The Arizona Anachronism

Eventually, even the New York Times figures it out.

2010-05-26T19:28:00.014+08:00

It would be difficult, at this point, to express my disgust with the New York Times, but I’m going to try.

I should preface this yet again. I am a political independent. As I have said in the early incarnation of this blog, most conventional political issues don’t interest me. My primary interests are philosophical, and all revolve around the fight to uphold standards of objective truth and ethics in the post-modern world. The fact that this has made me a “default conservative” is something that I’m willing and able to fully explain another time, but this post will do for now.

Let me get to the point. This week, the New York Times, to my knowledge for the very first time, realized the obvious: that the European social welfare model is failing.

This really should never have been a political argument; it's simply a mathematic and demographic reality. Why on earth the folks at the "Paper of Record" couldn’t notice this before they spent months cheer-leading Obamacare, I don’t really know (actually, I do really know, they are more loyal to their utopian fantasies than they are to reality).

Now, suddenly, the NYT runs an article titled “Europeans Fear Crisis Threatens Liberal Benefits”. I quote:

“With low growth, low birthrates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle, at least not without a period of austerity and significant changes.”

Well, I guess no one can sleepwalk forever. And yet even that statement is wishful thinking. Let’s put the emphasis on the “no longer afford” half of that quote, because the prospects for "austerity”, and “significant changes”, aren't very good. Merely the suggestion has already caused mass riots in Greece, and even the crowd-murder of three bank employees.

Greece is only the vanguard, because as even the New York Times admits in this article, this is not a Greek problem, it’s a European one; and with American political elites now hellbent on Europeanizing America, it is our problem too. This situation isn't going away. Let me go back to my credit theme from earlier posts. Do you want to make a long term bet on an aging society that will soon have a 1 to 1 ratio between workers and retirees? Do you want to buy their government bonds? And if you are from the ambitious half of European society that still has a work ethic, do you want to pay the taxes that support this situation?

Incidentally, this says volumes to me about which side, in our great bipolar political debates, I should believe. Conservatives have been saying this was going to happen for the past half-century and longer. For all that time, political liberals have called them stupid, heartless, and greedy for saying so.

Now finally the (pallorous) Gray Lady admits the same problem. Well, they say so in the news section at least, their editorialists still ignore the elephant in the room. And that elephant retired early with no children and wants a taxpayer funded pension.

Here’s an idea: since it was the conservatives who said all this in the first place, perhaps you just should have believed them. And perhaps you should start now.* And maybe, just maybe, what was truly stupid, greedy, and heartless, was your having thought that you could relax and let the labor of immigrants and someone else's 1.3 children support you for the non-working half your life.

-AzA

* notice that I said "conservatives", not Republicans. When it comes to economics, the Republicans have pretty much been just the party that spent the same deficits on different things. That doesn't change this fact that the bad economic theories all originated on the left!

Chinese Migrant School

2010-05-26T17:06:00.006+08:00

These are some more pictures that have been sitting around for a while. A few months ago, the family did some volunteering at a migrant school. These are kids of migrant workers from around China, who are here in the wealthy east mostly as construction workers. The school wasn't purpose built for them. As I understood it, it was supposed to be a regular school (and may yet be). It was far too nice of a facility to have been built for migrant workers, despite the fact that it was shabby, and freezing cold.

We were there to just do some basic little English activities. Some of these kids were pretty sharp.

I made sure to get a good clear photo of the girl in the center of the photo on the right. One thing that a lot of people don't know about China is how much ethnic variety there really is. The culturally, politically, and numerically dominant group are the Han Chinese. 90% of the population is Han (although considering that many of the ethnic minorities are either exempt from, or ignore, the one-child policy, it is interesting to speculate how long that will last).

In any case, I don't know if these kids are Han or not. They did speak Mandarin, but just about everyone speaks it as at least a secondary dialect, and I certainly don't understand enough to distinguish accents (or ask kids detailed questions about their backgrounds).

My point all that goes back to the fact that there is a lot of variety in China. The stereotypical Chinese "look" is not at all universal. It is a very common experience for me to see people in the street who, for all the world, look exactly like the Latino and American Indian students I have had over the years. I thought the that girl in the middle was a good example of that. If I were to see her in a different context, I might have assumed she was Mexican.

Finally, a photo I took from a window of the school's front gate. Note the reception dish mounted on top of a chair on the roof. Scenes like this keep my earlier comment about being in "wealthy" China a little bit in perspective, no?

Are you threatening me?

2010-05-13T21:33:00.002+08:00

Okay, I've already explained that I am conflicted/ambivalent/skeptical of Arizona's new immigration law. But this is just too funny. Following the lead of San Francisco, the city of Los Angeles has announced that they will be boycotting the State of Arizona.

Bankrupt cities in a bankrupt state are threatening not to do business with us. Considering that half the time they can't even pay their own state employees, I find that threat hard to take seriously.

Go ahead, Los Angeles. I think we can live without your IOUs.

- AzA

Huangshan (Yellow Mountain)

2010-05-08T13:42:00.011+08:00

This was never intended to become purely a political blog, I'm just leaving the family stuff out of it these days. Look me up on facebook for those photos.

These are some photos from a recent outing to Huangshan. Yellow mountain, as it is called in English, is probably the most famous mountain range in China, and it is very significant in the Chinese psyche. If it looks familiar to you, it is because a great deal of traditional Chinese art was painted here. Even now, you will find lots of artists along the trails, using traditional materials.

The hiking isn't terribly natural. All the paths are paved with handrails. That isn't to say that it is easy. It is about 6000 feet in elevation, and virtually every path is stairs. Some are quite steep. Me and the boy hiked a good 15 miles or so over two days.

Below are some of that stairs that have been cut into and sunk into the cliffs. This section of the mountain is quite spectacular, but it is off of the main trail, away from the famous peaks. There were relatively few hikers here, which was nice. The main trails get quite full. It is said to be the ambition of all Chinese to climb Huangshan at least once. Even the emperors were expected to do so. That means a lot of people can be there at one time. I've been told that during the May 1st holiday, there can be over 250,000 people on the mountain at one time. That sounds excessive to me, if only because of the logistics of buses and hotels for that many people. Then again, this is China, and the Chinese know how to do big crowds right.

We were there the week before the big holiday. That meant only mostly big crowds, instead of unbelievably big crowds.

More miscellaneous pictures.

There are several hotels on the mountain like the one below. All of the supplies for them, and garbage from them, are carried up by porters. They clog the main trails and make it quite hard to get around sometimes. Some of them carry pretty incredible loads. It exerts an amazing peer pressure.... stopping on the trail makes one feel pretty pathetic when a guy with 20 gallons of cooking oil on a bamboo yoke is coming up behind you.

I don't know if the building materials were carried up or not. There are no roads. There was a construction site near one hotel that had a small bulldozer and hydraulic shovel at work. Maybe they brought those in by helicopter.

On the right, there is a billboard of Deng Xiaoping visiting Huangshan, looking quite sporty in his shorts. Like I said, every emperor was expected to climb the mountain, and that includes the Communist ones too.

Don't cry for me Arizona.

2010-05-04T19:56:00.007+08:00

Well, I'm from Arizona. It's even in the name. Therefore, I suppose I'm practically obligated to have something to say about an Arizona issue so big that it has made world news (last week I even watched it on China's English language news program). So here it goes. It's in list form, because I'm not willing to invest the effort to turn it into an essay. Considering how much I'm contradicting myself, that would be especially hard, anyway.

1. All nations regulate and control immigration. To not do so is to literally abandon national sovereignty itself. In the entire world, perhaps only the United States is under public pressure not to regulate immigration, or even to enforce its own immigration laws.

2. It never would have come to this if the federal government showed any interest in enforcing its own laws.

3. Mexico has used the porous American border as a safety valve to avoid unrest, and even potential revolution, among its own citizens. It also props up its own economy with the huge inflow of cash that come from remittances to family members from Mexican workers in the U.S. Yet despite it’s insistence that America not enforce it’s own immigration laws, the Mexican government brutally patrols its own southern border with Guatemala.

4. Cesar Chavez, whose name is invoked by activists, openly opposed illegal immigration.

5. Radical immigrant groups are nationalists and separatists. The useless media hyperventilates every time someone in Texas says anything even mildly secessionist. However, the "La Raza" activist groups promote it explicitly. I have personally worked with these types of “immigration” activists. I can tell you that their antipathy for the United States is profound, that their desire for secession is literal, and that they are perfectly transparent about it whenever they think that you can’t understand Spanish (and sometimes you don't even need that, like the link above shows). Considering that several major elected officials in Arizona and other states have deep ties to them, their agenda should not be dismissed as irrelevant and “fringe”. It is a legitimate danger to the republic.

6. The pro-business Right conveniently forgets that they wanted, and gain by, the labor of immigrants in the first place. They suppose that they can have free flow of capital and resources without having a flow of labor as well. It is deeply naïve. They need to admit that the workers are being drawn to the U.S. by legitimate free market principles. Free market conservatives should be leading the charge to streamline and shorten the process for legal immigration.

7. Bitter and enraged men like Russell Pearce of the Arizona State Legislature (a chief sponsor of the current immigration bill) are constant reminders to me as to why I’ve never registered as a Republican.

8. Any elected official who calls for an economic boycott of his own state is a first-class idiot, and a betrayer of his constituents. He should be run out of town on a rail. Raul Grijalva, this means you.

9. Illegal immigration and illegal immigrants are closely correlated to crime, including violent gang crime. To pretend otherwise is a denial of reality.

10. Republicans seemed almost determined to alienate Mexican-Americans. If they had any sense, they would realize that Hispanics are natural allies in the support for traditional family values.

11. Democrats have sold their souls to identity politics. If they had any scruples, they would stop their tactics of electoral divide and conquer by trying to stir up division between groups of American citizens. They need to quit using immigration as a propaganda tool to paint valid concerns by American citizens as “racist”. And if they were more intellectually honest, they would push for immigration law to be changed, rather than just acquiesce on the law being ignored.

12. If Hispanic (and any other minority group) voters were wiser, they would realize that no political party will ever lift a finger for any voting bloc whose votes they can take for granted.

13. Asking for identification is not the same thing as racial profiling.

14. The two stupidest memes in the entire immigration debate are as follows: For the right, it is “Of course they are criminals, they are ‘illegal’ immigrants.” For the left, it is “Show me a twelve foot fence, and I will show you a thirteen foot ladder”.

The first is a circular argument, in which the speaker tries to distract through verbal sleight of hand from the actual question. Everyone knows that it is “illegal”.... the point under debate is whether or not that illegality is just. To reflexively turn back to the meaning of the word itself is semantic obfuscation.

As for the second, it is a lazy attempt to paint all immigration enforcement as futile. If the Left actually believed that government was so powerless, they would abandon all of their great grand schemes (of which they are so fond) to regulate every aspect of human behavior and opinion. They should just admit that they don’t want immigration law enforced and be done with it.

15. A great many Mexican-American citizens actually support strict immigration enforcement. It would be very hard for this new law to get the 70% support that it has without them.

16. Some of the very best students I ever had back in Arizona were illegal immigrants. There needs to be a much better and faster process for those that really do have something to contribute to our society to gain legal residency.

Darth Vader goes Honky Tonk

2010-04-22T21:05:00.001+08:00

This is totally stupid, but I haven't laughed this hard at something in weeks.

Well that certainly explains a lot...

2010-04-15T22:05:00.003+08:00

I've known for a long time that a lot of people believe that there are aliens visiting earth. After years of teaching high school, that doesn't even rank in my top 10 crazy ideas I've heard.

Based on a recent survey, 20% of people worldwide (or at least in selected countries) believe that aliens walk among us disguised as humans. That number is high enough. But apparently, in China and India, the number is 40%!

I've been pondering that all day today. Did 40% of the people I walked past today here in China believe that there were aliens walking among us? Were those aliens on the street right then?

Or maybe they think I'm an alien. I kind of hope that they do. I'm wondering if I can come up with some way to entertain myself by confirming their suspicions. That would be some good clean fun....

Give Me Some Credit, again

2010-04-06T19:28:00.004+08:00

To return to an earlier theme: being "rich" just isn't as big of a deal as you think it is. After all, what place could possibly be richer than California?

To quote one of my favorite movies (Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, but probably countless other movies as well), "It's all about the money, boys!". Or to be more specific again, all about the credit. And when it comes to that credit, Kazakhstan and Mexico are looking better than California.

