The Holiday That Wasn't
There is a new holiday policy in China starting this spring. I had heard last fall in the local media that the idea was being discussed, but I suspect in fact this report was just a kind of trial balloon and the real decision was a done deal long before.
In a nutshell, the new policy takes the former one-week International Workers holiday centered on May First and reduces it to a 2-day holiday and creates 3 new one-day official holidays on traditional Chinese festivals: Qing Ming, the Dragon Boat Festival, and the Mid-Autumn Festival. The Western New Year's Day (January First), the Spring Festival, and the National Holiday are the other major holidays. In recent decades, the 3 new holidays were probably not much noted by people with the exception of the Mid-Autumn Festival when people exchange moon cakes.
It's probably pretty safe to say that the biggest holidays of the year will remain the Spring Festival and the National holiday because they are the longest in duration and each serves its own purpose. The former, it's safe to say, is the strongest traditional holiday—like Christmas in the US—a time when families come together and make special food, give the house a ritual cleaning, buy new clothes, etc. Even now, though families are now more often separated for reasons of work and career, they make heroic efforts to get back together, as witnessed by the huge backlog of travelers in the spring of 2008 when massive snow and ice storms hit the country. The National Holiday, on the other hand, serves the purposes of the CCP, so it will also continue to get strong attention to remind the populace of the nation-saving function of the Party in order to underscore its legitimacy to rule.
I confess to having a bad attitude about the Qing Ming holiday for very personal and selfish reasons—I lost a whole week of vacation that I was hoping to spend traveling to the Northwest of China, an area which I have never visited before. Beyond that the Foreign Language Department has made me reschedule all the classes I would normally teach on these "holidays" so that the cycle of classes that students get will not be broken. I know that the other 2 Chinese professors who are teaching writing with me needed to reschedule their classes too, but I'd be very surprised to find out that anyone else in the department has done so, with the excpetion of the other foreign teachers, who, I know, did reschedule theirs too even though it wasn't required.
What this return to tradition is mostly about, in my view, is the fact that with all the "development" and "modernization" going on (aka: capitalist profit making) there has been criticism from some quarters that traditional things are being lost left and right as people, young people in particular, have little time for anything beyond the the pursuit of money and career. In the local newspaper last fall there was a long article about the Mid-Autumn Festival having just become the "Moon Cake Festival," a time when people buy various kinds of expensive moon cakes without any recollection of the traditional meaning of the celebration, which, according to the article, connects the Chinese people with nature. The author went to great lengths to explain how China is a country connected to nature where traditional festivals have to do with the passing of seasons and agricultural cycles, etc. (I wonder whether he was writing his essay by hand after getting in from a sweaty day of hoeing or at his computer in some nice urban air-conditioned office.) Now it's just all about gift giving and money and trips to the local department stores. Well, duh, what else would one expect in a country where everything is now about profit making after all? (Does this remind one of another country that many readers and this writer might be familiar with?) Similar comments were made in articles about Christmas and Valentine's day at the very same time it was reported that local businesses were going full tilt trying to sell as much junk as they could and doing so more and more successfully every year, thank you.
Qing Ming literally means "clear bright" and it is sometimes translated at Tomb Sweeping Day because on this day all filial descendents are supposed to go to the graves of their ancestors and clean them off and in traditional times make offerings to their rememberence. On the holiday itself I took the opportunity to walk off campus with my camera to a nearby graveyard that had maybe about 30 traditional graves consisting of mounds of soil with yellow paper and a few stones at one side. I was eager to see locals cleaning off the their ancestors' graves. Of course, I expected to see nothing and that's exactly what I did see. I was there a bit later in the day and there was some new yellow paper on all the graves, but it seemed to have been laid in the same way all at the same time. In a later ride around the city I also saw nothing to indicate that any recent activity around grave sites. There was probaby a blip in yellow paper sales across town, but nothing to compare to what one could make off roses, Valentine's Day cards or Christmas gifts. In capitalist economies the intensity of holidays is measured in sales volume, after all.
I do not mean in any way to suggest that nowadays Chinese people are less respectful to their ancestors, living or dead. My only point is to suggest that this newly declared official holiday is unlikely to have any effect on the issue. The irony is that the government's declaring a day off to honor one's dead ancestors flies directly in the face of any supposed anti-patriarchal values that the CCP might have left and is more likely just a sop to traditionalists and nationalists. Anyway, if everyone is out sweeping tombs, maybe they won't know if all the shit in the air is dust kicked up in the course of their filial duties or rather from runaway industries that pollute freely for profit with the acquience of the government.
During this essay cycle students are writing about culture loss in the face of modernization and development. About 60-70% of the students think culture loss is real, but those who don't point to the fact that the government has instutited these holidays. Of course, now that these holidays have been instutited, everyone can go back to pulling down as much cash as possible and leave these and all other such problems to the government or whomever. Needless to say, all stores are open and doing even more business on this day as on all other holidays. As in America, all holidays are now shopping days. There's nothing more patriotic and American that one can do than shop. I heard some people say that even on the first days of the Spring Festival this year some stores were open. This is about as unheard of as stores being open on Christmas Day back in the 50s in the US. It's no surprise either that the big push for "development" came right after Tiananmen in June of 1989. This is exactly the same weapon of mass distraction used so successfully in the US, where 81%of Americans in a recent poll say that the country is going in the wrong direction at the same time as they themselves are apparently headed in the direction of the nearest mall after another exciting day at their dead-end alienating jobs.
Another thing that startled both average people as well as the government was South Korea's success in designating dragon boat racing as one of its national cultural treasures with the UN. Many students see this as not only a result of the government's inattention to these issues but also as a wake-up call that people have been too busy with careers and the pursuit of cash to notice. So the response to this uproar was the usual window dressing and promulgations that any government would engage in to make people think that talk equals action.
I wonder if the big boys in Beijing were out sweeping tombs on Qing Ming.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Sunday, April 27, 2008
At the Foot of the Mountain
At the Foot of the Mountain
Well, I got off campus and had a good time for the first time in a long time. I made it on the bike to some mountains that are about 15 km away, so there and back I had a good 30 km of biking in about 2 hours (half of it up hill and the other half back into the wind) and spent about an hour in between chit-chatting with locals. I didn't have a plan to go there, but when I got off campus I was able to see the mountains, so I resolved that this time I'd make a real effort to get there. Usually the sky is so polluted-dusty that I can't even see them when I head north, so out of sight is out of mind. But this time I could more or less make them out through the particulate matter, so I headed in their direction through the fields and villages determined to make it.
Not knowing the way, I took a rather circuitous route and first covered some territory familiar from past attempts to get there. In a rather small village, I passed a Christian church, a Protestant one from the translation in Chinese (基督教堂), and I parked my bike and started into the courtyard to have a closer look and maybe talk to someone, but the only greeting I got was from a very big and unfriendly dog, so I quickly decided not to find out if or how well it was chained up. I had always figured that Christianity in China was probaby more attractive to Western-oriented city folk, but I have been told that this is not so and on trips through the countryside I've been greeted by spires and crosses, so indeed Christianity has made its way to the villages.
As I got closer to the mountains, I saw signs for an old king's tomb called 潞王陵 and a spring called the 愚公泉, both of which I had heard of before, but I headed past them for the place called the 凤凰森林, the Phoenix Forest. That's what a Minnesotan, even a transplanted one, needs most—trees.
When I got there, I found the mountain was pretty bare as most of the countryside around here is too due to its being so arid after many years of drought, but I really didn't get a chance to explore it much as far as hiking up into it is concerned. It's probably only about 600 or 700 meters high but looks like more than that because it rises up steeply from the surrounding countryside. The part that I saw was especially unimpressive because about half of it had been blasted away for limestone and gravel over the decades. There is seemed to be something around the other side with some trails and recently planted "forest." I was told that maybe about 20 years ago the quarry activity was stopped due to the dust and pollution it kicked up. However, on the way I passed a cement factory and two huge power plants with a total of 7 or 8 cooling towers and maybe a dozen huge smoke stacks putting out who knows what. However, even that is supposed an improvement over past years. One must be thankful for small favors. Half a mountain is better than none. Anyway, now I have a place to go back to and I know how to get there more directly, so I can wander more next time. It's certainly better than anything I have encountered to date in my 8 months here of wandering the area on my bike.
There's a temple at what was probably the original foot of the mountain, but now there's about 300 meters between the temple and the sheer cliff that used to be the middle of the mountain. The temple was the usual mix of old and new. I didn't get a chance to talk to anyone there because I was just checking the place out for future trips, but maybe it was late Qing judging from the architecture and the glaze on the roof. Some workers were still putting finishing touches on the patio surrounding a new glass enclosed Buddha of white stone. One sees this kind of thing everywhere. From the point of view of the Buddhists it's certainly a good indication of renewed interest in faith, but from the point of view of preservationists—if there are any—it has to be a nightmare.
The huge open square of flat limestone where the mountain base used to be slopes off from the temple to a greenish pool where the rain water collects at the opposite end. As I was riding across it, I overheard a group of 20-something guys say laowai 'foreigner' (the not terrible but not complementary version), so I turned around and laughed and asked if I was the first they had ever seen. They laughed back and said they'd seen one now—just a retort, I'm sure—but, they said, I was certainly the first one they'd seen up there on a junky old bike. After I parked my bicycle I popped up the stairs to quickly check out the temple and on my way down there was guy in a blue jacket in the middle of the square waving to me to come over. Well, why not.
In the middle of the flat area there was a little awning where a 40ish couple with their son was selling drinks and snacks. There were "tea eggs" and I asked how much it cost for one and the rather stone faced woman said one and a half yuan. I said half seriously that she was overcharging me because I was a rich foreigner. In fact, I think she was. Well, before that conversation could go further, the guy in the blue coat came over and was obviously very interested in having a chat.
He had all the usual questions, but I did my best to get a few in too. But first out came the customary cigarettes. I had promised myself that I was not going to smoke these polite cigarettes anymore and at first refused—as one would have to do anyway. But these are made from local Henan tobacco. Very mild. Try one. Let's have a smoke together. We're friends now. Ok, ok.
He was wearing a Fresh Tech Corporation blue jacket, like the ones seen all over Xinxiang because altogether some 15,000 are employed in—if I remember correctly—20 some separate Fresh Tech facilities in and around Xinxiang. In fact, he himself didn't work there, but his son has been there for some 15 years or so now. The son made 1500 yuan per month (about $200 USD), which is not bad, and he told me that the long time employees can make up to 2500 or 3000, which is really quite good for workers by Chinese standards anywhere. He said there was insurance too but only for the full-time employees. Temporary or part-time workers don't get this benefit and he took a moment to complain about the poor level of health care across China. I corrected his impression that health care was not a problem in the US. What workers wanted, he said, was steady jobs and Fresh Tech is able able to supply them. There was some concern because now the owners of Fresh Tech are from Singapore, but so far there there seemed to be no reason to worry about the all-important issue of job stability.
Talk always turns to the US and its power and wealth. Life is good in America, right? The US has aircraft carriers and directs its interests and violence outside, so inside life is good. Not an inaccurate analysis. I mentioned having been in Viet Nam recently and he talked about the Spratley islands, which China claims to own though they are much closer to Viet Nam, but he said since it doesn't have aircraft carriers like the US the Vietnamese are in a position to benefit from those (as yet unrealized) resources. They were also asking about Las Vegas and other such places.
By now we were on our second cigarette and I had coughed up the price of a tea egg. The couple's boy was in 6th grade and had been studying English since 3rd grade but couldn't overcome his shyness to say anything. His mother came close to being more friendly when I encouraged him to speak and get some practice with a real live foreigner. Or maybe because I finally bought a tea egg at her price.
I found out that my enthusiastic friend's name was Mr. Zhou and his thing was his green bean noodle stall, which was in fact a small tralier hitched onto his motorcycle parked next to the awing. The two had been doing business side by side there for abut 5 years. Altogether he has been doing the noodle thing for 17 years here and there and lived in a village not so far from the mountain. When he got me over to his side, he had me sit down on one of his stools and write my Chinese name in Chinese and tested me to see if I could read his name and address from the Chinese that he wrote. I passed his test, much to his delight and amusement. He asked me to try his cold noodles, which were mixed with a watery hot sauce. I was a bit nervous but not in a position to refuse. After all, I had smoked his cigarettes. I reassured myself by looking at the clean chopsticks and two plastic jugs of water by his stall that looked pretty clear, so I let into the noodles and hoped for the best. While I was there he'd call to passers-by to come to have a chat with the US professor. He couldn't believe that I was nearly 60 years old after he saw me scamper up the hill to the temple after riding 15 km from town. He himself was 49 but I would have guessed him to be older. He had a grandchild on the way, or at least he hoped so.
He found out that I had a son, a daughter and grandson, so my life is good (幸福) and I couldn't disagree with him, especially on this fine day without a big stack of papers waiting for me on my desk back in Xinxiang. It was the first weekend in about 6 weeks which I didn't spend mostly on paper correction. Yes, life is good when you don't have to work all the time.
While we were having our chat, a fellow in his mid 30s, who was a junior high school teacher in one of the local villages stopped by with his son, who was about ten, to have some noodles. He had gotten a teacher training certificate in Xinxiang and went back to the village he was born in to teach. He seemed to be pretty content with his job and agreed that life in the village was pretty comfortable in the sense that you could grow some vegetables and raise some chickens or whatever and live pretty much on the cheap. They came on pretty nice motorcycle, so he must be doing ok. While we were having this discussion, Mr. Zhou noted that I had rode up on my rickety second hand bicycle and was impressed by my apparently simple (朴素) life style, which he said was best. We all agreed, though this hardly seems to be the direction in which most of China is headed.
Two students, boyfriend and girlfriend English majors from a technical school in Xinxiang, also stopped by to chat. We spoke in English and their English was quite good. They have a foreign teacher in their school too and wondered if I knew him. I don't know anyone or anything except my students' papers. It was interesting that Mr. Zhou insisted that we speak English as he sat there watching in amazement. They had many questions--Do you like Chinese food, Can you use chopsticks? (I'm thinking of making a handout with these questions and answers on them to save time in future encounters.) We talked about about my past travels and their dreams to travel too. They said that they hoped to travel on jobs teaching Chinese just as I have been able to by teaching English. They suggested that I could make a living in the US by teaching Chinese, but I told them that every job in the US having anything to do with China these days was pretty much sewn up by upper class mainland Chinese who had gone there for grad school and stayed. Well, I didn't say it in such a discouraging way actually, but I have met so many young people here like them who want to see the world this way, and I know that for students who are probably from working class or lower middle class families without connections it's virtually an impossiblity. What they have been told and have heard about the great interest in China around the world is pretty much restricted to business. Upper class jobs will be grabbed by upper class people. Working your way around the world teaching English is a lot different from trying to do it with Chinese. Good luck, my young friends! The young guy was carrying a Chinese flute (笛子) with him and played me a few tunes. He was quite good.
