We’re in a Chinese hospital for an ultrasound to confirm our first pregnancy. The examining room is a bit of gong show — there’s no privacy, and forget lining up; a group of women are elbowing each other for position, crowding the examining area, each trying to shove her paperwork in the doctor’s face ahead of the others while the doctor’s busy seeing Jessica. But we don’t care, it’s a spiritual moment for us: we’re going to hear our child’s heartbeat for the first time, see his or her first picture, get real live confirmation that there definitely is a baby growing inside Jessica and that we are indeed parents. Awestruck doesn’t even begin to capture our feelings. “I want to abort it,” a woman says bluntly in Chinese, in front of everyone, as she thrusts her paperwork at the doctor. That was our first personal encounter with abortion in China.

China’s Abortion Epidemic

That was two years ago. As our language ability develops and abortion becomes increasingly ubiquitous and brash in China, we’re running into it more often. If I take a taxi and the radio’s on, chances are I’ll hear a commercial about once every 30 minutes that always starts with the same unflinching dialogue:

“Oh no! I’m pregnant! What about my career? What will I do?”
“Don’t worry! It’s no problem. You can just go to blah-blah hospital and get a 3-MINUTE, PAINLESS abortion!”

Only once have I heard them use the euphemism of “woman’s surgery” for abortion; usually they’re just unapologetically explicit. Students have told me how they were “supposed to have a baby brother” but didn’t, and most of them assume we’re planning to have more than one child because we didn’t get a boy the first time. In a country with an on-going legacy of post-birth infanticide, killing babies before they’re born doesn’t carry near if any the stigma that it does in North America, as our taxi driver last week demonstrated by bringing it up in casual conversation:

Driver: “How many kids do you have?”
Me: “Just one, but we hope to have more later.”
Driver: “Yeah, then you can have a boy!”
Me: “We don’t really care if it’s a boy or a girl.”
Jessica: “Besides, you can’t really choose that anyway.”
Driver: “Sure you can! You just wait until the belly’s big enough” [he gestures] “and then you can see. If it’s a girl you can get rid of it, but if it’s a boy, ‘Oh! We want it!’” [thumbs up sign].

Sex-selective abortion may be small talk fodder for some in China, but pre-marital pregnancy is another story:

“The moral outrage over having a child before marriage in our society is much stronger than the shame associated with abortion,” said Zhou Anqin, the manager at the clinic in Xi’an, which performs about 60 abortions each month, mostly on students aged 24 or younger.
[...]
“Luckily, in Chinese culture people generally feel that before the actual birth, you don’t yet have an actual person, so we have cases of induced abortion at seven and eight months along,” Li said. “I think this is to China’s advantage from a population control point of view … China has absolutely no need for the so-called ‘right to life’ argument, no need to introduce ideas about abortion as murder and so on.” [Full article]

The Chinese abortion epidemic is even skewing gender ratios in North America. In my hometown of Surrey, B.C., Canada where our daughter was born, there were signs taped to the walls in the ultrasound clinics telling us that the techs and doctors would absolutely not tell us the gender of our baby. I later confirmed what the nurses in the NICU had told us: too many baby girls were being killed. Turns out that a school board administrator in the 1990′s noticed that the gender ratios in greater Vancouver elementary schools were skewed in areas with large East Asian and Indian communities (see Canada’s Missing Daughters and Ultrasound ads promote female abortion). (In Canada you can abort your child for any and no reason because a person’s legal status depends on her physical location relative to a few inches of birth canal (or, it used to); if she’s on the inside, then she has not yet magically transformed from a not-a-person into a baby. Arbitrarily disallowing minority women who have a gender preference to know the gender of their not-a-baby seems just a TAD hypocritical to me.)

I try not to share the nastiest parts of our China experience on the internet. It’s rude and misleading to show up in someone else’s country and make a big deal out of the absolute worst or exceptional and freakish experiences. All our societies have brutal, inhuman aspects to them, but China takes it to a whole nother more explicit level by foregoing the faux-moral fig leaves to which Western societies still hypocritically cling. In blunt, unapologetic ‘honesty’ China carries some things further toward their logical conclusions than North Americans are currently willing to go or admit to (in the West we’re still in denial about being unable to grow Judeo-Christian moral absolute apples — like the inherent value and dignity of people — from secular, relativistic trees).

I could share some things, with photos, that people do and accept/tolerate in China that are so mind-blowingly brutal and animalistic that they make ubiquitous abortion look minor by comparison, even to the hardest-core pro-lifers — but I wont. I will, however, translate something below, because abortion in China is invading everyone’s consciousness here with increasing regularity. And since it actually invaded our home this week, I’m blogging it as a significant aspect of our China experience that we can’t ignore.

Magical Abortions… at a discount!

