The Rice Wine Diaries

I am Totally Famous

2008-09-28T17:58:00.001-07:00

Apparently, this blog was referenced in a national Indian newspaper.

And I quote, "And for Indians, who have been saved by Abhinav Bindra from getting a crushing inferiority complex, there is more cheer in all those Western reports and in CNN’s stories about some Chinese ways that are very Indian. Spitting and baby pooping, as reported in the blog called The Rice Wine Diaries, and in a CNN story on the booklets the government was distributing telling its people how to behave for the duration of the Olympics." See http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/08/17/stories/2008081750130300.htm

Here I was thinking no one read this thing. And now, my dream has come true. I am finally the international voice on Chinese spitting and baby pooping.

Chinese Buses

2008-08-31T23:14:00.000-07:00

As a foreigner who had a minimal grasp of the language, to me, China was often a country of surfaces.

It was difficult to penetrate past the surface, whether it was with people or places. Unless I had the secondary medium of English, I mostly dealt with surfaces. I was disabled in China. I couldn’t understand. I dealt with surfaces.

But sometimes, the surfaces were so beautiful.

One of my favorite activities was to ride the buses. On a Saturday or Sunday, with a friend or alone, I would pick a random bus and ride till the end of the line.

Boarding the bus, I would clank my coins into the slot. One or two Yuan would usually do it. After some initial stares from the rest of the riders, I would sink into anonymity.

The bus would muscle down the street, blaring its angry horn at unsuspecting drivers and pedestrians. At stop lights it would turn off its engine to save on gas.

The bus is a place where you usually interact on surfaces, no matter where it is. Rarely will people strike up a conversation. In this way, riding the bus made me feel at home. I was just another person on his way to somewhere.

Sometimes, I would interact with children. I remember one particular little girl, sitting across from me. Her mother looked ahead but the girl stared up at me with huge oval eyes. She looked for a long time and then she looked at her mother, as if asking for cues on how to handle this new thing.

She wore an orange puffy-coat and matching orange mittens. Her hair was in black strands of pig tails, her nose slightly snotted. When she glanced back, I stuck out my tongue and her head snapped forward.

But then I saw the pink flesh of her tongue flash and she looked straight again. I had about 20 more years of face-making experience, so the girl was clearly outmatched.

I made my best scrunched face but the girl countered with bottom teeth exposure. I inside-outed my bottom lip and rolled my eyes but the girl countered with a classic display of tongue out and hand-antlers. At this point, the girl’s mother looked down and lightly smacked her on the head. I made my best “nothing” face.

When they rose and walked down the aisle for their stop, the little girl turned and flashed her tongue one last time in a Parthian shot.

I must have taken the bus dozens of times. My aim was to get outside the city, to see a neighborhood without Western advertising or Western money; that was more old China than new.

From my vantage back in America, the rides blend together in a series of pictures. Tall buildings gave way to dingy shops and little caves of industry. The road became narrower. Among the rows of white-tiled apartments, I saw the occasional house, with its old-timey black- tiled Chinese roof, the top in a slightly curved crescent moon.

The bus stopped at a traffic light near one of Shaoxing’s many canals. I looked down onto its coffee-colored water. Off to the side, women dressed in pink puffy-coats scrubbed their clothes, mashing them against concrete slabs in the water.

Downstream, I saw similar slabs with similar women scrubbing on each side, about 30 feet apart. Each woman knelt over her her rock, emanating ripple after ripple in the water. Each rippled wave reached out across the canal to meet another, the women’s energies coming together and overlapping in the middle, like a synchronized water show performed for no one and everyone.

As the bus drove farther from the city, smoke spewed from little factories, their thin pipes cutting whisps in the grey sky, like flag poles with ephemeral cloth. Among the grey factories, farms and green patches suddenly appeared, like puzzle pieces from two different pictures jammed into one another’s edges.

We passed residential neighborhoods, with their old grey houses and huddled shops. One house opened up into a pond with hundreds of downy baby ducks swimming in the murky water. Others had lilly-padded ponds with algae blooms and buoys; a network of nets for raising fish.

Sometimes, I could see the mountains. They seemed positioned against the city’s neon lights, like sound barriers against car horns on a highway. They were spectacularly green compared with everything else, the elevated terrain unusable for quilt-patch farms and slap-dash factories.

When I would ride, perhaps three or four in the afternoon, my fellow riders were usually young teens returning from schools in the city. Boys in the back would flick each others’ ears, their hair purposefully messy, as if they had waged war with weed-wackers; their hair the only casualty. Or they’d be middle-aged men and women returning from work, haggard with huge plastic rucksacks sitting beside them.

And then there were the old. In China, old people seemed particularly jolly, keeping active with Mah-jongg, Tai Chi and grandchildren. Sometimes I’d hear a hacking cough and an old man would rise to hawk loogies out the window. No heads would turn.

I remember one old lady. Her hands were cracked from winter or washing, like clay baked too long. She had a paper bag with red apples sitting at her feet. She wore a Mao suit, woolen and drab-blue. She had big brown eyes, calm and serene. She sat so still, like she was part of the seat. She looked to be about 80.

Sometimes, watching people on the bus was like viewing part of a movie without context. I would look at someone’s surface and in my negative space, I would try to infer their story. For this woman, in those at-least-80-years, she had 10 years of civil war in the 40’s, a couple years of starvation in the 50’s, mass madness in the 60’s and 70’s, opening in the 80’s and 90’s and textile factories in the aughts. That was the rough outline of her country’s history, events that were sure to affect her life.

Then, there were the all the smaller events that effect every life. Childhood. Marriage. Children. A husband? Rough hands for a good farm? What did the world do to her?

I wanted to know what she thought when the bus hugged the road’s edge for a passing BMW; what she thought when she boarded a bus for home and found a foreigner. I wanted to know how she kept streaks of black in her grey pigtails.

When the bus slowed to a stop, the old woman rose. She smiled and muttered something, shaking her head, before waddling off the bus. I had the impossible urge to talk to her, to know her story.

But we both dealt in surfaces. We didn’t have the language to penetrate past our skin, our clothes and expressions.

Like the washerwomen’s ripples, we could only touch the surface. Never down beyond the surface, into water who knew how deep.

Sometimes I’d get out and walk around. But other times, I’d stay on until the bus turned around. With my usual late start, the bus would soon stop running. The bus would turn around in a gas station, the driver getting out to sign a sheet of paper.
On the way back, from my new position, I would sometimes see something I missed.

Once, it was a small hill with little mounds rising up equal distances apart, packed earth supported by marble slabs and steels. Some had huge neon pink, yellow and green reefs beside them, on reef blown down to a ditch.

They were graves.

The hill looked ancient and I wondered how many generations were piled atop one another. On the hilltop, a tree arched upwards in every direction, it’s leaves so loose upon its sprawling branches that they seemed to vibrate. The tree seemed to hum, its long roots reaching deep down, deeper down, on my way back to the city; back to the lights.

American Music

2008-08-31T00:18:00.000-07:00

In my Oral English class, I gave a lesson on American music.

Many of my 400 students requested such a lesson and I was happy to oblige. Part history lesson, part musical tasting, the lesson started with Southern field songs and then moved on to blues, jazz, country, bluegrass, R and B, rock, punk and rap. It was the best music my fair country had to offer.

However, my country's musical stylings were not well received. They looked confused during the field song.

Leadbelly “sound like dying.”

Miles Davis was “crazy man.”

Hank Williams was plain "terrible," they said. “He is a too sad man.”

Foggy Mountain Breakdown was a little better, but still terrible.

They dug Curtis Mayfield but plugged their ears to Jimi Hendrix.

Bad Religion was “so terrible.”

The only group they almost unanimously liked was Outkast. As I finished my lesson, a student would usually ask me why I hadn’t played Backstreet Boys, which apparently, was good American music.

In China, most of the music didn’t appeal to me. I disliked Beijing Opera and the local variant, Shoaxing Opera. To me, it "sound like dying" and "so terrible."

On the radio, they most often played an imitation of trashy European techno. When I would ride the buses and watch the beloved Karaoke videos that incessantly played on the journeys, it seemed as if China was stuck in the early 90s. Shaoxing wasn't exactly the cultural vanguard of China but maybe our two country’s musical standards don’t translate too well.

Also, it could have been the quality of pop music in general. Now that I’m back in America, turning on the average radio station is almost equally distasteful, almost worse, especially now that I understand the words. At least in China, I could pretend they were singing something deep and beautiful.

Although my students failed to appreciate my country’s music, it wasn’t a total failure. At least they now knew what it sounded like.

And usually, among the scrunched up faces and condescending smirks, I would see one person in the back, bobbing a head back and forth, to the beat.

Bad Habits

2008-08-01T23:16:00.000-07:00

I loved my Great Uncle Harold.

He died about four years ago but I remember him fondly, as an affable bigot. I loved his delusional worship of all things Republican and the dirty ditties he would sing at holiday dinner tables.

What made him a bigot was that he raged against almost every minority. What made him affable was that he raged against every minority except the one he was secretly a part of.

My Great Uncle Harold was most likely a homosexual, gleaned from the fact that he lived with his “roommate” for over 40 years and from that one Christmas card with the pink sweaters and that poodle. Spending the majority of his life in San Francisco (another piece of evidence), one of his favorite minority targets was the Chinese.

Uncle Harold would get on his third glass of wine and he would start. “They are just little, awful people. You wouldn’t believe it. When you get on a trolley, they push right past you and go under your arms when you’re waitin’ in line. And they sit there and scream at one another like there isn’t anyone else in the world. Uhh.”

For a long time, I thought my Uncle Harold was just being a bigot, but in this case, his description sounds just about right. But from the Chinese point of view, they weren’t acting rude in the trolley; they were just acting like that trolley was in China.

As a Westerner in China, local habits often felt like an assault on my senses. However, during the year I lived there, I came to tolerate and even embrace some of those habits. But others I never got used to.

Let me first say that the Chinese in general are not a rude people. They just delegate their politeness to the private sector. For the most part, they are extremely courteous in private but publicly atrocious. Manners become more civilized the more metropolitan you get, but are still very relaxed.

In their defense, when you have so many people in a tiny space, there is not much private space to pick your nose. But still, their behavior tends to shock foreigners.

To help you experience their offenses, I’ve organized each offense by sense assaulted. Enjoy.

Sight
Picture this: A gorgeous Chinese woman walking down the street in a stunning red dress. She’s wearing stiletto heels and she’s strutting. She knows she’s got it. She’s basking in her own beauty and so is everyone else. But as she steps down to the curb, you hear a Hhhqwwwwaaak. She turns her delicate little head and from her dainty mouth, she lets fly a mess of regurgitated snot.

Probably the most conspicuous rude behavior in China is the spitting. It isn’t just a subtle drop of spittle to cement. Rather, it’s a throat-rattling hawk followed by a flying projectile of flem. In China, the violent crime rate is very low. But that doesn’t mean it’s safe.

In one year, I was almost spat upon more times that I can count on all available fingers and toes. I saw students spit on the classroom floor and mash it into the ground. If I was the last person off the bus, I would see puddles of spit on the floor under several seats. Even walking behind elderly men and women was dangerous, because, in addition to their spitting habit, they have the habit of not seeing where they were spitting.

Although the government says it’s trying to stamp it out of cities, in most of China, spitting isn’t a big deal. That would bother most people, and I admit that spitting probably isn’t the best way to avoid germs and communicable diseases (especially SARS), but came to embrace spitting.

I have always been a clandestine spitter, harried by the disgust of my fellow Americans for too long. In China, I had few human rights, but I could spit in peace. I embraced this social habit.

But there were some habits that I refuse to embrace. For instance, I was afraid of Chinese babies.

Here’s why: You are walking around China and you see a cute baby, with chubby cheeks and big eyes staring at you. Then, its mother turns to go and you see another pair of chubby cheeks. I’m talking about the constantly exposed baby-ass.

It doesn’t seem logical. It would be more logical for adults to have exposed asses because we have control over our bodily functions. But the baby does not possess this control and therefore, an exposed baby ass is highly volatile and could blow at any time.

I saw the devastation: about to sit down at a table outside Starbucks and what’s waiting for me on the chair: baby poop. At the checkout line in the grocery store and why isn’t anyone using cashier 14? Baby poop. Walking on the sidewalk and what’s that on my shoe? Baby poop. BABY POOP.

And once the Chinese baby gains control over their faculties, the fun isn’t over. If you are a Chinese child, you have a carte blanche to relieve yourself wherever and whenever you please. I saw children drop trow at busy sidewalks, their streams arching upward onto the blacktop, as cars and pedestrians pass by and their parents proudly look on. I saw children peeing besides bus stops not 3 feet away from a businessman’s pant leg.

And once, walking around an imitation Wal-mart, I saw a father not a one-minute-walk away from the bathroom plop down his little girl in the seafood section and goad her to let it flow onto some rubber mats. There was no drain. The pee was trapped in the pockets of the mat until some poor soul had to clean it up. What appalled me most was that I was the only one to stop and stare. Pissing on the floor of a grocery store was no big deal in Shaoxing, China.

I don’t know when the cut off age is, but I know it isn't before 12. And this freedom seems to return when you get old. I’ve walked in many an old man’s pee puddle as he relieved himself near a pedestrian walkway. Old people and babies are so respected in China, that they have complete freedom in bodily expulsion.

Hearing
I was once talking to a student about her dream to travel abroad.

“Where do you want to go,” I asked.
She listed off the Native English-speaking world. “England, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.” There was one country missing.
“You don’t want to go to the USA?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “It is too noisy.”

I lost it. I cracked up for a full minute. If the Chinese people have tolerance for one thing, it is for noise. A Chinese city is the noisiest place I can imagine. The most constant noise is the beeping of horns.

After a year, I became accustomed to the din but when I first got here, they blasted into my skull.

In America, our traffic etiquette is based on trust. We assume that most people are paying attention and only use our horns as a “fuck you” or a “what the fuck?”

But in China, their traffic etiquette is based on mistrust. One would think that the actual car was powered by the horn. In a 5-minute taxi ride, the driver will typically beep the horn 15 times.

He’ll beep to let the bicyclist know he’s nearby, beep at other cars so they see him or beep at pedestrians walking across the street without looking or with looking. He’ll beep at on-coming traffic when he decides to improvise a lane on the other side of the road, beep at traffic lights that are red when he wants them to be green and if he hasn’t beeped in a while, he’ll beep.

I don’t know if it’s because he’s testing the horn to see if it still beeps or if it’s just his chosen form of expression but yeah, there is a lot of beeping.

A large portion of the other noise comes from mind-obliterating, brain-thumping, spinal-cord rattling, pull-my-hair-out-someone-turn-it-off techno music. I have no idea why storeowners feel the need to blare electric squiggles and bass thumps from massive speakers outside their stores. Perhaps they think it will get their store noticed.

Techno music is so annoying, you can’t really ignore it. But don’t tell them that. One day, my friends and I were eating dumplings at our favorite dumpling restaurant. I noticed a new noodle restaurant opened next door. The way I noticed was that our table started to quake against the vibrations of the techno beat. A young Chinese man bobbed his head to the scourge of sound and suddenly our haven wasn’t so haven-y.

The nice couple that ran the dumpling restaurant didn’t seem to be too happy. But still, they didn’t say a word. They tolerated it. I was so fed up that I decided to try out by burgeoning Chinese.

I turned to the noodle shop owner and said, “Duibuqi, ni de yinyue rang wo exin,” which means “Excuse me, your music makes me want to puke.”

He stared at me for a moment and then said a torrent of words I didn’t understand, except the last one, which was either “die” or “kill.” I decided to tolerate the music too, which was a good move, because he turned it up.

As much as I hate to say this, another thing you have to get used to is the Chinese manner of speaking. Chinese can be beautiful if you go closer to the north, featuring the Beijing dialect that is profuse with rrrs and shhs. But unfortunately, the north was defiantly not where I lived.

I lived in Zhejiang province, which is notorious for its awful sounding dialects. Imagine that someone from the hills of Kentucky had a love child with someone from a hole in Texas. Imagine that love child talking and then translate that level of ridiculousness into Mandarin.

When I first got there, I thought the people in Shaoxing were an argumentative people, always screaming at each other. And while that is partly true, most of the time, they were just talking normally. Sometimes I passed a person talking and I’d think they were making fun of themselves, or perhaps, quacking. But they weren’t.

The cacophony of the language became most apparent when listening to it screamed into cell phones. Sometimes I’d be sitting on a bus and hear what I thought was a frantic cry. Perhaps someone had a gun somewhere or maybe a fire broke out. When I actually looked, however, I would see a cell phone attached to the person’s head.

Many Chinese people, for some reason, see no rudeness is screaming into the phone. And why should they? No one is going to tell them it’s annoying.

But in America, my Uncle Harold would have had no qualms about it. Except he’s dead.

Taste
The Chinese do have the best cuisine in the world, but like USA’s “best” baseball player, they also use performance-enhancing drugs.

MSG, a flavor enhancer, is another habit of the Chinese that Westerners frown upon. The Chinese sell it by the bag here. In almost everything you eat, you will find MSG.

But walking past a Chinese restaurant in America, you might find “No MSG” written in the window. That is because Chinese people love MSG, while Americans think it causes headaches and cancer. Recent studies show that MSG isn’t all that bad for you. But it isn’t necessarily good.

I do notice the good taste, but I don’t notice the headaches. I just have utterly insane dreams.

A brief survey: I had a dream that I was lovelorn bachelor’s imaginary friend in the style of a really bad romantic comedy.

I had a dream that I somehow went back in time and prevented racism but my mother still grounded me for not telling her where I was going.

I had a dream in which I saw my ex-girlfriend in a San Francisco restaurant and her friend had a “perception problem,” which required me to throw “perception glitter” on my face and get in a “perception bear mascot suit,” just so she could see me.

When you wake up from dreams like that in America, you say, “What the fuck?”

But in China, you say, “What did I eat last night?” And usually, when you eat at Chinese restaurants, the answer is “something delicious.”

Whenever I started hating China, my taste buds would tell me otherwise. I think it is safe to say that China has the best food in the world.

Most of it is made of the typical stuff: rice and noodles, vegetables, beef, been curd, pork, chicken and fish. But occasionally, some people will eat things most westerners outside of mental institutions would not consider food.

In the south, they have a saying, “If the backbone faces the sky, they eat it.” That would appear to include everything except for bipedal animals (humans). But from what I’ve heard, even that is not entirely true.

As was repeated to me in awful joke after awful joke before I came to China, yes it is true: Many Chinese eat dog. But most people don’t eat dog very often.

I could sense a generational rift. The younger generation seemed to view canines more for petting than digesting. At our local Starbucks, I even saw a group of Chinese yuppies in sweaters with their Chinese dogs, in sweaters. But if I walked down the street, I could find a small restaurant that serves dog and nothing but dog, 18-hours a day.

Men sat around tables outside and gnawed on a plate of steaming puppy paws, waiting for their basket of roasted dog or bowls of doggy stew. And right next to the diners sat a large bucket of blood-tinged water with little raw paws poking out, where the cook would skin the next day’s delicacies.

Almost every time I passed by this restaurant, I cringed and remembered my own beloved dog who passed away last spring.

But I write “almost” because once, I ate dog. Exactly why I chose to eat dog escapes me. Perhaps it was the sheer want of a new experience that convinced me to put that first chopstick-pinch of meat in my mouth, or maybe it was the beautiful looks of horror I expected when, back in America, someone would make the same lame joke of “did you eat dog? Har Har Har” and I could say, in a hollow Hannibal Lecture voice, “Actually, yes.”

And perhaps, I was because my own dog died a couple of months before and I wanted to remind myself that he was just an animal after all. And maybe, it was because a friend “double-dog dared” me.

Perhaps it was all of those reasons that made me open up the menu and point to “Spicy Dog Salad.” When they brought the plate out, the most surprising thing was that it looked like any other plate of meat. There were a few peppers but mostly it was cold, spiced meat strips. The closest meat I can compare it to is bear meat, which doesn’t help the general readership.

The meat was tough and stringy and I stopped eating after a few bites. I haven’t eaten dog since but I would recommend it to anybody. It puts the pampered, sweatered, gourmet-food-fed dog off its pedestal and where it belongs: as an animal that I could eat, but would rather make friends with. And no, I didn’t get a doggy bag.

In addition to dog, I ate less cuddly creatures, including snake, turtle, eel, frog, camel, snail, chicken foot and once, fried scorpion. For the most part, I would dread the initial bite but then would realize why the Chinese ate it: it doesn’t taste that bad. Snake is particularly delicious when barbequed.

Generally speaking, I became accustomed to the odder parts of the Chinese cuisine. But on one occasion, some of my students told me something I never got accustomed to.

One day, I came to help Natalie with one of her group discussions. Unlike me, Natalie taught at a private school. Most of her students were adults and had a high level of English. We got on the topic of alternative medicine.

“Yes,” said one of her brightest and kindest students. “We often eat fetus.”

I thought I misheard her. “You eat what?”

“Fetus,” she said. “It is very good for the skin. It can make your skin clear… have no, how d’you say…” She pointed to a dot on her face.

“Pimples?”

“Yes! In my village, we often eat fetus.”

The woman next to her nodded in agreement. “Yes,” she said, “fetus is very good for health.”

“Where do you get it?” I asked.

“The hospital.”

“Oh.” What surprised me most was not that the people across from me had eaten human baby but that I smiled and nodded. Some people would jump up and scream “cannibals” and catch the next flight out of Shanghai.

But Natalie and I didn’t do that. We politely sat across from the baby eaters, and let them go on about the benefits of eating baby. Was I that culturally sensitive?

Later, the misunderstanding was revealed. They didn’t eat fetus but rather, the placenta, which is actually used in a lot of products in the West, like shampoos and perfumes.

We laughed and laughed and laughed until one woman said, “Actually, one man in my village, he is very sick. He has eaten the small baby.”

“The fetus?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Many people don’t like his action but he think it good for the health. Very expensive.” Asking other close Chinese friends, I know that eating fetus happens rarely, but still happens.

Intellectually, I try to understand it as using the same moral calculus that Westerners use for justifying using embryos for stem cell research. But in the end, it was the worst thing I heard while living in China.

Touch
Perhaps after occasionally eating babies for medicinal purposes,the next most offensive thing to a foreigner’s senses would be butting-in-line.

Traveling last summer, I would often wait in line to buy a train ticket, sometimes for an hour in the sweltering heat. During this hour, I would sometimes turn away for a moment. And on more than one occasion, during that moment, I would feel something move in front of me. Then I would turn back to see that in the space where before, there was nothing, there was now a Chinese body.

In America, we hold our personal space dear. The space in front of us while in a line is some of the most sacred personal space. Anyone who attempts to violate this space gets throttled.

But in China, this violation is moderately tolerated. It’s not that most people butt. It’s just the people who do, tend to get away with it. Most people just ignore it.

Now, I say most people because in my year in China, I saw about three fights go down in the train station over butting. But as often as it happens, I should have seen a lot more.

Chinese also invade each other’s personal space in another way, but this invasion is often welcome. To express same-sex friendship, many Chinese tend to be physically affectionate. If I saw two men holding hands in America, I would think they were gay (which is perfectly fine).

But in China, I often saw two men hold hands. Young men are particularly affectionate. They often have their arms around each other in camaraderie, hands on each other’s knees or even interlocking each other’s legs on the train. Sometimes I heard that lovely frat boy voice inside my head saying, “What are ye, a gay? (which again, is perfectly fine) but I know it is just a cultural difference.

Chinese society is not exactly open to homosexuality, although the government did take it off their list of mental illnesses in 2001. But on the bright side, with all the touching that goes on, it’s easier for gay people to hide.

Smell
Chinese people are a mysteriously unsmelly people. I arrived in China during the winter season and on my first trip to the grocery store, I was horrified by the dearth of deodorants. I cringed as the weather grew hotter, expecting human stench to spring from my students’ deodorant-less bodies.

But the awful smells never came. Except for that one kid, they were odorless.

However, China more than makes up for the unstinkiness of its people.

First, the air quality is one of the worst in the world. The World Bank estimates that China has China has 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world. While that makes for beautiful sunsets, that sunset is also complimented with a burning sensation in your throat.

Then, the sewer system isn’t so great so there are sidewalks that you know will reek of shit. This smell is competing with many delicious smells coming out of apartments and houses so your nose is constantly in misery and elation, sometimes in a single moment.

“What’s the lady in that house cooking?” Sniff. Sniff. “Sweet and sour chicken with rice cooked in…diarrhea.” And then there’s the many street vendors who cook smelly tofu. The name speaks for itself.

Well, I think that about does it. That’s a lot of bad habits. Some may say that I’m picking on the Chinese but even the Communist Government publicly acknowledges their problems.

A recent report in China’s own Asian Times said that Chinese traveler’s poor manners were “affecting China’s international image” with common complaints of graffiti on historical sights, spitting, talking loudly, littering, bargaining at stores that don’t bargain, screaming into cell phones and publicly clearing one’s throat (Asian Times, Oct. 2006).

Chinese tour groups have even been banned from several French hotels. How could the citizens of the most “cultured” country in the world appear so crass? The Communist Government has always been comfortable with contradictions but they are not comfortable with that one.

They are quickly trying to change it. Efforts include a “no spitting” campaign in Beijing, a horn ban in the city of Chongqing and a stand-in-line day every Monday. With the Olympics coming in one year, they don’t have much time.

Still, old habits are hard to break, especially when they belong to a large chunk of 3.6 billion people.

To be fair, now that I’m home, I can see many American habits that would horrify your average Chinese citizen. They can take their pick: The compulsive overeating of our people, the incessant violence in our communities, the dry-humping on our dance floors, the material waste in our households, the isolation of our elderly, the blah blah blah of our blah blah blah.

Still, they are my culture’s bad habits and it’s good to be home.

I Just Like

2008-08-01T23:07:00.000-07:00

As classes progressed, I became more critical of my employer.

Yuexiu Foreign Language College was a special type of school. It was a money-making institution, designed mostly for rich kids who did poorly on their college entrance exam.

Its classes appeared impressive. “Marketing,” “System Operations” but just like building bricks, many of the classes weren’t real. They were meant to look good.

They had one foreigner teaching gym when he could have helped so much more teaching another class, like half of my English students. But he was there so the administration could tell prospective students: “We have so many foreign teachers, we have one teaching gym.” The students, and their parents who were paying for it, were being cheated out of a quality education.

However, despite its capitalistic gouging, the school did offer the students a way out. The school was known for its study abroad program. For exorbitant amounts of money, Yuexiu students could travel to partnership schools in England, Germany, France, Australia and Singapore. In the business school, my students had their hearts set on Singapore, an island south of China with a large ethnic Chinese population. If they studied for three years at Yuexiu, and their parents paid enough money, they could be accepted into an unscrupulous Singapore business college.

Their three years at Yuexiu would shrink and count as one year, leaving them with two years to go. But if they graduated, they would have the coveted Foreign University Diploma. That piece of paper would put them above most other mainland graduates. It was a rip-off, but it offered a better alternative than just settling for less.

To be fair, my experience at the college was probably not an average one. My oral English classes were the shortest of any teacher, with the Business students who could probably care the least of any major.

Other foreign teachers taught newspaper reading, culture and writing, or simply how to pass the state tests. A good many were perfectly happy with their classes and would renew their contracts the following year. I was not one of those.

But I tried to make it work. In my Marketing Class, I decided to assign their first paper. They were to get into groups and write two paragraphs on one of China’s “marketing environments.”

While that sounds a bit advanced, it boiled down to three people writing three sentences each on technology, China’s culture, politics or people. While broad, the essay was to be in their own words. There were no questions. No one came to me for help.

When they turned in the papers, 75 percent of the class had plagiarized. To mix it up, I decided to take them on field trips. The great thing about marketing is, if the place sells something, you’re money. Because the marketing book featured a case-study on McDonalds that they couldn’t understand, I decided to pay our local chapter a visit. McDonalds is all over China. Shaoxing had three.

In the particular store we visited, I saw those glorious arches from my homeland. I would often go there when I was feeling homesick for quick and fatty fare.

However, before you even go in the store, you can tell it has a Chinese tint. Outside, what appeared to be Ronald McDonald sat molded to a bench. But it wasn’t Ronald McDonald. It was Uncle McDonald. The differences are subtle, but in essence, it means that Uncle has a smaller body and even smaller head, with extra-squinty eyes.

The speaker outside usually played the melodic McDonalds advertisement. “Ba-ba-ba-baba.” But instead of saying “I’m loving it,” the sweet-voiced singer sang “Wo jiu xihuan,” meaning “I just like.” I thought this was a great semantic improvement from American culture’s many abuses of the word “love.”

Inside, the McDonald’s staples were basically the same. Differences included putting sweet red beans on ice cream and offering fried chicken, because hey, it’s American. They also offered group family meals; family being the preferred style of eating.

Advertisements featured sensuous body parts: full lips, a neck, a Caucasian man’s peaked bicep, with a tasty burger beneath. I lectured my students on the genius of Ray Kroc, globalization and standardization for 15 minutes.

I opened the floor for discussion. We discussed buying ice cream and spent the rest class time eating sundaes.

It was 10 in the morning. During that semester, we went on several other field trips. One to Starbucks, where I had my morning coffee; one to Trust-Mart, Taiwan’s version of Wal-Mart, where I did my weekly grocery shopping; and one to the main street, where I got my morning exercise.

Each field trip contained a corresponding lesson and activity for the students, and a corresponding errand for me. I liked this way of teaching better.

2008-07-10T12:41:00.000-07:00

The Bullets Are Very Expensive

2008-06-11T23:05:00.001-07:00

In my Oral English classes, I kept it light.

I gave a lesson on descriptions. I took pictures of my friends getting incredibly drunk and brought them in for my students to describe. Another lesson covered pronunciation, using a Bingo game.

I was tired of being frivolous, so I decided to have a lesson about something serious. How much more serious can you get than war? I printed out vocabulary sheets, pictures and discussion questions so we could handle the big stuff: Why do people have war? Would you be willing to kill another human being?

I conducted a survey and it usually went like this:
“What if Hu Jintao called you up and said, ‘Would you please fight in a war?’ Would you go?”
A resounding “No!”
“What if the war was to defend China. For example, if USA bombed China, would you fight me?”
“Yes!” they yelled.
“What if Hu Jintao called you and said, ‘China isn’t big enough. We need more land.’ Would you fight for more land?”
“No!”
“What if that land was Japan?”
“YES!!! I hate Japan!”

From then on, whenever I wanted to spice up a class, I could push the Japan button.

I asked them about 9/11. As I mentioned before, I heard that in China there was dancing in the streets. But in no way did I mean that everyone was dancing in the streets, or even most, but that the anti-American sentiment is common among the Chinese population.

However, most of my students said how terrible it was, how awful for the loss of life and how sorry they felt that day. When talking about 9/11, that was the attitude I most often encountered.

But not always. One male student said, “The terrorists do well.” He wasn’t a very good student, so I thought he might have mispronounced. He didn’t.

“So 9/11 was a good thing?” I asked.
“Yes. The USA is too powerful.”

I controlled myself and tried to appreciate his use of terrorist (a word I just taught him) in a correct sentence.

Whenever I was confronted with Anti-Americanism, I tried to imagine why they might hate us. For that, you must think about the propaganda their government tells them as well as the legitimate reasons they might have.

America is too powerful. With that, comes the ability to be benevolent, as well as the ability to be a bully. And hell, whenever I watch E! Entertainment News or Oprah, I hate us too.

There were others who agreed with him, albeit with more tact and intelligence. These students gave the kind of answers a teacher dreams about: both articulate and contentious.

One girl talked about the “hegemony” of the United States, that the loss of life was unfortunate but the US policy is unjust. Another girl said that “governments are naturally violent. They use violence to control the people.”

Even though she was attacking my country, I appreciated the girl’s universal answer. Governments were violent in general, not just in the U.S., which implied that the Chinese Communist Party also used violence. I could live with that.

I never expected one of my students to publicly say something that hinted disrespect to the government. It was as if they came out of the wall, had an intelligent conversation and disappeared once again into the mass of Chinese faces.

The students made me promise to give a “happier” lesson next time. As they were leaving, I fell into conversation with a student who had a question about guns.

Guns are banned in China, but this student seemed to have a particular interest in firearms. He was a good student with a buzz haircut and a penchant for dressing in army uniforms.

He said that in China, you can get any gun you want. “The smuggler,” he said. You want an AK-47? 3000 yuan, or about $400 dollars. A Hunting rifle? 6o yuan or about 10 dollars.

“My neighbor had a machine gun,” he said. “But the bullets are very expensive.”

My next lesson was lighter, a lesson on emotions. I started the lesson with describing the foreigner’s experience in China as an emotional roller coaster.

I start my day on a high point. Then, my shower doesn’t work (drop). Next, I have a really good class where students participate (go up) followed by a dead-faced bad one (go down). I walk outside and eat in a cheap and delicious restaurant (go up). But on my way home people harass me with hellos and laugh and point and call me “old other person” (plummet down). Then I see two men holding hands (roller coaster loop, signifying confusion). The last one always got a big laugh.

I started out with the nice emotions, like joy and calm but the fun didn’t start until I got to heartbreak. This was where my improv acting skills came in handy. I picked a girl out from the audience and said, “I love you.”

She was, of course, mortified, her face flushed with embarrassment. Then I said, “You say, ‘Go away.’”

I mimed ripping out my heart, breaking it and stomping on it, which they thought was hilarious. After that, I wrote “furious” on the board and screamed, “Why don’t you love me!” which was followed by a definition of “bold.” I then mimed a gun and shot her. That was followed by a quick definition of “remorse,” at which point I started sobbing. Finally, I defined “despair,” before taking my own life.

I separated the class into groups and instructed them to write a small play depicting an emotion for next class. I spent the next week watching imitations of Chinese soap operas.

Classes

2008-06-11T23:02:00.001-07:00

Yuexiu College was impeccably clean and relatively new. It had a faux-European design, with white colonial columns bolstering up light blue buildings.

From afar, it appeared as if all the buildings were constructed of brick. But a closer look revealed it was merely brick-colored tiles. Its meager library had a giant clock a la Big Ben, which ticked off the day’s mind-numbing regularity with British precision.

Grey concrete walkways crisscrossed the grounds, giving a depressive pallor. Sad half-filled fountains teemed with algae or had dried up altogether. Guards stood at the gates, with truncheons at their belts, making sure no one got in or out during school hours. And from a distance, you could see the giant statue of Da Yue, China’s first emperor, looking down from a mountain as if it was a guard tower. It reminded me of a prison.

Because the Yuexiu administration had made it nearly impossible for me to teach, I actually felt relieved. From now on, whatever happened, it wasn’t my fault. My oral English classes were dizzying. I had 12 classes in four days, each lesson lasting 45 minutes each. Just when it seemed like I was getting started, time ran out.

I felt like I was in the movie Groundhog Day. For each lesson, I had to repeat myself 12 times for a large group of students. My students looked the same. I said the same things. By the 6th lesson, I would dismiss my material as stupid. By the 10th time, I got sick of the sound of my own voice. By the 12th time, I wanted to throw-up I hated me so much. However, by that time, my performance was flawless.

I had to make-up most of my own material. The administration supplied me with a book, but it featured 90-minute lessons that didn’t fit into a 45-minute space.

I tried to start off light, doing introductions the first week. My students were Business majors, freshman and sophomore, but I couldn’t tell the difference. To me, each class was separated like this: the front girls who eagerly paid attention and answered my questions, the back boys who preferred MP3 players and text messaging, and everyone else, who fell somewhere in between.

During introductions, I asked each student to tell me what they wanted to do with their lives. Being that I taught business majors, most of my students responded with money-centric goals. Most responded with “white collar,” “CEO” or straight to the point, “rich.” In one class, I had a male student stand up, and with impeccable English, announce that he would “invade Wall Street.”

