21 posts tagged “china”
Back on the other side of the Great Firewall tomorrow, so no Vox for a few weeks. I will probably still send posts if I can, but won't be able to access it until the middle of July.
Wow, it's going to be a busy few weeks: meetings, discussions, observing, editing, writing, arguing...and that's just ONE job! I still have two other gigs I have to manage to keep up with after going into the office all day every day. But it's OK. I'm in a nice hotel in a great city...
But I hate leaving home for so long. I guess it's a good sign that after 5 years, I still miss Masa terribly when we're apart. A week is fine. Actually, a week might even be good. But three weeks sucks! We do end up talking on Skype at least once a day (usually twice) which is borderline pathetic (or maybe fully pathetic, I don't know).
But this time I feel that I have so MUCH to get back for: Masa (of course), closing on our house, getting ready to start renovating for several weeks, moving, Mags and Marie (I wonder if she'll remember me after being away for three weeks, I guess she probably will), plus all our friends who have fun stuff planned for later this summer.
It's good to have a little break from the routine, to be honest. And put in my face there to guarantee another 8-12 months of work on a new project (which means 8-12 months of INCOME). And hang out in Shanghai, a city I love (though it'd be so much better if Masa could come with me!).
I feel like getting slightly poetic here, to write about how lucky I feel at this time in my life: to be surrounded by close friends who give me so much, to have a job which though a bit dull at times, provides me with a good living and allows us to have our own place, travel, be productive. To be such an important part of Magdali's life, to feel invested here in Montreal. Leaving my life for three weeks is so good: it makes me reflect on how GREAT my life is and how very lucky I am.
Damn. I have to leave for over three weeks. And on SUNDAY. Big corporate companies: grrrrr. I've been asking for a month when I was needed back without a word or an update about it. Then yesterday: "Can you be here Tuesday?"
Obama's speech last night was solid: not loaded with specifics but rousing and forceful. I'm glad to see someone finally taking aim at the disastrous Bush presidency. Generally the Democrats have been so spineless, it was nice to see some ammo. Didn't go far enough, perhaps, in nailing McCain for being such a waffler: caving in to all the Evangelical propaganda that he doesn't even really believe. Still. I'm not optimistic about this election. Obama's "cult of personality" (toned down recently) is more than slightly annoying, though that doesn't mean he's not worlds better than same old Republican nonsense for another term. It's amazing to me that given the state of the US in terms of its economy, international reputation, embroilment in two futile wars, and general cultural malaise, Obama's not miles ahead of McCain. Again, not optimistic.
Vox is blocked in China which means no blogging while I'm there. That really sucks. Stupid Chinese government. There are ways, apparently, of getting around the filters, but it takes a bit of finagling and isn't consistently effective. So there may well be two weeks of silence followed by post after post once I'm back, all relating to being there. Or maybe nothing will happen worth blogging about since I will be working the entire time I'm there.
Finishing a huge project today that I've been working on since April. It feels good to have this OFF my (virtual) desk as it's been a lot of work and really stressful some weeks. Just about three or four more hours to do today and that's it. The best part is that since this project is done, and since I don't have HK stuff for another three weeks (just finished that stuff last week), AND since the big company in Shanghai told me to hold off on the work for them so that I am free to be worked like a dog while I'm in China in 10 days, I only have ONE COMPANY to work for next week. This is honestly the first time I've had only one job to do in probably more than two years. It's like a vacation: only 18 hours next week!
Canada seems to be fixing to have our own election in the next month. Ah, so much easier! Campaigning will be limited to a few TV channels and there will pretty much only be a few placards posted here and there on the busy streets. No two years of campaigning, thank God. Sad, but true: the US election gets far more attention than the Canadian one, even IN Canada! Since I'm not a citizen of this land, I cannot vote (yet), though I can definitely cross my fingers that the Convervatives will lose their slight majority (though the Conservatives in Canada are not like Conservatives in America, at least not in terms of many issues: the vast majority of Canadians are center left and the Conservatives have never had much a mandate but do anything except walk a fine line). The gap between mainstream Liberals and mainstream Conservatives in Canada isn't that wide (I'd be an NDP man myself, if I could vote), so as far as I'm concerned, the election isn't a nail biter.
