9/25 9:30am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_25?authkey=Gv1sRgCM-P_NXq1p7jGw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkBKimV06KE
After a breakfast that my gut pains do not welcome, we hit the pavement for the second day of our lightning visit to Shanghai. Today it's another tourist area called Xinghuang Temple in the morning. More shops hawking their wares. My parents manage to buy a couple of things as souvenirs. One place smelled so incredibly weird. This fry shop was selling various fried meats on a stick, and I guess the meat plus spices plus cracked oil made for a very acrid smell. It bothered me but it nearly made my dad hurl it was so strong. We hit noon and got over to the restaurant where Bao Gongjing invited us for lunch. She brought her husband this time. We had a very pleasant chat about various things, over a quite good meal. I think this was the second best meal we had in China, next to that place in Beijing. Again, refinement really makes a difference. I had problems following parts of the conversation because her husband's accent was really unfamiliar to me.
After lunch, we made it official -- we were full on tourists tackling the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. This is a thing that's been the cause of all the buzz in Shanghai for the past 5 months. Over Mid-Autumn Festival, traffic through the expo peaked at 630,000 on the day before we arrived. In all, some 300 million have attended. I think I did argue that it would be weird to go to Shanghai while the expo was running and not even check it out. Bao Gongjing handed us 3 tickets and would not hear of our paying for them. So of course we would go.
The Expo is many things. It's a way for China to show off one of its premier cities, and it's a way for countries to show off who they are to Chinese visitors. The Expo organization and infrastructure is outstanding. Everything was clearly well planned and executed. The expo area is virtually spotless and really attractive. All across the city, volunteer stands are stationed to help tourists get to where they want to go. The Shanghai people, according to our lunch chat, are generally pleasant and have really gotten behind the expo. Of course it's delivering gobs of money to the city, but even so, it must be hard to tolerate the tourists. Many have to adjust commute schedules to deal with the loads of people clogging the subway and the streets, to give you an idea. I'm sure everyone's had to point to the same obvious landmarks over and over for the past months. But still, most of the volunteers and extra city staff (cleaners, traffic guards, police) were exceedingly cheerful about helping out. Compare this to the atmosphere in Beijing for the Olympics. Beijing people can be compared to New Yorkers -- rather grumpy about it all. The prevailing attitude during the games was "let's get this over with and all yous people leave." So in comparison, touring around Shanghai has been an absolute pleasure.
The Expo pavilions themselves are interesting. I suppose each country gets to decide how to design the exterior of the building and how to populate the innards with an introduction to the country. All the big countries had immense lines to go into the pavilions, so we agreed not to try any of those. Instead, we sampled such obscure gems as the Czech Republic, Armenia, Hungary, and Norway. Heck, even Norway had a 20 minute line. Norway's was very well made, and the Czech one was very bizarre and intriguing, but overall it didn't feel worth it to try to go into a big country's pavilion, based on the contents of what we saw. It was nice enough to see that each country was executing their ideas differently and to their own standards. Oh, we saw these guys sneaking into the exit of Hungary, so my dad tried that with Montenegro, but some Montenegran caught him and shooed him out in Chinese. The Expo had this clever idea of selling you a toy passport for fairly cheap. When you get into a pavilion, some clerks can stamp your passport for that country. The goal of course being to get a full passport. We actually saw a guy selling fully stamped passports, and people fliping through them to confirm. I can't imagine anyone really wanting that. But yeah, I suppose if we'd bought those passports, we'd be banned from Montenegro for life. We swung by the US pavilion to see if they had special treatment for citizens. We got this idea from the UK urchin pavilion, which gave priority access to UK passport holders. The guard told us that, with the US passport being such a common thing in Shanghai, that they couldn't do it. The US Diner sold such awesome food items as hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, and pulled pork. They, sadly, did not have a Philly cheeseteak or Boston creme pie or gumbo or fried chicken. Come on!
We got to ride the ferry across the Huangpu River to the other half of the Expo, which had technology and theme exhibits. The lines were also very long here, so we gave up and went to dinner. The Expo actually hired its own fleet of VW Touran taxis, which are much nicer than the normal taxi fleets. Only these guys are allowed to deliver people out of the Expo. I suppose when the Expo ends in October, they'll join the normal fleets.
For dinner, we hit up a roast duck joint. It claims to have roast duck as good as Beijing's best places. After back to back testing, I can safely say that Beijing has nothing to worry about. The basting flavor was good, as was the quality of the local duck. But this place was nowhere close in terms of rendering out the fat and getting the skin to a crisp perfection. Add on top of that the godawful service (truly worse than the place to which it aspires, Quanjude) and you have an experience that is passable but not worth repeating.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Vote this Matt Drake for supervisor
Normally I don't get into politics, but I can heartily recommend my friend for supervisor in San Fran:
http://www.mattdrakeforsupervisor.com/
http://www.mattdrakeforsupervisor.com/
Monday, October 25, 2010
9/24
9/24 7:35am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_24?authkey=Gv1sRgCJaU_OqEzK3MIg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dJysT_KFTg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj7VLMiBI3w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWOrRvniXtM
The train glides without drama into Shanghai's Hongqiao train station. My mom places a call to one of our contacts in Shanghai, the sister of one of our Chinese friends in North Carolina. She wanted some stuff brought back from China, so the sister is going to meet up with us to give us some packages. We take a fairly long trip along the subway to our planned hotel room. When we get there, we find out that the travel agency that booked the room for us basically lied about the hotel accepting foreigners. Tourism is a carefully regulated business in China. Obviously, there are plenty of hotels that China doesn't want visitors to see. These are simply not allowed to reserve rooms for people without domestic resident permits. The staff wholly refuse to take us. The nicer hotel next door is much more expensive and only does checkins after noon. Without any other recourse, my mom calls the sister again. She promises to book a nearby hotel and to come pick us up. We end up sitting for a while in the first hotel's lobby. There's a bathroom that locals seem to know about, so people wander in off the street and use it at will. One of these is a really strange lady who asks what my mom's name is, and when she's getting off work, and how much money she has, all the while with an earnest stare on her face. It's pretty clear she's mentally unhealthy and begging for money. Kinda spooky. Actually, this whole trip back to China, I've only seen a few beggars on occasion. Nothing like in my previous trips.
Eventually, the sister, Bao Gongjing, pulls up. We manage to square ourselves and luggage into her work car, which has its own driver. So the five of us make it through some crowded Shanghai streets to our new hotel, which is not only cheaper, but clearly much nicer than our intended stay. Signs of the ongoing World Expo are everywhere, on every corner and evidenced in the masses of tourists flocking around. Bao Gongjing helps us into our room and we agree to meet later. The courtesy she's extending us is incredible, considering that hours earlier we were complete strangers. When we told her of our plight, she called up her personal driver and had him pull around to come get us. Then, because of my ongoing gut aches, she did us a favor and called the local hospital director to arrange a direct appointment with a GI specialist. Instead of working our way through the hospital, we got driven pretty much to the office door of the doctor. Within 30 minutes we had some minor anti-bacterial meds and were outta there. Obviously it's a bit easier to be welcoming when you have a work car at your disposal and a high enough position in the local administration to personally know the director of a hospital, but we were still very grateful.
With the boarding situation behind us, we set out to walk the pedestrian avenue of Nanjing St., a major tourist spot. It was lined with a variety of shops and we stopped in a few of them just to check it out. Mostly it was food and tourist type goods, but still fun to be looking around. It helped that indoors were heavily air-conditioned. Because of all the tourists, it was the heaviest crowds I'd seen since I'd arrived. More elbowing and jostling here than anywhere else. It hasn't bothered me as I'm one of the largest people out there and can't get pushed around, but I guess it might bother those who have private space needs.
We step into one of the places where we were told to go eat -- the Tai Kang steamed bun restaurant. They have a very special steamed crab soup bun, where the soup is inside the bun. My gut ache has ebbed to a low, so I am pretty hungry for this meal. The food is incredibly slow in arriving, but different and delicious. We stumble back out and keep gawking around like the tourists we are.
In the late afternoon, we return to our hotel and wash up to prepare for dinner. We're inviting the daughter of some friends of coworkers of my parents from when they lived in Beijing. Dinner is going to be at another restaurant recommended to us. The subway is slow and not a very good way to view the city, so we have been taking the taxi around. We taxi to the restaurant and meet up with her. My gut bug is back, so that may be coloring my perception of the dishes. Both of the must-try items are busts. The first is lion's heads, which are simply huge meatballs. They don't have a lot of flavor and the meat itself doesn't seem to be high quality. The new acquaintance seems to be eating hers up, so it must be an acquired taste to some degree. The other thing is a sliced jellied meat dish. Nothing to write about.
After dinner, we ask the daughter to walk around with us. I get the sense she'd rather be elsewhere, but she's sporting enough to give us a tour of the city. She grew up in the US just like me and has only been back in China for five years, spending the first three learning Chinese in Beijing, and these last two at an ad agency where she can work mostly in English. So her Chinese is predictably loaded with English phrases and manners of speech. Doesn't affect our understanding, but I wonder if it catches her out on the streets sometimes.
First, we went to the Bund. I don't know much about this place, and seeing it in person made me acutely ashamed of that. I know it was the area colonized heavily by foreign entities back in the day, but I don't know how the Bund buildings came into being or what purpose they served. At one point, it was a capitalist oasis in an imperialist land. Then it was a relic in a communist land. Now, some of the buildings are being used as bank branches and such. So now a capitalist oasis in a semi-capitalist regime. It makes you think a bit.
Thanks to Ou-yang Dan's guidance, we get to see tallest building in Shanghai. She takes us to the back entrance where there's no ticket price. The elevators only take you to the 87th and 91st floors, but that's all you'd want to see anyways. The restaurant is predictably patronized by the rich and fashionable, so you see foreigners having meals, high class hookers plying their trade, etc. We very bluntly ask to just check out the scenery, and the staff let us. The view out the windows is really breathtaking. Despite some vertigo, I managed to take a picture of the landscape. Even from the ground, it was obvious that Shanghai is simply beautiful the way it is lit up at night. But from this height, it's almost surreal. The city is beautiful in a way Beijing could never be. Beijing's central districts are still pretty stubby, thanks to the historical sites and earthquake paranoia. It doesn't have a real river splitting the city in half. It doesn't condone miles of neon advertising that Shanghai shares with Tokyo and New York City. So it can never really look modern in the same way. I begrudgingly have to admit that there's real reason why Shanghai is such a destination. With that epiphany, we get the heck outta there and back down to the ground. We make a very brief trip over to the broadcast tower and look around. At this point, Ou-yang Dan splits and we repair to our room.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_24?authkey=Gv1sRgCJaU_OqEzK3MIg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dJysT_KFTg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj7VLMiBI3w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWOrRvniXtM
The train glides without drama into Shanghai's Hongqiao train station. My mom places a call to one of our contacts in Shanghai, the sister of one of our Chinese friends in North Carolina. She wanted some stuff brought back from China, so the sister is going to meet up with us to give us some packages. We take a fairly long trip along the subway to our planned hotel room. When we get there, we find out that the travel agency that booked the room for us basically lied about the hotel accepting foreigners. Tourism is a carefully regulated business in China. Obviously, there are plenty of hotels that China doesn't want visitors to see. These are simply not allowed to reserve rooms for people without domestic resident permits. The staff wholly refuse to take us. The nicer hotel next door is much more expensive and only does checkins after noon. Without any other recourse, my mom calls the sister again. She promises to book a nearby hotel and to come pick us up. We end up sitting for a while in the first hotel's lobby. There's a bathroom that locals seem to know about, so people wander in off the street and use it at will. One of these is a really strange lady who asks what my mom's name is, and when she's getting off work, and how much money she has, all the while with an earnest stare on her face. It's pretty clear she's mentally unhealthy and begging for money. Kinda spooky. Actually, this whole trip back to China, I've only seen a few beggars on occasion. Nothing like in my previous trips.
Eventually, the sister, Bao Gongjing, pulls up. We manage to square ourselves and luggage into her work car, which has its own driver. So the five of us make it through some crowded Shanghai streets to our new hotel, which is not only cheaper, but clearly much nicer than our intended stay. Signs of the ongoing World Expo are everywhere, on every corner and evidenced in the masses of tourists flocking around. Bao Gongjing helps us into our room and we agree to meet later. The courtesy she's extending us is incredible, considering that hours earlier we were complete strangers. When we told her of our plight, she called up her personal driver and had him pull around to come get us. Then, because of my ongoing gut aches, she did us a favor and called the local hospital director to arrange a direct appointment with a GI specialist. Instead of working our way through the hospital, we got driven pretty much to the office door of the doctor. Within 30 minutes we had some minor anti-bacterial meds and were outta there. Obviously it's a bit easier to be welcoming when you have a work car at your disposal and a high enough position in the local administration to personally know the director of a hospital, but we were still very grateful.
With the boarding situation behind us, we set out to walk the pedestrian avenue of Nanjing St., a major tourist spot. It was lined with a variety of shops and we stopped in a few of them just to check it out. Mostly it was food and tourist type goods, but still fun to be looking around. It helped that indoors were heavily air-conditioned. Because of all the tourists, it was the heaviest crowds I'd seen since I'd arrived. More elbowing and jostling here than anywhere else. It hasn't bothered me as I'm one of the largest people out there and can't get pushed around, but I guess it might bother those who have private space needs.
We step into one of the places where we were told to go eat -- the Tai Kang steamed bun restaurant. They have a very special steamed crab soup bun, where the soup is inside the bun. My gut ache has ebbed to a low, so I am pretty hungry for this meal. The food is incredibly slow in arriving, but different and delicious. We stumble back out and keep gawking around like the tourists we are.
In the late afternoon, we return to our hotel and wash up to prepare for dinner. We're inviting the daughter of some friends of coworkers of my parents from when they lived in Beijing. Dinner is going to be at another restaurant recommended to us. The subway is slow and not a very good way to view the city, so we have been taking the taxi around. We taxi to the restaurant and meet up with her. My gut bug is back, so that may be coloring my perception of the dishes. Both of the must-try items are busts. The first is lion's heads, which are simply huge meatballs. They don't have a lot of flavor and the meat itself doesn't seem to be high quality. The new acquaintance seems to be eating hers up, so it must be an acquired taste to some degree. The other thing is a sliced jellied meat dish. Nothing to write about.
After dinner, we ask the daughter to walk around with us. I get the sense she'd rather be elsewhere, but she's sporting enough to give us a tour of the city. She grew up in the US just like me and has only been back in China for five years, spending the first three learning Chinese in Beijing, and these last two at an ad agency where she can work mostly in English. So her Chinese is predictably loaded with English phrases and manners of speech. Doesn't affect our understanding, but I wonder if it catches her out on the streets sometimes.
First, we went to the Bund. I don't know much about this place, and seeing it in person made me acutely ashamed of that. I know it was the area colonized heavily by foreign entities back in the day, but I don't know how the Bund buildings came into being or what purpose they served. At one point, it was a capitalist oasis in an imperialist land. Then it was a relic in a communist land. Now, some of the buildings are being used as bank branches and such. So now a capitalist oasis in a semi-capitalist regime. It makes you think a bit.
Thanks to Ou-yang Dan's guidance, we get to see tallest building in Shanghai. She takes us to the back entrance where there's no ticket price. The elevators only take you to the 87th and 91st floors, but that's all you'd want to see anyways. The restaurant is predictably patronized by the rich and fashionable, so you see foreigners having meals, high class hookers plying their trade, etc. We very bluntly ask to just check out the scenery, and the staff let us. The view out the windows is really breathtaking. Despite some vertigo, I managed to take a picture of the landscape. Even from the ground, it was obvious that Shanghai is simply beautiful the way it is lit up at night. But from this height, it's almost surreal. The city is beautiful in a way Beijing could never be. Beijing's central districts are still pretty stubby, thanks to the historical sites and earthquake paranoia. It doesn't have a real river splitting the city in half. It doesn't condone miles of neon advertising that Shanghai shares with Tokyo and New York City. So it can never really look modern in the same way. I begrudgingly have to admit that there's real reason why Shanghai is such a destination. With that epiphany, we get the heck outta there and back down to the ground. We make a very brief trip over to the broadcast tower and look around. At this point, Ou-yang Dan splits and we repair to our room.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
9/23
9/23 8:23am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_23?authkey=Gv1sRgCM-hqbX0uZ-l_AE
It's our last day in Tangshan. These big Chinese holidays usually come with three days of vacation, so even though not everyone had their first day off, everyone definitely gets the second day off. Except those in retail, I guess. In the morning we taxi over to 2nd Uncle's. He's taking off for the Northeast for work, so we figure we'd send him off. It's a pretty pleasant parting. We decided to walk back. This was very rewarding, in that it reminded me of the way things used to look in the area around where my grandmother lived, and where I stayed for a bit back in 1997. It basically looked like halfway to a slum, which is still fine to me, as it represents part of what China has been trying to rise up from on its way to greatness.
Lunch is all about dumplings. 1st Aunt makes two kinds -- chives and pork and also pure beef. Because of my intestine issues, I have a few chive dumplings and peanuts but otherwise abstain. They're really good, though. After lunch, Ranran is extremely motivated to play a game of: stretch this elastic band, and then take turns letting go of it at your partner. I don't have too much else to do, so I humor her for about two hours at this game. She's my cousin's daughter after all, so I ham it up with variations and go along with her feigned outrages.
Eventually, mom's high school classmates show up. One just to say goodbye, and the other to drop us off at Beijing. Recall that, thanks to some poor logistics, we weren't able to get sleeping berth tickets from Tangshan to Shanghai. So we decided to get them starting in Beijing. So this requires us to get to Beijing (east of Tangshan) and then head south to Shanghai. It would probably have been cleverer to get the tickets starting in Tianjin, which is an hour closer to Tangshan and to Shanghai, but we didn't think that part through. My mom's classmate's own car was too small, so he managed to convince a connection from his old job to pick us up. This guy was really doing a favor -- not only is it holidays for Mid-Autumn Festival, but it's also his birthday! He says he often goes to Beijing or Tianjin for his vacations, but still.
Even though it was kind of pricy, we bought out a 4-person room on the sleeping car, so that we wouldn't have a stranger among us and so we'd have extra storage space for our luggage. My parents waffled a bit on whether it was worth it, but with some deliberation and goading on my part, we went with it. Because the tickets originate in Beijing, and it's the holidays, this is technically the most costly hotel we've paid for since we've been in China. Oh well.
So now, around 10pm, the train has lurched out of Beijing South station and is aimed like a bullet for Shanghai. I think this one tops out at 250 kph. We'll be there by 7:30 am.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_23?authkey=Gv1sRgCM-hqbX0uZ-l_AE
It's our last day in Tangshan. These big Chinese holidays usually come with three days of vacation, so even though not everyone had their first day off, everyone definitely gets the second day off. Except those in retail, I guess. In the morning we taxi over to 2nd Uncle's. He's taking off for the Northeast for work, so we figure we'd send him off. It's a pretty pleasant parting. We decided to walk back. This was very rewarding, in that it reminded me of the way things used to look in the area around where my grandmother lived, and where I stayed for a bit back in 1997. It basically looked like halfway to a slum, which is still fine to me, as it represents part of what China has been trying to rise up from on its way to greatness.
Lunch is all about dumplings. 1st Aunt makes two kinds -- chives and pork and also pure beef. Because of my intestine issues, I have a few chive dumplings and peanuts but otherwise abstain. They're really good, though. After lunch, Ranran is extremely motivated to play a game of: stretch this elastic band, and then take turns letting go of it at your partner. I don't have too much else to do, so I humor her for about two hours at this game. She's my cousin's daughter after all, so I ham it up with variations and go along with her feigned outrages.
Eventually, mom's high school classmates show up. One just to say goodbye, and the other to drop us off at Beijing. Recall that, thanks to some poor logistics, we weren't able to get sleeping berth tickets from Tangshan to Shanghai. So we decided to get them starting in Beijing. So this requires us to get to Beijing (east of Tangshan) and then head south to Shanghai. It would probably have been cleverer to get the tickets starting in Tianjin, which is an hour closer to Tangshan and to Shanghai, but we didn't think that part through. My mom's classmate's own car was too small, so he managed to convince a connection from his old job to pick us up. This guy was really doing a favor -- not only is it holidays for Mid-Autumn Festival, but it's also his birthday! He says he often goes to Beijing or Tianjin for his vacations, but still.
Even though it was kind of pricy, we bought out a 4-person room on the sleeping car, so that we wouldn't have a stranger among us and so we'd have extra storage space for our luggage. My parents waffled a bit on whether it was worth it, but with some deliberation and goading on my part, we went with it. Because the tickets originate in Beijing, and it's the holidays, this is technically the most costly hotel we've paid for since we've been in China. Oh well.
So now, around 10pm, the train has lurched out of Beijing South station and is aimed like a bullet for Shanghai. I think this one tops out at 250 kph. We'll be there by 7:30 am.
9/22
9/22 8:55am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_22?authkey=Gv1sRgCPiTv574sNSWwgE
It's Mid-Autumn Festival! It's 8/15 in the Chinese lunar calendar. This is as big a holiday as Thanksgiving, I'd say. Even still, some of my relatives seem busy with work. A sign of the times, perhaps. The first thing I do when I wake up is take a bite of mooncake. It's actually a really shitty one so I don't finish it. I mean, there's a piece of grit in it. Come on.
