Thoughts on China

Well, I really enjoyed my first day here. Because this is a Golden Week (when everyone in China is off work and going to tourist spots), I decided to spend a couple of days going to non-tourist areas. I walked approximately 10 miles today.

The first journey was to Xidan, a shopping area that is not as “touristy” as the better known Wangfujing shopping district, to buy a cell phone. I got by for a little while with my limited Chinese, but they finally had to find someone who spoke a little English. Unfortunately, I found out that the sim chip which was supposed to have $16 of time on it and be recharged automatically when it gets to $4 didn’t have any minutes on it at all. When I went to a different China Mobile shop, I found that I can’t even buy time for this chip in Beijing, since it’s a Shanghai phone number, even though both are China mobile. So, I’m in the process of emailing back and forth to Pandasim, where I bought the chip, to get this straightened out.

In the meantime, I stopped at a stand in Xidan that sold bowls of noodles for 3Y with various vegetables and sauces. There were a few round tables outdoors behind the stand where customers could eat. They seated me with a group of girls who I’m guessing were about 20 years old. I had my first chance to really try out my Chinese lessons, and was pretty successful! I, of course, told the noodle vendor “我喜欢麻辣面!  (”Wǒ xǐhuān málà miàn!”, i.e., “I like (spicy) hot and numbing noodles!”) when she asked if I wanted the hot chili sauce there. So I got a few surprised looks when my noodles were brought over with a big mound of hot sauce on top. The noodles were really good and I was able to make some small talk, like (今天天气不好。 (Jīntiān tiānqì bù hǎo。), meaning “Today, the weather’s not good”), discussing about where we were from, how long I’m staying, etc. They didn’t speak any English, yet we understood each other, for the most part, for about 10 minutes.

The second walk was to a restaurant that was recommended by my Chinese tutor, Sophie. It is a large, noisy restaurant that has a staff to announce customers when they come in and when they leave. I had the jia jiang mian, that is also a bowl of noodles that comes with about 8 sides that are all dumped on top of the noodles and that you then stir up with your chopsticks. I wish I could describe the difference between the Chinese dishes here and those in American restaurants, but it is nice to finally find out what all my Chinese friends mean when they say that the food in the US can’t compare….and that’s just from two bowls of noodles!

I think if I lived here, I would lose weight, because the food is very tasty, but you naturally get more exercise and at least with what I’ve had so far, it has very little fat in the preparation.

It was also nice to not see a lot of foreigners (since I didn’t have a mirror). I don’t know quite how to describe this feeling, but it was nice just seeing daily life in a foreign culture. The rhythm of the walking traffic, bicycles and motor vehicles seems to be very well in synch here, though I did see one moped wreck into a bicycle (everyone was alright, but the bicyclist was not a happy camper). The buses are twice as long as they are in the US, with an accordion-like section between the two sections that helps when they turn. From what I saw today, it seems like Beijing is more like a big series of small towns (hutongs). This is changing rapidly, of course, as high rises come in and take over where many hutongs have been demolished. Besides the history, I’m sure it’s this small town feeling that many people miss.

Well, that’s enough for one post. Thanks for the comments! I’ll write again soon.

OK, I’m an idiot.

I lost my cell phone on one of the connecting flights. I’ll get another one tomorrow, and I still have the sim chip, but that was a costly mistake for nothing.

I’m in the Lotus Hostel now and the Internet connection works great. It’s after one in the morning now, so I’m going to call it a night.

Scott

Well, I promised a post this weekend with links to web sites in English that introduce Chinese culture. I’ve been so busy doing last minute shopping, packing and, I confess, watching American college football (i.e., not soccer), that I haven’t written this post yet. What I will do is to create another page called “Links”, which will be between the “Home” and “About” page links at the top of this page. In fact, I’ll make the page now and add to it as I get the time. If it comes together as I expect, it will have several sections, one of which will be Chinese culture, another section will be links to Chinese language learning sites, etc.

I can’t believe that the trip is almost here! It’s been about a year and three months since I decided I’d go to China. Since then, I’ve learned a lot and met a lot of kind, interesting and interested people. The dichotomy between Eastern and Western thought is a very interesting subject. I will try to write about this in some of my blog entries and hope I don’t bore you too much. Here is my first attempt:

Eastern thought is cyclical, where Western thought is more linear.

