For this week’s Chinese National holiday me and a couple friends are headed to Sichuan province in southwestern China. We’re going to check out the sub-tropical capital, Chengdu, taste the city’s amazing food and maybe see a panda or two. Then most likely we’ll head farther west to the eastern mountains of Tibet. I’m not bringing my computer (just my camera), so posting will be light. But when I get back expect more photos like this, which I took on my last trip to Sichuan in 2006:
Sept. 24, 2008: 六大盟友拒绝救美国 – Six big allies refuse to rescue America
Everyday I wake up eat a banana, make a mug of instant coffee, and turn on my computer. Lately the American news I read online has gotten steadily worse, as I’m sure you all know. While I was finishing up high school America was going to war, by the time I graduated college the sub-prime mortgage debacle had gotten into full swing and now while staring my first job post-college the whole financial system of America is struggling through the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression. This is not what any American twenty-two year old wants to be seeing after college. The American dream and a prosperous life just got placed that much farther away from me. But there is a catch: I’m in China.
I’m living and working far away from Wall Street and Washington in a country where they just lowered interest rates so that China’s annual GDP growth rate could stay in the double digits. I’m in a country where construction is taking place at a dizzying pace, where children are given a competitive education so that they call all find jobs in new fields that didn’t exist ten years ago. Everything here is looking up. Don’t get me wrong, China is feeling the pinch because of the worldwide crisis, but they’re not that worried. Premier Wen Jia Bao (温家宝) said a week ago:
Overall, the economy is developing in line with our macroeconomic control measures. The negative impact of the global economy and major natural disasters have not changed the basic situation of our economy, and we have achieved stable growth.
I’m beginning to think that China is actually glad to see the U.S. flounder in its financial crisis because it could mean an end to the U.S. being a leader in world economics. A Chinese article that was spread all over the world’s news agencies testifies to this fact. The article, Is the sun setting on US economic supremacy?, was published in the China Daily, the main English language news outlet for the Chinese state. The author of the article is “a researcher with the State Council Development Research Center.” It began:
The unfolding financial crisis in the United States leads us to wonder whether this signals the end of that country’s long-established financial hegemony in the world.
I love China and hope to continue to work in China. However, I did not leave the U.S. because I saw it as a sinking ship (President Bush’s idiocacy did help me get out the door though) and I don’t want China to become the world’s biggest financial superpower. I came to China because we live in a globalized world where a young American man can succeed in Boston, Beijing, or any number of cities across the globe. Right now though these recent developments have spooked me and I’m worried that my future won’t be as rosy as my childhood of the 1980s and 1990s. So maybe learning Mandarin and coming to China was in fact the smartest thing I could have done. Maybe the rosy future I’m looking for can’t be found in America. I hope this isn’t true and I hope Obama wins the Presidential election because, frankly, I’m tired of this shit.
I just got back from an evening of music with this guy: 阿牛 (ah niu). It was one of those situations that even after all my time in China I will never expect. Me and my Cameroonian friend Elvis, a teacher at the local college who has been here for three years, were having a casual dinner of eggplant, a whole fish, and mapo tofu at a really good restaurant near his school. While we were eating a student of his sat down at the table next to us with her family. After talking with Elvis for a while she offered us five tickets to a concert with this guy taking place that night at the local college’s auditorium.
I got to the show on time but ended up waiting half an hour until the show started at eight o’clock. The auditorium, on the third floor of the cafeteria, was mostly full with about two hundred Chinese people of all ages. Before the show started I made friends with a freshman P.E. student at the school, we found a mutual love for Queen and dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. As the lights dimmed and the bubble and smoke machines went on full blast we were treated to a dance display of a couple dozen young women in skimpy clothing dancing to Justin Timberlake, Fergie, and a China Mobile jingle . Then two made-up MCs straight from China TV introduced Ah Niu. He sang a couple covers (including one of my all time favorite Chinese songs: Dui mian de nu hai 对面的女孩).
The crowd loved him, in a very Chinese way. The whole audience was alive with the screens of cell phones taking pictures and filming the show. People kept running on stage breaking through the police barricade to get their photo taken with the guy. I should explain that Ah Niu is a 40 year old, he looks so much younger, pop singer from Malayasia who now lives in Guangzhou (aka: Canton). It felt like seeing the big-time city slicker superstar in a small rural city, he didn’t have to try hard to get the whole place yelling that they love him. I left a bit early after Ah Niu’s second lipsynched song feeling happy and content.
I had to teach to today due to next weeks school vacation. Chinese state employees, like me, have to deal with some vacation absurdity, though they may just scrap the whole vacation anyway. In my mind it is not a good idea to make students attend class on a Saturday, but that’s just me. My classes earlier today made that very clear to me. My students seemed extra disruptive, which is saying a lot considering there are around 60 fifteen year old students in each of my classes and they act out every time I teach them. I confiscated a whole bunch of magazines, comic books, novels, math homework, and MP3 players, I even had to kick one student out of my class.