If you buy a pregnancy test today in Tianjin, China (we’re not pregnant), it comes with one of these (below), because if you’re potentially pregnant in China the first thing you’re apparently supposed to do is consider killing your baby. And judging from the amount of advertising, pre-birth infanticide is not only much more convenient than traditional infanticide, it’s a cash cow:

This is an abortion discount card for a local hospital. Mouseover the Chinese text below to see the pronunciation. The front says:

“PAINLESS ABORTION Assistance Card” 无痛人流援助卡
“Assistance amount: $50 援助金额：326元
Tianjin City Family Planning [Government-]Appointed Hospital 天津市计划生育定点医院
Painless Abortion Assistance Hotline 无痛人流援助热线

And then it has the address, bus routes, and website. The back is worse:

The back compares three kinds of abortion: abortion via drugs 药物流产, ordinary abortion 普通人工流产, and (in the pink column) “Blah-blah Hospital’s Hysteroscopy Obtain Embryo Surgery” XX医院宫腔镜取胚术 (a Tianjin City Women’s Federation Designated Medical Treatment Aid Hospital 天津市妇联指定医疗救助医院). Here’s what the pink column says:

• Surgery eligibility 适应症 (“medical indication”):
  • “up to and including the 11th week.”
• Surgery time 手术时间:
  • “three minutes” 3分钟。
• Anesthetic 麻醉:
  • “short-term effect I.V. anesthetic” 短效静脉麻醉。
• Patient’s surgery experience 手术者感受:
  • “sweet dreams during the surgery, wake up promptly, cozy and cheerful after the surgery” 术中甜梦、术后即醒、舒适愉悦。
• Harmful side-effects 不良反应:
  • “very few complications, won’t affect subsequent pregnancies, can go to work the next day” 并发症极少、不影响再次怀孕、转天即可上班。

Under the chart it says you can get:

1. “a free ‘early avoidance early pregnancy detection’/ultrasound exam (valued at $20 USD)”
   免早早孕检测/免费B超检查（价值126元）。
2. “$30 USD off an abortion (Please present this card when visiting)”
   凭此卡可抵扣人流手术费200元（就诊时请出示此卡）。

Related blog posts:

• When the news is real life
• October’s propaganda: anti-”gendercide”

Related news links:

• Chinese Academy of Social Sciences publishes the latest and most negative data on sex-selective abortion in China
• China’s abortion numbers grow
• Largest Gender Gap Seen in China’s Youngest Generation
• The worldwide war on baby girls
• India’s unwanted girls
• Mothers in China — Sobs on the night breeze: The centre of global gendercide
• Rise in abortions in China, young women targeted
• Abortion adverts come to a college campus
• Canada’s Missing Daughters
• Ultrasound ads promote female abortion
• Asian ‘Gendercide’ Migrates to North America

Canada’s “fourth trimester abortion”:

• Fourth Trimester Abortion
• Infanticide conviction nets Alberta woman suspended sentence
• Thrown Over the Fence — Infanticide, Canadian Style

On the Kermit Gosnell scandal:

• It is All About Abortion
• Gosnell Headlines? Gone, Baby, Gone!

In Canada the Province of British Columbia gave us a free CD with a hippie/new-age reading of a poem for infants about how “YOU. Are a chiiiiild of the UUUNiverse…”. In Tianjin our friends who had their baby here got this free bib with a One Child Policy slogan on it:

“Fewer births, scientific and healthier births, lifelong happiness”
or
“Fewer and better births make your life happier”
or
“Few births, scientifically bearing children, happiness for whole life”
少生优生，幸福一生
shǎo shēng yōushēng, xìngfú yìshēng

Other One Child Policy stuff:

• “There are too many Chinese!” (translations of One Child Policy signs in a Tianjin village).

Some other Vancouver stuff:

• China takes over world, starts with 2010 Olympic mascots, exacerbates Canadian identity crisis
• Chinese tattoos in Vancouver
• Aiya, Wen-ge-hua… 哎呀，温哥华……
• A “foreigner” in my own country, “yellow” people, and other funny Chinese racial talk
• How to: Confuse the traffic in your hometown

Chinese character tattoos are apparently pretty popular in Vancouver. Here are the ones I saw on people during the eight months we were there. Clicking on individual characters below will open a dictionary list of associated words.

I saw 成 (chéng) on a woman’s neck in the airport. With just a single character and no context, I guess it could theoretically mean all sorts of things; 成 is part of the words for grow, change, become, succeed… She had sort of the trendy hippie/new-agey/alternative thing going on, so I’m guessing she meant change or becoming.

勇敢 (yǒnggǎn / brave, courageous) on a guy’s neck on the Seabus.

There was more than one 爱 (ài / love), of course. For some reason both times I saw this it was also on people’s necks.

