Construction Scene

I haven't been posting again. Here is a quick entry of a common scene here in China. I can't remember whether or not this is one of my photos, or one I gathered from somewhere else (I've taken several much like this, in any case).

All that glitters is not caulk

As I have written before, entirely too much of my life in China revolves around trying to fix things. First of all, that already is my nature, as I am an obsessive fixer. Second of all, every thing in China needs to be fixed.

This is no country in which to be an obsessive handyman, as I have mentioned ten or twenty times before. Everywhere I turn, something needs done or done right. However, this new item takes the grand championship.

I was walking down a hallway a few days ago. There is a large floor crack that has been covered with a metal threshold. The piece was sticking up well off the floor, so I pulled it off and set it to the side so that no one would trip over it.

I expected that the piece would be held down with caulk. Everything in China is held together with caulk. The only problem is that no one knows how to apply it.

This reminds me that I have a long list of caulk-related photographs that I have intended to post. I will get back to them, even though this particular entry is going to supersede all of them. Other than its general and appropriate uses, I have seen caulk used to do the following: hold down floor tiles, hang pictures, fix pipes, plug wall holes, and on and on. It's as if caulk was the first home-improvement substance they ever learned about, and they think it fixes everything. Caulk is the duct tape of China, except that it is even less useful than duct tape, which is actually only really good for, I don't know, sealing ducts? I was already horrified by how many lame attempts at duct tape repairs I see in America. It is far worse with caulk in China. There are likely to be entire buildings here held up with caulk.

Actually, that last one is a little too close to the truth. I don't like thinking about the construction of Chinese buildings, as I just barely noted in my last post.

Back to the caulk. I see it everywhere, but rarely have I ever seen it applied well. Honestly, I think that half the problem is that the Chinese construction boom is so vast, that anyone who has any legitimate skills and experience already has a job somewhere. The repairs are all left to the unskilled.

Whatever. Back to my story. I pulled up this metal threshold, and then inspected. I'd like you to look closely at the photograph and see what they had used to hold it down. Don't read ahead until you have guessed.



That's right, boys and girls... it was held down with....

GLITTER GLUE! That sparkly decoration that has graced millions of grade school posters!

I really should make more jokes here, but I'm speechless.


I went down the same hallway only 1/2 hour later. I'll say this for Chinese workers, they are prompt. They were already sticking it back down. This time, they were using a hot-glue gun.

I suppose that is better than using duct tape, but maybe that's next.

Maybe we should live in a Yurt

I don't have any time these days. Here's a quick one, borrowing from the efforts of someone else. An apartment building fell over in Shanghai. Link here.

Pray for us that there is never an earthquake.

My New Favorite Book

Some months ago I found a book in the school library. The Longman's Visual Dictionary of Chinese is a treasure trove of laughs. I tried to find my own copy on the internet, but to know avail. So I have instead scanned a number of pages, and I will share them with you, dear reader, whenever I feel like it.

The pages cover almost an amazing range of topics. Some are absurdly specific. Most are useless. To say more would be to deprive you of the joy of discovery, so you will just have to wait until I make a new post. If, however, are visiting a Chinese machine shop anytime soon, and really need to know how to say "geared headstock" or "wheel flange" anytime soon, just let me know.

In the meantime, I will start with a page that teaches you necessary vocabulary that is much closer to home: underwear and baby clothes.




Now as you can see, there is a wide variety to choose from. All appear extremely uncomfortable. By the way, this book was published in Hong Kong in 1997, which was the year of the handover from Great Britain. I suspect that they just recycled pictures from some older book, however there are a few pages that almost appear to be calculated insults of the mainland Chinese as backwards and provincial. More on that later. The resolution on the page is good enough to see all the illustrations and text clearly if you click on the image. I will highlight just two.

This was my personal pick for "most uncomfortable looking underwear" (unless it is number 13). In fairness, I would hazard a guess that no one in China under the age of 75 is wearing anything remotely similar.




Now if the picture above looks like something Medieval, what you see below is actually still widespread in China. "Widespread", of course, is a very bad pun in this case, because that is exactly the pose in which you see a whole lot of Chinese toddlers, as their mothers hold them over gutters, tree wells, and sometimes the middle of the sidewalk. Sometimes the toddlers just decide to take care of business on their own schedule. A friend of ours got peed on by a little boy standing in a shopping cart next to her in line at a store.




Disposable diapers are for sale in the stores these days. They probably remain too expensive for most Chinese. If you want proof that bare baby butts are still a common sight in China, here is a photo for you. In case you are wondering, the front of those pants is just as wide open as is the back.



Occasionally, I feel guilty for taking surreptitious pictures of people, but they certainly don't have any compunction about doing it to us, so I guess it is all fair.

Finally, this one reminds me of another little saying we have around here: "China doesn't have a five-second rule".

Think about it.

Nothing to see here

It has been a very, very busy school year for everyone lately. That hasn't left me with much to write about (unless you really want me to explain how to diagram tariffs and quotas and calculate the resulting consumer and producer surpluses).

I don't have any new pictures. I still have a number of old ones stored on my other computer that I can use sometime. However, I won't be having any new photos anytime soon. That is because my camera was stolen.

Like most other minor misfortunes, at least I can milk a story out of it. Or at least a cautionary tale. A street thief got it from me in Shanghai. If I knew exactly how he did it, then I suppose that he wouldn't have been able to do it.

It is embarrassing really. I've traveled a lot of places over a lot of years, and never had anything stolen from me. That is because I always scrupulously followed my own rule, which was to never, ever put anything down. Last year, when I took a bunch of high school kids to Europe. I had coached them thoroughly about street crime. There is no way to be totally safe, but fortunately, not a single one of my kids lost anything. That was not true of the group of kids traveling with us, at least two of whom lost things to pickpockets.

To make a long story short: Lee asked to borrow my camera. I tried to hand it to her, but she wasn't ready for it, so I set it down next to my hip on a park bench while I used my cellphone. It was dark, there was no easy way to approach the bench from behind. Nevertheless, two minutes later, the camera was gone.

Oh well. One can't keep an unbroken record forever. On that note, traveling is a bit like riding a horse. If you keep riding horses, eventually one of them will throw you off. Likewise, if you walk enough public streets for long enough, the pickpockets will get you. They are professionals, and that is their craft.

Speaking of cowboy analogies, I suppose I can take solace that once, many years ago, they got my grandfather when he was in Paris. And that was no mere pickpocketing. They tripped him, and when he put his hands down to catch himself, they stripped bare his pockets. Big Don was, as the title implies, a very big, intimidating cowboy; and yet that didn't deter them in the least.

