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.
Friday, October 15, 2010
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.
--------
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.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
9/11
9/11 10:30am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_11?authkey=Gv1sRgCIyyjr75zP-qhQE
Today we're heading out of Lhasa for Nanning, by way of Kunming and Shangri-la (yes, a Chinese city renamed itself that). The airport is about an hour out of Lhasa. Wouldn't you know it, our flight is delayed. I also lost my Germ-X alchol wipe going through security. I guess I'll have to get some ghetto Chinese version. The whole day is gonna be eaten up by flying. At this point we might not even be done by midnight.
Even at the airport, paper towels and tissue paper is non-existant. They know that if they offered any for free, the first person to come up to the dispenser would take all of it. This sort of ethical problem is long-standing enough that there's a term for moving away from it -- becoming civilized. Whenever someone does something like that, it's called not being civilized. And of course the goal as a nation is to become ever more civilized. Exhortations to become more civilized in various facets of life are plastered on signs everywhere. For example, I've seen in some bathrooms a poster that says, "one step closer to the urinal, one giant leap for our civilization." Because you know, splatter and pissing on the floor is a legitimate issue.
Eventually, we land in Nanning. One of mom's classmates, Lin Jin, is there to pick us up. He drives us on the nice Nanning highway system to where we'd stay for the night. Before we get to the hotel, he first swings by a noodle joint and has us sit down for a bit of a night snack. Nanning is in the province of Guangxi (Wide West) which is next to the province Guangdong (Wide East). Both these provinces are well in the area of China where Cantonese is spoken. Cantonese, like Mandarin, is subject to various dialects and local variations. Lin Jin and my dad are from counties that are fairly close to each other in Guangxi. The Cantonese they speak is quite different from that spoken in Hong Kong and Canton, but it's still mutually intelligible. These variants are probably far apart as a Puerto Rican from New York and a good ol Southern boy -- slight vocabulary difference and large accent difference. As far as Cantonese and Mandarin... if a Mandarin-only speaker listens carefully, he might pick up 25% of sentences/phrases a Cantonese speaker is saying, by similarity in sound and context.
The noodle soup Lin Jin ordered was excellent. It was savory and had nice and soft noodles. You can think of it as a Chinese version of pho, devoid of the Vietnamese style spicing. It was served in a big sandstone pot. Because of the air bubbles in the material, it acts like a thermos -- cool to the touch even when there's hot soup on the inside.
When we get to the hotel, it's pretty swank. It's not even a nice one. I guess it shows the level of refinement in Nanning. I have pictures.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_11?authkey=Gv1sRgCIyyjr75zP-qhQE
Today we're heading out of Lhasa for Nanning, by way of Kunming and Shangri-la (yes, a Chinese city renamed itself that). The airport is about an hour out of Lhasa. Wouldn't you know it, our flight is delayed. I also lost my Germ-X alchol wipe going through security. I guess I'll have to get some ghetto Chinese version. The whole day is gonna be eaten up by flying. At this point we might not even be done by midnight.
Even at the airport, paper towels and tissue paper is non-existant. They know that if they offered any for free, the first person to come up to the dispenser would take all of it. This sort of ethical problem is long-standing enough that there's a term for moving away from it -- becoming civilized. Whenever someone does something like that, it's called not being civilized. And of course the goal as a nation is to become ever more civilized. Exhortations to become more civilized in various facets of life are plastered on signs everywhere. For example, I've seen in some bathrooms a poster that says, "one step closer to the urinal, one giant leap for our civilization." Because you know, splatter and pissing on the floor is a legitimate issue.
Eventually, we land in Nanning. One of mom's classmates, Lin Jin, is there to pick us up. He drives us on the nice Nanning highway system to where we'd stay for the night. Before we get to the hotel, he first swings by a noodle joint and has us sit down for a bit of a night snack. Nanning is in the province of Guangxi (Wide West) which is next to the province Guangdong (Wide East). Both these provinces are well in the area of China where Cantonese is spoken. Cantonese, like Mandarin, is subject to various dialects and local variations. Lin Jin and my dad are from counties that are fairly close to each other in Guangxi. The Cantonese they speak is quite different from that spoken in Hong Kong and Canton, but it's still mutually intelligible. These variants are probably far apart as a Puerto Rican from New York and a good ol Southern boy -- slight vocabulary difference and large accent difference. As far as Cantonese and Mandarin... if a Mandarin-only speaker listens carefully, he might pick up 25% of sentences/phrases a Cantonese speaker is saying, by similarity in sound and context.
The noodle soup Lin Jin ordered was excellent. It was savory and had nice and soft noodles. You can think of it as a Chinese version of pho, devoid of the Vietnamese style spicing. It was served in a big sandstone pot. Because of the air bubbles in the material, it acts like a thermos -- cool to the touch even when there's hot soup on the inside.
When we get to the hotel, it's pretty swank. It's not even a nice one. I guess it shows the level of refinement in Nanning. I have pictures.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
9/10
9/10 7:40am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_10?authkey=Gv1sRgCPKenvfvrLbX6AE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l15SrABVlww
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q3riFjpkqU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWLr0iq8mYw
Today we're mostly taking a break. Because we advanced our schedule a bit with doing two trips yesterday, today we've got the morning free and the afternoon to visit Sera monastery. Our guide Tsenam seems to have been caught off guard by the schedule change, as he made some flimsy excuse about why he couldn't guide us through Sera. I think it'd have been slightly better if he'd told us right away yesterday when we asked to change the schedule instead of this morning. We should be able to get ourselves through Sera without too much trouble; we don't need a licensed tour guide to get tickets or enter.
For the morning though, we're just going to walk around and do some shopping. The obvious thing is that while, from stall to stall, the items are different, overall there's only a few kinds of items for sale. I was just reading on the Gaussian Unitary Exclusion principle, and I wonder if that governs the the distribution of items. You don't want to be the same as the vendor next to you, but you also don't want to be selling stuff that's too left-field, because few people will want it and you'll have trouble finding suppliers.
Walking around and just looking at the city is pretty relaxing. While I end up just buying a couple of gifts for friends back home, it's been pleasant walking around at our own pace and not having a strict agenda. I'm not even that miffed that the whole area is dedicated to tourism. We're just shopping, after all.
We head back to the hotel to have a quick lunch, and then meet up with the driver to go to Sera. The monastery is pretty close by, so we're right back out on our feet. This is a much bigger complex than the other sites, except for Norbulingkha, with dozens of buildings scattered around. Recall that a monastery is for training monks, so there's hundreds of them on site living in these dorms. The statues and chapels in the public areas look very similar to others we've seen, and without a guide to expound on them, we pass by them quickly. The main attraction at Sera is the monks' debates. This is held twice every other day. We made sure to get to Sera right before they start the event.
What happens --
The monks gather in a gravel courtyard, which is fortunately shaded by some trees. The tourists ring the outside of the courtyard. The monks split up into questioner-answerer pairs. The answering monk sits on a red pillow on the ground, while the questioning monk stands before him. When the event begins, the questioning monks proceed to present various questions. Each question is punctuated by an elaborate clapping motion, as though the questioner is sending the question on a current of air toward the answerer. If the answerer is wrong, the questioner gets to do multiple claps in succession.
Many of the monks did this with a lot of enthusiasm, seeming to have a good time of it. After all, they are all young men with a lot of youthful energy. There was a senior monk patrolling the rows, but he didn't seem to have objections to the content or procedure. Another monk was going around with what seemed to be a checklist. I suppose to make sure each pair had adequate performance? I can only assume the questions were trivia like, who was the founder of the Niungma sect? What are the Three Sorrows? What was the first Nepali chapter of Tibetan Buddhism? In any case, I'm not sure there's much debate to it.
