Wedding in Tianjin
I got out of Xinxiang for the first time in what seems a very long time to go up to Tainjin for the wedding of the son of a couple we got to know quite well when I was working in Tianjin 20 years ago. Both the trip and the wedding were interesting though it was a very hectic three day weekend.
We took the bullet train to Beijing and then another one to Tianjin. On the way up I sat next to an early 30s couple with a 2-year old daughter. We didn't really talk but I got that they were from Beijing, which was as plain as the very big nose on my face just from looking at how they—I should say she—was dressed. The kid was actually pretty good and both parents took turns watching her and walking her up and down the aisle when she started to get antsy. There were a couple of times when mom lost patience a bit and told the kid that if she didn't shape up mother wouldn't want her (妈妈不要你), a very common threat from mothers here. Of course, these single child city kids know full well very early on that nothing further could be from the truth because every one of them has 2 parents and 4 grandparents vying for their affection during every moment of their waking hours.
The one headache about our route is that the two trains arrive at and leave from different stations and getting from one station to the other is a hassle with Beijing traffic being what it is now. On the way up it was Saturday so the problems were minimal. A number of somewhat pudgy counter-culture looking teens with slightly more daring hairstyles and clothes were hanging out in front of the main Beijing station. Across from the station there was a new shopping mall full of small specialty shops. Well, actually all of them had pretty much the same speciality—selling lots of clothes, cosmetics and jewelry to virtually an exclusively female clientele. Overdressed women of all ages were there browsing among overpriced items as you would see in any upscale urban center in any deveolped country of the world.
Compared to earlier years there was only a small number of workers from the countryside in the square in front of the main Beijing train station. Maybe the migration is taking other forms or maybe there are other modes of transportation such as long distance busses. More likely the later blooming smaller hinterland cities like Xinxiang are now soaking up the rural labor.
Tianjin's air quality was very noticeably poor. It's hard to believe that some of the Olympic events will be held there in just 8 months. A talkative cab driver said that the team sports events that will be held there would happen in climate controlled indoor stadiums. He went on a good bit about how Tianjin is still way behind Beijing and Shanghai in terms of economic development and I'm sure it's true. He pointed to the single storey brown brick buildings that are still everywhere where the pooer types live in between the the 30-40 storey places that are springing up everywhere. He asked me if I was some kind of factory manager and I said if I were we'd be going to the airport instead of the train station. Still when he asked my salary—the inevitable question—I'm sure it seemed like I was a very wealthy person indeed, and by Chinese worker standards I am. He said that his cab salary allowed him to get by (过日子) 'get through the days' but not allow him to buy a flat in the city.
It was something of a comfort to see that the famland between Beijing and Tianjin is still pretty well intact. Both cities are spreading out but more up than out. Lots of the smaller towns in between are building big new housing blocks that are replacing old one and two storey housing. This is a big improvement over US suburban sprawl. Along all the train routes there were lots of trees planted just last fall because they were cropped short before transplanting in the typical manner but had no small branches yet. There seems to be an effort under way to put about 10 meters of trees on either side of the major railroad lines and superhighways though so much more could be done. Every time I drive from Duluth to Minneapolis, I have this same feeling. All the places along the highways could be planted as well as the medians not to mention making wind breaks between the huge farm fields which still blow topsoil away on warm dry days in spring and fall when the crops are off. But since it doesn't turn an immediate profit it doesn't happen. China and the US—two very different countries with so many simliar problems stemming from the same causes, the rush for immediate and maximum profit.
We were at the family's home before the wedding and got to the location too late for the traditional fireworks. Some fireworks displays before weddings are really something. In general, wedding customs, I'm told, are a bit in flux and vary greatly from place to place. During the cultural revolution all the former customs were stopped and now what comes back is a mixture of this and that. (A good example of what happened at that time can be seen in the film To Live 活着)). For example, Tianjin weddings traditionally take place in the afternoon followed by an evening meal, but this bride was from Tanggu, just 75 miles away, where they happen at noon followed by an early afternoon meal. Here in Xinxiang they happen at noon too.
The ceremony was rather brief because people are officially married when the receive documents from the state and don't even have to go to a justice of the peace as in the US. Nevertheless, most people go through something like what we participated in. The room was decorated in pink: a floral arch, a row of small columns covered with pink satin, a pink backdrop with neon blinking cupids, a large candle stand, and pop music love songs in the background. On either side of the room there were rows of chairs facing the center with the closest ones for the immediate family, one side for the bride's and one side for the groom's. A few people wore suits, but most were dressed very causally. The main guests of honor wore corsages and most older women on both sides wore in their hair a kind of bright red barette, which was about 2 inches by about 6 inches separated into three bars with silver stars in it. I take this to be a Tianjin custom. At least I have not seen it elsewhere.
The ceremony was presided over what seemed to be a hired MC. It was really quite short, and in it the couple pledged their love and loyalty to each other in words not unlike any US service. The new couple was then introduced and there was applause at several points. There were words by the MC about the importance of parents to children and the parents and representatives on both sides made statements of congratulations and good wishes. Not surprisingly, however, there was no mention of reproducing and filling the earth. This part of the earth is pretty full already, thank you. After the words there was a quick and restrained kiss-the-bride thing, an interlocking arm drinking of wine and that was about it. There was no dancing, no removing of garters, no throwing of bouquets. A distinctively Chinese feature was the bowing and offering of tea by both the bride and groom to their respective in-laws.
Of course, this is China and the most important part of the day was eating. There were about 25 dishes served at each table of 12 people and all of them were very delicious indeed. The other big part was the drinking of baijiu (白酒), a kind of white lightening about 50% alcohol. There's some of it that goes up to maybe 60% and some only about 35%, but one of my fellow drinkers said that hitting the middle around 50% is best. I'm not a big fan of baijiu because I'm not so crazy about the taste but also because it's a really nasty hangover. Of course, they say the same thing here as in the US: If you drink the good stuff it doesn't bother you. Don't believe it. However, I did managed to leave the place under my own power with all of the food I ate staying in its proper place. A couple of Excedrin back at the hotel got me through the rest of the day.
The ceremony and dinner happened in the same building, a complex of dining halls with gardens called Ding Xiang (丁香), "Most Fragrant." The bride wore white for the ceremony and then wore a lavish reddish pink dress to make the rounds to toast guests at dinner and then changed again into blue. There were about 100 guests and this might be considered a smaller gathering, but again like the US it depends on one's cash reserve and desire for face, etc. I'm told that some get really carried away and might invite a thousand, but such large events are perhaps rare. Also, the more you invite and get invited, the more endless the cost and the mutual obligations that are incurred. After the ceremony the bride and groom headed off the their new condominium and I didn't hear any mention of a honeymoon.
The next day we headed back to Xinxiang by the same route—train to Beijing, change stations and trains, and then back to Xinxiang. The return trip was on a Monday, so the traffic in Beijing was at its worst. When we tried to get a cab in the cab line in front of the main train station to go to the west one, the clown cab driver asked me for 80 yuan for a fare I knew was only 30 at most. I told him he was crazy in a very colloquial way (你疯了), which brought laugher from all the cabbies in line and someone said, “This guy really knows China” (中国通). Well, I know enough not to get ripped off that badly. We went across the street and hailed a cab on the street rather than from the line because this has worked for me before in Beijing. After we got in, the guy popped on the meter as he is supposed to but started going on about the traffic's being so bad and how he'd better take some more expensive but faster ciruitous route to get us there on time. He said I'd pay for the time sitting in traffic or the time on the road. But as a former Chicago cab driver, I know that time on the road cranks the meter faster than time in traffic, so I told him to sit tight. Also, I know that the road to the other train station goes past Tiananmen Square and is very wide after the worst part and would likely be fairly smooth sailing as it was. Even when we got back to Xinxiang a local cabbie wanted to get a higher fare instead of using the meter, so I told him to forget it and slammed the door just before I was about to get in. I suppose he thought I was some foreigner newly fallen off the turnip truck in the big town of Xinxiang. No. In fact, I've been around the block more than a few times. The young fellow who did take us according to the meter had a plastic rear view mirror ornament of Mao Zedong. He said although some people don't like Mao because of the Cultural Revolution, Mao was the one he believed in, "He is my god." Step into a different cab and step into a different China.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Sunday, December 30, 2007
A Chinese Worker
A Chinese Worker
Over the months I have come to know a person who works in our area, who is both interesting and in some ways typical of a class or workers that one meets here. She does indoor cleaning as well as yard work and various other duties for which she receives the equivalent of less than $100 USD per month. She's on the job 5 or 6 days per week pretty much from 8 a.m. till about 5 p.m. with the an extended lunch/rest time (休息) that used to be typical but that fewer and fewer workers now get. She and her husband are both from the countryside around the middle of the province, and while all of her siblings have left the farm to work in the city, her husband is the only one of his siblings to do so. He's a construction worker and is now in charge of a small construction team for a bigger company so probably does a little bit better, though construction workers of rural origin are typically not well paid for very hard work and very long hours. They are both probably in their early-mid 40s and have one son, who is 12 years old. She knows a bit of English and uses it with the foreigners she encounters on the job. In short, the folks she works for are lucky to have such a person for so little money. On top of that she is incredibly conscientious and energetic about her cleaning work, reflecting her rural upbringing—fearless in the face of hard work.
