Misquotability

Soft Power Blowback

2012-01-25T01:11:00.000+08:00

The NYT recently published an essay by Joseph S. Nye, Jr. The odd timing of its appearance is a bit curious. Nye did a round of media appearances to promote his most recent book, The Future of Power, early in 2011. For the man who is given credit for inventing the term, soft power, it seems that the NYT editors are behind the curve. None of this is to suggest that there are any faults with Nye's essay. He is spot on in his interpretation of soft power in today's socio-political discourse and he aptly applies it to China. He doesn't, however, suggest why China is so incompetent with its soft power appeal. I want to suggest that the PRC sabotages its best efforts by its top down approach and by, seemingly, patterning its campaign on Chinese pedagogy.

The modern mandarins are under the impression that they can package and launch an attack of soft power; 'shock and awe' rendered as 'cool and wow'. Nye cites the 2008 Olympic summer games, and the Shanghai expo, but as much as even the central planners want to convince themselves as to how effective the Expo was in promoting brand China, it was much more of a domestic affair. The Chinese attendees learned far more about urban living in the many national pavilions than foreign nationals learned about Chinese methods of crowd control or mascot selection. And yet in spite of spending more money on the 2008 summer games than any other nation has spent, the number of foreign tourists went down during in August, 2008 because of Beijing's desire to predeport all potential troublemakers, even those who had purchased tickets. Nye argues that any gains from hosting the games were undone by the subsequent crackdowns in Tibet and Xinjiang. Events in those regions might have been juxtaposed in the media at the time, but the situations in these two regions had been longstanding black marks on China's international reputation. Internally what deflated even the proudest of jingoists was the melamine milk contamination and the subsequent revelations that the health warnings and the prosecution of the perpetrators were delayed until after the end of the games. So there was a lot of buck with very little bang and hardly an echo. Other publicity fiascoes can be mentioned, but the pattern is apparent and shows little sign of improvement.

Soft power comes in many forms, the least effective of which is when a nation tries so blatantly to promote its agenda, using soft power. Today the most effective modes are the forms that a national government has the least control over such as in the fields of athletics and entertainment. By contrast, Voice of America was once an effective tool of statecraft in many parts of the globe when it was the only form of information that countered state propaganda. Not only has the internet decreased its influence, so too have, to a much greater degree, pirated DVDs of feature Hollywood films, AV porn, and HBO blockbusters. Postings with Chinese subtitles done by volunteers within 24 hours of domestic broadcast can be watched by millions of viewers. HBO's Boardwalk Empire is but one example.
It's possible to cite contrary examples to this premise such as the Apollo program (NASA is one of the most visited websites in the world, ranked 778 according to google statistics.) and the Marshall Plan and certainly those who were effected directly by such efforts will never forget them. In spite of those government directed activities, I think it is fair to say that Kobe Bryant and Lady Gaga are far better for US soft power than Neil Armstrong, or George Marshall ever were. Walt Disney has undoubtedly done more to promote the USA as a force of goodness than any State Department program.
Another example of the Chinese soft power push is through the spread of Confucius Institutes. Their effectiveness is difficult as yet to measure and they are not without their share of controversy. India has refused to allow them. But for every little gain brought about by the Confucius Institutes' good will and ample cashflow, the heavy handed control from Beijing undoes it. A far more effective means of spreading its soft power is Hanban's placement of subsidized Chinese language teachers in diffuse institutes of secondary education.This is still a rather new program with equally difficult to measure results, but that is why, in part, it is called soft power. According to the law of unintended consequences, I can equally foresee it as a vehicle for promulgating the soft power messages of other nations as a result of the many Chinese language teachers who reenter their homeland and reacclimate to their classrooms with firsthand experiences abroad.

Plush toys at the vanguard of soft power offensives

Chinese soft power launches an awkward fashion moment on the diplomatic front!

Getting back to the premise of this posting, I feel that the best way to understand why the soft power push by China fails miserably is to consider the source of their methods, Chinese schools. The role of a teacher in a Mainland Chinese classroom is to enter the students' space, stand at the front of the classroom on an elevated platform, and to speak at the students, who do their best to remain attentive and to be passive vessels of knowledge. The students are expected to study all the information in preparation for regularly scheduled tests. The teachers are explicit as to what information will appear on their tests. Contradictions, inconsistencies, and even the purpose for having to study the material are dutifully ignored by the students who hope to succeed in this system. Chinese educators teach to the test for in China that is the only purpose of teaching. Some voices have questioned this method and yet theirs is the exception that defines the rules. Teachers who fail at getting their students to pass their tests are regarded as failures, themselves, which is why many are not above teaching their students how to cheat on their tests. If enough teachers can turn the process into a profit by selling cheating hardware, then are they to be blamed or the system's emphasis on results over procedures? The money to pay for such devices certainly did not come from the students' working part-time jobs.

The CPC fashions itself as the teachers in this campaign and consequently wants the rest of the globe to behave like good students according to their definition by accepting Chinese culture as strictly defined by the authorities in Beijing. The official curriculum, the setting, and what gets ignored are determined from above. This is a one-way approach with only one acceptable answer to any topic. Continuing this analogy, one can easily enough comprehend its shortcomings. The whole system survives and perpetuates itself only because the colleges entrance exam, gaokao, has such an important role in determining one's success in Chinese society. And if the students don't recognize this fact, the parents anxiously normalize the next generation to the system. But the rest of the world's students and sinophiles are not bound by fear of failing on a test; they do not feel compelled to remain silent in the classroom; nor have they certainly any hesitation to criticize the prescribed curriculum's shortcomings. Progressively as more about China becomes better understood outside China, the students will demand to know even more. Will the teachers lose these students or adjust their pedagogy? As Nye sums up his piece:

The development of soft power need not be a zero sum game. All countries can gain from finding attraction in one anothers’ cultures.

The most positive conclusion that can be drawn from this development is that in the end, the soft power assaults and counterstrikes will benefit all parties, from the front line troops to the civilian populations. For the longer that China engages in its efforts, the more the CPC will be forced to recognize the counterproductivity of its present strategies. It will become more evident to even the most intransigent residents of Zhongnanhai that more can be gained by undoing bad acts than by overspending political capital on soft power with Chinese characteristics. Simply freeing a few well known political prisoners will generate more good will than hosting yet another international sports event. Multiple battles to restore the environment will conquer more than constructing another maglev line. As unthinkable as this idea seems today given the extreme nature of Han Chinese conservatism, geo-political expediency will inevitably prevail. On another front, as more thought is invested in how to effectively teach the Chinese language to foreigners, the improved approaches can have crossover benefits within China's school system. In the past neither the Chinese people nor the rest of the world gained in the slightest whenever the leaders of China closed off the country in both directions. Soft power, on the other hand, breaks down barriers and facilitates communication. It is mutually beneficial for all combatants. And as long as China has the drive and resources for this kind of combat, I cannot complain about the increased fallout of peace, love, and understanding.

Dystopia

2012-01-11T17:15:00.000+08:00

Tyrell Corporation, Shanghai, Nanjing Lu, Replicant Research Division

Shimato-Dominguez Corporate Headquarters

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...

Timberframing in China

2012-01-01T23:34:00.001+08:00

Yangzhou is a tourist destination within a day's journey from Nanjing. I had an opportunity to spend a few days in the city last October, 2010. I had wanted to travel there for several reasons, yet it was only by happenstance that I was able to come across some examples of modern Chinese timberframing and am now finally able to post the images that I was able to collect.
There are many very old buildings in Yangzhou, and remnants of old buildings. The difficulty as with much of China is distinguishing the old from the made to look old upgrades. There are to be sure some impressive, extant examples of Yangzhou's past. Ge Yuan is one notable site. This streetscene typifies much of what charm Yangzhou offers.
The paved streets and walls of grey brick give some indication as to the amount of wealth that flowed into Yangzhou at one times. The salt trade, rather the collection of taxes, on the salt trade accounts for most of the wealth that flowed into this once worldly city. From what I saw there is no reminder of this commodity's importance.

The city even had its own perimeter defensive wall yet only this one remaining gate is a testament to that. Further developments make it impossible to see the extent of the original defenses. The gate has been beautified and rebuilt so much that it is a pale representation of Chinese military architecture.

And because even the oldest parts of Yangzhou are still a very much inhabited, it is possible to walk down its many narrow alleyways and find sights such as this, modern construction pressed up against the old with a mixture of modern amenities and destructive alterations. In all cases of historical relics, it is happenstance in what determines what is preserved and what is lost.

One is just as likely a beautiful gem of detail as a modern metal door as its replacement. This motif does not appear to be Chinese, but I have no experience is such matters and it is doubtful that the present residents can offer much accurate interpretation either.

Within close proximity of the above, one can find examples of much lower quality and preservation. And yet I argue that this architectural example reveals as much history of the place even though its interpretation is equally problematic. It's a mystery that it even remain standing. There is something almost intentionally sloppy with the mortar repairs and even though some attempt was made to afford a decorative elements to the upper corners of the entryway, the mason used a segmented lintel against all sense of utility.
I cannot say for certain whether these two doorways are contemporary, but they exemplify how appearances and methods can vary across time and between craftsmen.

Here is an exposed example of the timberwork of an older building near where much new construction is underway. The roof structure is simple yet elegant. The bottom chord rests on the posts in open mortises, tying the opposing walls together. Two queen posts support a straining beam with a mortice that accepts a king post, which is in turn morticed in a ridge beam. Purlins carry closely spaced splitsawn timbers as rafters. The whole assembly carries interlocking fired tiles set in mortar.

Not far from this original historic building is this structure that attempts to recreate, at least in appearance, what was probably demolished to make room for it construction. It will be used to extend the amount of retail space for the sale of trinkets and travel souvenirs, which line most of the pedestrian venues in old Yangzhou.

Here is a closeup of the modern interpretation of Chinese timberframing. It features the use of rounded timbers and some of the same joinery. There are, however, some changes. While the purlins are carried on the king and queen posts, they do not appear to involve any joinery. As can be seen, the purlins are simply cut flush at the ends and butted together atop the posts. I can only guess that they are toenailed or will be connected with some sort of other metal fasteners.

In this image, it is possible to see a wider gap between the purlins. It is difficult to ascertain what is happening at the ridge line. The kingpost does not seem to be engaged into the ridgebeam, but instead it is attached to sawn lumber pieces upon which a round ridgebeam rests. This kind of connection seems to not rely on traditional joinery, perhaps as a concession to modern building codes or simple expediency. It is rather high up and out of eyesight.

As another example of expediency, there is this shim where a mortise was cut too deeply into the top of a post for accepting a tiebeam. Every good craftsman knows how to correct his mistakes and this might be evidence of a relearning curve. The timberyard is just a stonesthrow away.

In another concession to modernity these men use an electric chainsaw to cut a raw log flush at one end. Behind them is a stack of partially worked and unfinished timbers.

In the next step, a workman lays out the dimensions of the timber, using a template and ink. Afterwards he uses a single beveled hatchet and planes to smooth the timbers to their final rounded dimensions.

A pile of finished timbers await assembly. A few are marked with a general description of where they are to be placed. 中栋东 means nothing more than "Middle Support East" The bases show the centers marked in ink where an anchor pin will be used to secure them to pedestals. It is possible to see the two interlocking mortises properly cut on the tops of the posts, the deeper one accepting the lower chord onto which the tie beams are placed.
These are the handmade tools used by the man above doing the layout, lying on some raw logs. The horizontal handles seem to be a feature of Chinese planes. Cheaply made planes of bamboo and Vanadium alloy blades of similar design can be bought in retail stores. This plane body was built of a dense tropical wood and had the heft of bronze.

A workman uses a similarly handled plane with one hand holding the near end of his stock and the other end against a backstop. I cannot say whether this awkward stance is considered best practices by the other timber framers. I can say that on most construction sites that I have visited, the workbenches are flimsy pieces fabricated from scrap lumber and constructed to last no longer than the present job. Unsurprisingly, I, therefore, saw no benches on this worksite other than some crudely built brakes and horses.

Back at the new construction site posts rest on their pedestals, not of stone but brick piers with a cement overcoating. This seems like an odd manner of cutting costs since the piers are so close to eye level and the fact that stone is widely used in China and so is readily available and with many workmen who can fabricate it into more traditional pedestals. A stainless steel pin is anchored into the concrete upon which the posts is dropped down.

This historic structure managed to survive demolition. It is hard to ascertain its original function with many of its surrounding buildings removed and the clear evidence of many alterations. It does though stand as a remarkable survivor, an example of the refinement and craftsmanship of Yangzhou traditional architecture.

Restorative

2011-12-31T00:36:00.001+08:00

Wushang Gaungchang is a rebuilt commercial area located in Hangzhou. It gives a taste of what old China was like to satisfy the touristic desires of modern Chinese and foreigners alike. Most of it is all new construction, which is a testimony to both the degree that traditional Chinese architecture has suffered and to low standards for heritage conservation. I did, however, spend a bit of time venturing behind the newly constructed facades of Hefang Jie to get a glimpse of some more hopeful signs of what can be done with enough care and attention to the past. More often than not historic buildings with an even greater pedigree are torn down. In the video at 0:56 it is possible to spot a hastily spray painted character in a white circle, 拆, which is shorthand for demolish. It is a common site in all Chinese cities. I have a background in restoration so it was remarkable to witness the slower, more deliberate efforts on maintaining these buildings. I enjoy finding positive developments in China. I took these photos in 2009 and have not been back to Hangzhou since.

The above photos gives a good sense of the nature and methods of construction. I cannot date when these structures were originally built. It is possible to see the combination of post and beam construction with the major members still in the round along with sawn boards and plaster lathe to fill in the voids. The one wall in this case is of common red brick with a mortar overcoat. The roofing material is made up of grey overlapping clay tiles. The tarpaper seems to have been an attempt to lessen the discomfort of these draughty buildings or a sign that at one time the residence was subdivided.