Anyways, the monks are having a good time and enjoying themselves. It's a pleasant atmosphere, but because everything is conducted in Tibetan, we can't stay there watching it forever. We make a quiet exit (probably one of the earliest) and continue visiting around the monastery. We make a good circuit of it, hearing the monks debating the whole time. I hope nobody stayed for the whole thing.
After we left Sera, we went to our last dinner in Tibet. The coworker of my mom's college classmate couldn't make it as host, so he sent an underling to treat us to a good dinner. And boy was it a good one. We were dining at Sunset, or if you do a bit of wordplay, The Sun Never Sets. This was supposedly the best Tibetan restaurant in Lhasa. Everything was done according to Tibetan tradition, so midway into the dinner, they brought in three maids (I'm sure on any given night, some of the waitresses get to do serenade duty instead of serving) to serenade the guests. For each guest, they sing a traditional Tibetan song. After the song is over, the guest is presented with a glass of barley wine. The guest holds the glass in his left hand, and dips his right ring finger into the glass, and flicks the wine on his finger heavenward. He repeats a flick to the ground. Finally, he flicks toward the dinner table. These are the respective blessings to heaven, the earth, and the friends. Then, he takes a small sip and holds it. The maids top off the glass. He sips again, and the maids top it off again. Then he drains the glass. After he finishes, the maids put a kada on him and say Tashi delek. The maids did it to all three of us guests, singing a different song each time. It was pretty cool. The songs were really the best example of Tibetan singing, probably because they were acapella. I didn't drink my barley wine except for the sips, and I think I still managed to get a buzz off of that.
The food at the dinner had repeat dishes of stuff that we'd liked before, as well as new items. I think I liked the boiled lamb and yak momo the best. I have details in the photos. I think the only downside is that I won't be able to enjoy Rangzen in Cambridge as much, if only because of the limited menu.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_10?authkey=Gv1sRgCPKenvfvrLbX6AE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l15SrABVlww
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q3riFjpkqU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWLr0iq8mYw
Today we're mostly taking a break. Because we advanced our schedule a bit with doing two trips yesterday, today we've got the morning free and the afternoon to visit Sera monastery. Our guide Tsenam seems to have been caught off guard by the schedule change, as he made some flimsy excuse about why he couldn't guide us through Sera. I think it'd have been slightly better if he'd told us right away yesterday when we asked to change the schedule instead of this morning. We should be able to get ourselves through Sera without too much trouble; we don't need a licensed tour guide to get tickets or enter.
For the morning though, we're just going to walk around and do some shopping. The obvious thing is that while, from stall to stall, the items are different, overall there's only a few kinds of items for sale. I was just reading on the Gaussian Unitary Exclusion principle, and I wonder if that governs the the distribution of items. You don't want to be the same as the vendor next to you, but you also don't want to be selling stuff that's too left-field, because few people will want it and you'll have trouble finding suppliers.
Walking around and just looking at the city is pretty relaxing. While I end up just buying a couple of gifts for friends back home, it's been pleasant walking around at our own pace and not having a strict agenda. I'm not even that miffed that the whole area is dedicated to tourism. We're just shopping, after all.
We head back to the hotel to have a quick lunch, and then meet up with the driver to go to Sera. The monastery is pretty close by, so we're right back out on our feet. This is a much bigger complex than the other sites, except for Norbulingkha, with dozens of buildings scattered around. Recall that a monastery is for training monks, so there's hundreds of them on site living in these dorms. The statues and chapels in the public areas look very similar to others we've seen, and without a guide to expound on them, we pass by them quickly. The main attraction at Sera is the monks' debates. This is held twice every other day. We made sure to get to Sera right before they start the event.
What happens --
The monks gather in a gravel courtyard, which is fortunately shaded by some trees. The tourists ring the outside of the courtyard. The monks split up into questioner-answerer pairs. The answering monk sits on a red pillow on the ground, while the questioning monk stands before him. When the event begins, the questioning monks proceed to present various questions. Each question is punctuated by an elaborate clapping motion, as though the questioner is sending the question on a current of air toward the answerer. If the answerer is wrong, the questioner gets to do multiple claps in succession.
Many of the monks did this with a lot of enthusiasm, seeming to have a good time of it. After all, they are all young men with a lot of youthful energy. There was a senior monk patrolling the rows, but he didn't seem to have objections to the content or procedure. Another monk was going around with what seemed to be a checklist. I suppose to make sure each pair had adequate performance? I can only assume the questions were trivia like, who was the founder of the Niungma sect? What are the Three Sorrows? What was the first Nepali chapter of Tibetan Buddhism? In any case, I'm not sure there's much debate to it.
Anyways, the monks are having a good time and enjoying themselves. It's a pleasant atmosphere, but because everything is conducted in Tibetan, we can't stay there watching it forever. We make a quiet exit (probably one of the earliest) and continue visiting around the monastery. We make a good circuit of it, hearing the monks debating the whole time. I hope nobody stayed for the whole thing.
After we left Sera, we went to our last dinner in Tibet. The coworker of my mom's college classmate couldn't make it as host, so he sent an underling to treat us to a good dinner. And boy was it a good one. We were dining at Sunset, or if you do a bit of wordplay, The Sun Never Sets. This was supposedly the best Tibetan restaurant in Lhasa. Everything was done according to Tibetan tradition, so midway into the dinner, they brought in three maids (I'm sure on any given night, some of the waitresses get to do serenade duty instead of serving) to serenade the guests. For each guest, they sing a traditional Tibetan song. After the song is over, the guest is presented with a glass of barley wine. The guest holds the glass in his left hand, and dips his right ring finger into the glass, and flicks the wine on his finger heavenward. He repeats a flick to the ground. Finally, he flicks toward the dinner table. These are the respective blessings to heaven, the earth, and the friends. Then, he takes a small sip and holds it. The maids top off the glass. He sips again, and the maids top it off again. Then he drains the glass. After he finishes, the maids put a kada on him and say Tashi delek. The maids did it to all three of us guests, singing a different song each time. It was pretty cool. The songs were really the best example of Tibetan singing, probably because they were acapella. I didn't drink my barley wine except for the sips, and I think I still managed to get a buzz off of that.
The food at the dinner had repeat dishes of stuff that we'd liked before, as well as new items. I think I liked the boiled lamb and yak momo the best. I have details in the photos. I think the only downside is that I won't be able to enjoy Rangzen in Cambridge as much, if only because of the limited menu.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
9/9
9/9 9:19am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_9?authkey=Gv1sRgCIKFqeulw-uPRA
We're heading out of Lhasa for today. There's a ceremony for which we have to stay overnight at another site.
Had a decent headache for most of today, thanks to my dry sinuses. It took a bit out of my recall for the outings, but I'll try my best.
First, we had a schedule change. The basis for this is that when you enter Tibet, because of the political overcast, you need to fill out a fairly detailed tourism itenirary. The sites you want to visit may require explicit prior approval. So if you didn't apply to visit Temple X, you might not be allowed to visit during your stay. The consequence for filling out a limited number of sites (like we did) is that you schedule may be kind of light. What happened was that Tsenam took the list of sites we asked for and spread them out evenly over the number of days we'd be staying. We'd basically be doing an hour's worth of sightseeing per day for the last 3 days. When we heard the schedule for today and tomorrow, it was obvious that we could fit the 1 site per day into 2 sites on just today, so we asked to do it that way. The guides obliged, but it means tomorrow is up in the air. We'll try to figure out some stuff to do, but we don't necessarily have permission to go to any major sites.
