ChengduLiving.com just gave us another free subscription to Freedur! This means that our family still gets to see photos and video of our daughter on Facebook for the whole next year, even though we’re in China where Facebook is blocked. So thank-you Chengduliving.com!
Related Stuff:
Summer is just about done, so here’s a photo gallery of “our” Tianjin covering the first half of 2010 (Spring Festival to present): Tianjin 2010 — Spring & Summer. There’s lots to see, like these grandmas in the park having a group eyeball-rubbing session:
The photos come from all over: partially abandoned and bulldozed hutongs in Tianjin’s less developed districts, the Great Wall in northern Tianjin, street markets, etc.
Click a photo to go to our Tianjin 2010 — Spring & Summer gallery.
| Learning Mandarin | Meta-narratives | People | Propaganda | Race & Nationalism | Students | Teaching English | It’s time for all the university sophomores in Tianjin to do their mandatory military training. According to my students, this means they have to buy a super-low-quality blue camouflage uniform (the seats split on several of my student’s classmates when they sat down) and march around in formation all day for a week or two. According to what we hear and see out our windows in the sports field beside our apartment, it means a lot of goose-stepping and yelling one-two-three-four. My students didn’t like doing it but said it made them more patriotic.
I didn’t set out to go get a picture, but we were out taking a walk happened upon a … squadron? … doing their drills. Here’s a shot of the young ladies:
I asked my students about it and this immediately led to a common and annoying language problem that plagues both English speakers learning Chinese and Chinese speakers learning English.
Basically, in everyday Mandarin it’s context rather than grammar that determines the difference between “they made me” and “they let me.” My EFL students routinely say things like, “My boss let me work late yesterday” or “they always let us work overtime” because in their heads they’re thinking in Chinese, and in Chinese they’d use the same verb to express both of the above concepts (ordering sb. to do something and allowing sb. to do something). A student today tried to tell me that the drill sergeants “let them” stand very still for a long time, so I hammered out some sentences with her and double-checked with my Chinese coworkers:
The military training officer doesn’t let us (让) talk or look around.
教官不让我们说话或者左顾右盼。
jiàoguān búràng wǒmen shuōhuà huòzhě zuǒgùyòupàn.
The military training officer makes us (让) goose-step for a long time.
教官让我们踢很长时间正步。
jiàoguān ràng wǒmen tī hěn cháng shíjiān zhèngbù.
Sure, people could use other words to say it more specifically, but they don’t! They just say “让” and expect you to know what they mean from the situation. If I try to use more specific words when speaking Chinese, it comes off sounding funny because usually they wouldn’t bother in most situations. Like much of China, that’s just how it is; you can like it, you can leave it, but you’re not gonna change it.
| Chinese medicine | Cultural perspectives | Family | Foreign baby in China | People | “…she’ll get diarrhea.”
That’s right: diarrhea. :)
(This message brought to you this evening by our friendly Tianjin neighbourhood dumpling ladies and traditional Chinese medicine.)
More about free Chinese advice and ‘compliments’:
More about having a foreign baby in China:
More about Chinese medicine:
| Photo posts | Places | Running wild in the streets | Things we've eaten | Tianjin | 
Living in Tianjin and not knowing about this food is like living in America and not knowing about hamburgers, except that maybe there aren’t giant Chinese corporations more powerful than some national governments selling “oil sticks” and “tofu brains” next to KFC on every potentially profitable street corner on the globe. Still, you can find Tianjin’s local … delicacies … within walking distance of most neighbourhoods here. These local foods are a defining characteristic of the city, and you can feel the warmth and even a little pride from locals when you ask about them.
Breakfast is an especially big deal in Tianjin. Many people don’t like to cook breakfast themselves and the sidewalks are filled from early to late morning with folding tables, plastic stools, and crowds of people enjoying their very public meals.
Last week my sister came from Canada to see us, so I took her out before 6am one morning to sample both the local daily exercise scene and some breakfast. We took pictures, so here’s breakfast, Tianjiner-style, in no particular order. See the warning label at the bottom. Most dishes cost around two kuài ($0.30).
