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The Economist talks about 同妻, aka: Homowives

Friday, March 19th, 2010

This is a subject I find rather fascinating, as can be seen from this previous post on gay men marrying heterosexual women in China.  Today I was again reminded of this sad occurrence by the Economist magazine, which published a short article on the subject.  Worth a read if you’re interested.

It is estimated that 15-20% of gay men in America marry heterosexual women. But Liu Dalin, a pioneering sexologist now retired from the University of Shanghai, has put the share in China at 90%. If so, the number of tongqi in China may be as high as 25m.

Last week I joined 飞赞 (Fei Zan), a kind of Facebook for gay men in China.  Shanghai’s City Weekend LGBeat blog recently published a nice introduction to the service.  One of the fascinating things about it is that is entirely geared towards gay men in China (the site is only in Chinese), which these days are often only open about their sexuality online.  So on top of the usual information you would find on a social networking site 飞赞 also asks you to share whether or not you are closeted, what role you play during sex, and the state of your body hair.  They also ask whether or not you plan on getting married (是否结婚).  As a gay guy from Massachusetts my answer would normally be a definitive yes, but since this is China saying you plan on getting married is akin to saying you will never be completely open about your sexuality and that you and some poor woman will live a sexless life together.  So in these circumstances I put down that I do not plan on getting married, a assertion that I will have open relationships with men, but from what I’ve seen on the site I am the only one that thinks this way.

Posted in Gay Rights in China, Homosexuality, Internet, Reading | 1 Response »
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The Fat Years: China, 2013

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Just a quick post on the new Chinese novel The Fat Years China 2013 (盛世 中国 2013年) that just came out in Hong Kong.  It was written by a John Chan (陳冠中), a Hong Kong native who currently lives in Beijing.  His novel takes place in the year 2013 when China is in a period of prosperity and general happiness, while at the same time Western countries, lead by America, have fallen into another far more catastrophic financial crisis that has brought destruction to every country in the world other than China.  What will this China of 2013 look like?  In the book the State will have expanded its control over all aspects of the economy and society, all in the name of stability and prosperity.  The main character is a writer from Taiwan who has moved to Beijing and “discovers that a month (filled with rioting and other mayhem) has gone missing out of everyone’s lives…just disappeared.  He sets out to find out exactly what happened.”

It’s being billed as a 1984 for our day and age, a modern day update for George Orwell’s masterpiece.  It has been published in Hong Kong by Oxford University Press and will soon be available in Taiwan, and will, of course, never be officially published in mainland China.  On the Publishing Perspectives blog (where you can also download a detailed English summary of the novel) Marysia Juszczakiewicz of the new Peony Literary agency is quoted as saying:

“The book is reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984 and will not be published on the mainland. Copies have been smuggled in and are available under the counter. There is a buzz on the blogs about it. It think it’s the type of book that really taps into the China of today.”

Over at Global Voices, where I’m first read about this book (via Danwei), they share some of the social conditions of the book as described by Zhang Tiezhi (张铁志) of Taiwan’s China Times newspaper.  The original Chinese can be found here, all translations are taken from Global Voices.

Western countries faced another economic crisis in 2011 and entered a prolonged ‘ice and fire’ period of stagnation.  China, unharmed, becomes even stronger and more confident than today. People are happy, or even ‘high’. The Age of China has arrived.

The main character said: ‘I know China still has a lot of problems. But think about it, the developed capitalist countries, headed by the US, have destroyed themselves. They have only recovered from the 2008 crisis for a few years, and are now in deep troubles again… Only China can spare itself of the crisis… Not only has China rewritten the rules of the global economy, it has also maintained social harmony. You cannot but appreciate this.’

In the year of 2013 described by the book, Beijing’s most important humanities bookshop, Wansheng, has closed down. The important liberal magazine, Southern Weekend, has ceased to exist. You cannot find in any bookstores books about the anti-right campaigns and Cultural Revolution. Newspapers which recorded past periods of social instability are all gone. The few people who insist on having a memory of history are marginalized, or even treated as insane.

Global Voices also translated a “twitter broadcast”, organized by the blogger Du Ting (杜婷), where the author, John Chan, touched on issues of freedom.  These few lines really hit the mark in my mind (again, translations taken from Global Voices):

With the inequality between happiness and freedom, resulting in happiness without freedom, could the world sustain itself naturally? In mainland, we can see that official ‘newspeaks’ are becoming more and more common. In the 1980s, the Chinese society went through a period of self-reflections. Ba Jin spoke out, and spoke the truth. But in these years, we have fallen back. We have lost the freedom to speak the truth.  Why does [the government] become unhappy once the words used are inappropriate? We know that it would be terrible if there are only positive, but no negative, feedbacks. If China only has one voice, it will lose the ability to self-correct. Therefore, freedom is very important.