The most glaring issue today though was something else. I’ve been teaching my students about travel this week, having them in groups think of a dream vacation anywhere in the world they want. Paris was the all-time winner in my classes, but there was also a huge percentage that wanted to go to Japan. They all presented their trips saying why they wanted to do and what they would do. All of the Japan groups did this without incident except for one of my classes today.
The Chinese generally loath the Japanese. This makes some sense when you think about the fact that the Japanese Imperial Army brutally occupied China back in World War II. However it has always surprised how intensely the Chinese still hate Japan today. I mean why should a Chinese high school freshman hate all the Japanese people today? I still don’t get it, but when a group in one of my classes presented a bunch of racist Japanese slurs instead of reasons for a trip to Japan I wasn’t surprised.
The group’s reasons for going to Japan were simple English sentences followed by racist slurs in Chinese. The sentence “I want to see Japanese dogs” was followed by 日本狗 (lit: Japanese dogs), which is a very negative word for all Japanese people. The sentence “I want to see the soldier….” (the student’s English was very bad so it was unclear what he said) was followed by 黄军 (lit: yellow soldier). According to Wikipedia 黄军:
Was used during World War II to represent Imperial Japanese soldiers due to the colour of the uniform. Today, it is used negatively against all Japanese. Since the stereotype of Japanese soldiers are commonly portrayed in war-related TV series in China as short men, with a toothbrush moustache (and sometimes round glasses, in the case of higher ranks), 黃軍 is also often used to pull jokes on Chinese people with these characteristics, and thus “appear like” Japanese soldiers.
These “jokes” made the students very excited and they laughed loudly, though some looked back at me with worried expressions. I took the group outside and told them they had not done the activity properly and even if they disliked the Japanese that was not what they were supposed to speak about. I then saw one of the student’s paper for the presentation. On the paper were several sentences under the heading of Japan. They included: “I hate them” and “I want them to die” among other angry phrases. I made them redo their assignment and hand it into me at the end of class. That’s all. I don’t think any more action would help at all, no one cares about teaching tolerance for the Japanese here. It was not a fun day to teach.
-My backyard.
I didn’t think it true at first, but indeed I am one month into my career as a spoken English teacher. The month did not pass by at a blurred pace. Between getting acquainted with my new life here in Huaihua, learning the ropes of being a English teacher to more than 750 students, and traveling every weekend my days have been full and filled with experience. I feel like I’ve been here half a year.
But I’ve only been here a month and as far as teaching not all that much has happened. I settled my teaching schedule and only added one tutoring gig for eight students every Tuesday night, all the while fighting to not get more teaching jobs. First my school liaison had a friend at another middle school who wanted me to teach 6 more lessons on Fridays then a teacher friend here at school tried to get me tied up with a 2.5 hour Saturday afternoon (what?!) spoken English class/English drama club. I’m helping out with the Saturday afternoon class on a every-now-and-then agreement.
My former classmate and UVM Student Government President Kesha Ram is running to be a representative in the Vermont State Legislature (Chittenden 3-4 District). And she’s only 22! Kesha is an absolutely amazing woman and while we were in school together at the University of Vermont she inspired me with her intelligence, organizational skills, friendliness, and sheer force of will (she gets stuff done, for real). In this year, when we have one of the best candidates for President we’ve had in oh-so-long, of course I refer to Barack Obama, Kesha Ram is the kind of inspired youthful change that Mr. Obama calls on Americans of my generation to give. I wish her the best of luck and no matter where you live please remember to vote.
This video was made by her campaign and then picked up by the folks over at MTV and, I am told, by the Associated Press and Yahoo. If you are worried that people my age (ie: college students and the like) are lazy and uninterested in politics you should definitely watch this video.
Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Kesha Ram speak at the University of Vermont – March 2006
This is my Hunan version of 宫爆鸡丁 (Kung Pao Chicken). Lately I’ve been making this a lot, it’s an easy lunch or dinner.
My favorite restaurant in Kunming is on a side street and serves basically one dish. Kunming, for those who don’t know their Chinese geography, is the capital of Yunnan province in southwestern China and where I lived and studied for half a year in 2006. I was back to my old stomping ground two weeks ago since it was Mid-Autumn festival and I had four days off from teaching. The train to Kunming was 17 hours and rolled through the breath-taking Guizhou province – all green mountains, clear streams, and quaint villages. I arrived early in the morning on a crisp Kunming day. My day was spent greeting old friends, eating western food and drinking coffee at Salvador’s, and walking down sunny streets. When it came time to pick a place to have dinner I knew where to go – Spicy Crab.
“It’s the best restaurant in Kunming,” I told my friends. They were down to try it out.
Last weekend I traveled back to my old home, Kunming. Here are a few shots from the trip. I have more to say but right now I’m catching a bus to Fenghuang (凤凰) to meet some friends. Enjoy.
After a day of teaching spoken English last week I still had a lot of energy and an intense hunger, so I decided to hit up my local wet market. It was late afternoon and the sun was already beginning to set, many of the vendors had packed up and gone home. The ground was littered with vegetable debris – empty soy bean pods, excess lotus stalks, rotten chiles etc. Then I saw that a tofu seller was still in business, which is odd because they always seem to be the first ones to leave. So I quickly decided on tofu for dinner. Here is the tofu vendor, with my bag on the left. The brown tofu on the right is Hunan smoked and pressed tofu (香干), another story altogether.
