Tony's China Blog

Whenever we have dinner with new Chinese acquaintances, it usually takes less than twenty minutes for me to hear the common observation: "Oh you are left-handed! Left-handed people are very clever!" I always have to move my little chopsticks rest from the right side of the table to the left, and I always try to sit to Erica’s right on the circular tables to avoid the elbow bumping which occasionally occurs with my abnormality.
On the first day of class for our high school students, as I fielded questions from them and wrote on the board, in half of my classes an early question was "Why do you write with your left hand?"
No on in China is left handed. Okay, that is hyperbolic, but very, very few people are (allowed to be). Students are, essentially, not allowed write with their left hand, and if, like the rest of the world, 10-20% of them are natural lefties, that is unacknowledged, and those writing their compositions with their ‘off’ hand must just have very bad penmanship.
I talked with a fellow teacher the other day about this fact and she said, triumphantly, that one of her (150) students was left-handed. "Who?" I asked. She wouldn’t tell me. "You’ll have to see for yourself," was her reply, as though discovering this student for myself was important. I haven’t remembered to look. I think that perhaps it is not that lefties here are clever, but that they are stubborn, for if I was born here I’d be right handed too, with penmanship even worse than it is now.

Yes, China still has its one-child policy in effect. For the most part. There is a slowly growing list of exceptions to it (your parents were both single children, you don’t live in the city and your firstborn was a girl, you are a member of one of China’s officially recognized 56 minority groups), but still, the vast majority urban families have only one child. Surprisingly, even the rich and powerful seem to abide by this rule.
It is strange so see so many one-child families. Twins are priceless and highly visible here because they are such a lucky break for the parents. Especially twin boys! Since this policy has been advocated for 30 years (previously, Mao had encouraged parents to have as many children as possible), millions of families are also becoming one-grandchild families.
This creates a complicated dynamic, where the hopes and dreams of six people (both parents and both sets of grandparents) are pinned upon one (un)lucky child. This goes two ways for children. On the one hand, they have enormous pressure not to be a screw up, to make the family proud, to study, to be diligent, and so forth. On the other hand, as is the case universally with single children (I am thinking primarily of Italy because of my experience there), these kids get Spoiled! The children are usually waited on hand and foot. They no housework at all (we take an informal poll of our high school classes and no one ever does the dishes or cleans up), and are carried and even fed by doting grandparents beyond the age when they are perfectly able to do it themselves.
Are kids here happy? Sure. But from the people we’ve talked to, it seems that most of them wish they could bring brothers and sisters into the world. It would create a more natural family dynamic, and by extension, a more natural society.

Walter, our sole remaining "Native English Teacher" co-worker (Erica loves that job title), had an interesting observation about China the other day. If Bush and the Republicans were able to institute their policies unabated, the USA would be a lot less like the USA we knew and a lot more like China today. We spent some time discussing this theory and found it held true over a surprisingly wide variety of issues.
One does not need to spend much time in China to realize that Mao’s dream is dead. They may call themselves the Communist Party, but there is little left to the communist ideal. The free market reforms have been wildly successful, judging by the number of new Audis and BMWs on the streets on Ningbo. We have a Ferrari/Maserati dealership. But bicycle is by far a more popular way to get around and most deliveries in town are still done on tricycles with big wheels and older men straining their calves on the pedals.
Allow me to enumerate the ways that China is a Conservative’s dream world.
Minimal environmental safeguards. Diesel trucks belch out unfiltered exhaust, a fine layer of black soot appears on any undusted surface within a week, and things never seem that clean.
Unfettered capitalism. As Deng Xiaoping said (and every single article reporting on the economic reforms he started in 1978 dutifully quotes) "To get rich is glorious." The businessman is the glorious man, his workers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and assistants, worthless.
No effective labor laws. Most employees are virtually owned by their bosses, who even have to give them permission to quit (and therefore look for a different job). You do what you are told. This leads to:
A seemingly endless supply of cheap labor. If there is a minimum wage, it’s negligible. You can hire a cleaning lady or street sweeper or migrant laborer for $4 a day, no problem.
Food, too, is cheap, cheap, cheap. If you don’t pay the farmers, busboys, waiters, or cooks anything, of course it will be!
Civil rights? What? The police and army have unfettered power. They need no judge to okay a home search. They do not have to testify publicly in order to convict you of a crime. You can be arrested and held indefinitely for no reason at all, just suspicion.
State-run enterprises seem to have made a strange slide from socialist to fascist. Instead of being run by the state, the state seems more run by them.
Schools work two ways: if you can’t get into the magnet schools based on your grades, you can buy your way in. Our school, best in the city, reserves 1/6 of its slots for the highest bidder—literally. As I understand, there is a dutch auction of those spots in the entering class each year. The free market!
So some things aren’t necessarily on the Republican wish list… especially the whole guns are illegal thing. And free and promoted abortions. But I look around me, and most of the things that I find unpleasant about China, I also find that they mesh quite well with the far Right in America. Amazing. If I had better information and sources, I could probably turn this into a cute article for slate.com or something. But instead, you few privileged readers will have exclusive access to this theory.