If you think about calendars, you might think that the Western calendar does celebrate the seasonal cycles of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. However, our Western way of thought about time is much more linear. We even use the words “time line” to represent a linear order of events over time. We very much like to put things in chronological order, including our lives. We are born on a date, have important events happen to us on other dates and finally die on a date, all of which are thought of as having no cycles in them other than the yearly seasonal cycles mentioned above.

Even the religion in the West is linear in thinking about time. Christianity is the example with which I’m most familiar. The Western calendar we all use is based on the time of Christ, with B.C. going back in increasing years (negative numbers, if you will) before this and A.D. increasing away from this as positive numbers. Time is mapped out in the Christian Bible in a line from the creation in Genesis, through the life of Christ, until the end of the world. Death is seen as the beginning of an eternal afterlife. The concept of eternity is, in its essence, yet another formulation of linear time. One continuous line…

I am definitely not an expert on Eastern thought; however, even looking superficially, you can see that the East is much more cyclical in their thoughts about time.

The years in the Chinese calendar are based on cycles of twelve years, represented by different animals (rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog and pig). Further, these twelve year cycles happen within sixty year cycles, which combines the animal cycle in a cycle of elements (earth, metal, water, wood and fire).

Note that these are based on cycles of the moon, rather than the sun. While Western calendars and other conveniences are being injected into Chinese culture, the soul of China lies with the lunar calendar. The Chinese New Year (Spring Festival, 春节, or Chūnjié) is the biggest festival of the year and celebrates the first day of the first lunar month. The mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节, or Zhōngqiūjié), this year on September 25, is the 15th day (full moon) of the eighth lunar month.

Living by the lunar calendar alone makes a culture more cyclical in nature, simply because the moon cycle is so apparent. While the sun does cycle back and forth from winter to summer solstices and passes through the equinoxes as it moves over the equator on the first day of spring and fall, it is dependent on calculations rather than direct observation. The moon moves from new to full to new in an easily observable cycle. This introduces a finer degree of control for our calendar, only having to be adjusted one day every four years, but it does so at the expense of living less naturally.

Eastern religion, unlike Western religion, is highly involved in cycles. The most obvious example is the idea of reincarnation, which (I think, I’d have to research this) spread to China with Buddhism, which started in India. The Indian religion of Hinduism is very much influenced by the idea that sentient beings are recycled into other beings again and again.
Rather than look at the life cycle as a time line (birth, life, death, afterlife), as Christianity does, Buddhism is replete with the idea of rebirth, which turns the event of death into another spoke on the wheel of life that turns again. The prayer wheels that are spun in some forms of Buddhism are yet another reminder of this cyclic nature.

Another example of circular thought in Eastern religion is the Tai Chi symbol (☯) of Daoism. The interaction of yin and yang (阴阳, or yīnyáng), female and male, dark and light is seen in circular harmony. The spot of the opposite color represents that there are both yin and yang in everything and there cannot be one without the other. They are constantly interacting. In a very real sense, that act of procreation is the interaction of these two that brings forth another life to begin yet another cycle.

This type of cycle is very similar to Hegel’s dialectic idea of - thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

When I think of the completely different models that East and West use in thinking about the world around us, I am constantly drawn to a very flawed analogy - that of a wheel traveling in circles (the East’s cycles) moving along a road (the West’s time line). The reason it is flawed (or to make a terrible pun, why the rubber never meets the road) is that it does not address the psychological and cultural differences that go along with such fundamentally different ways of seeing the same thing. It may work to explain how the calendars interact, since any given day can be seen as where the cycle of the lunar calendar turns along the path of the solar calendar, but that is about all it is good for.

One other problem with this analysis is that it treats huge blocks of people as having the same mindset. Today’s world is changing in Internet time. While it is great in one way, since with the population of the earth today, we all need to think of ourselves as a “global village”, it also is a destroyer of cultural identities. But that’s an issue for a different day…

Sorry this was so long. If you’re still here, thanks for reading!