I’m so elated that people can finally comment on this blog once again that now I want to backtrack a couple weeks to a weekend trip I made to the small city of Chenxi. Chenxi is home to two of my fellow American teachers in Hunan and the closest Americans to me that I know of. So naturally I had to take the hour long train ride and visit them. No doubt this will be one of many trips to Chenxi, so I will try and keep this post short.
Chenxi (晨溪) is a small city, which until this year had never hosted American teachers before. My friends are on the cutting edge of China exploration! Like Huaihua (really much more so) Chenxi is off the beaten path for foreigners in China. Unlike Huaihua getting there is a little tough since the train station is a good 30 minute drive from the city and the Chinese government has yet to build a solid expressway to the city (though as with all roads in China construction is underway).
It is a small polluted city in the middle of beautiful hills, valleys of rice and picturesque cliffs of white stone. An absolutely perfect place for wandering, which my two friends have become quite adept at. No sooner had I arrived before we were hiking down a country road through rice fields ripe for picking. My weekend in Chenxi was the first time this summer that I realized autumn was right around the corner. There was a certain musty death in the fields of Chenxi, as if I had arrived just past the peak of summer. There are really just two other things I want to mention:
I finally was able to delete the 10,460 spam comments without crashing my computer! So now feel free to leave all the comments you wish.
I just got back from a few days in Kunming and should really write about that, but until then here is some more about the U.S. election!
Through the Shanghaiist Blog I just read two briefs given out by the McCain and Obama campiagns regarding what their U.S.-China relations would look like if they were to become President. These briefs were published by the American Chamber of Commerce. They are in fact very similar sounding plans which give little insight, but they are all we American expats in China can go by. Certainly they deserve your time more than the plentiful articles on Sarah Palin do.
In the coming years, the United States and China face challenges that require fresh thinking and a change from the US policy approach of the past eight years. How the US and China meet these challenges, and the extent to which we can find common ground, will be important both for our own countries and for others in Asia and beyond.China has achieved extraordinary, sustained growth over the past three decades. Hundreds of millions of people in China live better now than most thought possible even two decades ago.
But as China’s leaders acknowledge, China must make some basic adjustments if it is to continue sustained, shared economic growth. China must develop practices that are more environmentally sustainable and less energy intensive, that boost domestic consumption as an engine of growth, that enhance the social safety net, and that encourage indigenous technology innovation. Otherwise, the country’s future performance may fall well short of its potential.
The resurgence of Asia is one of the epochal events of our time. It is a renaissance that is not only transforming the face of this vast region, but throwing open new opportunities for billions of people on both sides of the Pacific—Americans and Asians alike—to build a safer, more prosperous and freer world.
Seizing these opportunities, however, will require strong American leadership and an unequivocal American commitment to Asia, whose fate is increasingly inseparable from our own. It requires internationalism rather than isolationism, and global trade rather than national protectionism. When our friends and allies in the Asia-Pacific region think of the future, they should expect more—not less—attention, investment and cooperation from the highest levels of the US government.
A central challenge will be getting America’s relationship with China right. China’s double-digit growth rates have brought hundreds of millions out of poverty, energized the economies of its neighbors and produced manifold new economic opportunities. The US shares common interests with China that can form the basis of a strong partnership on issues of global concern, including climate change, trade and proliferation. But some of China’s economic practices, combined with its rapid military modernization, lack of political freedom and close relations with regimes like Sudan and Burma, tend to undermine the very international system on which its rise depends. The next American president must build on the areas of overlapping interest to forge a more durable US-China relationship.
More Links:
China Rises McCain and Obama on China
-The view of Huaihua I got after class.
Today is indeed Teacher Appreciation Day here in China, the lovely fragrance coming from dozens of bouquets in the Teachers’ office says it all. It was a day of ups and downs for me, though waaaay more ups than downs.
Thanks to the cool cats at Danwei I was alerted to a story that happened a mere hour drive north of me in the city of Jishou. Apparently a large protest took place in the Prefectural capital of Jishou, blocking roads and railways. The protesters were protesting a fundraising firm that had taken their money and run, apparently after they had tried talking to the government. The BBC reported there being as many as 10,000 protesters.
China Daily: Hunan clamps down on illegal fund-raising
Local authorities in central China’s Hunan Province on Sunday started probing into 12 companies involved in illegal fund-raising cases after a dispute led to lenders’ demonstration on Wednesday and Thursday, blocking roads and railways.
The government of Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture issued a notice on TV, radio and newspapers on Sunday, telling the public that working teams had been sent to the enterprises on suspicion of illegal fund-raising and a probe into their assets had began.
The notice said the executives of the suspected enterprises and relevant financial information would be put under control.
The prefectural capital of Jishou city ordered all underground fund-raising activities to stop and suspected enterprises to suspend paying interest before the probe ended.
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A young American living in Shanghai working in law. I first came to China in 2004 and have been living here off and on ever since and see no reason to stop.
