Chinalbeit

Yes, I am back.   Not that there was much here to begin with.  Nevertheless, I’ve decided to continue writing this blog, though the format is going to be different from before.  It’s not going to focus exclusively on China, because to be honest I don’t really have that much to write about China.  I’ve lived here for four and a half years now, and it’s not really that much of a mysterious place to me anymore.  I’ve really only had two ridiculous things happen to me the whole time I’ve been here, which was getting deported and having an endless string of horribly bad luck in Xi’an, and I’ve already written about that.  I used to travel a lot more, but I’m basically a normal working stiff these days, so I don’t have many travel stories to write about.  And there are plenty of other blogs that write about the political situation or report on silly Internet trends a lot better and with more dedication than I could ever muster.

So what the hell am I going to write about then?  Time will tell I suppose.  Since we last met, I’ve moved on from the endless sea of smog and skyscrapers in Shanghai to the picturesque seaside frozen hellhole called Dalian.  I have taken up a new post working for a pretty large and well-known State-owned institution in the financial sector here.  I can proudly boast that I was the first foreigner to ever become an employee of a State-owned institution in the Dalian region, though in actuality I share this perhaps dubious honor with another Canadian guy who was hired with me at the same time.  There is more to this story and how I learned this information and I’m sure it will be turned into a riveting blog post shortly enough.  For now I’ll keep the name of this institution secret.  Those of you that know me already know, and the rest of you could probably guess well enough with a bit of researching.  I will be posting some stories and experiences related to working for a government institution in China; it has certainly been a wildly different experience from working in the private sector, and surprisingly mostly in a positive way.

So yeah, I’ll probably still blather on uncontrollably about China, but to encourage myself to write more (I have a hard time thinking up interesting topics to write about this place) I will meander off into other areas of interest like music, movies, or god forbid maybe even my own home country of America, from which I’ve just returned from a month of relaxation.  Some fiction writing might creep its way into here as well.  I’m sure you’re just sitting on the edge of your seat waiting for more.

Dalian - a "small" city of 5 million

Well, I will leave you today with an amusing tale that happened to me recently on the “mean streets” of Dalian.  As I was walking down Zhongshan Road, the main East-West artery running through the city, I spotted a very young and inept mugger sneaking up on a girl walking next to me.   I don’t think he could have possibly made himself more obvious.  He was quickly walking up behind her, but rather than trying to look nonchalant about the whole affair, he was literally creeping up to her with his hand and arm outstretched about as far as possible from his body.  I looked over to the girl and said “Thief” to her in Chinese.  Well, the guy obviously heard and he turned around and started walking away, trying but failing miserably to blend into the non-existent crowd (there was nobody else walking in that direction).  Well, the girl got very angry and started chasing over the inept kid, screaming and waving her hand in the air like a war torn banshee.  I guess Dalian is where the pickpocket university dropouts go to get their practice.

Ah Xi’an – the cradle of Chinese civilization, home of the first emperor, site of the historic Terracotta Warriors, seated at the base of majestic Hua Mountain.  Yeah…I can’t stand it.

For the most part I’ve been pretty lucky in China…well, except for getting deported, requiring 25 stitches in my face thanks to Chinese hospitality, nearly getting my juggular cut by a crazed Chinese female.  OK, actually, I haven’t really been that lucky at all.  I’d still take it over my life back in the States, which though it was quite a bit safer and saner bored me into addictions with online video games and all-night raiding parties.  Never again, I say.  My wonderful trip to the center of Chinese civilization in September of 2008 certainly takes the cake for run bad, however, which is saying something considering its competition.

I wasn’t even supposed to go to Xi’an in the first place.  I had my trip already booked and planned for Guilin / Yangshuo.  I got a dirt cheap flight from Beijing into Guilin: the only problem was that the departure time was 7AM.  No problem, I thought, I can get up early.  I had just bought a brand new phone with alarm function (yeah I’m a little behind the technical curve here, I realize this), so the night before the flight I set it to wake me up at a very early 4:30AM and off I drifted into slumberland.

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Just a quick note.  This is not a new post.  About a year into my stay in China, I ran into some trouble with the law.  I never found out why I was targeted, or what exactly happened to bring this about.  In retrospect, it wasn’t that big of a deal, though it did certainly change the way I viewed the country and the way I behaved and acted toward people here.  I’ve obviously changed quite a bit since this incident happened.  It was pretty interesting to read it again.  I haven’t changed any of the wording of the post, so some of it might seem a bit strange.  Obviously, I decided to stay, and I’m glad for that decision.  I’m certainly much more careful about my visa situation here, and I’ve been able to help out some other people with their problems as well. I was pretty angry when I wrote this, so there is a lot of swearing here.