力 (lì / strength), predictably, was on a guy’s shoulder.

生 (shēng / life, birth, to be born) was on a guy’s hand on the bus. From overhearing his conversation it was obvious he was some kind of an evangelical Christian, so I wonder if he was going for life or born again or something, maybe with another tattoo that I didn’t see.

Come to thing of it, I’ve also seen 爱、力 and 生 on coffee mugs at the supermarket.

No doubt cultural influence still flows mostly from the West to China rather than vice versa, but I think it’s interesting how these mundane examples suggest that cultural influence from China is at least trickling in our direction.

Dear Vancouverites,

Ever wondered what all the Chinese people around you are talking about? Given the amount of Chinese people in Vancouver, you may wonder this occasionally.

From what we’ve overheard, most of the time it’s not that interesting; they’re just talking about mundane daily stuff like everyone else: when to meet or where to go or what to eat, etc. But occasionally you get funny stuff like, “Those foreigners are speaking Chinese!” (referring to us, and I’m a white Vancouverite born and raised), Mandarin radio English-teaching spots that use the example of a marijuana bust to illustrate “the jig is up,” or really random stuff like what we overheard this weekend.

We were hiking in the forest near Deep Cove in North Vancouver when a Chinese couple passed us going the other way. They were in the middle of a conversation and as they passed the man said, “In China and Taiwan they don’t have big heads like in other countries.”

Do lǎowài have big heads? In Tianjin we’ve heard lots of remarks about foreigners being tall, having “high” noses, even having “three dimensional” faces (I was seriously impressed with that woman’s English vocabulary), but do we have big heads, too? No wonder people stare at us. ;)

Related Posts:

• A “foreigner” in my own country, “yellow” people, and other funny Chinese racial talk
• Aiya, Wen-ge-hua… 哎呀，温哥华……

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

Once a wàiguórén, always a wàiguórén
We’re so used to hearing it that I didn’t think about it at the time: my ESL student from Beijing was using wàiguórén (外国人; foreigner) to refer to the white people in a Vancouver shopping mall this weekend. Then while we were shopping for Chinese DVDs a group of college-age Chinese girls passed us. One of them said in Mandarin to her friends, “Those foreigners are speaking Chinese!” I’d heard that Mainlanders sometimes talk this way even when they’re the foreigners, but this was my first time hearing it for myself.

Is there a term for this? “Middle Kingdom syndrome” or something? These people talk like they already own the whole world! ;)

Yellow people
One time the retired guys on the neighbourhood bike repair corner stopped me and Jessica to have a discussion about our respective colours: “She’s white, and we’re yellow, but what are you?” (I’m a white guy who was once mistaken for an Indo-Canadian.)

When Mainlanders call themselves ‘yellow’ the meaning has several connotations: the ‘yellow earth’, ‘yellow emperor’, Yellow River, yellow skin; China and Chinese are ‘yellow’ but not in the same way as the older, racist American ‘yellow’.

Whites are stronger, African Americans are faster, Africans more energy-efficient
Last week a Chinese guy we know here in Vancouver matter-of-factly unpacked his theory about the differences between races: whites are bigger and stronger than Chinese, but African Americans have stronger joints and that’s why they’re faster than whites and Chinese. Africans are skinnier and can live on less food. Chinese generally have weaker constitutions than everyone else.

Of course some of the ways Mainlanders can treat outsiders provokes my culture stress, and “racist” is occasionally an accurate description of some commonly heard conversation. But I love the way people sometimes discuss perceived racial differences (or any topic considered sensitive in the West) in that bluntly Chinese matter-of-fact way without malice and with zero regard for Western political correctness. It makes me chuckle at both our cultures. Talk that’s totally innocent in China is a cultural sin where I grew up, and using it can be a total gas for people like me from the socially liberal West Coast.

Anyone else experience funny Chinese racial talk?

Related Posts:

• Aiya, Wen-ge-hua… 哎呀，温哥华……
• Please Stop Paying Attention to My…
• 关心 talk – so offensive it’s funny

A rather Vancouver moment.

Today we took one of my Chinese students, a teenager from Beijing, to the Crystal Mall in Vancouver, B.C. for lunch and shopping. On the way home we were listening to Vancouver’s mostly-Chinese radio station, 96.1 FM, when a little English lesson segment came on introducing “The jig is up!” to the Chinese population of Vancouver. We listened to see how they’d translate it (完蛋了！), but I couldn’t help laughing and shaking my head when they gave the unfortunately appropriate example sentence: “The police found marijuana in his car. The jig is up!” At least Vancouver’s Chinese immigrant population is learning locally relevant English…

My Chinese students say the Crystal Mall is the current big Chinese hang-out (Chinatown is apparently for the older generation of Hong Kongers). If you combined a Tianjin supermarket with a Tianjin vegetable market, cleaned it up, made it a little less crowded, mixed in some 繁体字, and improved everyone’s English, you’d have the Crystal Mall. You can use Chinese in all the stores and they’ll hardly bat an eye.

