Some Final Adventures

Hi! Sorry it's been so ridiculously long since I've posted. I am now back in Boston, but I'm definitely not done talking about China! I started writing the post below a week ago, but got too busy/lazy to finish it and post it. It's about my second to last weekend in China. Enjoy...

That title is rather dramatic, but I guess things are getting a little dramatic here, in terms of how quickly time has flown past, and how much I have had to do before leaving. For example: I started writing this post Tuesday, but now it’s Sunday, and I’m in the airport waiting to board my flight to Toronto. For the sake of having some semblance of focus, this post is going to be about last weekend. Then, once I return to Boston (AH!), I’ll post about what it was like saying goodbye here and sort of try to wrap up my China experience. If that’s even possible. But first, let’s rewind a bit to the weekend, because it was absolutely marvelous (and adventure-filled).

Saturday morning I got up early to go meet up with my friend Douglon Tse (fellow member of the Milton Class of ’09, currently a student at the University of Hong Kong), who was in town for the weekend to see his dad, who works in Shanghai. Douglon had invited me (because he’s absolutely crazy awesome) to go along on a private, very very special tour his dad had arranged of the Shanghai World Expo site. The Expo, in case you don’t know, is the current incarnation of the World’s Fair; it happens every 10 years, and features pavilions from most countries, and provides a tremendous opportunity and a tremendous amount of prestige (and responsibility/expense) for the host country. Kind of like the Olympics. Except the Expo is even bigger because it runs for 6 months, and involves building basically an entire city, not just an Olympic village. So the Chinese government has set aside (read: seized and razed?) a huge piece of land on the eastern side of the Huangpu River (aka Pudong) and has been busily transforming it into a sort of ideal “world city” filled with futuristic buildings, examples of urban best practices, pavilions, and a whole infrastructure of its own. It’s just an incredibly enormous project. China is also busily rebuilding Shanghai in preparation for the millions and millions of visitors they’re expecting to get. The Expo doesn’t open until May, so I was a little bummed that I was going to miss out on seeing it, since it’s such a big deal. And Douglon, per usual, came to the rescue! I got to spend a morning touring the Expo site, and it was amazing, for many reasons. The most obviously striking part of the tour was how completely un-ready the site is. It’s a massive construction site, filled with debris, scaffolding, construction equipment, construction workers, piles of dirt, cement, steel, etc etc. Certainly not a place ready to be descended upon by tourists anytime soon…and yet May 1 is not that far away. Getting an inside look at a Chinese construction site was really cool in and of itself; tens of thousands of workers from all over China have migrated to work on the site, and seeing them and their temporary housing was interesting (overwhelmingly men, but I did see a couple female construction workers interestingly enough). The other highlight was, somewhat obviously, seeing the pavilions. The Chinese pavilion has become something of a national icon, much like the Birds Nest, as its image appears everywhere—posters, advertisements, TV, etc. I think it’s a really striking, beautiful building that deserves to become a classic. Built to look like a modern pagoda, it’s bright red and absolutely massive. The other iconic building that we saw was the flying-saucer-like performance stadium. I have a feeling that that one’s aesthetic might be a little more short lived than the China pavilion. My other favorite pavilions were the Scandinavian countries’; they’re all well thought-out, interesting buildings, that show a commitment both to showcasing the country, and to adhering to the spirit of the Expo and highlighting some sort of “best practice.” The American pavilion, on the other hand, does not yet exist…uhoh. In our defense, the recession hit, and our government decided it wasn’t going to spend any money on the pavilion which I think was a good choice. But we have failed at finding private or corporate donors, so we have yet to start to build our pavilion. I think we should just set up a hot dog stand. Or maybe put some voting booths out on display that people can go into to practice voting. The Chinese government would love that!

After our tour of the Expo, we went to look at Douglon’s dad’s latest development project, which is renovating the former headquarters of Justine Matheson (the largest opium importing firm) on the Bund. It’s an absolutely INCREDIBLE building, with beautiful detailing and a breathtaking view. I can’t wait to go back when the project is finished, because it blew me away in its unfinished state. So cool, particularly for a history buff like me. At this point, that building basically embodies the historical irony of the Bund—former center of commerce in Asia, now completely irrelevant, supplanted by its new neighbor, Pudong, across the river. After an amazing (lots of superlatives when it comes to describing this whole morning…but it was really superlative) lunch, I made my way to the train station, where I caught a train to Nanjing for a 24 hour solo excursion.

I’d been looking forward to getting to travel on my own for a long time, and the trip was a wonderful chance to just hang out with myself. My hostel in Nanjing was well-located, right in the middle of the Confucian Temple District, which is a mostly pedestrian area that was lit up and bustling on the Saturday night I spent wandering around. Sunday, I first went to the Taiping Rebellion (or Taiping Heavenly Kingdom as the Chinese still call it) Museum. This museum was remarkable, not because it was particularly good, but because it sort of (accidentally) summed up all of the Chinese neuroses about the 19th century. For instance, the plaques in the museum implied that the Taiping were practicing communism even before Communism existed, while at the same time they laid the foundations for modern commerce in China. What?!? My other favorite quirk was that the museum never once mentioned Christianity or the Taiping’s pseudo-Christian basis (the founder claimed to be Jesus’ younger brother). Not once. According to the museum, the Taiping were just another righteous peasant rebellion against corrupt masters and a broken system…not slightly crazed messianic cult-members genuinely inspired by Christianity. Ah well. They were both, so I guess the museum gets a 50%. From this perplexing (but slightly funny) museum, I went to the very thought-provoking, very disturbing, very emotionally involved Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. The Nanjing Massacre took place during 6 weeks in December 1937 and January 1938. When the Japanese army invaded China and finally captured Nanjing (then the capital), they went on a raping, killing and burning spree that left 300,000 people dead, and many hundreds of thousands more scarred and scattered. The Nanjing Massacre was a horrible, violent act—one that still exacerbates Japanese/Chinese animosity, especially since members of Japan’s Right Wing claim that it never happened. Ugh. The museum is incredibly detailed, filled with artifacts, interviews with survivors, photographs (of executions, dead bodies, a ravaged city, etc…), and even a viewing platform over a mass grave site. Most of the time, this heavy-handedness feels appropriate, or if not appropriate, it doesn’t feel like it goes too far over the line. However, I definitely experienced moments of intense discomfort with how the museum was handled, in particular with how it often seemed to be egging on anti-Japanese Chinese nationalism (if that term makes any sense…). For instance, upon leaving the main exhibit halls, you walk through this area that’s all about “Peace” and how we must all never forget the past so that it can never be repeated, and how every one on earth should join together to forge world peace. Good stuff, right? And then in order to exit you have to go through this “separate” exhibit about the “glorious” victory over the Japanese and how the Chinese triumphed in the war even though the Japanese were incredibly savage, etc. And it goes military victory by military victory, up until the Japanese unconditional surrender…without once mentioning Hiroshima and Nagasaka. Again: What?!? This unnecessary, untruthful aggrandizing of Chinese military “might” left a bad taste in my mouth, and reminded me why the animosity between China and Japan is one of the potentially most explosive nationalism-fueled feuds of the 21st century.

After leaving the museum, I spent about an hour or so figuring out how to navigate Nanjing by bus to go across the city to the other major site, Purple Gold Mountain. The mountain dominates the eastern part of the city, and is the site of Sun Yatsen’s tomb, the tomb of the first Ming emperor, and a beautiful scenic park. Sun Yatsen’s tomb is incredibly grandiose, and I don’t think he would be particularly happy with it if he knew, as it was built by the Nationalists in the style of a Ming Emperor’s tomb. Hmm. Maybe not appropriate for someone trying to start a republic. But you have to walk up like 400 steps or something to get to the tomb, and the view is beautiful. The Ming tomb is also really cool (it’s a World Heritage Site), and in the late afternoon light, it felt melancholy and abandoned and beautiful. The mountain is just gorgeous in general, and, with the autumn leaves (a soft yellow) but dark branches (purple) it really lives up to its name, as it looks purple from far away but yellow when you’re there. From Purple Gold Mountain, I then took the bus back into the center of the city to see Nanjing’s ancient city wall and the city’s largest gate, Zhonghuamen. By this time, dusk had set in, and wandering around this ancient city wall (wide enough at the top for 3 horses to walk abreast, and four layers deep, it’s more like a castle in the middle of the city than a gate) in the dark with the city lights twinkling below was a little creepy, but also striking and beautiful. It was such a moment of feeling the intersection of ancient and modern in China.

After that, I hopped on the metro and caught my train back to Shanghai. It was an amazing weekend!

Random PS to Best Week Ever

Things that I just thought of that I can't BELIEVE I forgot to mention that contributed to making this the Best Week Ever:

- I sent in my absentee ballot and VOTED in the MA Special Election! For Alan Khazei, of course (endorsed by The Boston Globe, The Worcester Telegraph, General Wesley Clark, Mayor Bloomberg....alanforsenate.com...GO ALAN!).
- A letter arrived, snail mail, from my friend Sarah Diamond, meaning that I exchanged letters with someone from China! The process just took almost 3 months, no big deal...I sent her a letter in the beginning of September, it got to her at the end of October, she sent her reply then, it got to me at the end of November. I sent her a reply, we'll see how long that takes. I thought that was pretty nifty, so I'm sharing
- I had a CRAZY conversation with my tutor, and I don't want to repeat it here because, you know, I'm still in China and she's still going to be here when I leave. If you're a Chinese official and you're reading this, Hi! Let's just say it was really sensitive and interesting and her family has definitely been caught up in China's turbulent recent history, and she's definitely NOT the Western media assumption of a brain-washed, disengaged Chinese upper middle class young person. Nope. Not at all. I'm obsessed with her a little bit (which is good, it's probably a good thing she has a friend outside of China, just in case...or whatever).
OK. Now I'm seriously done. This has officially been the longest update ever. Goodnight!

Best Week Ever?

It’s now December, and I can’t believe I go home so soon—10 days! The past week has maybe been my best week yet in China; before I get into the details, I think the overarching reasons for this week’s awesomeness are that I actively sought out adventures/awesome experiences, plus I sort of sensed my Chinese coming into its own, in terms of my being able to communicate and understand what’s going on around me. Ok, so the details: why was this the best week ever?