I bring up this new book not merely because of my serious love for futuristic dystopian novels, but also so people can stop and realize just how murky China’s future is.  When I contemplate why I’m spending so much time living in China and studying its language the one big argument that always comes to mind is: China’s future, whatever it may be, will no doubt be exciting.  Sure the CCP controlled government would have you believe that China’s future will harmoniously progress forward as material prosperity and social stability rise together, but I don’t think any intelligent person who has been reading the news coming out of China would buy into such a rosy and over-simplified future.  Having a new novel out that deals with China’s near future in such a politically dangerous and thought provoking way is very interesting to me and I really want a copy.

Posted in Books, Internet, Politics, Reading | 5 Responses »
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The sad state of the internet in China

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

This post has been in gestation for awhile now.  However, right when I think it’s time to speak about the Chinese government’s pernicious censorship of the internet some new bit of even more saddening news comes out and then yet another, so I kept waiting.  The story of the Chinese internet, especially since the summer of 2008, has been one of endless sorrow.  It’s almost too bad the internet is such a intangible thing.  If what the Chinese government was doing was happening on the streets, rather than secretly in an office room without warning or explanation, people might stand up and care.

I originally wanted to write this post because just last week the Chinese government blocked IMDB (The Internet Movie Database) to all 300 million+ 385 million+ Chinese internet users.  This is simply a piece of pathetic censorship and emblematic of the paranoia that the Chinese government has when it comes to the freedom of speech.  I love movies and since I can’t use Netflix, go to a video rental store or use American cable television I use the Chinese internet and stream whole movies online for free (it is easy to watch and download movies, TV shows, and music for free on the Chinese internet), but I am constantly looking for new movies to watch.  IMDB was always a great way of figuring out what is popular State-side and what movies have come out on DVD.  I don’t think that’s why the government blocked it, probably has more to do with their gargantuan (and unwinnable) fight against pornography.

Then there was this little tidbit of news last month that had every foreigner in China laughing their asses off, before a period of quiet sadness set in as they realized the perilous world they live in.

“Our country’s Internet situation is unique. Compared to all kinds of restrictions in foreign countries, China has the most open Internet in the world.”

«我国互联网形态有特殊性。相对于国外的各种限制，中国的互联网是全世界最开放的。»

- Zhou Xisheng (周锡生) Deputy Chief of Xinhua News Agency, Director-General of Xinhua News Net.

In general the internet in China has since the Spring of 2008 been sliding ever-faster towards a sad world were freedom turns up no search results.  2008 was of course the year of the Olympics and was when we saw the riots in Tibet, with corresponding government censorship and paranoia.  2008 was followed by a new year of even more censorship as Facebook and Twitter were blocked and Xinjiang became (and remains) an internet dead zone after intense riots there.  And as time has gone by the government has silently picked off sites big and small, hiding pieces of the internet from its people.

All of this would be enough to warrant a blog post on any blog that pays attention to China issues, but with this morning’s bombshell of an announcement about Google in China the story of Chinese censorship of the internet has exploded and we all can’t help but take notice.

Early this morning in China, Google posted on its official English blog this: A New Approach to China.

The post starts off by explaining that in mid-December Google’s servers, along with those of a couple dozen other American internet companies, were systematically attacked by someone or something in China that really knew what they were doing.  Google never states that it is blaming the Chinese government but it’s there if you read between the lines.  For Google the attack targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.  But that’s not all!  The real juice of the post comes towards the end when they write:

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Right now this means that Google.cn is uncensored for the first time ever (check out those cute pictures of the Dalai Lama!) (1/25: Google.cn has continued to be censored since the blog posting).  In Beijing Chinese citizens are laying flowers outside Google’s China headquarters.  A friend of my colleague just emailed her saying that Google management at the Beijing headquarters has told employees to not come to work starting tomorrow. (1/25: These rumors about the office closing seem to have been nothing but rumors.)