This sort of thing is literally keeping me up at nights right now. It's not just California at this point. We're in a tight spot (to quote the same movie again), and the Obama administration is doing nearly everything it possibly can to replicate the problem on a national scale. If that happens, Americans, unlike those Californians fleeing to Utah, don't have anywhere to which we can "R-U-N-N-O-F-T."

Okay, I'll stop quoting the movie now.

Wait a sec, wasn't it set in the Great Depression?

Congress spends your money, and steals my jokes

2010-04-06T16:58:00.007+08:00

I'm never going to be a proper blogger at this rate. I've had this post in mind for a week, but I'm only getting to it now.

In a history class several years ago, I was asked the following question by a very sweet, but extremely confused young woman: "How do islands float, anyway?".

Now, being the kind and gentle teacher that I am, I refrained from direct ridicule. However, that has not stopped me from milking that incident for jokes countless times over the years. It has been a very useful addition to my arsenal of "stupid questions", which all teachers collect and reuse endlessly, just to answer the question of "just how dumb could somebody be?"

Well, they could be a U.S. Congressman. Last week, Rep. Hank Johnson - Democrat, of Georgia, stated in a hearing with the House Armed Services Committee, an unexpected concern. Watch and listen.

Yes, that's right. The honorable congressman is concerned that, with an impending influx of U.S. military personnel, that the island of Guam might become overloaded and capsize!

Disclaimers have since been disseminated that Johnson was joking. I'm not convinced, and that explanation certainly doesn't seem to be gaining media traction. It has also been noted that Johnson suffers from Hepatitis C, which can cause disorientation and confusion. On that note, the man deserves sympathy. But why on earth can't he get that sympathy while he convalesces at home, rather than conduct national affairs and vote on how to spend our tax dollars, while all the while worrying about island buoyancy? And, even if the poor man is confused, he can't be the brightest bulb in the first place. His condition might well jumble his thoughts, but it can't generate them out of thin air.

Oh by the way.... When I got asked that question, I did have an answer. I told the girl that islands floated because they were built out of styrofoam. Now you might think that I handicapped her education, but it is now very clear that I did her a big favor. Thanks to me, she is qualified for a good career. The benefits are spectacular, and they hire new applicants every two years.

-AzA

Give Me Some Credit

2010-03-25T18:14:00.017+08:00

Here’s a little historical question for you…

What caused the Great Depression?

Oh, I’m not asking for all the usual high school textbook answers: stock market crashes, trade protectionism, drought, indebted farmers. I’m asking about this from another angle. My question is more fundamental: How did a rich nation, in fact the world’s richest nation, grind to a halt?

Nothing real had disappeared. Everything tangible was still there. The workers were still available, the factories still stood, the banks and the farms hadn’t gone anywhere (excepting those that had been carried by a dust storm into the next state).

And then it all stopped.

What happened? Did America suddenly stop being rich? Did the factories disappear? Did the workers lose their skills? Did the resources run out? No. All those things were still there, just as they had been before. The Depression started for lots of reasons, but one simple and single factor links them all: the money stopped flowing, by which I mean that the credit dried up. No one would lend anyone any money anymore.

We say that America is rich. We are very rich. But rich matters a whole lot less than you think it does. A man with vast property is rich by definition, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he can pay his bills. Wealth means little without income, and in the modern world, all income really depends on credit.

Credit is much maligned, and much misunderstood. While indebtedness is usually bad, credit is usually very, very good. Wonderful, actually, as it literally makes the whole system work. Using credit is not necessarily the same as going into debt. Think about your own household purchasing. Unless you use cash for literally everything, you are using credit all the time. If you use a check or card, even the supermarket “lends” you groceries until they get your money a few minutes, hours, or a couple days later. And absolutely all of the most expensive things you ever buy are bought with credit. Without credit, it might be years before you bought a house or a car, if ever.

Even the most successful business runs on credit, even if it doesn’t have any actual long-term debt. A business buys expensive capital equipment on credit, which is what makes it possible to make goods and services in the first place. It uses credit to stabilize its cash flow over time, so that it can meet day to day expenses. Without that credit, it is absolutely impossible to run a modern business, because an advanced economy requiring large capital investments and cash flows simply can’t depend on people physically carrying around cash. All of the things that are used to make everything else, the capital, labor, and resources, all are useless without credit.

The same is true for nations. They run on credit. America has a lot of physical capital, a lot of human capital, and a lot of resources. But none of those matter much without credit.

Some people say that America should do this or that important, ambitious, noble, or generous thing because we are rich. But rich doesn’t matter, credit matters. For one to borrow, another must lend. For another to lend to you, he must have confidence in your future. A lender is not interested in how rich you are, he is interested in whether or not you can pay him back. And he gets to make that decision, not you. You may think that everything is fine, but what matters is if he thinks everything is fine.

We spend a lot of time telling ourselves that everything is fine because we are rich. It is true that we own a lot of things, and it is also true that we do have a lot of money. But let me extend what I said above about "being" rich to the subject of "having" money. We have less money that you think, and what we do have matters less than you think it does.

I'll illustrate it this way. Do you remember the cartoons of Scrooge McDuck? He kept a big vault of money, and swam in it for pleasure. If Scrooge never made another dime in his duck life, he could have kept spending that money for a very long time before it would all be gone. Our money isn’t quite like that. Most Americans don’t have any money saved at all. If we tried to swim in our money like Scrooge McDuck, we would be painfully jumping into a big pile of consumer goods and/or the disposable packaging they came in, because that is what we spent all our money on. Actually, scratch that. We would be jumping into empty air, because half of that stuff we own hasn’t even been paid for with real money yet, it is getting paid for with future money that we expect someone else to give us right before we are due to pay the bill on the credit card we bought the stuff with.

Americans don’t actually have money, so much as we have a lots of movement of money. What comes around goes around, and no sooner do we get money then do we pass it along to the next guy. When it comes to our buying habits, we don’t really have the money today, we just always assume that we will have money tomorrow.

In an advanced economy, everyone is doing this, including individuals, businesses, and the government itself. Most, if not all, of our long term plans are actually based on tomorrow’s money. Therefore, all our projections are meaningless if the money doesn’t keep flowing, and once again, that all comes back to credit. Once upon a time, the credit necessary to run the U.S. government came from the savings of Americans, who used those savings to buy U.S. treasury bonds. We don’t do that much anymore. Instead, we mostly let the Japanese and the Chinese do it. They will keep giving us credit only so long as they believe in our future ability to pay. The moment they lose confidence, they don’t lend.

And when that moment comes, everything stops. It doesn't stop in that future year that we showed on our charts and spreadsheets. It stops at that moment. Then it no longer matters what factories, stores, infrastructure, human skills, or resources we have. The economy stops.

For the time being, we are still okay. The Japanese and Chinese haven’t lost confidence in our economy just yet. Luckily for us, they don’t really have too many other places to put their savings anyway. But ask yourself this question. Would you buy U.S. debt if you had other options?

Let’s look at just a few items from America’s balance sheet.

Social Security is supposedly going to run out in some year or other at some point in the future. I think I remember the exact year, but I’m not even going to bother to look it up. Last year’s biggest-in-American history “stimulus package” which was spent on virtually everything under the sun except those things that are generally considered to actually “stimulate” an economy, involved a specific amount that is supposed to be repaid by a certain time. I think I remember those numbers too, but I’m not going to bother to look those up either. I’m not being lazy, I’m making a point. Would it really matter if I told you the numbers anyway? They are already so big that we can't even visualize them as abstractions. They have no frame of reference. How do you describe a trillion, anyway? Do all those analogies about how deep the ocean is, or how many times around the equator, or how far away the moon is, really tell you anything? They might as well be imaginary numbers.

Actually, they pretty much are imaginary numbers. They change all the time, as they are purely based on predictions. Do you remember all that talk of surpluses when the Clinton administration ended? What happened to it? If you are inclined to be partisan and blame Bush for losing it (okay, fair enough, I'm also inclined to blame Bush for losing it), just think of it like this: If Bush lost our money, then Obama has found it and gone to Vegas.

But of course, in reality, there was no money to lose. That surplus wasn't cash in a Scrooge McDuck vault, it was only a prognostication for the future. And just like in those time travel science fiction movies, the future is always changing. Just today, news came out that as of this year, the government is paying out more for social security benefits than it is taking in from social security taxes. That wasn't supposed to happen until 2016.

And now comes our latest and greatest must-do-it-because-we-are-rich spending scheme, Obamacare. This bankruptcy in the making has been promoted with numbers that are worse than imaginary. This time, they are flat-out lies. They are based on the next ten years of tax collection, but only on a six year period of expenses that doesn’t even start for another four years. And for that matter, the promised cost "savings" over those ten years literally equals only about half of what the U.S. Federal government spent last month!

So forget all the numbers. Let's get back to credit. None of the numbers matter one bit unless the credit keeps flowing. And for that, we’ve got to keep selling government debt, and people have to keep believing that it is safe to buy it.

Is it still safe to buy it? Last week, it was announced that Moody’s Investment Services, is warning that the U.S. bond rating may be downgraded from AAA status. In fact, as far as the free market is concerned, it already has been downgraded, because it is now considered safer to invest in several private companies than it is to buy short term U.S. treasury bonds!

That is unprecedented. U.S. Treasury bonds have traditionally been the safest investment in the world, and now people trust them less than bonds from Berkshire Hathaway, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouses, Abbot Laboratories, and the Royal Bank of Canada.

Investors now trust U.S. treasury bonds less than those of four major corporations, one more that you've never heard of, and a Canadian Bank. I wonder how investors got that idea?

Right now, foreign investors are still buying our debt and giving us credit. They still have confidence. Pray that they don’t lose it, because when and if they do, we will all find out very, very, quickly that being the “richest” country doesn’t really matter all that much.

-AzA

America's drift (now plunge) to social democracy, and the price of it

2010-03-24T18:05:00.004+08:00

This is an eloquent and moving speech from researcher Charles Murray, about the consequences of the American temptation to European-style social democracy. It isn't possible to say it better than he has said it, so I will simply encourage you to read it.

-AzA

The Beasts of the Forest

2010-03-21T20:56:00.010+08:00

On very rare occasions, one has a conversation that sticks in the mind for life. I had one a few years ago that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

I was talking to a French friend as we drove down a highway somewhere outside of Paris. It was winter, and that got us talking about the cold. That turned into talking about the heat. That reminded me of hot summer days in France, where few homes have air conditioning. Granted, air conditioning figures disproportionately in the consciousness of those of us from Arizona, but I still remember being quite uncomfortable on the rare, truly hot French summer day. And that memory led me to make a comment about the great European heat wave of 2003. I wasn’t there, of course, but if you remember, there was quite the public scandal when nearly 15,000 elderly French men and women died in their homes from heat exhaustion, stroke, and dehydration.

At that moment, my friend, who had until then always been a gregarious speaker, turned silent. I was worried that I had deeply offended him. It had been several years since I had had a real chance to speak French for an extended conversation, and I thought that in my enthusiasm I overstepped my bounds. I started to apologize, but my friend cut me off. Then, through a clenched jaw and with palpable bitterness, he said:

“The French abandon their old to live like beasts in the forest!”

He elaborated at some length, but the gist of his words had already been distilled in the first phrase, so I won’t retell it here. I thought of that conversation repeatedly in the following weeks, and it led me to reflect on a far older personal experience, one that I hadn’t given any thought to in several years.

Over two decades ago, I was a Mormon missionary in France. The land of post-Christian secularism is hardly the most fruitful place to proselytize, and if you are inclined to ask me why the French need missionaries, well, at least a hundred Frenchmen already beat you to the question. Not many people wanted to talk to us, and I remember spending a lot of time just knocking on doors and trying to be sociable; and in that, I saw a side of France that few others have ever seen, including no doubt most French people.

Many tourists have seen the famous side of France. Monuments and museums, tree lined streets, and cozy cafes, stylish women, and noisy little cars. Those that venture from the tourist corridors might see a bit of the rougher side of France, but those were hardly exceptional, as every city in every nation has similar neighborhoods.