We head out to go visit another cousin in Tangshan city. With no cars for hire or friends driving, we take the bus this time. We first take a 3-wheeler to the bus station. Of course 3-wheelers are pure deathtraps, but they're very cheap (often less than half the price of a cab) and don't get snagged up as badly in traffic jam situations, squirting through disastrously tight spaces. The bus ride is tedious and bone-jarring over the awful Guye--Tangshan stretch. I'm genuinely curious if any of the windows on a bus has ever shattered in its track from going over such big potholes. We pass another bus that got into a fairly big accident with a Jetta. Half of the trunk was totally smashed in. That driver must have made a serious misjudgement. Doesn't look like a person could have been seriously injured, though.
Once we get off the bus, we wait a while for the daughter of my mom's mother's sister. We meet up and get picked up by Uncle Biao's brother. He drives us back to the aunt of my mom and her cousin. It is a good chance for their aunt to visit both of them at once. The engagement of my cousin in Beijing (the one from the Peking duck restaurant) is the topic of conversation basically the whole time. Here we have a pretty good lunch. I think I'm over the fever I had yesterday, but now have an intestinal ache that's bugging me. Maybe from the crabs I had last night? It puts me on the sidelines a bit.
After lunch, we make one last visit to another relative to drop off a gift we neglected to deliver earlier on the 18th. Then we wait for another bus back to Guye. I learn on the bus that my mom only lived on the farms in the outskirts til the age of one. Then she moved to where my grandmother lived til she died, several minutes' walk from where we're staying. She also pointed out to me where her commune was. It was only a few km from her home, but back in those days, that would still be a considerable distance from home. Even in this age of traffic jams and awful roads, that distance is so greatly shrunk. It's a bit startling.
Once we're back, we're pretty much headed straight into dinner. This time 1st Aunt is hosting it. Ranran manages to beat my high score in the air traffic control game. It's a good time until 2nd and 3rd Uncle get really sauced again and start debating the most random topics. My mom makes an excuse to leave early and we walk back to the apartment.
I don't even have many pics from today because of my ailment being a constant distraction. I'm hoping it cures overnight.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_22?authkey=Gv1sRgCPiTv574sNSWwgE
It's Mid-Autumn Festival! It's 8/15 in the Chinese lunar calendar. This is as big a holiday as Thanksgiving, I'd say. Even still, some of my relatives seem busy with work. A sign of the times, perhaps. The first thing I do when I wake up is take a bite of mooncake. It's actually a really shitty one so I don't finish it. I mean, there's a piece of grit in it. Come on.
We head out to go visit another cousin in Tangshan city. With no cars for hire or friends driving, we take the bus this time. We first take a 3-wheeler to the bus station. Of course 3-wheelers are pure deathtraps, but they're very cheap (often less than half the price of a cab) and don't get snagged up as badly in traffic jam situations, squirting through disastrously tight spaces. The bus ride is tedious and bone-jarring over the awful Guye--Tangshan stretch. I'm genuinely curious if any of the windows on a bus has ever shattered in its track from going over such big potholes. We pass another bus that got into a fairly big accident with a Jetta. Half of the trunk was totally smashed in. That driver must have made a serious misjudgement. Doesn't look like a person could have been seriously injured, though.
Once we get off the bus, we wait a while for the daughter of my mom's mother's sister. We meet up and get picked up by Uncle Biao's brother. He drives us back to the aunt of my mom and her cousin. It is a good chance for their aunt to visit both of them at once. The engagement of my cousin in Beijing (the one from the Peking duck restaurant) is the topic of conversation basically the whole time. Here we have a pretty good lunch. I think I'm over the fever I had yesterday, but now have an intestinal ache that's bugging me. Maybe from the crabs I had last night? It puts me on the sidelines a bit.
After lunch, we make one last visit to another relative to drop off a gift we neglected to deliver earlier on the 18th. Then we wait for another bus back to Guye. I learn on the bus that my mom only lived on the farms in the outskirts til the age of one. Then she moved to where my grandmother lived til she died, several minutes' walk from where we're staying. She also pointed out to me where her commune was. It was only a few km from her home, but back in those days, that would still be a considerable distance from home. Even in this age of traffic jams and awful roads, that distance is so greatly shrunk. It's a bit startling.
Once we're back, we're pretty much headed straight into dinner. This time 1st Aunt is hosting it. Ranran manages to beat my high score in the air traffic control game. It's a good time until 2nd and 3rd Uncle get really sauced again and start debating the most random topics. My mom makes an excuse to leave early and we walk back to the apartment.
I don't even have many pics from today because of my ailment being a constant distraction. I'm hoping it cures overnight.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
9/21
9/21 5:00am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_21?authkey=Gv1sRgCPiA9Pb-xYvQeg
3rd Uncle bellows into our shared hostel that we should try to get up and go hiking. It is dark and drizzling, and the power is out so there's no hot water. My mom yells at him that we should get up later and go back to sleep. I go back out and count sheep. The bed is a nice soft one, which lets me sleep on my stomach. At other places where the bed is very hard, I haven't been able to use that mode of sleep because my quad muscles are so thick that they raise my knees off the surface of the bed. So my leg is somewhat suspended in the air by the muscle and thus there's a lot of pressure going on. A couple hours later, 3rd Uncle says they've fired up the generator so we should all get into the showers. I'm of course the last in line, so the hot water runs out on me, and I'm freezing as I put my clothes on. Foolishly, I opt for a jacket and shorts, hoping that the sun will come out to match my anticipated temperature. Everyone tries to change my mind at breakfast but I rebuff them.
We drive over to the hiking point and get started. Fortunately, though it is still windy and cold, the rain has stopped. The first thing we have to do is cross a wooden suspension bridge. About 50 meters long and 10 meters over a very shallow river. It sways a bit and my hands are very cold, but I manage to get some cool panoramas. The end of the bridge has a pear tree that has dropped lots of pears. I lob a few into the water. The first half of the hike is all on granite steps and pretty easy. 12 zodiac animal statues line the early part of the walk. Someone has cleverly put a pear into the open mouth of the dragon statue. In Chinese mythology, a dragon carefully holds a pearl in its mouth. We all hike at different paces and I try to press mine, just to stay warm in the chilly wind. I can't seem to catch my breath and I'm tiring out faster than I should, whether or not I've been shirking exercise. Something is up, but I don't complain about it. After some more grueling hiking up steps, we reach the end of the easy phase. There's a very big golden Buddha statue on the mountain side. It was built in the last 15 years or so as a tourist attraction. Not that well made, but a nice rest break. Now we had to muster up courage for hiking to the Great Wall. 3rd Uncle tried to dissuade us from going in this weather as the path would be slippery, but we'd gotten this far, so we all decided to go for it. The hike was a lot slower and all on dirt and rocks. I struggled with the temperature, but managed to keep going. At last we got to the bricks making up the Great Wall. This stretch of the wall is not really in a heavy tourism area, so it has never been restored. All the bricks and mortar are original. It's about the same size as the stretches I've seen elsewhere. The wall tries to move along the ridges from mountaintop to mountaintop. The enemy would not only have to ascend really craggy slopes but also mount the wall to get into China. The China side of the wall has access stairs so I climb up those and land on the wall itself. As always, it's cool to see the Great Wall meandering from peak to peak, a testament to the great efforts of the people. This section is really worn down, which is good if only for seeing how old it is. We walk around a bit and duck into one of the guard tower sections. The wind still finds me, and I continue to chill down. After getting our fill of pictures, we start the descent. It's a bit slippery in places but overall very easy. We cross back over the foot bridge and head back to the retreat.
We stop off at a Buddhist temple to check it out. At this point, I'm feeling really weird and am zoned out of the whole tour that the monk delivers. I'm just thinking about getting some sleep or something.
Lunch was similarly rustic and good, but I'm really feeling beat down. The cat is back for scraps, and I pet it and give it a lot. It has really soft fur and doesn't feel bony. I'm guessing it gets a good amount of meat in its diet. I certainly give it a fair share. I excuse myself from the table to put on some pants, but just end up flopping onto my bed in the hostel. Don't really get any sleep, but the rest helps. I am in and out on the car ride back to Guye. I head straight to bed there, too. My mom comes in to check up on me and piles some blankets on. My parents go outside to fetch some food for dinner. They get chestnuts, dates, moon cakes, crabs, and mantis shrimp. We are planning to eat with Wang Yupo's family. He turns out to be stuck at work. He even has to work tomorrow, on Mid-Autumn Festival, which is rather unheard of. I register a low-grade fever on the thermometer and keep napping. Eventually, I manage to get up. The power is back on, so I guess the others didn't have to eat dinner by candlelight. I very agonizingly slowly eat some dinner, but decide to take it easy and go back to napping. The fever has broken somewhat but my stomach isn't in the best of moods.
A note on utilities:
As you've seen during the trip, we've run into some many instances of bad utility service. I'm not exactly sure how it works out, but the power and water companies basically do whatever the hell they want and cut off your utilities without notice. I think they do it to address their grid consumption needs, but it is really really inconvenient. At times the electricity will be out for hours at a time to the whole neighborhood. The company will usually turn it back on before dark. At other times, water won't run and you'll have to use whatever you happen to have sitting around. This is really inconvenient for the already delicate bathroom situation.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_21?authkey=Gv1sRgCPiA9Pb-xYvQeg
3rd Uncle bellows into our shared hostel that we should try to get up and go hiking. It is dark and drizzling, and the power is out so there's no hot water. My mom yells at him that we should get up later and go back to sleep. I go back out and count sheep. The bed is a nice soft one, which lets me sleep on my stomach. At other places where the bed is very hard, I haven't been able to use that mode of sleep because my quad muscles are so thick that they raise my knees off the surface of the bed. So my leg is somewhat suspended in the air by the muscle and thus there's a lot of pressure going on. A couple hours later, 3rd Uncle says they've fired up the generator so we should all get into the showers. I'm of course the last in line, so the hot water runs out on me, and I'm freezing as I put my clothes on. Foolishly, I opt for a jacket and shorts, hoping that the sun will come out to match my anticipated temperature. Everyone tries to change my mind at breakfast but I rebuff them.
We drive over to the hiking point and get started. Fortunately, though it is still windy and cold, the rain has stopped. The first thing we have to do is cross a wooden suspension bridge. About 50 meters long and 10 meters over a very shallow river. It sways a bit and my hands are very cold, but I manage to get some cool panoramas. The end of the bridge has a pear tree that has dropped lots of pears. I lob a few into the water. The first half of the hike is all on granite steps and pretty easy. 12 zodiac animal statues line the early part of the walk. Someone has cleverly put a pear into the open mouth of the dragon statue. In Chinese mythology, a dragon carefully holds a pearl in its mouth. We all hike at different paces and I try to press mine, just to stay warm in the chilly wind. I can't seem to catch my breath and I'm tiring out faster than I should, whether or not I've been shirking exercise. Something is up, but I don't complain about it. After some more grueling hiking up steps, we reach the end of the easy phase. There's a very big golden Buddha statue on the mountain side. It was built in the last 15 years or so as a tourist attraction. Not that well made, but a nice rest break. Now we had to muster up courage for hiking to the Great Wall. 3rd Uncle tried to dissuade us from going in this weather as the path would be slippery, but we'd gotten this far, so we all decided to go for it. The hike was a lot slower and all on dirt and rocks. I struggled with the temperature, but managed to keep going. At last we got to the bricks making up the Great Wall. This stretch of the wall is not really in a heavy tourism area, so it has never been restored. All the bricks and mortar are original. It's about the same size as the stretches I've seen elsewhere. The wall tries to move along the ridges from mountaintop to mountaintop. The enemy would not only have to ascend really craggy slopes but also mount the wall to get into China. The China side of the wall has access stairs so I climb up those and land on the wall itself. As always, it's cool to see the Great Wall meandering from peak to peak, a testament to the great efforts of the people. This section is really worn down, which is good if only for seeing how old it is. We walk around a bit and duck into one of the guard tower sections. The wind still finds me, and I continue to chill down. After getting our fill of pictures, we start the descent. It's a bit slippery in places but overall very easy. We cross back over the foot bridge and head back to the retreat.
We stop off at a Buddhist temple to check it out. At this point, I'm feeling really weird and am zoned out of the whole tour that the monk delivers. I'm just thinking about getting some sleep or something.
Lunch was similarly rustic and good, but I'm really feeling beat down. The cat is back for scraps, and I pet it and give it a lot. It has really soft fur and doesn't feel bony. I'm guessing it gets a good amount of meat in its diet. I certainly give it a fair share. I excuse myself from the table to put on some pants, but just end up flopping onto my bed in the hostel. Don't really get any sleep, but the rest helps. I am in and out on the car ride back to Guye. I head straight to bed there, too. My mom comes in to check up on me and piles some blankets on. My parents go outside to fetch some food for dinner. They get chestnuts, dates, moon cakes, crabs, and mantis shrimp. We are planning to eat with Wang Yupo's family. He turns out to be stuck at work. He even has to work tomorrow, on Mid-Autumn Festival, which is rather unheard of. I register a low-grade fever on the thermometer and keep napping. Eventually, I manage to get up. The power is back on, so I guess the others didn't have to eat dinner by candlelight. I very agonizingly slowly eat some dinner, but decide to take it easy and go back to napping. The fever has broken somewhat but my stomach isn't in the best of moods.
A note on utilities:
As you've seen during the trip, we've run into some many instances of bad utility service. I'm not exactly sure how it works out, but the power and water companies basically do whatever the hell they want and cut off your utilities without notice. I think they do it to address their grid consumption needs, but it is really really inconvenient. At times the electricity will be out for hours at a time to the whole neighborhood. The company will usually turn it back on before dark. At other times, water won't run and you'll have to use whatever you happen to have sitting around. This is really inconvenient for the already delicate bathroom situation.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
9/20
9/20 7:34am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_20?authkey=Gv1sRgCN2Nqdqm9fCgNg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GnhRJ-umnE
Got up early to work out a bit and burn off some of the eating out fat. Also I'm worried I'm gonna lose all my progress with kickboxing when I get back. Once we were all set, we took a taxi to the cemetary a ways from the apartment. 1st and 2nd Uncle came with us. When we got the taxi, we got a big stack of fake money, many sheets of paper coins, and some incense.
My mother's parents' ashes are in a shared grave. The tombstone is carved with their names and dates of birth and death. Pretty typical stuff. The cemetary is very tightly packed, but otherwise looks pretty recognizable. There's patches of dirt where you burn offerings to send into the afterlife. We emptied the incense pot on the grave, filled it with new sand, and then stuck in the incense. We unpacked the paper coins, which are simply stamped outlines on sheets of paper. In the old days they would have taken care to cut the coins out, but now the coin outlines are firmly attached to the paper, so that you're basically burning a solid sheet of paper. Even in 1995 I remember the quality being better. But it's the tradition that counts. We had a couple pounds of paper to burn so we had to get a serious fire going. As my 1st and 2nd Uncle put paper onto the fire, they said, "Mom, Dad, tuck away this money." Just a traditional utterance for sending the money to heaven. I had the set of paper bills with me. It seemed like it was 10 bills to a plastic wrapping, so I unpacked them all and stacked the bills together. I think the denomination was 1,000,000,000 or something. I saw some bills of the same design with 50 lying around the burn area. Of course, it's difficult not to hold back the tears at a memorial like this. I carefully fanned and refanned the money until it was really spread out, and then threw it onto the pyre. The fire was shooting ash several feet into the air, only to have the bits fly back down all around us. The air was cold and threatening to rain. Neither my dad nor I managed to say anything during the ceremony. He because the southern traditions are different; I because the ceremony was so serious to me. My mom talked to her parents some at the grave, and then spruced up the area around it. When the fire went out and all of the paper was burned, 2nd Uncle led a formal bow in front of the grave. And with that, we were done.
My grandfather died when I was still very young. I'm told he got to hold me, but I have no recollections of the man. My grandmother died in 2006, very shortly after my mom visited. With some years intervening, I think she and her brothers have come to peace with their deaths, so even though it was emotional, burning the paper coins was not a painful experience. A family beside us was also mourning their parents. There was a lot of crying and anguish, but after the paper was burned, cell phone calls were made and cigarettes were lit as the family made their way out. As meaningful as it can be, the event obviously has mostly ceremonial significance to some. I didn't take any pictures of the burning. But as we were walking out of the cemetary, I saw a dog curled up and sleeping on someone's grave. That was a message to me that there's life after death, perhaps not in the way the phrase is typically meant, but still nice to see.
After that, we went to a Bank of China branch to get another stack of cash for our upcoming costs. Because of however it is that foreigners open and maintain an account with BoC, the already surly tellers became even meaner and it took forever. I walked around on the street and went into a supermarket. I told myself I should try something I couldn't get in the US. And while there were a lot of things, one of the ones that stood out was this snack called Cat Ears. It was the spicy flavor. It was only 2 yuan so I got it and tried them out. It was pretty interesting -- a sweet and only mildly spicy chip. I would eat them again.
From the bank, we went over the home of Cao Ruiling, one of my mom's good high school classmates. We chatted for a bit and waited for our lunch party to show up -- Ruiling's husband, and Huo Yongjian (another classmate) and her wife. Once we were all assembled, we drove over to a nearby restaurant and had lunch. It wasn't amazing, but it was still pretty interesting. Cao Ruiling's daughter, husband and their baby son also came. While my mom is pretty close to these folks, I don't have but a few memories of hanging out with them. In fact, every time I see Cao Ruiling, I re-remember that she has a lisp. Since s is only an initial sound in Chinese, she'll say those words as starting with th. Since there is no th sound in Mandarin, it's probably a bit less noticeable than a lisp in English is.
After we got out of lunch, we went over to 3rd Uncle's. Even though it continued to drizzle slightly, we stuck to our plan of going to Baiyang Yu, the White Goat Mountaintop. This was about 100km outside of Tangshan, to the east. It had the ruins of some of the Ming-era Great Wall, and it'd be nice to do a hike to see it. 3rd Uncle was friends with a guy who'd started a facility that hosted motivational training seminars and the like, right by the mountains, so it was yet another free trip. The same driver who'd been ferrying us around the previous couple days was back in the saddle, and his loaf car looked spotless despite the adventures it'd been through. Because of the number of relatives going, one of 3rd Uncle's friends was driving his Jetta as well.
When we got there, we ate some a dinner prepared using mostly stuff grown on the mountain. Because of the relative lack of pollution, everything was grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizer, so it might be as close to 'natural' or 'organic' food as you could get in China. The dishes tended toward the rustic, like stewed julienned potatoes, but it was obvious the vegetables were fresh and things tasted good. Whiskey was served out of a teapot and once again 2nd Uncle got pretty drunk. His desire to do karaoke and self-judged ability increased as the dinner wore on, until we concluded and got up, at which point he said, "alright let's go to the karaoke hall."
Sure enough, the facility has a huge room dedicated to karaoke. When 2nd and 3rd Uncle do their first several songs, they're really bad as the alcohol was still in full effect. 3rd Uncle actually got better and better as he recovered a bit. I got pressed into doing a couple songs. Actually, I really only know 2 songs well enough to sing all the lyrics. The English songs were all crappy ballads that I didn't know, so I did Crescent Moon, classic love song, and Possessed of Nothing, a pioneering Chinese rock song that I learned somehow. I think I impressed my parents with the second one. That's just not that popular a song, especially on the karaoke scene. My dad got carried away with a slew of traditional songs about Tibet. Though Tibet is its own world, there are a surprisingly large number of classic Han songs about it. I'd say my dad ended up doing about 50% of the songs that night.
When he eventually gave up the mic, we all turned into our hostel-quality quarters.
A note on our driver:
As a driver who hires himself out for these everything-included day trips, it's conventional to include him in lunches and dinners. So whereever we went with this guy, we'd ask him in to have meals with us. I'm sure in most instances he'd be fine with getting food on his own, but in some cases, like when you're in a remote mountain retreat, it'd be putting him out of his way to feed himself. At this point, I think he'd gotten in 6 really good meals with the rest of us. I'm not complaining -- he's professional, doesn't barge into conversations at meals, hasn't drunk a drop when driving remains to be done, and only smokes outside. When we're doing something, he either hangs out outside or naps in his loaf car. To address someone like this, who is a hired hand, you use the term shifu, which is exactly the term you see used to refer to kung fu masters and the like. In this context, it is probably best translated to something like maestro. Anyways, for dinner tonight Maestro Liu got to have a bit of whiskey since he wasn't driving til the next morning. He seemed to enjoy it.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_20?authkey=Gv1sRgCN2Nqdqm9fCgNg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GnhRJ-umnE
Got up early to work out a bit and burn off some of the eating out fat. Also I'm worried I'm gonna lose all my progress with kickboxing when I get back. Once we were all set, we took a taxi to the cemetary a ways from the apartment. 1st and 2nd Uncle came with us. When we got the taxi, we got a big stack of fake money, many sheets of paper coins, and some incense.