Then again, he probably looked totally lost in Paris, and that is all the opening it takes for those guys. I've seen the Gypsy gangs at work in France with my own eyes, and until you have seen them, you really can't fully believe how good they are at what they do. Even when you watch it, you can't truly see how they could clear someone out so quickly (and if anyone wants to call me a bigot for linking street theft to our Roma friends, then you haven't actually lived in Europe).

All in all, not a huge loss. Better than having them get my wallet or passport. It was just a two year old pocket camera. It did have some pictures on it I wanted, but nothing truly irreplaceable. I'll buy another one sometime, but I'm not looking forward to it. It is so hard to shop for electronics here. If you go to established stores, you are pretty much safe from the counterfeits. Still, it is hard to comparison shop, and the prices on anything Western quality are always just as high as Western prices (and often higher).

So no photos today.

We have had some extra teenagers staying in our apartment for the last three nights. They are here for a big athletic tournament, and the school was short on hosting arrangements. We were going to take two anyway, but we stepped in and offered to take four. A couple people have suggested that we are crazy for doing so. I reply that that may well be true, but it is only a coincidence.

The People's Republic at 60

There has been a lot of fuss this week about the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. If you watched any of the festivities from Beijing, they included a parade of military hardware much like we used to see from the Soviet Union. That has sparked yet another round of hand-wringing and panicky talk in the Western press about the future of China. Often, this includes a paranoia about China as our "next enemy", a term I have literally had people say to me.

I'm going to throw out my bold prediction here, however, and tell anyone who wants to listen that they don't need to worry about China, or at least not about China as a rising military superpower. I'll preface this by saying that I have no pretensions to great expertise. The only authority I have is that I read a lot (or too much, according to a certain someone in my household), and that I read without ideological prejudices (although I have plenty of them, I only get them after I read, and I make new adjustments all the time).

My first, and most basic point, is that many people don't fully appreciated how vast the gap really is between the Chinese military and the U.S. military. My second point is that China has yet to really demonstrate an aggressive military intention for the future (there are incidents, but very little truly militant or expansionist rhetoric). My third point is that I believe both of those issues, the questions of Chinese military capabilities and intentions, are largely moot. I have my suspicions that those questions are, in the long run, irrelevant.

The real factor that will shape the future is demographics. The size of the population doesn't matter as much as the ratio of ages within the population. China is racing the calendar, and it is losing. The Chinese are getting old faster than they are getting strong, or rich. The Chinese fertility rate is down to less than 1.8, and dropping. The median age is already 34 years old, and rising. The ratio of men to women is 1.2 to 1.

If you don't realize the implications of those numbers, I'll explain. Fertility rate is a measure of babies born per woman in the population. It requires a fertility rate of 2.1 to maintain a population (the ".1" being the extra needed to offset premature deaths in the population). A fertility rate of 4.0 or more will double the population each generation. A fertility rate of 1.0 will halve the population in the same time. China's population growth is virtually zero, and it is very likely to start falling. The rate among the educated, professional classes, the same people that are needed to sustain a vibrant economy, is even lower.

A median age of 34 is itself not especially high, yet. The U.S. median age is 36. The Japanese median age is 44. However, given the low birthrate, this is going to increase very quickly. The imbalanced gender ratio, itself a byproduct of selective abortions created by a cultural desire for boys (reinforced further by the one-child policy, because being allowed only one child, many families opt for boys, and there are ways around the laws prohibiting sex selection through ultrasounds).

The demographic shift has already taken hold. Many Chinese families are already looking at a future in which one worker supports four grandparents. In the case of families with a non-working spouse, that is one worker supporting eight grandparents. This will be a crippling burden for the Chinese. The punishing math would hold even if China had a public pension system, because the underlying ratio of young people to old will be true across society as a whole. This demographic challenge is very unlikely to reverse itself. Once people start having fewer babies, they tend to get used to it. (Side story: When I went into the school to pay fees for my three children to go to school camp, the secretary was aghast "Three children?" she blurted out in amazement, "one is enough!").

Eventually, the cumulative effects of not having those children adds up. The young people just aren't there, and their absence wreaks havoc on all the factors that actually make for a vibrant economy. It is the young who have the energy, confidence, and entrepreneurial zeal to drive a society.

I'm not predicting the imminent collapse of the Chinese economy here. The overall population size, and natural increase among some segments of the population (not all Chinese are bound by, or follow, the one-child policy), will keep China going for a long time. They will face economic challenges in the future, but all societies do for various reasons. But in the end, demographics drives everything; those that have the babies, have the future.

If you want a grand sweeping historical example, then look to the British, who rode the agricultural and industrial revolutions to world empire. People often overemphasize the technological advantages of Britain, but that is only part of the story. The more important part is that Britain was the first nation to conquer chronic food shortages and widespread childhood illnesses, which gave them a huge population surplus. Their many sons manned the Royal Navy, and staffed the thousands of military and administrative posts needed from Africa to India to Australia and beyond. That was the indispensable factor in British hegemony. Like I said, in the long run, those that have the babies win.

Europe, of course, is old news at this point. Literally. The European economy is untenable, with its lavish state welfare programs that cannot last because the workers that would support them simply are not being born, and it is doubtful that the immigrant workers who are by necessity replacing them will willingly support their European elders indefinitely. This should be a warning for those Americans who are so enamored of the European model, but that is a bigger topic than I want to go into right now. As for China, the most relevant current cautionary tale is Japan.

Do any of the rest of you remember the talk about Japan back in the 1980s? We were all told over and over about how the Japanese were on the brink of taking over the world economy. They were going to own everything. In case you haven't noticed, it never happened. The reason is simply that they got old. The Japanese fertility rate is down to 1.2. The median age, as I noted above is already 44. The population will literally halve in the next generation. Given the Japanese antipathy to foreigners and immigration, they are already having a terrible time supplying their own workforce. They are experimenting with incentives to lure ethnic Japanese workers to immigrate back from Brazil, to which thousands of Japanese families moved over the past few generations. It isn't working out so well (they don't act Japanese enough anymore, and there is perhaps no other culture on earth so unable to assimilate "others" as Japan). Never mind that, the young Japanese who are left are like to get sick of living in a geriatric society and emigrate out. There goes all of your economic energy and creativity.

