aisles of large wooden cabinets. Each had numerous drawers, each filled with a different ingredient. A young woman took my prescription and started to fill it. She laid out five one-foot squares of light brown paper on the table and started heaping on my prescription. She’d measure out a few large handfuls of most ingredients on a primitive scale (like the one the blindfolded Justice holds), then scatter them roughly evenly over the five squares. I had ten ingredients in my prescription, including three types of wheat, a wood of some sort, orange peel, bottom-grade ginseng, and some green sticks. When she was finished, she folded up the squares of paper anput type="hidden" name="name" value="karensun">
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2004-06-18T22:30:00.000-07:00

Medicine

Last week I finally used some of our connections at Xiao Shi to start pursuing the “I want to be a doctor” part of my life. Our connections at that school are numerous, and as much of Chinese society depends on such ‘guanxi,’ it has served us well. We need to be careful asking favors at school, though, because sometimes we aren’t really even looking for a favor, but wind up with one. Like if I ask how much jade should cost, the next thing we know they are trying to arrange the school car to take us to some crazy market and insist on buying it for us. And I didn’t even want jade, I just wanted to know how much it should cost.

But this time, I did want something. Chinese medicine is still very popular here, and I was very curious about how it worked. Allan, our liason who left after a month because he had cancer has returned for two weeks in order to get some Chinese medicine to complement his treatment.

Our friend Andy gave us a book about it before we left, and I read all about the various elements, organs, and energies that are all balanced in a healthy person’s body. The book also described many traditional herbs and how they work to put your body back in balance, but what it lacked was the actual doctors office where Chinese medicine is practiced. We had been to a few pharmacies that were part of a tourist town or museum, but never to an actual working hospital. And I wanted to go.

We were told in passing that one of our co-teacher’s husbands was a Chinese medicine doctor, and I asked her if we could visit him. Of course, she said, and she could come along as our translator! Very exciting. Her English name was Snow.

Snow met us at the front of the large Western hospital that was right next door. This large building is somewhat of a landmark—maybe it was the only building in town more than 6 stories tall until ten years ago? She led us around back to the Chinese medicine hospital. From the outside, this looked like a normal hospital. From the inside, it looked like a normal office building. There was a wide hall, with doors opening into offices. Like most buildings in China, it was clean, but the walls and floor looked dirty with age. Snow walked down the hall, squinting at the nameplates next to the doors, looking for her husband’s office. She didn’t come here often, clearly. Finally, we found his office, and though he wasn’t around, the door was open and a dozen or so people loitered, standing or sitting in chairs along one wall of the room. There was an observation table against one wall, an older computer that was not turned on, and two desks pushed together facing each other. On one, there was a small piece of equipment to take blood pressure, but it was not used while we were there.

We waited with the rest of the patients for him to come back. Snow told us that he is still building up his client base, and that he specializes in diabetes, which is increasing in China like it is in the rest of the world. His patients generally came in weekly for a quick check up to determine how well their treatment was going and for a new week’s worth of drugs.

The other patients in the room were generally elderly. He strolled in wearing a doctor’s white shirt, but without a stethescope. He sat down and the crowd of people moved towards him. There was no line but apparently an established order. Patients sat down, gave him their green books which were probably case histories, and he looked at them, took their pulse, and jotted something down in his notebook, something on their case history, and then wrote out a prescription. Each patient took less than five minutes. And of course everyone was hovering over their shoulders to see what everyone else had and was getting from him.

The tests in Chinese medicine are very basic and observational. A traditional doctor looks at your tongue, your coloring, and takes your pulse. From this, he can decide what is out of whack in your body and prescribe traditional medicine (mostly plant material, but occasional animal or mineral) to make you feel better.

I didn't just want to observe, I also wanted to have my persistent nasal drip checked out. Some say that Chinese medicine is best for those who have problems that are low-level and persistent, and cannot be solved by Western medicine. My ailment fulfilled all three of these criteria.

I watched a few patients being helped, and then I sat down in the chair to face him. I explained my condition. He took my pulse, looked t my tongue for a second, pondered for just a moment, and then gave me his diagnosis. We had to look it up in our dictionary together. I have too much phlegm! So that was a let down, of course I do! He asked if I wanted any medicine to help me with it, and of course I did. So he scratched out a prescription and we were on our way.

Downstairs, the hospital had one of the set ups that is so classic to China. I had to take my prescription to one window, where a man added up my herbs on an abacus and told me how much I owed. But I couldn’t pay him. I had to walk down to another window, hand them the piece of paper he had given me, and pay them. But they couldn’t give me my drugs, they could only stamp my prescription and send me to the actual pharmacy, where the pharmacist took my prescription and filled it.

There were five or six pharmacists working in a heavily scented room, with woody, earthy, and ginseng lingering in the air. There were several aisles of wooden cabnets, each with dozens of drawers, each containing a different ingredient. A young woman took my prescription and started to fill it. She laid out five one-foot squares of light brown paper on the table and started heaping on my prescription. She’d measure out a few large handfuls of most ingredients on a primitive scale (like the one the blindfolded Justice holds), then scatter them roughly evenly over the five squares. I had ten ingredients in my prescription, including three types of wheat, a wood of some sort, orange peel, bottom-grade"MyShoutbox.com - Free Shoutbox!">

2004-06-11T23:41:00.000-07:00

Crab

Every so often I come across a direct contradiction between what I was always told, and the way the Chinese do it. When this occurs, I am torn. But as they say, “When in Rome…” so I normally decide to go with the Chinese way. Like when I let that barber stick a q-tip deep into my ear. Not too many people in China are deaf, and it turned out okay.

This rule was tested the other day at the market, when Erica and I decided that we would like to boil some crabs for dinner. Now my mommy always told me never to buy nor cook dead crabs, but…

At the market there are many vendors selling both live crabs who look miserable with plastic bags tied like ropes around their claws, and, yes, dead crabs. We arbitrarily chose a merchant, a woman who was earnestly pointing out her pile of chopped up crabs, picking up a section of the body and pointing to the meat. She was definitely proud of her product, so we figured we would try it ourselves. We were not convinced that her crabs were dead, but we figured we would go with her, since others had done the same before us.

So we chose four decent-sized crabs (about the size of big Maryland blues) to take home. They were beautiful, gray-brown with two spots half the circumference of a dime on their back that looked like eyes. We went through the same charade that we seem to go through each time we buy shellfish at the market, mishearing the Ningbo accent’s pronunciation of the word ‘10’ as the word ‘4,’ and then being quite surprised that, yes, despite the fact that most stuff here is pretty cheap, seafood can be just as expensive as back home.

But it didn’t break the bank and we went home. Once we got back we became convinced that our crabs were indeed dead, not in part because one’s leg fell off when we took off its binding rubber band. We should have noticed that before. Anyways, it seemed that they had been long dead, so we figured they were supposed to be dead. I boiled and salted some water, and we dropped them in. After boiling them for the normal time, we pulled them out and tried them.

I think I have mentioned before that a rather popular dish here at banquets is salted raw crab. The crabs are brined for I don’t know how long, and then chopped and served in pieces. People dip them in vinegar and suck the briny goop out of the shells. I am not a fan, but Erica doesn’t mind them. The more coveted crabs are the pregnant females, who have a large number of orange eggs inside their shell.

The crabs we had just purchased were just such crabs. They had been extremely heavily salted and were not supposed to be cooked. Well, though they were really, really salty, they were dinner, and we ate them. The vinegar came out early, and we suffered through one crab a piece. Realize that no one ever eats a whole salted crab when they are served at a banquet; maybe some one will eat two or three sections, but rarely.

I gave up after one, my mouth rough and raw from the brine, my fingers stinging from the salt that had worked its way into the tiny cuts no one ever notices until in such a situation. Erica kept eating, and then got mad at me for giving up after one. “I wouldn’t have finished my second crab if I knew you weren’t going to do it!” she complained. I couldn’t.

Needless to say, we spent the rest of the night drinking water and laughing at our idiocy

2004-06-10T06:37:00.000-07:00

KFC

It is probably news to few that KFC is huge in China. PepsiCo or whatever that company they spun off that is just their restaurants has done a very good job of marketing KFC here in China. Our town has a Pizza Hut (maybe two), but the only other international chains here are KFC and McDonalds, and they go head to head . I once heard that KFC makes more money in China than it does in the States. This might not be true (a brief Google search didn’t confirm it), but there are over 1,000 KFCs here, and they serve burgers and fries along with their fried chicken. Sadly, they don’t sell biscuits. Less sadly, their saccharine coleslaw and bland potato salad aren’t on the menu, either. In fact, none of the sides are.

We had intended to avoid KFC under my general don’t-patronize-American-restaurants-while-abroad rule, but after we spent some time here, we realized that going to KFC is actually a very Chinese thing to do. We meet with (literally) two friends of a friend of a friend of a friend every few weeks, Yvonne and Cecily. These two women are students in Ningbo, and are very interesting to talk to, to learn more about our city. When we asked them what they did for fun, they didn’t have much to offer. Both shrugged and said, “We go shopping, or we go to KFC.” KFC is one of the few places here where young people can go after dark and linger. Or before dark, for that matter. In Ningbo, there are probably five or six KFC outlets, and all of them seem to be thriving. Prices are not exorbitantly high, so middle class kids can buy themselves a meal without going broke. One can always buy a $0.25 soft serve ice cream cone if he can’t afford more.

We went to KFC with Yvonne and Cecily one afternoon, and the place was crowded. We found a table and had a small meal with them while we practiced some Chinese and they practiced some English. The experience was fine. It seemed like the inside of any KFC (or McDonalds, or Taco Bell, or Wendy’s), except that surrounding us were Chinese people and language. We haven’t been back. Yet.

2004-06-10T06:36:00.000-07:00

The rest of our mountain trip...
I am very fortunate I have been taking a ton of photographs from our trips because I take so long to actually write them down. Now that I have referenced my photos, I remember that we piled back into our cars (we were a gang of 10, remember?) and headed further into the mountains. This was an interesting situation. We drove on a very new road that was concrete—not the cheaper blacktop that we Americans use for our back roads—but only one and a half lanes wide. This was apparently a village-level road. And we passed through a smaller village but kept going, following a stream up into the mountains.

When I say mountains, I should clarify that I really mean hills in the shape of mountains. These are probably about 1000 feet high, at the most. They are different from the mountains we think of, maybe like the foothills of the Appalachians. But the mountains in this area are neat because they just jut up from flat land, and are always covered in green (except when they have been denuded by a quarry—in which case you often just see the contour of half a mountain and a big blonde cliff where it abruptly ends).

We are climbing further into this range of mountains, and we stop and pick up a man, seemingly randomly, from the side of the road. He will be our guide. I say seemingly randomly because I am frequently a bit confused at why things are happening. Usually this is because of the language barrier, but even when we are with someone who can speaks English, I don’t always get my questions answered. Or more likely, they don’t know. I believe that a big problem/issue with China, where there really are no legitimate organizations (until recently) other than the government, if the government doesn’t bother explaining something to the populace, there are not institutions to fill that gap. How old is the drum tower? No one knows, because the government never found it necessary to tell everyone. Is there actually an English TV station in Ningbo? No one knows, and no one knows who to ask to find out. So I’ve become accustom to not knowing big things, and not pressing on smaller things, because often even if there is an answer, it would take too long for it to be explained to me. Was this guide pre arranged? Beats me. I never asked.

Strangely, this has become a part of my identity here. There are times when something crazy happens, or something is done for no apparent reason, and I don’t ask questions. I actually don’t want it to be explained to me. I prefer to be in the dark. I think this may be partly because I am so accustomed to peppering someone with questions and asking “Why,” that when it becomes impossible, instead of becoming irate about not knowing, I cope with this reality by preferring not to know why at times.

Back to the mountains. We got out of our cars and started gleefully picking these berries at the side of the road. They were very similar to raspberries but better, with a vague hint of rosewater. Maybe I just think that because they are new. New and exciting! And unheard of in the West! After we picked berries for a few minutes, someone looked at his cell phone and noticed that there was no signal! This was a big event, and everyone else looked at their phones to confirm that, indeed, we were out of reach of the antennas. Sometimes I think that China has successfully made parts of the country more modern than even the United States.

We drove for a few more kilometers along this stream and then headed up a path behind a mill on the side of the road. On the side of the path we found a few wild cherries, sour and sweet, smaller than our domestic versions and the tree in front of my parents’ house, but much larger than the cherries we find in the north woods of Wisconsin. This was the reason for the current hike. But there was a larger supply ahead, so we kept walking. Also along the way, we passed small groves of bamboo. The plants were only as wide as a cane fishing pole, and frequently not even that large. It was early-mid-spring, so the new shoots were sprouting. These are the good parts that you can cook and eat. So as we came across the shoots that were less than a foot and a half tall, we snapped them at the base and took them with us. By the end of the hike Erica and I had a nice bundle, enough for a meal, once peeled and stir fried.

We stopped at a tree as our guide pointed out wild plums and at a vine where he pointed out wild kiwis. Both were far from ripe. We did come across another fruit tree whose name escapes me. It had garnet-colored fruits, the shape of a tiny kiwi, with a thin skin. It had a large seed on the inside, and we ate many of these from the branches that hung over a small creek. But it was a few dozen meters further up the mountain (all of us stumbling along in our city shoes and our guide’s 10-year-old son—did I mention he had a son?—carrying a long curved blade of a knife/machete) where we finally found the cherry trees. There were three or four trees in the area, each loaded with ripe cherries, but most of the berries were in the canopy, 15 or so feet above. While a few of us made grasps for the low hanging fruit (I like that phrase when used outside actual fruit-picking, and it is extra fun to use it in its original context), our guide took his knife and started hacking at one of the trunks, which was just small enough for me to wrap my hands around and touch index fingers and thumbs. A few minutes later, he put his foot onto the lower trunk and yanked at the top half, pulling the entire tree down. This is why Erica felt like we were living a scene out of the Great Gatsby. Since I’ve never read that book, I thought more about George Washington and just utter decadence.

But since the tree was already felled, it would have been even worse not to harvest our largesse. So we picked cherries for a long time, while our guide’s son ineffectively tried to fell another tree. I was grateful for that. Craigpony, sensing some of my uncomfortableness with the situation, tried to maintain that this was actually healthy for the forest. “New cherry trees will grow in its place and next year there will be even more cherries,” he claimed. That sounded suspiciously like G.W. Bush logic to me. Healthy Forests Initiative my behind! But all in all, I didn’t feel all that bad. We were pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Their cell phones weren’t even working!

So we headed back to the car and drove further into the mountains to try to pick some more bamboo shoots. The next town up apparently had a grove that was great for it. I had definitely learned to go with the flow on this trip. We pulled into this small town, which was really off the beaten path, and immediately one of our companions started taking pictures of a toothless old lady who was staring intently and confusedly at us. Erica and I were maybe the first foreigners she’d ever seen. Someone talked to someone and it turned out that we were way too late to pick the bamboo shoots, because they are picked in the morning. It is a neat cycle, the bamboo shoots sprouting over night and being picked in the morning. I believe if they are not picked the same day they break the surface, they get too big and tough to be edible, but I might have just made that up.

So since there was no bamboo to be bought, it was decided (I also admit I have had no idea who was calling the shots for any of our stay in Yiwu) that we should spend a few minutes staring at the locals while they stared at us. I snuck a picture of a few and felt bad about it later. Then we piled back into the cars and headed to our next stop.

Surprise! We were going to a tea plantation! This was indeed exciting. We fell out of the car (still sitting four in the back) and met the owner of this tea factory, who was friends with our host. In fact it was an organic tea plantation, internationally certified and such! We donned plastic shoe covers and he showed us the factory where the leaves were dried and sorted into their fancy tea. Inside, we watched as lots of shaking, sifting, and stirring was going on in order to get the best part of the tea sorted out. We all stuck our hands into the tea leaves with abandon, sifting, breaking, and smelling the leaves and nodding our heads that this was indeed good tea. The other large room had a floor full of recently harvested leaves in a big green pile. They are fairly mundane looking leaves, a little waxy, but nothing special. These were heated over a coal fed fire, which made me smile. Our first view of the factory had been of a half-dozen smokestacks spewing the black smoke typical of coal furnaces. Organic does not mean coal-free.