The second week we played a game in which they had to arrange the most suitable spouse for their imaginary children, trying to match their child’s description with a corresponding one. I thought pairing them with same-sex partners would be promoting same-sex marriages, a CCP no-no, so I went the traditional route.

But I was shocked to find that in most of my classes, I had resistance to boys and girls working together. In one class, an entire set of boys sat with their heads lowered in the corner. When I asked them why they weren’t participating and they said, ‘We are shy boys.” They were 19 years old.

In college, relationships were strained. The students had immense pressure to “focus on their studies.” To me, at least, most wanted to be perceived as good little boys and girls. It was after college, with their first jobs, that they would go through emotional maturity.

Now, of course, when I talk of 5,000+ young adults as “they,” I am generalizing a little bit. With the “good little boys and girls” also came students who were rebellious and who acted very much like their Western counterparts.

For instance, one weekend night when my teacher friend locked himself out of his room, he went to stay in a large nearby hotel. However, the desk said that the rooms were full. They were occupied by the students and their significant others.

Still, that was the exception. In Shaoxing, which is a rather traditional town, I got the impression that women had great pressure to be either wives or whores. There was little middle ground. Women who hung around in bars were considered “loose.”

Even advertisers had trouble depicting Chinese women in sexual roles. In all the underwear advertisements on billboards, the models were invariably Caucasian. When I asked my marketing students about this phenomenon, they only said, “The Westerners are very beautiful.” Perhaps it was their attempt at flattery.

My marketing class was going a little better. The students seemed more eager. The pace was slower, with two 90-minute classes every week. We could get to know each other.

But, as my bosses instructed me, we had to talk about Marketing. I knew nothing about Marketing but to them, I did. I was the only one who could read the textbook. I was surprised. I’m usually a literary guy but what I found was fascinating.

Marketing is like the liberal arts of business. You have to know psychology, geography, anthropology, economics, communication, logistics and political science all at the same time. But no matter what the subject matter, it comes down to this: how do you trick your customer into buying your product? And after I learned the basics of the trade, I never wanted to buy anything again.

But I couldn’t tell that to my students. I had to present the material as objectively as possible. The problem was, no matter how I presented the material, they would have little idea what I was talking about. They couldn’t read the book. They couldn’t understand complex sentences or vocabulary.

So each week, I had to rewrite a college textbook chapter in the most simple English available. Because discussion was often met with silence, we spent most of the class reading my handouts out loud. At least they could work on their pronunciation.

However, we didn’t do marketing all the time. Each class, I also spent 15 minutes answering a question of their choice.

Here is a brief sample:

How about the sea in USA? Is it all blue?

Why Occident people looks like taller and sinewier than Asian people?

What do American people think of Yao Ming and all the Chinese?

What do you think of Bush and Lincoln?

How do Americans keep their passion for life?

How about the living after 9/11?

In my life outside the classroom, I started to shy away from the Chinese culture. I began to retreat into my ex-pat community. An “other” finding solace in other “others.”

One reason for the retreat was because one of my best friends had come to Shaoxing to take my old job. Another reason was that I had grown closer to other foreigners in the city, particularly the Australians.

However, I was also tired of being a foreigner. I was tired of the “hellos” yelled at me by sarcastic young men, tired of not understanding the language and tired of the assumptions foisted on me by virtue of my Western-ness.

But in Yuexiu, my foreigner status became absurd. Now, more than ever, I had the feeling of what foreigners in China refer to as “the rock star laowai.” In class, students would take pictures of me on their camera phones. They would digitally record sections of my lectures to show to their friends. And the camera-phone assault would continue when I walked from my classroom to my apartment.

Once, when I was walking back from running on the school’s track, I heard the clack of high heels behind me. The clacks stopped when I stopped and went when I went. Finally, there was a burst of clacks and I was accosted by a nervous young woman.

She was one of the older female students, pretty but in a way that money can buy. She made small talk until she asked me for my number. When I said I didn’t remember it, she gave me her number, her hand trembling as she held her phone, reading it off.

“My god,” she said. “My hand is shaking.”

When I bid her adieu, she scurried back to her friends giggling and shrieking. I felt like a famous actor. But I didn’t know if it was for a good movie or a bad one.

9/11

2008-06-11T22:55:00.000-07:00

What surprised me most about 9/11 was that the Chinese were more sensitive to it than the actual Americans were. Even some of my former students e-mailed me, giving their condolences and declarations of remembrance.

As an American, 9/11 is something that defines you. When you meet a foreigner, they always want to know: what was it like for you?

For me, it was like this: In my Freshman year of college, I was walking back to my dorm room. As I passed my neighbor’s room, I saw on their TV: the black plumes pouring out of the first tower. It was that innocent time when the telecasters were still confused, dreaming it was just a pilot’s error.

And then, the second plane struck and after some animal sounds, they announced that it was most definitely planned. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t sad. Those feelings would come later.

For me, in the first few days of my adult life, I was overcome with foreboding, and the knowledge that something terrible had happened but that something worse was yet to come.

Six years later, the edict to “never forget” held sway and it was impossible to do so. The tragic news from Iraq served as a daily reminder, no longer connected by a “why” but, rather, a “how.”

In Shaoxing’s American ex-pat community, patriotism was extremely qualified at best and the most mournful action it could muster was going out to the bar with intentions to get hammered, which would make us forget all the same.

At the bar, one of Canadian teachers had invited his Chinese friends. They were young women employed at a private language school.

One girl, Lan, I had seen before. She was usually very friendly, wearing a constant smile and square black-rimmed glasses. After a few beers, someone brought up the reason for the engagement: 9/11.

Lan said, “Oh yes, I am very sorry. One of my students said he must remember this day today. He didn’t want to forget.”

The Canadian smiled. “You know, in China, people were dancing in the streets. Ask her.”

I turned to Lan to see if it was true. She nodded.

I was taken aback. I expected dancing in the streets, rejoicing in the Middle East, perhaps South America but not China.

She explained, “See…we love the people and we feel very sorry for the people…but we hate the government. And so we feel very happy when they crashed the planes,” she said matter-of-factly, saying “we” like she also danced on asphalt that day.

I got angry. “But the World Trade Towers weren’t our government. They were businesses. Businesses that were building China. Look at the trade deficit. The USA, our world trade, is making China rich. Why cheer its destruction?”

She looked at the other foreigners, trying to reduce her enemies. “We have no problem with Canada or Australia or England,” she said.

I laughed. “That’s because they have no power.”

“Right, but with America, they always criticize us about our province, Taiwan.” I nodded my head, letting her call Taiwan a province even though it has its own government.

“And in trade, they always make our government re-evaluate our currency.”

“That’s because your government is cheating,” I said. “And Taiwan hasn’t been an issue for over 10 years. The Cold War is over. China isn’t even communist anymore. We could give a crap if China took Taiwan. We have way too much invested in China to care. It’s the same with Xinjiang. We criticized your government over abuses of Muslims in Xinjiang but now we say they’re terrorist organizations. You know why? Because China and America do so much damn trade!”

I was livid. And she was silent. It was becoming awkward. I was losing face. I didn’t want to blame her. I knew I couldn’t argue with her. We were operating with two different knowledge bases. She only knew what her state-run media told her. And I only knew what my spin-run media told me.

Shortly after the argument, the Americans left the bar. The argument soured the evening, casting a dour mood.

As we walked home, I realized why they really danced in the streets. It wasn’t about the various policies of the United States. It was about its position.

We are the most powerful nation on earth and before 9/11, every nation had to pay us tribute. But the terrorists revealed a weak spot. We weren’t impenetrable. We weren’t the superpower we claimed to be.

The Iraq War only underlined what was revealed that day. Perhaps more than any other people in the 20th century, the Chinese are accustomed to a few innocent deaths in the name of an idea. And to the Chinese, perhaps the idea was this: that this world was now big enough for two emperors.

Violence in Hangzhou

2008-06-11T22:44:00.000-07:00

My move wasn’t all bad because it was also the reason I had a new friend in town.

Brian Carroll, my friend from when I traveled abroad to Dublin, Ireland, came to Shaoxing to fill my old job.

BC was a good friend whom I wanted to make a better one. With his puffy, brown fro, and pale Irish skin, he was the type of person that made other people feel hilarious. Now, I had someone with whom I could be a complete idiot (see Wedding Story).

I met him at the Shanghai Airport, but avoided that glossy whore of a city that so overwhelmed me when I first arrived. Instead, we made our way to Hangzhou, which is two hours south.

Hangzhou is the nearest big city from Shaoxing and served as my big city stomping grounds many-a-weekend. Along with Suzhou, it is Eastern China’s self proclaimed “Heaven on Earth.”

BC was in a steady state of culture shock most of the time. I took a sadistic pleasure in taking him to Trustmart, China’s answer to Wal-Mart, remembering how I almost lost it the first time I stepped inside. I loved the look on his face when I showed him the tank of doomed turtles, the bobbing heads of the eels, the whole burnt ducks, on a rack, hanging by their heads and the death row of bull-frogs.

He was shocked when two strangers, high school girls, approached us and asked for our pictures. And he was shocked at the insane traffic crushing through the streets and the tones of mandarin permeating the air. At all times, I wanted to hold my hand out, like a game show host, and say, “This is China.”

But BC got to see more of China than I expected. We were walking down one of Hangzhou’s main street, Nanshan Lu, right next to its famed and therefore, most touristy lake. Looking off onto a side street, we noticed a group of men surrounding a van. They didn’t seem to be yelling.

Suddenly, some other men ran up and jumped inside the van. Before the van sped off, the surrounding men whipped out sticks and bashed its windows out. As the glass clinked on the ground, several other men ran down the street towards us, quickly followed by their pursuers, who now brandished machetes, knives and curiously, a ladle.

As they ran out of sight, I looked for the video-cameras. There were none. It was like a cartoon. We were witness to a real life gang fight. It was BC’s second day in China.

But the violence did not stop there. That night, we met Benny and his father at the bar. Benny is an Australian ESL teacher in Shaoxing. At all times, Benny is “taking a piss,” with a boisterous laugh and a wink.

His father is an older, more experienced copy of Benny. The interesting thing about Benny is his father is also a quarter Chinese, which makes Benny about one-eighth. If you’re a westerner, you wouldn’t notice. But the Chinese usually pick him out of the line-up. “You’re Chinese. Why don’t you speak like one? Why don’t you get paid like one?” Benny’s family comes from a fine tradition of Australian Chinese Mafioso.

My girlfriend, Natalie, joined us and we made our way to the bar. The bar was depopulated but the pitchers were cheap. We sat there shooting the shit and making fun of everyone’s respective ethnicities.

As Americans and Australians, being mutts, we probably covered the gamut. We ripped into Australians, British, Irish, Americans, French and Germans. We might have said a thing or two about the Chinese. I don’t remember.

What I do remember is that every so often, BC would get a flying peanut in the eye. I held my tongue but when the third peanut came, I yelled, “What the fuck!”

Across the empty bar, a Chinese-looking guy yelled, “Hey, watch your language!”

I said, and mind you, I was a bit intoxicated, “Well, who threw the fucking peanut!”

Then, he responded in a perfect American accent, “You think you can talk to me like that because I’m a Chink?”

Wait. “Why would I do that?” I asked, pointing to Benny.

“He’s one too.” Apparently, that was not the right thing to say. The Chinese-American was sitting next to a burly Westerner and their respective Mainland girlfriends.

The Westerner said, “Wait…did you just say chink?”

“No, you said chink,” I said, referring to the Chinese-American.

“You just said chink,” the Chinese-American said.

“That’s because you said chink.”

“But I can say it. I’m Chinese.”

“But I wasn’t saying it in reference to you. I was just saying what you said.”

He thought about retreating in the face of my peerless logic, but instead said, “You better watch your fucking mouth before I come over there.”

I was fine with sitting down and praying he didn’t come over to punch my face. But Natalie decided to make friends. She led the friendship blitzkrieg to their table and introduced herself, apologizing for any misunderstanding.

They stared at us with furrowed brows and mumbled their responses. The “Chinese” guy was actually from L.A., and the Western guy was from Idaho. We explained that we were just making fun of ourselves and meant no harm. They grudgingly shook our hands and we returned to our seats.

I wasn’t too scared because Benny and his dad were probably trained in Australian-Chinese Mafioso fighting techniques. But as soon as I sat down, Ben’s dad said, “Drink up. Chug your beers. I’ve seen some scrapes in my life and I’ve seen that look in someone’s eye before. Those boys are playing the game and they won’t stop until they play.”

We got up and power-walked it to the cabs. Because not everyone could fit, Ben waited for the next one. He said they came outside looking for me.

Back at the hostel, Ben’s dad shared his thoughts over a bottle of rum. “In China especially, in these developing countries, you’ll be surprised how much a human life is worth. In Australia, it’s worth about 20,000 pounds. I’ve traveled my share of this world and I’ve seen a life go for so little,” he said.

“In somewhere like China, these guys don’t care. They’re more likely to be carrying hardware or a cannon. The life would leave you so fast, you’ll be dead before you hit the ground. And someplace like China, you have to be extra careful because anything has its price. The police, the judge, the witnesses. Everyone can be bought. This…is not America.”

As his voice began to break, I could tell it wasn’t just the rum. I could tell he had lost friends. “I do anything to avoid a scrape. I’ve seen some bad ones in my time. Now, most in my part of the woods know about Uncle Pete. A phone call and he’ll have it taken care of. But those that don’t, they could be your end. I did some awful things to avoid a scrape. I got down on my knees. I kissed boots. But I always walked away. I went home to my family. It’s not worth it. Get into scrapes. For what?”

It was true, especially in China. Even though China has one of the lowest violent crime rates on earth, if you kill someone and have enough money, you can pay a fine. Or you can circumvent the system entirely and pay off the witnesses, the judge, the police. This is the reality.

It happens in America, so imagine how often it occurs in places with less resources, less checks, less balances and less incentives to play by the rules.

It made me realize how safe and pampered I’ve been in my upper-middleclass environs.Who knows what would have happened if I would have stayed in that bar? Maybe nothing.

But maybe instead of a flying peanut, the next projectile would have been a bottle. Maybe he was packing. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe some American, drunk on both cheap beer and the illusion that he’d finally “come home” to Mother China, wanted to take out all the “Ching-chang-chongs,” all the “You eat dog,” all the embarrassment of being treated like a foreigner in your own country, on one of his bastard countrymen. For what?

Yuexui Foreign Language School

2008-06-04T22:42:00.000-07:00

If you remember, through overreaching and playing Chinese politics, I was forced to get another job.

Luckily, there was another college in Shaoxing called Yuexui Foreign Language School. But what they needed was a Marketing teacher. Angela, the Foreign Affairs Officer, seemed more genuine than Mr. Dick but I wondered if I could really do the job. My only qualification as a marketing teacher was the fact that I occasionally go shopping. Besides grudgingnly selling restaurant patons the fish-o-the-day, I had no marketing experience at all. But that seemed not to matter.

The only qualifications that mattered to them were that I could speak English and that my skin was white. Angela never asked me if I could be a marketing teacher, she asked me if I “would” be a marketing teacher.

And I had to negotiate to get that subject. She tried to force “Systems Operations Management” on me, as well as “Accounting.” Because I was in dire straights, I accepted the job immediately. In the fall, I started as a college marketing and oral English teacher. It could only happen in China.

As the semester began at Yuexui, I realized what a mistake I made. The university was on the outskirts of the city. Before, I was isolated from my students and colleagues. Now, I was isolated from my girlfriend and friends. It was about a twenty minute bike ride to my former haunts. I was sincerely wishing I had just swallowed my pride and nodded and smiled my way back to Shangyu.

At Shangyu, the faculty offered little help in getting me started. But they were generally friendly and after a rough beginning, I settled into a rhythm. My new college, however, the faculty not only offered me little help but made my job nearly impossible.

I had two types of classes. The worst was my oral English class. I had 45 minutes a week with 12 classes, with a grand-total of 350 students. You cannot teach a language to 30 people in 45-minute blocks, once a week. Just as soon as you finish your lesson and are ready for an activity to drive you point home, the bell rings.

And seeing so many faces once a week, I would walk in the crowds of the campus scrutinizing each face and wondering: are you my student? Are you my student?

In my marketing class, I had almost 3 hours a week with a class of 16, which was great. I could get to know these students and we could talk about a real subject: Marketing. The only problem was that I was teaching from a textbook I would read in an American college, to students who couldn’t understand the language in which it was written.

The good side was that if they couldn’t read the book, I would always know more than they would. The bad side was that most of them couldn’t speak English.

I tried to solve all of these problems. I met with my contact teacher, voiced my concerns and offered solutions to the problems: 1) cut down my oral English students and double my time with them. 2) let me teach the Marketing students English half the time.

She proposed that I double my workload. I proposed that I wouldn’t, at least not for $500 a month. Finally, she said that “it has been decided by leader,” which, translated from Chinglish, means: “I know it’s stupid but it’s the boss’ idea.” I would have to lower my expectations.

Bargaining

2008-05-28T20:19:00.001-07:00

In Franz Kafka’s The Castle, perhaps no other book so deftly depicts how maddening bureaucracy can be.

Its main character, K., is invited to a Duke’s kingdom as a land surveyor. However, when he gets there, it is unclear what he’s supposed to do or whom he is to report to.

He cannot gain access to the authorities in the Castle. The locals are suspicious and constantly remind him that he doesn’t know how it works here, that he just can't talk to them.

His hopes are repeatedly built up and dashed. In the end, K gets lost in the paperwork, a victim of bureaucracy.

It’s no surprise that, in China, The Castle is one of the most popular foreign books. The following example depicts my own Castle, or as I call it, Trying to Transfer Jobs.

My time at Shaoxing University Shangyu Campus was positive overall. I found I enjoyed teaching, enjoyed my students and got along with my colleagues. But there were some problems.

The main problem was the isolation. My girlfriend and I had to travel 45 minutes by bus and taxi to reach the campus. Because the buses stopped at five, we had little opportunity to spend free time with our Chinese students and colleagues.

And while we only made the journey three times a week, it was still four and a half extra hours a week of almost dying in Chinese traffic.

While all of that isn’t too bad considering what can possibly befall a foreign teacher in China, it was enough to make us consider our options. Our contracts were up that summer and we were both considering greener pastures.

Natalie had an offer to work for a private school for twice the pay, money she needed for traveling and school loans and I had an offer from Shaoxing University Yuanpai Campus, which was not 10 minutes by bicycle from my apartment.

They were looking for an English Literature teacher. Because I majored in English Literature, it was one of the only things I was qualified to do.

I thought the only remaining task was to inform my current employer I would not be renewing my contract. However, that was a little awkward. It wasn’t just informing my current employer. I was informing my good friend Lynne that I didn’t want to work with her any longer.

When she asked me if we were coming back, I broke the news. Natalie was leaving the university and I would be transferring to the other campus.

It was not their fault, I told her. It was the isolation and the distance. We were grateful for everything she had done. We would do everything in our power to help her find another teacher.

She seemed to accept it. “That’s too bad,” she said.

Shortly thereafter, I got a phone call. It was Lynne. She tried to talk me out of the move. I repeat my complaints about the distance and the isolation.

She countered. “Well, we can take care of that. We can try to do something. Are those the only reasons?”

“Well, no,” I said. “Natalie is considering making more money at a private school.”

“We can do something about the salary if that’s a problem,” she said.I was getting irritated, my voice a little testy. “And we don’t want to drive an hour and a half to work everyday.” Silence.

Finally, she said, “What if you can’t get the Yuanpai contract.”

“What do you mean?”

“What if it becomes impossible and something happens.”

“What? Why would something happen? Are you going to make something happen?”

“Maybe you will have a problem.”

“But our contract is up. We can go where we want.”

“You may find in hard to switch.”

It was a veiled threat. Our friendship was becoming hostile. “Well, I hope we don’t. Look, we can come and visit often.”

“And I can come to Shaoxing. But have you talked to Richard yet?” Richard was the Foreign Affairs Officer, my official handler.

“Not talked,” I said. “But we communicated by e-mail.”

“Uh-huh. I’m sorry,” she said, her voice a bit more sympathetic, “but maybe you will have a problem.” She hung-up.

I tried to see where I stood with my prospective new employer. I called the dean of Yuanpai campus. “We are not the authority,” he said. “We take orders from the foreign affairs office.” In other words, he couldn’t help me.

My fate rested in the hands of a man named Richard Wang. Or as foreign teachers like to call him, Dick Wang aka Penis Penis. He was a man whose chosen English name was a euphemism for male genitalia.

However, the name fit his personality so well that the foreign teachers neglected to tell him.

I made an appointment with Mr. Wang. He was the consummate Chinese bureaucrat. He seemed to be insanely busy at all times, so busy that it caused him physical pain whenever you asked him to do anything. He wore the same expression for both granting a favor and passing a kidney stone.

I walked into Richard’s office and caught him by surprise. He had a large flat mouth, rather like a toad, sallow skin and black square glasses. His voice seemed hush and sibilant, like a snake. He apologized for not getting back to me sooner.

“I was so busy with the conference last week,” he said, and motioned me to sit down. He explained the situation to me. “We know you want to go to the other campus and would like to help you but I need the agreement from Shangyu campus. They have recruited you and they have to agree to let you go.”

“But the contract is up,” I countered.

“But they still recruited you. We don’t want to make them angry. So what is the problem?” he asked. I explain my situation. No, there is no way we would teach there again.

“That is unfortunate,” he said. “If they agree to let you go, then we should have no problem.”

I tried to reiterate my case. “Look, I am trying to help the University out. Our contract is up in June. I am offering to stay for another semester. My only request is that I go to Yuanpai. I’ve talked to the dean and he said he would have us. I would be saving you money. I’ve already proven we can live and teach in China. I don’t see what the problem is.”

“I understand. We only need their agreement. What if you don’t get their agreement?”

“Well, to be frank,” I said, my voice dropping to suggest gravity. “I have had other offers.”

“Other offers?” He acted like I had just slapped his one child in the face.

“Yes,” I said. I was now playing hard ball. “In Shaoxing. So I would like to stay at Shaoxing University, but I could leave.”

“Well, this is a problem but a bigger problem,” he said, countering my grave tone with one of his own, “is that your foreign residency permit is expiring next month and we can’t renew it until you sign a contract. So maybe you should sign the contract first and we can see what we can do.”

What a dick. “I will sign the contract, if I’m allowed to go to Yuanpai.”

“I see. Well, I hope we can be successful. We have to talk to Shangyu.” I shook his goobery hand and left his office.

Another day. Another Chinese bureaucrat.

Natalie and I went to Shangyu to talk with the campus president. This was the man with authority but not with the English, so our friend Lynne acted as the translator. A man in his position must speak English, but probably not so well as to comfortably negotiate.

We met in his office. Lynne was nervous. This was an important man, the boss of her bosses. He bid us to sit down and beckoned Lynne to bring us paper cups of hot, green tea. He smiled at us, his crooked yellow teeth fronting his best attempt at sincerity.

He asked about our time here, if we enjoyed the college and the campus. We said we did. Then, with his puzzled look, and in Lynne’s friendly voice, he wanted to know why we possibly wanted to leave?

“You have been great,” I said. “Lynne has been amazing. It’s all external influences. It’s the distance and the isolation. We can’t see our students or coworkers past five o’clock. That’s the problem.

Natalie is leaving because she needs more money. She has bills to pay. We are sincerely sorry. We will help you get someone else. We have only high praise for you and your staff.”

He smiled and nodded. He then looked perplexed for an instant and then again with the smiling and nodding.

“So we are very sorry. But that is why we are leaving.” Again, with the smiling and the nodding.

“But I want to make it as easy as possible,” I said. “I will do whatever it takes to help you find another teacher. But in return, I need your permission to transfer to Yuanpai campus.”

He smiled and nodded so much that I started to suspect neurological damage. He mumbled something in mandarin. Lynne looked directly into my eyes. “I think that will be OK.”

“Good,” I said. I was relieved. It seemed too easy. We shook hands. His weren’t as goobery as Mr. Penis Penis. Everything seemed to be going my way. I called the dean of Yuanpai to inform him of the good news. He would start the paperwork, he said.

The next day, I was teaching one of my classes. I was in a good mood even though I was undergoing the monotonous task of reviewing common mistakes in their recent essays.

While I was in the middle of saying for the 10th time that semester that “and so on” shouldn’t appear every other sentence, I felt my pocket rumble. My cell phone vibrated, indicating a text message.

It was from the dean of my new university. He said, “Actually, Shangyu has decided not to let you go. I am sorry. How about a contract for next year?” I sent a message asking what he was talking about but I didn’t receive a response. He was done with me.

Then, I got a second text message. It was from Lynne. It said, “How do you distribute 13 oranges among 9 children fairly.” What the hell did that mean? Was that some ancient Chinese proverb for “I’m sorry, we’re screwing you?”

I texted back, “I thought Shangyu said I could go to Yuanpai if I helped you find someone else?”

“Yes, so what’s the problem?”

“Yuanpai said Shangyu did not agree.”

“I have to go to the president to make sure.”

I found out later that Lynne was asking me a question that appeared on one of the many standardized English tests the students had to take and that she actually had little knowledge of ancient “screw you” proverbs.

She called me back. “I’m sorry but there has been a miscommunication,” she said. “Actually, he did not agree. He will not let you go.”

A miscommunication? A miscommunication? I knew that was a blatant lie. The man just told me what I wanted to hear so he could get me out of his office, smiling and nodding, nodding and smiling, when he was really going to screw me.

Lynne was too good of an English speaker for a miscommunication. She just had the unfortunate job of covering up for someone else’s bad behavior.

It was a real life lesson in a typical feature of Chinese communication: the yes/no. Many Chinese people would rather lie to your face than say something that would make you unhappy. However, this belated bad news just disappoints you all the more.

The Chinese must be primed for this kind of disappointment, but to Westerners, it infuriates them. Chinese friends say it is slowly changing, favoring the more direct communication, but for this bureaucrat, it has not.

I was now in a desperate position. I had no idea what was happening. I was in a haze of foreign business customs.

I thought one of two things: One: they were bluffing, playing hardball by making it extremely difficult to transfer jobs so that I would stay with Shangyu but would crumble under the prospect of losing me.

Or two: it was a total face saving venture and they would rather lose me and waste hundreds of dollars finding a new teacher than for a campus president to be slightly dishonored.

I had a decision to make. I could either come crawling back to my old job and shake that smiling and nodding bastard’s hand, or I could threaten to leave in the hopes that they would eventually cave in and give me the literature job. I chose the latter.

In my dealings, I had been direct. I had challenged Mr. Penis Penis and he wasn’t going to give me what I wanted. I tried to be Chinese in my dealings afterward, having my business professor friend put in a good word for me.

I realized that a lot of Chinese business dealings happen through backchannels, word of mouth behind closed doors. I hoped I would get a call telling me they had another “miscommunication,” this time in my favor.

But as my residency permit was about to expire, I was getting desperate. I called Mr. Penis Penis one more time. He didn’t return my call.

I was forced to get another job. Luckily, there was another college in Shaoxing called Yuexui Foreign Language School. I asked them for a job and they were interested.

But what they needed was a Marketing teacher. Angela, the Foreign Affairs Officer, seemed more genuine than Mr. Penis but I wondered if I could really do the job.

My only qualification as a marketing teacher was the fact that my brother and sister were business people. Besides the fact that I occasionally go shopping, I had no marketing experience at all.

But that seemed not to matter. The only qualifications that mattered to them were that I could speak English and that my skin was white. Angela never asked me if I could be a marketing teacher, she asked me if I “would” be a marketing teacher.

And I had to negotiate to get that subject. She tried to force “Systems Operations Management” on me, as well as “Accounting.”

Because I was in dire straights, I accepted the job immediately. In the fall, I started as a college marketing and oral English teacher. Only in China.

As the semester began at Yuexui, I realized what a mistake I made. I was teaching Marketing 101 from a textbook I would read in an American college, to Chinese students who couldn’t understand the language in which it was written.

The good side was that if they couldn’t read the book, I would always know more than they would. The bad side was most of them couldn’t speak English.

But they could speak better than most of the 350 students in my 12 Oral English classes. In one class, I spent 2 whole minutes trying to get the class to stand up. “Stand up…get up… stand…up….getupstandup… up….up…..stand up.”

In addition to my awful students, I had another problem. The university was on the outskirts of the city. Before, I was isolated from my students and colleagues. Now, I was isolated from my girlfriend and friends.

It was about a twenty minute bike ride to my former haunts. I was sincerely wishing I had just swallowed my pride and nodded and smiled my way back to Shangyu.

Meanwhile, while Shangyu lied to me, I remained honest. I followed through with my promise to find someone else. Therefore, my friend, BC, filled both Natalie’s job and my old job.

Toward the third week of the semester, my friend just happened to mention to Dick Wang that I was unhappy with my current position, to which Dick Wang responded, “Really?”

He just happened to desperately need a foreign English teacher for the school’s best students in the Chinese department. He couldn’t give me the job when the transfer would have been easy, but now that transferring was next to impossible, why not give it a try?

I had some reservations about breaking my contract. I felt bad for my new students, who would be out a foreign teacher for the semester.

But when the school authorities refused to make the classes long enough to properly teach them, I had little choice. I didn’t want to waste my last semester in China.

My only hang-up was that my contract stipulated up to a $2,000 fine for breaking it. But I knew if there was someone who could snake their way out of it, it would be Dick Wang.

I met Mr. Dick Wang and the dean of the Chinese department at a posh coffee shop. What people don’t understand about Starbucks in China is that it is the cheapest coffee around.

Coffee is a luxury item in China, usually three times what Starbucks charges. So I knew he was trying to impress me. I sat down in a private room and waited for him to arrive.

He came with the Chinese Department dean, who seemed nervous. He barely looked me in the eye, but Dick Wang was cool and collected.

We could have said everything we had to say in about 20 minutes, but that is not how the Chinese do business. They like to make business personal, feigning friendship before they talk money.

He began asking about our recent National Day holiday. “I spent the holiday decorating my house,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Great.” What do you say to that?

“Yes, it was very stressful. I have a decorator but I had to oversee her and watch very closely. More and more, decorators are cheating Chinese people.”

“Oh,” I said. “Tough job.”

“Yes.”

“My mother got a decorator once. And she didn’t watch her and then one month after she decorated, my mother realized the couch was ugly.”

“Oh,” said Dick Wang.

“Yes,” I said.

“So….”

It went on like that for another excruciating 15 minutes. His endurance for inanities was impressive but eventually he talked turkey. “So, we want you to come to work at our university.”

“Yes, I would like that too. But how can we make that possible? I have a contract with Yuexui.” I showed him the contract. He nodded and mmmmed.

“Yes, I think it will not be a problem.”

“But what about the fine clause. It says if I break my contract, I get a $2000 fine. I can’t give them money I don’t have.”

“Yes…actually they would not waste their time and energy. They must hire lawyers and it can be quite expensive. There is no way to make you pay.”

“OK, then this shouldn’t be a problem.” I was relieved. As my Chinese friend later said, Chinese contracts aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

The fine was my only reservation. I thought the future held some minor unpleasantries and then a return to students who could kind of understand what I said.

The overpriced coffee came. We clinked cups and they agreed to take me on. I said I would go in the next day and announce that I was breaking my contract. We drank to that. I was beginning to think he wasn’t such a bad guy after all.

All of a sudden, he turns to me and says, “Oh, I should mention: Yuexui cannot know that you are coming to our college. We have good relations with them and if they find out you went to our college, we may have problems.”

The dean had his eyes plastered on the ceiling at this point. I could tell. This is when they got down and dirty.

“What kind of problems,” I asked.

“Our vice president was on the board of Yuexui. There is still a relationship there.”

“Does he know about this?”

“Yes, but he wants to maintain a good relationship.”

“So what happens if they find out?”

“Hopefully, they will not find out. You can just say you are going to leave and you don’t know where.”

“Right. Won’t they ask where I’m going?”

“Hopefully, they will just go and get a new teacher. Whatever you do, you must leave on good terms.”

“But they are going to be pretty angry if I break the contract, Richard.”

"Maybe but if you talk to Yuexui and tell them the situation, then I think it will be OK.”

“Yeah, but what if it’s not.”

“Then come to me and we will think of a solution.”

“OK,” I said. “Hopefully, it will be OK.”

“Yes,” he said. And then, nonchalantly, he said, “Oh, I should tell you…we can’t give you full airfare because you must work for us six months.” Another additional piece of bad news.

It kept getting worse. He also “forgot” to tell me that they needed a year commitment, that they needed me to start immediately by taking on three classes and he wanted me to teach three classes for free, as a “demonstration.” I refused all his requests.

At a standstill, he said, “Who is the foreign affairs officer at Yuexui?”

“Angela,” I said.

He smiled broadly, as if he was imagining her in pain and enjoying the image. “Oh yes,” he said. “I know Ms. Zhou. We have been acquaintances for many years.”

I thought I heard him hiss.

Finally, they agreed to take me as is. Then, Dirty Dick got down to the details. “OK, you must have a strategy. A…battle plan.”

I thought if anyone was going to teach me to be allusive and sneaky, it was Dick Wang.

“You must be very friendly to her but firm," he said. "You must mention some other things of why you are not happy and how you can no longer be employed. You mist give other reasons than you have given us. Make it convincing but be friendly. Then, I hope she will let you go.”

I said I would.

We shook hands. Richard Wang’s was as pasty as ever. As a parting good wish, he said that in the future, I should recommend my friends to his school. “We want teachers who are qualified…and honest.”

I loved that last part, just as he was coaching me to lie.

I didn't sleep well that night. I went from vowing to march to Angela's office the next morning to put in my resignation to vowing to report Dick Dick's underhanded plotting, exposing him as the snake he really was.

In the morning, I gained a clear perspective. I realized that these two men wanted me to lie and break a contract and in return, they would, like a CIA sleeper contact, disavow all knowledge of my associations with them if my plans were discovered.

In addition, they wanted to cheat me on my benefits and hours as well.
Basically, I was being pressured into a shady operation, where I would be a pawn in university politics. I messed with Chinese bureaucracy before and was smacked down.

If I broke my contract, I would have a lot to lose. Dick Dick would have very little.

I didn’t want there to be another “miscommunication,” another “saving face,” another “yes/no.”

I didn’t call them back and I never heard from them again. Kafka never made it to China. But his final short story collection was fittingly titled, “The Great Wall of China.”

Chinglish

2008-05-03T14:12:00.001-07:00

Before I came to China, I thought I would be lost amid the Chinese written characters, never to see my roman script until I set foot in America again. But to my surprise, in China, English is everywhere.

The Chinese are in love with the English language. There has been a language boom. There are now more foreign teachers in China than ever before. Enrollment in private language schools is skyrocketing. People want to learn English as the international language of business, but they also want to learn it to embrace Western movies, music and fashion. In short, the West is “in.”

The West is so “in” that a recent CCTV program’s theme was “Say no to the West,” about how China should resist the influx of Western cultural influence. And I would agree, if the results weren’t so hilarious.

First, I’ll deal with music. A lot of Chinese folk music is beautiful, but as far as popular music is concerned, the Chinese have failed to develop any indigenous styles that do not sound like cheap imitations of Western pop.

And by cheap imitations, I mean that it sounds extremely similar to Western songs, perhaps even copyright infringement similar, albeit with a cranked up techno beat backing the track (That was how I once heard a song eerily similar to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”).

Also, they often lace their songs with English phrases to show how “in” and/or pretentious they are. Popular phrases include “I love you,” “So beautiful,” “Come on” and “Dolla bills.”

Recently, however, I heard my personal favorite. I don’t know the name of the song and I don’t understand most Chinese lyrics beyond “I miss you and love you,” so to me it sounded like “ching shang chong shing shing I hate myself ching shang wong sching Yeah, I hate myself.”