In fact, it was getting pretty late and I tried several times to get back on the road because I was nervous about getting lost on the way back as I was pretty far off my usual beaten path, not to mention that the back tire of my bike was a bit low on air. However, Mr. Zhou had no intention of letting me go until I finally insisted strongly the third or fourth time.
When I did get up, I tried to give him 3 yuan for the noodles because that's what the other fellow paid, but he would not accept it. In typical fashion I just put the money down on the table and started to walk away, but in typical fashion, he picked it up, came after me and stuffed it into my pocket. We're friends. No charge for the noodles! But you work here all day and how can you make a living, and besides I smoked your cigarettes. Of course, you did. I'm Chinese. That's what we do! The two students were on his side, of course, so I had to relent.
I left there hoping not to get a bad case of Confucius' revenge or at least get back before it struck, but I was happy to get into a good time with some real people. It kind of renewed my faith in things here and I badly needed it. My biggest problem all along has been not getting out enough to meet such folks and being stuck on campus, even though I do not regret being dedicated to my students. Whenever I meet real people anywhere I'm renewed, and whenever I have to deal with university administrators and important professors and other such grasping low life, I get depressed. That's not really so hard to understand now, is it?
Well, I got off campus and had a good time for the first time in a long time. I made it on the bike to some mountains that are about 15 km away, so there and back I had a good 30 km of biking in about 2 hours (half of it up hill and the other half back into the wind) and spent about an hour in between chit-chatting with locals. I didn't have a plan to go there, but when I got off campus I was able to see the mountains, so I resolved that this time I'd make a real effort to get there. Usually the sky is so polluted-dusty that I can't even see them when I head north, so out of sight is out of mind. But this time I could more or less make them out through the particulate matter, so I headed in their direction through the fields and villages determined to make it.
Not knowing the way, I took a rather circuitous route and first covered some territory familiar from past attempts to get there. In a rather small village, I passed a Christian church, a Protestant one from the translation in Chinese (基督教堂), and I parked my bike and started into the courtyard to have a closer look and maybe talk to someone, but the only greeting I got was from a very big and unfriendly dog, so I quickly decided not to find out if or how well it was chained up. I had always figured that Christianity in China was probaby more attractive to Western-oriented city folk, but I have been told that this is not so and on trips through the countryside I've been greeted by spires and crosses, so indeed Christianity has made its way to the villages.
As I got closer to the mountains, I saw signs for an old king's tomb called 潞王陵 and a spring called the 愚公泉, both of which I had heard of before, but I headed past them for the place called the 凤凰森林, the Phoenix Forest. That's what a Minnesotan, even a transplanted one, needs most—trees.
When I got there, I found the mountain was pretty bare as most of the countryside around here is too due to its being so arid after many years of drought, but I really didn't get a chance to explore it much as far as hiking up into it is concerned. It's probably only about 600 or 700 meters high but looks like more than that because it rises up steeply from the surrounding countryside. The part that I saw was especially unimpressive because about half of it had been blasted away for limestone and gravel over the decades. There is seemed to be something around the other side with some trails and recently planted "forest." I was told that maybe about 20 years ago the quarry activity was stopped due to the dust and pollution it kicked up. However, on the way I passed a cement factory and two huge power plants with a total of 7 or 8 cooling towers and maybe a dozen huge smoke stacks putting out who knows what. However, even that is supposed an improvement over past years. One must be thankful for small favors. Half a mountain is better than none. Anyway, now I have a place to go back to and I know how to get there more directly, so I can wander more next time. It's certainly better than anything I have encountered to date in my 8 months here of wandering the area on my bike.
There's a temple at what was probably the original foot of the mountain, but now there's about 300 meters between the temple and the sheer cliff that used to be the middle of the mountain. The temple was the usual mix of old and new. I didn't get a chance to talk to anyone there because I was just checking the place out for future trips, but maybe it was late Qing judging from the architecture and the glaze on the roof. Some workers were still putting finishing touches on the patio surrounding a new glass enclosed Buddha of white stone. One sees this kind of thing everywhere. From the point of view of the Buddhists it's certainly a good indication of renewed interest in faith, but from the point of view of preservationists—if there are any—it has to be a nightmare.
The huge open square of flat limestone where the mountain base used to be slopes off from the temple to a greenish pool where the rain water collects at the opposite end. As I was riding across it, I overheard a group of 20-something guys say laowai 'foreigner' (the not terrible but not complementary version), so I turned around and laughed and asked if I was the first they had ever seen. They laughed back and said they'd seen one now—just a retort, I'm sure—but, they said, I was certainly the first one they'd seen up there on a junky old bike. After I parked my bicycle I popped up the stairs to quickly check out the temple and on my way down there was guy in a blue jacket in the middle of the square waving to me to come over. Well, why not.
In the middle of the flat area there was a little awning where a 40ish couple with their son was selling drinks and snacks. There were "tea eggs" and I asked how much it cost for one and the rather stone faced woman said one and a half yuan. I said half seriously that she was overcharging me because I was a rich foreigner. In fact, I think she was. Well, before that conversation could go further, the guy in the blue coat came over and was obviously very interested in having a chat.
He had all the usual questions, but I did my best to get a few in too. But first out came the customary cigarettes. I had promised myself that I was not going to smoke these polite cigarettes anymore and at first refused—as one would have to do anyway. But these are made from local Henan tobacco. Very mild. Try one. Let's have a smoke together. We're friends now. Ok, ok.
He was wearing a Fresh Tech Corporation blue jacket, like the ones seen all over Xinxiang because altogether some 15,000 are employed in—if I remember correctly—20 some separate Fresh Tech facilities in and around Xinxiang. In fact, he himself didn't work there, but his son has been there for some 15 years or so now. The son made 1500 yuan per month (about $200 USD), which is not bad, and he told me that the long time employees can make up to 2500 or 3000, which is really quite good for workers by Chinese standards anywhere. He said there was insurance too but only for the full-time employees. Temporary or part-time workers don't get this benefit and he took a moment to complain about the poor level of health care across China. I corrected his impression that health care was not a problem in the US. What workers wanted, he said, was steady jobs and Fresh Tech is able able to supply them. There was some concern because now the owners of Fresh Tech are from Singapore, but so far there there seemed to be no reason to worry about the all-important issue of job stability.
Talk always turns to the US and its power and wealth. Life is good in America, right? The US has aircraft carriers and directs its interests and violence outside, so inside life is good. Not an inaccurate analysis. I mentioned having been in Viet Nam recently and he talked about the Spratley islands, which China claims to own though they are much closer to Viet Nam, but he said since it doesn't have aircraft carriers like the US the Vietnamese are in a position to benefit from those (as yet unrealized) resources. They were also asking about Las Vegas and other such places.
By now we were on our second cigarette and I had coughed up the price of a tea egg. The couple's boy was in 6th grade and had been studying English since 3rd grade but couldn't overcome his shyness to say anything. His mother came close to being more friendly when I encouraged him to speak and get some practice with a real live foreigner. Or maybe because I finally bought a tea egg at her price.
I found out that my enthusiastic friend's name was Mr. Zhou and his thing was his green bean noodle stall, which was in fact a small tralier hitched onto his motorcycle parked next to the awing. The two had been doing business side by side there for abut 5 years. Altogether he has been doing the noodle thing for 17 years here and there and lived in a village not so far from the mountain. When he got me over to his side, he had me sit down on one of his stools and write my Chinese name in Chinese and tested me to see if I could read his name and address from the Chinese that he wrote. I passed his test, much to his delight and amusement. He asked me to try his cold noodles, which were mixed with a watery hot sauce. I was a bit nervous but not in a position to refuse. After all, I had smoked his cigarettes. I reassured myself by looking at the clean chopsticks and two plastic jugs of water by his stall that looked pretty clear, so I let into the noodles and hoped for the best. While I was there he'd call to passers-by to come to have a chat with the US professor. He couldn't believe that I was nearly 60 years old after he saw me scamper up the hill to the temple after riding 15 km from town. He himself was 49 but I would have guessed him to be older. He had a grandchild on the way, or at least he hoped so.
He found out that I had a son, a daughter and grandson, so my life is good (幸福) and I couldn't disagree with him, especially on this fine day without a big stack of papers waiting for me on my desk back in Xinxiang. It was the first weekend in about 6 weeks which I didn't spend mostly on paper correction. Yes, life is good when you don't have to work all the time.
While we were having our chat, a fellow in his mid 30s, who was a junior high school teacher in one of the local villages stopped by with his son, who was about ten, to have some noodles. He had gotten a teacher training certificate in Xinxiang and went back to the village he was born in to teach. He seemed to be pretty content with his job and agreed that life in the village was pretty comfortable in the sense that you could grow some vegetables and raise some chickens or whatever and live pretty much on the cheap. They came on pretty nice motorcycle, so he must be doing ok. While we were having this discussion, Mr. Zhou noted that I had rode up on my rickety second hand bicycle and was impressed by my apparently simple (朴素) life style, which he said was best. We all agreed, though this hardly seems to be the direction in which most of China is headed.
Two students, boyfriend and girlfriend English majors from a technical school in Xinxiang, also stopped by to chat. We spoke in English and their English was quite good. They have a foreign teacher in their school too and wondered if I knew him. I don't know anyone or anything except my students' papers. It was interesting that Mr. Zhou insisted that we speak English as he sat there watching in amazement. They had many questions--Do you like Chinese food, Can you use chopsticks? (I'm thinking of making a handout with these questions and answers on them to save time in future encounters.) We talked about about my past travels and their dreams to travel too. They said that they hoped to travel on jobs teaching Chinese just as I have been able to by teaching English. They suggested that I could make a living in the US by teaching Chinese, but I told them that every job in the US having anything to do with China these days was pretty much sewn up by upper class mainland Chinese who had gone there for grad school and stayed. Well, I didn't say it in such a discouraging way actually, but I have met so many young people here like them who want to see the world this way, and I know that for students who are probably from working class or lower middle class families without connections it's virtually an impossiblity. What they have been told and have heard about the great interest in China around the world is pretty much restricted to business. Upper class jobs will be grabbed by upper class people. Working your way around the world teaching English is a lot different from trying to do it with Chinese. Good luck, my young friends! The young guy was carrying a Chinese flute (笛子) with him and played me a few tunes. He was quite good.
In fact, it was getting pretty late and I tried several times to get back on the road because I was nervous about getting lost on the way back as I was pretty far off my usual beaten path, not to mention that the back tire of my bike was a bit low on air. However, Mr. Zhou had no intention of letting me go until I finally insisted strongly the third or fourth time.
When I did get up, I tried to give him 3 yuan for the noodles because that's what the other fellow paid, but he would not accept it. In typical fashion I just put the money down on the table and started to walk away, but in typical fashion, he picked it up, came after me and stuffed it into my pocket. We're friends. No charge for the noodles! But you work here all day and how can you make a living, and besides I smoked your cigarettes. Of course, you did. I'm Chinese. That's what we do! The two students were on his side, of course, so I had to relent.
I left there hoping not to get a bad case of Confucius' revenge or at least get back before it struck, but I was happy to get into a good time with some real people. It kind of renewed my faith in things here and I badly needed it. My biggest problem all along has been not getting out enough to meet such folks and being stuck on campus, even though I do not regret being dedicated to my students. Whenever I meet real people anywhere I'm renewed, and whenever I have to deal with university administrators and important professors and other such grasping low life, I get depressed. That's not really so hard to understand now, is it?
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Angkor Wat and Seam Reap
Angkor Wat and Seam Reap
Visiting Angkor Wat one cannot help but think of Shelley's Ozymandias. It is a clear and awesome testimony to the power of a past age. One can only imagine how many people it took to construct it and how many servants and workers and minions were running around each day to maintain it and those for whom it was built.
Probably due to the climate and the fact that it was in large part overgrown by jungle for many centuries, it is remarkably well preserved right down to the intricate carvings of Hindu dancers on door posts and depictions of myths and legends of Hindu gods and goddesses on walls that stretch for 100 meters in some places. At the opposite end of this detail is the massive grandeur of the huge temples and palaces with their winding corridors and inner chambers, some of them now holding Buddhist statues reflecting the cultural and religious evolution that has gone on in Cambodia since the building of Angkor Wat. One can only go and see. Further attemps at description seem futile.
Seam Reap is totally a tourist town, but the tourism in Cambodia, at least in Seam Reap, is much better organized than that of Viet Nam. Getting in the country is easy and efficient and one does not need a visa beforehand. There are child peddlers but they are more polite and less aggressive and one does not have the feeling of being taken all the time. Outright beggars are noticeably fewer than in Viet Nam.
We rented a taxi for a complete day for $25 US to tour Angkor Wat. Like everyone, the taxi driver had story. I relate it to the reader not knowing how much is embellishment. His English was quite good because he had studied until the 11th grade when he dropped out after his mother died. His father was killed during Khmer Rouge times because he was a military officer with the previous regime. One of his sisters died for lack of medical care. He said that the family could have taken her to Viet Nam for better treatment but could not afford it. He has a bit of land in the countryside outside of Seam Reap and a small house that he rents out. He is married with two daughters, one 5 years old and the other just 9 months. He says that nowadays in Cambodia some people have 10 or 12 children, but in such cases they are not likely to get much if any education. He estimates that now only about 40% of children go to school as far as high school even though it's free. His wife stays at home to run the house, which is a good bit of work due to childcare, daily shopping, cooking with wood and such things. (Indeed, in the morning and evening in particular one can easily see and smell the evidence of cooking stoves that burn wood.)
He said that he voted for Hun Sen in the last election and there will be another election in the fall, but he's not happy with Hun Sen now because he didn't do what he said. Now there's a familiar theme! Western style democracy has taken hold in Cambodia. Already there are campiagn billboards and posters everywhere on sides of roads and many political party offices. The driver also said that there is a gap between how rural and urban people vote. Though I am not in a positon to explain the reasons in terms of the Cambodian situation, there is little surprise that such a situation would exist, for as in China all the countries of SE Asia are seeing the effects of the incursions of foreign money and a "modern" capitalist economy, but the beneficiaries are in the minority. Relations with Viet Nam, according to our driver, are now good, but during the Viet Nam-Cambodian war of 1978, the Vietnamese did come all the way to Seam Reap and there was serious fighting there. When the Vietnamese left in the 80s, he says, they took with them whatever they could carry—wood, resources, cultural treasures, etc.