These two workers unwittingly posed for me. It's possible to see a single beveled hatchet in hand that is used to remove the waste from the mortises that one is sitting on. The plane seems to be handmade or passed down through the generations.

In another section, two more workmen are assembling timbers. The scarf joint on the right hand side stands out as an example of their craftsmanship. It was undoubtedly cut with the bowsaw that rests against it. The posts rest on a carved or turned stone plinths.

A closeup of another scarf joint. I see no evidence of any mechanical fasteners on these joints.

Another workman lays out the mortises on another timber, using an ink brush and a very light square. An off-centered tenon cut to fit and match up flush with one side of a round post can be seen.

A view from the courtyard reveals the state of the original workmanship. Original woodwork stands out as darkly oxidized in contrast with the newly placed vertical pine paneling. The delicate tracery of the banister molding shows loss. The various pieces might be for disposal or to be part or the reassembly. One leg of sawhorse rests on the pile.

Looking up at the second floor walkway from the central courtyard, it's possible to see the degree of loss and one step in the restoration process. Along the dripline can be seen the decorated ends of the clay roofing tiles.

A close-up of one area where the woodwork seems to have suffered very little damage. By eye, it looks to be machined applique in this case. A beaded edge highlights the arris on this and many wooden elements.

Here a stonemason cuts the design for a drain cover. I have seen many examples of this kind of onsite work being done in China when one might expect it to arrive finished from a quarry.

Lastly there is this image showing the construction of some of the buildings in this area. This exterior wall consisted of random use of stone and brick masonry covered with a thick sort of daub onto which was applied a smooth plaster coating. The effect was to give an appearance of solidity and uniformity.

Word Empire Idea

2011-12-14T16:45:00.007+08:00

Thorsten Pattberg has recently been making an impression in a few media outlets with an essay in which he attempts to assign blame for the lack of Han Chinese philosophical contribution to western imperialism and bemoan the barriers of arrogance against accepting Chinese terms into a worldwide lexicon. He supplies a few quotes and some examples, but in the end, it's his unwritten motives that stand out and not his linguistic persuasiveness.
Pattberg frames his essay this by pointing out that the general terms in Chinese used to denote philosopher, democracy, and civilization have different connotations than their equivalents in western languages. There can be no dispute that history, context, and usage can have such an effect on the meanings of words. Pattberg simply chooses to ignore what every thesaurus makes clear and pretends that he is as ignorant as a casual reader.There are many words in any language that can be found to have no exact equivalents in another. This is not new nor exciting to anybody who has looked at such matters. Definitions can even vary between native speakers across generational, class, and regional lines. This is the reason why dictionary entries are ranked by number in order of most common usage. Exact correspondence from one language to another is not controversial. It only becomes a controversy when a lack of overlap between terms in one language and another becomes a kind of sticking point upon which one can skewer an innocent strawman.
"I estimate that there are over 35,000 Chinese words or phrases that cannot properly be translated into the English language." It's impossible to know what to make of such a number or what to make of what it means to properly translate a word. Adding "phrases" to the number of untranslatables is a qualifier that lets him off the hook of accountability. He might be alluding to Chinese Yanyu 諺語, proverbs, often in a 4-character phrase, called Chengyu 成語. Dictionaries exist to compile these expressions and to explain their meanings. Even the Chinese can be confused due to the truncation of phrases taken from literary sources. But the purpose of Pattberg's essay is not about how to understand Chinese nor the challenges of translation.
Pattberg checks off his points by attempting to overwhelm most readers with their lack of knowledge of the Chinese language. He then makes the following claim: "In many countries, adopting Chinese terminology is a taboo." If it is a taboo (or is that even the right word?), then how can he have mentioned earlier in his essay the adoption of Chinese words into English. "Words like yin and yang, kung fu and fengshui.", words he claimed were all untranslatable. He seems to suggest a kind of circular argument: words are untranslatable when they are borrowed directly and therefore not translated. I wonder what Pattberg's definition of proper translation is. And in how many countries exactly is it taboo to say: tea, typhoon, gung-ho, soybean, or kowtow? Has anybody felt the need to refer to a one-handled, iron pan for stirfrying vegetables euphemistically lest he cause others to blush?
It took me a few readings to understand why I needed to reread this essay so often. Pattberg is an academic but, or because so, he is an inferior scholar. By this I mean that he wants to construct an essay well enough to make himself appear like a viable candidate for an academic post. I suspect that he really wants a permanent position at Beida. It's probably also why he wrote his book, which even now has only gotten one comment on its googlepage. In fact, his writing style reads like so many essays by Chinese students that I have had to edit. I suspect that his intended audience is the Peking University faculty selection committee.
The essay ends with an appeal that we all adopt Chinese terms as part of a larger discourse, specifically, minzhu (democracy), wenming (civilization), and shengren (philosopher). Yet there is no reason given as to why such terms ought to be adopted or how anything can be gained by doing so. Some languages are very conservative when it comes to borrowing foreign terms. e.g. Icelandic, Chinese; whereas, some languages are promiscuous with incorporating foreign words. e.g. English, South Korean.
In more adoptive leaning languages, words are borrowed when speakers and writers decide that a foreign term has advantages. Two examples pointedly bear this out. The word guanxi 关系 has gained a foothold in English to describe relationships inside Chinese society and between businessmen. Its general meaning of connections, or network with hints of cronyism and nepotism made its adoption useful in describing guanxi's overwhelming importance within the context of China. It remains to be seen whether guanxi might used in a general sense.
Another way for a language to borrow from another is with a calque, an overlapping of words from one language onto another's. The founding of the People's Republic of China was a heady time of news ideas and bold political energy. For those people who lacked the obligatory revolutionary fervor, techniques were developed to persuade them to conform to the right-thinking manner of the new ruling power. The Chinese term for this is 洗腦, xinao, or literally 'washing brain'. Directly from this wording along with knowledge of the technique the calque, brainwash, entered the English language.

Pattberg bemoans the lack of Chinese terms in a wider discourse while he ignores evidence of words that have entered general usage. He simultaneously interweaves bits of China's humiliation narrative into a poorly constructed thesis on comparative linguistics, beginning the essay with the assertion that he earns the charge of "culture treason" for highlighting such injustice. For the record, words are borrowed from the Chinese language when there is a need, not simply because doing so might help a postgrad curry favor with his Chinese academic advisors.

China through the eyes of a Czar

2011-12-07T00:25:00.007+08:00

Original article
There are many people who write about China and it can be a challenge to sort the drek from the gems of wisdom that are contained in their writings. Most, however, are undoubtedly sincere in in their purposes. China is afterall an important topic of academic, business, and social inquiry. There are, on another hand, those who write about China for unclear reasons and with personal motives. There was something about a recent opinion piece that caught my eye and got me to think about its author and his intentions. Steve Rattner is a man of many talents and with many career turns, whose connections with the New York Times staff entitled him to submit an essay about China. His observations bear close scrutiny and his conclusions deserve mockery.

Rattner has held many positions in his storied life, but cheerleader for the Chinese economic model seems to be the latest stint on his carreerpath. Or he might be a parttime shill for G.M. international. Ever since Thomas Friedmann perfected airport journalism, it has become trendy to become an instant expert on any region of the globe while earning frequent flier miles. Rattner begins his contribution to Sinology by vaguely referring to much of the recent bad press about China.

"Hardly a day goes by without news of yet another economic problem facing China. A frothy real estate market. Quickly rising wages. A weakening manufacturing sector. Tightening lending standards."

First of all, what exactly is a 'frothy real estate market' and why is it a problem? There are very clear structural, and simmering problems with the Chinese real estate market. Why does he choose to compare it to a tasty cappuccino? Is frothy perhaps a bit of venture capitalist jargon? Next, he has: 'quickly rising wages' as a problem. For whom is a rising wage ever a problem? Clearly for the people Rattner is writing this essay for, I can surmise. And then, 'a weakening manufacturing sector'. For China to continue its development into an advanced economy, it will shift more of its wealth creation to the service sector, just has happened in every other postindustrial society. So how is this anticipated development a problem and for whom? Lastly, he ends his list with 'tightening lending standards'. This last one is the most bizarre feature to highlight as a problem. If only the USA had such a clearly defined problem during the last decade while loose lending standards helped to create the housing bubble of 2008.

I like reading about China. I don't read Chinese so I have to rely on the many bridge 'blogs that provide translation of many media highlights and postings from the Chinese language intranet. Most of these are managed by volunteer translators, some Chinese and some nonHan. The quality varies. The best ones have been blocked on the mainland; another relatively good one has been subjected to denial of service attacks from hypernationalists. A new 'blog from inside China appears from time to time with both meaningful content and analyses.

But the editors of the New York Times evidently believe that one visit by one of their own is more valuable than whatever those who specialize in China can ever hope to enlighten. Of course, having been the able car czar under Obama who saw to the restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler affords him a special perspective. It's a pity that he only found time to visit GM assembly plants and to sing their praises in the NYT piece.

"... G.M. achieves American levels of productivity, quality and worker safety — with pay that is a small fraction of levels in the United States."

So at least we can understand a bit better for whom the quickly rising wages are a problem. And so he further assuages the investor class to not worry with the most tonedeaf and heartless bit of his writing:

"This illustrates China’s great strength: its ability to relentlessly grind down costs by combining high labor efficiency with wages that remain extraordinarily low."

To illustrate his point, he cites Foxconn as a positive example. I doubt Rattner met any of the workers who have their wages ground down in order to make China strong.
The rest of the piece is where he sings the praises of the Chinese model for development. On the one hand, he does mention: "China’s economic success is colored by its opaque political system, repressive and riddled with corruption." And yet according to Rattner's priorities, the political system is not even a problem worthy of mention at the outset of the piece. Yet all is well as he concludes, on the other hand: "...a populace that appears more interested in economic advancement than in democracy." Because in Rattner's mind, the same people who are having their wages ground down by a political system are willing to forego better governance because that same system is advancing them economically. But does Rattner hate the working class so much? He recently clarified his position:

"Perhaps I misspoke. Perhaps my remarks were misinterpreted. So let me be clear, I have no desire to see auto workers (or anyone else) take a pay cut,".

Cutting, in a strictly tool and die sense, is, in fact, quite different from grinding down.
To be fair to Rattner, he is truly concerned about one minority group, the investors in China who might be worried about how so much corruption might affect their bottom lines. He dismisses this all with a comparison with the USA.

"Not unlike the United States in the 19th century, China’s early stage of industrialization has brought with it an unsavory wild West flavor, from cronyism to fraudulent accounting, ..."

It's really odd for him to claim that China is still in its early stage of industrialization unless he is focussing on the level of labor rights and trade unionsim, which clearly he is not. China's leaders want it to move into a more balanced economy, which means de-emphasizing manufacturing and a greater development of the service sector. Rattner's claim that China is both at the same level of US productivity and at its early stage of industrialization is both awkward and selfserving. In Rattner's mind it's all good because China's debt, which might or not be larger than the USA's (possibly due to fraudulent accounting?) is being spent on infrastructure.

"Notwithstanding accounts of 'roads to nowhere,' China has vastly improved its core infrastructure. Its government arguably does better than ours at allocating capital."

Is there anything that China can ever do wrong? Or the USA do right for that matter? Is he possibly hinting at the misallocation of the TARP funds or of the $82 billion of public funds to bail out the US auto industry, which he supervised. One might even hope that he is referring to the indefinite military ventures, but I doubt that is much of Rattner's concern.
Rattner then proceeds to list even more reasons to invest foreign capital in China, finalizing his pitch with the most assuring of assurances for the investor class: "...China is likely to continue to get away with reforming only slowly." 30 years of 8% annual growth and, as as as Rattner can foresee, it will continue on indefinitely.
Steve Rattner is an interesting man by many accounts. While he is not even the only billionaire on the NYT staff, he has worked his way up to that level from beat reporter. His most recent title is that of chairman of Willett Advisors, LLC, which for all intents and purposes is just a rebranded version of Quadrangle Asset Managment with most of the same staff and likely a good deal of the same investment funds. Before QAM, he was with Lazard Frères & Co. to which he matriculated from Morgan Stanley after getting his start in the investment banking world at at the now defunct Lehman Brothers.
One theory is that Rattner is just doing what he can to stroke the egos of high level Chinese officials. The NYT is considered the only newspaper that the Chinese politburo pays attention to. Fallows at the Atlantic often mentions this. Rattner is indeed well positioned; being in the middle allows him more easily to play both sides against each other. And isn't that what a hedge fund manager's real job all about? There is something jarring to read an editorial shift to the second person. Starting in the title, "Will China Stumble? Don’t Bet on It", he then plays a tourguide, "Visit the General Motors plant on the outskirts of Shanghai and watch Buicks..." By the end, the piece comes across as a salespitch for China composed by a very wordy bookmaker. A hedgefundmanager is a very well compensated and privileged bookie. I have no doubt that Rattner has been making bets on China, but while he encourages others from one side of his mouth to make long bets on China's upward growth, I strongly suspect that he has a good deal of smart money on short trades.

Early Modern Chinglish: 101

2009-05-14T17:40:00.008+08:00

There is a name for every regional variation of English brought about by local conditions, historical migrations, and interactions between other language groups. Singaporeans refer to the occasional loan words and some syntactical influences notably from Chinese as Singlish. And I am certain that many PhD dissertations have been written just on this one variant. Such variations can also be used to justify Canadian English and Australian English dictionaries. These such variations, however, occur in all sufficiently large sampling of speakers of any living language.