Anyways, for today, we drove south out of Lhasa to visit two places, whose names I can't quite remember thanks to my headache. The first is the castle built by the first king of Tibet. The second is a temple whose particular significance escapes me. Going south means driving on the so-called Friendship Highway. This connects Lhasa to Kathmandu in Nepal. They're separated by only 900km, apparently. The road goes into a tunnel at the point where the Lhasa River empties into the Yaluzangbu River. Once you're out of the tunnel, you run alongside the Yaluzangbu for a while. The drive was scenic, but still quite a rollercoaster of honking and close calls. These are bound to happen when, around any blind corner, a cow can decide to bolt onto the road and have the right of way. Drivers respect the farm animals a lot and will make it a priority to work around them. We've encountered at least 3 animals simply sleeping on the road and getting away with it. Once a hawk decided to land on the road and we had to swerve to avoid it.
Lunch was at a restaurant in a city before our final destination. This was I think my best Tibetan meal to date. I ordered the blood sausage, and the guides ordered other dishes for us. There was no bad dish and a couple were outstanding. Everything fit together well. The only thing I've been avoiding is Tibetan tea. I guess the milk aspect just scares me. All the details in the picture section. Once we finished we got back onto the highway.
Anyways, when we got to the castle, there was a whole support village built nearby to handle the tourism needs. Not quite as artificial feeling as before, but still obvious. The path up to the castle is shaped much in the same way as it has been for centuries. The very start of the path is also conveniently where the road ends and the village is situated. Tsenam said it might be about a 2km hike to the castle, so my mom opted for the horse option. A guide helped her onto a little horse and led her up the horse path. The rest of us started walking. I got winded pretty easily on the uphill parts of the path, and soon my head was throbbing. I had to take a few breaks on the way up. I passed a woman selling small boiled potatoes for what seemed like too much. It just doesn't strike me as the best snack. It might work when it's cold, but it was like 80 degrees. In what I'm sure was much less than 2km, I was at the castle. I got to really catch my breath as I waited for my mom and dad to show up. Tsenam took us inside and explained the very interesting, bordering on mythical history of the castle.
Many centuries ago, there was no kingdom of Tibet. An Indian prince was exiled and began journeying north. He is remembered as Nyaturi Gyampo (don't quote me). Nyaturi means on the shoulders. When the natives in the area of Tibet saw this strange looking man, they tried to ask him who he was. He didn't speak the language and merely pointed up, meaning that he came from the heavens. The natives bought it and decided to hoist him up and make this heaven-sent man their king. And thus began the Kings' Time in Tibet. The king commanded that a castle be built on this hill, and it was done. A nearby field became the first cultivated farmland in Tibet. Any fantasies aside, this castle probably is one of the earliest constructions in Tibet. It's not anywhere close to original form, however. It was razed during the Cultural Revolution, and on top of that, the 5th Dalai Lama rebuilt it to be a Buddhist temple. Restoration has brought it back into the form it was in after that rebuild.
The tour inside was brief (delivering the story above, among a few repeats from Jokang temple). There was another adopted cat, and a monk who was chatting on his mobile. Mobile phones are so common in China that it doesn't bother me in the slightest to see a monk using one, from neither an ethical or practical standpoint. After touring the insides (no photos again), we went to the roof and looked around. The view is dazzling. Even though the village below isn't very original, it lends a great reference for how isolated the castle would have been in its time. Around the back, Tsenam pointed out the field where archeologists found fossilized evidence of cultivation. I didn't get details on how it could be concluded that this was the first farmed field in Tibet, but that's what it was. It was cool to look out onto a landscape, that, save for a road and the village, looked as rugged and natural as it must have been 2300 years ago. Regardless of current political borders, it's obvious this is a special place among all the peoples and cultures in south central Asia, and it's obvious that Tibetans have a unique stake in history from very early on.
Two more stories about the castle. After the 1st king built it, a scroll with Buddhist teachings fell out of the sky onto the upper landing of the castle. Because it was written in Sanskrit, no one could decipher it. These Indecipherable Sacred Scrolls were unknown until Tibet sent scholars to India to learn Sanskrit and create a written Tibetan language. When they came back, they translated the scrolls. The original relic, carefully housed in the castle, was lost when the castle was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution.
Story two: in the full Tibetan mythos, Tibetans (the natives the 1st king encountered, I suppose) came from the offspring of a monkey, which was an emanation of the goddess of compassion, and an ogress. Tsenam elaborated that the ogress looked like "a bigger monkey," but maybe he meant, I dunno, "a Yeti." The current Dalai Lama actually states that Tibetan Buddhists' standout tendency to enjoy meat might be attributed to Tibetans' monkey origins.
After we got down from the castle, we went on to a nearby temple. Once again, no pictures is disappointing. The inside was packed with statues of various deities, some of which were new and others the classic Tibetan pantheon. Frankly, I've been surprised by multitude of different kinds of gods and beings described by Buddhism. My high school world literature class level understanding of the religion had always presumed it was a simpler, no-god affair. I have to assume a lot of these gods overlap into Hinduism. Worth looking into later.
Ringing around the outside of the temple are the prayer bells that you can spin. Tsenam led us around in a short kora. A kora is a prayer circuit. There's one around Potala and another one around all of Lhasa. That one takes about 2 hours to complete. So going around this temple makes for a quite a short kora. Both when we were on top of the castle, and during the kora, Buddhism's principle of clockwise motion was carefully observed. Once we finished it, we drove back to Lhasa.
The last place we stopped at was a specialty shop that sold yak meat products. Our driver told us that Tsenam is contractually obligated to bring us here, and that he gets a cut of our purchase amount. Well, there was definitely a lot of interesting jerkies for sale, so I don't feel bad about the built-in money-making aspect. I'm sure most of the restaurants we land at, Tsenam has a deal of some sort. I can't complain; it's all new experiences. Anyways, I'm planning to bring various yak meats back to the US. Hopefully, if the US customs gives me grief about bringing in beef products, I'll point out that yak is a different species.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_9?authkey=Gv1sRgCIKFqeulw-uPRA
We're heading out of Lhasa for today. There's a ceremony for which we have to stay overnight at another site.
Had a decent headache for most of today, thanks to my dry sinuses. It took a bit out of my recall for the outings, but I'll try my best.
First, we had a schedule change. The basis for this is that when you enter Tibet, because of the political overcast, you need to fill out a fairly detailed tourism itenirary. The sites you want to visit may require explicit prior approval. So if you didn't apply to visit Temple X, you might not be allowed to visit during your stay. The consequence for filling out a limited number of sites (like we did) is that you schedule may be kind of light. What happened was that Tsenam took the list of sites we asked for and spread them out evenly over the number of days we'd be staying. We'd basically be doing an hour's worth of sightseeing per day for the last 3 days. When we heard the schedule for today and tomorrow, it was obvious that we could fit the 1 site per day into 2 sites on just today, so we asked to do it that way. The guides obliged, but it means tomorrow is up in the air. We'll try to figure out some stuff to do, but we don't necessarily have permission to go to any major sites.
Anyways, for today, we drove south out of Lhasa to visit two places, whose names I can't quite remember thanks to my headache. The first is the castle built by the first king of Tibet. The second is a temple whose particular significance escapes me. Going south means driving on the so-called Friendship Highway. This connects Lhasa to Kathmandu in Nepal. They're separated by only 900km, apparently. The road goes into a tunnel at the point where the Lhasa River empties into the Yaluzangbu River. Once you're out of the tunnel, you run alongside the Yaluzangbu for a while. The drive was scenic, but still quite a rollercoaster of honking and close calls. These are bound to happen when, around any blind corner, a cow can decide to bolt onto the road and have the right of way. Drivers respect the farm animals a lot and will make it a priority to work around them. We've encountered at least 3 animals simply sleeping on the road and getting away with it. Once a hawk decided to land on the road and we had to swerve to avoid it.