When Tianjiners travel overseas and get homesick, this is the stuff they miss.
I like this stuff, though I wouldn’t have a clue what it’s made of just from eating it: maybe some sesame sauce, strips of something, some pink sauce, thick brown broth, and you can throw in some cilantro and crushed hot peppers in oil if you want. Apparently gābacài (锅巴菜) is a Tianjin original, and it’s seriously high-energy food; you feel like running a few miles afterward. According to this online recipe, it’s made with a mung bean-&-millet broth, strips of chopped, crepe-like jiānbǐng (煎饼), some of kind of gravy made with over ten kinds of seasonings, sesame paste, chilis in oil, pink fermented tofu sauce and cilantro. In standard Mandarin it should be guōbacài, but in Tianjin it’s gābacài — people often think it’s funny if the foreigner knows to use the local pronunciation.
My students rave about “old tofu” (老豆腐) or “tofu brains” (豆腐脑) whenever I bring it up in class, but even they admit that it looks disgusting.
From what I can tell, it’s slimy lumps of tofu in an oil bath with some brown (sesame?) sauce thrown in. For me, the taste doesn’t come anywhere close to making up for its appearance. Of all the Tianjin breakfast foods, we liked this one the least. I think my sister stopped after the first or second spoonful.
Two small strips of dough pinched together at the ends and deep fried, “oil sticks” are pretty much donuts without any sugar or flavouring. I honestly don’t see the point, unless you were trying to consume as much oil as possible without actually drinking it straight, though for some reason I still eat them occasionally. These things are everywhere at breakfast time, perhaps the most ubiquitous of all Tianjin’s breakfast offerings, maybe because they travel easily. 5 máo ($0.07) each.
The wider thing in the fry pot in the above photo is called a guǒbìngr (果饼儿) in Tianjin (薄脆 báocuì in Beijing). Guǒbìngr are thin and crispy rather than donut-y.
If you cooked it in less oil and traded the salt for brown sugar, you could slip bowls of miànchá (面茶) onto a Canadian family breakfast table and no one would notice (assuming that some Canadians actually still have family breakfasts). According to this online recipe and my Chinese-English dictionary, it’s made from millet, sesame paste, sesame oil, and sesame seeds. Unsweetened porridge, basically. I don’t know how to translate the name; the characters are the ones for “noodles” (面) and “tea” (茶), but I’m not seeing either in this dish [see comment #14]. Anyway, I’ll definitely be eating this again on a somewhat regular basis, though I can’t say the same or the “tofu brains” in the right half of the photo above.
This is more or less the Chinese breakfast burrito, except that other than having a thin crepe-like wrapper, it’s (sadly) nothing at all like a burrito. The styles can vary and you can sometimes choose for yourself (see a list here), but a standard jiānbing guǒzi (煎饼果子) will be a green onion crepe lined with egg wrapped around a yóutiáo (油条 “oil stick”) or a crunchy guǒbìngr (果饼儿 — stacked overhead in the photo below), with some sauce and crushed red peppers in oil, and then folded twice. These transport well, and I often see them on the subway in the morning.
“Bean broth” (豆浆) is better known in North America as soy milk, only the Tianjin variety is unsweetened and served really hot in a brimming bowl, scooped out of a big pot. Dòujiāng to-go comes in a bag with a straw. Sometimes they’ll add sugar to it if you ask. I like dipping the yóutiáo (油条 “oil stick”) in it, but I get funny looks from my Chinese friends when I do this.
This post doesn’t include every single kind of Tianjin breakfast food (there’d be no end; Tianjiners love them some breakfast!), but these are all the biggies. Hungry?
