Visitors

A few days after the swine flu closed our school a few days early in early July, Aaron's parents and two of his siblings, Caleb and Emily, arrived in Beijing for a two week visit.  They came partly to visit us, and partly to visit Jing Wei--the exchange student from Beijing who spent a year living with their family and going to high school in Gladstone, Michigan--and Jing Wei's parents.  Jing Wei and Mr. and Mrs. Wu were incredibly welcoming, hosting dinner after dinner, taking us all on a trip to Tian Jin, arranging a hotel for the Whitmers to stay at, and the list goes on.  It was a very busy and fun time.  Here are some photos of the highlights.

dinner at the hotel run by Mrs. Wu

A meal in Tian Jin, a city of 10 million near Beijing

preparing the fish

Caleb surveys the 4 star hotel they put us up in in Tian Jin (the nicest hotel I think any of us had ever stayed in...)

never again will i visit the forbidden city at high tourist season... (and note the umbrellas, not for rain but for protection from the sun)

Emily surveys her kingdom

the night market.  everything you never really wanted to eat on a stick. 

(silkworms, sea horses, starfish, sheep testicles, etc.)

beijing duck

Gary makes a friend

rooftop cafe in the seaside town of Qingdao we visited for a couple days.  The city is pretty; winding streets and German architecture from the late 1800s when the Germans controlled parts of the city.

ah, Chinese beaches. 

late night street

worker at the Qingdao brewery;  we toured the factory.

bottling area

dinner at the Wu's apartment.  In chinese culture inviting someone to have dinner in your home is not a common occurance, so we felt honored to be invited to the Wu's home for a delicious meal. 

the 'squirrel fish'

a lot of jiao zi (dumplings)

more food than we could ever possibly finish

i forgot

i forgot to mention that i recently posted an entry with lots of photos about our may holiday, but because i'd started it before it's saved under May.  the title is "May Holiday-Trip to Yujiacun" if you'd like to read it.

swine flu, end of school

end of the year dinner with our coworkers--upscale hotpot

lots of giggling...

Alice, one of my first graders

bobby, 3rd grade.  i feel like this picture captures his personality pretty well. 

Spring (Chun Tian/ 春天), 3rd grade

(I never learned most of my students' real names which is kind of a shame, but they only went by their English names in my class.  This was an easy one though since chun tian actually means spring.)

Leela, one of my favorite 3rd graders

Last week we went into teach our usual half day on Friday and were told when we got there that school was canceled.  The children were in their dorms and waiting for their parents to come pick them up.  We were still supposed to have 4 more days the next week to do all the end-of-the-year stuff... some contests, a party, a movie, etc. not to mention just having a chance to say goodbye to the kids.  I guess a case of the swine flu broke out in a school on the other side of Beijing and 8 kids were infected, so they closed most of the schools in the city.  I was able to go find the kids in their dormitory and tell them goodbye quickly there, but it was a strange ending to the school year.  I'll post a few photos of our students. 

aaron's first grade

saying goodbye to our empty office

eating habits

well, first of all, we figured out from from friends how to bypass the firewall here, so i'm able to access this website again and can start writing more often....  hopefully people haven't given up checking in on it now and then. 

I've been wanting to write a bit about some interesting perceptions of what westerners (namely Americans) eat, which can at times be kind of funny.  

In general, people are curious and i notice while i'm shopping at the grocery store in our neighborhood people like to look into my basket as they walk by or at the checkout.  Of course westerners have the (pretty well-founded) stereotype here of eating a lot of dairy products. Milk has really caught on in China recently (thanks in part to the commercials of tall children drinking milk and then being the tallest kid on the basketball team and making baskets while the short, non-milk drinking child stands by on the sidelines).  The whole milk scandal here put some people off milk for awhile i think but now there are also commercials of pristine milk factories complete with large car-wash type scrubby wheels that scrub the sides of the white happy seeming-cows and lots of smiling scientists testing the milk with pleased and impressed- looking westerners observing.  Cheese hasn't really caught on much though and and all in all i do eat a lot more dairy products than the average Chinese person.  So in the grocery store while they are adding jars of fish paste, tasteless rice snacks, and plastic bags of bloody meat to their carts, i feel i must be confirming their suspicions as i pass with my basket of bread, milk, and yoghurt. 