We took a walk through the neatly manicured tea rows. They are a common sight here, grown on the sides of hills in unusually neat rounded rows, as though someone had skillfully trimmed them with clippers that very morning.

The best tea comes from the youngest leaves of the new buds of the tea plant,. This plantation had invested in black screens that limited the amount of light that could filter onto the plant (like the ginseng farms in Northern Wisconsin). We were told that this increased the chlorophyll in the leaves, which makes a better tea. Beats me if it works (my unrefined Western palate, deadened by spices and dairy and, of course, coffee, for so many years has left me unable to discern a difference), but the tea is expensive and it sells.

We bought a few tins of the tea for our Chinese teachers and headed homewards, but looking at the clock it was determined that it was dinner time! So we stopped at what seemed like an oasis of a restaurant, small and surrounded by nothing. A few minutes later, they were carting out the food. It was an average meal, meaning excellent. The food in this area (including Ningbo) do tend to be heavy on the oil, which is off-putting to some, but to me, fat = flavor! Seriously, though, the heaviness of the food does get to me sometimes, but since we cook the majority of our own food at home—frequently using a tiny percentage of the oil in a native dish for our rendition—it isn’t an issue for us when we go out. Erica thinks she has gained some weight, but without a scale, we don’t really know. If she has, it isn’t much.

The ten of us managed to make a sizeable dent in the food we ordered, and this immediately made some of the members of our posse concerned—one cannot hold a legitimate banquet in China without comically over-ordering—so we ordered a few more dishes. Among these dishes are the occasionally heard of, though seldom seen, silkworm larvae. I had to sample them, and unlike many of these strange foods that I don’t find unobjectable, these I did. They tasted really dirty. Craigpony popped them rapid-fire into his mouth, happily explaining that they were protein. I agreed with that, but it was not rationale enough to keep eating them. I am not sure what to call them, because they are at that in between point post-caterpillar, pre moth. It that point when their bodies are all squishy and rearranging themselves. Not really anything. Perhaps larvae is the best term for them.

From here, we almost were finished, but the next morning before we left we were whisked away to a leather/luggage store. Since Yiwu is known worldwide as a commodity center, we had been peppered all weekend with questions about what we wanted to buy. Under pressure, I admitted that I was considering a new wallet (mine is a bit too small for the big Chinese 100RMB bills). So here we were, ready to buy me a wallet. They marked prices were a little expensive for what I wanted (about $20 apiece), but the store owner was a friend of our host and I was happy to patronize his shop as a favor to our host. Plus I figured they’d give us a discount. They pressured us to buy one for Erica. Fine. This wasn’t really all that much money anyways… but then they pulled a fast one. Of course they were not going to actually let us pay for this! We insisted, but they always win. And then the shop owners were able to show how much they loved our host and refused to let him pay, further improving his image in our eyes. The nerve! But we meekly caved into their plans.

When we got back, we bought a small piece of pork, and stir fried it with our bamboo shoots and wild cherries, with a little rice wine and pepper for seasoning. It was one of my favorite meals we’ve had here so far, probably because we picked two-thirds of it.

That was the trip. It was quite an experience. Now that I have this out of my way, I can write about other things, like what I have been doing for the past month…

2004-06-04T23:35:00.000-07:00

We've been blessed with visitors for the past week! Very nice, yet it has rendered me too busy/tired/hungover to type much. And I have been lazy/grappling with long-term life decisions more than I'd like. So here is a ltitle more from Yiwu, super late but potentially somewhat interesting.

A mountain visit and a mountain meal.

Back to our shenanigans. The next morning we had a similar breakfast to the day before (I stuck with the dumplings and such, avoiding the true breakfast items) and drove off for a day in the mountains! Sabrina had floated the idea of going to pick bamboo shoots early in the trip, and of course I jumped on it. So another posse headed into the mountains for the day. First we drove to a temple which was famous.

This was up a mountain that had recently been accessible only via many, many steps, but we were able to drive up a new switchbacking road that had clearly been carved into the mountainside very recently. While the rest of the mountain was green and vigorous, the area around the road was freshly defoliated, pinkish-orange earth exposed without even the beginnings of regrowth.

Up to the temple we went. Erica and I and resisted efforts to get us to pretend to pray in front of one of the Buddha statues for photo ops. We climbed down and I posed with a parked tractor-truck, which, essentially, was an old-style motor strapped onto four wheels with a truck bed and a cab to ride in.

On the way down the mountain we Josh mentioned he had decided Josh was a boring name. He wanted to change his name (not uncommon). He asked me for some English names I liked. He wasn't too hot on Archibald, so I suggested other names... Ben, Craig, Dan, Joe, so forth. And so he picked Craig. Craig is a hard word for Chinese to say, for the don't have that unvocalized final consonant ‘g’, as it nor do they have "cr" together. It sounded like C-raig-uh when he tried to say it.

After a few minutes of practicing his new name, he decided that perhaps he didn't want to be a Craig after all. "I have decided to be called Craigpony!" He announced to us. We were a bit surprised, to say the least. But he clarified, "Pony, that means small horse, right?" Sure. Craigpony may have taken inspiration from my explanation how my full name is Anthony but Tony is what they call me, or maybe he just pulled it out of thin air. Anyhow, that is what we called him for the remainder of the trip.

It was time for lunch, though, so we stopped at the rustic restaurant at the base of the mountain. Everyone else had cleared out though the floor left signs of their presence—the owner swept piles of sunflower seed hulls and bones past a coop of chickens (inside) and a few lazy dogs. We were here in the mountains to eat mountain food, and they did not let us down. Here was our meal:

Spicy home-raised chicken soup
roasted peeled potatoes
fried-stirred little river fish
skinny bamboo shoots with cured pork
the insides of soybeans and scallions in a mush
braised lotus root
stir fried froglegs
tofu skins
string beans with dried salted vegetable
peas
wild celery
dry fried small green peppers

They were excellent. The home-raised chicken soup was the topic of much discussion, and our companions generally agreed that it as tastier than normal, factory/farm raised chickens. There was no commentary about the earth-friendliness of the chicken, just about taste.

Chinese generally have different tastes when it comes to animal products. They are not put off by squishy or rubbery things the way that we Westerners are. On many occasions we have been offered or found on our plate various foods that would never be served in that manner in the US. For dinner the other day we had fried chicken cartilage, which was crunchy like chicken cartilage. Chicken feet, basically cartilage and skin with really no meat on them, are consumed very frequently. Chicken skin and pork fat are very popular steamed.

At this meal, the chicken was plucked and gutted, but otherwise served whole. I was ladled a wing, which was very tasty. Although I have been able to adapt somewhat to this “focus on the taste and not the texture or the fat content,” technique of eating, I still only ate about half of the stewed skin and left the wing tip pretty much alone. Craigpony noticed this and asked if I had not liked the chicken. I explained to him that I liked the chicken very much but that we typically like the meat more than the skin. He replied that for him it was just the opposite. He would much rather eat the skin than the meat.

Perhaps the only really crispy fatty thing you get here is Peking Duck, where the skin is crispy and good, served with thin pancakes, plum sauce, and scallions. I still don’t know what they do with the rest of the bird—it never makes it to the table.

2004-05-16T02:02:00.000-07:00

Touring with the Chinese

Back to Yiwu, Commodity City. So far I have only written about less than 24 hours. I need to scroll through my photos to remember what came next. After the plastic factory, we were driven to the second generation commodities mall, which was a huge, open mall selling the woven goods and hosiery that are one of the backbones of the commodities trade here. They called these malls by their generation. There were four generations so far, but a fifth generation mall-market was being built. We walked into one of the first shops we passed, which was the factory store for the socks place we visited. We stared around at the various socks and eventually were told that they wanted to buy for us. Okay. It is polite to refuse a gift on the first attempt but not for too long. I didn’t really need socks, but I spent some time looking for one. I learned to identify the Chinese character for ‘cotton’, which was a bonus. We each selected a pair and showed them off. Somehow, we were talked into choosing more, as Sabrina told us that if we each picked six pairs of socks, they would be cheaper. We are not good at refusing egregious gifts, and held true to form at this juncture.

We had a nice lunch with our new hosts and Sabrina. They took us to a nice restaurant where we got a private room and ordered a bunch of food. Our host, the cousin, was a smiley man and happy to show us around, and though he knew almost no English, Josh translated for us, and his dad was excited to learn a bit of English. More on that later. The biggest dish from that meal (I am embarrassed I did not write down more) was a fish head from a good-sized fish in a huge plate with lots of sauce, red hot-sweet peppers and garlic.

We relaxed for a while at lunch, but this was not to be a relaxing vacation. We were driven off to the Fourth Generation Commodities Market to do some shopping. This was a huge structure on the outskirts of town, and it was crazy. This was the marketplace of cheap, crappy Chinese stuff. We walked in and stared at the signs directing us to the correct area. We chose Jewelry and Hair Ornaments. We walked through aisles and aisles of stalls, each selling hair ornaments.

Ornaments of all sorts were available, but mainly barrettes, hair bands, and so forth. It wasn’t so much the variety of the items that were available (though there were quite a lot), it was the sheer number of these shops. Hundreds of 10-foot wide stalls lining hallways that went on forever. Each selling perhaps a few dozen samples, and ready to deliver 10,000 of anything if you should order it. We walked through hair ornaments to jewelry. Here were the cheap rings, earrings, necklaces, and other adornments. Nothing cost more than a few cents here, it seems. We were literally lost for a few minutes searching for a shop run by a different cousin of Sabrina’s who owns a different ring factory. Finally we found it.

At this shop both walls were lined with samples of their rings. There were mostly mood rings and glow in the dark rings, with some generic gold-ish and silver-ish rings. One could purchase 100 of these rings for around $4. If you bought in bulk (and earlier that week a Russian had ordered 200,000), the discount would be steeper. Here we were given a few more rings, a few which now sit on our bedside table glowing eerily when we turn off the nights. We fought through a few aisles of the toy section, purchasing a few dozen sheets of stickers and tiny origami folding papers.

Exhausted, we left and crammed four into the back of the Accord. We then drove to one of the proud new developments in Yiwu, a big stadium and park area. We had to pile out of the car and pose for a few photos in front of it before piling back in. We drove to a new school, which was built like a fancy new college campus. It was spotless and modern, and had well-tended gardens and lawns, fountains and sculptures in addition to the academic and dormitory buildings. In the background we could see the low green mountains surrounding Yiwu.

We eventually drove to a noodle restaurant for dinner. The specialty of this restaurant was chicken feet, but though they looked meatier and more interesting this time, I still opted for pork instead. It was good, spicy and warm. This was a hot day and the sweat that formed my brow was welcome.

On our way home, Josh’s mother insisted that we stop and buy snacks for the evening. We protested but relented. So inside a grocery store, we had to pick up some sunflower seeds, nuts, chips and chocolates for the evening, though we did not wind up eating any of them. I eyed a cured pig leg that is sold here in a convenient zippered bag but didn’t follow through.

We went home and Josh’s mom met us at the door of her home. This consisted of the top two floors of a five-story complex. It was luxurious by the local standards. Josh’s mom was a very nice woman. She had slightly reddish-brown hair cropped short and slightly permed. She was rather stylish and always wore a smile. She didn’t know a word of English and couldn’t comprehend me when I attempted to speak Chinese. But when we arrived she frantically gestured for us to sit on the longest couch I have seen (it could have easly seated seven) and watch English TV. They didn’t have satellite but many cities in China have one English channel. This station’s programming was typically “Dialogues,” where the host interviewed people at length about random topics. We spent a few minutes watching a ping-pong gold medallist from the 1980s ruminate about the sport before our interest waned.

The father was also a very jovial man. I believe he wore red every day we were there. He had just purchased one of China’s most popular English programs: “Crazily Speak English.” This was built somewhat on a cult of personality, a charismatic guy who had a riled up studio audience in his DVDs, handy phrase cards to take with you on the road, CDs to practice in the car, and a work book as well. The early lessons involved simple, idiomatic phrases, like, “Isn’t is a nice day?” “Isn’t a good idea?” and “Isn’t it wonderful?” We (mainly Erica) spent much of the trip helping him pronounce these phrases.

Soon, some other friends or relatives came over with three children, one in college, one in high school and one in middle school. Sabrina was going to tutor one in the girls in English for a big test she had. “You must be exhausted,” again came the plea. It had been a busy day, but the clock said it was 8:30. Well, not really. We decided to go outside to their patio and practice some Chinese with Josh and Sabrina’s husband, Michael, who had arrived that afternoon.

After maybe an hour of conversation, the older two girls who had come to visit trickled outside to see us. One of them was very bold and asked us promptly, “What do you think of President Bush and Iraq?”

We told her, trying not to be overly critical of our country, that we did not agree with the invasion, and asked her opinion. She said that she thought the war was a good idea because Saddam treated his people so poorly and “because he was responsible for the World Trade Center.” We tried to correct the error in the latter half of her justification and Josh jumped in with a defense to the former.

“It’s his country, he can do what he wants,” he said. At first I thought he was talking about Bush, but no, he was talking about Hussein. We are not sure if he was just giving her a hard time or not, but it was a very surprising point to come from him.

We were a tad grumpy that night because our suitcase, which we were told to leave at the first place we stayed, had not made the transfer. So we got up in the morning with our same clothes and one (my) really stinky shirt. At least they had loner toothbrushes. But our clothes came and I was able to change before running out.

We had another breakfast, this one we ate out. I had some noodles, some dumplings, and a fried egg. It was a lot like lunch, with an egg, though a variety of porridges were available.

A neat thing about the common Chinese way of traveling is that it is usually done with a crowd. So in addition to our hosts and Sabrina, for the rest of our trip we were accompanied by a half dozen other family friends or members, giving us between 10 and 14 people, just enough to ensure a large, jolly dinner table or tour group wherever we went. We didn’t observe a chain of command, but there were few problems in terms of indecision. Remarkable. Or perhaps everything was figured out beforehand so there would be no quibbling.

And then we were off, crowded into the back seat, again, to visit an ancient city. I don’t remember the name of it or the specifics, but essentially a really smart emperor from maybe 1200 years ago hailed from this city. There were some halls in commemoration of his greatness and various other interesting aspects of the city. It was somewhat mazelike and at the center there was a pond and a large cement platform that formed a yin-yang figure. We hired a guide and wandered around for a few hours. There were calligraphy demonstrations and old-time farming equipment you can try out, as well as some views and such. Many locals were selling preserved vegetables.

This ran late and threw us off in our search for lunch. We went to a nearby town and wandered around looking for a place to eat. It was very late for Chinese to eat lunch—almost 2:00. Finally, we found a smaller place that took us and we had a big feast, eating lots of snails and chicken. After a lounging around the table for awhile, we got back in the car for the hour’s drive back to Yiwu.

I dozed much of the ride, and when I awoke we were driving past the main square with what may be the only building in Yiwu that is more than 10-years old—a decrepit looking tower from the Ming dynasty that had small plants growing out of the brickwork and looks as though its days are numbered. We pulled up to a new building facing the square. We were ready to eat dinner. Dinner! We couldn’t believe it. Even I, he of insatiable appetite, couldn’t imagine eating more. This was a teahouse, however, and not as regimented in the eating as normal restaurants.

This was our second experience in a teahouse (the previous was the location of my chicken-fetus eating episode), and this time we were able to appreciate it in a different manner. The allure of the teahouse is that you get a table or a room, order a glass of tea for each person, and get free access to snacks and refills for as long as you want. So the response to our grumblings about not being hungry yet was essentially, “wait an hour and then maybe you will be.”

