If you’ve ever wondered why so many Mainlanders still love Mao, this quote explains it more or less the same as our friends and teachers in Tianjin do (except our friends in Tianjin are less negative toward Mao).

An American-born Chinese female general, born in 1930, who worked 40 years in military education:

I feel that the Liberation of China in 1949 really was a fantastic event. And I include Mao Zedong in that. Even though Chairman Mao did a lot of wrong, and even committed crimes — I do acknowledge that. But we have to recognize Mao Zedong’s contribution to the revival of the Chinese nation as a whole. He was actually a great historical figure and his name will go down in the annals of history. He’s like the Emperor Qin Shi Hung Di, who burned books, buried Confucian scholars alive and tyrannized the people, but this can’t obscure his achievements in uniting China, setting up the legal code, developing commerce, and even building the Great Wall, one of the wonders of the world. Mao Zedong gave the Chinese back their self-respect as a people after the Opium War, and that achievement can never be wiped out.

What does Liberation mean? The greatest liberation has been for the working people. Previously in China, workers and peasants had absolutely no status; now, they may still be poor, but it’s not the same. At least now, society and the media and officials have to show respect for them, whether they mean it or not, and they’re supposed to be the masters! Before Liberation, the expression “Chinese people” didn’t include them. The difference between then and now is really huge. That’s why I tell you we are the most fortunate generation, because we have seen with our own eyes the difference between before and after Liberation. We have seen the whole process — from war, starvation, poverty and unrest, to the imposition of order, our growing strength and the development of a humane society.

(Quoted from pg. 286 of China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation by Xinran, a collection of interesting personal interviews with members of China’s most fascinating generation.)

Related Posts:

• Chinese women & high heels
• Mainlanders and their past; Mainlanders and their selves — from China Witness by Xinran

“Big rural village” indeed. Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Tianjin: China’s #1 most livable city! I can’t believe it. Our very own Tianjin, which is so beautiful that you can look at the sun and it doesn’t hurt your eyes, took top honours among Mainland cities this month in a study by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

First place in China makes Tianjin 72nd in the world according to the Economist’s Liveability ranking, which

quantifies the challenges that might be presented to an individual’s lifestyle in 140 cities worldwide. Each city is assigned a score for over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories: stability, health care, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure.

So our Canadian home is the most livable city in the world, and our Chinese home is the most livable city in China. If anyone has more info, please pass it along. I’d love to know how Tianjin scored this.

Below is the intro I never used for the “Tianjin-friendly New Year’s Resolutions for Laowais” magazine article last December, followed by links to some of our best Tianjin stuff.

Yeah yeah, in Tianjin we know how in Beijing you look down us for being old school and undistinguished, and how in Shanghai you think you’re better than, well, everybody, but the intro below from an upcoming local expat magazine article explains why Tianjin kicks all your butts!

Tianjin Rocks!

If you disregard your first impressions and look at it from the proper angle, it’s not hard to see that Tianjin is a romantic city with some exciting nightlife. Stop sniggering; I’m serious: romantic, with exciting nightlife. I’ll also add – traffic and public transit aside – warmhearted. I’m glad it’s not Shanghai or Beijing, and I’ve got good reasons.

Tianjin is a big city with a small town feel. Beijingers might say it’s unsophisticated and really just a big rural village (大农村), but they don’t know what they’re missing. Tianjin’s the kind of city where your neighbourhood bike repairman and his buddies will call you over to sit on those little stools, share some báijiǔ (白酒；white lightning) and play Chinese chess, even though you can barely ask for the bathroom in Chinese. It’s the kind of city where, when you’re reading your Chinese homework on a bench in the park, someone will eventually come sit next to you and make polite conversation. It’s the kind of place where you open your door to find the new neighbours you haven’t met yet standing there with a plate full of steaming dumplings for you and your wife. Or it’s a place where a stranger might join your picnic lunch, where people sing out loud biking down the road, where your taxi driver will talk your ear off if you let him, where couples tango in public, and where the parks are bustling with happy activity from after dinner until late.

