Zen and the Art of Casual Acquaintance

Migration

2005-12-01T23:07:00.000+08:00

So I got bored with this blogger blog and its limitations, plus I wanted to integrate my blog with a more complete website. Also I had to finish my last two grad school applications, and designing a new website was a terrific way to procrastinate. One of the best (and most productive) methods I've found yet--and believe me I've found plenty.

From now on, I'll only be posting there, at www.thevortext.com. Right now it's up and running, although I haven't fully finished fixing up the archived posts that I exported from this blog. No worries, I'm sure I'll do it soon. I do have an entire book to write now, which I'm sure will give me plenty of opportunities for further procrastination.

Awesome video

2005-11-28T22:44:00.000+08:00

Shot by me on my trusty digital camera in the Banana Leaf Curry House here in Hangzhou, tonight while eating dinner. Click on the image to launch the movie:

Technorati tags: movies, videos, funny, humor, china, music, dancing, restaurants

Searching for the huguai

2005-11-26T19:31:00.000+08:00

This diving blog, which from its name--Divester--I at first assumed was about getting corporations to stop investing in morally suspect countries and companies, had a post about China's own Loch Ness monster. Living as I am in a town famous for its lake, thoughts of possible lake monsters (huguai in Chinese) had crossed my mind, inspired by Matthew, who had suggested that if I needed an excuse to head back to Beijing early I could always say I'd been spooked into leaving town by the Xihuguai, which is probably what a monster inhabiting West Lake (Xihu) would be called. The original feature (from the A.P.) on the "real" lake monster, which supposedly calls Kanasi Lake in Xinjiang Province home, is an interesting look at a cross-cultural phenomenon, that, with careful scholarship, could probably be traced back and related to dragon myths, one of those hugely pan-global narratives. Something to look into.

Technorati tags: china, monsters, lakes, loch ness

A village visit

2005-11-26T00:32:00.000+08:00

After my interview with the Fuyang Ribao reporter, I finally headed to what had been my intended destination for the day--Longmen (Dragon Gate) Village--an ancient town 10 kilometers outside the city. The town is in a state of stunning decay, Ming and Qing dynasty buildings and archways with faded characters crumble over narrow streets, populated by well kempt cats, scraggly dogs, pig-tailed children, and weathered grandparents, hunched over on stools stringing plastic badminton racquets with neon strings--the local cottage industry, I guess.

One familial clan dominates, the descendants of a man named Sun Quan, who was a king during the Wuyue Kingdom. Around 95% of the town's population even today bears his surname, Sun, and a line of descent parallel to that running through Longmen Village was responsible for the production of China's Republican hero, Sun Zhongshan, better known to English speakers as Sun Yatsen. One of the town's own favorite sons was Sun Kun, who isn't that interesting except for the fact that he built ships for one of the most intriguing characters in Chinese history--and my own personal favorite--Zheng He, the eunuch from Xinjiang who captained a fleet of Ming Dynasty treasure ships throughout Southeast Asia all the way to India.

Despite its semi-illustrious history, Longmen Village today is a shell of its past, albeit a beautiful one. In open courtyards, 400-year-old furniture sits under overhangs, unpreserved and unprotected against the bottoms of overexcited tourists, inquisitive youngsters, and jaded locals. My guide to the town, a young, bored Sun descendant, seemed both excessively proud of his family's long and distinguished narrative and untouched by the splendor and ruin (and the splendor of the ruins) that surround him. The only thing that really lit him up was when he mentioned a number of Chinese TV shows that have been filmed in the town.

Still, walking through this town was an almost mystical experience, especially after all my time in big-city China, a classification under which even this current interlude in (relatively) green, moist, Hangzhou falls. Husked corn dried on the side of a pond, men eating cloud-like dumplings in a small shop called out an invitation for me to try some, the setting sun cast the town into stunning shadow. In all, it was well worth the strangeness of the events that came before it to visit this place, as it is now, and witness such spectacular living ruin.

Technorati tags: china, hangzhou, fuyang, villages, history, architecture

Making (the daily) paper

2005-11-25T22:54:00.000+08:00

The other day I hired a driver to head out to a city about an hour south of Hangzhou called Fuyang. L. had arranged for me to be met by a representative from that city of 620,000 people's tourism office, Mr. Chang, who tailed me for the rest of the day, paid for lunch, and failed to say more than three or four words the entire time. After lunch, however, which was surprisingly delicious (the best dishes were xihongshi xiaren guoba, crispy rice cakes in a sort of tomato sauce, congyouguiyua large white fish with fresh scallions and no gloopy sauce, shanyao jue, purple Chinese mountain yams wrapped in crispy rolls of something lightly fried, and jiwei xia, steamed shrimp netted from the Fuchun River, gorgeous with bright red and white stripes--I apologize that words have to suffice alone here: I was a bit embarrassed to photograph the lazy susan in front of a number of city officials whom I didn't know and whom didn't speak English) he had a reporter from the daily paper, the Fuyang Ribao, intercept us at a park overlooking the river in order to write a story on me. She took photos of me enjoying the scenery, gazing pensively, and taking my own photos of schoolchildren and local women practicing for an upcoming group exercise contest. She asked me a bunch of inane questions about things like my impressions of the city (I had been there for about five minutes), how I thought it compared to other small cities in China, and others of that ilk. I tried to be both obsequious and humorous, quipping (via an interpreter) that if Fuyang were in the States it wouldn't be such a small city at all. Hysterical, I know. What's actually hysterical is the fact that my presence as a foreigner in this city of more than half a million people is so unusual as to be newsworthy. It's not like they thought I was writing a book about Fuyang--I told them it would have a page or two in the book on Hangzhou (which is probably a stretch too). It really just is the boondocks, I guess, even though since it, like Hangzhou, is in Zhejiang Province, China's wealthiest, it's a pretty nice second- or third-tier city.

Before lunch, I had the chance to visit an "ancient papermaking village," which in reality was actually more like a factory in old buildings using manual labor and old-fashioned techniques. I saw the men pulling bamboo frames through a freezing cold suspension of wood pulp and water, crafting perfect sheets of paper with each draw. I saw women printing classic tomes with wooden blocks on loan from a local museum. I got to try both of these things, and they were surprisingly harder than they looked--I guess these skills are actually hard to master. When I asked the man in this photo how long he had worked in the job, I found out that he had studied and apprenticed for three years first, followed by over twenty years of experience at this factory. The site was worth a short visit, especially for someone like me who's more than mildly interested in/obsessed with paper, notebooks, and the other paraphernalia associated with writing.

Technorati tags: china, hangzhou, fuyang, paper, papermaking, crafts, artisans

Street food in Hangzhou

2005-11-21T18:26:00.000+08:00

Today I happened upon what can only be described as a "snack street" here in Hangzhou. It was off of Hefang Lu, otherwise known as "History Street," a pedestrian shopping area where old, probably restored, buildings line the street, housing souvenir shops, restaurants and tea houses. I'm still a bit amazed that the city can be full of tourists without there being more than a couple of other foreigners walking around--they're just all Chinese. There are so many of them (as if I could ever forget that fact of demography)!

The snack street clearly caters to their tastes, while at the same time highlighting the ghastly specialities for which Hangzhou is famous. I saw giant snails, fried sea creatures on a stick (with their shells still attached below the tempura-like crust), chicken feet, pigs' feet, unidentifiable feet, duck heads complete with bills, skewered giant silkworm pupae, scary stews and porridges, and some more appealing treats (to my tastes, anyway) like black sesame candy, naan-like bread stuffed with pineapple, rou chuan(r)--the Chinese take on shish kebab--and pancakes with noodles and vegetables inside.

I was actually still full from lunch and looking ahead to dinner with L., so I managed not to eat anything myself, although I did buy some of the sesame candy for my room, and I'm sure I'll return to snack street at least once before I leave. I mean, who could resist?

Technorati tags: food, China, chinese food, Hangzhou, weird food, snacks, street food

Not Kobo Abe...

2005-11-19T00:03:00.000+08:00

...it's Kobo Rabbi, a man involved in the exchange of tea culture between China and Japan in its early days, who, despite his name, has no known Jewish associations. For those who don't know, Kobo Abe is one of my favorite Japanese authors--an existentialist of sorts who wrote The Woman in the Dunes.

Technorati tags: China, tea, Japan, Kobo Abe, Kobo Rabbi

An enlightening day

2005-11-17T23:58:00.000+08:00

This afternoon I decided to head out to the opposite side of the lake and up a hill to a string of temples called by the name of the small winding street on which they're located--Tianzhu Road, which I later learned is actually the archaic Chinese name for India, which makes sense since Buddhism first came to China over the Himalayas. I called the monastery on my cell phone so the taxi driver could get more specific directions than just the name of the street and the street number, which never seems to be enough information to satisfy cabbies in Beijing either.

Finally I arrived at the gates of the topmost temple, where one of the women who always sit outside temple entrances selling incense convinced me (without having to try too hard, certainly) to buy some pink sticks to burn inside. The people working at the temple were really friendly--they all wanted to know whether I was in Hangzhou to visit or to work, and were excited when I lit the incense and knew what to do with it. There were only two or three other visitors to the temple (which seemed to be a monastery from all the monks walking around but which I had read was actually a nunnery), and they passed me as I walked down the hill on the side of the road toward the next of the three temples.

I was content to take my time and revel in the calm greenery that surrounded me. A stream ran alongside me, and dogs ran from tree to tree next to it. I said hello to all the dogs, but they were all kind of scared of me. I was only scared of the chickens I passed crossing the road and wandering around outside the houses. It brought real clarity to my vision of the impossibility of what the Chinese government proposed yesterday--to vaccinate all the 4-5billion chickens in the country against bird flu--after the first three confirmed cases of human bird flu in China were announced.

The next two temples were a bit larger but still beautiful and interesting, which is much more than could be said of my final stop of the day, the (supposedly) famous Lingyin Temple. The book I bought described it as one of ten temples of the Chan (Zen) Buddhist sect in China, but it was possibly the least zen place I've ever been. Gigantic tour groups with guides herding them with instructions shouted into blaring loudspeakers are not exactly my idea of tranquil. It was a disappointing end to a day of reflection and insight. Still, it was probably equally enlightening.

Technorati tags: China, Hangzhou, buddhism, temple, buddhist temple, monastery

Leifeng Pagoda in Evening Glow

2005-11-17T00:06:00.000+08:00

The title of this post is also the official name of one of the enumerated "Ten Views of West Lake" that appear in every Chinese-published English-language guidebook to this city currently in print. Most of the views (which are accompanied by "Ten New Views of West Lake") don't seem that special, but, as a fan of "evening glow," I figured it couldn't hurt to try to time my first visit to the Leifeng Pagoda on the southwest shore of the lake to coincide with that golden time of day. As these photos show, it probably wasn't a bad decision. Leifeng Pagoda was originally built to house what the posted signs called "relics of Sakyamuni," or Buddhist holy objects of some kind, but it was destroyed in the 1920s. The current structure, which stands seven pagoda-storeys high on the summit of a hill, was built of steel over the ruins in 2001. What makes it hysterical, though, is the fact that you can go from the level of the lake to the top of the tower without climbing more than ten or fifteen steps--the rest of the journey is made by a combination of two escalators and two elevators. That was great for all the elderly tourists I ran into at the top, but seems strange after climbing so many stairs at other ancient towers, both in China and around the world. I had not expected to rest my weary feet by getting to the top of a pagoda.

