The Chinese editor at the magazine keeps complaining about the Regular Zhou‘s I’ve been choosing to profile, which include a bike repairman, a sidewalk barber, a parking attendant, a fried noodle vendor and a student. They don’t like the photos of my apparently-not-dressed-well-enough neighbours either. These aren’t the kind of people the boss/censor/overly-sensitive locals (not sure who, exactly) wants shown between the advertisements in a free monthly expat magazine in Tianjin. I’m supposed to find yuppies (“小资“, formerly called “petty bourgeoisie“), or at least wealthy “success” stories. Instead for May’s issue I found this guy, who, it turns out, had a bunch of sensitive stuff to say that normally wouldn’t get published in this city.

I self-censored a lot out before submitting the final draft, but even still none of the people involved on my end had much hope that the magazine would actually print it. In the past the censors have been extremely strict about anything related to Chr!stianity in China — as if they have orders to publicly pretend it isn’t here. Below is what they eventually printed, except for a couple of things:

1. Although they left most of the Chr!stian content in, a couple lines were removed. I added them back in in red below. There were some other odd (to me) editing decisions that seemed to characterized parts of his story in unnecessary ways, but I’ve left most of those alone.
2. I’ve altered the spelling on potentially sensitive words just to avoid triggering any automatic word filters or whatever. I know that’s paranoid, but since censorship enforcement is inconsistent and this is just a personal blog, I’d rather not unduly tempt fate.
3. I replaced their title with my original title (they substituted “Ask and you shall receive”, which I though was lame).

At the end I’ve also included the text and (bad) translation of the Chinese summary that they added, which contains some interesting vocab. Without further ado, here’s May’s Regular Zhou.

A Blessed Life

…one young Tianjin professional discovers something more powerful than fate and more valuable than success

Maybe you’ve seen the aerial photos of Chinese job fairs, the only events whose sprawling, densely-packed crowds could possibly rival those of a Spring Festival train station. China’s alarmingly over-saturated job market is especially tough on males, who first need to establish financial self-sufficiency for themselves and their parents and buy an apartment in the inflated housing market before they’ll be considered marriageable.

Employers benefit from the claustrophobic rat-race; millions of college graduates struggle to find their feet in spite of it. This is one young Tianjiner’s success story, though it’s not merely about transitioning between college and career in modern day Tianjin. This particular Tianjiner, whose Chinese name could be translated as “cultivate hope”, is passionately convinced of something he’s discovered along the way – there’s much more to life than salaries, promotions and apartments.

Sink or Swim
Zhū Lǎoshī (朱老师 / ‘Teacher Zhu’), as he’s known to students and coworkers, was born twenty-five years ago near Long Rainbow Park in Nánkāi (南开). He grew up in the Dàgǎng oil fields (大港油田) before studying teaching Chinese as a foreign language at the Tianjin Foreign Languages University. After four relaxed college years, the pressure was on.

“After graduating I found a part-time job teaching Chinese to foreigners at a private language center,” he says. “I worked there for one and half years. It was hard at first. I was a new teacher with no experience and in class I didn’t teach that well. But the students were really patient and encouraging and my coworkers helped me prepare lessons. They gave me lots of help and basically taught me how to teach.

“At the time my parents still lived in Dàgǎng but my job was in Héxī (河西). My part-time income wasn’t enough to rent an apartment, but my bosses provided a free place to stay for two months. Eventually I rented a small two-bedroom with five roommates. Every weekend I’d go home to Dàgǎng and my mom would make enough food for the whole week plus some to share with my friends.

“Working at the language center really gave me a lot of help. I made a lot of friends, I learned how to teach and work, and gained experience. Yet, while I was happy to begin with, during the third semester things got really difficult. With my lack of experience I was still only part-time and wasn’t making much money. I hated the idea of leaving because my students and coworkers were really great. But I couldn’t see my future there; that last semester was pretty painful. It was sad, but I stopped working there in February 2009.”

