I get a real kick out of reading about foreigners who have made China their home for long extended periods of time, especially those who lived through World War II, the Chinese civil war, and the Maoist era. People like Sidney Rittenberg and Joseph Needham lived lives those of us who are relative newcomers to China can only dream about. So it was with great excitement that I found this video about another foreigner, American no less, who has lived in China since 1947. His name is Sidney Shapiro, he is 93 years old and lives in a hutong in Beijing.

This video is in Chinese. Though if you know a little Chinese you can probably follow along, it’s relatively simple. I didn’t understand every bit of it but understood the majority. Fascinating stuff. He saw Shanghai under control by the Guomindang, moved to Beiping (as Beijing was known then), watched as Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China from Tian’anmen gate, joined the Chinese Communist Party, and married a Chinese woman. I really enjoyed hearing him speak Chinese. His Chinese is quite natural sounding even if he does add a rising tone to the end of some sentences. I wonder if his Chinese is better than his English now?

Also, a couple weeks ago I read this story on Danwei. It is about a Belgian man who has lived in Beijing since 1980 and recently received the equivalent of a green card from the Chinese government - basically a residence permit that lasts for 10 years. For the rest of us living in China requires a lot of time spent getting and renewing visas, I’m pretty jealous of this guy’s situation.

I arrived in Beijing by plane, a luxury I still haven’t forgiven myself for indulging in.  Regardless, the ride was a magnificent and allowed be to rest in peace after the drenched Halloween party I went to in Changsha (it was raining).  All I need say about that is: Baijiu (白酒)+water cooler = awesome party idea.

Once I arrived in Beijing I was immediately at ease and in complete awe.  My plane docked at the airport’s brand new terminal 3, the worlds largest building.  I’m not kidding, it really is the world’s largest building.  Then I took a surprisingly easy and comfortable express bus into town.  Beijing felt, at times, like a completely different city from what I knew and loved back in 2004.  When it didn’t seem new and different it seemed like a better version of its old self.  There is a lot of talk about how Beijing is destroying itself far too quickly and selling itself out to mimic the concrete corporate blandness that is now easily found all over the world.  This is true and I strongly disagree with the ways the government has reshaped Beijing, but man is Beijing a nice city these days!

Every one of the construction projects that were going on during my stays in 2004 and 2005 had been completed, most importantly the several new subway lines and the Olympic park.  Walking around I was ecstatic for Beijing.  The socialist austerity that was still visible in 2004 is losing ground every day, replacing it is a new capitalist cosmopolitan metropolis of culture and business.  Sure the Hutongs are basically all gone and signs of Beijing’s long fascinating history (legitimate signs of history, ie: not fake) are on their way out, but I never lived in a Hutong and neither do most Beijingers.  Life is good in Beijing, really really good.

I arrived at sundown and took a picture of the sun setting from the airport.  On my ride into town I saw how much the city has changed.  It seems like roads that were once flanked by simple buildings of little stature are now wider and lined with such impressively tall buildings that you sometimes feel like you are riding a tunnel into the future.  I passed the new and almost-complete CCTV building, a building so insane and awesome it will change what people consider to be an awe-inspiring skyscraper.  Check it out:

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As someone who has studied abroad in China a few times I was excited to read the New York Times Article Study Abroad Flourishes, With China a Hot Spot.

The number of Americans studying in China increased by 25 percent, and the number of Chinese students studying at American universities increased by 20 percent last year, according to the report, “Open Doors 2008.”

“Interest in China is growing dramatically, and I think we’ll see even sharper increases in next year’s report,” said Allan E. Goodman, president of the institute. “People used to go to China to study the history and language, and many still do, but with China looming so large in all our futures, there’s been a real shift, and more students go for an understanding of what’s happening economically and politically.”

Interest is surging for sure.   My trip to Beijing a couple weeks ago showed me a city far different from the one I knew just four years ago.  It is starting to feel a little like a expat wonderland of opportunities and comforts.  They just opened China’s first American Apparel and the amount of good Mexican food has skyrocketed.  One thing this article doesn’t talk about are the Americans studying abroad in China to start a new life here.  Something tells me that number is climbing as well.  One quote that tickled me was from a undergrad at Princeton, she said:

“These days, nobody questions why you take Chinese and go to China.”

