zhu_wuneng

Of course, New Years day was kind of anti-climactic. Don’t get me wrong, we had a good time, but it couldn’t measure up to the previous day. We ended up revisiting the healthy dessert place for Mango ice cream and other treats, and in the evening we went out a bit in Kowloon again (where I ate curried fish balls, which is as strange as it sounds), but the main activity of the day was going to the giant Buddha statue in the hills outside of Hong Kong.
If you’ve ever seen the Da Fo statue in pictures, you have some idea how incredible it is. The easiest way to get up there is to take an alps-style cable car, so we did, and got an incredible view of the hills. The tiny village and Buddhist temple that exist near the statue are incredibly touristy—they’re popular both with conventional tourists like me and with Buddhist pilgrims, who travel from all over Asia to see the statue and participate in special rituals at the temple. Not only Buddhists come, either; I saw a lot of southeast Asian Muslims, especially women, coming to take smiling photographs with what is a giant idol that would send most Muslim scholars into conniption fits.
The statue is really, really impressive. The temple is like every other temple in China, a business that pays the bills by promising people if they donate money or buy incense and burn it, it will somehow erase all the horrible shit they’ve done and as a result they’ll magically get richer and have a son instead of a daughter and so on. You can also buy a fortune-telling session, or gigantic sticks of incense roughly the size of a human body (seriously) sculpted with dragons and Chinese characters that cost roughly half of what I make in a month. There’s a sign soliciting donations for a new temple, promising that any contributions made for this purpose will return to the giver through “causal law”, which is a fancy Buddhist way of saying “magic”. The scam is pretty nakedly on display here; they appeal to the sense of greed most of us carry around. Hey, I’ll get better stuff if I give this guy my money? The difference between someone who believes this and someone who believes an email they got from a Nigerian prince is only a matter of degree at best. Religion shows again that it will nearly always play to peoples’ worst instincts. Okay, I’ll stop now. Either way it was interesting to watch a bunch of saffron robed monks march through playing Chinese instruments as black robed pilgrims who were taking temporary vows followed them.
Back to the statue, it’s gigantic and detailed. There are little seams in the brass but they’re almost invisible, and the face, hands, and garments are covered with tiny, subtle clues as to their meaning. It’s pretty incredible.
The next morning we left for Macau by ferry, only to find on arrival that we couldn’t take the ferry to Shenzhen the next day. We decided we’d take the bus and hope for the best. Because of several near misses, we didn’t get to Macau until fairly late, so we headed to drop off our bags at our hotel and set off. We were really hungry, as travelling had made it difficult to get food, and ducked into the first local place I saw. I ordered Portuguese chicken rice and my wife got pork chops with pineapple, with us sharing a bowl of yam and squash soup, and interesting mix that sort of showed the Portuguese influence (all the Macau signs and money still have Portuguese as well). As we went on, we passed a Burmese restaurant. Our reaction was basically “Burmese? There’s Burmese food? I guess there’d have to be, but who’s ever thought about it?” so we made a note to go later.
We made it down to a local temple which was beautiful and different than most of what we’d seen. It was covered in big, hanging loops of spiral shaped incense that looks really common in Macau but that I’ve never seen elsewhere and dedicated to A-ma, the sea goddess that gave Macau it’s name (A-Ma Gao, tall temple of A-Ma, which the Portuguese just changed to Macau). As we wandered we also visited a couple of Catholic churches run by nuns who gave services in English, Indonesian, and Portuguese. My comments about religion earlier aside, I find religion and the symbols and impact on culture fascinating and often beautiful
We made our way back to the Burmese place and tried coconut noodles and bean crackers with some Macau beer. It was okay, but kind of disappointing; I could have had the same thing at a Thai place pretty easily. We decided to head downtown as dusk came, which was a definite treat for the eyes; the mix of European and Chinese architecture and cultural signs was gorgeous, and the pastels and dark colors that were everywhere were a great change from the typical greys and whites of Chinese buildings. We stopped and tried famous Canton milk pudding, which was also disappointing; it just tastes like milk pudding. As we went further, through the winding and atmospheric streets of the area, we tried other famous treats as well; pork chop on a bun was basically just a pork torta, though, and I wondered why things so rarely live up to their rep. Then I tried Portuguese egg tarts, and decided that they were worth the whole trip. Simply amazing.
We found the iconic St Paul ruins, which are quite lovely at night, and took pictures before continuing on. We cut through some local areas and found an adorable little round colonial building that was still in use as a library which apparently stayed open late at night and had portraits of unknown European women on the wall. The Gran Lisboa was a huge, pulsing Vegas-style ball of light, so we went that way and decided to gamble $20 HK, which promptly disappeared. As we were heading home, it started to rain, so we scrapped our plan to visit a nearby night market and retired to our hotel room.
In the morning we had Dim Sum again, and it was great, particularly dumplings of shark fin. The rest of the day was a huge hassle filled with recrimination and difficulty, but I’ll spare you the details. Suffice to say, the trip was great, but I was glad to get back home if only to have access to green vegetables again and be able to stop worrying that I left the camera somewhere.