An Open Door
“I considered starting my own small business, but within one month of leaving the language center, one of my friends who works at a private school in town mentioned they were looking for a Chinese teacher. At first I wasn’t that interested, but when I found out there were Chr!stians working at this school I became really interested. I’d heard the Gospe! for the first time over a year before and I’d continued studying the B!ble. I wasn’t a Chr!stian then, but I’d started to believe. I believed there was a G0d and I’d had some really moving experiences, so I really hoped I could have some Chr!stian coworkers. I started preparing my application the very next day. I also started thinking a lot about how I’d come to believe in G0d.

“The interview went really well. On April 12 I moved out of my crowded apartment and moved my parents out of the oil fields into an apartment in Héxī where we live together. Two days later I received the call from the school and started working part-time on the 16th. I was extremely happy.”

Deep Impressions
“When I’d just started at my new job I saw the students’ art work and heard their songs – they were beautiful. They did science experiments and studied happily – they all had happy smiling faces. They were all really obedient, so different from the 90’s kids at my Chinese school. I could see it’s because this school provides a good environment. The school also held fun relationship-building activities for the teachers, students and parents. I really wanted to work there full-time.

“At the end of April I heard that two of my former students were having complications with their pregnancy. I was worried, but they’d returned to Canada to have the baby and I was in Tianjin. I wasn’t married, I couldn’t really understand, so I thought: All I can do is prey.

“I asked my coworkers to prey for them, too. At that time I’d just started working there; none of these coworkers knew who I was yet and they definitely didn’t know who my former students were. But when they heard about the situation, they wrote down their names and the details and promised to prey for them. Other coworkers preyed right away with me right there. I was deeply moved.

“I also discovered that many of my Western coworkers had adopted Chinese children. My coworkers aren’t really rich, so I don’t think it’s the same as rich people adopting kids. Adopting kids gives them lots of stress, but that doesn’t stop them. They do things the way G0d does; their love comes from G0d. Those kids were pitiful, no parents, but because they were adopted they have parents and brothers and sisters and an education. Their fate has been changed. I deeply respect these coworkers. They’re like this because they have G0d’s love.”

An Altered Destiny
“My students gave my supervisors positive feedback about my classes, and this really gave me hope that I’d be able to work full-time. The next semester I preyed about it a lot. Friends also preyed with me. Soon became a full-time teacher.

“I’ve worked there for almost a full year now. I really love this place and this job. It’s a good environment; they really care about people and give you lots of support. Sometimes coworkers ask me, “How are you?” I always tell them “Excellent!” because that’s really how I feel. Now that I have steady work that covers my rent, my family can live together and I don’t need to worry about them.”

It’s no surprise that some of Zhū Lǎoshī’s favourite B!ble verses are in Psa!m 23, about how G0d is like a good shepherd who provides His sheep with everything they need.

“I was bapt!zed on Christmas Eve 2009. I’m so thankful I have new life. Now everyday in the evening I prey together with Chinese a friend. This makes me closer and closer to G0d, and He refreshes me and gives me peace. I share the Gospe! with my parents and I hope they will believe, and stay in good health. I think G0d led me to this school. I want to continue working here for a long, long time.”

寻找生命的航标
朱老师来自天津大港，毕业几年间一直作着兼职中文老师的工作。从最初的“蚁族”，到如今能够把父母接到市区一起居住，朱老师经过了不懈的学习和努力。现在他已经shòuxǐ成为一名jīdūtú，这让他的心变得更加柔软，用更多的爱和关怀对待周围的人。通过一年的努力，朱老师终于转正成为专职老师了。他对自己的新生活心存感激。每天他都会虔诚地qídǎo，感谢shàngdì把他带到这所学校，并且希望能一直这样工作下去。

Seeking a Life Buoy
Zhu Laoshi comes from Dagang, Tianjin, and in the few years since graduating has held consecutive Chinese teaching jobs. From being part of the “ant tribe” at first, to nowadays being able to bring his parents to live together in the city, Zhu Laoshi has untiringly studied and worked hard. Now he’s been bapt!zed and become a Chr!stian, and this made his heart change to become softer, and uses even more love and care to treat the people around him. After a year of great effort, Zhu Laoshi finally became a full-time teacher. He has gratitude in his heart for his new life. Every day he will devoutly prey, thanking G0d for bringing him to this school, and also hopes that he can always continue in this kind of job.