He works whenever and as often as he can but it varies a lot. He plans to pay off his car—a Toyota Camry—in about 2 more years. Work is hard to find and lots of people come to Seam Reap for the tourist work. He said lots also go to Thailand and may work there for years only to get shaken down by Cambodian police at the border when they return and be left with absolutely nothing even to the point where they have to walk back to their home villages. Relations are still bad with Thailand due to the refugee situation and the existence of refugee camps there, continuing effects of the Viet Nam war long forgotten by Americans.
On the way out of Angkor, we ran into a Shanghai Chinese who owned a tourist business back in Shanghai. He was visiting Angkor for the first time to scope the place out as a possible destination for well-heeled Chinese who could afford this kind of travel. However, he was pissing and moaning that "this culture has nothing interesting," just "these stones" as he characterized Angkor Wat, and the accommodations and food were not good. Yes, I said sarcastically, I know Chinese people hanker after physical comfort (贪舒服) and wouldn't be inerested in such a place. The worst was his tone of voice and facial expression, which made no attempt to hide the old arrogance of the Chinese toward Southeast Asia combined with the new arrogance of the Chinese nouveau riche. There will be ever more of it in coming years. Of course, what he's looking for is speical food—the #1 Chinese pleasure—along with people to kiss his upper class ass.
Koreans are everywhere too, and according to the driver they own many businesses and are very demanding employers. Korean language is on many shops, hotels and restaurants. I went into one restaurant to scout around and was told in Korean accented English that there was no menu probably because they primarily serve Korean tour groups. Across the street there's a minimart named Kim's and every product inside is Korean except the local beer. Maybe Seam Reap is an easy flight from Seoul and an attractive place to come to in winter. It might not be the whole story because there was a restaurant named Pyongyang too. I can't imagine well-to-do South Koreans flocking to a place with that name.
The books in Viet Nam and Cambodia in English about the wars there seem to appeal to liberal guilt or interest—Viet Nam's suffering or Pol Pot's murders, but in Cambodia there is nothing at all that I could see about the incredible US bombing there and how it drove many Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge as recounted in William Shawcross's Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (1979). Most of the books on display in the hotels in Seam Reap were published by a Silkworm Press out of Australia, about whom I know nothing.
The young woman working at the hotel gift shop had pretty decent English, which she had studied for one year after high school. Now she is studying to be an account. I complimented her on being clever and having a good plan for the future. If she gets a nice 9 to 5 job doing accounting in an international tourist business of some sort, she should do quite well.
We visited silkworm raising and silk painting businesses run by the Cambodian government. They were started in 1992 and are now self-supporting. Some of the workers were deaf-mutes but most were able bodied. Salary is based on total sales in the shop. There are now 9 or so such places in the Seam Reap area mostly out of town and one of the goals of the program is to keep so many people from streaming into the city.
US dollars are the coin of the realm here. You can even use them in small markets or restaurants and get your change in USD or local money. While in Seam Reap, I overheard interpreters in English, French, German, Spanish, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and others that I didn't recognize or can't remember. It seems that everyone in Seam Reap has a little English even in somewhat out of the way places. The young woman who was our guide in the silkworm farm gave us a competent tour in English but kept apologizing because French was her first foreign language. All of this puts Americans to shame. All over SE Asia I had conversations in English with Europeans, who probably have some competence in another foreign language as well. Of course, these are upper class people who have money to travel and had the advantage of a high quality education back home. Nevertheless, most of the Cambodian interpreters were in their early or mid 20s at most, evidence of what hard work can accomplish—for economic motivation to be sure, but in any case something that few Americans are willing to do for the purpose of talking to those who are different for whatever reason.
Visiting Angkor Wat one cannot help but think of Shelley's Ozymandias. It is a clear and awesome testimony to the power of a past age. One can only imagine how many people it took to construct it and how many servants and workers and minions were running around each day to maintain it and those for whom it was built.
Probably due to the climate and the fact that it was in large part overgrown by jungle for many centuries, it is remarkably well preserved right down to the intricate carvings of Hindu dancers on door posts and depictions of myths and legends of Hindu gods and goddesses on walls that stretch for 100 meters in some places. At the opposite end of this detail is the massive grandeur of the huge temples and palaces with their winding corridors and inner chambers, some of them now holding Buddhist statues reflecting the cultural and religious evolution that has gone on in Cambodia since the building of Angkor Wat. One can only go and see. Further attemps at description seem futile.
Seam Reap is totally a tourist town, but the tourism in Cambodia, at least in Seam Reap, is much better organized than that of Viet Nam. Getting in the country is easy and efficient and one does not need a visa beforehand. There are child peddlers but they are more polite and less aggressive and one does not have the feeling of being taken all the time. Outright beggars are noticeably fewer than in Viet Nam.
We rented a taxi for a complete day for $25 US to tour Angkor Wat. Like everyone, the taxi driver had story. I relate it to the reader not knowing how much is embellishment. His English was quite good because he had studied until the 11th grade when he dropped out after his mother died. His father was killed during Khmer Rouge times because he was a military officer with the previous regime. One of his sisters died for lack of medical care. He said that the family could have taken her to Viet Nam for better treatment but could not afford it. He has a bit of land in the countryside outside of Seam Reap and a small house that he rents out. He is married with two daughters, one 5 years old and the other just 9 months. He says that nowadays in Cambodia some people have 10 or 12 children, but in such cases they are not likely to get much if any education. He estimates that now only about 40% of children go to school as far as high school even though it's free. His wife stays at home to run the house, which is a good bit of work due to childcare, daily shopping, cooking with wood and such things. (Indeed, in the morning and evening in particular one can easily see and smell the evidence of cooking stoves that burn wood.)
He said that he voted for Hun Sen in the last election and there will be another election in the fall, but he's not happy with Hun Sen now because he didn't do what he said. Now there's a familiar theme! Western style democracy has taken hold in Cambodia. Already there are campiagn billboards and posters everywhere on sides of roads and many political party offices. The driver also said that there is a gap between how rural and urban people vote. Though I am not in a positon to explain the reasons in terms of the Cambodian situation, there is little surprise that such a situation would exist, for as in China all the countries of SE Asia are seeing the effects of the incursions of foreign money and a "modern" capitalist economy, but the beneficiaries are in the minority. Relations with Viet Nam, according to our driver, are now good, but during the Viet Nam-Cambodian war of 1978, the Vietnamese did come all the way to Seam Reap and there was serious fighting there. When the Vietnamese left in the 80s, he says, they took with them whatever they could carry—wood, resources, cultural treasures, etc.
He works whenever and as often as he can but it varies a lot. He plans to pay off his car—a Toyota Camry—in about 2 more years. Work is hard to find and lots of people come to Seam Reap for the tourist work. He said lots also go to Thailand and may work there for years only to get shaken down by Cambodian police at the border when they return and be left with absolutely nothing even to the point where they have to walk back to their home villages. Relations are still bad with Thailand due to the refugee situation and the existence of refugee camps there, continuing effects of the Viet Nam war long forgotten by Americans.
On the way out of Angkor, we ran into a Shanghai Chinese who owned a tourist business back in Shanghai. He was visiting Angkor for the first time to scope the place out as a possible destination for well-heeled Chinese who could afford this kind of travel. However, he was pissing and moaning that "this culture has nothing interesting," just "these stones" as he characterized Angkor Wat, and the accommodations and food were not good. Yes, I said sarcastically, I know Chinese people hanker after physical comfort (贪舒服) and wouldn't be inerested in such a place. The worst was his tone of voice and facial expression, which made no attempt to hide the old arrogance of the Chinese toward Southeast Asia combined with the new arrogance of the Chinese nouveau riche. There will be ever more of it in coming years. Of course, what he's looking for is speical food—the #1 Chinese pleasure—along with people to kiss his upper class ass.
Koreans are everywhere too, and according to the driver they own many businesses and are very demanding employers. Korean language is on many shops, hotels and restaurants. I went into one restaurant to scout around and was told in Korean accented English that there was no menu probably because they primarily serve Korean tour groups. Across the street there's a minimart named Kim's and every product inside is Korean except the local beer. Maybe Seam Reap is an easy flight from Seoul and an attractive place to come to in winter. It might not be the whole story because there was a restaurant named Pyongyang too. I can't imagine well-to-do South Koreans flocking to a place with that name.
The books in Viet Nam and Cambodia in English about the wars there seem to appeal to liberal guilt or interest—Viet Nam's suffering or Pol Pot's murders, but in Cambodia there is nothing at all that I could see about the incredible US bombing there and how it drove many Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge as recounted in William Shawcross's Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (1979). Most of the books on display in the hotels in Seam Reap were published by a Silkworm Press out of Australia, about whom I know nothing.
The young woman working at the hotel gift shop had pretty decent English, which she had studied for one year after high school. Now she is studying to be an account. I complimented her on being clever and having a good plan for the future. If she gets a nice 9 to 5 job doing accounting in an international tourist business of some sort, she should do quite well.
We visited silkworm raising and silk painting businesses run by the Cambodian government. They were started in 1992 and are now self-supporting. Some of the workers were deaf-mutes but most were able bodied. Salary is based on total sales in the shop. There are now 9 or so such places in the Seam Reap area mostly out of town and one of the goals of the program is to keep so many people from streaming into the city.
US dollars are the coin of the realm here. You can even use them in small markets or restaurants and get your change in USD or local money. While in Seam Reap, I overheard interpreters in English, French, German, Spanish, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and others that I didn't recognize or can't remember. It seems that everyone in Seam Reap has a little English even in somewhat out of the way places. The young woman who was our guide in the silkworm farm gave us a competent tour in English but kept apologizing because French was her first foreign language. All of this puts Americans to shame. All over SE Asia I had conversations in English with Europeans, who probably have some competence in another foreign language as well. Of course, these are upper class people who have money to travel and had the advantage of a high quality education back home. Nevertheless, most of the Cambodian interpreters were in their early or mid 20s at most, evidence of what hard work can accomplish—for economic motivation to be sure, but in any case something that few Americans are willing to do for the purpose of talking to those who are different for whatever reason.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
The Chinese Economy—A Ground Floor View
The Chinese Economy—A Ground Floor View
In spite of some setbacks due to lagging demand in the US for Chinese exports and the bad weather in February, the Chinese economy still seems to be chugging fairly well. But what do all the figures in the New York Times mean here on the ground in hinterland China?
Whether locally or nationally, it's sometimes hard to know if there really is a plan here or if things are just addressed on the squeakiest wheel principle. In spite of a fair amount of evidence for the latter, based on what happens and what doesn't I think it's fairly safe to say that there is plan. Of course, there is a public plan and it's on the big bulletin board near the campus entrance across from the administration building. That one is the summary of last fall's 17th National Party Congress and it's all about scientific development and the construction of a harmonious society. But that's the kind of thing you'd hear at a State of the Union message too. I'm talking about the real plan.
From what I can see the real plan is to continue to maximize the capacity of the country to industrialize and produce products for export in order to maximize the inflow of capital—as much and as long as possible until it just can't continue any longer for whatever reason be it world recession, internal strife, a total crash of the US economy, or China's finally being undercut by some other low wage producer. I think one can come to this conclusion not just by what's being done but just as much as by what's not being done in other sectors of the ecnomy and society.
I can't say I've seen a rush of new factories going up in and around Xinxiang, but there are lots of them of recent construction. Furthermore, everywhere on the edge of our end of town there are new 4 and 6-lane concrete roads going off into the countryside with some factories at the near end and space for many, many more. It's not unlike many places you can see in the US that are earmarked for low or tax free industrial development. We have such a place right near the airport in my hometown of Duluth with those same kinds of roads with names like Prosperity Lane that go right off into the woods. Most new construction here in Xinxiang is for residential housing and new spaces for mom and pop businesses on the ground floors of these large residential complexes. Although there are large ddowntown department stores, as in Japan, it's in these little neighborhood shops where the vast majority people buy their noodles, their shoes and their beer. As the residences fill up so do the shop rentals on the ground floors and even in my six months here I've been able to mark the progression.
However, the things that are not being done to curb pollution, improve living conditions in the countryside, and improve the rural health care system are indicators that the focus in these areas is on stopgap measures and not serious attempts to find final solutions to these problems. Incremental improvements in these areas are being made, but they take second place to industrialization and the export economy.
In fact, the situation in the countryside seems almost consciously designed to get more and more people off the land and on to the shop floor. As to the countryside surrounding Xinxiang, it was stated in the local paper that getting people away from earning their living on small pieces of land was the best way to reduce poverty. The paper refers to a study of 390 households which were part of a proverty reduction plan stretching over 3 years. According to their statistics, the incomes of those who were involved in work outside the village or were self-employed made up more than 30% of the total rural village income. It is forecast that for 2008 such families will constitute 43.5% of the village income. It is not stated directly, but this contract labor almost certainly consists of going to the city for day labor construction work and the like. In any case, due to the success of this plan "party committees and government of the various counties and townships attach great importance to the work of the transfer of agricultural labor." (PingYuan Wan Bao 2/15/08) An important thing to note, however, is that the villages in question are part of the same political entity of the city of 650,000, so it's easier for these workers to do day labor or stay in the city for short periods of time without being very far from their families. These options don't exist for rural people who are farther from urban labor markets. Those people must make the difficult choice of leaving their families for long periods of time or continuing to live in relative poverty.
While things have been done to ease the difficulty of rural life, like instituting a very minimal basic rural health care plan and eliminating tuition for junior high school education, the changes border on insignificance. The rural-urban gap remains huge and I can see the transition even as I bicycle out of the city to the adjacent villages and then to those an hour or so away where they grow basic grains and don't have access to the urban vegetable markets. Another indication is that just a quick ride through rural villages shows that it's overwhelmingly old people who are out in the fields. If one could make a good living staying on the land, more young people would choose to do it.