Language barriers and vast cultural distances won’t stop the local lǎobǎixìng (老百姓；regular folks) from giving a warm welcome to the foreigners in their midst. Foreigners are still a little special here, but we’re not so unusual that people can’t relate to us normally-enough. Sometimes the biggest problem is the foreigners themselves; we miss out on many of the best aspects of Tianjin because we inadvertently make ourselves unavailable by living lifestyles that are incompatible with the main streams of local Tianjin life.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that pretty much none of Tianjin’s foreigners want to completely abandon all of their foreigner ways and living habits. Thankfully, that’s not necessary. Even just partially adjusting to the rhythms of local life can yield some meaningful relationships and experiences. Making ourselves available to the more meaningful aspects of local Tianjin life will greatly increase our enjoyment of this city and its people, and New Year’s resolutions are as good an excuse as any to get after it.

Selected Tianjin fun:
(You can browse the Tianjin or Regular Zhou categories for more.)

• Getting fire cupped in a Tianjin bath house (or) Losing a wrestling match to a giant octopus
• Staying Alive and On Your Bike in Tianjin
• Tianjin: more colourful in the rain, more marriable in the sun
• This week in Tianjin (photos)
• Photos from a Saturday bike trip around Tianjin
• Watching the Opening Ceremony with a few thousand Tianjiners! (video)
• Tianjin’s “Old Hundred Names” on the Olympics (video)
• Reduced to Memories: Tianjin’s hutongs
• The Tianjin “Incident”
• A little taste of Chinese New Year in our neighbourhood
• January’s propaganda: museum style (Tianjin Museum)
• Sex, drugs, and Tianjin University students
• Putting the OMG! in Smog

Tianjin is a fine place to be a China-loving lǎowài. (Never mind that Business Week rated it the 13th hardest “hardship post” (2nd worst in China) for foreign workers on account of the pollution, disease & sanitation, medical facilities, physical remoteness, and culture & recreation. Sissies! You’re an embarrassment!)

We’ve been back in Canada for a few months now after three years in East Asia (one in Taiwan, two on the Mainland). Three years is not very long when you’re talking about cross-cultural adaptation, especially between vastly different cultural and linguistic contexts like China and North America. But it’s long enough to get your feet wet in a new language and culture, and to make you feel weird when you go back “home.”

We’ve pretty much re-acclimatized to North American life, meaning that we feel naturally, effortlessly comfortable in this cultural context again (though we didn’t feel this way at first) — except for one thing, for which I suspect China has ruined me forever.

Every time I open the fridge to get a drink, or even some fruit, I instinctively want to leave it on the counter for a while to warm up. I cringe inside at the thought of how cold the juice is in the pitcher. Really cold drinks hurt my throat now, and I can’t drink them as fast when I’m really thirsty. I never cared before. Now I can’t help it. China has ruined my relationship with refrigerators, probably forever.

Ok, China. I admit it. You were right on this one. Cold drinks are bad. Warm drinks are better. I’ve tried it both ways, and I’ve been converted. I’m scared to think what might be next: Beijing Opera? Walking backwards through the park? Rolling my undershirt up to my armpits in the summer? You never can tell what too much time overseas will do to a guy.

(P.S. – I hope you weren’t expecting something profound here. We’re busy with the new baby and getting our lives in order to move back to Tianjin!)

So what if she is minus-four weeks old?

A couple of the nurses in the NICU are Chinese, so we left this little note for them on Lilia’s board (请您跟我讲中文). We can’t be there 24 hours a day, so many of her diaper changings and feedings are done by the nurses. Every once in a while she’s bound to get one of the Chinese ones!

In this hospital, Lilia is a minority as the daughter of native English speakers, and she’s hearing more Punjabi than Chinese on a daily basis (both her immediate neighbours belong to Indo-Canadian families). Still, she yanked out her own feeding tube last night and the doctor decided to leave it out, so she’s one step closer to the door!