China and Japan are hardly perfect analogies. For one thing, the Chinese population is literally 100 times bigger. But the basic economic challenges are similar, and China doesn't have the advantage of Japanese wealth. There will always be a lot of people in China, but too many of them will be too old. They will still make their mark on the world order, but it will be through diplomatic and economic means. As I said above, I'm predicting economic challenges for China, not economic collapse. China economy should hold strong for a good long while, and as far as their economic power goes, they have enormous leverage over the U.S. because of the trillions of dollars of debt they hold in U.S. Treasury Bonds. That is the sort of power that could be wielded even by a nation populated by little old ladies.

An example of how the Chinese will use their power can be seen right now in Africa and the Middle East, with an instructive situation being the fact that any Western efforts to enforce economic sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program are going to be toothless, because the Chinese and the Russians aren't going to play ball. This is entirely off the subject, but speaking of the Russians, they are already in a demographic death spiral: median age 38 (42 for the half of that actually has the babies), population growth -.5, and fertility rate 1.4. The Russians can cause trouble through international politics, but they won't be reviving the empire anytime soon, no matter how much Vladimir Putin wills it to be so.

So as for the Chinese military, forget about it. They won't even have the young men needed to fill a great military machine. I would imagine that any attempt to actually use that military could provoke total rebellion by the millions of parents who would never accept their only hopes for the future get sent off to war. One can't build an empire with a nation of only children.

Korea in China

Here's another attempt at using up some old pictures.

One might expect that, having moved to China, I would spend a lot of time with Chinese people. Not so. However, I spend a lot of time with Koreans. Several major Korean corporations have operations in Suzhou, and they tend to go much deeper into the rank and file when then send employees here (as opposed to the Western companies, who typically only send high-level engineers, managers, and accountants). That is apparently a sore spot with the Chinese government, which I have heard pressures the Koreans to give more of those jobs to Chinese workers.

I digress, as usual. As I said, I spend a lot of time with Koreans. I never really knew any Koreans before I came here, and I like them. The kids are, for the most part, friendly and hard-working. Too hard working, in some cases. A lot of these poor kids finish school only to go to Korean schools all over again for the evening. Many of the kids (in particular, the girls) are incredible musicians as well. I was at the elementary school talent show last year. It was pretty impressive.

And of course, let's not forget the Korean food, which I have really developed a taste for.

The Korean kids are very, very partial to all things Korean. When we take them on school trips, they always bring bundles of mom-packed food, in little nested boxes and neat packages (all to save them from having to eat anything Chinese). Sometimes, their enthusiasm is better described as nationalism. Case in point, have you ever heard of Dokdu Island? Talk to a Korean for a few minutes and you will. It is a rocky speck of an island halfway between South Korean and Japan. It is officially accepted as Korean territory (and they have two caretakers stationed on it to make sure the claim is firm).

However, occasionally, Japan makes noises that it rightfully belongs to them. There have literally been street protests in South Korea over this, including bizarro stuff like when a college student sliced his fingertips and wrote his loyalty to Dokdu in his own blood. At school, I have had to reprimand kids for starting up arguments over it. In the library, atlases and even wall maps have been hand marked to show Dokdu, and remind everyone who it belongs to. This is in addition to the fact that the same maps have often been defaced so that the "Sea of Japan" has been renamed the "Sea of Korea".

I digress again. Below are some pictures of some art from some of the Korean 4th graders from last year. They have nothing to do whatsoever with anything I said above. They just made me laugh. For this assignment, the kids were supposed to draw a picture illustrating "empathy". They had some interesting interpretations. Names have been blocked out.



This one if from a very sweet girl who was one of my favorites. If your friend will cry over your dead dog with you, she is a true friend.




I'm not sure what this kid was thinking. Perhaps he has heard the expression "walk a mile in his shoes".




This is the best one. This kid really didn't get the concept.

A quick post

Between the fact that I have no time, and we continue to dither as to the future of our blog plans (see last post), I haven't had anything to say. In the meantime, I'll through out a picture. This is an advertisement I saw in the Beijing subway that made me laugh. Hip young popstar types are routinely used to advertise all manner of products. But kitchen range hoods?

Does it come in candy iPod colors? Are the other kids jealous? Does this punk even know how to cook?

Reflections on nearly a year in China, Part Two

Food:
I like almost any real food. By that I mean it should be recognizable as a plant or animal product (as opposed to some industrial substance), and prepared with some skill. I’m not especially fond of most seafood, but I’m not afraid of it either.

I guess you could say I’m a picky eater, but not in the usual sense of the word. I just want food to be good. Not fancy, not a “dining experience”, just quality stuff that feels like something that a good home cook would feed the family. However, I think even people like myself who like almost everything still really get to craving “comfort foods”. Perhaps it is whatever you grew up on. I can eat a whole lot of really, really good meals, and yet never have them scratch that deep itch that only certain foods can fill. For myself, the number one thing would be a proper plate of tacos and enchiladas, or a good bowl of chili with cornbread.

For that comfort food, pickings are pretty slim. We make some good things at home, but there are still a lot of the family favorites that we didn’t ever make this year. Some of the family comfort foods we have made are pinto bean soup, split pea soup, macaroni and cheese, meatloaf, pork roast, and a proper Thanksgiving dinner. There is a long list of other favorites that we haven’t yet tried to recreate here.

The local cuisine of Jiangsu Province is not to my liking. It is sweet and oily, and really doesn’t have much flavor. Fortunately, there is a great variety of other good food to be had. My favorites are the cuisines of western China, and Korean food. The western Chinese stuff is Arab/Islamic influenced. It has a lot of lamb, and good spicy flavors. I’ve written about it in detail before, so I will move on.

I had never had occasion to eat Korean food before I came here (other than Kimchi), but it really is good stuff. There are a lot of Korean companies in the area, and unlike the European and North American companies, which send few workers to China, there is a large Korean population (according to some sources, that is much to the consternation of the Chinese government, which wants those jobs for local citizens, but the Koreans keep putting them off).

Korean food emphasizes freshness, and there are a lot of good hot, spicy flavors. Barbecue is a popular favorite, but with the Korean variety, the meat is grilled in small strips, then dipped in sauces and wrapped in a piece of lettuce for eating. However, my very favorite is, in an approximate phonetic spelling, called Bi Bim Bap. It is a mix of rice, vegetables, sprouts, and sometimes meat. It comes cooked, but unmixed, in an extremely hot stone bowl. It will have a dollop of thick hot sauce, and sometimes a raw egg, on top of it. You then stir the whole concoction together yourself. The egg cooks from the heat of the bowl as you stir. A proper bowl of this stuff can literally serve as that “comfort food” that I was talking about above.