Google, like so many other useful and righteous websites will soon no longer be accessible in the People’s Republic of China.  As someone who uses Google search, Gmail, and Google Reader every single day, this is not good news.  Some are rightly pointing out that Google was never going to become the no.1 search engine of China (that belongs to China’s own Baidu.cn) and that Google never made a lot of money in China, so bowing out of China was not as difficult a decision as it could have been.  Nevertheless, this announcement is epic.  Foreign companies never go after the Chinese government like this.  American companies actually bend over backwards to do business here, even if that means ignoring issues like freedom of speech or privacy.

I can’t help but applaud Google’s actions.  Not only are they living up to their mantra of “Don’t be evil”, but they are also confronting the Chinese government the way no one else seems to be doing.  That said, people in China are really sad today.  Here in my office Google is the search engine of choice and my colleagues are not happy that they will have to let it go now.  Me, I’m horribly sad to see Google go (though I have the power to jump over the Chinese government’s Great Firewall), but as an American who holds certain freedoms in high regard and as someone who lives in China I am thankful that someone is standing up.  I really liked what Jeremy Goldkorn, of Danwei, published in the Guardian today:

The fallout will be interesting. I can’t recall a single case of a major international company with operations in China taking a stand like this. As someone who agreed with Google’s reasoning when it entered China, I also support this move. If it cannot operate here in accordance with its global standards, it should leave. I have given up on getting my own website unblocked by the government and am resigned to the fact that it’s only accessible to people who are outside China or know the technical tricks to get over the Great Firewall.

I’d rather be outside the wall and free than inside it with the icy hand of the censor around my throat.

This has been really big news today and seems to only get bigger as the day goes on.  Looking at my Google Reader feeds of China blogs, it seems that the vast majority have already posted something about this news.  Twitter, which is blocked in China, has been glowing with people’s comments on the issue (check out China Digital Times collection of interesting tweets).  Of course, the government here seems to be blocking information of the announcement left and right.  Still, the news is traveling fast along office corridors and between friends on the street and people sitting next to each other in internet cafes across the nation, censorship of the internet is being talked about like I’ve never seen before.  And that, my fellow internet users, is something we should be thankful for.

Mourners laying flowers at Google's China headquarters in Beijing. January 13, 2010

Mourners laying flowers at Google's China headquarters in Beijing. January 13, 2010

Some further reading on the subject:

Imagethief
James Fallows (The Atlantic)
More photos of people bringing flowers to Google’s China headquarters
Global Voices Online
The Peking Duck
Shanghaiist
China Hearsay

Posted in Internet, Politics | 2 Responses »
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Readability

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

I’m not one to keep up with all the new techno marvels that stream from all corners of the world day in and day out.  I almost never check out the large pile of posts that get put up on this blog, even if it is one of my Google Reader subscriptions.  Most of this gadgets, programs, apps, websites, social networking sites and what-have-you seem to just suck up our limited time and give little in return.  That said, every now and then I get something that makes my life better.  Other than he new Pleco Chinese dictionary for the iPhone/iPod Touch I have recently been playing with a new web service called Readability.

Like much of my generation I do most of my reading on computers.  Now with a full-time office job, which affords ample time for reading the news and what not, I am doing more reading than ever before.  The problem is the internet and a computer screen are not nice places to rest your eyes hours at a time.  The flashing ads, teeny tiny text, distracting links that take you away from what you wanted to read in the first place, and so on make reading annoying in a way curling up with a paperback isn’t.  Besides having Google Reader to organize and display the countless blogs I try to keep up with, I’ve begun to use this nifty new service called Readability.

Readability is basically a link on your browser that you click when you want to view a online text without all the clutter.  For example, today I was reading Evan Osnos’ interview with the U.S. Ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman.  On the New Yorker website the article looks like this:

Picture 4

It’s not horribly displayed, nor is it egregiously distracting, but nonetheless I would rather read it in a font size and layout to my particular liking.  So while viewing the page I just clicked on the Readability icon on my bookmarks bar and I see the article rendered like this:

Picture 6

Goodbye crap, hello clean clear text.  The readability site lets you pick what style, text size, and margin you want when you make the bookmark on their website (it’s very easy).  The three buttons in the top left corner let you return to the original version, print the unadulterated text, or email the text to a friend.  This isn’t really the best example because Evan Osnos’ New Yorker blog on China, Letter From China, can be easily viewed on any blog aggregator, such as Google Reader.

The real beauty of this service for me has been with viewing Chinese articles.  Not only are Chinese websites well known for their bad design, distracting ads, and generally off-putting vibe (though the situation does seem to be getting better as of late), but Chinese text is very difficult to read if it is small, which makes Readability great for reading Chinese texts online.  Importantly, viewing a text with Readability doesn’t hamper one’s ability to cut and paste or use tools like Perakun to look up characters.  Here’s an example from a People’s Daily article published today on the Chinese government’s anti-corruption work:

Picture 5

Picture 7

Nice, right?