Technorati tags: China, Hangzhou, pagoda, sunset, landscape

Welcome to West Lake

2005-11-16T22:33:00.000+08:00

West Lake is considered the traditional (and official) heart of Hangzhou, and I figured I'd head there first in my attempt to wrap my head around this city as quickly and thoroughly as possible. I had not at all imagined that it would actually be as beautiful as it proved today: I spent over five hours walking around it, interspersed with stops at cafes and visits to just two of the dozens of peripheral sites that surround it. In that time, I only made it halfway around--I think the perimeter is probably about eight or nine miles, if not more. In all the statistics I've gathered so far, I've only found the area of the lake in square kilometers, which I don't remember and I'm not about to look up again right now.

I was surprised by the large percentage of the people gathered around the lake who seemed like locals--although it is the middle of November and a weekday to boot. I was one of very few foreign faces in the crowd, certainly, but many of the Chinese just seemed to be living out their daily lives on the lakeshore, and not snapping pictures with goofy expressions and amusing poses like they'd most likely be doing if they were not Hangzhouren.

I've posted only my favorites of the many, many photos I took today. With a digital camera, it meant nothing to take over 140 pictures in the course of six or seven hours, and I know that as I spend more time here, I'll become innoculated to the splendor of this city. I wanted to make sure to capture my original impressions of awe, as I've failed to do in most of the places in which I've spent long amounts of time (Beijing, and Madrid, and Cuzco, and Salamanca--basically every foreign city in which I've spent a month or more).

Technorati tags: China, travel, Hangzhou, West Lake, lake, lakes, xihu

Adventures with L.

2005-11-16T21:24:00.000+08:00

After I had disembarked the Hainan Airlines Boeing 737 at Hangzhou airport and grabbed my suitcase from the carousel, I passed through the doorway into the meeting area and a young, skinny, well dressed (not as in a suit and tie but more like not wearing the shitty sorts of casual clothes in which a Chinese 28-year-old might be liable to show up) guy called my name. It took a second to realize that my boss had asked me to send her a photo last week--I hadn't thought it was so that L. could recognize me when I arrived. It's a much better method than the usual tacky sign that I'd expected. L's boss had made him bring one of those anyway, in case he didn't recognize me, but he showed me how he'd folded it up and stuffed it in his back pocket. He'd only gotten his driver's license two months ago, so, since my plane landed at night, he had been uncertain of his ability to drive the long distance to the airport on the highway; instead, he had a company driver, Mr. Chang, as he was introduced to me shuttle us both in a white minivan. The ride into town took about a half hour, and we passed some of the futuristic houses the wealthy farmers of Zhejiang province like to build, though it was too dark to get a decent photo.

We went first to my hotel, so I could check in and drop off my bags, and then the three of us headed toward a Korean barbecue place, since L. was excited about the chance to eat there. He promised that we'd have plenty of chances to eat Hangzhou food together, and I think he was even a bit disappointed that his chosen cuisine wasn't new to me. I told him how I eat at a Korean barbecue restaurant in New York whenever my brother can convince us to shell out the cash (at home it's really overpriced, which I guess it tends to be in China too, although the "prices" are so low here that "over" is hard to calculate), which usually happens only on or around his birthday. On our way over to the restaurant, L. called ahead to reserve a table and found out that the kitchen was out of lettuce with which to wrap the barbecued meat. He and Mr. Chang were so disappointed that they asked me if it would be alright to stop at the supermarket before dinner so we could buy our own! Of course I said okay. That moment marked a most auspicious beginning for this journey. Dinner was delicious, we had lamb, beef, and squid to cook on our table-top grill, as well as scallion pancake, shiguo banfan (better known to Americans by its wonderful Korean name: bibimbap), and my first taste of Hangzhou's favorite beer: Siwo, which seems to be an attempt at non-pinyin transliteration of its Chinese name, which is, unsurprisingly, Xihu Pijiu, or West Lake Beer. It was at that very lake that I would end up spending most of today.

Technorati tags: travel, China, Hangzhou, food, Korean food

Strange images

2005-11-15T23:50:00.000+08:00

I arrived in Hangzhou this evening, and already I can tell that I'm going to have some incredible adventures here. For now, the only evidence will be these two photos, since I'm too tired to really write anything--tomorrow, however, I promise more. In any case, the first one is from the nightstand in my room at the surprisingly well decorated and nice Bokai Commercial Affairs Hotel, where a room with free ethernet is costing my boss only US$25 a night. I'm still waiting for Matt to get back to me on the meaning of Mei Rong Mei

Fa. My bet's on "Beautiful lady, beautiful time," or, more accurately, on some weirdly poetic euphemism expressing that sentiment. The other photo is of a miraculous find I made at Vanguard Supermarket tonight--the whole box cost only US$1.10, which in itself is unusual for American junk food in China, although from the box (and the frosting's sad divergence from American tastes) it's clear that they didn't have to import this overseas...it's actually manufactured in China.

Technorati tags: junk food, snacks, food, China, condoms, hotels

Fun with Google

2005-11-11T01:53:00.000+08:00

I came across this cool idea about how to personalize Google while browsing the blog of Ken Dyck, the guy who created xBlogThis, the tool I use to generate Technorati tags. This is definitely a concept to ponder.

Technorati tags: blogging, google, ideas, internet, search

The friend formerly known as M.

2005-11-11T01:18:00.000+08:00

As you've probably noticed, when I mention the people with whom I interact in actual life in this virtual representation of it, I refer to them by initials only. I figure that I wouldn't want to

stumble across a mention of my name linked up with weird things I've said or done on someone else's blog without knowing about it first, and I don't particularly feel like getting permission from my friends to write about them. Sure, I'm not going to post pictures of them if I haven't mentioned that possibility with them, but pseudonymic initials seem pretty harmless. Some, however, have asked for more--in particular, M., who would prefer I call him by his full name, Matthew Pereira, in order to further inflate his web presence and the Google ranking of his blog. I don't know that I'll oblige: it seems silly to use his surname all the time, and I might just resort to using "Matt," but I figured at least I should explain why I'm expanding his identity from a mere M. At least it frees up the letter for someone else!

Technorati tags: Matthew Pereira, blogging

Beijing's Little California

2005-11-10T19:26:00.000+08:00

In the northeast corner of Beijing, between the third and fourth ring roads, exists a neighborhood called Lido (pronounced lee-DOO), where large stand-alone restaurants line a long strip of street, foreigners stream into Starbucks and Baskin Robbins, and I spent an evening last weekend with my friends, eating at a restaurant called Eudora Station and, amazingly, going bowling.

The twenty lanes at Lido Place were fitted with high-tech Brunswick equipment, electronic scoring systems, and fluorescent bowling balls with holes perfectly spaced for my hands--small by American standards but seemingly average here in China. We had a wild time, drinking Asahi until at one point one of us released a bowling ball in the wrong direction, letting it fly out toward her amused and frightened friends (that was me, but shhhhhh). R. fell a bunch of times, as she told us beforehand she was certain to do,

and then on the way out lifted a small pumpkin from in front of a shop in the lobby, with which we proceded to play catch until we got in a taxi on our way back to our part of town. The cabbie taught us how to say "pumpkin" in Chinese--it's kangua--although I never did learn how to say "bowling," and we convinced him to take it from us as a gift. In any case, the experience was a bit surreal, as there was even a group of expat middle school students bowling and causing trouble in the lane next to us. I don't think I have ever felt less like I was in a

foreign country before in my experience. It was disconcerting, but also great fun--it may happen again this weekend, although I'm pushing for karaoke on my last weekend in Beijing before I head down to Hangzhou on Monday (or Tuesday, but probably Monday) for a month and then New York for three weeks.

Technorati tags: china, beijing, bowling, expats, expatriates

What if...

2005-11-10T17:58:00.000+08:00

Among the hundreds of links I've received from my friend M. (the highway enthusiast of Roadwork Ahead fame) over the past few days (we trade links like Algonquins traded cowrie shells) was this one, to designer Craig Robinson's website. His project "What if..." is a fascinating exploration of the decision trees of his life up to this point and his life going forward, arranged graphically with cute little icons. It's not exactly germane to much of what I broach on this blog, but I think it's cool and wanted to share it.

Technorati tags: funny, design, life, decisions

My first publication on the Mainland

2005-11-10T16:28:00.000+08:00

My review of Yiyun Li's collection of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, was published in the most recent edition of City Weekend, my favorite of the expat-focused magazines here in Beijing. I've also proofed the past two issues, which is always fun, since I like the crazy detail-obsessed exercise of checking an entire magazine for errors, and since the people who work there are so much fun. The managing editor, C., is a really cool guy, as well, which is always a bonus. In any case, here's my review, and a short excerpt from it:

Li's characters are at the same time figures of the so-called New China and fascinating individuals, people any of us would be intrigued to talk with waiting on line at the bank. In these stories, Beijing opera singers turned male prostitutes mingle with students heading abroad on scholarship, while deposed kings of rocket science tour the American Midwest and laid-off factory workers marry decomposing widowers to ensure a nice standard of living.

Doesn't it sound great? It was actually a pretty fair read, though what I wrote in the lead is completely true--I did forget for almost the entire length of the first story that I had actually already read it in The New Yorker a couple of years ago.

Technorati tags: writing, books, literature, chinese, china, book review, yiyun li

Beijing acrobats

2005-11-03T08:37:00.000+08:00

My new friend K. wanted to see the famed traditional acrobats while he's here studying for a month in Beijing, so I decided to head over to one of their performances with him. I'd never seen the full-out show, having only experienced a few acts of acrobatics while at a more pervasive (and less fun) Chinese cultural extravanga at the touristy Lao She Tea House six years ago. The best part of that night had been my discovery of watermelon seeds spiced with anise, a favorite Chinese snack that I actually haven't had since I've been here (even though I feel the need to run to the Chinese supermarket at home every once in a while and buy them). I think I might look for them soon. They make a terrific not-awful snack food.

In any case, I was pretty impressed with these acrobats, who not only balanced in all sorts of contorted positions, but often did it while holding on with their mouths to various sexual-seeming apparati or swinging from a ribbon in a duet with another acrobat (this effect was sometimes heteroerotic, sometimes homoerotic, as K. aptly put it). There were also plate twirlers, bicycle tricksters, and, surprisingly, a few acrobats who danced to music that approached hip hop. My favorite music was the Chinese 80s music megamix that came on for the grand finale. But that shouldn't surprise anyone.

Technorati tags: China, Beijing, acrobats, acrobatics, entertainment

Success!

2005-11-03T01:18:00.000+08:00

So, as it turns out, I was offered both jobs--the editing position at the radio station and the co-authorship of the Hangzhou travel guide. Of course, I chose the latter, met with M., my fellow author, and Q., our Beijing-based corporate liaison with the goverment clients, and will, if all goes according to plan, sign a contract tomorrow. I still have visa issues to clarify, which might prevent me from taking them up on their offer to fly me to Hangzhou for the weekend to meet, but that's not such a huge deal, and if my visa is entirely taken care of, that would be incredible. The idea as of now is that I would head down to Hangzhou by the end of next week, stay there for a month, all expenses paid, and fly back to Beijing a few days before I head home for my three-week jaunt in New York (with a side trip to Columbus, and perhaps West Philly, lol).

