Recently in China Category

Anticipating my Guangzhou metro trip in a couple days (the machines only take 1-kuai coins, not bills), I asked if they had coins at the counter after having dinner.

"冇啊," she said. "有嗰陣時又冇人要。" ("No, and when we do no one wants them.")

I laughed. I guess the preference for light paper bills over annoying, heavy coins is universal (note the reluctance of people in the U.S. to replace the dollar bill with a dollar coin).

Here's a lovely little supermarket logo. I think it's a person on a bike. The unfortunate part of it is the string of letters of along the top, which seem to make no sense at first glance. Guess what the letters SCSHHSYYXZRGS stand for... (scroll down for the answer)

OK, here's the answer: 四川省互惠商业有限责任公司. I found it on the side of a package of toilet paper, right about the time one of the ladies in the store walked over to me and said, sir, you can't take pictures here.

Today I went to the Sichuan University Museum, which, according to reviews, is one of the better museums in the southwest of China, with a good ethnographic section.

Peh! This does not make me want to visit other museums in southwest China.

I found the collections to be rather sparse and superficial. I suppose it was, perhaps, worth the 10 kuai student admission (about USD 1.50---I actually had a conversation with myself to convince myself that it would be worth that much to take a look even if it sucked), and their "ethnicities" section dutifully displayed artifacts and clothing from Tibetans, Qiang, Miao, Naxi, and Yi, but it hardly does justice to the complex ethnographic and linguistic make-up of southwest China. The language that I'm studying, for example, is not even mentioned (since it's subsumed under the general category of "Tibetan", even though the language isn't Tibetan at all). The English descriptions posted on the walls were passable at times, and utterly nonsensical at others.

There's a kind of interesting archaeology section in the basement, but it too is superficial. It briefly introduces various archaeological sites that have been excavated in Sichuan, displays some artifacts from them, and shows you the innards of a scaled-down model kiln. I still have no idea how a kiln actually works. (Maybe you stick bricks in one end, and plates and bowls come out the other...) But there's so much more they could have said. What was significant about these discoveries? How did they change our understanding of history and pre-history? How does modern development, e.g., the building of the Three Gorges Dam, affect archaeological excavation? For the ethnography section, which groups have become more Sinicized, and which groups have maintained their own language and culture? How are people dealing with the loss of language and culture in the face of Han expansion? Are there efforts being made to preserve or at least document these cultures? None of these questions are addressed in the museum exhibits.

I expect the party line in tourist brochures and web sites. But from a museum affiliated with an academic institution, I expect better.

(To be fair, the shadow puppets were pretty damn cool.)

There is a brief moment of levity at every bus stop in Chengdu, when the name of the stop is announced (prerecorded) in both Mandarin and English. The English version is the following: "Now. [insert name of stop in Mandarin here]."

If you ever need to add passport pages, I highly recommend doing it abroad, where they do it while you wait. Every page of my passport has now been stamped or visa'd, so I went to the consulate here in Chengdu, which (after getting past the security) was an extremely pleasant experience, since the waiting room was air conditioned and they had old copies of the South China Morning Post (the Hong Kong-based English-language newspaper whose front page is one of the ones posted outside Moffitt, for those of you in Berkeley). Since I get no news here, even week-old news was welcome. I don't make an effort to watch the TV news here, since it's mostly sob stories about various natural disasters happening around the country---either that, or reports of where the "holy Olympic torch" was paraded around today. International news is pushed to the very end, it seems---you know, the spot where, in American news broadcasts, they show pictures of the cute puppies from today's county fair dog show. Newspapers are probably better, but I don't bother spending money on those either since all information is filtered by the you-know-who.

In the town I'm in (Mianning), there's been a particularly disturbing and/or hilarious sound change in their variety of Southwestern Mandarin, namely /ʂw/ > /f/, the result of which is that, e.g., 'drink water' (喝水) is /xo⁵⁵ fei⁵⁵/, 'fun' (好耍) is /xao⁵⁵ fa⁵⁵/, and 'read' (看书) is /kʰæn²¹ fu⁵⁵/.

This sound change, as I hope all my Ling 130 students will recall, is a kind of fusion, since /f/ retains the manner of articulation from the fricative /ʂ/, and the labial place of articulation from /w/.

I confess... my guilty pleasure here is the National Geographic channel. (Actually, English-language TV in general, but the other two channels are movie channels and the movies are usually a family affair. Hot Fuzz is a great movie, by the way.) Last night I watched "Whitewater Kayak China". It was definitely superficial on the cultural commentary (one of the guys was even going to stay in China for a whole six months to learn "the language"), but it was definitely well-shot and the kayaking was pretty damn cool.

There is exactly one travel agency here, and I went there today to buy a plane ticket from Chengdu to Guangzhou. I was originally going to take an overnight train from Kunming, but my plans now require going back to Chengdu first, and a train from there to Guangzhou will take something like two days---too long to be trapped in a train in China, for me. So here I am at the single travel agency here, they tell me they have a ticket for 50% off, I say I want it, they ask for my ID, and I pull out my passport. Dear goodness, they say, what country is he from? (In such circumstances people always seem to prefer to ask the person I'm with where I'm from, even though I'm obviously capable of telling them myself.) I tell them. The boss says, normally we don't do business with Americans, but since you're Chinese (华裔), it's OK. (And one that can speak Putonghua, too, the woman working there adds.) He tells me that Bush is to blame for the high oil prices, along with all the war around the world. They don't do business with Americans or Japanese, he tells me. (They're anti-Japanese for WWII reasons... I've been kind of shocked at how many TV shows and movies here are about the Japanese invasion of China, which naturally vilify the Japanese. I'm also kind of surprised that the actors portraying the Japanese are actually speaking Japanese, though I can't tell if their accents are horrible or not.) I try to explain how the foreigners they meet here are just ordinary people, and remind him that pretty much half the people in the U.S. didn't even vote for Bush, and the woman helps out by saying yes, it's not like everyone's a political scientist. He says, but maybe it will send a message if people know that Americans are disliked even in a small, remote town like here. He goes on to bring up the March incidents in Tibet. Isn't it good that it's being developed, he asks rhetorically. He goes on to tell me, pretty much every foreigner here ends up reporting to our travel agency, since they have to buy train or plane tickets. I smile and nod.