There is probably one way in which she is not typical: she finished senior high school and did 2 years of further of study, which could have qualified her to teach primary school. She was not very informative about why she didn't get that kind of job, but I suspect that one of the reasons is that it's much more competitive to get that kind of work in the city as opposed to being back in the village, and for the sake of her son it's better to be a cleaning person in the city than a primary school teacher in the village. There's a lot riding on this 12-year old boy. She has definite plans for college for him and possibly an eventual Ph.D. She asked me if I would spend a little time with him once in preparation for an English langauge speech contest competition. I agreed and was impressed that this 12-year old could function as well as he did in a foreign language. Indeed, he was first in his school but didn't progress to the next level in competition with students from other schools. His mother said it was because his school was less prestigious, suggesting that the students are not as good, though the pecking order might well have influenced the judges' opinions.
Social class is something we have talked about and something that, like most urban workers from the countryside, she is keenly aware of. She has mentioned feeling looked down on for her job and her rural origins even though she is obviously very intelligent and more intellectually alert than lots of professors I know. During several conversations, she has mentioned my treating her as an equal (给我平等), which prompted me to mention my own class background and my political beliefs that this is her due and not a matter of anything I bestow on her out of some manner of kindness.
She is well read and has well-informed opinions on many issues. She doesn't read the mainline newpapers but tries to get information from various sources to triangulate what the truth might be. She opposes the death penalty, a minority view in China, and is very concerned about the environment. Her views about the US are quite positive to the point of being generous perhaps, but she quite correctly sees Americans as more concerned about the environment and more governed by laws than personal relations. During the 17th National Communist Party Congress meeting back in October she was hopeful to hear the "leaders" (领导人) talk about issues like the environment, inflation and rural development, but at the same time blasts them as corrupt and untrustworthy. I told her of my experiences in the countryside sleeping on a kang (炕) with a whole family and shitting in their common hole and such things, and she laughed that one of these people would never do that (not any more than George Bush or Bill Clinton would either). In spite of her mistrust of such people, she seems to be resigned as most are here that these people make the policy decisions and people like her are pretty much left to hoping for the best from them.
Recently we had a really interesting discussion about rural and agricultural issues. This really got her going. She feels that the biggest issue in the country is the plight of farmers. Since she grew up in a rural village and now lives in a city she knows both, but city people don't have a clue about what the countryside is about and most of the political and economic power is now in their hands. She said they wouldn't be able to tell a corn stalk from wheat. Of course, I egged her on and she agreed with me that the national government probably had no real intention of improving the rural economy or rural living conditions and was probably far more interested in getting more and more rural people into urban factories to produce goods for big export profit.
One thing that really set her off was coal mining deaths, which probably number around seven or so per day across the country. Quite recently there was one explosion that killed 180 some miners. As a person of rural origin, she said that she knows that it's the desperately poorest of the poor rural people who go down into the mines. Everyone knows the risk and no one goes unless there are no other choices. The compensation that they receive after getting killed is the biggest insult of all. She doesn't believe at all the stats that come on the TV about the numbers of miners' deaths and believes it's much worse than what gets reported.
She had lots of interesting things to say about local farming. She said that it used to be that the farmers in her area could drill down 3 meters to get ground water to pump for irrigation and now it's 10. (One student told me in her area they have to drill 30 meters now. No wonder I see so many posters in the countryside for well drilling. It must be big business.) Also, there used to be about 2 to 3 feet of snow in winter, but in recent years there has hardly been a few inches. Thus, farmers have to pump and irrigate even more as a result of the lack of snow for winter wheat and the ground water is hardly being replenished at all.
Chemical fertilizer is another issue. Nowadays farmers don't want to raise pigs and cows and use the fertilizer on their fields. It's easier just to use chemical fertilizer. Yields keep going up but the soil is depleted more every year. I told her that one Minnesota farm boy once told me that the soil in his southern family farm didn't do a damn thing except hold up the crop. Everything else comes from Monsanto or whatever.
She decries all the investment in planes and high tech hardware and whatever at the expense of agriculture. If agriculture collapses, what will all these people eat? She feels that no matter what "development" comes about there will still be more workers than engineers so why aren't the lives of workers being attended to? She had all kinds of stats that she was firing at me about how many people per hectare and stats about the loss of agricultural land and how she doesn't believe what the government puts out about these issues. Even if I were a trained stenographer and native speaker I could not have kept up with her. Inflation was another big issue. Her rural-urban experience tells her that both urban consumers and small scale rural producers are taking a hit. What she pays from shopping everyday does not jibe with the inflation numbers she hears on the evening news. It just ain't so.
Our last conversation ended with the usual grimmaces and head shakes accompanied by the very common phrase 没办法, meibanfa, 'no way,' 'no solution,' 'it can't be helped.’ It seems to be descriptive of so many situations, and not just in China. From the price of peanuts in Henan to the Iraq war, it seems that someone is always taking some links out of your chain, cutting down your running room, giving you more comps to corrrect and adding the earnings from your sweat and your sleepless nights to their travel money. 肯定有办法. There has to be a way.
Over the months I have come to know a person who works in our area, who is both interesting and in some ways typical of a class or workers that one meets here. She does indoor cleaning as well as yard work and various other duties for which she receives the equivalent of less than $100 USD per month. She's on the job 5 or 6 days per week pretty much from 8 a.m. till about 5 p.m. with the an extended lunch/rest time (休息) that used to be typical but that fewer and fewer workers now get. She and her husband are both from the countryside around the middle of the province, and while all of her siblings have left the farm to work in the city, her husband is the only one of his siblings to do so. He's a construction worker and is now in charge of a small construction team for a bigger company so probably does a little bit better, though construction workers of rural origin are typically not well paid for very hard work and very long hours. They are both probably in their early-mid 40s and have one son, who is 12 years old. She knows a bit of English and uses it with the foreigners she encounters on the job. In short, the folks she works for are lucky to have such a person for so little money. On top of that she is incredibly conscientious and energetic about her cleaning work, reflecting her rural upbringing—fearless in the face of hard work.
There is probably one way in which she is not typical: she finished senior high school and did 2 years of further of study, which could have qualified her to teach primary school. She was not very informative about why she didn't get that kind of job, but I suspect that one of the reasons is that it's much more competitive to get that kind of work in the city as opposed to being back in the village, and for the sake of her son it's better to be a cleaning person in the city than a primary school teacher in the village. There's a lot riding on this 12-year old boy. She has definite plans for college for him and possibly an eventual Ph.D. She asked me if I would spend a little time with him once in preparation for an English langauge speech contest competition. I agreed and was impressed that this 12-year old could function as well as he did in a foreign language. Indeed, he was first in his school but didn't progress to the next level in competition with students from other schools. His mother said it was because his school was less prestigious, suggesting that the students are not as good, though the pecking order might well have influenced the judges' opinions.
Social class is something we have talked about and something that, like most urban workers from the countryside, she is keenly aware of. She has mentioned feeling looked down on for her job and her rural origins even though she is obviously very intelligent and more intellectually alert than lots of professors I know. During several conversations, she has mentioned my treating her as an equal (给我平等), which prompted me to mention my own class background and my political beliefs that this is her due and not a matter of anything I bestow on her out of some manner of kindness.
She is well read and has well-informed opinions on many issues. She doesn't read the mainline newpapers but tries to get information from various sources to triangulate what the truth might be. She opposes the death penalty, a minority view in China, and is very concerned about the environment. Her views about the US are quite positive to the point of being generous perhaps, but she quite correctly sees Americans as more concerned about the environment and more governed by laws than personal relations. During the 17th National Communist Party Congress meeting back in October she was hopeful to hear the "leaders" (领导人) talk about issues like the environment, inflation and rural development, but at the same time blasts them as corrupt and untrustworthy. I told her of my experiences in the countryside sleeping on a kang (炕) with a whole family and shitting in their common hole and such things, and she laughed that one of these people would never do that (not any more than George Bush or Bill Clinton would either). In spite of her mistrust of such people, she seems to be resigned as most are here that these people make the policy decisions and people like her are pretty much left to hoping for the best from them.
Recently we had a really interesting discussion about rural and agricultural issues. This really got her going. She feels that the biggest issue in the country is the plight of farmers. Since she grew up in a rural village and now lives in a city she knows both, but city people don't have a clue about what the countryside is about and most of the political and economic power is now in their hands. She said they wouldn't be able to tell a corn stalk from wheat. Of course, I egged her on and she agreed with me that the national government probably had no real intention of improving the rural economy or rural living conditions and was probably far more interested in getting more and more rural people into urban factories to produce goods for big export profit.