Lunch was at a restaurant in a city before our final destination. This was I think my best Tibetan meal to date. I ordered the blood sausage, and the guides ordered other dishes for us. There was no bad dish and a couple were outstanding. Everything fit together well. The only thing I've been avoiding is Tibetan tea. I guess the milk aspect just scares me. All the details in the picture section. Once we finished we got back onto the highway.
Anyways, when we got to the castle, there was a whole support village built nearby to handle the tourism needs. Not quite as artificial feeling as before, but still obvious. The path up to the castle is shaped much in the same way as it has been for centuries. The very start of the path is also conveniently where the road ends and the village is situated. Tsenam said it might be about a 2km hike to the castle, so my mom opted for the horse option. A guide helped her onto a little horse and led her up the horse path. The rest of us started walking. I got winded pretty easily on the uphill parts of the path, and soon my head was throbbing. I had to take a few breaks on the way up. I passed a woman selling small boiled potatoes for what seemed like too much. It just doesn't strike me as the best snack. It might work when it's cold, but it was like 80 degrees. In what I'm sure was much less than 2km, I was at the castle. I got to really catch my breath as I waited for my mom and dad to show up. Tsenam took us inside and explained the very interesting, bordering on mythical history of the castle.
Many centuries ago, there was no kingdom of Tibet. An Indian prince was exiled and began journeying north. He is remembered as Nyaturi Gyampo (don't quote me). Nyaturi means on the shoulders. When the natives in the area of Tibet saw this strange looking man, they tried to ask him who he was. He didn't speak the language and merely pointed up, meaning that he came from the heavens. The natives bought it and decided to hoist him up and make this heaven-sent man their king. And thus began the Kings' Time in Tibet. The king commanded that a castle be built on this hill, and it was done. A nearby field became the first cultivated farmland in Tibet. Any fantasies aside, this castle probably is one of the earliest constructions in Tibet. It's not anywhere close to original form, however. It was razed during the Cultural Revolution, and on top of that, the 5th Dalai Lama rebuilt it to be a Buddhist temple. Restoration has brought it back into the form it was in after that rebuild.
The tour inside was brief (delivering the story above, among a few repeats from Jokang temple). There was another adopted cat, and a monk who was chatting on his mobile. Mobile phones are so common in China that it doesn't bother me in the slightest to see a monk using one, from neither an ethical or practical standpoint. After touring the insides (no photos again), we went to the roof and looked around. The view is dazzling. Even though the village below isn't very original, it lends a great reference for how isolated the castle would have been in its time. Around the back, Tsenam pointed out the field where archeologists found fossilized evidence of cultivation. I didn't get details on how it could be concluded that this was the first farmed field in Tibet, but that's what it was. It was cool to look out onto a landscape, that, save for a road and the village, looked as rugged and natural as it must have been 2300 years ago. Regardless of current political borders, it's obvious this is a special place among all the peoples and cultures in south central Asia, and it's obvious that Tibetans have a unique stake in history from very early on.
Two more stories about the castle. After the 1st king built it, a scroll with Buddhist teachings fell out of the sky onto the upper landing of the castle. Because it was written in Sanskrit, no one could decipher it. These Indecipherable Sacred Scrolls were unknown until Tibet sent scholars to India to learn Sanskrit and create a written Tibetan language. When they came back, they translated the scrolls. The original relic, carefully housed in the castle, was lost when the castle was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution.
Story two: in the full Tibetan mythos, Tibetans (the natives the 1st king encountered, I suppose) came from the offspring of a monkey, which was an emanation of the goddess of compassion, and an ogress. Tsenam elaborated that the ogress looked like "a bigger monkey," but maybe he meant, I dunno, "a Yeti." The current Dalai Lama actually states that Tibetan Buddhists' standout tendency to enjoy meat might be attributed to Tibetans' monkey origins.
After we got down from the castle, we went on to a nearby temple. Once again, no pictures is disappointing. The inside was packed with statues of various deities, some of which were new and others the classic Tibetan pantheon. Frankly, I've been surprised by multitude of different kinds of gods and beings described by Buddhism. My high school world literature class level understanding of the religion had always presumed it was a simpler, no-god affair. I have to assume a lot of these gods overlap into Hinduism. Worth looking into later.
Ringing around the outside of the temple are the prayer bells that you can spin. Tsenam led us around in a short kora. A kora is a prayer circuit. There's one around Potala and another one around all of Lhasa. That one takes about 2 hours to complete. So going around this temple makes for a quite a short kora. Both when we were on top of the castle, and during the kora, Buddhism's principle of clockwise motion was carefully observed. Once we finished it, we drove back to Lhasa.
The last place we stopped at was a specialty shop that sold yak meat products. Our driver told us that Tsenam is contractually obligated to bring us here, and that he gets a cut of our purchase amount. Well, there was definitely a lot of interesting jerkies for sale, so I don't feel bad about the built-in money-making aspect. I'm sure most of the restaurants we land at, Tsenam has a deal of some sort. I can't complain; it's all new experiences. Anyways, I'm planning to bring various yak meats back to the US. Hopefully, if the US customs gives me grief about bringing in beef products, I'll point out that yak is a different species.
Monday, October 4, 2010
9/8
9/8 6:46am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_8?authkey=Gv1sRgCOKuuu_ryavPZQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqrvCkZeb6Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vAKLhwCNP0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEuiF-ke07g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFYcYdPUOQ8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7-xAMzSxNw
I'm starting a new sidestream, that I'm tentatively going to call Fashion Victims. I've tried forever to casually describe how the average Chinese person dresses. The closest I've ever come is labeling ones who try as fashion victims. That's not to say that I think the people I have in mind dress poorly or come off looking terribly. Rather, a lot of the looks just go way outside of the box from what you'd expect in the US. So yeah, I'll try my best to get candid shots of good examples. If anyone catches me and asks me what's going on, I'll just do my best "No speaking Chinese" impression and run.
Today we're going to that big lake we saw on the train, Lake Namtso. It's supposed to be very beautiful. Because of the distance, we have to get up really early to make it out in time. It's basically a frenzied drive through Lhasa and then the cities/zones up to Lake Namtso. The gutsy performance put on by our driver might make some people faint, but I have faith in the rules of the road in China and didn't sweat it too much. It was a long drive, punctuated by stops at various checkpoints. The way it works is that you get a timecard for your route, and the speed limit imposes a minimum time it should take between checkpoints. For every minute you arrive early, you're docked a fine of 100 yuan. This ends up working exactly like a Time-Speed-Distance rally event. If you know where the checkpoint is, and how long it should take to get there, you can speed like hell as you need, and park for some extra minutes at the end, just out of sight of the checkpoint. Our driver, being a tour guide professional, has done this circuit plenty of times and made quick work of finding places to park and knowing for how long. Whenever we had one of these stops, I'd walk around and look for interesting things. On the way up there was lots of traffic, so usually we didn't have to punt before checkpoints. At the places we did stop, though, there was highly specialized catering to tourism.