But within those streets are hidden something else. In every neighborhood, there are long dark hallways of small apartments, each holding a single, frail old man or woman. I met and talked to them day after day. They were desperately lonely, and yet many of them had barely left their apartments in years. They were often terrified, and refused to open their doors. But sometimes they did. I have very specific memories of some of them. A delirious old man wearing no pants; A frightened old woman who asked if we would buy her groceries; Another who hadn’t had a hot meal in months and asked if I would fix her stove. Typically, they hadn’t heard from their family, including their own children, in years. Sometimes they told us stories. Some had fought in the First World War. One old woman told us of carrying messages in her shoes for the French Resistance in the Second World War.

These were people like you and me, and they had been abandoned.

Even today, I’m not willing to turn my experiences and observations into a larger condemnation of the French. In fact, my French friend’s judgment of his countrymen was much harsher than my own. The French have always been good to me. The problem, as I see it, is not that the French are heartless. Rather, it is that they, like all of us, tend to ignore whatever we are given the opportunity to ignore. And if they truly do ignore their old, it is only because the state promised that it would take care of them, back when it socialized medicine over sixty years ago.

Like everything else in life, socialized medicine offers a choice. We will sacrifice some things in order to gain others. The basic exchange is simple: we will give taxes, and gain security. However, implicit in this bargain are a number of additional, intangible costs. The first and foremost is a dramatic increase in the power of the state. Citizens simply cannot cede such a large segment of the economy to a government without losing some of their individual economic independence. The decline of economic freedom erodes every other kind of freedom, both because the new government authority expands, and because the door has already been opened to more and more intrusion into daily life. After all, every possible event or condition effects our health in one way or another, and therefore virtually anything is now under the purview of the state. Additionally, socialized medicine breeds resentment and contempt for others, because their health problems are now our taxes. Preventable health problems are no longer seen as private consequences of an individual’s free choices, but as a theft of your money. But there is more. It fosters a sense of dependency in citizens. It weakens the bonds of obligation within family and community. And finally, in the end, its unsustainable costs will bankrupt nations.

But enough of that, everyone knows those arguments, and most people seem to have already taken up sides. For those who support socialized medicine, there is one final argument that trumps all others: That argument is that socialized medicine is compassionate. It’s a powerful moral argument. After all, should we not care for the weak and sick among us? Arguments for socialized medicine are always framed in such terms. We must be compassionate, and therefore the state must care for the citizens.

However, that sentiment also has an inverse. If socialized medicine can on the one hand be seen as our using the resources of the state to show our caring for others, it can just as easily been seen as license not to care about others, because the state will do it for us.

After many years of observation, I am very much convinced that, among advocates of socialized healthcare, that latter sentiment is the far more widespread motivation. Some of the individuals I have listened to argue for it the most forcefully have been among the most angry, alienated, and resentful persons that I have ever known. In their contempt for others, they have not desired to care for others, but rather to be absolved of the need for caring.

“Socialized” anything is in fact a cruel oxymoron. It is distinctly anti-social as it actively discourages caring. Only weeks ago, a man I know who is an outspoken advocate of “social democracy” rejected out of hand the suggestion that he participate in a local charity program for migrant Chinese workers. “That should be the government’s job, not ours!” he said. That sentiment may not be universal among the citizens of the enlightened welfare states, but it is common, and much more common than it is among Americans. It is an uncomfortable truth for some people that Americans give much more time and money to private charity than do western Europeans. This is especially true of social conservatives, that same Neanderthal class that so adamantly opposes socialized medicine.

I am, for the record, not in any way a defender of the status quo of the U.S. medical system. I have been a critic for many years, and was so long before I gradually became a conservative by default. I'm not even opposed to government welfare programs, so long as they are carefully targeted in their purposes, and limited enough in scope that they don't foster permanent dependency. I want Americans to have good affordable health care, that they can choose and control for themselves. Free citizens don’t need "free" health care, they need free choices, and the dignity and self-respect that come with self-reliance. Compassion cannot be compelled. However, these are arguments that have been made eloquently by others elsewhere, and if you haven’t read them, I will fail in convincing you otherwise here.

I'll conclude with the story I began with. I recently retold it just as I did above to a person from a nation with socialized medicine. The response was that “no doubt the same thing went on in America”. Maybe. I doubt it though. I've never read anything anywhere that suggests a similar phenomena exists in the U.S., and until several thousand geriatric Americans die in a single heat wave, I’m going to remain skeptical. In any case, what consolation would that be? The entire promise of socialized medicine was supposed to be that things like that wouldn’t happen in the first place.

Socialized medicine promises that others will take care of us, while at the same time promising that we need not concern ourselves with others. These are incompatible promises, but they do offer each of us the comfort of ignorance…. an ignorance that, for many, may persist right up to the moment that all the promises fail, and they themselves join the beasts in the forest.

-- AzA

Changes are in Store

2010-03-17T19:27:00.002+08:00

I have really lacked my old blogging motivation lately. I'm going to get back to it, but in the meantime I've made a momentous (for my dozen or so readers) decision to rework this blog to a different purpose.

For some time, I've wanted to write a few more general essays on cultural, philosophical, and political topics. Several times, I've been on the brink of starting a new blog for that purpose. One of the things that has held me back is the lack of a blog name.

Finally, I realized that the name I actually wanted to write under was the one I already had. I like this name, and it is appropriate to the tone and perspective from which I wish to write.

All of my previous, family-adventures-in-China posts have been transferred to a new blog. It is not confidential, but at the same time, I don't really wish for my two blogging worlds to mix. Therefore, I have provided no link. If you actually know me, please email me and ask for the new link. And if you don't actually know me, then convince me in the comments that I should divulge the new link.

Happy Trails.

AzA

Harbin - how cold can you go?

2010-02-22T20:05:00.009+08:00

Well, it is time to finally get around to posting something again. This is from a couple months ago.

Being from Arizona, one could expect that I would not have a lot of experience with cold. One would be mostly right.

However, I do have some limited experience. Many people who are not from Arizona make the false assumption that the entire state is a hot desert. That is not true. About two-thirds of the state is mountainous, and some of that gets a fair amount of precipitation. Anyone who thinks Arizona can't get cold has never stopped for gas outside of Snowflake in January.

I have also lived in Utah. Northern Utah can get quite cold. I moved from Utah in the middle of the the winter of 1990-1991. The news story at the time was that it was the coldest Utah winter in a hundred years. My brother and I drove down to Arizona in my 1971 VW beetle. Every part of us were freezing except our ankles, which were being slowly roasted. If you have ever had personal experience with a Beetle's pathetic heater, you know exactly what I mean. I really did like that little car, but for the life of me I've never understood why those little crap baskets get so much adulation for their "clever design". "Different" is not necessarily a synonym for "smart". Sometimes car designers do things a certain way for an actual reason. Sometimes, it is just stupid. Powering the windshield washer fluid sprayer by means of your spare tire's air pressure is stupid. Directing the entire heater to blow through a small vent inches from your left ankle is stupid.

In any case, a few hours into the trip, my brother and I had to stop the car to adjust the load on the roof rack. That experience suggests a corollary to my statement about stopping for gas in Snowflake. If you can at all help it, never stop outside of Beaver in January to adjust a load on your roof rack.

Actually, there is one other reason that a person can get surprisingly cold in Arizona, and any of you who are actually from our fair state will totally understand how this works. The reason is this: because you are from Arizona, the land where the sun always shines, you have never bothered to buy a proper coat. Therefore, you are wholly unprepared when you actually need to venture into the true cold.

I was reminded of this about two years ago when we visited Emily in France. Standing in line under the Eiffel Tower in January, dressed in our totally inadequate coats, was just about the most uncomfortably cold I've ever been. And it was only around 20 degrees Fahrenheit (-6 Celsius).

That brings me to my current story. During the week after Christmas, we flew up for a quick visit to Harbin, China. Harbin is a major industrial center and transportation hub in northern China. It is directly north of Korea, and Northwest of Vladivostok, Russia. Because of its proximity to Russia, it has in some respects a distinctively European appearance. Not that we saw much of it, though, because we went for a very specific and limited purpose. Each winter, Harbin holds a huge Ice and Snow Festival of snow sculptures and life-sized ice buildings, lit from within by colored florescent tubes. It is amazing what can be accomplished by an army of workers getting paid no more than three dollars a day.

But for all the fame of the Ice and Snow Festival, there isn't a lot of other reasons to go to Harbin (the Russian Orthodox cathedral is said to be beautiful, but we didn't get the chance to see it). So we made the plan to go quickly, twenty-four hours in and out. The reason for that haste was the cold, and that is what I actually want to write about. There are more pictures on facebook if you are interested.

It was cold. 22 degrees below zero Fahrenheit cold. 30 degrees below zero Celsius cold. Cold like we've never before experienced cold.

We actually came quite well prepared. We bought and borrowed some true cold-weather gear. I do try to (slowly) learn from past experience. Perhaps most importantly, I contracted with a driver to take us around, so that we could get out of the cold whenever we wanted (and didn't have to try to find taxis in the cold and dark, and then try to get two taxis to find and drop all six of us off at the same place).

With all the preparations, it wasn't quite as bad as one would think. By which I mean that we didn't die. I really truly felt fully aware at all times that we were in cold that could literally kill you, and do it quickly.

With the exception of my feet, I was okay. Lee was quite miserable with her hands, but her hands are always cold. I swear that she has no circulation at all in them. The one time that I had my hand out of my glove messing with my camera for too long was a big mistake. I couldn't get it to warm up again for half an hour, at least, and the process was very painful. Lee's camera iced up, and at one point stuck to her cheek. My personal favorite was feeling my nose hairs crackle with ice if I breathed too deeply.

My final verdict? Well, the great ice buildings truly were spectacularly beautiful. I was very, very impressed. We all especially liked the enormous Great Wall of China ice slide. It was around two hundred meters long, it propelled you along at shocking speeds, only to shoot you into a snowbank in the dark. At that point, two Chinese workers would rush in to grab you under the arms, no doubt thinking that they were being helpful, but in reality making one flail in humiliation while you tried to stand up without being able to use your arms.

I would say that the Harbin Ice Festival is a once in a lifetime experience. I mean that it two different ways. First, because it was amazing. Second, because it was so cold that I never want to go back.

A long view, showing a variety of buildings. Many of the sculptures were copies of specific buildings, but I didn't recognize any of these.

Emma, on the steps of an icy facsimile of the Forbidden City.

The Colosseum. Not quite life-sized in this case, but still impressive.

Some visual aids for how cold it was. Note, in particular, the icicles on John's lashes. I'm not sure why we didn't end up with a picture of Emma like this. You might note that we had our special guest Ambra with us for this outing. I hope the look of shock on her face was just her mugging for the camera....

And finally, a shelf of Russian nesting dolls for sale in the Harbin airport. I was sorely tempted, but I was feeling really, really cheap at this point. Plus I didn't really like the selection.

Construction Scene

2009-12-14T22:03:00.004+08:00

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

2009-11-22T17:34:00.009+08:00

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

2009-11-17T19:07:00.007+08:00

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

2009-11-08T21:07:00.008+08:00

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

2009-10-24T22:09:00.005+08:00

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

2009-10-03T21:54:00.018+08:00

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

2009-09-18T19:49:00.006+08:00

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

2009-09-16T21:18:00.005+08:00

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

2009-06-27T19:35:00.006+08:00

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

2009-06-18T21:55:00.004+08:00

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

2009-06-13T22:12:00.001+08:00

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

2009-06-11T16:09:00.008+08:00

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

2009-06-09T19:17:00.006+08:00

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...

2009-06-04T23:14:00.015+08:00

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....

2009-05-27T21:01:00.011+08:00

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

2009-05-20T20:21:00.016+08:00

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.

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!

2009-05-17T19:03:00.015+08:00

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

2009-05-09T21:07:00.015+08:00

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.

2009-05-08T20:43:00.006+08:00

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

2009-04-18T07:05:00.003+08:00

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

Miscellany

2009-04-11T14:07:00.009+08:00

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.

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

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).

A few more pictures of Zhenjiang

2009-04-04T09:00:00.008+08:00

It is a rainy Saturday morning, and I'm stalling before going out to run some errands. Here's some more pictures of varying quality that may nevertheless look interesting to someone out there. All were taken in Zhenjiang.

New Concepty English

2009-03-29T17:34:00.003+08:00

Sign seen near a fountain.

Don't play in it, and don't make fun of it either.

Zhenjiang

2009-03-27T17:20:00.013+08:00

Here is a set of pictures from another outing that I didn't post about previously. In February we spent a couple days in Zhenjiang. It is a smaller city along the Yangtze river to the West. Of course, "smaller city" doesn't quite mean the same thing in China. This one, for example, has a population of around three million. I made some comments about relative city size in a previous post, so I will move on.