[You can read about China's "ant tribe" (蚁族) here, here, here, here, or here.]

Related stuff:

• Meet Mr. Lù – a living Léi Fēng
• Meet Mr. Cháng – Navigating Fate
• Meet Guāng Yuǎn (光远)! (a.k.a ‘Shine Far’)
• Meet Liú Wěi – Coming of Age in a Changing China
• Meet Mrs. Shǐ – Striving Hard for a Stable Future
• One Tianjiner’s first impressions in America
• Two Worlds; One Apartment
• National ‘Face’ & Local Sensitivity (Part 1): Not fit to print in Tianjin
• National ‘Face’ & Local Sensitivity (Part 2): One hour of criticism on the “Regular Zhou” column & Tianjin Olympic interviews video

“Big rural village” indeed. Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Tianjin: China’s #1 most livable city! I can’t believe it. Our very own Tianjin, which is so beautiful that you can look at the sun and it doesn’t hurt your eyes, took top honours among Mainland cities this month in a study by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

First place in China makes Tianjin 72nd in the world according to the Economist’s Liveability ranking, which

quantifies the challenges that might be presented to an individual’s lifestyle in 140 cities worldwide. Each city is assigned a score for over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories: stability, health care, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure.

So our Canadian home is the most livable city in the world, and our Chinese home is the most livable city in China. If anyone has more info, please pass it along. I’d love to know how Tianjin scored this.

Below is the intro I never used for the “Tianjin-friendly New Year’s Resolutions for Laowais” magazine article last December, followed by links to some of our best Tianjin stuff.

Yeah yeah, in Tianjin we know how in Beijing you look down us for being old school and undistinguished, and how in Shanghai you think you’re better than, well, everybody, but the intro below from an upcoming local expat magazine article explains why Tianjin kicks all your butts!

Tianjin Rocks!

If you disregard your first impressions and look at it from the proper angle, it’s not hard to see that Tianjin is a romantic city with some exciting nightlife. Stop sniggering; I’m serious: romantic, with exciting nightlife. I’ll also add – traffic and public transit aside – warmhearted. I’m glad it’s not Shanghai or Beijing, and I’ve got good reasons.

Tianjin is a big city with a small town feel. Beijingers might say it’s unsophisticated and really just a big rural village (大农村), but they don’t know what they’re missing. Tianjin’s the kind of city where your neighbourhood bike repairman and his buddies will call you over to sit on those little stools, share some báijiǔ (白酒；white lightning) and play Chinese chess, even though you can barely ask for the bathroom in Chinese. It’s the kind of city where, when you’re reading your Chinese homework on a bench in the park, someone will eventually come sit next to you and make polite conversation. It’s the kind of place where you open your door to find the new neighbours you haven’t met yet standing there with a plate full of steaming dumplings for you and your wife. Or it’s a place where a stranger might join your picnic lunch, where people sing out loud biking down the road, where your taxi driver will talk your ear off if you let him, where couples tango in public, and where the parks are bustling with happy activity from after dinner until late.

Language barriers and vast cultural distances won’t stop the local lǎobǎixìng (老百姓；regular folks) from giving a warm welcome to the foreigners in their midst. Foreigners are still a little special here, but we’re not so unusual that people can’t relate to us normally-enough. Sometimes the biggest problem is the foreigners themselves; we miss out on many of the best aspects of Tianjin because we inadvertently make ourselves unavailable by living lifestyles that are incompatible with the main streams of local Tianjin life.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that pretty much none of Tianjin’s foreigners want to completely abandon all of their foreigner ways and living habits. Thankfully, that’s not necessary. Even just partially adjusting to the rhythms of local life can yield some meaningful relationships and experiences. Making ourselves available to the more meaningful aspects of local Tianjin life will greatly increase our enjoyment of this city and its people, and New Year’s resolutions are as good an excuse as any to get after it.

Selected Tianjin fun:
(You can browse the Tianjin or Regular Zhou categories for more.)