So true.

These past couple of nights I’ve been invited to lavish banquets by the parents of some students in my school (some of the students aren’t even mine!).  The dinner I went to last night was, I think, the craziest Chinese banquet I’ve been to.  It was just men, 15 men; some were teachers like me, some were school officials, and some were government officials.  It turned out the host is Huaihua’s head economic official, or something like that.  The food was plentiful and had some cool dishes you don’t normally find, viper for instance, which our host loudly boasted to everyone cost 300 rmb a kilogram, about $44/kg.  The viper was hard to eat but the beautiful patterns on the skin made it a oddly fascinating piece of meat.

The dinner quickly reached a level of craziness that I do not normally get to experience here in China.  The culprit: wine.  Usually beer and baijiu (an evil 100 proof sorghum liquor) are what Chinese men want to drink.  However our obviously well-off host bought wine, around 15 bottles worth, because he told me teachers can’t take baijiu.  While that is true for the most part and though I have a deep rooted fear and hatred of baijiu I’m not sure wine was a better choice.  In America and Europe we sip wine, getting our glasses filled halfway infrequently during a meal.  In China men like to drink wine the way American college students take shots of tequila during Spring Break.  Our glasses were never more than a gulp’s worth full and were constantly being refilled by the two waitresses that watched us closely the whole night.  We drank these tiny glasses of wine every couple minutes for hours.  I was surrounded by men with bright Rudolf’s nose red faces.

The conversation was all over the place and people were getting embarrassed by what the host was saying to me (we sat next to each other, seating was done by seniority).  I was told that I should find a Chinese girl and marry her, later someone shouted that I should find a Chinese girl and rape her.  The two female waitresses watched and listened stone faced.  People complained about China’s government, about the lack of democracy, and about the one child policy.  The host was particularly annoyed at this law, though he has two children, one of whom is living and working in the UK.  I gave a toast to the unity of China, this was in relation to Taiwan.  Play to people’s tastes, that’s what I say, especially when surrounded by drunk powerful Chinese men.

At some point a bowl of baijiu with a weird little dark green sack floating in it was placed in front of me.  No one knew how to say it in English, besides my friend who had been translating for me was wasted.  Today I learned that the weird little sack was in fact a viper’s gall bladder, fresh and raw from the viper we had just eaten.  Here is what they look like:

Then the waitress, who was in a fit of giggles the whole night, used a couple tooth picks to pierce the gall bladder and spill out its contents into the strong liquor.  The organ’s insides had an evil dark green shade, think the evil witch of the west.  I watched as the silty insides slowly permeated the whole bowl.  Everyone watched me stand up and shout out some deep throated manly toast before I downed the whole bowl, gall bladder and all.  Immediately a waitress gave me a big mug of green tea.  No one else had a big mug of tea and I think I caught a flash of pity on the waitress’ face as she walked away from me.  All in all I couldn’t be happier that I was lucky enough to drink a snake’s gall bladder, it was a kind gesture on the host’s part and one I won’t soon forget.

-A tamer version of my viper gall bladder cocktail

UPDATE:  You can buy your own snake wine here.

It turns out my home here in China, Huaihua city, just turned 10 years old today.  Just so you understand, the city of about 2 million (or more) that I live in, a modern city of malls, KFC and trendy bars is only 10 years old.  It all seems utterly amazing to me that 11 years ago this city used to be nothing more than a little backwater town.  The transformation of Huaihua, from what I’ve learned, occurred because of the railroad (Huaihua is a railway hub) and because 10 years ago the Hunan government named Huaihua the capital of the large county it sits in.

Right now I’m watching the huge sparkling concert that is taking place on the other side of the city in the new modern stadium, our own little Bird’s Nest.  The show is being broadcast on Huaihua’s very own television station.  The birthday spectacular is a mix of Chinese pop song performances, casual banter between the MCs about how great Huaihua and its people are, and displays of traditional ethnic minority culture (Huaihua is home to at least 4 different ethnic groups besides the Han).  The crowd is really into the show, everyone has neon light sabers, the kind kids play with in America, and they are waving them back and forth to the sappy songs.  With every mention of Huaihua the place erupts in cheers.  What a change from usual Huaihua bashing I used to hearing everyday!  No one usually understands why I would choose to live here.