Well, here’s where I’ll be going…Google definitely has a lot of cool tools. By clicking on the button labeled KML in the upper right of the map (next to the print link), you can open the route in Google Earth, if you have that installed.

I did this in July, but just updated the post so that it would come up top, now that the trip is near.

Well, the tension is building. I just got over a couple of days in bed being sick. That’s going to put more stress on my job, since I have a few things I really have to get done before I leave. Now, it’s 3:00 in the morning and I’m wide awake. So, I guess because of how I came out of this cold, I’m on Beijing time a week and a half early…Hopefully, this will be good practice for the jet lag I’ll soon have…

I just saw another site that’s only half finished, but if you are planning to go to China, I would really recommend you checking it out: http://www.yilongwei.com

He really adds details that many others gloss over when it comes to dealing with things. For instance, he spends a lot of words describing exactly how riding the trains in China works. He discusses many of the pitfalls that can happen when you make assumptions (like you’ll be able to get a ticket for the next day’s train when you get off at a tourist destination for one day…not necessarily, and you better make sure your schedule is loose enough to handle this type of delay).

Well, mine is, but I have planned where I’d like to spend the extra time. Now I know I better have a few days of slack built in to the schedule to accommodate these types of unplanned delays.

Of course, I already have this figured out for the flights to and from China. With a total of four stops each way (including the destination), there are plenty of opportunities to miss connecting flights (or have my checked bag miss them).

My plan is to be unflappable and to take everything in stride. I figure there will be times that I won’t be a happy camper. Maybe I get a flat tire on the bike I just rented and have to wait a half hour while it gets repaired. But, this will just give me an opportunity to meet a Chinese bicycle repairman I wouldn’t have met otherwise. Perhaps he’ll get a chuckle out of my mispronunciation of some Chinese words, but I hope he’ll appreciate that I’m trying (in fact, my wife says I’m VERY trying, but that’s a different story…).

I have been planning this trip for so long, I don’t think it’s going to hit me that I’m going until I’ve left Detroit and am drifting off to sleep somewhere over the Arctic Circle…we’ll see…

With all the headlines in the US newspapers over the last year about all the horrible transgressions of the Chinese, I immediately thought of America over a century ago.Sweatshops in China?

Where do you think child labor laws in the United States came from?

Pollution? That pea soup London Fog was caused by coal burning smog…

In other words, I felt like we are blaming the Chinese for going through a phase of capitalism that we went through ourselves.

While I was too lazy to write an article summarizing all of my thoughts, I am glad to see that a very good article on this subject has already been written.

So, while China definitely has to clean up its act, we would do much better to have the attitude of “how can we help you avoid the mistakes that we made in the same circumstances” than a holier-than-thou attitude that acts as if the US has always been “green”. Remember the Cuyahoga River burning at Cleveland? That wasn’t 100 years ago, it wasn’t even 50 years ago, it was 38 years ago in 1969.

It always helps communication if we start any chastising by looking in the mirror and recognizing that we aren’t exactly a pillar of perfection, either. Then, work together to solve the problem, rather than pointing the finger.

Well, it appears that I will be going for six weeks, after all!

我很高兴 (Wǒ hěn gāoxìng, or, I’m very happy!)

But now I’m leaving in only 36 days…so much to do, but not really. All I really have to do has been done. I’m not going to put myself on any kind of rigorous schedule when I get there. If I like a place, I may stay there a couple of extra days. I have a schedule, but I’m not on a tour bus, so I’m sure there will be plenty of unexpected detours, just not to a “xxx” factory and associated store (as tours in China tend to do, from what I’ve read).

One thing I’ll be sad about is that I’ll be saying goodbye to my English student (and Chinese tutor), 雪飞 (Xuě Fēi, or Sophie), when I leave. Her husband got a job at Yale University, so they’ll be gone before I get back. We have learned a lot about each others’ cultures and have become best friends over the past few months. I’ll miss her.

I had been planning to do a few posts about different aspects of what I’ve done to prepare for this trip, but I’ve been too busy preparing for this trip! So, I’m not sure what I’ll be doing on this blog before I leave….