My mother's parents' ashes are in a shared grave. The tombstone is carved with their names and dates of birth and death. Pretty typical stuff. The cemetary is very tightly packed, but otherwise looks pretty recognizable. There's patches of dirt where you burn offerings to send into the afterlife. We emptied the incense pot on the grave, filled it with new sand, and then stuck in the incense. We unpacked the paper coins, which are simply stamped outlines on sheets of paper. In the old days they would have taken care to cut the coins out, but now the coin outlines are firmly attached to the paper, so that you're basically burning a solid sheet of paper. Even in 1995 I remember the quality being better. But it's the tradition that counts. We had a couple pounds of paper to burn so we had to get a serious fire going. As my 1st and 2nd Uncle put paper onto the fire, they said, "Mom, Dad, tuck away this money." Just a traditional utterance for sending the money to heaven. I had the set of paper bills with me. It seemed like it was 10 bills to a plastic wrapping, so I unpacked them all and stacked the bills together. I think the denomination was 1,000,000,000 or something. I saw some bills of the same design with 50 lying around the burn area. Of course, it's difficult not to hold back the tears at a memorial like this. I carefully fanned and refanned the money until it was really spread out, and then threw it onto the pyre. The fire was shooting ash several feet into the air, only to have the bits fly back down all around us. The air was cold and threatening to rain. Neither my dad nor I managed to say anything during the ceremony. He because the southern traditions are different; I because the ceremony was so serious to me. My mom talked to her parents some at the grave, and then spruced up the area around it. When the fire went out and all of the paper was burned, 2nd Uncle led a formal bow in front of the grave. And with that, we were done.
My grandfather died when I was still very young. I'm told he got to hold me, but I have no recollections of the man. My grandmother died in 2006, very shortly after my mom visited. With some years intervening, I think she and her brothers have come to peace with their deaths, so even though it was emotional, burning the paper coins was not a painful experience. A family beside us was also mourning their parents. There was a lot of crying and anguish, but after the paper was burned, cell phone calls were made and cigarettes were lit as the family made their way out. As meaningful as it can be, the event obviously has mostly ceremonial significance to some. I didn't take any pictures of the burning. But as we were walking out of the cemetary, I saw a dog curled up and sleeping on someone's grave. That was a message to me that there's life after death, perhaps not in the way the phrase is typically meant, but still nice to see.
After that, we went to a Bank of China branch to get another stack of cash for our upcoming costs. Because of however it is that foreigners open and maintain an account with BoC, the already surly tellers became even meaner and it took forever. I walked around on the street and went into a supermarket. I told myself I should try something I couldn't get in the US. And while there were a lot of things, one of the ones that stood out was this snack called Cat Ears. It was the spicy flavor. It was only 2 yuan so I got it and tried them out. It was pretty interesting -- a sweet and only mildly spicy chip. I would eat them again.
From the bank, we went over the home of Cao Ruiling, one of my mom's good high school classmates. We chatted for a bit and waited for our lunch party to show up -- Ruiling's husband, and Huo Yongjian (another classmate) and her wife. Once we were all assembled, we drove over to a nearby restaurant and had lunch. It wasn't amazing, but it was still pretty interesting. Cao Ruiling's daughter, husband and their baby son also came. While my mom is pretty close to these folks, I don't have but a few memories of hanging out with them. In fact, every time I see Cao Ruiling, I re-remember that she has a lisp. Since s is only an initial sound in Chinese, she'll say those words as starting with th. Since there is no th sound in Mandarin, it's probably a bit less noticeable than a lisp in English is.
After we got out of lunch, we went over to 3rd Uncle's. Even though it continued to drizzle slightly, we stuck to our plan of going to Baiyang Yu, the White Goat Mountaintop. This was about 100km outside of Tangshan, to the east. It had the ruins of some of the Ming-era Great Wall, and it'd be nice to do a hike to see it. 3rd Uncle was friends with a guy who'd started a facility that hosted motivational training seminars and the like, right by the mountains, so it was yet another free trip. The same driver who'd been ferrying us around the previous couple days was back in the saddle, and his loaf car looked spotless despite the adventures it'd been through. Because of the number of relatives going, one of 3rd Uncle's friends was driving his Jetta as well.
When we got there, we ate some a dinner prepared using mostly stuff grown on the mountain. Because of the relative lack of pollution, everything was grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizer, so it might be as close to 'natural' or 'organic' food as you could get in China. The dishes tended toward the rustic, like stewed julienned potatoes, but it was obvious the vegetables were fresh and things tasted good. Whiskey was served out of a teapot and once again 2nd Uncle got pretty drunk. His desire to do karaoke and self-judged ability increased as the dinner wore on, until we concluded and got up, at which point he said, "alright let's go to the karaoke hall."
Sure enough, the facility has a huge room dedicated to karaoke. When 2nd and 3rd Uncle do their first several songs, they're really bad as the alcohol was still in full effect. 3rd Uncle actually got better and better as he recovered a bit. I got pressed into doing a couple songs. Actually, I really only know 2 songs well enough to sing all the lyrics. The English songs were all crappy ballads that I didn't know, so I did Crescent Moon, classic love song, and Possessed of Nothing, a pioneering Chinese rock song that I learned somehow. I think I impressed my parents with the second one. That's just not that popular a song, especially on the karaoke scene. My dad got carried away with a slew of traditional songs about Tibet. Though Tibet is its own world, there are a surprisingly large number of classic Han songs about it. I'd say my dad ended up doing about 50% of the songs that night.
When he eventually gave up the mic, we all turned into our hostel-quality quarters.
A note on our driver:
As a driver who hires himself out for these everything-included day trips, it's conventional to include him in lunches and dinners. So whereever we went with this guy, we'd ask him in to have meals with us. I'm sure in most instances he'd be fine with getting food on his own, but in some cases, like when you're in a remote mountain retreat, it'd be putting him out of his way to feed himself. At this point, I think he'd gotten in 6 really good meals with the rest of us. I'm not complaining -- he's professional, doesn't barge into conversations at meals, hasn't drunk a drop when driving remains to be done, and only smokes outside. When we're doing something, he either hangs out outside or naps in his loaf car. To address someone like this, who is a hired hand, you use the term shifu, which is exactly the term you see used to refer to kung fu masters and the like. In this context, it is probably best translated to something like maestro. Anyways, for dinner tonight Maestro Liu got to have a bit of whiskey since he wasn't driving til the next morning. He seemed to enjoy it.
Monday, October 18, 2010
9/19
9/19 8:30am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_19?authkey=Gv1sRgCNWy7pHjg5KjnwE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrmM8hefT2Y
This morning, we got up and packed into the same loaf car. Today, 2nd Uncle, Yupo, and my family were going to visit Qinhuangdao, a city south of Tangshan. There my mom wanted to see another brother of her father's and his children. Yupon wanted to go because he was working on his own story about the period between the end of WWII and the end of the Korean War. Supposedly the old man was a war vet, so Yupo was looking to get some color to lend to his story. Qinhuangdao is only about an hour away, but the accent in that city is totally different. In fact, it sounds much closer to how people talk in Beijing -- quickly and with less expressiveness. Anyways, about the first thing we did was stop at a supermarket to buy gifts of alcohol and moon cakes (Mid-Autumn Festival is almost upon us). Then we went to their home and visited a bit, before turning around and heading out for lunch. On the walk over, we walked by what was apparently the largest rotary in the city, and definitely one of the biggest I've ever seen. It was a good few hundred meters across, with a little park in the middle.
Lunch was really good. The dishes were different to what we'd had before, and most of them tasted excellent. I have the write-up in the photos.
After lunch, we walked back. The sight of a TKD school got Yupo and me talking about my sanda kickboxing training. I think he was a bit of a kungfu nerd back in the day. He showed me once his caricatures of all thees different kungfu styles, like eagle, rabbit, snake, tiger, etc. He even asked me what stance you took in sanda. There is no such thing, but I guess I'll show him when next we meet. He stayed with the old grand-uncle a bit while the rest of us went to visit one of my mom's classmates. Relatives and classmates -- that's pretty much all we're here for. My mom got to swing by and look at this real estate deal that she couldn't close in 2008. I managed to use the internet a bit at her classmate's apartment. Her classmate gave us gifts of Buddhist bead bracelets. I took one supposedly made of obsidian. It looked cool.
On the way back to Tangshan, my mom made the driver stop off at Beidaihe, which is on the coast. It was a huge hassle driving through the densely packed village streets, but the sea looked nice. I love the sea. I picked up a stone to skip out into the waves. As I released and snapped my hand back, I felt the bead bracelet I had just received snap. I looked down and the beads quickly sank into the washing sand. I managed to hop into the water a bit and recovered one, and with a bit more inspection found two more on the beach. Easy come, easy go, I suppose.
We finished off the trek after sunset, so my Aunt had prepared a meal for us. She hand-made a first-rate won-ton soup. I haven't had a won-ton soup that good in the US, as a point of data. It takes forever to roll dough skins that thin, so I really appreciate her effort and admire her skill. She also bought a miscellany of meat from the corner stand, and those were good, too.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_19?authkey=Gv1sRgCNWy7pHjg5KjnwE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrmM8hefT2Y
This morning, we got up and packed into the same loaf car. Today, 2nd Uncle, Yupo, and my family were going to visit Qinhuangdao, a city south of Tangshan. There my mom wanted to see another brother of her father's and his children. Yupon wanted to go because he was working on his own story about the period between the end of WWII and the end of the Korean War. Supposedly the old man was a war vet, so Yupo was looking to get some color to lend to his story. Qinhuangdao is only about an hour away, but the accent in that city is totally different. In fact, it sounds much closer to how people talk in Beijing -- quickly and with less expressiveness. Anyways, about the first thing we did was stop at a supermarket to buy gifts of alcohol and moon cakes (Mid-Autumn Festival is almost upon us). Then we went to their home and visited a bit, before turning around and heading out for lunch. On the walk over, we walked by what was apparently the largest rotary in the city, and definitely one of the biggest I've ever seen. It was a good few hundred meters across, with a little park in the middle.
Lunch was really good. The dishes were different to what we'd had before, and most of them tasted excellent. I have the write-up in the photos.
After lunch, we walked back. The sight of a TKD school got Yupo and me talking about my sanda kickboxing training. I think he was a bit of a kungfu nerd back in the day. He showed me once his caricatures of all thees different kungfu styles, like eagle, rabbit, snake, tiger, etc. He even asked me what stance you took in sanda. There is no such thing, but I guess I'll show him when next we meet. He stayed with the old grand-uncle a bit while the rest of us went to visit one of my mom's classmates. Relatives and classmates -- that's pretty much all we're here for. My mom got to swing by and look at this real estate deal that she couldn't close in 2008. I managed to use the internet a bit at her classmate's apartment. Her classmate gave us gifts of Buddhist bead bracelets. I took one supposedly made of obsidian. It looked cool.
On the way back to Tangshan, my mom made the driver stop off at Beidaihe, which is on the coast. It was a huge hassle driving through the densely packed village streets, but the sea looked nice. I love the sea. I picked up a stone to skip out into the waves. As I released and snapped my hand back, I felt the bead bracelet I had just received snap. I looked down and the beads quickly sank into the washing sand. I managed to hop into the water a bit and recovered one, and with a bit more inspection found two more on the beach. Easy come, easy go, I suppose.
We finished off the trek after sunset, so my Aunt had prepared a meal for us. She hand-made a first-rate won-ton soup. I haven't had a won-ton soup that good in the US, as a point of data. It takes forever to roll dough skins that thin, so I really appreciate her effort and admire her skill. She also bought a miscellany of meat from the corner stand, and those were good, too.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
9/18
9/18
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_18?authkey=Gv1sRgCKO0uPralvT0Gw
I'd like to talk about spin a little bit. Spin is not a single concept, but very similar patterns applied to different contexts. Spin is where you keep a certain amount of emotional distance from various things, and you use that to your advantange. A very honest, plain-spoken person will only have one emotional viewpoint on any given thing and only ever voice one opinion of that something. If he's nice, maybe he'll take after the proverb about saying nothing about things he doesn't like. I think this is a good way to go about life, and perhaps most Americans live abide pretty closely by it. The average Chinese person, however, applies a lot of spin. If you were a fly on the wall of three different living rooms where a Chinese person is recounting a story to three different friends, you'd likely hear three totally different stories.
Let's factually describe a hypothetical event. Some friends are asked out to dinner by a business acquaintance. He generously provides a tea he likes to be brewed for the whole party. Friend A really likes the tea, and compliments it quite a bit. The hosts sets out some packets of the tea and offers them to anyone who wants to take some home. Some time later, friend A tastes his tea once again and then pockets one of the packets.
When talking about A, people present at the dinner might say of him, "he likes to pretend he really knows his stuff about tea. He was just going on and on about that tea so he took a packet for himself. Now he's going to show off with it at his next dinner and tout how good his tastes are." Who knows, that might lie close to an honest opinion of friend A's behavior.
In some other setting among a different circle of friends, when comes up, the same person from above might say, "oh, A is really into tea. He liked this red tea that we once had. That was a good tea."
As you can see, no matter what your emotions are on a subject, when doing spin, you should always view the situation in a different light. Having gone to so many different dinners with so many subsets of folks, I've seen the same things treated well and poorly in turn, praised and slagged depending on what the speaker was trying to get across. Obviously, some people have more spin than others, but overall, spin is clearly detectable more so in China than in the US. I don't know if I'm ready to label the average Chinese person as slimier because of his spin-doctoring, but I am observing that he does it.
In the morning, we packed into a loaf car to go to my mom's old home. It's where the brother of her father still lives. The poverty in which they live is reminiscent of what I saw in Guangxi. I mean, they have plenty of money, but their attitudes and habits are such that they live in conditions that are like poverty. My mom's uncle is 82 and his mind is perfectly healthy. But he took a spill last year and his legs haven't recovered quite yet. There's some nerve damage that makes it very hard for him to walk. In America, even at that age, his children would likely get together and figure out what kind of physical therapy program he'd need, or what kind of live-in nurse they might try to hire. Here, all his children are busy with their own lives, and so his care is left to his wife, who's perambulatory but not bushy-tailed at her age. In the family, there is enough cash to treat him and to make his life better for years to come. But the attitude here is that he took that fatal fall that is going to leave him bedridden for life, as though there are no options. It might seem cruel to an outsider, but this is probably the way people have been thinking for centuries here. It's these sorts of attitudes that will take the longest to Westernize, if they ever will.
We left there before lunch, even though my mom's uncle's wife insisted on cooking something for us. She was very nice. After scrabbling out of the unpaved country roads in the loaf car, we went into Tangshan city to have lunch before visiting another relative. By keeping lunch limited to ourselves, we were taking off some of the money burden of the relatives who were being visited, who are obligated to host for the visitors. My 3rd Uncle knew a guy who opened this Sichuan restaurant in the city. It specialized in dutch oven cooked fish soup. That dish was amazing. The details are with the photos.
After lunch, we visited my mom's brother's youngest sister, who also lived in Tangshan proper. We hung out for a long time at their home, which was mildly annoying because there were a lot of smokers. While there's a lot of smoking everywhere, I don't have to stick around it for long usually. Even at a web cafe, I could get better air. Finally, we got off our asses and went to the dinner restaurant, bringing our own steamed crabs with us. Chinese restaurants usually don't have problems with you bringing in some of your own dishes. Some have wised up and started taxing outside alcohol, though.
Dinner was extremely over-ordered. Eventually, it got up to triple layers of plates. I didn't stick around to see that with my own eyes, though. I had been lobbying all day to visit my cousin Yupo, who I'd missed in the initial gathering of relatives. I heard second hand about how many dishes there were, left uneaten. Also about how hammered my 2nd and 3rd Uncles got. That's typical for them. Even before I left, about 2/3s into the dinner, about 5 people drinking had put back a couple fifths of 100 proof rice whiskey. And they apparently kept going on brandy and some beer they ordered. I'm sure my uncles soaked up a lot of that total. On the long ride back to Guye, one uncle had his head bowed the whole time, passed out, and the other had his head slack and tipped all the way back, sleeping. Truly tweedledee and tweedledum.
A couple of us took an early taxi for the hour ride back to Guye. At night we finally got ahold of Wang Yupo, who hadn't come up to dinner last night because of the terrible traffic around here. Even tonight he got back pretty late. The company van just couldn't get through the traffic jams fast enough. He has to get up at 6 and gets back at 9. Too many people with cars. Yupo came over in his scooter and picked me up. I think the last time I was on a motorcycle or scooter was 1997 when I was back here. It was at night and only a few minutes or so, so not too scary. Of course neither of us wore any gear or helmets or anything like that.
Anyways, I brought as his gift some DVDs for his daughter, Wang Xinran, or Ranran for short. She's just started first grade this year, and is still bounding with that young kid energy. Fortunately, she hadn't seen at least one of the cartoons I'd brought her. According to her pops, it doesn't matter how little English she knows; she'll keep watching something over and over. Yupo and I started chatting about stuff, and Ranran kept coming over asking about this and that. I showed her the air traffic control game on my iPhone, and she liked that quite a bit. When I last left China, Yupo was dating his wife but still single. What a difference 8 years make. Since then, Yupo's hair has thinned out enough to warrant wearing it really close. He's married that girlfriend and been having a family. His work as an electrician at the train plant has been pretty steady, if a bit hard with all that commuting. It's decent money, which is good. Still, it's not his dream job. He's always wanted to be a director and still pursues that interest by writing in his spare time. He's not terribly good at typing Chinese, so he still writes in shorthand, and if a story is worth it, he has his wife type it up. She teaches elementary school (the very one their daughter goes to) and thus has decent computer skills. I don't actually know her full name. When you're friends with someone much more so than his wife, you can call the wife 'sao zi.' I'm not sure what it means, but it it's basically a title for a friend's wife.
Yupo once had a last ditch effort to get into the moviemaking business. After he graduated from his vocational school, he snuck up to Beijing to audition at the Central Institute for Performance Arts, which would radically boost the viability of his acting career. He went through a couple rounds of auditions, having to make excuses about why he would be away for a couple days at a time. Ultimately, he didn't make the cut, so he had to go back to life as usual. He told me this in confidence some years ago when he didn't have anyone he could share it with. While he was doing these auditions though, he met another hopeful who ended up washing out. This friend stuck it out in Beijing and kept at it one way or another, and eventually landed a job as a script editor. Now they're hiring and the friend has a spot for Yupo. It's a big leap. Yupo has a job and home that supports his wife and kid. If he were to take on this job in Beijing, he's not gonna be able to give up after a few months and come crawling back to that electrician job. He's worried he's not gonna be able to come through on the occasional writing assignments, as writing to someone else's topic as opposed to one's own ideas is much harder. He's going to be living alone in a city that's at least 2 hours away from his family. All serious considerations. Still, it is a good pay raise and would be a real stepping stone to other opportunities in the business. Sadly, I can't relate at all to switching between industries that differ that much, and from a job I tolerate to one I might genuinely like. Yupo's got til about the end of the year to decide.
After hanging out with Yupo and playing with Ranran for a while, I headed back home. I think it was a good talk. There's only one more thing on my checklist -- in 2002, one night we were walking around at night just hanging out, the four of us cousins. Yupo, me, Wang Peng, and Wang Kang. I spotted a vendor broiling lamb skewers over his coal brazier and asked to stop and get some. Yupo ordered the whole set and handed them out to us. I got out some money to pay, but he stopped me. Over all the dinners we'd been invited to, where friends and relatives have paid for, this one moment was the most genuine. Yupo told me, "no matter how much time goes on, no matter how much distance separates us, we're still family, and from one relative to another, it doesn't matter who pays." It's not like it was a lot of money, but it would have made more sense for me to pay rather than him. Still, the idea means a lot to me and I think it's the basis from which I think about my family in China. So yeah, before I leave, I need to make sure to drag him and maybe his family out to have some of lamb skewers on me.
At this point, it should be clear that I'm closer to my mom's side of the family than my dad's. One reason is that I've simply spent more time with them. In 1997, I lived in Tangshan for almost 2 months, and didn't even go to my dad's old home. Another important reason is the language barrier. My da bai's wife and my da gu -- they can't even speak Mandarin. They can understand it reasonably well, but I can't talk to them. For these two reasons, I've never had a really meaningful conversation with my Guangxi relatives. I wish I could have, but that is left for future visits.
The superbly observant will have noted that Wang Peng and Wang Kang, sons of sons of my mom's brothers, have the surname Wang. While I am surnamed Mao because of my father. So why is Wang Yupo, son of my mom's sister, also a Wang? Simple -- his father is a Wang, too.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_18?authkey=Gv1sRgCKO0uPralvT0Gw
I'd like to talk about spin a little bit. Spin is not a single concept, but very similar patterns applied to different contexts. Spin is where you keep a certain amount of emotional distance from various things, and you use that to your advantange. A very honest, plain-spoken person will only have one emotional viewpoint on any given thing and only ever voice one opinion of that something. If he's nice, maybe he'll take after the proverb about saying nothing about things he doesn't like. I think this is a good way to go about life, and perhaps most Americans live abide pretty closely by it. The average Chinese person, however, applies a lot of spin. If you were a fly on the wall of three different living rooms where a Chinese person is recounting a story to three different friends, you'd likely hear three totally different stories.
Let's factually describe a hypothetical event. Some friends are asked out to dinner by a business acquaintance. He generously provides a tea he likes to be brewed for the whole party. Friend A really likes the tea, and compliments it quite a bit. The hosts sets out some packets of the tea and offers them to anyone who wants to take some home. Some time later, friend A tastes his tea once again and then pockets one of the packets.