The deadline for my half of the manuscript would be January 19th, after which I could travel somewhere awesome with P., who'll be in China for work (and pleasure) and then hopefully take on another book project for this same contractor. They're currently in talks with the provincial governments of Yunnan and Sichuan. OMFG, either of those would be so incredible!!!!! Like actually really interesting places instead of just Hangzhou, which is intriguing more for the experience than for the place itself. Okay, I promise some posts with pictures and stuff in a bit, I'm just uploading them now and wanted to post this update. I know it's been a lot of text and no color as of late. I swear that will change as I travel within China, exploring Hangzhou, taking photos for pay (and for posting on here), and boozing with officials, cronies, and their honored guests at lavish banquets.

Technorati tags: China, Hangzhou, jobs, employment, expatriates, expats, expat, travel, radio writing

Jobs on the horizon

2005-10-27T16:46:00.000+08:00

I'm writing now from the newsroom of China Radio International, where I'm busy polishing news stories for their English service to see whether they think I'm apt for the job and whether I'm at all interested in it. I had an interview here earlier this afternoon with X., the middle-aged woman executive in charge of English-language broadcasting for this government-owned station, after an awesome Aussie, J., whom I met at 80s Night at Alfa two weeks ago, passed on my resume to her boss. J., obviously, works here already, but as an on-air personality. Pretty cool, huh? Anyway, I'm trying to see if I can work out the details of my already-planned three-week vacation home with them or if that will be an obstacle to this coming through.

In any case, I'm not too worried, since this isn't my top choice at the moment. That honor goes to the job for which I had an interview yesterday outside at Mexican Wave, a mediocre taco joint on Dongdaqiao Lu across from the Silk Market. That was with M., who's a writer hired by the Hangzhou city government to author a new travel guide to their city, reputed to be a beautiful city of a few million two hours from Shanghai, known for its gorgeous West Lake and for centuries of history. I would love to get this job, but M., even though she seemed to want to hire me, was worried that the crotchety Chinese suits down in Hangzhou might think I was too young to be up to the task. She's only 25 herself, so it might be a bit too much for them to have two of us youngsters running the show. Still, I'm having the book I edited sent here via DHL from Amazon in hope of persuading the elderly officials that I'm worthy of this resplendent task.

If I luck out and convince them I'm a professional, I'll be flown down there for free, put up in nice housing, guided around the city every day by a liaison from the city government, and feted almost nightly at banquets in my honor where I will be forced to consume large amounts of the noxious Chinese booze called baijiu, or "white liquor." Then I'd be charged with drafting half of this book, a share estimated at about 25,000 words, over the course of the following five weeks or so. I can't think of a better job to have here--I'd get to see a new place for free, experience a completely different side of Chinese life, get paid to write and photograph, and get drunk with lots of old Chinese men who don't speak English. What could be better?

Technorati tags: China, jobs, employment, expatriates, expats, expat, travel, radio writing

Wikipedia falls victim to the Great Firewall

2005-10-24T17:45:00.000+08:00

I was suitably upset when I tried to look something up on Wikipedia earlier and encountered the "site not found" message that here in China signifies not an error in the internet but rather the mark of the government's web censors, laying the stones of what has been cutely (if not unexpectedly) termed "The Great Firewall of China." Apparently, according to this post on ArsTechnica the Chinese-language version of the site has been blocked since June 14, 2004, a day before the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests (and ensuing massacre). Still, until a couple of days ago, the English edition of one of the internet's most useful sources of unfiltered information was 100% accessible from here in Beijing and throughout China.

One theory, posted on Fons Tuinstra's blog, China Herald, suggests that the ban might be temporary (pray with me here!), related to a desire to limit access to information about assisted suicide in the wake of the death at age 101 of famed author Ba Jin, who spoke of his desire to die with dignity shortly before he passed away on October 17th.

Let's hope that theory has more weight than I think it does. I need my Wikipedia!

An even more recent post on the China Herald page reminds me of something more immediately relevant to this blog: for some reason, since I've been here, blogspot sites have been given free access through the checkpoints of the Great Firewall. I didn't take the time to theorize, instead preferring just to count myself lucky that I no longer had to access my own blog through a proxy server and happy in the knowledge that others readers in China could now find it more easily. The post in question, however, points to this blog, which suggests that Google might have conducted some under-the-table transaction with the Chinese goverment in order to enact this change, since Microsoft's bloghosting site was not restricted here, and Google owns the Blogger service. The great site Danwei has this to say.

Technorati Tags: china, politics, chinese politics, wikipedia, internet, censorship, internet censorship.

The Real Mao

2005-10-24T17:07:00.000+08:00

I have no plans to read the new book by Jung Chang, despite the fact that I finally got around to reading her widely acclaimed multigenerational memoir, Wild Swans, when I first returned to China this July. Like that first tome, her latest work--a comprehensive biography of Mao Zedong, titled, simply, Mao--is reputed to be a bit too prolix to be a fun read, and despite (or perhaps because of) my previous ultra-leftist leanings, I've never been all that interested in the life and crimes of the Chairman. His story piques my interest just long enough to sustain me through the sometimes-wise and sometimes-annoying Nicholas Kristof's review of it in the Times. His writing is clearer (and more humorous, surely) than Chang's, as evidenced by the way he opens his review:

If Chairman Mao had been truly prescient, he would have located a little girl in Sichuan Province named Jung Chang and "mie jiuzu"- killed her and wiped out all her relatives to the ninth degree.

But instead that girl grew up, moved to Britain and has now written a biography of Mao that will help destroy his reputation forever. Based on a decade of meticulous interviews and archival research, this magnificent biography methodically demolishes every pillar of Mao's claim to sympathy or legitimacy.

Despite his early praise for her efforts (which were actually done in tandem with her British historian husband), he goes on to give me every reason not to bother cashing out for this ponderous re-evaluation of the man whose ugly face is still relatively ubiquitous in China (and in the t-shirt shops of the East Village). Still, I felt the need to post about it here, if only because its publication is a common topic of conversation among Beijing's more literarily inclined expats at the moment, and because the book and issues of magazines with reviews of it have been banned by the Chinese government. I'm just doing my duty here, reporting on the cultural zeitgeist of Beijing's international community and making news of the book's contents available in at least one more place in which Chinese readers might be able to access it.

Technorati tags: china, history, politics, mao, books, communism, chinese history, mao zedong, mao tsetung, jung chang nicholas kristof

What an interlude!

2005-10-24T14:46:00.000+08:00

Sorry for the lapse in time between the previous post and this one, but in the past week I've both quit my job and become newly single--both of which I'm viewing as opportunities for new and interesting experiences, but I've still spent quite a lot of psychic (and physical) energy over the last week or so pondering these events. I promise I'll have lots more interesting things up here soon, as they're all already bubbling in my brain, but I just haven't had the time to post.

In other news, I've reserved tickets home to New York for a vacation from December 15th through January 6th. Depending on what happens on the work scene, these dates may shift a bit, but if you'll be in the area and want to see me, be in touch.

The Tibet Express

2005-10-16T12:55:00.000+08:00

As I read in this article from the People's Daily, China announced yesterday that construction has finished on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway. The railway, having surpassed the railway between Cuzco and Machu Picchu in the Peruvian Andes (which I rode in 2002) to become the world's highest, traverses 1,956 kilometers of mountains and frozen plateau between Xining and Lhasa. Still, test runs aren't set to take place until July, which will probably mean a start date for regular service long after my hopeful trip to the region early next summer.

Just as interesting as the news itself, however, was this editorial also published in the People's Daily, which, after praising the efforts of the government planners, engineers, and construction crews, goes on to preemptively defend their creation from the many international detractors worried about cultural imperialism in Tibet and the strong cultural and environmental impact that increased traffic and lower travel costs will have on the remote region, which even now is still difficult and expensive to reach. Amidst all this, the editorial makes a fair point, which many so-called activists neglect to consider:

Only when one sees with his or her own eyes a Tibetan who struggled his way on rugged roads on foot on a bare mountain can he realize what a modern traffic tool means for Tibet. They, who are enjoying all the conveniences and luxuries of modern civilization, are disqualified to make any remarks to defame China's efforts in developing Tibet. And those who think the snow land should be kept as a medieval museum to satisfy their bizarre personal curiosity should feel ashamed for their selfishness and nearsightedness.

Despite the validity of this argument, however, the editorial takes it one step too far, reasoning that:

Such tub-thumpers neglected a basic truth of human history: Development is a common choice of the human race, and no one should, or can, slam on a brake on a train to modern civilization.

If I believed that the Tibetan people had been at all consulted about their desires regarding a rail link to the rest of China, or that the impact increased tourism by both Chinese and foreigners will have on the fragile cultural balance left in the wake of persecution and on the incredible and not-yet-spoiled landscape of the "roof of the world" had received due consideration on the part of the Chinese government planners, I might agree that this development was "a common choice of the human race." As it more likely stands, however, it seems yet another dictate imposed on the Tibetans by their conquerors, one that might make the transportation of supplies, goods, and people into and out of the region more easily achieved, but one that will certainly have negative consequences as well.

Technorati tags: china, tibet, development, free tibet, politics, news

Durians and breadfruit and jackfruit, oh my!

2005-10-16T03:47:00.000+08:00

So, when I said that the foodie gods had bestowed some divine luck upon me and let me see durians just sprouting from the trunk of a tree on the beach--I lied. Or, more accurately, I was mistaken. I was so excited about seeing them that I hadn't made the effort to confirm my suspicion that they weren't actually the infamously odoriferous and dangerously spiky and heavy fruit but rather some other Malaysian treat. They hadn't seemed sharp enough, and that is the distinction that makes all the difference. In addition, I'd been told that they don't usually grow out of the side of a trunk, but only in the branches. After some research, in which I came across this blog, which has terrific pictures and fair descriptions of many fruits native to Malaysia and the surrounding region, and a number of other sites that were a lot less interesting, I think I have narrowed its classification down to the jackfruit or some special local variety thereof, like the chempedak or the marang. That's still pretty exciting, especially after looking up some facts about the jackfruit here:

Jackfruit is the largest tree-borne fruit in the world, reaching 80 pounds in weight and up to 36 inches long and 20 inches in diameter. The exterior of the compound fruit is green or yellow when ripe. The interior consists of large edible bulbs of yellow, banana-flavored flesh that encloses a smooth, oval, light-brown seed. There may be 100 or up to 500 seeds in a single fruit, which are viable for no more than three or four days. When fully ripe, the unopened jackfruit emits a strong disagreeable odor, resembling that of decayed onions, while the pulp of the opened fruit smells of pineapple and banana.

Since it also says that the jackfruit can "appear on short, stout twigs that emerge from the trunk and large branches, or even from the soil-covered base of very old trees," I think I have probably found my fruit.

The weirdest thing is that jackfruit and breadfruit both are distant cousins of the fig--reminds me of the taxonomical closeness of elephants and hyraxes.

