It had always been the plan to let him go. Animals in cages – except for hamsters – are a little too metaphorical for me, especially birds. I mean, if you’re not gonna eat it, then let it live! We let Mr. Knightley out in the backyard tonight after a picnic dinner by the canal. During dinner we put his cage in the grass and he started chirping, and two little crickets came and crawled in the cage and started eating his food. We figured his days were numbered anyway, since I think they die off when winter comes, so might as well let him die free. We tried to pick the bushiest place in the backyard where the birds and kids wouldn’t get him. You can see some more Mr. Knightley pictures here.

Here’s a depressing excerpt from “Chinese Cricket Culture” by Jin Xing-Bao of the Shanghai Institute of Entomology, about one possible origin of pet crickets in China:

…it was not until the beginning of the Tang dynasty that they were kept purely for the enjoyment of their song. We find a record of this kind of captivity in the book of “Kai Yuan Tian Boa Yi Shi” (Affairs of the Period of Tian Bao, 742-759 A.D.):

“Whenever the autumn arrives, the ladies of the palace catch crickets and keep them in small golden cages, which were placed near their pillows so as to hear their songs during the night. This custom was also mirrored by common people.”

Most of the ladies of the palace were concubines to the Emperor. With emperors typically having three thousand concubines, their life was typified by a rich material life but starved emotional and cultural experience. A similarity can be drawn between the concubines and their captive crickets in their golden cages. Rather than enjoying the sweet chirps of the crickets, the concubines heard a reflection of their own sadness and loneliness in the cricket’s chirp.

I heard they’re cheaper during winter (crickets, not concubines)… maybe we’ll get another one and let it go next summer.

Pronounced: guō guō

Means: a cricket, but apparently it’s complicated. Jessica started a debate among the retired men in our backyard over what size, colour, sound, etc., was best, what you should feed it, how much they should cost depending on the aforementioned attributes, etc., etc. See “Chinese Cricket Culture,” an article from the Shanghai Institute of Entomology, for more info.

Noodle magic at lunch on Monday, no machines. These are called 拉面 (“pulled noodles”), and two bowls of these in soup with some beef, cilantro, black vinegar, and other spices cost us less than a dollar at lunch time in the 花鸟鱼虫市场 (“flower-bird-fish-bug market”).

We chose this place for lunch because it was cheap and busy. It’s owned by Chinese Muslims, and often the Muslim-owned places have great food.
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Today we went with ‘Shine Far’ and two new Americans to a local museum, which was especially cool because it was the first chance for me to see “dragon bones” aka the earliest forms of Chinese writing written on bone fragments and tortoise shells – some were apparently 4000 years old! Then we had dinner at a fantastic local dive, and kicked a 毽子 in the park. School starts again in just a few days!

It’s not unusual for bicycles to disappear around here. Especially if they’re parked in the “free parking” areas at any of the local supermarkets. Most of the foreigners we know have lost multiple bikes during their stay in Tianjin…it seems like every week at least one person that we know loses one. So far, we haven’t lost any bikes…but ours are older and mine has a really pretty paint job from it’s previous owner to make it a little more noticeable (and harder to resell, I’m sure).

This past Saturday, one of our friends lost her fifth bicycle. This one was parked and locked up next to her husband’s bicycle, right next to their own apartment building. Sunday morning they discovered that his bike was still there, while hers was gone…locks and all. That afternoon, we went to their house for some dessert and coffee, and as we were locking up our bikes I realized that one of my locks had been stolen! We had parked them just outside our building for an hour or so earlier, and I’d left one of my locks in the bike basket (because we had used Joel’s locks to chain our bikes together). There were no keys in the lock, but this is the kind of lock/chain combo that could still be used as long as the original padlock could be removed and a new one put on.

I was a bit frustrated, but mostly at myself for leaving the lock where it could so easily be stolen. Our neighbourhood just feels so safe that I’ve become a little relaxed about things like that. I think I was also frustrated because I felt that our neighbourhood had just proven itself to be not quite as safe as I had thought.