When talking about A, people present at the dinner might say of him, "he likes to pretend he really knows his stuff about tea. He was just going on and on about that tea so he took a packet for himself. Now he's going to show off with it at his next dinner and tout how good his tastes are." Who knows, that might lie close to an honest opinion of friend A's behavior.
In some other setting among a different circle of friends, when comes up, the same person from above might say, "oh, A is really into tea. He liked this red tea that we once had. That was a good tea."
As you can see, no matter what your emotions are on a subject, when doing spin, you should always view the situation in a different light. Having gone to so many different dinners with so many subsets of folks, I've seen the same things treated well and poorly in turn, praised and slagged depending on what the speaker was trying to get across. Obviously, some people have more spin than others, but overall, spin is clearly detectable more so in China than in the US. I don't know if I'm ready to label the average Chinese person as slimier because of his spin-doctoring, but I am observing that he does it.
In the morning, we packed into a loaf car to go to my mom's old home. It's where the brother of her father still lives. The poverty in which they live is reminiscent of what I saw in Guangxi. I mean, they have plenty of money, but their attitudes and habits are such that they live in conditions that are like poverty. My mom's uncle is 82 and his mind is perfectly healthy. But he took a spill last year and his legs haven't recovered quite yet. There's some nerve damage that makes it very hard for him to walk. In America, even at that age, his children would likely get together and figure out what kind of physical therapy program he'd need, or what kind of live-in nurse they might try to hire. Here, all his children are busy with their own lives, and so his care is left to his wife, who's perambulatory but not bushy-tailed at her age. In the family, there is enough cash to treat him and to make his life better for years to come. But the attitude here is that he took that fatal fall that is going to leave him bedridden for life, as though there are no options. It might seem cruel to an outsider, but this is probably the way people have been thinking for centuries here. It's these sorts of attitudes that will take the longest to Westernize, if they ever will.
We left there before lunch, even though my mom's uncle's wife insisted on cooking something for us. She was very nice. After scrabbling out of the unpaved country roads in the loaf car, we went into Tangshan city to have lunch before visiting another relative. By keeping lunch limited to ourselves, we were taking off some of the money burden of the relatives who were being visited, who are obligated to host for the visitors. My 3rd Uncle knew a guy who opened this Sichuan restaurant in the city. It specialized in dutch oven cooked fish soup. That dish was amazing. The details are with the photos.
After lunch, we visited my mom's brother's youngest sister, who also lived in Tangshan proper. We hung out for a long time at their home, which was mildly annoying because there were a lot of smokers. While there's a lot of smoking everywhere, I don't have to stick around it for long usually. Even at a web cafe, I could get better air. Finally, we got off our asses and went to the dinner restaurant, bringing our own steamed crabs with us. Chinese restaurants usually don't have problems with you bringing in some of your own dishes. Some have wised up and started taxing outside alcohol, though.
Dinner was extremely over-ordered. Eventually, it got up to triple layers of plates. I didn't stick around to see that with my own eyes, though. I had been lobbying all day to visit my cousin Yupo, who I'd missed in the initial gathering of relatives. I heard second hand about how many dishes there were, left uneaten. Also about how hammered my 2nd and 3rd Uncles got. That's typical for them. Even before I left, about 2/3s into the dinner, about 5 people drinking had put back a couple fifths of 100 proof rice whiskey. And they apparently kept going on brandy and some beer they ordered. I'm sure my uncles soaked up a lot of that total. On the long ride back to Guye, one uncle had his head bowed the whole time, passed out, and the other had his head slack and tipped all the way back, sleeping. Truly tweedledee and tweedledum.
A couple of us took an early taxi for the hour ride back to Guye. At night we finally got ahold of Wang Yupo, who hadn't come up to dinner last night because of the terrible traffic around here. Even tonight he got back pretty late. The company van just couldn't get through the traffic jams fast enough. He has to get up at 6 and gets back at 9. Too many people with cars. Yupo came over in his scooter and picked me up. I think the last time I was on a motorcycle or scooter was 1997 when I was back here. It was at night and only a few minutes or so, so not too scary. Of course neither of us wore any gear or helmets or anything like that.
Anyways, I brought as his gift some DVDs for his daughter, Wang Xinran, or Ranran for short. She's just started first grade this year, and is still bounding with that young kid energy. Fortunately, she hadn't seen at least one of the cartoons I'd brought her. According to her pops, it doesn't matter how little English she knows; she'll keep watching something over and over. Yupo and I started chatting about stuff, and Ranran kept coming over asking about this and that. I showed her the air traffic control game on my iPhone, and she liked that quite a bit. When I last left China, Yupo was dating his wife but still single. What a difference 8 years make. Since then, Yupo's hair has thinned out enough to warrant wearing it really close. He's married that girlfriend and been having a family. His work as an electrician at the train plant has been pretty steady, if a bit hard with all that commuting. It's decent money, which is good. Still, it's not his dream job. He's always wanted to be a director and still pursues that interest by writing in his spare time. He's not terribly good at typing Chinese, so he still writes in shorthand, and if a story is worth it, he has his wife type it up. She teaches elementary school (the very one their daughter goes to) and thus has decent computer skills. I don't actually know her full name. When you're friends with someone much more so than his wife, you can call the wife 'sao zi.' I'm not sure what it means, but it it's basically a title for a friend's wife.
Yupo once had a last ditch effort to get into the moviemaking business. After he graduated from his vocational school, he snuck up to Beijing to audition at the Central Institute for Performance Arts, which would radically boost the viability of his acting career. He went through a couple rounds of auditions, having to make excuses about why he would be away for a couple days at a time. Ultimately, he didn't make the cut, so he had to go back to life as usual. He told me this in confidence some years ago when he didn't have anyone he could share it with. While he was doing these auditions though, he met another hopeful who ended up washing out. This friend stuck it out in Beijing and kept at it one way or another, and eventually landed a job as a script editor. Now they're hiring and the friend has a spot for Yupo. It's a big leap. Yupo has a job and home that supports his wife and kid. If he were to take on this job in Beijing, he's not gonna be able to give up after a few months and come crawling back to that electrician job. He's worried he's not gonna be able to come through on the occasional writing assignments, as writing to someone else's topic as opposed to one's own ideas is much harder. He's going to be living alone in a city that's at least 2 hours away from his family. All serious considerations. Still, it is a good pay raise and would be a real stepping stone to other opportunities in the business. Sadly, I can't relate at all to switching between industries that differ that much, and from a job I tolerate to one I might genuinely like. Yupo's got til about the end of the year to decide.
After hanging out with Yupo and playing with Ranran for a while, I headed back home. I think it was a good talk. There's only one more thing on my checklist -- in 2002, one night we were walking around at night just hanging out, the four of us cousins. Yupo, me, Wang Peng, and Wang Kang. I spotted a vendor broiling lamb skewers over his coal brazier and asked to stop and get some. Yupo ordered the whole set and handed them out to us. I got out some money to pay, but he stopped me. Over all the dinners we'd been invited to, where friends and relatives have paid for, this one moment was the most genuine. Yupo told me, "no matter how much time goes on, no matter how much distance separates us, we're still family, and from one relative to another, it doesn't matter who pays." It's not like it was a lot of money, but it would have made more sense for me to pay rather than him. Still, the idea means a lot to me and I think it's the basis from which I think about my family in China. So yeah, before I leave, I need to make sure to drag him and maybe his family out to have some of lamb skewers on me.
At this point, it should be clear that I'm closer to my mom's side of the family than my dad's. One reason is that I've simply spent more time with them. In 1997, I lived in Tangshan for almost 2 months, and didn't even go to my dad's old home. Another important reason is the language barrier. My da bai's wife and my da gu -- they can't even speak Mandarin. They can understand it reasonably well, but I can't talk to them. For these two reasons, I've never had a really meaningful conversation with my Guangxi relatives. I wish I could have, but that is left for future visits.
The superbly observant will have noted that Wang Peng and Wang Kang, sons of sons of my mom's brothers, have the surname Wang. While I am surnamed Mao because of my father. So why is Wang Yupo, son of my mom's sister, also a Wang? Simple -- his father is a Wang, too.
Friday, October 15, 2010
9/17
9/17
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_17?authkey=Gv1sRgCOCO17fH3O3i8QE
NOTE: I've been told the vocabulary describing relatives is pretty dense and tedious at the end. Feel free to glaze your eyes over that section.
We get up and drive to Tangshan. Mom's cousin, Uncle Biao, is once again ferrying us there in his Buick.
Tangshan has always been a coal town. There's big 100+ ton coal trucks that drive around and ruin the roads. The highspeed road from Beijing down to Tangshan is fine, but once we're local, things slow to a crawl as we deal with major truck traffic and pockmarked roads.
Around noon, we stop off at my mom's mom's younger sister's place in Tangshan city. This relationship is called lao yi in Chinese (youngest sister of one's mother). My mom's lao yi is Biao's mother. Biao is closer to my age than my mother's because of the age difference between the two sisters -- something like 13 years. When my mom's lao yi spoke, it reminded me quite a bit of how my grandmother used to talk. We have a really quick meal and keep going on to Guye district, around which most of my mom's relatives live. While it would be nice to have longer visits with each relative, geography and our timetable make it such that we have to pry ourselves away before getting sucked into any long meals, which you must know by now, is the currency of Chinese hospitality.
We make it to my da yi's apartment (da yi == oldest sister of one's mother). This is where I lived before when I came to China by myself. My da yi, her husband, and my cousin hosted me for most of the time that I spent in Tangshan back in 1997. After unpacking here, we head over to my 2nd Uncle's apartment. Everyone is supposed to be meeting up for dinner. We wait for a long time, but because of the huge uptick in cars, the traffic back into Tangshan has become really bad. My da yi's son, and probably the cousin I'm closest to, Wang Yupo, can't make it into the dinner. This is disappointing, but we proceed to have a fairly tame (by my uncles' drinking standards) meal among the rest of us. I get to meet Yupo's daughter, who was born the year after I last visited. It is also good to reunite with the bevy of uncles and aunts that took care of me while I was over here. The only highlight of the meal worth sharing was a dish of pork brains. I thought it might be kidneys at first, but nope, it was brains. I stared at them for the whole meal, trying to muster the courage to eat one. It wasn't the taste that I feared, but the whole Critonesque fear of getting kuru or something. Eventually, I half a quarter lobe. It tasted fatty and porky, so quite good. But it didn't taste different enough from pork belly that I would risk eating it regularly. I bet fried, it would taste like bacon.
I apologize for freely mixing English and Chinese terms for relative relations. The Chinese relative naming system is pretty complex, and I'd say more relevant than the Nth cousin, x-removed system that exists in English. I describe this just for your entertainment, not to be of use with my story.
First, Chinese has different nows for older and younger siblings. Relative to you:
older-sister: jie
younger-sister: mei
older-brother: ge
younger-brother: di
Sibling seniority:
From the days when multiple brothers and sisters were born to one family, naming by rank makes more sense. It's going to be irrelevant with a couple more generations under the one-child policy. So the eldest brother is called da ge (big older-brother) his siblings. The eldest sister is da jie (big older-sister). The 2nd eldest brother is called er ge (2nd older-brother) by his younger siblings and er di (2nd younger-brother) by his older siblings. The 2nd eldest sister is called er jie or er mei. Then going down the line, each sibling gets labels like that. Usually, older siblings will address younger siblings by their name or nickname instead of by their label. They would only use the label when describing the relationship to someone else. When a younger sibling addresses an older one though, they have to use the label. Exception -- the youngest brother gets the label xiao di (little younger-brother) and the youngest sister gets the label xiao mei. Addendum -- when I led off the examples, I left out that the oldest brother can still be junior to older sisters, or vice versa. To older siblings of sex A, the oldest sibling of sex B is called da di or da mei. But again, this doesn't come up much since by convention, they would be referred to by name. Addendum 2 -- in the South, a variation can be used to describe a family's sons. You could say something like "that family's a er" to mean that family's second eldest son. Note that patrio-implicitly, daughters don't even figure into this ranking. "a" is merely a commonly used exclamation sound.
Mother-side conversion:
How you address aunts and uncles on your mother's side comes from your mother's relationship to them and the corresponding labels. Mother-side uncles use the term jiu, and mother-side aunts use the term yi.
Mother, you:
da ge/di, da jiu
er ge/di, er jiu
san ge/di, san jiu
da jie/mei, da yi
er jie/mei, er yi
Note that since there's only one term for uncle on your mother's side, the term you use doesn't preserve information about the uncle's relative age to your mother. That gets washed out. Finally, another deviation:
Mother, you:
xiao ge/di, lao jiu
xiao jie/mei, lao yi
lao literally means old, but is used informally in very different ways. Here, the meaning is simply the youngest uncle/aunt.
Mother-side grandparents:
Mother, you:
mother, lao lao [again, this literally would be old old, which makes no sense]
father, lao ye
Father-side conversion:
On your father's side, the nouns are different -- shu for uncle, gu for aunt.
Father, you:
da ge/di, da shu in the North, da bai in the South
er ge/di, er shu/bai
xiao ge/di, lao shu/bai
da jie/mei, da gu
xiao jie/mei, lao gu
Father-side grandparents:
mother, nai nai
father, ye ye
When addressing strangers or non-relatives of a different age, it is polite to use the terms:
shu for uncle
a yi for aunt (a just being the same exclamation sound)
nai nai for elderly woman
ye ye for elderly man
It is awkward for people seeking to be friendly to use the terms Mr. and Mrs., which are reserved for formal business type relationships. One more note -- one thing that's tricky about the mother-side and father-side relationships is that different people have different titles for the same relatives. For example, you call your mother's eldest sister da yi, but your cousin who's the son of your mother's brother calls the same aunt da gu.
A note on the Tangshan accent:
The Tangshan dialect is for the most part very similar to standard Mandarin. They have weird rules that transform and lilt the tones of certain words, along with a batch of commonly used slang terms. A slang example --
yesterday, today, tomorrow.
Mandarin: zuo tian, jin tian, ming tian
Beijing slang: zuo tian, jir, mir
Tangshan slang: lir, jir, mir
sound/tone change examples:
Mandarin: fang4 jia4 (to go on vacation)
Tangshan: fang3 jia2
Mandarin: tai4 (excessively, extremely)
Tangshan: tei2 or tei1
While tei is totally permissible under Chinese phonology, that sound in any tone doesn't exist in standard Mandarin. It's interesting to see the Tangshan dialect reach out and fill in the hole.
I'd say you have to have a certain mastery of spoken Mandarin before you can easily coerce phrases that on their face aren't intelligible because of all the wrong tones, into contextually correct phrases. This is easier when dealing with accents in English because there are far fewer homonyms in English compared to Chinese.
To illustrate the overall effect the lilt gives to Tangshan speech, I would compare the difference in accent to how the Beatles sound to us American speakers.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_17?authkey=Gv1sRgCOCO17fH3O3i8QE
NOTE: I've been told the vocabulary describing relatives is pretty dense and tedious at the end. Feel free to glaze your eyes over that section.
We get up and drive to Tangshan. Mom's cousin, Uncle Biao, is once again ferrying us there in his Buick.
Tangshan has always been a coal town. There's big 100+ ton coal trucks that drive around and ruin the roads. The highspeed road from Beijing down to Tangshan is fine, but once we're local, things slow to a crawl as we deal with major truck traffic and pockmarked roads.
Around noon, we stop off at my mom's mom's younger sister's place in Tangshan city. This relationship is called lao yi in Chinese (youngest sister of one's mother). My mom's lao yi is Biao's mother. Biao is closer to my age than my mother's because of the age difference between the two sisters -- something like 13 years. When my mom's lao yi spoke, it reminded me quite a bit of how my grandmother used to talk. We have a really quick meal and keep going on to Guye district, around which most of my mom's relatives live. While it would be nice to have longer visits with each relative, geography and our timetable make it such that we have to pry ourselves away before getting sucked into any long meals, which you must know by now, is the currency of Chinese hospitality.
We make it to my da yi's apartment (da yi == oldest sister of one's mother). This is where I lived before when I came to China by myself. My da yi, her husband, and my cousin hosted me for most of the time that I spent in Tangshan back in 1997. After unpacking here, we head over to my 2nd Uncle's apartment. Everyone is supposed to be meeting up for dinner. We wait for a long time, but because of the huge uptick in cars, the traffic back into Tangshan has become really bad. My da yi's son, and probably the cousin I'm closest to, Wang Yupo, can't make it into the dinner. This is disappointing, but we proceed to have a fairly tame (by my uncles' drinking standards) meal among the rest of us. I get to meet Yupo's daughter, who was born the year after I last visited. It is also good to reunite with the bevy of uncles and aunts that took care of me while I was over here. The only highlight of the meal worth sharing was a dish of pork brains. I thought it might be kidneys at first, but nope, it was brains. I stared at them for the whole meal, trying to muster the courage to eat one. It wasn't the taste that I feared, but the whole Critonesque fear of getting kuru or something. Eventually, I half a quarter lobe. It tasted fatty and porky, so quite good. But it didn't taste different enough from pork belly that I would risk eating it regularly. I bet fried, it would taste like bacon.
I apologize for freely mixing English and Chinese terms for relative relations. The Chinese relative naming system is pretty complex, and I'd say more relevant than the Nth cousin, x-removed system that exists in English. I describe this just for your entertainment, not to be of use with my story.
First, Chinese has different nows for older and younger siblings. Relative to you:
older-sister: jie
younger-sister: mei
older-brother: ge
younger-brother: di
Sibling seniority:
From the days when multiple brothers and sisters were born to one family, naming by rank makes more sense. It's going to be irrelevant with a couple more generations under the one-child policy. So the eldest brother is called da ge (big older-brother) his siblings. The eldest sister is da jie (big older-sister). The 2nd eldest brother is called er ge (2nd older-brother) by his younger siblings and er di (2nd younger-brother) by his older siblings. The 2nd eldest sister is called er jie or er mei. Then going down the line, each sibling gets labels like that. Usually, older siblings will address younger siblings by their name or nickname instead of by their label. They would only use the label when describing the relationship to someone else. When a younger sibling addresses an older one though, they have to use the label. Exception -- the youngest brother gets the label xiao di (little younger-brother) and the youngest sister gets the label xiao mei. Addendum -- when I led off the examples, I left out that the oldest brother can still be junior to older sisters, or vice versa. To older siblings of sex A, the oldest sibling of sex B is called da di or da mei. But again, this doesn't come up much since by convention, they would be referred to by name. Addendum 2 -- in the South, a variation can be used to describe a family's sons. You could say something like "that family's a er" to mean that family's second eldest son. Note that patrio-implicitly, daughters don't even figure into this ranking. "a" is merely a commonly used exclamation sound.
Mother-side conversion:
How you address aunts and uncles on your mother's side comes from your mother's relationship to them and the corresponding labels. Mother-side uncles use the term jiu, and mother-side aunts use the term yi.
Mother, you:
da ge/di, da jiu
er ge/di, er jiu
san ge/di, san jiu
da jie/mei, da yi
er jie/mei, er yi
Note that since there's only one term for uncle on your mother's side, the term you use doesn't preserve information about the uncle's relative age to your mother. That gets washed out. Finally, another deviation:
Mother, you:
xiao ge/di, lao jiu
xiao jie/mei, lao yi
lao literally means old, but is used informally in very different ways. Here, the meaning is simply the youngest uncle/aunt.
Mother-side grandparents:
Mother, you:
mother, lao lao [again, this literally would be old old, which makes no sense]
father, lao ye
Father-side conversion:
On your father's side, the nouns are different -- shu for uncle, gu for aunt.
Father, you:
da ge/di, da shu in the North, da bai in the South
er ge/di, er shu/bai
xiao ge/di, lao shu/bai
da jie/mei, da gu
xiao jie/mei, lao gu
Father-side grandparents:
mother, nai nai
father, ye ye
When addressing strangers or non-relatives of a different age, it is polite to use the terms:
shu for uncle
a yi for aunt (a just being the same exclamation sound)
nai nai for elderly woman
ye ye for elderly man
It is awkward for people seeking to be friendly to use the terms Mr. and Mrs., which are reserved for formal business type relationships. One more note -- one thing that's tricky about the mother-side and father-side relationships is that different people have different titles for the same relatives. For example, you call your mother's eldest sister da yi, but your cousin who's the son of your mother's brother calls the same aunt da gu.
A note on the Tangshan accent:
The Tangshan dialect is for the most part very similar to standard Mandarin. They have weird rules that transform and lilt the tones of certain words, along with a batch of commonly used slang terms. A slang example --
yesterday, today, tomorrow.
Mandarin: zuo tian, jin tian, ming tian
Beijing slang: zuo tian, jir, mir
Tangshan slang: lir, jir, mir
sound/tone change examples:
Mandarin: fang4 jia4 (to go on vacation)
Tangshan: fang3 jia2
Mandarin: tai4 (excessively, extremely)
Tangshan: tei2 or tei1
While tei is totally permissible under Chinese phonology, that sound in any tone doesn't exist in standard Mandarin. It's interesting to see the Tangshan dialect reach out and fill in the hole.