Related Posts:

• Lilia Eden

“That is SOOO so so so FAKE!” exclaims my 16-year-old English student from Beijing this morning when I show her the iconic China photo on the front page of today’s Vancouver Sun. She isn’t angry but she’s keyed up, the strength of her feelings quickly exceeding that of her English vocabulary. After insisting that the man never actually got run over and that he voluntarily put himself in harms way, she changes targets, “…was one of the student leader, and she SOOO so so so SO SUCKS!” I know which particular student leader she’s referring to and I’ve heard this character assassination before. So apparently she’s heard something about the event. This is one of the ESL students to whom I gave some Google and YouTube homework about this particular event a month ago.

Before I showed her the paper, I asked her, “Did you know that today is special? The whole world is thinking about China. All the major newspapers have stories about China. Do you know why?” She didn’t. Her guess: swine flu.

Today’s Sun, which I’d nabbed from the staff room before my morning one-on-one tutoring session, carried two decent articles and some photos to mark this historic day. I was curious about how much or how little my student knew about the event, plus I wanted her to see some decent representative examples of how Canadians think and write about China.

I didn’t argue or push it with her, as I didn’t think that’d be appropriate. I guessed correctly that she’d be interested in how China is portrayed in the local papers and was curious about her reaction. After a bit we discussed another unrelated story illustrating interesting aspects of Canadian society and before calling it a day.

(P.S. – Comments are closed on this one.)

Related Posts:

• Nothing to My Name / 一无所有

The only way one of my teenage ESL students from Beijing could reconcile the fact that Canadian mothers apparently routinely engage in self-destructive life-threatening behaviour after giving birth is that Chinese and Westerners must have different biological constitutions. It was funny (and not entirely untrue). I was tutoring her this morning in between trips to see Lilia in the NICU, and she was alternately gushing with very earnest advice about what Jessica must eat as a brand new mother and appalled with the things we let Jessica do.

I was telling her how the day after the surgery Jessica walked to the NICU to see Lilia in the incubator (and rode back in the wheelchair) — my student couldn’t believe I’d let Jessica out of bed. Then she couldn’t believe that after getting discharged from the hospital we actually let/make Jessica ride in the car to the hospital at least twice a day to see the baby (there are bumps in the road!). Basically Jessica shouldn’t leave the house — actually, better that she just stay in bed, for a month.

When Jessica was still pregnant one mother of a teenager from Sichuan was talking to me about the traditional Chinese custom of being house-bound and not showering for a month after giving birth. “Oh, that’s silly. I had a shower after only two weeks!”

Of course we’d heard about the popular traditional Chinese beliefs surrounding pregnancy and birth. No doubt our various cultures contain plenty of mutually jaw-dropping popular advice in this area. But this kind of stuff sounds even funnier in Canada for some reason. And no matter how particular advice sounds to us, it’s great the way our Chinese friends show their care and warmth by showering us with concern and advice.

(P.S. – Commenting *should* be fixed now, so you can leave comments again. Stupid security plugin changed my settings without telling me!)

Related Posts:

• Lilia Eden

If blogging is a little slow for the next little while, here’s why:

Lilia Eden was born 7 weeks early at 9:21pm on May 23! She’s 4lbs 10.5oz, 18.5 inches. Jessica is doing great, despite the unexpected emergency surgery, and Lilia is in the NICU getting stronger every day. If you’re Facebook friends with either of us, then you can see photos.

We’re aiming to move back to China in September, but blogging will be less frequent (but not totally absent) until then.

P.S. – Chinese name suggestions most welcome! But we make no promises. Her family name is 陆。

P.P.S. – As tempting as it is, we wont be turning this into a baby photo blog. We’ll keep writing China stuff here, and just make a different blog for the baby photos!

