Man, I Hate Tourists

OR WHY I GROAN AT THE SIGHT OF NON-ASIAN TOURISTS

Lately I've been having a hard time relating to other tourists. Tourists mainly from Europe, a handful from Asia, and a scant few from America. Here I am, having my first face-to-face conversations with proficient English speakers in four months (not counting my 5-person expat community in Taigu) and I'm realizing that I don't have much in common with these people. Not with fellow Americans, "my" people. Not with Europeans, even though I've lived in Europe. Maybe it's that there's been a much shorter period of time between the last time they had good ice cream and the last time I did. I don't know. But even with regaining linguistic competency in my current community (which is now English), I just cannot seem to communicate. Not only that, but I'm even embarrassed to be associated with them.

Maybe a story will explain my feelings better...

So I was at a dance concert tonight. It was full traditional Indian dances and lots of rich, white, Europeans tourists. How do I know they're rich? Well, they're traveling in large groups, are all over the age of 50, are all Caucasian, all wear outfits that look put together based on style (not lack-of-cleanliness desperation), and all have high-end digital cameras in their hands. And, they smell nice.

Immediately after the curtains open, a flash goes off from one of their cameras. As soon as this flash occurs without complaint, everyone begins to think that using their flash would be a good idea. You would have thought we were at these people's children's first kindergarten play. People would stand up, flash, sit down, pause...and then repeat the whole process again. Way to ruin the stage lighting for the rest of us. And so much for ambiance. The kicker is that the flash didn't help out any of pictures they were taking, because they were too far away from the stage for it to light the dancers. Instead, their pictures with flash probably made the stage look dark and the stuff near them (i.e. the backs of heads and seats) would show up very clearly. As I sat there, grinning and bearing it through the flash-fest, I just imagined this internal conversation going on in each one of their heads:

"I'll take a picture."
"But it's dark in this auditorium. Let's use flash."
(takes picture)
"Humph. Not the best picture in the world."
"Let's take another (with flash)."

Wow. Am I proud to be a Westerner. Insensitive, selfish, overflowing with money (have I mentioned that even people in Asia, some of who could get dinner for a USA $1.50 if they tried hard enough, think my salary is low), and stupid. Wow.

When it comes right down to it, the only tourists I've gravitated towards while traveling in India are Asian (or Asian-descended) ones. Why? Because they are the only people I've met that can actually handle India, and enjoy it for all that it offers: relaxation and chaos.

Let me pause right here and say that all the Shansi fellows I've had the pleasure of meeting -- all of whom are American or have spent much of their lives in America -- have been GREAT to travel with. Let me repeat: SHANSI FELLOWS ARE NOT STUPID ABOUT LIVING IN ASIA. Good to know our fellowship is paying off, right?

So back to the problem at hand: Westerners sucking at an Asian lifestyle. I'm defining an "Asian lifestyle" for the purposes of this post as the negative parts of this continent that do not exist, or we Westerners just ignore, hide, or cover up in the West, such as pollution, trash, human waste disposal, homeless animals, "unordered" traffic, unsanitary eating conditions, undrinkable water, obvious poverty, etc, all of which I have found somewhere in China and India. Maybe I didn't convince you with my first example. Maybe you thought, hey, rich people everywhere can be insensitive. Why do you have to hate on my countrymen over one group of rich tourists, Ray?

Well let me give another incident I've witnessed here.

I met a guy at my ashram in Rishikesh. A know-it-all American, the kind that could only be produced in a highly individual-centered society. He gets "hit" by a rickshaw. As in, he was grazed by the mirror of a rickshaw as it drove past him. He used this incident to generalize negatively about all Indian rickshaw drivers. Other Westerners (two nice people from different parts the of British Commonwealth) staying at the ashram used this incident as a reason to not leave the ashram because it was "too stressful to take a walk outside". Now here's what I bet actually happened. I wasn't there, so this is all speculative, but it seems more probable than the conclusion that "rickshaw drivers try to run over their clients". I bet this American was walking in the middle of the road, not playing attention to traffic, saw this moving vehicle getting too close to him, flinched trying to get out of the way, and flinched into this rickshaw. (I've seen this guy walk around, and this seems like a good, probable description.) Yes, I blame the whole accident on him. I've been living in Asia for 5 months now and dealing with traffic is scary. Luckily Chinese traffic is similar to India. Here is what I've learned.