This should, nevertheless, not be confused with a relatively new phenomenon known as Chinglish. One might be tempted to suggest that Chinglish is akin to a pidgin language, which emerges when different speaking groups want a simple means by which to quickly engage in commerce. They feature reduced inflections, and simplified vocabulary and syntax with deference to the dominant group’s linguistic features. Chinglish is solely the product of the Chinese educational system. English is typically introduced here in the third grade. Its inclusion came about when the central government in Beijing mandated English education for all students in China as part of the national curriculum, commencing some time after the opening up under Deng Xiaoping. Relatively overnight Chinese students put their noses to the grindstone and began preparing for the subsequent tests that would evaluate their ability to study for tests thereafter focussed on English grammar and translation. Often the tests are simply badly translated passages that require the students to translate the English text back into the original Chinese.They also often feature multiple choice questions for which the students must choose which one of the two or three possibly correct answers the examiners want the students to select.

So for every newly identified phenomenon, there quickly arise postdoctorates hoping to develop enough expertise to justify landing a tenured position. A center for advanced Chinglish studies shall likely take root wherever Dr. Michael Erard ends up teaching. I bet he dreams of the day when he can get out of the freelance business and start going to department sponsored mixers and draw upon his two years in Taiwan as a cultural anthropologist, disguised as an out of work English graduate teaching ESL in a cram school.

In an article that appeared in Wired, he speculated as much as his unshaven face and glasses can lend gravitas to the profundity of his thinking about the future of communication in English, implying that Chinglish was somehow part of the ongoing evolution of the English language. The man does have the paperwork to prove that he studied linguistics, which might explain how well the doctor can embarrass himself in so many languages. Being a jack of all languages and master of none, Mr. Erard’s main skill is getting published, anticipating the academic dictum of publish or perish demanded in universities. For true Chinglish scholars, I offer for the following adage in the target language: Make article or be died.

I can convince an audience of native Chinese speakers that Chinglish is not, in fact, a phase in the evolution of English but simply a dialect (albeit loosely defined) of Chinese itself. Bluntly, it is nonsense to suggest that Chinglish is anything more than sloppily and poorly translated Chinese idioms replete with misspelt and invented words, which, in its worst manifestations, cannot even be understand by Chinese speakers themselves. At a minimum, it requires a general understanding of Chinese grammar and the common faults of English education on mainland China to be understood. One advantage of having linguistics enshrined in places of higher learning and treating it as a profession is that it can offer some advantage to general society. Wouldbe faculty members like Dr. Erard (MA Linguistics, PhD English) who keep themselves busy by finding stuff to fill column inches and bookcovers with while they plot about how they can best convince others that they understand better than another candidate marketably arcane topics are on today's pathway to the ivory towers.

By the way,I hate to be pedantic but rest in peace in Spanish is properly ‘descanse en paz’. Dr. Erard, if you really want another job in an institution where competent scholars really do study other languages, you ought to redo the epitaph for your uncle. But it might be forgivable. Selection committees love creatively pompous selfdescriptions like yours:

"A linguist by training, I'm a writer by birth. [...] The transition from academia made for the second most profound year of my life. I'm committed to marrying narrative power to specialist knowledge, and to helping produce a more mature discourse about language in the US. I'm also committed to doing so accurately, responsibly, and creatively." 1

Nobody can fault the man's verbal creativity, especially when it comes to the booktitle.

There is yet one more contender for the head of a Chinglish language department. Who knew that there could be so many selfappointed scholars in this field? But as they say in academia: the competition is fierce because the rewards are so meaningless. Herr Oliver Radtke in the tradition of Teutonic linguistic methodology wants to record every single instance of Chinglish for posterity and further academic inquiry. At least, he wants to keep publishing books on the same theme. Referred to as a German sinologist, Herr Radtke’s main skill is being sly about his motives for producing photo collections that go straight to the marked down table. It’s really a bargain at $7.95!

Referring to the incomprehensible examples that can be found on everything in China from warning signs to plagiarized homework assignments, Mr. Radtke makes a plea for the conservation and the academic scholarship of Chinglish. He asserts as one does when polishing a doctoral defense to a a committee conditioned to be culturally aware:

"I'm trying to challenge the notion that there is only one type of standard English - the English that's spoken in America or in the British Isles - which is shortsighted, because Chinglish is already being used by millions of people to communicate with one another."2

One of the hallmarks of an academic researcher in search of tenure today is how he claims to want to challenge the very same system, which he eventually hopes to become part of. One type of standard English? Whoever proposed that there was even a standard to begin with. It was a professor I had in university who made it clear that English, unlike other languages with language academies to prescribe orthography and usage, but which inevitably fail in the task [pause for knowing tittering], English has no such institution that sets its usage standards. My classmates and I, of course, dutifully wrote down his words and accepted them without question.

As any businessperson from outside China who does business inside China via email can relate, Chinglish is indeed used for communication. It doesn’t, however, mean that such communication is ideal or regularly clear. I cannot claim with certainty, but I think that in dealing with Chinese traders, many foreigners imitate the Chinglish patterns in an effort to streamline their communication and to feel more assured that the meaning is not lost on the Chinese side. This has the unfortunate result of normalizing the Chinglish in the minds of some Chinese speakers.

The claim that millions use it goes beyond reasonable credulity. Native born Chinese speakers themselves don’t use it other than to help them pass examinations or to lend cachet to places of business. It's not used for communication as much for decoration. The same garbled menu tomes exist in mainland China, too, even in restaurants that might never be visited by a nonChinese speaker. Almost invariably, the mainland Chinese ignore any English words whenever the Chinese script is printed next to it. (Enough competent English speakers exist in places like Hong Kong and Singapore so that errors are more likely to be weeded out by conscientious civil servants and businesspersons.) In trying to understand why public signage intended to communicate to nonChinese speakers would so consistently produce incomprehensible examples such as: Calculate Experiment Base. The answer that best explains is that miserly managers want to believe that when any English words are used, the foreigners can figure them out. Optimistic to say the least.

In many academic circles, semantics has become a dead end for one’s career. It’s just too difficult to stake out an exclusive corner on accuracy and meaningfulness; whereas, interpretation and symbolism can be the ticket to lifetime employment. It is in this vein that Herr Radtke hedges a bit in his defense of Chinglish as he did in his interview.3 He quickly backs up from defending the nonsensical and incomprehensible, claiming that nobody wants to do that.

He refines his goal, instead, to wanting to preserve the new expressions to “Stay off the grass” which he regards as trite and believes that the English language could use some refreshing with the Chinese alternatives. Is it necessary to even include this as Chinglish, "Little grass has life, please watch your step" since there is so little meaning lost with the more verbose expression; whereas, with "wash after relief" it is not clear as to whether it is an admonition to flush or to wash one’s hands. He is far more intrigued by what the word relief culturally says about taboos regarding corporal functions. I am certain that an entire seminar can be held somewhere about this topic and how the Chinglish can be used as a starting point to explain the workings of the Chinese language. Such an erudite discussion is definitely not, however, on the mind of a foreign traveller who has just learned the hard way that Chinese public restrooms are commonly not supplied with toilet paper or soap. There is in his appeal to preserve Chinglish, a subtle nod to any future selection committee that Herr Radtke is well aware of the different norms and practices of foreign cultures. There must be an endowed position for him somewhere! Because as any department head of an American university knows, it requires a foreigner faculty member to teach properly about cultural presumptions and insensitivity.

Simply put Chinglish is just one aspect of my work that makes my life as an ESL teacher in China more complicated. Its ubiquity reinforces what I seemingly in vain struggle to undo on account of the English teaching practices used in China. It also reinforces itself by suggesting that there is no need to use English as an accurate means of communication. It is just there for an abstract purpose. It is something that must be studied because it is part of the curriculum that insures a Chinese student a bright future, right next to Maoist economic theory. But one should not tell that to the experts in Maoist economic theory. So often in education, it’s not what or how well you know any subject, but whether you can find a job teaching it.

When I first noticed this sign resting on a baby grand in a coffeeshop near where I work, my best guess told me that it meant: No Tipping the Invited Player. In fact, it means: Do Not Play the Piano.

Does Dr. Erard see this as a kind of missing link in the evolution of English?

Does this example of Chinglish add spice to Herr Radtke's understanding of how it can represent "something more creative and more local"? Is there anybody other than himself who feels that this garbled translation does anything more than to confuse the meaning of the more universally understood glyphs?

Sugar spinning

2009-05-07T13:06:00.011+08:00

Wushan Guangchang lies on one end of Yan’an road opposite the very upscale shopping hub of Wulin square. Lately the area has been undergoing extensive amounts of refurbishment the quality and authenticity of which I want to observe over the coming year since it seems to be handled better than other urban renewal projects in present day China. On a recent visit there, I happened to come across some street entertainment amongst the usual hawkers, whom I had not noticed during my previous forays. The main activities and little boutiques, some vintage, others made to look vintage are along Hefang street, a pedestrian thoroughfare with many diversions to amuse even the most jaded or jade seeking tourist. Some ancient looking apothecaries dominate the corners, but the majority of shops sell silks, tea, and trinkets. Without any attempt to downplay its presence, McDonald’s doesn't do much to blend in with the setting's theme.
I came across two candymakers while strolling there with some students. What struck me was how the candymakers were selling the candymaking as entertainment even more than the sweets. I was amazed at just how easily the two artisans made the tasks look. Having worked with sugar in the past, I wondered how they could maintain the sugar at the proper temperature to do what they did. I could only think of Antonin Careme and his five stages of cooked sugar.
The first that I saw was a young man making candy tracery on a stick. The majority of his customers were young and so he had cleverly placed a wheel with a pointer to spin in order to get them to make a design selection. Then the candymaker would dip into a pot of sugar at hard crack stage maintained on a small electric hotplate. Letting the sugar drizzle, he drew the selected design over his worksurface, placing a stick halfway through his effort, but still with only one dip into the sugarpot. At this temperature and concentration of sugar, it is so very easy to burn the sugar or to have trouble maintaining humidity. I wondered whether an additive might have been mixed in with the sugar in order to lengthen to working time and how long the mixture could be allowed to sit on the burner. The same candymaker made candies whenever a customer asked for one. The spectacle of one piece candy being made would subsequently draw in more customers. Then more sugar would be drawn out of the working sugarpot. I didn’t see any backup pot to know what would happen if the raw material started to run out.

The young customers get just as much pleasure from watching their candies made as from eating them.

A few paces down from one candymaker saw another woman who made what can seemingly be best described as taffy. There she also drew from a simple pot that was thermostatically controlled without much apparent concern or oversight.

She would pull out a measured amount of the sugar with two sticks and spun the mass with a third stick, just as with a taffy pulling machine. Not only did this allow her to work air into the concoction, but she would also add tiny amounts of dye that went into the zoomorphic shapes that she had on display.

Christmas Lunch at Dragon Well Manor

2009-03-19T23:05:00.009+08:00

It has been overdue for me to write about my actual visit, albeit delayed, to the Dragon Well Manor. I was given the opportunity to dine there after being invited by a student to experience what it had to offer us and her colleague.

My dining experience was heavily influenced prior to our lunchdate by the New Yorker essay by Fuchsia Dunlop, which was the initial motivation for me to seek out the restaurant; otherwise, I and my fellow diners would likely never have heard of this destination restaurant. At the very least, I would not have been able to strongly hint that I wanted to pay a visit to such an establishment.

Our private room awaited us. A simple table set for three and watched over by a large print of Zhu De. The barest of table service was laid out with three bowls of amuse-gueules to stave our hunger until the meal began: dried cherry tomatoes, unsalted peanuts in the shell, and assorted rice cube candy (dou mi). I thought of coining the term, tomato raisins, which, in fact, I think I just did. Some painted tiles added color to the otherwise dark table and austerely padded chairs. Tea was immediately poured into lidded mug to help alleviate the late morning chill. There was a sideboard where the waiters would do the staging of the various courses. We strolled a bit before being seated by the head waiter and presented with a menu composed of vertical bamboo strips. My hostess and her colleague read and chatted with the waiter and I sat back and waited for what was to come. I am not certain whether my companions ordered a la carte or whether this was the menu de degustation for the day. I asked to look at a wine menu which seemed appropriate given that this meal represented Zhejiang haute cuisine. I selected a 2005 St. Emilion grand cru. The headwaiter showed me the label and then proceeded to divide the bottle into three glass pitchers. The Chinese have a certain protocol, insisting that all members drink the same amounts of alcohol. As it was, my two companions at the table offered me most of the contents of their pitchers by the end of the meal.

The first course was a bowl of warm soymilk with condiments: sugar, dried tiny pink shrimp, youtiao (chopped strips of deepfried batter), chopped pickled green chilies, soysauce, chopped green onions, a yellow pepper salsa, and unskinned peanuts. This is basically what most Han Chinese call their breakfast on any given morning: doujiang or warm soymilk. The rather bland or neutral soybean gets something to help make it palatable. And for reference, it went well with the French bordeaux.

The next wave of courses came after the first was cleared away. Normally platters come haphazardly in a Chinese restaurant. This locale was showing itself as different. To save tablespace, the kitchen served dishes on raised, footed platters. Set before us were deepfried fish soaked in vinegar, mutton sausage with fivespice powder, and pressed tofu (dofu gan) in a cloudy broth. The waiter then brought out the famed leather booklet that showed the sources of all the ingredients and the delivery times. There were photos of rustic farms and traditional animal husbandry in practice. Sadly I could only look at the photos and imagine the kind of details that were shared about the suppliers of the day’s repast.

The headwaiter then brought out a poached duck that had been simmered for four hours. After showing it to us and telling about its background, it was brought back into the kitchen to be segmented. The bowls arrived with equal portions of ginseng, steamed duck, and cicada larvae that were in the original cooking crock. I don’t think the cicadas added much of anything to the flavor. We were also served a scrambled egg dish that was mixed with lots of chives. It reminded me of the medieval tansy.