It's disappointing in that any heavily frequented area inevitably becomes commercialized and robbed of its original character. Whenever we stopped at one of these checkpoints, there'd be lots of tour buses also parked there. And when you have hundreds of people milling about, there's opportunity for making a buck. I saw broadly three classes of business going on. First, there were cart vendors. Each cart is a little table on wheels with a roof. You can pack your wares into the cart and push it away, or you can put all the wares out and start selling. It was all the trinkety stuff you'd expect, like jewelry, models, carvings, etc. I was actually looking for a phurba dagger as a gift for a friend, but nobody was selling at a price I wanted to pay. Second, there was the bathrooms. 1 yuan per person. These were pretty horrid bathrooms for that kind of money, but I didn't see the government running in and trying to regulate, so let the free market reign. That said, I've seen free "bathrooms" that I'd gladly avoid by paying 1 yuan to class it up a bit. Third, tiny roadside huts with their standardized shop signage, offering tea or food. I'm a brave eater but I wouldn't go into those places. Not only is hygiene a big question mark, but the huts, basically the building equivalents of a cubicle, seem ready to implode. In one place, some enterprising Tibetans had roped up their dogs and a goat for picture-taking. You pay a fee and take your pictures with these animals. I suppose they are better fed and cared for than the numerous strays in the area, but it must still be a very rough life for them. My disappointment is that, instead of being able to see something unique everywhere you go in Tibet, you are forced to run the same gauntlet every time you make a tour stop. I think the underlying reason it bothers me is that it highlights the casual wage-slavery accepted by the poor and looking-for-work. For example, at the Bird's Nest, there was a peddler at every corner clutching a sheaf of folded up flying bird toys. It was like a rubber band power airplane, except the rubber band turned a crank and flapped a pair of wings. I think they were being sold for 20 yuan a piece and subject to haggling, of course. I'm guessing each morning, each person selling would show up at the main office and get handed 20 toy birds from a box. They'd pay up front for the birds, and whatever profit they could make was theirs. The same routine every day. Some days, they might be able to sell out their stock. Some days, maybe not a single sale. Yet in the long term, each of them must be undoubtedly making a living doing it, otherwise they'd be off doing something else. And underlying this is the crippling realization that the vast majority of people out there don't have interesting lives by virtue of living in poverty. Back to Tibet -- I'm not exactly sure what all these tourist-stop vendors would be doing if there were no tourism. I suppose the stituation could be worse for them. When we were driving along, I saw one woman on the roadside, holding up a pan full of fried bread, standing next to her small stove. I'm guessing it was worth her time to sell some bread to tourists while tending to her livestock. I guess you could call that making the best of it.
Anyways, the weather got progressively worse as we drove up the mountains to get to Namtso. At some point the altitude peaked at 4700m. The rain turned to sleet and snow, and driving along was pretty treacherous. It was pretty miserable all the way to Namtso. My mom once again felt the effects of high altitude sickness. When we got to Namtso, all we did was huddle in a restaurant for a bit and then take some lakeside pictures. My mom didn't even come out. So about 15 minutes after we finished lunch, we were back in the Landcruiser on the way back to Lhasa. My mom started breathing out of the oxygen bags we'd brought for such emergencies, and she got better. I wish she'd taken it as soon as she started getting a headache and feeling lightheaded, but she was too stubborn to treat herself earlier, thinking all her preventative medicines would help.
The drive back to Lhasa was under much improved weather. I shot a couple videos of how daring our driver was. There are some principles to how to drive around here, and I've almost got them sorted out. Going out there and on the way back, we passed a Buddhist doing the prostration pilgrimage to Lhasa. The prostration is where you get on your knees and do sort of a butterfly stroke, and then stand back up. You only move a couple feet each prostration, so it can take years to get to Lhasa this way. Such is their devotion. I wasn't able to get a picture in time. I didn't spot if the pilgrim had a sack of food on him. I have no idea how they make it.
I'll take some time now to comment on how dirty things are over here. Hygiene standards are simply different. Like I mentioned before, nobody cares about the cleanliness of common spaces. If a wall in the lobby gets slightly scuffed, it'll stay that way pretty much forever. It seems like no one is in charge of cleaning these places up. That sort of casual attitude extends to cleaning most public bathrooms. When you're in America, you don't give too much thought to where your shoes have been. Yeah, you're reminded every so often that there's dirt on the ground, but it never seems like a big deal. Once you've stepped into a public bathroom or latrine in China, you'll never forget how dirty the soles of your shoes are. It's contagion theory. It's easy to track the grime from the bathroom onto your shoes, from which they'll never be clean. That's why Chinese people are such sticklers about taking off shoes before going into homes. So while I haven't made much explicit mention of it, whenever I've been going out, I've naturally assumed Chinese habits with respect to what is dirty. I won't ever lean on a wall, for example. It comes naturally.
After getting caught up reading on Tibetan languages on the wikipedia for a bit, I have to overturn my conclusion that Tibetan isn't tonal. The dialect spoken in Lhasa is a Central Tibetan language. The Central Tibetan family acquired tonality from its contact with Chinese languages. So somewhere in there, there are tones. I just can't hear them I guess.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_8?authkey=Gv1sRgCOKuuu_ryavPZQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqrvCkZeb6Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vAKLhwCNP0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEuiF-ke07g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFYcYdPUOQ8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7-xAMzSxNw
I'm starting a new sidestream, that I'm tentatively going to call Fashion Victims. I've tried forever to casually describe how the average Chinese person dresses. The closest I've ever come is labeling ones who try as fashion victims. That's not to say that I think the people I have in mind dress poorly or come off looking terribly. Rather, a lot of the looks just go way outside of the box from what you'd expect in the US. So yeah, I'll try my best to get candid shots of good examples. If anyone catches me and asks me what's going on, I'll just do my best "No speaking Chinese" impression and run.
Today we're going to that big lake we saw on the train, Lake Namtso. It's supposed to be very beautiful. Because of the distance, we have to get up really early to make it out in time. It's basically a frenzied drive through Lhasa and then the cities/zones up to Lake Namtso. The gutsy performance put on by our driver might make some people faint, but I have faith in the rules of the road in China and didn't sweat it too much. It was a long drive, punctuated by stops at various checkpoints. The way it works is that you get a timecard for your route, and the speed limit imposes a minimum time it should take between checkpoints. For every minute you arrive early, you're docked a fine of 100 yuan. This ends up working exactly like a Time-Speed-Distance rally event. If you know where the checkpoint is, and how long it should take to get there, you can speed like hell as you need, and park for some extra minutes at the end, just out of sight of the checkpoint. Our driver, being a tour guide professional, has done this circuit plenty of times and made quick work of finding places to park and knowing for how long. Whenever we had one of these stops, I'd walk around and look for interesting things. On the way up there was lots of traffic, so usually we didn't have to punt before checkpoints. At the places we did stop, though, there was highly specialized catering to tourism.
It's disappointing in that any heavily frequented area inevitably becomes commercialized and robbed of its original character. Whenever we stopped at one of these checkpoints, there'd be lots of tour buses also parked there. And when you have hundreds of people milling about, there's opportunity for making a buck. I saw broadly three classes of business going on. First, there were cart vendors. Each cart is a little table on wheels with a roof. You can pack your wares into the cart and push it away, or you can put all the wares out and start selling. It was all the trinkety stuff you'd expect, like jewelry, models, carvings, etc. I was actually looking for a phurba dagger as a gift for a friend, but nobody was selling at a price I wanted to pay. Second, there was the bathrooms. 1 yuan per person. These were pretty horrid bathrooms for that kind of money, but I didn't see the government running in and trying to regulate, so let the free market reign. That said, I've seen free "bathrooms" that I'd gladly avoid by paying 1 yuan to class it up a bit. Third, tiny roadside huts with their standardized shop signage, offering tea or food. I'm a brave eater but I wouldn't go into those places. Not only is hygiene a big question mark, but the huts, basically the building equivalents of a cubicle, seem ready to implode. In one place, some enterprising Tibetans had roped up their dogs and a goat for picture-taking. You pay a fee and take your pictures with these animals. I suppose they are better fed and cared for than the numerous strays in the area, but it must still be a very rough life for them. My disappointment is that, instead of being able to see something unique everywhere you go in Tibet, you are forced to run the same gauntlet every time you make a tour stop. I think the underlying reason it bothers me is that it highlights the casual wage-slavery accepted by the poor and looking-for-work. For example, at the Bird's Nest, there was a peddler at every corner clutching a sheaf of folded up flying bird toys. It was like a rubber band power airplane, except the rubber band turned a crank and flapped a pair of wings. I think they were being sold for 20 yuan a piece and subject to haggling, of course. I'm guessing each morning, each person selling would show up at the main office and get handed 20 toy birds from a box. They'd pay up front for the birds, and whatever profit they could make was theirs. The same routine every day. Some days, they might be able to sell out their stock. Some days, maybe not a single sale. Yet in the long term, each of them must be undoubtedly making a living doing it, otherwise they'd be off doing something else. And underlying this is the crippling realization that the vast majority of people out there don't have interesting lives by virtue of living in poverty. Back to Tibet -- I'm not exactly sure what all these tourist-stop vendors would be doing if there were no tourism. I suppose the stituation could be worse for them. When we were driving along, I saw one woman on the roadside, holding up a pan full of fried bread, standing next to her small stove. I'm guessing it was worth her time to sell some bread to tourists while tending to her livestock. I guess you could call that making the best of it.