One thing that really set her off was coal mining deaths, which probably number around seven or so per day across the country. Quite recently there was one explosion that killed 180 some miners. As a person of rural origin, she said that she knows that it's the desperately poorest of the poor rural people who go down into the mines. Everyone knows the risk and no one goes unless there are no other choices. The compensation that they receive after getting killed is the biggest insult of all. She doesn't believe at all the stats that come on the TV about the numbers of miners' deaths and believes it's much worse than what gets reported.
She had lots of interesting things to say about local farming. She said that it used to be that the farmers in her area could drill down 3 meters to get ground water to pump for irrigation and now it's 10. (One student told me in her area they have to drill 30 meters now. No wonder I see so many posters in the countryside for well drilling. It must be big business.) Also, there used to be about 2 to 3 feet of snow in winter, but in recent years there has hardly been a few inches. Thus, farmers have to pump and irrigate even more as a result of the lack of snow for winter wheat and the ground water is hardly being replenished at all.
Chemical fertilizer is another issue. Nowadays farmers don't want to raise pigs and cows and use the fertilizer on their fields. It's easier just to use chemical fertilizer. Yields keep going up but the soil is depleted more every year. I told her that one Minnesota farm boy once told me that the soil in his southern family farm didn't do a damn thing except hold up the crop. Everything else comes from Monsanto or whatever.
She decries all the investment in planes and high tech hardware and whatever at the expense of agriculture. If agriculture collapses, what will all these people eat? She feels that no matter what "development" comes about there will still be more workers than engineers so why aren't the lives of workers being attended to? She had all kinds of stats that she was firing at me about how many people per hectare and stats about the loss of agricultural land and how she doesn't believe what the government puts out about these issues. Even if I were a trained stenographer and native speaker I could not have kept up with her. Inflation was another big issue. Her rural-urban experience tells her that both urban consumers and small scale rural producers are taking a hit. What she pays from shopping everyday does not jibe with the inflation numbers she hears on the evening news. It just ain't so.
Our last conversation ended with the usual grimmaces and head shakes accompanied by the very common phrase 没办法, meibanfa, 'no way,' 'no solution,' 'it can't be helped.’ It seems to be descriptive of so many situations, and not just in China. From the price of peanuts in Henan to the Iraq war, it seems that someone is always taking some links out of your chain, cutting down your running room, giving you more comps to corrrect and adding the earnings from your sweat and your sleepless nights to their travel money. 肯定有办法. There has to be a way.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Christmas in Xinxiang
Christmas in Xinxiang
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in Xinxiang. Trips downtown over the past two weekends have revealed some evidence of capitalist Christmas in Xinxiang, something totally unheard of in years past. Of course, it all has to do with promoting shopping. A couple of stores have life-size Santas in the windows and one of them is playing a sax out in front of the store as Jingle Bells wanders into the street from somewhere inside. Of course, the stores with this Christmas hype are the more upscale places, where both customers and owners alike are just looking for one more excuse to buy and sell. In the biggest stores, all of the check out and sales staff, virtually all young women, are wearing red elf or Santa hats or whatever. I've seen literally hundreds of them in the past week or so. There was even one comely young woman totally in red velvet with a mock ermine trim cape at one sales station, and I was wondering what was so special about her get-up until she turned around and I saw Coca Cola embroidered in white across the back of the cape. Many other downtown stores have snow flakes, tinsel, streamers, trees and Santa faces taped to the windows.
In fact, the Christmas spirit has belatedly migrated from downtown to other parts of the city. Even our local department store, the Star Market (the title appears in both English and Chinese), has its clerks wearing Christmas caps, though these young (and not so young) ladies are less dolled up than their downtown counterparts. The neighborhood store even has a scrawny plastic Christmas tree right inside the entrance. The campus guest house next door also has fancy Santa faces taped to the restaurant doors with "Xmas" across Santa's chubby face and beard. A nice touch. I was out for a walk the other day and saw that one of the local internet bars also had Santa faces taped to its doors. Old Saint Nick's likeness happened to be right under the sign that said "No admittance to those under 18 years of age." Good advice for those venturing into capitalist Christmas. Caveat emptor.
For sure the biggest displays were at the city's biggest department store, Pang Dong Lai (胖东来). This store has everything you could expect to buy before Christmas in the upscale shopping districts of the Twin Cities except it's just more concentrated due to the fact that the number of people who can afford such stuff is smaller. There are Hong Kong jewelers, French wines (Bordeaux for about $25 US—I passed), European watches and plenty of brand name clothes. In the basement one can find a lavish food store with many fancy things hard to get elsewhere. It very much reminded me of similar places in Kobe or Taipei complete with an extensive food court. It's the one place where we can get nice western style bread and butter as well. There are sweepers and moppers constantly moving around in the crowds getting up every bit of trash and every stain from the highly polished floors. Target managers would be envious.
The characters in the name of Pang Dong Lai literally mean 'fat' 'east' 'come,' "Fatness Comes to the East," referring to the idea, I would guess, that China—the heart of the East—has arrived. Fat city is here, at least for some. How appropriate to connect it with Christmas, the ultimate fat city for sellers around the world and now for China as well.
A few days ago the local newspaper had an interesting article on the phenomenon of Christmas decoration shopping. They quoted one "happy" manager, who reported that the sales of Christmas items are going up every year. "Christmas is getting closer to the common people (老百姓) every year," he said. He noted that it used to be only stores that that bought Christmas decorations, but now average people are also buying them up. The place was hopping with people who were "wondering if this Santa sings or how many snowflakes are in that package." About half the article talked about how most of the Christmas articles were shoddy or even potentially toxic without indications of who made them or where they were made—Disney toys from Haiti perhaps!? In any case the reporter indicated that these issues were not of concern to the enthusiastic shoppers s/he spoke to.
Needless to say there are no religious items or themes in evidence, not because China is a godless communist country, but more likely just because there's no money to be made in selling them. But that day may not be far off.
On a personal note, this is not my first Christmas in China, but maybe because there's just one other American working here or just because we are thousands of miles from the hard core source of Christmas hype, I seem totally unaffected by it. We're far from family and the 25th is just another work day and my stacks of essays are even higher as the semester draws to a close in two weeks—not much time for the holiday spirit. Anyway, on the bright side, there are still 367 shopping days till Christmas of 2008. Happy Holidays!
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in Xinxiang. Trips downtown over the past two weekends have revealed some evidence of capitalist Christmas in Xinxiang, something totally unheard of in years past. Of course, it all has to do with promoting shopping. A couple of stores have life-size Santas in the windows and one of them is playing a sax out in front of the store as Jingle Bells wanders into the street from somewhere inside. Of course, the stores with this Christmas hype are the more upscale places, where both customers and owners alike are just looking for one more excuse to buy and sell. In the biggest stores, all of the check out and sales staff, virtually all young women, are wearing red elf or Santa hats or whatever. I've seen literally hundreds of them in the past week or so. There was even one comely young woman totally in red velvet with a mock ermine trim cape at one sales station, and I was wondering what was so special about her get-up until she turned around and I saw Coca Cola embroidered in white across the back of the cape. Many other downtown stores have snow flakes, tinsel, streamers, trees and Santa faces taped to the windows.
In fact, the Christmas spirit has belatedly migrated from downtown to other parts of the city. Even our local department store, the Star Market (the title appears in both English and Chinese), has its clerks wearing Christmas caps, though these young (and not so young) ladies are less dolled up than their downtown counterparts. The neighborhood store even has a scrawny plastic Christmas tree right inside the entrance. The campus guest house next door also has fancy Santa faces taped to the restaurant doors with "Xmas" across Santa's chubby face and beard. A nice touch. I was out for a walk the other day and saw that one of the local internet bars also had Santa faces taped to its doors. Old Saint Nick's likeness happened to be right under the sign that said "No admittance to those under 18 years of age." Good advice for those venturing into capitalist Christmas. Caveat emptor.
For sure the biggest displays were at the city's biggest department store, Pang Dong Lai (胖东来). This store has everything you could expect to buy before Christmas in the upscale shopping districts of the Twin Cities except it's just more concentrated due to the fact that the number of people who can afford such stuff is smaller. There are Hong Kong jewelers, French wines (Bordeaux for about $25 US—I passed), European watches and plenty of brand name clothes. In the basement one can find a lavish food store with many fancy things hard to get elsewhere. It very much reminded me of similar places in Kobe or Taipei complete with an extensive food court. It's the one place where we can get nice western style bread and butter as well. There are sweepers and moppers constantly moving around in the crowds getting up every bit of trash and every stain from the highly polished floors. Target managers would be envious.
The characters in the name of Pang Dong Lai literally mean 'fat' 'east' 'come,' "Fatness Comes to the East," referring to the idea, I would guess, that China—the heart of the East—has arrived. Fat city is here, at least for some. How appropriate to connect it with Christmas, the ultimate fat city for sellers around the world and now for China as well.