Some of you may know that Lee went to China two and a half years ago as part of the Sister Cities organization. This city, Zhenjiang, is where she stayed. It is, therefore, part of the reason we have ended up doing and being where we are right now. Lee's experience helped push both of us to consider teaching overseas. That had always been a eventual plan of ours, and I even tried to apply to the U.S. Department of Defense school system (for military dependents) clear back when I first got my teaching certificate. Back then, it didn't take long for me to figure out that a new teacher with a non-teaching spouse and two dependents was not an attractive candidate. The overseas plan was shelved indefinitely, and had in effect become a retirement plan. The plan resurfaced once we began to feel that the kids could really gain by it, and it would matter for their educational and personal growth. At that point, we decided that it was time to take action, rather than just have them experience it from a distance as something cool that Mom and Dad did long after they had moved out.

From the very beginning, Lee specifically wanted to go to Suzhou (she had visited it that summer). However, although China was the initial inspiration, once the actual job search began, we cast the net far wider. A number of schools took us very seriously as candidates, and with a few twists of fate, we might have ended up in Latvia or Croatia or Lebanon or Turkey or China. Each place, in its turn, inspired great enthusiasm, and since we took each of our interviews very seriously, almost every single one was briefly "my life long dream" of where to live. I will tell you that the mental whiplash of constantly switching between cities, climes, and continents was possibly the most surreal experience of my entire life.

In the end, we ended up only an hour away from Zhenjiang, and in the exact city that Lee had wanted from the beginning. I'll leave it to you whether that represents ironic fate, or the culmination of inspiration, hard work, good preparation, and blessings. I know where we stand on that question.

Zhenjiang is not a major tourist area, but it does have a really nice Buddhist temple. It is an enormous complex of jumbled buildings and twisting stairs. On the left, John is in the photo.

This is another nearby temple, that is on a small island in the Yangtze river. Ann as per your comment, here is further evidence that your mother was actually here (and evidence that I read your comments).

John, hamming it up.

It was a very misty day. This is an evocative scene of a ramshackle old boat on a quiet spur of the Yangtze. One interesting part of the scene is hard to pick out in the photo, so I have a closer view below.

A pig carcass washed up on the shore of the Yangtze.

An evening out at a Hotpot restaurant, a regional tradition from Sichuan province that has become popular nationwide. Basically, it is a big pot of boiling broth, into which everyone puts their selections of tidbits and delicacies, and which everyone then shares. Options include a variety of meats, noodles, vegetables, and dumplings. Strangely, a good Hotpot restaurant is something that we have yet to chase down in Suzhou. We know they are here, but few have English menus. We do occasionally go places without English menus, but it is a lot of work.

In the left photo is Janet (Lee's mother, who was visiting) with Emma. They are displaying their duck feet, if you can't tell. On the right, Lee is with Christine, the teacher who hosted Lee in her home during the exchange in 2006.

One more photo for good measure. A local boy under attack by fearless and overfed pigeons.

Cover the kids' eyes

2009-03-23T21:11:00.018+08:00

Okay, here's the deal. Because this is a family-friendly blog, I've been putting off this post for some time, but I'm going to go for it. Parents, you are at your discretion.

I'm throwing a bunch of little stories into this one, so I'm going to be rambling. Here we go...

One of the things one eventually starts to notice about China is how chaste everything is. You don't really realize it right away, because it isn't about what you see, but rather what you do not. Then finally, one day, you see a woman dressed like a typical American out on the town, and you are suddenly shocked to realize that she looks half naked! Chinese women are, by comparison, very modest dressers.

This goes for advertisements as well. For those of us like myself who have spent extensive time in Europe, the difference is especially jarring. Ah, France, the land of topless women on family television, postcards of sex acts on souvenir stands, and condom ads towering above you on billboards... By contrast, in downtown Suzhou I have noticed exactly one store with a display of a naked woman. It is very incongruous.

Traditional moral values are still very strong in China, and but I'm under no illusion that a good part of this is also enforced from above by the government. In fact, there has been a recent well-publicized crackdown on online pornography. I don't have enough cultural experience to give a real opinion as to how much if this is reflects a real difference in what actually goes on in the Chinese mind, or whether this just reflects reserve as to what gets displayed in public. However, I have done some reading that suggests a certain level of naivite about the "birds and the bees" (particularly in rural areas).

I do have one funny little anecdote I can tell relative to that. A co-worker was telling me that last year he suddenly began to get a lot of, shall we say, inappropriate e-mail spam. He went to talk to our tech person to see if she could do something about it. She is a very sweet and friendly, very competent young Chinese woman. My friend tried to explain what the problem was, but he just could not get her to understand. He kept offering variations of "bad pictures" and "dirty pictures", but she just didn't get it. Perhaps it was just a language barrier, but in the end, he decided that he didn't want to risk being the one to shatter her illusions about the world, and he just let the matter drop (eventually, the spam tapered off on its own).

So, with that as an only marginally relevant introduction, I have some pictures. I return to a theme on which I have posted before: the fact that so many Chinese produces are anthropomorphized in some way. This includes even household products that are not intended for children. Here is another example:

These are two humidifiers (which the Chinese love) for sale in a local shop. Aren't they just adorable? They look like they should have their own Saturday morning kids show, and maybe they do. The one on the left had me quite confused with the horns and all, until I finally made the connection that we are in the "Year of the Bull". That disappointed me, because up until that moment I had a better name for him, to which I was quite attached, which was "Satan's Humidifier".

So now I come to the two pictures that got me thinking about this post in the first place. They bring together the two threads of thoughts that I have been rambling about so far, the apparent gentle naivete, and the "cuteness" of consumer products.

Now.... I want to know, in all honesty, is there anyone out there that looks at these two products and does not think the same thing I do? Do the Chinese not notice, not care, or do they think it is funny?

Finally, now that I've brought up the whole topic, take a look at these packages of prophylactics.

Copulating while parachuting? That should come with a warning label of some kind.

Nanjing

2009-03-19T20:05:00.010+08:00

I was feeling like I didn't have any interesting pictures to show, but I had forgotten that I had a whole bunch of photos still stored in my camera. I'll get at least a couple of good posts out of them, so I will start out with a daytrip that we took to Nanjing back in the first week of February.

There are two major cities that have, in turns, been the great capitals of China. Nanjing is one, and Beijing is the other. The names are simple, as "Nan" means south, and "Bei" means north. Beijing was the capital during the reign of the Manchus (originally from north of the Great Wall), but Nanjing was the capital up until the success of the Communist Revolution in 1949, when Mao and the gang relocated the capital back to Beijing. For that reason, the Taiwanese often continue to refer to it as the "true" capital of China.

As the capital of China, this city was singled out by the Japanese for especially brutal treatment. There is a major monument and museum to the "Rape of Nanjing", but we didn't go there this trip. We will do that later. In fact, I'm considering going with just John this Saturday, while Lee goes to Shanghai to do some shopping. One of the bargains we made with John to get him to accept this whole China project was that we would take him to see interesting World War II sites, and Nanjing is the closest place to us where there is really something to see. Once we quit worrying about the economy so much, I may eventually take him on a father-son outing to the Philippines. You can get there quite cheaply from here, and there are said to be really good tours of the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor.

I have another motivation to go to Nanjing again soon... it has a very ominous nickname: "The Furnace of China." That sounds like a good reason not to wait for summer.

The grounds of the Nanjing Museum. In the background you can see the slope of Purple Mountain, a site of great cultural importance to the Chinese. Pearl Buck, the American writer of The Good Earth, grew up in sight of this peak, and wrote lovingly of it. I didn't even try for a good picture of the mountain, as it was overcast that day. I'll post pictures another time if I get good ones.

Some funky sculptures on the grounds of the museum

A mixture of clothes and meat hanging out together to dry.

A spot on the city wall. About half of Nanjing's original city walls are intact, more than any other city, I've been told. In the scene are Allyne, Emma, Lee, and Lee's mother Janet, who was visiting us. Once again, a word to you all: visitors are very welcome.

Emma and John on the city wall. On the right, John is standing in an embrasure over the highway facing east. It was from that direction that the Japanese marched through the gate below him and into the city during World War II.

There is one final photo of the Nanjing outing, but Lee has it on her blog. It is very much worth a look.

Nooooooo! Not the Cheese!

2009-03-15T17:48:00.004+08:00

Okay, maybe this isn't such a good place to live after all. Apparently the Chinese authorities have recently declared war on imported cheese. Who knows why? Do even the people enforcing it know why? James Fallows speculates that it might have something to do with the big milk contamination scandal from last fall. It would be a real stretch to connect the dots between those two, but it makes as much sense as any other explanation. It also reminds me of the big DVD crackdown last fall, which I wrote about here. For myself, I don't know anything I haven't read, although I did notice that the usual selection of imported cheeses was available last night at the grocery store (not that I bought any, the good stuff is far too expensive to be anything more than a very rare treat).

The more I learn about Chinese bureaucracy, the more it reminds me of that old legend about J. Edgar Hoover, the first director of the F.B.I. Supposedly, he once wrote "watch the borders" in the margin of a memo. Rather than question him and face his wrath, his underlings ordered increased surveillance on the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada. Only later did they learn he was referring to the width of the margins on the memo itself.

So, did someone high up in Chinese customs and immigration enforcement say something to the effect of "don't cut the cheese", and everyone got confused? The world will never know, but by this time next month, it will probably all be forgotten.

Worst Places to Work?

2009-03-13T22:48:00.004+08:00

This is an article I stumbled across in Business Week magazine. They ranked Suzhou as #14 in their worst places to work for expats.

A bit harsh, I think, although I am certainly glad to know we rank better than Lagos, Nigeria and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The magazine knocks Suzhou for "pollution and the limited opportunities for culture and recreation". I guess I can recognize their point in some ways. This certainly isn't the most cosmopolitan of cities, and I know that some of the younger expats here have been frustrated with the "sleepy small town" environment.

The irony of that, of course, is that it is a city of six million people. That might sound like a lot, as it makes Suzhou larger than Phoenix, Philadelphia, or Dallas. However, in China, even a city this big does not support a middle-class population large enough to have the range of entertainment, cultural events, and restaurants that one would find in similarly sized American or European city.

For those things, one really does need to live in Shanghai, and I can tell you that the contrast between Shanghai and Suzhou is huge. For us, however, Suzhou has really fit the bill nicely. We have found it to be a great family environment.

And we just got a Burger King. I suppose that is a plus.....

The Shanghai Museum

2009-03-12T18:54:00.006+08:00

More of my ongoing project to post various orphaned photos that didn't get used before. These are from the Shanghai Museum. There are some very good museums in Shanghai, but this one focuses on antiquities. I didn't make any attempt to keep track of when these works were made.

A bronze water bowl with a fun feature: there are sculptures of aquatic creatures molded into the bottom, so they are swimming in the water when full.

A bronze wine vessel. About half of the bronzes in the museum are identified as being wine vessels, which no doubt tells you something. This is a very typical Chinese form, and in fact, the building itself is in a stylized shape of one of these vessels. Sometime later, I'll comb back through all my photos and see if I have an exterior shot.

A huge bronze bell. Unless it is actually an inverted wine vessel.

A stone relief known as the "Thousand Buddha Stele". I quite liked it.

You ain't yet seen crowded.

2009-03-07T14:53:00.005+08:00

I'll be trying over the next while to put some random unused photos to good use. We really need to go out and do some real travelling again, because I'm not sure how much entertainment I can milk out of some of these (there are reasons I haven't posted them before). This particular batch is from my cell phone, which is my camera of last resort, as the quality is low.

Contrary to its reputation, not everywhere in China is crowded, and even crowded places are not so all the time. However, if a tide of humanity is ever going to sweep over and drown you, it will be it may well be in the aisles of the Auchan grocery store. It is actually a French chain that got in early when Chinese consumers started to have a little money. Although the more traditional market streets are still thriving, Auchan attracts huge crowds. They don't always appear to actually be shopping. Last year (before we were here) during the big freak snowstorm that virtually paralyzed all of China, the poor crowded in and milled about all day for shelter from the cold.

The store was already huge, but in December, an entire interior wall was opened up for a major expansion. It is now, hands down, the biggest store I have ever been in, and that includes American mega-stores like Bass Pro Shops. Amazingly, it can still be completely packed. When it is, it feels like an entire shopping mall of shoulder to shoulder humanity.