1. Cars will enter your personal space bubble. They will get within inches of you most of the time you share space with them. Relax, this is normal.

2. Traffic will look like it is a constant series of near-misses and cars that do not follow "standard" driving rules, like lines on the road or traffic lights. Don't worry, people don't tend to get into accidents, even though it always looks like they will (except when they do get into accidents).

3. Moving traffic can be thought of as a partner dance, with leaders and followers. To lead, slowly indicate in some way what you plan on doing next (like turning right, driving in the wrong lane, stoping randomly, narrowly passing other cars). To follow, pay attention to these signals.

4. NEVER flinch, act quickly, or dash anywhere around traffic. You will get hit...basically by trying to save yourself. You get hit because of rule # 1 and # 3. Cars are very close and they need a moment to react to you, so give it to them.

In America we have rules. Pedestrians can do almost anything they want, as long as they know what the rules are and expect drivers to follow them. Pedestrians are also respected in the US. In India and China I walk as far off to the side as possible. I try to never stop, even when rickshaws and motorbikes get close, so my movement will be predictable to them. I walk slow and steady. Sometimes I hold people's hands to cross the road, and I've never, ever been hit.

Americans and Europeans are dumb here. They cannot help it. They don't really know what to do to stay safe, not get sick, not get bothered on the street. With their privileged, Western ways, they have no Asian street smarts. But me and people living in Asia...we know what's up. We know when to move, we know what to eat. We know how to look beyond burning trash and cow shit (not to mention the holy, roving cows themselves), to see the beauty and the awesomeness of India. Where Westerners say "STRESSFUL!", we say "oh, another day in the life...". Well, at least that's what I say.

And Asians miss the best things too. My Korean friend and I were sitting in a cafe, having a break from ashram and Indian life, from things like tea heavily spiced with milk and sugar and very cold drinking water. He orders a glass of piping hot, freshly boiled water. And I think "Hmmm, that reminds me China." I sigh and smile at the thought.

Having New Eyes

OR THE REAL VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY CONSISTS NOT IN SEEKING NEW LANDSCAPES BUT IN HAVING NEW EYES. --Marcel Proust

Hello from India. I was going to use this post to tell you about how I've grown in and with China. I would have pointed out that my painfully intimate relationship with the (tied-for-) third (-with-the-US) largest country in the world is starting to pan out in interesting ways. I was going to analyze the below pictures I saw in a gallery in 798, Beijing's contemporary art district. Take, I would have said, this first picture of a man. Maybe just a few months ago I would have gawked at this portrait of an Asian man and a rice cooker. How essentialist, I would have said. How orientalist. Now, after living in China, I see the picture two ways. First, I see my above description. Second, I see a real Chinese man painted truthfully by a Chinese painter. For when I look at the portrait, I see my rice cooker in my severly under heated Taigu kitchen, I see my water cooler from my cosy living room. I see my life and the lives of the people around me in these paintings. The American in me is disgusted by this painting; the Shansi fellow (or ex-pat, anthropologist, explorer, honorary Chinese) in me sees truthful familiarity. All my students have their favorite NBA star (ranging from Yao Ming to Kobe Bryant) and watch more American basketball than I ever have. Finding groups of adults playing cards in public places is common -- the rundown airplane is a common sight at kid's parks. This double view, or "craziness", is a concept I discovered in Bill Holm's Coming Home Crazy: An Alphabet of China Essays...and I'm a huge fan. After teaching English in China for a year, he could never see anything one way. Instead his whole life was seen in craziness because only he could see in double view. For example, his modest American home became both spartan (US view) and frivolous (China view). Multiply this example by every common, routine, usually trivial experience, and you can begin to understand how I see these paintings and how I will see America when I return. Now I can look at Chinese art and see both foreignness and familiarity, which excites me to no end.