First bit: Some guy in the UK bought a new iPhone and once he got it home and started futzing around with it, he noticed a photo already stored in memory. Turns out it's a photo of the girl at the factory in China, the person who made it! So UK guy posted the photo and it's become a true internet phenomenon in China with people trying hard to figure out who she is...full story here.
Second bit: In personal news, I'm off to Shanghai for ten days, leaving on the 8th. Company accepted my proposal, though slightly reduced terms since they will have to pay for semi-regular flights, visas, hotel rooms for me, etc. The editor also said that they'd pay me "off-shore," meaning (to her mind) "tax free," which is laughable! I will probably pay three times the tax in Canada than I'd pay in China! But whatever, once I'm working for them and once things are moving along, I can start to ask for things like more money... for the time being it seems good: I can do the work for the rest of the year, spend a bit of time in Shanghai to see if moving there again in the future is feasible. Mainly it'll be nice to just do something different and take on a new project, managing a team of writers and editors. Woo hoo.
I feel so lucky, actually. Two of the companies I've worked for for a long time are both very flexible: so I can just keep both gigs but cut back hours for a while if I need to. Anytime I want to take more hours, though, I can. The big publishing company I work for, too, is fairly flexible since it's project work: they just pitch me a big project and if I have time in the near 3-4 months, I can accept or reject it. I imagine I won't be doing much work for them over the next several months, but maybe I can squeeze in a project or two. So I'm going to be really busy, but I feel good about this. Job might end up going nowhere (it's a big company with lots of big company issues), but it's worth a go, at least...
I just wrote a big-ass blog post about recent media portrayals of China, since so many hack reporters are there currently, attempting to make their careers writing drivel. It was long and detailed.
But I lost it. Damn. Stupid IE crashed. Grrrrr.
So I will summarize:
1) Tired old cliches bad.
2) Bob Woodruff's piece on ABC news tonight: not too bad (surprisingly).
3) CBC television coverage: very bad. Inane. Silly tropes that just mimic bad American news. Sigh.
4) CBC radio: much better, particular Eleanor Wachtel's piece on Wachtel on the Arts: as usual she provides insight, intelligence, and complexity when most media just trounce out the same crap they've been reporting for five years. Leave it to the literature people to think critically about the information they are spoonfed (and then, in turn, spoonfeed us the same shit).
Late spring, 1998. Paul and I both scored bikes and got out onto the chaotic streets of Shanghai, riding in every direction those iron horses would take us. Seriously, they were made of iron and heavy, and I felt like Kermit the frog on mine because it was so high.
We often rode in those days: to and from work (we lived in adjacent apartment blocks along Changning Road), back home, sightseeing on the weekends (Paul always called a newly discovered "shortcut" a Ho Chi Minh trail): it was (still is?) the best way to see a city like Shanghai. One day we rode way out by the airport (the old airport at Hongqiao, before Pudong was built) and leaned our bikes against the chain link fence in order to watch the planes land. It was so fun! These huge steel jets felt like they would graze the tops of our heads as they zoomed in, the metal gleaming off the sunlight. Soon a crowd of peasants gathered to watch us, point, laugh at the crazy laowai watching planes come in.
On the way home, we discovered this sculpture garden with an enormous stone carving of Marx and Engels. This was in the middle of nowhere -- and anyone who's spent time in a Chinese suburb knows how desolate, poor, and odd they are (totally unlike North American suburbs). This photo was taken along a dusty road full of loud blue trucks.
This statue (or a later version of it, Marx's hand is slightly different in the installed version below) is now standing in the middle of Fuxing Park in downtown Shanghai. A pic (not mine) below of what the statue looks like today.
Paul, my closest friend my first two years in China, left China in 2000, and after stints in Australia, Cambodia, Angola, and London, now lives in Jerusalem...