For starters, Thanksgiving was great—not the homesickness fest I sort of expected it to be. I definitely missed seeing my family and being in Vermont, but the more than sufficient Thanksgiving festivities here definitely took the edge off. Thanksgiving day itself, I skipped class. I went to the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, which I had not yet been to, and walked around Renmin Square and East Nanjing Road, taking pictures and enjoying a lovely warm and sunny day. The art museum is housed in a really cool building (it used to be a greenhouse), and while the art wasn’t so great (Chinese contemporary art is still sort of coming into its own) it was definitely worth going, and it was nice to get out into the central city again with my camera. It was cool to feel at once awed by Shanghai (Nanjing East Road is a pedestrian only shopping street and it’s crazy…even at lunch time on a weekday it was absolutely packed with people), and like an old hand, as I could make my way around with ease.

Later that afternoon, I met up with my friend Katherine, and we went to Zhongshan Park, which, even though it’s near my house, I had never been to. After wandering through the park for a little while, we eventually found our way to this big center grassy area. This place was bustling; there was a ballroom dancing class going on, tons of old people standing or sitting and enjoying the day, and a bunch of old men flying kites. Old men really like flying kites in China; in fact, I have yet to see a child flying a kite, but every day see old men flying hawk-shaped kites on the field outside our classrooms. I think they may actually be hired to fly kites to keep sparrows/other birds off the field (a strategy I think Milton should definitely incorporate into its anti-goose efforts…just make flying kites part of health class or force kids in detention to do it or something…or offer boarders yummy food in return for their kite flying efforts…). We eventually find the field’s kite seller guy, and buy a small kite off him for an exorbitant price. There were so many people crowding around watching the young laowai girls buying kites that we kind of just wanted to get out of there, so we didn’t really bargain that much. BUT we did get an absolutely excellent kite, not in terms of its flying ability, but in terms of its design. Our kite was adorned with three images of Haibao, the blue toothpaste smudge (slash wave, which is what he’s supposed to be) mascot of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. Beside a large central Haibao, two smaller Haibaos frolicked, dressed in Santa Claus suits. Perfection. The large grassy area was actually blocked off (TIC?), so we wandered for a bit trying to find a place to fly our kite before giving up and deciding to walk back to ECNU, which we know (from watching every day) has a couple good kite-flying places. This was a good choice, and we spent a lovely 90 minutes or so flying our kite, watched by a couple wide-eyed toddlers and the students walking by. It was a great way to spend any sunny, warm day outside—but especially Thanksgiving Day.

That evening we went to Thanksgiving dinner with the rest of the gap year students, our teachers Huang Laoshi and Yang Laoshi, Lynn the student intern who has taken us on excursions, and four UPenn students whom we didn’t know who are also in Shanghai with CIEE. The hotel we went to had an endless and varied Thanksgiving buffet. No stuffing (I know, what’s up with that?), but the turkey was INCREDIBLE. I guess in China because labor is so cheap they could probably pay someone just to be in charge of basting the turkey, because that bird (or birds, I guess, since there were definitely multiple) was moist and perfect. Yum. We all seriously over-ate, but that’s necessary for Thanksgiving, right? After dinner, it was go home, food coma, bed.

Friday afternoon I went to my second Thanksgiving, which was definitely even better than the first. I had been generously invited by Dru, my friend/former youth mentor Judith’s cousin, to their home in Pudong for their Thanksgiving party. It was SO delicious, and really interesting and fun to get to talk to a varied group of American expats. Everyone was super welcoming, especially considering that I was so young, and didn’t know anyone there. We watched the Pats/Colts game from the Monday before, which at first I was really excited about…until I remembered that it was a spectacular loss on the Pats part. Blergh. Oh well.

Saturday was another adventure day, as Ben, Katherine, Cindy and I, and Katherine’s super cool friend Olivia who is also going to Stanford after a gap year and is in Beijing for the semester (she was in Shanghai spending Thanksgiving with her brother who works here), went to Suzhou. Suzhou is a small city a half hour by train outside Shanghai, famous for its canals, historic city center, and gardens. Here’s what I would say about Suzhou: I’m glad I went, but it is definitely overrated. There isn’t too much to do, and the city center, while definitely different looking and vaguely old, is still very much a city center (traffic, modern shops, plenty of nondescript buildings, etc). The canals were sort of hard to find and not particularly easy to enjoy as they are usually just the median between two lanes of traffic, and the gardens, while beautiful and peaceful, are very constructed and in a certain style that’s very different from what I expected. All that being said, it was still a very enjoyable day—I’m just glad I didn’t decide to go for a weekend or anything. I think the most interesting aspect of the day trip for me was getting to see another example of what urban China can look like; this semester, I’ve now been to the cities of Shanghai, Beijing, Xiamen, Hangzhou, and Shaoxing, and Suzhou, and they’ve all been completely different. Just another example of how China is most definitely not monochromatic, in any respect. Next time you hear the phrase “urban China,” keep in mind that it can mean an infinite number of things; it’s not all white tiled highrises, or old whitewashed buildings with tiled roofs, or rundown hutongs, or Pudong modernity.

Sunday. Sunday was epic. Sunday was the day of my special secret activity. What was this secret activity? Well. Elizabeth Campbell (JUCCCE star, Milton ’05, Yale ’09, and my mentor/friend while I’ve been here, in case you’ve forgotten) and I went on a photo tour of Shanghai. But not just any photo tour. A photo tour of us, decked out in Yale gear, with Elizabeth’s “For God, For Country, and For Yale” banner. You can check out the pictures here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2028885&id=1237920519&l=abcc6e47c4
Other than being an amazingly silly/ridiculous/fun afternoon, it was also a great way to say goodbye to Shanghai (*sniff sniff*). Interesting insights/ experiences: going to the “Meat Market” in Renmin Square where parents/grandparents with grown children meet up to do some old-fashioned match-making and set up their single children; feathers+fans+Yale=crazy fun (see the pictures); if you hold a banner with English words up in a public place in China, people will try to read it, and will ask you what any words they don’t know mean, specifically what “Yale” means, and then when they find out that it’s the famous university in America, they are really surprised that these crazy laowai are associated with such a place; you can buy a hat shaped like a panda head on the promenade by the Bund for 10 RMB, instead of the original price of 30 RMB, if you try it on and giggle a lot and then walk away (that being said, we didn’t actually end up buying the hat, don’t worry); spending hours being utterly ridiculous is super tiring. Other than that, I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves….

After the photo tour, I went to Shanghai’s “fake market,” located in the bottom of a metro stop. There I bought myself a (highly necessary) pair of fake Uggs, so now my feet are warm, and a fake Longchamp bag (not at all necessary), so now I can feel like a tool, but at least a frugal one. I spent about $30 total, so if you consider that a real pair of Uggs and a real Longchamp bag all together would be like $250 (ish? right?), then I really “saved” a lot of money, right? But I actually feel a little accomplished, as I did some hard bargaining and got both of my items for about 1/4 – 1/3 of the original asking price. Sunday morning (pre-photo tour) I also picked up the blue dress coat I had made (the dream was realized!) at Shanghai’s fabric market. It’s beautiful, I’m obsessed. When I first showed my host family what it looked like, my host dad tried for like 5 minutes to communicate something to me that I could not understand at all, until, through a series of charades-like guesses and motions, I figured out that he was trying to say that my coat makes me look like Audrey Hepburn in “Roman Holiday.” Win.

Sunday evening (it was a very busy day…I wasn’t really home at all between 8:30 am and 10 pm), Katherine and I and Huang Laoshi went to a modern dance called “Unbound,” an interpretive dance about foot-binding. Interesting, but also appropriately short (at just 70 minutes, one could even say that it was appropriately stunted in length…hmmm insensitive much…).

Tuesday, we had our last class teaching English at the migrant school. The kids were SO CUTE when we said goodbye and took some pictures, it made me so sad to be leaving. Even though we only spent an hour a week there, and we missed a bunch of weeks because of scheduling conflicts (on our end and their end), it was still sad to think that I was never going to see any of those kids again…I’m endlessly curious to know where they’ll all end up. This is really the first big generation to grow up with migrant worker parents, as the numbers of migrant workers really exploded in the last 15 years, and I’d be interested to see how successful the government is at helping these kids overcome some of the obstacles/inequality facing them, and whether they end up being migrants themselves, or settling in cities, or what. Teaching these kids has definitely meant that I’ll always have faces in mind when I think of Chinese roughly my own age (well, 8 years younger), and we’ll always have in the back of my mind a sense of the challenges (and opportunities and social upheaval) that are part of living in China today.

Wednesday was another epic day. Our “core class” on current issues in China was a lecture on China and the Environment, my favorite topic. The readings we did to prepare I had actually all done before in my Topics in Modern World History class with Ms. Wade last fall, a funny coincidence, but a cool one, as I got to re-read them thinking about how my impressions had changed over the course of a year. I would say that reading them now, I had less of a sense of panic and unease about how China is going to deal with its environmental challenges, but also more of a sense of the realities (and the enormity of those realities) here in China. My sense of hope stems from what I’ve seen first hand of how quickly China has changed, and how amazing that change has been—in 30 years, China has had more success in pulling people out of poverty and improving living standards/quality of life than any effort by anyone in history. It’s transformed itself at an incredible pace. So my hope comes from the knowledge that China can do basically anything if it focuses on it, and that environmental awareness is increasing at an incredibly rapid pace, and hopefully China will over the course of the next 30 years apply its energy and abilities to increasing efficiency, cutting emissions/rate of emissions, and eliminating pollution. All my fingers and toes are crossed. And will remain so for the next 30 years. So yeah…the lecture was very interesting, as our speaker, Matt Koon, focused on coal in China, which is so important but I had never really heard comprehensive facts about. Scary stuff (but the hope…the hope must remain…).

