[June 11] As you can see, our blog is having “issues.” Our friend and my former computer genius of a roommate Greg (formerly my roommate, still currently a computer genius) is working on getting our Chinese characters back and getting rid of that error message at the top. Once he does, I’m afraid you’ll get daily posts for at least a week or two, along with a few photo galleries. This server move has made our blog a little constipated.

If you’re sick of checking back here all the time and seeing this same dumb post and NO new photos, then look down on the left hand column and put your e-mail in the little box and hit “Subscribe.” That way you don’t have to check here every day and you’ll get an e-mail when something new is posted… assuming that subscription thing still works, of course. Hopefully we’ll be back in business soon!

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There’s been some fun and interesting stuff the last couple days, but we’re in the middle of changing web hosts. I’m waiting to post until it’s finished… hopefully done today or tomorrow. Greg is actually doing it for us, since I’m 有一点笨 when it comes to stuff like that. If we disappear for a bit, that’s why.

We camp on the Great Wall this weekend!

This is nuts. And I don’t mean the ladies in the photos.

The other day it rained solid all afternoon and all night. It was more rain in one day than the whole three months we’ve been here combined. We’d remarked how unusual it seemed. Then when we got to school, one of Jessica’s teachers mentioned that the government had made it rain. Other students had seen it on the news. It’s called cloud seeding. I’d heard of it before, but never actually knowingly experienced deliberate rain. Apparently they shot stuff into the clouds… apparently they do this all the time to clear the air of dust and pollution.

Aside from the regular Industrial-Revolution-era-mega-city-type pollution we’ve got going on over here, the Gobi desert can blanket Beijing in sandstorms. And we’re more or less downwind from Beijing. On a bad day, like the one we had a few weeks before the artificially enhanced rainstorm, you can clean your whole apartment at night and then write your name in the dust on the table in the morning (which is exactly what we did). As you’ve probably heard, there are plans to use cloud seeding to guarantee blue skies for the summer Olympics.

Something about messing with weather patterns gives me the willies.

Women dressed like those in the photos are common in Tianjin. It can be so dusty/polluted here that riding your bike to work can coat your face in grit. One of our teachers says she started taking the bus because she was showing up at school with dirt on her face. Most people don’t worry about it; I’ve only personally noticed this phenomenon once, on a day when we were out riding for about 6 hours. Maybe I’m just a dirty guy. But a good number of slightly older-middle-aged women (and one kid) wear nets/veils around their heads to keep the particle pollution off their skin. From far away they can look like colourful Muslims. Veils are usually accessorized with gloves, sometimes of the elbow-length variety.

Trying to understand what is really going on can easily seem hopeless. I know it’s not, but things really are different over here.

One of the things I learned from my parents early on was that everyone matters, including/especially people in the service industries: the lady at the cash register, the people serving your food, etc. They’re human beings, but usually they get treated like less all day long. Sure, the waitress is ‘just doing her job,’ but you should still convey respect and appreciation through the way you interact with her (including the tip). You want to acknowledge their value as a person, and that it’s equal to yours. And if that goes for strangers, it certainly goes for family members and spouses! It’s not being formal; it’s letting people know you value and appreciate them and what they’re doing and that you acknowledge their value.

But we’re being told that it doesn’t work that way here. Some of the Chinese teachers, most of whom are the same age as the students and enjoy forming friendships with their foreign students outside the classroom, feel like the students are keeping them at a distance when they use “please” and “thank-you” and ask instead of demand. The idea – I guess – is that if you are friends then you don’t need all this formal politeness. The politeness creates distance.

So the foreigners wonder why their Chinese friends are so blunt and verbally inconsiderate, and the Chinese wonder why the foreigners are so cold, distant, and formal. One day we’ll figure it all out, right a book, and be rich.

And speaking of being blunt, it’s amazing to me how Chinese people can appear to fit the typical cultural profiles in books in certain instances, but completely blow them out of the water in others. This is getting into a future post, and we’ve written on it before from Taibei (which has nothing on Tianjin when it comes to personal comments!) but I have never met people who can be more straightforward and blunt, and who apparently enjoy stating what appears obvious to them: “You’re too fat!” “You’re skin is bad, you should change your diet.” “You should [unsolicited parenting advice].” “You’re a foreigner.” “How much money do you make?” “How much do you weigh?” “How much does your _____ cost?” We and our other foreigner friends hear this kind of stuff pretty much daily. High-context culture? Disagreements between locals can lead to prolonged shouting and shoving in the street or market. But in other contexts you dare not directly or explicitly acknowledge disagreement or disapproval and people use this fact to get away with shenanigans (these are often, coincidentally, the kind of situations in which a Westerner would want to be explicit and direct)! Ai ya! We have a lot to learn!

Pronounced: ji? y�ng gu? zi
Literally: false ocean/foreign devil
Means: “fake foreign devil” – a derogatory term used to describe Chinese people who return from overseas and criticize China for not being like the West.

Come, share our ignorance.

