Pronounced: yán wài zhī yì
Means: the implied meaning; the meaning behind the words; what’s written between the lines, etc.

(Click the photos to see them big-size.)

I was buying some new notebooks after my morning class and it sounded like someone had unleashed the entire contents of an aviary onto the sidewalk. Across the street there’s a small park, and now that the weather is nice the old men have started walking their birds again. (Get a good look at one of our neighbour’s birds here.)

It would’ve been such a waste of a beautiful morning to spend it writing homework sentences in the library; I headed to the park. It seemed like most of the men were just sitting, looking at the birds on the wall, not saying much. Some were chatting, and a couple started talking with me. Tianjin locals on the whole are really friendly like that. I almost never have to force a conversation. We went through the usual questions and answers, which often start discussions about countries and cultures. That’s when they offered their unsolicited opinions about the Japanese:

“We Chinese all hate the Japanese.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard.”
“Yes, we hate Japanese.”
“I also heard that some Chinese don’t like Koreans.”
“Yes! They’re also no-good.”

Several times people have offered their opinions of the Japanese without our prompting. I asked about the Koreans because I thought it was kind of funny, probably because I’m not Korean (apparently they have a reputation for being really rich but really stingy in the markets).

I suppose I should point out – lest this encourage thoughts involving racist and xenophobic Mainlanders – that in the West we don’t exactly handle race or diversity in general very well. That’s one thing I’m discovering the longer we live here. Maybe our collective guilt from our imperialistic, slave-trading, minority-oppressing cultural pasts (we love to bathe in cultural self-loathing – the easiest of responses) is making us overreact and go way overboard with the racial hypersensitivity – I don’t know. But the Chinese aren’t afraid to generalize or call a spade a spade when it comes to race, skin colour, body type, etc. – things that are culturally “wrong” for me, and I’m starting to wonder why, and how much of our own Western political correctness is really just serving our collective (white) cultural felt-needs more than enhancing our societies’ capacity for healthy diversity.

Anyway, sorry for that tangent – wasn’t planning on it. Springtime is fun-time in Tianjin. People seem to spend most of their spare time outside, and that brings a lot of colour and fun activity to the parks and neighbourhoods.

Cool experience on the way home this afternoon: We met our first two migrant workers, and they met their first two foreigners. Judging from the looks on their faces, I think they might still be in shock as I type this. Of course, the fact that I’m blogging about them might say something, too. Crazy world…

Anyway, we’d started chatting with one of our retired neighbours outside our stairwell, which is also right by the migrant labourers’ camp. (I took the photo at right while we were talking.) We asked him about the work they were doing on the roofs, and got more of an answer than we were expecting. He said that not only are they building fake roofs on all the buildings visible from the main road, but they’re also going to paint the sides of the buildings that are visible from the main road.

He said it’s because our neighbourhood is opposite the Sheraton (one of the ritziest public places in Tianjin) and during the Olympics lots of foreigners will be there and China wants the foreigners to see good looking neighbourhoods, not ugly ones with flat roofs. (Of all the things that could be changed to make things look better in the eyes of foreigners, the shape of the roofs never would have crossed my mind….) Then he went off about how China is still a poor country and not fully developed, and that spending money on projects like this is a waste when so many people need food. Jessica asked him if it was about “face” and he agreed and said, “Yes, it’s about looking good.” He pointed at their open air kitchen, saying that the workers don’t get meat; just cabbage and bǐng (饼 – Chinese biscuit).

While we were talking, two really young looking workers with a wheelbarrow passed by, staring at us. Then they backed up and stood just outside the circle of conversation, and stared at us some more before asking our neighbour first if we were foreigners (we have no idea why) and then if our neighbourhood had a lot of foreigners. We started talking with them, and although they had that shocked look – the one that you get when you discover that the exotic animal in the zoo can speak – they were really friendly, and just a little shy. 18 year olds, working long days far from home (one was I think from Henan province, the other from Hebei). They said we were the first foreigners they’d ever met, but wouldn’t shake my hand, saying their hands were too dirty. We chatted a bit, asked some of the basic questions that always get asked, and then I headed off to the vegetable market.

I’d already planned to talk to this group of migrants as much as possible, since I didn’t with the last couple crews that came through. I figured it might take a few times to really get things warmed up with them – we’ll see how it goes!

p.s. - I am continually glad that we decided to ditch the foreign ghetto that we’d been placed in by our n.g.o. and move into a regular Chinese neighbourhood (as in, a neighbourhood full of Chinese people instead of foreigners). Yes, the plumbing is bad, the toilet’s in the shower, and you get woken up in the morning by groups of old ladies slapping their thighs in unison (assuming the migrant workers hadn’t already started hammering into the roof directly above your bed at 6:30am), but even on the “bad” days, having a friendly community around is so worth it!