A few days ago the local newspaper had an interesting article on the phenomenon of Christmas decoration shopping. They quoted one "happy" manager, who reported that the sales of Christmas items are going up every year. "Christmas is getting closer to the common people (老百姓) every year," he said. He noted that it used to be only stores that that bought Christmas decorations, but now average people are also buying them up. The place was hopping with people who were "wondering if this Santa sings or how many snowflakes are in that package." About half the article talked about how most of the Christmas articles were shoddy or even potentially toxic without indications of who made them or where they were made—Disney toys from Haiti perhaps!? In any case the reporter indicated that these issues were not of concern to the enthusiastic shoppers s/he spoke to.
Needless to say there are no religious items or themes in evidence, not because China is a godless communist country, but more likely just because there's no money to be made in selling them. But that day may not be far off.
On a personal note, this is not my first Christmas in China, but maybe because there's just one other American working here or just because we are thousands of miles from the hard core source of Christmas hype, I seem totally unaffected by it. We're far from family and the 25th is just another work day and my stacks of essays are even higher as the semester draws to a close in two weeks—not much time for the holiday spirit. Anyway, on the bright side, there are still 367 shopping days till Christmas of 2008. Happy Holidays!
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Wednesdays with Bob
Wednesdays with Bob
Since about the 3rd week of the semester I have had open meetings with students for 2 hours on Wednesday afternoons for whoever wants to come to chat about anything. I was told by somebody in the English department that I didn't have to bother to do this, but I went ahead anyway. I actually had two motives. One was to head off having students come to the apartment because I just don't have the time given my work load. The second was that I really did want to have a chance to get students' views on things but on their own turf. If I just had an open house, only the most outgoing ones would come. I did it this way in Shengyang in the early 90s, and it worked out pretty well.
It has been interesting. The first week I had the most people, about 30, and the first comment/question was what book of the Bible I most recommended them to read. I actually gave a considered and somewhat detailed answer and then went on to tell them that while I thought that it was important to know about Christianity for purposes of understanding western culture, I myself was no longer a believer. I asked them if they were surprised, and indeed they were. Maybe the Christian crowd among the students thought that these sessions would or could be turned into a Bible study group. Well, I gave my reasons for not believing and then the discussion went on to why not believe if it can offer some comfort in this increasingly isolated and alienated post-modern world. My answer was simply that those energies would be better spent asking ourselves why modern society was like this and doing something about it—actively working on those problems instead of running to church (though I conceded that there were church goers doing both). I said I thought there were plenty of things we could start working on right now. However, there didn't seem to be a lot of enthusiasm for this approach. Anyway, that was the first and last of the visits of the Bible study group.
The other big contingent on that first day back in September was the get-rich-quick crowd. Did I want go get rich and isn't that the most important thing to do right now in China? Well, no, I didn't think that either and gave my reasons there too. In fact, quite a lot of young people enthusiastically buy into the idea of getting rich and becoming a philanthropist...a bit later in life, of course. However, it is also convenient to hold this view because it's the party line and government policy. Buying into the neoliberal export economy and letting some "get rich first" is presented as the quickest route to enriching the country. Lots of students embrace this and it's hard to criticize success. You can see the effects of 10 years of double-digit economic growth everywhere. Even in a hinterland place like Xinxiang there's new construction everywhere and lots of really nice stuff to buy. This was another case of not getting the expected answer from the American, so that was the last of that group as well.
Students are very interested in the US and curious about US attitudes about China. We have spent a good deal of time breaking down stereotypes about Americans: All Jews support Israel, all blacks are poor, all whites are well off, all Americans are Christians, etc. and other issues of race, class and gender. Students are anxious to travel and see the US and the world for themselves, but this group will have to do a good bit of waiting because they are not well off by any means or they would not be in this school. Snide comments about "high class Chinese" here or in the US are pretty well received. These students of largely rural origin know the meaning of social class and they don't have much use for such people.
I try to get them to be more realistic about the US as I have had to get more realistic about China. Each place has plenty of its own issues and some advantages, but the more I move back and forth the more I see similarities. I couldn't find answers for the problems of the US by coming here any more than they can solve the problems of China by assuming that they have already been solved in the US. The problems of both places are just variations on the same themes—income gaps, no health care, lack of democracy, assembly line education, social class, gender inequalities, indirect rule by a rich elite served by a political establishment, etc.
The students who continue to come on Wednesday afternoons are mostly those who are interested in these political, social and economic issues in the US and China and around the world. The discussions can get heavy and sometimes difficult or even discouraging. From student writing, I know lots are in la-la land or, more accurately, in a state of denial, but not those who are still coming to these discussions. Once a student even started crying from feeling so overwhelmed with the world's problems and the powerlessness she felt both as a Chinese citizen and as a single human being. The fact she could cry at least indicates a sensitivity which lots have discovered is most conveniently left behind. No wonder that only less than 10 still come.
There's a good bit of cynicism among some of them. We discussed rural education, which lags so far behind what's available in the city, and I said that the government could, for example, decide to pay rural teachers more, though I recognized that it wouldn't ever happen. But even the mention of the example of the government doing something like that just produced cynical sneers in some of these 19-year-olds. Many feel that while China had made stunning economic progress, it has regressed spiritually in many other ways. As an example, one mentioned that twenty years ago director Zhang Yimou was producing challenging reflective films but now is just turning out trash for cash.
I've mentioned several times in these group discussions my doubts about how long the US can stay on top of the world heap. This surprises them. The attitude here is that China can "cooperate" with the US to "develop" China for a long time to come. To the students the US seems pretty invincible though their hope is for a multi-polar world in the future rather than China somehow replacing the US as the new world power.
In some ways, I'm a little surprised they are not more on top if world news. But this is just another similarity between the countries. They are, of course, busy but also as cynical about news sources as their counterparts in the US as well both should be given the Judith Miller-NY Times cheerleading role before the Iraq war and the People's Daily going on about a new harmonious society that's just around the corner.
It's difficult. Maybe for these bright mostly female students it's the problem of being served up a China that's still a feudal cake with the recent addition of a frosting of capitalist consumerism decked out with a few churchy vigil light candles on top. Eat it or go hungry. The western menu is not so different.
Since about the 3rd week of the semester I have had open meetings with students for 2 hours on Wednesday afternoons for whoever wants to come to chat about anything. I was told by somebody in the English department that I didn't have to bother to do this, but I went ahead anyway. I actually had two motives. One was to head off having students come to the apartment because I just don't have the time given my work load. The second was that I really did want to have a chance to get students' views on things but on their own turf. If I just had an open house, only the most outgoing ones would come. I did it this way in Shengyang in the early 90s, and it worked out pretty well.
It has been interesting. The first week I had the most people, about 30, and the first comment/question was what book of the Bible I most recommended them to read. I actually gave a considered and somewhat detailed answer and then went on to tell them that while I thought that it was important to know about Christianity for purposes of understanding western culture, I myself was no longer a believer. I asked them if they were surprised, and indeed they were. Maybe the Christian crowd among the students thought that these sessions would or could be turned into a Bible study group. Well, I gave my reasons for not believing and then the discussion went on to why not believe if it can offer some comfort in this increasingly isolated and alienated post-modern world. My answer was simply that those energies would be better spent asking ourselves why modern society was like this and doing something about it—actively working on those problems instead of running to church (though I conceded that there were church goers doing both). I said I thought there were plenty of things we could start working on right now. However, there didn't seem to be a lot of enthusiasm for this approach. Anyway, that was the first and last of the visits of the Bible study group.
The other big contingent on that first day back in September was the get-rich-quick crowd. Did I want go get rich and isn't that the most important thing to do right now in China? Well, no, I didn't think that either and gave my reasons there too. In fact, quite a lot of young people enthusiastically buy into the idea of getting rich and becoming a philanthropist...a bit later in life, of course. However, it is also convenient to hold this view because it's the party line and government policy. Buying into the neoliberal export economy and letting some "get rich first" is presented as the quickest route to enriching the country. Lots of students embrace this and it's hard to criticize success. You can see the effects of 10 years of double-digit economic growth everywhere. Even in a hinterland place like Xinxiang there's new construction everywhere and lots of really nice stuff to buy. This was another case of not getting the expected answer from the American, so that was the last of that group as well.
Students are very interested in the US and curious about US attitudes about China. We have spent a good deal of time breaking down stereotypes about Americans: All Jews support Israel, all blacks are poor, all whites are well off, all Americans are Christians, etc. and other issues of race, class and gender. Students are anxious to travel and see the US and the world for themselves, but this group will have to do a good bit of waiting because they are not well off by any means or they would not be in this school. Snide comments about "high class Chinese" here or in the US are pretty well received. These students of largely rural origin know the meaning of social class and they don't have much use for such people.
I try to get them to be more realistic about the US as I have had to get more realistic about China. Each place has plenty of its own issues and some advantages, but the more I move back and forth the more I see similarities. I couldn't find answers for the problems of the US by coming here any more than they can solve the problems of China by assuming that they have already been solved in the US. The problems of both places are just variations on the same themes—income gaps, no health care, lack of democracy, assembly line education, social class, gender inequalities, indirect rule by a rich elite served by a political establishment, etc.