By contrast, there is another French chain here, Metro, that is more of a warehouse store, which caters to restaurants and businesses. It requires a membership, but most of the expats have one through their employers. It is, unsurprisingly, much less crowded, although not useful for regular grocery shopping. We don't go that often, as it is on the wrong side of town for us. However, it is one of the few places in town that I will buy meat. I have made it a point to observe how they are handling and storing the meat in most of the shops around here. Suffice it to say, I haven't liked what I've seen.

Back to the crowd topic. Here is a comparison of Auchan on the left, Metro on the right.

Notice how the people just sort of blend into each other in the distance. Now imagine that you can see the same thing 360 degrees around you. Remember that a typical camera can't capture distance and depth very well. You get the picture.

This China project is good for a few years, but I intend to save enough money that, when it is over, I can go live in a nice, quiet rural area.

Monday Miscellany

2009-03-02T21:47:00.010+08:00

I'm thinking of abandoning my post naming schemes, because I don't always post often enough to avoid having a chain of the same titles. I'll stay with it for tonight, however. Here are various pictures that didn't make it into any previous posts.

Our Christmas tree and Santa spread. Christmas photos were supposed to be Lee's blog topic, but she has waited too long and lost her privileges.

The kids with some Christmas morning treasures, which was actually held a few days late due to our Hong Kong trip (which was where we bought all of the presents anyway).

These were for sale all over Hong Kong, but I've never seen them in Mainland China. Click on them for a good look. I'm not sure what that has to say about cultural differences. I didn't visit the homes of any locals, of course, but dare I imagine convenient underwear dispensers on bathroom walls?

These are from a few months ago, on our very first foray into Shanghai. This is in the area known as the French Concession (or the "Former French Concession" for those who are sticklers for their anti-imperialism vocabulary). In other words, it was the part of the city that was on long term lease to the French government during the days of empire.

In their day, the concessions all had "extra-territorial rights", meaning that within their boundaries, the laws of China were superseded by the European laws. Today, that is held up as an example of the humiliation of China, and therefore a rallying cry among ardent nationalists. I really do sympathize, but the fact is that even the local Chinese did their best to keep themselves under European jurisdiction, rather than face the arbitrariness (and brutal punishments), of the Chinese Imperial courts.

In any case, this area of the city really does look like a blend of France and China. It is quite pleasant.

China News Story: don't dis' your mistress.

2009-02-25T19:09:00.006+08:00

Okay, so it is a tragic tale, but just try reading it without laughing. This short little story has got it all: sex, money, revenge, deceit, humiliation, greed, stupidity, suicide, murder (attempted), all around strange behavior (they all took a vacation together!?), and finally, a heaping helping of just desserts.

You just can't make this stuff up.

Post Script: March 2nd. I'm following some leads that indicate that perhaps you can make this stuff up. There are rumors that this story is a rumor. My skeptism started with the notion that they all got in the car together for some sort of group outing, which is a very hard scenario to imagine. Who would ever think that a major news outlet could fail to check its sources and run a story just because they hoped it was true? I am shocked! shocked I say!

I'll keep you posted.

New Concepty English for Education of Weekend

2009-02-22T17:08:00.009+08:00

Beware of random grumpy sheep.

This is a menu item from one of our favorite restaurants. It is regional cuisine from Western China. There are two different restaurants that we go to, and both are excellent. The regional food here in Jiangsu Province is heavy on the fish, which isn't bad, but also heavy on the oil and sugar, and we don't like it too much. However, this Western Chinese stuff, which has come here with the western migrant workers, is seriously good food.

Much of Western China is Muslim, and this cuisine represents that influence. It is heavy on the lamb and mutton, and has spices similar to Arabic foods. During my time in France, I developed a taste for Arab food, but as some of the dishes are also heavy on the cumin and chili peppers, this stuff also help assuage the family craving for Mexican food. It ain't quite the same, but it's close enough to scratch the itch (there are some "Mexican Restaurants" in Suzhou, but let's not go there. Literally).

They also have another menu item known as "impertinent sheep", but I don't have a picture of that one. When it comes to taking menu pictures, I'm a bit shy ("sheepish?"), because Chinese waiters and waitresses really hover. Actually, that one may be from our other favorite restaurant. Honestly, I'm not sure, as some of the restaurants seem to have previous editions of the menu still in circulation, so I can't always remember what I've seen where. If that isn't confusing enough, remember, as I've said before, that we don't actually know the names of our even our favorite restaurants. We have therefore dubbed this one "The Camel Restaurant", as it has a lighted yellow camel above the entrance.

My guess is that that other sheep is "impertinent" because that is a synonym for "saucy". So, with the Chinese penchant for bizarre literal translations, the mutton with sauce became the impertinent one. At least that one has an explanation at all, because I have no idea why this one is so irritable.

The best part (other than the food itself), is that we can feed the entire family at this outfit for about 15 dollars. We go every Thursday.

Putting the "Fire" in Fireworks

2009-02-17T20:30:00.007+08:00

Some of you may have caught this on the news. On the last day of the Chinese New Year celebration (15 days after it began), fireworks set off a devastating fire in a Beijing hotel. The hotel was under construction, which limited the loss of life to one unfortunate fireman. It could, have course, been much, much worse. As everything in this country is built by migrant workers, they always have housing on the job site. They live in these distinctive white and blue modular buildings. Sometimes, I have seen those buildings set up within a highrise building itself while it is under construction.

Here is some YouTube video of the fire.

I would like to clarify that when I wrote about the thrill of the Chinese fireworks in a celebratory tone, I was not blind to how dangerous such a pyrotechnic free-for-all can be. There is, despite what I implied, something to be said for having safety regulations. The Chinese (and Asian) obsession with fireworks is nearly psychotic. One other example is a particularly tragic/absurd incident that occured in a nightclub in Thailand. Who on earth doesn't realize it isn't a good idea to set off fireworks indoors? According to some reports, they were actually set off on a dinner table!

I'm not going to commentate on it further, but I will refer to a few links here. The first is from James Fallows, one of the editors of The Atlantic Monthly, and a resident of Beijing. It is his picture that I borrowed above, and I'll link you to his blog post here. His blog is wide ranging, but often includes really interesting commentary on China. As for the fire and fireworks, I'll just second what he has to say:

"it might be hard to believe that they set off a major building fire if you haven't seen how much ordnance is set off; it's all too plausible if you have"

Amen to that.

From his blog, you can follow out some additional links that give some other insight as to how the Chinese are reacting to this incident, which is quite interesting and enlightening.

China in the News

2009-02-06T22:29:00.015+08:00

I'm going to start a new recurring feature, which will be a selected news article about China, with commentary from me. Click for the story: Shopping 101: China's Consumers catch on.

Summary:
Upon purchase, new apartments in China are an empty concrete shell. All amenities and improvements to that apartment are then up to the purchaser, and choosing what to buy for that apartment (and what to buy in any other situation) is extremely difficult for the Chinese, who have no previous experience with a consumer culture. That difficulty is multiplied with every single other purchasing decision they need to make, until they are overwhelmed.

Commentary:
Some weeks ago I began to notice that there are a lot of these vacant unimproved apartments here. Yet so many new buildings are under construction. Even an amateur economist can clearly see all of the classic signs of a dramatic oversupply. Within the strange brew of government planning and free-for-all capitalism, clearly the residential real estate market is not being subjected to conventional market forces. I don't know whether the costs of these projects is being carried by the government, the developers, or various investors. Actually, I don't have any idea how they finance major construction projects here at all. I do know, however, that the oversupply must be costing someone out there some big Yuan. It doesn't seem a very smart way to do business, but since the Wild West free market U.S. economy managed to dramatically overbuild its own housing supply, which is a of course one part of our current economic catastrophe, we clearly don't have any useful lessons to impart.

Two interesting anecdotes to accompany this train of thought. First, a young teacher we know was befriended by a local Chinese woman. The young woman invited the teacher to her apartment, where she lives with roommates in one of those unimproved concrete boxes, with not a fixture in the apartment other than a single toilet. Still, the Chinese woman said to her that it was "the best place I've ever lived". Things like that help foster the uncomfortable sense of "First World Guilt" that I think occasionally haunts all Westerners here (including me).

Second, a few weeks ago Lee and I noticed some activity in two of the vacant apartments, one above the other, across the way from us. It was after dark, and there were clusters of workmen in each of the two apartments, and all of the surrounding apartments were dark. The group above were inspecting the floor. The group below were inspecting the ceiling. Then both groups got out mops and buckets. It doesn't really qualify as a story, I guess, but it was a really funny visual image.

I'm rambling. Back to the article, and to my real point. I have expressed previously how annoying it is that the Chinese will pay so much attention to what we are buying in stores. They look, they snoop, they stare, they talk. And they buy... once in a housewares store, Lee approached a display of dishes. A woman was standing there trying to select some cups to buy. In her hands she had a couple possible selections. Lee approached the display, and confidently chose some porcelain mugs. As she left, she saw the woman replace the items she had in her hands, and select the exact same mugs that Lee had purchased. What really makes the anecdote revealing to us is that the woman had been holding items that were much more typically Chinese (they had cutesy cartoon characters on them, as do half the products in this country). Lee, on the other hand, chose the only mugs that were plain white porcelain in a simple design. Score one for the diffusion of American tastes in China. I'm remembering right now that a woman did the same thing to me when I bought some bread in a grocery store, literally watching me and then picking the exact same product. Score two. If I do that enough, maybe there will be more bread here that doesn't taste so sweet.

This article gave some interesting perspective on all of this. According to the author, shopping for consumer goods is overwhelming for the Chinese, who are only in the last few years really having a variety of products to choose from, and drowning in all of the advertising and marketing that go with them. They face hundreds of choices, and don't know where to turn to get real information. That, if you ponder it, is terrifying.

I used to do some activities related to this sort of thing back when I taught high school economics (which I will be doing again next year). Basically, I would get students to tell me what features they were looking for in the products they bought or wanted to buy; typically, I centered the activity on purchasing cars. Invariably, they cited appearance and quality as what they wanted in a car. Then, I would coax them into realizing that they really had no idea how to judge those things. They deferred to the mass opinion to judge the appearance of cars (just as well, since the entire purpose of having an attractive car was to impress others). Quality, on the other hand, they judged strictly by brand name, because in the end, few if any of them (or me) was in any position to accurately assess the quality of a car on our own. We all tell ourselves that we are making informed decisions, but most of the time what we are really doing is stirring together a mix of brand awareness, advertising, rumor, habit, and what some relative once told us, and calling it knowledge.

So now, try to imagine that you know absolutely nothing about cars, but you are about to spend several years worth of salary buying the very first car that you, or anyone in your family, has ever owned. All the while, salesmen, advertisers and marketers are descending on you from all sides, and they know full well that you don't have a clue. Now multiply that to everything else that you need to shop for. It is enough to give me nightmares, and thinking of it that way makes me a lot more sympathetic to the Chinese following us around in stores. Western consumer culture, and all of the variety, features, competition, marketing, advertising, pricing, ad infinitum, have come crashing down on a virgin population, and they are completely overwhelmed. The fact that they will look to random Westerners for shopping advice shows how desperate they are. The irony, of course, is that we are ourselves sometimes looking to them to figure out what we should buy (although I certainly hope we are more subtle about it).

Shop 'til you drop indeed.

New Concepty English for Education of Weekend

2009-01-31T00:03:00.005+08:00

Go on, just do it!

I suppose that it is better than going to a "scatological" hospital.

Happy New Year

2009-01-25T22:20:00.016+08:00

10 pm: It is the eve of the Asian New Year. The fireworks have been going since before nightfall, and intensifying by the hour. There are bursts to be seen from all windows, 360 degrees around us, across the entire city. They explode over, around, and between buildings. Distant lights flash over and behind the horizon of layered apartment blocks, which are made to appear more distant by the obscuring smoke. From our vantage on the 5th floor, nearby rockets often explode at eye-level, just outside our windows.

Men below are lighting fireworks with a shocking recklessness. With cigarettes dangling from their lips, they scurry to light new fuses among the skipping firecrackers and flying rockets lit moments before by their fellows. They carelessly lean over the rockets as they light them, as if they are tempting them to launch prematurely. A patch of grass was on fire, but now they have stamped it out.