• Getting fire cupped in a Tianjin bath house (or) Losing a wrestling match to a giant octopus
• Staying Alive and On Your Bike in Tianjin
• Tianjin: more colourful in the rain, more marriable in the sun
• This week in Tianjin (photos)
• Photos from a Saturday bike trip around Tianjin
• Watching the Opening Ceremony with a few thousand Tianjiners! (video)
• Tianjin’s “Old Hundred Names” on the Olympics (video)
• Reduced to Memories: Tianjin’s hutongs
• The Tianjin “Incident”
• A little taste of Chinese New Year in our neighbourhood
• January’s propaganda: museum style (Tianjin Museum)
• Sex, drugs, and Tianjin University students
• Putting the OMG! in Smog

Tianjin is a fine place to be a China-loving lǎowài. (Never mind that Business Week rated it the 13th hardest “hardship post” (2nd worst in China) for foreign workers on account of the pollution, disease & sanitation, medical facilities, physical remoteness, and culture & recreation. Sissies! You’re an embarrassment!)

One young Tianjiner gets ready to celebrate his first Spring Festival away from home, and talks about the adjustments he’s faced during his first semester in America.

(Guāngyuǎn was profiled last May for the Regular Zhou column in a Tianjin expat magazine. Here he is nine months later, finishing his first semester in Iowa and looking forward to his first Spring Festival on foreign soil.)

Christmas can be one of the toughest times of the year for Tianjin’s foreigners. It’s at Christmas when we often miss our families the most, along with the friends, food, fun, and traditions that make Christmas one of the most meaningful dates on our calendars.

But Tianjin’s wàiguórén (外国人) aren’t the only ones missing out on the major family and cultural event of their year by living in a foreign land. For Tianjiners like Guāngyuǎn (光远), this winter also means passing the most meaningful time of year far away from home. Like us, he’ll be away from his family and closest friends, huddled together with a small group of fellow foreigners, trying to produce a traditional holiday meal without all the proper ingredients in a country that has no clue how to really celebrate the holiday he holds dear.

Spring Festival in the Excited States of America
When I first interviewed Guāngyuǎn early last year, he’d just received acceptance letters from several American university post-graduate engineering programs. He’s since moved to the U.S.A. and is just finishing his first semester at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. That means he’s gone from Big Brother to Uncle Sam; from Tianjin with its 7 or so million to Ames with its almost-51,000; from the Chinese exam-centered education system to America’s emphasis on independent thinking and self-expression. Once he finishes his first semester, it will be time to start preparing for Spring Festival. Here’s how he envisions it:

“In America, I have made a lot of new friends. I think at the first spring festival in USA, I plan to have a good time with my Chinese friends. Maybe to have a party is a great choice for us. Of course, we will invite some American friends and other international students for sure. In the party, I and my friends will cook Chinese foods for us and the customers. Considering that Ames, the location of Iowa State University, is in winter and just like the winter in Tianjin, the hotpot and dumpling, Chinese traditional food, is necessary. At that time, we will enjoy warm food and warm environment.

“Since I was born, I have celebrated every Spring Festival with my parents and relatives. There is no exception for this. I guess, to have Spring Festival is a great experience for me, although I have a little bit homesick. So as what I did (拜年；bài nián; call or visit to wish someone happy New Year) in the last Spring Festival, I will give the call to everyone who cares me and tell them that I am great in America and don’t need to worry about me. Maybe the people in my family will feel different… ‘Where is Guāngyuǎn?’ Haha.”

Living Life Elsewhere
Guāngyuǎn knew that adjusting life in the U.S. wouldn’t be easy, and he shared his feelings about it before he left:

“I worry about the absolutely strange environment, strange people, and strange culture that I will face after I land in the USA, which is full of challenges for me. Therefore I feel excited and nervous.

“I plan to live the community outside the campus, so my roommate and neighbor might be western people. …it is the first step for me to overcome language difficulty and get involve western culture and society. These are related to many living things, like buying the stuff, communicating with native people, and getting used to western living style. …I will face similar problems in the campus. To better understand what the professors talk about, I need not only to ask questions in class but also to communicate with other students after class positively. Other than these, there are great differences with class, homework and exams between American universities and Chinese ones. Above all… culture shock and language are great challenge for me and therefore make me a little bit nervous. But I believe I can do it better as soon as possible. Maybe one day I will feel comfortable to live outside the ‘Chinese culture bubble’ in the future. Every time I think that this day is coming, I am very excited.”