Perhaps you’ve become enamored with China. Perhaps you want to move here yourself and try out this whole living-abroad thing. Perhaps you are just interested in what authors have influenced and informed my China view. We are fortunate to have a very good English bookshelf in our dormitory, one that has at least a few dozen books that would be instantly confiscated if we were locals and somehow caught with them. I’ve been making my way through them, among the fluffier and usually non-China-related books that can let me escape the country for a few hours here and there.
My recommendations:
Evening Chats in Beijing by Perry Link is a fascinating/depressing book by a Princeton professor who talked with a lot of intellectuals before and immediately after the Tiananmen Square massacre. It gives an insight into the oppression that thinkers in this country face and makes you really hate those in the Party and in power.
River Town is a much lighter, though just as insightful book. Peter Hessler, who now covers China for the New Yorker, wrote about his two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English on the Yangtze River in a smallish town. He is very smart and connects his experiences with the greater societal structures here. It is an engaging read.
Iron and Silk, by Mark Salzman, is a fun book by another American teaching English. This one is a martial arts aficionado. His book is really interesting as well. Both this and River Town give a pretty good idea of a lot of the challenges and excitement that comes with being a foreign ‘Native English’ teacher here. It was made into a movie starring the author. This movie is on my must-see list once I come back home. A movie about the suburban white boy cum martial arts expert. I’ve got to see it.
Another good book on China that is depressing, for it talks about the horrible recent history of the Cultural Revolution, is called One Man’s Bible. I ran across it here and the author is Gao Xingjian. He’s a Nobel Prize winner, and his ‘fictionalized’ personal history includes a lot of fear, persecution and unhappiness. It is sandwiched in among sex scenes from a later life as a refuge in Hong Kong.
For something not as depressing (but still somewhat), try The Concubine’s Children by Denise Chong. It is her family history, from the first half of the 20th century mostly, when her family came over from Guangdong to Vancouver.

Erica and I were bummed this morning when we had to work through the final presidential debate. So during our lunch break, we pulled up the NY Times online and read their commentary. Then, after teaching in the afternoon, we came home and read the punditocracy’s take on the debate: I generally read www.slate.com and www.dailykos.com for a slightly broader (if not more balanced) idea of how things played. Yes, I am a political junkie. Part of this comes from my general fascination with all things competitive, but most of it is, of course, a result of my infatuation with the removal of W. and his cronies from the presidency.
We have already signed and mailed off our absentee ballots for Wisconsin, and I spend up to an hour daily reading whatever I can get my hands on about the election and so forth. We gave some money to several congressional candidates and are trying to get money off to the Democrats and Kerry, but the links on their websites are coming up dead from China.
So what is the feeling here? Our tiny circle of friends includes two Americans and two Australians. The Americans are, unsurprisingly, quite liberal. So are the Aussies, so we have fun talking politics. The vibe here in our tiny bubble is positive, but what do we know?
The overseas vote has been discussed at some length by others, but in our time here and out travels elsewhere, I’d estimate the odds are about 20-1 that a young American traveling or teaching abroad (outside Europe) is liberal. Maybe I am being overreaching, but one who spends considerable time outside of our borders and realizes that we are global citizens tends to realize that the right’s idea of foreign policy is moronic.
I don’t know how the overseas vote will split, because for all us progressive youths living abroad, there are a fair amount of industrialists, as I like to call them... those business folk who are stationed here to keep an eye on the factory and do their importing/exporting. But outside the military establishment, those who are living abroad almost certainly lean Democratic.
As for the Chinese, they, like the citizens of EVERY SINGLE COUNTRY in the rest of the world, strongly dislike Bush. Could we, just this time, open the polls up to anyone who wants to vote, regardless of country of residence?