Street food is always an adventure, but you can find some real treasures. Kabobs of various sorts can be quite good, and there is a fried egg folded up into dough that isn’t too bad. There are various forms of steamed buns that are really good if you get the kinds with the right fillings (they are like chocolates that way… you never know what you are going to get, at least if you don’t speak Chinese). Dumplings can be good.

In the first weeks we were here, there was a certain smell that would assault us when we went downtown. I was convinced early on that it was a hideous smelling food of some kind. Lee, however, was convinced that no food could possibly be that rank, and she was sure that we were smelling an open sewer. We actually had arguments, although I occasionally lost the courage of my convictions and would become convinced that she must be right.

Eventually, we found out that this odor came from what was known as “stinky tofu”. It is a fermented tofu that is then deep fried and served on a stick. Given the delicate balance that this family sometimes has between adventurous and masochistic, we did finally try it. It is better than it sounds, but now by much. I was right in the end, but it was a hollow victory. Any smell that you can’t distinguish from food or offal, can’t be a good smell. Or a good food.

Most of the Western food here is pretty mediocre. There are three Mexican restaurants in town. We’ve eaten at two. They are okay, but not much more. The usual selections of Italian foods and whatnot are here, but not that exciting. There is one new European/American restaurant that is pretty good. There is some really good Western food in Shanghai, and we’d had some very proper French food there, but we really are too busy to get there very often.

As I said in the beginning, I’m not particularly snobbish. I can enjoy a typical fast food burger as much as the next guy. This winter, a new Burger King opened in town. In the U.S. probably eat at a one of those no more than once a year, and only on road trips. However, I can tell you that, if you have not experienced it for yourself, you have no concept of how good a Whopper can taste after seven months in China.

Shopping:
I don’t enjoy shopping here. At the street markets, you often feel like someone is trying to take advantage of you. Even in regular stores, it is really hard to find specific things sometimes. The largest store in town a grocery from the French chain Auchan, can get so crowded that you almost have to swim through the people.

In general, shopping is the prime example of how much China has changed. Two major shopping centers have come into Suzhou just this year, and the product variety is expanding and diversifying rapidly. One case in point, nine months ago I specifically cited one thing as being virtually un-findable in China. That was chocolate chips. Now, they are consistently stocked in all of the Western shops. There are more foreign products of other kinds as well. However, that in no way communicates the dramatic changes that have come in the past decade. For example, few people are aware that until the current generation, very few Chinese drank milk or ate dairy products. One British man living here tells that story that, a mere ten years ago, when he lived in another, somewhat less developed Chinese city, he could not purchase milk in stores at all. To keep a personal supply for his coffee and tea, he made a special deal with a local farm woman. Let me repeat… this was only ten years ago!

Nowadays, dairy products are well established. In fact, the Arizona-based and founded Cold Stone Creamery has two locations in Suzhou. The brochure, by the way, shows a picture of its original store next to Nello’s Pizza at the corner of Southern and McClintock in Tempe, less than one mile from our old house.

One more thing I thought of recently, when I was pondering exactly why I hate shopping here so badly (as opposed to all the reasons I hate shopping generally), other than things I mentioned or alluded to above, here are a few others:

Selection. This is something that the Chinese really haven’t figured out. There is usually only two or three options for any given product.

Prices. There are two kinds of prices. Super cheap (for super crap), and prices that are equal to those in U.S. department stores. There is very little middle ground. What China really, really needs is for an outfit like Target to catch on. Some retailers are figuring out that there is a market for good quality at mid-range prices. The IKEA furniture store in Shanghai, for example, does great business.

One final shopping note. We are preparing to go home, and recently I said to a Chinese person that we would be bringing a lot of things back with us (from our U.S. shopping and restocking). She asked, rather pointedly, why I wanted to do that, when it was so obvious “You can buy everything in China!”.

I realize that have let her annoy me all out of proportion (there are extenuating circumstances why I am frustrated with this person), but that comment has stuck in my craw for days now.

It is possible that virtually anything I want to buy exists somewhere in China. That is not to say that I can buy it. Sure, if I spoke and read the language, had a car, and plenty of time, I could find some of the things I’ve been looking for. However, despite the fact that seemingly everything in the world is “Made In China” these days, that doesn’t mean that those same things are For Sale in China. Many products are manufactured exclusively for the export market. If I had a contact in that specific factory, I could cut a deal (does anyone want any Dewalt tools? I do have a contact in that company).

To make a long story short, no, I can’t buy many things in China. So purely out of spite, we have now been compiling a shopping list to give to this person. We won’t ever actually do it of course, but it makes me feel better. The first item on the list is a good pair of American size 10 ½ 4E width shoes.

Reflections on nearly a year in China, Part One

I don’t know how much more I will write before we go back to the U.S. for the summer, but I’ve been thinking that I would do a bit of a roundup on impressions and experiences. Although I have a few coherent thoughts collected, this will mostly be a stream-of-consciousness. Therefore, sometimes I might have organized categories, and sometimes I probably won't. A great deal of it will doubtlessly be redundant to things I've written before.

Argument as a form of street theater:
The Chinese love to argue, although thankfully not with me (it would be rather one-sided). They must enjoy arguing in public, because there is often a great deal of theatricality, and a sense sometimes that they are playing to crowd. And there is always a crowd. Spectators gather to enjoy the show, and they react when someone gets off a good line (although I can only judge this by reactions), or when someone gets flustered. People get out of cars and shake fingers in each others’ faces. They yell and gesticulate. What they don’t seem to do is threaten (although there are exceptions, as I retold in one of my earliest blog posts). I have seen more arguments in public here in less than a year than in my entire previous lifetime.

The argument that I was closest to was also one of the strangest (and depending on your perspective, funny). I was in a line waiting to buy an inter-city bus ticket. The queues were separated by railings. Within that confined space, I got caught right behind a young couple, with other people behind me so I couldn’t escape.

It appeared that the young woman was trying to leave the young man (as in, leave, go home, and never come back). Every time she tried to buy a ticket, he would thwart her in some way, with that trying to act gentle but in reality using his superior strength sort of man behavior. She would try to put money on the counter and he would try to grab it. She would grab the money back with her other hand before he could get it. She would try again, only this time he would grab her other hand so that she couldn’t use it. She would try to talk to the ticket seller and he would put his hand over her mouth. She would stop and act defeated just long enough for him to let his guard down, and then dive for the ticket window again. He would block her path with his arms, but try to make it look like he wasn’t using force, while he had one of those but-baby-I-love-you looks on his face. She would turn her back to him and then when he got to close try to elbow him in the gut, and then make a fresh push for the counter.