We decided to start the best New Years Eve we’ve ever had in the best way possible, by going for Dim Sum. Why does my blog come back to food so much? I’d hate to think what that says about me. In my defense, it’s a very easy, memorable thing to write about and it’s not like you want to hear my thoughts on Spinoza or Conference of the Birds this week, or the 15th time I got in a shoving match on the 60 bus.
Anyway, my wife managed to find a place beloved of locals, which we went to, and it was amazing. We had to take the subway to HK Island, where we would remain the rest of the day. When we got there, it was full of a reassuring madness; it’s always a good sign if a place is packed, and an even better one if it’s packed with local people over fifty. This place was boring looking, getting its look from the Denny’s playbook of inoffensive blandness, but the food was spectacular. We had tofu skin rolls, shrimp steamed buns, rice rolls with red sauce and bbq pork, sweet pork buns, a layer of rice over chicken and shrimp (all wrapped in lotus leaves), and sweet buns with egg yolks. All were served in small, almost delicate portions in little bamboo steamer trays. We ate slowly and deliberately, drinking from a pot of earthy pu’erh tea, while the incredibly busy staff packed each table as full as possible and peeled off the tablecloths that were stacked there in an effort to save time by avoiding having to clean each table every time someone left. Some of the older locals read newspapers or books, but most simply chatted with friends. When we left I spotted a shrine to some Buddhist god stacked with oranges and incense; it was the only personal touch to the place besides the food itself.
We ended up walking a ways until we came to Times Square, where they were setting ready for a huge New Years celebration. I already knew that we’d want to be at the IFC building, though, so I just took a brief look and moved on. I saw a sign for a coffee place called corridor café, and being little more than a drug addict decided that the pu’erh tea I’d had wasn’t enough and followed it down (yep, a corridor) until I got there and found coffee, which was damn good, probably the best I’ve had in China. The place was tiny and out of sight but comfortable and unique, and I found a pretty good little English language literary zine published (apparently?) by some local residents that has the best (and only) Chevy Chase POV short story I’ve ever read. There was a cool little ceramic cat in the bathroom too that really sticks in my mind for some reason.
After we left, and stopped at a couple of cosmetic shops (my wife’s sisters wanted a few things) we decided to take the trolley. I can’t really say that a trolley has anything a bus doesn’t--in Hong Kong both are double-decker affairs which cost about the same amount—but hey, we all like to ride trolleys, don’t we? We ended up eating lunch at Subway, a place I normally have no interest in, mostly because I just wanted to taste raw vegetables again for a change. Then we took the giant escalator uphill through Soho. Why does my spellchecker recognize words like bukakke and gangbang, but not Soho? The programmers at Microsoft are some dirty buggers.
Anyway, the giant escalator is just what it sounds like; a huge, huge escalator that runs uphill seemingly forever through a fairly posh part of Hong Kong. I really wanted something that was truly, distinctly Hong Kong, but not kitschy, as a memento of the trip, so we looked around here a little but nothing came up. I liked a hoodie that said “patriotic” in Cantonese, but I’m not especially patriotic so I’d feel a little stupid wearing it. Some photobooks of Hong Kong looked awesome but the price tags seemed a little bit nuts. So we just continued along uphill, then down to the downtown area again, soaking in the beautiful sights.
We ended up at the tram station that goes up to the peak overlooking Hong Kong, and they operate pretty quickly, so we managed to get up there before long. The view going up is incredible; you go right by the skyscrapers at a 45 degree angle and see the city slowly turn like a kaleidoscope as you move upwards. When you get off the tram and climb to the upper deck, it’s very cold but very beautiful; you can see HK Island and Kowloon and the bay all spread out beneath you like a beautiful web of jewels. I don’t think any photographer could really do it justice; I certainly can’t. I was amazed both by the view and by the spectacle of Japanese girls in miniskirts and high heels braving the same windy, freezing platform I was shivering at in my jacket, jeans, and wool cap. There were also houses on the hills, a couple of which had Christmas lights up, and some touristy shops and photo ops. One Arab family took pictures of the father pulling the rest of the family in a prop rickshaw. Like many of the other visitors, the woman wore hijab, and I reflected that as far as I could tell, the hijabi girls and the miniskirted girls seemed equally happy, and it was bizarre how much time men of all ideological stripes spend trying to tell women how to dress.
When we returned to the lowlands, we made our way to the ferry terminals, and then decided to go out a bit as we had some extra time on our hands. Originally the intent was (of course) to get food, as we (of course) were a little hungry, but this got derailed as we wandered across the island, stopping both to make a phone call and for me to try on smoking jackets (which I looked totally pimp in, but my wife decided were too low quality to buy). People began to move through the streets in groups, and I spotted an amazingly lovely Pakistani family in full traditional get up, who were nice enough to let me photograph them provided I don’t publish it. We made our way over to HK’s famous bar street, which was packed full of so many honkies that we could have just as easily been in Frisco if it wasn’t for the Hong Kong cops guarding the entrances and exits. Hong Kong cops are impressive looking; they’re fit, serious, and dress immaculately. They’re polite and professional and look like they could as easily knock you out as look at you.
The bar street looked fun but chaotic, and we decided to head back towards the ferries and IFC, stopping at a 7-11 along with many other visitors and locals to buy booze. My manly vanity demanded that I buy beer, but my wife’s enjoyment of girly vodka drinks dictated that we ended up buying those, throwing in a can of Guinness as a compromise. We made our way back and at the walkway decided to take some photos. I saw a Sikh couple about our age nearby, the man in a business suit and turban and the woman in a stylish party dress, and asked them to take our photo. They did, asked that we take theirs, and asked if we knew where the IFC was, and ended up joining us on the way over, so we rolled over to IFC together. We were still trying to find dinner, in this case a place called the burger box, which we finally did thanks to a very sweet Hong Kong couple (long story). We went and waited in line for bacon and mushroom-swiss cheeseburgers for me and my wife, and some vegetarian option for the Sikhs. The couple argued a little in English, and I realized that they might have different first languages and use English to communicate. However, they figured out whatever it was and we got a spot directly next to IFC. Nearby a loudspeaker was announcing things, and the crowd kept cheering, though a Cantonese guy near me remarked that the things coming through the speaker had nothing to do with New Years; the crowd was just in a festive mood.
At 11:59 the IFC building began a countdown in gigantic neon numerals. When the minute was up, they began blasting out huge streams of fireworks as we all hollered and sang. The Sikh couple shared some wine with us, we took some pictures together, and they invited us back to the bar street; we declined though, wanting to get back to Kowloon before ferries closed. We managed to board one full of drunk Cantons and honkies, and got to Kowloon, where the huge streets were amazingly free of cars and full of bands of wandering Cantons. We stopped at a bakery to grab breakfast for the morning, and discovered that my wife had managed to put an open bottle of wine into her purse earlier, spilling it everywhere. A pain in the ass, but nothing that could ruin the greatest New Years Eve ever.