再见

Well, I can’t go into it, but something happened yesterday that puts my whole trip up in the air. How it comes down, only time will tell. It’s not a bad thing, but what would ordinarily be a great opportunity, seems so unwelcome now. The trip I was looking more forward to than anything I’ve ever done is, at the very least, going to be cut short. I can’t believe that anything has stopped me from just going and sorting everything out when I get back, but it has.

I’m going to try to see if I can go for three weeks. After all, I bought $980 nonrefundable tickets, a Chinese visa cost about $162, including FedEx each way, a $29 sim chip for cell phone service in China, etc. That’s just the things that will surely be no good if I don’t go. It doesn’t include the numerous guidebooks, etc., that I bought this spring and that go out of date quickly with the continual construction that is going on in the cities.

OK, enough lamenting. All I have to do is look a couple posts down…that is:

塞翁失马, 焉知祸福

(sàiwēngshīmǎ, yānzhīhuòfú)

Well, many things are going according to schedule. I got my Chinese visa through BCV Visa and Passport Expeditors. They handled that process flawlessly.

I also got my airplane tickets. Originally, I had planned to leave Tallahassee on October 6 or 7 to arrive in Beijing on October 8, then return from Shanghai on November 10. I changed that to get back on November 15, so that I could go to Huangshan (a very cool mountain), as well. Well, I couldn’t find tickets much under $1200 on these dates. In fact, the prices seemed to go up over the last couple of weeks. Then, one of the travel agents told me that if I left on Wednesday, October 3, I could get the tickets for $980 including all taxes, etc. So this is how my 4 week trip became a 6 week trip!

Now I have to completely review my itinerary to see what I’ll add, change, etc. I already have 4 mountains on my schedule (Tai Shan (泰山), Song Shan (嵩山), Emei Shan (峨眉山) and Huang Shan (黄山). If you haven’t guessed by now, 山 (shan) means mountain, and the character looks like one, too. Well, I might add one more mountain, Hua Shan (华山), near Xi’an. Each of these mountains offers something unique, but I have to look at China again to see if having a full six weeks doesn’t change my mind about where all to go.

Just when I thought everything was firming up, my plans became completely loose again! At least I’m doing this with 6 weeks left and not 6 days!

塞翁失马, 焉知祸福   (sàiwēngshīmǎ, yānzhīhuòfú)

I find myself thinking about this idiom a lot. As with all Chinese proverbs, there’s a story behind these few words that is then condensed down:

Once upon a time, an old man’s horse ran away. His friends and neighbors lamented his misfortune, but the man said, “Who knows if this is bad luck, or good luck?”

A few days later, his horse returned with another beautiful horse. The town’s people, as you would expect, excitedly proclaimed the old man’s great luck! The old man merely replied, “Who knows if this is bad luck, or good luck?”

His son set about breaking in the new, wild horse, but was thrown and broke his leg, which didn’t get set right. You guessed it, the people murmured to each other what a terrible tragedy had befallen the old man’s family. Of course, the old man stoically repeated: “Who knows if this is bad luck, or good luck?”

The very next year, the emperor’s men came to town to conscript all the able-bodied men of the town into the army, for a war was brewing. The old man’s son, because of his gimpy leg, was the only one left behind. Sometime later, terrible news came from the battlefront that most of the town’s soldiers were killed in a terrible battle.

So, no matter what happens, it is not always immediately knowable if it is good or bad. I know my first job after college, I was working as a retail assistant manager, working 60-80 hours a week for $14,000 a year (this was in 1984, so the wage was not that great for so many hours). In addition, my manager wouldn’t give me time to do the manager’s training program on the job. When they had to lay off 150 assistant managers, they did it by how much of the training programs we had completed, so I got laid off. I thought it was terrible, since it was my first experience of failure. Two weeks later, though, I went and took a test to get into Air Force Officer Training School and did well, getting a slot which eventually led to 6 years as a navigator on a C-130. I initially thought being laid off was the worst thing that could happen, but I found out it was maybe the best thing, since I didn’t have the opportunity in a small town working that many hours to find another job.

So, when something that seems really terrible or really great happens, the first thing I think to myself, is 塞翁失马, 焉知祸福