The headwaiter spent a good deal of effort in answering questions and explaining the background of the meal as I expected based on The New Yorker article. While this approach to cuisine with an emphasis on local and seasonal ingredients is still avant-garde in the USA, it is revolutionary in the PRC. Dare I say counterrevolutionary even? Food culture is still trying to shed the communist mantle that insisted that a chef feed simple foods for the working masses. Thinking toom much about the pleasures of food was a luxury of the old regime and a bourgeois affectation. So this restaurant has taken upon itself to engage the diner in a kind of voluntary reeducation, to rediscover flavors and to join the international slow food movement. There is already a national chapter in one part of China. In spite of their best efforts, however, the wineglasses were far too small for the red wine that I chose. They were uniwineglasses, I presumed, that are used for serving reds and whites. The assistant waiter as is typical in China hovered and tended to overfill the glasses as though any of the three of us might at any moment challenge the other two to “Ganbei!”

The headwaiter then brought ought a mature head of bokchoy and showed us the insides by pulling off the outer leaves. We were then served a platter of these same “hearts of bokchoy”, lightly sautéed with a hint of sesame oil. Then arrived a seafood broth medley: abalone, seacucumber, scallops in a dense chicken stock. In amongst the recognizable bits there were gelatinous marine things and what appeared to be shark’s fin.

We were then served another soup that seemed to be made from squid and its own ink. I believe that it is called laroutang. Forthwith were placed in the table a platter of boiled pork and eggs, sautéed chicken heart with bamboo and red chilies, ham and bamboo in a light broth, steamed white rice, small, darkened pickled cucumbers, a dish called dofu qizi.

Then arrived the birdsnest soup sweetened and flavored with what seemed to be peach tree resin, niangao in a caramelized sugar syrup along with more of the niangao in an eggdrop soup that was oversweetened with what tasted like raw sugarcane juice, xiaoxianzi, and a carved fruit platter of melon and kumquats.

It was as we were exiting the diningroom that we were all able to observe the cooks at work making the fresh niangao and their dried pork and poultry for Chunjie. It was a mild afternoon by then and I could see the advantages to working outdoors even though the usherettes and the parkinglot attendants stood in their quilted overcoats. A gentle, arid breeze wafted through the rafters drying and curing the pork and ducks that seemed to have been hung out as part of the seasonal preparations after being dunked in a dark brining solution.

Sino Italo Bistro

2009-02-14T15:36:00.005+08:00

Henry Yang Shigang was a freshman in Heze University, Shandong province when I first arrived as an ESL teacher in the PRC. He and his close classmate Owen liked to pull me aside me during classbreaks in the hallway and chat informally. More casual conversations often occurred this way than in the classroom. My feeling at the time was that each student wanted his own foreigner to speak English with privately. It annoyed me, especially during the long empty silences while I tried to lead a lesson, but it seemed better than the absolute silence that I encountered with some students. I was frequently asked about how to study English better, how to get a good accent, and sometimes, how to find a good job. It didn’t take me long to realize that the answers to such question would not come from studies at Heze University. When Henry asked me what he ought to do for his future, I told him to strongly consider leaving that school and finding another means to make his own path.

I don’t know what about Henry’s character and family background enabled him to consider and then to follow my advice. He himself sought out an agency to find him employment in Singapore and negotiated with his parents to fund the venture. Chinese parents tend to be conservative and they are inclined to help their children attain the highest level of education possible. For about the past 30 years and throughout most of Chinese history, a high education was as much a mark of status as a means of class advancement. The present state of Chinese education has undone most of this historical pattern. And to be honest, while most Chinese students know that they are not learning anything in their universities, many feel entitled to enjoy the break in their studying regimen and more sadly, they are often incapable of making decisions on their own. They do not learn critical thinking skills that could help them escape their own educational downfall.

Henry is different, but in some ways he is simply smarter about being himself. While he wants what most all of his peers want, he is better at breaking from the crowds of who want to achieve the same goals and by doing so in lockstep diminish the likelihood of successful outcomes. We were not able to meet on my first visit to Singapore. He had decided without telling me that he would upgrade his working conditions. To do this he needed to return to China and reapply for a work visa. When we finally met, he had been working in his second job there for about three months as a waiter in an Italo bistro.

During our first meeting outside his native China, we strolled near where he worked at his first job. He started out his career, working in a kitchen located in a museum in a former colonial structure that has been annexed to accommodate films, multimedia exhibitions, and live performances. We sat down and enjoyed coffee and a slice of the lime cheesecake, lounging on frameless chairs. He gave an invitation to go a nightclub to meet a colleague on the eve of the lunar new year. There I met Jek, the name he goes by in Singapore. He holds a degree in food and beverage management from a college in the Philippines. It was he who finally urged Henry to invite me for lunch at the restaurant.

I wanted to arrive as early as possible since I needed to be at the Zhangyi airport by midafternoon. I arrived with a good friend by taxi, suitcases in tow. The restaurant is located in Rochester Park, a former residential retreat on a thickly treed hill that has been converted into a series of upscale restaurants. I arrived and Henry offered me a cappuccino and I looked around the otherwise empty restaurant. The kitchen was open to the elements as were the majority of table settings. A plate glass roof littered with fallen leaves covered where we were seated.

The menu was typical Italo food, the international amalgamation of the various regional cuisines: pizza, pasta, and prosciutto. We started with a platter of antipasti misti. There were all the ingredients that made it look like a dish that people who had not closely studied Italian cuisine might feel comfortable identifying as authentic. There were slices of melon wrapped with shaved ham, roasted bell peppers (thankfully peeled), a slice of eggplant and another of zucchini both bearing light grillmarks but unsalted. There was a handful of salad of wild rocket, a tougher version of the more delectable arugula. I have grown this type of green and while it is a true Italian green, it does not serve itself well as a fresh salad green. There was a pesto and a drizzling of oil over the assembly. The oil was pomace grade and the pesto seemed to be made of parsley or some other bitter green, perhaps more of the wild rocket. Lacking garlic, pinenuts, parmiggiano, or salt for that matter, it was insipid and added little more than extra calories to the dish. There were two mozzarella balls that had been frozen and for some inexplicable reason, the plate also contained a few slices of preserved pink salmon slices.

I had ordered a glass of the house red and asked Henry to bring it with the pizza. An Australian Shiraz arrived just before the pizza. It had a pleasant nose that was not enhanced by the diminutive wineglass that it was served in, yet it was overoaked and needed time to regain its composure. I accepted Henry’s recommendation for the pizza selection. It arrived with a minimal crust: marina sauce, loads of shaved ham, baby shiitake, and white cheese. The restaurant had just acquired Italian pizza ovens and Henry told me that the staff was still learning how to use them. They were placed behind an exterior wetbar on the adjoining patio. Good baked bread is hard to find in Asia, European bread, that is, bread with a crust that requires chewing and that has flavor from multiple risings. The weakness seems to be the lack of hard wheat flour in the doughs. In an effort to compensate for the low quality bread, the headchef seems to have decided to overload the toppings. It was essentially tomato sauce with meat and cheese on a big round cracker. In fact, I have tasted worse pizza in mainland China.

Pizza has become an international dish, and being so it has been homogenized and reinterpreted by local tastes and foreign economic forces. I now forget which of the owners of the restaurant and the associated specialty food outlets throughout Singapore, the husband or the wife is the Italian. But it really doesn’t matter since having left the homeland, and abandoning the guidelines of whichever regional cuisine, generations of Italians have let the local market inevitably determine the outcome. This restaurant would fail in short order in any corner of the Italian peninsula, yet in Singapore, the palette of the overworked office workers and locals pressed for time seems to be happy with something different for dinner.

The same process occurred in the US as Italian immigrant families opened their restaurants and focused on what they needed to do to be successful. Any emigrant might have been a stonemason or a peasant back in Palermo and had only heard of Neapolitan pizza by name, but after being processed through Ellis Island, he could open a restaurant with his whole family and serve whatever dishes the local residents thought of as Italian. He didn’t need to claim it was authentic; the less the diners knew, the happier they could be as they ate their spaghetti and meatballs with imitation parmesan cheese. The same process has taken place with Chinese cuisine with chop suey and fortune cookies, the most frequently cited examples of Chinese food invented in the USA to appeal to the local tastes and based on the locally acquired ingredients. I thought about this confluence of a Chinese emigrant and Italo foods as Henry asked whether I wanted to taste the housemade tiramisu for dessert. I accepted his earnest recommendation.

I cannot even say what a good tiramisu is supposed to be. There seem to be as many variations as pastry chefs with the ubiquitous in their repertoire. Henry was telling me that most of the ingredients are shipped in from Italy. I don’t doubt that there are no nearby sources for mascarpone. This example had some kind of lady finger pastry that was apparently baked in a sheet. It was layered with cocoa powder and covered with finely grated bittersweet chocolate. Bitterness predominated since the mascarpone has not been flavored with anything else and after asking what sort of coffee liqueur was used, it was explained to me that simple coffee was used to soak the base. It was an interesting end to the meal, but both my dining partner and I had little trouble leaving behind the better half.

Cocktail Complexion

2009-02-14T15:30:00.003+08:00

China seems to have become newly tapped market for olive oil exporters. Its main selling point seems to be its exoticism. The allure ties in with the general notions applied in TCM wherein the more distant an item’s provenance, the higher its price, and consequently the more ‘medical’ its value. In a new market and one with a fast growing urban middleclass, there is a lot of overpriced olive oil available, much of it is low grade pomace that is extracted chemically and after all the other more desirable grades have been expressed. I don’t know just how much olive oil has entered the Chinese diet. The most common vegetable oil for homecooking is soybean as it has been for centuries. Olive oil as a skin emollient, however, is becoming extremely popular and as any marketer knows, it is only necessary to put something in a little bottle and declare the contents therein able to make a woman more beautiful in order to charge a very high price. I have come across a few closet boutiques selling nothing but little bottles of the stuff with exotic looking labels.

Even though I came across this display in Singapore of a Korean label promoting its olive oil based product, I think it serves an example of how the olive is still regarded as an exotic fruit, one for which it is necessary to resort to an image of a fancy cocktail stuffed with pimento as the best known icon.

Dragon Well Manor, a place down the road from

2008-11-28T11:00:00.013+08:00

I spend much of my waking hours in the PRC, on the clock and off, thinking about topics that I can use during the school’s twice daily English corners. The purposes of these events are manifold. The school as a business uses them primarily to put their foreign teachers on display. In spite of this, I have always tried to make mine somewhat educational and to elicit from the students natural speech that can take place in a less rigid classroom atmosphere. Without going into the challenges, it suffices to say that I spend many hours perusing the internet in hopes of finding news items that can serve me in this function. It was, therefore, doubly pleasurable to come across an article on the New Yorker written by Fuchsia Dunlop, describing her encounter with a chef in Longjingcun who can be seen as a kind of scholarly trailblazer on the path to recover lost cuisine with Chinese characteristics.
I read as Ms. Dunlop confirmed what I had suspected since arriving in China. The great food culture that China has bestowed upon the world as its legacy has suffered greatly first under communist authority and now under the rush to develop economically into the 21st century. Dunlop employs the sesquipedalian word, prelapsarian, to describe the offerings and methods underway at the Dragon Well Manor (龙井草堂). Mao Zedong didn’t, at least openly, enjoy fine dining and with his tastes imposed on everything during his reign, many culinary skills disappeared along with their sensory memories. I recall early on, when I first arrived in China and struggling to find something tasty and nutritious on the university campus, a young coed telling me how the food that we were sharing was what chairman Mao liked as she slurped back a bowl of insipid cornmeal gruel with a skin forming on its surface so fast that the students usually stirred with chopsticks while tilting the bowl back.

I was eager to invite the same two who had hosted me on a similar expedition to Longjingcun just a few weeks before to be my guests to such an oasis of delights. Dunlop explained that the owner and Watersesque man behind the scenes, Dai Jianjun, modestly never expected to recoup his investment and has a kitchen that serves guests based on the ingredients, working backwards from the amount that the diners want to spend. Minimum charges began at a mere 300 RMB. This seemed too good to be true. I asked one fellow wouldbe gourmande to track down the address and to make us reservations. She responded with some bad news. Yes, the meals do start at 300 RMB per diner, but if we want to sit down, a table covercharge is 1,600 RMB. To put these numbers in perspective, a college graduate, even a dentist, often doesn’t expect to earn more than a monthly wage of 2,500 RMB. The food might be affordably priced for some but the chairs and table can break the bank. She instead arranged for us to sample the food at another restaurant in that same area that she thought would be as good. I deferred to her judgment.

Green Tea is another restaurant located on the same road as the Dragon Well Manor, a location for dining that attempts to evoke and exploit the more refined and opulent days of Hangzhou's past as a milieu of cultural attainment. We arrived early for lunch in a setting that can be called pittoresque and sculpted. The restaurant features large expanses of glass, windows and ceilings, to allow diners to look out and contemplate the teabush covered hillsides, the ornamental plantings, and the waters that surround and pass by the diningroom windows. After stepping over a stony arched bridge, we made our way into the restaurant where the morning chill was tempered by braziers charged with coal pressed into tubal shapes. Deleafed grapevines covered an atrium, the frontal dining area, by which voluble growth, the plates of glass had become dislodged and askew. Workmen had been above and squirted large amounts of silicon caulking to cover the gaps. The excess gapfiller hung down indecorously in phlegmatic drips which seemed a minor eyesore given that the spent cartridges were still littered above.

A hostess greeted my two acquaintances and we then selected our menu from the wall mounted chalkboard that has some dishes photographed and a few translated into English. We were then led towards the back of the restaurant along wooden flooring and pebble encrusted walkways, past more precarious braziers and the bar and abundantly stocked juicestation that form the hub of the operation. As I was admiring the fruits on display, I spotted the day’s meat delivery resting on the walkway in front of the bar: gray busstubs of porkbelly strips, chicken quarters, and mutton segments. Our table overlooked a small pond that might have presented a better vista in a warmer season. The summer’s foliage was browning and the waterlilies were getting ready for next spring. A few fishes swam in some of the transparent zones. I struggled to find the lock for closing the window to fend off the chilly breeze. The interior decor was contrived rusticity. The tables and benches were made of an ashlike wood and contoured so as to give a quaint notion of how handmade furniture might have once been made. Crocks stuffed with dried everlastings broke up the large expanse, yet the flowers themselves had outlasted their appeal, many missing petals and tilted downwards. In the evening the interior would be lit up with paper lanterns, oddly some with Tibetan motifs.