I’ve seen Hong Kong only in its own movies, which are heavy with corrupt cops, hustlers, kung fu, and unlikely situations. I didn’t see any of this for real while I was there; well, obviously I probably saw people who happen to hustlers, but none hustled me. I also saw several things that I’ve never seen before in Hong Kong films, but that only makes sense; a movie about Pakistanis trying to sell bespoke suits or Brits drinking San Pedro beer would probably not be as good for export value as flicks with undercover cops or old men who can train Jackie Chan to fight shitfaced.
Hong Kong is probably the only Chinese city I’ve seen that seems truly multicultural. There are expats and immigrants in every large Chinese city, but most cities are overwhelmingly monolingual and culturally entirely Chinese. Hong Kong’s large South Asian, Southeast Asian, African, and Western populations mix with the indigenous Cantonese population to create a very interesting mix of people. It’s very dissimilar to the mainland, even superficially.
The first thing that strikes one about Hong Kong, in contrast to the mainland, is how clean everything is. You rarely see litter or waste, and people aren’t spitting on the sidewalk or smoking in elevators. People in general are thoughtful and polite; the subway gets crowded, but the kind of shoving and yelling often seen in urban China simply doesn’t come up here. Nor do people eat noodles on the train or have their kids pee on the sidewalk. Is this a British thing or a Cantonese thing? I can’t say.
The city itself is colorful and awash in neon, the East Asian decoration of choice. There are signs everywhere, usually in Cantonese with Romanized letters below and occasionally an English translation. Visitors from the mainland usually can’t speak Cantonese, but can get the gist of the characters, so signs are usually posted in old fashioned Chinese letters followed by English, and occasionally Japanese, and/or Thai or Urdu, depending on what languages people visiting the establishment are most likely to speak. Businesses on the main drags are more likely to deal in English; places away from the tourists are likely to deal exclusively in Cantonese, which I don’t speak or understand at all, so I had to often rely on my multilingual and patient wife. The buildings often have a funky, 70s-ish appearance which is hard to describe and doesn’t come across in photographs, but is very cool.
The first day we arrived a bit early, so we dropped our stuff off at the Lee Garden Guest house, and went out for a bit. We had been on a sleeper bus from Fuzhou, which was the first time I’d tried this mode of transport; which is okay, but clearly designed for people smaller than me. We passed a large mosque almost immediately that, unlike most Chinese mosques I’ve seen, looked completely un-Chinese and could have been teleported in from Karachi. The men going in and out were almost all bearded, South Asian, and wearing shalwar kamiz, the knee length tunic over pajama-style pants so popular with South Asian Muslims. Not a Hui or a Uighur in sight, and no Chinese characters. It was at the south edge of the main park, which is pretty but sort of unspectacular; it was familiar, though, as I watched people practice Tai Chi nearby.
As we walked, we began to get hungry, and if there’s one thing Hong Kong has plenty of, it’s food. We stalled a bit and decided to head first to the local Hong Kong walk of fame. Across the bay we could see all of the towering buildings with giant corporate LED screens glowing clearly across, with fog-shrouded hills behind them. It may very well be the most impressive cityscape I’ve ever seen, even with giant beer and electronics logos staring you in the face. The walk was neat in sort of a general way; I didn’t know most of the stars who had a star on the walk, with some obvious exceptions like Bruce Lee.
Afterward we headed to a fairly well-known local place to get some lunch. My wife got the beef tripe and tendon noodles, and I got various fish cakes with noodles. All was good, except the beef tendon which was amazing. I’ve never realized beef can be so tender and tasty; why don’t we eat tendon in the US?
As we walked along past the shops, with Desi men asking me every few yards if I needed a suit, we came to Hui Lau Shan, a famous Hong Kong “healthy dessert” chain of shops that doesn’t exist on the mainland. We got a cup of mango with red bean porridge and glutinous rice (you sip it through a straw) and a similar cup of mango with mango jelly. It was incredibly good; the fresh taste was sweet but not too sweet and the texture was perfect.
When we got back and saw our room, I was a little surprised; I guess I hadn’t realized just how premium space is in Hong Kong. It was about the size of a large walk-in closet, and the tiny attached bathroom just had a drain in the floor next to the toilet and a showerhead on the wall, meaning you had to remove the toilet paper from the room before showering or it would get soaked along with everything else. The staff at the guesthouse are incredibly friendly and helpful, and the location is great, just a quick walk from most of the Kowloon area; but man, the rooms are barely large enough to lie down in.
We took the afternoon to relax a bit and then went out. Kowloon at night is an amazingly active mixture of sounds, sights, and smells, most of them pleasing or at least interesting. For some reason there are 7-11s EVERYWHERE in HK, when I’ve never even seen one in Fujian. Like American 7-11s, the clerks are usually not Americans; unlike American 7-11s, they often speak good English. The rest is a mixture of small restaurants, outdoor night markets, cosmetics shops (very popular with visiting Asians), street vendors, and mulling crowds of people in hip-hop inspired street clothes, business suits, shalwar kamiz and hijab, and soccer jerseys. Less people smoke, but of those that did, there were almost as many women as men. We went and tried shrimp wonton soup (good), Hong Kong meatballs and stuffed eggplant (ehh) and rolls of rice pasta covered in soy sauce, peanut butter, and sesame seeds (possibly one of the greatest things I have ever or will ever eat). I had Hong Kong beer, too, which is as boring as mainland beer but with a higher alcohol content. I couldn’t really buy anything; most of the stuff in Hong Kong that interests tourists I can buy on the mainland (not that I do, but I could) and most of the stuff that interests Asian tourists I could buy cheaper in the US (ditto). Oh yeah, I also tried the new orange Kit Kats, and I dug it.
We sort of wandered around until we found our way back, around 11 or so. The next day was New Years Eve, which I’ll tell you about tomorrow.