The sharp crack of rockets mixes with the ripping roar of endless firecracker chains, and the occasional thunder of something really big. As the sound of each explosion fades, the silence is filled by the constant wail of hundreds of car alarms.

I was about to write that it would be cliche to say it sounds like a war zone, but that made me think of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War. In 1968, the Vietcong invaded Saigon in the midst of the New Year's celebration. An excellent plan, as how could anyone possibly have heard them coming?

As for tonight, there is no sign that supplies are going to run out anytime soon. People must have been storing this things by the crate in their little apartments. We should be glad the entire building didn't explode.

Updates to come as we progress through the evening...

12:30 am: I said earlier that it would be a cliche to call this a "war zone". That was before it turned into a war zone. There was a lull between about 10:45 and midnight, but that was just set up time before the main event. At midnight, the entire city went off.

When I was a kid, back before America was fully in the grip of the "nanny state" culture which now tries to protect us from every possible danger (and lawsuit) and is inexorably turning us into a nation of coddled adolescents, we had great fireworks shows in Benson, Arizona.

It really wasn't the fireworks that were that great. Actually, the rockets themself were kind of lame; the best a small town could afford, I guess. It was the atmosphere that was special. Everyone would gather on the high school football field with blankets and picnic dinners. The show was put on by the local volunteer fire department. They didn't have much to work with, and they didn't seem to really know what they were doing. There was no showmanship or timing to the launches, they just kept lighting them randomly until they ran out. The great part is that the launches were no more than thirty or forty yards from the audience. The fireworks would burst at low altitudes, sometimes right overhead. The embers often were still burning strong when they hit the ground, and dads were always anticipating the need to move blankets before they hit, and stamp out fires after they did. It was kid heaven, and it didn't even last my entire childhood before the town didn't do it that way anymore, and it faded into history.

Tonight brought back those memories, and multiplied them tenfold. We didn't watch the fireworks, we were in the fireworks. They launched from every street, sidewalk, balcony, and rooftop in the city. They sometimes burst mere feet from high rise apartment buildings, with sparks ricocheting violently off of the windows. Sometimes they deflected off of trees, causing them to explode just overhead, or even within the tree itself, blowing leaves everywhere. The sound was a constant roar, this time we couldn't hear all of the car alarms. Smoke lay in heavy blankets, even drifting into doorways. Meanwhile, people wandered the streets everywhere, while dogs barked and stray cats ran all directions in panic.

I suggest you come to China for New Year's Eve someday. They probably still have a lot of years left before the nanny state takes over and makes sure that no one does anything dangerous (or fun).

We don't have any cameras that would capture the full effect of the chaos in the darkness, but I'm going to set my alarm so I can get pictures of the aftermath before the army of little-old-lady street cleaners beats me to it. It's a war zone of paper and cardboard out there.

8 am: The fireworks died out around 2 am. I don't know if they ever went away completely, or did so just enough that we could sleep. At 6 am, they began again in earnest, so now I'm up again.
Unfortunately, even by then I had missed the chance to take the pictures that I really wanted. I beat the little old lady street sweepers to the action (they were already working, but there is too much debris for them to even make a dent so far), but I forgot to account for the roving cardboard recycling guys. With their battered little bicycle/pick-up trucks, they are constantly on patrol for anything that they can get a bit of cash for, and they must have cleaned up all of the spent launch tubes and casings during the night.

I did go out and get a few pictures, and I'll post them later. There hasn't been any big explosions nearby for a while, and I'm going to try for some more sleep. John woke up just enough to move to the couch. Lee and the girls appear to have slept through it, and Janet (who is visiting) isn't up and about. I can't imagine she didn't wake up for a while, because there was a guy setting off rockets on that side of our building an hour ago, and as I've said, they often explode at window level for us.

Jan. 30th picture update, 9:15 pm:

Two scenes of the aftermath. The scene doesn't do the mess justice, because as I said, the cardboard recyclers had already done their work. Here is one guy still at it at 7:00 am. He was not the only one. In fact, they are all still going strong, as their are fireworks going even as I write. Last night was the 5th day after New Years, which is a holiday in its own right, and had fireworks almost as big as the first night.

One of the army of street-sweeping ladies, who was on the job by 6:30 am.

This last thing is a little video montage I strung together without too much care into it. I'll work on getting better video technology sometime. I tried to capture the fact that the fireworks were going on all around us, but it doesn't in any way capture the true feeling of close proximity. Note the constant flashes on the horizon, John yelling right at the beginning, and the guy shooting a Roman candle out of his window near the end.

note: video won't save right now.... I'll try again later.

New Concepty English for Education of Weekend

2009-01-11T18:58:00.008+08:00

Four samples of signs from local scenic areas. I think that they are threatening us.

Monday Miscellany

2008-12-30T07:29:00.030+08:00

It's not actually Monday, I just thought I would try to get back in the groove of more regular posting. We went to Hong Kong for Christmas; partly for the vacation, and partly to be able to do American-style shopping for American-style goods, which we sorely needed. We now have a good handle on day-to-day shopping in China, but shopping for durable items like clothing, electronics, etc., is often just too daunting here. There are just too many variables and questions: Where do I find it? How much does it cost? Is it real or counterfeit? How does this item really compare to that item? I made half a dozen shopping outings for a laptop computer for Allyne's birthday, and then finally gave up (a friend helped my out by ordering one through the IT department at his corporate employer).

I may post some pictures related to Christmas, but Lee and I decided that I was going to post about Thanksgiving, and she would take Christmas. Therefore, I'll give her first choice of the photos and the stories. In the meantime, here are some more miscellaneous pictures:

A giant Buddha statue somewhere west of Suzhou. It seems to me that Buddha statues get built as sort of an municipal economy booster. If a place really needs to get some tourist dollars, what better than building a big statue and hoping for some piligrims? I don't begrudge it to them. In the same vein I actually admire how the town of Roswell, New Mexico, found a way to turn the whole "crashed flying saucer" tale into a way to actually have a viable local economy. Side note: the traditional fat "laughing buddha" of China is not Siddhartha, the Indian Prince and origin of Buddhist religion. The true Buddhas are always thin, to represent his self-sacrifice and freedom from the appetites of this world. There is a loose historical source for the fat buddha, which is something about a kind hearted monk of centuries past. I suppose you could loosely equate him to a Santa Claus figure.

I really amused myself with this next photo. It calls to mind on of those old cheesy/good monster movies, like the bronze statue monster in Jason and the Argonauts. Or perhaps the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters.

A spot on the shore of Tai Hu lake. (a redundancy for me to write it that way, since Hu means lake).

Seemingly every stinkin' consumer product in Asia has a cute face on it. It gets old sometimes.

New Concepty English for Education of Weekend

2008-11-16T20:23:00.005+08:00

This is a business card from a shop in Shanghai that I went to because I really needed some biggilet lie fallowpants. I think "Welcome the lately old customer come" sounds like a good title for a short story.

Nature Calls

2008-11-15T07:33:00.014+08:00

Western style toilets are becoming common in China. I'm not really sure how common, because I haven't had the chance to visit the homes of any local Chinese. The bathrooms in all of the modern apartments I have seen are equipped with familiar plumbing. In new areas like where we are, the plumbing can handle toilet paper. In older areas, there is always a little trash can by the toilet where you are expected to dispose of your used wipes.

There are, apparently, Chinese jokes about people trying to stand on a sit-down toilet. I doubt there is much reality to that. They are probably just jokes to make fun of country bumpkins. Then again, the great Mao Zedong himself refused to use western style toilets. When he made visits to Moscow, he would demand that a platform be built around the facilities in his hotel room, so he could stand above the toilet. Great visual image, that one.

Public toilets will typically have one stall with a western toilet, and the rest are squat toilets. That might seem like a nice concession to Westerners, but let me tell you it is not. If you think that you are horrified by the thought of using a squat toilet, it is only because you haven't personally been faced with the choice. At that moment of choice, you suddenly realize that they have done you a great service by giving you any option other than sitting on that thing.

So now it is time for your short quiz.

Question:

You are on vacation in China and you gotta to go. Which toilet do you use, Toilet A, or Toilet B?

If you are having any trouble choosing, let me give you a close-up view of Toilet B. This one is definitely worth clicking on the image so you can really see the details.

Yes, those really are maggots. And they are alive.

Answer:

None of the above. Avoid Chinese public toilets at all cost. Go before you leave. Go again before you leave. If you do have to go, go with the squatter. If, like our family, you like to go camping, you can just think of it like crapping in the woods. And if you are squeamish, you may want to consider not coming at all. Because in that case, your other options are: Don't drink water, don't eat, never get farther than half and hour away from home base, or bring a supply of adult diapers.

Little Sister is Watching You

2008-11-11T19:37:00.008+08:00

I thought I would tell a little story that you all might find amusing. This one happened a few weeks ago, and it combines two facets of the daily life in China experience. First, the "hardware wars", my ongoing quest to find all of the little fasteners and doodads I would like to have to get our apartment set up properly. Second, the constant feeling that you are being stared at and talked about by scores of Chinese people.

I've explained that first issue in detail already, so I'll skip over it and go on to the second. We get watched all the time. Here in SIP (Suzhou Industrial Park) it isn't so bad, because there are a lot of Westerners. However, the deeper you venture into real China, the more intense it gets, and it is often no more than a street away. I've been riding my bike a lot, and whenever I leave the main streets and go into the side neighborhoods, what little Western Civilization there is here disappears instantly. People look at me like I'm the first gringo they've ever seen.

It can get a whole lot worse for others. We were in one local store with an African family in line in front of us, and they were stared at by everyone the entire store all the way to the door. Some friends of ours have a little girl with striking blue eyes, and she gets crowded by women wanting to pick her up. I hear the same kinds of stories from families that are very blond. Garden variety blondeness doesn't seem to attract much attention, but there are several Swedish and Finnish families here, and I can only imagine how much they get stared at (Lars and Ulrika, don't let that discourage you from visiting us).

Local people don't just stare at us, they stare at what we are doing. At the grocery store, they are often fascinated with what we are buying. I still don't understand much they say of course, but I'm learning. They will talk about what we are buying, how much we might be spending, etc. Friends have had incidents in which passers-by go so far as to dig through their shopping carts to see what they have in them.

Back to my story. One of the main hardware items I wanted to find were wall anchors. As I said before, even the Home Depot-type store doesn't have a hardware section. However, I have found that a few items of hardware are scattered throughout the store, placed with other items with which you might need to use them. That is the way I finally found some wall anchors, which were inconspicuously hung on a peg near some shelf brackets. I've since bought several packages, just to keep them on hand.

Chinese shopkeepers and cashiers can be real busybodies, and it is not unheard of for them to arbitrarily decide that you don't actually need to buy a specific something. An extreme example of this happened to a music teacher friend, who failed in an attempt to purchase an accessory for a musical instrument, simply because she couldn't convince the owner that she had one of those instruments at home. I've heard other stories from friends of not being allowed to purchase the last of an item! With such scenarios in mind, I bought my wall anchors only two packages at a time, as I didn't want them to think that I was depriving someone else who might need them for the shelf brackets they were specifically placed next to.

The last time I bought some wall anchors, I happened to also be purchasing some "floating" wall shelves, for which the mountings are invisible once they are installed. I had put the shelves in my cart first. When I picked up my two packages of wall anchors, a store employee happened to be right there. From the moment I touched the packages, it was clear that this small young woman was not at all satisfied with my selection. She really wanted to say something, and she continued to follow me from a distance as I went through the store.

Finally, I passed again by the same spot where I had picked up the anchors, and she made her move. She said something long and complicated that included the word "no", and then she reached into my cart and picked out the anchors and put them back on the peg!

I politely smiled, and I took them off again, saying in English that yes, I did want them. She took them out of the cart and put them on the peg again. This time, she reached into my cart and began to unwrap the shelves. I realized at this point what she was up to. She was trying to show me that the shelves already had anchors included.

I smiled, and took the wall anchors from the peg again. This time I kept them in my hand, which completely flumoxed her. By this time, however, a second, older woman had approached, and the younger woman began to explain the situation to her with a staccato urgency. With the assumption that the older woman was being dragged in because she understood at least some English, I said "I understand, I want to buy these for something different".

The older woman looked at me. The younger woman looked at her. Then, without warning, the older woman reached up and gave the girl a solid "you idiot" slap to back of the head. She said something, and then shuffled away shaking her head and muttering to herself.