I followed the two ladies to see the restrooms which were positioned on an open balcony with an overlook of a stonefaced bridge overlooking one of the watercourses and next to the kitchen service entrance. There was a private diningroom with glass walls along the way that was packed to the ceiling with construction waste as though it has been more convenient to fill the floorspace than to remove the detritus.

I had been asked what I wanted to drink. Beer was suggested and then mijiu. ‘Rice alcohol’ made me think of the Korean makgeolli so we ordered a pitcher after I was told that is made in house. It arrived warm in a bamboo pitcher decorated with red ribbon. We had to ask for clean shot glasses which the waitress delivered after personally inspecting them by eye. Pouring a round, we lifted our glasses and tasted. This was not at all what I was expecting but I tried to taste it without prejudice. It was a artificial orange tinted fluid that had an odd flavor that is present in the ubiquitous baijiu. I can best describe it as filtered hooch mixed with flat orange soda. The first dishes arrived: a platter of sautéed cabbage and cured bacon and deepfried parboiled, squished potatoes. My accompanying diners decided that we would have to eat with only our left hands. After we proved to ourselves that we could in fact move foods to our mouths, using chopsticks in our left hand, the novelty wore off quickly. A hefty bowl of pork intestines was brought out prepared in a Sichuan manner: submerged in vegetable oil and dried red chilies with a green branch of numbing huajiao (花椒) and festooned with a handful of cilantro and green onions.

Then came what seems to be a signature dish of the restaurant. It was a cube of sweetened pain de mie that had been carved out, cut into smaller squares, repacked and then toasted whole thereby resteaming the interior. The piping hot crusty cube was then topped with a small scoop of ice cream. As it was prepared, the outer section was not meant to be eaten. This could have been a delicious course. The pastry was actually tasty. Had it been part of a more complex dessert like a charlotte with seasonal fruit or preserved yangmei from the spring, much tastier and accomplished. Oh, and it would taste better if it also were served at the END of the meal. The Chinese habit of covering the table with dishes in whatever order they leave the kitchen leaves much to be desired by the palate.

On the table next was set a crock of bean soup with cracked pork leg bones. I was portioned a serving with one of the pork bones brimming with marrow at its jagged end. I changed my opinion afterwards, deciding that it was, in fact, a pork broth with beans added as filler. The broth was undeveloped and undersalted while the beans were still chewy and added nothing to the flavor of the soup. The marrow, although sweet, needed something to complement it. A large wooden board was brought out with a section of roasted mutton ribs generously rubbed with dried herbs. The meat was cooked bone tender, slightly greasy, but oddly bland in spite of the spices. It also arrived unsalted and as is typical in most Chinese restaurants, there was no salt on the table to upgrade it.

When I thought that there could be no more to come, a waiter brought out a large shallow bowl lined in a reed basket that held two steamed fishheads. They were floating in a very salty broth that tasted of soy sauce and soybeans and were covered with chopped pickled green chilies. The flesh however had not been completely steamed and rather than flaking apart under the pressure of the chopsticks, it held tight to the bone. I would have sent the dish back in different times, but my tablemates seemed indifferent as though they were conditioned to accept whatever was served and to pay the price. So I looked at those two untouched fishheads and wondered whether we had really found a more affordable restaurant than if we had gone to the Dragon Well Manor. On the whole, I think that I am more annoyed with Dunlop for not accurately giving the full extent of the costs of experiencing a meal at the Dragon Well Manor. Dai Jianjun is on a mission, just as the founders of Chez Panisse so many years ago in Berkley were. He has made it clear to his suppliers that he is not interested in getting the lowest prices. He wants quality and authenticity and is willing to pay a premium to them. This is a subversive revolution in a nation that for thirty years has pulled millions out of poverty by making cheap clothes for the world and counterfeiting products at will. One restaurant, however, is not enough to change more than a few minds at a time. By raising the prices at his restaurant he will get more attention and scrutiny from fellow countrymen and entrepreneurs than from another glowing review in Gourmet or The Art of Eating. Money is what gets people’s attention and Dai is establishing market forces that encourage a renewed appreciation of China’s culinary legacy and that foster an awareness of a forgotten way of enjoying life, rediscovering the past while reimagining a future. As soon as more restaurant owners recognize that they can get rich from copying his formula, they’ll follow in suite. Ultimately this is a metaeducational process with restaurant patrons and restaurateurs/chefs engaged in a mutually beneficial learning process, learning as well as relearning. Does this then produce a more refined leisure class antithetical to the goals of socialism with Chinese characteristics? One can hope as much. Only a well educated class of consumers able and willing to call out cheaply concocted copies of properly prepared platters can push the market for quality upwards. There is already enough evidence to show that lecturing downwards about the need to be honest and creative produces few benefits for a society.

The background noise of the restaurant rose steadily as the lunch chatter developed into a crescendo. We were wise to have arrived before the standard midmeal time. I picked over the last of the potatoes and cabbage and then tore off a piece of the dessert cube. A weedy tree the leaves of which had not begun to turn colors leaned over the water where a few more uncooked fish swam without purpose. I caught a glimpse of something bright land on the branches and fixed my gaze, hoping for a gust to blow strongly enough to offer me a better glimpse. From behind the foliage flew the recognizable profile of a kingfisher, most likely an Alcedo atthis (普通翠鸟). I turned my head to follow its flight leftwards when I heard over my right shoulder that my lunchmates were ready to exit.

The menu of a dinnerparty hosted by an English motherinlaw as best detailed in the English language

2008-11-27T14:42:00.003+08:00

The following is the menu of a dinnerparty hosted by a motherinlaw to celebrate the first visit to China of herself and daughter for the parents of her daughterinlaw. The courses are described by this attendee to the best of his knowledge and in the approximate order of their presentation:
-Sliced lotus root stuffed with sticky rice and coated with a red simple syrup
-Zue xia, Drunken shrimp:live shrimp macerated in a tomato, chili base of distilled spirits under a domed glass bowl
-Jujubes in a simple syrup with a maraschino cherry
-roasted chicken steeped in a light chili broth
-jellyfish in vinegar
-green pumpkin vines with enoki
-stuffed squid with a reddened sauce
-short ribs with a quasiworchestershire sauce
-brown mantou with hollowed bottoms served with shrimp and chilies
-poached brusselsproutstalks
-Xiaoshan style fishsoup
-Scallops with pickled green chilies on the halfshell
-Cod served two ways: fillets poached with summer vegetables and mushrooms and thickened, then served and encircled with the tail, fins, head, and remaining parts deepfried
-Tangsuliji with bones, batterdipped deepfried pork pieces with a sweetened starch glaze
-Sauteed eggplant with small clams
-Braised and browned pork fatback in small earthen pots (Dongporou?)
-Tofu soup with julienned capsicums in a starch thickened broth
-Braised cabbage over a flame
-Sauteed wild mushrooms
-Lightly herbed noodles served individually and then a large serving bowl
-watermelon wedges
-Tea, baijiu, beer
12 diners and two children feted during the Transeurasian family gathering

Teatime

2008-11-06T12:10:00.007+08:00

It seems that I live near a renowned tea growing area. Within the political boundaries of Hangzhou city lies Longjingcun, or Dragon well village. On its terraced slopes grows the Longjing tea variety. And as with anything in China, most of what is sold as Longjing tea is phony. It would be redundant to describe and categorize all the sundry and arcane terms and grades of tea produced under the Longjing tea label. Other sources are already more competent on the subject than I am and most of what is written is irrelevant since one can seldom be certain what one is buying when one purchases a box of tea leaves labeled, Longjingcha (龙井茶). Apparently some merchants distinguish themselves by proclaiming that they are selling real counterfeit Longjing tea. This amounts to truth in advertising.

I know a little bit about the area only because I was kindly invited by two students to visit a teahouse in Longjingcun. One student owns an automobile which made the jaunt from Xiaoshan up into the mountains rather easy. Chinese mountains hold a quasimystical aura about them. I live near a slight geological mound call Beiganshan, or Beigan mountain as my students like to announce. It’s certainly higher than the surroundings, but it could also be a kind of fake mountain. It gives the area some clout, it seems. Tea plantations grown on a mountain might in fact benefit from the microclimates, but in the marketing of it, the mountain source is the key. Mountains are where wisemen live and powerful herbs grow for use in TCM. Mountains are where people go to escape the heat and the chaos of the cities.

The walk through the village was pleasant and relaxing. It reminded me of some propserous Italian villages where the prosperity is due to a collective effort of all members to focus on a particular resource, be it specialized foodways, shoemaking skills, or ancient architecture for the tourist market. All the houses in Longjingcun are well maintained and show a unified style. I saw tidy, little gardens, fruit trees and closely cropped tea bushes next to small tea finishing rooms and welcoming restaurants. My two hostesses settled upon a restaurant at the end of the village’s mainstreet after inquiring about the menu with the doorgirl. We all sat down in an arbor covered courtyard in the back of the restaurant on a lower terrace. The place had a rustic charm and felt timeless with its cut stone masonry and lanscaping.

It seemed obvious that we would drink tea here, yet they asked me anyway whether I wanted to drink some with them. With the first sip, I thought I was doing something wrong. Had I not let it brew long enough? The tea seemed especially insipid and weak. I looked at the pot, which was crafted of attractively shaped and decorated porcelain, only to see a single teabag string hanging over its rim. Perhaps by clearly showing that they used teabags, this restaurant was trying to set itself apart from those that intentionally deceive their customers as to thereal contents. I asked my accompanying tea drinkers why a restaurant located in the middle one of the most famous tea growing regions in the world would serve such low quality tea when I could see all around us tea plants and tea leaves drying in the midday sun. They answered in the same way that they have answered their own similarly posed questions and probably those of others: “Because it is cheaper.” And that was the end of the comparison between Longjingcun and an Italian mountain village.

I could have and should have known the answer to my own question. I have asked and answered it myself often enough about matters in China. It is a theme in this developed and developing country. It explains why so much of manufacturing in China is contracted or counterfeit. It’s cheaper to copy than to foster talent and innovation. Why did the Xinjiang restaurant’s baba ghanoush taste so bland? It is because it saves the owners money to substitute neutral soybean oil instead of olive oil and to leave out the tahini. It is cheaper to build upon somebody else’s ideas than to create one’s own, at least, in the short run. Why does melamine end up in so many foodstuffs? It’s because it’s a cheap way to make foods appear to have more digestible protein in them than they do.

The driving economic impetus to ending the misery and chaos under the Maoist management of the PRC has been to make things cheaply and to repeatedly make lots and lots of them. There is even a grading system for rating knockoffs whether pirated DVDs or Louis Vuitton handbags. Not surprisingly, not much stock is put into this system since every seller claims to sell the most highly rated fakes. When I ask about the enormous percentage of counterfeit goods made and sold in China, most Chinese see it as a problem but they limit the negative consequences in their answers. They reason that it’s ok to buy fake bags and clothes since they know that they are not the real ones. And they know that they are not real because they can, and willingly, buy them so cheaply. It’s harder for them to explain about the prevalence of melamine in so many foodstuffs. They, therefore, have much less to say about it.

The most recent scandal involving the adulteration with melamine makes my disappointment with the tea served in Longjingcun somewhat selfish and petty. Just as with the counterfeit grading scale, is there a continuum with legitimate copying and cheaper substitutions on one end and universally recognizably illegitimate counterfeits on the other? Adulteration with melamine that causes the deaths and hospitalization of nursing infants would seem like a clear cut case of bad counterfeiting. I fear, however, that in the mind of some industry players, chemical or dairy, the bad counterfeiting was simply that a bit too much melamine was added to the watered down milk.

What if the bad element is that people aren’t allowed to know that they are buying fakes? Is it acceptable to sell tainted milk products as long as it is labeled properly? Possibly, but there is a reason why we weren’t given that information freely. It severely reduces the profit margin when consumers are told upfront that they are buying poisoned food. Some Chinese seem to feel that they, in fact, benefit from the counterfeiting. How else, they reckon, would they be able to carry a LV handbag if they had to pay for a real one? Even if there is no apparent acknowledgment of a product being a copy, the cheap price is regarded by the Chinese as proof that they are getting what they pay for. It’s a kind of unspoken caveat that saves face for both parties.

A few months ago, there was raid on an upscale Hangzhou retailer of LV handbags. Authorities discovered and confiscated counterfeit, admittedly high grade, samples in the storeroom of a boutique on Wulin square. The storeowner featured originals to put on display but sold unlicensed copies to unwitting customers as originals and with original grade prices. The purpose driven officials had to walk past a lot of other retailers of counterfeit goods along the streets of Hangzhou to get to the one store that was worthy of being shut down, but they persevered. I wanted to think that this signaled a kind of shifting tide, and that WTO standards regarding IPR were beginning to wend their way through the Chinese bureaucracies. That thinking is premature as yet. It’s much more likely that the merchant sold a counterfeit LV item to the wife or mistress of a high ranking party member or, to a party member herself. Either that, or he failed to come down in price for somebody important and the subsequent backlash led to an investigation. Ladies of high station cheated of their lucre into carrying bogus handbags might be the mechanism that starts a trend. Up until now, it has mostly been the parents who cannot afford imported infant formula and particular foreigners who assumed that they are getting local tea who have really seemed to be bothered enough to complain.