Adventure eaters, be ye warned: This kind of local food is pretty much guaranteed to use the cheapest, poorest quality ingredients, and in China that means something different than it does back home. If, for example, you were deliberately trying to consume “gutter oil” (地沟油), which is discarded cooking oil that’s been skimmed off the sewer slop that was scooped out of manholes and resold in used containers back to restaurants and street vendors, you would eat things like yóutiáo (油条 “oil sticks”) or lǎodòufu (老豆腐 “old tofu”) at places like those pictured above, or you could go to an average local restaurant and order shuǐzhǔròu (水煮肉 “water boiled meat”), which is basically meat and vegetables in a serving bowl filled with oil. Most Chinese dishes use incredible amounts of oil, but the ones I’ve mentioned here use even more than usual and are therefore thought to be the most likely candidates for gutter oil.
My sister’s backpacking all over southeast Asia this summer and I meet her at the Beijing airport a couple days ago. We’re gonna hit Tiananmen Square and the cheap parts of the Forbidden City before heading to Tianjin. The problem is she’s got two of her boyfriend’s souvenirs (thanks, Josh!) in her backpack: a lighter that looks like a handgun and brass knuckles. This means that we’re going to — unavoidably — test multiple security scanner checkpoints between the airport and home: the Beijing airport express train, the Beijing subway, Tiananmen Square and the Beijing South Train Station.
The Beijing Airport Express Train
We walk out of Terminal 3 toward the platform for the Airport Express, which connects to the Beijing subway. A friendly young woman who looks like a recent college grad motions for us to put our backpacks through the scanner. Turns out that gun looks fantastic on the scanner screens.
“You have a gun in your bag,” she says, turning the screen toward me.
“It’s just a lighter.”
“OK,” she motions us on. No inspection, and nothing about the brass knuckles. Those express train passengers are lucky we didn’t decide to go postal on them.
Beijing Subway: Dōngzhímén (东直门)
They make us scan our bags to enter the subway. No one says anything. We pick up our packs and move on, hoping that the stifling rush hour subway crowds don’t trigger our claustrophobia in a bad way.
Tiananmen Square
We exit the subway and head down the underpass to enter Tiananmen Square. Finally some security that cares! :) They immediately spot the gun and the brass knuckles, don’t feel like taking my word for it that it’s just a lighter, make us take them both out for examination, and temporarily confiscate the brass knuckles. No Canadians will be hauling off on anyone in Tiananmen Square today, at least not these Canadians.
We leave the Square to find lunch and re-enter at a different checkpoint, the gun is still in my sister’s backpack. They catch it again and make us take it out for inspection before letting us repack and continue on.
Beijing Subway: Tiānānmén Dōng (天安门东)
We return to the original checkpoint to pick up the confiscated brass knuckles on our way out of the Square. Then we enter the Tiananmen East subway station. Scanned again, ignored again, and we’re on our merry way.
Beijing South Train Station
Honestly can’t remember if we had to scan our bags entering Beijing South Station from the subway or not. We didn’t get searched, in either case.
We have to do it again when I take her from Tianjin to the Beijing airport, which means going through the high speed train, Beijing subway, airport security checkpoints. After that we’ll wait and see what Canada customs does…
[Update: Aug. 12]
On the way to the Beijing airport from Tianjin we’d made the gun and brass knuckles easily accessible, thinking we’d need to take them out for inspection.
Tianjin Train Station
Scanned again. Ignored yet again. Had to fight through some overly-anxious fellow travelers who were nervous about leaving their bags on the conveyor belt a split second longer than they had to.
Beijing South Train Station subway entrance
It looked like they were staring at the screen, but nobody blinked and we sailed right through.
But even with the apparent holes in Tianjin and Beijing’s subway and train security, I have to say it’s a lot tighter than what I remember of the security on Vancouver’s Skytrain, where you can walk right on without paying. But to be fair to the Skytrain, we did see the security in action last time we were in Vancouver and it seemed to work pretty well.
We’re playing a Taboo-style English exercise where I give a student a word and she has to make her classmates guess it, but she can’t say the word or certain specified related words. I give one mid-20′s female student Japanese, along with China and island.
“Who do we all hate?”
“Japanese!”
It was the fastest correct guess all class.