Wednesday night. Oh, Wednesday night. Wednesday night I almost died, multiple times, but it was so totally worth it: Katherine and I went on a nighttime guided tour of Shanghai, on bicycle. 14 km in 3 hours, through the French Concession, Old Shanghai, and Pudong. Definitely in the top 5 of most fun things I’ve done in China, and definitely a very memorable experience. Our guide, Patrick, was amazing—I think he found us very amusing, as we conversed with him in Chinglish, freaked out as we biked through intersections, obsessively rang our bell (well, Katherine did…), bought ice cream, sang Christmas carols, raced, and basically had a marvelous time. I HIGHLY recommend doing this tour or another bike tour of Shanghai or anywhere…go to chinacycletours.com if you happen to be in China or if you will be ever. Totally worth the money (150 RMB). Just totally awesome in general. Like riding a roller coaster, except more dangerous, and we weren’t ever hanging upside down (luckily). Katherine definitely thinks I have a death wish now, as I convinced her to come with me, and apparently I’m “fearless” (she was riding behind me the whole time, as I dodged cars/motorcycles/pedestrians…). We got to see Yu Gardens lit up at night, navigate the narrow alleyways of Old Shanghai, cross the Huangpu River on the ferry, bike around Pudong…SO FUN. AH.

Today, Thursday, Katherine and I had lunch with Jenny, my Chinese friend, and then we watched a Chinese romantic comedy. Very interesting…completely unsexual romantic comedy, supposedly “comedy” but yet someone tries to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff, almost entirely consists of people talking to each other in coffee shops (pacing is definitely different for Chinese v.s. American movies). Also very hard to understand, haha. But good for my Chinese, and fun to see a glimpse of Chinese pop culture. Will definitely have to seek out more Chinese movies this winter so I can keep practicing my Chinese.

Alright. If you’ve gotten to the end of this epic post, you know why this was an epic week. The best week ever. Now I head into the home stretch—AH—and I have some awesome stuff planned, which I will definitely post about here. But for now, I will sign off and go to bed. Peace.

Thanksgiving!

I hope you all are enjoying a restful Thanksgiving Day/break! I am excited for my Thanksgiving-in-China festivities. Tomorrow (Thanksgiving) I will fly kites with my friend Katherine and spend some time gallivanting around Zhongshan Park, a large park close to where we live. In the evening, we have a Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant, sponsored by CIEE. Yum! Then, Friday I’m going to a “traditional Southern Thanksgiving” feast at the home of my friend Judith’s cousin Dru (who lives in Shanghai). This, too, will be super yummy. Double yum! Saturday I’m heading to Suzhou, a famously picturesque city about an hour outside Shanghai by train, for the day. And then Sunday I have a super exciting activity planned which I will keep secret until after the fact—get excited, it’s going to be amazing. Hint: Boola! Boola!

This week I’ve had midterms, my one and only official evaluation while in China. I think my tests—speaking, listening, and grammar—actually went OK, except for maybe the grammar portion. We’ll see!

Since my last post I’ve gotten a bunch of questions about Obama’s visit. The reason I didn’t mention it at all on the blog is that it was literally a non-event here. People barely knew that it was happening, and if they did, it wasn’t important to them. In fact, my host family took more notice of the fact that Hillary Clinton was in Shanghai than they did that President Obama was here. Part of this lack of reaction is that the Chinese are pretty ambivalent about Obama. My three data points on direct conversations about Obama’s visit were with my host mom, my tutor, and my Chinese friend Jenny. All of them had absolutely nothing substantive to say about Obama, but they all remarked that Obama is very handsome/cool. I think a visit to China is going to be inherently different from a visit to say, Europe, because people can’t congregate in large numbers/ there isn’t a culture of gathering to cheer or protest public figures (obviously). And being involved with or interested in politics in China usually means you are super Communist and a fount of Communist ideology/propaganda (according to my tutor), so most people choose apathy (as being the opposite of “political” ie protesting isn’t really an option). Haha “choose apathy” is a funny phrase. So I’m not sure people would have seen the point in reacting strongly to Obama’s visit, even if they did (or do) feel strongly. So sorry to disappoint, but….nothing to see here. Plus I was in Hangzhou on the actual day Obama was in Shanghai, so I couldn’t have gone to hold a sign and cheer or anything, although that was my original hope. Ah, well.

It being Thanksgiving, the other thing I wanted to write about was what I’m thankful for. This seemed like a particularly appropriate topic this year, since I feel like I have so so incredibly much to be thankful for right now—I’m living the dream, right? So obviously I can’t hope to encompass everything I want to give thanks for here; there is simply too much. **Beware: if you don’t like sappy and overly earnest attempts at sincerity and thanks, skip this entire section. The cynic within me cringes as I re-read it, so I feel obligated to warn my readers.**

As a start, I am thankful for my family. I particularly want to thank my parents, for letting me take a gap year, and for making it possible. I try to remind myself every day that I am not at all entitled to be here; that I have done nothing to earn this amazing experience and education that I’m getting by being here, and that I am incredibly, incredibly indebted to the generosity of my parents. They’re amazing—I can’t believe I have such awesome parents who really do see this experience as important and valuable and are backing me so fully and generously. So thank you, Mom and Dad! I love you! I’m also thankful for my grandmother, Joan Bok. She’s been an incredible inspiration and teacher my entire life (as well as an amazing person to have a conversation with, or watch a movie with, or, say, go to Anthropologie with, hehe), and definitely both inspires and enables my love of travel. Without her, I wouldn’t be here, and I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I am so blessed to have such an amazing family, and I hope they enjoy their Thanksgiving up in Vermont. I will be thinking of them!

I am thankful for my education. Even though I’m not writing papers (except for this blog and the weekly journal entries I have to give CIEE) or taking tests (except for today) while in China, I’m still thankful each and every day for the amazing education I’ve received, because I feel like I know how to think the thoughts, how to make the connections and observations, that really make this experience valuable.

I am thankful for free time, and for literacy, and for reading material. I spend a good chunk of my time reading, which, while maybe not the best way to engage with China, is still incredibly satisfying (don’t worry, it’s not too excessive). I read newspaper articles (nyt.com and boston.com = my BFFLs), books (10, I think, while I’ve been here), China Daily, blogs…you name it. And it’s like a dream come true. Not since probably 6th grade have I had a Fall so saturated with the written word. And the glut will only continue over the next 10 months! And probably at an accelerated rate once I return from my adventures here!

I am thankful for the 3 kuai espresso machine in the CIEE office. For 50 cents I can get a decent cappuccino or latte. It’s delightful and has saved me a ton of money. In case you didn’t know, we’ve officially entered the sillier section of my Thanks Givings.

I am thankful for blue sky and warming temperatures—it’s been a solid 55-60 degrees for the past couple of days. Thank goodness!

I am thankful for street food. It’s yummy and cheap and filling and varied.

I am thankful for the people I’ve met here, and how friendly they’ve been. Like John, for instance, who is in my Chinese class and whose wife baked Thanksgiving cookies for all the Americans in the class. A lovely random act of Thanksgiving cheer!

I am thankful for the hospitality of my host family. I totally lucked out with them, and I’m glad to know them!

I am thankful for bubble tea! Yum!

I am thankful for the Shanghai metro system. It is beautiful and efficient and fast and wonderful.

I am thankful for the Internet. I have not been too homesick, and my bouts of missing friends/family/home have been greatly alleviated by this nifty (read: world-changing) tool.

I am thankful for wool ski socks and my sheepskin slippers.

I am thankful to be heading to Yale next year. It may sound trite, because it should be obvious, but it’s true. Plus, at home it’s sort of hard to express that sentiment without seeming self-aggrandizing/insensitive to those who were disappointed by the college process. But I think it would be stupid and wrong not to mention it: I am incredibly excited about my future university, and still can’t believe my good fortune.

And, finally, but most importantly, I am thankful for God, and for the blessings and love He constantly rains down on me, even when I don’t deserve it, even when I’m selfish and oblivious. To be honest, I think one of the toughest parts about being in China has been the feeling of being totally removed from a Judeo-Christian society. It can be really lonely to realize that everyone around you either doesn’t believe in God or has a completely and totally different concept of the divine, and, furthermore, lives according to a value system/moral code that isn’t based around the Golden Rule (or, at least, not as explicitly as Western culture, even secular Western culture). Definitely interesting, but also a little bit of a downer, at least for me, after years of being immersed in church and youth group and a society that, while certainly full of infinite definitions of divinity and morality, still has this central Judeo-Christian-based moral code/philosophy. So, a shout out to the One who is Love, to whom all of these Thanksgivings go—You are the best! It is right to give you thanks and praise (It is right, and a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth...oh man do I miss the liturgy!). Thanks for always being there for me, more than I can ever imagine, more than I can ever express.
And on that note, I, thankfully, am ending this post and going to bed.

Let's Talk About the Weather...and some other stuff too

Sorry about the long gap between updates! I have two excuses: I’ve been pretty busy, and it’s been too cold to update. The latter excuse is no joke...all of a sudden, it’s become super cold here (think low 40s-30s, and raining), and my house doesn’t have heat, so typing is no fun. I keep doing typos because my fingers are so stiff and then I have to go back and fix them…yuck. So I kept waiting for the cold to go away, and then it didn’t, and it got worse, so now I’m just going to go for it, frostbite be damned.

So, what has been going on in my life since I last wrote on this fine blog of mine? Well, lots. First of all, last week my dad was here! It was so great to see him, however briefly. I took him to the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum, which I think was cool for him to see (amazing model of the whole of Shanghai which takes up an entire floor, plus a whole floor on the famous Shanghai Expo, May-October 2010, Better City, Better Life). We also went for a lovely dinner in Xintiandi, this Quincy Market type area filled with super swanky restaurants and shops…not a place I could eat on my own, but since Dad was here…just had to try it. Then, last Wednesday, was the big day: dinner with my host family. Well, first I took Dad to see ECNU in all it’s glory (giant Mao statue, the CIEE building, meet our program director, etc, etc), and then we took my host family out to dinner. My original idea was to take them to a non-Chinese restaurant from a cuisine that would be sort of familiar, like Thai or Vietnamese food, where there would hopefully be an English menu and my dad and I would know what was good. When I floated this idea to my host family, however, they looked at me like I had ten heads. So I told them to pick their favorite restaurant (and insisted, about a gazillion times, that WE were hosting THEM, even though they did not seem to like that idea one bit). We ended up going to this really nice Chinese restaurant close by…my host dad ordered (and did a great job, too, successfully avoiding anything too weird). My host mom was feeling ill so she didn’t come, but afterwards we all went back to the apartment and looked at Judy’s baby pictures and she and my dad got to talk which was nice. How did we come to be looking at Judy’s baby pictures? Well, my host dad was convinced that my dad was the spitting image of his former boss at Nestle, and instructed Judy to go find a picture from his Nestle days in the family photo boxes. Judy, being Judy, instead picked out all of the cute pictures of herself, dumped them on me (we were picking through the pictures together) and told me to bring them out to the living room so she could keep looking for more cute pictures. So my host mom and my dad looked at Judy’s baby pictures while I acted as ferry, and Judy stood in my room singing to herself (in English) “This is me, this is me, this is me, this is me” as she sorted through pictures…oh, Judy. The cutest, most low-maintenance spoiled child I know haha.