A few of us took a short walk around the square, which our table overlooked. The sky was overcast and windy and rain loomed on the horizon, but it was break from the stickiness that we had endured throughout the day. This square was more of a park, with a small pond and tended lawns and shrubs. It was decent. We spent a moment staring at a stubbly palm-palmetto type tree with three or four main trunks emerging from the ground, each about the size of a ten-year old maple. We were informed that this tree was very valuable tree, and had recently been purchased by the city from a private collector for something like $200,000. It looked nice, but not amazing. I sadly look back through our photos from the trip and note that somehow we neglected to take one.

So back to the teahouse, where everyone else was involved in conversation. We talked some, snacked some, and I somehow found myself paying lots of attention to dried lychees and pistachios. We drank a lot of tea, had a generally good time, and went home later. Back at home, we showed them a few photos from home and gave them our meager host gift, some candied pistachios we had purchased before leaving. It was just a tiny token and seemed all the more tiny when we realized how many meals they had taken us out to and things they had done for us. In China, the host always pays. There is usually a ceremonial fighting for the bill, but it is accepted that the host is the one who pays for everything. This has obviously worked to our advantage, but we are helpless in most cases to try to pull our weight.

We watched a few more minutes of Dialogues, Erica helped out the father with Crazily Speak English for a bit, and we went to bed.

We suspect that, despite the fact that the father was a very nice guy, he likely has been accepting kickbacks or various types of bribes on the job. He is a city employee, and though he seems rather high in the government, his position likely doesn’t pay all that much on his own. As one in charge of zoning and future citywide development, he had many opportunities to direct growth one way or another, thereby enriching those who had land in the area early. A different cousin was remarking how his new home, which was still being built, had almost doubled in value since he started building because of rising land values in the district. It was quite possible that our host had something to do with this.

2004-05-08T07:43:00.000-07:00

Commodities!

We spent a wild weekend in Yiwu, known around here as Yiwu, Commodity City. This was the place where all of the stereotypical cheap Chinese stuff comes from. It was amazing on many, many levels.

Sabrina, one of our colleagues at Xiaoshi who has actively befriended us, invited us on this adventure. She was excited about showing us her hometown, and since we were stuck teaching in the middle of this May holiday, we decided that though four days was not enough time to explore Beijing, it was enough to explore Yiwu.

We drove out there in her friend’s old Audi. I looked out the window the entire ride. The countryside in foreign places fascinates me. Perhaps this is because my many trips on I-80 through Indiana and Ohio made me value anything moderately interesting out the window, like that dome of Notre Dame’s you can glimpse for an instant on your way through South Bend. But people, machines, buildings, and crops keep me entertained for hours. This trip was only three hours, and we shared the backseat with Sabrina’s mother in law. I was anticipating spending a lot of time on this trip with her classic toothless grin and unintelligible dialect, but once we got to Yiwu, we pulled into a housing development and she hopped out, disappearing into her son’s apartment never to be seen again.

We also said goodbye to the Audi at this time, as one of Sabrina’s grown nieces pulled up in her four-door pickup truck. She introduced them, “This is my niece and nephew, they own a ring factory.” Okay. We piled into the back seat and drove off to their house, through the new developments of this city. We crossed a bridge and stared at the cranes dotting the skyline. Maybe in the China of ancient generations, the cranes would have gracefully spread their wings and flown off, but these were made of steel and were busily attending to buildings swathed in dark mesh fabric while their insides were put together.

We drove through the city and emerged on the other side. We drove past a cluster of derelict brick buildings on the left, some four or five stories tall. Sabrina said this was the village she grew up in. But it is slated for redevelopment, meaning that everything will be leveled and a spiffy new housing development or factory will arise in their place. She admitted she was going to miss it.

Suddenly the concrete ended and we pulled onto a rutted dirt path. So the pickup had a use after all, I thought, as we bounced along. But 50 meters further a brand new, though narrow, street emerged. We drove a bit longer on this road. To our left we passed an acre-sized pond lined with floating plastic soda pop bottles every meter or so in a perfect grid. We had seen many similar ponds in the countryside, but never in the presence of a local who spoke English. Sabrina explained that those bottles were buoys that marked the spots where pearls were cultured. Under the surface of the pond hundreds or thousands of pearls were slowly growing inside the shells of freshwater clams.

We continued on and turned off abruptly where a larger, stout building stood facing a similar pond, this one without the soda bottles. This was home. We got out and dropped off our bags inside the spacious living room. Then we immediately ducked back outside to check out the scene at the pond, where several children and men were loitering.

At the pond, we watched as a 10-year-old attended four primitive fishing poles. He also had a fine mesh net on a pole. After his patience ran out with one of the poles, he would slowly lift it out of the water with the net poised next to it. If he was lucky, a crayfish would be clamped onto the piece of bait he had tied to the end of the stick and he could quickly scoop up his prey and dump it into a plastic bag he had with him.

The view from the front patio of the house was of this small pond, the road to the left, and fields on the other side of the road. It seemed like the idyllic country life that so many of us pine for. But it would not be so for long. On the other side of the pond was a small field, but past that a low mound of red soil arose like a broad dune. This soil, devoid of vegetation, would soon become the base for new factories. Yiwu is growing.

We went inside and watched them prepare some dinner, which was a simple affair meaning only about 10 dishes for us, but none elaborate. Dinner was nice, and we were invited to try their homemade wine. I was excited, but the pale pink alcohol was rather sour. I’d rather drink our concord grape wine back home.

After dinner, a handful of other relatives stopped by (Sabrina has six older siblings, each with their own set of children) and the room was alive with little children running by, laughter, and the TV playing some kung fu movie that involved. We sat back in a daze eating watermelon and not even discerning whether we were hearing Mandarin or the local dialect. Eventually, the guests left and Sabrina and her niece coaxed us up to bed. “You must be exhausted,” she said. It was 8:30. But we went up to the bedroom and red for an hour or two before drifting off to sleep.

We were awoken at 6:30 in the morning by the same animated conversations, this time from the patio outside our window. That got us out of bed and we pulled on our clothes and headed down to join the crowd. Not being a morning person or understanding their conversation, I left the crowd and went off to watch the crayfishermen, who maybe never left for all I knew. Some had a few dozen crayfish in their buckets already. But soon I was called back for breakfast.

This was our first real Chinese breakfast (we generally eat wok fried or scrambled eggs or yogurt and granola at home), and I don’t really need to eat any more. We had the famous rice porridge which tastes like, well, overcooked rice in a lot of water. There were a few condiments available, but the preserved tofu was slimy and salty and sour (though not as bad as that description makes it sound) and the preserved vegetables were too salty for me to deal with so early. And the fried, baguette-sized piece of airy dough was a bit too much for me to deal with. I am not a breakfast person anyways, so it didn’t bother me too much.

We were off by 7:30, piling into the back of the pickup and heading off to visit the factories! We pulled into the ring factory and first started in the storeroom where we examined the rings that were made here. They were generic, pewter or silver-plated or stainless steel (I’m embarrassed I don’t know which), and molded into shapes of all kinds—the Irish handshake thing, peacocks, skulls, hearts with the Chinese character for heart written on each one, and various patterns and so forth. They pulled out a little bag and insisted we take some. We really didn’t need nor want any, but we didn’t want to insult them so we picked a few. They picked several more for us and we walked out with maybe two dozen of them.

Next we walked upstairs to where they were being made. No rings were being poured into the molds today, since it was the Sunday of May holiday, but a handful of workers had showed up. We watched as a man buffed out the scuffs on a ring, spending perhaps 10 seconds on each one. After being cast, the rings had to be filed, pounded and welded into ring shapes, and then plated. We were told that a worker makes one fen per ring. One fen is about $0.0012. Not a whole lot. If they are fast workers, they can make 30 yuan (about $4) a day. Sabrina told us this proudly. Perhaps it is one of the better paying factory gigs in the area.

There was another factory on the lot, and we walked into this one. The building was owned by her niece and rented out to another producer. This one made cheap cloth belts, the kind that are basically woven straps with buckles on them. We walked into where a half-dozen power looms were stitching the fabric at a rate of maybe a foot a minute and several workers attended the machines, keeping everything running. The straps were collected into huge woven rice bags where they were carried into the other building and turned into belts.

Next we drove to a building under construction. This was the house that Sabina’s niece and her husband were going to move into. It was big and spacious but had no greenery anywhere near it. This was a long ways from the house they would be leaving. We were told that the home had already almost doubled in value due to its proximity to the manufacturing area. We inspected the progress, noted that at least two workers had taken up residence in the uncompleted rooms (as is standard practice here), and headed off to the next factory.

Here we met more relatives, who, unbeknownst to us, were taking over as hosts. Erica and I got into another car, this one a new Honda Accord, and were introduced to our the driver, Sabrina’s cousin (I think), his wife in the front seat, and their son, Josh, who was a sophomore in college and spoke very good English. He immediately started asking us about the wildlife in Australia. We answered him as best we could until we admitted that he probably knew more about Australian wildlife than we did, since we had never been there.

“You aren’t from Australia?” he asked. We shook our heads. “I can’t believe it! My aunt told me you were! I spent all night trying to figure out something to talk to you about!” He hadn’t needed to bother. He was a very nice and interesting guy, and we had no problem finding things to talk about for the next few days. We pulled into another factory, this one quite modern, large, and new looking. It was the Meng Na sock factory. Sabrina asked if we knew of it. Apparently it is quite famous in China and Sabrina’s cousin was proud that he had pulled some strings to get us in. And quite a factory it was. Cavernous but decently lit, one of the first things I saw was a small Wal-Mart sign on the wall with the Arkansas company’s name the only thing not in Chinese.

Despite detractors’ accusations, there was no evidence of sweating in this shop. Hundreds of Italian-made looms churned out tubes of fabric that were inspected and then closed at the toe, steamed or stretched into the correct shape, and packaged. It was a fascinating place to see in action. The six of us walked around snapping pictures and poking at socks. We were not the first visitors this place had seen—a sign with bilingual regulations for visitors was prominently placed at the entrance.

From here we drove off to BOPP, another factory run by a cousin or nephew of Sabrina’s. Here we watched as a huge machine turned a vat of hot chemicals into plastic sheeting, perhaps 8 meters wide and hundreds of meters long. This was used mostly for greenhouses and so forth. It was hot enough to sweat in here, but most of the employees were engineers or computer guys monitoring the German machinery.

That concluded the factory segment of our trip. I will write more when I have the time. I am off to explore a nearby island that is very sacred to Buddhists.

2004-05-08T05:41:00.000-07:00

Calendar Games

I am writing this on May 8, a day known to the rest of the world as Saturday. And our Chinese calendars also say it is a Saturday. However, the entire country is operating as though it were a Thursday. Banks had regular Thursday hours and we had to teach our Thursday classes today. Tomorrow will be Friday. And the day after, Monday again, returning us to the normal week.

You may find this strange, but there is a reason for it. See, yesterday, when our calendars said Friday, was actually Sunday. And the day before (allegedly Thursday) was Saturday. The government pulled this nifty switcharoo where they gave three statutory holidays to the masses yet everyone got 7 consecutive days off. Most got Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday off as a holiday, and then were able to take another weekend just three days after the first one in order to pull off the seven days.

It has caused no shortage of confusion among us. This is only a few years old (it seems it was introduced in order to stimulate the tourist economy for 7 hectic days). The downside of this switch is, of course, that after seven straight days off, you have seven straight weekdays. Aye.

2004-04-29T06:49:00.000-07:00

I've been lazy lately, not wanting to write, not wanting to do much of anything. It is fairly depressing when this happens. But the weather is nice, so the unit we taught this week to the eighth graders about basketball was particularly fitting. Though to the dismay of many Chinese, Yao Ming's Houston Rockets were eliminated from the playoffs this morning.

Basketball is big time here. Our school has a half-dozen courts, and the games are carried live and then rebroadcast later in the day. It is not uncommon for it to be on TV in our 'library' here at our dorm or in the noodle place next door. Many of our kids are really into it. One of my students is named Kobe, and they were really excited that we were able to go outside this week for a few minutes and practice some of the words we taught them: "pass," "shoot," "steal," "dribble," "rebound," etc.

The games are all on with Chinese commentary and are played commercial-free. I haven't figured out Chinese TV at all.

When we were over for dinner at Rosie's last week, after dinner we watched a DVD from two years ago, when Xiao Shi competed in some gameshow against a school in Beijing. Her daughter was involved, and the show had about thirty students doing dance routines, answering trivia, being carried on their principal's shoulders, doing some sort of bungee basketball competition, writing a spontaneous creative performance piece, and racing through an obstacle course.

I suppose that wasn't all that strange, it was somewhat like the famous all-day variety shows like Sabado Gigante and their ilk in Italy. This one, sadly, did not involve any scantily-clad hostesses or supporting women.

Our apartment came with a TV. Just last week I decided to see what was on. Basic services here are about 30 channels, but they are all in Chinese. There might be an English channel that we just don't get, but no one seems to know for sure. Another of those things where no one seems to know, or know who would know. We have figured out how to watch DVDs played on our computer through the TV, so we've watched a few episodes of The Sopranos over the past week. A typical DVD costs about 10 yuan.

2004-04-26T07:15:00.000-07:00

Dinner with Rosie

We have had some problems here finding people who like to cook or even know how to cook. Most of the locals we are in touch with are fellow English teachers, and they are usually young, around our age. It seems that almost everyone we talk with on a consistent basis lives with their mothers (or vice versa, more truthfully), and that their mothers do the cooking.

We asked around and finally found someone who was willing to give us a cooking lesson! One of the English teachers at our school named Rosie generously invited us over to dinner last Sunday and cooked us a lavish meal.

We were over for dinner once before in a Chinese house, and both times we followed a very similar scenario. We sit down, drink some tea and watch TV while consuming snacks. After a short while someone retires to the kitchen to cook, and then we eat, lingering afterwards for a short time to have some fruit and perhaps look at photos or something.
At Rosie’s, before we started cooking, we watched the basketball game on TV. Despite the fact that they are on all the time here (especially when Yao Ming’s Houston Rockets are playing), I hadn’t watched much. But this game, a playoff game between the Rockets and the Lakers, was engaging me. I was getting into it until Rosie mentioned that the Lakers won by a point. It was on tape delay. Oh well, onto the kitchen!

Rosie had the largest kitchen we had seen in China, able to equip three people easily. She had a very nice apartment, two floors and fancy fixtures. Her husband owned a cement factory. If there is a stereotypical way to get rich in China today, it is owning a cement factory.

In the kitchen, Rosie had prepped various items for our feast. She started with a simple dish that I will probably not have the patience for here, a pork and ginger soup. In a pressure cooker, which I may never own despite their handiness, she had previously steamed a few pieces of pork shortribs (she just called them bones though they were boneless) and a few slices of ginger. She then added raw soybeans (essentially edamame), and pressure-cooked it for about half an hour more. Without a pressure cooker, I’d estimate it would take a much of the afternoon to create such a tasty, concentrated broth. It was excellent and jealousy inducing.

The next dish she made started with a bowl of quarter-sized clams, which are extremely cheap here. She scrambled a few duck eggs and poured them and a little water over the clams. After adding a little salt, the bowl went into the microwave for a few minutes. It wound up a bit overcooked, but next time she’ll cook it for a minute or two less. Chicken eggs would be fine, too, but Rosie uses duck eggs because she can find them farm-raised where they eat a more natural diet.

After the eggs and clams were in the microwave, she prepared a dish that she invented. Erica peeled a cucumber, and then Rosie cut it crosswise into two-inch sections. She then scooped the seeds out of half of each section, creating a tiny bowls. She simply stuffed ground pork into each bowl. Nothing else. She steamed the dish for about ten minutes and that was all. This dish wasn’t amazing, but the natural salts in the cucumber brought out a bit of flavor in the pork, and it was better than I’d have expected. The Chinese do not like to eat raw vegetables, not even cucumbers.

For another dish, she stir fried small strips of beef with hot green peppers to make a dish that is very common in this area, perhaps the most common way to cook beef.