This statue is just a few steps from (what was once) the hippest and wildest club in Shanghai. Once I drank waayyyyy too much and woke up on the grass at 7.30am directly underneath this statue. Marx and Engels: not pleasant faces to see first thing when hungover, hungry and tired. O, youth!
I find this Howard French piece in IHT unnecessary. And, frankly, boorish, condescending and cliché. His entire thesis is that it's strange that the Chinese are reacting so emotionally to questions about what the government is or isn't doing as far as earthquake survivors and rescuing. He implies that it all has to do with Chinese conformity and government control. He seems concerned that asking about Tibet now is seen as taboo, even discussing it with people who a month ago might have been sympathetic towards Tibet autonomy. Oh, these silly Chinese, he seems to be implying: why can't they be less emotional and let me get my story, the same story every American journalist tells from China.
He does acknowledge, though only slightly, a similar kind of American response after 9/11. I wasn't in North America at 9/11, but even from afar, it was bizarre to see the US swept up into such nationalist fervor. A list of "banned" songs (as if hearing "Stairway to Heaven" on the radio after might cause some to go nutty), canceled TV shows, no stories but one story, the story. It was, as I said, bizarre.
But completely understandable.
In a family, even a rough n tumble family, when someone dies, past slights are put aside. People focus on those suffering, not on the problems the family needs to face. After a death is not the time to deal with why Agnes always belittles Jerry. Or why the plumbing always rattles when it gets cold.
Why does he expect to travel around China and hear people complaining about what the government should be doing differently? Yes, it's a journalist's job to ask questions (the right questions), to investigate, to criticize. But it's also a journalist's job to be a human being and understand humans are emotional creatures who don't always think rationally. Just as a journalist wouldn't go to a funeral and start attacking the dead guy for reasons of decorum, trying to get people to open up and attack their government a week after an earthquake kills tens of thousands violates decorum.
Lighten up, guy. You'll get your stupid story. Keep asking and pissing people off: sooner or later you'll get someone willing to say something negative about the government which will help you feel like a journalist doing something interesting (yawn) and you can then pat yourself on the back for being so hard-nosed.
What's interesting about this is that it seems that the Chinese right now want to tell only one story: the earthquake. But Howard French wants only to tell one story as well: it's just a different story, that same old tired story that every American journalist thinks is interesting: Chinese government oppressive, Chinese people victims blah blah blah.
Is it just the one story that we are interested in hearing? Maybe it's not Howard French's fault that we all expect the same story. Same in publishing: Why is every single book translated from the Chinese into English about someone being persecuted by the Chinese government? Either that or by some author who is "banned" by the Chinese authorities (generally this fact is splashed all over the cover, too)? There are lots of stories in a country five times the size of the US. Lots. Thousands of stories have nothing to do with persecution. Thousands of authors write novels that aren't banned. Why not translate those? Why no access to different stories?
Why not write a "real" story instead of the same old story?
Why not explore the country as a journalist with a little more intelligence instead of relying on some principle you learned in News Writing 101 at Columbia?
Some factory in Guangdong in southern China was producing "Free Tibet" flags before it realized what the colorful emblems meant. Apparently, some factory workers saw the flags being shown on TV (the flag is banned in Mainland China) in the context of Pro-Tibet rallies abroad and began to suspect they were involved in producing "contraband". The authorities were notified and Mr Factory Owner suddenly found himself in deep doo-doo, claiming not to know what the flags meant or what they stood for. He thought they were just colorful flags for some crazy foreigners! How on earth did the "Free Tibet" people manage to pull this off? I bet afterwards, they had a big flag burning ceremony and the Factory Owner had to write a self-criticism about how he had contributed to anti-Chinese propaganda. And the Free Tibet people had a good laugh somewhere.
It reminds me of that story a few years back at the height of American nationalist fervor when some reporter discovered that the majority of American flags were being produced in China.