And then my dad went back to Boston, and it became COLD. SO COLD. And RAINY. Luckily he had brought me some of my winter gear (essentials, such as a fleece, a pair of sweatpants and my slippers...such a good call), so I’ve survived, but there have been some close calls, I swear. Besides the weather, other news is that I’ve been volunteering more with JUCCCE, which has been fun. Friday afternoon we went to this massive fabric market where they can make you ANYTHING YOU CAN IMAGINE out of ANYTHING you can imagine. Am currently drooling over the prospect of getting a cashmere dress coat handmade for like $75…will probably remain fantasy, but it’s a nice fantasy. A warm, fashionable, tailored fantasy…

Sunday evening I had dinner in the ECNU cafeteria and watched “Love Actually” with my one Chinese friend, Jenny (her English name…embarrassingly enough I don’t know her Chinese name…I don’t think she’s ever told me…). This came about because we were chatting on Skype and she mentioned that she was watching “High School Musical” and she asked me what kind of movies I like to watch. I said that I like all types, but listed some of my favorites, including “Love Actually”. She wanted to know if she could find “Love Actually” in Chinese, and I said I didn’t know but I had an English version (I brought DVDs of “Love Actually” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” to watch whenever I feel down…haven’t had to do so yet, so it was nice to have a more cheerful use for the movie). And then she suggested that we watch it together. So that’s what we did! I had forgotten about some of the more raunchy parts of the movie, but we fast-forwarded through those (I felt sooo bad that I forgot about a couple scenes…it’s kind of a jump from “High School Musical” to “Love Actually”…). But all in all she seemed to really enjoy the movie! We had the English subtitles up and I stopped it every so often to explain, but I was super impressed by how much she understood. Her English is really good, and she’s really patient with my Chinese. Jenny is studying to teach Chinese to foreigners, and she’s going to be super good at it, because she’s incredibly nice and patient and chill.

Monday and Tuesday were spent on an ECNU-organized trip to Hangzhou, a city about 3 hours away from Shanghai by bus. Hangzhou is famous for its West Lake (Xihu), which is considered the most beautiful lake in China. Marco Polo said that Hangzhou was the most beautiful city in the world. I can’t really vouch for the city, but the lake was indeed very beautiful. Monday was cold and raining, and a sort of maddening day. We drove in the rain from stop to stop in Shaoxing, a small city about an hour from Hangzhou, and we kept being dropped in the rain to go look at things without any explanation really except a time when we had to be back on the bus. Hmmm. But we saw this massive Buddha that was carved out of this ginormous rock about 1300 years ago, so that was definitely worth seeing. It was probably my favorite Buddhist site I’ve visited, in terms of being incredibly simple and majestic and basic and awesome…definitely inspired a sense of the holy. The park, called Keyan, was very striking (even in the rain). Think flat landscape, with tiny hills randomly rising out of the flatness, and then in one place a massive rock cliff with a small lake in front of it. Monday night Katherine and I went on an excursion to find this restaurant mentioned in Lonely Planet for it’s clay pot chicken, a Hangzhou specialty. Oh my god. This chicken. It was unbelievable. A full spring chicken, roasted in a clay pot…the best roast chicken I’ve ever had. When we were done, all that was left was the head and a large pile of bones.

Tuesday we spent three hours at West Lake. It was COLD COLD COLD but not raining, luckily. Katherine and I walked briskly until we came to a place where we could rent bikes, and then we biked, and then we found Starbucks (by chance…it was like magic…we had talked about how cool it would be to find Starbucks since hot chocolate would be perfect on a day like Tuesday, and then, BAM, there was Starbucks, on the shore of the lake…). The lake was breathtakingly beautiful, I think even more beautiful than it would have been on a sunny day…mists and clouds shrouded the mountains that rose from one side of the lake, the water and the sky were both a beautiful light grey, the hills were dark blue, the dark green willows bent over the water, water rippled, I shivered, I marveled, it was restful to have the leisure to just glory in this natural place. PLUS it was so cold that there were very few other people there.

Today, Wednesday, back in Shanghai, we had a very enjoyable cooking class…yum. Which was good, since for dinner tonight we had dog meat stew. Yuck times a gazillion. At one point my host dad pulled the head out to show to me/offer to one of his friends who was eating with him…it had teeth. My host mom wasn’t home, and she doesn’t eat dog, and my host dad was eating with two of his friends, so I guess that’s why we had such a gross dinner. Luckily I wasn’t hungry, and there were other things to eat (like egg and tomato soup…so good), but it was still pretty traumatic. Blarrgh.
And on that note, off I go to snuggle down deep under my covers. Peace!

Fujian/Xiamen Trip, and Other Doings

Hello! This is the first time while I’ve been in China that I’ve felt that I have too many things to do and not enough time to do them in, so I’m going to keep this update really short. I have a dictation on Monday, a paper/project due next week about our trip to Xiamen that I haven’t started yet, about 100 pages of reading to do for our “Core Class” on Wednesday, and this entry to write—a lot to do by the standards of the past 7 weeks. And tomorrow almost the whole day will be spent volunteering at a charity carnival benefiting kids with heart disease, followed by dinner with my friend Katherine and her grandparents who are visiting Shanghai…then Monday – Thursday, MY DAD WILL BE HERE! I am very excited to see him, of course, especially since it’s a surprise (for him, too, as he only found out he was coming to China on Wednesday/Thursday, and he’s leaving 7 AM Saturday morning Boston time). Meaning this will be a fun but crazy week! Then a week from this Monday/Tuesday I’ll go Hangzhou with all the other international students at ECNU (we number in the hundreds, so this should be interesting….). And then when we get back we have like a week before our midterm…and then Thanksgiving…and then November is basically over and I have like 2 weeks left, during which I want to go to Nanjing at some point….Basically, with 5 weeks left, December 13 looms large.

So, by update, I meant “you get to listen to me stress about how much fun stuff I have to do.” Sorry.

The original purpose of this post was to write about what I did/saw in Xiamen, not make a to-do list/schedule. So back to last weekend and our trip to Xiamen…

Xiamen was warm, sunny, small, clean, and beautiful. We spent our first day on the island of Gulangyu, where the foreign embassies/rich people’s villas were located when Xiamen was known as Amoy, and was an important treaty port. Gulangyu was definitely the cutest place I’ve been to in China yet; it felt a lot like Bermuda with Chinese characteristics. The streets are narrow, and no cars or motorbikes or even bicycles are allowed on the island. It was quiet. The buildings were a medley of different Western styles, surrounded by palm trees and gardens. There were tons of tourists, but it didn’t even matter because there was a beach and freshly squeezed orange juice stands and warm sunshine (I got a bit of color…perfection) and delicious food and I bought a very colorful summery skirt…clearly, contemplating Gulangyu has robbed me of any ability to write or think coherently. Suffice to say, it was a very pleasant night/day.

On Saturday, we hopped in a van and, along with our incredibly Zen, nice driver and our sweet guide Ann, made our way out into the countryside of Fujian Province. Our destination was Yongding, a village known for its tulou (“earthen buildings”). The tulou come in three varieties, either round, square, or “five phoenix” which is like square but different (hard to explain). They were built by the Hakka people, ethnically Han (according to the Chinese government), but with their own culture and history. The Hakka have been migrating around China since about 200 AD, purportedly from the north-central region (around Xi’an, in the area known as the cradle of Chinese civilization) to the southeast…they’re sometimes referred to as “the Jews of China” because of their extended migrations and encounters with persecution. Their history is disputed; some call them the descendants of the Han Dynasty, the “true Han.” From what I can gather, all people know for sure is that in around the 13th-14th century the Hakka arrived in the Fujian Province region and began to build their massive tulou dwellings. The tulou are fortified, massive dwellings, designed to house hundreds of members of one family group/clan. They have thick outer walls (up to 2 m thick at the base) that are reinforced to protect against tunneling under or attempts to burn them. Inside each tulou are a series of smaller inner rings, built as more housing was needed. At the center is the ancestral temple. The tulou are striking because they’re a lot like castles, as their purpose is to protect the occupants from attack from bandits or violent enemies of any type. However, the tulou are for families, and show none of the class differentiations of a castle. There is no keep. There are just hundreds of rooms arranged in 4-story tall rings, allotted to clan members according to their needs/status (young couples got one room, old people lived lower down so they wouldn’t have to climb so many stairs, etc.). I definitely had fun exploring them and taking pictures, even if there were a TON of tourists (the tulou were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008).

Even more than seeing the tulou, however, my favorite part of Saturday and Sunday was getting to see some of rural China. Fujian is 82% mountains, according to our guide, and the drive to Yongding was absolutely stunning—terraced fields, winding mountain roads, small villages. It was also very refreshing and relaxing just to get away for a bit from the hustle and bustle (and bad air) of urban China. One of my favorite moments was buying pomelos (if you’ve never tried one, try one soon, because they’re amazing) from a guy sitting along the side of the road that ran through the middle of the pomelo tree orchard (field?) where the fruit had grown. It just felt so natural. And the pomelo was delicious (once I finally cut it open).

After a fun evening of karaoke with our teacher Huang Laoshi on Sunday, on Monday we had a chill day in Xiamen. Ben, Katherine, Erika and I went on a very leisurely scavenger hunt (no one else wanted to do it, so we weren’t competing against anyone) in the morning, after which Huang Laoshi treated us to dim sum (yum!) for lunch. After lunch, Erika, Katherine and I rented bicycles and biked along with beach for a little while before we had to go back to our hostel and go to the airport. All in all, it was the perfect “vacation from vacation” as I dubbed the trip…not at all intellectually taxing—in fact, not taxing in any way—but just very relaxing and pleasant.