we get our vegetables at the large semi-outdoor vegetable market down the street.  a lot of migrant workers from the country side sell good fresh fruit and vegetables there (I've heard the main fertilizer is human waste, but i guess it's not that big of a deal really... right?) Anyway, there or back at our building waiting for the elevator people often look at my bag and then at me and ask if i know how to cook.  I tell them yes, my husband and i both like to cook.  Then they usually ask if we cook chinese food and i say no i don't really know how and then they ask what we cook and i try to summarize my cooking habits in a few floors worth of elevator ride. 

maybe the strangest assumption about American eating habits was a couple months ago when aaron was across the hall at our neighbors. He's been helping their son and their son's friend with English and trying to get some Chinese practice in too.  He was sitting in the living room with the two little boys (who were hanging out in their underwear-it was a hot day) and the mother kept coming in the room refilling aaron's little cup of beer she'd given him.  But as it was  only 3 o'clock in the afternoon and he was pretty thirsty, he asked her if he could just have a glass of water.  She said,  Oh! You drink water?  I thought Americans only drank beer.  She seemed surprised to see Aaron drink down the glass of water she brought him.  She's been very generous though and often sends aaron home with a gift of some sort:  8 bottles of pepsi, crisco-y tasting cookie snacks, weird icecream, and once a watermelon, but this particular day she brought him a plastic bag from the kitchen with a duck in it.  head, beak, feet, body, it was all there, though it had been hacked into many pieces. Try the neck! she cheerfully instructed aaron who was trying to decide what to do.  Aaron dutifully retrieved a neck-looking piece from the bag tried it--it's suposed to be the best part of the duck.   He thanked her but tried to explain that since his wife didn't eat meat he couldn't finish the whole duck himself, so maybe he could just take half of it.  Trying to explain vegetarianism to someone in a culture of not so distant famine and hardship, where meat is a sign of health, wealth, etc, is never easy.  She said, yes, but has your wife ever tried this?, indicating the duck.  Aaron said no but she really hasn't eaten any meat for 15 years; i don't think she'll want to try it.  Finally the mother seemed to understand: Oh, She's a buddhist!  Aaron tried to explain again but sort of gave up, so now i guess i'm the Buddhist neighbor.  when aaron came home and deposited the bag on my chest where i was reading a book on the couch i had a moment of cultural defensiveness.  wait--she thinks we're weird?  she gave us a hacked up duck in a plastic bag! i could put it back together like a puzzle. 

finally, the other conversation that seems to fit into this entry about food and assumptions took place last week in our office. One of the Chinese teachers who's only been there the last couple months asked us if we liked chinese food.  we said yes we like it a lot.  she asked if we cook at home of just go out. I find this question sort of weird.  Considering we've been living in Beijing in an apartment for nearly a year would you really think we only eat out? we said no, we usually cook but sometimes go out.  she asked if we really cook though, because didn't we mostly eat cold foods?  i asked her what she meant. she said she thought americans mostly eat salads and uncooked foods. (this was a new one--other people seem to think we only eat hotdogs, hamburgers, and pizza.) I said, well, i do like salad, but we definitely also eat a lot of cooked foods too.  This is the same teacher who asked us if American high school is really like Gossip Girl and if American culture is like Desperate Housewives.  

I can't really blame people for having skewed perceptions of the U.S. if that's what hollywood is showing.  (I think about what i knew about China 4 years ago before I came--very little.)  But it can still be frustrating at times to feel misunderstood.  Yes, you're right; I'm American and I'm not fat.  No, I do not drive a fancy car, own a gun, live in a mansion,  eat cold foods and drink only beer.  

tian an men massacre anniversary

hello to anyone out there who is still checking up on my blog. It's been a long time since i've posted a new entry because a lot of sites were blocked here in May. I'm not very computer savvy so it took me awhile to learn that i could get to this website by going through a proxy website. it took awhile to find one that worked.