I missed Christmas at home this year, but I didn’t miss the feeling on December 26th that’s somewhat like waking up next to an unappealing stranger after a night of drinking; the holidays are over and in the cold light of day we’re fatter, broker, and have to put away a bunch of stuff. I spent this 26th engaged in more gluttony and midday drinking and to the Chinese it was just another day.
I recently made the acquaintance of a very fun ex-pat. I usually don’t find other expats very fun company, with some exceptions; this one was funny, intelligent, and fun. She’s butch but doesn’t talk about the topic constantly, liberal without being a PC stick in the mud, and most importantly doesn’t just seem like a burnout who couldn’t hack life in her home country, as many expats are. We agreed to meet at shida gate for a street food extravaganza the day after Christmas. My lovely wife and I had enjoyed our own Christmas dinner of jiaozi (dumplings) the night before, but I was still excited at the prospect, like a little kid on Christmas, and the ability to openly bring booze was just the icing on the cake. China is curiously a totalitarian society where the vast majority of people will leave you alone as long as you let them, especially if you’re a foreigner. The expat we were meeting asked if she could bring a friend who needed a break from an over protective host, and we said sure.
The friend turned out to be a half-Persian, half-Chinese/Malaysian Ba’hai girl from Botswana who was studying in Sidney. This amazing combination mostly just resulted in people thinking she was a Uighur. She was bright, funny, lovely, and just overall a great addition to the group, and we set off down Shida’s famous student street to sample the tiny, dirt cheap boxes of freshly cooked food sold everywhere in the crowded area.
Going through a crowded Chinese street sort of alarmed me when I first arrived, but now scooters, pedestrians, and hand pulled carts weaving around each other seems entirely normal. We first found a cart with a wok where an older woman flash-stir fried potatoes with freshly chopped garlic and cilantro and chili paste. It was good, but nothing I couldn’t make at home. At about 55 cents, I couldn’t really complain though. I reached into my bag and broke out some tall boys of German beer I’d been saving for the occasion, and the three of us went on our way.
Next up was liang pi, which I’d had before, but not like this. Pretty much the ultimate Chinese street food, the cook deftly and quickly cuts noodles fresh from a sheet of rice pasta, and mixes it with several spices, fresh herbs, cucumber, and peanut sauce. It’s about as good as it gets and can be as mild or spicy as you need; I love spicy but amazingly, our Persian-Malaysian-African fellow traveler did not. This seemed inexplicable to me.
As we crossed out of that alley to another street, I saw a cart selling sesame balls. I will never eat another donut in my life because of these; I will always know that there is something just as nutritionally bankrupt but far, far tastier. A ball of glutinous rice dough rolled in sesame seeds and deep fried, it gives a taste that’s somewhere between sweet and savory with the best elements of both. I told my increasingly stuffed friends we had to try it, and we did.
As we got back to the main street, most of our bellies full of food and beer but still wanting more, I caught a smell not unlike a decaying pile of vegetation but hotter. My wife confirmed to me that I smelled what the Chinese straightforwardly call “stinky tofu”. I’ve been pretty adventurous here, but stinky tofu is one bridge I have yet to cross. The gray, fermented appearance is just too much. This didn’t stop me from picking up a skewer of cumin-barbecued tofu a few feet further.
As we completed the circle back to the gate, we stopped for a pancake; the vendors operate a crepe table that they smear with a thin layer of cornmeal-batter; which they rapidly scramble an egg on top of. They then spread spicy sauce and pepper paste, two kinds of chopped pickles, cilantro, and onions. They then place a couple strips of crispy fried dough in the middle, roll the whole thing up, and slice it in half. It’s allegedly a snack, but could be a meal in itself. We ended with this, and then went back to the house with our guests for coffee, pumpkin pie, and orange liqueur.
Next week we’re going to Hong Kong. I’ll try to focus on more than the food.