I'd say you have to have a certain mastery of spoken Mandarin before you can easily coerce phrases that on their face aren't intelligible because of all the wrong tones, into contextually correct phrases. This is easier when dealing with accents in English because there are far fewer homonyms in English compared to Chinese.
To illustrate the overall effect the lilt gives to Tangshan speech, I would compare the difference in accent to how the Beatles sound to us American speakers.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
9/16
9/16 8:40am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_16?authkey=Gv1sRgCK37uoydkejAbQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEgUspdlx4k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VWEsqsaBp4
After probably the first serious workout I've had over here, I showered and stumbled down to breakfast.
-----------
In the morning, we went back to our old neighborhood in Beijing. Beijing is _my_ hometown. This vacation is a triptych of home scenes. There is my dad's old home, which I've covered. There is my mom's old home, which we'll get to soon. And there is my old home, which is the always changing city of Beijing. From my earliest childhood of 20 years ago to now, Beijing has been a mental beacon for who I am and the national Chinese identity. Not only is it a real thing and a real city, but it's also a symbol in my mind for the nation.
New Yorkers love their city, and say that all of its deficiences are simply character. I feel the same way about Beijing, despite having been on a 20 year diaspora.
When I was born, my parents lived inside the 3rd Ring Road, near the outskirts of the city, in a neighborhood called Hepingli, the Peaceful Acres. Our apartment sat in Hepingli Area 4, one of 7 areas making up the neighborhood. Many of my memories before coming to the US are from these city blocks. At the time, there were a lot of dirt roads and small flats in that part of Beijing. It was a relatively undeveloped part of town. Initially we were supposed to visit some other tourist site, but so attached am I to my memories that I made it our mission to walk through our neighborhood again. So we detoured and walked from our hotel on over to Hepingli. We first went through a park called Ditan, the Earthly Altar. When my family had a free moment, we would walk out to the park and play. Today there was some sort of book fair going on and there were tons of stalls selling new books. Didn't ruin the scenery, really. It was a quick walk through the park. And now we were on Hepingli Street, which of course borders the neighborhood. It took my parents a couple of minutes to figure out where there were, as literally every shop and every building has changed since we last ever lived here. But eventually they got their bearings and we walked down the street looking for Area 4. The apartments of my early youth were 2 floors, and very small. They were on their last legs even when we left China back in 1989. Soon after we left, they got torn down to make way for the ever expanding development emanating from the center of the city. When I visited it 1997, every block was a still pile of rubble, waiting to be rebuilt. Now in 2010, there are by current standards very small 6-floor apartments standing in Hepingli. This part of the city isn't under much pressure to develop more, but who knows how long before these apartments are demolished, too? Anyways, on the end of each block, a sign is posted on the corner of the building advertising what area it is. We right away saw the sign for Hepingli Area 3. So we were definitely close. After much looking around, wondering if the Areas had been redrawn, we found de facto Area 4. There was no sign for it, but there were some huge trees that must have been standing back in the old days. I tried my hardest to orient the streets I saw to the ones in my mind. To map this new neighborhood to the place from before; where a delivery truck once bumped over a pothole and spilled some of its cargo of eels, causing all the neighbors to spill out and run off with some free eels; where a friend and I very naughtily plucked a big cucumber from someone's backyard garden and toss it into a pit dug for a new septic tank a few meters away, just to see how long it would take to fall to the bottom (we aimed it to land on a pile of poo that some other genius had thought to contribute, but we missed our mark). I have no idea if my orientation is even close. But these streets and that line of trees is, for now, all I'll ever have of my old home. It's a fitting measure of progress that, in my parents' hometowns, not enough has changed in the countryside to take away their old homes, but in Beijing, my old home is already long gone. Think of it another way --
there's a little irrigation ditch running around Beijing that I always thought of as the city river. Along the concrete banks of this river, there used to be a dinky little park with a couple of stands for kids. One of the things that I always remembered through the years was this MiG 17 fighter jet. I don't exactly know the story behind it, but it was an honest to goodness fighter jet that was put up on a pole. If you wanted, you could climb on the wing and into the dusty cockpit and pretend to fly. I did that quite a few times. Even got back into it in 1997. I figured I'd visit the MiG this time around, too. Couldn't find it. We even called up our family friends to ask them about it. As soon as she heard the question, my aunt said, "That thing? Long gone." Again, I suppose it's only right that after so long, with the civilization of the city on the rise, that this dusty relic of the Vietnam War sitting on the side of an algae-choked ditch would be an amusement too far beneath the new generation. The Cultural Revolution said to throw away anything that is old, which went too far. The attitude in Beijing now says to throw away anything that is old and has no value. I think I can accept that.
Let me give you a brief history of the city. Over the centuries, China has had several capitals. Xi'an was the ancient capital when the empire was first unified. Then there was Nanjing (South Capital, relative to Xi'an). Then Beijing (North Capital) was built over the ancient city of Yanjing. It was the Ming who constructed the Forbidden City, which remains the center of the city. The confluence of ancient and modern history at this point is, for me, one of the great attractions for me. Refer to this diagram:
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFeMfD3Zd6LhCALzT6h-kwRov31Ndd8mHkMJIbPH3ZBsWHLTkjPywDo7IkRnTsq6UHDTNC53VpEGBo6n24iA4MqiWlD0mRp0bpXBrfgHqkeEtz9WK5ZEAh_OD4dOJGMUtlz-B63b39vBpO/s512/9_16%20061.jpg
The Forbidden City's front opening (Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace) faces due south, after the ancient tradition. In old times, there was a straight path out to two ceremonial gates, through which all entrants to the Forbidden City must past, the Zhengyang Gate, and then the Front Gate. The area the Gates and the Forbidden City is now the location of Tiananmen Square. Mao stood in front of the masses standing in Tiananmen Square in 1949 to proclaim the founding of the People's Republic. From there, most of the modern structure has been built in symmetry around Tiananmen Square. West of the square is the Great Hall of the People, and to the east is the National History Museum. Both of these are massive, blocky and symmetrical Communist block style buildings, and certainly lend plenty of character to the square. In 1955 (so following the bloodshed of the Korean War), the Monument to the People's Heroes was erected in the center of Tiananmen Square, in the line between the Forbiddden City and the front gates. In some sense, the souls of visitors past and visitors present would thus be obligated to pay their respects to the people's heroes when entering through the front gates in the south, since it would be the first thing they see on their way to the Forbidden City. After Mao died in 1976, it was decided to house his memorial in Tiananmen Square. His huge mausoleum now completely blocked out the view of the Forbidden City when entering the gates. Over the years, trees have been planted around it, and now a fence further sets the building off in the center of the square. My politics on this progression is almost verbatim from the book Almost a Revolution. Which you should read. China is a huge country, and it owes its modern existence in large part to the sacrifices of multitudes of ordinary citizens. In that context, the Monument to the People's Heroes is a worthy memorial to the people themselves. Its base is decorated with socialist realism styled bas reliefs of the anonymous many advancing into symbolic battle. The inscriptions on the sides of the tower are dedicated to no particular person. It is a small but potent reminder of how so much was done by so many in the service of their country. Compare that to the expanse that is Mao's Memorial Hall, which, although it is open to the public free of charge, is like a tomb in the style of the Phaorohs, serving to deify one man. If you look back at the diagram, you can see how much larger a footprint it occupies in Tiananmen Square. In my youth, there was no fence around the square, and there was no special cordoned off area around Mao's Memorial. The square was open to the public to walk in and enjoy from all sides. It was a completely usable public space in addition to being the center of the city. Nowadays, after civil unrests that have raised fears of a 9/11-like incident, there are security measures in place that make the square feel rather more hostile and reserved. Despite all these changes, I was still totally charged walking around the square and seeing the Monument to the People's Heroes, which even brought some tears to my eyes. It is from this point that the essence of Chinese identity still emanates -- the various old and new buildings being the respective standard-bearers of ancient tradition, revolutionary zeal and conviction, and a modern dose of greed and xenophobia. It is around this point that the Ring Roads circle the city, each new road built another layer in the tree trunk of progress.
When people ask me where I'm from, I say Beijing. It may be a simple fact for them, but in detail, the above describes what being from the city means to me.
-----------
Lunch was put on by the cousin who drove us around Beijing when we got there initially. He took us to a really exclusive spot. The restaurant was on the 6th floor of some ultramodern building that was packed with Western brand shops and stores. There was a Subway across the floor from the restaurant, as an example. That's the thing -- even now, I bet patronage to a place like Subway is at least 50% fueled by the desire for conspicuous consumption. If nobody sees you eating at Subway, an American deli, you probably wouldn't ever go other. So I doubt a Subway on the 6th floor of a fancy building is going to cut it. I certainly didn't see any customers there. The restaurant was called Wuyutai Inner Court Restaurant. We ordered a set menu for the 4 of us. It was a good variety and showed an incredible refinement applied to traditional Chinese food. Overall, I'd say it'd be a very high-class and appealing introduction to Chinese cuisine. The waitstaff was also much better trained than at other places. Not only did they never show any attitude like at other even pretty nice restaurants, but they were also discreet -- they didn't feel like they were hovering over us the whole time trying to prove that they were providing incredible service (which other places failed to do plenty of times, like seeing that I was out of my drink). That place wasn't terribly expensive, for a foreigner. I would probably recommend it first as the place to eat at Beijing.
At some point after lunch, we went over to the National Center for the Performance Arts, or something like that. It's refered to as the metal bird egg. I was really not feeling this place from the outside, but the inside of it feels very pleasing. I know nothing about architecture but I thought that the huge variety of elements inside bordered each other harmoniously, without any clashing. I took a lot of panoramas that tured out well, imo.
After that, we went to "Old Beijing" south of Tiananmen Square. It's pretty much a tourist trap, but it is decorated like Beijing once was, and does house some shops that legitimately have been in those spaces for over 100 years. The first order of business was to get some yogurt, now refered to as Old Beijing Yogurt for tourists' sake. It's served in a little stone pot. If you want it chilled, the pot cools you hand a bit and makes sure the yogurt is cold for the 30s or so it takes to suck it up the straw. Chinese yogurt is liquid enough for that. Old Beijing yogurt should be sweet but also sour. It has to be just right, or it would be really gross. The first spot we got some, it was like 5 yuan a pot. We found another place selling for only 3, so we had to have it again to set off the initial expensive batch. They actually tasted pretty different. I would definitely have it all day for 3 yuan a pop. We didn't really end up buying anything, as the shops, despite their age, were selling nothing of interest and didn't really have the character or old Beijing neighborliness to match the illustrious history.
At dinner, it was my mom's classmates and some of their children. I also happened to invite an old friend of mine who's been in Beijing for a couple of years now, to pick his brain on stuff. He showed me his corporate office and also his apartment, where we had a reunion with his wife, whom I haven't seen for as long. Because of the details of our talk, I guess I won't reveal his identity. Let's just say he works for an internet company. We talked for a long time and I'm still digesting some of the stuff. I don't have time to type it up nicely now, but I give notes from the two topics of our talk.
Google marketshare was increasing until conflict with Chinese gov got them to abandon the market. Which made it the only web company with any success in China.
avg turnaround time in a tech company 1.4 years
average lifespan of chinese company 2.9 years
companies tend to favor degree relevancy over eliteness of college. My friend does opposite
renrenwang cofounder notes:
- from the outside, any industry looks saturated. When you get on the inside, there's always holes you can identify. Not always actionable, but there will be holes.
- in any new venture, there will be a series unanticipated obstacles. To make it out, you have to keep detouring and changing it up a bit to go around the obstacles.
A senior Google China or Baidu engineer can see 25-50k/month.
The overhead of making a sale in China, given the business culture, is so enormous that it's hard for foreign companies to make headway against adequate local competition. "Excel has 100 functions, but I only use 3 of them. So anybody's product will do... It's about who throws the best parties and gives me the best kickbacks."
Chinese competition on the web is especially strong because there's so little sunk cost in the web industry.
State companies, because of their wealth, can be a good target for business development. You just have to convince them to try your product/service. If it is ok for a couple years, they'll stick with you for life and never deviate because of the cultural aversion to change.
Ultimately, the way to close the deal with such a company is to woo several top people at once so that they're all willing to jump off the bridge at once. A good tactic is to convince them that the move will make them look good to their superiors.
This sounds similar to how some conduct business in US or probably anywhere, but is to such an extreme degree in China.
It's easier to do set up a startup with huge potential in China than in the US. I can't remember his argument.
.5% own 70% of wealth
avg income of 99.5% is 1000/month
avg income of .5% is 500k/month
No bond and equity markets because of limited quality business in need. State biz has no need for issuing bonds. Central planning + nationalized banks + no competition == $$$ for state companies
Because no other consumers of excess money, housing market is the only sink of investment cash. Rich people buying up houes left and right, at pretty inflated prices. These aren't even houses that the middle class, which he defined as 15k/month households, can afford. Two bad outcomes:
- all the luxury units being built could be rotting in 10 years from lack of demand
- without careful urban planning, which would include high capacity projects, large cities like Beijing will suffer urban sprawl and might not support the projected 300 million Chinese who will urbanize through 2030.
Tax structure favors rich getting richer at a very rapid rate compared to the US. Resentment of the superrich on the rise, and evident on the BBSes and on the streets. THe sentiment could boil over and cause nat. change on taxation
The national goverment is aware of these issues and within the constraints of extant politics, it is doing a decent balancing act. While it does have ultimate control over # new housing units created, it tends toward keeping up the hot momentum of foreign and domestic building, as opposed to truly reigning in the inflated market.
His apartment's rent is $1000/mon, but to buy would be almost $1mil, which is obviously inflated.
There are some parts of Beijing real estate that are luxurious and exclusive enough where the inflation still might be worth risking investing in. There's this area out past the 5th Ring Road that's going to be the new Zhongguancun, where all the new web tycoons are living. That place might be really posh in a couple years. The original Zhongguancun is basically China's humble analog to Silicon Valley. Back in 1997, it was a bunch of dirt roads, guys lugging around boxes of pirated software, and rickety computer shops.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_16?authkey=Gv1sRgCK37uoydkejAbQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEgUspdlx4k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VWEsqsaBp4
After probably the first serious workout I've had over here, I showered and stumbled down to breakfast.
-----------
In the morning, we went back to our old neighborhood in Beijing. Beijing is _my_ hometown. This vacation is a triptych of home scenes. There is my dad's old home, which I've covered. There is my mom's old home, which we'll get to soon. And there is my old home, which is the always changing city of Beijing. From my earliest childhood of 20 years ago to now, Beijing has been a mental beacon for who I am and the national Chinese identity. Not only is it a real thing and a real city, but it's also a symbol in my mind for the nation.
New Yorkers love their city, and say that all of its deficiences are simply character. I feel the same way about Beijing, despite having been on a 20 year diaspora.
When I was born, my parents lived inside the 3rd Ring Road, near the outskirts of the city, in a neighborhood called Hepingli, the Peaceful Acres. Our apartment sat in Hepingli Area 4, one of 7 areas making up the neighborhood. Many of my memories before coming to the US are from these city blocks. At the time, there were a lot of dirt roads and small flats in that part of Beijing. It was a relatively undeveloped part of town. Initially we were supposed to visit some other tourist site, but so attached am I to my memories that I made it our mission to walk through our neighborhood again. So we detoured and walked from our hotel on over to Hepingli. We first went through a park called Ditan, the Earthly Altar. When my family had a free moment, we would walk out to the park and play. Today there was some sort of book fair going on and there were tons of stalls selling new books. Didn't ruin the scenery, really. It was a quick walk through the park. And now we were on Hepingli Street, which of course borders the neighborhood. It took my parents a couple of minutes to figure out where there were, as literally every shop and every building has changed since we last ever lived here. But eventually they got their bearings and we walked down the street looking for Area 4. The apartments of my early youth were 2 floors, and very small. They were on their last legs even when we left China back in 1989. Soon after we left, they got torn down to make way for the ever expanding development emanating from the center of the city. When I visited it 1997, every block was a still pile of rubble, waiting to be rebuilt. Now in 2010, there are by current standards very small 6-floor apartments standing in Hepingli. This part of the city isn't under much pressure to develop more, but who knows how long before these apartments are demolished, too? Anyways, on the end of each block, a sign is posted on the corner of the building advertising what area it is. We right away saw the sign for Hepingli Area 3. So we were definitely close. After much looking around, wondering if the Areas had been redrawn, we found de facto Area 4. There was no sign for it, but there were some huge trees that must have been standing back in the old days. I tried my hardest to orient the streets I saw to the ones in my mind. To map this new neighborhood to the place from before; where a delivery truck once bumped over a pothole and spilled some of its cargo of eels, causing all the neighbors to spill out and run off with some free eels; where a friend and I very naughtily plucked a big cucumber from someone's backyard garden and toss it into a pit dug for a new septic tank a few meters away, just to see how long it would take to fall to the bottom (we aimed it to land on a pile of poo that some other genius had thought to contribute, but we missed our mark). I have no idea if my orientation is even close. But these streets and that line of trees is, for now, all I'll ever have of my old home. It's a fitting measure of progress that, in my parents' hometowns, not enough has changed in the countryside to take away their old homes, but in Beijing, my old home is already long gone. Think of it another way --
there's a little irrigation ditch running around Beijing that I always thought of as the city river. Along the concrete banks of this river, there used to be a dinky little park with a couple of stands for kids. One of the things that I always remembered through the years was this MiG 17 fighter jet. I don't exactly know the story behind it, but it was an honest to goodness fighter jet that was put up on a pole. If you wanted, you could climb on the wing and into the dusty cockpit and pretend to fly. I did that quite a few times. Even got back into it in 1997. I figured I'd visit the MiG this time around, too. Couldn't find it. We even called up our family friends to ask them about it. As soon as she heard the question, my aunt said, "That thing? Long gone." Again, I suppose it's only right that after so long, with the civilization of the city on the rise, that this dusty relic of the Vietnam War sitting on the side of an algae-choked ditch would be an amusement too far beneath the new generation. The Cultural Revolution said to throw away anything that is old, which went too far. The attitude in Beijing now says to throw away anything that is old and has no value. I think I can accept that.
Let me give you a brief history of the city. Over the centuries, China has had several capitals. Xi'an was the ancient capital when the empire was first unified. Then there was Nanjing (South Capital, relative to Xi'an). Then Beijing (North Capital) was built over the ancient city of Yanjing. It was the Ming who constructed the Forbidden City, which remains the center of the city. The confluence of ancient and modern history at this point is, for me, one of the great attractions for me. Refer to this diagram:
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFeMfD3Zd6LhCALzT6h-kwRov31Ndd8mHkMJIbPH3ZBsWHLTkjPywDo7IkRnTsq6UHDTNC53VpEGBo6n24iA4MqiWlD0mRp0bpXBrfgHqkeEtz9WK5ZEAh_OD4dOJGMUtlz-B63b39vBpO/s512/9_16%20061.jpg
The Forbidden City's front opening (Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace) faces due south, after the ancient tradition. In old times, there was a straight path out to two ceremonial gates, through which all entrants to the Forbidden City must past, the Zhengyang Gate, and then the Front Gate. The area the Gates and the Forbidden City is now the location of Tiananmen Square. Mao stood in front of the masses standing in Tiananmen Square in 1949 to proclaim the founding of the People's Republic. From there, most of the modern structure has been built in symmetry around Tiananmen Square. West of the square is the Great Hall of the People, and to the east is the National History Museum. Both of these are massive, blocky and symmetrical Communist block style buildings, and certainly lend plenty of character to the square. In 1955 (so following the bloodshed of the Korean War), the Monument to the People's Heroes was erected in the center of Tiananmen Square, in the line between the Forbiddden City and the front gates. In some sense, the souls of visitors past and visitors present would thus be obligated to pay their respects to the people's heroes when entering through the front gates in the south, since it would be the first thing they see on their way to the Forbidden City. After Mao died in 1976, it was decided to house his memorial in Tiananmen Square. His huge mausoleum now completely blocked out the view of the Forbidden City when entering the gates. Over the years, trees have been planted around it, and now a fence further sets the building off in the center of the square. My politics on this progression is almost verbatim from the book Almost a Revolution. Which you should read. China is a huge country, and it owes its modern existence in large part to the sacrifices of multitudes of ordinary citizens. In that context, the Monument to the People's Heroes is a worthy memorial to the people themselves. Its base is decorated with socialist realism styled bas reliefs of the anonymous many advancing into symbolic battle. The inscriptions on the sides of the tower are dedicated to no particular person. It is a small but potent reminder of how so much was done by so many in the service of their country. Compare that to the expanse that is Mao's Memorial Hall, which, although it is open to the public free of charge, is like a tomb in the style of the Phaorohs, serving to deify one man. If you look back at the diagram, you can see how much larger a footprint it occupies in Tiananmen Square. In my youth, there was no fence around the square, and there was no special cordoned off area around Mao's Memorial. The square was open to the public to walk in and enjoy from all sides. It was a completely usable public space in addition to being the center of the city. Nowadays, after civil unrests that have raised fears of a 9/11-like incident, there are security measures in place that make the square feel rather more hostile and reserved. Despite all these changes, I was still totally charged walking around the square and seeing the Monument to the People's Heroes, which even brought some tears to my eyes. It is from this point that the essence of Chinese identity still emanates -- the various old and new buildings being the respective standard-bearers of ancient tradition, revolutionary zeal and conviction, and a modern dose of greed and xenophobia. It is around this point that the Ring Roads circle the city, each new road built another layer in the tree trunk of progress.