I could have talked about my emerging connection to the community. I played in Nong Da's New Year's Party. A "party" here means nothing party-like whatsoever. Instead what they meant is somewhere along the lines of a high school talent show, with all the enthusiasm and talent that goes with it. Much as I tried to explain that this "party" was in fact a concert, I couldn't change the term. There seems to be a campuswide misunderstanding of the vocabulary term "party"; I eventually gave up and started using their definition too. At Oberlin, every job and most every extracurricular activity I did involved acting, improv, and tech theatre. Since May and graduation, this "party" has been my first gig. To represent myself, I decided to play a well-known song in the folk and queer communities, "Closer to Fine" by the Indigo Girls. At the "party", I played "The Closer to Fine" according to the hosts, gave a Happy New Years speech to a huge audience (in Chinese no less), and watched blue bubbles float on by while I sang a song 5 people in the audience could understand (apparently the English is too fast for our Chinese students to follow). It was epic.

I was going to say how this experiences gave me hope for the future. But instead I'll talk about the Taj Mahal and my first few days in my 2-month India trip. The Taj was epic, awe inspiring, and perfectly amazing. Yet getting to the Taj tested me in every way possible. I had to get on the tourist bus at 7am on 5 hours of sleep; sit through 6 hours of slow driving, cows blocking the road, and stops at gross eateries; shiver all day because I though India would be warm; be charged for every little thing I did all day long; be charged 750 Rs. to see the Taj, when Indias pay 20 Rs.; be given less than an hour to actually see the Taj; be left behind by my tourist bus when my friends and I decided 1 hour was not long enough; shiver the whole ride back (after we had finally caught up with the bus with our expensive taxi); hope I wouldn't get frostbite in India; get home to my hotel at 2am to a cold, cold room.

Yet I also had one of the best days possible. If any Shansi fellows are reading this...do you remember the day it was mentioned that traveling for one day would feel more rewarding and amazing than hanging out at our sites for months at a time? My Taj visit was that amazing day. I made the best of friends -- 2 ethnically Indian sisters from Tanzania and one of their husbands (who is originally from Germany). They stuck up for me and each other when we got ripped off, when the tour guide wouldn't speak English on the tour (he later came up to me and snottily remarked "Where are you from?" When I answered "America", he asked "Do you understand English?"), and most importantly, when the bus left us behind. They made sure I had a good time and that I got home safely. They were also really enjoyable people. We giggled the whole day, and made sure to share our negative (or rarely positive) opinions with the annoying bus drivers, salesmen, restaurant employees, and trinket sellers who bothered us. I learned many new things about Tanzania and my concept of an "Africa person" became more complex and friendly after meeting them (just as I hope I expanded their concept of an "American person"). I felt true comradery with these people who had never been to America: a successful go at cultural exchange and intercultural respect. We traded storied about America, China, and Tanzania. We giggled over real brownies and real lattes. We took photos of each other squeezing the top of the Taj into oblivion. Perhaps, needless to say, I was sad to get off that freezing tour bus and say goodbye to my new friends.

Now let's compare this to Taigu. I never realized how heartbreakingly, soul-crushingly, mind-bogglingly hard my decision to accept Shansi would be. To date I still don't have friends in Taigu that I feel that I have as much in common with as with these friends I met for one day. In fact, the depth of the conversations I had with my African friends I don't even have the luxury of having in Taigu: few to no people's English is that good. (My Chinese, being at food and light bulb ordering level, doesn't help yet.) Certainly Taigu is not as mesmerizing or as beautiful as the Taj. But where is, honestly?

So where does that leave me and Taigu?

I don't know. That is a question I hope to answer in the next coming months, during this trip and beyond.

At the least, I hope to come home to China with new eyes.

Da Tong (Pictures)

DO YOU LIKE THESE PICTURES?

This is just a small sampling of the pictures I took in Da Tong.

Please check out the rest of the photos...

...Here.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2077462&id=1230660239&l=0d8503d6a5

Eating My Way Through Asia

OR A LIST OF ALL THE TASTY, INTERESTING BITS I HAVE HAD IN CHINA

• fried scorpions


• donkey meat


• Bacon stuffed with red bean paste, then fried in batter and dusted with sugar


• Chicken feet*


• Pig ear*


• Chicken kidney


• Chicken heart


• Rabbit head
  
  
  
  • Brain
  
  
  • Tongue
  
  
  • Palate
  
  
  • Cheek
  
  
  • Eyeball


• Sheep stomach*


• Sheep intestine*


• Sheep congealed blood*


• Chicken "soft bone"


• Sheep feet


• Pig feet


• Shrimp head*


• Noodles that are the consistency of Jell-o

* I had this food at a Chinese wedding in Da Tong. Rarer parts of the animal (i.e. internal organs, eyeballs, etc) are considered more special, so they are the main attraction at special occasions, like weddings.