Mrs. Xie is an old sidewalk shoemender who abandoned her village and migrated to the city, where she’s worked on the same street for 28 years. Her and her bicycle repairman husband live in poverty, sacrificing every fēn for their daughter to get her Master’s degree and their son to pursue his PhD, both at one of China’s top universities. Mrs. Xie has watched people for so long that she can tell all kinds of things about a person just from their shoes. For example:

The one’s in high heels are the most worth looking at. If they jab their heels into the ground as they walk, it’s because they don’t know how to wear them, or they’ve put them on for the first time. You don’t need to look at them to know that they’re sticking out their bums, which is really unattractive! You have to walk slowly in high heels — walking fast looks hideous. The higher the heels they’re wearing, the less willing they are to give way to other people — these are shoes that can only go forwards not backwards. The high-heeled slippers that are fashionable nowadays are really funny. The foot often slips out of them, and then the slipper is just looped over the foot, which makes it completely useless. Everyone knows that women have small, delicate feet, but with these high heels now, the toes are very pointed, not for putting your foot in. It makes the whole shoe look big, and a small woman striding along with a pair of big feet looks ridiculous! And something else: not a lot of women look after their feet. Sometimes you smell her perfume, what a lovely smell! But she walks past you and her feet are really ugly with yellow calluses at the back of the heels and the feet all wrinkly. If I look up, the face is bound to be plastered in thick make-up. Quite repulsive. I can’t bear to see that.

(Quoted from pg. 386 of China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation by Xinran, a collection of interesting personal interviews with members of China’s most fascinating generation.)

Related Posts:

• Why they still love Mao: “Liberation”
• Mainlanders and their past; Mainlanders and their selves — from China Witness by Xinran

“Nothing to My Name” has been called the biggest hit song in Mainland Chinese history. If you’re only gonna learn one Chinese karaoke tune, this is the song. And if you’re looking for a poignant time to learn it, this is the month.

一无所有 / yīwúsuǒyǒu / Nothing to My Name

If you’re in Great Firewalled Youtube-blocking Mainland China you can see the video here (thanks, Ryan!). Listen to the mp3 here:

一无所有 channeled the disillusionment, anxieties, hopes, frustrations, complaints, and rebellion of urban Mainlanders coming of age during the ideological thaw of 80’s China. They adopted it as their generation’s anthem. Even many 90’s kids (in their mid to late 20s now) still connect strongly to this song.

Cuī Jiàn (崔健) is often called “the father of Chinese rock.” He first performed “Nothing to My Name” on a TV talent show in 1985 and then at a major concert in 1986. China’s urban young people ate it up. This month marks the 20th anniversary of a third significant performance, but I’ll let you follow the links at the end of this post to discover the more dramatic and sensitive details about the significance of Cuī Jiàn and “Nothing to My Name.”

Lyrics & Guitar Chords
From the beginning people interpreted the ambiguous lyrics in different ways (politics, sex, love & economics). But it was no secret that the lyrics were intended to contain both national and critical meanings. Cuī Jiàn’s concerts, in which he’d perform with a red blindfold over his eyes and play other songs with more pointed lyrics, left little doubt as to the targets of the critique. Those ‘targets’ responded by banning Cuī Jiàn from playing any large, significant performances for over 15 years.

The vagueness of the lyrics leaves this song open to a wide variety of English renderings. The English translation below is based on the translation found at cuijian.com (see other English renderings here and here). The title literally could mean “having nothing” or “not having anything.”

The guitar chords in the download aren’t perfect, but close. If you catch any mistakes on that or the translation, let me know! Download: YiWuSuoYou.pdf

You can play the video or mp3 above and follow along here:

我曾经问个不休 / wǒ céngjīng wèn gè bùxiū
I’ve asked (you) endlessly

你何时跟我走 / nǐ hé shí gēn wǒ zǒu
When will you go with me?

可你却总是笑我 / kě nǐ què zǒngshì xiào wǒ
But you always just laugh at me

一无所有 / yīwúsuǒyǒu
(with) nothing to my name

我要给你我的追求 / wǒ yào gěi nǐ wǒde zhuīqiú
I want to give you my dreams

还有我的自由 / háiyǒu wǒde zìyóu
(and I) also have my freedom (to give you)

可你却总是笑我 / kě nǐ què zǒngshì xiào wǒ
But you always just laugh at me

一无所有 / yīwúsuǒyǒu
(with) nothing to my name

噢 你何时跟我走 / ō nǐ hé shí gēn wǒ zǒu
Oh! When will you go with me?