It went on and on, and everyone stood by watching. Finally I just forced my way past them with a swimming motion, and then leaned in and bought my ticket while their wrestling match continued in my armpit.

At least I made it out of town and back home to Suzhou.

Public transportation:
In a nutshell, it is far to public for me. I don’t like it. I have a lot of experience with European public transportation, and I never get quite the feeling that I’m getting stared at like I do here. Actually, I don’t really mind subways. I find them easy to work with, and the passengers are varied enough that we Westerners don’t stand out so much. Beijing and Hong Kong have very nice subway systems, although Beijing could really do with filling in some of the gaps with some additional lines, as there are huge areas of the city without close access to a subway. Hong Kong’s is the best I’ve ever seen, although the accessibility is helped by the fact that the city is so linear. Shanghai’s subway is a bit shabby by comparison, but I’m sure it will be much more spiffy by the time the Shanghai Expo (World Fair) comes along next summer. Suzhou’s single subway line is slated to be completed next year as well. Also in the works is a light rail line into Shanghai, which would be so much more convenient than buying advance tickets to use the train.

Very few of the westerners drive. Cars are not really any cheaper than they are in the U.S., and parking is a nightmare. A lot of the higher-up expat corporate guys have private drivers. That might seem better, but frankly, I don’t want it. The people I know with drivers have a lot of scheduling headaches. Having a driver becomes sort of like having just one more person in your family that you have to work out your plans with. I’d really rather live without.

I really hate buses, although I do use them. Westerners rarely ride the buses, so we are really conspicuous. The drivers aren’t always that good, and are prone to really hard stops. Also, the buses can get amazingly crowded. I don’t know about you, but I think it should be one of the lesser human rights to never have to ride in a bus that is so crowded that your crotch is in contact with strangers.

Construction:
Nobody can build fast like the Chinese. Amazing what can be done when you work hard, work constantly, and cut corners. As to the stories about the workers being kept energized with rations of methamphetamines, I don’t have any way to know.

Just as important, I’m sure, is the capacity to make quick decisions. Perhaps, behind closed doors, it takes months of wrangling to make a plan. However, the state technically still owns all property, so although people are able to own pseudo-private property, there are not zoning and eminent domain issues. All that is required is one single decision.

And once the work gets started, the buildings can go up almost in front of your eyes. There is a new shopping center next to us that is nearing completion, and it looked barely started 10 months ago. There are a couple apartment towers right across from the school that are now up to about 20 stories, and they were working on the foundations when we got here. That allows for the nearly one month when everything stopped around Chinese New Year. Speaking of the school, the story is that it went up in only eight months, and was in use while still under construction. At one point, the workers were living in the gymnasiums.

Quality is what you would expect. Buildings no more than five years old look twenty. There definitely is a different standard of quality for important buildings, and I am sure that they have elite building crews for those, apart from the migrant workers who do most of the building.

English Names in China

I read this article a couple months ago and I found it interesting. It is by a man who is Chinese by birth, but raised in the U.S., who then went to live in China. In America, people had trouble with his Chinese name. When he moved to China, he expected it, quite logically, to longer be a problem. However, there (here), he found that the Chinese expected him to have an English name!

The context of the article is that most people in China (or at least most educated ones), have adopted an English name. I know from talking to people that they typically choose one in grade school. All of the secretaries at work have one, as well as anyone around town who speaks any English at all. Our Chinese tutor has one, but she does not use it (her English name is Jeannie, which in her case is quite similar to her Chinese name, although most are not). A few other names of people that I know are Judy, Christine, Caroline, Sophia, Julie, Nicky, Andy, Ken, Chris, and so on. I know more women's names than men, because most Chinese that I know are secretaries or teachers at the school. Unless there is someone I do not know, every last one of the Chinese teachers at the school are women.

One thing that interested me is that the author specifically mentions "Ivy" as being a popular name. I can confirm that, as I know three Ivys. I find that interesting in that it is a name which, although unmistakably English, is not exactly common in the U.S. Where are all the Britneys and Jennifers? The popularity of Ivy reminds me of my days on the Reservation years ago. There, the single most popular name for boys seemed to be "Ivan". I knew several Ivans, and I have no idea how it caught on. Did someone have an affectation for Russia? Other than Russians and Apaches, I have never met another Ivan in my life.

Also of interest might be this story about the names of dishes in Chinese restaurants. It bears some relation to my comment in a previous post about the gradual (and somewhat tragic) disappearance of bizarre English in China.

Hangzhou

My photographs are piling up faster than I am making blog posts. This set is from Hangzhou, which is about two hours from here. Suzhou and Hangzhou are often mentioned together, as both are famously beautiful, and both have at times in history been fabulously wealthy cities. Both are also favorite tourist destinations for the Chinese, although still a bit off the beaten path for Western tourists. That became very clear to me when we went to Beijing, where sometimes it seemed there were as many Europeans and Americans out on the street as there were Chinese.

Here are some photos:

The lake at Hangzhou (West Lake) is very famous. At one spot in the lake, there are some little spires. No one I have asked so far can tell me what they are, but I haven't tried very hard to find out either. In any case, they appear on the back of the 1 Yuan (RMB) note. In fact, the guys trying to sell you boat rides hold up the bills to advertise.

This generated a bit of a family joke that we may try to go visit the scenes on the backs of all of the banknotes. In reality, this wouldn't be to hard, except for the Llasa Palace (50 RMB note), which is in Tibet. We have already seen both West Lake at Hangzhou (1 RMB note), and the Great Hall of the People in Beijing (100 RMB note). If you want to see pictures of all of the bills, you can go to Wikipedia, or to this site.

New Concepty English

Prior to the Olympics, there was a massive effort to clean up bad English in Beijing. They did a good job of it, and it's kind of too bad, really, the end of an era. Fortunately, China is a big place. It will take many years to make even a small dent in the nationwide supply of Chinglish.

I did find one funny sign in Beijing while we were there.

Once in a Blue Moon, Politics...