Sometimes they even sing their songs entirely in English. I don’t have any ready examples but the results are often hilarious. You’d think that if music executives were spending millions of yuan to put out an album, they would at least spend 100 yuan to get the girl’s grammar checked. But no.

I have no problem with the Chinese throwing some English in. English sounds more beautiful than Mandarin so it’s no different than English singers incorporating Spanish or French, both of which sound more beautiful than English. But at least get it right.

English can be seen in Chinese fashion as well. One of my favorite pastimes is to go hunting for Chinglish T-shirts. Like with many commodities, the Chinese are excellent at producing T-shirts for cheap and then copying styles to make money for themselves. I saw an imitation Abercrombie and Fitch shirt that read, “Abercromish and Fitchy.”

The majority of Chinglish shirts are just nonsense though. One shirt I purchased featured a row of d-con bug spray cans on the front with the text beneath: “Where will you find great dining? Non-stop to Braniff’s Wichita.”

Many Chinese think English t-shirts are cool, but they don’t know exactly what the shirts say. I saw a very polite and wholesome girl in my class with the word, “Slut” printed on her chest in big red letters.

While all that is ridiculous, I would love to hear what a Chinese person has to say investigating the Chinese character tattoos and t-shirts of the patrons of a trendy American club.

Q: “Why did you get “plastic bag” tattooed on your arm?”
A: “Because it looked cool.”

The Chinese also love Western movies, shown by the proliferation of pirated DVDs. Almost every DVD store in China will have a “secret room” or “secret drawer” where they stash the illegal DVDs.

In Suzhou, the stores paid off the police so thoroughly that they display the pirated DVDs in the store windows. I couldn’t thank these criminals enough because I can buy any movie I could want for the paltry sum of a dollar.

But for all their counterfeit knowledge, perhaps their English isn’t so good. For instance, when I bought Forrest Gump, the description of the back was: “One man will stand up to the Genocide in Rwanda.”

Or sometimes, on the package, they will list what the critics say, but a lack of understanding can be seen. In big bright letters, it will sometimes read, “MIDDLING PERFORMANCES” or more bluntly, “A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME!” I enjoyed the fact that you had to go to China’s counterfeiters to get honest movie advertising.

The signs are also fantastic. China has launched a campaign to clean up their sign English in time for the Olympics, but they have a lot of work to do. Recently I encountered a sign for “Quiet” that read, “No Louding.”

In the nearby city of Hangzhou, there was a sign near their famed West Lake ordering me to “Have fun,” as if I would forget. In Xi’an, a bar had the tagline “A friend-making clubhouse at half past eight.” A sign near a mountain read, “No hurdling” with a stick figure falling on its head, which I assume is what “hurdling” is.

Other great signs include one I saw by a lake that read, “Careful drowning” and a sign near a mountain that read, “No open flames. Fire is heartless.”

However, the most entertaining translations are for products that are supposed to be international. Thankfully, the companies don’t want to put the time or money into getting the labels properly translated. The best food label example was for dried fruit that read, “Tasty Tang Nazi.”

But I came upon the best product labeling when I stayed at a hotel in Wenzhou. The hotel seemed nice. It had good service, clean rooms and it even offered some additional products.

In a basket beside the sink the hotel offered the usual shampoo products but also offered those of the sexual type. The following are the written descriptions on the back of the products.

Delaying Damp Towel.
The product is extracted scientifically from the essence of rare traditional Chinese medicine. Being hygienic and sterilizing it has a magical function to prolonging and enjoying the sexual intercourse without any side effect. Indeed it provide the sexual life to harmony and perfection. Usage: apply evenly around the balanus and coronary sulcus with a piece of wet wipe (avoiding the urethra orffice) making the fat liquor absorbed sufficiently within 30 minutes before the sexual intercourse. Notice: Unsuitable for people with broken skins or alcohol allergy.

Condom
Made from natural latex inspected by 100% electronic aperture, the product can efficiently prevent involuntary pregnancy and infectious disease like AIDS ect. Before sex, carefully take out the condom from the packaging and let out the air in the seminal vesicle at the top end, avoid damaging it with fingernails or other rigid stuffs. Put on the condom before injection, pull the opening and draw out the condom with the penis after ejaculation to avoid overflow of the sperm. Before and after the sexual intercourse, please rinse the private parts of each other with the bacterial lotion to achieve double protection.

Anti-Virus Bubbles Bath
The product has adopted activator with negative and positive ion on surface, which performs function of cleansing, duppling and condition in gentle. This product has special and original element for anti-biosis made in Switzerland, which can easily prevent inbreak of harmful germs while enjoying romantic gentleness and fragrancy. It has humidity reservation agent, which can prevent caducity of skin after often using and it also has alacine formula so you needn’t wash any more and after using your skin will be fine and smooth with sweet smelling.

Hair and body wash
Adopting latest formula with full efficency which focuses on require ment of bathing and hair washing with high quality by traveler. It has elements of moistening skin and hair with double efficiency which can moisten your skin and hair. After wasing, no scruf shall exist and the passion fragrant smell prevailing in the world can bring elegant and fragrant smell to successful people. The special and original antibiosis genes from Switzerland can prevent in break of body surface bacteria efficiently.

It was too good to be true. I almost wanted to cease teaching English just so there would be more of these fabulous translations in the world. It was a world I loved, full of fragrancy, efficiency, romantic gentleness, duppling, rigid stuffs, extremely sanitary sex and most of all, balanuses.

All these mistakes bred a false sense of superiority in me. When you go to a foreign country, you should feel like an idiot. But China’s haphazard love of English had me walking around another country, constantly correcting its usage of my language. This superiority would last until I would try something so simple as giving a taxi driver directions to my apartment, which would quickly cut me down to size.

Shaolin Temple

2008-03-29T03:14:00.000-07:00

Every kid pines for super powers. But as you get older, you settle for obtaining such petty things as popularity and/or money. But kungfu movies led me to believe that if I only received lectures from a wizened, scraggly-bearded Chinese elder, kicked and punched the air a lot and walked through an occasional sidewalk of hot coals, I could run up walls, do double back flips, and most importantly, kick anyone’s ass.

Kungfu was my last, best hope for obtaining super powers.

But in one winter day in Cleveland, my hopes were dashed. The auditorium was stacked with about two thousand kungfu aficionados sitting in the bleachers. I was 15.

I had been in kungfu classes for about two years, and my “master” pronounced me good enough to enter a local competition. But while I was waiting to do my form, I saw something so disturbing, it made me quit kungfu forever.

It was a demonstration of “qi” or internal energy. The announcer started: “When his friends were busy building careers and starting families, Steve was busy developing his qi.” I remember thinking: if you sacrificed your life for this, Steve, this better be good. An unassuming guy walked out. He resembled an auto mechanic, burly but also quiet fat. He squatted down, meditating and breathing deeply. His body started to shake; his breaths grew louder and deeper, like he was having a mild standing-seizure. Then, he stopped and gave a nod.

A square-shouldered Asian man walked up to Steve. Steve stood with his legs apart and gave the man a little bow. The man politely bowed back. Then, he proceeded to kicked Steve in the crotch with jewel-destroying swiftness, not once, but several times, each blow raising Steve slightly off the ground. The crowd gasped but Steve did not, his face unchanged. He must have endured seven blows all told. In exchange for career and family, Steve got iron balls.

I didn’t want that kind of super power. I placed second-to-last in the forms competition. I stopped training soon after.

SHAOLIN, HENAN

Nearly eight years later, I found myself in China, the country of kungfu’s origin. I had one month to travel. If there was one place I wanted to go, it was surely the birthplace of kungfu, the Shaolin Temple in Henan province.

Legend has it, Shaolin kungfu was created by Shaolin Temple monks who imitated animals to strengthen their bodies against long bouts of meditation. While not totally untrue, a more rational explanation is that kungfu was created over many centuries by former soldiers and generals seeking haven from ancient battlefields. Within the safety of the Shaolin walls, they could turn their practical martial skill into an art. In time, Shaolin kungfu would emerge as an institution, used in the service of emperor and revolutionary alike, and most importantly, in awesome kungfu movies. And I was going to where it all started.

But as I got off the bus in Dengfeng, I realized that many kungfu fans had the same idea. That was evident from the taxi. It was a mobile tourist center. Before we were a half mile from the bus station, the taxi driver pulled over, whipped out the business card of a bald kungfu monk and offered to take me to him. I refused. He refused to move. Then, he called a tour guide who tried to browbeat me into purchasing her translating services in the temple, saying, “You will be lost. No one speaks English.” After I refused her, the taxi driver started to drive, only to pull over at a crappy hotel. I just kept repeating “Shaolin Temple…Shaolin Temple,” like it was a Buddhist mantra. Eventually, he dumped me out in what looked like just a parking lot.

After dodging the assaults of old women begging me to stay at their hotels, I found my way into the Shaolin Temple park. It was as I imagined it: a lush verdant valley, a tranquil brook to my left with stone bridges spanning over it. Concrete stones were neatly organized on the path, with lazy drooping willows arching up out of dirt squares in between the stones. But as I looked closer, it seemed not so much clean as sterilized. I paid 100 Yuan to get in.

I saw packs of Chinese tourist groups walking around with their golden flags. Their children licked ice cream cones with one hand while vanquishing invisible enemies with the other, changing it up with a kick or two. Others swung wooden swords and axes as the tourist carts sped up and down the pathway.

I wandered around the grounds. My first stop was the “Kungfu Show” at a performance amphitheater. The monks filed out, dressed in neon orange flowing robes; their legs wrapped in tight black cloth; their bodies taunt and cut. They sat cross-legged on the floor, feigning meditation. Each held a small gourd and a small wooden mallet, which they knocked to peaceful flute music. But soon, the lead monk let out a grunt and they flew to their feet. Their rhythm became furious as they wielded the mallets to wound.

After this initial outburst, one after another, they demonstrated their martial art skill. One monk broke two metal bars over his head; another bent a spear against the floor using his neck. Another monk threw a needle through a glass rectangle, popping a balloon on the other side. There were also the 18 weapons of Shaolin: Whirling staffs, slicing swords, spinning metal hooks and metal chains going the speed of helicopter blades. It was an ancient armory of weapons.

They were good. Especially that spear neck guy. After the show, I saw him come out of the bathroom, holding a tissue to his bleeding neck. His wound wasn’t in vain. They had dazzled me. I was so impressed I decided to renew my kungfu training. Maybe I wouldn’t pierce my neck with a spear, but I would watch someone else do it again.

TAGOU

However, I had to choose a school. I could train at the Shaolin Guan, which was the expensive, official Shaolin Temple hotel or I could train at the other school on the grounds, the Tagou School, which just happens to be the biggest martial art school in the world.

As I was trying to make up my mind, I met a pointy-faced Ukrainian woman who was at the Tagou School learning internal energy healing techniques. When I asked her who her teacher was, she said, “Everything.” When I asked for clarification, she said, “A bird can be your teacher if you know how to learn.” I wanted to go where she was going. I signed up for the Tagou school.

I made my way to the foreign affairs office and met Ying Ying. Ying Ying was the foreign affairs representative. She seemed bored with my presence until I decided to tell her I was a journalist. Seven months in China will teach you to say, “What the hell?”

In all our future interactions, Ying Ying wore a fake PR smile that snapped from zero to full-face-flex with the least provocation. She said that if I needed anything, I could come to her. I said that I would. For 100 dollars, she gave me four days of kungfu classes with room and board, as well as free range of the Shaolin Temple. It was a deal.

From my run-down hotel room, I saw an army of red-shirted children practicing in the courtyard amid gray, cracking concrete. They were organized in little kungfu companies, throwing punches and kicks in unison. Others stabbed the air with thin cutlasses that wobbled with every movement like thick tinfoil.

I could hear the cries out in the training field, across the path, of more children practicing on the razed foundations of other fallen schools. There were thousands of them, doing kungfu drills and calisthenics as a man in a guard tower shouted into a loudspeaker.

The Tagou School was divided into two campuses. The largest, the new campus, housed most of the students and was located in the nearby town of Dengfeng. The old campus consisted of approximately 4,000 students and was still on the Shaolin Temple grounds. All together, the Tagou School considered itself the biggest martial art school in the world, with about 18,000 students. I counted myself as 18,001.

TRAINING

Training began at 8:30 the next morning. Although Sunday was the students’ one day off, Ying Ying made special arrangements for me. The training room was dilapidated, with dusty, concrete floors and a large puddle collecting mosquitoes at the end of the hall. The ceiling was stained in parts and missing several panels in others. A rusty rack of spears, staffs, swords and battle-axes lay against one wall. It was perfect.

While on my way to the training hall, I decided that for the rest of my time at the school, I would judge people by whether they seemed like they would be a good guy or a bad guy in a kungfu movie. Initially, I decided my trainer was a good guy. He was young, short and trim, with a bemused smile on his face at all times. He looked like the sort of young man who was nice enough until his father is murdered and he becomes duty-bound to take revenge.

We started out by running in a circle but soon he had me kicking over my head. In eight years, I had forgotten all my forms but I still had the flexibility. We did some light sparring with gloves and before I knew, it was lunchtime.

However, after lunch, he was not so easy. First, he made me stand on one leg for about five minutes. Then, it was kicking and punching at the same time. He couldn’t speak English but he knew the necessary words like, “OK. Quicker.” I would do it quicker and he would say, “Ok. Relax.” I would relax and he would say, “OK. Quicker” and so on and so fourth for about an hour. How am I supposed to relax when I’m trying to punch through someone’s face?

At some point, he must have gotten frustrated because then he just made me do calisthenics. I was doing marine push-ups and sprinting to the other side of the hall only to do them again. At one point, when I was going to collapse, I thought that he wasn’t a martial arts instructor at all, but rather some sicko nationalist who paid the school for the privilege of torturing a foreigner.

I came to my senses. I reminded myself that I may be at kungfu school, but I was first and foremost a tourist. I didn’t have to do anything. I just kind of stopped moving. We ended the class 30 minutes early.

I had to sit down for a while. Luckily, it was dinnertime. I watched the kids file into the mess halls after their hard day of training to gobble bowls of slop. I was shocked to see an occasional chubby child. There weren’t many but there were enough for me to take notice. Being that they did martial arts all day, I wanted to ask them, “How did you do that?”

But I only had to take one look at the food, most of which consisted of some form of grease. Line cooks stir-fried meat and vegetables beyond recognition, causing a grease fire almost every time. Other fare included fried bananas and chicken fingers, coke, ice cream, sandwiches lathered with mayonnaise, hot dogs, donuts and of course, ramen noodles. In another testament to unhealthiness, the hotel kiosk operator sold packs of cigarettes to children who couldn’t have been older than 13. But I guess if I trained all day for my health and fitness, I would want ways to make my efforts futile too.

DAILY ROUTINE

That night, I slept soundly. For some reason, I had the idea that I would wake up with the thousands of Chinese students at 5:30 and participate in their morning exercises. I heard them screaming outside at around 5:40 and I briefly joined in their screaming…when I tried to move my body. I managed to get out of bed at 6:00 and off the floor at 6:15.

When I somehow got dressed and made it outside, the students were still out, marching in their companies under the pale dawn fog, yelling “Eee-eeer-eeee,” or “one-two-one!” Other regiments did various calisthenics on the packed earth of the training fields. Some regiments did squats while they sat on each other’s shoulders or held each other’s feet to do wheelbarrows across the dirt. The youngest company looked to be comprised of children not older than 4. The oldest wasn’t older than 18. And it all happened before the sun was fully up.

As I would later learn, this sun-up practice was the easiest part of their day. Talking to a teacher at the Wushu College, Shan Yuxiao, I learned how hard a student’s day actually was. They have twenty alarms regulating their day, indicating when to eat, sleep and move. After training for two hours at dawn, they have breakfast at 7.

At 8, they manage to get some schooling in, but the students are really here to learn kungfu. “Maybe their education is inferior to a normal school,” Shan said. They go to school for about three hours, learning English, Chinese, history, politics and science, with lunch at 11.

There’s a rest at 12, as some children drag out mattresses and sleep outside on the concrete courtyard. Kungfu starts again at 3 when they practice forms and train in a type of fighting known as sanda, which is like Murry Tai kickboxing with throwing techniques. There’s dinner at 6 and then more kungfu. In all, they train for about 5 hours a day, she said. However, I never saw any schooling; I rarely saw any resting; as far as I saw, there was kungfu going on most of the day.

KUNGFU FATE

It was fine to see the teenagers running around all day but it was a bit disconcerting to see the four-year-olds doing the same. At the age I was running around my basement with underwear on my head, they are learning how to take out a kneecap. What kind of childhood is that? Sure, they were learning to be kungfu badasses, but at the age of four, you certainly don’t know if you’re a badass. You should be running around on the playground, being a child.

Now, if you find yourself spending most of your free time pummeling other children, well then by all means, join a kungfu school. But the four-year-olds spent most of their day mastering forms and doing awkward aerials in a place that resembled an army barracks. The building’s only childhood touch was the occasional puffy, mushroom-shaped trashcan. It seemed out of place amid the gray concrete of everything.

What would compel a parent to send their four-year-old to grow up at a kungfu school? The teacher said that the school fee was rather expensive: 6,000 RMB per year for the older children and 8,000 RMB per year for the “babies.” The price increase was to pay for the “life teachers,” who act as the children’s surrogate mothers.

For 8,000 RMB, parents could actually send their kids to a good private school for a quality education. I asked Shan why their parents picked kungfu school instead. “Some of the children are bad,” she said. “Maybe their parents love them very much but they can’t handle them so they send them here.” I always thought that if you have a bad child, you beat his ass, not teach him how to beat yours.

“Some also don’t do well in school so they come here.” All levels of Chinese education require placement tests. The Tagou School did not have high academic standards. And some parents are just too busy for their children. “Maybe they are business people. But many leave the children sometimes only for two or three years,” she said. Whatever their case, while attending the school, the children go home for as little as one month in a year.

“But some of the children have the special kungfu,” she said. When I asked her what this meant, she mentioned Hong Chi Hung, a petite six-year-old boy from Sichuan province who is the face of public relations for the school. Chinese media flock to the school to videotape the boy standing upright and putting his foot in his mouth. “He will have a very bright future,” she said.

Many other students also have the “special kungfu.” The school boasts some 1000 Wushu Championships and recently, it had 4 champions in the US-China Wushu Championships. In addition to the tournaments, it also has former students in movies and T.V. series. If they have the “special kungfu,” they rarely go home. They’re too busy performing in the school’s touring groups.

I saw many examples of “special kungfu” during my stay. One such practitioner came into the training hall every day to punish a heavy bag with nasty flying sidekicks, later moving to the mat to do a succession of back flips and finishing his workout by posing for pictures doing a one-finger push-up.

But many others don’t have the “special kungfu.” Not everyone can be Jet Li. So what do most students do? Ms. Shan ticked them off. “Many go into the army, police, coaching, teaching, being a guard, secretary…many things.” Tagou students can also continue on to the Tagou Wushu College and further their studies in such fields as applied English, office management, security, traditional medicine, health and tourism, she said.

Ms. Shan told me all this while sitting on the mat during the second day of training. As I had severe problems moving my body, I spend a lot of that day sitting with her. I tried to train a little, but my teacher had the idea that he would make me do running leaps off a mat while doing flying crescent kicks. To make sure I jumped high enough, he swung a bamboo stick under my feet. I changed my mind. Definitely bad guy.

THE INTERVIEW

I didn’t train in the afternoon. I was planning to, but Ying Ying informed me that she had set up an interview with “a very important person.” She told me I should be “very excited.” I was to interview Liu Hai Chao, the President of the Wushu College!

Liu Hai Chao’s father founded Tagou school in 1978. As the story goes, he was a simple farmer who just happened to be a kungfu master in his spare time. His fame spread throughout the land until three pupils traveled to Dengfeng to be his disciples. In 25 years, his school grew from three students in a field to 18,000 students in two massive complexes. A man who could do that must be pretty good at kungfu and/or business.

But his son showed no signs of his father’s prowess. His office indicated more CEO than kungfu master, with fine stained wooden paneling, a coffee maker in the corner (rare in China) and a bright blue-haired Buddha statue as a paperweight.

Mr. Liu was a coarse, ogre of a man, massively middle-aged with a wreath of jet-black hair around his otherwise bald head. He was the type of person who talked at you instead of to you, visibly titillated by his own words while hardly listening to yours. He showed no signs of health, having what the Chinese call a “General Belly” (beer gut) and chain-smoking four cigarettes during the course of our 15-minute interview.

I was beginning to think that he had no kungfu training at all. But then, about one minute in, he lifted his right butt cheek completely off his seat and set forth a fart of such power and fury that I knew he had to have some kungfu training.

I started with a basic question. What do the students actually learn? At the biggest martial art school in the world, they do not learn kungfu. They learn Wushu.

After the Communist revolution in 1949, officials attempted to ban kungfu, branding it as superstitious and backward. But when they couldn’t beat it, they joined it. They legalized it but watered down much of the spiritual elements and made it more of an acrobatic dance rather than a system of self-defense, with flamboyant aerials and a well-defined point system. They also added the kickboxing-like Sanda for combat competition. Mr. Liu said, “Theory is the same. External forms are different.”

The school advertises itself as teaching “Shaolin kungfu.” I asked them if the students learn any Buddhism. He laughed in my face. “The students learn about Buddhism scholarship and culture. They also learn there is no God in the sky or on earth.” It made sense for a kungfu school in Communist China to stay on the safe side and stick with the government’s official atheist line.

But if you take out the religion, what the Chinese government calls “superstition,” how do you explain the “superpowers” of kungfu? For instance: Qi or the “life force” that animates every living thing. Both kungfu and Wushu practitioners believe that if they focus their “life energy” at a certain point in their body, they can strengthen it (like Steve and his iron balls), causing increased damage to other objects or people. Or they can use their qi for healing. Does this life force just appear naturally or is there a reality beyond our reality?

Mr. Liu was adamant and shouted his response. “Most foreigners misunderstand this. We assimilate energy from the cosmos and increase our life potential by practicing ourselves. We refine our life essence and increase life energy for the purpose of fortifying our internal organs.”

Ok. So students from the age of four all the way up to 22 train at least five hours a day and for what? What was the point? Being really good at kungfu? Its practical use went out the door with the advent of firearms.

I was expecting Mr. Liu to have a vague answer about the value of heritage and discipline, which will help students no matter what they do, perhaps like a liberal arts professor defends what he or she teaches. But Mr. Liu was devastatingly practical. “If they know English and Chinese, the most suitable job is a secretary/body guard.” All that training to be a rich man’s toady. Sounded like the kungfu equivalent to flipping burgers.

I told him that I was shocked about the young age of some of the students. Mr. Liu agreed. “Their parents think it is suitable. But in my opinion, it is not good. The teachers only take care of them. They don’t teach them knowledge.”
“So why do you let them in?”
He became defensive. “I just manage the Wushu college. I don’t know about these things.”
“But I thought you owned the school.”
"The school belongs to human kind.”
“But it’s private right? Either your father owns it or you own it.”
“I only want to work hard and do my work well.”

He wouldn’t even answer a simple question. I changed the subject. When I would walk outside, I saw beautiful fields, lush mountains and a flowing brook. While not exactly quiet on account of the Chinese tourists, it was almost peaceful. In between the Tagou School and the Shaolin Temple, the space was relatively empty.

But even in the fields, one could see where foundations once stood. The impressions of buildings haunted the path to the temple. Massive structures that once stood there were now gone, and recently so. Mr. Liu told me that there used to be about 50 kungfu schools on the Shaolin Temple grounds but they have since moved out. “There were too many people near the monastery. It destroyed the climate.”

About five years ago, the newly ordained abbot of the Shaolin Temple, Shi Yongxin, ordered the grounds cleared of schools and farmers alike. The farmers protested and the schools moved to Dengfeng. The Tagou School is the last privately owned school left in Shaolin. But talk in the training hall was that the school was moving to nearby Dengfeng by next year. When I asked Mr. Liu about the school’s future, he said, “I have no idea about the future of the school.” I had to go to someone with less of his head up his own ass.

SHAOLIN, INC.

The hotel manager, Gou Deping, was more obliging. He told me the Abbot forced Tagou School to move next year. They are building extensions to their new school to prepare.

“Local people hate the abbot,” Gou said. “Because they thought it was his idea. I’m an outsider so I don’t care. I think it’s better for the environment. It makes the place cleaner and quieter. It’s good for tourism. But they shouldn’t move all the schools. Shaolin culture includes kungfu and schools. Only a temple and no kungfu is not good. It’s not fair.”

But there will be a kungfu school. Next to the Shaolin Temple, the exhibition hall also houses a small school that will be allowed to stay, which just happens to be owned by the abbot’s brother. Abbot Shi Yongxin said he wanted to clear the Shaolin Temple of elements corrosive to Buddhism but it is obvious that he also wants to turn Shaolin into a highly profitable business.

The monastery is in the midst of a legal battle to trademark the Shaolin name at home and abroad. They send hundreds of monks abroad to perform in kungfu shows to “spread our culture” but to also rake in handsome returns. They recently established the Shaolin Culture Broadcast Company to produce its own blockbuster films. And there are plans in the works for a kungfu version of American Idol. While these facts sully my dream of an enlightened Buddhist sanctuary where they can also kick your ass, I knew that it was appropriate. The current Shaolin Temple was conceived to resemble a dream.

The Shaolin Temple has been destroyed several times during its long history. The temple has always been rich. The Shaolin Temple had valuable possessions to protect, gained by courting the favor of powerful emperors. But then again, it has also housed dissidents and supported their activities. This combination caused the temple to be sacked repeatedly, most recently in the Ming Dynasty and Qing Dynasty. Then, the temple was destroyed almost irreparably in the Chinese Civil War in 1928, when a fire burned for 45 days destroying priceless literature and records.

Even when Mao Zedong banned kungfu, the temple held on. It wasn’t until the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards ransacked the temple in the 1960s, that the monks were expelled. After that, only local farmers came to the temple. They used it to dry their corn.

But the reform era came in the late 1970s, and like much of China, things got better for the Shaolin Temple. Looking for a way to generate much needed income, the Chinese government cashed in on their cultural heritage and bankrolled their first kungfu film, “The Shaolin Temple” with a young Jet Li in his first starring role. Based on a legend of 13 monks defeating an entire army, the movie was a success. Realizing the tourism possibilities, the government rebuilt the temple and restocked it with monks. Shi Yongxin completed the set. So it really should resemble a movie set.

But this has led to problems, as the temple was not recreated properly. Ying Ying led me to a pavilion and told me a story. As the legends goes, translated from her Chinglish, the “inventor” of Zen Buddhism, Damo, was at the Lixue Pavilion inside the temple when one of his followers knocked on the door. The follower had such a hankering to become a full fledged monk, that when Damo came outside, the follower cut off his own left arm, his blood spurting out over the newly-minted snow. Damo knew he now understood Zen Buddhism and awarded him his monk’s alms bowl, signifying full monkhood.

“Is this the exact ground where his blood fell?”
“Yes,” said Ying Ying. “Very famous.”
I imagined the whole scene, thinking this was the same ground, right here, where the blood spread, where the arm fell.
About 20 feet to the left, there was a building not open to the public. I asked Ying Ying what it was. She stalled for a second and said, “That’s the original pavilion.”
“So he didn’t really cut off his arm here?”
“No,” said Ying Ying. She was caught. She mumbled her reply. “They moved the pavilion in 1984.”

It made me wonder: what was the difference between an authentic historical site and a theme park? It reminded me of Colonial Williamsburg, with a mix of original and recreated buildings. And just like Colonial Williamsburg, the Shaolin Temple also had actors.

According to other westerners more familiar with the temple, most of the “monks” are not really monks. They are paid martial artists training with the real monks, who give them Buddhist names to sound genuine. In turn, they provide the public with the illusion that there are still a good number of “warrior monks.”

To some, it was definitely a job. I saw a young monk chain-smoking cigarettes in a red baseball hat, much like a historical re-enactor would suck down before starting work.

But the Shaolin Temple retained aspects of its former glory. Toward the back of the temple, there was Pilu Hall, built 500 years ago during the Ming Dynasty. It was also called 500 Buddha Hall because of its magnificent paintings of 500 Buddhas on the wall. With a wall like that, I couldn’t imagine that the monks would train there for fear of damaging it, but the proof was in the floor. It was evident that the monks held their stances for hours in the hall, because pocked all over the floor were deep indentations from where they pressed down. There was so much pressure over time that the worn stones had actually sunk down into the earth.

MONKEY KUNGFU

The next day, I doubted that my body could endure another game of jump-kick so I called Ying Ying. “What do you want to learn?” she asked.

I thought for a second. There was so much to learn. Modern Wushu has tons of insane forms with names like Poking Feet, Supreme Ultimate Fist, Praying Mantis Fist, Through the Back Boxing, Drunken Boxing and Cannon Punch.

But I knew which form I wanted. In high school, my friends made fun of me for my slight primate features, nicknaming me “monkey boy.” At the biggest martial art school in the world, I would turn that moniker of derision into a powerful weapon. I would turn Monkey Boy into Monkey Boxing.

The next day, my teacher arrived. I expected a master of the Simian arts, but what I got was a little boy. His head was shaven and he had baby-like rosy apple cheeks. He was only 15, but like a lot of Chinese youth, he looked younger. Ms. Shan said that he “majored in monkey and monkey stick” at the Tagou School. That had to be the best major I had ever heard of. He walked onto the training mat and said, “Look.”

All of a sudden, he was a monkey. He sucked in his cheeks and hunched his shoulders up. His wrists and fingers hung loosely and his legs sunk in a crouched position. His eyes widened and he started to pick imaginary lice out of his head. He looked around for enemies and then snatched some invisible fruit from an imaginary tree. He was totally serious.

He motioned for me to do whatever he did. So I assumed the monkey position and picked some air-fruit. He then started to walk on his haunches using his hands for support. Easy enough. He then broke into a monkey shuffle, which shortly became a monkey run and then into what best can be described as a flying ballerina spin with a leg extension and a smack down on the ground with his…what I guess were now paws. I had no idea how that would help me beat people up, but I had no time to think. I did my best to follow him, but at the ballerina spin, I flailed my body in the air and landed on an internal organ.

He looked down at me and shook his head as a human but quickly resumed monkey position. Next he did a leg sweep and hopped over his own foot, doing it three times while simultaneously spinning around, finishing the move by spinning on his ass. I tripped over my own foot and went right to the ass part.

Then, he ate some imaginary fruit but I guess it tasted bad, so he wobbled his fingers in front of his face, and made “monkey is mad” sounds (Wo-ahh-ahhh-ahhh!). That had me wobbling and Wo-ahh-ahh-ing, and then we were going back and forth being mad monkeys. What do mad monkeys do? Apparently, they hop on their asses. So there I was, bouncing my butt cheeks on the mat.

Then he did a roll back into the crouched monkey stance and I followed suit. Suddenly, he whipped out a flying sidekick, the first actual kungfu move in the whole performance. I could do that. I was relieved, until he did a one-handed back handspring. I couldn’t do that. I fell all over the place. He was patient with me, and told me where to place my hand and eventually, I pulled off a weak rendition. It was the only time he said, “Very good.”

He picked some lice out his head and did a punch. But the manliness of the punch was gone when he made me immediately go into a monkey prance on my toes, skipping along the mat picking imaginary fruit. I maintained my dignity by imagining I was plucking out my enemy’s eyeballs, but the prancing was still unnecessary.

After that, he picked some imaginary hair out of his head and blew it, which I guess was to blind the enemy. Then he was embarrassed for some reason, probably because we’d been acting like monkeys for the past five minutes and he resumed human form once again. Everyone in the gym stopped their own training to watch us. For the next two days, I would once again be called “monkey boy.”

We practiced it for about another hour and a half. The form was interesting, like a kungfu ballet. There were very few practical applications in the form but I thought it should have at least included the defensive move most natural to monkeys. Nowhere in the form did I see any throwing of feces. I asked him about it. Well, actually I just made a monkey nose and mimed the throwing of my own crap. He just laughed and informed me (through a translator) that nowhere in the monkey forms was there any poop throwing. Like many other Wushu forms, the Monkey form is for show, not combat.

PASSION

However, the question did lead to a conversation. His name was Houzhi Peng. He had been at the school six years, since the age of nine. I imagined his busy parents sending him off so they could log more hours in China’s expanding private sector but he said that wasn’t the case. “I chose it myself. I saw the school in an advertisement and asked my parents if I could go. They said yes.” He said he missed his family very much when he first started but it doesn’t bother him anymore. His major was the monkey form, but technically, it falls under Performance.

Like many students at the school, he wanted to go onto the Beijing Film Academy to become a kungfu action star. He already had the “special kungfu,” traveling around the world with the Tagou performance troupe. But as any Hollywood waitress knows, you need more than talent to be in the movies. You need an impossible amount of luck. He knows that but it doesn’t seem to matter. “I love Wushu very much,” he said.

I asked him why he loved it. He stumbled for an answer and finally said, “It is a myth to me. I want to learn the secrets. It is endless.” And then I realized what a stupid question that was. Passion is irrational. Why do you love a person or a thing? You can make stabs at it, fumble for concrete reasons but in the end, you just love it. It could be a movie you saw, a song you hear, a sentence you read or a glance you receive. It doesn’t matter. Something in you just clicks, fusing your identity with that person or thing, sometimes forever. For that boy, right now, what he loved was Wushu, specifically, Monkey Wushu. There was nothing more to say.

WISDOM

I didn’t know if the Shaolin Temple was real or fake. But then, that is the essence of Zen Buddhism, which has been practiced in the Shaolin Temple for nearly two millennia. It is the coexistence of opposites, the existence of contradictions. The Shaolin Temple is both Buddhism and business, theme park and temple.

It didn’t matter that the temple was pursuing major economic interests. The temple has almost always pursued its economic interests. Why stop now? Instead of donations, they’re doing things for themselves. Business and Buddhism seem just as outlandish as violence and Buddhism. But kungfu was the whole reason I was there.

The Shaolin Temple seemed to fit China, with its capitalist communism, its socialism with few social programs, its emerging superpower status with astonishing backwardness. It is the land of a million contradictions. As I took my last look at the Shaolin grounds, I realized that the Shaolin legends were probably just as real as the re-created temple. But that was OK.

Kungfu is more than the Shaolin Temple. It is organic. It spreads not from temple to the rest of the world but from teacher to student. When I remember learning kungfu, I remember all the kicks and the punches. I remember the weapons. But I also remember the non-western thought. It was the first time I meditated; the first time I sought spirituality in some place other than the church; the first time I really became curious about some place other than America.

In an age of firearms, no one really uses kungfu for self-defense. Now, kungfu defends Buddhist and Chinese heritage. It exposes curious people all over the world to a culture so vastly different from their own that perhaps within its mysterious confines, one can really attain super powers; or at least a different perspective.

My Favorite Photos

2008-03-23T19:21:00.000-07:00

A Chinese Wedding

Hui Minority Train Station

This boy was for sure Muslim. Kazacks near Karakum Mountains.

On a motorcycle in the Karakum Mountains.

Szechuan Opera

Xi'an

2008-02-06T20:38:00.000-08:00

I had been traveling around China for one month. I called my Chinese friend, Laura, and found she was at her childhood home in Xi’an. I asked her if I could stop by for a few days and she agreed. But she warned me: “My family is very poor. You are welcome to stay, but we don’t have much.”

I had been teaching at a Chinese University for the past seven months. During that time, Laura was a force of good in my life. She was my Obi Wan Kenobi in China. Whenever I took the wrong bus, locked myself out of my apartment, broke my toilet, had a problems with my students, Laura would help.

But she was more than that. So often as a foreigner, I was separated from the general population. Because I didn’t speak Chinese, to Chinese people I was either a teacher or an oddity. Very rarely did I get to be a friend.