The girl gave me a big sheepish grin with a shrug, and then slinked away.

I made it home with my wall anchors.

Monday Miscellany

2008-11-10T18:02:00.007+08:00

My more or less weekly round-up of random pictures.

Lee with about 1/3 of the boxes we shipped. We still haven't really settled what happened to some of the things that are missing.

Derelict cranes along a canal north of Suzhou.

A view of Central Park.

John's enormous foot protruding from under his blanket while he slept.

Chinese DVDs

2008-11-08T17:13:00.022+08:00

I've been thinking about this new post for some time. It will take me a lot more work than most, but I just spent 90 minutes choosing and scanning the pictures for it, so I'm ready to go.

We've been buying quite a few DVDs here. There are barely any movie theaters, and they typically don't show any English subtitles (not that we have been to one to see for ourselves). However, there are DVD shops everywhere.

Well, they were everywhere at first. Then, they all shut down for several weeks. From some expat friends who are married to locals, I finally heard that there was a big police crackdown. Apparently, Suzhou received a government recognition as a model city of some sort, so their was a huge push to crack down on illegalities, both large and small. That was also why there was so much traffic enforcement at our nearest intersection.

For a while, there were guys out selling DVDs streetside off of temporary stands. Now all the shops are back in business. Obviously the shops were able to wait out the cops.

The DVDs are all, by definition, pirated. One could have ethical qualms about that if one wished, but there is literally nothing else to buy. A typical single movie costs 10 RMB, or about $1.50. A boxed set for a television show might cost anywhere from 70 to 150 RMB. Video games, buy the way, are even cheaper. Except that only about one in four will actually work.

The quality varies wildly, although it is often better than you would think. We have only purchased one that was just filmed in a theater with a camcorder, the movie 10,000 B.C. The movie was so bad that there wasn't much a bad pirating job could do to make it worse.

Despite being pirated, there has often been quite a bit of work put into the packaging. However, the packaging is photoshopped and cobbled together in truly bizarre ways. You now that old joke about enough monkeys at enough typewriters would someday write a novel? Maybe they would just produce a pirated DVD. It is better to show than to explain, so without further ado, I give you two items of evidence.

Exhibit A: Battlestar Galactica.

When I was a kid, the premiere of the original Battlestar Galactica was cut off so that President Jimmy Carter could give a speech. If there had been suffrage for pre-teen boys, his 1980 loss to Ronald Reagan would have been even worse (no, that doesn't count as talking about politics).

In any case, if you haven't ever watched it as an adult, the old show really stinks. It isn't as wretched as Buck Rogers in the 25th century (Lee and I once ordered it from our Blockbuster Online account back home to try and watch with the kids, it is worse than you can imagine), but it is bad.

However, this new Battlestar Galactica is really good, except that we had to buy it four times. In the first three sets I purchased, it was missing half of the second season. Apparently the pirates even pirate the pirates, because the copies were all coming from the same bad source.

Looking at a pirated DVD packages is a lot like one of those "Find everything wrong with this picture" features in the newspaper. So if you want to study it and see how many problems you can spot before I go on, by my guest.

Here are some of the more notable anomalies on this package:

Item 1: The front cover photo collage.

This truly is a photo of several of the principal cast members from the show. However...

The background image is taken from a completely different sci-fi TV show: Stargate Atlantis

and this section is from Star Trek

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Now we move on the back cover

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Item 2: The Reviewer Quotes

I'm quite sure that Battlestar Galactica is neither a "Tween Comedy" nor a horror movie. I'm also quite sure that there is not a city called "Geiroit". I'm doubtful that San Francisco has a newspaper known as the "Chronich".

Item 3: The Extra Features Box

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And this is obviously taken from yet another completely different movie. This sort of thing is extremely common on DVD packaging here. Maybe they think no one is going to read the fine print, so why bother making it match?

Exhibit B: Iron Man

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Once again, the packaging looks quite normal at first glance. However, study it closely...

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Item 1: The Reviewer Quote

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This time it isn't actually a review quote at all, just some random text that was cut-and-pasted off of IMDB, a movie info website. Sometimes, you can actually find bad reviews used on the cover, literally saying "This movie sucks".

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Item 2: The Proof of Purchase

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Maybe there is a market for counterfeit DVD proofs of purchase. Can I redeem these for a plush toy or something?

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Item 3: The Aspect Ratio description

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I always check to make sure I'm buying movies widescreen. When I taught high school and sometimes used movie clips to illustrate a point, I would invariably have a kid complain that the top and bottom were cut off. I would try to explain that it fact, to make a full-screen movie, they "panned and scanned", cutting off the sides of a widescreen movie. Some of the dimmer kids never could get the concept. However, in this case, they would have been right..

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A scene from Iron Man, in which Gwenyth Paltrow's chest talks to some guy's chin.

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As you can see, for this disc they took a full screen version (which was already cropped) and then literally chopped off the top and the bottom to make it "widescreen".

Conclusion:

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Some of this is just typical Chinese bad English. Some of this is just lazy photoshopping over the top of a previous package. But I am convinced that some of this actually has to be intentional. One example that I don't have to show you is a Battlestar Galactica sets that I didn't buy (I'd already bought two at that point, and I wasn't going to buy another just for laughs). The title logo looked exactly the same, except that it was spelled GALACTIGA. Putting together a finished logo like that was not just a matter of typing, and it would have been much more work than just cutting and pasting. I think that there are guys out there amusing themselves by putting stupid things on DVD covers.

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Either that, or I'm back to the monkeys and typewriters explanation.

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My Political Last Will and Testament

2008-11-04T22:36:00.018+08:00

We launched our international job search almost exactly one year ago. When Lee and I were first drawing up a “pros and cons” list for going overseas, one thing that I put on the “pro” list was that we would miss the presidential elections.

I was being only mildly sarcastic. I have paid only superficial attention to the campaigns. I have read analysis and commentary, but I am blissfully unaware of the debates, the advertisements, and the overall daily news grind. I was a history and government teacher for over a decade before coming here, and I’ve been a serious follower of current events my entire adult life… until now. It feels good, and it has been a substantial relief.

In fact, I even dropped the ball on being able to vote at all this year. We did the initial prep-work on getting absentee ballots, but the follow-through was one more casualty of the “hunter-gatherer” existence of daily survival that defined our first two months in China.

This blog has really been about life in China, and I haven’t had any interest in writing about politics. The elections have prompted me to write this one time, but it may not happen again. If my political interest gets resurrected, I’ll start a new blog to that purpose. That is why I titled this entry My Political Last Will and Testament.

I’m not even going to start out mentioning political parties, because that prejudices people to choose up sides right from the beginning. So I will tell you the one thing that has always mattered to me in life, which is Truth. In one sense, the age of absolute truth died in the modern era, and good riddance. Unfortunately, as humans are prone to do, we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We now live in an age of relative truth, and it is killing us.

I’m an absolutist, I suppose. The term is typically used as a pejorative, to describe the intolerant and the inflexible, but I think it needs a rehabilitated definition. I don’t mean that I think I always know what is absolutely true, only that, independent of and above human opinion and prejudice, a final truth always exists. Wise people spend their whole lives not only trying to find as much of it as they can, and they know that the rest of it is out there somewhere. Even if we can’t always find all of the truth, we can get enough of it to live wisely and be free. Somewhere, deep in their minds, I think everyone knows this, but it is terrifying how deeply it has become buried. What has replaced it is a widespread certainty, among people of all political and cultural stripes, that everyone else’s truth is relative, but their own truth never is.

Recently I had yet another run-in with a full-blown conspiracy theorist. Friends have teased me about being obsessed with conspiracy theories. I’m not, except in the sense that in their increasing proliferation in the Internet Age, they have become especially egregious examples of the war on truth.

I won’t address which specific conspiracy theory it was; it doesn’t matter, and my experience has been that those who believe one conspiracy theory believe them all. What struck me most was that this individual kept insisting that “we can’t really know for sure, it is just a matter of opinion”.

Just a matter of opinion… except that he and I both knew that it wasn’t. He was in no way actually giving equal weight to other “opinions”, but only trying to thwart anyone who might try to counter his. In his mind, he clearly spoke the truth, and it was only labeled an opinion for tactical purposes. It was an “opinion” that had no reason to exist other than to legitimize his contempt for “the establishment”, and since it was "just" an opinion, he felt free of the burden of contradicting, or even knowing, all of the facts, logic, evidence, and overwhelming expert consensus that stood against him.

And that effectively summarizes what I fear is becoming of our culture and our politics, in the United States and elsewhere. Truth is opinion, and opinion is truth. Politically speaking, we are becoming a nation of conspiracy theorists. We have given ourselves licence to make up our own truths, and it will bring us to ruin. Just this week, I read a profound statement (from a book I may get back to writing about later).

“A society in which no one is prepared to tell the truth, whether about historical events, small or large, or commercial transactions, individual or corporate, cannot prosper”

Surprisingly little of my political dismay is tied up in traditional “issues”. I’ve always felt that a citizen of a democracy has two core responsibilities, to vote his or her informed conscience, and to accept the will of the majority even when they don’t like it. Both political parties have much in their traditional platforms that I can get on board with, but both are now being run by their angry activists. While good and caring people in both parties go on thinking that our elections are about government policies, programs, and issues, the real fight is over truth. Sadly, both see extremists of the other side as mortal threats to our society, but they excuse their own side's extremists as harmless eccentrics.

I get most angry at the Left. That doesn't inherently include Democrats, and the only political party I was ever actually registered in was the Democratic Party. However, it is the Left that has the philosophical affinity with the historical sources of modern “relative truth”. Marxism asserted that all accepted truth is really just the self-justifying propaganda of the ruling elite. Deconstructionism, which similarly holds that all truth is relative, takes it so far that a person can’t even own their own thoughts, since their own words can be twisted and reinterpreted to any new meaning. These ideas, and their cousins, have trickled into every corner of our culture. They have given opportunistic people the opening to make all truth into mere ideology.

If any Democrats out there are now feeling offended, let me point out that there was no foreordained necessity for them to ever become so closely allied to the Radical Left. However, the Reactionary Right, instead of standing against this trend, has been infected by it. They may oppose the Left’s politics, but they have copied their methods. There was a time before either party had succumbed to the temptations of their own political fringe. The Democrats drank first and drank deepest, but the Republicans are at the well with them. The labels of “radical” and “reactionary” are tragically appropriate, as they are now permanently bound to each other. Both sides excuse the most outrageous lies, as long as they come from their own side’s propagandists.

In America, truth is very close to being wholly politicized. The Left seems intent on breaking down every single standard, value, tradition, hero, and common purpose we have ever had as a nation. Yet they offer little to replace them, and the very real possiblity that any new standards will fall to the same fate. This moral entropy is creating an absolutely toxic environment in which to raise our children, and may eliminate any hope of healthy national unity. The Right pretends that they stand against this, but mostly they have turned to the comfort of wishful thinking, clichés and jingoism. They don’t think through their ideas, they just make sure they oppose the Left.

If I were voting this year, I would vote for John McCain. However, assuming that Barack Obama wins the Presidency, I'll accept it. I don’t like his inexperience, or his ties to the Radical Left, but I’ve seen modest signs in his campaign that he is a pragmatic man. That is different that being a moderate, as the media has assured us he is, but I'll take what I can get. Perhaps he will be moderate in practice, although I doubt it. Even if he is not, he hopefully will have limited power to advance Leftist ideology. The panicking Republicans who think he is going to usher in a Socialist state need to have more confidence in the structure of our our entire government, which demands consensus at every turn. I'm hoping that there are still enough Democrats in Congress who are not radical Leftists to prevent anything too reckless. Our political system is less susceptible to great policy shifts, for better or for worse, that any other (by the same token, angry Democrats need to remember that Bush pursued the Iraq War only with the willing and informed vote of a majority of Democratic congressmen, and quit acting like he is some sort of rogue dictator).

Republicans were never going to support Obama anyway, which means that his biggest political challenge may well be facing the rage of the Radical Left if he doesn’t do what they tell him to. Of course, if we do enter a new Great Depression, all bets are off on what changes could be in store.

I’m choosing to look on the small bright side of his election, which is proving to the rest of the world what we Americans have known all along: that we are the world’s most open and tolerant society, where anyone can grow up to be President.

New Concepty English for Education of Weekend

2008-11-01T18:05:00.008+08:00

My semi-weekly roundup of fractured Chinese English.