A few weeks ago, I wrote a critical essay about the economic policies of the Obama administration. I never posted it, and I’m not sure I ever will. If anyone is really interested, I'll email it to you. This blog hasn’t been about politics, and I’ve only posted a political essay once so far. This is the second. Part of the reason that I don’t have much to say politically is that I'd rather just spend my time wondering at the strangeness of China right now. The other part is that traditional notions of political “issues” do not interest me. More on that at the end.

I’m doing a bit of not-so-light reading. I’ve finally been working my way through The Gulag Archipelago. It is a book best taken in small doses. Last week, I came across a passage that stood out. Then this week, I happened to read from a speech by Sonia Sotomayor, current nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. The back to back reading of these two things struck me forcefully. Below are two excerpts:


First, from Solzhenitsyn

It turns out that in that terrible year (1937) Andrei… Vyshinsky (prosecutor of Stalin’s show trials), availing himself of the most flexible dialectics…, pointed out in a report which became famous in certain circles that it is never possible for mortal men to establish absolute truth, but relative truth only. He then proceeded to a further step, which jurists of the last two thousand years had not been willing to take: that the truth established by interrogation and trial could not be absolute, but only, so to speak, relative. Therefore, when we sign a sentence ordering someone to be shot we can never be absolutely certain, buy only approximately, in view of certain hypotheses, and in a certain sense, that we are punishing a guilty person. Thence arose the most practical conclusion: that it was always useless to seek absolute evidence—for evidence is always relative—or unchallengeable witnesses—for they can say different things and different times. The proofs of guilt were relative, approximate, and the interrogator could find them, even when there was no evidence and no witness, without leaving his office, “basing his conclusions not only on his own intellect but also on his party sensitivity, his “moral forces”…”and on his character”

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn – The Gulag Archipelago, Chapter 3


And now, from Sotomayor

I accept the proposition that, as Judge Resnik describes it, "to judge is an exercise of power" and because as, another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minnow of Harvard Law School, states "there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives - no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging," I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that--it's an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others. Not all women or people of color, in all or some circumstances or indeed in any particular case or circumstance but enough people of color in enough cases, will make a difference in the process of judging….

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences…our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases… I [am not] so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life…

I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate. There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering.

Sonia Sotomayor - University of California, Berkley – 2001

There is a definite symmetry of language between these two excerpts. First, of course, is the assertion of relativity as a legitimate standard of judicial truth. The Stalinists openly embraced the concept. Sotomayor, at least, admits that there is a danger to relative morality, but only after having rationalized judging the law by it. The parallels deepen with the emphasis on what Solzhenitsyn calls "character" and "moral forces" (expressed by Sotomayor as the experience of being a Latina woman). In both cases, these are held up as being not only sources of authority for making judgments, but as literally being determinants in the making of correct decisions by those that possess them. Relevant to this, her use of the word "aspiration" is worrisome. For her, the word does not convey that one should long for a greater truth and strive for it. Rather, she uses it as a dismissive, an expression of the futility of even trying to find that great truth. By clear implication, she then substitutes something else as a standard of truth. To paraphrase what Solzhenitsyn called "party sensitivities", she is basing her decisions on gender and cultural sensitivities.

Relative truth does have its place in this world. In our human weakness, we will sometimes rely on it because, lacking the knowledge of gods, it is the best we can do. When a relative truth is expressed in the spirit of being our best human effort to interpolate absolute truth from limited information, it becomes a form of humility, an admission of our limitations, and a guard against the hubris of misplaced certainty. However, that is not the sort of relativity that is expressed in either of these passages. For both Stalin's interrogators and Judge Sotomayor, relativive truth is treated not as a best effort to reach to a fundamental truth, but rather as a window of opportunity to rationalize a desired outcome.

I am not suggesting that Sotomayor is a malevolent person, and there is absolutely nothing in her speech that suggest an affinity for Soviet-style convicting of the innocent by purely relative standards. However, there is no denying that her way of reasoning has been used by malevolent people. The deeper these ways of thinking take root, the more subjective the law becomes, and the less protection any of us have from those who will use the law to evil purposes.

As I have said before, traditional notions of politics do not interest me. My intellectual obsessions have always been questions about truth, and how we find it. As a culture, we are losing our ability to seek truth. Good people are becoming blind to the consequences of ethical relativity. We are becoming more and more willing to invent our own truths, and we are losing both our capacity, and our will, to ask and answer difficult moral questions. Politically speaking, neither side is immune. However, let me ask, what was the wellspring of this phenomena? It came out of the Marxist conceit that truth is only the self-serving invention of the ruling classes, and the postmodern truth-is-whatever-you-want-it-to-be fantasies of modern academia. And politically speaking, which side has the fundamental ties with these philosophies? The answer to that question is why, while I may never feel myself fully at home with the political Right, I am most certainly do find myself at total alienation from the political Left.

Truth, and the constant search for what it really is, is all that matters. Truth is not an opinion, it is not a feeling, and it is not a perspective. And when we don't know it, we can’t just take its absence as license to substitute it with our own. For even when we cannot find truth, we must hold to the sure knowledge that truth is out there, and it will stay there until we find it.

And then we must seek to find it.

Just checking to see who is home....

Despite the reputation (and official stance of communist atheism), churches are not uncommon in China. Some are semi-official, although with some limitations. For example, despite the fact that the Catholic Church is established within the People's Republic, it is not fully recognized. The government will not allow any truly independent organizations, and the Vatican won't countenance being told by the state whom they must choose as bishops. If you would like some additional perspective on Catholicism within China, I refer you to the excellent blog Shanghai Scrap, whose author Adam Minter often comments on the subject.

Unofficially, so-called "house churches" are said to be widespread in China, although there is no way to know how many of those there are. For those of us who are expatriates, however, the rules change entirely. The government has no problem with expat churches, so long as there are no Chinese citizens invited, and no proselytizing.

And that brings me to this little story. Last Sunday evening, we hosted a "fireside", a gathering of youth from church, in our home. There is a sizable LDS (Mormon) branch in Suzhou, and the membership is quite varied, including families from a handful of Asian nations.

Before I go any farther, I need to make a digression. All of the apartment compounds here have guards at the gates. It is often rather questionable as to exactly what their purpose is, as they typically don't actually stop anyone. At least, they usually don't stop people at other apartment compounds. Here at ours, they usually do. Our theory has been that our apartment complex is quite small, and therefore they have a better sense of who actually lives here. Just this week, a second (and compatible) theory came up, because we learned that there are many local government officials living in our compound. For some time, it has also been noticeable that Asians are stopped at the gate far more consistently than Westerners. This includes our apartment agent, hired workers, and friends (as a digression within a digression, our friend Elvina, who is Chinese-American, born and raised in New York City, gives some poignant perspective on this in her own blog entry about the confusion with which the locals, including our gate guards, treat her).