Of course, China is only one of the more recent countries to go through such a transition. The interesting thing is the extent to which it becomes part of a conscious plan on the part of government or a more natural and gradual shift. In Japan, from about the 1870s the government raised land taxes, forced many peasants off the land and and gave them no other recourse but to head for low wage urban factories as the government got its export industry going with textiles. Rural samurai also turned in their swords for suits and briefcases and headed for town. The basic class relations continued in a different venue. Now other carrots and sticks are being used in China now to accomplish the same ends.
Continuing the expansion of industry is clearly a much higher priority than cleaning up the environment as well. For sure good things are being done and some progress is being made, particularly with the use of electric bicycles and new low emissions public transportation in the cities. However, coal burning to produce electricity for industry continues to grow though some reports say that coal pollution is actually decling only to be replaced by auto emissions. The air is generally better now than when I came here for 2 months in the spring of 2001 at the time of the grain harvest when farmers burn the stubble. However, there are still plenty of bad days and weird smells in the air at times especially at night when most people don't go out to notice. I found it interesting that last fall there was a "no car day" in some parts of the city. The 8 column inches or so in the local paper devoted to it contrasted sharply with a full-page report of the annual auto exposition in Guangzhou complete with pictures of the requiste number of women draped over cars.
Pollution of rivers is even worse and an even clearer indication of where priorities lie. My students are writing on pollution problems this semester, and student after student has reported how the rivers in her/his towns and villages where they used to swim and fish as young children have become smelly lifeless black flowages just in the last 10 to 15 years. Right here in town I can walk to the place where the local river turns from a semi-transparent light green to totally smelly black after it passes a point where in very plain view a culvert empties into it and totally changes the character of the river. The origin is unknown to me, but it would be very easy to find it if someone wanted to. Fixing it, however, is apparently less important than something else, that something else probably being more and more profitable production of goods for sale domestically and internationally. The fact that some of the profit does get routed to stopgap measures to silence the squeakiest wheels does not detract from the obviousness of the main priority.
I can add some details and examples on a more individual basis. The other day I went to have some 泡馍羊肉 at a mom and pop street side establishment. The name of this dish rather defies direct translation, but it's a favorite in western Muslim regions where mutton is the main meat. In fact there's very little meat in it; it consists of mutton broth, a little parsley and chips of heavy bread that soak up the broth. In short, it's a cheap dish that kills the hunger and sticks to the ribs. This place happened to be popular with employees of Fresh Tech (新飞), one of the biggest employers in Xinxiang, just a block or so away. Not surprisingly one of the main arteries in town is named after the company as well. I was able to have some conversation with two fellows that were finishing their lunch at the next table. The conversation stated with the inevitable question about my salary and I told them that I get 5000 rmb (about $650 USD) per month. At first they thought maybe I was getting $5000 USD per month, but when they found out is was indeed rmb they said it was 不多, "not much." I hastened to agree.
As it was Saturday, they were off work. They are factory workers in this establishment that makes freon free "green" refrigerators and freezers. Their characterized jobs as 中等, kind of ok jobs. They make about 1000 rmb per month (about $140 USD). Interestingly that's the number I was told by someone when I was here 6 years ago too. At that time Fresh Tech jobs were considered desriable and either things have not gotten better for those workers over the years or I was misinformed by someone who didn't have information straight from the horse's mouth as I was getting now.
The factory employs about 15,000 people and its products are virtually all for export to East Asia—very few to Europe or elsewhere according to my infomants. They work regular 5-day weeks, but it's likely that with new fast assembly line techniques their employers get a lot for their $140 per month (the cost of one refrigerator?!). The company is now owned by someone in Singapore though I was once informed that the company was originally German. In any case the place seems to be doing well enough because I walk past there now and then and there are always flat bed semi-tractor traliers full of refrigerators and freezers going out. I once saw a group of large residential high rises south of town with the Fresh Tech name on it and these fellows told me that anyone could buy those flats but they were built by the company and were cheaper for employees. I neglected to ask about health insurance, but most urban work units have decent insurance policies compared to rural and temp workers, so the housing option and health care serve to agument the just ok salaries. Outside of town my bicycle wanderings brought me across another Fresh Tech operation—a factory that makes electric bicycles. It was not nearly as big as the refrigerator operation, but it seems that the company has its foot in the door of another potentially lucrative business, this one for domestic as well as international consumption. (An electric bicycke might cost a couple months' salary.) In another place south of downtown there is another huge Fresh Tech Group building and not far from it a block square empty lot that is surrounded by a wall with "Fresh Tech Electric Bicycles" on every inch of wall space. Perhaps it is the site of a future factory.
The cheap lunch these two guiys had on their day off illustrates another very important point—the economic multiplier effect of their work for the countless mom and pop operations mentioned earlier. So far so good even in spite of serious inflation in the past year, particularly in the past months. As a single party government running a capitalist state, the folks in Beijing have more levers to pull quickly if needed. It may surprise readers to know that they still have the confidence of a very sizeable segment of the population when it comes to delivering propserity, but undoubtedly it could still turn out to be a very bumpy road.
The two Fresh Tech employees were having a beer with their lunch and offered me the customary social cigarettes, but I had the good sense to refuse. I really wanted the beer, but I still had an afternoon of paper correcting to do. As for the cigarettes, I probably got a good half pack worth of whatever into my lungs during the 15 minute walk from my apartment, so no loss there.
Back on campus on Friday and Saturday, there was another interesting bit of economic activity going on. The school was having a job fair for spring graduates and there was much hoopla and many banners to advertise it. As it was happening pretty much right outside the foreign teachers' residence, I went out to have a look. Probably in the two days of the fair some thousand or more people were milling around squinting at the posters that were hung everywhere on the walls and fences around the guest house which was the center of the fair. Some were very professionally done and some looked like big-character posters form the 60s and 70s. Maybe half of the onlookers were younger undergrads just courious about the job scene, but others were very serious looking suited up individuals writing down the names and phone numbers of contacts or punching them into their cell phones. Some were accompanied by helpful parents—probably those with some education and experience. There were also visiting school bureaucrats (virtually all male) here and there, but most of them were probably in the guest house meeting rooms conducting interviews At the end of the day on Saturday they filed out to get into their cars and drive home.
This is a teachers college though for sure half or more of my students have no interest whatsoever in being teachers. Afterall they are not foolish. Nevertheless, representatives had come from many parts of the province, some of which I was familiar with and some of which were little backwater places I'd never heard of. Most of the posters didn't give much in the way of details beyond what kind of positions needed to be filled. There were ads for primary school teachers to Ph.D.s in high tech fields, but most were for junior and senior high school. I suppose some students were looking for a position close to their home towns and parents while others for sure want to get the hell as far away as possible, but those are the ones uninterested in teaching too. The biggest demand seemed to be for foreign language teachers, specifically English teachers. Next was Chinese language and after that a smattering of biology, physics, geography, etc. In many if not most cases thre was as much need for English teaches as all other positions combined, certainly more than any other single field. This interest in foreign language stands in stark contrast to the situation in the United States, where serious investment in foreign language study has maybe never been at a lower ebb.
One technical college was hiring Ph.D.s and M.A.s in various technical fields and was paying up to 100,000 rmb per year, about twice what I'm making here teaching English as a foreigner with a Ph.D. These positions had lots of other benefits too like computers, housing assistance and moving allowances. There were also ads for a Moslem school, not an uncommon thing at all in any part of China. There was also a bilingual school (双语) though this was probably just a school that taught two languages in parallel, the usual situation here. They were hiring at all levels from primary school to senior high. The salaries were 20,000 rmb for primary school and 25,000 or even up to 50,000 for senior high, so even the primary school teachers at this particular place were making nearly double the salary of the Fresh Tech factory workers. It's likely however, that this school advertised its salaries because they were more competitive, and for the same reason perhaps others intentionally omitted this information. Everyone agrees that teachers are underpaid, and not just in China, but as in other lines of work the rural-urban gap is the biggest factor.
Even this cursory and localized acount of economic conditions in China shows what a large and unwieldly animal is at the end of the tether that the CCP is trying to tame in the face of many, many other challengers. The big numbers don't tell half the story and no one is telling the whole story if indeed anyone can.
In spite of some setbacks due to lagging demand in the US for Chinese exports and the bad weather in February, the Chinese economy still seems to be chugging fairly well. But what do all the figures in the New York Times mean here on the ground in hinterland China?
Whether locally or nationally, it's sometimes hard to know if there really is a plan here or if things are just addressed on the squeakiest wheel principle. In spite of a fair amount of evidence for the latter, based on what happens and what doesn't I think it's fairly safe to say that there is plan. Of course, there is a public plan and it's on the big bulletin board near the campus entrance across from the administration building. That one is the summary of last fall's 17th National Party Congress and it's all about scientific development and the construction of a harmonious society. But that's the kind of thing you'd hear at a State of the Union message too. I'm talking about the real plan.
From what I can see the real plan is to continue to maximize the capacity of the country to industrialize and produce products for export in order to maximize the inflow of capital—as much and as long as possible until it just can't continue any longer for whatever reason be it world recession, internal strife, a total crash of the US economy, or China's finally being undercut by some other low wage producer. I think one can come to this conclusion not just by what's being done but just as much as by what's not being done in other sectors of the ecnomy and society.
I can't say I've seen a rush of new factories going up in and around Xinxiang, but there are lots of them of recent construction. Furthermore, everywhere on the edge of our end of town there are new 4 and 6-lane concrete roads going off into the countryside with some factories at the near end and space for many, many more. It's not unlike many places you can see in the US that are earmarked for low or tax free industrial development. We have such a place right near the airport in my hometown of Duluth with those same kinds of roads with names like Prosperity Lane that go right off into the woods. Most new construction here in Xinxiang is for residential housing and new spaces for mom and pop businesses on the ground floors of these large residential complexes. Although there are large ddowntown department stores, as in Japan, it's in these little neighborhood shops where the vast majority people buy their noodles, their shoes and their beer. As the residences fill up so do the shop rentals on the ground floors and even in my six months here I've been able to mark the progression.
However, the things that are not being done to curb pollution, improve living conditions in the countryside, and improve the rural health care system are indicators that the focus in these areas is on stopgap measures and not serious attempts to find final solutions to these problems. Incremental improvements in these areas are being made, but they take second place to industrialization and the export economy.
In fact, the situation in the countryside seems almost consciously designed to get more and more people off the land and on to the shop floor. As to the countryside surrounding Xinxiang, it was stated in the local paper that getting people away from earning their living on small pieces of land was the best way to reduce poverty. The paper refers to a study of 390 households which were part of a proverty reduction plan stretching over 3 years. According to their statistics, the incomes of those who were involved in work outside the village or were self-employed made up more than 30% of the total rural village income. It is forecast that for 2008 such families will constitute 43.5% of the village income. It is not stated directly, but this contract labor almost certainly consists of going to the city for day labor construction work and the like. In any case, due to the success of this plan "party committees and government of the various counties and townships attach great importance to the work of the transfer of agricultural labor." (PingYuan Wan Bao 2/15/08) An important thing to note, however, is that the villages in question are part of the same political entity of the city of 650,000, so it's easier for these workers to do day labor or stay in the city for short periods of time without being very far from their families. These options don't exist for rural people who are farther from urban labor markets. Those people must make the difficult choice of leaving their families for long periods of time or continuing to live in relative poverty.
While things have been done to ease the difficulty of rural life, like instituting a very minimal basic rural health care plan and eliminating tuition for junior high school education, the changes border on insignificance. The rural-urban gap remains huge and I can see the transition even as I bicycle out of the city to the adjacent villages and then to those an hour or so away where they grow basic grains and don't have access to the urban vegetable markets. Another indication is that just a quick ride through rural villages shows that it's overwhelmingly old people who are out in the fields. If one could make a good living staying on the land, more young people would choose to do it.
Of course, China is only one of the more recent countries to go through such a transition. The interesting thing is the extent to which it becomes part of a conscious plan on the part of government or a more natural and gradual shift. In Japan, from about the 1870s the government raised land taxes, forced many peasants off the land and and gave them no other recourse but to head for low wage urban factories as the government got its export industry going with textiles. Rural samurai also turned in their swords for suits and briefcases and headed for town. The basic class relations continued in a different venue. Now other carrots and sticks are being used in China now to accomplish the same ends.
Continuing the expansion of industry is clearly a much higher priority than cleaning up the environment as well. For sure good things are being done and some progress is being made, particularly with the use of electric bicycles and new low emissions public transportation in the cities. However, coal burning to produce electricity for industry continues to grow though some reports say that coal pollution is actually decling only to be replaced by auto emissions. The air is generally better now than when I came here for 2 months in the spring of 2001 at the time of the grain harvest when farmers burn the stubble. However, there are still plenty of bad days and weird smells in the air at times especially at night when most people don't go out to notice. I found it interesting that last fall there was a "no car day" in some parts of the city. The 8 column inches or so in the local paper devoted to it contrasted sharply with a full-page report of the annual auto exposition in Guangzhou complete with pictures of the requiste number of women draped over cars.
Pollution of rivers is even worse and an even clearer indication of where priorities lie. My students are writing on pollution problems this semester, and student after student has reported how the rivers in her/his towns and villages where they used to swim and fish as young children have become smelly lifeless black flowages just in the last 10 to 15 years. Right here in town I can walk to the place where the local river turns from a semi-transparent light green to totally smelly black after it passes a point where in very plain view a culvert empties into it and totally changes the character of the river. The origin is unknown to me, but it would be very easy to find it if someone wanted to. Fixing it, however, is apparently less important than something else, that something else probably being more and more profitable production of goods for sale domestically and internationally. The fact that some of the profit does get routed to stopgap measures to silence the squeakiest wheels does not detract from the obviousness of the main priority.
I can add some details and examples on a more individual basis. The other day I went to have some 泡馍羊肉 at a mom and pop street side establishment. The name of this dish rather defies direct translation, but it's a favorite in western Muslim regions where mutton is the main meat. In fact there's very little meat in it; it consists of mutton broth, a little parsley and chips of heavy bread that soak up the broth. In short, it's a cheap dish that kills the hunger and sticks to the ribs. This place happened to be popular with employees of Fresh Tech (新飞), one of the biggest employers in Xinxiang, just a block or so away. Not surprisingly one of the main arteries in town is named after the company as well. I was able to have some conversation with two fellows that were finishing their lunch at the next table. The conversation stated with the inevitable question about my salary and I told them that I get 5000 rmb (about $650 USD) per month. At first they thought maybe I was getting $5000 USD per month, but when they found out is was indeed rmb they said it was 不多, "not much." I hastened to agree.
