If you have a infant in China and you’re using baby formula, then this is for you.

The Problem

After the 2008 melamine milk powder scandal, in which several infants died and hundreds of thousands were harmed by drinking melamine-tainted baby formula, we heard other foreigners multiple times say, “Now’s the best time buy Chinese milk powder — it’s never been safer.” Thankfully, we knew better.

That kind of thinking is what Chinese people call “using foreign thinking to understand China” — in other words: wrong. Now in 2010 it’s all over the news that 170 tons of unsafe milk powder products that were supposed to be destroyed in the wake of the 2008 scandal were simply repackaged and put back on store shelves. Melamine is an industrial chemical used in plastics and adhesives that also creates false, boosted protein readings on quality tests of watered-down milk powder solutions so that they don’t appear diluted. It also causes kidney stones and kidney failure. Despite the very public scandal, people knowingly repackaged and resold a product that they knew was lethal. Silly foreigners; “you laowais can’t understand China.”

It’s not a matter of being overly cynical about the priorities of China’s highest leaders. The system is broken, or rather, it was never designed to protect and empower individuals and the public in the first place (just the opposite; it was designed to empower the rulers at the expense of the people). Even if high-level leaders have good intentions they simply can’t adequately enforce these kinds of policies. In response to a major international scandal in which babies died, hundreds of thousands were harmed and the public was outraged, they executed a dairy farmer and a salesman, shuffled the responsible gov. officials around, and obviously failed to remove 170 tons of the stuff that caused the damage in the first place. (Those ‘disgraced’ officials are now back in same-level or higher positions.)

It borders on irresponsible, in my opinion, to trust the Chinese system more than you have to. Thankfully, when it comes to baby formula, trusting the system is unnecessary.

Breast milk is best, of course, but if you live in China and your baby needs formula, 怎么办？

Our Solution

When we need baby formula, we use Táobǎo to get imported name-brand Dutch formula (inspected by our Dutch friends) for the same price or cheaper than what’s on the store shelves in China. No doubt it includes ingredients made in China, but Dutch babies haven’t gotten kidney stones from baby formula yet.

Taobao.com is the cuter, blinkier, Chinese eBay. Some of your Chinese friends or co-workers most likely have accounts. My Chinese co-workers used to shop on Táobǎo all day before the company blocked the site. Get someone to order imported formula for you or open your own account (opening an account requires Chinese and Táobǎo accounts can be complicated, even for locals).

*Special tip: The first time you order from a vendor on Taobao.com, order a small amount so you can check the product closely to see if anything looks suspicious. You can get fake stuff on Taobao just as easily as anywhere else. If it checks out, you’re good to go! The vendor we use is here.

**Warning: This is not foolproof! By ordering off Táobǎo you’re trusting your ability to spot a fake product. Some fakes can be very well done. Be extremely careful. Ordering imported formula from Taobao is no guarantee, it’s just significantly better odds than domestic formula, imo. For a safer and only slightly more expensive option, see the first and fifth comments below.

If anyone has any other baby-formula-in-China advice, please let us know in the comments!

(This is the first in a series; several more are cued up, in no particular order. We have a baby, so as we discover the tricks of the trade in China, we’ll share them here.)

Related:

• A Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 1 – is this our future?

Other foreign baby in China essentials:

• Foreign baby in China essentials: FRIENDLY STRANGER FINGER SHIELD
• Foreign baby in China essentials: FACEBOOK SUBSTITUTE (or VPN) & SKYPE
• Foreign baby in China essentials: AIR PURIFIER

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

(If what follows starts to sound culturally patronizing, just hold on… I saved that part for the end.)

Welcome to China! the Foreign Bubble

When we first arrived in China with next-to-no Mandarin or knowledge of our city, the organization that helped arrange our visas and school placement also arranged our apartment: we had a prearranged flat in a complex occupied entirely by foreigners where the manager had good English (back in the day this was the only place foreigners were allowed to live in Tianjin). It was super convenient, especially for China newbies who are usually high-maintenance. From the standpoint of an organization facilitating foreigners’ language school placement it was ideal. But for foreigners interested in China and Chinese, it sucked.