The rest of this week was very routine. Two highlights: Thursday, my tutor and I went on a walk instead of having normal tutoring, and during our walk my tutor started talking about how awful the current system is in China, and how stifled she feels by the Communist Party. Basically, she said, getting ahead in China requires everyone to fake enthusiasm for the Party, even though everyone knows that Marxist ideology doesn’t apply to modern China anymore. It was an incredibly, incredibly interesting and intense conversation. She wasn’t talking about these things from a theoretical standpoint; she was speaking through her own emotions, from her own experience.
Friday night I went out for Italian food with some CIEE friends, as well as this group of Italian girls my friend Erika knows (Erika is Italian but living in the US). It was SO fun! The Italians were incredibly friendly and fun, and the food was amazing (homemade pasta…mmmmm).
That’s all folks. Back to studying for my dictation…

The Time I Almost Became a Chinese Gangster, and Other Adventures

Hello! I’m heading out in a few minutes to go to Xiamen, a small but apparently very beautiful city a couple hundred miles south of Shanghai on the coast (it’s actually an island). You may have heard of Xiamen by its old name, Amoy. It was a treaty port, and still has a lot of European architecture and stuff. I’m excited. I’ll be there until Monday night (going with my CIEE teacher Huang Laoshi and the other gappers). I will definitely let you know how the trip goes!

Because of my imminent departure, I have to keep this update brief and to the point. This past week has been especially busy, with lots of fun happenings. Saturday evening we had our first gathering of all the host families and Americans…we wrapped dumplings and ate a lot of yummy food. It was fun to get to see everyone else’s host parents and siblings, and see how people interacted. I think I mentioned before that we eat dinner every night at this community center type place, where there are mah jiang rooms, a badminton court (aka squash court), and a couple function rooms. It turns out that we eat there because my family either owns the center, has a major stake in it, or is in charge of managing it, or all three (still not sure of the details). The fact that it took me more than a month to figure this out is pretty sad…gap year state of mind, I guess? But that community center was where the host family party was, and my host parents sort of played host, making sure everything was running smoothly. Judy is definitely the most adorable of the host siblings (it’s true…seriously), and this impression was reinforced when she walked into the room (she came late because she had English lessons) and every single host mother clustered around her, literally stroking her and asking her questions and stuff. It was hilarious (for me). The Chinese are sooo good at doting on children. They love children. I am so jealous of little Chinese kids (although life gets pretty stressful pretty quickly…these kids’ lives are absolutely DOMINATED by the exams they have to take to get into middle and high school. Even a 10 year old like Judy has a HUGE amount of pressure to do well).

Sunday I cooked dinner for my host family! I made mashed potatoes and marinated/sautéed chicken and spinach and served a baguette (they thought that was pretty weird. In Judy’s words: “It’s too long!”). They seemed to like the food, although they added hot peppers to the mashed potatoes (haha). It was fun, and a nice way for me to feel useful and like I could give them/do something for them that would show my appreciation for how well they’ve treated me.

Yesterday was a very eventful day. Last week, I ate in the cafeteria (the day after I wrote my last update saying I would do that! Yay sticking to goals?) and made the acquaintance of a very nice Chinese university student, Jenny (her English name). She told me about a party for foreign and Chinese students, where the Chinese students speak English and the foreign students speak Chinese. So that party was on Wednesday (yesterday) and it was super fun! There were Chinese snacks and games…it was a little crazy because there were so many people, but also fun because of that. We were sitting at tables and I was called on by the party MCs to introduce my table in Chinese. I think I acquitted myself well (Jenny afterwards said my Chinese was “fluent”…HAHAHA big joke. But it made me feel good anyway). So now I have Jenny as a Chinese friend (we’ve been chatting on Skype, me in Chinese, her in English…she’s very interesting). And I exchanged contact information with the girls at my table (the Chinese students at the party were almost all girls), so next week I’ll hopefully hang out with some of them! Very excited!

After the bilingual party, I headed into the city to go to a roundtable discussion led by/with Charlie McElwee, a major (if not the major) environmental lawyer in China. He is an expert on Chinese environmental law, and is also incredibly well-informed on the Copenhagen meeting this December. Elizabeth got me in; I was SO out of my league…this was a gathering of thinkers and do-ers in Shanghai, there to exchange ideas and thoughts about how China and the rest of the world, particularly the US, can collaborate on finding solutions to climate change. I could write pages and pages on this meeting, but suffice it to say that it was fascinating. The group was a mix of entrepreneurs, environmental consultants, and representatives of NGOs/activist groups (the discussion was convened by JUCCCE, the organization Elizabeth works for). If I had to pick a main idea for this meeting, it would be that Charlie doesn’t really think that Copenhagen will lead to much progress on the “numbers” side of things (ie finding specific targets/goals and a way to “force” countries to meet them), but he does think there’s still hope for the development of ideas and more abstract commitments. I’m going to write a whole post on Copenhagen/China and the US and the environment sometime in the next couple weeks because I have SO much to say.

Last night at about 10 pm, I had the most bizarre experience/moment of my time in China. My host dad came into my room and handed me a letter hand-written in Chinese and a slip of paper. The paper said “Uncle:…” followed by a telephone number. He then explained that when I got to Xiamen I should call the number and arrange to meet with “Uncle” and give him the letter. But make sure not to tell Uncle anything about myself, and just tell him I’m a friend of my host dad’s, a tourist passing through Xiamen, not that I’m living with them. Uncle apparently owes my host dad a lot of money (according to the letter, 170,000 yuan…so like $25,000!). And I was supposed to shake him down….? I was SO freaked out/confused/ tickled by this request. Is my host dad a secret Chinese gangster/master of the underworld? Was I about to embark on a life of crime? Would I meet my end in a dark alleyway in Xiamen? There were a couple hours of uncertainty there, as I tried to figure out how to tell my host dad that I couldn’t/wouldn’t be his debt collector, and as I pondered what the heck was going on. Luckily, when I woke up this morning my host dad took the letter and slip of paper back and said that he’d just send Uncle an email.

Let’s just absorb that last paragraph for a minute.

Yeah. That actually happened.

I have a lot to say about that little episode as well, and what I think it says about the difference between Chinese and American attitudes toward money/money matters, and what it says about lending in China. My teacher Huang Laoshi says it’s very common for family members/close friends to lend each other money because getting money from banks is really hard, and Uncle is probably either a distant family member or a close friend. Which is reassuring, but doesn’t explain why I couldn’t tell him who I was…and doesn’t explain why my host dad would send an 18 year old who doesn’t speak Chinese very well after someone who owes him so much money.

OK I’ve run out the clock. Feel free to comment/send me an email (Abigail.bok@gmail.com) if you have any specific questions/comments/thoughts. Love/peace.

Half Time

Today is October 20th, the half-way point of my time in China. WOAH. Time has flown by, and I know the next seven weeks will also go by before I know it. I am both sad that I’m halfway through this adventure, and satisfied that I’m here for an appropriate amount of time. When we arrived, as part of our orientation we reviewed and discussed the stages of common reactions to being immersed in a foreign culture. The first stage was the “honeymoon” stage, followed by a “crash” or “culture shock” stage where the full reality of being so far away from the familiar hits you with brutal force, followed by a slow climb up from that “low” towards a more balanced outlook where you see both the good and bad of a place. Our teachers told us that we could expect to experience any of these stages for really any amount of time, and even repeat this process multiple times while in China. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve traveled so much, or if the very act of discussing the stages sort of made me emotionally detached from/analytical of my own “culture shock process,” but I haven’t really gone through any extremes, and have sort of plodded along, experiencing the good and the bad and keeping a pretty balanced perspective the whole time. Or at least that’s how I’ve felt about it—I’ve been having a great time, but not because I’ve been blissfully entranced by China (I absolutely love the experience of being here, but I’ve definitely been aware of what I don’t like about China or what makes me uncomfortable), and I haven’t been miserable, or particularly homesick. I think any serious emotional issues have been kept in check by three forces:

1. My host family is really great. When I went to Spain for a month in 2007, it was infinitely harder, because my host family situation was less than ideal (a story for another day…). Having gone through that experience, every good thing about my Chinese host family has eclipsed anything bad, and they’ve been so welcoming (while also not being overbearing), that it’s been incredibly easy to live with them.
2. Compared to junior and senior year of high school, living in China is an emotional piece of cake. This might sound funny, but I am completely serious. I am so relaxed here. I loved Milton, especially as an upperclassman, but a day there was infinitely more busy, stressful, sleep-deprived, and caffeinated than any day has been here. I am simply less stressed; all of my stresses here are fleeting and situational (it’s raining out; the crowds get a bit overwhelming; I just barely miss a train on the subway and have to wait three extra minutes; I have an un-graded but mentally-daunting dictation in class…aren’t you jealous?).
3. I’m here for such a short amount of time. Itt really is not a very long time at all, in the grand scheme of things. Or even not in the grand scheme of things, just in the normal scheme of things; I’m here basically the length of a summer vacation. The time between Labor Day and Christmas, minus a few days. Not very long at all. You can endure anything for that long (re: senior fall). And in my very lucky case, it has not been a case of my having to endure anything, but rather getting to enjoy my time here. Yay. That short amount of time, however, also exerts its own pressures. Because it’s very easy to feel like you’re not making the most of it. Or it’s easy for me to feel that way. So, to keep me honest for the next half of my time in China, I would like to post a list of things I want to accomplish before I leave. Here we go.

1. Make Chinese friends.
This is embarrassing. Like, really really shamefully embarrassing. Like, so embarrassing, that if it shows up on the blog, it means that my better angels have won over my devils and I actually sucked it up and posted this shameful fact, and it was a close call, let me tell you. The truth: I have not made one Chinese friend while I’ve been here. Not one. I have my tutor, who is a Chinese graduate student. She is very nice, and we have a great time in our two sessions every week, and she does a great job. But she’s not a friend. And I have my host family. And once when I was studying at one of the outdoor tables at ECNU, a Chinese guy came and sat at the same table because they were all full, and he was reading Jane Eyre so I helped him with vocab and he helped me study my characters. The end. Part of this issue is situational; for having class at a Chinese university every day, and for living with a Chinese family, it might seem surprising, but I have no formal opportunities to meet or interact with Chinese students my own age. Let me stress formal. Because the rest of this sad situation is my own fault. Because, obviously, ECNU is crawling with Chinese students my own age. I just haven’t been brave enough to plop down next to a group of them in the cafeteria or at the outside tables or on the quad-like grassy area and make a Chinese friend. And it really should be that easy…most of the time, Chinese people are incredibly friendly (Except if you want to ask random passers-by for directions…they don’t stop. Ever. Like, if you were dying on the sidewalk, they probably wouldn’t stop. You can make eye contact, start to awkwardly ask your question, and they will just keep walking.). So yeah. Make 中国朋友 (Chinese friends). Truly my biggest priority. If you’re concerned about me and my cowardice, feel free to keep me honest and check in on my progress.