With all that as context, let me get back to my story. Over 20 people, a mixed group of Westerners and non-Chinese Asians, nicely attired in dresses and suits, came to our apartment. That isn't exactly a normal sight around here, and this wasn't the first time. We have joked together that the guards must be completely baffled.

Some time after the the gathering was over and everyone had left, the doorbell rang. I answered to find one of our familiar young guards there. He looked somewhat uncomfortable, and he didn't seem to know quite what to say at first (although maybe that was just searching for words that he hoped I would understand). He finally asked me, in Chinese, if there were any Chinese people here.

I told him that there were not, and he left. The brief exchange represented the limits of my rudimentary Chinese anyway, so there wasn't much to talk about.

The point is, why did he come?

We are not naive, and despite the fact that I joked above about our guards being baffled, we know that any insightful observer is going to eventually realize the obvious.... that all of these people could only be gathering for a church meeting of some kind. As I said, the congregation represents a mix of nationalities, and while those who are from other Asian countries are under the "foreigner rules" when it comes to churches, they are not, of course, easily distinguishable from Chinese (and even ethnic Chinese are exempt from the restrictions on churches if they hold foreign passports). Proceeding then, from the assumption that our guard was there to make sure no Chinese citizens were being included in our little gathering, a long list of other questions comes up. For example:

Are the local gate guards actually integrated into the police force? In the U.S., of course, they would not be.

Is it already within the mandate of even the lowly local gate guards to keep an eye out for renegade church meetings? That question very much intrigues me, whether or not they have standing orders to be on the lookout for such things. If so, did they sit down there in their guard booth together discussing a course of action and reading their manual or something?

Did he make this check on his own initiative, or did someone tell him to? Did he have to call in and ask for orders? Or to report his findings?

Did someone have to spy or search to figure out which apartment they were going to? This wouldn't take much. There are other Westerners in our compound, but we are pretty conspicuous, and we do get a lot of visitors, but still....

All very fascinating.


P.S. This post has become the first time I have had signficant blog readership outside family and friends, so suddenly I'm feeling like I need to be more careful in my explanations. Based on the one person who commented, there is a confusion that I can clear up. It is probably bad form to quote myself, but here is what I say in my own comment:

" Actually, the Chinese can have churches, they just can't mingle with expat churches. This incident wasn't about making sure that the Chinese don't go to church, it was about making sure that they weren't going to church with us. That is not to say that they have freedom of religion as we would concieve of it, but I will leave it to people who know more than me to elaborate on that."

The Forbidden City

Just a few quick pictures of the Forbidden City from our May trip to Beijing. It really is immense and impressive. However, I did have, in a way, a bit of a strange reaction to it. Generally, this is the first great stop that tourists make in China. Under those circumstances, I can see that it would be quite overwhelming. But after nearly a year of living here, I have to say I felt a bit jaded. We've seen a lot of this sort of thing, just never quite so big.

In any case, it really is a fascinating companion to the some of the other great palaces I've seen, like Versailles and the Medici palace in Florence. Of course, both of those would fit inside with room to spare.

John, on a separate outing from the following pictures (no, we didn't stay until dark and change clothes in the public toilet). On the right is The-Square-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.

The following are some random pictures from within. As a side note, when I was buying tickets, I am quite sure that I guy tried to pick-pocket me and failed. It is among my major lifetime goals to never get pick-pocketed. I've trudged all over France without the Gypsy rings ever getting me, and I'm trying to keep the streak going. So far, I've never seen any street hustling in China that anywhere approaches the kinds of things I've ever seen in Europe.

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This last item is from a clock museum within the Forbidden City. It contains a huge collection of spectacularly ornate clocks that were gifts of state from the European nations to the Chinese emperors. Some of them are ingeniously elaborate, and include such things as singing birds (the songs produced by slide whistles powered by bellows), dancing figurines, fountains, and a golden elephant that swings its articulated trunk as it marches. A few clockworks are actually demonstrated twice a day, but many of the best ones are at least shown in action in a looping video.
The 18th century English clock above was my favorite. When the hour chimes, the mechanical figure writes a few Chinese characters in calligraphy. The actual action is only shown on the video mentioned above, but even still, it honestly ranks as one of the coolest things I've ever seen in a museum.

Take That, Chinese Net Nannies!

You may be aware that in three weeks it will be 20 years since one of the major events of modern Chinese history. I shall refer to this as the anniversary of The-Square-That-Must-Not-Be-Named. The Chinese authorities, of course, would prefer that no one remember the anniversary at all, but barring that, I suppose that they are trying to make do with the Must-Not-Be-Named part. If there is one word that you just can't say in China, that is it.

There are elements of absurdism in this. Several weeks ago I read a report from a China blogger that signs for public squares were quietly being taken down around the country.* It was surmised that the rational was that, if you keep people from thinking about the "Square" part, they won't think of the "Must-Not-Be-Named" part, and that will keep them from thinking about all that unpleasantness with protesters and tanks.

When we were in Beijing two weeks ago, we had to get our bags searched just to go into The-Square-That-Must-Not-Be-Named. I don't know if that is a normal thing, or if it is just precaution for the anniversary. What I do know is that some time ago I started to say to people that we could all expect to see a whole lot more net censorship as the day approached.

Unless we just had a huge coincidence, it appears I was right. You may be aware of "The Great Firewall of China", a partly derisive term for the sporadic efforts of the Chinese government to censor and restrict Internet access. On Friday, May 15th, access to popular blog hosting services like Blogspot (which I use), Wordpress, Typepad, etc., suddenly disappeared. So far, outlets like Facebook are still working, but I expect that a lot more sites will go down over the next couple weeks. Nevertheless, enforcement is completely capricious and arbitrary. For example, as far as I can tell, news of the newly published memoirs by Zhou Ziyang, the one government official who sided with the protesters (and spent the rest of his life under house arrest for doing so) has not been restricted at all.

Of course, you might note that I am writing on a Blogspot hosted blog right now.... That is because I just purchased a subscription to a VPN (Virtual Private Network). Given what they just did for me, I don't at all mind giving the good folks at Witopia.com a free plug. The service costs $40 a year, and it routes me through an IP address in Washington D.C., making it appear to the Chinese authorities that my computer is located there, not here.

