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

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

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

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

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

Go on, just do it!

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

Happy New Year

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

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

Monday Miscellany

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

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

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.