2. Explore more on my own.
On one hand, this means travel on my own at least once. For instance, I need to go for a weekend or even a day trip to one of the cities near Shanghai. I’m thinking day trip or a weekend overnight to Suzhou or Hangzhou, which are both very close to Shanghai by train. This goal also means get out into different parts of Shanghai more on my own. I do plenty of going out on my own (or, if not plenty, I make a significant effort). But I’ve stopped going to new places and have started becoming repetitive in my wandering habits. I need to just go to a random metro stop and just walk around and take it all in. I think this will be a project for this weekend, when I don’t have much scheduled.

3. Go an entire day without speaking English.
A difficult task, but I think I could do it. Maybe Sunday? I will choose a day and then write about my experiences. To prove that it actually happened.

4. Ask my host family more questions; engage with them on a deeper level.
We get along really, really well. But we also don’t talk about serious stuff. This is getting better (last night I had a really interesting discussion with my host dad about the Cultural Revolution), but I think I need to make a more conscious effort to reach out and ask questions.

OK that’s enough of a list for now. Maybe from these goals you can sort of see my odd but also enjoyable situation: no one is pushing me to do anything I don’t want to do. This makes this a very not-stressful situation in many ways. It also means that it’s very easy for me to fall back into my more timid/shy side (It exists! I swear! Especially when you don’t speak the language!). And it also means that I spend a great deal of mental energy thinking about and trying to justify my stressless state. Which in turn leads to, while not exactly stress, the closest substitute I can find on my gap year. A stress-like substance. The Nescafe/Coffee-mate of stress.

That’s all. Good night!

Beijing Part II

I’m back! And will try to keep this short (HA. NOT SHORT AT ALL. EPIC FAIL.) And vaguely interesting (fingers crossed).

By Wednesday, I had re-gained the trust of the group (after the somewhat disastrous Saturday forced march to Tiananmen…our Long March, but without the glory…) enough to be allowed to set an itinerary. I say this only half-jokingly. One of the issues of traveling with 7 people was that we only had two guidebooks, one of which was from 2005, which in Beijing made it very much out of date. So many of my fellow travelers either didn’t want to set the agenda or didn’t have/seek access to the information necessary to do so. This situation created a certain amount of friction, both on my and my friend Katherine’s side (we wanted to get up and out and do things from our books, and thus we became the “cruise directors”), as we resented it when people were unenthusiastic about what we wanted to do but had no suggestions of their own, and on the group’s side, because we were often less than perfect in our navigation and logistical skills (although, in my own defense, I would like to say that it was an especially difficult week to be trying to navigate Beijing, because of crowds, and random metro closures when they would shut all the stops around Tiananmen, leaving us to walk for miles through downtown Beijing searching for an open station). And who wants to be walking for miles through a city you don’t know, when you don’t know where you’re going or really why you’re going there? So my suggestion, if anyone ever follows in my footsteps, is to make sure everyone in your group has done some research and has some idea of what they want to do in the place you’re going, and knows why they’re going wherever they’re going. I hesitate to use the phrase “set goals,” but I think that a little structure within the potential madness of a gap year isn’t a bad thing. So I will say it: setting some goals (ie places you want to go, things you want to see, how intense or relaxed you want to be, etc) is not a bad idea. And I think that having lots of people with lots of ideas is probably better than having just a couple people setting the agenda. It’s healthier and more balanced. So yeah…there were a few moments when I felt like, in regards to my fellow gappers, they didn’t seem ready to make the most of Beijing. And I’m sure they found me thoroughly annoying and somewhat opaque and prone to forced marches. Let’s just say that I relish a long walk even when I don’t know where I’m going, and other people differ with me on that point. So yeah…a little glimpse for you into group politics. All that being said, I really truly do enjoy the group I’m with, and we had a great time. We just had our moments.

Back to Wednesday. Wednesday morning, we went to an ancient astronomical observatory that had operated continuously for 500 years, until 1929. It was pretty cool to see these beautiful wrought iron instruments set on top of a little tower, plopped down in the middle of modern Beijing. After that, we walked a short ways to a piece of Beijing’s old city wall, with a watch tower, that has been preserved and turned into a park. Like the observatory, it was very cool to see a piece of old Beijing in the midst of all the modernity. Since so much of old Beijing has been torn down over the decades since 1949 (and at an accelerated pace now), these rare preserved pieces, even if they are just dusty historical artifacts, feel strangely refreshing. That afternoon, after a long walk (re: the 2005 guidebook…it didn’t have a key metro line on its maps, because it hadn’t been built yet in 2005...and map scales are deceiving, that’s all I’ll say) we arrived at the Temple of Heaven, one of the top sights in Beijing and China. It’s an incredible sight…an intricately decorated and enormous three tiered round temple rising up into the sky on top of a huge tiered marble platform. Beijing is still a very low city (compared to Shanghai, at least), so looking at the Temple of Heaven, there are no buildings or signs of modernity behind it. It’s just the tower, and the sky (and hordes of tourists, but let’s forget about them for the moment). The park around it is very beautiful and very calm once you get away from the Temple (the whole complex has an admission fee, which helps with crowds I guess). Beijing has so much open space compared to Shanghai…its city center, after all, is dominated by the visual power of open space: the vast expanse of Tiananmen, mirroring the scale and spread of the Forbidden City, and then the huge openness of the Temple of Heaven park. And the hutong neighborhoods around these sights, while far from empty, are certainly low to the ground. So there is more breathing space in Beijing (even if you don’t want to breathe the air…although up until Wednesday, the sky was pure pure blue with hardly any clouds, thanks to the government).

Thursday we slept in again; that afternoon was all about exploring “normal” Beijing. Late morning I went on a short excursion to visit Beijing University (BeiDa), to see where Kenzie studied this summer (and where I will probably end up studying at some point), and to catch a glimpse of another famous Chinese university (probably the most famous) and compare it with my home university here, ECNU. It was pretty and bustling but not that interesting haha. We tried and failed to eat in the cafeteria, but you had to have these special cards, and we spent about 15 minutes trying to get up our courage to ask a random person if we could use their card to pay and pay them in cash, but we didn’t have enough gumption. Oh well. Thursday afternoon we went on a free tour of the hutong around our hostel. Some words about our hostel…it was PERFECT and AMAZING. It was in a preserved hutong house. The staff was friendly and accommodating, it felt safe, was clean, and had this beautiful little courtyard where I enjoyed sitting and drinking tea. It was cheap, convenient (right next to a new metro line that opened right before we arrived in Beijing), and interesting. One interesting part was the staff…they were almost all Chinese teenage/young 20s women, who lived in a bunk room in the back. One or the other of them was always around in the office, or in the kitchen making tea or putting out snacks, and it was they who brought us on the tour. They were all about our age, 18 or so, and they (or the two I talked to) were from Hebei, the (largely rural) province right outside Beijing. They’re not going to university, but they’ve found a place in urban China, and they seemed pretty happy. A very superficial judgment, but it’s the best I can do. The tour of the hutong was refreshing after all the touristy stuff we’d been doing…they took us to an open air market (mostly selling pets…it was at once cute and horrifying to see all these animals in their cages…animal rights means nothing in China…but all the Chinese were cooing over the kittens and bunnies in tiny tiny cages, while we were cringing at the sight of how small the cages were), and then to a covered produce market. The hutong was pretty run-down by our standards, but definitely not the slums that the Chinese government wants people to think they are so they can tear them down. And there was a surprising number of cars parked along the narrow streets. That night, we went to a night market…I had this amazing whole leg of lamb that I ate cavewoman style. One thing about being in China is that my table manners have depreciated considerably (or at least my worries about eating neatly)…now I worry more about showing my appreciation for the food and not pointing my chopsticks at people than I do about chewing with my mouth closed or about where to put my bones (and as for putting my napkin in my lap…I haven’t seen a real cloth napkin since I’ve arrived). It was fabulous.

Friday was Forbidden City (and departure) day. We saved the Forbidden City for Friday because it was technically the day when everyone had to go back to school and work, so we thought there would be fewer people. And we were right! Yay us. The Forbidden City, while crowded, was not the zoo I’m sure it was earlier in the week. I have a confession to make….I don’t really like the Forbidden City. It’s impressive and visually stunning, but beyond that I find it repetitive, unapproachable, detached, and symbolic of the destructive narcissism of the emperors. Like Versailles, actually, but without some of the fun trinkets and human touches of Versailles (I think because the emperors weren’t as into frivolous pursuits, other than having as many concubines as they could, as the French kings). I’m actually amazed that the Forbidden City made it through the Cultural Revolution, as it’s a pretty stunning reminder of China’s failures during the 18th and 19th centuries, and the attitude and outlook that brought down an ancient empire. The emperors were completely and utterly convinced that they were at the center of the world (not at all unique to China, but the attitude is uniquely clear when you’re standing in the Forbidden City), and felt utterly justified in cutting themselves off completely. It was its own little world, and I found it frustrating to think about how stultified and rigid it must have become, at exactly the wrong moment for China’s rulers to become so.