Christmas (Pictures)

RURAL CHINA STYLE

I'm a Christmas elf!

I bought a tree and wrapped me up some presents.

Here's a plastic wreath I decorated with bits and bobs I found at a Beijing IKEA.

My students gave me a Christmas cake.

And lots of Christmas apples, some of which were wrapped up like presents.

Nong Da establishments tried to decorate for the holiday season.

To celebrate Christmas Eve, we decided to all be Santa's helpers.

Elves hard at work.

Following family tradition, I watched The Santa Claus, with Tim Allen.

A Christmas miracle: our cats are getting along.

Alexandra's student came over and created this calligraphy piece for us. It will say "Merry Christmas" in Chinese. It is now hanging on our wall, above the cat food bucket, ready to bring Christmas cheer during any time of year.

Just Rolling in It

OR ONE PERSON'S RESPONSE TO LIVING IN THE 9TH MOST POLLUTED COUNTRY IN THE WORLD

Almost a year ago, I was sitting in the Feve, tired from a long day of TESOL training, and having a drink or two with my Shansi co-fellows. Julia, one of the Indonesian fellows, hands me a book, entitled Coal.

You should read this.

Why? I ask.

Well, you province is mentioned at least 10 times in the index. See?

You know when an Environmental Studies minor hands you a book on pollution, and your new home is prominently featured, that you just may have a problem on your hands. Perhaps a respiratory problem. Or a trash problem. Or a sad, dying planet problem.

I never guessed that my biggest problem would be one of dust.

In Shanxi province, the province I now call home, coal is money. Our reputation is based on it, our wealthiest are involved in it. We heat our houses with it and we get electricity from it. We mine it and use it in abundance. And it certainly shows. The most polluted city in the world is in our province. Wearing white here has become dangerous. Owning things in it is dangerous. Expecting anything to stay that color is dangerous. White and all things clean are very ephemeral states in the 9th most polluted country in the world.

Cleaning is downright depressing. White on gray -- the coal dust coats all of the newly plastered walls. The walls color and crack every year or two, and soon a new coat of white will be forced upon these tired surfaces. So they shine when the new teachers arrive.

But forget about your floor, your clothing, and everything else. When we sweep, we rid ourselves of dust bunnies, but never of the ingrained dust that stains every crack in the fake wooden floorboards. When we do laundry here, the water turns black every time. If you leave something out for too long, the next time you pick it up, it will soil your fingers. Black spots at every connecting point: fingers to phone, fingers to guitar, fingers to everything.

The air has a near constant reek to it. The radiators have turned on, so the coal plants must work overtime. And then there's the fires -- burning leaves (little to no public leaf disposal systems), burning plastic (little to no public trash disposal systems), and burning trash. Once I thought my neighbor's house was on fire. Nope. It was just time to get rid of some trash. The noxious fumes and the white, billowy smoke scare me. Outside my classroom window, students come to light fires. They burn piles of leaves. As my students work, I watch the small flames and the huge clouds fill up all 100 meters of space between me and the fire: space between trees and the curves of the building. I always make the students close the windows on these days. But sometimes they strongly protest and there's a constant pattern of open and close, open and close.Did I mention that everyone smokes here? Could someone remind me what smoke-free restaurants are taste and smell like?

So how do I cope? Well, by becoming an ardent environmentalist, of course. As a suburban-MD-resident-by-birth and an Obie-by-degree, my surroundings have been relatively pollutant-free. It wasn't until Ghana that I witnessed blatant anti-environmentalism. In the rural parts, the dirt roads are paved with squashed water bottles. The trash disposal system is as simple as Use-and-Drop. The ground is a trash dump.

In China I because I can respond, I must. So, step 1, I changed all my light bulbs to florescent bulbs, warm ones. This was a more impressive task than you might imagine. Normal, blue-tinted florescent lighting is extremely common is China. Finding something that doesn't make your home look clinical is very hard. The installed lighting in my house is overhead florescent tubular bulbs, the kind you see at the doctor's office or average office place. Homey, right? So I bought some lamps, took trip after trip (3 trips into town with many language barriers and much help from Chinese friends), and somehow found a bunch of warm bulbs. Though I had to pay 10 times more for these bulbs than their incandescent counterparts cost, I made my side of the house incandescent-free. Since I cannot drive (and will not for safety and sanity reasons) in this country, I don't pollute with car exhaust. I compost my extra food in a compost pile started by another fellow. I buy my food from local vendors. I try to keep my electric heater off when I can. I bundle. I bike.