One Sunday afternoon we bike with some foreigner friends to the Li family ancestral temple complex. This place was a great find. As one of the first photos explains, a warlord from Tianjin bought the buildings off a prince in Beijing and reassembled it in Tianjin in 1913. It was intended to imitate the Forbidden City, and it’s apparently the largest traditional complex in Tianjin. Now it’s practically abandoned. Some people sell used books in the entrance way to one half of the complex, which was empty. A small furniture market clogs the entrance to the less preserved but more popular half, which seems to have been unofficially converted into something of a public park – it’s full of jumbled junk, furniture, bricks, a few occupied small brick homes, and a bunch of old men playing cards, chess, or otherwise relaxing under the trees or on the steps of the giant, faded, peeling gateways. It’s an interesting oasis in the middle of the polluted urban near-chaos.

After the family courtyard complex we headed to a crumbling church building that we’d first found last summer. It’s literally falling apart; trees are growing on it, against it, and even through it in one part. The yards are strewn with bricks, junk, and clothes lines; people live in the buildings all around it, which look like they may have been classrooms or offices at one point. Simple brick structures have been built onto the front of the church. The people living there were really friendly, and told us that the church hadn’t been used in over 30 years. I climbed a rusted fire escape on what maybe a condemned building across the road to try and get a shot of the whole thing. One interesting thing here that we also noticed on another crumbling church building: the crosses have been removed, bricked in, or otherwise covered from view.

Turns out that the Zǐ Zhú Lín church was built in 1872 with compensation money extracted from the Chinese government by the French as reparations for the infamous Tianjin ‘Incident’/'Massacre’ (1870). Foreign and local Catholics used it as a refuge during the Boxer rebellion (1900). It’s been disused since 1958.

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2008 March 9

Here are a few photos from the last couple days. There’s a also a new photo gallery from our bike trip today to a run down family shrine and a long-disused church building.

Descriptions are under each photo. All are from today (Sunday March 9) unless it says otherwise.

[left] When I saw the crowds on the bridge and around the banks this morning, my first thought was “Oh no, not another body.” Turns out that the fish were all swimming at the surface of the canal, and people were just scooping them out with big nets. The water level dropped several feet overnight this week, and I suspect maybe the oxygen levels are depleted and the fish are trying to breathe the air, like when I wouldn’t change the water in the goldfish bowl soon enough. [right] Migrant workers are camping in our backyard again. Behind them you can see our neighbours doing their morning tai-qi. We suspect this crew is building fake roofs on all the buildings in our neighbourhood that can be seen from the road. These facades can be seen around the city. They make it look like the roofs are pointed with dormer windows instead of flat with satellite dishes.

Here you can see their food stash as of today – cabbage, flour, and potatoes.

[left] Two of our teachers came over Saturday afternoon to play games, eat strawberry shortcake, and watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding in Chinese. [right] One of them brought some snacks, which included this package of pre-cooked dog meat. You’re supposed to eat it chilled.

[left] This much colour early in the morning in the middle of a usually drab commute is like a kick in the head (the good kind). [right] Jessica buys dinner from a window shop on our way to an evening meeting this last Wednesday.

You could spend an entire day taking photos at this run-down former ancestral temple complex. Half of it is mostly empty (a few architecture students were sketching), but the other half is filled with junk and old men hanging out playing cards and chess.

[right] This is us riding a giant turtle or lion or luck-dragon or something. Click here for the temple complex & abandoned church photo gallery.

Pronounced: sān bā
Literally: 3, 8 (three, eight)
Means: 三八 is shorthand (from the date, March 8th) for International Women’s Day, which as far as I know is only celebrated in China. However, saying that someone is “really 三八” is a sexist put-down, as it means they are gossipy, quarrelsome, etc. – qualities that here are considered to be particularly female vices.

I seem to be unable to share these posts about beauty in anything that resembles a timely manner. The fear that what I’m posting is misrepresentation paralyzes me, at least a little. It seems that as soon as I begin to think that I’ve come to an understanding of some of the local beauty standards, I inevitably end up having a conversation or two where my previous thoughts and understanding get contradicted a little or thoroughly rearranged. These kinds of events make me wonder whether these thoughts about beauty, and beauty as seen by the Chinese, bear any relationship to reality at all?

I think one reason for these seemingly contradictory conversations and my continuing inability to pin things down more clearly is the ever broadening influence of Western culture, piggybacked in by movies and media. Obviously, some people have been more influenced by these things than others, unknowing recipients who slowly become conditioned to appreciate the current forms of “beauty” being marketed in media from the West. Of course, this is just one factor of many.