Just now I received a call from a good friend and long-time Huaihua resident who is now at the concert.  Over the phone it was easy to see how ecstatic and proud of his city he is tonight.  He wanted to make sure I was watching the concert on Huaihua TV.  Some hip rock stars just got on stage, they too love Huaihua.  Their happy-go-lucky rock pop song, the “Let’s go song,” is now stuck in my head.  The hundreds of fireworks being set off far away on the other side of this large city can be heard clearly in my apartment and are almost visible from my front porch.

Maybe the best example of how far this city has come and how far it plans on going is the new development being built next to Huaihua’s train station, which is itself less than a year old.  The development is a gigantic piazza of sorts surrounded by skyscrapers and malls.  I personally can’t wait for it to be finished.  I’m hoping they plan on building a Carrefour, as rumor has it.  Here are some pictures of Huaihua’s bright future:

For more Huaihua birthday news check out this article on the official celebrations.  (a Google translated version of the article can be found here)

I’m back from a week in Beijing and a frenzied Halloween weekend spent in Changsha.  There is much to say about my trip and I’ll try to get it written down soon, which I can do now since I have no classes today nor for the next two days.  Today was so interesting I first want to tell y’all about it.

I woke up to a phone call from another English teacher at my school, he had a simple question for me: “Are you coming to the sports meeting?”  Sports meeting?  That happened last week, I told him.  Of course I was wrong and of course I never should have expected the school to take the time to tell me about such important changes in the schedule.  They seem to think I have the ability to read minds.  A minute or two is all the notice they ever give me, which doesn’t bother me so much anymore (especially if the news is good).  So I rushed out to our school track and watched my students march around in front of the Chinese flag and our school’s administration.

The sun eventually came out, casting an orange glow on the military style ceremony.  The sheer number of students when put together was amazing, though only the junior and senior 1 and 2 grades participated.  enior 3 students were busy studying in class as they do seven days a week.

After the opening ceremonies for the sports meeting I went back to my apartment to eat breakfast, which I had skipped in my rush.  However I wasn’t even able to drink some instant coffee before I got another call.  This time I was informed that there was a delegation from America at the front gate and I must come immediately.  What?!  So much for breakfast.

The delegation from America was a group of government officials and business people from Fergus Falls, Minnesota.  I found them standing near their bus being filmed for Hunan TV while they met my school’s headmaster.  My jeans and Red Sox hat felt out of place around so many men in suits, regardless they were happy to see a fellow American.  We walked around the school looking at the cafeteria, student dorms and classroom buildings.

The Minnesotans were there to try and jump start an exchange program between schools in Fergus Falls and Huaihua and to officially designate Huaihua as the sister city of Fergus Falls.  It was a very preliminary meeting from what I could tell, consisting mostly of both sides expressing hope for future deals over the large conference table we sat at.  I told the Superintendent from Minnesota about my experiences as a high school exchange student in Beijing and my friends over at The China Exchange Initative.  The diversity coordinator of the Fergus Falls public schools and I also talked about setting up a pen pal program between my students and students in Minnesota.

Their visit to my school was really brief, they are visiting a hospital and having a banquet with the city’s Mayor later today, but it was wonderful to talk about school life in China with people that are deeply interested.  They couldn’t believe me when I  told them that the students are in class from 7:30 in the morning until 10:00 at night, wash their own clothes by hand and that they clean their own classrooms.  The small steps they took towards forging better ties with the city of Huaihua and my school just made me elated.  For once my time as a teacher in Huaihua seemed to have more meaning than my day to day work would have one think.

Today I catch a bus to Changsha.  There I will celebrate Halloween and hang out with some people I haven’t seen since August.  Then on Sunday I’m catching a train up north to Beijing where I will be for the next week.

I’ll be staying with my old host family and catching up with people I know in the capital.  Then of course there is the fact that the U.S. presidential election is on Tuesday (polls actually close Wednesday morning here in China).  Hopefully I’ll be able to celebrate with the many other American expats in Beijing, might even go dancing all over Tian’anmen Square.