I caught up with Guāngyuǎn for a second time as he was preparing for his semester’s final exams. I asked him about his cross-cultural experience so far, and what sort of impression he’s getting of Americans and life in the States.

Tianjin, China vs. Ames, Iowa
“America’s big cities are noisy and bustling just like China’s, but I’m just at Ames, a small town [population 51,000]. In China this kind of place is considered a small town. It’s really peaceful, so much so that every day you can go out on the street and often not see anyone.”

Daily Life Differences
“When I was in Tianjin and Beijing, I didn’t need to rent house myself. Also students hardly ever needed to cook their own meals. But when I came to the U.S. it wasn’t the same. You have to go yourself and rent an apartment and purchase furniture. Here there are very few Chinese-style vegetable markets, outdoor markets and so on, so every week I have to go once to the supermarket and buy everything. And I still have to learn to cook. Since I’ve arrived here I’m already slowly learning how to cook some things.

“A lot of things are new to me, I’m learning how to go do them. Regular people in China don’t need to use credit cards and checks to make payments, instead they use cash, but in the U.S. it’s just the opposite. In China you very seldom see bills and such, but in one month in the U.S. you will receive every kind of bill (rent, electricity, gas, cell phone, credit card…). Anyway, in the U.S. these are all simple, you can pay everything online. It’s really quick and convenient. Also in the U.S. you have to learn how to find a good deal. Sometimes so many things are so cheap you just stand there amazed. A laptop valued at over 10,000 in China is only 5000 in the U.S. In the U.S., cars are as common as bicycles are in China. If you don’t have a car, you’ll feel it’s really inconvenient. But I’m fortunate to live in Ames where there’s good public transit. But even here driving a car is an essential skill.”

Living with the Yanks
“Americans like things simple and direct, not implicit like Chinese people. Americans first speak their mind and then try to explain themselves. Chinese people are just the opposite. The food American’s like is all simple to make, not like Chinese people who like to prepare meals pan-fried. Thus in the supermarket you can see a lot of half-finished food products (however China domestically now also has this kind of similar trend).

“Americans like to have ‘excuse me,’ ‘sorry’ ready on the tip of their tongue, if they feel they caused someone inconvenience the just blurt it out. In the U.S., grass is for people to walk on, sit on, or lay on – this is really different from China. In the U.S., pedestrians are ‘king’; cars all have to make way for you.”

Comparing the Chinese and American Classroom Experience
“American classroom atmosphere is more vigourous than in China. Students in class can ‘at any time’ ‘call out’ their own viewpoints, problems, and ideas. American education pays particular attention to making students learn to think independently but at the same time learn team cooperation. Here the homework and projects arranged by the teacher all make the students be part of a group to accomplish something. They also ask the students to elaborate on their own points of view, so in class student presentations are a common thing.”

Adjusting to a New Cultural Context
“In life, if you try to learn and imitate you’ll quickly be able to adapt. I feel that concerning the foreign students, the hardest thing to adapt to are the cultural and the educational issues. First of all, being able to use the language is a significant concern. Once you’re able to easily use English to communicate with others, then you’re really able to get over your culture and education shock. To make progress with cultural and educational differences, you also need to actively go with American classmates and communicate for a long period of time. Then you’ll naturally adapt.”

I asked Guāngyuǎn he feels he’s changed a little bit since he’s been in the U.S., but he doesn’t seem to think so: “Actually rather than say I’ve changed personally, it’s better to say I’m just gradually started getting used to American life and study.”

What Does a Tianjiner in America Miss the Most?
“Speaking about what I miss the most, it’s has to be Chinese food, especially the food my mom cooks. When I go back to China I’m going to gobble down special food, but at the same time I need to raise the level of my culinary skills.”

Favourite American Food
“My favourite American food is sweet potato, along with Mexican chicken burrito (seems like that’s Spanish food?). American home-baked cookies are also really good.”

Making Do
“I think, every international student has the same feeling and experience. You and your wife live in China now and don’t come back to the motherland to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas. But this is the life and it is changing. Therefore, we have to adapt and learn to enjoy it.”