When people ask me where I'm from, I say Beijing. It may be a simple fact for them, but in detail, the above describes what being from the city means to me.
-----------
Lunch was put on by the cousin who drove us around Beijing when we got there initially. He took us to a really exclusive spot. The restaurant was on the 6th floor of some ultramodern building that was packed with Western brand shops and stores. There was a Subway across the floor from the restaurant, as an example. That's the thing -- even now, I bet patronage to a place like Subway is at least 50% fueled by the desire for conspicuous consumption. If nobody sees you eating at Subway, an American deli, you probably wouldn't ever go other. So I doubt a Subway on the 6th floor of a fancy building is going to cut it. I certainly didn't see any customers there. The restaurant was called Wuyutai Inner Court Restaurant. We ordered a set menu for the 4 of us. It was a good variety and showed an incredible refinement applied to traditional Chinese food. Overall, I'd say it'd be a very high-class and appealing introduction to Chinese cuisine. The waitstaff was also much better trained than at other places. Not only did they never show any attitude like at other even pretty nice restaurants, but they were also discreet -- they didn't feel like they were hovering over us the whole time trying to prove that they were providing incredible service (which other places failed to do plenty of times, like seeing that I was out of my drink). That place wasn't terribly expensive, for a foreigner. I would probably recommend it first as the place to eat at Beijing.
At some point after lunch, we went over to the National Center for the Performance Arts, or something like that. It's refered to as the metal bird egg. I was really not feeling this place from the outside, but the inside of it feels very pleasing. I know nothing about architecture but I thought that the huge variety of elements inside bordered each other harmoniously, without any clashing. I took a lot of panoramas that tured out well, imo.
After that, we went to "Old Beijing" south of Tiananmen Square. It's pretty much a tourist trap, but it is decorated like Beijing once was, and does house some shops that legitimately have been in those spaces for over 100 years. The first order of business was to get some yogurt, now refered to as Old Beijing Yogurt for tourists' sake. It's served in a little stone pot. If you want it chilled, the pot cools you hand a bit and makes sure the yogurt is cold for the 30s or so it takes to suck it up the straw. Chinese yogurt is liquid enough for that. Old Beijing yogurt should be sweet but also sour. It has to be just right, or it would be really gross. The first spot we got some, it was like 5 yuan a pot. We found another place selling for only 3, so we had to have it again to set off the initial expensive batch. They actually tasted pretty different. I would definitely have it all day for 3 yuan a pop. We didn't really end up buying anything, as the shops, despite their age, were selling nothing of interest and didn't really have the character or old Beijing neighborliness to match the illustrious history.
At dinner, it was my mom's classmates and some of their children. I also happened to invite an old friend of mine who's been in Beijing for a couple of years now, to pick his brain on stuff. He showed me his corporate office and also his apartment, where we had a reunion with his wife, whom I haven't seen for as long. Because of the details of our talk, I guess I won't reveal his identity. Let's just say he works for an internet company. We talked for a long time and I'm still digesting some of the stuff. I don't have time to type it up nicely now, but I give notes from the two topics of our talk.
Google marketshare was increasing until conflict with Chinese gov got them to abandon the market. Which made it the only web company with any success in China.
avg turnaround time in a tech company 1.4 years
average lifespan of chinese company 2.9 years
companies tend to favor degree relevancy over eliteness of college. My friend does opposite
renrenwang cofounder notes:
- from the outside, any industry looks saturated. When you get on the inside, there's always holes you can identify. Not always actionable, but there will be holes.
- in any new venture, there will be a series unanticipated obstacles. To make it out, you have to keep detouring and changing it up a bit to go around the obstacles.
A senior Google China or Baidu engineer can see 25-50k/month.
The overhead of making a sale in China, given the business culture, is so enormous that it's hard for foreign companies to make headway against adequate local competition. "Excel has 100 functions, but I only use 3 of them. So anybody's product will do... It's about who throws the best parties and gives me the best kickbacks."
Chinese competition on the web is especially strong because there's so little sunk cost in the web industry.
State companies, because of their wealth, can be a good target for business development. You just have to convince them to try your product/service. If it is ok for a couple years, they'll stick with you for life and never deviate because of the cultural aversion to change.
Ultimately, the way to close the deal with such a company is to woo several top people at once so that they're all willing to jump off the bridge at once. A good tactic is to convince them that the move will make them look good to their superiors.
This sounds similar to how some conduct business in US or probably anywhere, but is to such an extreme degree in China.
It's easier to do set up a startup with huge potential in China than in the US. I can't remember his argument.
.5% own 70% of wealth
avg income of 99.5% is 1000/month
avg income of .5% is 500k/month
No bond and equity markets because of limited quality business in need. State biz has no need for issuing bonds. Central planning + nationalized banks + no competition == $$$ for state companies
Because no other consumers of excess money, housing market is the only sink of investment cash. Rich people buying up houes left and right, at pretty inflated prices. These aren't even houses that the middle class, which he defined as 15k/month households, can afford. Two bad outcomes:
- all the luxury units being built could be rotting in 10 years from lack of demand
- without careful urban planning, which would include high capacity projects, large cities like Beijing will suffer urban sprawl and might not support the projected 300 million Chinese who will urbanize through 2030.
Tax structure favors rich getting richer at a very rapid rate compared to the US. Resentment of the superrich on the rise, and evident on the BBSes and on the streets. THe sentiment could boil over and cause nat. change on taxation
The national goverment is aware of these issues and within the constraints of extant politics, it is doing a decent balancing act. While it does have ultimate control over # new housing units created, it tends toward keeping up the hot momentum of foreign and domestic building, as opposed to truly reigning in the inflated market.
His apartment's rent is $1000/mon, but to buy would be almost $1mil, which is obviously inflated.
There are some parts of Beijing real estate that are luxurious and exclusive enough where the inflation still might be worth risking investing in. There's this area out past the 5th Ring Road that's going to be the new Zhongguancun, where all the new web tycoons are living. That place might be really posh in a couple years. The original Zhongguancun is basically China's humble analog to Silicon Valley. Back in 1997, it was a bunch of dirt roads, guys lugging around boxes of pirated software, and rickety computer shops.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
9/15
9/15 7:40am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_15?authkey=Gv1sRgCMuir-qmpLWuHg
Today I was awakened and told to hurry and shower. When I got done with showering and headed up to the 6th floor, plans had pretty much changed. Someone who wanted to have a business lunch with Lin Jin offered to invite us to dinner.
So instead of getting picked up by my dad's friend to hang out until we head to the airport, we are going out to have breakfast, sit around, and then have another lunch. It's a non-stop eating affair out here.
So we walk around looking for a breakfast spot, and we find a pretty forgettable noodle place. After dinner, we come back to Lin Jin's apartment and hang out. My dad's friend has to do some coordination to get his people to the lunch, but it happens. I think I have to learn some tolerance and patience when it comes to changing plans.
Lunch is quite a blast. It's not the best food, but there's 16 people and something like 20 dishes. I am pretty picky of Guangxi food by now, and snipe some of the better stuff. I also get to chat with one of my dad's friend's kids. He's applying to emigrate to Montreal. Apparently he has to demonstrate conversant level speech in both English and French. So he's cramming in French. He also played a lot of Angry Birds on his jailbroken iPhone. My dad got to hang out with his friends for a change. These weren't college classmates, but close friends nonetheless. Whatever business aspect to the lunch dried up once Lin Jin had to bail. We said our goodbyes and went back to eating. We managed to stay from 11:30 to about 3:45, most of it spent talking.
The flight to Beijing featured Date Night, but the subtitles were in Traditional script, which is extra hard for me to read, and the speakers were playing the English audio too softly. I think I'd like to watch it again for what could have been some good jokes. Tomorrow we'll hang out and walk around Beijing. For dinner, I'm gonna meet up with an old roommate of mine who works for the Chinese branch of his company, and ask what it's like to be working back in China.
We got the one of the same rooms in the same hotel. The mosquito repellant machine is in the same spot. A good sign for a hotel, even if the rest of it is falling apart.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_15?authkey=Gv1sRgCMuir-qmpLWuHg
Today I was awakened and told to hurry and shower. When I got done with showering and headed up to the 6th floor, plans had pretty much changed. Someone who wanted to have a business lunch with Lin Jin offered to invite us to dinner.
So instead of getting picked up by my dad's friend to hang out until we head to the airport, we are going out to have breakfast, sit around, and then have another lunch. It's a non-stop eating affair out here.
So we walk around looking for a breakfast spot, and we find a pretty forgettable noodle place. After dinner, we come back to Lin Jin's apartment and hang out. My dad's friend has to do some coordination to get his people to the lunch, but it happens. I think I have to learn some tolerance and patience when it comes to changing plans.
Lunch is quite a blast. It's not the best food, but there's 16 people and something like 20 dishes. I am pretty picky of Guangxi food by now, and snipe some of the better stuff. I also get to chat with one of my dad's friend's kids. He's applying to emigrate to Montreal. Apparently he has to demonstrate conversant level speech in both English and French. So he's cramming in French. He also played a lot of Angry Birds on his jailbroken iPhone. My dad got to hang out with his friends for a change. These weren't college classmates, but close friends nonetheless. Whatever business aspect to the lunch dried up once Lin Jin had to bail. We said our goodbyes and went back to eating. We managed to stay from 11:30 to about 3:45, most of it spent talking.
The flight to Beijing featured Date Night, but the subtitles were in Traditional script, which is extra hard for me to read, and the speakers were playing the English audio too softly. I think I'd like to watch it again for what could have been some good jokes. Tomorrow we'll hang out and walk around Beijing. For dinner, I'm gonna meet up with an old roommate of mine who works for the Chinese branch of his company, and ask what it's like to be working back in China.
We got the one of the same rooms in the same hotel. The mosquito repellant machine is in the same spot. A good sign for a hotel, even if the rest of it is falling apart.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
9/14
9/14
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_14?authkey=Gv1sRgCKf237ib4_jJqwE
Some of the panoramas are really nice and should be higher res to enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-7Kpv9iKks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1izQgwPcmuI
8:30am CST
I get up and do a very brief workout and hit the showers. Chen Dexin is still with us, and we're gonna spend the day cruising Nanning as well as checking out Lin Jin's other property in the city. Obviously Lin Jin has quite a bit of pride in having made his way into real estate investing from nothing, so between my mom's and Chen Dexin's interest in real estate speculation and Lin Jin wanting to show what his place was like, we definitely make checking out the spot a main attraction. The theme for the whole day is development and real estate.
In Nanning, there is a hill. And on top of that hill is a small pond. The site was sold by the county and rapidly capitalized upon as prime new real estate. The area was named Sky Pond after that pool of water. When we get there, it's obvious that this is an extremely nice neighborhood. The guard hands Lin Jin a keycard to access garages. We proceed to drive up some very San Francisco like hills. We park and check out the pond. The area around the pond has been carefully planted and a gardner was busy trimming one tree into a Dr. Seuss looking thing. The pond itself has also been potted underwater with lotuses and stocked with some goldfish. Around the top are the tall apartment buildings that are almost complete. Lin Jin takes us to his unit on one building's 8th floor. The building is done as far as the real estate developer is concerned, but his unit is still bare. He's still deciding what he wants to do with it. The views from his front and back balconies are... incredible. Not only do they show a very modern, clean city, but they also just how actively it continues to be developed. Both my parents and Chen Dexin are earnestly intrigued about buying the unit if Lin Jin ended up not wanting it. When we get back down to Lin Jin's car, some girls approached us with brochures. Apparently they were looking to sell their furnishing contractor company on us. From what I saw, about 50% of the units were finished on the inside and being lived in, as evidenced by people or laundry being hung to dry. The other half, possibly lived in, possibly being speculated upon like with Lin Jin's. I dunno if the buildings are being built to the code that comparable units are in the West (probably not, as the construction workers were wearing flimsy plastic shoes and bare excuses for hard hats. I even one guy jump on a leaned pole to get to the second floor of a building under construction, just out of convenience), but nonetheless, these are providing an incredible leap in the standard of living of the ever-richer Chinese middle class. They are getting to move from their crappy apartments into fairly luxurious spots, at a price they can afford. The deal with having a decent job in China is that the tax structure means that you can keep almost all of your income as savings. So give it a few years, and you have a big wad of cash and little to spend it on. That phenomenon explains the explosion in scooters and cars on the roads. The next step is in these new condos.
Real estate is booming and the government is keeping a very close eye on things. I'm not sure if it'll all be effective, but there's certainly tight controls in place. One thing the government does is to limit what pieces of land can be developed. It controls both the sale of land as well as approval of development plans. Thus, it is in strict control of how many new housing units are actively going on in China. At best, as sales figures come in for these units, the central government has an idea of how many people are shifting from their old homes into the new ones. But if, as seems to be the case, real estate speculation on the part of the upper middle class is rampant, then the government might overestimate the need for new housing, which could still lead to runaway conditions it wants to avoid. I assume the intended controls would be ok if the government secretly did some studies and modeling on what percentage of new homes are actually being used as long-term dwellings.
Some prime land in downtown Nanning was recently sold at 2,000,000 yuan a square meter, which is like $30,000 a square foot, which is unheard of. The developer plans to turn it into the tallest building in Nanning, to be used as a world trade center of sorts. We'll find out if that works out in a few years.
As we drove out toward the less developed areas of Nanning, we saw some "crop houses" standing on the sides of the road. The city government had already signaled its intent to move government buildings to this area, so the peasants that owned this land had wisely built bare-bones houses on it. The houses are sound but unfurnished and not intended for living or rent. Their only purpose is to cost fair market value when the government claimns imminent domain. When they're knocked down for the actual development of whatever the government wants to build here, they'll become a cash crop for the clever owners. Lin Jin said that there is grumbling that the government should just take the land and not pay, but it'll probably be treated fairly, as the peasants as a collective can make quite a scene, which the city would not want to reach the national government. If nothing else, I'm impressed that even the farmers have the cash to put on this sort of gamble. They're probably used to it with all the seasons and weather they have always had to deal with.
We take a break from all this watching to have lunch at a restaurant Lin Jin knows. He knows all the places we go to, since he's lived here for quite a while. The centerpiece of lunch is some steamed young chicken. It's like boiled chicken in that the primary source of flavor is the chicken itself. While it's being steamed, juices are collected and concentrated as a sauce. Some salt is added to the sauce. The way to eat it is to put on a lunch-lady glove and pick out a piece, and then dip it into the sauce and eat. It was really delicious. The meat was tender and really flavorful. I think it's in the spirit of a French roast chicken, where the showcase is how good the chicken meat is. I also get to eat the chicken feet and neck, which are huge amusement for me, since I love nibbling all the bits of meat off.
After lunch we go back to sightseeing. We hit up the new Guangxi Sports Stadium, a local bridge, a temple bordering the city, and a private hotel heavily used by top CCP officials. This last place we didn't really manage to get into. We claimed to be wanting to check it out to see if we want to say, but I don't think we were high class enough to pull it off. We manage to drive in enough of it to see how nice the grass was kept, and a couple of the buildings, but not much else. A very young guard gets in the road and tells us to back up outta there, so we reverse the car for at least a minute before we decide to try turning around in the narrow private way. We get outta there.
One note about Chinese family relationship terms:
The terms for aunt, uncle, grandmother, grandfather, etc. differ on the mother's side and the father's side. They also differ a bit between the north and south. There's a particular term for when some cousins have fathers who are brothers. For all other cases, cousins are "biao ge" cousin elder brother or "biao di" cousin younger brother. But when addressing a cousin whose son to your father's brother, the term is "tang ge" or "tang di," depending on your relative ages. Oh, and the relationship applies to female cousins, too. Not as cool as seventh son of a seventh son, but still an interesting partriarchal distinction. The male cousins are "tang xiong tang di," and are guaranteed to have descendants who share the family name.
In the north, one's wife is typically refered to by a term that's not awfully endearing. If you tried to convey the connotation to English, it might come across as "the old lady" or "the ol' missus." In the south, the typically used term is "loved one" or "person I love."
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_14?authkey=Gv1sRgCKf237ib4_jJqwE
Some of the panoramas are really nice and should be higher res to enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-7Kpv9iKks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1izQgwPcmuI
8:30am CST
I get up and do a very brief workout and hit the showers. Chen Dexin is still with us, and we're gonna spend the day cruising Nanning as well as checking out Lin Jin's other property in the city. Obviously Lin Jin has quite a bit of pride in having made his way into real estate investing from nothing, so between my mom's and Chen Dexin's interest in real estate speculation and Lin Jin wanting to show what his place was like, we definitely make checking out the spot a main attraction. The theme for the whole day is development and real estate.
In Nanning, there is a hill. And on top of that hill is a small pond. The site was sold by the county and rapidly capitalized upon as prime new real estate. The area was named Sky Pond after that pool of water. When we get there, it's obvious that this is an extremely nice neighborhood. The guard hands Lin Jin a keycard to access garages. We proceed to drive up some very San Francisco like hills. We park and check out the pond. The area around the pond has been carefully planted and a gardner was busy trimming one tree into a Dr. Seuss looking thing. The pond itself has also been potted underwater with lotuses and stocked with some goldfish. Around the top are the tall apartment buildings that are almost complete. Lin Jin takes us to his unit on one building's 8th floor. The building is done as far as the real estate developer is concerned, but his unit is still bare. He's still deciding what he wants to do with it. The views from his front and back balconies are... incredible. Not only do they show a very modern, clean city, but they also just how actively it continues to be developed. Both my parents and Chen Dexin are earnestly intrigued about buying the unit if Lin Jin ended up not wanting it. When we get back down to Lin Jin's car, some girls approached us with brochures. Apparently they were looking to sell their furnishing contractor company on us. From what I saw, about 50% of the units were finished on the inside and being lived in, as evidenced by people or laundry being hung to dry. The other half, possibly lived in, possibly being speculated upon like with Lin Jin's. I dunno if the buildings are being built to the code that comparable units are in the West (probably not, as the construction workers were wearing flimsy plastic shoes and bare excuses for hard hats. I even one guy jump on a leaned pole to get to the second floor of a building under construction, just out of convenience), but nonetheless, these are providing an incredible leap in the standard of living of the ever-richer Chinese middle class. They are getting to move from their crappy apartments into fairly luxurious spots, at a price they can afford. The deal with having a decent job in China is that the tax structure means that you can keep almost all of your income as savings. So give it a few years, and you have a big wad of cash and little to spend it on. That phenomenon explains the explosion in scooters and cars on the roads. The next step is in these new condos.
Real estate is booming and the government is keeping a very close eye on things. I'm not sure if it'll all be effective, but there's certainly tight controls in place. One thing the government does is to limit what pieces of land can be developed. It controls both the sale of land as well as approval of development plans. Thus, it is in strict control of how many new housing units are actively going on in China. At best, as sales figures come in for these units, the central government has an idea of how many people are shifting from their old homes into the new ones. But if, as seems to be the case, real estate speculation on the part of the upper middle class is rampant, then the government might overestimate the need for new housing, which could still lead to runaway conditions it wants to avoid. I assume the intended controls would be ok if the government secretly did some studies and modeling on what percentage of new homes are actually being used as long-term dwellings.
Some prime land in downtown Nanning was recently sold at 2,000,000 yuan a square meter, which is like $30,000 a square foot, which is unheard of. The developer plans to turn it into the tallest building in Nanning, to be used as a world trade center of sorts. We'll find out if that works out in a few years.
As we drove out toward the less developed areas of Nanning, we saw some "crop houses" standing on the sides of the road. The city government had already signaled its intent to move government buildings to this area, so the peasants that owned this land had wisely built bare-bones houses on it. The houses are sound but unfurnished and not intended for living or rent. Their only purpose is to cost fair market value when the government claimns imminent domain. When they're knocked down for the actual development of whatever the government wants to build here, they'll become a cash crop for the clever owners. Lin Jin said that there is grumbling that the government should just take the land and not pay, but it'll probably be treated fairly, as the peasants as a collective can make quite a scene, which the city would not want to reach the national government. If nothing else, I'm impressed that even the farmers have the cash to put on this sort of gamble. They're probably used to it with all the seasons and weather they have always had to deal with.
We take a break from all this watching to have lunch at a restaurant Lin Jin knows. He knows all the places we go to, since he's lived here for quite a while. The centerpiece of lunch is some steamed young chicken. It's like boiled chicken in that the primary source of flavor is the chicken itself. While it's being steamed, juices are collected and concentrated as a sauce. Some salt is added to the sauce. The way to eat it is to put on a lunch-lady glove and pick out a piece, and then dip it into the sauce and eat. It was really delicious. The meat was tender and really flavorful. I think it's in the spirit of a French roast chicken, where the showcase is how good the chicken meat is. I also get to eat the chicken feet and neck, which are huge amusement for me, since I love nibbling all the bits of meat off.