It might seem obvious that the Chinese government would move on to blocking access to VPN services like this, but they don't really, and here is my theory. I think they don't care. The Internet is a very unruly beast, and they can't control the whole thing anyway. However, they can make things difficult, and they can keep people reminded that they are paying attention. Also, subscription sites like this one are not an option for a lot of Chinese anyway. A typical schoolteacher, for example, makes around $500 a month, which makes even a $40 subscription prohibitive. Not to mention that I don't know if they have a way to make the payment with a Chinese credit card.

There is also the fact that the Internet enforcement is sporadic. Based on some quick research of mine, this is at least the third time Blogspot has been blocked (the others were 2005 and 2007). So, rather than really make an effort to beat the system or plot revolution, people just wait for the rules to unexpectedly change again. It is like being a lab rat in a classic Skinnerian behavioral psychology experiment. Why should one have a plan when the results are random anyway? Just keep pushing that lever until your food pellet comes out, or your web page loads.

Nothing quite like random reinforcement to keep the lab rats occupied. Well, here is my own small revolution. Take That, Chinese Net Nannies!


The unknown "tank man" takes a stand on June 5th, 1989, on a street leading to Tiananmen Square.

Post Script: 18 hours later, and Blogspot is up and running again, sort of.... it is working, but all of the pictures are blocked, except that I found one blog that wasn't.

Like I said, random reinforcement!

P.P.S: 36 hours later, and Blogspot is down again. Why I outta.... Oo! food pellet!



* Note. It is some time later, and I wanted to clarify the comment made above. I am still quite sure that I read somewhare that the authorities were physically taking down signs for "squares", however, the closest I can find is a comment that it was speculated that they might take down signs. On that note, I have now included a link to a blog post by James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly. I really need to branch out on my sources, because I think this is the third time I've quoted him.

I had a hard time finding this link for some reason, and I emailed Mr. Fallows with a question about it. He was gracious enough to reply. The following is a quote from his email to me:

On the “square” business, yes, here was my story: I appeared at both the Shanghai and the Beijing Literary Festivals this year. They had a very nice description of me in the program, picture, and all the rest. But one thing was different in my write-up and that of the other 30+ writers: I was the only one whose book wasn’t named. That was because (I was told by the person who produced the programs) they considered the title “Postcards from Tomorrow Square” too “sensitive.” You know, “Square” and all.

I asked the guy (a Brit) whether they planned to rename the Tomorrow Square building in Shanghai, or for that matter People’s Square, which takes up half the downtown. He said, “Don’t get me started…”

The Nanjing Massacre Memorial and Museum

This post is all from an outing I took with John about a month and a half ago to Nanjing. It was a different trip from the one shown in an earlier post. Lee and the girls were up to something or other for the day (I can't remember what), so we did a little father and son outing.

John has a book of World War Two sites that can be seen in Asia and the Pacific. Nanjing is the only one on the list that is in easy range of us. The big thing to see there is the Nanjing Massacre Memorial and Museum, and that is where we went.

Upwards of a quarter of a million Chinese in the Nanjing area were killed by the invading Japanese during the war. It is a very sore subject for the Chinese, not only for the horror itself, but for the continuing Japanese tendency to ignore and dismiss wartime atrocities (huge protests broke out a few years ago simply because yet another round of Japanese school textbooks were adopted that whitewashed the whole affair).

I don't have an organized story to go with this, so I will just drop comments as I go. Outside of the museum is a line of rather abstract statues. They have something of the effect, perhaps, of Picasso's Guernica. Each one has a caption that is worth reading, you should be able to read them if you click on them. They kind of capture the general tone of the place, which could just as well be called the "Nanjing Anti-Japanese Memorial". Throughout the memorial and museum, the sense of rage and despair are very palpable.

Past this line of statues (there are several more beyond these four), is the entry to the museum and memorial. At the gate, each guest is asked to write their nationality on a list. I've never had anywhere else ask us to do that. One could assume that this was just for statistical purposes, but I did look through the list quickly and I noted that there were no Japanese on it. Then again, if I were Japanese and coming here, I would sign as a Korean.

The grounds are quite dramatic, and make very good use of space to seem otherworldly.


Here a few pictures of photos and displays within the museum.

The Japanese entry into the city of Nanjing.

The Japanese entry into Suzhou, including a Japanese flag signed by soldiers to commemorate the day.

A torture device, a gibbet of sorts, in which the victim was tumbled. If you look closely, you will see that there are spikes lining the inside. There were actually far more gruesome implements and images, but some of the areas had guards standing by, and the Chinese prohibition of photography is always completely arbitrary. I didn't want to antagonize anyone.

Human remains in an excavation. This is in a different area than the pair that follows.

The centerpiece of the museum is a large excavated area of victims that have been left in situ, and the building has been built around them. It was quite a moving exhibit, even allowing for the distracting horror movie style music playing softly through the PA system.

A very interesting incident occurred for us here. A Chinese woman (probably around age 50), seemed to shadow John for part of the walk. When he stopped part way through, she stepped up to him and said, in English, "Do you believe it is real?!", in a tone that seemed to suggest that he must go forth and bear witness of what he saw there.

As I said, this place brings out real passions for the Chinese.

Watch this Place.

I haven't got around to/felt like making a blog post lately. That's too bad, because I've got a lot of good pictures, some good stories, some righteous indignations, a report on swine flu hysteria, and last but not least a lead on good Mexican food in Shanghai. You will just have to check back later. Maybe I'll muster some ambition this weekend.

So, as a little placeholder here, I thought I'd through in an interesting link to the total solar eclipse that is going to pass right over Shanghai and Suzhou on July 22. Unfortunately, that will be when we are back in the U.S.. That is actually disappointing, but life is like that sometimes, and it will be good to go home.

New Concepty English

One sucks, but the other is oh so easy to get along with.

Miscellany

Some more photos that, considered individually, are not interesting enough to get their own blog entries.

The Suzhou train platforms. On the right is one of the high-speed (150+ mph) trains that runs the Shanghai to Nanjing line.

Left: Taken in Hangzhou. The ugliest outfit ever. It looks like it is made of dead Muppet babies. The purse is a nice touch.

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Right: Taken in Nanjing. The only American-style punk street tagging I have ever seen in China. I'm hoping it never catches on.

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If your Big Mac wasn't enough, treat yourself to a red bean pie next time you go to Mac do do (more or less how it is pronounced in Chinese).