Carp Fishing in China

2008-10-30T20:54:00.007+08:00

I was invited by some friends to go fishing. A German autoparts factory manager was returning home with his Chinese wife and new baby shortly and this activity would be something of a goingaway outing. The photo above helps to convey better than mere words what sort of experience this was. Nature in China is a relative term, which does not cover the same geographic and abstractions as I am accustomed to. I have been to private fishing ponds in the USA where children, mostly, are escorted for the pleasure of pulling a fish, usually a trout or bluegill, out of a manmade, earthen embanked pond. They are located in the countryside, near or excavated out of former farmland with grassy hillocks, shade trees, and other natural amenities. This fishing facility, set in a dense urban environment and screened by a line of willows and alders, was a tightly packed series of shallow lagoons edged with concrete platforms and rusticated cabins for the more refined Chinese sportsmen and accompanying mahjong players. All the tools of the sport were provided by the facility’s management. I found it odd that in a land where bamboo is used for nearly everything applicable, here the reelless fishing poles were made of plastic tubes. The advantage was the lengths stacked inside one another, collapsing down to a shorter pole; however, the corresponding disadvantage was that during use the pole sections would slide down over one another. Yet due to the purchase decisions of the management, after renting the fishing poles, we would therefore not be unduly encumbered as we walked the 15 meters to where we would drop our lines and begin testing our patience.

This water was noticeably unclear. Only fish the most tolerant of low oxygen levels can survive in such muddy, stagnant conditions. This was indeed a carp pond. The carp is a fish revered by the Chinese as much as the pig because of its fecundity and ability to convert inedible waste into edible protein for humans. It was regarded similarly in the US until about the middle of the 19th century when public perception of this fish turned against it. The most rational story is that entrepreneurial farmers invested in creating productive carp ponds out of otherwise unusable waters: ditches, millponds and the like. The fish bred as is their wont and they and the early North American experimenters in aquaculture overwhelmed the local markets and the prices plummeted. At the same time, they also had to compete against species like cod and other fishes which were not only cheaper but easier to debone. Perceived valuation became ingrained in the American psyche: if the fish is so cheap, it cannot be good.

But there must be more to the story than the price drop in the 19^th century to explain the disdain for a fish that much of the world reveres in the arts for its fecundity, beauty, and adaptability. The carp seems to have been a big part of the diet of Eastern European immigrants. This might have led to an association with the fish as simply another immigrant, a nonnative that in later years would take on similar language as it competed with superior native fishes in dwindling habitats. While it’s true that the introduction of nonnative species can wreak havoc on native environmental systems, few complaints are ever raised about wheat displacing native grasses with in same domineering spirit. I don’t know anybody who would turn down a loaf of wheaten bread and prefer crackers made from North American Gamagrass because it is native to the biome. Naturalized and domesticated plants and animals can earn the label of native over time. In this process tomatoes have become Italian; pineapples and plumeria, Hawaiian; and beef cattle and mustangs, American.

Growing up along the coastline of Lake Michigan, I was told that the carp was an undesirable fish to eat because it was a bottom feeder and as such it was perceived as a trasheater. This explanation is reverse engineered to explain a deeply seated prejudice. Flounder and lobsters are bottomfeeders and they carry none of the negative associations. We only need to look at the recent resurgence of catfish as an acceptable food for the masses, often deepfried and batterdipped, and heavily marketed as homegrown in flooded Louisianan fields and raised on a diet of corn and soybeans. Topfeeders, in fact, carry the highest levels of concentrated toxins. Whales, clearly the largest of the topfeeders, have been found to have toxic flesh containing halogenated-organic contaminants such as PCBs, DDT among other synthetic poisons. On the other hand, many carp varieties subsist on plant materials, notably the grass carp, which makes their flesh the healthiest and cleanest. Louisianan catfish are raised on soybeans and cornmeal. This distinction takes to an extreme the adage: we are what we eat; instead, we have: we are what is eaten by what we eat. Once reviled by aquaculture producers and ecologists, in a strange twist of fate it seems that the carp might be a savior for the catfish industry. The black carp (Mylopharyngodon piceus) is especially adapted to consuming snails which host a parasite that can kill catfish in aquacultural conditions. They also consume other parasites affecting other marketable fishes.

When I was 18 years old, I attended my first seder although I didn’t understand what it was at the time. The French family who hosted me sat around a carp that had been poached and then carefully restuffed again in its skin with bones painstakingly removed. I was mildly shocked when the head of household greedily selected the head for himself. Having grown up to look down on this delicacy, I was intrigued. This memory got tucked away and was later recalled when I started a career as a chef in a catering company in the USA. I learned to make gefilte fish for American Jewish clients, who would never think of allowing the lowly carp in their food. They preferred topeaters like Great Lakes whitefish, pike, trout, anything but the carp. I doubt even that I could have bought carp then without resorting to an Asian market focused on Chinese customers. I made essentially unfilled gefilte fish, quenelles poached in chicken stock set to a simmer for as long as they took to float to the surface, and not for the two hours prescribed by one recipe from a Jewish mother.

There has been a trend in the American diet to disassociate food from its origins. This is especially true with meat. Meat is most often served in a form that least resembles its fleshy animal source. Hamburgers are round and shaped into identical patties. Atlantic cod is molded into squares and rectangles. The most expensive cut of chicken is the boneless, skinless breast, devoid of the vestiges of a living creature and the least flavorful part, plumped up and selectively bred for size. By contrast, restaurants in many parts of Asia specialize in fishhead soup adjusted to local styles and tastes. The memory of a fish served at a seder at the center of a French family dinnertable is evoked nearly daily in the PRC where live fish and seafood are sold in the most modern of supermarkets. Turtles, eels, and bullfrogs make up a significant part of the selection next to tanks wherein one finds the more western leaning choices of shrimp, bivalves, and salmon. The carp are always there, sorted by size and species.

We were given a papercup of bait, which was a sweetened paste of cornmeal that I packed around the hook. The tackle was basic: hook, sinker, and bobber. The key to catching carp in this pond as it was pointed out to me by the hired driver was to adjust the bobber so that the bait lie on the muddy bottom by sliding a plastic cone along the line and wedging the bobber tightly into it. Being bottomfeeders and accustomed to murky waters, carp find their food by smell and by touch, using their soft mouths along the bottom, stirring the mud and causing the damage to native limnological systems that riles so many anticarpists. Carp can attain rather large sizes. They can live for well more than fifty years and especially in cultivated conditions when they are allowed to do so, they can grow to a weight of 35 kilograms and 1.5 meters in length. In a single spawning, which can occur more than once a year in warm climates, they can produce 300,000 eggs, which in a polyculture system sometimes become food for predatory, topfeeder fish like pike and bass. I had no idea what sizes of carp might be found in this fishing pond. The tackle proved woefully undersized.

While we all stood there with our hands on our shafts, we would occasionally catch sight of a passing bobber arise to break the surface, move slowly, and then slip back under the level calm of the water. At one time, we spotted three such movements. These were the signs that some fish had broken free and still had fishhooks with lines dragging bobbers behind them. Those were the large fighters that we all wanted to pull in. I was no different. Whenever such a mystery bobber got close enough, I attempted to lash my line, wrapping it around deftly, in order to draw it within range so as to be scooped up with a net readied by an accomplice. Twice I succeeded at this level of my improvised carp fishing method. With one bobber locked onto the other and feeling the lines enmeshed, I began to work the fish closer to the jetty, allowing just enough tension to keep the fish from diving underneath so it might not scrape the line against the abrasive masonry piling. That was my plan when I called out to a colleague to make ready the long poled net. The hired driver however was convinced that he should pull in the fish in a manly way and grabbed the line directly before the net could get close enough. The polystyrene snapped as I expected. In a similar bit of piscatory struggle a fellow angler across the pond had his bent pole bust in two to the amazement of all the onlookers. There was less amazement after I hooked another fish and the hired driver decided again to intervene a second time by grabbing hold that time of the fishing pole. I heard the crack and refused to look him in the eye.

In spite of our struggles to wrest these fish from the turbid waters, we still had to pay for our catch. It was weighed up and the more knowledgeable among us agreed that it was a fair price. We then proceeded to head back home where awaiting spouses would turn our hard won game into a feast. A housekeeper helped out as well. Three of the fish went into a kind of stew, a very common way of preparing carp. The flesh was tender and mild while the broth was weak and watery. The additional vegetables added little to the overall flavor. To be certain, carp is full of little bones which can be picked apart between the flakes of the cooked fishflesh. As a testament to their endurance, the remaining carp were left in a bucket to be kept fresh and alive for meals later that week.

Finals and fines

2008-09-12T01:14:00.003+08:00

At about the end of May I noticed a sharp uptick in the number of students who had enrolled with the expectation that they would be studying in universities and colleges in English speaking countries. These students joined an already small number whose skills had remained unremarkable over the course of the time that they were enrolled. Some of the students from this first wave in May were still waiting to hear final news about visas, scores from their English competency tests, and other minor details. They represented a mixed lot with a minority of them who were levelheaded about their abilities and seemed to have the intellectual wherewithal to be able to benefit from a western education. More than a few, on the other hand, appeared entirely clueless as to what would be expected of them when they showed up on campuses in Houghton, Michigan, or Dublin, Ireland for example. Some of these students could barely put together a complete sentence without the assistance of their classmates’ prodding, but they seemed to comfort themselves that they had enough time (nearly 2 and a half months) in order to become prepared to hit the ground running as international students, or “abroad students” as some preferred to be called.

I was forewarned that as an employee in this private school, I would have some paid vacationtime but that I would not be able to take any in August. It was my impression that this was a function of the public school calendar, but I didn’t realize then that it was moreso a function of procrastination. At the beginning of August, there was a second wave (or possibly a third wave. I don’t want the metaphor to become too much about standard Chinese military strategy) of students with ambitions to study in English speaking universities around the world. These were the students who seemed to feel that they didn’t want their English speaking abilities to peak too soon. The last enrolled students are equally as confident that despite having trouble speaking English unhesitatingly, they feel that they only need a few weeks in order to be at a level of oral communication to make the most of life in a western, English speaking university.

I smile and try to treat them all as equally promising scholars but then again, I am not paying their tuition fees. The days when Chinese students studied their fingers to the bone on order to qualify for state sponsored opportunities to study abroad, first in the former Soviet Union and then anywhere the CCP deemed essential for the good of the nation are mostly in the past. There are still some state sponsored scholarships and the CCP has simultaneously increased the number of opportunities to earn college diplomas within China and without. Today, however, mommy and daddy principally foot the bill; they also make all the decisions about the children’s education. The motives are somewhat in dispute. I suspect that there is a desire to lengthen the amount of time that young women spend in schooling as a kind of socially engineered scheme to delay their marrying and subsequent childbearing. One reason that students in Heze told me that young women attend higher education is so that as future wives they will be able to speak with their husbands. (At least, they are honest about the level of their career ambitions and perhaps, as much, of their job prospects.) That rational came from students who had no interest in studying outside, or more relevantly, whose parents could barely afford to send them to a Chinese provincial institution.

A followup question that I posed whenever a student told me that she was going to study abroad was: “What does your father’s factory make?” And usually I got an answer and if not, the student fully understood why I had asked. These students are just as much automata as their homebound peers. They have only focused on an education from an overseas university in the same way that they do in China. They choose a major that their parents find acceptable and they want to attend a university based on its name recognition. The purpose strictly is the diploma, not the education.

The students heading abroad have been raised in a home and school environment wherein most life choices have been removed and important decisions, made for them. In one sense, the second language challenge is the least of their problems. The average Chinese has been taught to function merely as passive vessels of facts. They have been coddled and programmed while they toil to pass the next test set out before them.

And now it’s the first week of September and the public school calendar has restarted and the adult students who had wisely chosen to avoid the younger crowds have returned to replace some those who have packed up and headed to domestic universities and those abroad or else back to the local public schools. A small cadre of younger students seems to want to continue with the courses on the weekends and fortunately, they are the more willing to learn scholars. I’ve been noticing a few familiar adult faces pop up again. Teachers’ day was this week, too. The school hosted an evening in a Hangzhou nightclub with singing and free drinks. The next day we then learned that we would be fined 50 RMB if we are ever late submitting our discussion topics. Like so many things in China, some things are as predictable as the changing of the seasons.

Medieval practices

2008-08-28T13:58:00.006+08:00

One sight that is hard to adjust to in China is all the visibly bruised Chinese people on display. Bruising is the correct term but it in fact look like a series of enormous hickeys, some about the size of table coasters all over a person's back, legs and wherever the skins allows. The normally prudish Chinese would quickly cover the marks if they had been planted there by an eager kisser doing a Hoover imitation, but one learns the wearer of such splotches actually paid a professional to apply them.

There is a lot of interest now in western countries to better understand what is loosely referred to as Chinese medicine. Schools of traditional medicine are expanding to allow westerners to study firsthand and to earn valuable certficates. In this endeavor I do hope that calmer heads prevail. There can be some benefit in studying placebos and faith healing practices, which frankly is mostly what Chinese medicine amounts to. If feeling good is the main purpose of medicine, then indeed, there is much that can be gained from the practice of traditional Chinese medicine.
An Australian colleague told me about his Chinese wife's encounter with a Shandong doctor practicing 'traditional' medicine. The doctor held her wrist as taking her pulse. After counting and sensing the heartbeat and looking studious for a few minutes, he declared that she was in fact pregnant and she was going to have a boy. Effective? The patient happily agreed with the doctor so, yes, Chinese medicine does work effectively on at least one level.
There are lessons to be learned from even a very flawed philosophy that in most ways resembles medieval medicine. As soon as the elusive black humor is found, ours can be balanced and we just might all be better off for it. There are some herbs and plants that make up the bulk of Chinese medicine and the active ingredients do undoubtedly have therapeutic value. Some are in wide use today and others are being studied more still. The problem with common plants and herbs is, however, that most anybody in China will tell you that the strongest medicine is the most expensive and the most difficult to obtain. Ginseng from Wisconsin is marketed as some of the best here. And all the stories about endangered animals being essential to traditional medicine are true. And the stories about aborted fetal tissues used in medical concoctions are probably true. At least, the people who tell me about them believe that the stories are so.