I guess in a way, this is just an illustration of how the definition of “beauty” and what we come to see as beautiful is a complex thing. Aesthetic sensibilities, historical frame of reference, cultural and sociological conditioning, and genetic predispositions in a given population all play a part, not to mention personal taste and preference. What is seen as “beautiful” changes over place, time, and location. It’s hard to define. Perhaps my fears about misrepresenting what is considered beautiful here in China actually have less to do with the specific situation here, and more to do with the reality that worldwide our definitions of beauty seem to be in continuous flux; shifting and changing within our various cultural contexts, shaped by the past and present and impacted by outside influences.

Now that I’ve made my very large disclaimer, I’ll carry on as planned. The next post should be something regarding the female body. After that, there should be another on “sexiness” and then, if you’re really lucky, some thoughts that my female friends have shared with me about what makes a guy “really, really ridiculously good looking.”

Pronounced: jīng zhé
Means: “excited insects” or “insects awake.” The Chinese lunar calendar includes 24 mini-seasons. Yesterday (March 5) was this year’s start of Jīng zhé, when all the bugs in the ground start to wake up and get active.

Today (March 5th) is Learn from Lei Feng Day (学雷锋日). Young people are supposed to go do good deeds. Mouseover these 1970′s-era propaganda posters to see the translation.

Since the early 1960’s, Léi Fēng (雷锋) has been the government’s literal poster-child of wholehearted, selfless service to his fellow citizens and unquestioning, absolute commitment to Communist Party leadership. He’s the official Chinese version of a politically fervent, über-Boy Scout. Propaganda posters, textbooks, his published diary, photos, movies, and songs have all carried his message for decades, and today he’s memorialized in specially-dedicated museums, a town near his birthplace named in his honour, an online computer game, and can even be found in advertising. As recently as 2003, which was the fortieth anniversary of his death, he appeared in newspapers and television programs as the model of unselfishness.

As the story goes, the historical Lei Feng was born to peasants in Hunan province in 1940. Orphaned at a young age when Japanese soldiers killed his father and an evil landlord drove his mother to suicide, he was raised by the Party to become a PLA soldier and Party member. He died in a work accident in 1962 at the age of 22, when a truck he was directing backed into a telephone pole and knocked it onto him.

The government posthumously made him into a folk hero by launching the “Learn from Comrade Lei Feng” campaign in 1963 (向雷锋同志学习). They published his diary, along with numerous photos that had been conveniently prepared during his life. The masses were exhorted to follow Lei Feng’s “screw spirit” (钉子精神), a reference to a famous diary entry in which Lei Feng declared his humble desire to be a never-rusting screw in China’s revolutionary machine. A common slogan was, “Learn from Lei Feng’s fine example; wholeheartedly serve the people” (学习雷锋好榜样, 全心全意为人民服务).

In contemporary China, any person who unselfishly helps others can be called a “living Lei Feng” (活雷锋). Posters like the one’s shown here are a thing of the past, though there were some new ones circulated in 1989. Learn from Lei Feng Day is also called Lei Feng Memorial Day (雷锋纪念日).

Additional info on the “real” Lei Feng:

• Lei Feng – three pages outlining the evolution of Lei Feng in Chinese culture, illustrated with propaganda posters (this is cool!)
• Leifeng.org.cn – Leifeng’s official (as in ‘government’) homepage.

Bonus Propaganda
I found this while digging up Lei Feng info. ChinesePosters.net and IISH’s Chinese Propaganda Posters page both showcase a fantastic collection of Chinese propaganda posters with explanations. ChinesePosters.net includes pinyin and translations as well. They’re from the collection of Stefan Landsberger, of Leiden University, University of Amsterdam, and the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. His collection spans six decades. Chinese Propaganda Posters lets you browse by topics, which include the status of women, ideological campaigns from the 50′s onward, SARS, AIDS, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, tons of stuff. The University of Westminster’s China Poster’s Online looks good, too, and includes translations.

Below is an example of offerings at ChinesePosters.net:

Zai douzheng zhong chengzhang
(Growing up in the midst of struggle)
Publisher unknown, date of publication unknown (early 1970s), print no. unknown (imprint removed!)
Call number BG E15/151

The destruction of undesirable thought and publication was taught to one and all. The poster shows the determination and fanaticism with which children re-enact an event in which somebody is called to account for spreading counterrevolutionary publications, scattered on the floor. Judging by the looks of the two grown-ups, this is clearly no laughing matter. The slogan on the wall reads “Struggle to strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat!”

This quoted text and image belong to Stefan Landsberger.