This may be a new phrase for you, as it was for me when I first heard it.  Believe it or not “post 90s kids” (90后的孩子) is becoming a common phrase here in China, where the population is experiencing unprecedented social changes.  While most discussions on China’s population focus on the fact that they will have a very geriatric majority soon enough the Chinese youth are a far more interesting topic and will have a great impact on the future China we will all live in.  The post-90s kids are really the first generation to have grown up completely in the period of contemporary Reform and Opening, that is Deng Xiaoping’s great economic revolution that brought free market capitalism, cell phones, and the internet to the people.  Though us ’80s kids saw such changes too, the changes since 1990 have made the 1980s in China look like a bygone era of respectability and poverty.

When I first arrived here in Hunan I got back in touch with my old host brother, from my days as a high school student in Beijing.  He is now in his third year at a university in Beijing and this summer he worked for his school’s version of freshman orientation.  Over the phone he asked me: “What do you think of ’90s kids?”  “What do you mean ’90s kids?”  I replied.  He seemed astounded that I did not know the term and proceeded to explain himself and what he thought of this new generation.  “They’re so selfish, spoiled, and have no respect for anyone,”was his explanation.  Fascinating stuff, but I didn’t think too much about it till I found this article on China Smack.

China is all changes these days.  If you can’t read Chinese your likely to miss a lot of it.  Enter China Smack.  This absolutely amazing blog translates interesting posts from Chinese BBS, also called internet forums.  These BBS allow people to post stories and pictures, while also letting the greater public anonymously comment.  China Smack is filled with stories of sex, drugs, and rock and roll (no to mention anti-Japanese sentiment, police brutality, and stories of poverty).  These forums are often the best way to understand “which way the wind is blowing,” as one smart young man once said.  Danwei describes them well:

Internet fora, or BBS, were one of the first types of website in China to get young Chinese hooked, and they remain very popular. Chinese BBS are a refreshing contrast to the stodgy state media, and the cowed privately-managed media.

So it is no wonder I received the best description of who these “post-90s kids” are from China Smack and the world of the Chinese BBS.  My students are post-90s kids, as are the many Chinese students now in their first year of college.  Freshman year in America and western Europe may be characterized by care-free abandon, but here in China freshman starts with the exact opposite of a college party: one month of forced military training （军训).

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American prejudice against the Chinese during the nineteenth century interests me because of its sad place in our country’s history and because of how it showcases the American fear of foreigners.  The first federal law passed by Congress that specifically prohibited the immigration of foreigners based on their race was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.  During the second half of the nineteenth century Americans of all types were flocking west in search of new exciting lives and the transcontinental railroad, that was then being finished, brought more and more people and goods west.  At the same time thousands of Chinese were being recruited on the streets of Canton (aka: Guangzhou) to come to America to mine gold and work for companies like the Central Pacific Railroad.  To the Chinese America represented a better life than south China in the late Qing era.  The Chinese name for San Francisco is 旧金山, Old Gold Mountain, which shows how the Chinese immigrants viewed this new world before their departure.  However, once the Chinese got to California life was anything but golden.

-Chinese cigar factory, San Francisco

I was reminded of this bit of American history this morning while casually flipping through my father’s copy of the 1941 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.  Lately I have become extremely enamored of this book.  It’s short passages of the English language chosen at a time far different from today are endlessly captivating and expose me to people I otherwise would never have known.  The book really deserves its own blog post.

To get back to my point, today I looked up the word Chinese to see what I could find.  This led me to the works of Bret Harte, an American who in the late nineteenth century had written about life in California.  Miners and pioneers had been his main focus, but later in his life he had moved to Europe and settled in London and there he wrote a little poem entitled Plain Language From Truthful James, which was published in 1870.  This little poem became known to the American people as The Heathen Chinee and helped fuel the violent racial prejudice against Chinese immigrants that would eventually culminate in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.  The poem was originally never meant to be an attack on the Chinese but rather “was written with a satirical political purpose” and was plainly a satirical attack on American racial prejudice.[1]  One of the quotes I discovered from this work was:

We are ruined by Chinese cheap labour.