The students who continue to come on Wednesday afternoons are mostly those who are interested in these political, social and economic issues in the US and China and around the world. The discussions can get heavy and sometimes difficult or even discouraging. From student writing, I know lots are in la-la land or, more accurately, in a state of denial, but not those who are still coming to these discussions. Once a student even started crying from feeling so overwhelmed with the world's problems and the powerlessness she felt both as a Chinese citizen and as a single human being. The fact she could cry at least indicates a sensitivity which lots have discovered is most conveniently left behind. No wonder that only less than 10 still come.
There's a good bit of cynicism among some of them. We discussed rural education, which lags so far behind what's available in the city, and I said that the government could, for example, decide to pay rural teachers more, though I recognized that it wouldn't ever happen. But even the mention of the example of the government doing something like that just produced cynical sneers in some of these 19-year-olds. Many feel that while China had made stunning economic progress, it has regressed spiritually in many other ways. As an example, one mentioned that twenty years ago director Zhang Yimou was producing challenging reflective films but now is just turning out trash for cash.
I've mentioned several times in these group discussions my doubts about how long the US can stay on top of the world heap. This surprises them. The attitude here is that China can "cooperate" with the US to "develop" China for a long time to come. To the students the US seems pretty invincible though their hope is for a multi-polar world in the future rather than China somehow replacing the US as the new world power.
In some ways, I'm a little surprised they are not more on top if world news. But this is just another similarity between the countries. They are, of course, busy but also as cynical about news sources as their counterparts in the US as well both should be given the Judith Miller-NY Times cheerleading role before the Iraq war and the People's Daily going on about a new harmonious society that's just around the corner.
It's difficult. Maybe for these bright mostly female students it's the problem of being served up a China that's still a feudal cake with the recent addition of a frosting of capitalist consumerism decked out with a few churchy vigil light candles on top. Eat it or go hungry. The western menu is not so different.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Still Seventy Percent Feudal
Still Seventy Percent Feudal
This is basically a report on some conversations with the director of the foreign affairs office here, a very lively personality with very good English, a good sense of humor and interesting insights into life in China.
After some various issues came up about why things depend so much on people rather than clear policies and straight answers, he explained that it is necessary to remember that China is still 70% feudal, by which he meant that it's a hierarchical culture of relations not of rules. Everything depends on who you know and who you have done things for and who has done things for you. People do things for reasons. There's always a catch. It's an eternal merry-go-round. Let's have dinner--can you judge the speech contest？ Let's have lunch—can you give a 2-hour lecture at the art conference—in 2 days?! This is the kind of thing that has been going on for a few thousand years more or less.
As for the other 30%, he considers 20% of it to be capitalist and 10% socialist. He is optimistic about change, but it's tempered with reality. He feels it will probably take some decades to get the feudalism down to 60% and the capitalism up to 30%. It was clear that he would consider that to be progress and that the eventual near total capitalization of the Chinese economy would be a positive thing.
I would almost surely take him to be a party member. One doesn't get that far without it, so it's simply a matter of practicality. However, he was very strong about how the down and outs of society need to be taken care of. I presume this is his 10% socialism, and it gives some insight into how such people think about the nature of socialism in China. He felt this needed to be done not out of political expediency but out of a sense of morality and justice. This might set him apart from many who would certainly do it only for the former reason. Knowing him fairly well, I feel comfortable taking him at his word. He's kind of carved out some space for himself by placating or at least dealing with those who must be dealt with so as to be able to do what he likes and feels in important. In short, he has more successful in doing what I never could accomplish in my own university days.
He's had things to say about Mao now and then. On this his view is pretty much that of most intelligentsia. Mao was right to put his finger on feudalism, i.e. patriarchal social class, as the root of the basic inequality between classes and genders in traditional Chinese society, but he dealt with it himself in a patriarchal way, like a traditional emperor issuing edicts. Even worse, according to the director, he did it in a way that messed things up so badly in China for 10 years that no has been willing to deal with it again since, making the last state in some ways worse than the first. Yet, for me, at least Mao did try to confront it directly, but today's elite are comfortable—yes, very comfortable—with the idea of just letting the ruling oligarchy deal with social class and gender inequalities indirectly by manipulating the economy or throwing bones at various interest groups as the need arises.
His background gives some insight into things. He grew up in the Zhengzhou, the provincial capital, and is young enough that his Cultural Revolution experience came through the eyes of a child with no bad personal experience. His father managed some kind of mess hall during those times, so there was always something to eat. He is clearly a city person, urbane but not the least arrogant. He told a joke about a country guy who came to Xinxiang with his young son, who, seeing the city for the first time, asked his father if this was Beijing. No, silly boy, the father replied, Beijing is in Zhengzhou!
Henan province has always had the reputation of being a rural rather backwater place. He said that even the university people used to be rather rough on the edges too, but have come some way since his early days. People have gotten a little more refinement. He told the story of some department chair or other who some years ago came into the business office to get his reimbursement money and just entered the room rudely shouting “Where's the money?” as if he were barking orders to a waitress (as people usually do even now). One of the clerks just raised her head and responded, “Oh, are you here to hold us up?” and then put her head back down to her work. I guess people no longer do such things. Progress.
He had a funny comparison between the economy and skirt lengths. He said when the economy is good skirt lengths get shorter, but if it takes a dive skirt lengths get long again because the conservatives will be back in power managing a strict top-down economy accompanied by hosts of other conservative attitudes and policies. I told him he should write it up for publication in an economic journal. I do believe it could be proven with statistical data. I don't think we'd be lacking in volunteers to gather the data about skirt lengths.
From a dinner with him I recall a funny pun about Chinese people looking forward to the qiantu (前途) ‘the future’ and qiantu (钱途) ‘the way of money’. There are so many things like this. I just wish I could catch faster and remember them better. I should have stuck with French.
At this same dinner he talked about world leaders like Bush and Hu Jintao. He thought that what makes such people succeed is not brains (responding to my comment that Hu probably had some whereas Bush had obviously been shortchanged) but just guts. This is what allows them to get what they want. In this context he went on to say that he thought the US had about another 50 or 100 years before it would slide, not to obscurity or into some cataclysmic implosion, but just to the natural end of its world dominance. Without saying so, he was probably reflecting what most Chinese feel about their own future in the world—slow and steady wins the race. I had no contradictory evidence to offer, at least not about the United States. Not with a bang but a whimper.
This is basically a report on some conversations with the director of the foreign affairs office here, a very lively personality with very good English, a good sense of humor and interesting insights into life in China.
After some various issues came up about why things depend so much on people rather than clear policies and straight answers, he explained that it is necessary to remember that China is still 70% feudal, by which he meant that it's a hierarchical culture of relations not of rules. Everything depends on who you know and who you have done things for and who has done things for you. People do things for reasons. There's always a catch. It's an eternal merry-go-round. Let's have dinner--can you judge the speech contest？ Let's have lunch—can you give a 2-hour lecture at the art conference—in 2 days?! This is the kind of thing that has been going on for a few thousand years more or less.
As for the other 30%, he considers 20% of it to be capitalist and 10% socialist. He is optimistic about change, but it's tempered with reality. He feels it will probably take some decades to get the feudalism down to 60% and the capitalism up to 30%. It was clear that he would consider that to be progress and that the eventual near total capitalization of the Chinese economy would be a positive thing.
I would almost surely take him to be a party member. One doesn't get that far without it, so it's simply a matter of practicality. However, he was very strong about how the down and outs of society need to be taken care of. I presume this is his 10% socialism, and it gives some insight into how such people think about the nature of socialism in China. He felt this needed to be done not out of political expediency but out of a sense of morality and justice. This might set him apart from many who would certainly do it only for the former reason. Knowing him fairly well, I feel comfortable taking him at his word. He's kind of carved out some space for himself by placating or at least dealing with those who must be dealt with so as to be able to do what he likes and feels in important. In short, he has more successful in doing what I never could accomplish in my own university days.
He's had things to say about Mao now and then. On this his view is pretty much that of most intelligentsia. Mao was right to put his finger on feudalism, i.e. patriarchal social class, as the root of the basic inequality between classes and genders in traditional Chinese society, but he dealt with it himself in a patriarchal way, like a traditional emperor issuing edicts. Even worse, according to the director, he did it in a way that messed things up so badly in China for 10 years that no has been willing to deal with it again since, making the last state in some ways worse than the first. Yet, for me, at least Mao did try to confront it directly, but today's elite are comfortable—yes, very comfortable—with the idea of just letting the ruling oligarchy deal with social class and gender inequalities indirectly by manipulating the economy or throwing bones at various interest groups as the need arises.
His background gives some insight into things. He grew up in the Zhengzhou, the provincial capital, and is young enough that his Cultural Revolution experience came through the eyes of a child with no bad personal experience. His father managed some kind of mess hall during those times, so there was always something to eat. He is clearly a city person, urbane but not the least arrogant. He told a joke about a country guy who came to Xinxiang with his young son, who, seeing the city for the first time, asked his father if this was Beijing. No, silly boy, the father replied, Beijing is in Zhengzhou!