I'm writing this in the happiness of post-Thanksgiving dinner warmth and joy. It sucks not to see any American friends or family today, but my wife and I have still had a good time. If we lived in Hong Kong, a traditional Thanksgiving would be a much stronger possibility. As it was, I hit up KFC and got traditional recipe and spicy chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn salad, rolls, and corn on the cob, with a bottle of Pepsi and a Chinese lemon jelly roll thing as desert. My wife and her sister and I ate hardy, then sat around drinking gin and tonics with lemon and snacking on cheese, almonds, and raisins. All in all it's been a great evening.

The recent past has been mostly good. My students have started learning not to be afraid to speak the language they've been studying for seven years. I've gotten fun and stimulating (and well paying) gigs as a lecturer and English-corner coordinator. The weather has finally gotten cold enough to suit me. Amazon finally released Kindle for PC. The list goes on. Life is good.

Experiences continue to be incredibly alien. It's rarely boring when I actually bother to go out. The other night I went out and had dinner with a German friend, who headed to Century mart afterward to buy German beer as I went to the bus stop. There was a crowd in the way where several monks in Shaolin-ish outfits and one giving a Kung Fu demonstration. As I got through the crowd, an older monk approached me, hands together, and said "amitofo", which basically means "hello in the name of the Buddha Amida of the Pure Land". I don't believe in Amida, but I do believe in returning a greeting given in good faith, so the same way I respond in kind to "Merry Christmas" I put my hands together and said "amitofo" right back. The monk began talking to me in very quick putonghua, which I had trouble understanding, and I told him so in Chinese a couple of times. He and another monk took my arm, in a way that initially seemed friendly, and guided me towards the bus they came on. Here I'm at a loss to explain my actions; I went with them. If some American tent-revivalists tried to pull me onto a bus, I can't imagine I would gave gone. Here, I think, I was afraid of casing an inappropriate ruckus.

The buse was an old model converted into bunk beds for the monks. One of them was still talking to me as I explained that I didn't know what he was saying as my Chinese is not that good. One of them suddenly grabbed my wrist. I realize now in hindsight that he was trying to take my pulse for some kind of Chinese medical thing, but I'm American and we simply do not grab each other suddenly by the fucking wrist if we don't want to start something. I pushed him loose and pushed past the monks and off the bus and left quickly.

As I walked back to the stop, my German friend called me from Century Mart. "Hey man" he said " I can't find the import section, could you help me out?" I was still less than a block away, so I said sure and turned back around to meet him. This would take me back through the crowd, though.

I went through as inconspicuously as any white guy in a peacoat can in Fuzhou. I was almost through the crowd when another monk, a young and somewhat portly guy, stopped me and offered his hand in a friendly manner. I shook while telling him that I couldn't stay, I had to meet a friend. He said that no, I didn't need to see my friend. I understood that pretty clearly. I tried to pull free but he wouldn't release, and grabbed my wrist with his other hand. A true WTF moment. I was surprised a moment, then roughly shoved him and yanked my hand free. I looked at him a moment to see if he'd try anything, and then walked away to meet my friend. I guess not all of those guys know Kung Fu!

The next day my wife told me that the monks were in the paper as being false monks from Henan who went around lying to people and taking their money. My bons mot was "So how do you tell them from real monks?" I was only half joking. This place is not where I'm from.

Thanks for reading. See you soon.

Did I really go a month with no updates? Man, not a good start. I've been working the past month and taking care of some official business.

I was going to go to Yunnan before the plan was scrapped, but I did end up spending a very beautiful day in Mawei going to the shipyards, historical markers, and museums. And having real, good coffee with my lunch, which is always nice. The experience reminded me that we're still not that far from the 20th century, or from the horrific things happening between nations then. Not that the world is a garden of roses now, but we've managed to clamp down a little bit on imperialism, genocide, and mass warfare.

Barely a century ago, the Chinese were being mercilessly exploited by the Colonial powers. The late Ming and Qing dynasties' tendencies towards isolation produced a country that was shamefully backwards in terms of technology and organization, though it had once been a world power in both. At the beginning of the 20th century, the boxer rebellion broke out, but it was a movement of traditionalists and mystics and while it racked up an impressive body count, it was ultimately crushed. Seventy years earlier, the Opium War had devastated China and Chinese were held in abjection while the Qing bureaucracy could do nothing. Noting the failures of the traditional Confucian system, and the boxers, some Chinese here in Southeast China got the idea to study Western techniques of shipbuilding, naval combat, and the like. They enlisted the best Western teachers of these disciplines that they could find, enrolled the most promising students, and put some very brilliant and determined men in charge of the whole enterprise. Then, one day when the French decided to show up and cause trouble, and the Chinese sailed out in their new modern ships, with their newly minted sailors, to smack the French around. The result was a slaughter where the Chinese fleet, despite managing to inflict heavy losses on the French, was destroyed, adding another layer of humiliation. However, the Chinese did not give up and still used the shipyards and academies in Mawei to rebuild their navy again, and today the Chinese navy is a very formidable force. The shipyards are still there, building huge war and transport vessels.