Related Articles:

• Meet Guāng Yuǎn (光远)! (a.k.a ‘Shine Far’)
• At the Animal Garden with Shine Far
• Sharing Chinese New Year’s with the neighbours

Mrs. Shǐ is December’s Regular Zhou. The magazine seems to share similar feelings with one other critic who doesn’t appreciate having China’s blue collar folks telling their stories in foreigners’ magazines. So I guess from now on they’ll be “above-average Joe’s,” or at least for the next few months while we’re in Canada and I have to interview over e-mail.

As usual, the blog version below has better photos and includes the more interesting content. But I still haven’t included any of the horrific Cultural Revolution stories she told, or her complaints about the Olympics.

Striving Hard for a Stable Future

How one Tianjiner works daily to give her son a better life, one plate of chǎo bǐng at a time.

Mrs. Shǐ is my favourite kind of Tianjiner. She’s warm and engaging, ready for conversation, and patient with language students’ pathetic Mandarin. If you’ve got the time and the ear, she’s willing to share all kinds of stories from her experiences growing up in Tianjin during China’s tumultuous last 50 years. Plus, she makes great chǎo bǐng (炒饼) and dàbǐng jīdàn (大饼鸡蛋), able to warm both the stomach and the heart.

Mrs. Shǐ, whose given name evokes images of mountains with colourful clouds, sells breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the occasional midnight snack from her xiǎomàibù (小卖部), the little shop she’s carved out of a first floor apartment that she shares with her 25-year-old son. She used to sell food from an outdoor stall in a bustling street market for eleven years before the market was cleared away in a nationwide sanitation campaign.

I’m often there at lunchtime, when the tables and stools out on the sidewalk are filled with hungry college students, vegetable market shoppers, and workmen. Inside the walls are lined floor to ceiling with shelves that overflow with snack food, cigarettes, alcohol, and seemingly random items like a large bag full of beer bottle caps. In between the newly-acquired fridge and a small low table with plastic stools there’s just enough room to take three steps to the cooking area, where she single-handledly produces dozens of meals every day.

Daily Routine
She gets up at 5:30 every morning, arranges the displays, tables, and chairs on the sidewalk, and prepares to start serving breakfast at 6am. After breakfast she makes some purchases, cuts up cabbage and cucumber, and gets ready for the lunch rush. After lunch she’ll rest her head in her arms over the freezer and take a nap. She finally closes shop at 11pm, but that doesn’t always stop customers.

At 12:30am they knock on my door and I have to sell: “Ayi! Ayi! I want dàbǐng jīdàn!” I haven’t counted how much I sleep at night. I close shop, eat dinner, shower, drink some water, watch a little TV, then go to sleep at I don’t know what time, maybe 1am or 2am. For twelve years I’ve managed like this.

Growing Up
Her living situation today is better than it was in past decades, when she remembers food rationing and being unable to buy things, even if you had the money. Still, some of her favourite memories are of her childhood in Tianjin’s “South City No-Man’s-Land” (南市三不管儿 / nánshì sānbùguǎnr), which until recently was one of Tianjin’s most well-known historical neighbourhoods, famous for its noisy, packed street markets containing all manner of food and entertainment. Nanshi Food Street (南市食品街 / nánshì shípǐn jiē) now sits near where she grew up as the middle child of seven.

When I was little I was pretty mischievious, even though I was a girl. I was a tomboy. Growing up in Nanshi was good. I could talk about Nanshi from morning ‘til night. It was really rènao (热闹 / loud, bustling, lively), especially in the evenings. There were wrestlers, storytellers, hot rice vendors, soup vendors, all crying out, it was fun to hear. You could buy big snails, five or six for two máo ($0.03). When we were small we couldn’t cook; we’d just go to the food vendors.

I had my son in Nanshi. When he was one-and-a-half, in 1983 on May 26, I moved to our current place. That was when they built Food Street and assigned us housing according to the number of people in our family. Now I have my own house to live in. In the old place I didn’t have my own room, but I like the old place. It was rènao and convenient. Now it’s already gone; it’s all Food Street now. It’s been more than twenty years, but I still cherish the memories of Nanshi.