Anyway, without further ado…How I got Deported from China:

Okay, I suppose that the title sounds a little more exciting than the actual story. But it’s still true. Yes, I was kicked out of China. I must say that this experience has showed me just how much beauracratic hell the millions of immigrants, workers, and exchange students have to go through in my own country everyday. I am comparatively lucky, I suppose. Have you ever heard of a Chinese person overstaying his VISA in America? Of course you haven’t, and I’m sure his family never heard either.
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Update
It looks like most of my suspicions were confirmed. According to this article there was a lot of suspicious stuff going on.  First of all, the land was purchased by the developer at an extreme discount of only 640RMB per square meter.  Other developers in the area paid over three times that amount for similar developments.  Suspicious connections much?  As well, the developer, which did not have a license, was granted a “temporary license” by the gov’t for the express purpose of joining the public bidding, which the gov’t has confirmed was not truly public.  Color me completely unsurprised

Original Post

As you may or may not have heard, an apartment building (luckily still unoccupied and under construction) in the compound “Lotus Riverside” in Shanghai’s Minhang district fell over in one big piece on Saturday.  Below are some pictures.  You can find some more high resolution photos at EastSouthWestNorth

Toppled Building

Toppled Building

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Inspired by this great blog post at Sinosplice “10 Vegetables China Taught Me to Love“, I thought I would take the opportunity to reflect on some the daily activities I do here that I never would have considered doing back home in America, or that I had to do but hated.  To start off, I couldn’t agree more with the above blog post.  I wasn’t completely anti-vegetable in my old days.  I’d often order the “garden salad” instead of the french fries with my burger, but I rarely ventured away from the safe pastures of iceberg lettuce, romaine, carrots, or broccoli.  My daily diet now consists of all sorts of crazy vegetables I pick up at the wet market near my house (a soon to be blog post about this wet market) and fry them up or grill them on my new barbecue.  The lifestyle changes haven’t stopped there, oh no.  So, without further ado…

1. Riding a Bicycle

I was actually quite an avid bike rider back home, but it was strictly a leisure activity.  The thought of trying to navigate a bicycle around the mayhem otherwise known as the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago sends more shivers down my spine than taking a bath in a tub full of Chinese loogies.  Well, okay…perhaps it’s  not that bad.  During the summer of my 17th year, I actually spent a month or so trying to ride a bike around those streets (due to an unfortuante accident I incurred just months after receiving my driver’s license).  It wasn’t quite so bad, but then again, it was summer and I was seventeen.  I didn’t really have anywhere to be, and I wasn’t in any hurry to get there.  If I had to rely on a bicycle as my main method of transportation to get to and from work, I’m quite sure I’d end up in the unemployment line pretty quickly, and not because of the current economic troubles. Read more…

The New York Times has posted a fascinating article stating that the Chinese (and other East Asian peoples – Japan excluded) have carried their proclivity toward male children with them to the New World. Here is an excerpt:

In general, more boys than girls are born in the United States, by a ratio of 1.05 to 1. But among American families of Chinese, Korean and Indian descent, the likelihood of having a boy increased to 1.17 to 1 if the first child was a girl, according to the Columbia economists. If the first two children were girls, the ratio for a third child was 1.51 to 1 — or about 50 percent greater — in favor of boys.

Personally, I am quite astonished at this fact.  I would have thought that the tendency toward male children would be one of the first things to disappear upon arrival in the States, but that doesn’t appear to be the case at all.  There is still strong familial and societal pressure for male children.  Take the following excerpt.  Note that the person involved is not a first generation immigrant, but was born and raised in America.

“I have two daughters and am married to an only child,” said a Chinese-American professional woman who is married to an engineer. “Early on, after the two girls were born and another two years went by and there was not a third, I found myself in the living room with four or five older relatives in a discussion of ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely for you to have a boy?’ It’s extremely uncomfortable.”

I’ve been fascinated for some time now with the massively skewed birthrates here in China – I wrote up this article about a month ago, but most of the info in it is still relevant.