On this note, I've seen news that we're remaking Red Dawn in the US. There are plenty of crappy 80s films to remake, and in a post-soviet world, it seems doubly bizarre to me to revive cold war paranoia, but it looks like in this one the Chinese occupy America. If recent history is any guide, I'd say that China has much more to fear than the US does on that score. The Chinese have always been relatively isolationist in nature, and have never set out to be a world-spanning empire. They never set out to colonize/conquer the Western Hemisphere, even though it seems quite likely they had the chance. They never tried to conquer most of central Asia, even though they could have. Leaving aside one's opinion of the Tibet situation, Tibet was traditionally considered part of China by the Chinese and the Tibetans themselves, so it's not as if reasserting their power there was the same as empire building. Meanwhile, the US has attracted anger from all over the world for our tendency to intervene in other countries' affairs and invade them on flimsy pretexts. And we're going to pander to the fear that the Chinese are planning to occupy us? Really?

Anyways, the seaside views from the hills in Mawei are quite lovely, especially on a calm, slightly overcast day like the one I went there on. The pagoda there is in a good spot overooking the city and it's old Qing buildings on the one side, and the bay on the other. The various museums and historical markers are all cheap or free, and were good to make a day out of.

I've seen a lot of funerals since I got here. And heard them, since people are throwing firecrackers and playing traditional Chinese music as they carry the casket through the streets and towards its destination. A large, colorful paper wreath with a character inscribed in the middle is part of the procession, as are belted short-sleeved tunics that the participants wear. It's not a happy (or cheap) occasion, but it does have a certain something that dressing in black and organ music lack. Daoists also have small parades sometimes that look like the funerals from a distance, but when they get closer you see that they're carrying large dummies rather than a casket, and the music is slightly more upbeat (as much as I can tell with Chinese music). Also, the people in the parades are smoking sometimes, which I think would be bad form at a funeral. The parades and funerals alike will go right through a busy street at rush hour, you just see if they don't.

I caught sight of one of the parades the other day while stuck on a bus that had stopped because a thief was supposedly on board. Theft on crowded Fuzhou buses is apparently a huge problem, and if there's a thief on board the driver will just stop the bus and wait for the cops. This was around 5:30 p.m., and so I was on a bus with several angry and impatient but also excited Chinese people, when the Daoists came stomping by. I'm not sure whether we or they held up traffic more.

More soon.....