Laura met me at a bus stop on the outskirts of Xi’an, China’s eighth largest city. She was short with plump, chipmunk cheeks. Her spoken English was impeccable, often interrupted by her boisterous laugh. She even got English jokes – a cultural acumen to be treasured in China.

Laura lived at the intersection between the sprawling city and the receding countryside. After laughing at my enormous red backpack, she hailed a motorcycle taxi to her family’s peach farm. The motorcycle taxi jostled us in the back of its carriage like kernels in a bag of microwave popcorn. Amid the shaking, I saw the gritty city pass quietly away into a quiet countryside, but not before going by two massive complexes made of brick so new they glistened, as if never before washed by rain.

“Those are the two new universities,” said Laura. At the time, I looked at the universities as a symbol of hope, an improvement to China’s burgeoning university system. But soon, that new brick would seem foreboding.

***

When city turned to village, we shot down a narrow side street and came to an abrupt halt at Laura’s house. It looked poor, but in a classy way. The façade had a concrete archway and a utilitarian metal door, as did most of the houses on the street. It opened up onto a traditional Chinese courtyard. Laura rushed me inside.

Sitting in her living room, Laura’s mother was expecting me. She was a plump, squat woman of about 47. Hardship added another 10 years to her face but she still had her rosy cheeks. She immediately offered me a meal. When I declined, she demanded that I eat some watermelon. As my mouth gushed with watermelon juice, she pushed some peaches in my face. Like many Chinese, she specialized in “hospitality by force,” a kind of hyperactive kindness that is exhausting for everyone.

Eventually, her mother did go to prepare dinner, leaving Laura and I to laze about on her living room couch. It was covered with a bamboo mat to keep it cool in the stifling summer air. I asked Laura how long her family lived here.
“Generations and generations,” she said. And then, casually, she said, “My family was ruined by the Cultural Revolution.”

The Cultural Revolution was a period of madness from 1964 to 1976 when Mao Zedong, China’s leader, inspired the country to devour itself. With the political revolution won, Mao redirected his people’s efforts to a cultural one. Officially, Mao wanted to eradicate the last vestiges of capitalism from China and make a clean break from China’s feudal past. But like Stalin’s USSR, he used ideology as an excuse to snuff out political enemies and create a nation of fear. It was a place where children accused parents and neighbors accused neighbors of being a dreaded “capitalist-roader.”

During that time, Laura’s grandfather was a prosperous farmer. “He worked very hard so he owned more land than others,” Laura said. He was even able to hire some of his neighbors to do part-time work. But his prosperity made some of his neighbors “jealous and hateful,” Laura said. Eventually, they charged him with being a vile thing: a landlord. Authorities took his land and redistributed it to those very same neighbors. He was humiliated and financially ruined.

Laura spoke of her grandfather with detached sadness. But her voice quivered when she spoke of his children. “The worst thing…no child of a landlord was allowed to go to high school or college.” Even though her father was the best student in his primary school class, he had to drop out at age 12. “He had to quit even though he was the smartest.” She mused on what he might have been. “He might have been an architect or an engineer. He designed our house himself.”

I looked around and believed her. Their house was rustic and basic but it embodied a simple elegance. It was a traditional Chinese courtyard house, with a spacious concrete courtyard surrounded by separate, unconnected structures: the kitchen, the living room, the bedrooms, a shed.

The shower itself was a feat of ingenuity. They had no indoor plumbing. Laura’s father rigged plastic PCP pipes running down from a water drum on the roof, using natural water pressure for the shower. The bathroom was an outhouse squatter, but it too was well made with new stained-wood paneling around a rectangular hole in the ground. A roll of toilet paper was placed nicely on a stick for easy dispensing. And even though the hole was half-filled with human waste, the only stench was the overwhelming reek of bleach.

I was surprised to see that her family’s house was not one story but two, with concrete stairs leading up above the shower. The upstairs had rooms too, but they looked like new additions, empty and covered in workmen’s scraps. For not having much, they had a lot. It made you wonder what he could have done with proper training.

I asked Laura if she had any hard feelings for her “jealous and hateful” neighbors but she didn’t. “It has been too long. Most of them are old or dead,” she said.
However, Laura wasn’t so easy on Mao Zedong. “The Cultural Revolution was one of Mao Zedong’s mistakes.”

Publicly, she still maintains that Mao Zedong was a great figure who just made some bad decisions. The official line is he was “70 percent right and 30 percent wrong.” I don’t know who made the final calculations, but I would count again. The mass starvation and then instigated madness of his countrymen deserve a little more than 30 percent.

In her subtle, Chinese way, I can tell Laura thinks so too. “Many people still love him, but he made many, many mistakes.”

If it was my family that was ruined, I would also have a grudge against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But Laura separates the two. While she disparages Mao Zedong, she is also a card-carrying member of the CCP. To be a member of the party is a privilege.

Members must undergo a rigorous selection process, demonstrating selflessness and honor. Only 5 percent of the population makes the cut. In return, they receive status and more opportunities. In my classes, the CCP members were usually the best and the brightest. Laura could count herself among them.

Accordingly, Laura follows the party line on many issues. We got on the topic of Tiananmen Square. Laura’s summary: “A few bad people inspired the students to act up. They didn’t know what they were doing.” She refused to recognize the student’s legitimate cause for more democracy and accountability. She simplified the movement. “They didn’t like the government so they protest. They didn’t like Deng Xiaoping (the president).”

But the more I talked with her, the more I realized: the party was her family’s ruin but it was also her family’s salvation. If Mao Zedong was the dastardly villain, Deng Xiaoping was the knight in shining armor. After Mao’s death, Deng oversaw the revitalization of China’s economy and lifted many out of poverty.

“After Deng Xiaoping took office, everything is better,” she said. It was Deng who loosened the shackles of an authoritarian state; Deng who encouraged private enterprise and foreign investment. It was Deng who laid the groundwork for the most dramatic economic turnaround of the 20th century.

Her grandfather, the “landlord,” saw things get better. He saw his family purchase their first T.V. in 1985. Before he died in 1995, he saw Laura enter high school, something his own children never did. And now his son is the “capitalist,” the prosperous farmer. They just purchased their third T.V., a 16-incher in color, smack dab in the middle of the living room. This year, he sold out his peach crop.

But if there is a lesson to be learned from the last 20 years, it is that change is swift. Now, politics might once again ruin Laura’s family. Outside their home, the two brand new-brick universities are expanding, inching ever closer like a rising tide. Last year, the government notified her family that they would have to give up their farm in the name of China’s development.

“I don’t know what they’re going to do,” said Laura. “They’d like to be farmers but that’s impossible.”

Before we could finish our conversation, Laura’s father returned from the orchard. Laura was definitely her father’s daughter. He shared her chipmunk cheeks with slightly beavered teeth. He was about 50, with a kind, sun-scorched face. He was the consummate Chinese patriarch: strong and silent. As his hand shook mine, I could feel his palm peppered with calluses.

Soon after, Laura’s mother brought dinner from the kitchen. It was simple but good: stir-fried sprouts, pork, shrimp, dumplings and all the rice you could want. I tried to flatter Laura’s mom by saying “tastes good” in Chinese but that wasn’t enough. She demanded I express myself through my stomach. Laura encouraged her.

“The best compliment to the cook is to eat a lot.” Her mother pushed food in my face, beckoning, “eat…eat.” Her father kept toasting me with watery Chinese beer, so much so that we each went through three large bottles. By the end of it all, I thought I was going to return their hospitality all over my clothes. I hope they got the compliment.

***

After the meal, I was relieved to discover that Laura’s family spent their evenings just like my family: in front of the T.V., ignoring one another. The evening feature was the ubiquitous Chinese Civil War historical drama. Turn on the T.V. anytime in China, and you are guaranteed to find corrupt Nationalists, evil Japanese and good Communists battling it out each episode.

But this program took on a greater significance. In two days, China would celebrate the birth of the Communist Party. There was dramatic music and explosions. That’s all I remember.

***

In the morning, Laura and I took a bus into the city. As we passed the universities, I saw tall, 25-story apartment buildings in the typical architecture of New China: bland and uniform, covered with slapdash tile in a last-ditch effort at style. Laura pointed to the buildings.

“This is where all the people will move when the government takes their land,” she said. “My father and mother will probably move here.” In return for giving up their farm, her parents would get an apartment and no more than 20,000 RMB or $3,500. They would very likely get much less. Laura estimated the final sum to be around $2,000.

I asked if the government was giving them a good deal. “It’s a good deal for the government,” she said. “But not for my parents.”

It didn’t make sense. The government was going to take their home, but Laura’s parents were putting on additions. “You don’t understand,” she said. “My mother is a woman with a thousand plans.” After they leave the farm, her mother has plans to open a store, start a restaurant or run a cleaning business. That’s something you learn in China, a place where a plan has a way of suddenly becoming impossible. To survive, you must have a thousand.

Laura’s mother even had a plan for the time being: she would open a renting house for the new students. That explained the new additions but it still seemed futile.

“But the government is going to take your land,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Laura. “But we don’t know when. It could be five years. In between then, my mom might have a hotel.”

Laura and I spent the day walking around one of he most cosmopolitan cities in Western China. We saw China’s biggest mosque, one of China’s first Buddhist Pagodas and urbane shopping centers. But the most interesting sight was not in the city, but rather, in its contrast to her village. When we returned to Laura’s village, we saw her neighbors on the street huddled together in gangs of old people. The men appeared impossibly primitive, fussing over piles of sticks and rocks.

“They’re gambling,” Laura said.

“With sticks and rocks?” I asked.

“Yes. I don’t know how the game works. They play it all the time. Some only play this game and don’t work. I think me and my parents are the only ones in the village who don’t know how to play it.”

The old women sat in similar gaggles talking with their raspy voices. All it took was one hello from me to send them into fits of cackles. Laura told me that I was probably the first foreigner to set foot in the village. For that matter, I was probably the first foreigner they had ever seen. It was immense pressure. Laura said they had initially thought I was her new husband. We joked that I should pretend, just to give them something to talk about.

As in any place with a violent history like China, I constantly found myself searching the faces of the old and asking, “What did you do? What have you seen?” I searched Laura’s neighbors’ wrinkled faces. I tried to pick out the one or two who ruined her grandfather, tried to find the traces of jealously or hatred. But time or the sun had absolved them. Everyone looked the same: old.

In fact, there were hardly any young people. It was no longer a place for the young.

“There is no future in the village,” Laura said. “The future is in the cities.”

Laura’s words rang true. China is in the middle of the greatest human migration in history. Every year, millions of rural people move into the cities. Eventually, even these old people had futures in the cities. Like Laura’s parents, they would join the masses of the stacked and the crowded in one of China’s infinite apartment complexes.

“Hello,” I said again. And again, they laughed.

As Laura and I waited for another of her mother’s stir-fried dinners, the topic of conversation returned to her parents. She said that she wanted them to retire. “They’re too old to work.”

“But they’re only 50,” I said.

“They’ve had a hard life.”

That may have been true, but they seemed to be doing well. It was hard to believe they could afford a new color T.V. and the second floor additions on a peach farmer’s meager income. But Laura explained.

“I give them some money,” said Laura. Laura gave them 1,000 RMB out of her 2,500 RMB salary each month. She owed them the money. She was paying them back for decades of education. It was only then that I got an idea of how hard their lives were.

In China, for any education past grade school, the parents must pay. For senior middle school, it cost 400 RMB a year. For high school and college, it cost 2,500 RMB a year. Laura’s parents paid single-handedly for her senior middle school and high school while aiding significantly with university costs. That’s no small feat for a couple of peach farmers, when at the time, Chinese rural residents made less than 2,000 RMB a year.

Laura’s parents scratched up the money, they clawed and coughed it up. Her father tended peach trees in the orchard during the day and worked construction in the evenings. Her mother helped on the farm and then cleaned wealthy women’s homes at night. “Now I pay my parents back,” said Laura.

But their lives were harder because Laura was an anomaly in modern China. She had siblings. Her parents had to pay for them too.

Due to China’s one child policy, few families have more than one child. Laura’s had three. After Laura came her younger sister, “the beautiful one,” said Laura. And finally came the one they were hoping for: her younger brother. He would be joining us for dinner.

If anyone ever accused Laura’s younger brother of being worthless, his comeback would be “Actually, I cost 600 RMB.” It’s not illegal to have more than one child in China, it’s just extremely discouraged. The government shows their displeasure through hefty fines. But that didn’t dissuade Laura’s parents, who like many parents in China, were set on having a boy. On the third try, they got him. They also got a 600 RMB fine, “a lot of money at the time for a farmer,” Laura said.

However, they couldn’t pay the whole fine. So government officials entered their home and confiscated a cabinet (a family heirloom) and some other furniture.

“But it was worth it,” said Laura. “I feel bad for some parents. Their child costs a lot of money and then the child is bad. But my parents are lucky. My brother is a good, simple boy.”

I wondered why Laura’s parents had so many children. You can only feed so many mouths with peaches. To someone who has a cursory knowledge of Chinese society, it might look like they were exercising the Chinese biased for male children. But there is a reason for this bias. In China, male children are a kind of informal social security. They are supposed to take care of their parents in old age.

Her parents also probably thought it wouldn’t be bad to have other children who could shoulder the burden too. Single-children in China are under immense pressure to get gainful employment. In a place that has few social safety nets, a child’s misfortune is also their parents’. China’s droves of elderly beggars can testify to that fact. So the more children you have, the better your retirement will be.

Laura’s brother, that “good, simple boy” inherited the family chipmunk cheeks. He was silent and shy like his dad. Recently graduated from high school, he was paying back his debt too. I couldn’t help but feel like his parents were a bit disappointed in him because compared to his sister, he was a little simple. Despite attending high school, he just missed passing the college entrance exams. He now worked in a factory, mixing paint.

Laura would be the family’s only college graduate. However, his was a common story. Laura could count herself among the lucky few. Only about 11 percent of China’s youth gets to go to college. To cap off her achievement, she was now pursuing a master’s degree. She was “the smart one.”

***

Laura’s mother cooked another great stir-fried meal, and again she pushed food upon me. “Eat more! Eat more!,” she shouted. Her father toasted me and I him, but we had to work her brother in too, so that’s 1/3 more toasting. I found that Laura’s brother messed up on the English part of the college examination because he could hardly say a word to me. It was O.K. though, because after dinner, we watched the Civil War Drama again. This time, there were fewer explosions. It was more solid stuff: idealism, hope, betrayal and murder.

Laura filled me in on the plot. During China’s Civil War (1928-1949), China’s then president, Chiang Kai-shek was a virulent opponent of communism. He and his party, The Nationalists, spent their days attacking communism from behind both the podium and the gun barrel. The only problem was, at the same time, the Japanese decided China would make a great addition to their country. So while the Nationalists were terrorizing the Communists, the Japanese were terrorizing the coast.

But Chiang was convinced you couldn’t fight the Japanese until the Communists were eradicated. The Communist leaders and some of Chiang’s closest generals were of a different opinion. The T.V. series followed one of Chiang’s generals from his nationalist idealism to his patriotic betrayal.

The next day, we would go to the very spot where that betrayal took place. Called the Xi’an Incident, it was one of the Chinese Civil War’s most famous…incidents. The next morning we rose early and took a bus to a local mountain where 70 years ago, some of Chiang’s rebelling generals and their communist co-conspirators kidnapped Chiang and “forced” him to fight the Japanese.

The mountain was nothing special; just a giant rock. There was a lovely lake at the bottom where Chiang’s bodyguards were massacred by the conspiring forces. Chiang fled up the mountain to hide in one of its rocky crevices.

It was the Communist Party’s anniversary. When Laura and I arrived, the mountain was crawling with patriotic tourists. One of the actors who portrayed Chiang from the Civil War Drama had set up at the gift shop, offering free pictures. Young couples mugged for the camera, pointing their prop guns at the guy, faces beaming.

The mountain also had a small museum. It featured a series of war photos detailing Japanese War atrocities. Mainly, they were of the Rape of Nanjing, when Japanese soldiers gruesomely massacred thousands of residents in the eastern city. The pictures featured Chinese corpses hanging from poles as Japanese soldiers stood around laughing. Executions. Beheadings. Laura closed her eyes at the most graphic scenes and wouldn’t open them until we left. “Ohhh…I hate the Japanese!” she said, in uncharacteristic anger.

“Why?”

“Because of what they did to us,” she said.

“Yeah, but that was so long ago.”

“But we remember.”

I couldn’t understand why the Chinese hated the Japanese. My Jewish friends didn’t shout about how they hated the Germans. They may hate the Nazis, but rarely did they hate an entire country in the here and now for something a political party did 70 years ago. It is blaming the sins of the father on the son, or more accurately, the sins of the grandfather on the grandson.

The Chinese may “remember,” but the problem with memory is it becomes warped by time, or in this case, propaganda. Most Chinese students are groomed from an early age to despise the Japanese. In their history textbooks, they read in graphic detail about Japan’s bloody subjugation of China while the books barely broach the greater atrocities of the Cultural Revolution. The state-run media emphasizes at every opportunity that Japan has never apologized for its crimes, even when the opposite is true.

But Japanese leaders still honor the shrines of war criminals. That’s wrong. Those men don’t deserve honor. But couldn’t Laura take that same grace she granted to her neighbors and grant it to the Japanese, who didn’t even directly harm her? She could say the same thing: “It has been too long. Most of them are old or dead.”

The CCP actively nurtures this hatred. It is a nationalist hot button ready to push when needed. In a time when the country seems like it may fall apart, with rising inequality between rich and poor, east and west, city and countryside, China needs something to pull everyone together. Perhaps nothing unifies a country more than its hatred of another. But I wondered how long the collective hatred of 1.6 billion people would be aimed at Japan. I wondered when it would reach across the ocean looking for someone its own size.

As Laura and I walked outside, we saw some WWII army supplies. We strolled between the jeeps, artillery guns, airplanes and tanks. Laura said that she hated the Japanese so much that when it was time to pick a second language, she decided to study French rather than Japanese even though she knew Japanese would be more useful. Of her friends who did study Japanese, most did it not because they liked Japan but so “they could know the enemy,” she said. “To guard against the enemy, you must know the enemy.”

At the bottom of a tank, a plaque read that it was given to the Nationalists by the U.S. Army. “What about that tank?” I said. “We gave the Nationalists weapons to fight the Communists. Does that make us the enemy too?”

“Maybe,” she said. “I guess that means I should hate you too.” But now, she was smiling. We laughed.

***

After the mountain, we went to an emperor’s tomb. Being that Xi’an was home to 13 dynasties and the capital of China for more than 1,000 years, there were plenty of tombs and relics to go around. But the most interesting relic was found in the tomb’s parking lot. While I was boarding our tour bus, I saw a stooped elderly woman with an insane smile. She clutched a jumble of florid wall hangings and she was walking toward me.

However, what she did was hardly walking. It was more of a painful shuffle, like taking baby steps on stilts. I looked down. Her feet were no bigger than a three-year-old’s, flat and balled-up. Her feet were bound. In all my 7 months in China, I had never seen a woman with bound feet. Laura said her grandmother had bound feet, even though the practice was banned after the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.

But tradition dies slowly, slow enough to leave that woman a relic of China’s feudal past. I felt pity. She could hardly walk because of an archaic sexual preoccupation. China had come so far. As she hobbled towards me, I boarded the bus. As it drove away, I wish I had bought was she was selling.

Our last stop was perhaps the most famous site in Xi’an, The Terra Cotta Warriors. Everyone is scared of death. We just express it in different ways. Some give to charity. Others buy a motorcycle. And some build a clay army of death, as in the case of the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty in 209 B.C.

The emperor commissioned hundreds of artists and thousands of convicts to build an army out of clay, which would then guard his ghost. There were three pits; one containing the infantrymen; another, the cavalry and another containing the generals and officers. Even though they have only dug up about 8,000, they estimate about 10,000 soldiers all told, each life-size with actual weapons.

It’s a magnificent display but perhaps not worthy to vie for the title of “eighth wonder of the world.” What makes it worthy is that each statue is a unique individual. No one statue is the same.

But that individuality was fractured with time. Many of them were faceless, armless, handless, headless. It seemed like an impossible task, the greatest puzzle in the world. The archeologists had to assemble millions of puzzle pieces, piece by piece, except the pieces weren’t right beside them. They were submerged in mounds of dirt, lost under two thousand years of dust, cracking and crumbling back to earth under its weight. And the archeologist has to sift through it all; from dust and fragments, he reconstructs individuals.

***

Back at her house, Laura told me she didn’t want to be part of the CCP anymore. “You have to do more work than everyone else.” Being part of the CCP is about more than opportunity, it’s also about being a model citizen. “If a room is dirty and no one cleans it, the CCP member must volunteer first.” But I knew Laura would never stop being a CCP member, no matter if the party ruined her grandfather or forced her parents off their land.

Although I would never think a Chinese woman would, Laura reminded me of my grandmother. My grandmother is sincere and moralistic, just like Laura. My grandmother is painstakingly frugal and hardworking, just like Laura. My grandmother was the first college graduate in her family, just like Laura. My grandmother was part of the Greatest Generation, helping to make America great.

Laura and the rest of her generation could have the same chance for China. And just like Laura, my grandmother has had a tough life. In period of one week, my grandmother lost her first-born son and her mother, and her husband had a heart attack. Throughout, my grandmother retained her faith in God. “It is god’s plan,” she always said.

Just like my grandmother, Laura will keep her faith. But her faith is in man’s plans, not divine ones. Last year, at the CCP’s annual Central Committee meeting, the party redirected their political goal from “sustaining development” to “creating a harmonious society,” with implications for increased social programs and lessening the gap between rich and poor. Whether their oaths are real or just lip-service will largely depend on how they treat individuals like Laura’s parents. Laura believes in the party’s plans. “[My parents] will be alright.” I just hope the party doesn’t disappoint her.

As we went into the city for the third and last time, Laura said her father and brother would meet us for lunch. Her brother worked downtown, so it was convenient but I wondered what brought her father to the city. “He’s learning to invest in the stock market,” she said. A Chinese peasant buying stock.

We went to a dumpling restaurant at noon. We ordered plates of dumplings and dumped red chilies into our black vinegar sauce bowls. We made small talk about the food and of course, we toasted one another. Soon, it was time to catch my train.

Before I left, I asked Laura’s father how the stock market went. He laughed and said he lost money. “But it doesn’t matter,” Laura said. “He’s just learning. It is just the beginning.”

Xinjiang Time

2007-11-25T22:28:00.000-08:00

I was on a train heading to the western-most city of China, called Kashgar.

As the train rocked west, it passed rolling hills on the right that seemed to rise out of the baked earth like air pockets on a cake. To my left, there were desolate, arid plains with everything dried out like neglected houseplants. A few houses and buildings punctuated the vast, empty expanse, some seeming to rise right out of the dust. I couldn’t believe anything would even attempt to grow out here. Then, an oasis would appear with skinny poplar trees that looked like their leaves were sprayed on, they clung so close to the branches. This couldn’t be China.

It didn’t sound like China either. In my sleeper berth, I listened to two women talk in the cot under me. I heard no exaggerated tones of Chinese Mandarin. It was a crackling of consonants and an occasional back-of-the-throat gurgle. They were definitely Uighur, one of China’s Turkic minorities. I had seen Uighurs before. You can find them almost anywhere in China, mostly manning cheap noodle restaurants or kebab stands. They seemed like they were from a different country, but I could never quite pin down where. That’s because Uighurs do live in another country…almost.

China is one country but there are also mini-countries inside it, called “Autonomous Regions.” Everyone knows about Tibet. Xinjiang is another. Directly above Tibet, Xinjiang makes up one-sixth of China. It’s almost twice the size of Texas. It has a majority minority population as well, inhabited primarily by Turkic-speaking Muslims. The most numerous ethnic group, the Uighur minority, makes up about nine million of its twenty million inhabitants.

One of the Uighur women on the train was strikingly beautiful. She seemed more Asiatic than her friend, who looked almost Greek. She seemed particularly modern, wearing a pink sweater, blue jeans and a striped shirt someone might wear at a dance club. During the trip, she read a Chinese version of Glamour magazine. We fell into conversation. She was a teacher in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumuqi. She spoke flawless English.

I commented on how different some Uighurs looked from one another.

Yes,” she said. “But I can tell by their eyes. One look and I know. It’s a feeling.” I loved that response; ethnic pride mixed with mysticism.

“It’s odd that Xinjiang is part of China,” I said. Xinjiang hasn’t always been a part of China. Areas of the country have been ruled by Tibetans, Russians, Mongols, Manchus and Uighurs. It was the gateway to the Silk Road, so it has been the object of envy and domination for many a ruler.

“Yes, we think so too,” she said. The Uighurs came to Xinjiang in the ninth century followed by Islam in the tenth, tying it to the Islamic world ever after. I was expecting her to go into a rant about the Chinese occupation, but her eyes fell to the ground and her voice softened. “But it is our destiny…I think.”

Her voice softened because China has been invading the area known as Xinjiang for 2000 years but it was only in 1949 that the communists gained a firm grasp on the region, incorporating it into China as “Xinjiang,” or New Frontier.

And just like America’s frontier, Xinjiang has a similar tragic story. After initial promises of real Xinjiang self-rule, it quickly became apparent that “autonomy” was only granted on paper. Since then, the Chinese government has attempted to stifle resistance and dissent. They educated, bribed, warned and censored. When that didn’t work, they used force. And now the ethnic Han from China’s mainland are settling in, with hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese arriving every year by the very rail I was riding.

This migration has chafed the local Uighurs who went from 75 percent to less than 50 percent of the population. Separatist leaders asked for separation from China just as other Turkic populations of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan received from the dissolved USSR. But China had different plans, particularly after the discovery of oil and mineral deposits. Violence broke out in the 90s with bus bombs and riots. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) responded with mass jailings, executions and human rights abuses. However, Bush’s “war on terror” has given the CCP carte blanche to persecute militants and peaceful dissidents alike, especially since the US State Department added an Uighur separatist group to its terrorist list.

I told her I was a little worried about the violence.

“No, it’s completely safe,” she said.

“Yes, but I heard there was some terrorism,” I said.

“But how much of that is true and how much of that is from mommy and daddy?” Her patronizing tone threw me off guard. I reacted more harshly than I planned.

“Actually, I heard it from the New York Times,” I said, as if that would convince her. But I wasn’t trying to attack. I back-peddled. “But you don’t know how much of that is Al-Qaeda and how much of that is separatism.”

“Yes,” she said curtly. “It is safe. No worries.” We both looked away and stared out into the desert.

Introductions

I had been teaching English in China for six months and frankly, I was getting a little sick of it. What had been curious or even entertaining before was now starting to grate on my nerves. The exaggerated tones of Mandarin, the awful tasting beer, the insane traffic, the public spitting and urination, the irritating music, the complete strangers stopping to scream Hello! Ha, Ha, Ha. China had begun to wear on me.

When you’re a foreigner, you have a love/hate relationship with the country. The two feelings interchange, sometimes in a period of several minutes. And it’s hard to tell the difference between what you dislike about a foreign country and what you can chalk up to general misanthropy. But I knew I needed a break.

In the taxi from the train station, it appeared as if I wouldn’t get one. I saw what looked like the beginning of any other Chinese city, with tall, tiled buildings and small, cramped shops along the road.

Suddenly, an ancient city emerged on my left. It was a network of two story mud brick houses; the kind of place where you expect to see togas. Jesus would look at home there. Minarets loomed in the skyline. I noticed that among the regular bicycles along the road were donkey carts manned by old men with white beards and embroidered Muslim hats. I was not in China anymore.

That first night, I watched the sunset on a restaurant patio. When I looked at my watch, it was almost ten-thirty at night. That brings me to a little slice of absurdity: Beijing Time. All over China, from the eastern-most nook to the western-most cranny, every clock ticks to the singular Beijing time. That is true even in Kashgar, which is closer to Bagdad than Beijing. While it’s convenient for train schedules, how audacious to tell the local people that it’s almost eleven at night, before the sun has fully set. The local people thought so too. If you ask for the time, depending on the person’s politics, it could be five o’clock Xinjiang time or seven o’clock Beijing time.

Street Life

I spent most of the next day walking through the streets. This was the home of Uighur culture. Down a narrow, dusty road, I saw carpet sellers hailing tourists. Their shops had beautiful hand-made silk carpets. Other stores sold rusty antiques with an occasional dog hide hanging from the entrance. There were dentist offices the size of large bathrooms, where women and men get their teeth capped in gold. Barbershop chairs sat outside, manned by men with straight-razors at the ready. Bookshops sold Korans along with more secular publications. I was used to seeing signs of Chinese with English translation, but here, both English and Chinese took a backseat Uighur.

The people were the best part. Kashgar has always been a trading hub, acting as China’s bottleneck gateway to the West. It shows in the population. Kashgar is 70 percent Uighur, but just like the women on the train, I saw a great diversity among its people. I saw people who looked Mongolian and Chinese as well as people who could pass as Arab or even Greek or Jewish. That’s because Uighur isn’t a strong identity.

The current Turkic-speaking oasis dwellers of Xinjiang were named Uighurs by the Soviets, in reference to the Uighur tribe and its kingdom, which reigned more than a millennia ago. But that doesn’t mean that all the “Uighurs” of today come from that Uighur tribe, hence their physical diversity. In addition to the “Uighurs,” Kashgar also has large populations of Kazaks, Tagiks, Kyrgz and Turkish ethnics. Kashgar even has Russians. So I saw a man that could pass as Irish, with pale skin and a shock of red hair. Technically, he was Chinese.

The men dressed like they were on the set of a 1930s historical drama, with flat caps, sharp slacks and sports jackets, wearing white dress shirts and beaten, leather dress shoes. Others wore square doppas, or Muslim hats with colorful embroidery on the outside. Others dressed more modernly, with English language t-shirts and blue jeans with cheap plastic sandals made in molds.

The women dressed with more variety. Some penciled on thick, black unibrows. In one restaurant, it was so humid, the waitress’ unibrow was running. There were also the Uighur traditional dresses: composites of bright reds, oranges and yellows. Some of the younger Uighur girls dressed like modern Chinese girls, with English language t-shirts, make-up and low-cut blue jeans. But just as many, and particularly the older generation, dressed conservatively, their heads covered by scarves or even by burkas, with only their eyes poking through in the hot, midday sun.

Amongst the shadows of modern buildings was a genuine snake-oil salesman. The man crouched over a giant bowl of blood-red coils in a viscous fluid, sprinkled with desiccated miniature scorpions. I didn’t understand what he was saying but he kept up his spiel, repeating words like an infomercial salesman, while he drew venom into medicine vials with a syringe, 30 cents a pop.

But even among all this bustling Uighur life, I could witness a culture war. Outside the China Mobile store, the Han-owned enterprise blasted techno-laden Chinese pop from its loudspeakers. But in between the thumps of bass, I heard animal skin drums and the whine of an Islamic flute. An Uighur traditional band played not 25 feet away. They were barely audible above the speakers. But they played on just the same.

English School

On the street, I met a man who was a tour guide/carpet salesman. He offered to take me to an English corner at a local language school.
The language school was in the basement of a worn-down building. The school had three classrooms with the main office at the foot of the stairs. On each side, the writing was on the wall. On the right: “English is the gate to worldwide knowledge.” On the left: “Mandarin is the path to job advancement and smoother living.” Uighurs could either learn English and be part of the world or learn Mandarin and be part of China.

I was to converse with a group of four men. Our conversation rolled through a gamut of topics, but eventually, we got on the subject of religion. They talked in boisterous voices before, but their voices became hushed. I asked them if the government places any restrictions on Islam.
One man said, “Everything is fine. You can practice Islam.” But that seemed a rote response reserved for foreigners. I asked some more questions. Only one man, a rather fat man, was brave enough, or stupid enough, to talk.

“There are many restrictions,” he said. “They won't let us go into a mosque until we are 18. Sometimes they close our religious schools. It's terrible. The worst part is, if you want to have a long beard, you have to get a permit. It is ridiculous."

Everyone looked uncomfortable. Eventually, one of the others cut in. “Let's change the topic."
The other man agreed. “Yes, this is not a safe topic. What can we talk about?”

“Women?” I offered.

They smiled. Everyone relaxed. “Women! Much better,” said the fat man.

The students have reason to be afraid. The government closely monitors Kashgar’s citizens. Much of their controls come in the form of regulating Islam, which has been one of the main vehicles for expressing Uighur culture and dissent. The CCP puts restrictions on mosque attendance, barring children from the mosque and forbidding religious education until age 18. The CCP also randomly closes down religious schools and limits enrollment in operational ones. And according to human rights groups, the CCP regularly breaks up underground mosques and puts security cameras and informants in public ones. The government also politically screens Islamic religious leaders, forcing them to undergo mandatory “patriotic education.” The basic idea in Islam is surrendering to Allah. But if you’re a Muslim in China, you must also surrender to the Communist party.

However, walking into Id-Kah Mosque, Xinjiang’s largest house of worship, you would never know. Id-Kah Mosque has served as the center of Islamic life in Kashgar since it was built in 1447. Outside the mosque, the square bustled with hawkers and snack stands selling fried fish and ice cream, camel rides and carpets against the backdrop of the mosque’s minarets. The mosque itself was still active, with men coming in to pray five times a day (no women allowed). The rest of the time, it was open to tourists.

Inside the mosque, a prayer hall stood in back with small, round pillows lining the floor. Near the entrance was a plaque written in three languages: English, Uighur and Mandarin. The English version laid out all the government renovations, totaling in the thousands of dollars. Then came this curious section: “All of it shows fully that Chinese government always pays special attention to the another and historical cultures of the ethnic groups and that all ethnic groups warmly welcome party's religious policy. It also shows that different ethnic groups have set up close relationship of equality, unity and helps each other and freedom of beliefs is protected. All ethnic groups live friendly together here. They cooperate to build a beautiful homeland support heartily the unity of different ethnic groups and the unity of our country and oppose the ethnic separatism and illegal religious activities." I think someone is being a little defensive.

Not only does the government restrict religious activity; they go so far as to reinterpret history. This point couldn’t have been made clearer than in the tomb of Apak Khoja. Apak Khoja was one of the most famous rulers in Uighur history. But you wouldn’t know that by looking at the English translations. According to the government-written plaques, it is the “Tomb of the Fragrant Concubine.”

According to Chinese legend, this redolent beauty was known for her exceptional body odor since childhood. In a testament to how bad people smelled back then, she became the favorite concubine to Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty. She also happened to be Apak Khoja’s great grandniece. After traveling to Beijing, The Fragrant Concubine grew desperately homesick. The Emperor bent over backwards to built a “little Kashgar” for her, compete with a mosque, market and olester trees. Only then did she submit to her master. As the plaque reads, “Since then, numerous tales about the fragrant concubine have appeared, expressing the good wish for unity and mutual love between different nationalities since the ancient times.”

The Uighurs have a different legend: how she was stolen from Kashgar and resisted her Chinese captor, plotting revenge for invading her homeland with daggers up her sleeves, and only later, faced with surrender or suicide, chose the latter.

But the men didn’t want to talk about any of that. Or, more likely, they knew that in Kashgar, talking politics is dangerous, particularly with foreigners. Instead, one young man said, “I don't want to get married yet.” We laughed. Everyone agreed. No one would arrest him for that.

The Sunday Market

The next day, I went to the Sunday Market. The Sunday Market is Kashgar’s age-old weekly bazaar. Every seller had a square of ground, selling cloth and silk, knives and swords, dried fruit and herbs, and even electronics and cell phones.

I walked down the street to another part of the market, where I found myself in the middle of a donkey cart traffic jam. Old, hard-faced men screamed at each other “Posh! Posh!” meaning ‘get out of the way.’ They whipped each other’s donkeys with their switches, in what must be the donkey cart equivalent of honking your horn. Motorcycles and mopeds sliced in between the carts. The donkeys had hissy fits, furiously hee-hawing in clouds of dust.