As you probably knew, the 20th anniversary of the tian an men square massacre was earlier in June, and a lot of social networking sites stopped working around that time. i guess it's a possible place for people to meet and plan a demonstration, so they were all blocked-- i heard the official line was that June 5-7 is the annual date for website maintenance in china where a lot of sites are closed temporarily. (the anniversary is on the 6th.) 

Aaron and i decided to go down to the square and see what the atmosphere was on the 6th. we heard from someone who tried to go earlier that they weren't letting foreigners in without a passport, so we stopped at home after school and got them. the police presence at the square was unbelievable. guards, armed police everywhere you looked. they had all but a couple entrances to the square blocked off. we put our bags through the usual metal detecters and then the workers searched them and asked us some questions.. why we were there, what we were doing in beijing, why we chose to come to the square that day, etc. they let us through and we walked back above ground into the huge cement square. 

the weather was strange; sweltering hot and humid but overcast and you could feel a storm coming. the weather itself was enough to make the atmosphere thick and tense. there were plainclothes guards stationed throughout the square, each with an wire in their ear and an umbrella. if their goal was to blend in they didn't do a very good job. they just stood and watched people. we learned later that the umbrellas were to deter people from taking photos they shouldn't take or any video. if they saw someone doing so they would walk infront of the camera with the umbrella opened and block the view. we watched a video of a reporter trying to report (outside the square) who was constantly being blocked by umbrellas. the whole thing almost seemed comical--it would've been funny if the whole atmosphere hadn't seemed so heavy. 

(the pictures included here are from the winter)

we wandered through the square, passed the tens of police vans sitting, waiting with their doors open, passed the scores of plainclothes police, passed the chinese people on a grassy area--not talking, just sitting quietly, passed the vans of young soldiers who stared at all the foreigners passing by and it seems likely that a lot of them weren't even from beijing but probably brought in from the country or other towns for the day. 

The huge stone statues of Mao's proclaimed heros of china--the people, the workers, the peasants-- stood as always outside the mausoleum where his pickled body is still preserved and displayed. They are impressive stone statues in their size and stature, depictions of hearty peasants marching forward in a group, arms outstretched and eyes looking toward the horizon, toward the new and better age of communism, THEIR government, their time, their future. And the irony of it all seemed so immense that a largely peaceful student led demonstration 20 years ago ended with hundreds of innocent people gunned down by their government in the same square. 

After leaving the square I was thinking how crazy it is that so many people outside of beijing don't even know what happened that day. The government swept it under the carpet and pretended it never happened. But with such a large police force there that day, anyone would know something important was going on. Which made me realize that it doesn't really matter if people know. Of course nothing would be reported in the newspapers, but even with all the people who were at the square and witnessed the government's enormous clamp down on any possible show of unrest, why does it matter if people see? For one thing, the many people who do know about the tian an men square massacre are vastly outnumbered by those who don't. China is enormous and beijing is such a small part of it. And secondly, it seems to have become less about a battle of truth (the massacre happened v.s the massacre didn't happen) and more about a battle of force (fine. you know it happened? just try doing something about it.) it's impossible to summarize this country. It's full of contradictions and surprises. I feel like I've been here for a long time, but still know very little.

May 12 One year anniversary of the sichuan earthquake

i thought i'd write a short post today as it's the one year anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake here in China.  I hadn't really realized until recently just how much controversy is surrounding the government's handling of the situation.  Directly after the earthquake authorities were praised somewhat for sending aid so quickly to the region, but have since aroused a lot of anger.  

Many of the 69,000 people who were killed and 374,000 people injured in the quake were school children, and a disproportionate number of schools crumbled that day.  Apparently, officials were receiving the building materials for new schools then selling off the steel reinforcement columns, and other materials etc. and pocketing the money.  The buildings were constructed far below building codes and completely unsafe.  The corruption was so widespread that literally hundreds of schools crumbled while other nearby buildings were far less damaged.  Rather than calling out the people responsible for this, the media is quite silent on the issue due to pressure from the authorities.  

wikipedia seems to have a good summary of the story.  Here's a short excerpt: 