As it was Saturday, they were off work. They are factory workers in this establishment that makes freon free "green" refrigerators and freezers. Their characterized jobs as 中等, kind of ok jobs. They make about 1000 rmb per month (about $140 USD). Interestingly that's the number I was told by someone when I was here 6 years ago too. At that time Fresh Tech jobs were considered desriable and either things have not gotten better for those workers over the years or I was misinformed by someone who didn't have information straight from the horse's mouth as I was getting now.
The factory employs about 15,000 people and its products are virtually all for export to East Asia—very few to Europe or elsewhere according to my infomants. They work regular 5-day weeks, but it's likely that with new fast assembly line techniques their employers get a lot for their $140 per month (the cost of one refrigerator?!). The company is now owned by someone in Singapore though I was once informed that the company was originally German. In any case the place seems to be doing well enough because I walk past there now and then and there are always flat bed semi-tractor traliers full of refrigerators and freezers going out. I once saw a group of large residential high rises south of town with the Fresh Tech name on it and these fellows told me that anyone could buy those flats but they were built by the company and were cheaper for employees. I neglected to ask about health insurance, but most urban work units have decent insurance policies compared to rural and temp workers, so the housing option and health care serve to agument the just ok salaries. Outside of town my bicycle wanderings brought me across another Fresh Tech operation—a factory that makes electric bicycles. It was not nearly as big as the refrigerator operation, but it seems that the company has its foot in the door of another potentially lucrative business, this one for domestic as well as international consumption. (An electric bicycke might cost a couple months' salary.) In another place south of downtown there is another huge Fresh Tech Group building and not far from it a block square empty lot that is surrounded by a wall with "Fresh Tech Electric Bicycles" on every inch of wall space. Perhaps it is the site of a future factory.
The cheap lunch these two guiys had on their day off illustrates another very important point—the economic multiplier effect of their work for the countless mom and pop operations mentioned earlier. So far so good even in spite of serious inflation in the past year, particularly in the past months. As a single party government running a capitalist state, the folks in Beijing have more levers to pull quickly if needed. It may surprise readers to know that they still have the confidence of a very sizeable segment of the population when it comes to delivering propserity, but undoubtedly it could still turn out to be a very bumpy road.
The two Fresh Tech employees were having a beer with their lunch and offered me the customary social cigarettes, but I had the good sense to refuse. I really wanted the beer, but I still had an afternoon of paper correcting to do. As for the cigarettes, I probably got a good half pack worth of whatever into my lungs during the 15 minute walk from my apartment, so no loss there.
Back on campus on Friday and Saturday, there was another interesting bit of economic activity going on. The school was having a job fair for spring graduates and there was much hoopla and many banners to advertise it. As it was happening pretty much right outside the foreign teachers' residence, I went out to have a look. Probably in the two days of the fair some thousand or more people were milling around squinting at the posters that were hung everywhere on the walls and fences around the guest house which was the center of the fair. Some were very professionally done and some looked like big-character posters form the 60s and 70s. Maybe half of the onlookers were younger undergrads just courious about the job scene, but others were very serious looking suited up individuals writing down the names and phone numbers of contacts or punching them into their cell phones. Some were accompanied by helpful parents—probably those with some education and experience. There were also visiting school bureaucrats (virtually all male) here and there, but most of them were probably in the guest house meeting rooms conducting interviews At the end of the day on Saturday they filed out to get into their cars and drive home.
This is a teachers college though for sure half or more of my students have no interest whatsoever in being teachers. Afterall they are not foolish. Nevertheless, representatives had come from many parts of the province, some of which I was familiar with and some of which were little backwater places I'd never heard of. Most of the posters didn't give much in the way of details beyond what kind of positions needed to be filled. There were ads for primary school teachers to Ph.D.s in high tech fields, but most were for junior and senior high school. I suppose some students were looking for a position close to their home towns and parents while others for sure want to get the hell as far away as possible, but those are the ones uninterested in teaching too. The biggest demand seemed to be for foreign language teachers, specifically English teachers. Next was Chinese language and after that a smattering of biology, physics, geography, etc. In many if not most cases thre was as much need for English teaches as all other positions combined, certainly more than any other single field. This interest in foreign language stands in stark contrast to the situation in the United States, where serious investment in foreign language study has maybe never been at a lower ebb.
One technical college was hiring Ph.D.s and M.A.s in various technical fields and was paying up to 100,000 rmb per year, about twice what I'm making here teaching English as a foreigner with a Ph.D. These positions had lots of other benefits too like computers, housing assistance and moving allowances. There were also ads for a Moslem school, not an uncommon thing at all in any part of China. There was also a bilingual school (双语) though this was probably just a school that taught two languages in parallel, the usual situation here. They were hiring at all levels from primary school to senior high. The salaries were 20,000 rmb for primary school and 25,000 or even up to 50,000 for senior high, so even the primary school teachers at this particular place were making nearly double the salary of the Fresh Tech factory workers. It's likely however, that this school advertised its salaries because they were more competitive, and for the same reason perhaps others intentionally omitted this information. Everyone agrees that teachers are underpaid, and not just in China, but as in other lines of work the rural-urban gap is the biggest factor.
Even this cursory and localized acount of economic conditions in China shows what a large and unwieldly animal is at the end of the tether that the CCP is trying to tame in the face of many, many other challengers. The big numbers don't tell half the story and no one is telling the whole story if indeed anyone can.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Viet Nam—Hue and Hanoi
Viet Nam—Hue and Hanoi
Our flight to Hue was diverted to Da Nang due to bad weather in Hue and this was blessing in disguise because it meant that we had to take a bus from Da Nang, which allowed us to see a good bit of the countryside along the ocean. In many places some very huge mountains come to within a half mile of the coast with many rivers of various sizes coming out of them. There is intense cultivation of rice everywhere. As in Tay Ninh province, there is lots of new construction and many new local Buddhist temples as well as Catholic churches and one Cao Dai temple too.
Along the route here and there one sees cemeteries of 50 to 100 or so white gravestones surrounding a monument calling attention to the sacrifice of those buried there, a quiet reminder of the horror of 40 years ago. These local cemeteries are all around the country, in some places more than others for obvious reasons, but one must recall that they don't even include the hundreds of thousands of missing civilians and soldiers of the US war in sharp contrast to the few thousand remaining US MIAs.
Hue was the capital of Viet Nam from 1802 to 1945 and construction of The Purple Palace was begun in 1805. At the entrance once can see an inscription in French saying that some of the parts of the temple were "destroyed in war in 1947." By guess who—the French! The Purple Palace is modeled after Chinese palaces so it's nothing very new in some ways to those who have toured similar places in China. However, it's a rather sad place partly due to the run down condition of the buildings, partly due to the fine cold rain that comes with the winter season, and partly due to the ghostly presence of Emperior Tu Duc, who reigned from 1847 to 1883 and was unable to save his country from the intrusion of the French as his predecessor Le Loi had been able to drive out the Chinese in 1428. Every Vietnamese city has a Le Loi Street but I saw no Tu Duc Street. Of course, just as the Chinese were no match for the British in the Opium War, Tu Duc's resources could not compare to the weaponry of the French, but it didn't stop him from feeling a profound sense of failure as an emperor.
While I was taking an afternoon walk out of the hotel district of Hue, two little girls about 5 or 6 years old started following me and laughing on their way home from school. Then one's hat blew off her head and into the street amid the whizzing motorcycles, so I motioned to them to stay put by the side of the road while I ventured into the traffic to retieve the hat. A bit later the one who had lost her hat came running up to me and said "thank you" in English and then quickly ran back to her comrade. It probably took her a few mintues to recall those words of their first English lesson. They kept walking behind me so I finally stopped and tried to ask them some simple questions in Vietnamese but they just giggled and ran off into a side street heading for home. Just after that a little boy about 3 years old on the back of his mother's bicycle looked at this foreigner with wonder and then smiled when I waved and waved back to me. I've had such encounters on so many occasions in so many places, and I always consider them precious for creating positive impressions about those who are different. Yet at the same time it's depressing to realize how quickly these feelings can be wiped away and what humans can do to each other under the influence of the propaganda of nationalism and fear.
The hotel staff in both Hue an Hanoi were very young, friendly, energetic and aiming to please. The place in Hue had only about 15 or 20 units and had been open only for a matter of months. It had been bought by the father of one of the young men and handed over to them to make a go of it. The staff in both places in fact slept on the floor in the lobby at night. The place was their life and everything depended on its success. In Hue if you sat down to use the internet they immediately brought you a glass of water. There was also fruit in the room and fresh flowers for $30 USD per night. Entrepreneursip in action. I hope they survive their first recession.
We took a pretty low budget boat tour along the Perfume River, which runs through Hue and along which there are numerous Buddhist temples and tombs of Nguyen dynasty emperors. Like the Purple Palace, the tombs were interesting but in poor repair. The Thien Mu Pagoda, built in the early 1600s, was an exception in that it was very nicely restored and is now the home of a number of young monks. On display was the 1950s vintage car belonging to the monk who drove it to the place where he immolated himself in 1963 in opposition to the Diem government's treatment of Buddhists and prosecution of the war. Du Tuc's tomb is also along the river. It's nearly as extensive as the Purple Palace. Apparently he spent more time there than at the palace downriver, perhaps being unable to face the reality of the bad news about the French invasion coming in from the provinces. The tomb contains a statement of apology to his people for his failure as emperor to keep out the French and there are depressing poems written in Chinese all over the place. In fact, his actual burial place is unknown. The poor man just wanted to disappear into the obscurity of history to join the scattered bones of his countrymen and women who died in the conquest and its aftermath.
Everywhere along the way there is begging and peddling by children, some of it rather clever. One had a good line, "I collect coins." When I emptied my pockets and said I didn't have any foreign coins, she saw my pen and said, "I'll take the pen." Good conversational English for an 11 year-old in the boonies. There were many women selling bananas, peanut candy and various kinds of wooden toys, all of them trying to sell the same things. They had good lines too, like "Maybe later?" or "Remember Huong on the way back." There was always a way to get an extra dollar. On the boat we were served a modest lunch as part of our tour. Drinks were served with the lunch, but only later were we told that drinks were not included and they were priced way, way over what you'd pay anywhere else on the street even as a tourist. One restaurant even charged and extra 2000 dong (about 15 cents US) for each wet wipe served with the meal. I wondered whether it was grabby greed and nothing else or just payback time for the western tourists. Understandable enough if it's the latter.
Hanoi is a much more interesting and and somewhat more relaxed city than Saigon and there seems to be a little less money floating around. However, one would not have gotten this impression from the driver who brought us from the airport. This suited young dandy with very long immaculately manicured fingernails operated three cell phones as he drove, acting like an upper class throwback from pre-revolutionary times.
The old quarter of Hanoi has lots of small quiet places to eat and there is a laid-back cafe area where locals hang out, but not far in the other driection there are lots of run down sections like Cho Lon in Saigon. Not far from out hotel I came upon a very wide parkway lined with huge old trees. At the head of the parkway was a huge socialist realist sculpture, on one side of which was a mililtary figure and the other side a muscular woman and a kneeling man. Further down there were rows of big dark yellow colored colonial buildings with tall shuttered windows, one of which was dated 1902. This area had obviously been the seat of the colonial government and the residences of the colonialist occupiers, full of back doors for servants, cooks, cleaners and concubines. Now it is a miltary area where pictures are forbidden. One soldier stepped out of his post box and pointed to the "no photos" sign. I smiled and nodded and and put my camera away. Further down another young soldier in his post box with an AK-47 across his chest—the banana clip loaded in the chamber—surprisedly smiled and saluted as I passed. No others even acknowledged my presence. A huge Catholic church was right at the edge of the former imperialist enclave. No doubt the colonial exloiters and murderers attended Mass on Sundays if not daily. At the end of the military area was a park and the tomb of Ho Chi Minh, which was guarded by two sentries in white uniforms. I didn't have time to try to go inside but hardly needed to as Ho's likeness is all over Viet Nam in many variations, often with children and various quotes and slogans. That said, there was never any Ho Chi Minh cult of personality as in China for Mao nor any cultural revolution. By the time the Americans were totally kicked out in 1975, the Vietnamese had seen the results of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and didn't want to repeat them in Viet Nam. It might also explain why many very active churches and temples still exist in Viet Nam, something for better or for worse that's only coming back now in China now 30-plus years after the CR.
The old area of Hoan Kiem Lake is ringed with tourist stores. They are endless and all full of the same things. That's not counting the peddlers and beggars. One dark skinned young woman who saw me hesitate as I glanced to find whether a small temple had an entrance fee—it did—asked me what I was looking for. I smiled and said "happiness." She must have misunderstood me because she tried to sell me a copy of Grahman Greene's The Quiet American, which I told her in Vietnamese that I had already read. Then she pulled out a copy of Bao Dinh's The Sorrow of War. At that point I put up my open palm with as much politeness as I could muster and she moved on.
We ended up having a very late lunch on a street side place where there were no foreigners. It consisted of bowls of very greasy thickly sliced bacon and small fried ground beef patties in greasy soup into which one puts noodles, sliced kohlrabi and various greens. Either I was really hungry or it was really good. We ended up there because an old lady from whom we wanted to buy some French bread sandwiches was asking 65,000 dong per sandwich—maybe 10 times the going rate. She was easily in her late 60s and probably would never sell enough sandwiches to Western tourists even at that rate to make up for the losses she had probably suffered in her life. Her one English phrase "sixty-five thousand" could perhaps have been better rendered as "I don't do business with whities." Later that night I went out to buy some green oranges on the street from two other women maybe about my age. As we did the transaction, I asked if they were sweet. Of course, they insisted. Then they asked if I was French. No, I said, Ameican. Silence. Why would an American man my age know any Vietnamese? Only one explanation.
We spent one night and the better part of two days on a boat on Ha Long Bay, whose tall mountains are like those of Guilin in China except that they rise out of the ocean. It's a very beautiful place for sure, but it's growing like crazy as a tourist attraction and it's already getting out of hand. In the little bay where we anchored for the night I counted 32 other tourist boats. As on land, all around are peddlers rowing little boats like remoras following sharks. The vendors were women and children and the men were away fishing. I spoke to the 28-year old tour guide who had gone to some foreign studies university and then did 6 months of further study to get a tour guide license. He said that the US war has to be not forgotten but "put aside" and he was quite pleased with the direction in which Viet Nam was going. He is part of a big post-war baby boom and "doesn't like politcs." Now it's all about catching up with the rest of the world. China is a good model, but Viet Nam must link up with ASEAN nations so as to be able to deal with China on an equal basis. He mentioned China's invasion of Viet Nam in 1979 but not Viet Nam's own invasion of Cambodia. As most people in China, he seemed oblivious to becoming too dependent on exports to the US as a way to enrich the country though I did meet one tourism worker who voiced this concern.