Technorati tags: food and drink, food, fruit, tropical fruit, jackfruit, breadfruit, durian, durians, malaysia

From the island to the city (Malaysia: the end)

2005-10-16T02:10:00.000+08:00

The morning I left Pulau Perhentian Besar, I noticed some durians growing out of the side of a tree right by my rustic beach chalet, an exciting send-off from this beautiful island to my exotic-fruit-obsessed mind. Still, that moment of foodie bliss, unimpinged even by the fact that I didn't even get to cut one open, let alone devour it, was little comfort during the trials of the rest of the day, which was uneventful but, for one specific reason, painful. From the time I departed the island, racing across the strait that divides it from its partner, Pulau Perhentian Kecil, in a rickety motorboat in order to catch the ferry, which had departed from its usual course, I sat on my severely sunburned legs (Who would have thought that three applications of sunblock would not be enough to prevent an entire day of lying face down in the water, as snorkeling would have one do, from causing horrible damage to the skin? I guess being about one degree away from the equator (to the north) didn't help that situation.) for two hours on a boat rocked by the huge waves stirred up by the monsoon the night before, for an hour in a taxi from the jetty to the airport in Kota Bharu, and then, after paying $80 for the last available seat--it was first class!--on the Malaysian Airlines flight to Kuala Lumpur, since it was leaving in 40 minutes and the next Air Asia flight, which probably would have cost only $40, wasn't leaving until six hours later, for another hour on a plane.

By the time I got to KL, I was utterly exhausted, plagued both by my fried thighs and the call of my internet addiction, unsatisfied for the prior two and a half days. It was then that I posted my photos of the island itself, after which I headed out to grab some dinner, stumbled into the closest fast-food establishment I could find, and ate there because it was an A&W--which I've only seen in the airport in Columbus, Ohio, but which I know from my friend M. exists in Asia as well because the first one he ever saw was in China--and because they had onion rings and what was actually a really good Belgian waffle, complete with an embossed corporate logo in the center. Also, all fast-food restaurants in Malaysia have two sauce pumps by the napkins, where in America we only have ketchup. They've got ketchup as well, but the red liquid that squirts out of the other shouldn't be mistaken for our favorite condiment: it's chile sauce, sos cili in Malay, and familiar to me as the Indonesian Sriratha brand. A couple drops of that mixed into the ketchup actually makes the perfect accompaniment to french fries, far better than the standard Heinz alone.

In any case, I spent that night at the Pudu Hostel, since it was the author's choice in Lonely Planet and, as I saw from the thumbs-up sticker on the door when I arrived, a Let's Go top pick in both 2003 and 2005. The vintage of this most recent decal actually means that it was my friend A.F., from Singapore, who recommended it, since he worked as the Let's Go Researcher-Writer for Singapore and Malaysia in the summer of 2004, when the 2005 guide was compiled. (I know this so well since during that summer I too was an employee of the fabled guidebook company popular with student and budget travelers who aren't as interesting as Lonely Planet readers--I was the editor of the Spain and Portugal guide, so it's not entirely relevant here...another time, another story, perhaps.) Despite its high marks, however, this hostel was one of the crummiest and scariest in which I've ever stayed. The bathrooms were far from hygienic, as the book had described them, the bedrooms smelled of mold and rot, the bunkbed threatened to collapse with every toss and turn, promising to send me flying down onto the sketchy guy asleep below me, and the "sociable" lounge was a dingy parlor with, yes, a nice flat-screen TV, but also with a not-so-nice crowd, busted sofas, and mean-faced Malaysian employees hovering over the room. I managed to survive the night somehow, sad that my $4 had bought me only this level of comfort, and eager to make it to the Chinese embassy in order to submit my application for the work visa that the communist bureaucracy had made so difficult to obtain back in China itself.

But the Chinese embassy only left me sadder. The line was tremendously long, the dirty room flooded with visa applicants trying to head north and make some money off of the awakening giant's sky-high growth rate. In the course of the four hours I spent there that day, at two different times, I spoke with a man from KL who now lives in Jakarta and owns a company that manufactures pipes--and who had three long hairs growing out of a mole on his face, like the whiskers of a catfish--an Indian Malay whose family owns a fireworks factory in Changsha, a nondescript city in Hunan, and who was heading up to check on production there, and then to check out the new Disneyland in Hong Kong, and a KL-based Chinese businesswoman who was off to Shanghai to conduct very important business and make some deals. If the conversation wasn't riveting, at least it kept me from trying to stab a Chinese official with a glue stick meant for affixing photos to application forms. Eventually I got what I had come there for, having spent an intervening two hours trying to find the nice part of KL, and succeeding, to some extent, by visiting the great shopping mall that forms the base of the Petronas Towers, which are, of course, the world's tallest buildings--though it's certain they won't remain at the top of the heap for much longer. The mall was gorgeous, but comparable to much of what I'd seen on Orchard Road in Singapore, and in Singapore, at least, I knew I could stay someplace nice, let alone someplace that didn't make me feel like a crazy drifter, capable of doing strange-in-a-bad-way things in this disturbing city, this sprawling, traffic-logged, polluted metropolis dotted with marble shopping centers, mosques, and Citibanks that seemed like an overwhelming cross between the city-state I'd just visited and the capital in which I now live.

Technorati tags: Malaysia, KualaLumpur, KL, PulauPerhentian, PulauPerhentianBesar, cities, travel, southeastasia, hostels, fastfood

Getting an early start

2005-10-16T01:08:00.000+08:00

I'm amazed by some of the statistics reported in this article in today's Times:

Twenty public schools in Chicago are now offering instruction in Mandarin.

"After 2,400 schools expressed interest, Advanced Placement Chinese classes will be offered in high schools around the country starting next year. Beijing is paying for half the $1.35 million to develop the classes, including Chinese teachers' scholarships and developing curriculums and examinations."

"Last month, the Defense Department gave a $700,000 grant to public schools in Portland, Ore., to double the number of students studying Chinese in an immersion program."

"In May, Senators Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, and Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, introduced a bill to spend $1.3 billon over five years on Chinese language programs in schools and on cultural exchanges to improve ties between the United States and China."

Chinese language programs in the US have more than tripled in number in the last ten years.

And, up to 50,000 American students are studying Chinese in elementary and secondary schools alone!

These numbers seem incredible to me, despite the fact that the other high school in my district has offered a 4-year Mandarin sequence for close to a decade now. (Our school had classes in Hebrew and Farsi, which better represented the demographics of our side of town, in addition to the French, Spanish, Latin, and (a conversational course in) Italian available throughout the district.) The amazingness of some of these programs speaks for itself, as in this description of the nascent endeavor in Chicago's public schools:

One recent morning, a class of third graders bowed to one another and introduced themselves in Chinese, and a class of fourth graders practiced writing numbers in Chinese characters on marker boards. Chinese classes began at Alcott in February, but more students are already choosing it over Spanish.

Even more surprising is the fact that these classes are not just being implemented in the richest and whitest of neighborhoods (or in affluent suburbs like my own hometown)--in Chicago at least, a number of the participating schools are predominantly black or Hispanic. This diversity in the cultural and economic backgrounds of the students involved, and the varying education levels of their parents, may contribute to some concerns about the difficulty of teaching Chinese to little kids from the inner city, but lack of knowledge isn't the only reason behind that wariness. Even if they know something about what it takes to learn Chinese (as I do), they'd still have rationale for their worries:

Some parents here worry at first about how relevant the Chinese classes are and whether they will be too difficult. The Foreign Service Institute, which trains American diplomats, ranks Chinese as one of the four most time-intensive languages to learn. An average English speaker takes 1,320 hours to become proficient in Chinese, compared with 480 hours in French, Spanish or Italian, the institute says.

Programs like this are terrific, and not just because they expose children that might otherwise grow up with a somewhat limited perspective of the world around them with a sense of its true expansiveness and manifold cultural differences. It's also just plain awesome that these 10-year-olds are able to start learning any language, and especially one that both takes many years to learn well and is much easier to acquire at a young age. Even though I attended one of the best public schools in the country, the only foreign language instruction I was able to receive before the sixth grade was a month-long before school Spanish program in fourth grade in which we met for a half-hour two or three times a week and learned how to count and say hello (and perhaps a few other words that I forgot long before I again had a chance to take up studying the language). This kid, Raul Freire, the 9-year-old son of an Ecuadorian immigrant, has had the opportunity of a lifetime to miss a few minutes of gym, art, and music and gain the world instead:

"Mostly everybody in the school wants to take Chinese," Raul said. "I think about being a traveler when I grow up, so I have to learn as many languages as I can."

I can't help but be jealous of kids able to participate in programs like these--and to be inspired to work even harder on my own studies here, so some little kid who's never left the South Side can't speak Chinese better than I can!

Technorati tags: Chinese, China, language, education, foreign languages.

Sometimes, China rocks

2005-10-14T23:10:00.000+08:00

This, in response to getting my computer back, completely up and running under OS X Tiger, with a brand new harddrive, in less than five days. And they guaranteed me it would take at least a week for the drive to arrive from Shanghai. As of this moment, it no longer feels so horrible to have returned here from Singapore.

This turn of events also means that I will shortly be posting about the remainder of my awesome trip, and about all the craziness that has ensued since my return. Sorry it's been so sporadic, but it's difficult to blog without a computer, you know--and hard to part with the $4 they charge per hour to use one of the computers in the lobby of my apartment building. That is actually quite expensive, for China anyway.

Turtle update

2005-10-12T12:27:00.000+08:00

So, apparently that was not just any old sea turtle but actually a leatherback one, a species on the verge of extinction. I stole this picture from the internet, as I don't have an underwater camera, and there was certainly no place to buy one on this island in the middle of the South China Sea, the only store on which sold batik sarongs and sunblock. I gleaned some awesome facts about the leatherback from the site linked to above and thought I'd share them here as well:

A leatherback's favorite food is jellyfish. They even have a special notch in their beak to help puncture the man-o-war jellyfish.

Leatherbacks in Costa Rica lay two kinds of eggs: yolked and yolkless.

The temperature in the nest determines if a hatchling will be a boy or a girl.

A leatherback's shell is covered by a leathery skin.

The "tears" that turtles "cry" are just their way of shedding excess salt.

Fantasy Island?

2005-10-05T20:23:00.000+08:00

Lonely Planet calls Pulau Perhentian Besar, the island on which I've spent the past two days, a real-life "Fantasy Island," but I would have to disagree. At least this late in the season, with most of the facilities on the island scheduled to close in two weeks until March, and the beginnings of the monsoon already upon it--with incredible storms both nights I was there from 7pm until late at night--there wasn't much of a crazy party scene going down. The island is beautiful, though: the surrounding water of the South China Sea a deep turquoise, spotted with purple splotches were the coral lies below the surface, the coconut palms abundant, the buildings the most rustic I've experienced on an island vacation but perfect for the setting.