As I said, last week I helped take the 4th grade class on camp. We went to Agriworld, which I suppose could be described as a Communist Knott's Berry Farm. By that I mean it was built, and is maintained, with absolutely zero evidence that its owners/managers care whether or not anyone ever actually comes.

Everything was very haphazard and cursory, and many areas in it look like someone had a bright idea and then abandoned it. Apparently, it was once a state hydroponics farm of some sort, and has now been reworked into a facility for school outings. Being that it is China, who knows what the real story is. It could be the neglected project of some unambitious child of a Party bigshot, or it could literally be the property of the Chinese Army (I'm not being facetious about that at all, the military has its fingers throughout the economy).

Still, there is fun to be had at Agriworld, and we all had a really good time at camp. At the gate, there are two big signs showing all of the available activities (several of which are derelict, or nowhere to be found). There are a lot of laughs to be had on these signs, but I gave close-ups of the two that amused me the most: for horse riding and for paintball.

How Inconvenient

2008-10-28T05:50:00.005+08:00

Our Internet was just down for four days again. This was the third time, and hopefully now it is finally fixed for real. For the time being, the teenage-looking repair guy ran a new wire out of the service box, which means that the wall jacks don't work, and we have no home telephone. That is OK for the time being, as we tell everyone to use our cellphones anyway (because the line quality is so bad).

It is all a reminder that, when it comes down to it, Internet is one of the few things we really can't live without. We need it to communicate, to manage our finances, to do schoolwork, and to not feel like we've lost all contact with Western Civilization.

No Internet makes Don go craaaaaazy....

Monday Miscellany

2008-10-20T20:22:00.007+08:00

I don't know if I've been busy physically this week, but I've sure felt brain busy. I have a couple interesting incidents to retell, but for now I'm just going with my weekly pictures. This time, however, they do have a theme:

Workers have been dredging the canal north of apartment. Much of the mud has been used to build these wattle and earth dams so they can drain a section of the canal, which is probably a step in the construction of the shopping center next door. The barge in the second photo has been plying the water for weeks. The engine looks like it is from the early Industrial Revolution, and the captain's wheel looks like something left over from the Opium Wars.

Construction workers building an apartment block that already looks old before it is even finished.

Several years ago, there was a book titled I'm OK, You're Not (the title was adapted from a warm fuzzy book in the '70s, I'm OK, You're OK). The point of the later book was that, when surveyed, many Americans said that neighborhoods were in decline, and schools were bad across America. However, the same people consistently said "but not my neighborhood, and not our schools". In other words, the problem was always somewhere else.

I find myself pondering that phenomena here, when I try to tell myself that our own apartment block is surely built better than all these other ones that I see under construction. I'm absolutely sure that this building won't come down in an earthquake.....

A work site north of Suzhou. Out of this endless pile of rocks, pairs of workers were moving them one by one by hand, with only a chain and a length of bamboo. In the second photo, I liked the little forest of tea jugs in the break area.

Monday Miscellany

2008-10-13T18:54:00.009+08:00

Weekly random images

The Lion's Grove Garden, a labyrinth of stone paths, tunnels, and bridges.

The Jade Belt Bridge (or Precious Belt Bridge), a stately 9th century Song Dynasty bridge along the Grand Canal that would be a lot more interesting if it were still in the country, rather than within an industrial area. I rode my bicycle out to in on a Saturday morning with H.K., a Korean friend from our LDS branch.

Wildcat dumping along a canal north of Suzhou Industrial Park

Found out by the trashcans in front of our building. The ugliest chair, and I mean ever...

I offered to rescue this chair for our friend Elvina, whose landlord supplied her living room with cheap wicker patio furniture, and doesn't see a problem with that. Citing how uncomfortable the furniture is, Elvina (who is Chinese American and speaks Mandarin) asked for a new couch. The landlord said "there is only one of you, so just stack the cushions". I've been teasing her that she isn't allowed to have friends over or date. Still, she refused my helpful offer, so maybe I'll have to go visit it the chair again in the wildcat dumping area from above.

Dealing with clueless landlords is something that will get its own post sometime, after I collect a few more stories.

New Concepty English for Education of Weekend

2008-10-12T21:36:00.007+08:00

I try to avoid posting twice in one day, but oh well... I took this out of a bus window in downtown Suzhou. It is an advertisement for an apartment complex (or possibly a hotel), that is currently under construction somewhere. As usual, click for a larger image.

Why only big men? Why only fifty of them? Is fifty the total limit, or do we have to apply in groups of fifty? Is it big as in large, or big as in important? Is it like being a ten-cow wife? How big must a man be? Am I big enough? If I continue to lose weight in China, will I lose my qualification?

Safety First

2008-10-12T07:33:00.009+08:00

Last week I posted photos of the guy spidermanning the outside of a high rise apartment building installing an air conditioner. That is just the tip of the iceberg. There are lot of really good ways to hurt yourself in China. Uneven stairs, random holes, protruding metal... they are everywhere. On the one hand, it is refreshing to see a place that obviously hasn't succumbed to the American legal culture of litigation and paranoia. On the other hand, I'm not looking forward to the day that I forget to look for the sharp end of the parking shelter down by the shopping center that is exactly at the height of my forehead. When it happens, I'll try to have my camera on me, so I can give you a good posting about Chinese hospitals.

So here are three hypothetical scenarios for how you could really get hurt around here. OSHA was invented for a reason.

Let's say you are driving your car, which you are so proud of, down to Rainbow Walk to watch the fireworks on National Day. You feel very lucky to have found a parking space on the sidewalk. In your excitement, you jump out of the door without looking down. Hopefully you have a date with you, because otherwise it might be hours before anyone realizes that you are missing. (Low photo quality on this one, I only had my cell phone with me).

Let's suppose you are a city that is going places in the New China economy, and there is lots of construction that needs to get done quickly. Still, you can't afford to close all the roads, or commerce will be adversely affected. Solution? Just let the people and the machines live happily together.

So, you are a young communist-capitalist, out with your friends in your new Buick, which you have proudly decorated with pictures of Mickey Mouse. You are driving down the road, listening to decadent Western music, at a reasonable and prudent 150 km/hr. Just make sure you pay attention to any hazards near the road, or in it...

A note:

I'm sure that some people would look at that last photo and think it was photoshopped. It is very real. I took it about a quarter mile down the road from the previous picture. Obviously the locals know that it is a construction zone, because there is virtually no traffic midday on a Saturday. Still, there are no barriers, and no signs. The roadbed has been moved, but it seems that they have finished the road before going back to move the utility pole.

The picture invites a "man, those people are stupid" sort of ridicule that I want to distance myself from. If the hell-bent ambition for progress leads to weirdness like this, it is also what gave me a job here. I keep reading posts on news forums calling the Chinese "our enemies". Can't the regular people at least get paved roads and cholera-free tap water before they have to be the bad guys? This country is being very good to me, and that is why it is the only photograph that I have marked with a copyright note. I'm really hoping to never see it on another website used to the purpose of mocking the Chinese.

New Concepty English for Education of Weekend

2008-10-05T14:47:00.006+08:00

My weekly post of creative uses for English in China.

One of the big reasons I wanted to move the family overseas in the first place was that we seemed to be settled into ruts in which we never did activities outside the house. Part of that was because Phoenix is so hot, but I can't use that as my whole excuse. Our lifestyle was just too sedentary, and I didn't know what to do about it. It felt that every day was a race from the time we woke up until we went to bed, and a lot of things that should be happening just were not.

One of the things that became emblematic of that to me was the fact that I had never actually taught my son to ride a bike. I always felt really guilty about it. So two weeks ago, I bought this bicycle for him. He is getting better by the day, although I'm still not willing to take him out on the streets. The bike was still wrapped in packing material when we bought it, so it wasn't until later that we got a chance to read all the Novelity English.

Click for larger images.

Emmelle is the brand name, so that makes sense at least. Beyond that, there are so many questions: Is the bike especially likely to fall down? or are you supposed to FEEL IT? The name could refer to Aeolus, a minor Greek god of wind, but why would someone put that much work into researching a mythical name without proofreading any of the other English? I guess feeling the wind is better than breaking it. "Ripals" are obviously "rivals", but are you competing with them for things to be "novel" as in new? Or perhaps for notoriety?

I'm so confused.

Tiger Hill

2008-10-04T08:40:00.007+08:00

This is the second half of the same outing from Thursday. Tiger hill is a large park of hillside gardens. It is topped off by a 1000 year old pagoda, which leans. Suzhou already dubs itself the "Venice of the East" because of all its canals. So I guess this the "Pisa of the East". It really is a nice area, and it also has the best tourist trap shops I've seen so far.

Two views of the pagoda at Tiger Hill

The family

The saddest little broken down slope-backed horse I've ever seen

Day trip to Taihu

2008-10-03T21:17:00.013+08:00

We have the week off from work and school for Chinese National Day. Although we have been here for over six weeks, we had only done local sightseeing. Yesterday we took our first real outing. We hired a local driver and he took us out to Taihu. the "hu" means lake, and Taihu, which is west of Suzhou, is one of the largest freshwater lakes in China. The following satellite image shows the location.

Taihu is the large lake at center left. The river is the Yangtze. There are four large cities visible in the image. Shanghai east at the far right. Suzhou is just east of the lake. Wuxi is at the northern edge of the lake. Changzhou is northwest of the lake at the corner of the image. The large island is Xi shan, or West Hill. The end of the large peninsula is Dong shan, or East Hill. We went to Xi shan, which is linked to the mainland by a series of causeways. It includes some nice resorts, and a pleasant little town that is obviously off the beaten path for foreign tourists (I didn't see a single westerner all day).

The following images are from that morning.

A cave we visited. It was kind of fun, but not especially spectacular. There are some additional caves west of the lake that are said to be much cooler (one has a waterfall, and in another you traverse an underground lake by ferry). Initially, I planned for yesterday's outing to go to those caves, but it proved to be too much of a logistical challenge, so I will work on it for another time.

John in a little pocket of rock off of the trail. Just outside of the picture to the right are the Chinese girls who thought this scene was very, very funny.

Lee and Allyne near the summit of the hill over the cave.

The second level within the pagoda. I think the guy here wanted to sell me my fortune.

A view from the summit.

Two views of the lake from another area of the island. The sky was very clear for the first half of this week, but the usual haze was back. Still, it was all very pleasant, it just doesn't photograph as well.

Two more images from the same general area. I should have kept track of the names of all these places.

Lunch. An interesting experience. Our driver recommended this little place. In the cities, most restaurants have picture menus to help out the foreigners. Here, the lady just took me out back to show me what they could cook for us. Everything was local, and most was right out of the lake. I chose a fish, a chicken, and I pointed to various vegetables. I specifically did not point to the little freshwater shrimp, but we got them anyway. Just because I pointed didn't mean I knew what they were going to do to them, so as each dish came out, we had no idea what it would actually be.

All in all, we had way too much food, but I've learned that ordering way too much food is a cultural characteristic here. Everything was good, even the scrambled eggs with little eel-like critters mixed in. The only thing I didn't like at all were the little shrimp. It isn't that they are staring back, it is that they were too much work for too little reward. The chicken was cooked in an oily broth, with only the innards missing. Everything else, including head and feet, were there with it.

Don't worry, if you come visit us, we won't feed you this way. Tomorrow I will post on the afternoon portion of this outing.

Monday Miscellany

2008-09-29T19:36:00.007+08:00

My weekly roundup of pictures that don't necessarily have a story to go with them.

One of the many security guards on the school campus. With straight backs, military clothes, and white gloves, they take their job very seriously. I am sure that here, they feel they have landed a good job, while back in the U.S., this would be seen as a "crap job", and they would make sure they looked like they hated it.

A school assembly. The kid in the foreground is a really nice Korean boy who goes by Danny. I can't even remember his real name.

The weekend light, fountain, and fire show on Rainbow Walk at Jinji Lake. It is bigger than the show at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Cheesier too, but in a good way. The shows usually happen weekly, but they have been sporadic lately because of tunnel excavation under the lake at this exact spot for the new Suzhou subway, scheduled to open in 2010.

Two views of old Suzhou. The second photo is the back door of someone's kitchen, with ancient steps going right down to the canal. It is a very evocative scene for anyone who doesn't have to live in this kind of poverty. I'm sure that, whoever they are, the get tired of tourists photographing them.