I never paid much mind until I lived somewhere that looks positively post-apocalyptic because of coal pollution. I don't know how much I can change but at least my hands are becoming more and more coal-free.



Next step...solar electricity?

Some Days I'm Glad I Brought My Teddy Bear

ON THE THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

In America, people say a lot of things about my new country. They whisper in hushed tone about evils of Communism. They wonder why this place does so well economically. They worry about how they now own America's debt. They especially don't enjoy the idea of communal-ism. "How can we trust a country where no one can think for themselves?", they'd say to me.

Now, I've seen the documentaries, I know this country is not the freest place to live. But people here are not automatons. People here feel and think as radically as any American. How they channel their feelings is a totally different matter. But China has a history, for better or worse, of the youth trying to create radical change through non-violent and violent means, much like the States does.

Did you know that not everyone here is a registered Communist? You have to apply, and many people get turned down. Did you know that people here do not consider this country a Communist country? It is Socialist nation. Did you know that Chairman Mao is not worshiped as the ultimate conceiver of social utopia? People think Mao only started the job and perhaps got some things wrong. Hence all of the reforms. And did you know that plenty of people, in the quiet of their homes, with the companionship of their American friends, are really quite skeptical of the government? Its corruption, greed, connections, and bribes. (A side note: By people here, America is considered the freest place on earth. Somewhere where anything goes. And this assumption is passed on to Americans, who are expected to act in pretty crazy ways (and get away with it) and be accepting of just about anything that is told to them, because we come from such an accepting country.)

But sometimes things happen here that really scare me. Every fall the freshman get on-campus military training. Every day during September and part of October, I woke up to their war cries. They would train all day, practicing marching drills and ingesting plenty of propaganda. Anyone could go and watch this process because it took place on both the small and large athletic fields.

Censorship here is a real thing. The Google search engine for mainland China no longer exists because Google refused to be so censored. If you want to use Google, you use the Hong Kong version. Usually very different webpages come up if you compare Google.com's and Google.hk's results. Gmail and Google.hk are the only sites I use daily that I don't need my VPN for. This blog cannot be read via Chinese internet. But that does not mean that people here don't notice this censorship. Just the other day, a random student came into my class -- which is a pretty normal occurrence considering how popular learning English is -- with a strange request. During the break, he beckons me over. "How do you use YouTube and Facebook in China?", he says. I just blink at him. Who is this kid? Would it be bad if I explained the concept of VPNs to him? (Many of my Chinese friends have one, though maybe this is because they know us, the Americans, who all have one.) Would it be bad if I outed myself to him as having one? Is he a party member? Is learning how to use YouTube and Facebook the only reason this guy came to my class? In the end I decided to play it safe. "Don't you know? You can't use those sites in China," I say. "Oh. Okay," he says, accepting my obvious lie to save my face. I haven't seen him since.

Religious oppression is also quite a real thing here. Only government-registered religious organizations may be worshiped at. That means that all home worship is illegal, irregardless of the religion. A bible study group made up of Nong Da underclassmen was arrested and fined for holding a bible study in a room in a cheap hotel right outside campus (in North Yard) just a few weeks ago. The foreign teachers have a few Christian friends, which is how we found out. No local or school news published anything about these arrests. (A side note: the only negative news reported about in a Chinese news channel or newspaper occurs in foreign countries; only positive stories occur in the nation.) The best part of this story is that the parents of the arrested kids petitioned the government, because the Constitution guarantees freedom of religious worship. Apparently constitutions don't hold quite the same weight here as they do at home.

What spurred me to write this post was an article I was sent on another disturbing trend here, the institutionalization of dissenters. Can you imagine putting sane people in mental hospitals, treating them as if they were mentally unsound, using treatments circa 1950s (i.e. electroshock therapy), just because they complained to the government about something as minor as a land dispute? Read on to see what I mean ("Assertive Chinese Held in Mental Wards", New York Times 11.11.2010).