My father is a true believer in having the best reading sitaution possible when you sit down to read something.  Having proper lighting, folding the newspaper the right way, and, when reading something from the internet, always printing out a text before reading it.  Now if we all printed out everything we read online there would be no more trees on this planet, so for me (and maybe my dad) Readability is a useful and almost perfect tool.

Posted in Internet, Reading | 2 Responses »
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Let the rivers be rivers, Let the mountains be mountains

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

This is kind of old news, but better late than never, eh?  This is an environmentally aware animation that until recently was playing at the People’s Square subway station.  I used to see it on my daily commute in the massive corridor between Line 1 and Line 2, where it would be simultaneously be playing on a dozen screens for the tens of thousands of people that switch lines there.  Something about the austere black and white animation and its similarity to the Chinese shanshui (mountains and rivers) landscape painting style would always bring my eyes to it.  People’s Square is a capitalistic maze of color and flashing lights, a sad black and white depection of the environmental degredation happening in the world was always a welcome change for me.  It was also nice knowing that someone here in Shanghai was trying to get the message across that we are destroying the natural world.  Today I saw a write up on it over at the Neocha Edge blog, which, by the way, is a fabulous place to see and read about all types of contemporary art coming out of China.

Posted in Art, Internet, Shanghai, Video | 4 Responses »
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Christmas in China

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Huaihua Before Christmas

I was recently asked to contribute a blog post for enoVate, a Chinese “insights and design firm” based here in Shanghai.  The company’s focus is on the youth of China, the world’s most dynamic demographic, specifically what young Chinese enjoy doing and buying.  It’s a fascinating topic that is in such flux and so misunderstood (even by the Chinese) that you never really know what to say about it.  I am of the opinion that China’s youth are one of the biggest reasons modern day China is so damn exciting (take, for instance, the fact that China has the largest number of internet users in the world yet almost all are under the age of 30).  Right now the enoVate blog is doing a series on how Chinese youth celebrate Christmas.  My entry is about my Christmas last year in Huaihua, Hunan, where I used to teach English.

If you are interested my post written a year ago about Christmas in Huaihua can be found here.

Posted in Huaihua, Internet | No Responses »
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Beijing’s Fourth Queer Film Festival

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

Jeremy Goldkorn may just have the coolest job in all of Beijing.  He is the founder and editor of Danwei.org (now blocked by the Chinese government, mirror site available in China at danwei.tv), which seeks to increase the international community’s understanding of China by translating pieces of Chinese journalism and bringing to light stories that you may not notice if you don’t read Chinese or scour the Chinese internet and blogosphere.  Danwei has also done a fabulous job discussing developments in the fight for LGBT rights in China.

Today they posted a video of an interview Jeremy Goldkorn had with the two organizers of this summer’s past Beijing Queer Film Festival (北京酷儿影展).  The organizers, Yang Yang and Cui Zi’en (催子恩), talk about the history of the film festival along with their thoughts on the gay rights in China today, what being openly gay can mean for your career in China and what the future will look like.  If you’re interested in gay rights in China this video is a must see.  Also, check out this Huffington Post article about the film festival.

Note: Vimeo video hosting is blocked by the Chinese government.  To view this video in China you will need a proxy or VPN.

Beijing Queer Festival from on Vimeo.

There was one question and answer from the interview that I wanted to highlight by publishing it here:

Goldkorn: From the first gay film festival in 2001 to now the fourth in 2009 has China seen any improvements in gay rights?

Cui Zi’en: Amongst the populace there has been some greater freedoms for homosexuals, the rise of grassroots associations and freedom of interaction between homosexuals.  But at the government level, in terms of government laws, policies etc. there hasn’t been any change at all.

You’re on the money there Cui Zi’en.