Later that night, as Joel and I returned home, I made a few cynical and suspicious comments about the missing lock. Something to the effect of “I’m going to be watching these bikes (belonging to our neighbours) parked right here by the stairwell to see which one turns up with my lock on it.” I also said, as we entered the first floor and started the long climb up to our sixth-floor apartment, “Hmmph. I wonder which one of these apartments has my lock in it?” I did realize that the loss of the lock was my own fault, but I was having a really hard time feeling charitable toward my neighbors.

Till yesterday afternoon. Joel came home from studying Chinese with my missing lock in his hand. Our first floor neighbours had seen it in my bicycle basket and were worried that someone might steal it (it is a really good lock). So they took it and put it in their apartment for safekeeping. When they saw Joel coming home they ran inside, brought out the lock, and explained it all. I was so thankful that they were looking out for us and felt really bad for my snide and suspicious remarks the previous evening. What had looked like petty theft was actually a matter of our neighbours taking care of us and helping us to continue to feel safe and welcome in the neighbourhood. When you’re a stranger in a strange land that kind of consideration feels really nice.

To be fair, it doesn’t always turn out this way…after all, plenty of bicycles are still missing! And even though I recognize that, I’m very thankful for the way it turned out this time. I learned a bit about my neighbors, and continue to love the area in which we live. However, I also learned a bit of a lesson…that even though we feel safe here, it’s just not smart to become careless about leaving things around.

Pronounced: tóng zhì
Literally: same will / together in purpose
Means: Comrade

Today we went to the 花鸟鱼虫市场，that is, the “Flower-bird-fish-bug market,” and bought a pet cricket like in that Disney Mulan movie. There are couple of these markets in Tianjin, and it’s basically like a giant pet-and-houseplant bazaar. People go here to get flowers for weddings and funerals, pets and pet stuff, and house plants. Most popular seemed to be fish, birds, and turtles, but there are lots of cats and dogs and crickets, plus snakes, lizards, scorpions, tarantulas, a huge centipede, rabbits, rodents, hermit crabs, snails – and all their various foods. It’s not a tourist place. I imagine many Westerners would be just as likely to sic PETA on the cat merchants as they would be to buy anything – it’s like kitten and puppy prison, where half of them are sick and they have to sleep on the bars, and when you get close they get all whiny and desperate and even more pathetic. So other than that, it was a really cool place. The birds can say “你好” (hello), imitate cell-phone rings, and, when we were there, were learning to give women compliments.

One cricket is less than a dollar, and comes in a little woven ball. They’re easy to find if you’re on the right street because dozens of balls will be tied together and all the chirping is really loud. And you can accessorize them like mad: small magnifying boxes for baby crickets, all kinds of fancy cages and boxes (some carved wooden ones with special sound holes), carrying cases so you can go for walks with your cricket in your pocket… Some of our neighbours, who saw us on the way in, wanted to examine it for colour, chirpiness, and I have no idea what else. Apparently it’s a bit of an art, having a pet cricket. We’re gonna set ours free in a day or two – sooner if it chirps too much.

From what people have said, this market is only a fraction of its former glory, when it was all outside on the street and you had to wade through an ocean of the ridiculously cheap flowers to get to all the pets. But it’s still better than our neighbourhood because it’s further away from the new Olympic stadium. As we biked over this morning I realized that they aren’t as tight on the street vendors in places further away from the roads destined for heavy Olympic traffic. We didn’t even have to go looking for lunch, and found a lot of the food we’ve been missing from the streets in our neighbourhood. Some foreigners (like us) are starting to hope that they’ll let the street vendors come out again once the Olympics are over.

More fun bug photos can be found here.

What I would send in to PostSecret:
I actually like it when locals take pictures of me for being a foreigner, or when people take pictures of our foreigner friends, because it makes me feel less guilty/obnoxious when I take pictures of them.