Once I took a taxi from the Kota Bharu airport to the jetty at Tok Bali and caught the fast ferry across to the island, I went for a quick sunset swim and met up with my friend A., her boyfriend J., and his friend J.U. We ate at my hotel: hot and flaky roti canai (similar to the parathas of Singapore's Little India), fish pineapple curry, which was terrific--the kingfish freshly hooked, the pineapples super-sweet, and the curry itself perfectly spicy--for dessert a fried banana with honey, and all accompanied by what would prove the first of many glasses of orange-pineapple juice. (Since it's in a heavily Muslim region, the island isn't exactly a bastion of alcoholic reverie...this late in the season, only one bar-restaurant even had any beer left in stock, Tiger and Chang. I had Tiger, it was just as A.F. had described it, "like Heineken but less bitter.") After dinner we played poker and then made it an early night. They headed back to their overpriced resort, while I tucked myself in to a small bed under a ceiling overhung with lizards (that's a good thing, since they eat the things that are bad) at Paradise, my cheap island hostel.

The next morning, I made a startling discovery. I thought I had been snorkeling before (once, with turtles and a family friend in Barbados), but that was nothing compared to this. I floated above thousands of fish feeding from the small coral reefs just offshore in the bay for almost an hour before lunch, entranced by the beautiful colors and patterns of their bodies and overwhelmed by my entrance into this entirely new world. It inspired me to inquire about diving certification at the dive shop, but I wasn't going to have enough time on the island to finish the course--it will have to wait for another vacation, perhaps to Thailand.

Still, snorkeling satisfied me for the rest of the day, after a lunch of local noodles--kue tiau goreng, which were thin and broad and mixed with chicken, egg, and cabbage and other good vegetables. With my friends, I swam across the entire bay twice, the first time to reach the cove with all the terrific fish I'd observed that morning, the second to backtrack to where one of them had earlier spotted a giant sea turtle. It was a successful mission, and I had one of the most incredible experiences of my life. I was hovering for almost fifteen minutes right above this tremendous sea turtle. It was at least eight feet across, and below its giant flippers it actually sheltered two small sharks, a purple one and a yellow one. I tried the entire time to untangle the complicated relationship that was clearly at work, but I'm still not sure whether they were protecting or hurting the turtle, whether their interactions were symbiotic or antagonistic. I guess I should look it up somewhere.

An Islamic concept-town

2005-10-05T20:04:00.000+08:00

On Monday before dawn, I hopped in a cab to Johor Bharu, more commonly known as JB, the city just across the Malaysian border, where, supposedly, everything costs half the price it does in Singapore, and where the airport from which I was to fly to my next destination is located. The taxi across the border cost about $30, and the passport-control and customs process went as smoothly as I could possibly have imagined. The cab driver handed my documents to a woman in a tollbooth, she stamped them, swiped his access card, and gave them back to us. Then the Malaysian official did the same thing, and we drove on, as if we had just crossed the border between New York and New Jersey or some other equally mundane delineation.

Then, I flew on Asia Pacific's Number 1 airline, Air Asia. They left late, as they are rumored always to do, but still arrived early in Kuala Lumpur (KL), where I had a 3-hour wait before my next flight on their no-frills airline to Kota Bharu (no abbreviation). The airports in these first two cities impressed me with their modern look, ample shops and restaurants, and western outlook: even the little airport in JB had a Dunkin' Donuts and a Famous Amos cookie shop! I tried a donut but the frosting was all wrong. Instead I had scrambled eggs and toasted ciabatta at the nondescript but clean coffeeshop down the hall. The KL airport even had a counter with Neuhaus chocolates--my favorite!!--so I bought two pieces of dark chocolate filled with vanilla cream, the best sweet known to man.

The airport at Kota Bharu was interesting for an entirely different reason: it announced that the city was the gateway to the east-coast province of Kelantan, true, but also that it was meant to be an "Islamic concept town." As the poster read, "Located in Pengkalan Chepa, Kota Bharu, about 20 minutes away from town, the terminal showcases a Moorish architecture, which resembles buildings in the Middle East; apart from reflecting and maintaining the traditional local flavour. It is in harmony with the State's vision of turning Kota Bharu into an Islamic-concept town by year 2005." I had a chance to return there today, after I caught the ferry back from Pulau Perhentian Besar and decided to find out what flights were available and when. It turned out that the next Air Asia flight wasn't until 9:30pm (it was 3pm then) and that the previous one had been cancelled due to lack of work ethic during Ramadan, so I didn't want to take any chances). Malaysia Airlines, which has been advertising its new Business Class with a slogan something like, "Sometimes the world's greatest luxury isn't even on earth," however, had one of those very Business Class seats available for only $80. I decided it was worth it, which I still think after the flight, despite the fact that the service wasn't quite the most luxurious I've ever experienced, and the food sucked. However, they did bring me a glass of delicious mango juice right after I boarded, the meal was served on china with real cutlery, and my bag was tagged specially to pop out onto the baggage belt among the very first, which made my arrival in KL tonight nice and breezy.

Singapore v1.0 remnants

2005-10-05T19:19:00.000+08:00

So, it's been a couple of days, but I've been on an island without phone service or electricity let alone internet, which seems understandable, if I say so myself. Now I'm in Kuala Lumpur, but I've decided to backtrack to the first leg of my trip and finish posting some pictures from Singapore. I'll be back there either tomorrow or the next day, so more will follow, but for now here's one from the MRT (the subway system), that verifies something I heard from someone, though sadly I don't remember whom. The durian is a large, smelly fruit popular throughout southeast Asia for its delectable flesh, but despised for its notorious stench. Hence the notice on the wall of the subway car.

The juxtaposition in this next picture of two vending machines and the statues on top of a Hindu temple in Chinatown struck me as particularly amusing, so of course I stopped to snap a photo of it (even though the lighting was less than ideal) on my way to dinner at the Hawker Centre.

The final photo is of the gay club to which we headed after dinner in order to chill and transfer files from my still nonfunctioning PowerBook to A.F.'s adorable iBook. It was called, cutely, Happy. From this experience, and from hanging out the night before at a beautiful Arabic teahouse called Samar, which served delicious iced mint tea, and an outdoor lounge done up to suit its name, Little Bali, it seems Singaporean nightlife has quite a bit more kick to it than its reputation would allow.

Little India

2005-10-03T12:27:00.000+08:00

Yesterday afternoon, A.F. went off to run some errands, and I headed out on my own to explore Little India. He'd been an incredible guide, knowledgeable about the answers to all my questions, explaining Singaporean history, culture, sociology, education, and filling my head with data like the fact that 85% of Singapore's residents live in public housing, which is actually really nice, and that six years ago, when the government implemented the famous electronic road pricing system, all the cars in the country were assigned an exact date and time to have the necessary device installed. Still, I figured I knew by now how to wander a foreign neighborhood and navigate a new subway system, especially in a country where English is the official language, despite the fact that most people speak Chinese, Malay, or Hindi at home as well. So I hopped on the MRT at Orchard Road, where we had been browsing at the Apple Store and at Border's (I read the The New Yorker and Harper's, but didn't buy them because they cost about $15 each after all the shipping charges had been incorporated.), and got off three stops and a line-change later at Little India. There, I walked the streets, explored a little market that had been set up to sell special goods for Deepavali (aka Diwali, the Hindu version of Hanukah that lasts a month around the same time as Ramadan), ate, as I've already written, a paratha and drank some heavenly mango lassi, and checked out the famous 24-hour electronics department store, the Mustafa Centre.

Food in Singapore

2005-10-03T11:46:00.000+08:00

If I had to describe Singapore in one word, it would not be "clean," "sterile," or "strict," but "yum!" The diversity of cultures and the way its inhabitants prize good cuisine is striking, and it means that there are tons of unique and delicious foods to try. Last night, my friend A.F., who grew up there and now works for the government, and his girlfriend C., originally from San Francisco but now a writer for The Straits Times, took me to Maxwell Food Centre, a hawker center in Chinatown, where we ordered an array of native foodstuffs and incredible tropical juices (soursop, star fruit, sugar cane, and watermelon). I took some photos, but it was dark out so they didn't come out too well. Still, the first one is of what the locals call Carrot Cake, which is the result of someone's bright idea to dice up the traditional dimsum treat of turnip cake (my boyfriend P.'s favorite thing to order) and fry it with an egg and chiles. The second is Hokkien prawn noodles, which is a dish beloved of the straits Chinese (Nyonya), who originally left Fujian Province (where Xiamen and Fuzhou are, and where the unusual dialect of Hokkien, different from both Mandarin and Cantonese, is spoken) to settle throughout southeast Asia in the late 19th century.

Earlier yesterday, I grabbed a snack in Little India, at a little vegetarian restaurant called Komala. I couldn't help but order the traditional roti paratha, which in Malaysia is known as roti canai (and which I'd had at the restaurant Penang in New York a number of times as a kid). It was both doughy and flaky, steaming hot off the griddle, and served with a small cup of delightfully spicy curry. I also(had the joyful opportunity to drink what was in my experience (limited as it is by not having yet made it to India) the best mango lassi in the world.

For breakfast, A.F. met me at my hip and clean hostel, where the in-house restaurant, Wild Rocket has been making a buzz among Singaporean foodies. We ordered mojitos (crisp and well-mixed) and pancakes with strawberry compote and fresh cream (buttery and brown outside and nice and soft within). Since the food took a while to come, the chef, Willin Low, sent out complimentary grapefruit and basil granitas (herby and refreshing). I had actually grabbed dinner there the night before, when I arrived, since it was 10:30pm and I was worried that by the time I found my way to a restaurant outside the hostel anything I found might be closed. Then, I tried a lychee martini and crabmeat linguini in a lightly piquant tomato cream sauce, both of which were spectacular as well. If only Beijing had food like this--and at such affordable prices!

Oh, and at some point, I popped into one of the 25 or so 7-11s I saw around town to check out potato chip flavors and other assorted local snacks. The best one on the shelves was this bag of "Ethnic Flavor" chips.

Xiamen

2005-10-03T11:15:00.000+08:00

Roughly halfway through the 6-hour, 2300-mile flight from Beijing to Singapore, my plane touched down for the better part of half an hour in the city of Xiamen. Xiamen is the Special Economic Zone formerly known as the Treaty Port of Amoy, whence the name of that ubiquitous brand of Chinese sauces. The airport was surprisingly bright, clean, and international for a random city in China, and the view from the circular windows on the other side of the people mover made Xiamen seem like a tropical background for a car-raching video game. It is in Fujian province, which basically makes it Florida relative to Beijing's New York, so I guess that makes sense, but still, it was surprising to see scenery like this in mainland China. I wonder if that's what Taiwan looks like as well, since Taipei is just across the Strait of Taiwan from there.

Feeding the spirits

2005-10-03T11:08:00.000+08:00

The news of the latest terrorist attacks in Bali shook me up a bit, when I heard of them upon my arrival in Singapore. Originally, I had thought of joining my friends R. and M. there for this holiday, since they had already decided to head to the famed island. I had this nagging sense that I should listen to the travel warnings, though, especially since it wasn't just the US Department of State that had one up: Australia, Canada, and the UK had them too. I guess this is more proof that I should always follow my instincts when traveling.

I was really struck by the way the Times concluded its most recent story about the attacks:

On Sunday afternoon, 60 Hindu monks, dressed in flowing white, performed a ceremony in front of Raja's, which is wedged between a McDonald's and a Kentucky Fried Chicken. They offered food to the spirits of the dead.

From this, at least, Indonesia doesn't seem too different from the parts of Asia I've experienced as of yet. And on those, more to follow shortly.