Next she worked on the fish, which was the most involved of her dishes. She had a fish (an ocean fish, she doesn’t like the freshwater types here as much) in a bowl, resting under another bowl full of water. She explained that she had salted the fish and was pressing it in an attempt to concentrate the flavor.To make this dish, cut about 2 tablespoons of ginger into matchsticks and fry them in maybe the same amount of oil in a wok. After a minute or so, slide in the fish (which was flat-ish and about the size of a small saucer), making sure it displaces the ginger and doesn’t sit on top of it. Fry on high heat until browned, maybe 3 minutes a side, then add a splash of soy sauce, brown sugar, wine, vinegar, and water. Next, steam/boil it for a few more minutes, then add some chopped scallion tops and more water. Cook it a little longer and it is ready to eat!

Another dish (my least favorite) was a stir-fry of tofu pressed and sliced into linguini-like strips, processed ham, and zhai cai, a pickled vegetable that Rosie swears by but I didn’t find that fabulous. We looked it up in their electronic dictionary and it spat out ‘mustard tuber,’ not helping us all that much. To these ingredients she added a splash of wine, and a little MSG, which is not belittled nor used sparsely here. Fine chefs proudly admit that they use the substance, which does bring out the flavors in almost everything.

The final dish she prepared was French fries Chinese style; fry your potatoes in a few tablespoons oil, then after they’ve fried for a few minutes, add water, vinegar, salt, and scallions, cook another minute and serve. They weren’t crispy, but they were good.

2004-04-26T06:58:00.000-07:00

Maybe I have been living out of my Lonely Planet for too long. Maybe I have read too much travel literature in my time. But I hereby vow never to use the words 'vibrant' or 'bustling' again in describing what I see. They are the two most overused words in travel writing.

2004-04-24T06:22:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is the remainder of our Nanjing trip. It is an awfully long bit, and if you feel like wading through it, you will find some drunkenness, some tomfoolery, a giant Buddah, lots and lots of eating, animals made from blown sugar, and several animated discussions with Chinese vendors. Things are good here otherwise, and I am backlogging stories for future ramblings.

Nanjing II

So we had three more days in Nanjing after my last entry. We got up a little slowly the morning after our boat race-laden banquet, but the low proof of the beer kept us clearheaded the next morning. Erica and I took a cab to a suburb where we visited the Nanjing Massacre Memorial. It was a very somber place set on the site were many Chinese were killed. The massacre, which has been inexplicably largely ignored by the rest of the world (and virtually denied by the Japanese), took place over a few months in 1937. Japan invaded China in 1937, and marched straight up the Yangtze River into Nanjing, which was the capital city at the time. They occupied Nanjing when the government fled. Over the next few months, they raped, tortured and murdered over 300,000 of its residents in a brutal effort to “bring China to its knees.”

The memorial was built less than ten years ago, and is somber though full of people. We did see a short man restrained so he couldn’t attack an old and extremely frail security guard while we waited to get in.

On the site, we saw many totems of remembrance, including a very large inscribed bell, a huge sculpture of a dismembered body and a boat, a walk of bronze footsteps, and a large field of smooth pebbles to represent the lives lost. Past the memorials was a painful site where several dozen skeletons of the dead lay half excavated (many victims were buried on this site as well), with explanations occasionally pointing out signs of torture or bayoneting. The melancholy mood was briefly interrupted by the ringing of a cell phone and a man answering it.

Lastly we walked through a photo exhibition that documented many acts in uncomfortably close detail, and finally, on a slightly higher note, recent photos of some of the survivors. It was a very moving episode.

We met Joe back downtown and continued eating. We went to a Muslim restaurant, recognizable by the fact that the workers there all wear little white hats. Inside, Joe ordered for us and soon afterwards, a huge plate arrived full of chicken, potatoes, peppers, and onions, flavored with tomato sauce, coriander pods, Sichuan peppercorns, and star anise. We dug into this plate that had a diameter that approached a foot and a half, and I was happily gorging myself when a waiter came around and dumped a bowl of wheat noodles on top. They were about an inch wide and as thick as lasagna noodles; they made an excellent mop for the juices. Joe won the battle to pay for this meal—less than $4 for the four of us.

On the way home, we ran across a man in the street with colorful toy animals on sticks on the back of his bike. Closer inspection showed that these animals were made from sugar. Joe and a friend of his from Minnesota talked up this man, who made the animals himself. Upon our request, he opened up the wooden box attached to the back of his bike and showed us his tools of the trade. In it he had a few hot coals keeping four or five colors of sugar in putty-like consistency. At our prompting, he selected some red putty, took it in his hands and kneaded it for a few seconds, then deftly worked it into a balloon with a tapered end where he blew into and, about a minute later, he had blown a nice looking horse, which he sold to us for about 13 cents. Amazing.

We figured the best way to work off this insane amount of hot, filling food would be to climb a mountain. So we did. Purple-Gold Mountain overlooks Nanjing. It is a holy mountain, and definitely derives some of its popularity due to the fact that Sun Yatsen (father of modern China) praised it highly and chose to be buried there. But we visited him later.

Today we took a cab to the base and started at the base, suspiciously close to the restaurant where we had feasted the night before. A few minutes later, we were on a well-marked and well-trodden path, but in a now well-forested area. And with this forested area came an increase in volume. Not the expected sentimental music that one often hears at tourist sights, but actual natural sounds. This was the sound of cicadas or maybe locusts. It was almost deafening; we had to talk extremely loudly in order to hear each other. Joe stopped a few passersby to quiz them on the source of the noise. They established that yes, as we already knew, they came from bugs. One man enlightened us to the fact that this happened every spring. So we were not in the midst of one of those cicada hatches that comes around every 18 years, and I understand is taking place somewhere in the States this year. But we were nevertheless almost in a different dimension than the city just a few hundred yards away.

So we climbed higher, marking our progress by the numbers that someone conveniently painted on every few dozen steps. Around step 1,100 or so, we reached the top, where we had to pay a few yuan to enter (there is always an entrance fee) a small park where a few men were doing gymnasics on some new playground equipment. We sat at a picnic bench with a beautiful view of the trees 30 feet away, and if you strained your eyes, you could see a bit of a hazy view of Nanjing. We walked a bit further and came across a huge, probably 30 feet across, poured cement Buddah. We took a few semi-scandalous pictures with him and walked out to the actual viewing part, where we squinted at the haze to make sense of the city below us. Nanjing has fairly bad air pollution, so the skyscrapers, roads, and parks below us did not make an awesome impression upon us. Joe spent most of the time chatting up a group of local phy ed teachers who were also enjoying the view.

We decided to take the chair lift down. A man at the top had set up a small archery range and was offering us the chance, for a few yuan, to shoot at the targets he had set up. We declined his solicitations. “We’re pacifists,” Joe announced to him.

We were unable to sweet talk the chairlift operator into allowing us to ride three on the chair (it would have been quite uncomfortable had he), so we rode down Erica and I in one, Joe in another. We quietly drifted along the treetops on this well-forested mountain, making out some more of the sites. We soon began to hear something off in the distance that became louder and louder as we approached it. It was music. At the top of one of the support pillars a speaker was mounted playing… Latino music. There were around 25 pillars on this half-hour long ride, and all of them should have been playing this sentimental music, except that the few pillars before and after our first speaker had malfunctioned, leaving a solitary speaker as an oasis of sound on the way down.

At the bottom we visited the pay toilets. Joe likes them because he is told that they are rated on a star system, and the attendants are usually game for a conversation with a wacky foreigner. This was not rated, but the facilities were fairly clean and the man was happy to be complimented on the high quality of his toilet.

Next, we hiked in the direction of Sun Yatsen’s grave, but it was a long ways off. We contented ourselves with the botanical garden where we walked around and admired many types of flowers and plants. Many tulips were blooming in celebration of this being an international garden or something.

When we decided to leave we had the unfortunate realization that we were far from any other tourist site, not on a main road or bus route, and that it was 6:00—the time that most cab drivers are either switching shifts or eating dinner—a horrible time to hail a cab. However, before we had time to despair, a tiny bus/van pulled up in front of us. Joe said where we were going to the driver. “Get in,” the driver shouted to us. Without thinking, we did, and the other five passengers made room for us. Once we were moving again, it dawned upon us that this was probably not a free ride (those are incredibly rare in China) and that we should have agreed upon a price before we got in, for we were now in his territory. So the bargaining began, and the driver was ruthless. Joe was hamming it up, appealing to the other riders and saying how naïve and lost we were (or something… I couldn’t understand anything), and the guy decreased it from 21 to 20 yuan. Anyhow, he had to continue arguing with the guy for almost the entire way home, which was somewhat fun. This guy was just some local who had a van and was trying to make a little extra money by running as a jitney cab. In the end, he left us off vaguely where we wanted to be and only charged us a little more than a cab would have cost.

So we walked to an Indian place and had dinner with two more of Joe’s friends—two characters. They were perhaps the only two young Conservatives I have met abroad. One was a Mormon on a fellowship to study Chinese and had just graduated from Harvard. The other was a PhD in Chinese military strategy at U Penn and a former rugby player. We were mainly spectators as these two guys, who were meeting for the first time, had quite a conversation.

The Mormon was asking advice about hitchhiking on a military road in far Eastern China—a road that is officially closed to foreigners and perhaps everyone not in the military. Everyone else seemed to think that this was a bad idea, but he was really excited about being a modern day Marco Polo or whatever. We figured he will wind up in a Chinese prison. The military historian volunteered that he had a friend in the Chinese police force who could possibly get him some sort of official document that could make it slightly less ridiculous for him to try to travel that road. He then asked if the Mormon could buy him a dagger when he was there. Apparently, some really nice daggers come from that area. We did point out that it while it might not be a good idea to hitchhike on a closed military road, it is an even worse idea to do so while carrying a dagger.

The conversation then turned even more absurd when these two guys got into a big argument about whether an academic should be obligated not just to research and ‘discover knowledge’ but then to present his knowledge to the masses, thereby circumventing the press, which the military guy thought was worthless. This argument went on for quite sometime while the rest of us stole glances at the Bollywood movie that was playing in the background. When we were full, Joe and I preferred to talk about what had become my favorite running conversation. Glancing at the leftovers and patting our distended stomachs, I would ask him, “How much more could you eat, if your honor were at stake?” We would then speculate how much more food we could cram into our stomachs if we absolutely had to. Hours of fun. As we left, the Mormon checked to make sure that the other guy would still talk to his friend in the police department for him. After dinner we called it a night.

The next morning we walked around the campus of Nanjing University, which had wide shady lawns and ivy covered buildings. Two women practiced on the croquet course next to the volleyball courts. For breakfast we had two more variations of one of China’s most popular (and best) snack foods: Take egg, batter, and scallions, combine in one of many ways, then grill or fry it, and maybe serve with something salty or hot.

We met Joe (who worked mornings all week) for lunch with some of his friends from Nanjing University. We had local take out for lunch and finally ate the cake that Erica had baked in Ningbo and hauled all the way out there on the bus. It sagged a bit, but it was a chocolate cake in China and was greatly appreciated by Joe and the other dozen or so people who were invited. We had bought a local candle that had lots of plastic, a little sparkler-like flame, and a tiny chip that played Happy Birthday, and that wowed the other foreigners there. It was one of the few times this week I was able to walk, not waddle, away from a meal.

After lunch we visited a lake and the city walls, which, though over 600 years old, are still in excellent shape. On the way there we saw a woman who looked like her poodle. Each brick was inscribed with the name and address of the maker, and the walls have a nice comfortable walkway on the top. We paid a few yuan to climb up and the walked for about a ¾ of a mile before a fence inexplicable blocked our way. Apparently, most people turned right at the top of the stairs. We had turned left.

After our excursion onto the wall, we ventured to the lake. Like the lake from our first day there, this lake was also probably natural only to the Chinese, but we had no way of knowing. We rented a paddleboat that was shaped like a swan and paddled around the lake for about an hour, doing a little public service by scooping up floating orange peels and bottles. We flirted with a little subversion but opted not to abandon our boat on the far (and more convenient to us) side of the lake and give up our $9 deposit on the craft.

But we pedaled rapidly on the way home and got back just before we’d be charged for another hour, then caught a cab to meet some more of Joe’s co-workers, again largely dermatologists. We went back to the same restaurant that we had eaten our prior banquet, and were seated in a private dining room one room over.

That afternoon, Joe had been telling us how embedded into the medical establishment that the drug companies are here. There are fewer restrictions on how much wining and dining the drug reps can dote upon the doctors, and though their presence is not as visible in advertising, it is severe behind the scenes.

As we sat down to this meal, we were immediately introduced to one of these drug reps. She was going to be kind enough to sponsor our meal tonight. Great. We felt guilty for taking part in this racket, but we couldn’t just decline the meal. The menu was fancier than the previous night. Our host, the head dermatologist, frequently pointed out dishes that were particularly expensive. No abalone, shark fin, or swallows nest, though. Joe tried to tell everyone that I was an ornithological gastroenterologist and most looked on bemusedly, figuring, probably, that something was lost in the translation.

The highlight of this meal was also the lowlight. For two-plus months, I had managed to avoid a bout of serious drinking with the Chinese. This night, the streak would end. I have mentioned before the cursed baijiu, a foul elixir made from fermented rice or sorghum that goes down painfully. It is the same proof as vodka but tastes far worse. It is usually served in tiny shot glasses that allow you to throw it down and almost avoid the taste.

But tonight, I looked on confusedly as our waitress cleared the tiny shot glasses, since I had been forewarned that baijiu would be involved. To my horror, this did not mean that our plans had changed. I realized this when the waitress then filled my wine glass to the brim with the perverse clear liquid.

We had a few toasts and took a few painful sips, then our host raised his glass to Joe’s and mine, smiled devilishly, and said, “Half.” I warily eyed my glass, teetered, and talked him down to a quarter. That was still too much, but I closed my eyes, imagined it was grape juice, and took a few gulps. To my surprise, I didn’t go blind. The rest of the night was more and more of that, until the 5 or so of us who were expected to drink had emptied a liter and a half of the foul juice (Erica did her part when she tipped over her full glass of baijiu onto my place setting. I got blamed for it, but at least didn’t have to drink it. A further unfortunate result of the spill was that the smell, reminiscent of rotten-strawberries, permeated the air around me for the rest of the evening).

Finally, we were allowed beer (Budweiser), which we naively drank greedily, it being not the foul substance we had just been paroled from. Earlier in the meal, we had considered just running away, but stayed on for honor.

There are a couple of blurry pictures from the rest of the night, but the short (and only, really) story is that we stumbled back to Joe’s apartment and passed out by around 9:30, sleeping soundly until morning.

The next morning Joe slept through most of his rounds, but caught up for the end of them. Erica and I sat around dazed in his room. When he got home around 10:00, we stumbled around for awhile before going back downtown and found a place for lunch. Joe was excited about a Western-style restaurant, so we ordered a few pizzas, some skewered lamb and chicken, and some French fries. Grease always seems to make a hungover stomach feel a bit better. The food did not completely erase my memories of the previous night, which frequently restated its presence every hour or so through a painfully bad tasting belch.

We lounged until mid afternoon and then Erica and I headed out to see Sun Yatsen’s mausoleum, a huge staircase up the side of the mountain, loaded with tourists but featuring nice views. We walked up the stairs and enjoyed the weather, paid our respects to the man who is most responsible for modern China, and then took a bus back into town.

We met Joe at a foreign language bookstore so he could help us buy some Chinese textbooks. So we can now study our characters and have some actual form to our Chinese lessons. We bought Joe a book that he had been coveting about Chinese high school girls getting pregnant.

We then went to one of Nanjing’s most famous restaurant where we ordered one of their tasting menus. We ordered the cheapest menu, which was 20 small courses. Each came in a single serving bowl, which were cleared as soon as we devoured its contents. It was somewhat like a Nanjing dim sum. They were tasty, but I was jealous of the table next to me that had ordered one notch up, to 25 small courses. I switched my order half way so I could partake in their additional dishes. Sadly, that confused the servers and I only got one more dish. We caused small spectacle up front trying to get my extra dishes (I had photographed each one and we stubbornly pointed to the sole extra dish on our camera’s display), but to no avail. You win some and you lose some.