Posted in Beijing, Homosexuality, Internet, Video | No Responses »
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Making a Gay Home in China

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

With the infuriating and hateful voice of a slight majority, a referendum repealing the decision of the Maine State Supreme court, which allowed gay marriage in the State of Maine, was passed this past election day.  It’s sad news, especially for a young gay guy like myself.  Luckily, I am not an old man living in Maine with the man I want to marry, though I feel very sorry for that man.  I have a long life ahead of me and I live in Shanghai, so this decision, while completely wrong and detrimental to America’s future and to the principles on which our nation stands for, doesn’t bother me so much.  While the Catholic Diocese (who organized this fight against equal marriage in Maine) may be patting themselves on the back right now, I’m laughing at them.  Anyone who thinks that in 20 years these results would happen again is delusional.  I’m on the winning side in this fight and me and my fellow LGBT Americans are not going to lose hope over this example of 20th century hate that has no place in today’s world.  One of the organizers against Maine’s referendum had it right when they said: “We’re not short-timers; we are here for the long haul.  Whether it’s just all night and into the morning, or next week or next month or next year, we will be here. We’ll be fighting, we’ll be working. We will regroup.” (via The Bangor Daily News).  Besides, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Maine over the years (like the New Englander that I am) and that State we always be a happy gay place in my mind, no matter what the old haters try to make it.  I try to remember that I still have equal rights in my home state of Massachusetts, Vermont (where I went to school), Connecticut, Iowa, and New Hampshire – so my rights aren’t directly affected.

Now that I have that off my chest lets talk about gay rights here in China.  The big news is that Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, held the seventh annual LGBT Pride Parade last weekend.  While Shanghai may be a really gay city it’s not much into being gay and proud in public during the day, we got Chinese culture and the Communist government here, dude.  Taiwan has a bit of lead on Mainland China when it comes to gay rights and speaking your mind in public, so it’s not very surprising that the parade in Taipei is the largest Gay Pride in all of Asia – 25,000 people joined in the festivities this year.

People were speaking out for gay marriage, the right to adopt children and start families with their partners.  The crux of the problem for gay rights in China and East Asia is that while being gay can be (kind of) okay if it is practiced clandestinely and if relationships are not given the same weight as heterosexual ones, the culture and governments over here don’t want such relationships to be legitimatized.  So I think that the big hurdle for gay rights in China will be in changing people’s minds that being gay can in fact lead to a lasting legitimate relationship, while in America the problem is getting the old and hateful people to recognize that open gay relationships should have the choice to become a sanctified marriage.  Step by step people…

Whatever people want to think, gay people are still going to start serious relationships and live with the person they love – just as humans have for millennium.  I know some gay couples here in China that live together, they’re all either made up of two foreigners or a Chinese person and a foreigner, I don’t know any Chinese-Chinese gay couples living together.  It’s not that big a deal, especially since none of the couples I know live in rural Chinese villages and most live far away from their families.  I was happy to read about just such a couple in a recent article in the New York Times (In China, Apartment Renovation Presents New Challenges) about a gay couple, consisting of a Chinese and American man, who recently renovated the apartment they share in Dalian.

Now, a gay couple talking about a their apartment renovation is about as rare as people wearing red underwear on the Chinese New Year’s eve.  I have a friend here in Shanghai who the night I met him literally never stopped talking about the interior decoration plans for the apartment he shares with his boyfriend here in Shanghai.  We gay guys nest in well-thought out beautiful spaces.  Besides hearing about the issues involved in renovating a Chinese apartment in a minimalist American style, which is a world away from the average Chinese style, it was interesting hearing a little about how an American gay man was making a permanent home with his Chinese boyfriend.  One thing that really intrigued me was the fact that the Chinese man’s father organized the workers for the renovation, transporting them from the family’s hometown five hours away.  The article doesn’t go into the father’s thoughts about his son living with his American boyfriend, though I really wish it had.  There’s also an interesting bit about extortion.  All in all a fun read, even if you aren’t interested in issues related to gay rights in China.  Makes we wonder whether living with your gay boyfriend in a Chinese city might be easier than doing so in some parts of America, minus the extortion, of course.

UPDATE: ChinaSmack has posted a translation of a mainland China BBS post about the recent Taiwan LGBT Pride parade.  It includes some pictures from the parade and a bunch of translated comments written by Chinese netizens.  The comments are by and large very disparaging of homosexuals, though there are some nice comments calling for people to accept homosexual love.  A couple of commenters mentioned God as a basis for their hatred of homosexuals, a sign that religious hatred of homosexuals is gaining ground in China.  It was a kind of sad read for me.  There was no mention in ChinaSmack’s translation about the differences between Taiwan and mainland China when it comes to gay rights or freedoms, which I thought to be rather surprising.

Posted in America, Homosexuality, Internet | 9 Responses »
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Who needs the Latin alphabet anyways?