Even being smart won't keep you alive forever

2005-09-28T12:15:00.000+08:00

I was surprised to read in the Times last night that Don Adams, the actor who so memorably played the bumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart on the classic TV show, "Get Smart," has died. Mostly, I was surprised to find out that he wasn't already dead--until I read his obituary, I would have assumed he died long ago. I mean, I watched that show relentlessly in reruns when I was only five or six, and it seemed even then like it belonged to such a distant past that he couldn't possibly still be around.

There was one bright spot in the standard recap of his life, however: apparently he starred on TV not only as my favorite character, Smart, who communicated via shoe phone and crushed hard on the beautiful Agent 99, but also as another loveable but incompetent crime-fighting, technology-embracing type--doo doo doo dah doo--Inspector Gadget! It makes perfect sense, I'm just sorry I didn't realize that when I was a kid. At the time, I guess I was too preoccupied with the details of all those intricate plots, but I would have loved to know that these two foolhardy lawmen were one and the same.

Notice

2005-09-27T20:30:00.000+08:00

"Dear Tenants,

As you have known that the door security system cannot work if there is no power. In that case, the door will not be opened. Therefore, pleaes keep one set of metal key at our security department for back up for the emergency cases. We shall seal the keys up for keeping together with your good self.

Best regards, we remain,
Property Office"

Clearly, I'm more worried about them sealing my good self up than about being locked out in case of power failure. Is that wrong?

Trials and tribulations

2005-09-26T14:02:00.000+08:00

Sadly, my beautiful computer has ceased to function, so it might be a while before I get a chance to post again. I'm hoping for the best, but I guess I'll just have to wait and see what I can figure out over here. I've tried calling what Apple's website lists as the service phone number for China, but there's just a short recording in Chinese followed by terrifying emptiness. Aiyou!

Dirty little secrets

2005-09-25T04:43:00.002+08:00

I fell in love with the blog PostSecret from the moment I discovered it--I think it was last year. Each Sunday, Frank, the guy who runs the site, posts about ten 4'x6' postcards he's received from readers, postcards with secrets they're too afraid to confess in real life and can only express in public anonymity. Some of the submissions are self-consciously hip, some are scarily strange, some mundane, some ugly, and others jarringly beautiful. Here's one from this past week, since the blog patently refuses to archive (something that bothers me a bit, as a compulsive collector and recordkeeper). I also don't know how I feel about the forthcoming book of secrets. This kind of thing was born on the web, and I think it should probably stay there.

Malaysia: Truly Asia

2005-09-25T02:41:00.000+08:00

Apparently the latest ad campaign of the Malaysia Tourism Board has won a number of awards. To be exact:

Tourism Malaysia won four gold and one silver international awards for its advertising campaign at the prestigious Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMAI) Adrian Awards 2004 competition in New York.

It's certainly been effective at getting my attention. Not only do I unconsciously sing along to the mesmerizing song that plays on my television at least once an hour, but I was even compelled to plan a trip there for my upcoming National Day vacation. I leave next Saturday for Singapore, where I'll meet up with my old friend A.F., who works for the government and lives, I'm sure, as exciting a life as can be found on that tiny, tidy, island--though we'll see when I get there. After a couple of days evading the strong bamboo cane of the law in the land of road-pricing and regulations that ban the sale and import of chewing gum, I'll hop across the causeway to the mainland: peninsular Malaysia. As of now, I plan to take the train to Kuala Lumpur and then possibly the famed "Jungle Train" up to the country's northeast corner, where I'll catch the ferry to Pulau Perhentian to meet up with my friend from Beijing, A., her boyfriend, and his friend for a few days of relaxed semi-luxury on some of the world's most gorgeous beaches. The other option is to head to Penang Island, for the colonial city of Georgetown and some other, also fabulous, beaches. Obviously, I'll try to write while I'm there, but for now, I thought I'd share the magic of this series of commercials with the world at large.

For small quicktime videos of the intoxicating propaganda that flashes on my screen at least twenty times a day, visit the Malaysian Tourism Board's website. The first one, "International - Culture, Beach, Eco," is my favorite. If the lyrics to my latest favorite song are enough to satisfy you, and they won't be--once you see them I'm sure you'll be compelled to watch the ad to hear the enchanting melody--here they are:

Everything I've wanted, all that I've asked of you.
Everything I've dreamed of, it's all coming true.
So stay with me (with me), as we walk hand in hand.

Malaysia: Truly Asia,
The mountains and the sea.
Malaysia: Truly Asia,
It's calling out, to you and me.
Malaysia: Truly Asia.

Irresistible, isn't it?

The "army of bang bang"

2005-09-24T18:57:00.000+08:00

Wouldn't it suck to be a member of the "army of bang bang?" It's not what you'd think it is from the name. The People's Daily explains it all here:

The "Army of Bang Bang," which comes from rural areas, can be seen almost everywhere in Chongqing.

Why not to get arrested in China

2005-09-21T16:33:00.000+08:00

This expose by Joseph Kahn in the Times on China's legal system makes it seem like the Cultural Revolution never ended. Stories of suspects under interrogation being forced to do the "airplane"--a form of torture from that bloody era of grassroots denunciation, public humiliation, and indiscriminate violence that entails tying a person's arms together behind and above their head and leaving them that way for days, often resulting in dislocations or fractures--in this day and age are truly shocking, especially when China has been so good at pretending to the world that true change has taken place. Still, this analysis, run through with the narrative of a man who was forced to confess to a murder he did not commit, and who was later cleared through the discovery of definitive evidence that he was not the perpetrator, proves all the diplomatic hype on the part of the communists to be dead wrong, and shows us that the kid gloves with which the leaderships of real democratic states treats China are exactly that, a means of protecting their pockets and wallets from the wrath of a country that could leave their citizens naked if it so desired. The man whose story this article foregrounds, Qin Yanhong, had a far more personal taste of the gangrene gnawing at China's legal system than I ever hope to get:

"Our public security system is the product of a dictatorship," Mr. Qin wrote his family when he was on death row. "Police use dictatorial measures on anyone who resists them. Ordinary people have no way to defend themselves."

Still, it is hard to remember that this is what the legal infrastructure of the country in which I now reside looks like, when all I see on a daily basis are high-rise construction sites that grow by stories every day, ads for "Intel Inside" computers and Dream satellite television, and websites for ordering international takeout with SMS order confirmation (see this earlier entry).

Today I bought a bicycle

2005-09-21T15:58:00.000+08:00

Well, actually, I bought it on Sunday, with help from R. to find the most fashionable color. It's a matte dark blue "Forever"-brand bicycle, small enough so that my toes touch the ground when I want them to, and with a cute tulip painted on the frame below the handlebars. But, today was the first time I rode it--to work, from work to Chinese class, and all the way home--and the first time I've even been on a bike in about four years; make that eight years if we're counting any real time or distance. I've never before ridden very far beyond the comfortable enclave that surrounds my suburban home, and I'd never even made it to the point where you ride along with traffic instead of facing the oncoming cars in order to know what's coming your way. And somehow I thought I could try all this for the first time in the chaotic onslaught that is the Beijing bike-riding experience. Well, I made it home alive--and exhilarated.

I figured out that the bike lanes off to the sides of roads were meant to be one-way, that the parking lot in front of McDonald's (Maidanlao in Chinese) costs .09RMB, or about 1 cent, to park your bike under the watchful eye of an attendant while you grab some fries (shutiao) and diet coke (jianyi kele) for lunch, that knocking a water bottle out of a woman's hand while trying to dash across a busy intersection is probably a bad idea, and that I most likely won't crash and sustain massive head trauma despite the fact that I didn't buy a helmet. No one here wears one, and most of them make it to work and back on a daily basis without incident, and traffic, even of the two-wheeled variety, moves so sluggishly that even if one were to fall, I don't think anything permanently damaging would come of it. I'll take a picture of my newest vehicle tomorrow and post it--on this first adventure, I thought it wise to leave my camera at home, in case all went to shit and I flipped over or something. Next time, I won't be so cautious.

China, this is the internet

2005-09-17T17:50:00.000+08:00

So, this article may not be the most recent news, but I certainly didn't know about its contents until recently, and I live here:

A year-long campaign by the Hu Jintao government to silence unofficial voices in China and to assert control over independent expression continues with an order...for all Chinese websites and bloggers to register their real names with authorities, or be closed by June 30.

Tens of thousands of Chinese use cyberspace to publish views on subjects ranging from politics to relationships, and have been able to avoid official censure by writing anonymously. But now Internet activity will be monitored in real time by Information Ministry computers. Sites and users not registered may be arrested.

From what I've seen and heard, no one has been arrested yet, and sites and blogs without the requisite registration information at the bottom of each page have not yet been taken offline, but the fact that this policy even exists is emblematic of the political climate here. The Chinese government tends to fall at least one step behind on regulating most things, but when it comes to the tools of oppression, they throw massive regulation at those who would have their individual freedoms long before most people have even said anything.

How exactly do they plan to do this?

2005-09-16T00:50:00.000+08:00

Apparently (according to this article in the Times) the Vatican is sending review teams to every Catholic seminary in the States to check that none of the priests or seminarians are gay, which by their instructions will mean "anyone who has engaged in homosexual activity or has strong homosexual inclinations," even if they haven't been sexually active for over a decade. I'm just wondering how they plan to root out the sodomites--strip, bend over, and see which priests wind up with mud on their faces? The Vatican's concern, of course, stems from the sexual abuse scandals that swept the nation in 2002, and from a more recent study the results of which understandably enraged many homophobes:

The issue of gay seminarians and priests has been in the spotlight because a study commissioned by the church found last year that about 80 percent of the young people victimized by priests were boys.

Experts in human sexuality have cautioned that homosexuality and attraction to children are different, and that a disproportionate percentage of boys may have been abused because priests were more likely to have access to male targets - like altar boys or junior seminarians - than to girls.

So they're not gay, they're just equal-opportunity pedophiles. Shouldn't the Church look to rid the priesthood of them? I recommend youthful undercover agents posing as altar boys.

The taste of Chinese chips

2005-09-15T23:41:00.000+08:00

It's well known that the Chinese have a taste for many delicacies that would make much of the world grimace: pig trotters, chicken feet, shark fins, snakes, intestines, stomachs, and tree fungi, among seemingly limitless others. You'd think, however, that they couldn't make even that prized delicacy of the American cupboard--the potato chip--seem revolting. But America's own storied snack manufacturer, Lay's, has perverted the standard chip into something resembling the more traditional Middle Kingdom snack of dried shrimp or shriveled, puckeringly sour plums. Sure, I've seen ketchup-, ham-, and pickle-flavored chips in Spain, but those still seem to somehow belong to the same genre: you could eat chips with any of those things and it wouldn't seem out of place at a Fourth of July picnic. These Chinese varieties (and I'm not even talking about homegrown brands, which create Frankensteinian flavor-powders that I'm sure rival even these, but who package their products exclusively in Chinese and therefore inaccessibly to my current powers of interpretation) will perhaps offer some insight into the nature of the Chinese palate, and into why even I, a pretty die-hard chowhound (slash foodie, but only when I have the money), find myself a bit intimidated when eating here, especially without language to help decipher what it is I'm eating.