Henan province has always had the reputation of being a rural rather backwater place. He said that even the university people used to be rather rough on the edges too, but have come some way since his early days. People have gotten a little more refinement. He told the story of some department chair or other who some years ago came into the business office to get his reimbursement money and just entered the room rudely shouting “Where's the money?” as if he were barking orders to a waitress (as people usually do even now). One of the clerks just raised her head and responded, “Oh, are you here to hold us up?” and then put her head back down to her work. I guess people no longer do such things. Progress.
He had a funny comparison between the economy and skirt lengths. He said when the economy is good skirt lengths get shorter, but if it takes a dive skirt lengths get long again because the conservatives will be back in power managing a strict top-down economy accompanied by hosts of other conservative attitudes and policies. I told him he should write it up for publication in an economic journal. I do believe it could be proven with statistical data. I don't think we'd be lacking in volunteers to gather the data about skirt lengths.
From a dinner with him I recall a funny pun about Chinese people looking forward to the qiantu (前途) ‘the future’ and qiantu (钱途) ‘the way of money’. There are so many things like this. I just wish I could catch faster and remember them better. I should have stuck with French.
At this same dinner he talked about world leaders like Bush and Hu Jintao. He thought that what makes such people succeed is not brains (responding to my comment that Hu probably had some whereas Bush had obviously been shortchanged) but just guts. This is what allows them to get what they want. In this context he went on to say that he thought the US had about another 50 or 100 years before it would slide, not to obscurity or into some cataclysmic implosion, but just to the natural end of its world dominance. Without saying so, he was probably reflecting what most Chinese feel about their own future in the world—slow and steady wins the race. I had no contradictory evidence to offer, at least not about the United States. Not with a bang but a whimper.
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Students on Life
Students on Life
For the first writing assignments, I had students write a journal and then an essay on the topic “A Theme in My Life.” Without much luck I first had a discussion on Erich Fromm's idea of being and having to get them away from seeing their lives just in terms of a job. It was a failure. Without a single exception all 360 of them produced “journals” that were in fact canned essays on the jobs they wanted. A number noted that they had never been asked to think about their lives in this way, so maybe that was part of the problem, but mostly it was just the default mode kicking in. When it was time to turn the journals into essays, I remained very insistent that they go beyond the idea of describing a job to a reflection on what meaning or significance they hoped to give to their lives. They were free to bring in the jobs they hoped to get, but the jobs had to be a part of a larger theme.
I had some mild success. There were a number of common themes, which said some things about life in contemporary China for these students. First, it must be recalled that this is a provincial teachers college of 20,000 students, who are overwhelmingly first generation college. Maybe half are from small rural villages around the province; many others are the children of factory workers in some medium size cities with a minority being the children of K-12 teachers following in their parents' footsteps. What they had to say strongly reflects these conditions.
One theme, frequent but not the most common, was to get rich. Make lots of money by setting up your own export company or whatever, and then buy lots of nice stuff—cars, villas, clothes, travel, etc. Then the background kicks in. After you've made lots of money, indulge your parents, who maybe now go to work in the city after the planting or harvest to keep you in school. Buy them a nice villa too and take them around in your car and overseas with you on your trips. The next use for the money was to do something for the village—build a school, a road or a factory to give people good jobs. I was sometimes indelicate enough to write responses on journals wondering how the CEOs they want to emulate got so rich themselves. Was it not in fact by starting up factories employing rural school drop outs and paying them very little? I never got any answers. Maybe they took my questions to be rhetorical.
Another very common theme was to be a teacher at some level along the K-12 continuum. Clearly lots of students find the calling to be a teacher a noble one and look forward to being the kind of teacher that many of them were affected by—someone who went the extra mile to encourage them to hang in another year and take the college entrance exams again or whatever. They want to be the students' friends and confidants and advocates. Within this context and even in the one above, spending some years teaching in one the China's poor and remote provinces or in Africa as a volunteer was often mentioned. These aspirations were often part of a larger theme of wanting to become a person who is useful to society. While the way these goals were expressed often struck me as naïve or incredibly idealistic, I cannot say that they did not also remind me of some younger days when I had very similar and equally naïve hopes.
A desire for a simple, peaceful or "ordinary" life was a third rather common theme. Give me any kind of job that puts food on the table—I don't care what—but let me live in a natural remote place or do something that removes me from the competitive grasp of the new society, the corrupt politics, the smiling at people I don't respect and the constant looking over my shoulder. I think this feeling might come from the fact that many of them have already seen too much of what they don't like just from the struggle of getting a seat in college.
Other themes included descriptions of lives that would be interesting, challenging, colorful, varied, independent, happy, full of travel, etc. Using their English to be an interpreter for some jet-setting CEO or high official was often seen as a way of accomplishing these other goals. Some of the more career-minded writers mentioned graduate school, which is apparently all the rage now. "Everyone" wants a graduate degree, and a number of my students voiced interest in that as a way of getting a job teaching in college—good pay, job security and long vacations. Talk about naïvete. Well, maybe not if you can get some fat tenure track cake job.
Family was at the center of virtually all of these themes. Family in terms of parents and care for them was equally important as spousal relationships to these still single (mostly) women. Not a few of them began these conversations with phrases like "Because I'm a girl/daughter..." Many made comments about wanting to find a "lover" (爱人, airen, the term for 'spouse' that has been used in post-1949 China) who need not be handsome or rich but is a kind person, devoted and faithful to them. Children—one or two—were in all the pictures. Not one of the male students made a similar comment about trying to find such a woman.
I've heard people talk about how this generation of students feels terribly pressured and for this reason prone to some instability. I certainly see the pressure, but can't say I've yet seen evidence of any obvious instability. The school here has recently set up a counseling center and the challenge is to get students to use it because there is an assumption that people who get counseling are mentally ill, and there is considerable social stigma in China about mental illness, maybe like the US in the 50s. Another issue is that so many of these students are literally just off the farm. They have come on dirt paths to blinking neon and western style department stores. They have lots of adjustments to make beyond academic ones. As noted above, they feel incredibly indebted to parents and family, who are putting all their hopes on them, and some of them are indebted to banks as well. To make matters worse, most of them were overprotected as younger children so the adjustment is all the more challenging. I heard of a fairly recent incident in which some young student of rural origin on a large urban campus in another province hammered a couple fellow students to death because he felt he was being ridiculed as a bumpkin who didn't know how to dance or dress or talk like the city folk. Supposedly he was found not to be criminally insane or pathologically anti-social—just full of hatred for the city people, who he felt had wronged him. (The common word for bumpkin is 土包子, tubaozi, which means something like 'wrapped in mud' or 'mud ball,' very descriptive but not very nice.)
Much more remains to be said about "higher" education here in China and certainly in the US. No one can teach anything well to 400 students, let alone writing and logical thinking with a touch of creative expression in a second language to boot. What the hell am I doing here anyway?
For the first writing assignments, I had students write a journal and then an essay on the topic “A Theme in My Life.” Without much luck I first had a discussion on Erich Fromm's idea of being and having to get them away from seeing their lives just in terms of a job. It was a failure. Without a single exception all 360 of them produced “journals” that were in fact canned essays on the jobs they wanted. A number noted that they had never been asked to think about their lives in this way, so maybe that was part of the problem, but mostly it was just the default mode kicking in. When it was time to turn the journals into essays, I remained very insistent that they go beyond the idea of describing a job to a reflection on what meaning or significance they hoped to give to their lives. They were free to bring in the jobs they hoped to get, but the jobs had to be a part of a larger theme.
I had some mild success. There were a number of common themes, which said some things about life in contemporary China for these students. First, it must be recalled that this is a provincial teachers college of 20,000 students, who are overwhelmingly first generation college. Maybe half are from small rural villages around the province; many others are the children of factory workers in some medium size cities with a minority being the children of K-12 teachers following in their parents' footsteps. What they had to say strongly reflects these conditions.
One theme, frequent but not the most common, was to get rich. Make lots of money by setting up your own export company or whatever, and then buy lots of nice stuff—cars, villas, clothes, travel, etc. Then the background kicks in. After you've made lots of money, indulge your parents, who maybe now go to work in the city after the planting or harvest to keep you in school. Buy them a nice villa too and take them around in your car and overseas with you on your trips. The next use for the money was to do something for the village—build a school, a road or a factory to give people good jobs. I was sometimes indelicate enough to write responses on journals wondering how the CEOs they want to emulate got so rich themselves. Was it not in fact by starting up factories employing rural school drop outs and paying them very little? I never got any answers. Maybe they took my questions to be rhetorical.
Another very common theme was to be a teacher at some level along the K-12 continuum. Clearly lots of students find the calling to be a teacher a noble one and look forward to being the kind of teacher that many of them were affected by—someone who went the extra mile to encourage them to hang in another year and take the college entrance exams again or whatever. They want to be the students' friends and confidants and advocates. Within this context and even in the one above, spending some years teaching in one the China's poor and remote provinces or in Africa as a volunteer was often mentioned. These aspirations were often part of a larger theme of wanting to become a person who is useful to society. While the way these goals were expressed often struck me as naïve or incredibly idealistic, I cannot say that they did not also remind me of some younger days when I had very similar and equally naïve hopes.