Ditching the Laowai Ghetto: hunting apartments armed with Chinglish

We’d come to China to study language and culture, and we’d decided before we even arrived that we’d be moving out of “洋人街” ASAP. It was inconvenient for language practice, and besides, going to a foreign country and living unnecessarily isolated from your new city’s regular people seemed really lame. So after about two months of classes we took a vocabulary list of apartment words, a map, and went and squinted at the scrawled 汉字 on the papers tacked to boards outside the little first-floor rental agencies tucked away in the surrounding neighbourhoods.

We knew what we wanted: an average neighbourhood (“average” as defined by locals, not foreigners) with a lot of outdoor community life and an apartment we could tolerate and that our neighbours, teachers, and local friends wouldn’t feel strange in. Surely, we thought, that isn’t too much to ask. Foreigners from one of the international schools told us we wouldn’t find “anything” (read: “livable”) for twice the price of what we eventually paid (also twice the price of what they said was the average Tianjin salary). We went with what our teachers told us instead, quickly realizing that foreigners can spend years in China and still know next-to-nothing about it.

Of course it was awkward pointing at a circle on a map and mispronouncing vocab words to rental agents who had maybe never talked face-to-face with a foreigner in their lives, but we managed to have three apartments shown to us. I wanted the first one, but the landlord balked when he discovered we were foreigners (that’s when we learned what “他有事” really means). The third location was perfect — better than we’d hoped. We incurred some 关系 debt because we had to ask a local friend (the boyfriend of a fellow foreigner) for a big favour to come with us to the contract negotiation and signing. It went smoothly, so we borrowed an electric 三轮车 and moved in.

The Benefits: people, people, people

Rather than bring local Tianjiners into our cultural space, we wanted to meet them in their own world where they were more comfortable. The single biggest benefit that living in this kind of neighbourhood gave us was exponentially increasing our daily opportunities for interaction with average, mainstream locals more on their turf than ours. We couldn’t come or go without speaking to someone, and usually more than one. The old boys club that hung out on the bike repair corner regularly included me in their Chinese chess, outdoor meals, and teasing. Families would invite us into their homes on the various big holidays. The only person we met in that neighbourhood in two years who had any amount of English — besides one charming but mentally handicapped man who would yell “I love you!” at us — was a university student three floors down who became a language exchange partner. It was a laid back but crowded, active community where language practice opportunities with everyone from laid-off factory workers to university professors were immediately available in excess of what we could handle. Those neighbours taught us more about China and made China more interesting, alive, and lovable to us than any books or classes ever could. Even on the worst days, we never regretted our decision to live there.

A few months after moving in our teachers, in their more candid moments, would sometimes confess that they felt extra awkward and distanced when visiting their foreign friends’ apartments for two big reasons. First, the furniture, decor, food, and even the way they were received as guests all felt foreign. Second, although the foreigners were taking a step down in living standards, to the Chinese their apartments just screamed wealth and economic privilege. In addition to the unavoidable language and cultural barriers, these foreigners, through their lifestyle choices, were emphasizing another gulf of distance between themselves and local Chinese: economic disparity.

The Downside: our economic elitism

The economic privilege in which most of us were raised (speaking globally here) gets us in two big ways. The first is largely practical, physical, external. The second is intensely personal.

Physical Annoyances & Inconveniences
My mother would be appalled if she saw that apartment. The whitewash was peeling and rubbed off on your clothes. The kitchen was the size of a closet. The toilet was in the shower and the exposed plumbing both precarious and temperamental. The sewer gas that came up the drains in the evenings smelled so bad it woke us up at night until we devised an overly complicated water-bottle-in-a-plastic-bag-hung-from-a-nail method for mostly-sealing the bathroom drain (plumbers don’t do U-bends in Tianjin). The windows let all the coal dust in and the layout of the place didn’t make sense to us. The electricity often shorted out and we had long extension cords running everywhere. There was only enough hot water in the winter for fast showers. I wore a toque to bed the week before they turned on the heat. In the words of younger versions of my little sisters: it was totally ghetto. But we would choose to live there again, no question. It was totally worth it. That apartment was slightly better or slightly worse than those of our neighbours, depending on the neighbours, and close enough to what they knew that our Chinese friends and neighbours felt much less awkward when they visited than they might have otherwise. I mention these things to give fair warning: if you aim to move into an average Chinese neighbourhood chances are you’ll be getting an average Chinese apartment. Count the cost, because not all foreigners are willing to pay it. Also, the neighbourhood and apartment described here, while unremarkable for that district of Tianjin, is still probably well above average for most places in China.