噢 你何时跟我走 / ō nǐ hé shí gēn wǒ zǒu
Oh! When will you go with me?

脚下这地在走 / jiǎo xià zhè dì zài zǒu
The ground beneath my feet is moving

身边那水在流 / shēnbiān nà shuǐ zài liú
The water beside me is flowing

可你却总是笑我 / kě nǐ què zǒngshì xiào wǒ
But you always just laugh at me

一无所有 / yīwúsuǒyǒu
(with) nothing to my name

为何你总是笑个没够 / wèihé nǐ zǒngshì xiào gè méi gòu
Why is your laughter never enough?

为何我总要追求 / wèihé wǒ zǒng yào zhuīqiú
Why will I always search?

难道在你面前我永远 / nándào zài nǐ miànqián wǒ yǒngyuǎn
Could it be that before you I’ll forever…

是一无所有 / shì yīwúsuǒyǒu
…have nothing to my name?

噢 你何时跟我走 / ō nǐ hé shí gēn wǒ zǒu
Oh! When will you go with me?

噢 你何时跟我走 / ō nǐ hé shí gēn wǒ zǒu
Oh! When will you go with me?

[instrumental break]

脚下这地在走 / jiǎo xià zhè dì zài zǒu
The ground under my feet is moving

身边那水在流 / shēnbiān nà shuǐ zài liú
The water beside me is flowing

脚下这地在走 / jiǎo xià zhè dì zài zǒu
The ground under my feet is moving

身边那水在流 / shēnbiān nà shuǐ zài liú
The water beside me is flowing

告诉你我等了很久 / gàosu nǐ wǒ děng le hěn jiǔ
(I’m) telling you I’ve waited a long time

告诉你我最后的要求 / gàosu nǐ wǒ zuìhòu de yāoqiú
(So I’m) telling you my final request

我要抓起你的双手 / wǒ yào zhuā qǐ nǐde shuāngshǒu
I want to grab you by the hands

你这就跟我走 / nǐ zhè jiù gēn wǒ zǒu
And then you’ll go with me

这时你的手在颤抖 / zhè shí nǐde shǒu zài chàndǒu
This time your hands are trembling

这时你的泪在流 / zhè shí nǐde lèi zài liú
This time your tears are flowing

莫非你是正在告诉我 / mòfēi nǐ shì zhèngzài gàosu wǒ
Can it be that you are telling me

你爱我一无所有 / nǐ ài wǒ yīwúsuǒyǒu
You love me with nothing to my name?

噢 你这就跟我走 / ō nǐ zhè jiù gēn wǒ zǒu
Oh! Now you’ll go with me

噢 你这就跟我走 / ō nǐ zhè jiù gēn wǒ zǒu
Oh! Now you’ll go with me

[guitaaarrrr soooloooo!!!]

脚下这地在走 / jiǎo xià zhè dì zài zǒu
The ground under my feet is moving

身边那水在流 / shēnbiān nà shuǐ zài liú
The water beside me is flowing

脚下这地在走 / jiǎo xià zhè dì zài zǒu
The ground under my feet is moving

身边那水在流 / shēnbiān nà shuǐ zài liú
The water beside me is flowing

噢 你这就跟我走 / ō nǐ zhè jiù gēn wǒ zǒu
Oh! Now you’ll go with me

When a Chinese friend in Tianjin downloaded a bunch of songs for me to learn, he made a point to highlight this one. Our Chinese textbooks have a whole lesson devoted to it, and when our teachers taught it they said it represents their generation. But I have a couple teenage Mainlanders in my ESL classes here in Vancouver, and none of them have even heard of this song or Cuī Jiàn. Of course, that’s not the only significant 20-year-old piece of Chinese history that they didn’t know about, so I assigned them some homework involving Google. Still waiting to see how they respond.