A desire for a simple, peaceful or "ordinary" life was a third rather common theme. Give me any kind of job that puts food on the table—I don't care what—but let me live in a natural remote place or do something that removes me from the competitive grasp of the new society, the corrupt politics, the smiling at people I don't respect and the constant looking over my shoulder. I think this feeling might come from the fact that many of them have already seen too much of what they don't like just from the struggle of getting a seat in college.
Other themes included descriptions of lives that would be interesting, challenging, colorful, varied, independent, happy, full of travel, etc. Using their English to be an interpreter for some jet-setting CEO or high official was often seen as a way of accomplishing these other goals. Some of the more career-minded writers mentioned graduate school, which is apparently all the rage now. "Everyone" wants a graduate degree, and a number of my students voiced interest in that as a way of getting a job teaching in college—good pay, job security and long vacations. Talk about naïvete. Well, maybe not if you can get some fat tenure track cake job.
Family was at the center of virtually all of these themes. Family in terms of parents and care for them was equally important as spousal relationships to these still single (mostly) women. Not a few of them began these conversations with phrases like "Because I'm a girl/daughter..." Many made comments about wanting to find a "lover" (爱人, airen, the term for 'spouse' that has been used in post-1949 China) who need not be handsome or rich but is a kind person, devoted and faithful to them. Children—one or two—were in all the pictures. Not one of the male students made a similar comment about trying to find such a woman.
I've heard people talk about how this generation of students feels terribly pressured and for this reason prone to some instability. I certainly see the pressure, but can't say I've yet seen evidence of any obvious instability. The school here has recently set up a counseling center and the challenge is to get students to use it because there is an assumption that people who get counseling are mentally ill, and there is considerable social stigma in China about mental illness, maybe like the US in the 50s. Another issue is that so many of these students are literally just off the farm. They have come on dirt paths to blinking neon and western style department stores. They have lots of adjustments to make beyond academic ones. As noted above, they feel incredibly indebted to parents and family, who are putting all their hopes on them, and some of them are indebted to banks as well. To make matters worse, most of them were overprotected as younger children so the adjustment is all the more challenging. I heard of a fairly recent incident in which some young student of rural origin on a large urban campus in another province hammered a couple fellow students to death because he felt he was being ridiculed as a bumpkin who didn't know how to dance or dress or talk like the city folk. Supposedly he was found not to be criminally insane or pathologically anti-social—just full of hatred for the city people, who he felt had wronged him. (The common word for bumpkin is 土包子, tubaozi, which means something like 'wrapped in mud' or 'mud ball,' very descriptive but not very nice.)
Much more remains to be said about "higher" education here in China and certainly in the US. No one can teach anything well to 400 students, let alone writing and logical thinking with a touch of creative expression in a second language to boot. What the hell am I doing here anyway?
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Reflections on Some Environmental Issues
Reflections on Some Environmental Issues
All told, Xinxiang, a city of about 600,000, seems to have somewhat cleaner air than when I was first here in 2001 though the bad air then may have been due to the spring burning of the winter wheat stubble. Now there are signs all over the countryside saying that such burning is prohibited and will be fined. I have seen this directive disregarded on a small scale, but the real test will come this spring after the winter wheat harvest when it's traditional to burn the stubble before turning over the soil. I can clearly recall in May of 2001 being able to look directly at the sun in the middle of the day and thinking that this was not a good thing.
The foreign affairs director said last week that the heat in his apartment building has not been turned on because the local government refused to allow the coal burning boiler to be used due to failure to meet pollution standards. In the seven-storey building where most of my classes are, they have yet to turn on the heat, but they are likely just saving money. In another classroom building the heat is on but not in the brand new art building. We have had heat in our apartment since November 15th, but I have heard no rumor that any of this variability has to do with pollution standards.
One sees very few pollution creating vehicles. Some taxis are pretty creaky, but I do not see any of them belching out black exhaust since they would be pretty easy prey to be stopped and fined by the police. (I would say extorted, but this is not Chicago.) There are plenty of public busses and vast majority of vehicles are electric bikes or bicycles rather than cars. Motorcycles are still common enough, but in terms of noise and exhaust pollution they seem well regulated.
However, even given the above, I can almost never see Taihang Mountain (太行山) though it is only about 4 miles from here, an hour or so away on my bike. I know what direction it's in, so if I want to go there I can just head north into the dusty smog and eventually it will appear. Anyway, it's a bit of a mystery where the smog comes from and why it varies so much from day to day. Surely the wind is a factor, but I've yet to see a clear pattern. There are two huge coal burning power plants right near the mountains, and I've bicycled right up to them, one of which looks very new, but I don't see the stacks putting out serious amounts of smoke. Within walking distance of school there are a few small coal yards where they produce these perforated cylinders of pressed coal that go into stoves in individual homes and I have seen them stacked up on the ledges of older flats, so some few people must still have permission to use them. Well, it's probably the usual stuff one would see anywhere. The little fish get caught and the big ones get away. The only thing I really know about these big fish is that they are somewhere upwind.
I can see very little evidence of any organized recycling effort. I do see older folks with 3-wheelers, who collect things like cardboard and plastic bottles, so they must take them somewhere. Also, I've seen some really down and out types going through the trash barrels on the street looking for plastic bottles for the most part. Virtually nothing is canned in aluminum or other metal cans, and just about the only thing that gets put into glass bottles is, thankfully, beer. Everything else is in plastic bottles, which in theory are recyclable.
A huge issue is plastic bags. They are everywhere. When you go to the store they put bags into bags and if you say anything they look at you as if there must be a language issue because you could not possibly be saying that you don't want your things inside of 3 bags. Plastic litter is one of the most noticeable differences from 20 years ago. In the early 90s just outside of Shenyang I once saw a man plowing a small field with a donkey, but there was so many plastic bags littering the soil that it seemed he was either growing or harvesting plastic bags instead of crops. I wish I'd had a camera to record this old to modern transition. Even the woman here who takes care of the compound and does some light cleaning and who once voiced her concern over environmental issues asked me if I wanted her to throw out my accumulated beer bottles. I said that I'd take them out myself for the 一毛钱 refund, a little more than a penny US, but not for the money but just to get them recycled. This seemed both to surprise and impress her.
I've already noted the terrible condition of the river that runs through town and passes near campus. Just walking in the neighborhood I can see drains in any number of places discharging waste water of various shades of tan and sickly green into the river. Some of the drains surely come from the campus. The river typically varies somewhat in color from dark grey to virtually black though on just one single day after a rain it was briefly a somewhat not totally unnatural muddy color. I plan to get some pictures one of these days. Even students have remarked that in their 19 or 20-year lives they can remember swimming and fishing in now lifeless hometown streams.
I've seen farmers in the local truck farm fields outside of town walk the rows of vegetables generously spraying what I take to be insecticides (they weed by hoeing or by hand—their labor being cheaper than the cost of herbicides) without gloves or masks. In reading my 360 students' journals on friendship, there were easily half a dozen who mentioned losing a high school classmate to cancer, often leukemia. A number also reported losing a young father to cancer, a father probably because of a dangerously polluted industrial work site. Of course, such things are plenty common enough in the US, where there was a recent report (in the UK Guardian newspaper) of a cancer cluster near a depleted uranium dumpsite.
Street sweepers are out daily in the morning to get the litter off the streets where people often just drop it because they know somebody will be by in the morning. Nevertheless, people, especially younger ones, do typically take the extra steps to put their trash in receptacles. However, I have also seen the street sweepers conveniently sweep the litter into the run off drains if they happen not to be covered.
I guess there's just not much of the good old 60s what-goes-around-comes-around awareness here yet. One possible reason for this obliviousness to environmental issues is the fact that even 20 years ago most everything was made of natural materials, so it didn't much matter where you dropped it. Furthermore, the previous non-consumerist economy meant that everything had to be used frugally, and you went shopping everyday with your basket as there were no plastic bags given out in stores. Thus, one must ask if the real issue is lack of environmental awareness or lack of foresight—both in China and the West—as to the implications of an immediately and maximally profitable capitalist-consumerist economy. In any case, I have seen some really stunning examples of the failure to deal with these issues here in China.
Once on a ferry from Hong Kong to Canton, I was amazed to see a trash receptacle lined with a plastic bag at the end of every single row of seats and signs about how you should put your trash in the proper place. I was pretty impressed. As we got into the estuary close to Canton, I saw the cleaning guy go dutifully up and down the rows and stuff each of these little plastic bags into two large ones. He then tied them off and proceeded to the fantail of the boat, where he gave them a quick windup whirl and tossed them right into the sea.