We all had fun (Sara’s first time on the Skytrain), and it was good Chinese speaking time for us. I think we’ll do this again.

It was a cold, rainy day for the Vancouver Chinese New Year parade, and I pretty much missed the whole thing because I couldn’t get down there soon enough. I only managed to get a shot of these lions:

Several teams of lions, each accompanied by a drum-and-cymbal group on wheels, went around to different storefronts in Chinatown doing a little dance and lighting firecrackers.

Businesses were hanging cabbage and hóngbāos from their awnings. I think the lions took the hóngbāo as their pay and “ate” the cabbage, which ended up all over the sidewalk, but I’m not sure. That’s a pretty sketchy part of Vancouver and some random guy flinging cabbage wouldn’t necessarily be all that out of place.

For the significance of the cabbage, see “Two questions re： cabbages and toilets”. A hóngbāo (红包) is the special red envelope with money in it that people give one another during Chinese New Year and at weddings. One of our foreigner friends in Tianjin had an interesting hóngbāo experience this Chinese New Year while staying with a Chinese family.

It’s rush hour, and I’m crossing the road with my bike, standing there looking at the cars looking at me, all of us wondering why the other isn’t going. I’d stopped in the middle of the crosswalk to wait for the line of cars turning right to finish. I’d assumed they weren’t going to wait for me to finish crossing.

I try to wave the first car through, but he doesn’t go until I look away. But the next car tries to wait for me, too. I look away and wave him through, wondering what the chances are of getting two overly-polite drivers in a row.

They were waiting for me, of course, because I was in the crosswalk and pedestrians have right-of-way. Right of way? For pedestrians? Traffic rules? I thought being in the way gave you right of way. It was so weird to see cars actually voluntarily stop to make way for anything that for a moment I didn’t know what to do. But that’s how it works; I asked my dad when I got home.

In Tianjin if we want the cars to stop for us we just step in front of them and force them to stop, or at least swerve, or adjust their trajectory. But in Surrey, crosswalks are magic!

My autopilot needs to be reprogrammed, apparently.

Related Articles:

• How to: Ride a Bike in China (Part 2)

So we’re been in Canada for five days now. After sleeping off the jet lag, loafing, eating, and playing with family that we haven’t seen in two and half years, I’m finally getting around to increasing my so-far meager ESL tutoring workload and cracking the Chinese textbooks we brought with us… after a little blogging, of course.

oh. Canada.
I’m delighted by all the trees, clean air, dishwashers, real washing machines and dryers, water pressure, counter space, and the customer service. Do you Vancouverites have any idea how unbelievably easy it is to get things done over here? I went to do some banking — they practically fell over themselves trying to serve me; I was almost embarrassed for them. They worship customers here!

Jessica and I were walking home from the store and stopped at a crosswalk, waiting for the signal to change. There weren’t any cars. “Do people really just wait for the signal even when there’s no cars?” I honestly couldn’t remember. Jessica was certain that they did. I’m still not sure. It felt so weird to just stand there, all that open road space in front of us… surely that’s not necessary!

It was a little disappointing to find out that the Asian supermarket up the road uses traditional characters, and I still have to consciously remind myself not put the t.p. in the garbage can. But it’s too early for us to be really annoyed with anything yet.

In honour of Chinese New Year and our temporary return to the Great White North, I’d like to present Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his rather Canadian Chinese New Year greeting to Chinese Canadians, which for some reason made it on CCTV (begins at 1:22):

(Australia’s PM did his video in Mandarin.) There’s apparently a some sort of Chinese New Year’s celebration this coming Saturday in Richmond, Vancouver’s newer Chinese center, and I plan to be there (CNY is on a Monday in Canada, so some festivities are postponed to the weekend, or so I’m told).

Greater Vancouver’s an odd place, though aside from reverse culture stress stuff I don’t plan to blog about it. It’s not particularly Christian or American, but I biked by this sign on the way to the bank. Also, it turns out that just before we arrived, some homeless guys (homeless people have conspicuously strong political advocacy in Vancouver — contrast that with Tianjin!) set fire to the wooden supports for one of the major bridges going into Vancouver, meaning 80,000+ vehicles per day can’t use the bridge for at least a month, turning our whole area into a “traffic nightmare.” Funny thing is, this ‘traffic nightmare’ looks rather quiet, calm, and orderly to me. Only two lines (lines!) of cars where Tianjin would have four abreast plus bikes, and they’re all carrying only one person each! Canadians…