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Everywhere you guy in China, you see these red banners with white or yellow characters strewn all over the place.  In neighborhoods, parks, over roads, on walls, in shopping centers…you get the point.  These signs are truly ubiquitous.   They serve many uses.  Some of them are simply advertisements, like the one below advertising a film festival:

Zhengzhou Cinema Club Movie Festival

Of course, the more interesting red signs tend to be the ones that government agencies use to either diseminate information, stir up nationalist sentiment, or warn citizens against engaging in certain types of behavior.  The name for these banners in Chinese is 宣传条幅 (xuānchuán tiáofú), or literally “propaganda banners”.  However, it is important to note that the Chinese word for propaganda would more correctly translate as “dissemination”  The Chinese translation does not necessarily carry the negative connotation of the English word “propaganda.”  Following are some translated propaganda banners.

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The Tank Man by Charlie Cole

Last post on this topic – I swear.  I’ve been getting a few questions about it though, so I’d like to address them.  What happened to the Tank Man?  Who took the picture?  The short answer is: nobody knows what happened to him or where he is now, whether he is even alive or not, and the man who took the picture is a guy named Charlie Cole.  Below is an account of his tale of the picture from The New York Times:

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Now that the day that shall not be named has come and passed, the time is upon us to reflect just what it means, both for Chinese at home and abroad, and for those foreign devils of us both living in China and those of us who have never been (Wing Wang’s Super Deluxe Chinese BBQ and Hamburgers doesn’t count as sovereign Chinese territory).  Of course, the original event occurred twenty years ago, though many people don’t know that the event was actually a culmination of a long process beginning with the death of Mao, continuing through the process of reform and opening, and finally resulting in a crushing defeat at the ends of the very same people who demanded China open up and modernize in the first place.   Chinageeks has an interesting translation up from a Chinese writer detailing some of the events leading up to the culmination at Tiananmen Square, and if you’re really interested, you can check out Chinese Lessons by John Pomfret, who witnessed firsthand both many of the events leading up to and including Tiananmen.  The point is that, at the time, mass student protests were quite common, and the riots at Tiananmen seemed an almost inevitable occurrence.  However, in the twenty years since then, there have not been any riots anywhere near the same scale.  Though there are tens of thousands of “disturbances” every year, they are normally quite small and focused protest.  Farmers demanding more pay or cleaner environments, workers protesting factory closings, migrant workers that haven’t been paid, etc.  Unlike 1989, these types of protests are not ideological at their base.  The people protesting are looking to obtain something concrete: thus it is not useful to compare these demonstrations to the events of 1989.

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This is a blog entry that I wrote back in 2006 about a motorcycle trip I took in Northern China.  Enjoy…

Part 1: Mental and Physical Preparations

Ever since a young age, as early as I can remember really, I have been obsessed with traveling. I don’t mistakenly use the word obsessed either. I did not just like to travel, I was totally overwhelmed and fascinated by it. Every summer my mother and I would make the drive to Minnesota to see our family. I would bring a large, spiraled notebook with me on these excursions to draw all of the road signs I saw on I-94. I suppose that to my young mind, the fact that they could somehow accurately determine from any point in the endless sea of grass, cows, and corn of Wisconsin how far Minneapolis was and slap the number on a big, green sign. Minneapolis: 274 miles away. Did some guy actually measure that out? Honestly, I still don’t know exactly how they do it and I don’t really care either. Of course, at the age of seven I barely had any concept of what exactly a mile was, but I definitely saw something in those signs beyond a giant slab of green metal propped up with lots of white words and colorful images on them, and I don’t think it was natural.

My impulse to travel manifested itself in many forms as I was growing up. I took every opportunity that I could to try out some new way of getting from point A to point B. I rode trains. I flew on airplanes. My dad took me on a trip in a semitrailer. I went to Canada in my uncle’s RV. I took a boat down the Mississippi (well, part of the way). I took helicopter rides. I even rode in the goddamn Goodyear blimp. Road trips were an inevitable part of my late teens. I rode by myself through the Great Plains to Vancouver and back. My friends and I drove to Detroit, Niagara Falls, Toronto, Montreal, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC. I inevitably donned my backpack and headed for Europe. England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic…knocked all of those off the list. I still can’t say what has driven me to do all of this. Many other people have visited all of the same places that I have, but that only adds to my confusion. Why do people travel? To see sites of historic interest or great natural beauty. Or to just relax somewhere for a while away from work and family. Maybe they are just really rich and have nothing better to do.

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