Friday, October 30th, 2009

Yesterday I was reading about the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, saying that in five years Chinese will dominate internet content.  Then it turns out that today is the 40th anniversary of the internet and that ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, will soon allow domain names to be written in scripts other than the Latin alphabet.  So that means instead of writing Google.cn we will get to write www.谷歌.cn (or will it be www.谷歌.中国?), and let’s not forget about Cyrillic, Arabic, Korean, Thai, and all the other written languages that make human civilization awesome.  I’m so pumped for this.  It’s going to be that much more incentive for American kids to learn a foreign language, especially if most of the internet will be written in 汉字 anyway.

Posted in Internet, Learning Chinese | 1 Response »
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The Life of John Zeidman

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Americans have been coming to China for centuries and they will continue to come long after my generation has left this world.  In fact, the first ones arrived in China in 1784 aboard the ship Empress of China, hoping to trade American ginseng for Chinese tea, porcelain, and other goods.  I have always enjoyed reading and hearing about these experiences, whether they happened a hundred years ago or last week.  Even with the great strides the world has taken and the developments these two countries have made, a trip from America to China is still an undeniable adventure.  Young men and women floating along in their lives in America with no hardened idea of what they want out of life may find themselves taking the flight to China and once there a new world of opportunity opens before them, and yes, even adventure.  China can intoxicate men with its vibrant cities, ancient culture, and a language that can make the most cynical of students see the beauty of learning a foreign tongue.  This country can literally provide everything that some young Americans need to make sense of this world, to see the way forward.

When Mozart first sat down at the harpsichord there must have been a click in his brain, a puzzle fitting into place.  For some, China can provide a similar epiphany.  It was this way for me and I know I am not alone in my sentiments.  While I am not saying I am destined to devote my whole life to China, I am just as sure that there was a profound click in my brain after my first trip to Beijing as a high school student.  It wasn’t something I could just brush off as I headed back to America.  There was something about this country that fulfilled my childhood dreams of foreign discovery in such a profound way and it gave me something useful to pursue in life.  Ever since that cold January day when I landed in Beijing that’s what I’ve been doing.  I don’t know where it will take me, but I know it will be worth it.

If this all sounds overly romantic, please excuse me.  I’ve just finished reading the story of an American that came to China to study a full five years before I was even born.  His name was John Zeidman and for him, like me and many other others, “China seemed to bring everything together.”

The story I read was written by Calvin Trillin and published in the New Yorker magazine on October 7, 1985.  I found my way to this mid-eighties copy of the New Yorker by way of a journalist I respect a lot, James Fallows.  You see Mr. Fallows just published a small article (all articles feel small in comparison to New Yorker articles) for the Atlantic magazine about an American couple who live in the town of Xizhou in my former home province of Yunnan.  To keep it short, they are trying to keep Xizhou from becoming the tourist wasteland that other historical towns in the hinterland of Yunnan have become (I’m looking at you Lijiang).  They run a community center/inn than supports the local arts and provides a more fulfilling way for visitors to appreciate that most beautiful and interesting corner of China.  Something mentioned in the article stuck out at me, though.  In the article we learn that the American husband, Brian Linden, came to China in the early 1980s as a student:

Soon after his arrival, he was spotted by a movie director while jogging down a Beijing street and cast as the lead in a Chinese movie. The film, He Came From Across the Pacific, was based on the tragic story of John Zeidman, an American exchange student who caught viral encephalitis in China and died in 1982.

I had never heard of John Zeidman, but I was instantly interested.  For a Chinese movie to have been made about an American student who came to China at that time, when relations between America and China were just beginning to include student exchanges, it was bound to be, at the very least, a good story and most likely a big deal.  Luckily for me before I came to Shanghai I packed a good chunk of my father’s “The Complete New Yorker,” which is stored on DVDs, and I had the 1984-1997 disc.  So today while there was a lull at work I stuck in the disc and brought up the article.  The information used in this post is entirely from that New Yorker article, unless otherwise noted; there was little more that I could find about him online and no photographs.  If you have a subscription to the magazine I suggest you read the article online.