On our most recent trip, a few-day vacation over the October (National Day) holiday, Erica and I went to Wuyishan, a mountainous national park, where we walked around and saw some great views, climbed some steep mountains, drank some of the famous local tea, and floated down the river.
Being in the mountains gave us a chance to eat some ‘mountain food,’ quite different from the food we eat in Ningbo that is so seafood based. In the resort town on the edge of the park were a few restaurant rows where tables were set up inside, limited alfresco dining was available, the cooks were outside, and a large table of the restaurant’s fresh ingredients was displayed streetside. We walked past a dozen of these setups, most showing us the same ingredients. Live frogs in a netted bowl, snails, cured pork and duck breast and small fishes were the major proteins available. A cornucopia of vegetables were piled on every table—a myriad of greens, okra, beans, peppers, tubers, and cucumbers were available for the pointing (a godsend for the Chinese-illiterate). Most notable were the healthy pink hibiscus flowers and wasp larva. The flowers were beautiful but the larvae leaned toward grotesque. You knew they were from wasps because a hunk of the comb was on display, complete with some capped cells and a giant inch long drone wandering around tending the squirmy grubs. We passed on the latter, but the hibiscus was fine in an omelette-type dish.
Erica and I dined on the flowers and added something green, a mixed fry of a half-dozen varieties of mushrooms on display, and some cured duck breast with bamboo shoots. We asked what the specialty was, or the local specialty, or whatever they understood from the garbled Chinese that came out of our mouths. They seemed to figure out what we were saying, and pointed behind us. Behind us?
We turned around and remembered the other standard display: The game in cages. Of course. Three one- by two-foot wire cages were stacked up to waist height. The bottom cage held a few clueless chickens. The middle cage held a sad, light-grey floppy eared bunny. The top cage held their ‘specialty,’ two birds, about pigeon sized but more grouse-shaped, grey with lighter head that had a black stripe running through the eye and a slightly curved orange beak. It was not in my bird book. We pondered for a moment, and asked how much. "45 yuan." We glanced at each other with raised eyebrows. Finally, I made the call and ordered its execution.
I had been thinking about this situation for awhile. I’ve recently felt a bit of guilt for being so detached from the actual slaughter of my meal. I am, to steal a line from Julia Child, an unabashed carnivore. However, being a child of the age that I am, I have barely experienced the death that is inherent in meat-eating. My best friend Ben gave up meat, essentially, it seems, because he is too big a wimp to handle the fact that it is dead animals. I deride him for that, but it is a honorable decision, one that many people would probably make if they spent time actually spent time on the farm/factory where their dinner lived out the end of their lives or thought and read enough about it.
In part from reading Jacques Pepin’s autobiography, The Apprentice, I realized that I had never really seen anything more ‘advanced’ than a fish killed for my supper. So in order to, in my mind, legitimize my meat eating, I almost felt like I needed to experience the actual moment when an animal went from ‘cute’ to ‘dinner.’ I successfully witnessed that at this meal.
Upon hearing our order, the chef walked over, grabbed one of the birds by its wings and twisted its neck. The bird seemed dead. I turned by back for a minute and then glanced back over to see it on the ground, helplessly flapping a wing and going around in circles. Apparently a few nerves were still functioning. The neck was given another twist, and life was over. The bird was dipped into hot water and the feathers were pulled out. It was then eviscerated, chopped into pieces, and thrown into the pressure cooker. 15 minutes later, we were eating it in a soup. I’d like to say it was amazingly flavored or that the experience of watching it die made me appreciate it so much more, but alas, it was only good. The bird was fairly scrawny, and though it imparted a nice flavor into the broth, the meat itself was a little dry and not particularly seasoned. Perhaps next time I’ll take it a step further and ask for the rabbit.