Anyways, the weather got progressively worse as we drove up the mountains to get to Namtso. At some point the altitude peaked at 4700m. The rain turned to sleet and snow, and driving along was pretty treacherous. It was pretty miserable all the way to Namtso. My mom once again felt the effects of high altitude sickness. When we got to Namtso, all we did was huddle in a restaurant for a bit and then take some lakeside pictures. My mom didn't even come out. So about 15 minutes after we finished lunch, we were back in the Landcruiser on the way back to Lhasa. My mom started breathing out of the oxygen bags we'd brought for such emergencies, and she got better. I wish she'd taken it as soon as she started getting a headache and feeling lightheaded, but she was too stubborn to treat herself earlier, thinking all her preventative medicines would help.
The drive back to Lhasa was under much improved weather. I shot a couple videos of how daring our driver was. There are some principles to how to drive around here, and I've almost got them sorted out. Going out there and on the way back, we passed a Buddhist doing the prostration pilgrimage to Lhasa. The prostration is where you get on your knees and do sort of a butterfly stroke, and then stand back up. You only move a couple feet each prostration, so it can take years to get to Lhasa this way. Such is their devotion. I wasn't able to get a picture in time. I didn't spot if the pilgrim had a sack of food on him. I have no idea how they make it.
I'll take some time now to comment on how dirty things are over here. Hygiene standards are simply different. Like I mentioned before, nobody cares about the cleanliness of common spaces. If a wall in the lobby gets slightly scuffed, it'll stay that way pretty much forever. It seems like no one is in charge of cleaning these places up. That sort of casual attitude extends to cleaning most public bathrooms. When you're in America, you don't give too much thought to where your shoes have been. Yeah, you're reminded every so often that there's dirt on the ground, but it never seems like a big deal. Once you've stepped into a public bathroom or latrine in China, you'll never forget how dirty the soles of your shoes are. It's contagion theory. It's easy to track the grime from the bathroom onto your shoes, from which they'll never be clean. That's why Chinese people are such sticklers about taking off shoes before going into homes. So while I haven't made much explicit mention of it, whenever I've been going out, I've naturally assumed Chinese habits with respect to what is dirty. I won't ever lean on a wall, for example. It comes naturally.
After getting caught up reading on Tibetan languages on the wikipedia for a bit, I have to overturn my conclusion that Tibetan isn't tonal. The dialect spoken in Lhasa is a Central Tibetan language. The Central Tibetan family acquired tonality from its contact with Chinese languages. So somewhere in there, there are tones. I just can't hear them I guess.
Friday, October 1, 2010
9/7
9/7 7:41am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_7?authkey=Gv1sRgCP7N17XkqZuI-AE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToIvazPWs44
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw7QR1qQTc0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkBr4PqL-2Y
Got woken up by a call on the room phone. It was mounted in the bathroom of all places. Turns out my parents' room doesn't have hot water or a working toilet. So much for Xiongbala (I need to remember what this refers to; I guess I didn't play Uncharted 2 closely enough, which is where all my Tibetan mythos is coming from).
I do a very light workout to see if I can handle it, even after about 2 days at high altitude. It's a bit dizzying, but I feel fine. After I shower, I hand the bathroom over to my parents.
We pile into the Landcruiser and head out to what I consider THE image of Lhasa, the Potala palace. Constructed in stages since the 7th century, it's perched on a hill that makes a perfect landmark. When you're actually in the city, though, it doesn't stand out that much from the surrounding buildings. I can even see it from out my hotel room window, as one panaromic phoot shows. Still, it's a very striking monument to the history of Buddhism in Tibet.
Tsenam leads us through the outside and inside of Potala, explaining the significance of various rooms and relics. I have a lot more to say accompanying each photo. Potala was built by the 5th Dalai Lama, who acquired political power over Tibet, in addition to the Dalai Lama's role as spiritual leader. It was built on top of the King's Cave, one of the earliest religious sites in Tibet. Many of the rooms were once reserved strictly for the Dalai Lama's use. In one hallway, I looked out a window overlooking a square in front of the Palace. I asked Tsenam about what had been there before it had been a square. Tsenam said that the green pond to the left had always been there, and the square used to be a grassy park for people to enjoy. He also said that this was the window through which the 14th (and current) Dalai Lama would look out as a child, newly chosen as the Dalai Lama, and envy the children playing in the park. He said it was a great struggle for him to learn at such a young age to set upon a path to enlightenment. Admittedly, it's odd that a place that has such special religious significance is opened up to the public. The more holy parts of the palace don't allow photography, which is at once a shame and a proper measure of respect. Sights that haven't been committed to film include the golden tombs of several of the past Dalai Lamas, the biggest of which bears 3700 kg of gold inlaid onto the sarcophagus. That thing also has thousands of precious gems, the most unusual of which is a pearl harvested from the brain of an elephant. That tomb is known as Zamling Gyanchik, the Sole Ornament of the World. In one of the courtyards within the no-photography area, I found a very small cat sunning itself. It obviously was not afraid of people. I petted it for a bit, and it even jumped onto my crouched leg. It weighned next to nothing. I got pictures of some other stray cats, though. They seem to be treated pretty well by Tibetans.
We then went to a second major temple, the Jokang temple. Tsekam distinguished between temple and monastery in the following way -- a monastery is a place where many many monks live and learn. They train toward earning degrees in various aspects of the religion. A temple doesn't offer learning and instead operates ceremonies and rituals. The Jokang temple was the first entrance of Buddhism into Tibet, some time in the 7th century. The founder of the temple also started the (and bear with my transcription of a Tibetan tour guide's English name for something) Niuma sect of Buddhism. The Tibetan king at the time had enough sway to do two things: he sent a priest to India to study Sanskrit and to develop a written Tibetan language. After 9 years, the priest mastered Sanskrit and devised an alphabet and accompanying written language. This strengthened the bond among the various states in Tibet, who could now all mutually understand each other via the written language. I have no eye for it, but it seems pretty clear to me that the Tibetan and Sanskrit alphabets are similar. The second thing that was accomplished was that one of the greatest relics in Buddhism was gifted to Tibet and transported to the Jokang temple. It's a 2300 year old statue of the Buddha. It's been at Jokang for over 1400 years. Throngs of practicing Tibetan Buddhists were in line through the temple as we toured it. They went into each special chapel and gave offerings of money and candle butter. The candle butter they carried in jugs or thermoses. I wish I had pictures but again, not allowed. Each chapel or room had altars where one could pour the butter into a vat. Several wicks would draw up the wax and burn. Some of the butter would settle and wax up. I saw one monk tending to an altar, scraping up strips of wax and shoveling into a bucket. I guess it's recycled somehow. The reverence these Buddhist pilgrims showed on this site was amazing. While it is not a very big religion, Buddhism's history is rich and its roots are very deep in cultures across Asia. It's fascinating to me what differences exist in mindset between Chinese Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism. Even within Tibetan Buddhism, there are the aforementioned sects. Each sect has its own particular teachings. The last sect, the Gilupa, was conceived by the teacher to the first Dalai Lama. This man had spent time in each of the 4 existing sects, and synthesized a new school, which is also know as the Yellow-haired sect (though Gilupa monks often wear red caps). It's a bit unusual that even now, there are 5 practicing sects with their minor variations in thought, but all of them revere the Dalai Lama, whose position of spiritual authority is an institution maintained by the Gilupa.