This was a rather difficult trip. Even though I managed by a stroke of luck and a matter of days not to be sent here to kill 35 years ago, Viet Nam has played a huge role in my life, taking away two years of it and offering me nothing but the prospect of an untimely death. However, the true culprit is imperialism and though this is realized by the majority of the Vietnamese population at an abstract level, on a personal level it's all about getting as much back as possible now. The tourism approach barely papers over the latent anger and sadness that pervades everything here and is underscored by the constant bone-chilling drizzle of Hue and Hanoi. Pehaps the yuppie back-packers from North America and Europe and the young hotel entrepreneurs don't feel it, but it's been with me every moment. I really wanted to find something to come back to here but I didn't. Perhaps someday.
Our flight to Hue was diverted to Da Nang due to bad weather in Hue and this was blessing in disguise because it meant that we had to take a bus from Da Nang, which allowed us to see a good bit of the countryside along the ocean. In many places some very huge mountains come to within a half mile of the coast with many rivers of various sizes coming out of them. There is intense cultivation of rice everywhere. As in Tay Ninh province, there is lots of new construction and many new local Buddhist temples as well as Catholic churches and one Cao Dai temple too.
Along the route here and there one sees cemeteries of 50 to 100 or so white gravestones surrounding a monument calling attention to the sacrifice of those buried there, a quiet reminder of the horror of 40 years ago. These local cemeteries are all around the country, in some places more than others for obvious reasons, but one must recall that they don't even include the hundreds of thousands of missing civilians and soldiers of the US war in sharp contrast to the few thousand remaining US MIAs.
Hue was the capital of Viet Nam from 1802 to 1945 and construction of The Purple Palace was begun in 1805. At the entrance once can see an inscription in French saying that some of the parts of the temple were "destroyed in war in 1947." By guess who—the French! The Purple Palace is modeled after Chinese palaces so it's nothing very new in some ways to those who have toured similar places in China. However, it's a rather sad place partly due to the run down condition of the buildings, partly due to the fine cold rain that comes with the winter season, and partly due to the ghostly presence of Emperior Tu Duc, who reigned from 1847 to 1883 and was unable to save his country from the intrusion of the French as his predecessor Le Loi had been able to drive out the Chinese in 1428. Every Vietnamese city has a Le Loi Street but I saw no Tu Duc Street. Of course, just as the Chinese were no match for the British in the Opium War, Tu Duc's resources could not compare to the weaponry of the French, but it didn't stop him from feeling a profound sense of failure as an emperor.
While I was taking an afternoon walk out of the hotel district of Hue, two little girls about 5 or 6 years old started following me and laughing on their way home from school. Then one's hat blew off her head and into the street amid the whizzing motorcycles, so I motioned to them to stay put by the side of the road while I ventured into the traffic to retieve the hat. A bit later the one who had lost her hat came running up to me and said "thank you" in English and then quickly ran back to her comrade. It probably took her a few mintues to recall those words of their first English lesson. They kept walking behind me so I finally stopped and tried to ask them some simple questions in Vietnamese but they just giggled and ran off into a side street heading for home. Just after that a little boy about 3 years old on the back of his mother's bicycle looked at this foreigner with wonder and then smiled when I waved and waved back to me. I've had such encounters on so many occasions in so many places, and I always consider them precious for creating positive impressions about those who are different. Yet at the same time it's depressing to realize how quickly these feelings can be wiped away and what humans can do to each other under the influence of the propaganda of nationalism and fear.
The hotel staff in both Hue an Hanoi were very young, friendly, energetic and aiming to please. The place in Hue had only about 15 or 20 units and had been open only for a matter of months. It had been bought by the father of one of the young men and handed over to them to make a go of it. The staff in both places in fact slept on the floor in the lobby at night. The place was their life and everything depended on its success. In Hue if you sat down to use the internet they immediately brought you a glass of water. There was also fruit in the room and fresh flowers for $30 USD per night. Entrepreneursip in action. I hope they survive their first recession.
We took a pretty low budget boat tour along the Perfume River, which runs through Hue and along which there are numerous Buddhist temples and tombs of Nguyen dynasty emperors. Like the Purple Palace, the tombs were interesting but in poor repair. The Thien Mu Pagoda, built in the early 1600s, was an exception in that it was very nicely restored and is now the home of a number of young monks. On display was the 1950s vintage car belonging to the monk who drove it to the place where he immolated himself in 1963 in opposition to the Diem government's treatment of Buddhists and prosecution of the war. Du Tuc's tomb is also along the river. It's nearly as extensive as the Purple Palace. Apparently he spent more time there than at the palace downriver, perhaps being unable to face the reality of the bad news about the French invasion coming in from the provinces. The tomb contains a statement of apology to his people for his failure as emperor to keep out the French and there are depressing poems written in Chinese all over the place. In fact, his actual burial place is unknown. The poor man just wanted to disappear into the obscurity of history to join the scattered bones of his countrymen and women who died in the conquest and its aftermath.
Everywhere along the way there is begging and peddling by children, some of it rather clever. One had a good line, "I collect coins." When I emptied my pockets and said I didn't have any foreign coins, she saw my pen and said, "I'll take the pen." Good conversational English for an 11 year-old in the boonies. There were many women selling bananas, peanut candy and various kinds of wooden toys, all of them trying to sell the same things. They had good lines too, like "Maybe later?" or "Remember Huong on the way back." There was always a way to get an extra dollar. On the boat we were served a modest lunch as part of our tour. Drinks were served with the lunch, but only later were we told that drinks were not included and they were priced way, way over what you'd pay anywhere else on the street even as a tourist. One restaurant even charged and extra 2000 dong (about 15 cents US) for each wet wipe served with the meal. I wondered whether it was grabby greed and nothing else or just payback time for the western tourists. Understandable enough if it's the latter.
Hanoi is a much more interesting and and somewhat more relaxed city than Saigon and there seems to be a little less money floating around. However, one would not have gotten this impression from the driver who brought us from the airport. This suited young dandy with very long immaculately manicured fingernails operated three cell phones as he drove, acting like an upper class throwback from pre-revolutionary times.
The old quarter of Hanoi has lots of small quiet places to eat and there is a laid-back cafe area where locals hang out, but not far in the other driection there are lots of run down sections like Cho Lon in Saigon. Not far from out hotel I came upon a very wide parkway lined with huge old trees. At the head of the parkway was a huge socialist realist sculpture, on one side of which was a mililtary figure and the other side a muscular woman and a kneeling man. Further down there were rows of big dark yellow colored colonial buildings with tall shuttered windows, one of which was dated 1902. This area had obviously been the seat of the colonial government and the residences of the colonialist occupiers, full of back doors for servants, cooks, cleaners and concubines. Now it is a miltary area where pictures are forbidden. One soldier stepped out of his post box and pointed to the "no photos" sign. I smiled and nodded and and put my camera away. Further down another young soldier in his post box with an AK-47 across his chest—the banana clip loaded in the chamber—surprisedly smiled and saluted as I passed. No others even acknowledged my presence. A huge Catholic church was right at the edge of the former imperialist enclave. No doubt the colonial exloiters and murderers attended Mass on Sundays if not daily. At the end of the military area was a park and the tomb of Ho Chi Minh, which was guarded by two sentries in white uniforms. I didn't have time to try to go inside but hardly needed to as Ho's likeness is all over Viet Nam in many variations, often with children and various quotes and slogans. That said, there was never any Ho Chi Minh cult of personality as in China for Mao nor any cultural revolution. By the time the Americans were totally kicked out in 1975, the Vietnamese had seen the results of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and didn't want to repeat them in Viet Nam. It might also explain why many very active churches and temples still exist in Viet Nam, something for better or for worse that's only coming back now in China now 30-plus years after the CR.
The old area of Hoan Kiem Lake is ringed with tourist stores. They are endless and all full of the same things. That's not counting the peddlers and beggars. One dark skinned young woman who saw me hesitate as I glanced to find whether a small temple had an entrance fee—it did—asked me what I was looking for. I smiled and said "happiness." She must have misunderstood me because she tried to sell me a copy of Grahman Greene's The Quiet American, which I told her in Vietnamese that I had already read. Then she pulled out a copy of Bao Dinh's The Sorrow of War. At that point I put up my open palm with as much politeness as I could muster and she moved on.
We ended up having a very late lunch on a street side place where there were no foreigners. It consisted of bowls of very greasy thickly sliced bacon and small fried ground beef patties in greasy soup into which one puts noodles, sliced kohlrabi and various greens. Either I was really hungry or it was really good. We ended up there because an old lady from whom we wanted to buy some French bread sandwiches was asking 65,000 dong per sandwich—maybe 10 times the going rate. She was easily in her late 60s and probably would never sell enough sandwiches to Western tourists even at that rate to make up for the losses she had probably suffered in her life. Her one English phrase "sixty-five thousand" could perhaps have been better rendered as "I don't do business with whities." Later that night I went out to buy some green oranges on the street from two other women maybe about my age. As we did the transaction, I asked if they were sweet. Of course, they insisted. Then they asked if I was French. No, I said, Ameican. Silence. Why would an American man my age know any Vietnamese? Only one explanation.
We spent one night and the better part of two days on a boat on Ha Long Bay, whose tall mountains are like those of Guilin in China except that they rise out of the ocean. It's a very beautiful place for sure, but it's growing like crazy as a tourist attraction and it's already getting out of hand. In the little bay where we anchored for the night I counted 32 other tourist boats. As on land, all around are peddlers rowing little boats like remoras following sharks. The vendors were women and children and the men were away fishing. I spoke to the 28-year old tour guide who had gone to some foreign studies university and then did 6 months of further study to get a tour guide license. He said that the US war has to be not forgotten but "put aside" and he was quite pleased with the direction in which Viet Nam was going. He is part of a big post-war baby boom and "doesn't like politcs." Now it's all about catching up with the rest of the world. China is a good model, but Viet Nam must link up with ASEAN nations so as to be able to deal with China on an equal basis. He mentioned China's invasion of Viet Nam in 1979 but not Viet Nam's own invasion of Cambodia. As most people in China, he seemed oblivious to becoming too dependent on exports to the US as a way to enrich the country though I did meet one tourism worker who voiced this concern.
This was a rather difficult trip. Even though I managed by a stroke of luck and a matter of days not to be sent here to kill 35 years ago, Viet Nam has played a huge role in my life, taking away two years of it and offering me nothing but the prospect of an untimely death. However, the true culprit is imperialism and though this is realized by the majority of the Vietnamese population at an abstract level, on a personal level it's all about getting as much back as possible now. The tourism approach barely papers over the latent anger and sadness that pervades everything here and is underscored by the constant bone-chilling drizzle of Hue and Hanoi. Pehaps the yuppie back-packers from North America and Europe and the young hotel entrepreneurs don't feel it, but it's been with me every moment. I really wanted to find something to come back to here but I didn't. Perhaps someday.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Viet Nam: Saigon
Viet Nam: Saigon
Arrived at the ariport in the early afternoon and changed $600 USD into over 10 million dong, the first time I've been a millionaire since South Korea. The airport terminal was new and very efficient but small for a city the size of Saigon and full of posters and advertisements mostly in English and oriented to Western business. In contrast, next to the runways concrete structures for protecting helicoptors from Viet Cong attacks remained as an eiree and unexpected remnant of the US war. This juxtaposition kind of set the tone for the visit.
Streets in Saigon—virtually no one there calls it by its official name of Ho Chi Minh City—are very narrow and crowded, much more than those in China and in much worse repair. There are zillions of motorcycles and few cars and fewer bicycles. One of the most striking first impressions is the webs of electric wires strung in incredible tangles onto the cross bars of concrete poles sometimes just a few feet above the heads of pedestrians. If someome’s lighbulb or telephone goes dead due to a break in one of these wires, I could see it taking months to find the place to splice the wire.
Streets have hammar and sickle banners and silhouettes of Ho Chi Minh with quotes. Lots of people are out in the early afternoon despite the heat. Everywhere there is a very high level of activity. No one on this weekday afternoon is taking an rest as they would be up north in China at the same hour. There are peddlers everywhere, a good number of beggars, lots of street food but relatively few restaurants. We made the mistake of entering a huge indoor market near the hotel, definitely a tourist area, and were aggressively pursued by hawkers so we quickly made for the nearest escape. Even as I was on the run, one woman came after me and grabbed my shoulder—more of a caress—in an attempt to get me to look at her merchandise. Nevertheless, many middle-aged mostly European tourists and a few young hipsters were having a good time bargaining for spandex jeans and souvenir knick-knacks.
Wandering around we happened to pass a Hindu temple and were deluged by people selling incense and flowers to use as offerings inside the temple. I was quite surprised to see Vietnamese devotees in this overwhelmingly Buddhist country putting their faces into the corners of well worn dirty stone altars while others were kneeling and bowing before various Hindu dieties. I foolishly took some incense sticks that were thurst into my hands and lit them and put them in front of some of the statues. Upon leaving the place I was swarmed with people demanding money for the incense, but after less than an afternoon in Saigon I was calloused enough to refuse them and walked directly away. As a rather seasoned tourist in Asia, I’m accustomed to paying a good bit more for goods and sevices, but it must be said that in Vietnam some of these situations were over the top.
Interestingly, women in Viet Nam and Southeast Asia generally were not obsessively thin and in most cases very casually dressed. I suppose it's because they are in between the time when there wasn't really enough to eat but before the arrival of the advertising industry. The only exceptions to the not-very-well-dressed rule were the uniformly comely ladies in the hair salons, who were dressed to kill just inside the large glass doors and windows of these establishments. There seemed to be little doubt that their real business is not hair dressing.
The War Remnants Museum is an absolute requirement for visitors to Saigon. The museum is just what is says—a collection of objects left over from the French and US wars on Viet Nam.: a helicopter, a jet, a recon plane, mines, bombs of all kinds and sizes, grenades, rifles, machine guns—just about everything. Most of the museum was galleries of photos going back to the French wars, a good bit of them taken by US and French correspondents, many of them war critics. There are also pictures of and statements by US war resistors including those who burned themselves in protest. Of cousre, Jane Fonda is there too. One room is dedicated to pictures of anti-war protests from around the world. There were mock-ups of the infamous tiger cages and illustrations of the various torture mechanisms for male and female victims and the effects both immediately and decades later. Examples include waterboarding (still a favorite), electronic torture, various methods of hanging, finger pins, snakes, helecoptor executions, etc. etc.