Red Dust

2005-09-13T17:47:00.000+08:00

Last week I finished reading photographer and writer Ma Jian's memoir, Red Dust, which left me shivering in my Beijing hi-rise, shocked for the first time since I've been here, really, into remembering how different China, and even Beijing, was only twenty years ago, and inspired to create something as moving as this book. It is an existential self-portrait of this Chinese-born artist and free spirit, who, in the heated political climate of 1983, quits his job with the foreign propaganda bureau and evades arrest and possible execution while at the same time living out his wildest dreams by leaving Beijing to roam around the country for three years. He first buys a ticket for Urumqi, a city in China's far northwestern Xinjiang province (where I hope to go next summer) and the farthest city in the world from the ocean, but disembarks the days-long train in Gansu province, two-thirds of the way there, to explore the Buddhist grottoes at Dunhuang. He wanders the deserts and strangely industrialized (by the oil industry) oases of that region for a long time, before swinging down through Qinghai, almost dying, and crossing through Sichuan to Chengdu on virtually the same route I took on my first journey through China, six years ago.

Along the way, he composes poems and pens short stories, which he mails to literary friends around the country to attempt to get them published in order to replenish his funds and sustain his soul-searching for a few more months at a time. He settles down in the western city of Chengdu, home of panda bears and Zhou Enlai, for a while, working for the regional publishing press and crashing with distant acquaintances, but his wanderlust gets the best of him and takes him back east along a southerly route. Eventually, after three years, he has crisscrossed the entire nation and ends up in Tibet, which even if it is not the concluding pinnacle he, as a man who took his lay Buddhist vows--he had been seeking meaning even then--before he left Beijing, had expected, did serve as a satisfying signal that this specific journey was over. Still, he has proved to himself that China holds nothing more for him, despite the attachments that remain, and with the help of his friends, he escapes across the border to Hong Kong, which in turn he leaves for London when the island territory returns to Chinese control in 1997. Much of the book's appeal is in the writing, which is both elegantly simple and downright gritty at the same time, but as a fellow wanderer, the story calls out to me with equal strength.

Obscenity in the travel section

2005-09-12T22:09:00.000+08:00

I've been trying to figure out if I could afford to spend a week in Tokyo over my October vacation for Chinese National Day. I've been told I could do it on a budget, but I could easily see blowing $10,000 that I don't have if I had seven days in the country I'd love more than any other to see. This incredible article from the Times travel section proves me unfortunately right, I believe. $250 a day might be a tight budget to some, but to me it seems pretty damn extravagant, even for a city like Tokyo! I knew my hopes were dashed from the first paragraphs:

Mention to any traveler that you're headed to Tokyo and be prepared to hear a litany of warnings: hotel rooms in Shinjuku equal to the cost of a month's rent in New York, breakfasts that can cost more than dinners at Per Se. Even the most in-the-know travelers persist in believing that Tokyo is a destination fit only for the superrich.

But given today's strong euro, Tokyo can actually be less expensive than some major European cities (and even cheaper than New York) - if you know where to go and what to avoid.

One weekend in June, I had a chance to test this theory. My goal was to enjoy two days in Tokyo on a total budget of just $500.

I guess if I were going to be there for just two days I could and would probably cough up the cash, but right now a week, even at that budget, would be much more than my two bank accounts on opposite sides of the world could possibly afford, even in concerted unison.

The filmmaker of suburbia

2005-09-10T18:46:00.000+08:00

Since I aspire to be a filmmaker, and given that my childhood was one of the suburbs, it's not altogether unlikely that one day I will make a movie that somehow nestles up against this genre, even if only in mockery of it, or perhaps as a more serious study of the qualities most films that fall within it profess to examine. While I was on Salon reading "Ask the Pilot," I also came across this interview with Mike Mills, the director of the soon-to-be-released (in America, and shortly thereafter on DVD here in China) movie, Thumbsucker:

Whether it's fair or not -- and it's not -- you're going to be compared to other recent American movies that deal with suburbia. People are going to talk about "American Beauty" and "Donnie Darko." I don't know if you see any thematic continuity there, but I'm curious how you approached a setting that's become so symbolic.

"American Beauty" I completely hate. I find it a really reprehensible movie because it's making fun of people that live there. I don't respond to "Donnie Darko" at all, because its quirkiness overtakes any sense of reality. But "Ordinary People" I watched a lot. "Ice Storm" I watched a lot. Those are two suburban movies I would embrace. And while mine has certain visual gags, I guess, I'm more in that camp.

I get compared to "Donnie Darko" every frickin' day. That and "Garden State," another movie I hate. I'm not going to argue with the audience. But my take on suburbia is that I have no interest in picking on people, or saying they're "dysfunctional." I hate that phrase. As if there's a family that's functional, you know? It's a very George Bush way to be looking at family: Evil is to be killed, and good will go to heaven.

Ironically, I had just watched Ang Lee's Ice Storm two days prior, after my friend S. recommended it over a month ago while we were shopping for DVDs. Unlike Mills, however, I happen to love both Donnie Darko and, even more so, Garden State, and I find American Beauty tolerable in its teasing humor--and for the ease and style with which Family Guy proceded to parody it in the episode where Stewie becomes a cheerleader. (I haven't seen Ordinary People, though after reading this I plan to, if only for comparison's sake.) Anyway, I think the above was the most interesting part of an otherwise lackluster interview, but the rest of the article may be worth passing through Salon's hoops anyway, as it discusses two other films that I hadn't actually heard of yet, and that seemed quite worth watching.

Ask the pilot

2005-09-10T15:33:00.000+08:00

I've always been an irrationally anxious flyer, despite lots of intercontinental and transoceanic airplane experience. Whenever there's a plane crash in the news, my anxiety heightens, and I'm even afraid on the ground when someone I know is in the air. The recent spate of spectacular crashes hasn't done much to help, especially when that Caribbean flight went down in Venezuela a week before my dad and his girlfriend were headed there on vacation, and when the Mandala Airways flight out of Medan burnt up on take-off--I had looked into flying from Malaysia to Sumatra (and landing at Medan) for my October vacation, an idea which never panned out, but one that made the horrific footage on CNN seem a lot closer to home. Still, one thing that has always helped to assuage my flying fears a bit has been reading Salon's "Ask the Pilot" column. I let my subscription to that website expire almost two years ago now, when they were really struggling to survive to the point that they published almost no articles. (I had originally joined in order to show my support--it was even in the days before they resorted to limiting non-subscriber access and installing the electronic sentries of mandatory advertisements--but by then it seemed hopeless and a waste of money.) So I hadn't read Patrick Smith's oddly compelling column in a year at least when I stumbled across it again yesterday. His discussion of the recent streak of bad luck in the air is, as always, rational and calming:

Many people are more anxious about flying than ever. What they need at a time like this is rational and useful information, not rumor mongering, cavalier accusations and hyperbole. Recommending the avoidance of an entire league of airlines is a drastic and wrong course. In the end, the realities of air safety are no more indebted to maintenance budgets or corporate culture than to luck and human nature.

I think I might take up reading him more regularly.

Sontag at the movies

2005-09-09T18:04:00.000+08:00

Arts and Letters Daily had a link to this terrific article from the most recent issue of The New Yorker. Since it would cost me well over $100 to have my weekly literary sustenance delivered to me here in Beijing, I have to subsist on the few articles those demigods of Times Square are willing to publish online for free each week. Luckily, this retrospective look by film critic David Denby at how Susan Sontag viewed the cinema was among the pieces that made it into their website. In addition to offering some fascinating insight into the perspective my favorite recently deceased public intellectual had on the twentieth-century's most unique art form, the article also reveals that Sontag loved some of the same films I do--most emphatically, Yasujiro Ozu's incredible Tokyo Story.

Sontag, it turned out, had a personal canon of about four hundred movies that she visited over and over at revival houses--Renoir's Rules of the Game and Kurosawa's High and Low were particular favorites, and she claimed to have seen Ozu's heartbreaking Tokyo Story thirty times. "There are passions which last forever," she told an audience of movie-lovers at the Japan Society in 2003. At the end of her life, working hard, and often ill, Susan Sontag went to the movies almost every day of the week.

Here in Beijing, I'm lucky to have unparalled, inexpensive access to great films on DVD. For 10RMB (a little more than $1), I can get almost any movie I could want, from Tim Burton's disappointing remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Istvan Szabo's Love Film, and Abbas Kiarostami's Ten, which are just a few of the DVDs I have purchased in the past few days. Even if I can't experience the dark pleasure of the cinema-house by going to the movies "almost every day of the week"--there's usually only one or two English-language films playing in the whole city, and those are the likes of Mr. and Mrs. Smith or Batman Begins--I can certainly attempt to do so from the comfort of my own home.

My regimental alarm clock

2005-09-08T00:06:00.000+08:00

Since I haven't quite yet adjusted to waking up at 7:30 every morning in order to be at school awake and ready to teach my three-year olds by 8:45, sometimes I'm still dozing to the intermittently jarring call of my snooze alarm at 8:00. It is then, however, that I pass irremediably out of the realm of sleep and into that of the unfortunately awake. A few hundred yards down the road is a track, which apparently plays host to the morning exercises of some local school--perhaps the middle school that I've noticed on Baijiazhuang Lu, an intersecting street. In any case, at 8:00am the blare of loudspeakers blasting a recorded rendition of some song that recalls the Chinese national anthem, "The East is Red," without actually being it reaches my wall of windows, imploring me to press against the glass, lean to the left, and witness the spectacle that is the tardy schoolchildren running to their respective places in the straight lines that have formed within the bounds of the track. It has become a tradition to mark the commencement of my day, as I find myself flush against my windows every morning, propelled by the dampened blast of music despite the fact that I know what awaits my gaze. I can't help but repeat my attendance at this striking event, emblematic of all of China's regimented past.

Big titties

2005-09-07T23:07:00.000+08:00

Today, one of my three-year old students, a British boy named L., boldly went where no toddler had gone before. He asked me, in exactly these words, "Can I see your big titties?" When I said, "No, L., that wouldn't be appropriate," he responded, "I don't have titties, see?" and lifted up his shirt. I told him that even his lack of corresponding bodily features didn't make his request okay. He pretended not to understand and then just felt me up. He was cute, so I let him.

"Holidays in the Danger Zone"

2005-09-05T16:52:00.000+08:00

For those of you whose cable carriers bring the brilliant programming of BBC World into your homes, I have to recommend this awesome show, "Holidays in the Danger Zone." The BBC World website describes host and author Simon Reeve's project thus:

There are almost 200 official countries in the world, but there are dozens more breakaway states which are determined to be separate and independent. The breakaway states have their own rulers, parliaments or warlords, and are home to millions of people, but they're not officially recognised as proper countries by the rest of the world. Several have their own armies and police forces, and issue passports and even postage stamps which the rest of the world ignores.

All of the breakaway states have declared independence after violent struggles with a neighbouring state. Some now survive peacefully, but others are a magnet for terrorists and weapons smuggling, and have armies ready for a fight. All could be at the centre of future wars which threaten their regions and the wider world.

In a world of easy adventure tourism, Simon visits breakaway states & unrecognized nations which don't usually feature on the tourist trail: Somaliland, Transdniestria, South Ossetia, Taiwan, Abkhazia, Ajaria and Nagorno-Karabkh.