On a 3-day ferry trip going down the Yangtze River from Chongqing through the Three Gorges on the way to Wuhan, I saw an even more incredible example of this mindset built into the design of a ship. This 3 or 4-deck ferry had easily a few hundred people on it, and it was one of a constant stream of ferries going up and down the river. We'd pass one every hour or so and on they went day after week after month after year. On the ship you could get packaged eats, but it also stopped from time to time at riverside ports for the purchase of meals in styrofoam containers, which had just become available back then in 1988. Right on the railings up and down both sides on every deck there were numerous handy trash chutes, which seemed to show evidence of forethought. Well, in my wanderings around the ship I happened to go down to the first deck and what did I see but that the chutes were open at the bottom and every bit of trash dropped directly into the river. They might as well have instructed people just to throw their trash directly overboard. Perhaps the chutes could have been fixed with collection receptacles or maybe they were removed to save labor and avoid the cost and trouble of proper disposal. I'd like to think that this issue was taken care of soon after we traveled the river, but the recent official confirmation that the Yangtze River baiji dolphin is extinct leads me to think otherwise.
One last example is something I saw right through my apartment window earlier this semester. There is a copy center in the next building and I happened to see some fellow opening toner cartridges and dumping toner right into a sewer grate 10 feet outside the front door of the copy center. For a moment I felt like running out and hollering at him, but I've been here too long for that.
Life is good. The shelves are full. The neon lights blink and beckon. What you don't see won't hurt you. Welcome to the post-modern-high-tech human condition, most recently arrived in China. Yes, e.e. cummings, pity this busy monster, manunkind,/not. Progress is a comfortable disease. Yes, Alfred E. Neuman, What-me worry? Yes, Kurt Vonnegut, And so it goes…
All told, Xinxiang, a city of about 600,000, seems to have somewhat cleaner air than when I was first here in 2001 though the bad air then may have been due to the spring burning of the winter wheat stubble. Now there are signs all over the countryside saying that such burning is prohibited and will be fined. I have seen this directive disregarded on a small scale, but the real test will come this spring after the winter wheat harvest when it's traditional to burn the stubble before turning over the soil. I can clearly recall in May of 2001 being able to look directly at the sun in the middle of the day and thinking that this was not a good thing.
The foreign affairs director said last week that the heat in his apartment building has not been turned on because the local government refused to allow the coal burning boiler to be used due to failure to meet pollution standards. In the seven-storey building where most of my classes are, they have yet to turn on the heat, but they are likely just saving money. In another classroom building the heat is on but not in the brand new art building. We have had heat in our apartment since November 15th, but I have heard no rumor that any of this variability has to do with pollution standards.
One sees very few pollution creating vehicles. Some taxis are pretty creaky, but I do not see any of them belching out black exhaust since they would be pretty easy prey to be stopped and fined by the police. (I would say extorted, but this is not Chicago.) There are plenty of public busses and vast majority of vehicles are electric bikes or bicycles rather than cars. Motorcycles are still common enough, but in terms of noise and exhaust pollution they seem well regulated.
However, even given the above, I can almost never see Taihang Mountain (太行山) though it is only about 4 miles from here, an hour or so away on my bike. I know what direction it's in, so if I want to go there I can just head north into the dusty smog and eventually it will appear. Anyway, it's a bit of a mystery where the smog comes from and why it varies so much from day to day. Surely the wind is a factor, but I've yet to see a clear pattern. There are two huge coal burning power plants right near the mountains, and I've bicycled right up to them, one of which looks very new, but I don't see the stacks putting out serious amounts of smoke. Within walking distance of school there are a few small coal yards where they produce these perforated cylinders of pressed coal that go into stoves in individual homes and I have seen them stacked up on the ledges of older flats, so some few people must still have permission to use them. Well, it's probably the usual stuff one would see anywhere. The little fish get caught and the big ones get away. The only thing I really know about these big fish is that they are somewhere upwind.
I can see very little evidence of any organized recycling effort. I do see older folks with 3-wheelers, who collect things like cardboard and plastic bottles, so they must take them somewhere. Also, I've seen some really down and out types going through the trash barrels on the street looking for plastic bottles for the most part. Virtually nothing is canned in aluminum or other metal cans, and just about the only thing that gets put into glass bottles is, thankfully, beer. Everything else is in plastic bottles, which in theory are recyclable.
A huge issue is plastic bags. They are everywhere. When you go to the store they put bags into bags and if you say anything they look at you as if there must be a language issue because you could not possibly be saying that you don't want your things inside of 3 bags. Plastic litter is one of the most noticeable differences from 20 years ago. In the early 90s just outside of Shenyang I once saw a man plowing a small field with a donkey, but there was so many plastic bags littering the soil that it seemed he was either growing or harvesting plastic bags instead of crops. I wish I'd had a camera to record this old to modern transition. Even the woman here who takes care of the compound and does some light cleaning and who once voiced her concern over environmental issues asked me if I wanted her to throw out my accumulated beer bottles. I said that I'd take them out myself for the 一毛钱 refund, a little more than a penny US, but not for the money but just to get them recycled. This seemed both to surprise and impress her.
I've already noted the terrible condition of the river that runs through town and passes near campus. Just walking in the neighborhood I can see drains in any number of places discharging waste water of various shades of tan and sickly green into the river. Some of the drains surely come from the campus. The river typically varies somewhat in color from dark grey to virtually black though on just one single day after a rain it was briefly a somewhat not totally unnatural muddy color. I plan to get some pictures one of these days. Even students have remarked that in their 19 or 20-year lives they can remember swimming and fishing in now lifeless hometown streams.
I've seen farmers in the local truck farm fields outside of town walk the rows of vegetables generously spraying what I take to be insecticides (they weed by hoeing or by hand—their labor being cheaper than the cost of herbicides) without gloves or masks. In reading my 360 students' journals on friendship, there were easily half a dozen who mentioned losing a high school classmate to cancer, often leukemia. A number also reported losing a young father to cancer, a father probably because of a dangerously polluted industrial work site. Of course, such things are plenty common enough in the US, where there was a recent report (in the UK Guardian newspaper) of a cancer cluster near a depleted uranium dumpsite.
Street sweepers are out daily in the morning to get the litter off the streets where people often just drop it because they know somebody will be by in the morning. Nevertheless, people, especially younger ones, do typically take the extra steps to put their trash in receptacles. However, I have also seen the street sweepers conveniently sweep the litter into the run off drains if they happen not to be covered.
I guess there's just not much of the good old 60s what-goes-around-comes-around awareness here yet. One possible reason for this obliviousness to environmental issues is the fact that even 20 years ago most everything was made of natural materials, so it didn't much matter where you dropped it. Furthermore, the previous non-consumerist economy meant that everything had to be used frugally, and you went shopping everyday with your basket as there were no plastic bags given out in stores. Thus, one must ask if the real issue is lack of environmental awareness or lack of foresight—both in China and the West—as to the implications of an immediately and maximally profitable capitalist-consumerist economy. In any case, I have seen some really stunning examples of the failure to deal with these issues here in China.
Once on a ferry from Hong Kong to Canton, I was amazed to see a trash receptacle lined with a plastic bag at the end of every single row of seats and signs about how you should put your trash in the proper place. I was pretty impressed. As we got into the estuary close to Canton, I saw the cleaning guy go dutifully up and down the rows and stuff each of these little plastic bags into two large ones. He then tied them off and proceeded to the fantail of the boat, where he gave them a quick windup whirl and tossed them right into the sea.
On a 3-day ferry trip going down the Yangtze River from Chongqing through the Three Gorges on the way to Wuhan, I saw an even more incredible example of this mindset built into the design of a ship. This 3 or 4-deck ferry had easily a few hundred people on it, and it was one of a constant stream of ferries going up and down the river. We'd pass one every hour or so and on they went day after week after month after year. On the ship you could get packaged eats, but it also stopped from time to time at riverside ports for the purchase of meals in styrofoam containers, which had just become available back then in 1988. Right on the railings up and down both sides on every deck there were numerous handy trash chutes, which seemed to show evidence of forethought. Well, in my wanderings around the ship I happened to go down to the first deck and what did I see but that the chutes were open at the bottom and every bit of trash dropped directly into the river. They might as well have instructed people just to throw their trash directly overboard. Perhaps the chutes could have been fixed with collection receptacles or maybe they were removed to save labor and avoid the cost and trouble of proper disposal. I'd like to think that this issue was taken care of soon after we traveled the river, but the recent official confirmation that the Yangtze River baiji dolphin is extinct leads me to think otherwise.
One last example is something I saw right through my apartment window earlier this semester. There is a copy center in the next building and I happened to see some fellow opening toner cartridges and dumping toner right into a sewer grate 10 feet outside the front door of the copy center. For a moment I felt like running out and hollering at him, but I've been here too long for that.
Life is good. The shelves are full. The neon lights blink and beckon. What you don't see won't hurt you. Welcome to the post-modern-high-tech human condition, most recently arrived in China. Yes, e.e. cummings, pity this busy monster, manunkind,/not. Progress is a comfortable disease. Yes, Alfred E. Neuman, What-me worry? Yes, Kurt Vonnegut, And so it goes…
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