I would like to add that in writing this post I don’t want to hurt anyone by rehashing a painful story, it was just that I found this young man’s experience in China so absolutely fascinating and heart wrenching.  The fact that no one I know my age living in China has heard of him is unacceptable to me.  Historians tell stories worth telling and this is without a doubt just such a story

Click to continue »

Posted in America, Beijing, History, Internet, Personal | 3 Responses »
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Twitter

Monday, March 9th, 2009

I was very skeptical of Twitter when it first showed up and people in large numbers began to use it.  I don’t take lightly the addition of the many new ways to suck away my free time that are popping up everywhere online these days and Twitter seemed like just another one of these.  I have just one email address and haven’t instant messaged with any frequency since high school, though Skpye is changing that these days, and I kind of look down on those that are hugely invested in an online life.  Still, living here in Hunan my computer is my connection to absolutely everything and I use it everyday all the frickin time.  I read, write, communicate with students, research, make international calls, watch TV, keep in touch with friends back home, learn Chinese, find recipes, download and listen to music, organize my calendar, make lesson plans, and do many many other things on my computer.  Yesterday another American teacher here in Huaihua and I discussed this and we decided that our computers are hands down the most important item we posses here.  It is a holy thing in my apartment.

So even though I would (somtimes) like to put the computer away and just live life, it’s pull is far too great and I often feel that I can’t say no.  Getting back to the point of all of this, I had decided that Twitter would put me over the edge and take away any sense of a normal life I had.  I already had Facebook status updates so why did I need Twitter?  And who on earth would ever want to fill out another online form?  In the meantime more and more smart people were signing up to Twitter and I started to think about it and ponder the pros and cons.  Then The New York Times’ techno-geek David Pogue wrote about Twitter and in a flash of excitement I signed up.

Returnjon

There I am.  My very own Twitter page where I will now micro-blog (I think that’s the term) my daily experiences and the interesting scraps of knowledge I find on the web.  Now I just need to figure out how to show my twitter feed on this blog.  I’ll leave that for another day.

You may be wondering about my Twitter user name.  I got it from my esteemed relative Return Jonathan, who was my namesake.  There is in fact a long line of Return Jonathans in my family tree and sometimes I rather wish my name was Return Jonathan, but then I realize that Jonathan is long enough as it stands.

To get back to this blog.  I’ve been seriously slacking off on my duties here and I apologize.  Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that after a certain amount of time a blogger is not as interested in writing for his blog, the blogosphere has discovered that this amount of time is one year for most bloggers.  There is also the fact that after 8 months life in China becomes a bit more – though never fully – routine and daily occurrences that maybe once seemed important enough to post on a blog no longer have that eminence.

However those two excuses are not the real problem for me.  Not a day goes by I don’t think of something to write on here or some photograph I want to post.  My life is much busier this semester and I am happily spending more time away from my computer and this of course means that there is less time to blog.  More importantly though technology is hampering my blogging.  My computer is coming up to its 5th birthday and that coupled with the fact that my internet connection in my apartment is horrible blogging and uploading photographs have become very large time drains and about as much fun and cleaning the bathroom.

All of this means that Twitter, the fast and simple way to blog, will be used by me more than this blog.  Where will the internet go next?

Posted in Internet, Personal | No Responses »

New York Times Blocked in Mainland China

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

This is undoubtedly some of the worst news I’ve heard in awhile and I can’t even read about it from my favorite news source: the first-rate New York Times.  The New York Times is BLOCKED BLOCKED!

I along with many over here were happy with the great reform and opening up of the Chinese internet that occurred right before the Beijing Olympics.  Finally we could access You Tube!  After the Olympics the government seemed to say that such online freedom would stay in place.  For the record the New York Times has always been unblocked while I’ve lived in China, ever since 2004.  Not for long it would seem.  Though no one really knows what the hell the blocking of sites behind the “Great Firewall of China” means nor how long they will last. The NYTimes reported (I’m getting this from another blog, not the source itself, obviously):

But the Chinese-language Web sites of BBC, Voice of America and Asiaweek, all of which had been blocked earlier this week, were accessible by Friday. The Web site of Ming Pao, a Hong Kong newspaper, was blocked earlier this week and still restricted on Friday.

I for one wish the government made a statement explaining such blockings so we could understand them better.  Though in China the government need not include the people in their struggle to “harmonize” society.  There is some speculation that a recent article in the paper, After 30 years, economic perils on China’s path, was the cause of this very unfortunate change in policy.

The New York Times is my news source.  During the election I strayed around to other news sites but these days I have been soley a NYTimes reader.  Growing up in Massachusetts my family always had a copy to read with breakfast.  Oddly enough the New York Times was one of the reasons I got so interested in China in the first place.  What am I going to do?  Try and hide my anger as best I can.  I’ve been forced into a position I don’t want to be in, so I’m doing something about it.  Guess it’s time I get a proxy server.

UPDATE:  Six hours after posting this I found that the New York Times seems to be unblocked.

Posted in Internet, News | 1 Response »

Post-90s Chinese Kids

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

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).