I caught the episode on Taiwan this weekend, and sadly missed the first two on Somaliland and Transdniestra. However, there's still two more to come in the following weeks, and I'm sure they'll repeat the others like they unfortunately do all too frequently. (Why when they clearly have such amazing thinkers brainstorming programs in some London thinktank must the BBC resort to reruns the vast majority of the time?)

Still, as I contemplate my hopeful odyssey through Central Asia next summer--I'm hoping to travel overland from Beijing through Yunnan in southwestern China to Tibet and onto Xinjiang in the northwest, then across the border into Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, from Turkmenbashi across the Caspian Sea by ferry to Baku in Azerbaijan, and then by plane to Istanbul, whence I'll either head by train back up into Eastern Europe or island-hop around Greece to Athens before heading home--I'm particularly attuned to any discussion of very out of the ordinary travel destinations, especially ones that might not be perceived as the safest of vacations by those less in the know.

I'm sure there'll be more on here about my work planning that trip as it comes together (or falls apart), but for now, a television show that's even tangentially related is certainly enough to catch my eye. Besides, its exactly the kind of television this world could do with a lot more of.

The "Mail Moment"

2005-09-05T00:19:00.000+08:00

Despite the fact that I'm in Beijing, I still read a good part of the Times everyday. I couldn't help but post this anachronistic link on my blog: snail mail really is special, especially of the international ilk. (I'm thinking in particular here of a postcard my boyfriend, P., sent my way from Greece last spring, but also with an eye toward much more transoceanic correspondence to come.)

The most touching artifact among these mail studies is a survey conducted by the Postal Service and called "The Mail Moment." "Two-thirds of all consumers do not expect to receive personal mail, but when they do, it makes their day," it concluded. "This 'hope' keeps them coming back each day." Even in this age of technology, according to the survey, 55 percent of Americans said they looked forward to discovering what each day's mail might hold.

Internet food delivery

2005-09-04T14:45:00.000+08:00

My friend S. turned me on to a dirty secret a few weeks ago: in Beijing, as in Boston, New York, or many other American cities, you can order your dinner online. The site, www.beijinggoodies.com, became something of an addiction for me of late, though I've had to cut back since the prices it charges are assinine, with a 100RMB minimum charge plus delivery fees. Dinner from Mexican Wave or Tandoor to fulfill cravings for exotic cuisines ends up costing between fifteen and twenty dollars--an outrageous amount in a city where I could stuff my face at a normal Chinese restaurant (preferably Sichuan, if I had my way) for 20RMB or $2.50. On top of that, they're not quite modern enough to take credit cards yet, so it really is an out-of-pocket expense. It's cheaper to order pizza from Annie's, which has its own free delivery service, even though you have to actually call them to place your order. (Beijing Goodies confirms orders on their site by text message to your cell phone.) Still, just knowing that a service like this exists changes my sense of how small the differences really are between life here and life anywhere else in the developed world. If you can order cheese enchiladas or garlic naan online and have it show up at your door thirty minutes later, you are definitely not in the third world.

China's greater metropolis

2005-08-28T18:52:00.000+08:00

I was in Shanghai for a few days this week on a short vacation. I left suitably impressed by the city's expanse, its modernity, its vibe that stands out against the staid hesitance of most of the rest of China, even by how very different it seems from Beijing, which is somehow more provincial and backwards. I stayed on the 70th floor of Jin Mao Tower, the fourth-tallest building in the world, at the Grand Hyatt, and out the window of my room the famed TV Tower dominated the middle-ground of the panorama, while the postcolonial relics of the Bund hovered above the opposite shore of the Huangpu River. Skyscrapers of varying degrees of imaginative design faded into the distance almost to the hazy horizon. On the other side of town, the blossoming district of Xintiandi, which stands in the former French Concession, transported me with its small shops and pedestrian streets to some nonexistent European city. M on the Bund wowed me with culinary stylings worthy of a New York setting (but still at Chinese prices)--a Continental menu, impressive wine list, incredible fresh-baked breads, and desserts composed of ingredients vastly more appealing than red bean paste. Shanghai really is a whole other world from the rest of China.

Still, some things persist despite the steady flow of big money, and the Chinese worldview is one of them, albeit with certain more cosmopolitan accents. Shanghai's taxis all bear a list of rules and regulations on the back of the driver's compartment. That these appear in both Mandarin and English is one point that differentiates the city, but their content connects it to a broader Chinese paradigm. Item number seven in a list of twelve was my favorite, and the one that really emphasizes how the Chinese mindset is distinct from what we're more used to in the West. In the various translations employed by the different cab companies, I saw two versions of it, both of which make my point: "No schizophrenics or drunkards to take the taxi without a guardian," and "No psychos or drunkards to take taxi alone."

Parable of the happy fish

2005-08-25T19:32:00.000+08:00

I was in the Master of Nets Garden in Suzhou, an ancient town outside of Shanghai, today. While pondering the fengshui of the buildings and the pond, I heard this story about two philosophers:

Two wise philosophers come to a pond, where they see a fish. The first says, "That fish must be happy." The second says, "How do you know that the fish is happy? You are not a fish." The first replies, "How do you know that I do not know? You are not me."

Chinese punk rock and caipirinhas

2005-08-18T01:56:00.000+08:00

I just returned from a less-than-raucous night out at what's supposed to be Beijing's best bar--Yugong Yishan. I have no idea what the name means, but I know characters homophonic with most of the syllables, which has led me to decide it means The One Mountain for Getting Down to Business. I'll probably never learn the real translation, so my imagined meaning will have to suffice. It doesn't bother me very much that I go through the day making associations like these. That's what I get for living in Chinese imaginary space.

But anyway, at this bar, which _that's Beijing_ voted Beijing's Best Bar of 2005, I met up with R., a fellow teacher and an artist from New York who's become one of my best friends here, our friends M., a graphic designer from Buenos Aires, and S.L., a Chinese speaker from Lima who works dubbing CCTV shows into Spanish for some reason, and a bunch of their friends. The international origins of the crowd don't stop there, as I spent most of the time chatting with S.A., a girl from Denmark who has two jobs--one with a Danish shipping firm and another as a bartender at a British pub here. C. and A., girls from Kuala Lumpur who are fixtures in this crowd were there, but they were talking to two guys, a Brit and an Italian, who never became even acquaintances (not even in hope of reducing them to initials here).

We were there to hear some "French funky band" perform, since Yugong Yishan is known for its live music shows, but when R. and I got there after a late bite at O Sole Mio, we found out that they were a no-show. Or maybe our friends had just been wrong to begin with. Instead, we were going to witness the debut of a ragtag ensemble. Two punk rockers S.A. had seen play a show a few weeks before were onstage with the bartender as their adopted lead singer. Now, punk in Chinese sounds a lot like punk in English--linguistically indistinct, lyrically unintelligible, and loud. They actually played pretty well together, though, and a couple of us were moving along with the songs. We even shouted and clapped after some of the numbers, since the Chinese audience, which was fairly large for 10:30 on a Wednesday night, still managed to seem entirely dead despite the fact that they could understand the songs and we couldn't. However, that might actually be understandable. The leader, whose haircut gave him the mien of a Wookie trying to look like John Lennon, announced toward the end of their set that he knew one song in English, and he was going to sing it for all us ladies in the back, who were smoking and drinking our delicious and surprisingly strong-for-Beijing caipirinhas ($3). The song was called, as he announced before beginning to sing it, "All I Want to Do Is to Do You." That sentence formed the base of the refrain, along with lines like, "Shit for the shitters, fuck for the fuckers, put it in your motherfucking mouth, fill the empty spaces," all to the strains of a punk ballad. In Chinese, he announced it as a love song. We keeled over with laughter, but gave loud whistles and cheers when they were through. Maybe the Chinese songs were of similar quality--and the Chinese audience slightly less easily amused?

In any case, my sole reaction was to want to film a movie about the punk rock scene in Beijing. It would be ridiculous.

Making acquaintance

2005-08-17T19:50:00.000+08:00

I moved from New York to Beijing five weeks ago, scared to meet the obligations of a year-long contract to teach English at a bilingual preschool and kindergarten. I haven't been in one place, doing one thing, for such a long time in years. College doesn't count, since I was always going somewhere or doing something I wasn't theoretically supposed to be doing--I haven't been much of a "student" since middle school, despite the modicum of academic success I've still managed to achieve. The prescribed life of a high school student or undergrad never really engaged me like that of an adventurer, whether that adventure is inside myself or across the globe, assisted, accompanied, or alone.

So now I'm here, for no reason other than that I wanted to let adventures happen to me and this is the one that found me first. Since arriving, I've shadowed more experienced teachers in classes of toddlers and teenagers, designed a summer camp for sixteen preteen boys (and one seven year-old girl) in which we shot and edited two short films, sang "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" more times than I'd like to recall, and learned that Brits sing their ABCs differently (they break up LMNOP, repeat XYZ, and end with "Now you see, I can say my ABCs"). I've also interviewed for three other jobs, and have a meeting over coffee coming up in two days to discuss another opportunity. It's not that what I'm doing doesn't pay well or isn't interesting enough--it's tolerable on both counts--but teaching is not at all what I want to do with my life, in any formal sense at least, and these other jobs all offer the opportunity to write, something much more in line with my visions of the future (and hopefully the present).

I also decided to pass on the apartment an acquaintance had offered me before my arrival. J.H. had been teaching at the same school for the past year, and living in this run-down two-bedroom apartment with a Chinese roommate for the past five months. The roommate, C., was great, despite the inevitable cultural conflicts I faced when I lived there for my first two weeks in Beijing. C. was a great cook, her egg and scallion jiaozi (my favorite kind of dumplings) were divine, and most of what she made appealed to foreign tastes, or at least to my palate, more than the chicken feet she made to suck on herself.

The bathroom, however, had no shower, just a spigot above the toilet; the kitchen was a dirty, box-like room that made me want to eat out every meal; the hallways of the building were fall of garbage and eerily shadowy. The clincher, though, was the elevator. It seemed mechanically sound--it even had the requisite elevator inspection certificate, which wasn't past the expiration date, unlike every one I've ever seen in Boston, where I went to school--and it even came complete with two thirtysomething women who took turns sitting inside it on a stool and reaching up to press 19 for me whenever I came home and 1 whenever I wanted to leave. These women, captives inside their own "iron rice bowls" (the sinecure-like term the Chinese use for jobs guaranteed by the government for life regardless of their continued necessity), went off-duty each night at midnight, even on weekends, and there would be no one there to press 19--just me, left to hike drunkenly up the unlit stairwells all on my own.

So I went looking for a new place, one I could decorate on my own with plants and saucepans from Ikea, at one-fifth the price the items with the same ridiculous Swedish names would cost in the U.S. Three weeks ago I found it, an unclutteredly spare but mod aerie on the 22nd floor of a brand-new building, where the elevator runs at least as late as I can stay out partying. So far, I haven't tested it past 3:30am, but I'm certain it zooms up and down with its ads for Audi A6s and Blackberry-like devices long after I've passed out in my king-size bed. What follows are some photos I took to give you a sense of what my retreat from the noise, chaos, and dirt of Beijing is like.