We left and did a little shopping for souvenirs for our Chinese tissues. Joe was fairly deft with his bargaining (he says if you add an exasperated “ayyyy-ya!” that automatically knocks off 20%) and definitely saved us a few yuan when we bought some of Nanjing’s famous rocks, called Mountain Flower Rocks, the types of rocks that, if you looked at them with an open mind, the mineral deposits depicted scenes of mountains, forests, and lakes.

We wandered around for a bit longer before heading home, bidding Joe farewell, and hitting the hay. Our bus ride home was fortunately uneventful and our classes the next day back in Ningbo went surprisingly well.

2004-04-19T07:25:00.000-07:00

Nanjing

We have just returned from our longest trip so far in China. We had a week off from classes because of midterms, so Erica and I ran off to Nanjing, the city that we almost moved to and visited our old friend Joe. He is there doing work on STDs and learning Chinese. It was an eventful and fun trip. Nanjing has a very interesting history and is much larger and its university draws many international students, allowing for a much different experience than Ningbo.

I gorged myself on numerous occasions. Numerous, well documented occasions. We ate many different foods with many different groups of people, and I just kept on eating. Upon reflection, I think what killed me about the burritos the other day was that I wasn’t limited by the use of chopsticks, which do a great job of regulating how much food I can shovel into my mouth at one time. Here, I also had that limit, so there were no sickening moments of overindulgence. Well, one, but it wasn’t with food.

Onto Nanjing. Joe is a great guy, and we really enjoyed spending more time with him. Our original plan was for us to spend a few days with him in Nanjing and then move onto Suzhou, but we never made it out of Nanjing. He and the city waylaid us, but we have no regrets.

We made it to Nanjing on our own, with no Chinese interpreter, though we comically took a cab to the wrong bus station early in the morning and had to jump into another to take us to the correct bus station. Our spanking new bus arrived 5.5 hours later, where we caught a taxi to some park where a bunch of ex-pats were celebrating Easter. We bought some mangos and oranges to contribute and managed to be so speedy in our arrival that we beat Joe there. We asked three lingering foreigners (lawai) out front whether they knew Joe Tucker. The were somewhat confused, until one asked, “Dr. Joe?” He’s the one.

We took a boat ride, all 14 of us, out to some tiny island with a pagoda built in the middle of this lake/lagoon. We spent the afternoon eating Western foods (someone had brought tahini all the way from the states to make hummus—we loved it), basking in the beautiful weather and catching up with Joe, who was close only to a few of the other foreigners there.

On the boat ride home, someone wondered aloud whether the lake was natural. That sparked an interesting conversation about whether that would even be a legitimate question to a Chinese person. It is unclear how many of the lakes in China, especially here around the Yellow River delta, are natural. West Lake, for one, the most famous lake in China, was once a bay that was eventually sealed off from the river and sculpted over several centuries to be the epitome of Chinese ‘natural’ beauty that it is today. It holds maybe six islands, with only one non-manmade one. The canals of Ningbo are usually completely straight, and were likely formed as a way to keep dry land drier and wet land wetter. But in the Chinese way of thinking, “manmade” and “natural” are not mutually exclusive. Of course the lake is natural! It is a lake! It is like asking if something plastic was manufactured! We asked our boatman, who of course answered that the lake was natural, but, unfortunately, we did not press the issue.

Joe took us back to his downtown apartment, where we were able to sleep in his ‘weekend room,’ which is close to Nanjing University, where most of the other expats live. He then took us out for dinner at the German restaurant where I had weiner schnitzel. At dinner, we continued to catch up and talk about China. He informed us that, since we were his guests, and this was China, he was going to follow the Chinese custom and pay for us. We allowed him the dinner, but when he suggested that we share a beer to end the night, we erroneously attempted to buy the beers. There was a bit of a scuffle, but Joe knew the woman at the store and told her not to accept our money, so he wound up paying.

For the rest of the week we continued to fight over picking up the bill, often creating a scene that was funny, at least to us, as Erica and I teamed up to restrain Joe and pay for whatever ticket or bill we were faced with. Joe gamely allowed us to foot some bills, but we did not come close to picking up our share.

Occasionally, we created a scene, drawing a tiny crowd of onlookers wondering what on earth these foreigners were fighting about. Joe and we took much glee in this, as Joe is fascinated with creating a spectacle.

In China, there are frequently spectacles. It usually involves two people arguing loudly, and occasionally involves construction work or other odd things. In order to be a true spectacle, though, one needs a crowd of people gathering around it. Otherwise, it is just an incident. Almost anywhere you go, there are enough people that if there is an argument or odd/interesting occurrence, people will stop, stare, and usually crowd around. It is not impolite to stare here, which works wonderfully for us tourists, but is a little unnerving (as we are often the object of the staring) until you get used to it. We failed (or didn’t have the guts) to create any true spectacles, but we came close a few times.

Back to our trip. After dinner, we turned in, climbing to the fifth floor and sleeping on the couch (me) and single bed (Erica). The next morning and wandered around the neighborhood. We found the drum tower (many cities here have an old, traditional, wooden drum tower that is a few hundred years old and was used to bang drums to ring in the time of day or warn war or something—we have one here in Ningbo, too!) and wandered around it, paid a few yuan to climb upstairs and escape the light drizzle that was falling—our only bad weather of the trip—and then ate a great breakfast, where a woman poured a big ladle of batter onto the bottom of a very hot oil drum, cracked an egg on it and spread it over the crepe-like substance below, then laid in some scallions, cilantro, hot paste, and some salty brown paste.

We then walked around lost, using our crappy guidebook map to look for the bell tower that we eventually found, though it was more of a pagoda in a tiny manicured garden setting. Bells are a symbol for remembrance here, apparently. It was lost on us what this particular bell was remembering, but it was big, probably ten feet tall. It made me feel pretty sad, thinking about all this to-do in the States over our Liberty Bell, when probably a half-dozen Liberty Bells could fit into this one, non-revered bell. Okay, I didn’t feel too sad.

Next we met Joe and an entirely knew set of expat friends for lunch. By the way, today was Joe’s birthday! We went out with maybe ten expats, but this was a very motley crowd. There was an undergrad from Minnesota, then three older undergrads from Malaysia, a guy named Guy from New Zealand, a woman from Belgium, and two crazy French guys who spent the duration of our (Chinese) meal torturing our waitress. The defining moment was when one of the French guys decided to take off his shirt and continue eating for 15 or so minutes. Our young waitress was absolutely scandalized, and the whole scene was pretty hilarious.

From there, we went out to do some sightseeing with Joe. We had a very fun time trying to find an art museum, which involved getting in a cab, driving 100 feet, then getting out again because we hadn’t realized the street we wanted was at the next corner. We walked the length of this tiny street looking for the museum, and wound up in a hilarious conversation with a half-dozen locals at what was labeled as a police station but seemed to be operating more as a foot-massage place.

I should mention, because most of our experience in Nanjing was drastically affected by it, that Joe speaks very good Chinese and is always excited to use it. When we would raise various questions, or wonder aloud about anything, Joe was usually halfway towards asking the closest local about it. We didn’t take a single cab ride where Joe didn’t engage the cabbie in conversation. This added a bit of giddiness to our trip, for Joe is full of energy, and all of us were excited to see each other and relieved to find someone here who shared those good old Swarthmore values.

What was amazing to me was that, despite having the ability to communicate with locals, we still usually didn’t have any idea what was going on. This, and numerous other occasions, has given me the conviction that most people in China frequently have little idea what is going on. Whether it is when the government holidays are (it seems that the government declares them less that a few months before they actually occur) to where the museum is, most people here seem to just take things as they come and not fret. There is almost no planning in China, and things change all the time. I guess we’ve mentioned that before, and I suppose it shows why people don’t want to invest time or energy in to plans, or learning things like opening hours and so forth because they will most likely just change.

So the gaggle of advice givers eventually steered us to the other side of town where we found the museum. Except that it was the wrong one. And it was closed. Kind of. There was a woman at the ticket office, but she wasn’t there to sell tickets. She was there just to tell people like us that the museum was closed. There was another man in the office, but he was busy playing Warcraft on the PC and didn’t pay much attention to us. We couldn’t quite figure out why it was closed, but the door was open so we walked in to find that most doors were open, but that there were galleries on the sides that had some Chinese watercolors.

Instead we went to the Presidential Palace, which was the seat of the Nationalist government in the 1930s, but was much older (I tend to forget these things more here). We enjoyed the numerous tourists wearing matching hats and taking pictures at the front gate. We snuck into a few of their photographs and had lots of fun with the video record function of our camera, creating a mild spectacle when Joe pranced around doing some sort interpretive dance to the poetic reading that I did of the poor English translation of the rules.

Inside, we admired the architecture of the air raid shelters, took detailed measurements of many things using Joe’s birthday present, a whale shaped tape measure, asked women about the flowers inside, wandered into a greenhouse on the grounds where Joe asked about plant care, and had a lengthy conversation with a security guard regarding the fact that the palace was AAAA rated by the government tourist council (or something) and whether he thought it could earn that fifth ‘A’ (he thought perhaps in a few years, if they worked hard).

Eventually, it was time for dinner, so we went out to a birthday banquet with Joe’s boss and some dermatologists and Masters students he is working with. It was a great meal, and though I am tempted to describe every course (I photographed each one), the gist of the meal is that Nanjing food is slightly spicier than Ningbo food, and there is a lot less seafood. They also served donkey, which was pretty good (cured, perhaps brined a bit) but made me wonder if there are donkey farms here that raise donkeys for just such a reason or if not, where they get it.

Another great thing about China is that most rules can be avoided if you are persistent or oblivious enough. At this restaurant, a fine dining establishment, we all sat down and ordered some local beer. Aghast that they only carried Budweiser and Tsingtao, Joe’s boss (the host) immediately sent two people to the store across the street, where they returned lugging a case of 600ml bottles of the desired beer. Probably against the rules, but no one was going to challenge us on it.

We drank the beer freely during the meal, and as Joe and I were reminiscing about rugby days of yore, somehow we got into our drinking games, and the next thing we knew we were competing in a boat race, which is essentially a linear chug—there are two teams and each member has to quaff his drink as soon as the competitor before him has finished his. But we didn’t break into teams, as per the norm, for this boat race was against the clock. Everyone at the table participated, men, women, students, and doctors. We did four rounds(!) and lowered our group time from 40 seconds to 12, though there was more than a little cheating by the end.

We headed home a bit hazy and a bit early. So that was our first day and a half. We didn't slow down from there, but I will write about the next three days in a future entry, for this is already absurdly long.

2004-04-17T08:15:00.000-07:00

Avoid this at all costs. Horrible, horrible, stuff. More to follow.

P.S. Nanjing was great.

2004-04-10T05:30:00.000-07:00

So we are off to Nanjing for the next week to hang out with our friend Joe from Swarthmore, and though I expect some crazy stories or keen observations to emerge from our visit, I can't promise it. If you try to make them happen, they don't. I will leave you with a story or two from the archives to tide you over while I am gone.

The health check up:

We needed to pass the Chinese Govenment Health Check up so, as far as I can tell, w could get a neat little boolket saying that we have passed our health check up. So our first week here, we were picked up early in the morning with three passport photos in hand. We took a cab downtown and were dropped off at some sort of travel medicine clinic.

In the clinic, we walked into the reception of the aging building and filled out part of some form, then were shuffled into a small room, where a doctor took our weight and height using some sort of laser distance finder. He then proceeded to check off a handful of boxes on the form: neck, back, anus, gall bladder, genitals, arms, and so forth. So from there, we cross the hall, where another doctor (or nurse, I don’t really know) draws a vial of bloods and gives us another stamp. We go into the next room down, where a doctor makes me read some letters off a wall through a mirror (I miss the last three rows, but Erica doesn’t have to take off her glasses). He then looks in my ears, down my throat, and up my nose, with some strange nostril-pinching apparatus. I am unclear as to whether this particular building is modern or downtrodden by Chinese standards.

We have several rooms to go, but I am waived ahead so we are not all waiting for each other in order to proceed. The next room was just next door down the hall. Here I had to lay down, take off my shoes, roll up one pant leg and one sleeve and hike up my shirt. The nurse (doctor?) attaches electrodes and we inhale sharply in response to the coldness of the equipment. I wait awhile, and finally, the nurse produces an ECG. Apparently, everything is normal, though there is a little more space than usual between my beats, she tells me. The next room has a standing divider/shade, making me think it was finally time to strip down. The sign outside said “b” ultrasound, but it was written top-down, making it look like bultrasound.

Inside a woman is reading a chart or an article or something (it is all Chinese to me) with her back to me. I stand uneasily right behind her, waiting for her to attend to me. I clear my throat a few times to make her aware of my presence. Still, no reaction. I wait a few moments, figuring she has decided to make me wait until she finishes her article. I waive my form in front of her in a last effort to make sure she isn't deaf. Maybe she was, for she turns around, startled. Here I hike up my shirt, she puts some sort of liquid on the ultrasound sensors, and rubs it around my kidney areas, then on the other side. I think I passed.

The last room is down around the corner, fairly isolated. Here I am instructed to stand amidst a car-sized machine. It looks about 50 years old. The technician retreats behind a window and there is a banging of machinery as a sensor scans my chest from the front. I look to the old TV set on my right and sure enough, there is a ghostly image of my ribs on the screen. A few moments later, it is done, and I return back. I suppose my lungs showed no sign of tuburculosis.

Chris is still in the ECG room. Apparently something is wrong. He has heart disease, they say. Amazing, he is 22 and very active. They want him to schedule an appointment in a different office. He is slightly worried.

He is considerably less worried when we describe our plight to our fellow teachers. “That makes four of us!” says Anissa. They all told us we had heart problems, as well." Alan, our facilitator here, laughs when we describe to him our ordeal. “All you need to do is stick out your tongue and I can tell you what is wrong with you!” he announced to all at a banquet we attended that evening. Chris went outside with him to be examined. “You are fine," Alan told him. “Well, your lung is a little dry. Beer is the best medicine!”

2004-04-10T05:22:00.000-07:00

A sample banquet:

In our first three weeks here, we have been the guest at six different banquets. They all involve copious amounts of food and frequently much drinking. I wanted just to write a few things about them, and record a menu from a fairly typical banquet that we had over lunch to welcome us to Xiao Shi.

The banquets always start with 7 or 8 appetizers, or cold dishes, which are on the table all at once. On this particular meal, we had cuttlefish in jelly with seaweed and sliced into disks, cooked dates with honey, cold steamed squid with a red, five-spice like coating, fruit salad with mayonnaise, dried little fish, salted raw crab, and pickled winter squash. I liked most of what was to offer, the cuttlefish being quite tasty, but the fruit salad would have been better unadorned with its condiment, and I have to admit that I wasn’t a fan of the texture nor strong taste of the raw crab.

After a few minutes of picking at the various littles, which were placed equidistant along the circumference of the large lazy Susan on the table, the other dishes trickle out. This day we had gelatinous fish soup, fried finger-sized spring rolls, tiny prawns, Sichuan beef, steamed razor clams, a bit smaller than your pinkie each, a salad with broccoli, shrimp, mushrooms and winter melon, sea cucumber, crisp fried duck skin with scallion and pancakes, whole steamed fish, braised crab, braised baby squid, braised cabbage, and finally, mushroom soup. The meal finished with a Ningbo specialty, tang tien, which are little glutinous rice balls filled with black sesame paste. At the end of the meal, the host always asks if you are full. "Would you like any rice or noodles?" is the question they always pose. Impressively, I usually decline.

This meal may have been a little more involved than most of our banquets, but not too much. Essentially, you have a tiny plate and your chopsticks, and you just pick at whatever is in front of you, spinning the table if you want a few more mouthfuls of a dish that is not near you. It is a neat way to eat, and no one can really tell if you are eating like a bird or a hog. I, of course, am always guilty of the latter.