In July 2008, local governments in the Sichuan Province coordinated a campaign to silence angry parents whose children died during the earthquake through monetary contracts. If the parents refused, officials threatened that they would receive nothing. Although Chinese officials have advocated a policy of openness in time before the Olympic Games, the pressure on parents to sign demonstrates that officials are determined to create an appearance of public harmony rather than investigate into the corruption or negligence of the construction of schools. The payment amounts vary by school but are roughly the same. In Hanwang, parents were offered a package valued at 8,800 USD in cash and a per-parent pension of nearly 5,600 USD. Many parents said they signed the contract, even if no real investigation ensues. Furthermore, officials have continued used traditional methods of silencing: riot police officers have broken up protests by parents; the authorities have set up cordons around the schools; and officials have ordered the Chinese news media to stop reporting on school collapses.^[21]

In July 25, 2008, Liu Shaokun (刘绍坤), a Sichuan school teacher, was detained for disseminating rumors and destroying social order. Liu’s family was later told that he was being investigated on suspicion of the crime of inciting subversion. Liu, a teacher at Guanghan Middle School, Deyang City, Sichuan Province (四川省德阳市广汉中学), traveled to heavily hit areas after the May 12 Sichuan earthquake, took photos of collapsed school buildings, and put them online. In a media interview, he expressed his anger at “the shoddy ‘tofu’ buildings.” Liu was detained on June 25, 2008 at his school. He was ordered to serve one year of re-education through labor (劳动教养) (RTL). Under RTL regulations, public security authorities may issue an order to anyone to serve up to four years of RTL without trial or formal charge. After being denied several visits, the family turned to international human rights organizations, who reported the case and urged the government to release him, which drew attention in the international community. On September 26, 2008, Liu was finally released to service his sentence outside of RTL.^[22]

The government also had refused to release the official death count of students for the whole past year.  Finally just last Thursday they did. if you want to read more there's a lot of information on line.  I was surprised it wasn't blocked for me here.   it seems hit and miss what the government chooses to block.  You tube, for example, has been blocked for a couple of months again now due to a video showing chinese police beating tibetans during the riots in tibet before the olympics last summer.  Also it's impossible to look up anything on falun gong--the semi religious group (more of a philosophy i think than a religion) that has been so severely oppressed and abused by the government.  It is strange at times to have the government so blatantly controlling information. I don't think the Chinese government is so different from ours in this respect, but they do go about it in different ways.   

May holiday--trip to Yujiacun

we had a four day weekend and decided to take a trip somewhere nearby Beijing for a night. we'd read about an old village still lived in where everything was made of stone.  so we left early Friday morning.  we took an express train to the capitol of the the province that surrounds Beijing; it took only two hours to get there.  it was one of the nicest trains we've been on in china. our tickets were a bit pricey by Chinese standards, but were the only ones we were able to get so last minute.  

at the train station--people waiting to get on another train...(each door was similarly crowded)

en route in our very comfortable seats

from the train window

every time i leave Beijing, china feels much more like china.  it's easy to get comfortable here.  we took a city bus to another part of the city and waited in a long line to buy bus tickets.  then realized that the time printed on our tickets to depart wasn't for four more hours.  as we stood there trying to decide what to do a woman quickly came up to us, looked at our tickets, and told us to hurry outside and get on a bus.  the station was disorganized, no one else seemed to know where to go either, but we were herded onto a mini bus.  we realized Beijing had made us used to schedules and organization, but things like that always happen when you travel around china.  after an hour or so we arrived at the next town where we needed to catch one more bus to the village.  it's interesting that even just a few hours from Beijing people are so unaccustomed to seeing foreigners.  people stood and stared at us in the streets, friends whispered to each other to look when they noticed us,  a few people called 'hello'! and laughed, two teenagers asked if they could take their photo with us,  and all around us we heard the familiar words "laowai" or "waiguoren" (foreigners) on everyone's lips.  

the next bus was crowded and hot. we sat in traffic a long time and then pulled off the road for another long wait for another bus to give them some of our passengers. but once we started moving the trip was fine.  the area around Beijing is brown and dusty with only small small gnarled trees and scrub grass. much of the way was over dusty dirt roads. it had been awhile since I'd taken a minibus in china, and we were reminded of some of the things that makes them interesting.  there's usually about 15 seats and an aisle for standing passengers. the ticket taker is the boss and often tells people where to sit.  the woman on our bus was friendly, but also pretty intense as i guess you'd have to be.  an argument broke out about the price of the ticket with one passenger and she wasn't someone I'd like to argue with.  (she actually smacked him a few times at one point).  