Finally, in the afternoon, we went to Norbulingkha, an administrative site used by the Dalai Lamas. Basically, each Dalai Lama has what amounts to an office building he would use in the summer. There are trees and flower gardens all around, giving Norbulingkha a more pleasant atmosphere for the summer weather. The rooms belonging to the 13th and 14th Dalai Lamas were the most interesting. They both received gifts from a modern world, including horse carriages, vacuum tube radios, chandeliers, and a tiger (now stuffed and mounted). I thought the site would have been way more fascinating if there had been more pictures of these later Dalai Lamas using their offices.
Some miscellaneous notes that don't fit the narrative above:
- Tibetan incense is much more herbal and woody than what I'm used to. It didn't bother me as much as I thought it might, but it cast a choking, pervasive scent to everywhere we went. I think if I didn't have a completely dry sinus from the weather, it wouldn't have bothered me at all.
- The Jokang temple was built on, according to legend, the heart of a giant demoness. Converting evil into good is a common theme in Buddhism, and so astrologers advised the king to build the temple on this demon heart, and in doing so, transmute the evil emanating from it into good. Some of the other major Tibetan religious sites are built on this demoness' other joints. The effect in total is that her evil is locked in place, and as a side effect, Tibet is freed of earthquakes.
- Once Jokang was established, the city of Lhasa (which means God's land in Tibetan) was formed around it, which still feels true today Once we exited the temple, we took a 10 minute through some tightly knotted streets packed with shops back to the Xiongbala Hotel. Each shop had a sign that inadvertantly conformed to a standard: Shop. Or shup, if you're that one place that misspelled it. Anyways, one shop was called the Holy Land Carpet Shop. Having never been to Mecca or Jerusalem, I can say without reservation that Lhasa is absolutely as meaningful and important a destination to Buddhists as those famous cities. It is truly a Holy Land for many Tibetans.
- I saw a Tshirt for sale that I thought Ryan would have appreciated. It had pictures of yaks and read "Yak yak yak yak Tibet" I couldn't find one in VT colors, though.
- Around Jokang is a very heavily Tibetan area of the city. Here is where People's Army soldiers keep the most careful watch. In the square in front of the temple itself, 4 soldiers stand watch on each side and a squad of 5 patrol around the square. All are body-armored and carry shotguns or rifles. This was something added in 2008 after the anti-Han riots in various parts of Tibet. I don't think there's much tension in the air from this, but it's still a sore thumb for an otherwise very peaceful place.
- In 1959, the Dalai Lama and his administration was exiled from Tibet. He was chosen at the age of 5 in 1940, so he was 24 at the time and had been Dalai Lama for almost 20 years. The damage the Communist government has caused is two-fold -- 1) the disruption of a fully-functioning spiritual leadership for Tibetans and Buddhists around the world and 2) destruction of religious sites during the Cultural Revolution. (By the way, Potala is a place that was not greatly damaged by the PLA's initial 1951 liberation or afterwards. Even in China, everyone knows that liberation is a euphemism for dominion). Anyways, many temples were mostly or completely destroyed. Knowing destruction was on the way, many monks and lay people smuggled out relics from various temples that lay in the warpath. One monk managed to hide the body of the 4th Dalai Lama in his home for the 10 year duration of the Cultural Revolution. Others hid fragments of the bomb bodies of the other early Lamas. There is a "all-in-one tomb" that inters those pieces together. Thousands of small artifacts that include gifts from India and other visiting Buddhist parties have been given back to the survining temples over time. Even so, it must feel horrible to have lost so many of the originals. Even worse, I think, is question hovering over the continuance of the Dalai Lama. I mean to ask Tsenam in private what will happen when the 14th Dalai Lama dies. Will Tibetan ex-pats in India be allowed to build him a tomb and have it shipped into Jokang temple? Is there ever hope that the Dalai Lama will be allowed to return to Potala to resume his administration? I think that would be one of the strongest concessions the Communist goverment could make. It might really hurt non-Tibetan tourism, since Potala would be closed to the public once again.
- Traditional Tibetan prayer offerings can be plain, like water, butter, or flour. Money is a relatively modern thing, I think. The greatest gift one can make is the following: buying gold which monks at Jokang will use to restore to perfection the statue of Buddha.
- The greatest relic in Buddhism is the Buddha's teeth, which is housed in a temple in India.
Couple of language notes:
- Tibet is not a word in Tibetan. It's like China, a term made up by foreigners at some point. The Chinese name for Tibet is Xizang, the Western Trove. Tibetans call the place Bod. Zang is the shorthand in Chinese refering to anything Tibetan.
- While there's a lot of overlap in phonology between Tibetan and Chinese, making it easy for me to pronounce Tibetan words that are recited to me, it's hard to avoid putting accents on syllables. I'm pretty sure Tibetan is not a toned language. In fact, it seems to be less stressed compared to English, which makes it hard for me to remember how to say a word. Like the phrase for goodbye -- taxi delek -- as far as I can tell only the first syllable has much stress on it. The rest are spoken very softly.
- many of the transliterations between Tibetan and Chinese fall prey to a poor Chinese ear for r/l, n/l. For example Nurbulingkha is transliterated as Luo bu lin ka. And Tsenam is transliterated as Ci lang.
I'm pushing food commentary to the pictures. It wasn't a big day in food compared to the sightseeing.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_7?authkey=Gv1sRgCP7N17XkqZuI-AE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToIvazPWs44
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw7QR1qQTc0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkBr4PqL-2Y
Got woken up by a call on the room phone. It was mounted in the bathroom of all places. Turns out my parents' room doesn't have hot water or a working toilet. So much for Xiongbala (I need to remember what this refers to; I guess I didn't play Uncharted 2 closely enough, which is where all my Tibetan mythos is coming from).
I do a very light workout to see if I can handle it, even after about 2 days at high altitude. It's a bit dizzying, but I feel fine. After I shower, I hand the bathroom over to my parents.
We pile into the Landcruiser and head out to what I consider THE image of Lhasa, the Potala palace. Constructed in stages since the 7th century, it's perched on a hill that makes a perfect landmark. When you're actually in the city, though, it doesn't stand out that much from the surrounding buildings. I can even see it from out my hotel room window, as one panaromic phoot shows. Still, it's a very striking monument to the history of Buddhism in Tibet.
Tsenam leads us through the outside and inside of Potala, explaining the significance of various rooms and relics. I have a lot more to say accompanying each photo. Potala was built by the 5th Dalai Lama, who acquired political power over Tibet, in addition to the Dalai Lama's role as spiritual leader. It was built on top of the King's Cave, one of the earliest religious sites in Tibet. Many of the rooms were once reserved strictly for the Dalai Lama's use. In one hallway, I looked out a window overlooking a square in front of the Palace. I asked Tsenam about what had been there before it had been a square. Tsenam said that the green pond to the left had always been there, and the square used to be a grassy park for people to enjoy. He also said that this was the window through which the 14th (and current) Dalai Lama would look out as a child, newly chosen as the Dalai Lama, and envy the children playing in the park. He said it was a great struggle for him to learn at such a young age to set upon a path to enlightenment. Admittedly, it's odd that a place that has such special religious significance is opened up to the public. The more holy parts of the palace don't allow photography, which is at once a shame and a proper measure of respect. Sights that haven't been committed to film include the golden tombs of several of the past Dalai Lamas, the biggest of which bears 3700 kg of gold inlaid onto the sarcophagus. That thing also has thousands of precious gems, the most unusual of which is a pearl harvested from the brain of an elephant. That tomb is known as Zamling Gyanchik, the Sole Ornament of the World. In one of the courtyards within the no-photography area, I found a very small cat sunning itself. It obviously was not afraid of people. I petted it for a bit, and it even jumped onto my crouched leg. It weighned next to nothing. I got pictures of some other stray cats, though. They seem to be treated pretty well by Tibetans.