Bloodletting has gotten a bad reputation in the west as many unemployed phlebotomists continue to assert. There are in fact diseases for which reducing the amount of blood can alleviate symptoms. And as the professional phlebomists of old used to say: "If it works for acute hypertension, why not bleed a patient with pneumonia or kidney stones?" This is probably one of the reasons why I dislike dealing with professionally minded types. The Chinese who defend even what some of them cannot explain will quickly use the argument that if it cannot be proven to not work then it does. And that same argument, that of forcing a detractor to prove a negative held sway in the west until, to be fair, alternatives were developed and put into practice. Doctors did what they did until a new method became more acceptable to engage in and to earn a living from. The idea that sometimes doing nothing is the most effective medicine was hardly cost effective even when doctors all knew what 'primum non nocere' meant and swore to uphold it.

Which now brings us to fire cupping,(many Chinese doctors, nonetheless, now use hand operated vacuums today) that other medieval practice that was due for a comeback like witchcraft and exorcism did in the 1970s. I tried to find a helpful image of cupping but all I could find locally was the above that I snapped during an anthropological promenade one afternoon. It's not gruesome or descriptive of this essay's main point but I think that the image reveals something just as helpful for treating medical conditions as fire cupping. Luckily for my expository proclivities, Gwenyth Paltrow (bless her heart and penchant for everything alternative) decided to revisit the middle ages back in 2004, subjecting her tired, qi imbalanced muscles to the ordeal and the results to aghast paparazzi and bewildered entertainment journalists. I do hope the evil spirits were removed by a certified expert though. The BBC did seek out and find such an expert, a professor, in fact, to comment on the distressing sight of a highly photogenic actress with some blemishes.
He states:
"There is no evidence for its efficacy. It has not been submitted to clinical trials, but there have certainly been satisfied customers for 3,000 years."
I am certain that Ms. Paltrow's publicist could not have agreed more. And after all who needs qualified efficacy, double blind trials, and cause and effect mumbo jumbo, when there is tradition that dates back to the time of Hippocrates and more than 1.4 billion people who have not yet been proven that it doesn't work?

Indicator Species

2008-07-31T18:54:00.004+08:00

The classic indicator species is the clichéd canary in a coalmine, schlepped into the poorly ventilated mines of days past. If the miners noticed that the canary had stopped singing in its cage, they might have a chance to escape before being overcome by the same fate of the more environmentally sensitive creature, probably due to asphyxiation from carbon monoxide, methane, or simply low oxygen levels. So then what shall China’s indicator species be?

There’s not much good news coming out of China with regard to the environment. The two most important rivers in China, the ones that rank with the Nile and the Mississippi in terms of historical and cultural legacies, the Yellow River (黄河, Huáng Hé) and the Yangtze (长河, Cháng Jiāng) are better thought of today as movers of industrial and urban effluence. Fully one third of all fish species of the river considered the cradle of Chinese civilization has been declared extinct. http://en.chinagate.com.cn/english/environment/49803.htm

Meanwhile in Yunnan province the White-handed Gibbon aka the Lar Gibbon (subspecies Hylobates lar yunnanensis) has been declared extinct officially in the wild. http://www.gokunming.com/en/blog/item/586/goodbye_yunnan_whitehanded_gibbon

This loss of a primate species, however, has at best been treated as a footnote in most of the Chinese press, qualified as ‘presumed’ or ‘possibly’. This perhaps parallels the recently drawn out scandal about the South China Tiger photos. Was there too much ready willingness even amongst the skeptical members of the media to publish anything positive about the state of China’s endangered species and diminishing wildlife habitat? I would prefer to think that the gibbons have just gotten smarter and stopped serenading park visitors with their distinct calls. There was another bit of a glimmer of hope a few months back when a Baiji dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) was spotted in August 2007 after it had been officially declared extinct in the Yangtze river. Now it is qualified as functionally extinct. It’s still extinct for all intents and purposes; there is simply one last straggler that didn’t get the memo. What the chance discovery shows rather is not that the species is anymore viable, but that the Yangtze is so muddied and opaque that a bright, white sea mammal can be missed when being looked for by a trained team of naturalists. As recently as the 1950s there were an estimated 6,000 of them in the wild when during the Great Leap Forward, veneration of the animal (长江女神; Cháng Jiāng nǚshén, or Yangzte goddess) was deemed incompatible with socialist dogma. It was hunted down freely and electric fishing became an acceptable method, stunning the river fishes with high current.

If the Yunnan Gibbon species had been cuddlier and more marketable, would it have gotten more attention in time to have saved its existence within Yunnan’s Nangunhe Nature Reserve? The Fuwa, Beibei, is a sturgeon of sorts yet I doubt that graphic allusion will convince buyers of the Olympic tchotchke to consider more about the greater need for aquatic habitat restoration. It seems easier to talk all about the recent birth of four more giant pandas recently in the state breeding program. The panda, too, is an indicator species. It indicates that the Chinese government thinks that it’s more effective for its political agenda to insure the panda’s survival and to occasionally bestow a few to some countries’ national zoos as diplomatic gestures while it squanders and befouls the environmental legacy of the entire nation and the world.

And so I wonder about the economic development of a country and the middle class phenomenon and its accompanying socalled middle class values. There had been efforts made to protect the variously declared extinct species of China, but they were all part of the central government's agenda. NGOs and the like are not encouraged in the PRC, certainly not ones that might besmirch the agenda of the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to protect the environment. Their efforts are mixed, to say the least.

Taihu, one of the largest freshwater lakes in China, forming a common border between Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces is essentially dead, so polluted that the bluegreen algae blooms now cover it as soon as the temperatures allow, rendering it unfit for human usage. In the meantime one of the most vocal defenders of the lake, Wu Lihong, now sits in prison after what most agree was an effort by the Jiangsu provincial government and polluting industries to punish his success in drawing attention to the worsening conditions. And in the meantime, the central government has allocated $14 billion US for the cleanup of Taihu to be administered by the Jiangsu provincial government. With that much money, they can build of a lot of new prison cells to make even more of the problems go away.

http://www.pacificenvironment.org/article.php?id=2418

There was a recent propaganda coup regarding the nests of a few swans at the sight of the 2008 Olympic rowing events. In order to restore this formerly dry site, water was diverted from other sources. How much and from where exactly is a state secret. The green Olympics have been redacted with black. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/01/olympicgames2008.china1

The operating truth is that appearance is always more important than substance in Chinese society. It follows to a degree from the concept of what motivates a shame society. The government uses this pretext to utmost effect with the general populace falling in line with its declarations, happily believing that the pollution in Taihu is due to natural cycles and a shortage of rain. Does it naturally follow that all middle classes demand more attention be paid to the environment? There is nothing equivalent to a naturalist movement that I can detect in Chinese history. Is there enough time, given the breakneck speed of China’s changes, for the nation to pause and reflect about what irrecoverable, shared biological assets are being sacrificed for private, material gain?

There are, however, the toads, a carpeting of them in the allotment gardens next to the city river/drainage ditch. I would like to believe that their numbers reveal the positive condition of the local waterways. Amphibians are, in fact, another good indicator of toxins and carcinogens in an environment since they readily absorb them through their skin. I don't know just how organic these horticulturalists are but they are big proponents of nightsoil dressing. I see an occasional butterfly in the city as well, which gives me hopeful pause in this urban jungle. More likely, though, the enormous knot of toads is better explained because the predator species, which might have consumed the tadpoles and egg clusters, have been eliminated to such an extent that the toads’ number have allowed them to become so dominant in the gardenscape. There are always winners and losers when habitats are modified by humans. Normally it's the rats and pigeons that come out as winners; this time the toads have the advantage.

A little bit sad

2008-06-05T00:01:00.002+08:00

Originally drafted March 3^rd 2008

It was simply meant to be a salon classroom that featured vocabulary building. I did not intend it to be so upsetting. There were several suggested lesson activities that all would function better with a group of students. She was alone this morning. I started by just asking about her day and life in order to gauge her level of working vocabulary.

“Tell me how you feel today?”

She gave a response that didn’t come out very convincingly: “I am happy.”

I continued asking without being overtly nosy about her homelife. She told me about her daughter, her husband and at each stage in the conversation, I repeated the same questioning and I received about the same response about her status. Thinking like the teacher I am paid to be, I tried different angles. I sat back as she started telling me about her ‘father’s younger brother’s son.’ I was impressed that she could compose such a phrase so I didn’t suggest that she simply call him her cousin. Her cousin was asking her and her husband yet again for another job. I paused and let her speak without any further guidance. They had just found him a job and he had lasted a week in it. I thought I found an opportunity. “Oh, how does that make your husband feel?”

“Maybe he feels angry.”

“And how do you feel?”

“No, I don’t feel angry.”

This seemed like a good time to introduce some new, relevant vocabulary. “Do you feel disappointed?”

She looked up at the word after I scrawled it on the whiteboard. After she wrote it down in her notebook, she spoke: “Yes, I feel disappointed at him.” She then went on to explain that this was the second time that they had found him a job. The first time he had quit after a month. This time he said that he would take anything. They told him that after two months in that job they would find him something better, but he seemed to start complaining from the outset.

“With him,” I corrected. “You feel disappointed with him.” She obliged me with a proper repetition. I banged the table to try to elicit what I thought should be a stronger response. I wrote out the words: frustrated, depressed, enraged, thinking that I could get her to open up and speak up more and use the target vocabulary. As she finished diligently writing down the words that I had only just suggested, she set down her pen and I noticed the creases of her lower eyelids swell ever so slightly and redden.

“Yes, I feel a little bit sad.”

I reached absentmindedly into my back pocket for a tissue but she held her hand up, telling me that she was fine. I think that then she was mainly relieved that she was facing away from the glass walls that define all the classrooms of the school. I was caught between pausing or else continuing as though this display of raw emotion were just part of my well crafted lessonplan. I wanted to neither overreact nor under to what she was feeling. She pointed to the selection of faces and vocabulary for feelings from the handout, placing her index finger on the word: embarrassed. I nodded once without saying anything further. I touched her once on the shoulder as I rose to fetch a tissue but she insisted that she was fine. She wiped away one last dribbling tear and regained her composure.

I asked whether she wanted to go forward and she picked up with her story, seemingly recharged. She told me how long her cousin had been living with her family and the additional stress that generated. By the end of the hour she had asked me for the definitions of the rest or words that were on the list and with a smile on her face she departed after I signed her booklet.

Many times I have found myself having asked a question that gives me more of an answer than I had anticipated. I don’t know whether this makes me a good teacher or not. I cannot plan for events like what happened. The best I can do is to deal with them as they arise, constantly weaving in and out of different roles. I don’t even claim to know what lesson she gained from me and yet I know that I must plug away in certain ignorance as to whatever benefits I might confer with my presence.

work, work, workweek

2008-05-30T03:49:00.002+08:00

For the third week of May my employer decided that I didn’t need any days off. Decided is perhaps too strong a word to describe the process. It’s clear that on some levels, this organization, like many businesses in China, doesn’t coordinate the efforts of all its departments. So even though it was, seemingly randomly, scheduled that I give an additional lecture as part of a “webwide” open class series on food culture on a Thursday, (My offdays are Thursdays and Wednesdays.) the marketing department also scheduled me to speak in a local high school on the Wednesday of the same week. Just to throw in an additional comment about labor relations in China, I asked that since my regularly scheduled days off had fallen on the same day as the Mayday holiday the previous week, whether I would gain an additional, bankable paid holiday. I was told to wait for a definitive answer as I was being told about the fact that I was expected to give up my Wednesday to speak to a group of highschoolers. I am still waiting for that definitive answer.

My direct manager assured me that I would be paid for the overtime for the additional assignments. He didn’t say however how much time. I would still have to prepare materials for both lectures. I asked what the high school students would want to know from me, what would interest them because as I pointed out, knowing this might help me decide what to talk about. My coworkers seem evasive about the actual purpose of my speaking role. They never explicitly told me that I was being paid to entice students from the visited school (The number of students was originally expected to be fewer than 300 since that is the capacity of the auditorium, but this is China. The students overfilled the seats and the aisles. The total seemed to be closer to 400.) to listen to somebody for an hour in order to get them to sign up as students. It might seem odd that the school would host an overflowing crowd in order to sell main its advantage to potential clients, that being direct contact with a native speaker. How well I can speak in front of a crowd says little, if anything, as to whether I can provide valuable instruction in a facetoface setting. But the school’s marketing plan was never about demonstrating pedagogical competency; it is primarily about proving to as many that they, in fact, have real, native English speakers working in the school. So there I was for all to gawk at. How soon would the bidding start?

When I arrived at the school on the day of the lecture, it was my first opportunity to witness a large banner with my first name boldly interwoven with a confusing mass of other Chinese characters over a background showing the cathedral grounds of Pisa. I asked my coworkers what it said about me and they explained that it was just the subject of the topic that I had chosen. It seemed to be a lot more than my chosen topic. I wanted as much as possible to give the students something meaningful and to not have my lecture sound like a salespitch. I still had no idea about the English level of these students although my coworkers had been assuring me, in a somewhat envious tone, that this was the best high school in the city. The proof was that the teachers are paid enough to drive to school where they enjoy underground parking. I was told that the students want to know about foreign countries so I thought I might tackle a particularly odd response to a frequent answer I have when I have been teaching in China. Quite frequently whenever I ask a student to tell me why he is studying English, I get the terse reply: ‘Travel abroad.’ When I then try to develop a conversation, I ask a simple followup: ‘Where do you want to travel?’ I usually get a blank stare or a rehearsed, and rather illconceived, itinerary. In the minds of the average Chinese student, abroad is somehow a destination to as much as a destination from. I wanted, therefore, to discuss some real places in the world where I have visited in order to get them to hold a meaningful discussion with me and to entice to think outside their normally restricted scope.