We walk out of the travel agency, and the important thing is, I have my half-price plane ticket in hand.

Dude, when did Obama get the nomination? Dammit, I get no news here.

On the other hand, it's very beautiful here... (this is a 360-degree pan... if anyone knows how to clean up the boundaries i'd appreciate help!)

Web cafes are kind of terrible here, if only because of all the smoke. Also, there are notices posted saying "no minors allowed", but I swear last time I witnessed a twelve year old kid committing both offenses: puffing away at a cigarette and surfing the web at the same time.

The TV is on pretty much all the time here. Today I had some TV time to myself, during which time I discovered the National Geographic Asia channel. To celebrate ten years of "Nat Geo in Asia", they were counting down the top 30 documentaries. The one I saw was about how bees are disappearing. CCD is what it's called--Colony Collapse Disorder. Basically a third of the food we eat and something like 70% of the plant life out there depends on bees for pollination (and thus reproduction), and for a variety of reasons bee populations in various countries including the U.S., France, and possibly England experienced massive decreases last winter (I assume they meant 2006-07?). Here in Sichuan, China, the town of Hanyuan has no bees at all because a couple decades ago they killed them all using pesticides. Hanyuan provides something like 80% of the pears in the region, and they way they do this, now that there are no bees, is by hand-pollination by humans. It's extremely labor-intensive, and unsustainable--with people increasingly moving to the cities nowadays hand-pollination probably won't be a viable option in ten or fifteen years.

In high school my online friends would joke about experiencing withdrawal after not logging on for a day or two... It's been almost a week for me, and I suppose I am experiencing somewhat severe withdrawal symptoms. At night I'll have dreams of easy internet access, like an ethernet jack in the hotel room ("Why didn't I notice that earlier?"). Or I'll dream that I'm talking to a housemate: "Since we don't have internet access at our house this summer, where are you going to go online?" And they'll say, "Oh, at my office." Then I'll think, of course, I can just go to my office for internet access. Then I wake up and realize my office is thousands of miles away.

Ran across this one this ad this morning on the campus of the Southwest University for Nationalities 西南民族大学. Using a video game metaphor, it says, 游戏开始了 / 你的生命正因此减少 "The game has begun. Your life is reduced because of this." Again, it's refreshing to see things like this, compared with the old man on the boat six years ago, who asked if I smoked. When I told him no, he told me, 你要学！ (You should learn!)

While eating 水饺 for dinner, I realized that I don't like expensive food. Twelve 水饺 with 白菜肉 filling (dumplings with meat and lettuce, I think... I think 白菜 in these parts is not the same as the bok choy we are normally familiar with) cost 3 kuai. Three kuai! And they were good! Of course, I am partial to delicious bits of meat and vegetables wrapped in a thin layer of dough, but still... Compare that to the 107-kuai hot pot (for two people), or juk 粥 for 97 kuai (for two people). I mean, sure, the juk was good, and the meat was tasty and whatever, but was it 20 times as good??? I don't think so.

Here's a sign, bilingual in Tibetan and Chinese, advertising new phone numbers:

ཁ་པར་ཨང་གྲངས་གསར་པ་བཙོང་རྒྱུ་ཡོད།

手机新号

Amazingly I can actually read the whole sign, which generally isn't true of the Tibetan signs around here. Although, around here it's not that important since everything's in Chinese, too. It says "new phone numbers for sale". (In Chinese, it says "new cell phone numbers".)

Please take the initiative for being old, weak, ill, incomplete, pregnant and offering one's seat.

Today I had lunch with some friends at this Shambhala Tibetan Restaurant ཤམ་བྷ་ལའི་བོད་ཟས། in the 武侯祠 district. We had tibetan tea and yogurt and groma གྲོ་མ་ (a beany kind of root, 人生果 in Chinese) and momos.

I'm staying at Holly's Hostel, whose primary selling point is that it's located right in the Tibetan district. So it was kind of infuriating to see scrawled on the "expression wall" on the third floor (where guests can write in crayon things like "I had a great time" or "greetings from Greece")---written there at least three times, in English---the sentence "Tibet was, is, and will always be a part of China." I actually saw this in Beijing on the back of someone's shirt, where the front said "I HEART China", where the heart was in the theme of the mainland Chinese flag (red background, yellow stars). Most of the time these shirts are otherwise innocuous, with, say, the Olympic logo on the back. I-heart-china shirts are very popular here. But the first one I saw was the one with the Tibet message on the back, which rather shocked me.

WHAT'S THE POINT of having separate "smoking rooms" in between the trains if all the windows are closed and all the smoke wafts back into the cabins anyway?????????

Here's a parked car, located conveniently next to a sign on the sidewalk that says "Parking is Forbidden".