We then went to a second major temple, the Jokang temple. Tsekam distinguished between temple and monastery in the following way -- a monastery is a place where many many monks live and learn. They train toward earning degrees in various aspects of the religion. A temple doesn't offer learning and instead operates ceremonies and rituals. The Jokang temple was the first entrance of Buddhism into Tibet, some time in the 7th century. The founder of the temple also started the (and bear with my transcription of a Tibetan tour guide's English name for something) Niuma sect of Buddhism. The Tibetan king at the time had enough sway to do two things: he sent a priest to India to study Sanskrit and to develop a written Tibetan language. After 9 years, the priest mastered Sanskrit and devised an alphabet and accompanying written language. This strengthened the bond among the various states in Tibet, who could now all mutually understand each other via the written language. I have no eye for it, but it seems pretty clear to me that the Tibetan and Sanskrit alphabets are similar. The second thing that was accomplished was that one of the greatest relics in Buddhism was gifted to Tibet and transported to the Jokang temple. It's a 2300 year old statue of the Buddha. It's been at Jokang for over 1400 years. Throngs of practicing Tibetan Buddhists were in line through the temple as we toured it. They went into each special chapel and gave offerings of money and candle butter. The candle butter they carried in jugs or thermoses. I wish I had pictures but again, not allowed. Each chapel or room had altars where one could pour the butter into a vat. Several wicks would draw up the wax and burn. Some of the butter would settle and wax up. I saw one monk tending to an altar, scraping up strips of wax and shoveling into a bucket. I guess it's recycled somehow. The reverence these Buddhist pilgrims showed on this site was amazing. While it is not a very big religion, Buddhism's history is rich and its roots are very deep in cultures across Asia. It's fascinating to me what differences exist in mindset between Chinese Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism. Even within Tibetan Buddhism, there are the aforementioned sects. Each sect has its own particular teachings. The last sect, the Gilupa, was conceived by the teacher to the first Dalai Lama. This man had spent time in each of the 4 existing sects, and synthesized a new school, which is also know as the Yellow-haired sect (though Gilupa monks often wear red caps). It's a bit unusual that even now, there are 5 practicing sects with their minor variations in thought, but all of them revere the Dalai Lama, whose position of spiritual authority is an institution maintained by the Gilupa.
Finally, in the afternoon, we went to Norbulingkha, an administrative site used by the Dalai Lamas. Basically, each Dalai Lama has what amounts to an office building he would use in the summer. There are trees and flower gardens all around, giving Norbulingkha a more pleasant atmosphere for the summer weather. The rooms belonging to the 13th and 14th Dalai Lamas were the most interesting. They both received gifts from a modern world, including horse carriages, vacuum tube radios, chandeliers, and a tiger (now stuffed and mounted). I thought the site would have been way more fascinating if there had been more pictures of these later Dalai Lamas using their offices.
Some miscellaneous notes that don't fit the narrative above:
- Tibetan incense is much more herbal and woody than what I'm used to. It didn't bother me as much as I thought it might, but it cast a choking, pervasive scent to everywhere we went. I think if I didn't have a completely dry sinus from the weather, it wouldn't have bothered me at all.
- The Jokang temple was built on, according to legend, the heart of a giant demoness. Converting evil into good is a common theme in Buddhism, and so astrologers advised the king to build the temple on this demon heart, and in doing so, transmute the evil emanating from it into good. Some of the other major Tibetan religious sites are built on this demoness' other joints. The effect in total is that her evil is locked in place, and as a side effect, Tibet is freed of earthquakes.
- Once Jokang was established, the city of Lhasa (which means God's land in Tibetan) was formed around it, which still feels true today Once we exited the temple, we took a 10 minute through some tightly knotted streets packed with shops back to the Xiongbala Hotel. Each shop had a sign that inadvertantly conformed to a standard:
- I saw a Tshirt for sale that I thought Ryan would have appreciated. It had pictures of yaks and read "Yak yak yak yak Tibet" I couldn't find one in VT colors, though.
- Around Jokang is a very heavily Tibetan area of the city. Here is where People's Army soldiers keep the most careful watch. In the square in front of the temple itself, 4 soldiers stand watch on each side and a squad of 5 patrol around the square. All are body-armored and carry shotguns or rifles. This was something added in 2008 after the anti-Han riots in various parts of Tibet. I don't think there's much tension in the air from this, but it's still a sore thumb for an otherwise very peaceful place.
- In 1959, the Dalai Lama and his administration was exiled from Tibet. He was chosen at the age of 5 in 1940, so he was 24 at the time and had been Dalai Lama for almost 20 years. The damage the Communist government has caused is two-fold -- 1) the disruption of a fully-functioning spiritual leadership for Tibetans and Buddhists around the world and 2) destruction of religious sites during the Cultural Revolution. (By the way, Potala is a place that was not greatly damaged by the PLA's initial 1951 liberation or afterwards. Even in China, everyone knows that liberation is a euphemism for dominion). Anyways, many temples were mostly or completely destroyed. Knowing destruction was on the way, many monks and lay people smuggled out relics from various temples that lay in the warpath. One monk managed to hide the body of the 4th Dalai Lama in his home for the 10 year duration of the Cultural Revolution. Others hid fragments of the bomb bodies of the other early Lamas. There is a "all-in-one tomb" that inters those pieces together. Thousands of small artifacts that include gifts from India and other visiting Buddhist parties have been given back to the survining temples over time. Even so, it must feel horrible to have lost so many of the originals. Even worse, I think, is question hovering over the continuance of the Dalai Lama. I mean to ask Tsenam in private what will happen when the 14th Dalai Lama dies. Will Tibetan ex-pats in India be allowed to build him a tomb and have it shipped into Jokang temple? Is there ever hope that the Dalai Lama will be allowed to return to Potala to resume his administration? I think that would be one of the strongest concessions the Communist goverment could make. It might really hurt non-Tibetan tourism, since Potala would be closed to the public once again.
- Traditional Tibetan prayer offerings can be plain, like water, butter, or flour. Money is a relatively modern thing, I think. The greatest gift one can make is the following: buying gold which monks at Jokang will use to restore to perfection the statue of Buddha.
- The greatest relic in Buddhism is the Buddha's teeth, which is housed in a temple in India.
Couple of language notes:
- Tibet is not a word in Tibetan. It's like China, a term made up by foreigners at some point. The Chinese name for Tibet is Xizang, the Western Trove. Tibetans call the place Bod. Zang is the shorthand in Chinese refering to anything Tibetan.
- While there's a lot of overlap in phonology between Tibetan and Chinese, making it easy for me to pronounce Tibetan words that are recited to me, it's hard to avoid putting accents on syllables. I'm pretty sure Tibetan is not a toned language. In fact, it seems to be less stressed compared to English, which makes it hard for me to remember how to say a word. Like the phrase for goodbye -- taxi delek -- as far as I can tell only the first syllable has much stress on it. The rest are spoken very softly.
- many of the transliterations between Tibetan and Chinese fall prey to a poor Chinese ear for r/l, n/l. For example Nurbulingkha is transliterated as Luo bu lin ka. And Tsenam is transliterated as Ci lang.
I'm pushing food commentary to the pictures. It wasn't a big day in food compared to the sightseeing.
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