When I managed to squeeze in the market entrance, I found myself in the bird section. Almost every man, woman and child had at least one fowl under their arm. The sellers splayed their birds out on a blanket or kept them in cages. The buyers stood above the birds, picking them up and turning them over, running their hands through the feathers looking for price-lowering imperfections.

In another part of the market were bags of dried fruit and spices as big as grown men. Women sat in between the bags wearing headscarves and gold teeth. Bees swarmed around bouquets of rock candy. And to confirm that I had fallen into a time warp, there were enormous golden caravan chests ready to strap to ancient camel trains traveling across the desert.

The Bad Muslim

Back at the hotel, I met a Pakistani man named Mamud (The names of all sources have been changed). He was involved in an age-old profession. Mamud transported silk to Pakistan using the Karakoram Highway, the exact route used by the caravans over a millennia ago. He was a trader on the modern Silk Road.

Mamud was about 30. Everything about him was thick, from his body and eyebrows to his accent. He was eager to practice his English, which is only one of his six languages. He took me out “for a beer.” I was thinking a regular bar but Mamud took me to an “entertainment” complex. There was a hotel on the second floor, massage parlor on the third and a karaoke bar on the fourth. But they all worked in tandem.

We went up to the fourth floor where Mamud said, “Here we can get beer and girls.” The elevator opened up to a gaudy bar.

“Girls?” I said. “What? Do you pay for the girls too?”

“Well,” he said. “Come here.” He led me to a room where 15 Chinese prostitutes were sitting around a couch.

“Oh.” I said.

Mamud asked how much for a private room, six beers and two girls. Thankfully, the price was too high. He just got the beers. Something on the menu cost 12,000 Yuan. I thought it was a sexual favor but when I asked Mamud, he said, “12,000 is too much to pay for a girl. 1,000 is too much. It was a third of the price last year,” he said. I took that as a sign. Kashgar's economy is improving.

I found out later that we were only allowed to see half the girls. Apparently, there was also a second room of Uighur girls. But they’re off-limits to foreigners.

“The Uighur men are very protective,” said Mamud. “If you walk with a Uighur girl, they will try to fight you.” Mamud had a lot of hostility for Uighur men. “They are dishonest,” he said. “And they mistreat their women. That’s why I have several Uighur girlfriends.”

The mistrust is mutual. When I asked my Uighur friends about Pakistani men, they said that Pakistanis are dishonest and are bad Muslims to boot. In Mamud’s case, it was true. Mamaud seemed a little free-wheeling for a Muslim. He never attended the mosque and he drank like a Catholic. And then there’s that prostitute thing.

He told me many Pakistani men view China as a place of freedom. This seemed rather funny to me, but then again, Americans seem to concentrate on the oppressive side of China. Because Pakistan is ruled by Islamic law, alcohol is forbidden. Although there is a thriving black market, he said, with even underground dance clubs, it comes with a heavy price. In one of the poorest countries in the world, a night out might cost you 500 U.S. dollars. Here, Mamud could be debauched at a much-reduced rate.

Lines of Separation

I spent the next day with Saudi and Karim, two tour guides I met outside the Id-Kah Mosque. They agreed to show me around the old city free-of-charge. They were both freshly minted tour guides, eager to practice their informative spiels.

Suadi was in his early twenties but he still had a boyish face. He had the gift of gab. He was always talking and talking to everyone. His friend, Karim, was more reserved. Like the Uighur women on the train, they showed their ethnicity’s variety. Suadi had dark skin and could have passed for Arab. But Karim, as Suadi put it, “looked like Chinese girl.” That might have been true if Karim didn’t assert his manhood with a hard-won, pencil-thin moustache. He had a quiet intensity about him. Unlike Suadi, when he spoke, he always said something.

They led me into the Old Town. Suadi started with his monotone tour guide voice. “This is the oldest mosque in Xinjiang. It’s over 1000 years old.” He gave me factual statistics, some of it rather boring. But I corrected his mistakes along the way, which added some entertainment. “Over here is where they had many poetry workshops.”

For an instant, I pictured the ancient equivalent of pretentious undergraduates talking about their feelings. I snapped out of it. “You mean pottery workshops?”

“Oh, sorry. Yes, pottery.”

They showed me the famous fountains and houses. People still lived in these old and cracked mud brick structures. Even though the outside looked Biblical, the inside was quite furbished. “It’s cool in the summertime and warm in the winter,” they said.

The Old Town only looked ancient because this area had been so poor for so long. The government is trying to quell the Uighur separatist movement with development. But with that development, they are also rapidly losing their way of life. There was no longer a need to live in mud houses. But there was a need to preserve tradition, which seemed so important to the Uighurs.

It was odd. In many of the places I’d seen in China, tourism had the habit of turning minority cultures into little more than Disney Epcot displays. But in Kashgar, tourism seemed to save it. Karim told me that government officials are preserving the Old Town to exploit for tourism. The Uighurs have such a connection with tradition as to make its bastardization improbable.
But he also said that the CCP has already torn down many parts of the Old Town. We went to one such place, which was now a shopping mall.

“This is not for us,” said Karim. “It is for the Chinese.” Ten years ago, it wasn’t here, he said. In the Old Town, I was surrounded by Uighurs but here I felt like I was in China again. Elderly Han Chinese women were line-dancing to Chinese pop music, a scene that I often saw in the mainland. It was a Chinatown...inside China.

“It’s weird that Xinjiang is a part of China,” I said again.
Suadi smiled. “It’s not. We call it China but it really is…” He hesitated.

“You better not,” said Karim. “It’s better if you don’t say it.”

He looked around his shoulder. “It’s China,” Suadi said. “Now.”

I couldn’t imagine. These young men were so frightened by the government, by someone overhearing them, that they wouldn’t even utter the name of their former nation: Eastern Turkestan. The Eastern Turkestan Republic (ETR) was a nation for two short stints in the early 20th century. After China’s civil war, the ETR was incorporated back into China, but with a promise of real autonomy. The ETR leaders were set on self-rule and boarded a plane bound for Beijing. But on the way, it had an "accident.” It would foreshadow the tone of Xinjiang’s future interactions with Beijing.

I asked them about Islam and Suadi gave the rote answer. “Islam is OK here. We can practice Islam.” But it didn’t take long for them to mention grievances. Karim couldn’t go to the mosque. Even though he was 18, those who pursue higher education are barred as well. Suadi wasn’t a student so he technically could attend but the CCP policies seemed to have worked well on him.

“I used to go to the mosque every day, five times a day when I was 10 or 12 but the government made it against the law. I was a very holy little boy. Now I just go every Friday,” he said. “The parents are less strict now. 10 years ago they encouraged it. You should be a good Muslim. Now they don't. It isn’t useful.”

Other religious restrictions affected one of the most important Muslim tenants: the required trip to Mecca. Every good Muslim must visit Mecca at least once during his or her lifetime. But the Chinese government severely limits travel. They operate a lottery system but it’s not nearly enough to fit the demand. “Very few can go,” said Suadi.

Many Uighurs not only call their country by a different name, they very clearly have things that are for “us” and things that are for “them.” For instance, many Uighurs don’t go to Chinese restaurants. Muslims are not allowed to eat pig but the Chinese use pork almost as a seasoning. “We must be careful,” Karim said.

Many Uighurs also divide Xinjiang. When I mentioned I might take a train to Korla, a new boom-city in Xinjiang, Karim immediately cut in. “Korla is not for us. It is for them.” Korla grows by 20,000 Han Chinese settlers every year. Compared to the large Han Chinese population, the small Uighur population lives in relative poverty.

But this separation of Han haves and Uighur have-nots extends all over Xinjiang. “The Chinese always get the best jobs,” Suadi said. “They are all very rich.” While not always rich, the Han more often own the infrastructure and the plentiful government jobs. Observant Muslims are barred from holding state jobs, including in the government and school systems. All the real power of the Xinjiang government lies in the hands of the Han. In addition, as Han entrepreneurs make their way out into Xinjiang’s vastness, business opportunities often go to them.

Even though Suadi lived in China, he couldn’t speak a word of Mandarin. “I learned some in school, but I forget it all.” Karim was different. He was a college student, which brings me to another line of separation. When you are Uighur, college is infinitely harder. In addition to the low quality of education in Xinjiang, if you make it to college you must take nothing but Mandarin classes for your entire first year. “It is very difficult for us,” said Karim. While Uighur students can chose to attend Mandarin language schools, that choice would also mean partly abandoning their own culture.

During our conversation, Suadi went to get us water. When he was gone, Karim said to me in a hushed voice. “We appreciate the American people mentioning Xinjiang to the U.N. It makes us very happy for the human rights,” he said. In that moment, I was never happier to be an American. But he was still frightened. “We better not talk about it. It is better for you and better for me.” Suadi returned highly excited, carrying three cold plastic bottles. “Most water companies are Chinese but this one is Uighur!”

Into the Desert

The next day, Suadi took me to the desert. He had his tour guide license so he could get in any attraction for free. “It is no problem,” he said. “I want to talk English with you as much as possible.”

We took a bus for about two hours. During our conversation, when I said a word he didn’t understand, he would ask me to define it. In one exchange, he asked me about the word “abuse.”
“It’s when you harm someone,” I said.

“I have heard stories,” he said. “The Chinese abuse Muslims.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“And there are many jails around the world where they…what’s the word?”

“Abuse.”

“Abuse Muslims. The Americans do it.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s also true.” Sometimes I get so caught up in my righteousness against China, I forgot my own country’s crimes. I tell him there are Uighers being held without trial in Guantonimo Bay, where some of the abuse happened. “But hopefully, they’re going to close down that prison.”

“Yes,” he said and he finally fell silent. The bus flew by a farmer, prostrate on his field, his face kissing fallen stalks, bowing toward Mecca.

I wanted to see the desert but I didn’t actually want to “go out to the desert.” Xinjiang’s main desert, the Talamalakan, roughly translates to “He who goes in will not come out.” It would involve a two-day trip and at least a small chance of dying. So we opted for the smaller Dawankul Desert. It used to be a stop over for trade caravans. Now, it was a resort with a modest lake where wealthy locals and CCP officials could swim and jet ski. However, it was still undeniably a desert. Beyond the lake emerged hulking dunes, their sands combed in stylized ripples by the desert wind. Off to the right a group of camels sat hunkered down in the sand.

We saddled up on camel hump and cruised the dunes. I didn’t mind being with Suadi. He made me laugh but still, something about him made me uneasy. Maybe it was the way he was always talking to everyone. He seemed a bit of a con artist. I still didn’t trust him. We dismounted from the camels to take pictures. Suadi’s girlfriend called but he said he didn’t have battery left on his phone. He asked if he could use my phone. When I handed it to him, he took out the battery.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Taking out your SIM card and putting in mine,” he said, referring to the card that keeps track of your phone bill. “It’s cheaper.” I watched him carefully; perhaps a little too carefully.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he said. He put my card in his pocket.

“No reason,” I said. But I was suspicious, watching his every move. He called her and replaced my card. I watched to see if he would switch cards. When he returned my phone, I checked. It had the same card.

He smiled. “Should we get back on the camels?”

I felt guilty about suspecting him. Switching cards didn’t even make sense. I don’t know how he would have stolen my card right out from under my nose. It was less of a thought-out suspicion and more of a reaction. When you’ve been traveling for a long time, you become suspicious of people trying to take advantage of you. It happens enough times that you become perpetually vigilant. But sometimes, you make a bad call. I saw ulterior motives in genuine hospitality. On the way home, I taught him more words than he asked.

The Friends

I spent the next day just wandering around the streets, taking in the people. I stopped at a stand near Id-Kah Mosque to get a bowl of yogurt with chipped ice and honey, which the Uighurs call durap.

A huge block of ice sat on the table. A man would put a ladle full of yogurt in the bowl, scrape the chips off the block and douse it in honey. It was delicious. Old Uighur men sat with their Islamic hats and hardened faces. Little boys played with pogs, a game I played more than 10 years ago. Women sat on benches with covered heads. Despite the addition of ice and a television, the place seemed ancient. My imagination traveled back in time, picturing people taking breaks to sip yogurt and honey for centuries. Just when I was waxing nostalgic, I saw what they were watching: WWF Women’s Wrestling.

God Bless America.

After seeing my female compatriots rip off one another's clothing, I needed to recover. I wandered into a carpet shop. I struck up a conversation with the salesman. His English was good. Not surprisingly, he moonlighted as a English tour guide. I asked him where he learned English. He said, “The school of hard knocks.”

His name was Hasim. Small-statured with an innocent face, he could have passed for a teen if it weren’t for his thick stubble. But even though he was only 20, his voice belonged to a man of greater years. I invited him to dinner and he accepted.

As we walked out of his shop, we ran into his friend, Farid. He was bigger than Hasim, both in stature and personality. He said that he was the “biggest of the friends” while Hasim was “the smallest of the friends.” He swore he’d seen me somewhere so we immediately started off on a friendly note. It was a counterfeit connection, but I appreciated his effort. He was also a tour guide and highly proficient in English.

They took me to a traditional Uighur restaurant. We got a private room so we could speak freely. After I told them I’d been traveling in China for a month, naturally our conversation gravitated toward tourism. Farid had just returned from a trip into the Karakoram mountains but he guided trips all over Kashgar. He confirmed my suspicions of the Chinese tourist. “The Chinese tourist just takes a picture and wants to go home. I ask them if they like Kashgar and they say ‘yes.’ I ask them what they like about it and they say ‘the tall buildings.’ Bullshit. How can you say tall buildings when you have Old Town?”

We talked about the differences between the Chinese and the Uighur. They said that Uighur children are more independent than the Chinese. That I could believe. Most of my students depended on their parents. Most of the 21-year-old university students I taught had never held even a part-time job. Uighur children, on the other hand, work almost as soon as they start school.

“We like to help out,” said Farid. Farid sold boiled water at the Sunday Market from the age of seven. In Hasim’s free time, he sold bagels. It’s not that Chinese students are lazy, it’s just they put more of an emphasis on uninterrupted scholarly pursuits, which brings me to another difference.

The Uighurs don’t concentrate as much on school. There isn’t so much pressure to get into college. “It’s more relaxed,” said Hasim. Now, that might sound like a bad thing, but when you’ve seen as many burnt-out college students as I have, it might not be that bad after all. Many of my students described their adolescence in the same terms that I would describe hell as run by my high school principal.

However, I’m sure the lack of education doesn’t help with their common Uighur complaint that “all the Chinese in Kashgar are rich.”

I genuinely liked these guys. They were funny. They teased each other. But there was one issue that divided us: They were Muslim; I was not.

I have Muslim acquaintances, but not close friends. I had some questions. I started with the most obvious. From various news reports, I knew there were some Islamic extremists in the area. I asked them what they thought about Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. “It is awful. A tragedy.” That was all. There were no rants about Jews.

I read somewhere that women stand outside Id-Kah mosque with bread and wait for the men to finish thier prayers. When the men file out, the women ask the men to spit on the bread, believing that their saliva makes the bread holy. Then they feed it to the sick. It sounded disgusting.

But when I asked Hasim about the spitting, he was equally repulsed. “No! That is…we would never do that. The men, they come from praying to Allah. They have the breath of Allah so they just breathe on it.” Not exactly sanitary but I eat food that has fallen on the floor for less than three seconds so it wasn’t that bad.

I was also uncomfortable with the praying five times a day. I’m fine with praying. Do it as often as you like. But I’ve seen many Muslims just bowing down in public, like the rest of us weren’t there. I respect their devotion, but I have to admit it was a little awkward.

Hasim told me that most Muslims don’t do that. “You can pray to Allah on a train, plane or car any time you like,” he said. “You don’t have to make a big deal. You only say the prayer and point with your eyes and go from left to right one time to salute the angels on each side.” I asked if this is some kind of reformed Islam.

“No,” he said. “It has been this way since the beginning. But I cannot do it in this restaurant because there is a mosque right over there. If I pray, I must go to it.” I found that their Islam was similar to my Catholicism. It holds a high ideal but it also has a highly practical side.

When the bill came, Farid rushed to the cashier. I had more money in my bank account than he would have in five years, and he wouldn’t even let me go Dutch. "Money is not everything here,” he said. “Friendship is more important."

We decided to continue our conversation over some beers. But we couldn’t decide where to go. We had hardly talked about politics. These men weren’t extremists. They were probably separatists but they certainly weren’t militant. And yet, their fear was still great.

When I suggested that we go to a nearby hostel bar called John’s Cafe, Farid refused. “John is a spy. He will call the police if you talk with foreigners about politics.” It was a land of informers.
We settled on a small outside restaurant. Farid and I ordered draft beers. Hasim didn’t drink, being more devout. “It is my choice,” he said.

As the beer started to flow, we relaxed. And then something happened. Up until that point, all my conversations with Uighurs and, for that matter, almost everyone on my month long trip, felt like cultural exchanges. With Hasim and Farid, we got that out of our systems at the previous restaurant. Now, we were talking naturally. We engaged in the ancient ritual of bitching. Hasim and I complained about waiting tables and we all complained about the Chinese. At that moment, the Chinese were “them” and I was in their “us.”

We talked about traveling. Sometimes I forget my good fortune. I can get a Visa in a week, no questions asked. But with little money and strict Visa regulations, Hasim was stuck in his country. He had a curious mind. He would have made a natural traveler. Instead of traveling by air or land, he traveled by the Internet. He talked about his love of “Google Earth.” He got so excited, his little body started to shake. He raved about New York City. “So many cars in New York. I can hardly see the people there are so many cars. Los Angles too.” He spent hours looking at pictures of places he’d probably never see.

Hasim and Farid told me a story. Hasim, Farid and another friend went fishing in a lake. But they didn’t want to pay for the permit. Farid and the friend got two in the first hour and quit. Hasim was still fishless but determined. He didn’t see a police officer approaching. Hasim was spotted with his line out. The officer threw him in jail.

He didn’t know what to do. It was either spend a few days in jail or pay a hefty fine. Then, unexpectedly, his brother came to see him. His brother screamed at him, and slapped him. The officers were shocked. His brother said, “I’ll take care of him. Wait till mother sees you.” His brother pulled him out of the cell by his ear. The officers let them leave, figuring Hasim would be in worse trouble at home. The catch was: Hasim didn’t have a brother. It was all a hoax by his friends to spring him from jail.

And I thought, that’s exactly something my friends and I would do. I thought I could really be friends with these guys. I could be “the whitest of the friends.” We talked till four in the morning. During one round, Farid put his glass to mine and said, “Friends forever.” Just for that moment, I actually believed him.

Time

The next day, I had to catch my train. It left at 2:00 p.m. Beijing time. Being that it was 11:00 a.m. Beijing time, I had some Beijing time to kill. I decided to have some coffee at the Caravan Café, one of the only Western restaurants around. Then maybe I’d wander down to say goodbye to Hasim. I sat reading an English language magazine until I got an odd feeling. I looked at the clock on my phone. It said 11:00. I looked at the clock on the wall. It said 11:25. Something was wrong with my clock.

I asked the waiter if the clock on the wall was Beijing time or Xinjiang time. “Xinjiang,” he said. Shit. It was really 1:25, Beijing time. I had 35 minutes to get on my train, and the station was outside the city. I sprinted to get my bags, hailed a cab and told him to go fast. As we sped down the highway, weaving between donkey carts, I caught one last look at Old Town, its sad and wonderful maze of mud brick, and I wondered what it would look like 15 years from now: new and better brick? Or would the brick be replaced with Chinese white tiles?

I just made my train. I knew what happened. When I let Suadi use my phone and he took out the SIM Card, my phone had automatically reset on Xinjiang time. But I operated on Xinjiang time in more ways than one. It wasn’t until that moment that I fully trusted these people, that I let myself be taken in, that I accepted their hospitality without suspicion. With the Uighurs I met in Kashgar, I felt like I had more of a connection with them, more in common than I had with most Chinese people. I was taken in by their world.

Maybe the same thing that drew me to them was the same thing that drew them to each other. Traditionally, many Uighurs identify less with thier ethnicity, feeling closer connections to their family, clan or oasis. But in the last 100 years, the most important part of being Uighur has not been what it is but rather, what it is not: Chinese.

I thought about the two cultures, Uighur and Han. They seemed so different. In America, with many different peoples and cultures, it is often said that the myth of the American dream holds us all together. In the last 30 years, China has been developing its own dream of material progress. With the lack of anything better, perhaps shared material progress is the best hope to unite these two disparate peoples. In 1999, the CCP started the “Develop the West” campaign, encouraging businesses to invest in Xinjiang. But to invest in a land, you also must invest in its people. If the Uighurs can’t have their freedom, I hope they can share in the Chinese dream without it becoming a nightmare; without losing their culture; without being crowded out. For if they are, I fear the Fragrant Concubine would once again be waiting…with daggers up her sleeves.

When I sat down in my seat, I heard the tones of Chinese Mandarin again. It wasn’t as bad as I remembered. It was the language of the people I had come across an ocean to learn about, in all thier naked humanity. In the next bunk, a Han Chinese woman offered me some grapes and smiled. As the train moved back East, I reset my clock. I was once again on Beijing time.

Monkey Mountain

2007-11-19T13:09:00.001-08:00

Christian Fundamentalists don’t like to admit it, but humans are just really smart, hairless monkeys. When I got to Chengdu, Sichuan province, I heard there was an entire mountain of monkeys called Mt. Emei. I couldn’t resist. I didn’t want to tell my grandkids that I could have gone to a mountain of monkeys, but instead chose to…not go.

I caught a bus out to the mountain and began hiking the trail. At the beginning there were a lot of stairs but I learned other things of interest. Apparently, the mountain is also a famed Buddhist sanctuary with several monasteries above the clouds. Monks have lived there for over 2000 years and it’s a cherished landmark of the Buddhist blah blah blah. There are tons of monkeys on that mountain and I was going to see them. The Buddhist temples would only be of interest to me as possible monkey hideouts.

I had been hiking for about two hours before I realized that the stairs would continue to be stairs for a long time. I consoled myself with thoughts of monkeys and fantasized about an opposable thumb war. When it started to get dark, I decided to turn in for the evening. Everyone knows monkeys are not nocturnal animals and consequently, are not to be seen in the dark. I was on the trail by 7 a.m. the next day.

By my map, I only had two hours of marching up stairs before I entered a highly concentrated monkey zone. And what a coincidence, 9 a.m. was their customary feeding time. In what seemed like the lifespan of the Golden Tailed Pewter Monkey, I reached the area. A kindly villager led me across a stream, as the stairs flattened to level path. When I saw a monkey food stand, I knew I was close. I purchased a bag of monkey victuals. I thought it might come in handy as an offering of good will. I was led further down a path that also had a large railing and a sign that read, “Monkey Zone.” I had made it and yet, no sign of my primate cousin. Just when I thought this whole operation was a farce, I heard the low clang of a bell that was eerily similar to the sound that summoned King Kong to his white girl feast.

I did not see a monstrous giant monkey, but rather, a terrible multitude. The monkeys came crashing down from the trees in all directions. There were monkeys both big and small, both fierce and somewhat adorable. This was what I was waiting for. It reminded me of a petting zoo, but instead of petting, you just have a dangerous confrontation.

The monkeys leapt onto the railing. The guide fought them back with his stick, making sure all of our women were protected against the savages. However, they took no pains for me, leaving me entirely exposed to attack. I suddenly regretted being too cheap buy the two dollar stick at the entrance. The monkeys sensed my weakness. The biggest, meanest monkey lunged at me. His face was multicolored, like it was covered in war paint. I threw him my packet of food and screamed. In my state of terror, I bravely managed to take this picture:

But the bell rang again and the monkeys went away as quickly and as mysteriously as they had appeared. I was impressed with my monkey encounter but by no means satisfied. I looked on my map. It was another six hours until the next monkey zone. I had to move. In the monkey interim, I mostly just hiked up stairs. It was like doing the stair master for 10 hours. I passed endless out-of-breath Chinese tourists. Most of the tourists were only concerned with the top of the mountain, where watching the sunrise is the “thing to do”. Most of them just took a bus right to the top. But a few brave souls and perhaps, kindred monkey admirers tackled the trail. That was made hilarious because many of them also smoke. Some of them hired human carriers who would lug them up the stairs on a bamboo seat. The carriers had massive calves and took the steep steps without a problem. I thought it would be a good advertisement for no smoking, until I saw one of the chair carriers sucking up a cigarette at a rest stop.

As I approached my seventh hour of stair stepping, I was covered in more of my own fluid than I have ever been before. I was also carrying my full forty pound back pack. I felt like I was going to pass out. But somehow, I had the foresight to get a stick in case of a monkey attack. That decision may have saved my life. I was alone.

I came upon a courtyard. As I entered the courtyard, I was ambushed. A monkey rushed up on me. He was larger and meaner than the first. He flashed his fangs. I swung my stick and yelled, “Back monkey!” He growled and cowered away from my striking zone. With one danger averted, I realized that there were many more.

I was entirely surrounded by monkeys. Some were massive, the size of large midgets while others were no bigger than emaciated cats. The fiercest ones crept forward and again, I swung my stick and let out a monkey hoot so they would think I was crazy, an effective playground defense technique. Most of the monkeys scurried off but one monkey stayed. He was the biggest one and he just stood there, looking at me. I didn’t know what he wanted. I swung my stick. He didn’t move. But then, a monkey fight broke out in the trees and he ran into the woods to sort it out.

Relieved, I sat down on the railing. Initially, the monkeys were curious about me but pretty soon, they just let me be. I felt they accepted me as a member of their family because they started to ignore me. Perhaps I was the middle child or something. The monkeys got more comfortable and in time, I was sitting right next to a real, live monkey. We just sat there, watching the Chinese tourists walk by. I felt a certain commonality with the monkey. I was also an outsider among the Chinese tourists.

I got a monkey’s perspective. The monkeys wait in the courtyard and when the tourists walk by, they charge them. The women scream and run as the men throw packaged food to appease the monkeys. In one group, a guy threw a sausage while another had a Gatorade bottle stolen out of his hand. The lucky monkey went to a corner of the courtyard and pierced the plastic with his fangs. They live as marauders, exacting a toll from travelers for their daily existence.

The rest of the time, they just fool around. I saw one monkey nursing its baby, two other monkeys wrestling and a curious little fellow pumping the most delightful load into another monkey’s behind. Alpha males will be Alpha males.

However, the sun was going down and I needed to climb four more hours of stairs if I wanted to get off this mountain and avert a stay at a Buddhist sanctuary. I needed no more enlightenment that day. I said goodbye to my monkey friends. As a joke, they checked to see if I still had any food and I swung my stick, playing along. I hated to leave but I knew I didn’t belong. They throw poop when they’re angry and I…well…maybe that’s not a good one. I’m a lot smarter than them are sometimes. I belonged with my own.

I left the monkeys in the courtyard. Many of them were so sad that as I left, they couldn’t even bare to look at me. I swore I would never forget those monkeys, those crazy monkeys on Mt. Emei. But I still had my stick if one of those bastards tried anything.

Enter the Panda

2007-11-05T11:33:00.001-08:00

Cute and cuddly; an animated teddy bear; one of the most universally beloved animals on earth: The panda.

The panda before me looks the part. He’s hanging from a tree branch, balancing his body playfully above the bamboo branches. Just when you think he’s going to fall, he loops up again to the ooos and awwws of all the on-lookers. And yes, he is so god-damned cute.

I’m at the Giant Panda Breeding Research Center in Chengdu, China. The center houses more than 44 pandas, which is a lot because less than 100 exist in the wild. Chengdu is crazy about Pandas. As the English language magazine, Go West said in an article obviously written by a non-native speaker, “The black and white pandas completely absorbed in the life of Chengdu people. In their minds the panda are not animals but angels; not neighbors but family members; not immigrants but citizens, respected honorable citizens.”

The research center is operated by the government. One of the government’s jobs is to cover up unsightly facts. Here is a fact that panda lovers may not like to mention: 45% of all panda births result in twins. Of those twins, only one will survive. It is not because of natural selection, but rather, the mother panda will abandon her less favored child to the ravages of the wild. She plays favorites in the deadliest of ways: MURDER. Respected honorable citizen indeed, China.

On the tour we are led to a small cinema showing a documentary. Here, I discover more startling facts. According to the video, China puts the success of breeding the panda in captivity on the same scale as building The Great Wall. I think they are exaggerating until I hear how hard that actually is.

The Panda has been around some 8 million years, but you wouldn’t know it by the way they breed. Pandas need a breeding center because they are really bad at having sex and, for that matter, surviving in general. First, they subside on bamboo, an extremely fibrous plant. They must eat about 40 kg of bamboo a day, but can only absorb two percent of the nutrients. The rest comes out in endless piles of crap. In summary, they spend most of their days stuffing themselves and crapping. Not a recipe for romance.

Furthermore, they tend to be solitary creatures so there’s the problem of finding each other. And when they do cohabitate in small groups, they are also lazy, resulting in inbreeding so rampant that it would rival an average royal family.

Then, the video shows us what happens when they try to mate. The shot opens with two large pandas in a cage. The female tries to escape, dashing herself against the bars as the large male tries to pull her down. Then, the female turns on him and snaps her jaws, batting his head with her claw. Now, either she’s playing hard to get or we are watching a panda rape attempt. I have seen enough.

The next scene starts with a blank screen and a voiceover, “When natural mating doesn’t work…” I hear the music of Enya and immediately become frightened. My worst fears are realized when it fades in to a zonked-out female panda lying flat on a table as doctors shove syringes full of panda spunk into her privates. The makers of the video are sick enough to continue the Enya music as we follow the panda through the various stages of pregnancy.

The culmination of all that is the birth of a baby panda, which is the most shocking event of all. The video opens on a shot of the mother standing in a cage. Suddenly, a little weasel-looking creature falls from her loins. The mother jumps back and doesn’t know what to make of it. She investigates with her paw and then starts violently batting her baby around on the floor as the researchers rush to the rescue.

And then, yes, you have the typical montage of the weasel somehow turning into the cute cuddly panda and we forget all the previous horror. At the end, the voice-over comments on the success of the center, saying, “77 pandas have been born in the center since its inception. 40 have survived.” I can’t help thinking: How many of those baby pandas were murdered?
But as I stand in front of one of the panda display areas, the pandas are adorably chewing on something and no one gives a crap. The spectators are too busy flashing their cameras in ignorant photo ops.

I want to free them of this ignorance and expose the panda for the murderer that it really is. I approach an older male guide and ask him like a straight shooter: “I know the center is trying to keep a secret.”

“What’s that?”

“That when the panda mother has twins in the wild, it will keep one and leave the other one to die. Isn’t that true?”

“Umm…I never heard of that. I don’t think that’s true because if you want to see Panda in wild, it is very hard. You must stay there a long time and Panda is very hard to find.”

“Yeah, but when the Panda has two babies, in the wild, it basically kills one of them. Right?”

“I don’t think so because the Panda has baby in the autumn so there is much time to have the baby.”

“You’re dodging my question.”

“I must guide my tour now.”

“Why are you afraid of the truth!”
[Ignores me. People stare.]

Obviously, they aren’t going to let out the most damaging secret about pandas ever. I got a good dose of Communist double speak. That, or the guy just didn’t speak English very well.
I decide to ask another guide, a young Chinese woman. I creep up close to her and whisper: ”I know.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Know what?”

“That the pandas are murderers.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, so you don’t think that when pandas have twins in the wild, that the mother kills one of them?”

“Yes, this is true. But the life is very hard so the mother can only care for one of them.”
Typical. She was trying to blame misfortune on external circumstances, just like the communist she is. Oh, no, certainly it couldn’t be that pandas are evil. It’s their “environment” and “evolution.” Excuses.

She continues. “But our government has given great effort to save our endangered pandas and they are working all the time to ensure their survival.”

“Well, no wonder they’re endangered. Your government could start by arresting the mothers. They’re murderers.”

“We must make compromises.”

After this admission of guilt, I made it my mission to speak truth to the masses. But in return, I got responses like “Not really,” “So what?” and “She’s four. Don’t ruin this for her.” In the end, people just didn’t want to know. They’d rather have warm, soft and fake, rather than cold, hard and truth.

Tiger Leaping Gorge

2007-11-05T11:11:00.000-08:00

Our next stop was Tiger Leaping Gorge, a well known back-packer refuge with some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. In ten years the gorge has transformed from obscure trekking adventure to an ear-tagged page in every China guide book.

The gorge is one of the world’s deepest river canyons. The Yangtze River begins in gentle tributaries upstream, but the narrow, winding gorge quickly pressurizes it into a copper-hued torrent. Over time the river has carved the gorge between two mountains: Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and Haba Snow Mountain. Although we didn't see any snow (it was summer) we got the idea: it was a long way up and down, almost two miles in fact, from top the mountain to the river.

Legend has it, a tiger leapt across the river at its narrowest point. Being that “its narrowest point” is 30 meters, the tiger probably drowned. But “Tiger Drowning Gorge” just doesn’t have that same punch. To me, all these facts only meant one thing: I could die. It is by no means an easy hike and several hikers have perished by falling, freezing or landsliding. Also, apparently from the name, there were tigers.

All of that delighted me. I don’t think dying should ever be a vacation goal. But almost dying makes for excellent stories.Late in the day, the bus dropped us off in Qiaotou, a town at the beginning of the trail. It seemed to be experiencing a tourism boom that hadn’t really gotten off the ground yet. There was a modest hotel, convenience store, residential houses and a brand new “Paradise Bird Bar” with fresh pine paneling. Several cranes hovered in the skyline. The residents were preparing for the influx of tourists.

We walked past the gate and stopped at the “Gorged Tiger Cafe” to buy some water. It was run by a feisty Australian woman named Margo. She told us to get on the trail if we wanted to make the guesthouse by dark. We complied and we were on the faint dirt path in no time.

When I say people have died, to be fair, I will also say that it is really easy to stay alive. Although the trail is sometimes treacherous with waterfalls and landslides, there are also guesthouses about every hour to see to your needs. It is here that you can get a room, food and cold beer for a pittance. In addition, there is also a paved road running the rim of the gorge so if you want to walk that, you only have to worry about the insane Chinese bus drivers speeding around the corners.

As for the risk of getting off the trail, there are neon arrows and messages painted on the rocks to guide your way and inform you of your progress. But they are usually more excited than you are: “Only 2 hours to Naxi Family Guesthouse!”

The scenery was fantastic. In addition to the large cut for the river, the mountains climbed into the clouds. Bare rock flashed itself through the skirts of trees and shrubs. Along the trail, the most spring blue flowers ran along it. Below and above the trail, you could see little hamlets of stone Naxi houses and their neat squares of corn fields against the backdrop of mountains. Cicadas kept time with their alien-like rattle as we hiked. Before we knew it, we were at the first guest house. We decided to stay.

The Naxi Family Guesthouse was run by a mother who spoke snippets of English. We were set up in a room and she cooked us dinner. There were already some foreigners there, some Danish, Germans and Americans. The house was set up like many of the Chinese houses, with middle courtyard and separate surrounding buildings of a kitchen, bedrooms and supply rooms. In addition, there was a wooden rack containing hundreds of dried corncobs and some chairs decorated with mule deer skin. It was a quiet relief from the cluster-fuck of Lijiang.

However, it didn’t stay quiet. About two in the morning, Natalie puked for the first time, in what would become a three-hour long orchestra of heaving. At mid-morning, I went in to see how she was. She said, “I feel like I’m dying,” which quickly progressed into an actual “I am dying.” This made me think it wouldn’t be prudent to tackle the trail that day.So I let her rest and went to look around the nearby village.

Here, the people weren’t trying to sell me anything. They weren’t singing outside a techno thumping bar. They were farming, exactly what their ancestors had done. This is how most of the people actually lived. I walked up the dirt path embossed with rocks, and passed the corn fields and the rock-stacked walls of the houses. The houses looked primitive, with deep brown, pine needle hay stacks outside, straw-thatched roofs and a gang of domesticated animals hanging around outside. I marveled at the simplicity of it all, to be living so high up and isolated, until something caught my eye above one of the houses: a satellite dish.