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This week has been slightly more interesting than most.  Once you think you’re nice in comfortable in China the rug gets pulled out from under you.

This week really started Saturday night with the birthday party for my friend Elvis.  He has lived in Huaihua for a few years and has always been a good friend and an unbeatable source of knowledge about the city.  I am by no means his only friend and for his birthday dinner a group of about 20 Chinese and foreign friends gathered in a really luxurious room to dine on 27 dishes.  The number of dishes is very important when eating out in China, but as I see it this is mostly used as an excuse to order more than one needs.  Regardless the food was fantastic, as a proper Chinese banquet should be.  Also my American friend Nicole who lives an hour north of me in Chenxi visited for the night and joined in the festivities.

As the long and well-lubricated meal wound down my English friend and I got out some party favors we had bought while shopping for fireworks.  There is an unbelievably huge market complex near the train station in Huaihua that seems to sell every manufactured good made in China.  It is the best place to buy school supplies, posters of Stalin, Chinese lanterns, shampoo, portable heaters, fake guns, and a gazillion types of party favors.  So after everyone was done eating we whipped out our best party favor: cheap plastic masks.

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I have to tutor English in an hour to eight students, before then I still need to get dinner.  Since I finished my regular classes this afternoon I’ve done little more than buy more minutes for my phone, clean my apartment, buy bananas, and watch a pirated movie.  I am more than a little frustrated with myself for not spending more time studying Chinese.  The excuses come my mind easily but I know deep down I need to be doing more.  While it is true that living in China automatically improves your Chinese, I have certainly noticed this in the time I’ve been here, how much it improves depends on one’s resolve.  One of my most important goals that I gave myself for this year in China was to bring my Chinese up to a new level.  I was reminded of how important this is to a foreigner trying to make a life in China while reading the wonderful Chinese history blog: Jottings from the Granite Studio.  One entry, Thoughts on learning Chinese, struck me as the perfect way to explain the need to study Chinese:

Fifty years ago, Fairbanks and his students moved the field of Chinese history forward with their insistence on fluency in Classical Chinese a prerequisite of study. His students and their students also demanded a fluency of a sort in modern Chinese sufficient to read and decipher the occasional Chinese journal article or monograph. It was IUP Chinese. Great for discussing 封建社会制度 (Feudal society) but not so much for buying toothpaste or hanging out after hours with your Chinese colleagues. Fluency in the spoken language, for the Western historian, was a parlor trick—useful for presentations but to aspire to native fluency was a low priority and some even considered such a devotion to pure language study a waste of time.

Now I can’t imagine a member of my generation of China researchers, whatever the field, who does not aspire to near native fluency in spoken and written Chinese. No longer a luxury, it is a necessity and the number of foreigners whose Chinese is near native level has increased exponentially in the past few years. It’s not just Da Shan (a famous Canadian on Chinese TV who has perfect Mandarin) anymore. A whole new generation of young China hands has realized that it’s not enough to simply jump off the plane in China and exclaim, “I come from the West. Behold me.” In this century, China and Chinese are starting to request that we, the Westerners, deal with them on their own terms and those terms are frequently written in hanzi. Whether in business or academia, the Westerner who proclaims his relative ignorance of the language as irrelevant to his endeavors is increasingly an anachronism.

Hunan, I’ve been told, is China’s largest producer of fireworks.  China is the world’s ultimate consumer of fireworks.  This makes my new home a great place to play around with gunpowder in all its family-friendly variations.  The options available for purchase are mind boggling.  Whole blocks of Huaihua are devoted to the sale of fireworks.  Here is one of the store’s me and my English friend Ruth visited today:

Tomorrow is our Cameroonian friend’s birthday.  In China birthday’s are a perfect occasion for lighting off a few fireworks (as are funerals).  Everyday I hear the boom of some distant fireworks, it’s just a normal sound here in Hunan.  Just this morning I was woken at 7 AM by the sound of hundreds and hundreds of fire crackers being set off in my neighborhood.  I recently found out that fire crackers are technically not allowed to be set off in downtown Huaihua, whereas the large rockets with exploding balls in the sky are perfectly okay for a pubic sidewalk.  Tonight we will play with all types of fireworks and hopefully no one will maim themselves.  Here are some more photographs of the fireworks store, which sometimes felt more like a munitions depot. (Our purchase of fireworks is at the end of the post)