Friday night we boarded our train home…we wanted to explore the cheap and convenient option of China’s amazing train system, and we certainly got a glimpse at the convenience. Our train was comfortable and timely. It wasn’t cheap (I mean, it was cheap, but not as cheap as our cheap flight to Beijing, and not as cheap as we thought it would be). This turned out to be because we bought bullet train tickets, without knowing that the train we were taking only had one type of cabin, these relatively luxurious four person cabins. We wanted to take the second-class “hard sleeper” type of cabin (it’s not that the beds are harder than the “soft sleeper” class, it’s just a Communist thing of not wanting to have first class and second class…hard sleeper is 3 sets of bunk beds and a shared bathroom, while the soft sleep has only 2 sets of bunk beds, and each cabin has its own bathroom), which is what we thought we had (and were mystified as to why our tickets were so expensive), but when we showed up we realized that the train didn’t even have those. So basically it was a really comfortable night for me, I slept the whole way home and like a rock. BUT when I woke up, I awoke to the news that my friend Katherine was seriously ill. Cue Saturday’s drama…straight from the Shanghai train station, at 8 am, Katherine and I went to the hospital, sending our stuff home with everyone else. Katherine had been up puking since 5 AM, and she was a very sick puppy. I spent a full 12 hours at the hospital with her, as the doctors alternated between keeping us waiting and trying to figure out what was wrong (at one point they thought appendicitis and told Katherine she might have to spend a week in the hospital). Eventually, they figured out that it was a gastronomical infection, and she has been in the hospital for four days (she finally left this afternoon). Yuck. Poor Katherine. So that was my Saturday. The only upside of the whole experience was that I got to read! What did I read? I read two absolutely incredible books. One, I’m sure you’ve heard of – Three Cups of Tea. If you haven’t read it yet, read it now. It was SO GOOD. And Greg Mortensen should have won the Nobel Peace Prize, NOT President Obama. I love our President to pieces, but his winning the prize is an embarrassment and cheapens what should be one of the highest honors the world has to give. I am fuming. Hear me fume. OK. The second book I read (or finished reading) was an amazing amazing novel called Wolf Totem. It’s based on the author’s experiences in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, where he was sent as a university student to be re-educated. It’s about the old nomadic culture there, and the relationship between the humans, the wolves, and the grassland, and how the Chinese thoroughly screwed everything up, leading to massive desertification and the destruction of an ancient and noble lifestyle. Sound familiar? All of the parallels with the American West and our efforts to “reclaim” the grassland there hit me full in the face. Plus it’s beautifully written (it’s translated from Chinese, so it’s very simple but evocative writing). And it dovetails perfectly with all the stuff I find so interesting about why people and cultures relate to nature the way they do. And you learn a lot about wolves, pretty freaking cool animals. So READ IT! Seriously. So good.

Yesterday, I went to a CIEE-organized lecture about China’s economy and what could account for how (somewhat) protected it’s been from the world recession. The speaker was basically very optimistic about China (to a point), and it gave me a lot of food for thought. He emphasized the fact that China is actually productive (as in, China isn’t all cheap factories churning out T-shirts in order to keep people happy and employed…and it’s not as export reliant as the Western media likes to say it is), and it’s a productivity that is largely based in (and will be more and more based in in the future) its greatest asset: its relatively well-educated, healthy, and numerous workforce. Human capital. It’s not going to go away, and it’s a force that is going to drive China forward basically no matter what happens, environmentally, politically, domestically, internationally…more alarmingly, he also said that he thinks all the buzz about China starting to go green is just buzz, not substance, and China will actually accelerate the amount of coal it produces during the 21st century, because it has no other options. Uhoh. Bad news for the world. I asked him about water (I was drilling him with questions and felt a little bad about it but he was really really interesting) and I was NOT satisfied with his answer. He said that the West shouldn’t underestimate the ability of the Chinese people to live on less and less water. Well, that’s true, but only true up to a certain point. And with the Chinese government encouraging Northern China (indeed, they’re subsidizing electricity to make it easier to pump the water) to pump water from its already dwindling water table, I don’t really see how that can continue indefinitely, unless the Chinese are superhuman and don’t need water.

OK. This post has become a little manic in terms of my run-on sentences, and in terms of its length. So I’m ending it. Now. The End.

Beijing! Part 1

Hello hello! I am back from my 8 days in Beijing and settling back into my Shanghai routine. Beijing was very fun, and it was quite refreshing to have complete freedom to set my own agenda. But coming back to Shanghai felt very much like coming home, and I’m happy to be back.

I have a lot of ground to cover, and I need to go to bed early tonight, so I’m setting myself a time limit and I’ll finish the rest tomorrow. OK….GO!

Thursday, October 1 was China’s National Day, and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC. You might have heard about a small parade that happened in Beijing, it was a pretty humble affair, no big deal or anything. KIDDING. I watched it on TV (we left for Beijing that night, as we were basically told that foreigners were not welcome in Beijing while the parade was going on…) with my host family. It was visually stunning, an amazing feat of organization and coordination, a jaw-dropping display of nationalism and might and accomplishment. My host family’s reaction was interesting…they sang along to some of the songs, and my host mom and host sister watched the whole thing, but my host dad seemed pretty disinterested and even laughed at it a few times, and my host mom and sister spent a good portion cuddling and tickling on the couch. This was disconcerting but adorable…nukes and tanks parade across the screen, and my host sister is hitting her mother with a pillow. Another favorite moment was spotting the Taiwan float, the last of the floats for the Chinese provinces. I chuckled. China is very persistent in keeping up that particular appearance. While watching, I couldn’t help but think of the Tiananmen Square protests of 20 years ago as I watched thousands of college students dance in the parade, next to tanks and soldiers. In fact, I’ve been shocked for weeks by how China Daily refers to the parade and all the National Day festivities in Beijing as simply “Tiananmen”…as in, on the front page, there would be a box saying “Turn to Page 6 for pictures from Tiananmen!” or “Students Gather to Rehearse for Tiananmen.” Very startling for me, and perfectly intentional I’m sure for the much censored/ state-controlled China Daily (they also refer to any member of Taiwan’s government as the Taiwanese “President” or “Minister of Education”, using the quotation marks). I guess they want to reclaim the term “Tiananmen” as a reference to the protests. I also couldn’t help but think about how happy I am to be American, where people march through the streets for social causes or protests, or to see a President inaugurated, but not in highly orchestrated affairs. And we’d certainly never send soldiers marching through our streets. It’s a silly symbolic thing, I guess, but it felt symptomatic of some of the differences between the two countries. Also the fact that there were no spectators to the Chinese parade, just invited “guests.” How lame is that?

We arrived in Beijing late Thursday night. Friday we went to the Summer Palace, which was lovely. Bright bright sunshine, absolutely perfect weather. My favorite part was exploring the ruins at Yuanmingyuan, a park a few kilometers from the Summer Palace. The ruins are of a Greek/Roman style palace built for one of the last Chinese emperors by some Jesuit monks, destroyed by British and American forces during the Second Opium War. I could barely handle the irony, and the sight of these beautiful, forlorn ruins in a Chinese park, with the late afternoon sunshine dappling pillars and slabs of stone and Chinese tourists climbing all over and posing for pictures was incredibly memorable. It would also be a great place to perform Shakespeare…I’m going to make it happen, some day. Stay tuned for my 2030 production of “Midsummer” or “Romeo and Juliet”, staged in these ruins. It’s gonna be great. A fascinating moment at the ruins was when a Chinese man approached me and my friends and asked us if we knew the history of the place. I said that we did, and he asked how we felt about it. I said that it felt strange to see these ruins here, and it made the West look very bad, but that it was still very beautiful. He responded that, for him and his friends, the history was too heavy for it to be beautiful. An interesting comment to hear a day after watching the exuberant display in Tiananmen Square…despite what the Chinese government perhaps wants the world to think, history still lays heavily on China in some ways.

Saturday was a crazy day. We went on an ill-fated and ill-advised excursion into Tiananmen Square. The two metro stops in the square were closed, and the one we could finally get off at was SO INCREDIBLY PACKED I CAN’T EVEN DESCRIBE IT. AHHHHH. Imagine the scene getting off the subway at Fenway Park, multiplied by a million bajillion. Parents were carrying their children on their shoulders, I think so they wouldn’t get crushed. It was unbelievable. Then, a very disoriented Abby led her little band of friends on a long, circuitous route to Tiananmen because I didn’t really know where we were, but the book had a walking tour to the square from where we were, and it seemed like a good idea at the time…ha. After a long (and vaguely mutinous) walk, the Square was little better than the subway station in terms of how crowded it was. At least it was sunny and open and there was air….And then, in our next mistake, we decided to walk under the main gate in Tiananmen (the one with Mao’s picture), but they wouldn’t let us turn around for probably almost a mile, and then we had to walk back through this park….it was a mess. But entertaining, and such an experience to see all these Chinese on holiday enjoying their national space and their families and friends. When we finally got back to the Square, we checked out the floats from the parade, and then fled to the Olympic Stadium, which was much less crowded and crazy. That was pretty cool. We collapsed in the Water Cube for a while and took pictures of the scene of Michael Phelps’ glory.

Sunday was more low key. We slept in, went to the Wangfujing Snack Street for a fun lunch of noodles, scorpion (I only tried one), coconut milk, Chinese fried dough, and other yummy things. After lunch, we went to the zoo! To see pandas. News flash: they’re cute.

Monday was Great Wall day! We went to the Simatai portion, which is roughly 2.5 hours outside Beijing (as opposed to the more visited Badaling section, which is only an hour or so away). It’s a pretty tough hike in some places, and I definitely made some bad choices about what to bring in my backpack (like…Bananagrams, three books, a rain jacket on a cloudless day…), so I definitely got some exercise. I lagged behind the rest of my group, to take pictures, and because of back pack issues, and because I wanted a day on my own (traveling with 6 other people was really fun and we had a great time as a group, but it was really really nice to get some time on my own, and I made friends with the other people I met along the way). At the end of the long hike was a pretty lake, over which I rode a zipline. It was a really very lovely day. I don’t know, though, if the Great Wall is really that “Great”…I mean, is it really something China should be proud of? Sure, it’s a great feat of organization and engineering, and it’s super beautiful, but isn’t it also a symbol of a xenophobic, authoritarian, closed-off, myopic and ultimately failed government? I guess in Chinese it’s not called the Great Wall, it’s the Long Wall. But I was definitely thinking hard as I climbed, about what I want the relics of my society to be, and what I want them to say about us. In centuries to come, will tourists walk along our freeways, or through our malls, or along our airstrips, and wonder what the point was? What will be our Great Wall? What will be the monuments of our civilization, constructed, metaphorically or actually, over the bones of those who suffered while building them? Nuclear weapons? Felled forests? Dams? Irrigation systems in deserts of our own making?

It was getting pretty emo up on that wall. Me with my fancy camera… pondering…. staring at the mountains…oy vey.

