Carp Fishing in China

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.