Ah, Bangkok.  This city elicits such strong reactions from visitors that most of the time it is best to ignore what others say and go there with an open mind.  When I visited Bangkok for the first time in 2006 I was in love with the city.  Coming from a chilly Chinese provincial city the cosmopolitan delights and humid tropical climate of Bangkok, 曼谷 in Chinese, were balm to my dry soul.  At the time, I had only heard people’s negative thoughts on the city, so I came pretty much expecting such a trip.  Really though, all those negative-Nancys were plain wrong.  Bangkok is awesome.

Now, that first trip was in October, when the overloaded Thai tourist season had yet to get into full gear, on my trip last month I arrived in the middle of the Great White Northern invasion.  The long bus ride from my plane to the Bangkok terminal went past rows and rows of airplanes all from countries that are thoroughly nontropical: Swedish Airways, Finnish Airways, American, Japan Air, Swiss Air, Air France, etc etc.  The Bangkok international airport, which had been open for merely one week when I had arrived in 2006, was packed to the gills with these pale visitors, all waiting in line for the tropical bliss that Thailand is so well known for.

I was only in Bangkok for a night, not really enough time to do the city justice.  However, since I had done all the must-see touristy spots on my last trip I was free to just wander and eat whatever came my way.  I did have three goals for my time in the city, 1) visit iberry 2) ride the canal boats and 3) eat a lot of amazing street food.  I was able to do the first two well, though my ignorance of the Thai language and Thai cuisine kept me from experiencing Bangkok’s fascinating food scene beyond the basic dishes we all know.  Tragic, I know.  After living in China for so long, a country where my language skills can get me through most situations, it was painful being in a country where I could not communicate in the local language.  I could see myself being lumped together with all the other tourists that come to Thailand, and I hated it.

Getting back to what I wanted to do in the city, ice cream was first and foremost in my mind.  For those of you not in the know iberry is a Bangkok based ice cream and sorbet company.  I had heard the greatest praise for their unique creations from all corners of the food-centric internet.  Ramblingspoon, Eating Asia, and Gourmet magazine have all scooped on accolades for this place.  Being a devout fan of all things ice cream related and tired of the expensive so-so offerings here in China it was a total pleasure to check out this spot.

I tried their sorbet in Bangkok and later their ice cream in the southern Thai city of Trang.  The sorbets were delicious, albeit not world changing.  The flavors were enticing and definitely not your everyday American offerings, where sorbet has always been given back seat to ice cream.  With flavors like pomelo, gooseberry, mangosteen, banana, guava, and tamarind it can be a challenge deciding what to order.  I opted for three kinds of sorbet: something called Blue Havana, a passion fruit sorbet, and a scoop of salted plum sorbet.  The first two were fantastic but the salted plum was just too salty for my tastes.  But how could I resist something as exotic as salted plum?  Though I will say that mixing the passion fruit and salted plum together was a cool combination.  I only wish Shanghai had a branch so I could methodically try every flavor they make.

The sorbet offerings at a downtown Bangkok iberry (the ice cream was another section that was just as big)

Traveling via Bangkok’s canals was just something I had enjoyed doing last time I was in the city and wanted to try again.  Something about boats as a means of public transportation have always intrigued me.  Bangkok is the only city that I know of that has very popular cheap public transportation on its canals and rivers (Hong Kong has the Star Ferry, which I guess could count even though it goes across a harbor, and as far as I remember Venice’s gondolas were largely used by tourists not local Venetians).  Bangkok is a very wet city (just try watching the streets turn into canals during the monsoon season) and in the past it had been host to an extensive canal system, which has since been almost completely paved over and turned into roads.  On a small number of the few remaining canals and on the large Chao Praya river that bisects the city cheap public boats still carry a mixed collection of local Bangkokers (is that the right word?), foreign European tourists and orange robed monks, who incidentally have their own section on the boat in the Chao Praya ferries.

The canals are a great way to get around if they’re near you and your destination (they’re often not) and even the act of waiting on the docks by the smelly opaque waters of the canals can be enjoyable, what with the little shops and abundant tropical foliage that can be found there.  All in all the canals are a nice way to forget that you are walking around a congested urban metropolis.

An orchid at a canal ferry dock

Updated 3/13: Embarassing grammatical mistakes fixed.

Besides my laziness, lack of a boyfriend and a graduate school application that had to be finished I was also traveling most of February, sans laptop.  Shanghai in the winter can be a bit of a downer so it was an easy decision to dip into my savings and head south to Thailand and Malaysia for a couple weeks with some American friends of mine.  It was a very pleasurable way to celebrate the Chinese New Year and I came back with quite a hefty collection of photographs, some of which I’m hoping to exhibit on this blog in the style of Primitive Culture and Itinerant Bordeaux (two very awesome blogs about travel and food written by two very attractive men).  For now you can check out my Flickr page for all the photos or just soak in the relaxed vibes from this photograph.

Life on the island of Ko Lanta, Thailand.

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.

One Sunday last month we went together to buy some new cut flowers and poinsettias for the apartment.  The place was amazing.  Not only is its size and variety stunning, but the prices were down right criminal.  If any of you have ever bought an orchid or a bouquet of roses in America you know that those items are luxuries, and usually you’re left feeling like you paid too much for something that’s going to die anyway.  Apparently in Shanghai it’s the exact opposite.  I even had to stop my roomate from bargaining at one point, the prices the shop owners gave us were, to me, insanely cheap.  For example, a pot of three healthy phalaenopsis orchids in flower was (before any bargaining) about 70 RMB or $10.00 US.  In the States those plants could easily fetch over $50.00 at a nursery.  I didn’t buy any orchids (international shipping of exotic plants is a bitch) but I did manage to take some photos.

Address:  安顺路 & 定西路  The market closes at 7 PM.

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

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

This photo of mine was just published by the Shanghaiist blog, a great resource for anyone living in Shanghai, as part of their “Photo of the Day” series.  I thought I’d take this moment to advertise my Flickr account, where I now have almost 5,000 photographs taken all over the world that you can check out.  Happy New Year everyone.

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:

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:

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:

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.

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.

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.