As I walked up the trails between houses, I couldn’t help but feel like a trespasser. The few locals were nice enough to say “Hello” as I passed. But the animals were not so cordial. After one lady gave a particularly cheerful hello, her ankle biter dog actually bit my ankle. I met hissing chickens that rapidly waddled at me and goats that furiously bleated. When a massive pig growled like a rottweiler and chased me down the path, I decided to retreat. Perhaps some people didn’t die because of the gorge, but were attacked by Naxi farm animals.

When I returned in the late afternoon, Natalie seemed recovered. We decided to go to the next guesthouse. We hiked for about one hour, when Natalie stopped for a rest. The trail was more stunning as we hiked up higher, so I was looking out through the cornfields onto cloud dappled mountain faces when I heard my first heave.Natalie puked again and once again, she felt like she was dying. I thought of going back to the first guesthouse, but we were about half-way to the next one. We pressed on.

We were doing fine for the next several minutes until we came upon the 24 Bends, the most strenuous part of the trail. It’s almost entirely up hill. I knew we were in trouble when at the fifth bend, Natalie began to feel dizzy. Toward the tenth bend, she began to have that actual “I’m dying” feeling. But this time, I feared she might be right.

There was at a two thousand foot drop down to the river. If she fainted, she might fall off. I situated myself between her and the edge of the trail, guided her arm and went real slow. In a hike that should have taken one hour, we took four. Every couple of minutes, she would stop and say, “I can’t go on” and I would say, “Yes you can.” I felt like a gymnastics coach, saying phrases like “You can do it,” “Just a little farther,” and “Don’t let the Russians beat us” (There was a Russian couple about to pass us).

When we finally arrived at the second guesthouse, we were safe. As Natalie retired to the room to recover and throw-up some more, I entertained myself (Although initially entertaining, Natalie’s throwing up had gotten a little old). I was reading in one of the rooms when I heard someone screaming for help. I ran outside to see one of the guesthouse workers holding a chicken upside down, as it screamed “ueeelp!”

He brought it inside the kitchen and with a bang, the chicken stopped calling for “ueeelp.” The man carried it outside again, its body limp and its black and blue pitchfork legs twitching. He brought it to a sink, and in front of all the Western guests, he took a knife and slit its throat.Some of the women gasped as he bent the neck back and dripped the blood into a small bowl.

An English woman said, “What are they doing that for?”
“They drink it,” I said.
“Really?”
“Yes, it’s their slaughter ceremony. Every family member must take a full sip.”
“Oh my God.”Her mouth hung open in disbelief.
I waited until the greatest amount of horror had manifested itself in her eyes until I said, “Not really.”She wouldn’t talk to me after that.

But the chicken was delicious.The next day, Natalie was feeling better. We hiked for 5 hours, traversing waterfalls and steep trails until we made it to the coveted Walnut Garden.

Walnut Garden is supposed to be the most spectacular area of the gorge. It has free wheeling guesthouses to make it even more enjoyable.We stayed in Shawn’s Guest House, situated right next to the drop off into the gorge. It was beautiful.

It was made even more beautiful by the fact that you could order anything off its extensive menu with a side of “Happy.” I found out that “happy” was the marijuana that grew outside. I looked around and saw that cannabis grew all over the place. I didn’t see any walnuts, however, so I think a name change is in order.We stayed there for a day and a half, taking in the scenery.

After six months in China, through visits to several major cities, I’d never seen accommodations for the disabled. High in the mountains above a raging river, this was the first place. A sign was posted: But then I got to thinking. How would a disabled person get over here? It would be like giving a prize to a disabled person, but making them climb five flights of stairs to get it. If they are truly disabled, they probably can’t even get here. What a great guy.

But then I noticed that the owner, Shawn, had a malformed right hand. When I asked him if any disabled people come up here, he said, “It is hard for them but they have strong hearts.”

Shawn’s real name is Xia Shan Quan. He is of Tibetan origin but he was born in Walnut Garden in the 1960s. He converted his home into a guesthouse over 25 years ago, making it one of the original guesthouses on the trail. Now, there are over 17 guesthouses with more built each year. Everyone is looking to supplement their income with tourist dollars, converting their family homes into little hotels. Walnut Garden was the most physically beautiful place I’ve ever been in my life. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

We would have stayed longer but Natalie had to get back to Shaoxing to start her new job. We asked a driver to take us back to Qiaotou for 50 Yuan, and so began one of the scariest drives of my life.We sped around the corners in a cheap van as the driver looked up to the cliffs for signs of falling rocks. In certain areas there was nothing separating the road and a 2000 meter drop but that didn’t slow the guy down. At one point, he actually turned around to talk to us. I was lucky. I managed to control my bladder for the duration of the ride. But if I had peed a little, he would have deserved it.We got back in the afternoon. We had some time to kill before going back to Lijiang.

We weren’t looking forward to going back there anyway so we decided to have a drink at “The Tiger Leaping Café,” from where we set off. Margo was in more rustic attire, wearing a blue hippie skirt and stripped shirt that showed her copious amounts of black pit hair. She was about 55, with deep wrinkles wrapped up in a pink bandana. After our harrowing car ride, we ask her how many people have died along that road.

"The accidents happen from the inexperienced drivers. Usually the Chinese who don't know how to take the curves. The locals, the experienced ones, are usually good. The ones left, that is.”

“Wow,” I said.

“I'm joking.” I deserved that for the chicken incident.

Her place was half guesthouse and half supply store, but that seemed like just a front for her real occupation: giving advice. She was the English voice of the Gorge. She sent people off and hopefully, welcomed them back. A new set of travelers arrived. They were Russian, decked out in all the newest hiking gear, all with overstuffed Northface backpacks.

Margo said with authority, “You need your money and your camera and a change of underwear. Everything else is optional. If you have any questions about what to take, just ask me. I’ve lived here 9 years. I know what I’m talking about.”

The Russians talked loudly during all of this. They seemed cocky, like they didn’t want to listen to her. I thought these are probably the kind of people that end up dying.

"If you’re leaving today, you better get out there. The trail climbs 900 meters in the next four hours. After you do the 24 bends all your hard work is over.”Her voice had the same automatic tone as a tour guide. She must have said all that thousands of times.

But as she spoke to me further, I found that she wouldn’t be saying it for much longer. In the course of our discussion, I learned that all this natural beauty, the rushing river and Walnut Garden, all the guesthouses and small hamlets, all of it would be gone. The Government is building a dam.“I’m 99% sure that they’ll dam the gorge,” Margo said.Surely, I said, out of all the cultural heritage spots, this qualifies for protection.

But that’s not so. In 2003, UNESCO declared a large area of Yunnan’s three rivers as The Three Parallel Rivers Park, a world heritage site.Most of Tiger Leaping Gorge was not included. Margo said UNESCO agreed to protect everything above 2000 feet. That would mean that the road we just traveled on would be submerged under water and so would everything under it. The river would rise up and swallow everything. They would turn it into a lake 130 miles long.

“It really is a shame,” she said. “It’s the flushing of the whole system; the kidneys of the place.”The river will also swallow up the start of the trail, making it only accessible by boat. It would lap the foundation of Shawn’s Guesthouse and probably submerge it in times of flood. And it would swallow up the town we were now in, the Paradise bar with its brand new pine paneling and the hotel that’s putting on additions.

But that didn’t make sense. In almost every guesthouse, in every building that I saw, construction was going on. Everyone seemed to be building something new or adding something on. They acted like they were going to be here for the next twenty years. Did they not know everything will be underwater? No, they know it all too well.“They are hoping to spend some money now and get some compensation,” Margo said.According to one report, many farmers believe they will receive 100 Yuan per square meter. The bigger the home, the bigger the check. “But they're not thinking correctly,” Margo said.“There is only so much money. They only get part of the pie.”

So all these people are building for nothing, or at least on a gamble that the government will compensate them for all their expenses. More realistically, they will be compensated for a fraction of the cost. It has been well documented that in China, displaced people are rarely paid the full amount promised. In addition, they are relocated to less fertile land. For the residents of Tiger Leaping Gorge, that land would be a far cry from the gorge’s rich riverside soil and far away from the lucrative tourist dollars that many use to supplement their income.

What will happen when the people realize they aren’t getting all their money?Margo sighed. “What they do in China is they wait till you go away so it can be 10 to 12 years before you get anything.”However, the dam affects more people than the Naxi and their builders, said Margo. “It's particularly bad for the Yi people (another minority). They live up higher. They have a subsistence living but they sell anything extra in town. Well that excludes that. They'll be like Robinson Crusoe. I don't know what they'll do.”In fact, the dam will affect the whole area, from Yunnan to Sichuan, with a proposed eight dams along the Yangzi river stretching over 544 km. It will relocate at least 100,000 people.

Although Tiger Leaping Gorge is obviously a national treasure, it is also money in the bank. Cheap and clean hydroelectric power for a polluted, energy-starved nation where development often comes at any price. Nearly 1000 miles downriver, they have already destroyed three gorges with the Three Gorges Dam Project. What’s one more?

Because the gorges surround the same river, their welfares are connected. The damming of Tiger Leaping Gorge will reduce the silt that flows into the Three Gorges Dam, thereby prolonging its life. And a dam upstream will give added flood protection. One dam supports the other.In addition to the engineering connection, the dams are also connected by major players. The president of the power company pushing for the dam is Li Xiaoping, the son of the former prime minister who backed the Three Gorges Dam. He has plenty of guanxi (personal connections) to push the project through. And almost as the final nail in the coffin, the Tiger Leaping Gorge Dam has been listed as one of the country's major infrastructure projects for the 11th Five-Year Plan period. Construction is planned for 2008, the same year as the Beijing Olympics.

To an American who has grown up with the environmental movement and cherished state parks, the idea of destroying such a beautiful place is infinitely depressing. Imagine damming the Grand Canyon.To many locals and environmental activist, it’s equally depressing. Some are fighting the dam. Some farmers even protested in Lijiang, in a country where protesting is notoriously dangerous.

Some efforts are being made with China’s burgeoning civil society and newly founded Non-Government Organizations, or NGOs, with actions such as petition signing. There is a small window of hope. In a country that is hopelessly bureaucratic, new environmental laws require public participation on any large projects. The Three Gorges Dam was a closed process and went ahead amid vast public outcry, but environmentalist are having better luck with some of Yunnan’s other rivers. When officials planned to dam the Nu River, protests and lobbying by NGOs and individuals pressured the government to declare a “Temporary Moratorium” the dam plans.

The Tiger Leaping Gorge plans have not been officially approved. Still, many environmentalists are doubtful they will be able to prevent the gorge from being sacrificed. The average Chinese person seems to be fine with this sacrifice.When Natalie asked her students about the proposed project, they merely responded, “But there are many beautiful places in Yunnan.” Up against this attitude, the future looks rather bleak.Even Margo had a defeatist attitude. “What can we do?” she said. In the end, there are not so many beautiful places as to make her stay. “I'll leave before it changes. I can't bear to see it. It breaks my heart.”

The knowledge that all of this will be gone in a couple years makes Tiger Leaping Gorge all the more beautiful. I wonder why I love this place so much. My best answer is that it is awe inspiring. It is so massive, so deep and so pristine that it inspires awe and is humbling. And I know the people of China won’t be able to experience the same feeling when they have nothing left but old pictures.

Then again, I wonder how many places America has destroyed in the name of development.Part of me feels guilty getting self-righteous about it because my country did it earlier. We built our dams earlier. We developed our industries earlier and polluted our environment earlier. We normalized our minorities earlier and we shot our students earlier, 20 years to be exact.Perhaps not on the same scale as China, but we’ve done it nonetheless. I almost want to believe China when its politicians and citizens beg for exceptionalism with the long uttered refrain: “But we are a developing country.”

But pragmatism and shared guilt do nothing to dampen down the feeling that the destruction of something so beautiful has to be wrong. As we caught the last bus back to Lijiang, I couldn’t help but imagine the sheer rock faces, the lush hills, the stone-stacked houses, the cornfield patches, the entire way of life for both nature and man, all of it I saw soaking in a watery grave. But a nation will have its electricity and call it “progress.”

Lijiang

2007-10-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

After Dali, we caught bus to Lijiang. The five hour ride was dreadful. We were crammed in a bus the size of a large van with screaming babies and chain-smoking and chain-spitting Chinese men. If the physical discomfort wasn’t enough, the TV screen in the front showed extremely bad Karaoke videos. It mostly featured men standing on top of majestic mountains playing eighties electric guitars, interspersed with flashes of an oh-so-delicate Chinese woman looking pensively into a pond for some reason.

The road was hazardous as we looped up and down and around the mountains, often with nothing between the edge of the road and a hundred-plus foot plummet. But the driver didn't seem to take this into account. Instead, he passed cars on blind curves with nothing more than a polite toot to warn anyone barreling towards us that he was driving like a complete and utter idiot. I think the pensive Chinese woman was trying to make sense out of why her friend was driven off the side of a mountain by an insane Chinese bus driver.

When we arrived in Lijiang, we were happy to be alive. But that didn’t last long. At first, I was actually excited about Lijiang. Lijiang was supposed to be a “can't miss” experience in Yunnan. From what I've read, the old way of life was quite interesting. Lijiang is largely inhabited by the Naxi people, who have been living in the area for more than 1,400 years. Both Lijiang's Naxi and Dali's Bai migrated from the same nomadic Tibetan tribes.

The Naxi were powerful in their heyday, helping to establish a kingdom that fended off the Han Dynasty before falling to the Mongols in 1278. They also had their own language, writing system, matriarchal society and shamanistic religion. With the founding of modern China, the people took the name Naxi, which means "people who worship the black things of the nation." How cool is that? Even though much of the culture’s distinctiveness is disappearing, I thought it would still be worth seeing.

At the very least, Lijiang was known as an interesting market town with quaint cobbled streets. The Lonely Planet, the bible for backpackers, called it a "delightful maze" and "extraordinary." However, just like the real bible, The Lonely Planet is a good basic guide but with many contradictions. Sometimes it is just plain wrong.

Lijiang is divided into new town and old town. The new town is like any other city, with modern metropolis of bright lights, tiled square buildings and homicidal traffic. The old town is what Dali might become. When I saw it, I thought of the phrase “Original and Primitive SHOPPING MALL.” It was an unsettling amalgam of the old, traditional way of life spliced with a virulent form of tourist re-creation that mutated itself beyond all sense of proportion.

I saw no quaint cobbled streets. Instead, they were covered by masses of Chinese tourists, with golden Chinese tourist flags floating above the sea of bodies. As I walked into the entrance square, I must have walked unintentionally into at least 15 people's pictures. What the Lonely Planet neglected to say was that Lijiang used to be a quaint town, that is, until they opened an airport in 1995 and now get several million visitors each year.

The intricate streets of the city were indeed a maze. However, they were anything but delightful. I was swept up with the flow of tourists. I had a feeling that cows must have during a stampede: if I stopped moving, I would be trampled. My fellow tourists and I marched past small shops selling various types of TRADITIONAL NAXI GOODS that were usually a deviation of yak. There was yak meat jerky, yak leather bags, yak jewelry and yak fur blankets. I also saw scarves and dresses and other kinds of mass-produced crap, but I’m sure that somehow, they were also made out of yak.

The town was a maze because on every street there were the same stores so you had a constant case of deja vu. The only streets that were different were the food streets lined with restaurant/bar establishments, usually on each side of a canal. The TRADITIONAL Naxi young women stood outside the bars decked out in their TRADITIONAL finest, as their headdresses vibrated to the techno thump inside.

When I went to the local English Pub (yes, there was one), I heard that Han entrepreneurs are opening stalls in the tourist district and muscling out the Naxi minority. This rumor is further corroborated by the fact that they are doing the same thing to Tibetan minorities in Tibet. I think this should be a rule: you can exploit a culture, as long as it's your own culture you are exploiting.

I don't know what I expected. I guess I just wanted a more genuine experience with the culture. That's the thing about great places to travel: They stop being great places when too many people know about them. And when it catches on with the Chinese, with their 1.3 billion people, it doesn't take much for it to be too many.

The only good part of the visit was listening to Naxi Traditional Music. There was a band that performed for tourists, only asking for donations. Most of the musicians were elderly and looked like they would keel over at any moment. But the band leader had boundless enthusiasm. He wore a yak hair vest and donned a Robin Hood-like cap, with a large feather stuck in it. Appropriately, he played the flute. Another small woman in the front actually played the leaf. By pursing her lips and blowing against it, she had a range of three high-pitched tones.

The musicians have been called “living fossils.” Due to Lijiang’s previous isolation, the people have preserved a music that scholars believe is the closest representative of the Tang Dynasty’s musical style (618-907 AD).. The people even preserved the music during China’s Cultural Revolution, when the players had to hide their instruments.

There were different reactions to the music. Several children put their hands over their ears and while others stood entranced. Many people were more impressed with the band leader’s awful attempts at English. But to me, the music was hauntingly beautiful. It sounded like Peking Opera mixed with some exotic and ancient tribal song. It was an eerie reprieve from the onslaught of tourist mania. I shut my eyes. Everyone around me disappeared. I imagined the city 300 years ago. I finally got my quaint village.

Dali

2007-10-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

I've heard this many times from teachers at home and abroad: The best time to be a teacher is the summer. That’s true. Some work for the weekend; teachers work for the summertime. When I crawled through my last student paper, numbed my brain with watered down Chinese beer and started to think in complete, unbroken sentences again, my thoughts immediately were of vacation. Many foreign teachers are actually broke professional travelers in disguise. For two months, I would be a professional traveler. Initially, my hopes were vague. I hoped to explore, I hoped to experience new things but most of all, I hoped I didn't die.

Natalie would be accompanying me part of the way but she had to resume her teaching after only two weeks. She got a grown-up private school job with a forty-hour work week. I still led the life of a debauched university employee; hence I had all summer.

Our first stop was Yunnan, China’s southern most province. Our ticket was to Kunming, Yunnan's major city. Despite the laid back atmosphere, there wasn't much to do around the metropolis - we only stayed for one night. But what a night it was.

A couple of streets down from the hostel, we came upon what looked like a disabled karaoke circus. There were crowds of people surrounding little pockets of spectacle. The most notable spectacle was two midgets plodding up and down a small strip of street, singing in high pitched off-key voices into a Karaoke machine, which they pulled with a wheeled cart. Then there were the usual disabled young men sitting in mangled positions on scooters with their legs over their heads and they were also singing karaoke.

Farther down the street, there was the biggest crowd of all. They surrounded a skinny, clean-cut twenty-something man. He had a paper thin mustache and one leg shorter than the other, which he compensated for with a crutch. He swayed from side to side singing with his whole body, soulfully belting out the tunes, hitting the highs and laying the lows. In between songs, the people applauded and took turns putting money in a hat, during which he would whisper, "Thank you" in Chinese.

In addition to the karaoke, there were also blind masseuses crushing sore muscles in a small park. Clustered in a half circle, I even saw a blind traditional Chinese band. I was happy to see they were selling something else besides pity, even though it was usually awful sounding music.

The next day we left the city for Dali, which was about five hours away by bus. From what I’d heard, Dali sounded like the Amsterdam of China -- a hippie backpacker's haven. Supposedly, people just come up to you and offer you "ganja" on the street and you can smoke it unimpeded. You can also get nearly any Western book or CD. The bars never play Chinese pop music and the beers are always cold. You see more white people concentrated in one place than on an entire season of Friends. It sounded too good to be true.

Walking into the city gates, I felt Yunnan was the place were China got a bit funky. Structurally, the city gates seemed like any other in China, the half-moon tiles layering the top and the sharp ended half-arches on each side, pointing to the sky. But the gates were painted in aqua blues, bright reds and deep browns, with animal heads carved into the side that reminded me of Native American totem poles.

Along the streets were shops and stalls selling traditional goods made by the Bai, the local minority people who descend from nomadic Tibetan tribes. They offered beaded bags, expressive tapestries and dyed scarves, as well as antiques and jewelry. On each side of the street ran two canals with clean water running down. Only pedestrians and bicycles could go down the impeccably clean stone streets. Then I noticed: For the first time in five months, I heard no sound of beeping horn, nor the sound of shopkeepers screaming on loudspeakers nor the thump of terrible Chinese pop/techno music from the boutiques. It was quiet. Almost too quiet.

Dali hasn’t always been this quiet. It is an ancient city. It used to be the capital of the Nanzhao kingdom, ruled by minority peoples that resisted China's Tang Dynasty for centuries before falling to the Mongols like everyone else. It was also the seat of the Muslim insurrection in Yunnan. Now, the city tells little of this tumultuous past.

Instead of the remains of a former kingdom, we saw a quaint town tailored to western tourists. Shops served western foods. A stone baked pizza shop served tomato sauce on their pizzas instead of the standard ketchup. There was a vegan soup cafe, a burrito restaurant and a place called Jim's Tibetan Peace Café, which I strongly suspected was run by a damned hippie.

We did see white people: groady, unshowered backpackers along with well-groomed yuppies and their children. They spoke American, British and Australian English; French, German and Russian. For the first time in six months, I was a member of the majority again.

But there also were a lot of Bai people. The men dressed like Han Chinese men but the women maintained their traditional garb. They were decked out in blood red vests, multi-colored, checkered head scarves and black skirts. They sold kick-knacks from their stalls and also toasted a bland goat's cheese that tasted curiously like a tortilla. And, of course, they sold other things.

It didn't take long for an old lady to approach us. She looked about 70, in traditional gear, and she hobbled up to us with a laminated booklet containing pictures of tapestries and hand bags. But as soon as I was close enough to hear, she whispered in a raspy voice, "Ganja? Ganja? Smokey Smokey?" My D.A.R.E. officer never trained me to refuse drugs from an elderly woman. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

There wasn't much to do in the town except hang around cafes, smoke pot, shop and get drunk. But there was a lot to do around the town. The town was surrounded by picturesque mountains where the clouds accumulated in a thick, white blanket at the peaks and seemed to be permanently resting there, like they were too lazy to transform into rain. A huge lake called Er Hu also offered boat trips and fishing adventures.

We decided to take a horse up one of the mountains. Outside the city walls, there was a never-ending line of construction. Everyone was occupied in building a new road. Most of the workers were men but there were many women, young and old, dressed in their bright minority clothing. They were doing back breaking work, hacking the soil with picks and digging out rocks with baskets. When the road is finished, it will serve to develop the surrounding area that, for now, is no more than houses, farmers’ fields, an occasional store and some stone mason shops. However, I did see a massive billboard for a soon-to-be golfing resort, planned to be built next year. I suppose that these same people will help build that too.

We purchased the horse up and down the mountain for about $20 all told. Our guide was a middle aged small-framed man in a “Beijing Olympics 2008” hat and a polo shirt. As we made our way up the narrow dirt path, he ran behind the horses all the way, chain smoking and yelling "Ta!" When I looked down, I noticed he was wearing treadless leather dress shoes. All the way up the mountain, he didn't stumble once, nor was he out of breath.

At night, we mostly stuck to The Bad Monkey Bar. It was on the foreigner's tourist street and looked like a hole in the wall from the outside, with a cartoonish, illuminated sign of a scowling Curious George in the window.

When we walked in, it reeked of hippie. We found several tacky red lanterns hanging from the ceiling and cut outs from various magazines hanging from the walls. A ruddy, thick-set Chinese girl was behind the bar, who made me think of the bierstein wielding German barmaids. It was early in the evening. The only person at the bar looked like a burnt out Rastafarian wannabe, with pale skin and thick brown dreadlocks hanging down his back. I supposed he was one of those Western backpackers who are on indefinite respite trying to stay in this free-wheeling town as long as he can, on account of his favorite past-time. But once we started talking to him, we found he was made of more serious stuff.

I asked him where he was from.
"England," he said, in a thick limey accent.
Then, I asked him how long he'd been here. I was expecting a few days, maybe a couple of weeks.
He thought about it for awhile, so long that I thought he wasn't going to answer until he said, "Three years.”
"What have you been doing?"
"I own this place," he said.

The owner’s name was Ross. A native of Essex, he had spent some time in Thailand, came up to Yunnan and was fortunate enough to run out of money in Dali. He bought the place with his then Chinese girlfriend. She stayed long enough to handle the permits but has since has gone her separate way. The girl behind the bar had a similar story. She came down to Dali and planned to stay for two days. She'd been there eight months. Their stories confirmed my suspicion that Dali is a place you can get stuck in.

But like the rest of China, Dali is not stuck at all. It’s changing quite rapidly. "I was the first bar on this street. Now how many are there? Five? We are getting a new crowd in. When I first came here, it was a chill smoker’s community. Now, there is a lot more drinking and other drugs. Some people are loud and obnoxious and cause a lot of problems in town.” He said that Dali is becoming less like a chill Western hang-out, and more like a Chinese resort. “Chinese tourists are coming from Beijing. It's getting well-known.”

However, with a greater reputation, there comes other problems, like greater competition. Ross said that he had no problem with competition because, being the first bar, The Bad Monkey is well known. However, that creates another problem: It’s a little too well-known. “We used to sell ganja from our bar. This was the place to get the best stuff, smoke and relax. But I stopped smoking two months ago. We got too much pressure. Someone said they did a search on the Internet for ganja in Yunnan and our bar came up. I did the same search and I didn't get it but our name had been circulating on chat boards. We had to cool down."

I asked about where people get their ganja. “The old ladies,” he said. “Those old ladies will sell you anything. They say ganja but anything you want like weed, hash, opium, heroin. Heroin is a big problem if you live here."

Ross then launched into a story about a local man. The man used to come to his bar but would never smoke pot. That wasn't unusual because many Chinese are wary of the drug. He kept saying, "That’s bad." But one day, talking up in the owner's room, the man said, "Ganja is bad. This is better," and pulls out a bag of heroin. The owner wanted nothing to do with him, but as luck would have it, he bought a dog from him a couple of months before.

"The guy is a heroin addict but he knows his dogs." One day, he came back to his apartment and his new dog was gone. "I knew the fucker stole my dog so I go down to the dog market and I find my dog. I had to pay the guy he sold it to 200 yuan but I got him. That pissed me off so I go and steal that fucker's dog. We're holding it for ransom for 400 yuan. 200 for the dog, 150 for the tag he never gave me and then...and then...50 for stress."

At the end of the story, another westerner came through the door. It was his business partner, sweaty with curly black locks down to his shoulders. Without missing a beat, he said, "That fucker's not getting his dog back. It's like stealing a child stealing a dog like that."

Some more westerners walked through the door, young backpackers but also an old man who looked like Samuel Beckett and talked in a long far-out drawl. When I had a rambling conversation with him, I learned he had been here 15 years. He was missing his back teeth to prove it. On his initiation, the bar air started to fill with the thick ganja smoke haze that had made this bar a little too famous.
It reminded me of our subject. "So the authorities don't really do anything?" I asked Ross.

"Since Chinese college kids have been coming to Dali, the authorities have been more uptight," he said. Anti-drug agents have been hanging out at hostels, delivering anti-drug pep talks to delinquent Chinese youth. When only westerners were doing it, it carried on with a nod and perhaps a bribe or two. But now that the Chinese are experimenting, he said, "a crackdown is coming soon. This can't go on forever."

But the more I walk around the town, the more I know that he's not just talking about the drugs. It's the whole town.

Walking up past the two foreigner's streets, I notice several streets were closed for construction. Against the concrete wall blocking the construction entrance was a poster of what the streets will look like: exact replicas of the already commercial foreigner's streets, full of trendy restaurants and boutiques. And then, I read a sign that encapsulates the whole concept. It reads: “Experience the traditional and modern harmonious beauty from the Original, Primitive SHOPPING MALL!”

It was absurd. The city would loose its character if they developed it anymore and from what I hear, it already has lost much of it. The town is changing because its tourists are changing. In years past, it was Western backpackers who mainly went there, and, for that matter, to most tourist attractions in China. But recently, Chinese domestic tourism has skyrocketed, with 1.1 billion domestic tourists in 2004 alone. The number is bound to be bigger now, as China's citizens have more money to spend. They need places to spend it in. Dali seems like a good candidate as any. As much as I don’t want to see this place fall to rabid commercialism, I also feel like I have little room to talk. America has built resorts on many of its beautiful landscapes and quaint towns. Perhaps now the Chinese have the right to built resorts on theirs.

But as I look around, I can’t help but to think that the people will lose their way of life. Their farms will be overtaken by shops and hotels, even more than they already are. They will cease to be self-reliant and will instead be tourist-reliant. Maybe that's something they're willing to forfeit. As one Bai man said to me, "20 years ago we were very poor. We could not buy color TV. Now, everyone has color TV." This is reaffirmed by the fact that during my whole time in Dali, I saw not one beggar. Now, that could be because they are all selling drugs, but it could also be that the tourism has already been a boon for the local people.

The only people that are complaining are the Western backpackers like me, who crave a pure, authentic experience. But much of the time, that “pure, authentic experience” is created because a place is poor and isolated and Dali is quickly becoming neither. But then again, I know it hasn’t been authentic for a long time. Instead of catering to the Western tourists who want stone-baked pizza and recreational drug use, they’ll cater to Chinese tourists who want megaphone tours and drunken Karaoke bars. It will just be inauthentic on a much larger scale.

In the end, the whole thing was a bit sad. We only stayed three days. From the sound of it, the owners of the Bad Monkey won't be staying much longer either.

Hunan

2007-09-20T15:00:00.001-07:00

Sometimes it’s best to travel with no idea where you’re going. On Labor Day vacation, Natalie and I found ourselves with a week to travel. So did everyone else. Every good communist loves labor but apparently, the best way to celebrate it is to take a vacation. Next to Spring Festival, Labor Day holiday is the most traveled week of the year.

I racked my brain for somewhere to go. I wanted to go far away but I also wanted to make it back for my class on Monday. Then, I remembered a restaurant in my hometown called “Hunan by the Falls.” If the province’s cuisine was good enough to have a restaurant near my house, it fit my sole criterion for traveling.
We made plans to go to Hunan with the knowledge that we would probably not get there. There was no way we could get a train ticket on the busiest traveling day of the year. Pessimism is best when traveling in China. You often have little control of the situation. That way, wherever you do travel is a pleasant surprise, even if it is to the bar after waiting three hours in a line, for a ticket that they didn’t have.

We went to the small Shaoxing train station and waited with the herd for a train to nearby Hangzhou. Then, we would try to get a ticket at the main station. We were not hopeful.

Even if they had a ticket, we would have to find the correct station first and overcome any language barriers to communicate our destination. Our dread must have been obvious. It was at that time when a young man approached us and said, “Can I help you?” His name was Steven, a local student from Shaoxing University, on his way to Hangzhou for a week of English lessons. He guided us to the right car and offered to help us get a ticket, acting as our interpreter.

In Hangzhou, Steven helped us find the right station. When he learned that the last train would be leaving in an hour, he hopped the queue and cut in front of a hundred people, all for us. I think people who cut in line are rude but I have no problem when it’s on my behalf.

But apparently, someone else did. Directly behind Steven, a man started to scream indecipherables at him. Our hero babbled back a hurried defense and turned around once more to haggle with the ticket seller. The man was old and disheveled in a sweat stained white T-shirt but he still had some fight in him. He became irate and reached past three people to attack our advocate’s backpack, ripping the zipper from the lining, spilling out his books. Other people started yelling at Steven and still others yelled at the man. And then other people yelled at those people and so on. But Steven just ignored the assault and advanced on the ticket seller once more. He emerged with our tickets, triumphant.

I felt terrible. I was amazed by his gracious hospitality. I offered to buy him a new backpack but he refused. All we could do was thank him profusely.
“No, No. It’s my pleasure,” he said.

Once we had the tickets, he still stuck with us. Then, he explained that he was from the west of China. “The east is all about business. If they see you, they think about money. It is not like that in the west. They help each other.” However, it wasn’t all altruistic. He mentioned that he had class at three but it was already four. “Don’t you have to get to class?” I asked. “No. I am learning more from you.” So he got free English lessons and a torn backpack and we got a travel agent. Before the train came, I taught him how to say “Yeah” and also how to hit on girls, with lines like “Hey, girl. You are fine,” “Did it hurt…when you fell from heaven” and “Let me get your digits.” Even though none of those lines had ever worked for me, I think they would have a certain charm if delivered in broken, halting English.

We said goodbye to Steven and got on the train. We wouldn’t get off for 17 hours. 17 hours on a train means different things to different people, depending on what kind of ticket you have. To those with a sleeping car ticket, it means 17 hours of sleep. For those with a seat ticket, it means 17 hours of dozing. And to those with a standing ticket, it means 17 hours of hell. My girlfriend got the sleeping car, I had to stand.

And so began my migratory experience on the train. I felt like a vagrant squatter, finding an open seat, only to be kicked out by its mildly annoyed new owner and standing until I found another seat, from which I was soon evicted. I played musical chairs in between crying babies, squawking ladies on cell phones and middle aged men who kept leaning their heads on me in mid doze, threatening to drool, for the whole 17 hours. To occupy myself in my brief periods of peace, I crafted elaborate plans to break into the sleeping car.

Eventually, we arrived in Changsha, the capital of Hunan. Initially, it had no distinctive features. Perhaps it looked a bit drabber and industrial compared to our native Shaoxing, but a lot bigger at two million people. Its most important feature was found on our way out of the train station. On the way up the escalator, hanging on a wall, a propaganda poster displayed China’s various ethnic groups. Some were the majority Han, others had turbans or round hats; others had bright colorful clothing; others looked Mongolian. But no matter what they looked like, all wore deliriously happy expressions, and hovering in the back, above in majestic bronze bust, was none other than Mao Zedong.

Hunan is Mao Zedong’s hometown. He was born in 1893 in Shaoshan, a small town thirty miles south of Changsha. He was educated in Changsha, where he took part in the first communist uprising. It was where he first observed poverty. This was where he first heard the word “socialism.” If we were going to live in China, I thought it fitting to pay homage to the man responsible for much of the modern state we saw before us.

First, though, we had to find a hotel. The guidebook said there was a cheap but moderately nice hotel a couple of blocks down from the station. As we were walking, we saw a passing white person.

When you live in the more remote parts of China, a white person is an event. You want to rush up to them, touch their skin and yell, “What the hell are you doing here?” I tried to contain myself. He was an older, gray bearded American, who looked a little like Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings. And like Gandalf, he gave us some advice. “There’s really not much to see in Changsha. I lived here for 3 years. You could go to the museum or see Mao’s hometown. Just one thing: Watch your cell phones. Changsha is as bad as anywhere.” He pointed us in the direction of the hotel and we were on our way again.

But, of course, when we find it, a sign says, in English, that it’s been moved to a new undisclosed location. So we improvised. Natalie got the attention of a bricklayer and mimed a pillow with her hands, pretending to sleep, and then put her hands up in the air. He caught on after about three minutes and led us around the corner and down a dirty alley.

We went to the desk of what looked like a convenient store and they led us up a flight of stairs and into a small room. We were exhausted. We saw the beds and passed out. We woke to roaches flitting across the floor. On a walk to the bathroom, I massacred an entire platoon of ants. When I got in the shower, I had to dance around the large drain in the middle, which also doubled as the toilet. However, it cost eight dollars a night.

The next day, we thought we would pay our respects to the ancient history before we hit the modern history. Hunan is also rife with ancient history. It was the home of one of the greatest archeological finds of the 20th century: Mawangdui.

Mawangdui was the site of three tombs dating back to the Han Dynasty in 156 B.C. Again, another thing as old as Jesus. In America, we make a huge deal if something is 300 years old. I remember getting chills up my spine in Ohio, looking at revolutionary era gravestones. The Chinese laugh at things 300 years old. To them, 300 years is a common punch-line in jokes.