After lunch we go back to sightseeing. We hit up the new Guangxi Sports Stadium, a local bridge, a temple bordering the city, and a private hotel heavily used by top CCP officials. This last place we didn't really manage to get into. We claimed to be wanting to check it out to see if we want to say, but I don't think we were high class enough to pull it off. We manage to drive in enough of it to see how nice the grass was kept, and a couple of the buildings, but not much else. A very young guard gets in the road and tells us to back up outta there, so we reverse the car for at least a minute before we decide to try turning around in the narrow private way. We get outta there.
One note about Chinese family relationship terms:
The terms for aunt, uncle, grandmother, grandfather, etc. differ on the mother's side and the father's side. They also differ a bit between the north and south. There's a particular term for when some cousins have fathers who are brothers. For all other cases, cousins are "biao ge" cousin elder brother or "biao di" cousin younger brother. But when addressing a cousin whose son to your father's brother, the term is "tang ge" or "tang di," depending on your relative ages. Oh, and the relationship applies to female cousins, too. Not as cool as seventh son of a seventh son, but still an interesting partriarchal distinction. The male cousins are "tang xiong tang di," and are guaranteed to have descendants who share the family name.
In the north, one's wife is typically refered to by a term that's not awfully endearing. If you tried to convey the connotation to English, it might come across as "the old lady" or "the ol' missus." In the south, the typically used term is "loved one" or "person I love."
Monday, October 11, 2010
9/13
9/13 9:20am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_13?authkey=Gv1sRgCKuOkKS418XsogE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMJYt_frjnI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgwRxj2KGPo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEGMQ97B_Z8
I'm taking this day to describe my dad's ancestral home. It's a term that means where your parents lived. We got here in Pingnan, my dad's hometown, yesterday, but I wrote enough about the first half of the trip. Now I relate leaving a modern China and stepping back into the past.
When we were riding the train through northern China, my dad remarked on the poor places where people were living, "When they talk about becoming 'great,' China will never achieve it until these areas are raised up from their poverty." I wonder if he sees his hometown the same way. I mentioned previously that some of my mom's classmates, including Lin Jin, are pretty well off. He might have come up from the same area, and might have only worn one pair of pants per semester in college, but now I'm sure he sleeps with the windows shut and the AC blasting every night. For him to drive us back to my dad's hometown and to stay overnight -- that will be like stepping between two worlds. I don't think anyone I know in America has truly known how my dad's relatives live. I hope this post illustrates that accurately.
Just outside Nanning, the highway scenery could be mistaken for Tennessee, if I drugged you and woke you up in the car. If you go a couple more hours, though, the hills take on a craggy aspect like those along the river in famous Guilin. This isn't surprising as Guilin is only 200 km from here. Banana trees crop up. The road gets worse and worse. If I woke you out of your drug coma at this point and told you it was Vietnam, you might believe me. I have pictures for the Tennessee part and videos for the Vietnam parts. Eventually, the highway ends and the country road begins. We drive through these parts, and I note how different the people look from up north, and certainly from in Tibet. After some more travel on the country road, slowed down by bouts of heavy rain, we reach the dirt and slab roads. We go some more along these, braving a loaf minivan stuck on a muddy stone bridge over a creek, until we finally reach my dad's ancestral home. It's a walled house with an iron gate, on the side of a very narrow dirt road. The road used to be wide, but has narrowed as people expand their homes. Inside the wall is two halves, the past and the present. In the past half is a one floor tile-roofed remnant of a house. It houses a truck and a little car, along with some young chickens. In the present half is a 3 story concrete house, built my dad's older brother.
This is one of the best houses in the village, and yet it leaves so much to be desired. In describing and showing it to you, I wonder how I will deal with keeping up the ancestral home. Seeing this place for the first time profoundly makes me think about how this place is a physical manifestation of my family bonds. At the same time, I think it'll make you question how you think of your own standard of living.
I have few relatives. There's my mom's side, and then my dad's side. My dad is Southern Chinese, and follows southern traditions of maintaining the ancestors' land. The three spots of land maintained by my uncle are all within a few hundred meters of each other. Ideally, this land will be kept for eternity by the sons and sons of sons of our family. As long as this land stannds, it ought to remain in the Mao family. As I said, the present half was built by my uncle. The past half is what my father has neglected to develop. Some day, it might pass to me or my cousins for development. I'm not sure, looking at it, what I should do.
When we get to the home, we all eat dinner. It's one I'm not especially hungry for, and I'll describe why later. After dinner, we go on a bit of a tour of the house. My uncle built it himself, using some contracted laborers for some parts. He's very proud of it, and for good reason. For a man who never went to college and was discharged from his teaching position for having a second child, he's done well with his lot. This is one of a few houses he's built, and since it was for himself, he made sure it was nice. "My son told me to only make it two floors [all they really need, really], but I heard the neighbors were going to make 3.5 floors, so I had to have 3.5 floors, too." The ceilings and high and the rooms are generously sized, but the floor is bare concrete and dusty everywhere. Nonetheless, it could be finished to an incredibly refined level. It just hasn't yet. We talk this over on the roof of the 3rd floor. I'm too chicken to walk up to the small poop deck roof, which makes up the 3rd and a half floor. My uncle points out over the neighboring houses. He says to me, "all these homes on this side of the road -- these are the people named Mao." There's only been a few times where I've felt such a strong sense of family. It fascinates me that for so long the Maos have been able to stay here in this small village, ever expanding and taking to the modern world. My dad describes his past from this high viewpoint.
"Over there is the creek where we used to bathe every night. It's now so small because people have been diverting it to water their farms. It used to be so wide. And that house with the curved wall over there -- that's the old home you visited in 2002. All those mountains in the distance -- those have never changed." Standing here on the roof of the house that my uncle built, next to a tract of land kept for my grandfather's other son, I keep thinking about what will happen next. About what it might take to keep this house, this monument of the Mao family, alive and well for the next half century. My participation would be hard. It doesn't make financial sense, and it makes less sense trying to participate in such a marginal part of my life half a world away. It still bears thinking about.
The pictures illustrate the poverty, in a specific sense, that my relatives live in. See for yourselves.
In the afternoon, during lunch, we got the call that another one of my mom's classmates was flying to Nanning to meet her, that night. So we had no choice (well, we did) but to go back to Nanning asap. And thus take leave of our relatives.
10:20pm CST
I regret forgetting to take some pictures that I should have, and for the whole taking off as suddenly as we did, but we have to keep going with the vacation. I know in some part it was because it was so hot, humid, and mosquitoey at my uncle's, that my parents and Lin Jin didn't really want to endure another night. I can't say anything bad about that, as the weather was really hard to bear. Though staying through it and living at my uncle's for even one night makes me appreciate how hard things must have been in the past for them, and how much better things are now. It's only when you get a taste of better things that you can't go back to the past.
So we took a slightly different route back to Nanning that ended up taking 3.5 hours instead of the 5 hours the other way. We ended up slightly ahead of my mom's other classmate who was flying in from Guangzhou. This guy was so enthusiastic to meet up with old friends that he bailed on seeing his daughter off on her return flight to America so he could schedule things this way. Such is the enthusiasm these college classmates have for visiting each other.
So the classmate flying in, Chen Dexin, was picked up by yet another classmate. They arrived to the restaurant where we'd decided to have dinner some 20 minutes after we did. The classmates chatted uproariously about various things. It was also a good dinner, whose highlight wasn't a dish, but a cat who'd learned to try to beg from the outdoors tables. The waitstaff kept shooing it away, but it'd run and come back every time. I really wanted to give it some scraps, but I knew it'd be better for it to survive some other way. The restaurant had fish tanks out front that you could visit and set up dishes from. Like you could ask for shrimp cooked a certain way, and one person would jot that down while another fished out the amount of shrimp you specified. Some of the animals seemed like they probably shouldn't be sold and eaten, like the sturgeon, but I wasn't going to dwell too hard on it.
After dinner, we went back to Lin Jin's apartment. He's rented the first 4 floors, hilariously, to a massage parlor. It's all aboveboard and advertises itself as a foot massage parlor, but quite entertaining to see into the big windows for each room at the clients getting massages. It makes you wonder if there's a back room somewhere. Nanning has had a big graft and sex trade crackdown, so this shop is probably keep clean. The 5th and 6th floors he keeps for himself, even though he has quarters at his job. He comes back here every so often when he needs to crash in this part of the city. The apartment is pretty modern and has AC, which will make it infinitely more tolerable to sleep in.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_13?authkey=Gv1sRgCKuOkKS418XsogE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMJYt_frjnI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgwRxj2KGPo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEGMQ97B_Z8
I'm taking this day to describe my dad's ancestral home. It's a term that means where your parents lived. We got here in Pingnan, my dad's hometown, yesterday, but I wrote enough about the first half of the trip. Now I relate leaving a modern China and stepping back into the past.
When we were riding the train through northern China, my dad remarked on the poor places where people were living, "When they talk about becoming 'great,' China will never achieve it until these areas are raised up from their poverty." I wonder if he sees his hometown the same way. I mentioned previously that some of my mom's classmates, including Lin Jin, are pretty well off. He might have come up from the same area, and might have only worn one pair of pants per semester in college, but now I'm sure he sleeps with the windows shut and the AC blasting every night. For him to drive us back to my dad's hometown and to stay overnight -- that will be like stepping between two worlds. I don't think anyone I know in America has truly known how my dad's relatives live. I hope this post illustrates that accurately.
Just outside Nanning, the highway scenery could be mistaken for Tennessee, if I drugged you and woke you up in the car. If you go a couple more hours, though, the hills take on a craggy aspect like those along the river in famous Guilin. This isn't surprising as Guilin is only 200 km from here. Banana trees crop up. The road gets worse and worse. If I woke you out of your drug coma at this point and told you it was Vietnam, you might believe me. I have pictures for the Tennessee part and videos for the Vietnam parts. Eventually, the highway ends and the country road begins. We drive through these parts, and I note how different the people look from up north, and certainly from in Tibet. After some more travel on the country road, slowed down by bouts of heavy rain, we reach the dirt and slab roads. We go some more along these, braving a loaf minivan stuck on a muddy stone bridge over a creek, until we finally reach my dad's ancestral home. It's a walled house with an iron gate, on the side of a very narrow dirt road. The road used to be wide, but has narrowed as people expand their homes. Inside the wall is two halves, the past and the present. In the past half is a one floor tile-roofed remnant of a house. It houses a truck and a little car, along with some young chickens. In the present half is a 3 story concrete house, built my dad's older brother.
This is one of the best houses in the village, and yet it leaves so much to be desired. In describing and showing it to you, I wonder how I will deal with keeping up the ancestral home. Seeing this place for the first time profoundly makes me think about how this place is a physical manifestation of my family bonds. At the same time, I think it'll make you question how you think of your own standard of living.
I have few relatives. There's my mom's side, and then my dad's side. My dad is Southern Chinese, and follows southern traditions of maintaining the ancestors' land. The three spots of land maintained by my uncle are all within a few hundred meters of each other. Ideally, this land will be kept for eternity by the sons and sons of sons of our family. As long as this land stannds, it ought to remain in the Mao family. As I said, the present half was built by my uncle. The past half is what my father has neglected to develop. Some day, it might pass to me or my cousins for development. I'm not sure, looking at it, what I should do.
When we get to the home, we all eat dinner. It's one I'm not especially hungry for, and I'll describe why later. After dinner, we go on a bit of a tour of the house. My uncle built it himself, using some contracted laborers for some parts. He's very proud of it, and for good reason. For a man who never went to college and was discharged from his teaching position for having a second child, he's done well with his lot. This is one of a few houses he's built, and since it was for himself, he made sure it was nice. "My son told me to only make it two floors [all they really need, really], but I heard the neighbors were going to make 3.5 floors, so I had to have 3.5 floors, too." The ceilings and high and the rooms are generously sized, but the floor is bare concrete and dusty everywhere. Nonetheless, it could be finished to an incredibly refined level. It just hasn't yet. We talk this over on the roof of the 3rd floor. I'm too chicken to walk up to the small poop deck roof, which makes up the 3rd and a half floor. My uncle points out over the neighboring houses. He says to me, "all these homes on this side of the road -- these are the people named Mao." There's only been a few times where I've felt such a strong sense of family. It fascinates me that for so long the Maos have been able to stay here in this small village, ever expanding and taking to the modern world. My dad describes his past from this high viewpoint.
"Over there is the creek where we used to bathe every night. It's now so small because people have been diverting it to water their farms. It used to be so wide. And that house with the curved wall over there -- that's the old home you visited in 2002. All those mountains in the distance -- those have never changed." Standing here on the roof of the house that my uncle built, next to a tract of land kept for my grandfather's other son, I keep thinking about what will happen next. About what it might take to keep this house, this monument of the Mao family, alive and well for the next half century. My participation would be hard. It doesn't make financial sense, and it makes less sense trying to participate in such a marginal part of my life half a world away. It still bears thinking about.
The pictures illustrate the poverty, in a specific sense, that my relatives live in. See for yourselves.
In the afternoon, during lunch, we got the call that another one of my mom's classmates was flying to Nanning to meet her, that night. So we had no choice (well, we did) but to go back to Nanning asap. And thus take leave of our relatives.
10:20pm CST
I regret forgetting to take some pictures that I should have, and for the whole taking off as suddenly as we did, but we have to keep going with the vacation. I know in some part it was because it was so hot, humid, and mosquitoey at my uncle's, that my parents and Lin Jin didn't really want to endure another night. I can't say anything bad about that, as the weather was really hard to bear. Though staying through it and living at my uncle's for even one night makes me appreciate how hard things must have been in the past for them, and how much better things are now. It's only when you get a taste of better things that you can't go back to the past.
So we took a slightly different route back to Nanning that ended up taking 3.5 hours instead of the 5 hours the other way. We ended up slightly ahead of my mom's other classmate who was flying in from Guangzhou. This guy was so enthusiastic to meet up with old friends that he bailed on seeing his daughter off on her return flight to America so he could schedule things this way. Such is the enthusiasm these college classmates have for visiting each other.
So the classmate flying in, Chen Dexin, was picked up by yet another classmate. They arrived to the restaurant where we'd decided to have dinner some 20 minutes after we did. The classmates chatted uproariously about various things. It was also a good dinner, whose highlight wasn't a dish, but a cat who'd learned to try to beg from the outdoors tables. The waitstaff kept shooing it away, but it'd run and come back every time. I really wanted to give it some scraps, but I knew it'd be better for it to survive some other way. The restaurant had fish tanks out front that you could visit and set up dishes from. Like you could ask for shrimp cooked a certain way, and one person would jot that down while another fished out the amount of shrimp you specified. Some of the animals seemed like they probably shouldn't be sold and eaten, like the sturgeon, but I wasn't going to dwell too hard on it.
After dinner, we went back to Lin Jin's apartment. He's rented the first 4 floors, hilariously, to a massage parlor. It's all aboveboard and advertises itself as a foot massage parlor, but quite entertaining to see into the big windows for each room at the clients getting massages. It makes you wonder if there's a back room somewhere. Nanning has had a big graft and sex trade crackdown, so this shop is probably keep clean. The 5th and 6th floors he keeps for himself, even though he has quarters at his job. He comes back here every so often when he needs to crash in this part of the city. The apartment is pretty modern and has AC, which will make it infinitely more tolerable to sleep in.
Friday, October 8, 2010
9/12
9/12 8:30am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_12?authkey=Gv1sRgCKOC2piOk7TaiQE
I woke up and groggily answered the phone. I was expected at the dim sum place next door. I shower and pack, and head downstairs to meet my dad, who'll walk me over.
Dim sum was with Lin Jin, some of my mom's other classmates, and one of my dad's friends. Basically all the people we knew local to Nanning. Dim sum was good. A lot of what you see in the dim sum places in the US, and pretty much the same quality. But also some specialty stuff that I took pictures of. My favorite was the pineapple bread. Somehow, they manage to infuse flour into a slice of pineapple and bake it into bread. It looks just like pineapple, has slight pineapple flavor, and has the texture of bread. After dim sum, we say our goodbyes and pack our bags into Lin Jin's Outlander. Or is it a Montero? I can't get my Mitsubishi SUVs straight.
Leaving Nanning, it's obvious how well developed this place is. It's one of the biggest cities in Guangxi, and rapidly developing into a clean and pretty city. I would say the architecture of the new buildings popping up is pretty Western. Unlike in Beijing, space is abundant and there's no fear of building tall. Recall that I said Beijing was not big on the skyscraper PR contest. One reason for that is because of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which registered 8.6. Obviously the quality of construction back then in a Chinese city wasn't that great, but the city was pretty much leveled, and 25% of the people died. Tangshan is about 90 miles outside of Beijing, and the fear has always been there than another quake could hit the capital. Because of this, buildings are constructed much more conseratively in the north. In the south, where there have never been earthquakes, buildings are constructed to take advantage of that. I'll demonstrate with pictures later.
Before we totally leave Nanning, we stop by a fruit shop and pick up some longyan (longan). These are the smaller sweeter counterparts to lizhi (lychee). There were some other exotic fruit on display and I snapped pics. Once we got a good amount, we bailed and traveled out of the city.
After getting on the highway, we go for a couple hours. This gives my mom and Lin Jin plenty of time to catch up, and natually, reminisce about the past. Here, I go into an essay on my thoughts on that part of my mom's life, largely from what I knew before, but also influenced by this recent conversation.
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I list October Sky as one of my favorite movies. When asked, I try weakly to explain that it's as close to my parents' generation's version the Chinese Dream as possible. Read up a bit on the movie if you're not familiar. Perhaps my whole life will be lived in reflection of what my parents went through, which is fine with me. When I say my parents' generation, I'm talking specifically about Chinese who were eligible to apply for the first year of college, which reopened at the end of the Cultural Revolution, which ended in 1966. My parents were 22 or so when they went to college. They had been sitting around not doing much during the Cultural Revolution, which is why they were older than the normal age. Their classmates were younger and older, since college was rebooted from nothing. It wasn't as though they had their hearts set on going, though. For the most part, it just sort of happened. The consequences of such a thing, though, were obviously profound and worth describing. Lin Jin and my parents agreed that at the time, college was an intriguing prospect but not a thing which was clearly worth pursuing. I think my mom has talked the most about it, so it's easiest to present her story as the example.
Growing up, my mom didn't really have any long term goals. Contrast this to the modern US primary school student, who is crushed under various regimes of proto career development. Back then, my mom was happy to play around. She managed to get the best grades all through primary school. My mom finished high school in the middle of the Cultura Revolution, a segment of history too complex to cover here, but one of whose effects was the banning of college. After high school, my mom volunteered to go to the communes to work and learn. After three years on a commune, she was done with her tour of duty. She had been hoping to be granted a job by the Chinese Communist Party for her efforts, but there was nothing happening. They simply said, "you can go back home and wait for us to call you up, or you could apply to go to college, which is starting back up again." Going to college would be a virtual free pass into CCP membership, which was at the time a very desirable thing.
So my mom was certainly interested, though not completely motivated. Her dad didn't think much of college. He wasn't like the blue collar coal miner dad from October Sky. In fact, he was even an administrator in the local school department! And yet, he and many like him voiced the opinion that getting a college education was a hoighty-toighty way to put off making a good honest living. My mom had doubts that this was the right thing, if so many were opposed to it. One of her high school teachers sought her out and basically forced her to get her application together. He went to mom's dad and argued in favor of college. He gave her a crash course in chemistry and had another teacher school her in political history. Going into the exam, my mom was really buzzing with confidence. The national college exam in 1977 was an extremely selective process. For every 10,000 applicants, one was accepted. The applicant was asked to list several disciplines they wanted to study. On the other end, the various schools tried to pick out applicants whose interests matched majors they offered. The more prestigious schools go to go first, so they scooped up the best scorers. The distribution of majors was more or less centrally planned, so obviously, in this melee, not everyone could get a major from their list. My mom listed math, meterology, and physics. She was called up by the Changsha Technical Institute to be a geology major.
When my mom got to Changsha (in Hunan province), she made friends with another woman in the geology department. Someone had joked to my mom that a geology major would be slogging up and down mountains looking at rocks, which didn't that glamorous to either of them. Her friend had serious doubts, and asked mom for some money, promising to return it. My mom realized that her friend was looking to return home, and wouldn't give the money to her. My mom insisted that if she went home, nothing she could do in four years be worth more in the eyes of the CCP to get her closer to membership. Her friend still wonders if that decision has made all the difference in her life. So my parents' generation faced so many obstacles and discouragements against getting into college. Making it in was no small feat, a combination of luck and talent.
The 28 people in my mom's class were like a microcosm. The college system at the time meant that all people in the major took all their classes together. Think about it -- if you'd gone to all the same classes with all the same people, you'd build up a much higher level of kinship with them. These were friends who were chosen for each other. This deep bond is, 30 years later, why my mom has enough sway with her classmates that we can enjoy an expenses-paid trip to Tibet, and why another classmate can offer to spend a couple days driving us around in Guangxi. These friendships obviously play into the whole Chinese construct of 'connections.' Things in China happen through connections. Using Tibet as an example: my mom is classmates with a senior engineer at a big mining company (geology majors, remember?), headquartered in Beijing. This person is high-ranking enough that he has several connections in Tibet. He asked one of the local managers to take care of planning a trip for his frieds. Doing this well would get that manager props in Beijing, and perhaps get him a promotion down the road. So the local manager knows a guy who manager tour guides. Between these two, the necessary paperwork is drawn up to hire a tour guide and driver, and the all costs are to written up as a business expense. When we get to Lhasa, we meet the manager and hang out with him briefly. He has the tour guide (Tsenam) and his underlings usher us around the rest of the way. This completely coordinated affair is ultimately all thanks to who went to college with whom, supported by a chain of connections. So on this trip and previous trips to China, we have greatly benefitted from a network of well-to-do or influential friends.