Uncomfortable Personal Discoveries
(Warning: confession/soap box/rant/sermon ahead.)
Whether it’s right or not, what’s a huge step down in living standards for the average foreigner is normal for the average Mainlander. If that embarrassing, awkward and unfair economic truth makes you feel uncomfortable and maybe even vaguely guilty, I promise I know how you feel, but I don’t apologize for bringing it up. That’s what we get for being the economically elite six percent of an otherwise much-less-privileged world. Keeping the hoi polloi at a distance so that we’re less poignantly reminded of this stark economic reality and our consciences are less likely to be called out does not make it any less real — but living in an average urban Chinese neighbourhood makes it harder to avoid.

If you’re a thinking, reflective person at all then living significantly below the comforts you’re accustomed to brings special challenges. Basically, you begin to discover how much of a pampered, manicured, whiny, elitist snob you are who has tragically confused unwarranted privileges with basic entitlements. When you get genuinely frustrated and upset about how sub-standard everything is, then you can enjoy the guilt that comes with realizing that you can’t handle what’s more than good enough for most of the world; for thinking that living more like the majority of the world is such a big sacrifice for which you should get some sort of multiculturalism medal. And when you’re in a good mood and those physical inconveniences aren’t annoying you as much as they would the average foreigner, then you can hate yourself for actually feeling proud of the fact that you deigned to lower your living standard closer to that of the global average, for thinking you’re better than all those other foreigners, and — last but certainly not least — for being so patronizing to the local Chinese.

The silver lining, I guess, is that living this way also creates ample opportunity to contemplate lifestyles that respectfully transcend economic divisions while still being honest about who we are and acting morally with our affluence given the economic disparity in the world… Anyway, that’s a big tangent I maybe should have saved for another post, but it’s part of our experience, so I’m leaving it in.

Gearing up for Location #2

That old apartment with its neighbourhood comes to mind today because right at the moment friends in Tianjin are securing an apartment for us for when we arrive in a couple weeks (we had to let the old one go when we left for Canada). When friends are doing us this huge favour we obviously don’t want to be picky, and with the baby we won’t be as mobile or tolerant/flexible as we were before. I’m also only on a year-long contract, so I don’t know how likely we’ll be to move after we arrive. The photos they sent make this second apartment look several notches above the first. I guess we’ll see…

Fun Chinese Apartment & Neighbourhood-related Posts:

• Becoming morning people
• Negotiating rent in Chinglish – Round One
• Lost the kitten, found the ninja
• Almost Famous
• Some rather dry illiteracy fun
• Our current home by the numbers
• Hunting Tianjin apartments, armed with Chinglish

Related “Living in China” posts:

• China-friendly New Year’s Resolutions for Laowais
• Living in China Q&A with a California Intercultural Studies class

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

We just got back from the annual NGO Christmas party. Christmas songs and the Christmas Story were conspicuously absent, unlike years past. This year in Tianjin, if foreigners and locals get together and sing Christmas songs or read the Christmas story at a non-preapproved venue and time, the sky will fall down. Actually getting preapproval would cause the canals to rise up and the garbage mountain to be cast into the artificial TV tower lake, so you can appreciate why preapproval is more of a theoretical possibility than an actual observed phenomenon.

Actually, that’s not exactly how the people of consequence explained it. But instead of getting into it and explaining it all here, I’ll just say that things are noticeably tighter in post-Olympic Tianjin, especially around Christmas. Since we’re the well-behaved kind of foreigners, our Tianjin Christmas is just that much less Christmas-y.

We still had a good time; our friends who were organizing it did a great job, especially with having to scrambled to redo the program at the last minute.

Tomorrow night me and a buddy are hitting the local bath house… Merry Christmas to us! Hopefully fun stories will be forthcoming.

(PS – Comments are closed on this post.)

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

I can’t provide details because this is Tianjin, and they-who-must-not-be-named, and the broken systems they perpetuate, are just that grinchy. Suffice to say that if they were trying to make a bad impression, encourage foreigners to “look down on China,” embarrass a bunch of locals in front of their foreign friends and co-workers and break a bunch of kids’ hearts, then they’re doing a fantastically effective good job.