Ten years ago this week, I went to China. It's difficult to imagine that so much time has passed. And being there, living and working there, changed me in ways that are impossible to undo. I quite literally wouldn't be sitting here in Montreal had I not gone to China. I wouldn't be doing the job I'm doing. I most likely would never even have met Masa (though we actually met in Tokyo). I wouldn't have known Lei or Paul or Jennifer or Lara or Kirsten. I wouldn't have traveled to Indonesia or France or Sri Lanka or Vietnam. I wouldn't have developed a love of Chinese poetry or Indian food or good white wine (well maybe I would have, but I'm being nostalgic today).
Funny to think how one decision can affect so much change. And it wasn't an easy decision: in spring of 1998 I was living in a huge cedar-built house with cathedral ceilings and 8 foot windows facing west. I was in southern Idaho, having just come from Seoul a few months earlier. The house there in Pocatello was Dutch's house and I was "housesitting" since he had just bought a condo in Palm Springs and wasn't ready to sell his place yet. My sister had lent me her Toyota Corolla for a couple of months and I was hanging out with Rupert who was in pharmacy school at the time. Those were quiet days: I'd swim in the mornings at Reed Gym, work at the university in the afternoon, and hang out with Mark or Rupert in the evenings. I would travel to Salt Lake City or Sun Valley or Jackson or Boise on the weekends and when the Shanghai job offer came across the wire in January, I hesitated. I had applied for a few jobs in Idaho Falls and my parents really wanted me to stay in the area. But I, as ever, had that restless spirit and so wanted to get out of there.
So I fobbed the job off for a few months, hemmed and hawed, debated with myself: what kind of life did I want? Was I ready to just settle down in Idaho and get a job and buy a house? Was I really ready to start a PhD degree? Or did I want adventure and a new kind of life in a place I'd never been? I knew it was a big decision, leaving, but I could never have known just how big. Finally, I came to a compromise: I told the graduate school in New Mexico that I would start in the fall and I decided to go to Shanghai just for the summer. I packed up my stuff, said goodbye to Rupert (saying goodbye to him was hard, I remember: sitting in his car outside the library at school because I knew it might be many years before I saw him again. And it was!) and hopped on a plane. Mark was mad at me because I was leaving (I haven't talked to him since, in fact). I think my parents finally accepted then that I would always be flitting around the globe my entire life.
Within a week I knew I'd stay in Shanghai. I sent New Mexico an email ("Thanks but no thanks.") and didn't look back. It was such an amazing time to be in China: there weren't so many westerners then, everything had a "cowboy" feel to it, the rules were still being established. I lived on the 18th floor on Changning Road, just up the street from the school where I worked (JiangSu and Yan'An). I loved everything: loved teaching in that classroom overlooking the street: the fact that you could open the windows and smell the rain: I could actually hear the raindrops as I taught (which was so novel since I had resigned myself to working in a big cubicle-laden office with no windows at all). The students were eager and serious. The school was a bit of a mess, but I loved the social scene: Paul and I became fast friends and suddenly there was this group of people around me that I got along well with. I loved the markets and riding my bike in the mornings. I loved the parks and the clubs and the pubs and the shops. More than that, I felt that I belonged there at that time in my life. I certainly had my "China days," but it felt like home.
I still wish I could recapture that sense of wonder I had then, that feeling that this place now is exactly where I need to be. I don't feel that in Montreal, I never did. I like it here. But it's a different kind of feeling from what I felt that first year in Shanghai. Every day was a lesson: a new word or phrase. A new fact about the Chinese that interested me. A new dish or a new way of making tofu (lol). I hung out at Always Cafe on Nanjing Road (just a few blocks from this picture here on the right). And Cotton Club. And KABB. And Henry and the Time Passage Cafe and Goya and O'Malley's. And 1931 and Le Garcon Chinois and DKD and Buddha Bar and Kathleen's. I traveled all over the world: to nearly every province in China, taking the train or flying or taking the bus or a big boat up the Yangtze River. I went to Hong Kong a few times a year to buy clothes or CDs. I went to Jakarta and London and Macau and Hanoi for work. My life feels so QUIET in comparison now!