Another part of the museum had to do with Agent Orange birth defect victims. There were many grim photos as well as a film. The tone of the museum reminded me of the documentary film Regret to Inform but even more powerful. For the sake of my mental health I went through the whole thing rather quickly not dwelling on any one part very much. In fact, there was little new for me, but still on a few occasions I had to back off a bit. In several of the rooms there were books for guests to record their impressions in, but I didn't read or write in any of them. I thought about writing something but didn't know if I'd be able to stop once I started.
Overall, the museum was balanced and tastefully done in the sense that it straightforwardly recorded what had transpired in terms of the French-US aggression, the Vietnamese resistence, and world wide opposition to the war including opposition in the invading countries. Perhaps I was reading into it for my own reasons, but there seemed even to be a certain sympathy for the French and American soldiers forced to fight in Viet Nam. There were donation bins to collect money for war victims and a few limbless beggars right in the compound but I didn't contribute. In the US I once gave a small contribution to the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation for aid to Viet Nam war victims, but when they called again the next year, after the Iraq war had started, I was angry and refused to give any more and lectured the caller about why I was refusing. Conscience money to pay for past wars is less needed than action to oppose current atrocities. The lessons from the war and why similar wars keep occurring remain to be learned by the public at large.
In the courtyard of the museum I overheard an American woman of Vietnam War era vintage asking a Vietnamese man who was perhaps in his 40s something like, "Do hate the Americans? You have a right to, you know!" The man smiled uneasily and replied, "No, no, we don't," but his reply was anything but forceful and convincing. She didn't seem to accept this response and her body language indicated she wanted more, but the man just muttered his answer again, turned his back and quickly moved away shaking his head—either to reinforce his reply or perhaps to indicate his unwillingness to carry the conversation further.
Cholon, which means 'big market,' is the crowded, busy, noisy Chinatown district of Saigon and is one of the oldest and most run down sections of town. Some buildings are crumbling and abandoned from pre-US war, pre-WW2 or turn of the 20th century colonial times. It is also the home of a number of Buddhist temples that go back a few hundred years in some cases. We visited two of the half dozen or so on the map and both were very active with incense-burning supplicants bowing and praying in large numbers. One of the temples, dedicated to Kuan Yin, had an attached school that seemed to go up to at least junior high school judging from the appearance of the students coming out.
Later in the day, we ate at a street stall run by some Cantonese speakers born in VN whose parents came from the mainland in 1931. The older brother was maybe my age and was drafted into the South Vietnamese Army later in the war after the family was extorted many times for a deferment to the point where the family restaurant was lost. All they now have now is the street stall and a floor in the old building behind it to live in. Well, he's still alive. I know the feeling. The sister said that there was a Taiwan-run Chinese language school in Saigon, so those who want their children to get a Chinese education can still do so. They say that relations between Vietnamese and the ethnic Chinese community are now good.
We took a bus to two places the next day, the Cao Dai Temple in Tai Ninh Province, all the way to the Cambodian border, and the Cu Chi tunnels, an area of strong anti-French and anti-American resistence, now an exhibition area. On the way to the Cao Dai Temple we stopped at a factory in Tai Ninh Province ostensibly for a chance to relieve our bladders but really for a chance to be sold some goods made in a factory which we were told was set up to employ handicapped workers. Relatively few of the workers were in fact handicapped. The goods in the factory show room were priced slightly below what one might pay in the US. The weak leftovers of my Vietnamese langauge training allowed me to ask one worker what he made per month—a million dong, about $60 USD, or $2 per day, so there was quite a slip between what he produced and what was being taken in on the show room floor.
As we rode through the countryside we passed an area of big factories, mostly textile firms built with foreign investment money. The countryside does not seem to be so hard pressed as China when it comes to land use. The area gets 3 crops of rice and in between there is corn and peanuts as well as rubber plantations, started by the French and now run by the state. A good deal of new housing was going up along the major roads, so things seem to be prosperous enough but it is hard to make generalizations from a bus window.
The very huge cathedral-like Cao Dai Temple was interesting in a fashion. Founded in 1926, the Cao Dai religion claims to be a compilation of Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, Taoism and Hinduism—the best of everything, presumably. Followers wear white and pray many times per day in some incantations that are unintelligble to native speaking Vietnamese...or anyone else perhaps including the prayers themselves according to the tour guide. Believers line up in the temple according to their seniority and position in the faith communty. It has several million followers in Viet Nam.
Cu Chi was interesting but quite disappointing in that it is an area of historical importance that has been turned into a tourist trap. The tour we were given started with an old black and white film with Viet Cong footage and commentary from the 60s explaining the particularly fierce resistence of Cu Chi villagers to the US based soldiers nearby. (The base is now used by the Vietnamese army and proceeds from entrance fees go to the military.) The famous tunnels were begun in 1948 when Cu Chi first resisted the French. The tunnels were built both to keep safe from US bombing campaigns as well as a place to escape to during combat with US troops. A B-52 crater remains and the jungle undergrowth is still thick. A tank stands in the jungle where the 5-man crew was shot dead as they tried to flee after the tank was stopped by a mine. The biggest attraction was to crawl through the black tunnels, now widened to accommodate Western derrieres. Various exhibits show how US ordnance was recycled by the VC, how various kinds of booby traps worked, and how the VC could even cook underground and spread the smoke out through vents in ways that would not be detected.
All of this was interesting enough, but it got over the top when we taken to a firing range where you could pay US dollars by the bullet to live fire any kind of weapon you wanted, AKs, M-60s, M-16s, etc. One French dude who came dressed in US knock-off camouflage really got into it. All the Japanese tourists fired weapons too. I kept my distance and somehow managed to keep my temper also.
The tour guide was maybe the biggest part of this story. He said we could call him "Slim Jim" because his old American buddies said he ate like a bird, drank life a fish and smoked like a chimney. Very cute. He said he was a new member of the tour guide company. He had taught English for 24 years in the countryside since 1973 and says he may go back into teaching after he improves his conversational English as a tour guide. Fat chance. I suspect he worked for the US Army judging from his use of words like klicks for 'kilometers,' totally a military term. When the US officialy left in 1973 he needed work and may have been forced to teach in rural areas as part of a re-education program after his US military backers were not there to help him anymore. He kept mentioning that he was a Roman Catholic and kept saying that Diem, the assassinated US toady (likely assassinated by the US because they had better toadies waiting in the wings), was "claimed" by the people of Cu Chi to be a US puppet. Diem, of course, was an ardent Catholic too, as were many of the well-heeled, anti-communist, pro-US upper class. Virtually everything the tour guide said was presented in a way to accommodate presumably sensitive American audiences. I overheard him talking to a young American about how the VC film at the beginning was "propaganda" and needed to be balanced by "the other side"—the side of imperialist aggression? The message of the day was tone down or stifle any possible obstacle to the steady flow of tourist cash. Surely the Vietnamese high school students who visit this location don't get the same message. It was sad and difficult to see this former killing zone but sadder still because an important educational opportunity was lost to the desire for tourist dollars.
Arrived at the ariport in the early afternoon and changed $600 USD into over 10 million dong, the first time I've been a millionaire since South Korea. The airport terminal was new and very efficient but small for a city the size of Saigon and full of posters and advertisements mostly in English and oriented to Western business. In contrast, next to the runways concrete structures for protecting helicoptors from Viet Cong attacks remained as an eiree and unexpected remnant of the US war. This juxtaposition kind of set the tone for the visit.
Streets in Saigon—virtually no one there calls it by its official name of Ho Chi Minh City—are very narrow and crowded, much more than those in China and in much worse repair. There are zillions of motorcycles and few cars and fewer bicycles. One of the most striking first impressions is the webs of electric wires strung in incredible tangles onto the cross bars of concrete poles sometimes just a few feet above the heads of pedestrians. If someome’s lighbulb or telephone goes dead due to a break in one of these wires, I could see it taking months to find the place to splice the wire.
Streets have hammar and sickle banners and silhouettes of Ho Chi Minh with quotes. Lots of people are out in the early afternoon despite the heat. Everywhere there is a very high level of activity. No one on this weekday afternoon is taking an rest as they would be up north in China at the same hour. There are peddlers everywhere, a good number of beggars, lots of street food but relatively few restaurants. We made the mistake of entering a huge indoor market near the hotel, definitely a tourist area, and were aggressively pursued by hawkers so we quickly made for the nearest escape. Even as I was on the run, one woman came after me and grabbed my shoulder—more of a caress—in an attempt to get me to look at her merchandise. Nevertheless, many middle-aged mostly European tourists and a few young hipsters were having a good time bargaining for spandex jeans and souvenir knick-knacks.
Wandering around we happened to pass a Hindu temple and were deluged by people selling incense and flowers to use as offerings inside the temple. I was quite surprised to see Vietnamese devotees in this overwhelmingly Buddhist country putting their faces into the corners of well worn dirty stone altars while others were kneeling and bowing before various Hindu dieties. I foolishly took some incense sticks that were thurst into my hands and lit them and put them in front of some of the statues. Upon leaving the place I was swarmed with people demanding money for the incense, but after less than an afternoon in Saigon I was calloused enough to refuse them and walked directly away. As a rather seasoned tourist in Asia, I’m accustomed to paying a good bit more for goods and sevices, but it must be said that in Vietnam some of these situations were over the top.
Interestingly, women in Viet Nam and Southeast Asia generally were not obsessively thin and in most cases very casually dressed. I suppose it's because they are in between the time when there wasn't really enough to eat but before the arrival of the advertising industry. The only exceptions to the not-very-well-dressed rule were the uniformly comely ladies in the hair salons, who were dressed to kill just inside the large glass doors and windows of these establishments. There seemed to be little doubt that their real business is not hair dressing.
The War Remnants Museum is an absolute requirement for visitors to Saigon. The museum is just what is says—a collection of objects left over from the French and US wars on Viet Nam.: a helicopter, a jet, a recon plane, mines, bombs of all kinds and sizes, grenades, rifles, machine guns—just about everything. Most of the museum was galleries of photos going back to the French wars, a good bit of them taken by US and French correspondents, many of them war critics. There are also pictures of and statements by US war resistors including those who burned themselves in protest. Of cousre, Jane Fonda is there too. One room is dedicated to pictures of anti-war protests from around the world. There were mock-ups of the infamous tiger cages and illustrations of the various torture mechanisms for male and female victims and the effects both immediately and decades later. Examples include waterboarding (still a favorite), electronic torture, various methods of hanging, finger pins, snakes, helecoptor executions, etc. etc.
Another part of the museum had to do with Agent Orange birth defect victims. There were many grim photos as well as a film. The tone of the museum reminded me of the documentary film Regret to Inform but even more powerful. For the sake of my mental health I went through the whole thing rather quickly not dwelling on any one part very much. In fact, there was little new for me, but still on a few occasions I had to back off a bit. In several of the rooms there were books for guests to record their impressions in, but I didn't read or write in any of them. I thought about writing something but didn't know if I'd be able to stop once I started.
Overall, the museum was balanced and tastefully done in the sense that it straightforwardly recorded what had transpired in terms of the French-US aggression, the Vietnamese resistence, and world wide opposition to the war including opposition in the invading countries. Perhaps I was reading into it for my own reasons, but there seemed even to be a certain sympathy for the French and American soldiers forced to fight in Viet Nam. There were donation bins to collect money for war victims and a few limbless beggars right in the compound but I didn't contribute. In the US I once gave a small contribution to the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation for aid to Viet Nam war victims, but when they called again the next year, after the Iraq war had started, I was angry and refused to give any more and lectured the caller about why I was refusing. Conscience money to pay for past wars is less needed than action to oppose current atrocities. The lessons from the war and why similar wars keep occurring remain to be learned by the public at large.
In the courtyard of the museum I overheard an American woman of Vietnam War era vintage asking a Vietnamese man who was perhaps in his 40s something like, "Do hate the Americans? You have a right to, you know!" The man smiled uneasily and replied, "No, no, we don't," but his reply was anything but forceful and convincing. She didn't seem to accept this response and her body language indicated she wanted more, but the man just muttered his answer again, turned his back and quickly moved away shaking his head—either to reinforce his reply or perhaps to indicate his unwillingness to carry the conversation further.
Cholon, which means 'big market,' is the crowded, busy, noisy Chinatown district of Saigon and is one of the oldest and most run down sections of town. Some buildings are crumbling and abandoned from pre-US war, pre-WW2 or turn of the 20th century colonial times. It is also the home of a number of Buddhist temples that go back a few hundred years in some cases. We visited two of the half dozen or so on the map and both were very active with incense-burning supplicants bowing and praying in large numbers. One of the temples, dedicated to Kuan Yin, had an attached school that seemed to go up to at least junior high school judging from the appearance of the students coming out.
Later in the day, we ate at a street stall run by some Cantonese speakers born in VN whose parents came from the mainland in 1931. The older brother was maybe my age and was drafted into the South Vietnamese Army later in the war after the family was extorted many times for a deferment to the point where the family restaurant was lost. All they now have now is the street stall and a floor in the old building behind it to live in. Well, he's still alive. I know the feeling. The sister said that there was a Taiwan-run Chinese language school in Saigon, so those who want their children to get a Chinese education can still do so. They say that relations between Vietnamese and the ethnic Chinese community are now good.
We took a bus to two places the next day, the Cao Dai Temple in Tai Ninh Province, all the way to the Cambodian border, and the Cu Chi tunnels, an area of strong anti-French and anti-American resistence, now an exhibition area. On the way to the Cao Dai Temple we stopped at a factory in Tai Ninh Province ostensibly for a chance to relieve our bladders but really for a chance to be sold some goods made in a factory which we were told was set up to employ handicapped workers. Relatively few of the workers were in fact handicapped. The goods in the factory show room were priced slightly below what one might pay in the US. The weak leftovers of my Vietnamese langauge training allowed me to ask one worker what he made per month—a million dong, about $60 USD, or $2 per day, so there was quite a slip between what he produced and what was being taken in on the show room floor.