2004-04-10T05:20:00.000-07:00

Going out:

There has so far been a generally implied consensus that we should go out as a crew once a week. That has worked okay, as it generally involves drinking lots of low-alcohol beer. There are just a few bars in Ningbo, and in our time here, we have been to the same, French-Canadian-owned bar that offers pool, American ambiance and music, though we’ve gone on off nights and both times it has been fairly empty with mainly Chinese populating it.

It is a fairly big group, the six of us, and we have coped by playing games. We play pool, liar dice, and cards. It is generally merry, and I think it provides decent staff bonding as a way to get away from the ickiness and politics of the ‘office.’ Liar dice is extremely fun, and I mentioned the other night to the crew (after several pitchers had been imbibed) how I can’t wait to get back to the States to show it to my friends. It involves, essentially, shaking five dice apiece and hiding what you roll. You then try to bluff the number of pairs and triples in your hand. It is lots of fun.

We met another Westerner who runs one of the three Western-style bars in Ningbo, called Cheers English Pub. She is British, and before I knew she ran the bar, we asked her what she does. She said she ran an antique factory here. I didn’t want her to clarify or explain away my first impression. It was perfect just that way.

2004-04-08T07:12:00.000-07:00

Oh man... I just ate 7 burritos (one for every week and a half we've been abroad) and drunken at least a half gallon of (low alcohol) beer. I feel like I am about to explode. Tonight was one of the many birthday celebrations that have showered down upon us here in our short time. Half our staff as well as one significant other have flipped the page in their life calendars since we've been here. This one, for Chris, our Australian cohort, was celebrated in full effect Tex Mex style, without the music or the jalepenos.

It wasn't bad. Erica made flour tortillas and I made refried pinto beans. We bought something that seemed to be black beans but after soaking overnight all the black leached out and left us with reddish beans that were white under their skins, but they refried okay. I kicked myself for not saving enough hogfat but we made do with the two measly strips we had so we were able to add a little taste to the beans. Someone had a pouch of taco seasoning which was poured into some ground beef, home-ground by David and Anissa.

What made the meal stranger was the presence of three women, Emily's mom and her two friends, who are visiting and hanging out with us here for a few days. There was a little less foul language (but just a little), and we were able to bond over jokes that elementary school kids like (Where do you find a no-legged dog? Right where you left him!) and Monty Python skits. Erica's big old chocolate cake was good, and though she wasn't that happy with it, everyone else was enthralled--it's the only chocolate cake you can find in Ningbo. We gave Chris a cactus and a bicycle poncho for his birthday and he seemed happy.

I tried to show him Beirut after most everyone went home (our 9:30 curfew also means that guests have to be gone by then or else they'll have to climb the fence to leave), but I couldn't find any cups that could hold their own against the mighty onslaught of a ping pong ball (plentiful here, as one could imagine upon seeing the dozen or so cement ones next to our school). So we played with skimpy cups and bounced all of our approaches so as not to upset their contents onto the table. By the time we finished one game of it, I was so full that I couldn't imagine fitting anything else into me. It has been a pretty good night, but I've got to get to sleep.

2004-04-07T09:00:00.000-07:00

The haircut:

I have had some neat haircuts over the past year and a half. One nifty side effect of having traveled the world is that I can remember quite distinctly each of my past few haircuts, and they have all been memorable.

There was the one in Buenos Aires, where, seconds after wondering aloud why there were so many people handing out leaflets advertising their services on the street and resisting Erica’s not-so-subtle hints that I could use a trim (and it is always her prompting that gets me to the hair cuttery sooner or later), I was handed one for a barber. So of course I got it cut, which was memorable for two reasons—the barber had only nine fingers and we happened to run into him on the street a few days later.

The next haircut came in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where I got my hair cut by an older man with a big graying pompadour. He gave me a newspaper than asked me how I wanted it cut. My response (I’d never learned barbershop words) prompted him to take back the newspaper and give me a comic book, and give me a picture guide from which I could choose my haircut. I then asked for a haircut like the guy with a ponytail, but my attempt at humor went unacknowledged. In the background someone sang Spanish lyrics to Procol Harum on the radio, and he sent me off with a business card/calendar that happened to have a dirty cartoon of some doctor having sex with a patient while talking to her husband on the phone and saying that she is doing fine, or something. Erica threw it out before I could put it in the scrapbook.

To the chagrin of all, I put off my next haircut for several months too many (no word in the English language rhymes with month… how strange). Just to spite her, I waited until the day after Angie left after hearing hell from her all week about my shagginess to schedule an appointment. I somewhat atoned for it by getting a haircut with Ken the Barber, my barber since probably second grade, a family friend on the corner of East Washington and Baldwin St in Madison. I will miss him, for this was probably my last haircut with him since I understand he has malignant cancer. But I went from having an ugly semi-fro with the receding hairline to having a buzzcut with a receding hairline.

I had a quick trim from my brother-in-law in San Francisco, which was notable only for the fact that I, idiotically taking matters into my own hands, misjudged the length of the clipper guard and carved a nice bald spot onto the side of my head before doubling over with laughter. Just in time to be introduced to China.

Oh, right. My haircut here. With my thinning hair out front my curly locks do not look as Adonis-like as before… Erica had started mentioning such. So we were walking down the street on our way from school, a two-mile or so walk we do a few times a week, when a boy runs up to Erica and sticks a glossy flyer in front of her. We brush him off, but then he goes for me, and starts gesturing wildly at the, yes, hair cuttery right down the street. And this was not just any hair cuttery, but the one with big windows and lots of light and a staff of two to eight standing at attention facing each other and flanking the doorway. We had noticed this many times, and it was Erica’s favorite salon in town. After a few moments’ indecision, I decided to take the plunge.

I can’t properly describe this salon in a vacuum. I need to put it in the context of its kin in Ningbo. Our apartment is, actually, in the thick of some of these establishments. Here there are beauty salons, and ‘beauty salons.’ The latter have several young women very done up and wearing skirts loitering in the salon, and I’ve never seen anyone getting their hair or nails done. We are unclear whether they would be defined as prostitutes, but the smart money is that these are, indeed, brothels. On our block (which is about twice the length of a normal city block), there are at least a half dozen of these ‘beauty salons.’ One could consider our neighborhood a school and brothel ghetto, if he so desired.

But the legitimate salons are just as interesting. We have at least two of these on our block. Here, whether a hole in the wall or a snazzy downtown place, the barbers are usually men. And they always, I mean always, have highlighted or bleached hair. Almost always long, too. This wouldn’t be as notable if it weren’t for the fact that we never see anyone else with this hairstyle. Except for one time, in Hangzhou. And he was a photographer, so he didn’t count.

In our salon, we were greeted by a half-dozen of these bleached and highlighted young men. I sat into a chair next to a woman with her hair in curlers that were attached by tubes to a contraption a few feet above her head that did something, who knows what. A man moistened and then shampooed my hair, spending several minutes with the lather, massaging my scalp, and so on. He did a nifty thing where he rested his palm on my head and his forefingers on his middle fingers and then snapped them down onto my scalp. It was not uncomfortable. We walked to a sink and rinsed, and he put my hair in a towel while he worked on the rest of my upper body. But first, the most harrowing part of the visit came. He pulled out a pack of q-tips and motioned to my ears.

Here is where I followed advice that I have used, with mostly successful results, throughout our time here. Since they offer this service and people apparently take them up on it, I went on faith that there must be some merit to it and that people are not getting punctured eardrums all that frequently.

So I let this stranger who could only communicate with me via pantomime and gesture stick a q-tip into my ear.

And he did not just wipe around the opening to my ear canal. He went all the way in. I think he was actually touching my eardrum, which was not all that comfortable, and quite loud to me. But he was practiced, despite the fact that he couldn’t have been much older than 20, and once he reached the point of resistance, he simply rolled the q-tip between his fingers for a long time. Probably a minute per side, or at least it seemed that long. Then he discarded the first q-tip and went in with a new one. Despite this dangerous and delicate procedure, it did not remove years’ worth of built up earwax. In fact, I was disappointed by the measly yellow buildup on his q-tips. Oh well. I was able to trick myself into thinking I could hear a little better afterwards.

Then we proceeded to the neck/shoulder/arm massage, which ran the gamut from pinches to flicks to karate chops. He did a little limbering with my arms, chopping the length of them and then shaking them out as one would shake out a sandy towel. By the way, I understand that all of these procedures are standard at most beauty salons in the area. Eventually he reached my hands, where he did some standard massages of the palm and then squeezed each finger between his thumb and forefinger and pulled outwards, forcing blood to the tips of my fingers for some alleged therapeutic effect. The he left.

A new young man (with fewer highlights but longer hair) came over with his satchel of scissors to do the actual cutting. He unzipped his tools and went to work on my hair, which was now dry. That is how they cut hair here.

Our trusty Chinese phrasebook had a section on the barbershop (“Please don’t cut it too short,” “Please massage my head only”), and Erica looked up the phrases that she wanted to use, “Please don’t cut the front too short,” and “Please shave his neck.” Our barber misunderstood the latter phrase, and awkwardly took his little scissors to my four-day stubble, which perhaps could have been cut a hair shorter but barely. Eventually he did shave my neck. Some of it.

Soon enough he was back onto my hair, which he fastidiously attended to. Naturally, during his work the entire staff cycled through, curious if he could handle this crazy white guy’s curly hair. We were in the same boat as everyone else. For the first fifteen minutes, I doubted that he was going to even cut it short enough to notice. But as he rotated from one side to the other to the back to the top (but being judicious with the front), my hair did get shorter. He spoke a tiny bit of English, but we exhausted our shared vocabulary fairly quickly.

I think his strategy for tackling my foreign head of hair was a good one: cut it short enough that it no longer is curly! And that is what he did, thinning and snipping around and around my head until my hair laid flat like good hair should. And when it seemed that he wasn’t going to cut it any flatter, he just kept going around, snipping stray hairs. We both wanted to yell, “Stop,” but that wouldn’t have been very nice. Finally, he was finished, and I got another shampoo and a pat on the back. We paid (about $3.75), and left, walking again past the employees standing at full attention on both sides of the door. It had taken over an hour and a half.

2004-04-07T07:13:00.000-07:00

So I feel derelect with my blog, with my journal, and with the rest of my life. We go on a vacation next week! A real vacation, for six days, to Nanjing and Suzhou. In Nanjing, we will be able to see old friend and co-rugger Joe Tucker, which should be a dandy of a time. But taking a week off mid school year means, of course, that we need to work much harder before so that we are caught up on our lessons when we get back. No big problems. But I still have to talk about my trip to the barber (yes, cleanly shorn again), how the volume here is always a click or two too loud, and an interesting experience we had at the market the other day trying to buy crabs. Hopefully I will get around to writing them soon, because, of course, after Nanjing I will have a hundred new stories to tell.

Excitingly, our fancy new camera just arrived today with the mother of one of our coworkers, so we should be able to get digital photos out onto the web very soon. I just read an article about two better ways to share pictures than with ofoto. Anyone tried share a lot or OurPictures Network?

2004-04-02T21:39:00.001-08:00

So maybe I am finally catching up with my journal. I am writing about what happened only two weeks ago. I was talking to Erica last night about how many things I’ve neglected to write about; things that shocked or startled me initially, but that I am now almost oblivious to. I no longer get white knuckles while riding in a taxi. I am not overwhelmed by the supermarket. I am quite capable of finding my way around town. The intense manicuring of park areas is beginning to bore me. I can buy things at the wet market without fear, and am even beginning to figure out how much things really should cost there. But what different/interesting/crazy things have I neglected to internalize before I became desensitized to them? Too any, no doubt.

Shanghai

Shanghai is a very, very different experience from Ningbo. It might have well been an entirely different country. This was partly because we stayed with Tom, a friend of the Turners for many years who is now an ex-pat settled in comfortably in Shanghai. He had a comfortable apartment with a nice view, a guest bedroom, and satellite TV which got a dozen channels in English. We read the English language newspapers available, watched TV, and gazed out at the city from his living room.

Unfortunately, it was a very poor weekend to go to Shanghai. It was cold and rainy on Sunday, and colder and cloudy on Monday. We caught the last bus from Ningbo and arrived around 10:00 in Shanghai, driving through a perpetual drizzle. Luckily, the cab driver could read our address for Tom since we didn’t have his phone number. We found his place, watched some TV and went to sleep. I suppose that should have been the time we went out and partied like you can’t do in Ningbo, but we aren’t quite that type. The next morning we got up and had some buns which Tom had brought home from the gym. Good, classic, central China vegetarian buns, similar to cha su bao, but full of some bok choi and tiny slivers of tofu and shitake.

We went out, in the rain, and visited the places that Tom knew well. We were next to the Xuijiahui shopping center, (at least at some point) the largest in China. We checked out the main mall area, which had a huge glass-domed atrium and seven or so levels of shopping opportunities circling it. We then crossed the street to Web International, a private language school were Tom worked until this year. It was quite impressive. In every way that Witts has no idea about what they are doing, Web did. They had a curriculum that the teachers worked from, they had adequate supplies, and they had a nice facility. It was like night and day. I admit I was a bit jealous, though the fact that they are expected to be at their nice facility for 8 to 9 hours a day was off-putting.

We left and took the subway to the People’s Square, on the site of the former racetrack that gave Shanghai much of its anything-goes reputation in the 1930s. This square, ironically, has a center park area with koi ponds and such that has a 2 RMB fee. “Communism with Chinese characteristics” is the phrase I have heard used to describe their economic system.

We went to the Shanghai art museum in the square, and despite it being a rainy Sunday, the museum was almost empty. I found it very compelling. The first floor was nothing but traditional Chinese watercolors. Some had more modern subjects, often involving construction workers. Upstairs was a more eclectic variety of art. On the third floor was an interesting exhibit using photo and video. We looked at a range of videos of people scratching—creepy. We were both transfixed for a few minutes by video of dozens of people of different races looking into the camera to say, “I will die.” Some said, “Yo voy a morir.”

We bought some paper cut cards from the gift shop, left the museum and walked, through the rain, down Nanjing Lu. Nanjing Lu is the primary shopping/people seeing street in Shanghai. But not quite as much in the rain. After a few hundred meters the hunger pangs started, so we had a lunch on the 8th floor (reached by 8 flights of escalators) restaurant of some department store. We had sizzling stone pots of curried rice and Korean rice. Both were good.

We cabbed over to Yuyuan Gardens, a popular spot for the tourists and with good cause. There is a nice garden complex here, with lots of little ponds and pagodas and courts and courtyards and such. It was built in the 1500s. It is mazelike, with each small part feeling intimate. We admittedly spent some time searching for the famous Large Jade Something or Other and came up empty. We found a large rock in a garden which may have been jade, but we didn’t know. It had a lot of holes in it.

Afterwards Tom went home and we went to the surrounding market and bazaar, which was extremely crowded (maybe some people stayed home but it is a lot harder to deal with huge crowds when everyone is carrying an umbrella) and extremely interesting. There are rows and rows of shops selling kitschy things as well as legitimate art, jade, jewelry, and so forth. But those did not beckon to us nearly as much as the numerous shops selling snack foods. Immediately, we regretted having eaten before we arrived. I had my nose pressed against the glass of various stores where you could see the cooks making their famous Shanghai dumplings. Ground pork and crab and a little liquid was magically sealed in a dough wrapper and then steamed or fried. Heavenly. I watched a woman with a pair of scissors and an empty bottle deftly extract the leg meat from a huge pile of dismembered crabs much smaller than the blue crabs we are used to in the US. We walked through a huge cafeteria and looked on jealously as others, not yet full, gorged on dumplings, buns, shellfish of all sorts and other foodstuffs.

Finally, we left, and walked briefly through the Old City, which was just as advertised: an older part of town. It was somewhat interesting to see the narrow winding lanes (though not as much so when you warily approached each corner with the real potential of being run over by a bicycle) and the local flavor of the old China we all idealized (chamber pots and everything), but we have those neighborhoods in Ningbo, too, so we didn’t spend too long treating the neighborhood residents like zoo animals.