Since such cross-cultural contrition makes us particularly conscious of our foreignness, I’ve chosen some English propaganda for this month. Not totally sure what to make of this…

…but this is the world we share. It says, “Perfect English, Perfect Job, Perfect Life.” We have some of the usual red bannered Chinese moral exhortations ready for next month.

Recently finished the 2005 translation “Sexuality in China” by Pan Suiming, a sociology professor at Renmin (People’s) University of China and Director of the Institute for Research in Sexuality and Gender who’s been working on sexuality in China for about two decades. In this book he gives a light overview of the relationship between politics, cultural attitudes, and sex education (or lack thereof) in China. Much of the book seems mostly to be a statistic buttressed critique of the current state of sexuality in China, especially public sex education. However, the English edition doesn’t give any bibliographic information for the numerous studies referenced. It’s hard to give weight to numbers when you can’t track down and examine the studies from which they came, but maybe they just assumed English readers wouldn’t be able to access research conducted in Chinese anyway. The book is most useful to me in that it gives a rather recent picture of current political and popular attitudes toward sexuality and gender, demonstrates the rapid changes with research data, and provides a small introduction to the history of sexuality in China in general. It’s a short, easy read, and a good starting point for further study.

In China, the general population’s understanding of gender and sexuality is (once again) changing quickly and drastically. Pan’s emphasis is on the relationship between politics and sexuality and its impact on the population:

How such a vast and varied nation had sunk to so low a level might seem puzzling, until viewed in the light of Chinese cultural history. Several times over the centuries, sex had become bound to political goals, and always explained in terms of preserving social order. The overriding need for order required a total remake of the common cultural views of sexuality (29).

It was interesting to find passages that, although referring to a situation in China much different from the West, still seemed to fit the West rather well:

When a society binds sex to politics, it is reasonable to assume that if the political winds change, then sex will also change (31).

As a result, the youth of an entire generation had no notion of what morals, mores or practices should be applied to sexuality, and neither their parents nor the society as a whole had anything useful to impart. As these young people reached the age of sexual maturity, their behaviour made it clear that their concepts of sexuality were often contradictory or self-defeating, and had been developed entirely in a vacuum (33).

That is the state of affairs that educational projects like Bright Future, which one of our friend’s heads up, is trying to address. Young adults and adolescents with very little if any sexual education and a vaccuum where guiding values and cultural mores would normally be are China’s current ascending generation. The vast majority of Bright Future’s university students say they learn about sex from the internet – Pan even translates a specific Chinese phrase for ‘learning from pornography’ – and their cynical expectations regarding marriage are self-defeating. For example, untrustworthiness seems almost assumed, and spouses undercut mutual trust and respect from the outset by relying on leverage and manipulation to keep each other in line.

Perhaps the most valuable thing in this book for me was to hearing from someone who knows and feels these issues as a cultural insider. He can give insider reasons for why no one – parents, teachers, officials – wants to take responsibility for implementing sex education even though people want it implemented, and why foreigner-initiated sex ed. projects like Bright Future receive such a warm welcome in China’s universities. It’s both fascinating and scary to see first hand through Bright Future the things Pan is talking about and the opportunities for outside organizations to impact China’s young people.

Here’s also a translated interview with Pan Suiming from Aug. 2 – “The Personal Affairs of 6,000 Chinese Citizens.” – where he discusses their research methods (getting Chinese people to talk about sex to strangers!) and China’s recent “sexual revolution.”

Pronounced: jiàn zi
Means: Chinese hacky sack, or shuttlecock, played in a circle or as a team sport that’s sort of a cross between volleyball, badminton, and soccer. Youtube has loads of jiàn zi stuff.

Our experience this weekend is a great example of an important and difficult (for us) cultural difference which we must embrace if we want to live in China and share life with Chinese people. We learned a lot.