A related topic is the fact itself that all these original college graduates have gone on to such big things. Lin Jin, in addition to his day job, has a lot of real estate going on and bootstrapped himself from basically nothing. This is a reflection less on his specific aptitude at school and more on how strongly China was filtering talent in that first year. Many of mom's classmates in China have done very well for themselves. Compared to some classmates who went abroad, they are relatively much better off. I don't have any regrets about my upbringing in the US and who I've become through it, but I acknowledge my family is completely middle class in its attitudes and level of living. If one of mom's classmates came to the US, I could offer to drive them around Boston, but we couldn't shower our friends with that same level of affection we've been shown in China. They couldn't get a translator and Sam the Patriot walk them around the Freedom Trail, for example. Sure, some of that is cultural, in that in the US, you'd have to be very very important to get that kind of treatment without paying for it, but by and large it's because my parents haven't had the level of career achievement that their peers in China have. When thinking about an evil twin, it's most natural for me to think of him as the me who had parents who stayed in China and stuck it out. What would I have learned differently? What would I have done with my life?
At the end of the Cultural Revolution, my mom decided to go to college on more or less a whim. She decided to come to the US the same way. One day she said to herself that it would be nice to have traveled abroad, and that come hell or high water, she would accomplish it. My dad got the itch when he came back from a conference in the Philippines with some US dollars. Eventually, my parents got student visas and found receiving schools. They thought that they'd give it a go, trying to earn a degree in the US or maybe making some money doing work, and then heading back to China. When we arrived, my parents talked to other Chinese grad students, the consensus was that no one ever thought of going back. Someone told them, "I stopped thinking about returning home the moment I stepped on the plane." My mom was quite surprised at the gap between her thinking and that of the grad students already there. Bit by bit, she found incidents that shaped her thinking about America and convinced her to stay. My parents stayed late at school doing work and also worked at a Chinese restaurant on the side. To facilitate all this running around, my dad bought an old orange Datsun 210. He wanted to show it off to my mom and drove us around. Because he was still so unfamiliar with driving and the American road system, he managed to high-center the car on a road median. He broke the oil pan and the car started smoking. My mom's heart sank, as the only extra money they had in the their whole lives had just been burned up. Some other grad students walking by saw us stranded and tried to help. Because we couldn't pay for a tow, they pushed us a mile back to the grad school dorms. There, someone fixed up the car for close to free. So glad were my parents that the car was working again that we decided to go to the beach for my birthday. About a few miles out of town, one of the tires blew. We were dumbstruck by our bad luck. While eating our picnic on the side of the road, a stranger pulled up in a truck to see if we were ok. We didn't even know what a spare tire was. He asked to see it. It was flat. So he told us to wait while he drove to get it inflated. When he got back, he put it on for us. We decided not to risk going to the beach on the donut, but were of course very grateful. These and other incidents left an indelibile impression on my mom about American culture. She came around to staying in America. As for me, that was the first moment where I really appreciated cars and the culture surrounding them in America.--------
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edit: My mom gave me some input and corrections to the narrative I wrote above. That mostly covered her college phase, but this gives more background into the years leading up to it:
As my mom was about to graduate middle school, my grandmother became pretty sick. She had trouble doing work and at times couldn't even walk. Because of this, my mom's father was concerned about the welfare of the family. He was against my mom's going to high school in the face of this situation. I think I may have composited my mom's high school and middle school teachers. In any case, her middle school teacher made a strong case for her to go to high school because my mom was doing well in class, and my grandfather ceded. Fortunately, my grandmother recovered and could resume running the household. When my mother graduated from high school, she was dispatched to a countryside commune to work alongside farmers. Because of her excellent performance, she was promoted to a paid position, leading a drilling crew consisting of three men and eight women at the Tangshan Hydroelectric Bureau. It was a decent job, paying 32 yuan a month. Furthermore, she was honored by the province and city government, and carried some real potential to be promoted to a much higher position. This was right around the time that the Cultural Revolution ended and the colleges reopened. At this point, my grandfather was neutral to the idea of my mother going to college. Her position with the bureau was considered quite an honor and the income was nice (and ultimately, pretty competitive with my mom's post-college salary of 46 yuan a month). Still, my grandmother was healthy and did not present a reason to stay close to home. At the time, my mom didn’t think going to college was such a big deal, probably in the light of her current job. My mom's high school teacher heavily encouraged my mom to take the exam because of her highest academic marks. The teacher did not want my mom to waste her talent.
Another anecdote that came out of the conversation --
My mom went on a tangent about the few times her mother had to quit her job. Once was in early 1960s, during the national famine disaster. There were three consecutive years of flooding and drought, which resulted in agricultural land being very unproductive. On top of that, the Soviet Union required that the Chinese government pay back what it borrowed during Korea War. The end result was grim -- a lot of Chinese were hungry to the point of death, and maybe only “80% of population could only eat to 80% full.” There was simply not enough to eat. The stories from that time are really scary. The other time grandmother quit her job was when she fell ill before my mother went to high school. This time, she qualified for a monthly pension, but she decided to take an up-front lump sum because the family needed cash desperately. The one-time package was actually quite high, enough to buy a bicycle and other big items to support kids or family’s immediate needs. I think it's hard for people of our day to imagine the poverty people faced. At the time, my grandmother worked, and her mother stayed home to cook and take care of the kids. As my mom recalls it, her grandmother favored her daughters (my grandmother and my grandmother’s younger sister), her son-in-law, and the grandson whom she had raised. But she wasn't as attached to my mother or my mother’s two older siblings. My grandfather could see that these three children were being underfed, even though mom's grandmother claimed or even believed she was setting out fair portions of food, inevitably the portions were slanted away from these three. To excuse herself, mom's grandmother would call out if she ever saw my mom dashing around, "Look at you, running around. How can you not be getting full?" My mom said that, indeed, the three of them (her sister, her older brother, and her) learned to sit still more often, not just to avoid such accusations but also because of the very real hunger they felt. Finally, my grandfather had had enough. He could not let his own children starve, so he asked my grandmother to stop working and to stay home. The pay was so poor back then that the family didn't really miss the lost income. At least this way, my mom got an extra bite to eat.
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One of mom's classmates managed to do two more degrees after his geology major. At the time, you had to sneak back into school somehow, since the government was expecting you to put the first degree to use asap. One of his extra degrees was from the Lu Xun Institute for the Arts. I was surprised when I heard the name. That's because Lu Xun was a revolutionary era writer. China's revolution and overthrow of the empire happened in 1911. But in some ways, you'd think nothing existed in China until the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. After all, prior to 1949, things are arguably not canonized as supporting or espousing Communist ideals. Lu Xun's intellectual writings were anti-fascist and anti-imperial, and with the right interpretations, were subversive against a regime like the CCP. I think in all of the interegnum between 1911 and 1949, the CCP and KMD have shared very few heroes, among which number Lu Xun and Sun Yat-sen. If the tree trunk of modern Chinese political history is Sun Yat-sen, then the two branches are Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. It's a shame that it never quite worked out the way Sun wanted, but there you have it. Note that Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek are their Cantonese names, as that's part of their geographic identity. In Mandarin, their names are Sun Zhongshan and Jiang Jieshi.
10:45pm
I'm in my underwear and I'm sweating balls in my room. I'm sweating drops of sweat. The south is hot.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_12?authkey=Gv1sRgCKOC2piOk7TaiQE
I woke up and groggily answered the phone. I was expected at the dim sum place next door. I shower and pack, and head downstairs to meet my dad, who'll walk me over.
Dim sum was with Lin Jin, some of my mom's other classmates, and one of my dad's friends. Basically all the people we knew local to Nanning. Dim sum was good. A lot of what you see in the dim sum places in the US, and pretty much the same quality. But also some specialty stuff that I took pictures of. My favorite was the pineapple bread. Somehow, they manage to infuse flour into a slice of pineapple and bake it into bread. It looks just like pineapple, has slight pineapple flavor, and has the texture of bread. After dim sum, we say our goodbyes and pack our bags into Lin Jin's Outlander. Or is it a Montero? I can't get my Mitsubishi SUVs straight.
Leaving Nanning, it's obvious how well developed this place is. It's one of the biggest cities in Guangxi, and rapidly developing into a clean and pretty city. I would say the architecture of the new buildings popping up is pretty Western. Unlike in Beijing, space is abundant and there's no fear of building tall. Recall that I said Beijing was not big on the skyscraper PR contest. One reason for that is because of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which registered 8.6. Obviously the quality of construction back then in a Chinese city wasn't that great, but the city was pretty much leveled, and 25% of the people died. Tangshan is about 90 miles outside of Beijing, and the fear has always been there than another quake could hit the capital. Because of this, buildings are constructed much more conseratively in the north. In the south, where there have never been earthquakes, buildings are constructed to take advantage of that. I'll demonstrate with pictures later.
Before we totally leave Nanning, we stop by a fruit shop and pick up some longyan (longan). These are the smaller sweeter counterparts to lizhi (lychee). There were some other exotic fruit on display and I snapped pics. Once we got a good amount, we bailed and traveled out of the city.
After getting on the highway, we go for a couple hours. This gives my mom and Lin Jin plenty of time to catch up, and natually, reminisce about the past. Here, I go into an essay on my thoughts on that part of my mom's life, largely from what I knew before, but also influenced by this recent conversation.
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I list October Sky as one of my favorite movies. When asked, I try weakly to explain that it's as close to my parents' generation's version the Chinese Dream as possible. Read up a bit on the movie if you're not familiar. Perhaps my whole life will be lived in reflection of what my parents went through, which is fine with me. When I say my parents' generation, I'm talking specifically about Chinese who were eligible to apply for the first year of college, which reopened at the end of the Cultural Revolution, which ended in 1966. My parents were 22 or so when they went to college. They had been sitting around not doing much during the Cultural Revolution, which is why they were older than the normal age. Their classmates were younger and older, since college was rebooted from nothing. It wasn't as though they had their hearts set on going, though. For the most part, it just sort of happened. The consequences of such a thing, though, were obviously profound and worth describing. Lin Jin and my parents agreed that at the time, college was an intriguing prospect but not a thing which was clearly worth pursuing. I think my mom has talked the most about it, so it's easiest to present her story as the example.
Growing up, my mom didn't really have any long term goals. Contrast this to the modern US primary school student, who is crushed under various regimes of proto career development. Back then, my mom was happy to play around. She managed to get the best grades all through primary school. My mom finished high school in the middle of the Cultura Revolution, a segment of history too complex to cover here, but one of whose effects was the banning of college. After high school, my mom volunteered to go to the communes to work and learn. After three years on a commune, she was done with her tour of duty. She had been hoping to be granted a job by the Chinese Communist Party for her efforts, but there was nothing happening. They simply said, "you can go back home and wait for us to call you up, or you could apply to go to college, which is starting back up again." Going to college would be a virtual free pass into CCP membership, which was at the time a very desirable thing.
So my mom was certainly interested, though not completely motivated. Her dad didn't think much of college. He wasn't like the blue collar coal miner dad from October Sky. In fact, he was even an administrator in the local school department! And yet, he and many like him voiced the opinion that getting a college education was a hoighty-toighty way to put off making a good honest living. My mom had doubts that this was the right thing, if so many were opposed to it. One of her high school teachers sought her out and basically forced her to get her application together. He went to mom's dad and argued in favor of college. He gave her a crash course in chemistry and had another teacher school her in political history. Going into the exam, my mom was really buzzing with confidence. The national college exam in 1977 was an extremely selective process. For every 10,000 applicants, one was accepted. The applicant was asked to list several disciplines they wanted to study. On the other end, the various schools tried to pick out applicants whose interests matched majors they offered. The more prestigious schools go to go first, so they scooped up the best scorers. The distribution of majors was more or less centrally planned, so obviously, in this melee, not everyone could get a major from their list. My mom listed math, meterology, and physics. She was called up by the Changsha Technical Institute to be a geology major.
When my mom got to Changsha (in Hunan province), she made friends with another woman in the geology department. Someone had joked to my mom that a geology major would be slogging up and down mountains looking at rocks, which didn't that glamorous to either of them. Her friend had serious doubts, and asked mom for some money, promising to return it. My mom realized that her friend was looking to return home, and wouldn't give the money to her. My mom insisted that if she went home, nothing she could do in four years be worth more in the eyes of the CCP to get her closer to membership. Her friend still wonders if that decision has made all the difference in her life. So my parents' generation faced so many obstacles and discouragements against getting into college. Making it in was no small feat, a combination of luck and talent.
The 28 people in my mom's class were like a microcosm. The college system at the time meant that all people in the major took all their classes together. Think about it -- if you'd gone to all the same classes with all the same people, you'd build up a much higher level of kinship with them. These were friends who were chosen for each other. This deep bond is, 30 years later, why my mom has enough sway with her classmates that we can enjoy an expenses-paid trip to Tibet, and why another classmate can offer to spend a couple days driving us around in Guangxi. These friendships obviously play into the whole Chinese construct of 'connections.' Things in China happen through connections. Using Tibet as an example: my mom is classmates with a senior engineer at a big mining company (geology majors, remember?), headquartered in Beijing. This person is high-ranking enough that he has several connections in Tibet. He asked one of the local managers to take care of planning a trip for his frieds. Doing this well would get that manager props in Beijing, and perhaps get him a promotion down the road. So the local manager knows a guy who manager tour guides. Between these two, the necessary paperwork is drawn up to hire a tour guide and driver, and the all costs are to written up as a business expense. When we get to Lhasa, we meet the manager and hang out with him briefly. He has the tour guide (Tsenam) and his underlings usher us around the rest of the way. This completely coordinated affair is ultimately all thanks to who went to college with whom, supported by a chain of connections. So on this trip and previous trips to China, we have greatly benefitted from a network of well-to-do or influential friends.
A related topic is the fact itself that all these original college graduates have gone on to such big things. Lin Jin, in addition to his day job, has a lot of real estate going on and bootstrapped himself from basically nothing. This is a reflection less on his specific aptitude at school and more on how strongly China was filtering talent in that first year. Many of mom's classmates in China have done very well for themselves. Compared to some classmates who went abroad, they are relatively much better off. I don't have any regrets about my upbringing in the US and who I've become through it, but I acknowledge my family is completely middle class in its attitudes and level of living. If one of mom's classmates came to the US, I could offer to drive them around Boston, but we couldn't shower our friends with that same level of affection we've been shown in China. They couldn't get a translator and Sam the Patriot walk them around the Freedom Trail, for example. Sure, some of that is cultural, in that in the US, you'd have to be very very important to get that kind of treatment without paying for it, but by and large it's because my parents haven't had the level of career achievement that their peers in China have. When thinking about an evil twin, it's most natural for me to think of him as the me who had parents who stayed in China and stuck it out. What would I have learned differently? What would I have done with my life?
At the end of the Cultural Revolution, my mom decided to go to college on more or less a whim. She decided to come to the US the same way. One day she said to herself that it would be nice to have traveled abroad, and that come hell or high water, she would accomplish it. My dad got the itch when he came back from a conference in the Philippines with some US dollars. Eventually, my parents got student visas and found receiving schools. They thought that they'd give it a go, trying to earn a degree in the US or maybe making some money doing work, and then heading back to China. When we arrived, my parents talked to other Chinese grad students, the consensus was that no one ever thought of going back. Someone told them, "I stopped thinking about returning home the moment I stepped on the plane." My mom was quite surprised at the gap between her thinking and that of the grad students already there. Bit by bit, she found incidents that shaped her thinking about America and convinced her to stay. My parents stayed late at school doing work and also worked at a Chinese restaurant on the side. To facilitate all this running around, my dad bought an old orange Datsun 210. He wanted to show it off to my mom and drove us around. Because he was still so unfamiliar with driving and the American road system, he managed to high-center the car on a road median. He broke the oil pan and the car started smoking. My mom's heart sank, as the only extra money they had in the their whole lives had just been burned up. Some other grad students walking by saw us stranded and tried to help. Because we couldn't pay for a tow, they pushed us a mile back to the grad school dorms. There, someone fixed up the car for close to free. So glad were my parents that the car was working again that we decided to go to the beach for my birthday. About a few miles out of town, one of the tires blew. We were dumbstruck by our bad luck. While eating our picnic on the side of the road, a stranger pulled up in a truck to see if we were ok. We didn't even know what a spare tire was. He asked to see it. It was flat. So he told us to wait while he drove to get it inflated. When he got back, he put it on for us. We decided not to risk going to the beach on the donut, but were of course very grateful. These and other incidents left an indelibile impression on my mom about American culture. She came around to staying in America. As for me, that was the first moment where I really appreciated cars and the culture surrounding them in America.--------
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edit: My mom gave me some input and corrections to the narrative I wrote above. That mostly covered her college phase, but this gives more background into the years leading up to it:
As my mom was about to graduate middle school, my grandmother became pretty sick. She had trouble doing work and at times couldn't even walk. Because of this, my mom's father was concerned about the welfare of the family. He was against my mom's going to high school in the face of this situation. I think I may have composited my mom's high school and middle school teachers. In any case, her middle school teacher made a strong case for her to go to high school because my mom was doing well in class, and my grandfather ceded. Fortunately, my grandmother recovered and could resume running the household. When my mother graduated from high school, she was dispatched to a countryside commune to work alongside farmers. Because of her excellent performance, she was promoted to a paid position, leading a drilling crew consisting of three men and eight women at the Tangshan Hydroelectric Bureau. It was a decent job, paying 32 yuan a month. Furthermore, she was honored by the province and city government, and carried some real potential to be promoted to a much higher position. This was right around the time that the Cultural Revolution ended and the colleges reopened. At this point, my grandfather was neutral to the idea of my mother going to college. Her position with the bureau was considered quite an honor and the income was nice (and ultimately, pretty competitive with my mom's post-college salary of 46 yuan a month). Still, my grandmother was healthy and did not present a reason to stay close to home. At the time, my mom didn’t think going to college was such a big deal, probably in the light of her current job. My mom's high school teacher heavily encouraged my mom to take the exam because of her highest academic marks. The teacher did not want my mom to waste her talent.
Another anecdote that came out of the conversation --
My mom went on a tangent about the few times her mother had to quit her job. Once was in early 1960s, during the national famine disaster. There were three consecutive years of flooding and drought, which resulted in agricultural land being very unproductive. On top of that, the Soviet Union required that the Chinese government pay back what it borrowed during Korea War. The end result was grim -- a lot of Chinese were hungry to the point of death, and maybe only “80% of population could only eat to 80% full.” There was simply not enough to eat. The stories from that time are really scary. The other time grandmother quit her job was when she fell ill before my mother went to high school. This time, she qualified for a monthly pension, but she decided to take an up-front lump sum because the family needed cash desperately. The one-time package was actually quite high, enough to buy a bicycle and other big items to support kids or family’s immediate needs. I think it's hard for people of our day to imagine the poverty people faced. At the time, my grandmother worked, and her mother stayed home to cook and take care of the kids. As my mom recalls it, her grandmother favored her daughters (my grandmother and my grandmother’s younger sister), her son-in-law, and the grandson whom she had raised. But she wasn't as attached to my mother or my mother’s two older siblings. My grandfather could see that these three children were being underfed, even though mom's grandmother claimed or even believed she was setting out fair portions of food, inevitably the portions were slanted away from these three. To excuse herself, mom's grandmother would call out if she ever saw my mom dashing around, "Look at you, running around. How can you not be getting full?" My mom said that, indeed, the three of them (her sister, her older brother, and her) learned to sit still more often, not just to avoid such accusations but also because of the very real hunger they felt. Finally, my grandfather had had enough. He could not let his own children starve, so he asked my grandmother to stop working and to stay home. The pay was so poor back then that the family didn't really miss the lost income. At least this way, my mom got an extra bite to eat.
---------
One of mom's classmates managed to do two more degrees after his geology major. At the time, you had to sneak back into school somehow, since the government was expecting you to put the first degree to use asap. One of his extra degrees was from the Lu Xun Institute for the Arts. I was surprised when I heard the name. That's because Lu Xun was a revolutionary era writer. China's revolution and overthrow of the empire happened in 1911. But in some ways, you'd think nothing existed in China until the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. After all, prior to 1949, things are arguably not canonized as supporting or espousing Communist ideals. Lu Xun's intellectual writings were anti-fascist and anti-imperial, and with the right interpretations, were subversive against a regime like the CCP. I think in all of the interegnum between 1911 and 1949, the CCP and KMD have shared very few heroes, among which number Lu Xun and Sun Yat-sen. If the tree trunk of modern Chinese political history is Sun Yat-sen, then the two branches are Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. It's a shame that it never quite worked out the way Sun wanted, but there you have it. Note that Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek are their Cantonese names, as that's part of their geographic identity. In Mandarin, their names are Sun Zhongshan and Jiang Jieshi.
10:45pm
I'm in my underwear and I'm sweating balls in my room. I'm sweating drops of sweat. The south is hot.
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