Sorry for being so derelict in my posting. My excuses are 1) my laptop got stolen from our room and I’ve been in too pissy a mood to write much lately. 2) I’ve went on a(nother!) vacation, a shorter one, that messed up my rhythm, 3) We’ve been really grumpy at work and too busy deciding whether to quit or not to think about the quirks, anecdotes, and little things that make life here fun and enjoyable, if not infuriating 4) I can’t access my blogging site anymore, thanks, most likely, to the kind government censors, which originally blocked me only from reading blogs hosted from blogger.com, not from posting. Now it seems to be blocking both.
So, with the kind help of my father (who I would like to apologize to for having claimed that he didn’t read everything—in fact, he does, and is my biggest fan!), I am back online.
I am also grumpy because I had written something I was really happy with about Xiahe, a Tibetan pilgrimage site that I visited alone last month, and tried to post it several times before losing it with our computer. However, I found a good article about it (http://travel2.nytimes.com/mem/travel/article-page.html?res=9807E4DD143EF935A25750C0A9659C8B63) that I’d suggest you read if you want a taste of how I spent three days last month. Just substitute in a slow and bumpy bus ride and slightly dumpier accommodations for the author’s, and you have a good sense of my experience.
Phone Bill
Our phone stopped working this morning. It wasn’t much of a surprise; it seems that we had neglected to pay our phone bill. For the past three months. No big deal, this happens all the time, and in fact, we kind of figured this would happen. It is interesting here in that you don’t actually receive a bill for your monthly charges. In fact, no one ever reminds you to pay anything. You just learn (sometimes the hard way) to walk down the street and pay it.
We had an annoying debacle when we first moved here. We had to wait almost a month before receiving service. Another month or so passed before we began to wonder how we would pay our bill, with no checking account and most places not taking credit cards. Nothing had come in the mail nor were we particularly clear how the mail system worked. So we did what we would learn to do more frequently—ask the questions. It has come clear to us that we are almost never told anything unless we ask—important information, like holidays and schedule changes, included. So we asked our co-workers, who apologized for not telling us (not that it was their responsibility). You don’t receive a bill, you need to walk to the nearest Agricultural Bank of China and hand them your phone number, and they then tell you what you owe. Then you pay them.
You receive a fa piao, or official receipt, that shows what your charges are in terms of national, local, and international calls, but it does not give a breakdown of your calls. If you want that, you can’t get it from the bank, you need to go to the phone company’s office downtown (with your ID, I think), and request it.
So when our phone was cut off, we figured that it was because we’d been lax in paying the bill. I walked down the street with a fistful of money (China doesn’t make any bills larger than a 100 yuan note, about $12, which causes headaches for us when heading out on vacations as we find ourselves carrying an inch-thick stack of cash on our various forays, in case we come across something to our liking).
I walked down the street (our nearest Agricultural Bank of China is on the corner of the next block, about a three-minute walk away). I slipped my phone number under the bullet-proof glass—funny, because guns are essentially illegal here—feeling slightly like a robber slipping them a note telling them I had a gun. Anyhow, she punched my phone number into the computer and came up with our info. 445.55 yuan.
I paid her, and, despite her two computer monitors and fancy receipt-printing equipment, she deftly flicked a few beads on the abacus located at her right fingertips and calculated my correct change: 54.45. Ten minutes later, our phone is back in service.
Notice that there are two digits after the decimal point. Outside of the supermarkets and market, most things are rounded to the nearest yuan ($0.12). Some transactions involve a tenth of a yuan, a jiao ($0.01), which, though worth more than our copper coin, are treated about the same. Inexplicably, however, there are still fen, which is a tenth of a jiao, in circulation. Except that the only time you’ll ever see one is when you pay your phone bill or buy a new propane tank for your kitchen.
Unless, your first week here, you are buying vegetables at the market and some unscrupulous person gives you fen as change instead of the yuan or jiao you were due, and you carry them around cluelessly for the next week and are constantly rebuffed when try to spend them like jiao, but who can fault you because they are actually larger (though thinner) than jiao, and finally you ask someone who has actually lived in China for more than a few days and they inform you of the fact that you have been scammed. Theoretically, of course.
Conspiracy theories:
After spending enough time here and reading enough about the ways in which China and the Party work, I start to feel that every little strange thing about China is perhaps not just a quirk, but instead a calculated plot to maintain the one-party rule, to oppress the masses and keep them down. I believe it was Mao who said that religion is the opiate of the masses (quoted to me most recently by a Chinese hippie a few weeks ago), but he and subsequent cadres have devised more than their share of opiates or, to be less subtle, barbed wire fences. It gets me suspicious of everything. For instance, paper seems to be unusually expensive and hard to come by here. Why is it that those in charge of us seem obsessive about not giving us paper? Perhaps to keep potential rabble-rousers from dispersing their Rightest thoughts to a wide audience! Erica pointed out that there are a lot of people in China and it is not widely forested, but I like my theory better.
And these tour groups that run rampant. Tours are by far the most popular way for locals to see the sights. Sometimes, it seems that there are no independent Chinese travellers, and all are a part of the touring masses, with the same colored hat, following someone holding a limp colored flag, seeing the same things, following the same route, and buying the same souvenirs. Why is this? The government’s doing, no doubt. They advocate for these tours, making the package deals often absurdly cheap by giving giant discounts for bulk purchase of plane tickets and entrance to the scenic spots. Why would the government be interested in keeping people in tour groups? They are less harmful this way! The won’t feel like independent citizens and therefore won’t act as such. Just another way of keeping the proletariat down.
And why don’t our local buses run past 7:30 at night? They don’t want poor people (who can’t afford the taxi ride home) away from home after dark, where they might cause some trouble. It all adds up when you have no trust in the benevolence of the government in the State you are residing.



It is no secret that living here you have a warped sense of what is news. When we occasionally watch the English language TV station, there is really only one type of story: How great China is and how exciting it is to watch it emerge upon the world’s stage. The last ‘news’ program I watched, they reported (I'd like to claim ‘with bated breath,’ but to their credit, that wasn’t the case) on China’s entry into the UN’s international aviation organization, or something of the sort. I had never heard of said organization and doubt that I will again, but it was dutifully mentioned how China was admitted by a vote of 174-2 (who were those two dissenters? Human-rights aware countries who were willing to accept less-favorable trade relations in exchange for their conscience, perhaps?), and, lest one wonder what took China so long to be admitted, that this was China’s first attempt to to gain admittance. Hooray! News of that calibre is what makes me reluctant to watch the news. I wonder how many political dissidents were arrested that day? For a taste of it, chinadaily.com.cn is a great place to check up on all the nicely censored day’s news from China.