(PS – I realize, of course, that giving foreigners a good impression is far, far down their personal priority lists. But anyway, now I feel better. ;) )

(PPS – The feelings expressed above don’t reflect our long-term, regular attitude toward these kinds of situations and the people who do them. But occasionally feeling this way is an unavoidable part of living here.)

(PPPS – Comments are closed on this post.)

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

Christmas!
And now for Christmas. To set the mood, behold! the photo on the right: this church in Tianjin has Santa and reindeer painted on the side… in August.

Two December’s ago, we brought you some disarmingly cute Third-Culture Kids from Africa making their point in a Target store.

Last December you just got a nice poem, though I was sorely tempted to post this video of a guy who crucifies Mickey Mouses and tries to exorcise the demons of out WalMart signs.

This year, it’s a slick little video from the Advent Conspiracy. Thank God your Christmas doesn’t have to be Made In China, or any other nation’s sweatshops:

Having a “christmas” that is Made In China and making Christmas in China — and everywhere else — are two different things. Thank God. And Merry Christmas!

(Thanks Miller and Steve for digging this one up. And for you Canadians: we’re not off the hook. Here’s the Canuck version.)

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

My only beef with Eric Liddell: Pure Gold, the latest Eric Liddell biography, is that I couldn’t get a feel for what kind of guy he was – what it might have been like to interact with him – until near the end of the book after he’d already died. The author desires to present Liddell as an inspirational Christian role model, and this becomes the book’s tragic flaw. Instead of letting Liddell’s inspiring life and character speak for themselves, the author coats the narrative in an artificial layer of Evangelical-ese, going out his way to over-emphasize and massage the aspects of Liddell’s spirituality that resonate in the popular Evangelical market. In the end, the Evangelical gene pool misses out on some potentially beneficial diversity, and the author produces a biography that reads a little too much like hagiography.*

Liddell comes across as so virtually perfect that he doesn’t seem real. The few token flaws mentioned are so minor and forgivable that they just reinforce the impression of an impossibly high degree of saintliness. It chaps my hide all the more because Eric Liddell’s life doesn’t need an author to compensate for it; his story is plenty inspiring and admirable in and of itself. Being able to see that this was a real man with whom we can relate and connect would make the story all the more compelling.

I finally found a pulse on this book’s Eric Liddell near the end, when the author quotes from an unnamed internee’s personal diary, written soon after Liddell’s unexpected passing in 1945:

He was not particularly clever, and not conspicuously able, but he was good. He was naturally reserved and tended to live in a world of his own, but he gave of himself unstintedly. His reserve did not prevent him from mixing with everybody and being known by everybody, but he always shrank from revealing his deepest needs and distresses, so that whilst he bore the burdens of many, very few could help to bear his.

His fame as an athlete helped him a good deal. He certainly didn’t look like a great runner, but the fact that he had been one gave him a self-confidence that men of his type don’t often have. He wasn’t a great leader, or an inspired thinker, but he knew what he ought to do, and he did it. He was a true disciple of the Master and worthy of the highest of places amongst the saints gathered in the Church triumphant. We have lost of our best, but we have gained a fragrant memory. (285)

This entry, for me, put some flesh and bones on the Eric Liddell of history, and in a way salvaged the whole book for me. I can look back at the stories and imagine a real, living and breathing brother, teammate, teacher, co-worker, husband, and father, rather than merely seeing a stock Evangelical archetype labeled “Eric Liddell.”

Historically, this book opens a window into the lives of missionary families of the day, how family members were often separated by oceans for long periods of time, dependent on written letters for news in an unstable time of civil and world war. The book offers only minimum detail regarding the larger, momentously consequential historical setting of aggressive Western economic imperialism (Liddell lived in Tianjin’s British ‘concession area’) and the brutal Japanese occupation of China. The Chinese people and culture of the time period, and Liddell’s interaction with them, also receive minimal attention. The bibliography is quite impressive; the author obviously did his homework. I just wish he’d backed off a bit and let us hear the story speak for itself.

Rumour has it that there’s an old man who sometimes attends one of the local churches here who actually remembers Eric Liddell, and who likes to give tours to all the related places of interest. Friends of ours did this a couple years ago. We just might hunt that guy down.

———

*(hagiography - an idealized, overly romanticized, and usually partially-fictionalized pseudo-biography intending to present the subject as worthy of admiration and imitation.)

©2010 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.