Click to continue »

Posted in Huaihua, Internet, School | No Responses »

The rising costs of getting around China

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

Lately I’ve been checking the train and airplane costs of getting around China. Thankfully the internet makes this easy. For train schedule info check out this website. And for airplane info I’ve been using elong.com. Though be warned if you want to buy airplane tickets for getting around China a foreign credit card could be more trouble than its worth. One thing I couldn’t get out of my mind is the value of the American dollar and how it has changed since my first trip to China in 2004. This is a good representation of the U.S. dollar’s exchange rate with the Chinese RMB in the last several months:

image-69

A plane trip from Huaihua to Beijing costs 1200 RMB, which in 2004 was around $145 but today is around $175. Oyvey.

Posted in Economics, Internet, Travel | No Responses »

Bored in Chengdu

Friday, August 11th, 2006


(HuangLongXi street scene)

Not that Chengdu is boring. It’s just that it is night here and I don’t know what to do but chill in the air-conditioned lobby of my hostel and surf the web. I spent today going outside of Chengdu to the small village of HuangLongXi (黄龙溪). It came highly recommended by my guidebook and I wanted to get out of the city. The town used to be the center of judicial control and a large trading area, it sits next to a river that flows through much of Sichuan, during the Qing dynasty and the Republic of China. It looks today much like it did a hundred years ago with wooden Qing style houses and cobble stoned streets. Many Kung-Fu films have been filmed there including Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and they display photos of the filming of every movie made in the town. Since it is a Friday the town was quiet and had few tourists. It was cool seeing what a prosperous Qing era town looked like and imagining the good ol’ days of China’s past, which is literally impossible in almost all of China’s cities.

Since I’m bored I want to point you folks towards some interesting reading on China that is presently online. I don’t pretend to add anything useful to China’s blogosphere by writing in this thing and truthfully you time is better spent checking out the blogs to the right.

Recently the Chinese government lifted its Internet censorship of Google’s English language blog hosting site Blogspot. This isn’t a change for those outside of China but is for me. I’d like to spotlight two blogs (there are more but I haven’t found them yet):

China Confidential – Harsh critcisms of the People’s Republic with interesting thoughts on China in the Middle East and US-China relations. I don’t always agree with the guy, but nevertheless interesting reading.

Asian Business Law Blog – As the site says this blog: “clarifies news of import for legal professionals in Asian business”. Some interesting thoughts on recent business news related to China and other more varied posts. Good stuff. Also, you can check out the great China Law Blog for more Chinese law tidbits.

Yesterday I took a late afternoon stroll through Chengdu’s DuFuCaoTang (DuFu’s Thatched Cottage), a park dedicated to Dufu (杜甫）one of China’s all-time greatest poets who lived during the Tang dynasty. I am a big fan of Dufu and have read a good deal about his history and his surviving poems. Seeing this park/shrine dedicated to his life and works was on my list of must see things in Chengdu. The park was beautifully landscaped with ponds, rivers, tropical plants, and calligraphy. I was really happy to see that so many Chinese appreciated their literary history and culture. Afterwards I was strolling around having absolutely no luck finding a taxi in the evening heat when I saw a string of bookstores. Now, I love Chinese bookstores….a lot. They are everywhere and always full of people and hold huge numbers of books. The Chinese seem utterly excited to learn everything, especially languages, and I respect them all the more for it. Bookstores are usually huge new department stores here but the neighborhood of bookstores I found in Chengdu was all small stores and almost entirely full of used books. These stores were like any good bookshop, or household, completely full of books. The floors were stacked with them, the walls filled to the ceiling and always that musty smell that made me want to carefully look through every pile and every shelf. I didn’t do that, but I did buy a book of DuFu’s poetry and an old propaganda poster of a young communist soldier reading Mao’s red book (perfect for any reading area!). Anyway, yesterday looking through the amazing Danwei Blog I found link to a post about finding Chinese used books online (here). The author mentions the book market near the DuFuCaoTang, which I thought was a cool coincidence.

I also recently found a cool blog about Shenzhen, the special economic zone that started it all, by a cultural anthropologist who has been living there for 12 years. Shenzhen Fieldnotes I discovered her blog from a Virtual China post (here)

So tomorrow I leave Chengdu and take a train back to Kunming. I will arrive on Sunday, just in time for my new semester of intensive Chinese, kungfu, brush calligraphy, and U.S.-China business relations. Should be a hoot!

Posted in Internet, Photography, Reading, Travel | 3 Responses »
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