Why was there no water in our apartment today? I’ll tell you:

tōng zhī

zǐ jīn nán lǐ (our apt. complex) [X] [X] give? water [X] dào [X] [X] [X] [X] [X] enter? [X] arrive? [X] internet??! [X] head [X] [X], [X] dìng [X] 2007-5-22 [X] 8 [X] [X] [X] 18 [X] [X] water [X] [X], [X] water [X] [X] ________. xiàn tōng zhī [X] [X] [X] first? [X] [X] [X] use water, [X] [X] residence middle? [X] person, yǐ [X] [X] [X] dào [X] [X] and [X] water xiàn elephant??! de [X] shēng.

Thank-you [X] zuò

huà [X] give water [X] [X] have [X] gōng [X]

That’s what the notice in the photo looks like to us.
If you can find meaning in our “translation,” then you would understand why there was no water in the apartment when we woke up this morning. Well, this particular notice has our address on it and says water a bunch of times… we’re assuming it’s the one. We found it around noon among the several pasted on our gate as we hauled our unshowered selves to class. We circled all the characters we recognize. Do NOT be fooled: there are way more words in English than characters in Chinese, but most Chinese words are combinations of two or three characters and context matters bigtime. Just because you can “read” most or all the characters in a sentence is no guarantee that you’ll have any clue what it’s about.

There are always signs like this posted around, telling us something we might want to know, and we can’t read any of them. So we just ignore them. But this morning, upon discovering our sans agua status, I looked out the window and saw workers digging holes beside the manholes outside our gate and the next gate over. That was our tip to go look at the notices. Not that they help much at this point. Ah well. The illiterate life!

Pronounced: shu?
Means: water

I biked around Tianjin for about 6 hours with some fellow foreigners today. One of them had been on a bike tour of the city before, and she led us to a lot of interesting places. Tianjin has some important modern history, particularly as it involved Western powers. My favourites were the former residence of Eric Liddell (the Chariots of Fire guy), and a public park where on Saturdays with good weather a couple hundred parents post their child’s stats on papers hung on lines between branches and shop around for potential spouses-in-law. There was also an old abandoned church building with a very old woman outside making bricks (we guess). We didn’t get much information from her, but she says the church was in use in the 1960′s.

Eric Liddell’s house
If you’ve seen Chariots of Fire, then you know that Eric Liddell was the Olympic athlete from Scotland who gave up competing in his best event (100m) at the Paris Games in 1924 because the heats were held on a Sunday, which was his Sabbath. What the movie doesn’t tell you is that he was born in Tianjin, returned to Tianjin four years after breaking the world record to win gold (400m) and bronze (200m) in Paris, and died in a Japanese concentration camp after they took over the station where he was working among the poor. His story is worth a quick read, and a recent biography has been published about him in advance of the Beijing Olympics (you can read the forward here, provided by a site commemorating those who experienced the Weihsien Concentration Camp). Like many historical sites in Tianjin, this one is locked up and left to rot. There’s even some company’s giant (disused) neon advertising sign running down the front of the house. Still, for some reason visiting historical places like this matters to me. I’m not sure why.

Marriage Market
This was amazing. We stopped at a park for lunch. There were crowds all over the park looking at pieces of paper hung from lines on trees, or on people’s bike baskets. The four of us went over to see what was up, and it turns out that each piece of paper was basically a description of an unmarried person’s health, education, etc. The place was crawling with parents and grandparents looking to find their child a spouse. The girls I was with have much better Chinese (one has three years of fulltime study), and a friendly crowd quickly formed when they started talking and asking questions. Someone asked me something about me looking for a wife, and I said (in Mandarin), “No, I still have a wife,” emphasis on the still. I meant to say, “I already have a wife,” but oh well! After a bit we excused ourselves to go have lunch in the shade under a tree, and had an interesting discussion trying to imagine how we’d feel if our parents tried that (I was the only married one of the bunch).

We saw a lot of other stuff – the old drum tower in the centre of the city, former foreign concession areas (each with their own distinct architecture), a bunch of old men in speedos swimming in the river, among other things. Speedo picture by request. Click here to see more photos from today.

Weekend Slogan #6
The workers who’ve lived in the big green tent below our window are finished installing some new water pipes, so our water pressure is increased slightly, their tent is packed up, and there are at least three new red banners outside our gate. Here’s one:

迎奥运讲文明，树新风，让您满意在供水！
yíng ào yùn jiǎng wén míng, shù xīn fēng, ràng nín mǎn yì zài gòng shuǐ!

“Welcome the Olympic Games, pay attention to good behaviour, build a new atmosphere, be satisfied with the water (that the government gave you)!”

My teacher says the part about the government is implied, and the “good behaviour” part means no spitting or littering, etc.

Unfortunately, the work crew who posted these new banners (and their tent) was replaced by another one the next morning, which probably means weeks or months more construction under our window. But who knows, maybe we’ll get enough water pressure to make the gas water heater work!