We returned from Beijing Sunday night, where we were on the receiving end of Chinese hospitality for an entire weekend. (All day yesterday we were helping orient some new language students.) Hospitality is one area where Chinese and Westerners have very different expectations, and it’s quite easy to cause misunderstanding or even offense. Of course we’ve read about the rules and expectations, and had previously experienced the great and eternally forbearing hospitality and generosity of our friends in Taiwan. But this was our first time to actually stay in a Chinese person’s home in China (we lived with a Taiwan family in the States for two weeks once, but that’s a little different).

Our friends, a young couple about our age with no kids whom we first met when they were studying in North America, came into Tianjin late Friday morning. They wanted to see where we were living before heading to their place in Beijing for the weekend. Since they were in ‘our’ town, I supposed we were supposed to be the hosts, but it wasn’t totally clear since they were playing host to the foreigners at the same time. In China, the host pays for everything. So we went out for lunch (first time to eat rabbit) and I managed to get away with paying, but only because I employed the oft-used sneak-away-from-the-table-3/4-through-the-meal-and-pay maneuver. Basically, I got the jump on the husband and he couldn’t stop me (I tried and failed to get the jump on ‘Shine Far,’ our language partner, when we went to the zoo). Mingdaw, our friend and employer in Taiwan, is a master at this – though at the time we were so ignorant we just assumed he was always excusing himself to use the bathroom and thought it was a little weird that he did it at the same time every meal. In fact, there’s no Chinese word for American-style dining out where everyone splits the bill. They call that “AA制”, creating a term with foreigner letters for such un-Chinese behaviour!

That meal was the only thing were we allowed to pay for, aside from a small bag of peaches, from Friday afternoon until returning to Tianjin Sunday evening. This couple has personal reasons for being generous with their money, in addition to the regular Chinese cultural hospitality expectations and concerns about getting “face.” They aren’t among the rich Chinese, but their experience in N.America meant we were able to talk explicitly about cultural hospitality differences in a way that (I hope) wasn’t impolite. They paid the taxi to the train station, train tickets both ways (at 165 km/h!), every meal, entrance to tourist spots like the Temple of Heaven, and even bought Jessica a souvenir in spite of her objections. In their one-bedroom apartment they made us sleep in their bed while they slept in the living room. Saturday night a bunch of people came over for a big family-style meal, and some stayed the night – all guests of their hospitality. We sincerely tried to help with the costs, but knew from the outset it was a lost cause. Once we were taken out to a ridiculously fancy restaurant by the Chinese friend of an American friend who was visiting us – ordering food was like walking through an aquarium – and when we mentioned to the American friend we didn’t mind helping with the bill he said emphatically, “Not a chance.” Your role is to humbly receive their generosity, whether it strikes your cultural fancy as excessive or not.

Jessica and I are both really thrifty-borderline-stingy by temperament, and I shudder to think what they spent on us. But I think North Americans in general cringe at the thought of being indebted to someone that way. We’re much more comfortable with AA-zhì because it affirms our desire for self-sufficient independency and frees us from expectations of reciprocation; N.Americans can feel hindered or trapped by “owing people” in this way.

In addition to being blown away by their generosity and greatly enjoying their company, the weekend was great for many reasons. It was fantastic language practice (in which Jessica lost no time in showing me up). We saw the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen), the Great Hall of the People, the Temple of Heaven, and other famous sites which we’d previously only seen in history videos and news footage. It was actually a little eerie to see Tiananmen square and the Great Hall of the People. We watched our first Korean movie (“Our Happy Time” aka “Maundy Thursday”). Many Chinese love Korean films, and this one has some interesting messages about guilt and forgiveness in addition to the usual pathos-saturated romance-doomed-by-impending-death plot line. We also ate fish eggs and lotus (not together) for the first time, and Jessica had her first ever train ride. My one regret is that I passed up the chance to buy a pet cricket in a cage from a lady selling them from her bicycle (they looked just like in the Disney movie Mulan). But we did buy a jiàn zi (Chinese hacky sack, far superior to that of the West).

Click here for more photos from this weekend!