More about Cui Jian and Nothing to My Name (from the web):

• Power of the Powerless
• Cui Jian: the Man Who Rocks China
• Dennis Rea on Cui Jian
• Beijing’s Bruce Has The Blues
• The Spirit Lives In Rock ‘n’ Roll (by Cui Jian).
• Wikipedia: Cui Jian & Nothing to My Name

More songs for your KTV repertoire! (with lyrics and guitar chords):

• Liang Shanbo & Juliet – 梁山伯与茱丽叶
• Even in Death I’ll Love – 死了都要爱
• Mouse Loves Rice – 老鼠爱大米

Conversational Landmine
I guess this is one of those things that most foreigners in China discover sooner or later, though I didn’t realize until recently that this is a sensitive nerve for a lot of Han Chinese (Han are the majority ethnic group in China at 92%). Apparently the idea that there could be racism in China is outright rejected by a lot of Chinese: “‘Racism’ is never in Chinese minds,” says one commenter from Hong Kong. “We don’t have racism issues.” Yet multiple glaring, text-book examples of racism instantly and effortlessly spring to the minds of foreigners who’ve spent significant time in China. They’ve experienced or witnessed it for themselves, and they can’t believe that anyone would seriously deny that it exists. The Mainlanders, however, are offended that a foreigner would even suggest it.

My point here is that foreigners and Chinese need to tread carefully if having cross-cultural conversations about “racism.” Culturally we approach racism differently, and this combined with Mainlanders’ sensitivity regarding how Westerners view China means the potential for miscommunication and/or offense is immense.

Overweight Baggage Fees
The average foreigner and the average Mainlander typically understand “racism” in very different ways. It’s a loaded subject inside and outside China; each of our respective societies and cultures still struggle with diversity. Obviously not everyone in China thinks the same, and as Westerners we have our own historical baggage that hinders our understanding and handling of race and diversity today. The same commenter I quoted above says that we (non-Chinese) are often guilty of “using foreign concept to understand Chinese” and she’s right. All of us, Chinese and non-Chinese, have inherited ‘issues’ from our cultures and histories, and we bring that with us to discussions about racism (even the people-categories I’m using in this post reflect this).

Specific Differences
I’ve only just recently accidentally stepped on this particular conversational landmine, so what follows are just my initial impressions. It seems that when Mainlanders hear the word “racism” they think first of institutional racism, like Nazis and segregation and apartheid. They get offended because to them it sounds like we’re accusing “China,” their state/race/civilization, of deliberate and extreme racist policies (that are usually associated with foreign nations). But North Americans often first think of individuals’ behaviours, like a manager’s subconscious hiring preferences or a person’s choice of friends, and individuals’ attitudes and thinking (personal biases, prejudices, and stereotyping). The North American can’t understand how the Mainlander could expect to be taken seriously when denying the obvious existence of racist attitudes and behaviours among many individuals in China, while the Mainlander is offended that the foreigner would lump their nation in with segregated South Africa and Nazi Germany. Neither side does a very good job of communicating to the other, even when trying to explain.

Online Discussion Drama
Here are a few recent links to articles and ‘conversations’ about race issues in China that demonstrate how muddled this topic can be:

• A “foreigner” in my own country, “yellow” people, and other funny Chinese racial talk (ChinaHopeLive)
• Understanding popular Chinese notions about “racism” (help me out here!) (Fool’s Mountain)
• How should foreigners feel about being called “鬼子,” “鬼佬,” “老外,” etc.? (Fool’s Mountain)
• Chinese Racism: Yes, It Exists, But Why Won’t They Admit It? (CNReviews)
• Young, gifted and black: China unveils Ding Hui, its new Olympic hope (Times Online)

I don’t suggest you actually read through all the comments, especially on the Fool’s Mountain links; it’s not worth your time. But a quick skim will at least give a taste of what some Chinese with good English have to say about it.