We decided to walk to the Bund, considered perhaps the most interesting tourist attraction Shanghai. It wasn’t but I’ll get to that in a moment. Along the way, we peeked into a market/bazaar where everything besides food that could sit in a breadbox was seemingly sold, from six-foot stalls that covered three floors, each the size of a football field. It was an amazing place, nothing that would make a tour book, and not that it was particularly busy, even. But all shops were open, and I became disoriented very quickly, my eyes glazing over as we walked past stall after stall of cell phone holders, combs, envelopes, umbrellas, calculators, hair accessories, and the like.

We left and made it to the Bund, which was, essentially, the original fancy strip of buildings built along the river when Shanghai was a decadent city based upon the British concessions. Today, it is perhaps interesting for some tourists because of its European architecture, but we’ve been to Europe and seen plenty of said architecture. The buildings were nice, but they were just buildings. And did I mention that it was raining? The view from the Bund across the river to Pudong is supposed to also increase the enjoyment of the area, and we tried to enjoy it, but the scene was blurred by the rain and the low clouds. We were able to see some of the modern skyscrapers across the way, but the scene was not as dramatic as it would have been on a nicer day. We kept reminding ourselves during this trip that we will come back and see it again on a nicer day. It is such a luxury for us to be able to do so.

So we took a bus with foggy windows most of the way to a favorite stop for our co-teachers—the ‘American store.’ in the Ritz-Carlton complex It wasn’t super exciting nor was it specifically an American store; inside were many things you would be hard pressed to find outside of Shanghai (barbeque sauce, mustard, lox, Special K) at inflated prices. But it was worth the stop so Erica could buy some powdered sugar and cocoa powder for a cake she intends to make. We also bought some dill-infused mustard from Germany.

We went home and back to dinner where Tom took us out to a favorite restaurant of his. He invited along a Chinese friend of his, and we had a nice dinner of silken tofu with crab, finely chopped and mixed green vegetable, tofu, and sesame oil, pork short ribs in a oily sauce served in a hollowed-out bamboo bowl, and fried chicken pieces with hot peppers and peanuts. We also had wine, a bit of a luxury for us.

Dinner went late, and we came back and watched some CNN before bed.

The next day was colder, but dry, at least. Tom went to work and we set out on our own to take a walk through the French Concession. It was an interesting neighborhood, with many stand-alone houses and such, but it was not too interesting. We walked into a park (that charged a small fee to enter) and watched a few locals (who likely did not pay) practice tai chi, do some ballroom dancing steps, and take wedding photos. We stared at the Marx and Engels statues and those practicing tai chi in front of it for a bit and debated what to do for lunch. I was excited about coming back to Yuyuan Gardens next trip, with eating in that cafeteria and be able to look forward to. But I gave in, and wasn’t able to look forward to that any more after lunch. Now I have it as a memory. We ate, of course, both types of Shanghai dumplings: both the fried kind and the larger, steamed kind. Very tasty, but dangerous, as the hot broth is prone to squirting all over the table for those who are unschooled in the proper eating techniques. We supplemented it with a nice tofu/green/crab soup and a bowl of little crayfish/shrimpy things that were braised, it seems, in a five spice oily sauce. Messy but tasty.

We walked around the bazaar a bit while. Erica waited in line for a baked doughy thing that wasn’t as exciting as the line in front was promising. and then took a bus to the American consulate where we waited around while they put more pages in our passport. If you do it in the US, they say it takes six weeks. It took about 6 minutes for us, but our retinas were scanned upon entering the premises.

Afterwards, we were cold, so we just took the subway home. It involved walking around in circles and feeling somewhat lost until we found our station. We shopped a bit for a host gift for Tom, and settled on some cocoa and sugar coated almonds. We made it home and rested/watched TV before he came home. I became enthralled in a documentary about the travels of Marco Polo (he went to Hangzhou) and the next documentary, where a woman did an almost identical portion of our South America trip from Cusco, through Bolivia and across the salt flats and into Santiago.

For the rest of the night we became why so many expats love Shanghai. We went to a trendy restaurant which could best be described as Peruvian-fusian tapas. It was mostly good, with some tapas much more successful than others. It was also extremely expensive by our standards—we spent about $60 between the three of us. But it was fun and quite different. We had hot chicken wings, a bland ceviche, a shrimp/avocado/pineapple salad, some sake-marinated roast fish, and some fantastic bread with butter.

Next we went to a club and watched some jazz being played. Two African-Americans were playing bass and piano, and Chinese were on brass and drums. It was a nice show. Tom ran into a two friends there, a woman from Suriname and another who was Jamican but had lived in England for her recent life. I don’t think there is anyone from Suriname in Ningbo. The band stopped around 10:00 and the club turned into more of a dance club, but we, being old and unfun, left.

We got up early the next morning, found the bus station and took the bus home, arriving there in time for our 12:30 meeting and taught in the afternoon our lesson on pop music.

2004-04-01T02:38:00.000-08:00

Gotta admit that technology is wonderful. Don't believe that I am out of the loop just because I am across the Pacific (or Eurasia, for a few of you).

Yesterday I was able to listen to NPR, have my bro-in-law IM me music from UC-Santa Cruz, IM with my friends Gerry in Morocco, Matty in DC, and read the NY Times online from the comfort of my living room. While guys ride past in their pedaled-trike carts, loaded down with scallions, trash, or the occasional trio of loveseats (like I saw today)

And I am currently listening to another welcome addition to my life: lefty radio. About time I could keep up on the banter without reading. And keep up with The O'Franken Factor

Google is offering email. A news item I am excited about, a chance to escape my spam-clogged yahoo! account. A new internet gold rush! Get that email address you always wanted. Just don't take mine

2004-03-31T21:41:00.000-08:00

China Update #1: Minor Culture Shock
Hello Everyone!

We are writing to you from Ningbo, China. These two months have been a steep learning curve, but we have come out alive and thriving. We have learned much, but our two most important lessons have been: 1) Be pro-active! 2) Put your foot down!

Though these may seem a bit contrary, they have been extremely fitting of our experience and should not be confused with the common Chinese methods of: 1) achingly, slow processes 2) wildly, quick changes of plans (do not expect to be forewarned about anything including new students and your days off).

Ningbo is a city of about a million people. Located just south of Shanghai, the city dates back to 4500 B.C and has been an important port city since the eighth century. Walking around Ningbo today, one would be hard pressed to find evidence this long history. Cranes dot the Ningbo skyline, adding to the numbers of shiny, high-rise apartment buildings going up across the city. A French-owned superstore, Carrefour, sells everything from prepared Chinese foods to DVD players, bathmats, and Camembert cheese. It is a good place to see people, as shopping is a favorite Chinese pastime. Rivers and canals cross-cut the urban area and finely manicured parks dot each neighborhood.

At the ultra-modern Tianyi Square huge video screens play, KFC looms large, and colorfully-lit fountains dance to piped in music (think Sound of Music or Kenny G. among other Chinese favorites).

But, there are other Ningbos to be found besides this gleaming beast. On dirty, narrow back streets people sell vegetables from carts and empty out chamber pots. In our neighborhood, generic six-story apartment buildings are done up in the “concrete-block” style of architecture. We live in one of these structures on a street best described as a school ghetto dotted with “beauty shops” and beauty shops.

We live over the students’ bicycle park in the foreign teachers’ dormitory of one of the two schools at which we teach. This leads to cold floors and early-morning wake-up calls six days a week. We have the best unit in the place (luckily for us we are married!), with our own bedroom, living room, kitchen and bathroom. Actually, have two of each room, except the living room. Not a bad deal, considering that the three other foreign teachers have to share one kitchen down the hall from their dorm rooms.

They tried to have us share our apartment with another new teacher, but we had to put our foot down, as we would not have had any private space (our bedroom being only a few feet larger than our bed) and the orange-and-red skateboarder patterned sheets take up a lot of visual space. We do have a propane-heated bathtub and stove, a heater, and our own refrigerator and washer. We sometimes walk down the hall to use the communal toaster oven and dryer.

Though there are no student boarders, we have a front and back gateman and a gate that closes at 9:00pm. We also have a 9:30 pm curfew! It is often disregarded, but it means that all teachers who live on campus have to jump over the fence after 10pm. One of the other foreign teachers, Joan, is about 55-years-old and also has this curfew. It is so absurd that we just laugh about it.

A brief biography of our other foreign teachers: Joan is from Vancouver and just got an MFA in writing; she is (self-admittedly) quite flaky (she applied to the famous Iowa writing program, but accepted the offer at the wrong Iowa!). Chris is a 22-year-old Australian who came here directly from Japan where he left an English teaching business that he started and a girlfriend. Emily just graduated from Yale. She is thoughtful, but still learning to live on her own (can't cook, has a terrible sense of direction, and doesn't always take care of herself well). Finally, there is Anissa, an Australian chemical engineer who came here with her fiancee, David, who is a metallurgical engineer. She is a little bit quiet and serious. She isn't crazy in any way. She and David live off campus, so we don't see her too much.

Our teaching situation has been a "jump right in" experience. Our classes began four days after we arrived, but things have since settled down. We teach Saturdays at the for-profit Witts Education Centre, the ones who hired us. Witts pays us and volunteers our services to Xiao Shi Middle School, the best school in the area. We teach there Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Xiao Shi is a great place to teach. The students know a fair amount of English. We have focused on improving listening and speaking skills and have been teaching what interests us and them: American music, small talk, St. Patrick’s Day, jokes, and sports. Teachers and students alike have been extremely kind and welcoming. The English teachers have taken us out on day trips and had us over for lunch. Several volunteered to teach us Mandarin, and we have lessons three times a week. It is a welcome change for Tony to have students who do as he says and seem to enjoy learning. Erica is pleased to be working with middle-schoolers again and finds that there are some cross-cultural similarities among 13-year-olds.

Witts is another story and the source of most of our frustrations with China. All of us foreign teachers have adjusted to constantly changing demands and expectations (which are often contradictory) from the management and stakeholders of the organization, all of whom are located in Hong Kong, except for the principal of the school we live at, who may be in charge of us (we are not sure), and he speaks no English. We basically work without supervision and try to do our best without curricular guidance. Unsurprisingly, Witts is not thriving. We only teach 4 hours a week for paying students, but at the moment there are not enough paying students. We wonder how long Witts can continue to remain solvent.

We are learning a bit about how business is conducted in China and it is extremely different from what we are used to in the United States. It involves making a lot of friends/contacts, which can mean (for the men) drinking a lot, and also talking around issues. Our first week in China, our liason, Allan, came to a teachers’ meeting drunk. We suppose he was at a business lunch before hand. Thankfully, that was an isolated incident. The larger differences require a quite a bit of patience on our parts, but we are getting more accustomed to it. We are also finding that we need to be firm about what is unacceptable to keep our lives from spinning out of control with every new cockamamie plan that is presented.

Allan, a retired Hong Kong/Vancouver Chinese businessman (who used to sell sweetened condensed milk in the US), had made contacts and progress on marketing before he learned he had throat cancer and returned to Canada. Despite his one drunken appearance, we really miss him and his wife, Bernadette, who were both very nice and able to occasionally get things done.

An enlightening example of how our office works... Xia Ding, our 22-year-old office manager, speaks just enough English to figure out our questions, but has not had much to do since Allan and Bernadette left. He is very nice and has been instrumental in getting us internet access and getting rid of a rotten cabbage stench emanating from our pipes. Xia Ding is eager to please and will do most everything asked of him (usually with the words: “It would be my pleasure,”) unless he doesn’t think he should or he can’t, in which case he will agree to do it, and then not do anything.

Since February we have run out of printer paper twice and ink once. Xia Ding bought exactly one new ream last time we ran out. Since teachers use a lot of paper, it was not long before we ran out again. All work ground to a halt. We have all begun to accept this type of thing as one of the strange inefficencies of China, but it is difficult to understand how an eager-beaver office assistant who is constantly bored couldn’t be a little more proactive about the office supplies. Joan asked him why he didn’t just buy two reams of paper. “Oh no!” He was truly taken aback by the suggestion. He seemed to believe that if he bought more, we would use more (entirely possible); he also has to pay for these expenses out of pocket and then be reimbursed by the school. Fair enough, but it leaves us to wonder why the school doesn’t just order us paper in the first place. It isn’t like they don’t use paper at our school!

Despite the ridiculousness of some of these situations, we still enjoy teaching at Witts. Tony teaches third graders and Erica teaches first, second, and fifth graders. It has been an interesting challenge to figure out how to teach such young learners for two-hour long classes.

Although we don’t teach much, we spend a fair amount of time planning and in meetings. When we have free time, we are often exploring Ningbo, especially the markets. We have also managed to take trips to Shanghai, Hangzhou, and a few other local sites. There is just so much to tell that these tales will have to wait for another day. It really has been lovely and at times hilarious, but perhaps this gives you a taste of our initial adjustment period. We are excited to have a full year here.

If you’ve made it this far, perhaps your thirst for information on our life is unquenched. In this case, please check out Tony’s blog at www.ningbochina.blogspot.com. We look forward to hearing from all of you, and visitors are always welcome! More stories, and photos will be forthcoming.

Love,
Tony and Erica

2004-03-31T07:05:00.000-08:00

Click here for photos

Nothing more than went out in our mass email, but perhaps a more accessible place to find it.

2004-03-31T05:32:00.000-08:00

I've got to confess. Last night, we succumbed to peer pressure and joined our fellow teachers at Pizza Hut. Yes, we have one in Ningbo. And yes, it is very popular. It is not as popular as KFC, but it is a classier (and extremely expensive, by local standards) place. They do nod to the local culture a bit and offer escargot on the menu. Ningbo's many canals offer snails, and we even saw Ningbo snails offered on the menu of a nice Shanghai restaurant. But after seeing a snail netter on a canal in Ningbo, I wasn't all that inspired to try them. Especially not at Pizza Hut.

The pizza tasted like, well, pizza from Pizza Hut, or what I remember it tasting the last time I was there, which was probably after a little league baseball game when I was around 10. The five of us ordered two orders of onion rings for an appetizer, somewhat excited about having onion rings for the first time in awhile. It was a good thing we got two orders. For each order arrived exactly eight rings, the same size, and stacked on on top of the other, two high. The four onion rings on eac level were arranged like the four corners of a square. Quite surprising, and a bit upsetting, since we could have bought three entire dinners at the restaurant next door to our school for the cost of each order of onion rings.

It was a big let down. Just pizza. Not that I had high expectations. Cheese is scarce here, but not nonexistent. But we just got paid that afternoon, and our fellow teachers were excited about splurging a bit. Next time, we'll go to, perhaps, the sole Indian restaurant in town or to a Cantonese place. Much more interesting to me.

2004-03-26T05:17:00.000-08:00

I wrote this a few weeks ago and just updated it. For the record, we bought our camera from amazon.com and Emily's mother will arrive with it next week.

Shopping:
Our digital camera broke, and we spent much of today looking for it. I woke up very hung over, Erica woke up with a sore throat, so it was a very lazy day for us. We wandered around the shopping centers we know of that may have carried the camera we were looking for: a Canon A70 or A80. At the Digital Market, which is, true to its name, much more similar to a greenmarket than it would need to be, we found one vendor with the A80 and two with the A70. Then we walked to Hy-Mall, the super-super market right off of Tianyi Square that sells almost everything a Chinese person would want to buy, and only lacks in a few imported goods. Strangely, when we attempted to describe Hy-Mall to the Chinese teachers, we initially got blank stares. Eventually, the recognition came, “Le Guo!” they exclaimed. Happy (Happy) Shopper is how it translates. They had a decent selection of digital cameras, but only had the A70. On we went, past a smaller camera shop that carried both, and had the A80 at a pretty good price, 3500 RMB… about $425. But today we were just browsing.

We then took a bus out to the east side of town, where we went to Carrefour, another super-super market, this one with a larger selection of Western-style goods. That is due in part, perhaps, to the fact that it is a French chain. Only the A70, again, but though this was our third time here, it was the first time we could browse it at our own leisure. This time we discovered many things that we were informed were not available anywhere else but Metro, a German warehouse-like store on the far south side of town. For instance, they had bacon. And a wide selection of cheese. And cumin. So we bought those three items and several more, winding up and down the aisles and not leaving anything unturned.