people wait along the road for a minibus to come by and it seems there's always room for more.  on our trip back after the weekend, as aaron and i were sitting at the front of the bus over the engine, we counted 30 people though there were only 15 seats.  soon after our bus slowed down by a small crowd along the road.  i thought there's no possible way we can fit that many people in, but somehow we did, until we had 48 adults and a few children packed in.  it's really impressive how unaffected people seem by it.  no one seems annoyed, no one really complains.  

another thing we were reminded of was the creative ways the bus operators get around the safety regulations.  at one point when there were only a few standing passengers they told them to get down. they all squatted low on the floor and we drove by a police car stopped in the road.  at a road check point our driver gave the checkpoint guy a cigarette and we drove on.  i remembered how last time in china, traveling around Xi'an, the minibuses would often pull off to the side of the road, all the standing passengers would be hurried off the bus, and we would continue through the checkpoint without them. (the checkpoints were usually a guy at a desk along the side of the road who would stamp a paper and give it to the bus operator if they passed.)  then we'd drive a little ways beyond the checkpoint, and stop to wait for the other passengers to catch up.  sometimes they'd walk across, and sometimes a pack of motorcycle drivers would be waiting along the road to drive them across.  then the bus driver would pay the motorcyclists and we'd go on our way. 

anyway, we arrived in the village and spent the afternoon wandering around the narrow stone alleyways.  there were some Chinese tourists but the whole place felt decidedly untouresty--no post card shops etc.  it was a nice combination of being enough of a tourist site not to feel like we were intruding, but not being overrun.  

these little boxes were once place on poles and used to carry a bride-to-be through town on her wedding day. i don't think this is an original one though...

most of the roads through the town looked like this.  there were also roads wide enough for cars and motorcycles, but all the small lanes connecting everything were narrow and winding.

one of the main attractions in the town.  This was a strange somewhat lopsided tower said to have been built about 500 years ago by a local eccentric.  He was an amateur architect; the building has no foundation, is composed of all sizes and shapes of stones, and does not follow the traditional ideals of symmetry almost always found in classical Chinese architecture. The story goes that he wanted to build a tower tall enough to see Beijing from and built the entire thing himself refusing help of any kind, and built only by the light of the moon.  Taking all that into account it was a pretty interesting building.  Inside were lots of kitchy statues of Chinese gods which have been added more recently. 

from below

scattered throughout the town were old opera stages once used for open air performances. 

detail of the painting over the stage

a small shrine in a wall

eventually we started to look for a place to stay.  our guidebook simply said some locals rent out rooms for a small fee, so we started to ask around.  people in the town were really nice. most of the residents seemed to be elderly, and a couple of times when we looked into an open courtyard they'd see us and invite us in to look around.  one woman up some steps in a tiny temple pointed out all the different gods to us and then stood and chatted with us for 20 minutes.  the dialect in the town was very difficult to understand and i think we were only getting about 30 percent of what she was saying, but she didn't seem to mind. she was very lively and laughed easily and had kind eyes.  we asked her if she had children and she said she'd had two boys and a girl but they had all died.  her husband had also had an accident and was either paralyzed from the waist down or had lost his legs.  he had had to pull himself around on a little cart with his hands.  it was hard to imagine what this woman's life had been like, living in this tiny village since she was 18 and all the changes that had happened in that time.  i thought it must sometimes be strange for her to have these people arriving from so far away who have had such different lives.  that's the strange side to being a tourist.  there's this lurking feeling of guilt that i just can't shake so much of the time.  i wanted to give her a hug for some reason, but people don't really hug in china, so we just smiled. 