Resident Sexperts
Thursday night we tagged along with the Bright Future crew (“HIV/AIDS, Sexual Health and Values Training for University Students”) to Tianjin University, where we posed as guest sexperts for about two hours. Not sure that I feel qualified to be an authority on human sexuality, but most of the people that get called sexperts don’t really know what they’re talking about anyway, so my conscience is clear. I think. Anyway, we were brought in for the “When should you start having sex?” lesson. Bright Future tries to give them a better understanding of sexuality by emphasizing the psychological, relational, emotional, and mental aspects, while also providing important info regarding what actually happens to your body and how all those aspects are interconnected. The idea being that all these things considered together indicate that having sex exclusively within a committed, lifelong monogamous relationship is best for everyone involved and provides the greatest potential for the best sex in the long term.

It was fascinating for a lot of reasons. Sexual education in China is generally pretty poor by Western standards (of course, sex ed. in the West is pretty poor by lots of peoples’ my standards). It varies a lot, but often if students here get anything it’s “Here’s a book to read” with little or no actual class discussion. Sex is still – relative to the West – not talked about very openly. This has many consequences, of course, sharp increases in AIDS and abortion rates among them. From the NYT this week:

For this new generation of single women, who have grown up in a China increasingly unmoored from the values, and inhibitions, of traditional culture, the rising abortion numbers are rooted in many factors. While the Chinese government has focused on policing the reproductive lives of married women, it has paid far less attention to educating single women about sex, partly because of cultural resistance.

Health experts say that many single women lack even a basic understanding about reproductive health and contraception. At the same time, premarital sex, once rare, is now considered common, particularly in urban areas. So as more single women are having sex, despite often knowing little about it, they also are having more abortions.

I’d partially attribute the high divorce and infidelity rates to poor sexual education as well; there’s no condom for your brain or heart. The students say they learn about sex from the internet and movies, which they can get off the street here before you see them on the store shelves in North America. One student asked me afterward what it’s really like in America because he had doubts about the picture painted by Hollywood. Many of them still don’t know the basics.

Jessica did a particularly stunning job. She wrote up and organized all the material. I didn’t contribute much, other than showing up and being the other half of the example relationship, and saying things to try and get the students loosened up (lots of fun!). Bright Future’s website is in progress. We’ll link to it once it’s up.

Culture Stress
I’ve been exhausted and out of it for the last week or two for no particular reason, other than the accumulation of thousands of little stressors that get together and sneak up on you. No creative energy for anything, tired but can’t sleep, can’t concentrate in class, can’t remember anything, a little more cynical about the host culture and more easily irritated by the locals – all for no particular reason. I mentioned it to some foreigner friends, all who’ve been here longer, and one said, “Oh, you’re there, are you?” This kind of thing is normal when you’re living in a different culture, especially if you’re working to engage the culture. It’s part of a cycle you go around and around. The best medicine for it is actually to keep on engaging the culture, even when you feel like pulling out. It’s not really a big deal, especially when you’ve been taught how to deal with it like we have (though if you’re not prepared it can be pretty bad). But it’s an important part of the experience so I thought I’d include it.

“He’s a woman.”

“You’re wife is your boss.”

“He’s too stupid!”

There’s a group of older guys who work/loiter at the entrance to our apartment complex. At least one of them is a bike repair man, but I can’t ever tell who actually works and who is just hanging out. They’re great for language practice and a lot of fun, and they love it if one or both us sit down to chat for a bit and share some food or beer or 白酒. But they can’t seem to deal with the fact that I have a limit to how much I’ll drink, and no amount of goading or joking or guilt-tripping or verbal abuse is going to get me to drink more. I think it will take a while before they finally give up and accept it. And it will also be a little while before they discover that we understand phrases like the ones above, which we heard last night.

We’ve heard from Chinese that even many Chinese don’t actually like the culturally perpetuated drinking rituals. It was interesting to watch different guys last night react to me genuinely refusing more bái jiǔ (sort of a Chinese “white lighting”). One guy plays the host and puts up the biggest fuss when you refuse more. The oldest guy in the group actually sticks up for me now. One guy was an old friend of theirs visiting last night (he doesn’t live in the neighbourhood), and he would waver between accepting more and refusing, like it was some sort of torturous decision. The others just sit around and laugh at everything. I imagine that having someone who genuinely refuses and is impervious to the social pressure and who can get away with social faux pas on account of being a cultural outsider might be like throwing a new factor into the equation that these guys haven’t dealt with before.

It would take a long time to model an alternative vision of manhood for these guys – one that isn’t dependent on how much you drink and has the kahones to stand up to peer pressure. And that might be an impossible task for me, being a cultural outsider and being from a different generation. Either way, hopefully I won’t – in some culture-stress-induced moment of supreme annoyance and weakness – share with them the fact that Chinese men are biologically among the weakest drinkers in world, and so if drinking is your measure of manhood… but culture stress has been known to make a person do all kinds of things.

Pronounced: bái jiǔ
Literally: white alcohol
Means: the infamous really strong and virtually unavoidable alcoholic drink popular in many parts of China.