But even in China, the tombs were a noteworthy discovery. They had a high degree of preservation and nearly 2,000 artifacts inside. They belonged to the Marquis of Dai, his wife and their son. The marquis and his offspring turned to dust long ago. But his wife was so well preserved that scientists could perform an autopsy to determine that she died of a heart attack.

Tombs are excellent ways to get inside the zeitgeist of a time. They didn’t believe in the maxim “you can’t take it with you.” They seemed to view the tomb as maybe a giant car ride where they would need to pack everything possibly important. As we know, they didn’t really go anywhere, but they made handy time capsules.

When we entered the display area, we saw artifacts laid out on the table. Several bowls were around but I never pay attention to bowls. Bowls are boring. It was what was in the bowls that was interesting. The lady took with here some travel food for the afterlife in case her corpse got hungry. She had petrified lotus root (a vegetable), berries and some other greenery, but as you can imagine, the green had faded a bit. Walking further, we saw she had some meat, but it was now merely ox bones, chicken bones, lamb bones and yes, dog bones.

The tomb also contained 300 wooden figurines, replicas of servants, made to substitute for the real thing. In more ancient times, emperors would be buried with their servants in the good ole days of human sacrifice. In what was one of the more humane moves of ancient times, they decided to just hire some sculptors instead. However, it may have also been to save money, as the more expensive items are also wooden substitutes such as rhino and elephant tusks, jade chimes (even painted green) and bells. All wood. For once, you would be happy that your boss is cheap.

Most of the other objects weren’t very interesting. What fascinated me were the personal items. One display was the empress’s gown; the actual pieces of cloth that she wore made of the finest silk. While its thread clung together, under the ground, scores of humans have lived and died above the earth, revolutions, repressions and civilizations. Everything happened while it was sleeping. And there it was, with little wear, looking like it was in a thrift shop. Another display held her make-up box, black and open, ready to receive its powders and paints. Even in death, the empress still thought about tricking people into thinking she was beautiful.

In the next large hall were the ancient texts, the philosophical, cultural and political ideas of her time. They had Taoist doctrines. If you’re traveling to the afterlife, you want good reading material, right? The empress included such steamy death reading as “The seven profitable and eight destructive ways to conduct sexual activity.” It had some of the earliest medical prescriptions known to man, some ethical precepts and a detailed astrology. It had the correct orbits of several planets and comets, with pictures that looked like my handiwork in the third grade.

What did the government think of all this? At its discovery, still at the height of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong called it “feudal extravagance,” saying, “We can finally return the labor of the people to the people.” Way to kill the moment. I bet this man was a riot at parties. I think that even in China, it’s a stretch to politicize 2,200 years ago. You have to stop somewhere. If you want to play that game, Jesus Christ was a liberal.

After all this, I wanted to see the woman herself. It’s like looking at a murder scene without the dead people. I went on a mad hunt for her, but before I found her, the museum closed. It was fine. I was sure I’d find more dead people tomorrow. I was going to the hometown of Mao Zedong.

But there was a problem. I had no idea how to get there. My plan was to go to the train station and hopefully communicate where I wanted to go. We weren’t looking forward to the arduous ordeal in the morning. As we were having dinner at a street vendor’s table, a portly middle-aged Chinese man sat down with us and said, “Where are you from?” He was an English Teacher at a local middle school. He traveled to Shaoshan every year for school trips so he called up the tour bus agency and booked us two tickets. They would pick us up in the morning. Another divine intervention。

At eight in the morning, our tour bus pulled up at the end of our hotel’s alley and our tour guide stepped out to greet us. Like many Chinese tour guides, she was a gorgeous, young woman. She looked like she was not going to Mao’s house but rather, to a nightclub, with a sleeveless green, glittery shirt, midriff bearing low-cut jeans and a spunky haircut. She couldn’t speak English so I knew the majority of her knowledge would be lost to me but her voice would probably be drowned out anyway. We were about to go to one of the most popular Chinese tourist destinations on the most popular tourist week.

We boarded the large travel bus, which also contained about 50 Chinese tourists, and set out on the harrowing road to Shaoshan. During the height of the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s personality cult, the town saw 3 million visitors a year. They even built a railway out to the town. Now, the place only saw about 1.8 million, which is still a great deal, but you couldn’t tell that by the condition of the road. The road was a narrow concrete slab. When another car approached from the opposite side, our bus had to blare its deafening horn and hug the edge of the concrete, with one false move landing us upside down in some rice paddy.

Along the way, the houses were rather average for China, considering that Hunan is one of its poorest provinces. They still had dirty, concrete frames, but they were surrounded by shimmering rice paddies, large square patches of pools with rows of tiny green stalks poking up through the surface, with the sky captured in its mirror.

In addition, lush, forested mountains were perched in the background. Growing up, Mao was surrounded by natural beauty. The town of Shaoshan looks like any Chinese town. It has an array of hair salons and shops, small and compact, but with an occasional restaurant open door that reveals large wall posters of their homegrown hero.

We drove for about an hour and then we hit the cars. Before we saw any structure or anything Mao, we threaded through thousands of cars, crawling to the back of the massive parking lot for about ten minutes. Eventually, we approached a large building that is the gift shop, our first stop.
The gift shop had a large bronze bust of Mao in the back of the reception area. Some Chinese tourists formed a line in front of it, taking turns bowing their heads in respect, much like Christians genuflect for the crucifix.

In the second large room, there were cases of every kind of Mao-mobilia imaginable. There were Mao commemorative plates and Mao portraits, Mao clocks and Mao watches, bronze Mao busts and Mao medallions, Moa videos and Moa books, Mao cigarette cases and Mao lighters, Mao hats and Mao necklaces, Mao golden wallet cards and Mao playing cards. I looked for a Mao bobble head, but I couldn’t find it. But it’s probably better that they didn’t have one (he supposedly died of Parkinson’s disease).

After the guide gave a wonderful speech I didn’t understand, we made our way up an inclined road lined with shop stands, where more Moa-mobilia could be had. They had old communist propaganda posters of rosy-checked chubby children in various poses with insane smiles on their faces. They had Mao’s Little Red Book, the collection of phrases and wisdom from the Chairman himself. The book’s contents were seen as the undisputed truth since its inception until his death.

In addition, you could purchase small wooden swords, slingshots, metal massage balls, Chinese hand fans and a curious Chia-pet-like clay figurine in the shape of a small boy with his pants down. If you poured hot water on him, a stream of water would shoot out of the small nub jutting out of his crotch. I had no idea what this had to do with Mao Zedong. Perhaps this was his favorite toy as a child or even as a grown man. Or it could mean that even the holiest of China’s Communist shrines is infected with shameless capitalism. But I prefer the toy theory.

After the shop stands, we went up a mountain. It was hot that day but the scenery was beautiful, with bamboo forests and mists, and Mao always stressed physical exercise throughout his life. But instead, we came upon a ski lift and before that, a massive line, where hundreds of people stared, pushed and sweated on each other. But the view was almost worth the wait. At the top, we could see the town of Shaoshan and Mao’s abode, but there was also a Taoist temple atop it. It was a modest temple but a temple nonetheless with gold shrines and many-handed gods. You had to climb several steps with fortune-tellers camped out along your ascent, ready to engage in “superstitions” that Mao fought so hard to snuff out.

But it was only appropriate that Mao and Tao were right next to each other. In China, and particularly in Shaoshan, people have been known to pray to both. The government has gone to great lengths to break up Maoist temples, where Mao is depicted as a halo-crowned Buddhist saint or a Chinese folk god bestowing wealth.

Marxism has always had elements of a pseudo-religion but with the decay of its Marxist ideology, what was left was Mao’s personality cult. His cult presented him as an enemy of landowners, businessmen, and Western imperialists, as a champion of the poor, peasants and workingmen, as infallible as the pope or even more so. If you disagreed with the pope, you might go to hell. If you disagreed with Mao, you definitely spent 5-10 in a labor camp. In the 1980’s, the cult slowly morphed into a real fringe religion: history’s fantastic joke on a man who made atheism China’s official religion.

Next we came down the ski lift and visited Mao Zedong’s childhood home. You would think the great proletariat leader would have some humble beginnings; the poorer, the better. But no. Mao lived in a wealthy peasant home built in the 1880’s. It was made of mud brick, containing five rooms. It had a thatched roof with a large goldfish pond cattycorner to the house. I remember because I stared at it for a long time, as people stared at me, waiting in the massive sea of people.

However, while we were waiting in the line, our line neighbor started a conversation with us in impeccable English. She introduced herself and then introduced the two teenagers with her.

“This is my niece and my son. They will be your interpreters. Their English is very good like mine. If you have any questions ask them.”

They were on vacation from Xiamen, one of the biggest free trade economic zones in China. I talked to the boy primarily, who was gangly and extremely shy in a Nike hat. He was in Shaoshan as a birthday present for his uncle, who wanted to see Mao’s home. His uncle was middle aged, the right age for this level of devotion to the Chairman. It was the people who came of age from 1965 to 1977, the age of the Red Guards, at whom Mao aimed his cult of personality.

The boy initially only translated his uncle, who droned on about how great Mao was, how hardworking and diligent as a young child, how he helped his mother and father. As we entered the house, we saw Mao’s parents’ dusty bed where Mao was probably conceived (unless his parents were more adventurous). Some signs described his father as a “crackerjack farmer,” industrious and a shrewd businessman. Meanwhile, his mother was devoted to her family. Mao often helped her do housework and helped his father in the field as an exemplar of filial piety. The boy told me all this, besides the conception part, and he seemed bored to death.

Then I asked him what he thought of Chairman Mao. Whenever I ask Chinese people this question, I get a variety of responses. Most people tip toe around the subject. In Conversation Corner in Shaoxing, some third year students said, “Well, he is good and bad” but one boy piped up, “He was a dictator!” There was an awkward silence, until he quietly said, “I mean, that’s what some people say.” Other people follow the communist official line, which states that Chairman Mao was “30% wrong, 70% right.” Though they don’t say which 70 percent.

But the boy was unequivocal about Mao. “We need another Chairman Mao,” he said. “The rich have so much and the poor have so little. Too many rich and too many poor.” That was certainly true, especially in a free market city like Xiamen. I didn’t fill him in on the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward. I wanted him to have his heroes.

Soon after, we were separated in the crowd and then our tour bus was leaving. I was disappointed that I didn’t get to see more of Maoland. We spent so much time waiting that we had to rush through everything. But maybe his home and mythology are really best viewed as a blur, as the surreal experiences they are.
Next, we visited the childhood home of Liu Shaoqi, the president of China in the 1960’s. This was a relief because it seemed a bit saner, except on the wall was a large plaque that commanded in both Chinese and English: SPEAK PUTONGHUA (which is the official Mandarin language). I spoke English to see if anything would happen. I was safe, for now.

There was less propaganda surrounding Liu’s life. The propaganda involved was more to repair the damage done by Mao Zedong. The farmhouse was more modest than Moa’s house but it was pretty much the same. Then you had subsequent rooms with artifacts from his life with plaques that told his story; of Liu’s rise in the communist party; how he fought alongside Mao during the civil war and eventually made the transition from soldier to statesman. You could gaze at the communist manuals he poured over, dog-eared and worn. You saw his letters from studying in the Soviet Union. The tools he used as a university trained engineer. His gun in the war. And letters to cadres in the new government; Pictures of his rise to the presidency. And then, the plaques broached a very delicate subject.

He opposed Mao’s policies in the Great Leap Forward, when ill applied economic collectivism and faulty planning caused mass starvation. At least 20 million people died. After the full scale of the catastrophe was revealed, Liu and Deng Xioapeng took over most of the responsibilities of the government, with Mao’s role reduced to figurehead. Liu then applied economic reforms in the capitalist vein, breaking up the collectivization and increasing incentive for individual production. China began to slowly recover. But Mao disliked his current curtailed position, so he initiated the Cultural Revolution. He encouraged young people to criticize communist cadres, trying to root out “capitalist roaders;” in other words, his opponents. He fingered Liu as one of the main culprits, along with Deng Xiaoping.

One day, Liu came home to his living room walls painted in denunciations. He and his wife were forced to make self-criticism and beaten with belt buckles and Little Red Books by the Red Guards. Eventually, they disappeared. Mao once again assumed leadership in what would be one of the bleakest times in Chinese history. Liu was later confined to a labor camp, where he was de facto murdered in 1969, dying from untreated diabetes and pneumonia. In a move that would do Kafka proud, his death wasn’t announced until ten years later.

All the plaques say in the Liu Shaoqi museum was that he died in the “turmoil” of the Cultural Revolution. That is the CCP’s go-to word in describing events to which they don’t want to attribute a causal agent. It’s a brilliant neutral word, one that they would also use for Tiananmen Square. For instance, “Billy, did you just hit your brother? No, it was the turmoil.” Liu was betrayed by his colleague and friend. His most famous work was “How to be a Good Communist.” From what I can tell, that’s just what he was.

Back in Changsha, Natalie and I decided we’d had enough of communism for the day. We decided to go back to our roots and engage in some consumerism. We went out to dinner and did some shopping. I looked at some pirated DVDs at a vendor’s stand. Then, we went to a bar called “Friends.” In the middle of mainland China, in the cradle of communism, in a dirty city surrounded by rice paddies and farmland, was a bar solely devoted to the TV sitcom, “Friends.” I stared at the idiot smiles of Joey and Chandler; Phoebe and Ross; Monica and Rachael. I walked in. No one was there. Good.

It was at another bar when I realized that my cell phone was not in my pocket. I checked again thinking that perhaps my hand was confused and still, no phone. Gandalf was right. I didn’t watch my cell phone. I retraced my steps. I had it when I got out of the cab to go to the restaurant and the only other place I sat down at was my current seat. So someone must have stolen it in between those times. Then, I remembered how I carelessly looked at the DVDs, lured by the promise of cheap piracy, my pockets exposed to any nimbly-fingered street urchin. I felt powerless and angry. The life I had built the past three months, all the friends I had made, all their numbers were in that cell phone. With it lost, they were lost and I could do nothing.

But another part of me was impressed. How in the hell did he steal my cell phone? It was in my pocket, right next to a small notebook. My pockets are usually a tight fit because I carry so much stuff around. I don’t know how he managed to squeeze a cell phone out of it. If I met him again, I would first give him props. Then, I’d beat his ass.

The next day, I was still disturbed about my cell phone. It seemed such a meaningless crime, destroying someone’s social network like that. I was looking for answers. Maybe I’ve been in China too long, but I decided to find them where any good communist is to find answers: I went back to Mao Zedong.

We visited Mao’s college, called Hunan No. 1 Teacher’s College. Mao attended from age 17 to 22, and returned as its principle from 1922 to 1924. It’s still an active college, with thousands of students, but the section where Mao studied was turned into a museum. Mao’s old school was basically a large courtyard surrounded by classrooms on all sides, which now house Mao-ian artifacts. They had a dusty room with an array of small wooden desks, one of which is the desk where Mao sat. I guessed that the one with the plaque on it was Mao’s. He wasn’t a front sitter. It was toward the back. He probably did a lot of plotting back there.

Mao studied philosophy, politics and Chinese literature. Evidence of his accomplishments was strewn throughout the other rooms. There was a picture of him as a teenager, scholarly, dignified and confident. There was a painting of Mao as an enlightened teacher, holding court to enthralled students like an Asian Socrates. I wonder what would have happened if Mao would have just stayed that way. It was at this school where I tied to bridge the gap: how did Mao go from the ideal son of his childhood Hunan home to the ruthless Machiavellian backstabber instrumental in the demise of Liu Shaoqi?

It was Thomas Carlyle who said of great historical figures: “Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.” I think you could argue that this college made him. It was here that Mao transformed from a curious farm boy into a burgeoning revolutionary. It was here that Mao learned of China’s past glory and recent century of shame, where they forfeited much of their power to imperialist interests, including the Japanese. They were ruled by the corrupt and ineffectual Qing Dynasty, which was powerless to stop the invaders. At the beginning of the century, the court expected tribute from the rest of the world. At the end, they would be paying tribute to the rest of the world. Here, he learned about possible reforms and modernizations that could free China from its trappings of superstitions and backward customs, where tradition ruled before logic. It was here where he first preached the saving graces of communism and it was here where he participated in the first communist uprising. How exciting this place must have been.

But as we continued on the grounds, we saw a ramshackle well with a sign that said that Mao enjoyed coming here to take cold showers “to improve his vitality and strengthen his will.” And then as you read on, the personality cult appears and you can’t separate man from myth. Even the act of showering is used for political purposes, as proof that he is an exemplar figure. Similar to Mao’s childhood home, I’m not sure that he would be happy with what was happening. Students were walking through the home of Chinese communism, wearing designer shirts and beauty-salon hairstyles. In a place where Mao railed against imperial influence, the students were all wearing shirts with English words. I saw a dog with an American flag leash. Times changed.

From my visit to Mao’s school, I surmise that my thief stole my cell phone because he was poor and needed money, a situation that has been created by bourgeois imperialist reactionary capitalist roaders and because there is no God. I understand now.

After visiting Mao’s school, we had decided that we had enough of Mao and also enough of Hunan. We wanted to go home. After a trip to Wal-Mart to get some much needed Sam Adams beer, we went to the train station to get our tickets back to Shaoxing. We were afraid that we wouldn’t be able to communicate to the teller that we wanted two sleeping car tickets but luckily, a student from Changsha University offered his services.

It was amazing. During this whole trip, whenever we were in need of help, there was someone to help us. We didn’t even have to ask. Steven was right. The people in Hunan just seemed to have this helping attitude. They were friendlier too. Usually in Shaoxing, when we walk down the street, at least five people will shout, “Haaaahh-loooooo!” at us, saying the o’s in a higher tone than the rest, rising to mock us. But in Hunan, even the Hellos were different. They were less drawn out and they did not contain that mocking higher tone. They were more genuine greetings, like they were happy we were here.

With our tickets in hand, we went outside by a fountain to wait for our train to board. We decided to crack open a few Sam Adams and started some light conversation with some business people as we tried to enjoy our last moments of Changsha. It was then that the first beggar came around, a woman in her thirties, with a big eyed little boy that couldn’t have been three years old, munching on an apple too big for his mouth. I gave her a couple of yuan and she moved down the line. We saw her again, orbiting the fountain, a pitiful planet and her poor little moon. She put her plastic cup in front of our faces again, asking for more money. Natalie felt terrible for the little boy and gave her forty yuan, which was still only about five dollars but a hefty sum in China. She made another revolution around the fountain and asked for more money. We refused her the third time.

But soon, they all came. They came on parade, the armless, the legless, the lazy and disfigured, marching past, rolling past, one after another. I felt like that scene in toy story when Buzz Lightyear and Woody are trapped in the deranged adolescence’s room and they see all his experiments. They came on wheeled carts, men and women, their legs cut off, pushing themselves with identical wooden blocks and a tin cup on their thighs. I gave them money. Then, a woman with a badly set brace on her left leg, just a metal bar sticking out of her, pins in the bone and her on the cart. I gave her some money. The man next to me said, “Oh, you give so much” but I was still only giving each person 20 or 40 cents.

Then, I ran out of change and I had no more small bills. I needed the rest of my money for another train ticket and for food along the way. Right before our train boarded, a woman approached with coarse burns all over her face and body. Her mouth hung open, exposing her jumbled teeth. Her eyes oscillated from side to side, a key sign of brain damage. She wore a blue t-shirt with two stumps coming out of the sleeves. One stump balanced a picture of her in a hospital bed, covered with bloody bandages and a look of anguish on her face, and the other stump balanced a tin bowl. I had just spent 40 RMB on beer. She could live on that for a week.

On the train ride home, it was mostly uneventful. I learned some Chinese from a jolly, old woman, who was probably about 70. She looked in my Chinese-English travel book, looking at the characters and telling me how to pronounce it. It was fine when she stuck to things like colors or food but then she moved onto a page about the human body. She grabbed my head and said “tao;” grabbed my thigh and said “kua;” hit my chest and said “xiong.” And then, she pinched my nipple. I don’t remember what she said for that one. All I remember is thinking: my nipple is being pinched by a Chinese grandma.

But mostly I just thought about what we had seen on our trip and the man of the weekend, Mao. I admit I look at him through western eyes. The West often looks at him as a monster. And yes, the death of millions of people can be linked directly to him and his policies. But to call him a monster is to make the same mistake as the members of his personality cult, who hallow his name. He was good and bad. He was human.

During this trip, I was trying to see him through Chinese eyes. I tried to understand why someone would feel honor and glory toward him: to see him as a hero, as he kicked out the corrupt Kuomintang and the avaricious imperialist powers; How he made the Chinese proud to be Chinese again; How not all of his great personality is cult; How the man really did achieve some great things; How he fought a bloody war for 22 years in the mountains, longer than his hero, George Washington; How he led his troops on the Long March, escaping annihilation, to defeat the Nationalists in the civil war; How you could feel the initial hope as he proclaimed an age of modernity and progress, with widespread literacy, healthcare, education and industrialization programs. And I can certainly share his hope for a more equal society, where the rich don’t run the government and where the most vulnerable citizens can get government checks or even jobs, instead of empty tin bowls.

But I can also understand their shame: The disappointment when his “Great Leap Forward” was into a chasm; His dreams of equality turning into paranoid nightmares, where keeping a death grip on power was more important than building a civil society, with his various campaigns aimed at purging the party of any dissidents or rivals; How he was the soldier who never quite stopped fighting the war. The scores of people rotting in jail for the ideas in their heads; The destruction wrought on thousands of China’s invaluable historical sights by his Red Guards; The violent retention of power from a man whose reality refused to go according to plan. Maybe he should have learned from his hero. Washington resigned after two terms. They called him the Great Helmsman but he steered the country into some pretty big icebergs.

All of that is history now. The Chinese children I see everyday, the well-fed ones with little red stick-on stars on their foreheads, the ones that now actually do look like the children featured on the propaganda posters from fifty years ago, will learn some version of it. My country’s children, with their homes and bodies now outfitted with Chinese-made products, will learn some version of it. Maybe we can put those two versions together, and come up with something very much like the truth and actually learn something from it. Or maybe we’ll have to wait for the Hunan hills to do their work and one day, we can stare at his Little Red Book with as much fascination as the Empress’s make-up box.

Baoying: Karma in China

2007-09-09T18:23:00.000-07:00

Growing-up, I was the worst foreign language student ever.

Granted, the German language didn’t exactly entrance me with its guttural throat-gurgles, its references to lederhosen and various-sized sausages and its history of being the official language of the Nazi Party. What little interest I did take in the language rested on its speakers’ fine tradition of beer and their beautiful women that served it. But for the most part, I wasn’t interested.

And it showed. In eighth grade, I was kicked out of German class at least twice a week. In high school, I spent most of my class time making Hitler, schnitzel and Hitler-schnitzel related jokes. I interrupted, skipped, goofed-off and spaced-out in class. I threw spit-balls, played calculator games and copied my homework. I only paid attention when I could goad my teacher, Mr. Gerhardt, into telling us about the time he “was in Nam.” I would cheat off the smart kid during tests and only learn a grammar point when I was failing. By 12th grade, I was applying to colleges so I tried to get my act together. But I was too far behind. During my final, when I had to give a speech, Mr. Gerhardt stopped me in the middle. “Alright, Trapp. How many points do you need for a B?”

I committed all my crimes without the knowledge that one day, I would be a foreign language teacher. I would like to take this time to tell Mr. Gerhardt: I am sorry. Really really sorry. Karma is a bitch.

In February of 2006, I was assigned to teach English Writing and Business Writing to 200 Chinese students at Shangyu Teacher’s College in Shangyu, China. I was given no instructions or briefings. The teachers just handed me an inadequate textbook and opened the door. “Now, teach,” they might have said. The problem was, I only knew how to be a student. I had to discover how to be a teacher.

I started with the rudiments of writing: Concentrating on words, then sentences, moving on to paragraphs and eventually, essays. I had high expectations for my students. This was college, after all. I thought we could debate topics that were important to them. I thought we could have heated class discussions in which I would give my opinion and they would give theirs. I thought by them writing me essays, I would have unfettered access to their thoughts. I thought wrong.

My biggest problem was that many didn’t speak the language in which I was teaching them. When I asked an average student a question, the student would typically look at me confused. He or she had two options: stare at the ground like a shamed puppy until I moved on, or turn to one of the better students in the class for interpretation and/or answer. While the student usually chose the latter, it was a bit awkward when the question was about a personal preference. “How does that girl know if you like Rock music or not?”

The lack of English also made it difficult to talk about complex or deep issues. Most of them didn’t have the vocabulary. If you remain in China for long enough, only speaking English with non-native speakers, you begin to think that the people around you are stupid. You can only have so many conversations about which cities in China are “famous and delicious.” But that’s not true. They aren’t stupid, or at only about as stupid as Americans. They just don’t have the words to express themselves.

But many also didn’t have the desire. Their shyness stymied much possible progress. The students were naturally shy. In fact, in China, it’s cool to be shy. When I asked the coolest of boys a question, he would shake his head and say, “I am shy,” as if he had just taken a drag off a cigarette. However, shyness is not so cool in language class where much of your learning comes from practice.

Apathy was the other culprit. And who could blame them. By the time they got to me, my students were so burnt out on school, the last thing they wanted to do was write papers. The male students were typically the most apathetic and consequently, the worst. Once, I assigned a worksheet to one of the business classes but saw a group of boys just sitting there.

“Why aren’t you working?” I asked.

“They boys are lazier than the girls.”

“I don’t care. Get to work.”

“We will do it later.”

Of course, they didn’t do it later. And they had good reason. As males, they would probably get better jobs than most of the girls who were working, so why work now?
I tried to wake my students out of their shy and apathetic slumber by being a little tough. When I had the students work in groups, I would walk around the room listening for any Chinese. When I heard the Chinese, I would smack the culprit on the head with a rolled-up newspaper and yell, “Speak English.” Maybe I even became an asshole. One class nicknamed me, “The Tiger.”

But then, one day in the English office, I came across a picture that scared the crap out of me. It was of my fresh-faced education students, smiling with toothy grins and making peace signs in two rows. They looked like they were on a field trip.

But as I looked closer, I noticed they were all wearing camouflage fatigues and then I remembered that two fingers up actually means victory in non-western countries. One girl cradled a semiautomatic assault shotgun and another girl had her hat tilted sideways, giving her a spunky look, which compliments her spunky submachine gun. The boys were in the back, their skinny faces and skinny automatic machine guns barrels peaking out over their classmates’ ponytails. And two best friends grasped a black pistol, their fingers in tandem on the trigger, and smiling like they were posing for a picture at a sleepover. When I asked what this picture was about, my teacher friend said that it was of their freshmen year military training. I wondered how many of my students were proficient in semi-automatic rifles. I decided to be nicer.

Next, I tried entertainment. I consider myself a pretty entertaining guy. And after awhile, I think the students did too. I added little things to make the class more fun. Because students wouldn’t voluntarily answer a question, I had to call on them. I did this with a name sheet and something I called “the finger of death.” My finger would make ostentatious swoops and flamboyant wiggles, as the students sat on the edge of their seats to see who it would land on. I incorporated little jokes about boyfriends and girlfriends; stuff they were sure to laugh at, which brings me to my next problem.

Generally speaking, my students were immature. I was supposed to be teaching college. All of them were at least 19 but many of them acted like they were still in early high school or even middle school. Any references to boyfriends and girlfriends would send them giggling and squealing like schoolgirls half their age (yes, even the boys). Any talk of babies being born would send them into a frenzy.

I marveled at their lack of experience, especially when compared with college students from my own country. Most of my students had never gotten drunk. Most had never set foot outside Zhejiang province or even been to the sea shore. Most had never held a part-time job. Most had never had a boyfriend or a girlfriend. They had spent all their lives studying. Not given time to exorcize their teenage angst while in high school, many of my students were still in full swing, moping to class only to stare hatefully at me, their authority figure, which brings me to the next problem.

The more I taught, the more my authority eroded. First, my costume changed. When I first started teaching, I tried to feign authority by dressing the professorial part. But the hotter it got, the less willing I was to don my dress shirt, tie and leather elbow-patched sports coat. I still carried around a pipe in case of emergencies, but for the most part, my cover was blown.

And the more I taught, the more I learned that the students didn’t really want a teacher. Almost every class, I would get requests to “Sing a song!” or “Do a dance!” Many students were barely alive unless we were playing an oral English game. I tried to start off the beginning of every class by playing a game but even this seemed to spoil them. When I would try to teach something substantive, like a grammar point, they would complain, “We want to play game!” When I would satiate some students, others would complain, “This game stupid. We not children!”

I realized that the foreign language teacher’s job is a combination of one part actual teacher, one part dancing monkey. The students didn’t want a strict, boring teacher. They had enough of them in their regular classes. My job was to teach them, yes, and also to speak so that they get my inflection and pronunciation, but a major part of my job was to entertain them.

And I slowly learned that’s what the administration wanted too. When I complained to my fellow teachers, they said, “The foreign teacher should be fun.” They wanted someone to get the students excited about English. And they wanted someone who looked extremely white, so that other students might want to attend Shangyu. That’s why they didn’t give me any advice on what to teach. They didn’t care.

As for what I did teach, I had mixed results. For debates, I was largely unsuccessful. They had the vocabulary but they weren’t used to thinking critically. Foreign teachers sometimes refer to it as “one China, one mind.” And while that’s not entirely true, it was very hard to get them to publicly disagree with one another. Debates about “What is more important, Love or Money” would have 37 people arguing against three or, more realistically, one person arguing against another person and the rest watching. Then the argument would break down to “marrying for love or money has two sides. It is not good or bad.”

Their essays were equally difficult. I was originally going to have them write thesis statements but eventually, I settled for topic sentences. It became my sole mission for each student to know what a topic sentence was and how to write one. Some students had it right away, but others I had to write, week after week, paper after paper: Topic Sentence. Topic Sentence. T-o-p-i-c S-e-n-t-e-n-c-e.

Every week, I railed against their garbage phrases, such as “and so on,” “on balance,” “until now,” “as is known to all,” and “in a word.” Whenever I would assign a paper, it would mean hours of grading the next week. By the end of the week, after reading so many broken sentences, so much bad grammar, their writing began to creep into my head. I would say things like “I go store now. You like?” It sounded like a Chinglish computer virus had borrowed its way into my brain.

Sometimes, the essays were hilarious. I had beautifully constructed comic gems. A brief sample: 1) On the challenges of women and work: “She deals with barriers to have a career to widen her horrison, to outdate her mind and suck.” 2) On a woman staying at home: “The love between the husband and wife will be more treacly.” 3) On Hardship: “First, it is commonly known to us that life is not all beer and skittles.” 4: On equality: “Women can do some jobs better. Women’s fingers are more slender so they can type better.” 5) On sharks: “I saw a picture of a shark in the magazine. From it, I know that sharks can be tender, like a gentle girl.”

The essays were not always bad. Sometimes the essays were good. Sometimes the essays were better than I remember reading in my Freshman College English class. I got slices of Chinese life: growing up on a farm in the countryside, reckless first loves, beloved grandparents or beloved dogs and their ill-timed deaths and critiques of the Chinese education system.

While some of the essays were good, some were too good. Plagiarism is widespread in Chinese Universities, particularly in foreign language classes. It is not looked upon as particularly bad. If I plagiarized in college, I would be suspended or even expelled. But in China, plagiarism is treated as a naughty, little habit. The teachers just say, “You Guys!” and make them do it again.

I found plagiarism particularly galling. What angered me most was not so much that the students cheated, it was that they cheated so badly. The worst example was when I had them write a review for the movie, Shawshank Redemption.

I don’t think it’s possible to dislike Shawshank Redemption. If you could assemble 15 people in a room who dislike Shawshank Redemption, I would give you 50 dollars. And then I would give you 75 dollars more to brutally beat them because Shawshank Redemption is an amazing movie and everyone should like it. My students were lucky. Everyone loved Shawshank Redemption. They didn’t want to particularly voice why they liked it, but they liked it.

The next week they were to turn in a review of the movie, giving a brief plot summary and their thoughts on different aspects of the movie. Because the subtitles were in Chinese, that should have been easy. But few people actually did what I wanted. Most just summarized the movie, which was fine. But several students copied from on-line reviews and the same badly-written one at that. In the space of one paragraph, students would go from misspelling their own names to giving in-depth critiques about the movie’s cinematography, the career of Tim Robbins and the film’s biblical themes. By the powers of Google, I busted them.

What made me angry was not that they cheated. I expected that. What made me angry was that they didn’t put in any effort. I just wanted my students to try, whether it was trying to learn or trying to trick me into thinking they’d learn. I’m not that smart. I don’t think I was asking too much. I expect the same thing from my students as I do from my government. You can cheat me, but at least do the work to trick me.

However, I did have a redeeming moment. When I passed the student’s papers back, they were to also show me their outline for their next essay. It could be on any topic they wanted. When I passed back one cheater’s paper, I looked at her topic. It was “Why Honesty is always the best policy.” I stopped everything and defined irony right on the spot.

To be fair, some of my students were fantastic. Some of them were brilliant. Some were amazing. Some could discourse on modern China, were virtual encyclopedias of American movie quotes and constructed compelling essays and personal stories on every assignment. Some of my students were so good at English, I wondered what they were doing at Shangyu at all. How were they in the same class with the boy who could hardly speak a sentence and drooled on himself a little?

The answer lies in the inefficiency of the college examination system. The Chinese love standardized tests. They should. They invented them. The examination system goes back thousands of years. They developed the first standardized test based on merit, called the imperial exam. Most of the learning was by rote. You had to memorize a ridiculous amount of Confucian text and weave it seamlessly into your arguments. Institutions were set up for the sole purpose of helping scholars pass the Jinshi exam, which was the highest examination and the gateway to the best government jobs.

China’s imperial examination system perpetuated the ruling social class and their overeducated sons, but it also provided some wiggle room for social mobility. Technically, any male could take the exam. If you were smart enough, all you had to do was study hard and one day, you would be rich. In reality, a peasant would rarely become a bureaucrat. But sometimes, he would. One test could change a life.

The University exam is the modern version of the imperial examination. The exam tests three main categories: Chinese, Math and a foreign language, usually English. Then, students have the option of taking either the Science portion (Biology, Physics and Chemistry) or the Humanities portions: (History, Geography and Politics). All applicants to university take the examination, which numbered at 9.5 million in 2006. The problem is there are only about 2.5 million university places.

That puts immense pressure on students. The pressure starts to mount at about age 10 when it’s on them to get into the best senior middle school and again at age 15 when they need to make it into the best high school, the ones that can best “teach the test.” The students spend most of their waking hours either at school or studying. Parents pressure students to forsake social lives, romantic relationships and hobbies all for a three-day period in the summer when they’re 18; the days of the National College Examination.

Like the Imperial Examination, the National College Examination changes lives. It also ruins them. Many of my students probably considered their lives ruined or at least severely limited. Most of them did not do well. Their school, Shangyu Teacher’s College, was only teacher training school and did not grant Bachelor Degrees. It was not what they spent their lives studying for. Most were training to be primary school English teachers, but they would be in constant danger of losing their jobs to more qualified teachers. Many of their life stories included the line, “I was a happy girl until I took the college examination…and now I’m here.”

The problem is that universities in China only consider one score. In America, college admission depends on more variables. You can get into a good college if you have good grades or are involved in theater or community service. But in China, who cares about your 10 year academic record or what kind of person you are?

In America, critics often cry that we are not teaching our kids enough hard math and science, that we need more standardized tests to measure progress. But in China, they have the opposite problem. It teaches kids to memorize for tests, not critically think for themselves. It teaches them to mindlessly follow rules instead of be creative. It teaches them to study, not how to develop as a person. All of that had a cumulative effect, resulting in the dead silences that accompanied my classes each week.

But talking with a 47-year-old mother at a party one night, she told me: “Oh, but it is so much better,” she said. “The children, they study all the time. But it is so much better than before.”