we asked a nice family running a shop about a place to stay and they helped us find the home of an elderly woman who rented out rooms in the home she'd lived in her entire life.  It was possibly the best place I've ever stayed in in China.  We took some photos and i also took a video of our room which i've posted a video of below.   The room looked like it hadn't been touched in 40 years, except for the newer t.v, the dates on the calendars, and the colored photographs.  Everything else seemed to be from a bygone era.  It was actually two connected rooms and each room had a 'kang' which is a large bed that takes up much of the room made of the same material as the walls. underneath it is an oven and serves as the room's heat source while heating the bed from below.  In the past whole families would share the kang at night and also spend much of their time on it using it as a living space during the cold days.  I'd always wanted to sleep on one.  it's warm out so the oven wasn't lit but it was still fun.  (though basically had no padding, so it was kind of like sleeping on the floor). 

this was the smaller room and the smaller of the beds

parts of the town were newer.  there was a new school and this huge stage next to it.  above the stage was painted 1984--maybe the year it was built.  It had such an old china look to it. I was imagining the communist productions that would have been put on on that stage at one point in a very different china than the one that exists today. 

the stage

we ate dinner in a little restaurant. i snapped a photo of our view of the kitchen.  we ordered some spicy shredded potato and jiaozi (dumplings).  we'd never ordered them by weight before, only number, and ended up with enough for five people.... we ate until we felt sick but still couldn't finish them

After dinner we walked down the the only road in the town.  It was dark now and we could hear singing down the road.  Earlier in the day we had seen a group of people down the hill standing around an old phonograph, playing a swelling orchestral song over and over again.  It was epic and dirge like and echoed through the town.  It's solemnity was undercut only by its repetition. Now it was dark and the music was not from a phonograph.  A group of musicians had gathered where the phonograph had been.  There was a keyboardist, a man playing the Er-Hu, another playing a guitar looking instrument with four strings, a few men clapping blocks or wood together for percussion and a pair of singing ladies.  The ladies took turns singing.  Sometimes they sang back and forth to each other.  Sometimes they were silent.  They performed old songs: folk opera.  The melodies were in turn sad and comical.  Piped through bullhorn speakers attached to the roof of a roadside shop, the music was incredibly loud.  It shot straight out of the speakers and crashed into the high stone wall on the opposite side of the narrow road and then bounced back out and across the entire village.  Goats watched from the high stone wall, looking down at the musicians.   Occasionally the music would stop and the musicians would pass around cigarettes and sip beer from green bottles.  We learned later that someone had recently died in the village and that the musicians had been hired to play as part of the funeral.  They played late into the night.  As the music--either the phonograph dirge or the live music--played nearly the whole time we spent in the villiage, it brings back the memory of the feeling of the village when i hear it now.  There is a video posted at the bottom, but it is better for the sound than for the visuals.  I think this type of chinese opera music is strangely wonderful.

back in our room

the woman whose home it was made us noodles for breakfast.  Her granddaughter said her noodles were famous locally.  I've never been able to get used to noodles for breakfast, but they were actually quite good.  we sat in the courtyard to eat.

the doorway to our bedroom

you could go up on the roof of the house. here's the view down into the courtyard. 

the house next door

the granddaughter is coming to beijing for college next fall and wanted to keep in touch with us. then we all took a photo together. 

the way home seemed longish, crowded most of the way back over the bumpy roads in the minibus.  An older woman standing near me started talking to us (her dialect was also hard to understand) and i wasn't sure what she was saying when she grabbed my hand and inspected it and laughed.  she was quite intrigued about my skin color or maybe my long fingers.  i don't know. but though personal contact with a stranger still seems a little strange to me i liked that she wasn't inhibited.  some people are so shy around us when we get out of the bigger cities and i appreciated that she was basically just like, wow- you're really weird!  

after the two busses we got to the train station but if we wanted to leave soon there was only standing room.  we bought a tiny stool and on the train sat on that and a newspaper we spread on the ground, which is what most people do with standing tickets.  it wasn't bad if you don't mind moving periodically for the mop women who come around. (it seems more their goal to make the floor wet rather than clean...)  . So after three hours on the train we were back in beijing.

a town we stopped at to change busses on the way back to beijing. the two cooling towers were the main skyline. we took this photo from a bridge over the 'river'. it was just a dry riverbed with crops planted in it.