The students began wandering in shortly after 4 p.m. I started the lecture about 15 minutes later with a microphone in hand and simply said: ‘Good afternoon.’ The voices chanted back at me while the mulling, upright crowd more hastily found places. A high school representative distributed plastic stacking stools while I tried to move up the aisles, making eye contact as I did. One energetic student asked about her former teacher at another private training school. Yes, I told her that he now worked with me. I put up a large topographical map of the Mediterranean basin and using the cursor on the laptop, I encircled the nations of Greece, Turkey, and Italy. As the students parroted my words back to me, I got the odd feeling that they knew the drill and that I was playing a role that I was less familiar with. I slowly introduced myself, explaining that I had taught in China for more than a year and I often asked my students why they were studying English. An answer that I often received was: “I want to travel abroad.” I paused and repeated and the students repeated without my intending them to. I then tried to hint at the emptiness of this goal. “Where is abroad?”, I intoned slowly. I repeated and generated some puzzled expressions. I held the microphone to a student who seemed about to burst and asked again. He enunciated: “Your country.” I smiled but that answer started many students to nod and repeat their own words in agreement. I tried to backtrack and restate the original question, picking from the crowd an brighteyed student who was chomping at the bit to say something. I pointed at the overhead projection and asked him where abroad is. He stated proudly: “I want to go to university in your country.”

There was some laughter in good humor and I decided that I might do better to start showing some of the other images that I had assembled. I showed an aerial view of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. I don’t know what the students were reacting to but it sounded like a positive murmur. I iterated that knowing how to speak will allow them to travel to places like Istanbul. Most repeated Istanbul without any prompting from me; they were on their own parallel track, it seemed. I also repeated Istanbul so as not to be left out of the program. I showed some different streetscenes and spoke in slow, short sentences in order to keep the mass of students with varying levels of interest able to follow me where I was headed. I led them around the city that I had once visited but the images of which I had been forced to appropriate from the internet. There were a few photos of the Egyptian covered market and of the city walls. I then tried to show a change in approach with a change in the tone of my voice. I showed some exterior views of the Topkapi palace then I suggested that there were some things in this building that they might find interesting. It can be challenging to distinguish between focused attention and indifferent silence. I showed the students the first of several pieces on display in a room of the Topkapi palace. It was a celadon platter with a distinctive dragon motif. The level of chatter bubbled up. I asked some questions that could be answered as a mob. “Do you know this?” “Where does it come from?” “How do you know?” They started shouting dragon and I acknowledged this by saying myself, “Yes, there’s a dragon.” They repeated after me in unison: “A dragon.”

I then became all professorial with them, deviating from the unwritten script. “But this is Turkey. Not China. How did these items get to Turkey?” I showed some other pieces all of the highest quality ever made for the export and diplomatic market. There was marked silence, but I felt I was in a groove. “This is why you go abroad to a place like Istanbul. You can learn more things about China by leaving China.” I repeated the idea that Turkey is a bridge between the far sides of Eurasia but I am not certain just what any of the students gathered from this display of their cultural legacy. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of overlap in the Chinese classroom. It is acceptable to learn oral English in oral English class and the right kind of Chinese history in Chinese history class taught by a Chinese teacher. And simply because I can show evidence of trade in porcelain dating from about the 15^th century doesn’t make it true necessarily and just because it can be shown with evidence doesn’t mean that the information might ever show up on a test, which is the basis for ever considering knowledge worth knowing. I hear repeated to me again and again that China has 5,000 years of history. The students know that this is true because it is the proper answer to the test question: How many years of Chinese history are there?

I pulled in the next theme of Turkey being tied in with China by getting them to mention the Olympics, the rallying cry for these students and the nation for the last few years as to what will put China into the world’s spotlight. I showed some images of the stadium in Aphrodisias and mentioned that the best preserved Greek stadia are not located in Greece. This seemed to generate a few quizzical reactions, which I hoped to get asked about later. I jumped ahead to a photo, my only personal example, of me standing in front of the temple of Concordia in Agrigento, Sicily. I don’t know what they know about classicism or whether these edifices have even remotely the same appeal to them as to me as a classics major. I thought about asking them to think about the many banks, churches, and other important buildings in Shanghai and other Chinese cities with some extant preMaoist architecture. I showed a few more images from Agrigento but then I left up on the screen an image of a Turkish doughnutmaker looking very much like the streetvendors in Heze, Shandong province, where a few make their doughnuts in a wok with dough rapidly measured out with chopsticks, while controlling a woodfire.

I explained that it was the end of my talk and I would answer any questions that they had. I was hoping to get some feedback as to how much they had been able to understand and what they might already know about the topic. But in fact they knew the routine so much better than I did. The questions were in various forms: “Where are you from?” “Do you like Chinese food?” “Can you tell me how to go to an American university?” “What do I do if I am invited to a foreigner’s house for dinner?” And even though I was deflated, I followed their routine and my obligations to the school were fulfilled for that Wednesday.

I spent a good portion of the next morning, preparing for a ‘new’ lecture series, so called Open class series, which seems to have been mandated by the central office of the school’s franchise headquarters in Shanghai. This series might be related to the school’s one year anniversary or not. And the theme “Food Culture” theme might change or be repeated at some undisclosed time in the near or distant future. The three foreign teachers were assigned the following food topics: coffee, chocolate, and coke. Until we were told about the open class series, we had been working with some local business contacts and been trying to organize a series of winetasting dinners. We had developed contacts who were willing to work with us for securing venues with wine distributors, one that was very eager to begin importing more Italian wines into the area. I mused: “We could start them off serving Lambrusco without Sprite and then have them savoring Puglian Primitivo by the end.” Whenever we brought up the subject, concerns about costs (whenever I countered that the costs would be borne by the wine distributors and retailers, the school was either unwilling or unable to accept this notion.) and whether guests from outside the school might be attending. We welcomed more attendees to develop connections within the local community and to spread through word of mouth; the school wanted more control and to follow the same methods as used by the other private training schools in the area.

I chose to talk about coke because it would allow me to vent my anticorporate spleen in the middle of a regime based on partially decentralizing authoritarian capitalism. My talk to the gathered students was how a civil war veteran, a trained chemist, from Atlanta, Georgia was hoping to make a windfall with a brain tonic that could be sold at soda fountains and help all the presuffragette, temperance movement commandos calm down their frazzled nerves and feel refreshed with a boost from the caffeine in the kola nuts after they had spent their leisure time, praying outside or smashing up the saloons that were the scourge of decent society. Afterwards socially progressive dries would also celebrate their advancing agenda with a pleasantly soothing opiate. Pemberton, having been wounded during the war and given the main painkiller at the time, was also hoping to come up a cure for his own opiate addiction. And as many people at the time reckoned, if anything could cure an opiate addiction, why not cocaine? I could have mentioned the caricature of Santa Claus created by a Coca-cola advertising campaign but instead I talked about how the temperance movement ushered in the Prohibition era and then drew a parallel with China’s own cultural revolution, the chaos that ensued, and how that has affected American society ever since. I would have been overjoyed if one student had been willing to take this idea and develop it further, but there was no interest. This was just an oral English lesson so it was really too much to ask that they make comparisons based on their own historical knowledge. To be fair this food culture talk was an additional hour of lecturing in a long day’s schedule for most of them. It was, therefore, a good idea that I had prepared to give them a coke taste test. I explained the definition of a double blind test and then I selected some testers and had them choose prepoured samples in the next room.

In hindsight, I should have outlined a script for them to follow. There was very little productive dialogue between testers and tasters. Rather than testing to see which of the samples was the best tasting and learning why, they all decided to quickly determine simply which the coke and which the pepsi was. I don’t think it was because of language challenges; they purposely avoided asking opinions or sharing them, preferring instead to determine the identities. When I pressed them to identify which samples each student liked above the others, only half participated and I marked those preferences on the board next to the samples A, B, and C. Their choices, however, were evenly spread across the three samples despite the claims that they knew the identities of each sample. By the end I was exhausted. I left the school that night, knowing that I still had another workweek before I could enjoy a full day away from this job.

China executes less

2008-04-09T20:11:00.004+08:00

Is China suddenly completing less of what it once intended to do?

The article attempts to answer this claim and also offers such headscratching gems as this:

"Xiao said the SPC has in the past year improved the procedure for second instance trials of death sentence cases and the procedure for the final review of death penalty with unified criteria applied."

Who knew that Chinglish was so easily translated into legalese!

As best as I can tell, "second instance trials" mean appeals trials. "Unified criteria applied' sounds like Chinese lawyerspeak for legal precedent. But I'm no lawyer and if I were, I wouldn't answer any legal questions without first demanding a retainer in order to make certain that any potential client could afford my high hourly fees in order to access public knowledge and subsidize my parasitic lifestyle.

In spite of my legal snarkiness, let us all try to follow what this article purports to explain. It is well known in the human rights community that China treats its true number of executions as a state secret. The CPC issues official numbers of executed citizens while also winking and nodding that the number is obviously 'low'. How low is anybody's doctoral dissertation. But more than one group has suggested that China executes more convicts than the rest of the world. But it's a country with more than 20% of the world's population so we ought to remind ourselves that just about anything that China does is potentially as much as the rest of the world. It is further worthy of note that I have heard from many thoughtful Chinese citizens themselves that, to wit, "China has too much people." Therefore, as the men with the expensive ties and more expensive cars like to say: the defense rests.
http://www.topix.com/world/asia/2008/03/china-hails-reform-of-death-penalty

This article backs up the point of wishful number crunching without nary a bit of hesitation:

"Legal experts claim that death penalty is imposed on more than 70 offenses in the Chinese criminal law. But the courts do not release the exact annual number of death penalty."

I am certain that a mathematical formula can be created to show how an unknown quantity can be reduced by a specific amount. But then the outcome is also an unknown, too. That still remains a state secret. The (old) inputs and the (new) output are both still state secrets yet we are being told in a well crafted translation from the original Chinese.

Somebody please tell me though how to do the math from this quote:

"Figures from the Beijing No 1 and No 2 intermediate people's courts suggest that, in the first five months of 2007, the number of death sentences dropped 10 percent from last year."

As it is made clear, the 10% reduction is a suggestion. This same formulaic qualification is often used, by the way, in many Chinese work contracts, e.g. "It is suggested that the employer pay the employee the full amount and on time." If the output is a state secret and the input is also, then how does anybody arrive at the figure of 10%? The percentage, too, is simply another official number.

So what can one do with this wonderful piece of high quality journalism? And by that snide comment, I am suggesting that finally Xinhua is rising to the level of Fox News! I thought to offer some helpful, unsolicited advice as a foreign language expert after I first found this headline to be lacking. To quote my own email to the website:

"http://www.cctv.com/english/20080311/102089.shtml

'China executes less following judicial reform'
With its incorrect grammar, this headline implies the exact opposite of progress. Less what? Less often? If the headline wants to explain that fewer people are being executed, then fewer, and not less is required; otherwise, less functions as an adverb modifying 'executes', which also means to accomplish, to perform, etc. On the other hand, how can one know whether are fewer executions when the real numbers are a state secret?
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/execute
to execute:
1. to carry out; accomplish: to execute a plan or order.
2. to perform or do: to execute a maneuver; to execute a gymnastic feat.
3. to inflict capital punishment on; put to death according to law.
4. to murder; assassinate.
5. to produce in accordance with a plan or design: a painting executed by an unknown artist."

To date the article's title on the CCTV website has not been updated in spite of my free editorial polishing! But why would anybody bother correcting the ungrammatical title when the article is fluff propaganda? Right, that's what I thought first, too. But then there's an inherent belief in the article that having fewer executions is something that China ought to be doing. That awareness iss a good thing. It just happens that sometimes it's necessary to propose something as factual before an institution like a free press develops the wherewithal to verify and the political environment in which such a notion is safe. I can hear the imaginary laughter at the staff meeting when a junior reporter even suggested the need to verify the 10% claim. But that is exactly how some things start.

In medias res

2008-03-28T18:31:00.004+08:00

Getting adjusted to living in Xiaoshan is presenting its own set of challenges. One pressing issue has been that of dealing with my housing. Even though the contract to work in the Xiaoshan branch included an apartment, what the manager of the school really meant to offer me (which only became incrementally clear to all parties involved) was a housing stipend just it is offered to the teachers in Hangzhou. There is a "Chinese characteristic" of legal contracts in China: it's not what is written but what is intended by the person in power. Even the school's general director apologized that I had been forced to sign for the apartment (I met her only after working here for a month and asking to be introduced), I get the impression that this contract discrepancy is really not a priority in her overall business plan.

In the meantime, I am still confused about how to pay the utilities. I was originally under the impression that the school had subscribed to them for me. How else could I have water, natural gas, and electricity, and even cable TV all functioning smoothly, thought I? It turns out that it's fairly easy in China, which has a 'pay as one goes' for everything from mobile telephone contracts to household utilities. I learned of this when I arrived one evening to discover that my electricity had been turned off. I still cannot sufficiently describe the school's reaction to the snafu. A kind of collective scrambling to cover asses ensued when I explained my circumstances. The people in the school would eventually explain to me that they weren't quite certain how and where I needed to pay for my utilities, and, oh, the building maintenance fees. Any other bills coming due, folks?

I was in a fix needing a quick repair until somebody suggested that I could just turn the electricity back on by myself. Oh, if only it life were so easy, I was about to opine. But this is China. 这是中国。I had been wondering what lay behind the panels in the stairwell of my apartment. Now I had a pretext to snoop around. It was easy enough to find which switch was connected to my apartment. That big switch was the only one out of line with the others, and it had been meticulously labeled by the last electrician. A somewhat oddly disturbing feeling arose that the general public has such easy access to everybody's electric power supply, a little scarier that these swtiches seem underrated for an entire household load. But who am I to complain now after switching it all back on as easily it had been switched off? Take that, Mr. Utility Man!