After the communists took over in 1949, they had to figure out how to rebuild the education system. The national examination hadn’t been implemented for years because of China’s bloody string of wars. The Communists went about educating the masses and once again implemented the national examination.

But just like it changed everything else, the Cultural Revolution changed education. Mao Zedong was distrustful of intellectuals so naturally, he disabled their power base. Access to higher education ceased to be based on merit. Instead, it was based on political correctness. Those who had the right thought and came from the right social background (peasants, factory workers, military) were chosen over those who were the best students. The leaders at the time also changed what the students learned: only Math and Chinese. They ensured the justification of the regime by reducing education to internal logic and the language in which to wrap it.

The result on higher education was devastating. Comprehensive universities closed and specialized engineering training schools proliferated. You had a whole generation of people who were educated, but its quality was so low that they might as well not have been. Members of Mao Zedong’s student organization, The Red Guards, were not so much educated as brainwashed. When the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death, one of the first steps of the reform was to revitalize the education system. My students were products of that revitalization. But they still had a long way to go.

In my students’ defense, they did have many other classes to prepare for. And there was a lot of other things to do. They had spent so much time studying in middle school and high school that most of them were unfamiliar with leisure time. Now, in college, they had time to play basketball and go window-shopping. They had time to watch movies and go on dates. College was more than studying. It was also a time to grow-up a little. They had to manage their own money, time and futures. Their parents were no longer lording over them, micromanaging their lives. And here I was, giving them homework. I was supposed to be the fun foreign teacher. I wasn’t a real teacher. Who did I think I was?

We did have some great classes. When that happened, I no longer taught them. They taught me.

In one class, I was showing them how to write an outline. We started talking about American stereotypes. My students listed the ones you would expect: humorous, fast-paced, hard-working, crazy about guns, violent, high crime and fat.

One student suggested, “Stupid.” I asked her to explain: “I don’t know how to say but the American will leave their job. They have a good job to make much money but they will quit the job just because they like to. They do what they like, without looking at what they have in reality.”

I understood her. Many Americans tend to look at a job as a source of self-fulfillment while the Chinese tend to look at work as a way to support a family. When Chinese students hear about people in America leaving a job where they make above $50K a year to pursue their “dream,” they laugh. Many Chinese people would love to have that job. There is an ingrained practicality very much on the psyche of my students; a practicality from living in a place that is still a developing country.

When I asked my students who wanted to be a teacher, 20 girls might have raised their hands. Others wanted to be business people in international trade but they didn’t really care what they did. They just wanted to be “white collar.” All my other students want to be something else: doctors, lawyers, writers, singers, psychologists or scientists. And each time, I heard the same response. “But it is impossible.” That is one definite difference between America and China. In China, there are more limits, more restrictions on the possible. It forces them to be more accepting of how things are. Even though they giggle about boyfriends and girlfriends, in a way, they are more mature than their American counterparts.

But the important part was, they were expecting more than their parents ever did. Many of their parents were farmers or factory workers. Many students complained that their parents worked all the time or even in an entirely different province, forcing their grandparents to raise them. Talking to one of the young teachers at Shangyu, the man said, “The generation gap is very large. The older generation, my parents and the student’s parents, they always sacrifice for the welfare of the children. They always save money so we can go to school and have a better life.” Now, the current generation wants that better life.

No matter how much better things had become, some things still really were impossible. A test you take when you are 18 really can determine the rest of your life. Although the expanding business sector is opening up opportunities for people who wouldn’t otherwise have them, the common view in China is that the examination system and university is still the pathway to social mobility. Add that to the fact that if you don’t know the right people or aren’t the right sex, your prospects will be further limited. While also somewhat true in America, those two factors contain more truthiness in China. The idea of a self-made man is still very much American. Most of my discontented students were resigned to future jobs they didn’t really want.

But there was one student who wanted to shape his future. His English name was Thomas. I initially hated Thomas because he was the first one to cheat on a paper, copying a terrible essay out of our terrible textbook (as if I wouldn’t read our own textbook), entitled “Why Studying is like Eating.” I was disappointed too because he was one of the best speakers in the class and seemed bright. Then, in the fourth week, he sent me an e-mail: “I want to know some information about the GRE.” Tomas’ dream was to earn a degree from an American University.

I tried to help Thomas the best I could. I understood Tomas’s ambition. Getting an American degree was a golden ticket to a high-paying job. I forwarded him some websites with practice tests. A week later, he wrote: “I thought you only had to get a good grade on the GRE. I didn’t know about everything else. I think it is impossible.” The hard part was, Thomas was probably right. To study abroad, you need a good grade on the GRE, which Thomas most likely wouldn’t get with his limited language skills, as well as a visa which is extremely difficult to get, and a lot of money.

But still, I rooted for him. I told him that with some persistence, hard work and luck, he might study abroad. If he quit trying, he never would. After that, he became one of my best students.

I liked Thomas. He had opinions. When I asked the class about American stereotypes, he said “No human rights.” When it came time to chose essay topics, he proposed, “Why the USA says they have human rights but in fact, this is a lie.” His alternative topic was, “What is more important: school or major?” reflecting his self-consciousness about going to a crappy school. I told him to pick the former. I was interested in what he had to say.

One afternoon, Thomas invited me for lunch at his family’s apartment in a nearby city. I accepted. After morning classes in Shangyu, I caught a bus with Thomas.
On the way, we talked. He was a thin-faced, nervous young man with a crooked smile. We talked about OSU, which he knew was one of the biggest schools in America. “Many foreigners go there, right?”

“Yes,” I assured him. “It’s a good school.”

We talked of class and I mentioned the student malaise. “Yes, the students think writing is very boring. You are not to blame. We need to improve our Oral English.”
He peppered me with the usual questions such as “How do you like China so far?” “Why do you come to China” and “Can you use chopsticks?” But eventually, he noticed the large book I was clutching, called, “The Search for Modern China,” a book about Modern Chinese History by Jonathan Spence. I said I like Chinese history very much.

“Yes, many Western people are interested in Chinese history. They study it in their home and come here to look for themselves. It has very disturbances.”

“Yes,” I said. “I think the word they use is ‘turmoil.’”

He asked if he could look through it. We looked at pictures of the communists fighting the nationalists and the communists delivering food to poor peasants. We saw pictures of Mao Zedong and his clique. We saw mobs of the young holding up red books during the Cultural Revolution. I kept turning the pages, until I was almost at the end, the end that covers the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. I paused.

When you are in another country, you have to be sensitive to the native people’s history and feelings. I didn’t want to rub the incident in his face, my only student who voiced opinions, but if he insisted on saying America had no human rights, I wanted to see his response to his own country’s violations. I turned the page. I showed him the jubilant students gathered in the square, dancing around a faux-Statue of Liberty made out of paper-mache, making speeches and holding hands. I showed him the picture of the troops confronting the students, their guns trained on unarmed college kids. And I showed him the man standing his ground in front of a tank. I expected him to repeat some official line like, “They were disturbing the stability of the nation” or “They deserve what they got for trying to overthrow the government.”

But all he said was, “They are playing a joke?”
“No,” I said. “They were not.”

A 20-year-old college student didn’t know about Tiananmen Square. He looked at the date. “I have never heard about this.” I thought he had the right to know. I turned the page onto a picture of bloody bodies strewn amongst a mangled pile of bicycles. He looked away and didn’t say anything for a long time.

Eventually, he turned back to me and said, “Yes, there are many secrets that we do not know. We want to know but we don’t have the access.” He looked crestfallen and extremely uncomfortable.

I felt guilty. “Look,” I said. “I could show you equally horrible books about America.”

“Yes, I know.”

“And the Chinese also have much history to be proud of.” I frantically flipped back to the Communists feeding the people, pictures of peasants in school for the first time, women in factories doing something else besides shooting out babies. I showed him the beautiful art, the Buddhist pagodas and poet’s calligraphy.

“Yes, I know,” he said, but he quickly changed the subject. When essay time came, he didn’t write about America’s human rights. He chose his alternative topic. Even though I felt bad, it was better for him to know the truth. That’s when I realized why the United States of America is so great: I’m allowed to know how awful it is.

Near the end of the semester, I reviewed with the students about everything they learned: Outlines, introductions, topic and supporting sentences, conclusions, prepositions, articles, transitions and punctuations. I looked at my big list and looked at my students. There seemed to be such a divide between what they were supposed to know and what they did know. I felt like I had taught them nothing over the course of 14 weeks.

During the second half of the class, I decided to put my review sheet away and just talk to the students. They wanted to play a game so invented one. It was called, “Embarrass Someone.” The game goes like this: use the finger of death to call someone to the front of the class and let the class ask them whatever questions it wants.

Usually, it was “Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Really? Why do you tell a lie?”

“Ahhh!”

Or this routine was popular: “When will you have a baby?”

“Ahhh!”

But there were also some awkward moments. For instance, I called a girl up and asked her if she had ever saved anyone’s life. She misinterpreted that to mean talk about anyone’s life. So the girl talked about how her grandmother had a terrible “silk,” which I soon figured out was “sick.”

“So did you save her?” I asked.

“No,” the girl said. “She died.” An awkward silence ensued.

“My grandma is dead too,” I said. “My grandfather too.”

“Yes, me too.” She looked like she was going to cry.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes.” The sobs started.

“OK! So who’s next?”

In between embarrassing people, we also had demonstrations of Peking Opera, Chinese traditional dancing and the singing of pop songs. Then, the finger of death landed on another girl. She was small and quiet and her English wasn’t very good. I asked her what she wanted to do in the future.

“Be a teacher,” she said. Someone who actually wanted to be a teacher?

“So if you could be one thing in your life, anything at all, that’s what you would be: a teacher?”

“Yes. You may want to be famous but teacher can teach many famous people and have influence. But I feel it is impossible.”

“Why?”

“My English and study is so poor. Many people say I cannot.”

“Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t be a teacher,” I said. “If you study hard and do your best, you can be a teacher. You can do it.”

“Thank you,” she said.

I felt like I was in an after-school special. But later, the girl wrote me an e-mail saying she would remember what I said for the rest of her life and was now more determined than ever. It was weird to think that something you throw out so casually can change someone’s life. Maybe the influence of a teacher can be greater than “many famous people.”

It was almost time to go. The finger of death landed on the last person, a girl, one of my most vocal and therefore, favorite students.

“Do you have any questions for her?” I asked the class.

“Yes,” said someone from the crowd. “Will you tell Brian your mind? You have something to tell him.”

The girl in the front turned giggly and bashful and I had to give her a minute to collect herself. Then she said what I wasn’t expecting.

“I want to say you are a great teacher and very funny and we all love you very much. We hope you will come visit in the future.”

Suddenly, all my frustration seemed inconsequential. Despite everything, this was what I would remember years from now: My students and I laughing at stupid things and sharing our cultures with one another. The bored, silent faces, the immature giggles, the plagiarized papers would all blur into the background. I hope that’s how Mr. Gerhardt views me.

I thanked her.

“One more question,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Will you also tell us something about the final?”

“Like what?”

“The answers.”

Chinatown

2007-09-04T12:25:00.001-07:00

I’d like to start this blog with a quote from the movie, “Chinatown.” In the movie, Jack Nicholson plays Detective Gettis, a hardnosed gumshoe, who falls for Mrs. Mulwray, played by Faye Dunaway. During the worst of the screwed up plot involving murder, mayhem and incest, Gettis compares the situation to Chinatown, saying, “you may think you know what’s going on, but you have no idea.” If a China town can do that to Jack Nicholson, imagine what an entire country can do to me.

The best example of that quote lies in what is known as the “yes/no.” I first encountered the yes/no before I even came to China. After I agreed to work at Shaoxing University, the staff members had to get my papers approved and mail them to the US so I could apply for a Visa. Because it takes at least a month to process your visa, I thought this was no problem since I had accepted the position two months beforehand. However, the month before approached and I didn’t have the papers. I asked my contact where the papers were and she said, “Oh, we will send them very soon.” Three weeks came. “In the next two days.” Two weeks approached. “It is in the mail.” One week until departure. “It should arrive any day now.” Three days before I’m supposed to get on the plane. “Yes, we just got the papers approved today. If we fax them, I think you can still get your visa.” Because of the “yes/no,” I had to pay $200 dollars extra for a visa rush delivery.

I made my plane, but the yes/no was there to greet me. As we were about to leave Chicago on Korean Air, we heard over the loudspeaker that the flight would be delayed about 15 minutes. They had to fix part of the wing. That was fine. I’d rather they realize something is broken now, rather than while we’re in the air hurdling to our deaths. But 15 minutes passed and we didn’t board. 45 minutes later, we were told that we would wait another 15 minutes. After 5 announcements of “the plane will board in fifteen minutes” and a five hours later, we realized that we’d have to get used to the art of the yes/no.

The yes/no is the Asian indirect way of communicating. They basically aren’t allowed to say no. You would think they would then say “maybe” or “I don’t know” but they don’t. They say “yes.” This gets your hopes up and encourages you to make plans based on their answer of yes. They then wait until the most sudden and soul crushing moment to say no. Or they keep saying “yes” while acting in a “no” manner, as seen in the examples above. They may eventually act in a “yes” manner, but you have no idea when that will be. It is a constant mind-boggle. I am almost in a perpetual state of disappointment. The only good thing about it is it confounds Western businessmen when they come to China. It is their punishment for outsourcing.

When the university officials said we would move into our apartments tomorrow, I thought that meant we would spend a month in the campus hotel room and then crash at someone else’s pad for another month until maybe by the end of the semester, we might get our own rooms. But sometimes when they say yes, they actually mean yes. The next day, we moved into our apartments. I say apartments because Natalie and I are not living together. I’m not ready to live together; I’m just ready to move to China together. Plus, we’d like to still be dating after this is all over. But that’s not a good answer to the cash strapped officials, so I just said, “I don’t want to bring shame to my family,” and viola, two apartments. I’m finding that if I ever don’t want to do something, I just say “I don’t want to bring shame to my family,” and no questions asked.

My apartment was one of our first experiences of China’s male bias. My apartment is nice. On an average day, I’ll wake up in my king-sized bed in my bedroom, make breakfast in my kitchen, dine in my dining room, write in my writing room, computer in my computer room, watch T.V. in my T.V. room and laundry in my laundry room. And then, maybe I’ll go for a run…upstairs. So yeah, it’s pretty spacious.

Meanwhile, Natalie has a small hole in the cement. It’s about 1/6 the size of mine. She has two poorly insulated rooms and a hallway off to the side that serves as a kitchen. She has no shower; only a showerhead sticking out of the bathroom wall with a drain near the toilet. And the worst part is, she doesn’t even have an upstairs.

But with a great apartment comes great responsibility. For instance, what will I do with my upstairs? I doubt if there are any gay interior designers in Shaoxing. My plans include cocktail lounge, sweatshop, kung-fu dojo or the classic: opium den. But I haven’t made any contacts for opium yet.

The second major incident of male bias was when we signed the official contract. My contract stated that I would teach 12 classes, which amounts to about 9 hours of teaching time, for a period of six months. For that teaching, I would receive 4,000 RMB, which is about $500. I would receive free accommodations. I would receive an hour of Chinese lessons per week. I would even receive a bicycle free of charge. Natalie’s contract was the exact same as mine, except she would receive 500 RMB less.

There was no explanation. It was just, “yes, he will be getting more money that you,” with the implication that it’s because of my penis. Natalie immediately took offense to the slight, but I paused for a moment. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad for her to get less money than me. This could be my one and only chance to subjugate her, so I better take advantage. When in China, treat women like the Chinese do. And who knows? She might take right to it. And then we can see about getting her feet bound. One at a time to be safe. But my momma raised me right, and I fought for my women’s equality. Natalie got the 500 RMB, with 25% going to me, of course, because, after all, I am a man.

However, the university officials still treat her like she’s my pleasant accessory, rather than another foreign teacher. They called her Jane up until a couple of weeks ago. To remedy this situation, Natalie has proposed to lug around a giant dildo to all official engagements. While that might win her some respect, people may not want to shake her hand.
So with the contract signed, it was official. I am now a “foreign expert.” That’s right. I’m an expert at something. I’d often felt like an expert in the U.S., but now I had a card from the Chinese Government to prove it. No matter that I was an expert at speaking a language that I’ve been learning since my fetal brain could process sound, I think it’s more important that I’m an expert. Let’s not qualify it.

With our paperwork in order, we were ready to start teaching. We soon learned that we would not actually be teaching at the beautiful environs of Shaoxing University, but rather we would be bused 35 minutes each day to Shangyu College in a neighboring city. This was fine. At least we had a job. Plus, we met the person who would be our contact there, Ms. Celia Xia. Celia is a small, plump and cheerful Chinese woman of 26 with a ruddy face and dyed brown hair. The first thing she said to me was, “Wow. How did you get so tall?” I liked her immediately. She also spoke impeccable English, the best we’ve heard from a Chinese person yet.

I hoped she would be our mentor in the ways of teaching English to Chinese students. Remember when I said did not learn how to speak Mandarin before coming here? Well, I also failed to learn how to teach English as a foreign language. My only preparation was that I took a simple Internet course that you can finish in two weeks. You mail them $250, you diddle-shit on the Internet for a couple of hours and then they send you a certificate that you can put on your resume. It was better than nothing. Celia seemed not to have known the meager level of my preparation, for as our first teaching day approached, we hadn’t even received our textbooks. In the way of mentoring, her only piece of advice was “I’m sure you’ll do great.”

But the best part was, I was almost positive I’d do great. I’ve performed in front of hundreds of aggressive Americans before, so how bad could 40 docile Chinese people be? I was sure that I’d be the most knowledgeable expert on English in the class if not in the entire college and if I ran out of stuff to talk about, I could just make faces. I am an expert face maker on both sides of the pacific.

However, when we boarded the bus at 7:00 a.m., I was not feeling so confident. Was I really qualified to teach Chinese college students who were about my same age? Am I really an expert? I majored in English, for Christ’s sake. The only thing I’m an expert in is bullshitting and traveling 9,000 miles for a job so I don’t have to work in a seafood restaurant. What if the students see through me to the fraud that I really am? I hoped they would be so dumbfounded by my Americanness that my identity would be protected. But just in case, I decided to bolster my authority the only way I knew how: disguise. I put on an ironed dress shirt, pressed khaki slacks, black socks and a corduroy professorial sports coat, complete with leather elbow pads and doused in pipe smoke. If I wasn’t ready, I sure as hell looked ready.

When we arrived at Shangyu College, I was impressed. I was expecting, again, shanties and huts, with maybe a small building or two. I have to stop doing that. Shangyu looks like any respectable community college. It has several large teaching facilities, student dorms, basketball courts, a track and a lovely lake. There is an actual English department, with its own office, computers and several other faculty members.

We arrived just in time for the start of our new classes. I was assigned to Business Writing and English Writing, while Natalie was assigned to Business English and Oral English. I was given little introduction other than Celia pointing to a door. I opened it to reveal 40 agape Chinese faces, mostly young women, sitting in three rows, facing the blackboard. I put my book bag down and mounted the podium. I said, “Hello.” They all responded in robotic unison “Hello.” I said, “How are you.” The drone collective responded “Fine, thank you. How are you?” They would probably be really great at Simon says.

I introduced myself and talked about my family. I didn’t know how much they would understand, so I just talked slowly and tried not to use big words. But I thought I was connecting. The class gasped when I said that my brother and sister are American business people, which also happens to be my only credentials for teaching Business English. And the class almost fell out of their seats when I said my father is a brain scientist. Apparently, money and science are highly revered by the Chinese youth. I drew some awkward pictures of a cow and North America to explain where Ohio is, and I drew a picture of a wheelchair to explain my twin brother, Danny. When the class asked what he had, I knew I couldn’t explain cerebral palsy, so I just hit myself in the head. But then, they would think that Danny punched himself and that’s why he’s disabled so I just said, “Head hurt” and they nodded.

As I continued with my introduction, I thought I was really connecting. Even though we come from totally dissimilar countries, we could connect with something as common as our families. Some students nodded their heads; others had that spark of recognition in their eyes. I knew I was getting through.

During the 10-minute break, a student came up to me and said, “We have no idea what you say.” Fantastic.

Then, I told them a story replete with hand gestures, body language and sound effects about when my washing machine leaked water onto the floor, which leaked water into the apartment below me, which caused the irate, old Chinese woman from said apartment to barge into my place and proceed to wipe up the floor with my soiled underwear, all the while swearing at me in Chinese. They laughed.

Then, it was their turn. I had them introduce themselves. Many had common names like Jen, but others were more creative like Ice Cream, Money, Cookie, Essence, and Pizza. Then I had them tell me their future job and dream job and tell the class a funny story. I was interested in what the Chinese consider funny, because humor varies between cultures. As opposed to our ridiculing authority brand of Western humor, most of the students’ stories were collective-crowd pleasing, self-deprecating humor that can be summed up as “I walked into the wrong bathroom,” “I am so stupid,” and “I fell down.”

However, there were some gems. One student told of how a Christian missionary was pestering her to join the Lord and wouldn’t stop until a local man “courted her and asked her to be his girlfriend.” I think that means he hit on her. I thought that was a great story, until the student who went after her said that his future job is “whatever God tells me” and his dream job is “to make everyone I know believe in our lord and only savior, Jesus Christ.” I wanted to teach them awkward as a vocabulary word right there and then.

But all the stories were topped by an unassuming, mousy girl, who told of one holiday celebration: “My friend and I were lighting some fireworks and a large dog came and frightened us. He was louder and louder, so we threw the fireworks at him and closed out eyes and when we open them, the dog was on fire. We ran away and didn’t tell anyone for fear of dog’s owner.” I was horrified but, and here is where the China comes in, the whole class laughed.

Besides the twisted humor, I also learned that there is a greater discrepancy between what their dream jobs are and what their actual jobs will be. In the Business English class, this discrepancy is not so wide. They are China’s future business people. They all want to be wealthy CEOs or up until they find a husband. But in the regular English class, the discrepancy is enormous. All of the students are training to be teachers, but almost no one wants to be one. Of course, people want to be movie stars and one girl wanted to be a “sexy person” (?), but most have more modest dreams like businessmen, doctors, scientists and lawyers. Many hate teaching and English, but it’s a safe profession, especially for girls and their parents.

I had several students say, “I don’t like be teacher but parents wish it so as a good daughter, I must obey.” Due to the one child policy in much of China, the children are under immense pressure to provide for their parents’ old age. With almost no social security, a person’s retirement is whatever your offspring can reel in. And when you only have one shot, too much is riding on the line for little Ming to major in theater.

Also, they start the collegiate culling extremely early in China, as early as age 12. And they do so strictly by examination. So if you screw up on one test, you may have screwed up the rest of your life. As I would later learn, many of the students did well in school and had rather happy childhoods, but their lives took a turn for the worst in the college entrance exam. The phrase is “It is my dream to be a _____ but now, that’s impossible. I don’t do well, so now, I am here.” In China, there is a significant limit on possibility, especially for these students. They will be teachers, one of the least lucrative careers for a college graduate. In China, those who can’t do, teach. And those who can’t teach, teach the teachers. I am teaching the dregs of the collegiate world.

However, at least they are in college. The number of young adults attending college is skyrocketing. The change in China is palpable as they write about their parents. My students are the babies of the Cultural Revolution, a massive government-supported purge and harassment campaign that affected nearly the whole population and happened between 1967-1977. Millions of people died. My students were born in the early 1980s, when the Cultural Revolution was still fresh gash in China’s memory. But they are also the children of the reform era. Most were born in 1984 or 1985, when Deng Xiaoping, China’s post-Mao leader, initiated sweeping changes to China’s economy, opening it up to foreign investment, private enterprise and private property.

This was a major transition from the stifling economic and social policies of the late Mao Zedong. The parents of these students were the generation to shoulder this transition, which meant working long hours with little pay. When reading their papers about their families, students often write “My parents gave up everything for me. They worked in the factory all day so I would have a better life.” Now, with college degrees, they will.

The first class was not as bad as I thought. I left unscathed, except that, after teaching for an hour and a half, it took me awhile to start speaking faster than 15 words a minute.
After the first day, I settled into a kind of schedule. I teach four days a week. On those days, I wake up bright and early at 6:20 a.m., stumble into the shower, throw on my professorial garb (I still wear it, albeit un-ironed) and book it down the block to the private car going to Shangyu at 7:00.

A drive to Shangyu goes a little something like this: About a minute into the ride, the driver decides that the car in front of him is going a bit too slow. He’ll give a honk, but that never works so he veers left and crosses the double line. We are now driving on the wrong side of the road as another car is speeding toward us. But the driver does not get out of the way. The driver gives a honk in hopes that the other car will get out of his way. And as the car does not turn and keeps on the path of impending collision, the driver looks back and savors the terrified look on my face. He lays on the horn and at the last minute, the car finally finds an opening in the lane and avoids a smash-up, as the driver crosses the double line again. However, I will have my revenge. Because of all the exotic cuisine, I ingest many substances that my body is not accustomed to. Therefore, I often feels like something is dying inside of me. I release some of this death inside the car, and guess who has the terrified look now?

Victory is sweet, but doesn’t last long as a man holding a baby on a bicycle thrusts into the lane. The driver weaves, just barely avoiding vehicular infanticide. Not five seconds later, a motorcycle-cart pulls out of a driveway into the line of their car and the driver slams on the breaks, spilling my coffee everywhere. I then attempt to clean the leather seats with my tie, until we see an elderly lady standing in the middle of the road take the first few steps into our lane…So we’ve covered about five minutes here. Take those five minutes and multiply them by six and insert a stretch of road where it’s a path of mud embankment and one false move will send you hurling into a rice paddy/ lake, and you have my ride to Shangyu.

It all seems like a perverse video game.

However, it’s functional. I’ve been here about three months now and I have almost never seen an accident. In America, people honk their horns in anger. In China, people honk their horns just to let the other person know you are there, in a preemptive beep. It’s kind of like the neon lights. With so many people, you have to honk and blink to get noticed. In America, people expect everyone else to follow the traffic rules. But in China, everyone is like “Oh fuck, Oh fuck” and somehow the system works.

We hopefully get to Shangyu campus at about 7:35, with enough time to print out my lesson plan or make copies for my class at 8:00. And then, I teach. On Wednesday, I teach two classes of Business Writing in the morning. On Thursday, I teach one class of regular English Writing and on Friday, I teach two regular English classes in the morning.

What I teach varies. The night before my classes, I ask myself this question: How can I waste ninety minutes of their lives? If I can waste one hour doing activities, I can waste the other half an hour teaching. I can handle that. I have several ways to waste that hour. I start off by being late every day (at least five minutes). I follow that up with having them write in their journals (15 minutes). Then, I pick several victims to read their journals aloud (10 minutes). After that, I usually give my lecture on thesis statements and topic sentences. I give this lecture every single time, but they never seem to get it. While this is a short lecture, I have to say everything three times and three different ways, at a pace of 20 words a minute, so it takes a while (20 minutes = 400 words). If I have a paper to hand back, I’ll do it and briefly tell them what they did wrong and they’ll briefly not listen to me. But it’s OK. I have to write everything (they have no idea what I’m saying) so it eats a lot of time (20 minutes).

Then, we’ll usually do some inane activity, like describe pictures of my friends or have a debate. During two classes, we also watched The Shawshank Redemption. I forgot about the prison rape scenes, but I did enjoy the look on the student’s faces. While it may seem that I’ve taken a negative attitude to this whole teaching thing, they are practicing English the whole time, so I feel like I am somewhat doing my job. However, when I first came here, I think it was Ali the Turk who said, “You’ll hate teaching and love Shaoxing.” And that is exactly what happened.

Teaching is a lot like stand-up comedy. You have your written material, but you might have to improvise if it is not working. You also refine your act the more you give a lesson. You change the jokes that didn’t work and play up the ones that did. You change the lesson, say something a different way to see if they understand it any better. You get better the more sets you have and you get better the more times you give a lesson. After you give the lesson, everything you’ve written is useless, just like an old joke. Often times, no one even gets it. And in both, you have hecklers. And just like in my stand-up experience, I bomb a lot.

And just like stand-up comedy, it’s more difficult if you have a hard act to follow. After the first class, I learned I was actually teaching in someone else’s wake, and what a wake it was. There was a teacher who taught them the semester before me. He will be known as “Other Bryan.” Other Bryan is from the same area of the US (the Midwest), is of a similar age (24) and has a similar name (Bryan). I initially tried to step out from under the shadow of Other Bryan. I said, “I don’t care what Other Bryan did. I am the new and improved Brian. The better Brian. The Brian you’ll write home about. Other Bryan is just a memory to you now.” As the students would tell me, Other Bryan and Real Brian shared many a trait, except Other Bryan was taller, faster and apparently, a lot more fun. Whenever I gave an assignment, a girl inevitably raised her hand and said, “Other Bryan play game with us. You should play game.” I informed her that if you want to learn how to write, you have to write, but she said, “Other Bryan never make us write.” Then, I would come back with “I’m not Other Bryan!” She waited a moment and said, “Other Bryan never yell.”

At 11:30, I am done for the day. I usually go to lunch in the cafeteria or just go back to Shaoxing. But to get back to Shaoxing, I have to take a taxi to the bus station. I hail a taxi, show them the slip that says Bus Station in Chinese squiggle and then it’s off to the races. It’s like the ride to Shangyu, only magnified in terror and fast-forwarded in time. I understand that time is money, but when you almost die more than once so that the taxi driver can make a couple extra cents, it makes you feel cheap. At least in the U.S., the taxis risk your life for hard U.S. dollars.

However, we do always get there. I am convinced that many taxi drivers possess Jedi reflexes possibly obtained by kung fu training or mandatory ping-pong. So much Nascar talent wasted at the helm of Chinese taxis. The only truly unsetting thing is that the taxis rarely have working seat belts. It doesn’t really bother me except when the driver has on a seatbelt and I don’t. Cause if the bastard crashes, he’s coming with me.

After we take the bus back to Shaoxing, the time is mostly mine. I still have some school responsibilities such as grading papers. It took me awhile to figure out that if I give an assignment, I have to grade about 200 of them. Grading English papers is toil but grading English as a Second Language papers is hell. I’d never thought I’d get excited over someone writing a topic sentence or using “although” correctly. I’ve read such fantastic essays as “Pine: My Best Friend” (a moving piece about pine trees and their friendship with man), “Maria Carey: My Hero” (a well written biography of Ms. Carey that was exactly like the biography on www.mariacarey.com) and “What I Did on my Winter Vacation” (a griping narrative of boredom and karaoke.)

Shaoxing

2007-08-31T13:33:00.000-07:00

After a three-hour bus ride, we arrived at Shaoxing. From what Danny had said, we were expecting maybe some shanties and huts. Perhaps a rickshaw factory. But when we entered the city, we saw that Shaoxing had massive blinking neon lights of it’s own, still seizure-worthy, with skyscrapers and matchbox apartments galore. We saw Starbucks and Pizza hut. We saw, count em, three KFC’s. We soon realized that Shaoxing was only small by Chinese standards.

It’s a city of about 200,000 people, but it’s a major textile manufacturing area, so it’s rather wealthy for China. It also has its moments of quaintness. It has a network of canals running through it, with an interesting mix of putrid water and picturesque stone bridges. After a night in a hotel, we were picked up by one of the university teachers, Ben, who thankfully looked nothing like my imagined Tum-tum. He brought us to the Shaoxing campus.

It was an immense relief. It actually looked like a real university. It had classrooms, dorms and a cafeteria. It had about 17,000 students. It even had a small hotel, where the rooms contained whirlpool baths. After we dropped off our bags, we were taken to a restaurant to be given the Chinese treatment.

When you walk into a traditional Chinese restaurant, they usually whisk you into a separate room that has the offered fare on display. This restaurant’s room had a large table full of uncooked dishes, as well as several glass tanks full of un-dead animals to choose from. The tanks contained the usual fish, shrimp and lobsters, but also, and this is where the China comes in, they contained bullfrogs, turtles, sea slugs and snakes. Ben said to order whatever we wanted, because “the university pays,” so I said, “why not” and pointed to the snake. I thought this was a bold move until Ben informed me that he eats snake all the time.

But it wasn’t until we sat down at a private table that I found out that they don’t just eat the snake. Before they brought out the food, Ben put two small ceramic dishes in front of me. One contained a clear, vodka-like fluid and another contained a tiny, pale-gray sac that I suspected was snake testicle. Ben said, “Snake part. Good for eyes. Make you strong,” and then I knew it had to be snake testicle. He put the sac in the liquid, popped the pouch and a green absinthe-like fluid drained out. “You must drink,” he said. I thought I was getting the bad end of the deal, until he passed Natalie a small dish that was filled with the same clear liquid, but garnished with coagulated snake’s blood floating on top. “It will make you beautiful,” he said. I looked at Natalie for a moment with a look that could best be summed up as “At least we’re not sex slaves” and bottomed up. Thanks to the strong liquor, I could hardly taste the snake nut.

Then, the waiters delivered the dishes that contained two of Shaoxing’s specialties. One is called “Shaoxing Yellow Rice Wine,” a fermented drink beloved throughout China, but to me, tastes like syrupy regurgitate. The second specialty is called “chou dofu,” which translates as “stinky tofu.” As you can guess, it stinks. As we would find out later, street vendors often cook stinky tofu in stands across the city. At any time of day, you can be walking past a modern clothing boutique, past a lovely stone bridge or historical building and become assaulted by a stench that can best be described as a combination of boiled piss and gonorrhea-ed asshole. And Ben eats it all the time.

Despite my nose’s desperate pleas, I put the putrid curd into my mouth because why stop at snake nuts and it actually didn’t taste that bad. It was still awful, but the sheer terror you experience before putting it into your mouth and the relative calm you experience once it’s inside your mouth creates a certain pleasurable relief.

Our first encounters with the city of Shaoxing were less traumatic. For the first couple of days, we just wandered around the city. It wasn’t as backward as Danny said. It has several modern stores and shopping malls. It has other massive one-stop stores that are no Wal-Mart, but they’re still pretty marty, with names like Trust-Mart and Century-Mart (Fun Fact: Wal-Mart plans to come to Shaoxing in 2008) I even found a picture of Lebron James in a store window.

Shaoxing even has a bar street, with about 20 bars. We stumbled onto this street during one of our first nights in the city. We walked past the neon blurs of Chinese characters but then spotted what looked like a Turkish flag amongst the neon scribbles. We thought we were the only English speakers in the whole city up to this point. We walked in the bar, were shown up three flights of stairs and greeted by a Turkish man sitting in front of a wall of liquor. “Hello. My name is Ali. I don’t speak Chinese.” We were so happy that we got really drunk.

But the backwardness would occasionally creep in. People stared at us in Shanghai but in Shaoxing, they would gawk. They stop whatever they’re doing and study us. Sometimes they’ll yell “Hello,” which is the only English word most of them know and sometimes they’ll yell at us in Chinese, which I can only hope is a racial slur equivalent to “hey straighty-eyes.”

The second encounter with backwardness was when we were walking in the night market. The night market is a city street closed down to traffic for the evening, while hawkers set up booths full of every kind of crap imaginable. You can buy fried squid or chicken, coffee mugs, imitation Gucci handbags, naked woman cigarette lighters, stereos, underwear, cell phones and books. And behind the booths are the legitimate shops that sell still more crap.

We were walking along the sidewalk, when we pass a Men’s suite shop. Enter a chicken, spastically strolling down the same sidewalk. The chicken stops at the suite shop and walks in. He begowks and walks around its racks of fine garments, pecking at yarn on the floor. No one is stopping to watch. No one thinks this is even weird, not even the shop owner, who stands behind the counter, in his suit and tie, and lets the chicken take a look around. And they wonder why they get the bird flu. But the scariest part of all this is the longer I stay here, the less weird that incident seems to be.

Chinglish

2007-08-31T12:41:00.000-07:00