Tuesday: The 60 is taking forever, and I’m downtown. The buses are all crowded and people are heading home, so I just assumed it was a little behind, even though it theoretically runs every 15 minutes. The 60 is a small deal, kinda like a school’s ‘special needs’ bus, so it might be a little slower than the big ones, which can intimidate drivers into letting them back into traffic. After about 35 minutes, I just decide to say hell with it, and head to a local Muslim noodle shop to have dinner. As I leave, I see the 60 go by. Is this shit for real? Anyway, I got to the noodle shop, which is very tasty and well-liked in this neighborhood, but very snug; there are four small tables with benches. Strangers just sit at the same tables and eat together, and the kitchen is only separated by a small counter with no window. You can bring your own drink, but they don’t sell any. I ask the woman in front if they have Lanzhou-style noodles, and she answers that they do, so I order it. She’s very interesting looking, thin and short and pretty, and you would just assume she was Han (mainline ‘Chinese’)if she didn’t have the tiny, almost inconspicuous Muslim khimr (headscarf) that really doesn’t cover her hair at all anyway. A few minutes later a huge bowl of thick noodle soup is brought, the noodles tasting like they were just made (they probably were), the broth rich and hot, a few shreds of beef, and leaves of baby bokchoy and cilantro all over. There’s a chili paste on the table you can add yourself. The whole deal costs 5元, about 88 cents. A Chinese guy sits across from me and orders the same thing, and we start talking about the food quality, which leads to our respective jobs, hometowns, and so forth. When I leave he pays for my soup, and gives me a card. Chinese people are really hospitable, and are also obsessed with business cards, and I make a mental note to get some.
I catch the 60 back later and when I get to my neighborhood, decide to explore a little bit. My wife is at a wedding so I’ll have a while. There’s a little shop that sells the cheaper Buddhist supplies; fake money that you can burn for your dead relatives, incense, etc. They don’t seem to have the overhead to sell the actual idols and altars that are pretty common here. Half the restaurants have an altar to a mean-looking guy with red skin. He looks really fearsome in those but then on a box of Xiamen-style green bean pies he looks really cartoonish and cute, and is giving a thumbs up, presumably to you for having the good taste to buy the pies.
One old, old alleyway, near a shrine that I’ve see before, has light and words pouring from it. I make my way down and see that on a small stage there, there’s a man about 60, which also seems to be the mean age of his audience, talking loudly into a microphone that looks like it’s been in use since the cultural revolution. He speaks expressively and vividly and I feel suddenly horrifically out of place and about a million miles from home. I pause a moment and leave the alley and buy a green tea from the corner store. I go back and approach the alley. An old-man in an old-style knot-front shirt greets me, and I ask if I can go in and watch again. He says of course, no problem, and I go back to the group. The assembled Chinese seniors, on stools or in lawn chairs and leaning against walls, give me a few glances but mostly ignore me in favor of the speaker.
And I can see why; he’s captivating to me too. His words and gestures are all practiced, controlled, and yet full of primal power and in perfect tune with each other. His voice covers several octaves, from a low and rumbling bass to a chilling shriek, and his face remains a mask throughout. Oh yeah, and I have no idea what the hell he’s saying. I’ve been using Chinese all night with some effectiveness, but his dialect is some regional thing that’s damn near indecipherable. A couple times as he speaks vividly about….Fuck, I dunno….He gestures my direction. At me maybe? Not sure. He may be simply talking about some ancient Chinese story. He might be saying “Remember the boxer rebellion? A hundred years ago we’d have had this guy hanging upside down with a fork up his ass!” I just can’t tell. But the dim red lighting, the fiery orator, and the gentle narcotic effect of the evening air have my total attention; it’s hard to leave.
Later I find out they’re probably talking about local opera.
Wednesday: We head out to Nanping today. I told one of my students I was going there for National Day, and she merely asked “Why?” Why? It’s somewhere new, innit?
We get there and I can instantly tell this is a prettier town at night. And it is night, thankfully. It’s a river town, moreso than Fuzhou, smaller and clearly built around the river as opposed to just sprawling at its mouth as Fuzhou does. The pagodas and temples on the hill across the bridge are softly lit in green, and the overall effect if quite lovely.
We get to downtown, at a dinner with my brother-in-law (and newfound good friend’s) companions of thirty years. They’re a friendly bunch, hospitable and kind, and proof that nepotism and social networks will trump ideology in each and every society. They’re judges, lawyers, police chiefs, and the like, most of whom have known each other since around the time my parents were married. They greet me with warm welcomes and a cup of Moutai.
“What the hell is this?” I ask my wife furtively. It smells like something you’d remove paint with.
She tells me that it’s grain liquor. I drink a half-shot and feel although it’s slightly cooler than room temperature my chest feels like I just chugged a cup of hot coffee. I look at the bottle, a red and white metal cylinder, which informs me that this is 53% alcohol. And nobody’s cutting it with anything.
People keep wanting to toast and wanting me to kill the little specialty shotglass, so I do, and while I remember that the food was good, that’s about all I remember. Tomorrow is National Day, so at one moment, in decent Chinese, I raise my glass and toast “中华人民共和国六十年”, which gets a big round of applause and many enthusiastic toasts.
A little while later we’ve left, to the relief of the patient and obliging restaurant staff, and walk a couple blocks to a karaoke club. In Fuzhou I’m slightly noticeable, but here in Nanping I might as well be a B-list celebrity; when I walk through the door, several nubile young women go out of their way to greet me, which my wife seems to find amusing. “Ohh, look, you have fans” she says mockingly. Later she’ll accuse me of using the pretext of an innocent trip to the bathroom to go meet up with my fans, but that’s neither here nor there.
At karaoke, I’m provided with several beers and glasses of wine, and I meet the challenge admirably, as well as eating a lot of fresh red watermelon. People keep wanting to play various number combination drinking games, and I manage to hold my own even though it’s in my third language. But pure odds mean I keep having to drink. I sing a couple of songs, and pass the mic to the various Chinese friends who have showed up. It starts off with regular pop music but then, the Holiday being imminent, turns to patriotic songs. What is it with commies and patriotic songs? Even the Nazis could tone down the kitsch now and then, but Asian communists never stop with the songs and slogans. The bottom of the giant TV screen displays Chinese characters to go with the words, and I find a mic being pushed my way and I find that, drunk, I can sing patriotic songs with the best of them. Am I sellout? I can’t imagine being drunk enough to sing Lee Greenwood, and ultimately I like my country more than China. I do like some horrifically nationalistic country songs, like Merle Haggard’s The Fightin Side of Me and Okie from Muskogee, but those have a sense of humor and are part of my heritage. So why am I singing “我爱你中国”? I mean, besides having lost the last six rounds of that drinking game? I don’t know. At some point later I’m dancing, probably badly, and people are clapping. Then at some point that I don’t actually remember, I must have gone back to the hotel. I’m lying on the floor and trying to tell my wife something. I have the foresight to drink some tea and then drift off, thinking I’m going to have a dry National Day tomorrow…..

Writing down my experiences here feels like an uphill battle sometimes because there are simply too many things and not enough time. I also don't want to turn into one of the solipsistic motherfuckers who thinks everything they do is fascinating and needs to be put down for posterity. Nor could I write about some experiences because they would sound silly rendered into words, like the other day when I stood watching an old brick courtyard and a single giant leaf just fluttered to earth in front of me and I felt totally and completely content. See, I felt like a pretentious zen ass just writing that. But all that said, I still want to record my experiences for myself, and if I sent you a link to this then I probably want you to have some idea too. So here's just some general notes.

-My neighborhood is old, super-Chinese, and I love it. There are old brick buildings, banyan trees, stone walls with commie slogans painted on them, courtyard, giant dragon-embossed jars of pickle, uber-traditional stores and restaurants (there's a freakin' professional calligrapher!). There's one middle aged Japanese woman and besides that I'm the only foreign devil living here. Some pictures/more description soon

-Chinese people have an obsession with 'face' based on their Confucian heritage, but then treat each other really, really rudely sometimes. It's one of those paradoxes of China I spoke of.

-My students are almost across the board smart and sweet kids who are so crippled by shyness that they can barely speak in class. There are various exceptions but it's a serious challenge. I'm enjoying it though.

-As a personal side note, I've discovered that the seated meditation we tend to associate with Buddhism here also has a certain amount of association with Daoist and Confucian thinkers. Of course, we see similar meditative practices in some sects of Hinduism, and to a lesser extent in Sufism and among some later European philosophers, and almost certainly elsewhere. This may be attributable to the exchange between the various traditions here, but I think it's also a powerful reminder that meditation as such can be extremely useful. When you get rid of all the unfortunate supernatural (and philosophical) bullshit people often attach to it, seated contemplation often has an amazing effect on the mind. Contemplation is too valuable a tool to be left to the purveyors of superstition. Could there be a genuinely secular contemplative tradition someday, a real science of inner exploration? I really hope so.