The turtles in the fish tanks are sad. The mud turtles don’t make me feel as bad as the painted turtles. Why is it that the more beautiful things inevitably invite more sympathy? The opposite should be true. We should feel worse for the mud turtles because not only are they destined for the wok they are also ugly. A cruel world we live in. I haven’t ventured to purchase anything from the live-animal aquariums yet aside from a funny story about some eels that I will get to in a moment, because like most of us, I find it so much easier to buy the pre-killed animals. Then I don’t have feel like it was killed for me. Instead, it was already killed, and I just happened to come by and buy it. So as of now, I haven’t had any fish, bull frogs, horseshoe crabs, or even shrimp killed for me. I’ll admit that the middle two don’t inspire me, but the shrimp and fish won’t be spared for much longer.

There is a whole aisle at most supermarkets here full of attractively packaged gift items, foods and alcohols. It is clear that here there is a much more developed gift-giving culture.

About the alcohols… Of course, I have insisted on trying many of them. Beer is cheap and abundant, but it is nearly all low alcohol, 3.2%, and I like that. I can drink a lot of it and not feel that drunk. In addition to the three or four local brands available, our local store stocks Heineken, and of all brands, PBR. I must admit I was floored to come across it at a very Chinese supermarket. How strange. There are several brands of relatively drinkable Chinese wines, with Dynasty commanding an overwhelming market share. We bought an off brand today for less than a dollar and are curious as to how it will taste.

And then there is the high-proof wine liquor, of which I bought a bottle of the cheap stuff (about 3 dollars) to taste. It was the most retched substance I’ve imbibed, and I’ve imbibed some pretty bad stuff. A few drops of it in the bottom of a glass of Coke made the whole glass almost undrinkable. It is clear, and if you smell it you may detect the sickly sweet stench of rotting strawberries. The taste is cloying but not saccharine, and somehow gets stuck in your throat, reminding you of your folly (having decided to sample a wee nip) for several hours. Incredibly, there is a huge wall of this putrid liquid for sale in the market. I can only hope that the more expensive brands are more palatable, for I believe that it might be impossible to get worst than this. I would rather quaff a snifter of cheap grappa than a teaspoon of this.

Much more acceptable liquors that we have discovered include a cheap locally made brandy and some ginseng-infused whisky thing, which I really liked. At Carrefour and Metro you can buy imported liquor like Stoli and Bacardi for less than they are in the states, but their prices seem sky-high when you compare them to everything else you buy in the stores here. We don’t drink much, though, despite my above description. Perhaps every other night we will share a half-liter bottle of beer and maybe go out to one of the few watering holes every fortnight.

For most of our shopping, we stay in the neighborhood, as we have a wide selection of goods almost at our fingertips. On our corner is a typical Chinese supermarket, called, in huge letters, Family Market. Inside is the same eclectic selection as at Hy-Mall, but many few choices. There is a very small electronics selection, a clothing section, office goods, dry goods, small cooked meat and prepared goods section, housewares, and some fruits. The major thing that the wet market is lacking is vegetables and meats. Those are available, however, at the wet market. I’’ describe that another day.

Oh yeah, the eels. So we went to the wet market with our office manager, Xiao Ding. I was excited to have a local with me so he could tell me some tips. Alas, we are cursed here in that of the half-dozen locals who are happy to help us all know nothing about cooking. Xiao Ding falls in this category and was unhelpful. I wanted to buy some fish, and wanted to know what he liked. He said he didn’t like fish much. Eventually, though, we passed a vendor with several wide, shallow tubs filled with slithering, foot-long eels. These were the freshwater type, dark olive-brown and round. He told me that these were his favorite, and healthy (our Chinese medicine book also raves about the health benefits of freshwater eels, I think they have lots of chi or something). We asked the eelmonger how to cook them, and he answered, predictably, “with ginger and scallions.” Very funny. We learned you boil them for ten minutes.

Okay, I’d give it a try. They were extremely expensive, though, by Ningbo standards. Almost $4 a pound. We bought three of the slimy creatures and the eelmonger wasted no time in dispatching them. He picked up his kitchen shears and just started snipping away. First, off went the heads. Then he snipped the remaining, squirming body into two-inch sections and pulled out the guts.

We watched with horror/fascination at his efficiency until we were interrupted by a graceful arc of blood/eel juice. He cut through something that released a lot of pressure, and the ensuing spurt of liquid easily cleared the tubs of the unfortunate eel’s peers and, as though she was its intended target, splattered all over Erica’s light blue shirt. We were certainly surprised. I apologized profusely to Erica, who didn’t find it nearly as funny as me, who didn’t find it nearly as funny as everyone else around us. Oh, and we cooked up the eels after consulting several recipes online. They were pretty good, with nice, light and firm meat, much better than their seagoing cousins.

2004-03-19T22:34:00.000-08:00

Hangzhou

I figured I'd better get this out before we go on our next trip!

So this was our first venture out into the great unknown that is China. We were going on our own, and staying overnight! Erica and I focused our Chinese lessons the week before on the simple things, like booking a train ticket and the hotel, and asking if things could be a little bit cheaper.

Finally, the morning arrived, and we took a cab to the train station. Nothing was listed in English nor pinyin, and we wandered around a bit before deciding to just get in a line and order our ticket. Since we didnÂt know anything, we just got in the shortest line to try to buy our tickets. Though we had rehearsed our lines many times, Erica just asked in Chinese, ÂHangzhou, ticket, two,Â and of course they understood her fine. So we had our tickets, and eventually discovered we had bought fancy ones, and were in the Âsoft seatÂ section of the train, where we would have had our own private waiting room had we known. But we made it onto the train no problem. I thought I would be cool and order some tea from the woman who had been selling tea and was now carrying a thermos back and forth. So when I tried out my Chinese for ÂteaÂ she brought me a train schedule. It could have been a less useful item.

We arrived in Hangzhou with our small backpacks and then hiked around the block before finding a bus that took us to the famous Xi Hu, West Lake. This is one of the most popular places for tourists in China. It has been a tourist attraction for over 1500 years, and thereby, has been molded very slowly by successive generations. And it is a beautiful lake. Originally a bay, this is now an artificial lake, with several artificial islands and causeways. There are lots of things to see, as various bridges, bays, pagodas, ponds, and gardens have been planted around it over the years. There are mountains in the background, and it seems like everything was built with the consideration of how it would improve the view from the other side of the lake.

We spent much of the day wandering around the lake, enjoying the views and people. It was busy. We were feeling hungry, so we bought little shish kebabs with spicy pork on them for about 6 cents each. Sadly, they seemed to be cut from the most inedible parts of the pig, and we wound up spitting out most of the chewiest parts, finding about 10% edible meat and 20% chewable fat, and the rest gristle. Oh well, you always learn something.

We stopped in a park on the northeast corner, and sat and watched with pleasure as dozens of kids and kids at heart flew kites on a small brick pavilion. Most of these kites were little things being sold for a few yuan on the spot, and most were lower than 50 feet in the air.

It was a beautiful day. We noticed that a few of the cherry trees were blossoming, and the willows that seemingly were planted every 30 feet the circumference of the lake were just sending out their first growthÂlight green, almost glowing. We had to join the multitudes of Chinese tourists in snapping photos with the new growth and blossoms in the foreground and some scenery in the background. At a particular spot, there were several cherry trees in full blossom. There was a line of people, waiting for their turn to pose in front of them. Naturally, we joined it. Postcards of the lake often show it with cherry blossoms and willow blossoms in the foreground. We attempted to mimic that look, but they are a bit fuzzier in our photos.

We walked around a newer section, one dedicated to the wine making and something else, though I canÂt remember what. It was new, but only in construction. It had the same angled walkways, arched bridges, and sloping pagodas that have been built up around the lake over the past two millennia. We were happy to wander around it, though despite many English signs, we did not find it particularly informative.

Around sunset, we had dinner. We went into one of the most famous restaurants in Hangzhou, which is on the sole ÂnaturalÂ island in the lake. We ordered off their English menu, and had their specialty, fish cooked in rice vinegar, as well as shrimp with puffed rice, and with an appetizer of dried sardine-sized fish and a silken tofu with preserved eggs on top. It was good, though both of our entrees were served with a rather sweet/sour sauce. We enjoyed the meal with a pitcher of watermelon juice and a beer.

After dinner, we went to the recommended hotel, which was a bit further from the lake than we had expected. But after arriving there, we managed to bargain the price of our hotel room down from 278 to 228 yuan. It was very exciting. And we did have a TV, bathtub, and comfortable living quarters.

After checking in, we went down to the night market, which had been recommended both by our guidebook and our fellow teachers here. We wandered around the location indicated in our Lonely Planet for half an hour before deciding that it must have moved. So we wandered around, staring at our map, until a very nice young man asked us what we were looking for (in English!). He then pointed us in the correct direction and we had no trouble finding it. It had moved about four blocks to the east.

At the market, we decided to do a bit of shopping. Hangzhou is well known for its silk and its fans, and we really needed something for the walls in our apartment. So we started browsing a bit, and of course, every aggressive vendor saw us and saw dollar signs, and really pushed us. I glanced at some silk pajamas and, just curious about the cost, asked how much. Â185 yuan,Â (about $24) she replied. No way. I started to leave, but they were insistent. ÂHow much?Â they asked in English. I pondered. ÂUmÂ. 50?Â (about $6) ÂBah!Â (or the Chinese equivalent), she yelled. Â80.Â That was a lot lower, but I didnÂt really even want to pay 50. ÂNo thanks,Â I said, and as I walked away, I was grabbed. ÂOkay, okay,Â they said, Â50.Â Of course I immediately wondered if she would have parted with them for 30. So I now have a slinky pair of royal blue PJs to wear to bed and slide around in my sheets with. In two months it will be too hot to wear such nightwear, but they are fun for now.

Erica, almost concurrently, had the same thing happen for a little wooden fan, for which she regrets having counteroffered 15 after he rejected her offer of 10 to his open of 40. She probably could have gotten it for 10.

We spent some time considering whether to buy a six-foot scroll for the wall, which we were under the impression was original art (it wasnÂt, it was a print). Eventually we decided to buy it, but we, naively, made the big mistake of offering to pay more than half of his original price. We paid 75 yuan for it (down from 120). I am a sucker, and hate bargaining with an artist for his work (support the arts!), but had I know that it was merely a water-colored print, I would have been more ruthless. Nevertheless, for less than US$10, we have a nice big piece of art to put on our poured cement walls.

After the market, we watched ping pong on TV in our room. After having watched sports on TV periodically here (it is always on in our library/common room), I am convinced that the Chinese guy/team always wins. In the matches I have paid any attention toÂsoccer, ping pong, swimming, etcÂthey havenÂt lost yet.

The next morning, despite our grand plans to get up early, rent bikes, and bike to the southwest side of the lake and into the hills to visit a famous tea-growing area, we slept in a bit, and got a slow start. We were still going to rent bikes, but the bike rental place described in the guide did not seem to exist any longer. So we changed plans, and walked south along the eastern part of the lake, admiring the aforementioned pagodas, ponds, bays, walkways, and so forth. We left the lake for a moment to check out the Academy of Arts, a huge building with modern architecture, soaring spaces, and imposing stone and cementwork. It was how, as Erica speculated, Swarthmore will probably look in 50 years if they keep building the way they do.

We then walked around lost a tiny bit, as occasionally here, a street that seems as though it would be a through street just stops in the middle of a housing complex. And usually, you have walked two blocks to arrive at the dead end. But we finally found the old street in Hangzhou that we were looking for, which happened to be thronged with people. It was a restoration of what Hangzhou looked like 150 or so years ago, and inside each of the storefronts was a merchant peddling good to tourists. Goods ranged from incredibly tacky things (the bug with the jiggly legs that is mounted inside a carved walnut that you see all over the world) to nice pottery, silk, and calligraphy.

We walked though the street, sampling some street food that was a sort of fried cake, where watery dough was poured into a mold filled with a shredded cabbage (tasty), and found the old Chinese medicine museum, which is also a working pharmacy. This museum has rows and rows of items animal, mineral and vegetable, and explains their medicinal properties. It left me wondering what wasnÂt medicinal in one way or another. Sure, there were the famous potionsÂtiger bones, ginseng, seahorsesÂbut there were also many obscure things. My favorite was fossilized crab.

I donÂt know why I donÂt write down more things, for example, why one would take it, but it was there, along with examples of the fossilized crab. Fossilized mammal bones also are useful. I wanted to get a diagnosis and potentially a recommendation for my persistent nasal drip, but not speaking Chinese was a bit of a hindrance. Maybe later.

I am very juvenile. My favorite part of the exhibit was where they were talking about different brands and types of gelatin that have been used to package the medicine. And, clearly translated was ÂAss SkinÂ gelatin. It was then referenced numerous times during the description of the technique for making gelatin.

After the museum, we wandered past the restored strip and into the flower and bird market. Here, we were walked pastcacophony stores selling plants, and a cacauphony of birds, as well as many of the same medicines that were for sale at the museum. We took a walk back to the lake and decided to stop for tea. We didnÂt know much about teahouses, only that there was a beautiful view and that this region was well known for tea. So we paid what seemed like a lot for tea (almost $6 each) on the understanding that the tea included a buffet. That was exciting. We were waited on for tea, but the buffet was self-service and I could finally try out some of the dishes that I was curious about but didnÂt want to sacrifice an entire purchase/the effort of an interaction on. So I started piling up some fruits I hadnÂt tried before, including a good tan shooter-marble-sized one that tasted grape-like with a huge seed inside, and tiny mangos. Of the cold foods, I had pumpkin seeds, pine nuts still in their shells, and toothpick-sized dried fish.

The moment worth mentioning of this meal came after about an hour. The teahouse was dimly lit, the sunset was beautiful, and I was trying a few more items from the buffet. Many places in Ningbo serve eggs boiled in tea. They were at this place, but they looked a little old, though after about six glasses of tea I decided to taste one. After I peeled it the egg was pretty wrinkly. Apparently these eggs are boiled in tea for a long, long time. So, I took a bite of the gray, wrinkled egg, and as I chewed it, the egg crunched. I immediately suspected what was in my mouth and suppressed the very beginnings of a gag reflex as I looked down and saw a mostly-developed chicken. That crunch was the beak. I kept it down and stared at the egg. If I had known that these eggs were like this, I still may have tried them. But the sheer surprise of the discovery took me aback. I took another bite, prepared this time, and didnÂt like it that much. It tasted a bit metallic. Erica tried a bite and was similarly unexcited.

I ran this story by Rebecca, our coordinator. She laughed. ÂMy mother likes those!Â she said, but she doesnÂt like them. You apparently donÂt find them around very much, but it confirmed that this wasnÂt an inadvertently overdeveloped chicken in a normal egg. We survived, and of course now have the luxury of telling the story afterwards!

The rest of the night was moderately eventful, as we went back to our hotel, took a cab to the bus station, and then were intercepted before we actually found the bus station by a person who wanted to take us to Ningbo. We were whisked away to a parking lot across the street from where we thought the bus station would be, and waited along with a handful of other Chinese travelers before we were loaded onto a bus, which drove us very quickly to Ningbo but dropped us on the outskirts of town. There was a Jackie Chan movie on and the buses here are quite an experience as well but that is for another story. It was a rather expensive taxi home, where it was already curfew. We walked around the school twice waiting for one of the gatemen to leave so we could climb the fence, remarking all the while how ridiculous that whole situation is.

2004-03-12T20:18:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my blog! As promised, here it is. I hope you will find it interesting, and not too boring. Of course, if it is boring, you needn't read it. I will try to post interesting/relevant items here from my daily life. I've never done this before, so let's see how it goes.

I keep in touch with the world news via The New York Times and I would use the BBC periodically for a less US-centric view of things, but the Chinese government blocks it.

I m not sure if this is going to work, so right now I will try it on a few friends.