For more about common Mainlander feelings toward the Japanese, see:
I finally put together a photo gallery of my favourite shots from about October 2009 through Spring Festival: Tianjin 2009-2010 — Fall & Winter
Click the photos to go to the gallery, or click: Tianjin 2009-2010 — Fall & Winter.
Click the photos to go to the gallery, or click: Tianjin 2009-2010 — Fall & Winter.
Have we ever seen this woman before? Nope. And did she just come up, start touching our kid’s face and try to make her smile? Of course!
This is routine whenever we take Lilia out for walks. A friendly stranger or two (or ten) will often stop to try and make her smile, and that often involves touching. Younger people like the girl in these photos tend to be gentler than middle-aged and older women, at least in our experience. We have some neighbourhood committee ladies who talk so loud when they’re trying to get a reaction out of Lilia that they make her scared; they pretty much yell in her face, but not intentionally — that’s just how they talk all day long. Those kinds of folks also tend to play a little rougher with the way the pinch legs and touch cheeks.
Obviously we don’t let the general public manhandle our daughter, but since it’s so expected that any friendly person can play with a stranger’s baby, and since “foreign dolls” (洋娃娃) are such an attraction, we try to be as accommodating as we can while still protecting Lilia. As you can see, she likes it sometimes.
I’ve only had to directly physically block someone’s hand once, when a woman who honestly looked like a KTV prostitute tried to stick her finger in Lilia’s mouth on the Beijing subway. People don’t understand when you bat their fingers away, but there’s no way I’m letting random people stick there fingers in our daughter’s mouth, regardless of whether or not they’re dressed like a xiǎojiě (小姐)! Same goes for anyone who seems like they might be too rough. I use as much finesse and tact as I can, of course (we indirectly block people all the time), but obviously we’re willing to cause offense if we have to to protect our daughter. Those kinds of situations are very rare, however, and most people are great, wanting to coo over a baby like people do anywhere… just maybe a little more so.
Other stuff about having a foreign baby in China:
“Establishing a civilized community is everybody’s dream;
creating a beautiful and happy life has your and my contributions.”
建文明社区是大家心愿，创美好生活有你我奉献
jiàn wénmíng shèqū shì dàjiā xīnyuàn, chuàng měihǎo shēnghuó yǒu nǐ wǒ fèngxiàn
This is the new banner that went up in our neighbourhood this week. What it actually means is, “Sidewalk vegetable sellers are officially no longer welcome here.” When this went up, the chéngguǎn (城管), which are the low-level bylaw enforcers who deal with things like illegal street vendors, came and kicked out our neighbourhood’s vegetable sellers — a migrant couple from Húnán (湖南) who daily pedal in their vegetables on a three-wheel cart — and the noodle vendors with their push carts. All of them have been daily fixtures inside the front gate of our apartment complex since the day we moved in. Jessica’s buying noodles after a walk in the park in the photo below (vegetables in the background on the left):
The Pros & Cons
We like having these people in our neighbourhood. In a big, dirty, noisy, anonymous, soul-quenching concrete wasteland where you don’t even know the people in your own stairwell, having an informal community center inside the front entrance where people play, gossip, buy breakfast and lunch, etc. really changes the feel of the place. We get to smile and make small talk every time we come and go (and show off Lilia), and the old guys sitting around doing nothing all day get just as big a kick out of it as we do, I think.
But it’s not simply a matter of vain city officials disregarding the poor in a selfish rush to create a sterile urban facade that will advance their careers and prestige (though no doubt that’s a big part of it); there are real downsides to having these vendors around. The chǎobǐng (炒饼) lady, whom we call “auntie” (大娘), leaves a pile of eggs shells, cabbage, and other rotting food waste right by the entrance every night. More than once when biking home from work at night I’ve seen and heard big rats scrounging around in it. These vendors are unregulated, and in China that often means things like dìgōuyóu (地沟油), cooking oil that was skimmed off the sewage scooped out of manholes outside of restaurants and resold in used-but-new-looking containers, usually to street vendors but often to restaurants as well. Street vendors also create traffic nightmares in a city where the traffic is already beyond brutal. Tianjin used to be known for its bustling street markets, which was a nice way of saying ridiculously crowded streets that you could barely push your bike through. These days such markets are harder to find, but I videoed a bike ride through one a couple blocks away.