-My wife brought me home a calligraphy brush and fireworks for our anniversary. We are so in tune it's scary.

-People are really, really scared about h1n1. One trait the Chinese share with Americans that I'm none too fond of is a tendency to just FREAK OUT because of the news crisis of the moment and let it cause them to miss out on life. I understand some of the measures they take, but I'm a say the same thing I said when CNN was running h1n1 reports every 5 minutes....Fuck, people, it's not THAT dangerous. I mean, take precautions, sure, but it's not Ebola or anything. You will die someday, and you might as well enjoy your life til then.

-One trait which I think we have sort of a yin-yang good-bad relationship to the Chinese is this; Chinese people in general don't take some kind of pride in being assholes like some Americans I know. Young Chinese people I know are really refreshing in how earnest they are and how unconcerned with being the coolest person in the room. However, the lack of really obnoxious American-style hyper-individualism has an ugly flipside, which is their absolute love of authority. It's a very top-down society where, even today, people often don't question a lot of traditional assumptions about whose role is to do what.

-Mid Autumn festival next week. If you guessed that I will be eating moon cakes, badly singing Chinese party songs, and playing with cordite, you guessed right.

A more substantive update soon, I hope.

It’s a wretched cliché, to be sure, to write that a foreign country is a “study in contrasts”. Wow, you mean societies run by brown people aren’t just monolithic structures and have aspects often as complex and seemingly contradictory as our own? Who’da thunk? But I’m sort of seeing WHY people visiting foreign countries resort to inanities like that. A lot of what Chinese people say and do can be really confusing.

Now, I’m sure when I’ve been in China longer than a grand total of two and a half months, I’ll probably see more of the bigger picture, resolving some of the apparent paradoxes of living here. For now, I’m just recording an impression.

The main thing, glaring at the observer like some kind of angry monkey, is how the most capitalist place I’ve ever set foot in, bar none, can still keep up the whole commie façade. Communism collapsed in the USSR, Eastern Bloc countries, and Cambodia. It remained pretty straightforward in Cuba, and turned into an insane nightmarish mass cult in North Korea; but in China the country kick started an amazing drive to enterprise that would bring a tear to Alan Greenspan’s eye, without ever actually dispensing with the actual communist party or its apparatus.
Mao is omnipresent and people who have grown up in the post-Deng Xiaoping era un-ironically sport wallets, shirts, and shoulder bags sporting the chairman’s picture, with or without Chinese red army slogans. He’s also on most denominations of currency, gracing every bill of one Yuan (about 16 cents) or bigger, and people keep collections of his calligraphy and poetry and take both very seriously. I’m not a good enough judge of Chinese letters to asses the claim, but some people whose opinions on wenhua (Chinese culture) seem pretty sound have told me that Mao was indeed very skilled at these highly regarded art forms. Pictures of Mao adorn private homes. My father in law keeps a box of old Mao regalia. Chinese people I know seem to genuinely admire him, even while belonging to professions or associations he was known to be none too fond of. I had dinner at a local Hunan place where pictures of Mao hung in every room and a large statue was in the foyer along with several old propaganda pieces, copies of the little red book, and Mao portrait medallions (Mao was a Hunan native). It was a spicy feast with good company, good food, good whiskey, and a great sense of décor. It was also across the street from some hovels and I could palpably feel them staring balefully at my privileged ass, even though they probably weren’t. Mao is huge here, the way Khomeini is in Iran, without much regard for context. Support reforms? Invoke Mao. Oppose reforms? Invoke Mao. Pro-regulation? Mao. Pro-deregulation? You get the idea. It takes on an almost religious aspect.

Or sometimes just an actual religious aspect. Yep, some people pray to Mao. Burn something in front of his picture and ask for things. The whole mushu. Given Mao’s dislike of religion in pretty much any form, it’s a bizarre development. Will people worship Richard Dawkins some day?

Admittedly, worshiping the temporally powerful and famous isn’t an entirely new idea in Chinese society. As I noted last post, a lot of people were deified after they died, and liturgical elements were added to many philosophical and social systems. In a way it’s sort of sociologically fascinating to see the cult of Mao get started.

My own personal views on communism aside (sort of a boring ‘pure socialism and pure capitalism are both dead end streets blah blah’ type of deal), I am here at a time when the Communist identity of the mainland is sort of a big deal. It’s the 60th anniversary of the Peoples’ Republic of China, and National Day in a few weeks is going to be a very big deal. There are a lot of little signs saying things like “Wo Ai Ni, Zhongguo” ( I love you, China) and 1949-2009, and etc etc. For National Day they’re having a big military parade in Beijing to show off their new missiles which, frankly, always creeps me out a little. I don’t like fetishizing weapons in any form and it seems a little too Cold-Warish for me, not unlike the idea of electing John “I’ll kick Russia out of the G8” McCain. I think Laozi more or less had it right when (t)he(y) called weapons tools of ill omen, of which wise men shun the use and will take only when necessary.

Amazingly to me, while I’m scheduled to give some lectures at a local college, it’s been postponed until after National Day because things are tense right now and they’re afraid I’ll say something too inflammatory. Which is okay I guess, I’m plenty busy with my student body right now, and I’m sure between trade disputes, H1N1, ethnic strife in Western China, etc, nobody has much of a sense of humor right now.

More general updates tomorrow.