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!
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Thursday, December 3, 2009
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!
- 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.
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.
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