Getting Kicked Out
Here’s the best shot we have of the vegetable selling scene, pre-eviction. It’s hard to see, but there are shelves of vegetables along the wall on the left, behind the chair and cabinet:
And here’s afterward, with their shelves and things torn down:
It doesn’t happen as sinisterly as I could make it sound in the telling; it’s not like there’s a squadron of stone-faced riot police that show up and bully people around. In our neighbourhood it means an unenthusiastic middle-aged guy, who looks just like the other middle-aged guys in our neighborhood aside from his rumpled, ill-fitting, cheap-looking uniform, standing off to the side smoking, almost apologetically telling the vendors they have to go. He’s just the messenger; he has no real power, but the people that sent him do and there’s nothing anyone can do about it except comply. He’s the opposite of intimidating.
That’s how it is here and elsewhere in our area: the vendors don’t get mad at the messengers — they even stand around and chat, taking their time. But that’s not how it is elsewhere, where chéngguǎn are often violent and beat the street vendors, in some instances provoking violence in return — not to mention the controversy surrounding the alleged leak of a chéngguǎn manual explaining how to use violence to enforce bylaws. In Kunming people are even getting creative in their resistance. No such drama for us, though.
I leave for work on my bike around 8:20am, and on the morning all this happened I passed the chǎobǐng lady on my way to the subway. She was pushing her cart down the road after being kicked out that morning. She’s funny because she’s tiny, can’t be more than 5 feet tall or more than 80 or 90 pounds, but she’s a real firecracker. I asked what happened and she animatedly told me that the chéngguǎn made her leave. I asked when she could return and she said, “After 9:00.” I double-checked, “You mean you can go back after 9:00? You just have to wait until after 9?” Yep, that was the deal apparently, at least for her and the other push-cart vendors. Maybe there was an inspection coming through. Since then they’ve all been back every morning like normal, except for the vegetable sellers.
Other stuff about street vendors, street markets, and city clean-up:
We both write, but Jessica only writes when I bribe her. See all of her posts here.
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Pronounced: kōngtiáo bìng
Means: "air conditioning disease". You aren't feeling sick because you spent all day out in the blazing hot sun in a humid Chinese summer and got heat stroke; you're feeling sick because after spending all day out in the blazing hot sun not getting heat stroke you went inside and exposed yourself to the air conditioner. It's not heat stroke; it's air conditioner disease. If you still don't believe:
- 2010/08/30
A guy decides to research and drink every single kind of tea in China, one per week, and blog about it. If you like Chinese teas and want to know more about them, this is a great project to check out: The Taobao Tea Trail
- 2010/08/23
A journalist with over seven years experience in China is taking a six-month journey through rural China to document the lives of China's "other billion" -- the Chinese who aren't born, raised and educated in relatively developed coastal cities: "I have embarked on what I hope will be a six month journey through the Chinese countryside — listening, watching and telling stories from farmers’ lives. ... China, it is often said, has more than 400 million Internet users and hundreds of millions of new urban residents who are changing the face of the country. It is less often noted that China also has another billion people who have not yet been fully included in these new economic and social changes. The following, if you will, are some fragments from the story of the other billion."
- 2010/08/20
China in 2013 -- a dystopian novel skewers "the China model of development"
The China Beat provides a helpful summary of a dystopian novel critical of the way things are in China: "The novel can be read ... as a realistic presentation of the shocking darkness behind the dazzling economic miracle created by the Chinese model. It also proposes that China’s younger generations suffer from the consequences of collective amnesia and historical half-truths... The book can also be read ... as an allegory of the modern nation-state. Taking China as a case study, by questioning the morality and political legitimacy of the Chinese model of development, the novel is intended to lead us to the potential catastrophes that a modern nation-state may bring about if it is out of its people’s control."
- 2010/07/28
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