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Don’t know how I missed this story.  My favorite member of China’s present day rulers and a man much loved by the Chinese, Premier Wen Jiabao, sat down to an interview with Fareed Zakaria of CNN.  I first spotted this story on the Zhong Nan Hai Blog, itself a good read.  The interview includes bits on the economy, human rights, the Great Firewall of China, and Tibet.  Not wholly satisfying but still more than Chinese leaders usually say.

Zhon Nan Hai Blog Post on the Interview

Video of the Interview & Transcript Part 1 (CNN)

Video of the Interview Part 2 (CNN)

Since my return from Sichuan I have resolved to spend more time in Huaihua.  Now that I know a little more about my home and a little more about teaching my schedule feels a much more open and the city feels far more inviting.  This all makes me more prone to contemplative wandering.  Thursdays are a wonderful day for such wandering.

Monday through Wednesday I teach morning and afternoon.  Usually by the end of my school day I have little energy or desire to wander outside of my neighborhood or tackle some new writing or photography project.  Thursdays however require me to just teach one class at 10 AM and the class happens to be my brightest and happiest class of the week (not a bad way to finish up).  I always seem to come off this class with a smile and a desire to explore.
Today after class I went back to my apartment and read all about the last Presidential debate.  Earlier in the morning I had able to watch an hour of while eating breakfast before my class.  After that lazy internet surfing I went out walking with a book.

My legs had me walk down a new road in a new direction.  The sun has been shinning with renewed force lately, after a string of cold autumn days.  Today was just as brilliant and warm as yesterday.  Feeling hungry I stopped at a restaurant which I had never visited before.  The menu seemed a bit luxurious so I just looked over at what two of the waitresses were having for lunch.  “I have one of those,” I told the attentive waitress hovering over me.  The simple dish was a wonderful omelet of fresh green chiles.  Satisfying with a nice crunch of spiciness the lunch combined with rice was just what I needed.  The owner of the restaurant came over to my table, offered me a cigarette (I declined), and asked me the questions I most often hear on my wanderings around Huaihua.  “What country are you from?”  “What is your job?”  “Where did you learn Chinese?”

After we got those basics out of the way and he complimented my Chinese (something I now am beginning to find a nuisance due to the fact everyone says it to me) we started talking about his family.  He was originally from Fenghuang, the beautiful riverside village 2 hours away that I have visited on occasion, but came to Huaihua to open the restaurant and give his son a better life.  His son is to start at my middle school next fall and he asked me if I could tutor him.  I asked him about the pictures on the restaurant wall, they were all of people motorcycling in the countryside.  He pointed himself out and explained that it was his favorite hobby to travel around with his friends on his motorcycle.  He asked me if I drive one myself.  I seemed to let him down when I said no.  I quickly added that I use Huaihua’s freelance motorcycle taxis often.  His laugh seemed to say it’s not the same.  With the warmhearted exclamation of “Eat slowly!” he got up and took a squat outside.

I left full and content, the sun warming my back.  Once again I was glad for my Boston Red Sox hat, which keeps the sun out of my eyes so nicely.  I bought a bottle of C100 and after wandering a half-hour more turned around and headed home.

After our harrowing 11 hour bus journey from Kangding we had finally arrived in the city of Litang.  The city rests at 4,150 meters above sea level in a beautiful valley rimmed by bald Himalayan peaks.  Here’s the view we got as we went over our last mountain pass and rode down into Litang’s valley:

In under 36 hours we had gone from warm sub-tropical Chengdu (500 meters above sea level) to Litang’s breath-taking altitude at over 12,000 feet.  On top of that I had done so after three basically sleepless nights.  I was almost getting used to going to bed 2 AM and waking up three hours later at 5 AM.  Then there was the train trip to Chengdu that had sucked much of my strength and health.  To get to the point, I wasn’t feeling so hot when we arrived in Litang.  Here we are as we walked down Litang’s main drag:

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