When I think about this, I wonder if I'm just made to live in Asia. I never would have imagined that before I went to Asia. I was always the type who wanted to live in France or Spain or Italy. Now these places don't interest me that much. But WOW I miss that kind of excitement in Asia: the huge numbers of people, the food, the history.
I also think that what made that time so amazing for me was the unknowability of the future. I had no idea how long I would stay there or where I would go next. But that didn't scare me or worry me. I thrived on it. I loved the uncertainty of the future and there is no way that I would ever have believed that 10 years later I'd be sitting in Montreal reflecting back on that time. Maybe certainty for many people is a kind of security but to me it feels like a prison. I don't want economic uncertainty or to worry whether I'm going to get sick: but knowing that in 10 years from now, I could be living anywhere in the world invigorates me, makes the world seem more possible. Ten years from now: will I still be here? Or in Japan? Or in Turkey or Sweden or Chile? I have no idea. I LOVE that.
And now ten years have passed since I left my hometown and went to China. I stayed six years. So much has changed: in me, in Shanghai, in the world. I wonder what the next ten years hold...
Some extremely short-sighted and unaware Chinese "netizens" are calling for a boycott of "western goods" in China.
Oh, dear. Every country has its share of idiots, but this is not only stupid, it's dangerous. VERY dangerous.
First off, these millions of people trying to organize a boycott are doing so because they say the French government didn't do enough to "protect" the Olympic torch in Paris. This just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how Western governments work. From a Western point of view, imagine what kind of reaction people would have had if the French government had reacted like the Chinese government in stopping "dissent" or preventing people from expressing their opinions. Please. This, to me, is also the crux of the problem about Chinese being infuriated at the Japanese for glossing over wartime atrocities (in their educational system): Mainland Chinese can't understand that the government's opinion doesn't often reflect the opinion of the "man on the street," that these opinions are vastly different and varied and an official government statement doesn't mean that people in this country believe the same thing. So the French government not "cracking down" means that all French people are anti-China. The logic is faulty, but this is not new, it's a problem that Mainland Chinese have long a hard time understanding because their viewpoint on the world is so limited.
Second, the Chinese are perilously close to having huge segments of the European and North American population turn against their products for a whole slew of reasons. And a boycott against French (or other Western countries') products would (or could) result in a much more widespread boycott against Chinese products. Many people already refuse to buy or hesitate to buy Chinese products up and beyond the political problems in China. Many companies plain refuse to produce in China because of quality and pollution concerns. If this issue of politics gets injected into people not buying Chinese products simply because the quality is often dodgy, a boycott would have far more damaging effects on China than their boycotting Western products. Far more damaging. In fact, China would be crushed economically if even 1/2 of people began refusing to buy Chinese products. Their entire economy is based around "potential" and it's not difficult to imagine that potential being shut down completely.
Third, the Western media, as anti-Chinese as they can often be, are just doing what media SHOULD do: raise questions, be critical. If anything, they are not critical enough (and not just about China, but about most issues). Again, the Chinese can only see the world through the limiting prism that their media holds up. Criticizing China does not automatically equal anti-Chineseness. Again, the simple-minded and the nationalists (is this redundant?) hijack every sane argument.
Finally, the Chinese media is just as much to blame and I'd say the majority of all of the above problems come about as a direct result of the government of China controlling what information Chinese people get. Nationalism? It's stoked by the Communist Party. Anti-Westernism? The Communist Party. Refusing to look at its own problems, its own complicity in being corrupt, polluting the cities and countryside of China, crushing the poor and dissenters: thank the Communist Party for all of that. This is what makes me fear this raucous like nothing that's happened before: now nationalism is a part of this and that is frightening. Nationalism is one of the ugliest and most hateful forms of fear and does nothing positive for anyone.
What's sad is that all the moderate Chinese voices -- all the intellectuals, all the fair-minded, critical thinkers, intelligent thinkers -- who raise the RIGHT questions are silenced: by the Chinese media, by the Western media, by hysteria, by disgusting nationalism. So, as is often the case, idiots and their small mindedness come to represent untold millions of people who are much more fair minded and logical.
The more things change...the more they stay the same.