As we rode through the countryside we passed an area of big factories, mostly textile firms built with foreign investment money. The countryside does not seem to be so hard pressed as China when it comes to land use. The area gets 3 crops of rice and in between there is corn and peanuts as well as rubber plantations, started by the French and now run by the state. A good deal of new housing was going up along the major roads, so things seem to be prosperous enough but it is hard to make generalizations from a bus window.
The very huge cathedral-like Cao Dai Temple was interesting in a fashion. Founded in 1926, the Cao Dai religion claims to be a compilation of Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, Taoism and Hinduism—the best of everything, presumably. Followers wear white and pray many times per day in some incantations that are unintelligble to native speaking Vietnamese...or anyone else perhaps including the prayers themselves according to the tour guide. Believers line up in the temple according to their seniority and position in the faith communty. It has several million followers in Viet Nam.
Cu Chi was interesting but quite disappointing in that it is an area of historical importance that has been turned into a tourist trap. The tour we were given started with an old black and white film with Viet Cong footage and commentary from the 60s explaining the particularly fierce resistence of Cu Chi villagers to the US based soldiers nearby. (The base is now used by the Vietnamese army and proceeds from entrance fees go to the military.) The famous tunnels were begun in 1948 when Cu Chi first resisted the French. The tunnels were built both to keep safe from US bombing campaigns as well as a place to escape to during combat with US troops. A B-52 crater remains and the jungle undergrowth is still thick. A tank stands in the jungle where the 5-man crew was shot dead as they tried to flee after the tank was stopped by a mine. The biggest attraction was to crawl through the black tunnels, now widened to accommodate Western derrieres. Various exhibits show how US ordnance was recycled by the VC, how various kinds of booby traps worked, and how the VC could even cook underground and spread the smoke out through vents in ways that would not be detected.
All of this was interesting enough, but it got over the top when we taken to a firing range where you could pay US dollars by the bullet to live fire any kind of weapon you wanted, AKs, M-60s, M-16s, etc. One French dude who came dressed in US knock-off camouflage really got into it. All the Japanese tourists fired weapons too. I kept my distance and somehow managed to keep my temper also.
The tour guide was maybe the biggest part of this story. He said we could call him "Slim Jim" because his old American buddies said he ate like a bird, drank life a fish and smoked like a chimney. Very cute. He said he was a new member of the tour guide company. He had taught English for 24 years in the countryside since 1973 and says he may go back into teaching after he improves his conversational English as a tour guide. Fat chance. I suspect he worked for the US Army judging from his use of words like klicks for 'kilometers,' totally a military term. When the US officialy left in 1973 he needed work and may have been forced to teach in rural areas as part of a re-education program after his US military backers were not there to help him anymore. He kept mentioning that he was a Roman Catholic and kept saying that Diem, the assassinated US toady (likely assassinated by the US because they had better toadies waiting in the wings), was "claimed" by the people of Cu Chi to be a US puppet. Diem, of course, was an ardent Catholic too, as were many of the well-heeled, anti-communist, pro-US upper class. Virtually everything the tour guide said was presented in a way to accommodate presumably sensitive American audiences. I overheard him talking to a young American about how the VC film at the beginning was "propaganda" and needed to be balanced by "the other side"—the side of imperialist aggression? The message of the day was tone down or stifle any possible obstacle to the steady flow of tourist cash. Surely the Vietnamese high school students who visit this location don't get the same message. It was sad and difficult to see this former killing zone but sadder still because an important educational opportunity was lost to the desire for tourist dollars.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
The Servants of Hong Kong
The Servants of Hong Kong
One can hardly be in Hong Kong very long at all, especially in middle class residential neighborhoods, without noticing the very large number of women who are obviously not Chinese or Western doing everything from shopping to walking well manicured dogs to pushing baby carriages with Chinese or Western children in them. They are domestic servants, mostly from the Philippines, but there is a sizeable number from Indonesia as well. Most are younger women from rural areas but there are some middle aged ones as well. The Philippine women speak Engish and can take their orders in English from native speakers or from professional Chinese, but there is a sizeable number who speak Chinese (both Cantonese and putonghua) to serve the Chinese monolinguals as well.
They work six days per week but on Sundays, their day off, they are everywhere—out shopping in the cheaper street markets, meeting with friends downtown, taking pictures, having picnics on the hillsides, or just strutting around in their Sunday finest. They all have cell phones and are constantly in touch with their friends and getting together with different groups from early on Sunday morning until they head back late on Sunday night for another week of work. On Sundays especially, they seem to talk a mile a minute. It felt this way to me possibly because I don't know a word in their langauges but maybe because they have spent the last 6 days listening to people telling them what to do and can now finally talk freely to peers. Their presence adds a new energtic cosmopolitan dimension to Hong Kong. There have always been domestic servants in Hong Kong but they were typically older Chinese woman who were invisible in the majority populace.
The servants are all live-in and they typically have a tiny room of their own to sleep in or go to when not on duty, which is not very often. Looking out of the window where we were staying, I could see into a kitchen in another wing of the same building (about 50 feet away) and noticed a servant's bed hanging about 3 feet off the ceiling in a corner of the kitchen. Needless to say these young women are not uncomely and having them at home all the time might put some stress and temptation into some marriages. Abuse is probably a more likely outcome than wrecked marriages, but this is only conjecture on my part. In Cantonese the usual term for the Philippine women is 宾妹, the first character of which is from the transliteration of 'Philippine' and the second of which means 'girl' but in a somewhat condescending way in this context. It's kind of like calling a foreigner a laowai on the mainland. It's not the worst, but not exactly respectful. On Sundays, I've seen middle aged Philippinas handing out business cards which looked like they might have hotline numbers. Many others, however, were just trying to sell bargain airfares back to Manila.
I'm surprised at the large number of people who are able to afford domestic servants. Of some people we saw—a technical college teacher, a legal worker, a social work couple—all had servants. A decent HK salary is about 20,000 HK dollars per month and a live-in servant might cost 4-5000 HK dollars per month in addition to food and a little room or corner to sleep in. Thus, for a 2-income couple it's not much of a stretch and covers child care, pet care, cooking, dish washing, shopping, house cleaning, laundry, etc. Quite a bargain. Clearly, the servants themselves must consider it worthwhile or at least better than other options back home because they are there in HK in the tens of thousands. Five to six hundred US dollars per month is not very much, but remitting half of it to a relative in a rural village could mean a lot. The comparison to Mexicans in North America is obvious.
In the house where we were staying we were waited on by an Indonesian woman in her early 30s who gets about 4000 HK dollars per month. She saves her money and sends it home to buy farm land and a house for her parents. She doesn't go out even on Sundays, seems to have only the barest necessities for clothes, and goes home only once every one to three years for a week or two. She's extremely polite, calling everyone Sir or Miss. She does things you don't ask her to do—I never asked her to do anything—like making coffee, peeling fruit, washing clothes, etc. Her biggest pleasure seems to be staying up late watching the house TV, which she is permitted to do, and sleeping in late when possible. She speaks good everyday Cantonese, which she learned from TV. She is also said to speak putonghua and basic English. She graduated from senior high school but said there was no point in studying further since there were no good jobs to be had in any case.
I explained to her that I didn't like the idea of servants and it was not necessary to treat me formally or do things for me since I wasn't her boss, but she said that she was a maid and this was her station in life. Anyway, she probably knew we would give her some extra money for her trouble, which we did. She refused to go out to dinner with us probably because she feared that the person who pays her salary would disapprove. (It's a very complicated family situation in which the friend we were staying with and where the servant works is not the one who pays the servant's salary.) She gets somewhat overworked in the sense that besides the place where she lives and works she occasionally gets dragged over to the employer's sister's place to do cleaning there too.
The whole idea of servants is repulsive to me, but perhaps one can say that being a domestic gives this person the chance to develop herself and save some cash, travel, and learn a language. After all, I did essentially the same thing with teaching English as a second langauge—not my first career choice by any means and one that opened me to heavier work loads, lower salaries and no job security, but got me off the block. She said if she gets enough land she'll have people farm it and take 50% of their crops. Thus, she in turn will become an exploiter after 13 years to date of being exploited. As yet she has no idea or plan as to when she can return home. She does not appear the least bitter or angry about her station in life. On the contrary, she always comes across as very cheerful.
She recognized that people in Indonesia have a negative view of Chinese because of the economic power of the overseas Chinese there and in most of Southeast Asia. An interesting and not unexpected aside is that she spoke well of the former independence leader Sukarno but dislikes the deposed and corrupt Suharto. I would presume that to be a common opinion among the dispossed majority of the country.
From the window of this flat I saw servants in other flats constantly washing windows, drapes, even the rims of flower pots and other stupid make-work projects. In return they get Sundays off and get to descend on flea markets and wear their finest right along with their young Chinese and Western counteparts. This is their gift from international capitalism, the global economy. Abuse—beyond what's totally legal—must exist, but to hear them laugh, chatter and picnic on a Sunday afternoon you would never know it. Is this what they came for? Are they content? Hopeful? It's easy enough for Tom Friedman to point to them and say yes. He's a busy and important man and may well have a servant too.
One can hardly be in Hong Kong very long at all, especially in middle class residential neighborhoods, without noticing the very large number of women who are obviously not Chinese or Western doing everything from shopping to walking well manicured dogs to pushing baby carriages with Chinese or Western children in them. They are domestic servants, mostly from the Philippines, but there is a sizeable number from Indonesia as well. Most are younger women from rural areas but there are some middle aged ones as well. The Philippine women speak Engish and can take their orders in English from native speakers or from professional Chinese, but there is a sizeable number who speak Chinese (both Cantonese and putonghua) to serve the Chinese monolinguals as well.
They work six days per week but on Sundays, their day off, they are everywhere—out shopping in the cheaper street markets, meeting with friends downtown, taking pictures, having picnics on the hillsides, or just strutting around in their Sunday finest. They all have cell phones and are constantly in touch with their friends and getting together with different groups from early on Sunday morning until they head back late on Sunday night for another week of work. On Sundays especially, they seem to talk a mile a minute. It felt this way to me possibly because I don't know a word in their langauges but maybe because they have spent the last 6 days listening to people telling them what to do and can now finally talk freely to peers. Their presence adds a new energtic cosmopolitan dimension to Hong Kong. There have always been domestic servants in Hong Kong but they were typically older Chinese woman who were invisible in the majority populace.
The servants are all live-in and they typically have a tiny room of their own to sleep in or go to when not on duty, which is not very often. Looking out of the window where we were staying, I could see into a kitchen in another wing of the same building (about 50 feet away) and noticed a servant's bed hanging about 3 feet off the ceiling in a corner of the kitchen. Needless to say these young women are not uncomely and having them at home all the time might put some stress and temptation into some marriages. Abuse is probably a more likely outcome than wrecked marriages, but this is only conjecture on my part. In Cantonese the usual term for the Philippine women is 宾妹, the first character of which is from the transliteration of 'Philippine' and the second of which means 'girl' but in a somewhat condescending way in this context. It's kind of like calling a foreigner a laowai on the mainland. It's not the worst, but not exactly respectful. On Sundays, I've seen middle aged Philippinas handing out business cards which looked like they might have hotline numbers. Many others, however, were just trying to sell bargain airfares back to Manila.
I'm surprised at the large number of people who are able to afford domestic servants. Of some people we saw—a technical college teacher, a legal worker, a social work couple—all had servants. A decent HK salary is about 20,000 HK dollars per month and a live-in servant might cost 4-5000 HK dollars per month in addition to food and a little room or corner to sleep in. Thus, for a 2-income couple it's not much of a stretch and covers child care, pet care, cooking, dish washing, shopping, house cleaning, laundry, etc. Quite a bargain. Clearly, the servants themselves must consider it worthwhile or at least better than other options back home because they are there in HK in the tens of thousands. Five to six hundred US dollars per month is not very much, but remitting half of it to a relative in a rural village could mean a lot. The comparison to Mexicans in North America is obvious.
In the house where we were staying we were waited on by an Indonesian woman in her early 30s who gets about 4000 HK dollars per month. She saves her money and sends it home to buy farm land and a house for her parents. She doesn't go out even on Sundays, seems to have only the barest necessities for clothes, and goes home only once every one to three years for a week or two. She's extremely polite, calling everyone Sir or Miss. She does things you don't ask her to do—I never asked her to do anything—like making coffee, peeling fruit, washing clothes, etc. Her biggest pleasure seems to be staying up late watching the house TV, which she is permitted to do, and sleeping in late when possible. She speaks good everyday Cantonese, which she learned from TV. She is also said to speak putonghua and basic English. She graduated from senior high school but said there was no point in studying further since there were no good jobs to be had in any case.
I explained to her that I didn't like the idea of servants and it was not necessary to treat me formally or do things for me since I wasn't her boss, but she said that she was a maid and this was her station in life. Anyway, she probably knew we would give her some extra money for her trouble, which we did. She refused to go out to dinner with us probably because she feared that the person who pays her salary would disapprove. (It's a very complicated family situation in which the friend we were staying with and where the servant works is not the one who pays the servant's salary.) She gets somewhat overworked in the sense that besides the place where she lives and works she occasionally gets dragged over to the employer's sister's place to do cleaning there too.
The whole idea of servants is repulsive to me, but perhaps one can say that being a domestic gives this person the chance to develop herself and save some cash, travel, and learn a language. After all, I did essentially the same thing with teaching English as a second langauge—not my first career choice by any means and one that opened me to heavier work loads, lower salaries and no job security, but got me off the block. She said if she gets enough land she'll have people farm it and take 50% of their crops. Thus, she in turn will become an exploiter after 13 years to date of being exploited. As yet she has no idea or plan as to when she can return home. She does not appear the least bitter or angry about her station in life. On the contrary, she always comes across as very cheerful.
She recognized that people in Indonesia have a negative view of Chinese because of the economic power of the overseas Chinese there and in most of Southeast Asia. An interesting and not unexpected aside is that she spoke well of the former independence leader Sukarno but dislikes the deposed and corrupt Suharto. I would presume that to be a common opinion among the dispossed majority of the country.
From the window of this flat I saw servants in other flats constantly washing windows, drapes, even the rims of flower pots and other stupid make-work projects. In return they get Sundays off and get to descend on flea markets and wear their finest right along with their young Chinese and Western counteparts. This is their gift from international capitalism, the global economy. Abuse—beyond what's totally legal—must exist, but to hear them laugh, chatter and picnic on a Sunday afternoon you would never know it. Is this what they came for? Are they content? Hopeful? It's easy enough for Tom Friedman to point to them and say yes. He's a busy and important man and may well have a servant too.
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