Tuesday, I went off with my friend Katherine (everyone else wanted to sleep) to see the 798 modern art district, which was maybe my favorite part of Beijing. I can’t wait to go back someday for a more thorough visit. It’s an old industrial park/warehouse district that has been converted into a huge complex of art galleries, shops, and cafes. Sooo cool. The art was hit or miss (I’m also just not that in to modern art…). I think my favorite thing was an exhibit on “Neo-historicism” that tracked the ways a famous painting depicting the proclamation of the People’s Republic had been revised during the Cultural Revolution and as the founding Party members depicted in it fell in and out of favor. The painting was apparently a favorite of Mao’s and is very famous and well known in China. That afternoon, we went to the Lama Temple, the largest Tibetan Buddhist temple in Beijing. No trace of the Dalai Lama, of course, and it felt exactly the same as every other Buddhist temple I’ve been to in China, except there were some prayer flags fluttering (half-heartedly, it seemed) in the wind. It was beautiful and there was a giant Buddha statue, but I found it interesting mostly for what it wasn’t. Next stop was the Confucian Temple and imperial college for some peace and quiet, then a long walk through a hutong to the Bell and Drum Towers, which were closed. Undiscouraged, Katherine and I (we never managed to make our agenda work with the rest of the group that day) walked another long way to Hou Hai, a lake surrounded by bars and restaurants, where we rented a paddle boat for an hour as the sun set. Then we walked again until we found a cute “homestyle” Chinese restaurant where we had delicious noodles. So much walking that day, but it was totally worth it, I felt like I really got a feel for Beijing.

And with that, to bed I go. Tomorrow, I will write about the next three days, as well as the very interesting lecture I went to today and the amazing book I just read (get excited!). Until next time. Peace.

Learning about the Real World

Last week, I got an interesting look at three different sectors through which foreigners interact with China. The three experiences gave me a lot to think about, and many comparisons to ponder.

Last Monday, CIEE arranged a lecture by a guy who has made his career helping multi-national corporations with risk management in China (Enterprise Risk Management: Mitigating the Risks of Globalization). Beforehand, I was a little worried that this would be a very, very boring two hours (I mean, “risk management” sounds about as exciting as tying your shoes before getting on an escalator…). However, our speaker entertained and informed us, regaling us with the details of how companies deal with (or try to deal with) the vagaries of Chinese government policy, corruption, fraud, and intellectual copyright infringement, and how they adapt to the more benign but no less impactful differences in culture and perspective. He (I’ve forgotten his name…fail) seemed like someone with tons of firsthand experience, and he showed a respect for both the good and bad aspects of the Chinese and American ways of doing business. One moment that struck me, though, was when he said that “foreign companies are teaching China how to modernize.” Probably true, to a certain extent—but it also feels like a comment right out of early-20th century China; at best, if felt at least a couple decades out of date. Right now, it feels like the Chinese have a pretty good handle on where they want to go as a country and how to get there, at least economically. They no longer need hand holding from Western companies. The next comment that gave me some pause was when he described how all foreign companies in China have a couple expats stationed here to oversee operations, but hire local Chinese for almost all other positions—from management positions, to office workers, to laborers. Yet, because of the language barrier, the expats really just have to trust that their ideas and rules and orders are being followed and understood, as they’re basically totally excluded from the inner culture and workings of their own company (he was especially citing foreign companies’ efforts to communicate their anti-corruption and non-compete policies to their workers).

Both of these aspects of what it means to be a foreign company doing business in China seemed incredibly retro to me, right out of 19th-century Shanghai. From the 1840s until 1949, foreign companies in China had a couple of taipans (rich, largely useless managers who spent all their time and money on food and Western leisure pursuits) stationed in Shanghai, who did basically none of the work—everything was done by a Chinese comprador (a Portuguese term that became universal), who actually ran the company’s day-to-day affairs and managed investments. Now, of course, Chinese workers do high-level professional work as well as labor-intensive low-level work; companies put significant effort into thinking about how to best structure and deploy their Chinese staff. But it just seems funny to me. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense; it’s clearly the most efficient way of doing things. And clearly it works, or companies wouldn’t still be doing it this way. But still. How much has changed since a century ago? So much. But also, weirdly enough, in some ways not so much.

Wednesday night, I went to a reception for American students at the US consulate. Notable lessons: 1. Working in a consulate sounds very, very boring, and 2. Americans can ALWAYS have a great BBQ, no matter where they are in the world. Think hamburgers and hot dogs, potato salad, gooey chocolate chip cookies…I’ve been loving the Chinese food I’ve been eating here, but even so, that hamburger was freaking amazing.

Now, I don’t wish to disparage the State Department and the consulate when they showed me such great hospitality. There are certainly some interesting aspects of their work; they police fraud by both American and Chinese companies, and are working very closely on executing the American Pavilion at the World Expo which will be in Shanghai from May-October of 2010 (Better City, Better Life!). There are certainly some very boring aspects of their work; they spend a lot of time and staff on citizens services (replacing passports, birth and death certificates for Americans who are born or who die in Shanghai, etc.), and probably an equal amount on issuing visas for Chinese who wish to go to America. Apparently Shanghai issued the 5th largest number of US visas in the world last year. Lucky them. I also met some interesting Americans, such as this group from a program called “Global College”…basically they spend each year of college in a different place, and they’re all (there are like 30 in each grade) basically international relations majors, with a sub-specialty of their own. To be honest, I was a little weirded out by this group, I think mostly because they were so down on the traditional American college experience (although, really, how would they know?). Clearly I believe in study abroad and different types of learning…but I also believe that at some point you need to be in a classroom, learning a wide variety of things, even some things you don’t really like (one girl told me that a major reason she chose the program is that she wouldn’t have to take math ever again…this girl is running a long way from math…). I think I just don’t like feeling like the most conventional, stodgy person in a conversation. Which I guess is probably a daily reality if you work at a US consulate…kidding…that was mean. They gave me a hamburger, after all. If I ever lost my passport, the last couple sentences will be summarily deleted and will never have happened. But until then, I need something to provide some levity to this monstrosity of a post, and, I mean…the US Diplomatic Corp is known for being a great source of levity. Right?

Now, everything of any importance or interest must come in threes, and the best thing is always last, so now we come to the Baby Bear event that was “just right” for me.

The event was an evening of speakers about environmental entrepreneurship and action in China. I was invited by Elizabeth Campbell, the Milton and Yale grad with whom I had a very enjoyable lunch a couple weeks ago. Elizabeth was one of the speakers at the event, along with a woman who founded a “social business” called Greenovate that seeks to “integrate sustainable concepts into traditional business and community practices”, two Chinese university students who volunteer for Greenovate and spent their summer teaching rural schoolchildren about sustainable practices and the environment, the founder of the progressive design company Frog Design, the founder of Naked Retreats, a resort company, and the founder of Eno, a clothing and accessories company that seeks to promote environmental awareness and action among China youth while selling them nifty fashion items. All of the companies spoke of their “bottom-up” approach to creating social change by promoting environmental awareness in China; they all had different approaches and products, but similar philosophies. Let me report: Greenovate highlighted its MaGiC (Made Green in China) public awareness and action program which they launched this weekend (www.joinmagic.org). The Frog Design founder said that “The ultimate challenge for Design is to create objects which are useful art, and to inspire spiritual values…,” adding that “Waste is the product of bad design.” The Naked Retreats guy said that China represents an “enormous opportunity to educate individual communities” on how to live more sustainably, and also said that his company planned to build the first LEED Platinum resort with more than 100 rooms in the world—in China. That was pretty cool. Eno said that their mission was to “inspire China youth to make a difference through fashion and fun.” The lady who founded Eno with her husband also remarked that Chinese consumers are starting to be willing to pay more for a product because it’s “green,” and she thinks there is a huge and very profitable niche for the company or companies that first manage to craft an image of being “green companies” in China. Elizabeth represented her organization, JUCCE (Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy –www.juccce.com), which uses a more “top-down” approach to promoting sustainable practices by working with the Chinese government and businesses. Elizabeth called JUCCE a “convener, with an eye to action.”

OK so enough exposition. Basically, this event was SO COOL and gave me an inside look at some of the stuff that is going on here in regards to the environment. It also brought home to me that part of why I’m learning Chinese is that I’d love to be involved with this sort of “social business” or non-profit work in China. As was emphasized throughout the evening, a little bit of change by a mass of individuals is a powerful idea in China, where the mass of individuals is bigger than anywhere else.

Something that both the Chinese students and Elizabeth’s presentation touched on was the Chinese idea of pursuing an “environmentally harmonious society.” In the US, the idea of ‘harmony with nature” seems like a very hippy-dippy crunchy goal to espouse, and would certainly never be the basis of a government public service campaign. But here in China, such a principle is ancient and seems to work as a motivator, or at least it seems that way from how I’ve seen and heard it used while I’ve been here. I was also interested that both of the Chinese students highlighted water pollution as a motivator for them; one girl said that her dream is that her children will be able to swim in the lake in her home city. Environmental destruction is such a concrete reality here; in the US, it often seems like somewhat of an abstraction, with all the focus on emissions and less on pollution. You can’t see or taste or smell carbon dioxide, and its effects on the environment are not at all cut and dry. A lake or river so clogged with debris and spoiled by chemicals that humans can barely go near it is a whole other ballgame.

So things are happening here. Maybe on a small scale, maybe too small. But think about this: 5 years ago, Greenovate, Eno, and JUCCE didn’t exist (that might be true for Naked Retreats, too, not sure). And now they’re established organizations and companies that are starting to make an impact. And think about this: in 5 years in China, the equivalent of 10 New York Cities are constructed in new development. So yes, there is a ton to do here. But the pace of change is also so fast that social change can take root quickly. My fingers are crossed.

Not a lot of other goings on, and this post is getting so long. I’m going to Beijing on Thursday for 8 days, and probably won’t bring my computer, and probably won’t post unless I get super inspired by all the National Day fervor.

One last thing…last Thursday, one of the CIEE college students here, a senior at UPenn, died in an accident in his dorm room. His name was Kenny, and I’d appreciate if you could send out a prayer or a moment of silence for him and his family and friends. We Gap Year students don’t really interact with the college students here, so I had never met him, but it’s still really sad and scary.

See you in a couple of weeks, and be well! Peace.