Future Hopes
The turbulance of the past still impacts her life today, as it does for millions of Mainlanders from her generation. When the Cultural Revolution broke out she was just starting middle school. That means she essentially never had a chance for a real, normal education, but still has to make do in today’s market economy. “Long live Chairman Mao” is the only thing she can say in English. She’s come through hard times, and those life experiences shape her hopes for the future:

I wish my son was able to go abroad, like the way you came to our country. But I can’t be too idealistic. I don’t have desire or hope anything for myself. I just hope my son’s future is able to be good. I don’t hope that in the future he becomes a boss or whatever. Just so long as he doesn’t have to have the kind of difficulties I’ve had it’s fine.

My most important desire is to hurry and make money so my son can buy his own place and get a wife, and have a stable life – a little bit better life. Right now I feel tired, but I can’t stop because life pressures are too great. My son is going to university and working, earning his own tuition.

Foreigners
I can’t resist asking Mrs. Shǐ what she thinks of foreigners:

I’ve had contact with Japanese, Americans – I’m in contact with a lot of foreigners. We get along really good. Aside from nationality, we’re all friends, and also all neighbours, right? It’s just our skin colour is different. I wish foreigners and us would talk and communicate more.

Several months ago I interviewed a former street-food vendor for the Regular Zhou column. My Chinese isn’t that good, so I have to get help transcribing the recordings into Chinese. But this time there was a problem. After hearing what this woman in her 50′s had to say, people are refusing to help me transcribe it.

If the interviewee talks into a conversation area that I have no vocabulary for, talks too fast, too unclear, uses bad grammar or uses too much Tianjin dialect, they can lose me pretty quick. Usually I transcribe as much of the interview as I can myself, and then get help filling in the gaps. Then I translate it into English, get help with the difficult bits, and from the English write the column. It’s monstrously tedious, and not at all worth it merely for the column itself, but it’s language practice and the people are interesting.

During the semester finding transcription help is easy because there are local university students at our school who have to log hours practicing teaching foreigners Chinese. This means free extra class/practice for us Mandarin students; we voluntarily sign up for as many hours a day as we want! All the previous Regular Zhou articles had their help. But during the summer semester our “language slaves” (we mean that affectionately) were gone and I had to ask others for a favour.

First I took an hour of regular class time and asked one of my real teachers to help me. After listening for a bit he started saying, “天哪！” (tiān nǎ / “Heavens!”) and laughing in the way Mainlanders do when they’re embarrassed and/or uncomfortable. He started dragging his feet and making it quite clear that he didn’t want to do it, so I gave up (I didn’t want to waste class time on this anyway). Next I tried a local friend, who was a Regular Zhou himself. When he came to certain sections, he’d just tell me, “This part is useless. It’s not interesting. You don’t need it. Let’s skip it.” He made the whole process so burdensome that I was happy to have him stop helping. For my third attempt I took a long shot and asked the editor if anyone on staff could transcribe it for me. He said sure, and had me email the audio files to one of the magazine’s local staff. She flat out refused after listening to it, saying it was way too sensitive. So this interview has been on hold until last week, when the local university sent over a fresh batch of language slaves.

Most school days this semester I do two or three hours of real class, two hours of free practice with the local students, and now one extra hour on this transcript (it will only take a few hours total to finish). For most of these practice sessions I’ve had the same student. We’ve gotten on really well, and he’s willing to help me finish it. We’re about 3/4 of the way done. When he came to the sensitive sections, I had to reassure him that I wasn’t going to publish the embarrassing stuff and even if I wanted to I couldn’t because they’d censor it out anyway. He said he was worried that it would make it into Western media. I told him don’t worry, I’m not a real writer and no Western magazines or newspapers want my stuff. He was still afraid someone might steal it from me and publish it in Western media. I told him they already have lots of material like this, plus now there’s a bit of backlash against ‘China bashing’ in some English-language media.

So what was the terrible, forbidden material? I already knew that the woman had talked about her family’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution. At least one of her siblings was sent “up the mountain and down to the countryside” (上山下乡 / shàng shān xià xiāng). Someone was killed, and someone committed suicide by jumping off a building, but I couldn’t catch all the details on my own. The magazine staff and my real teacher had reacted to this section, I think. But that’s not the offending section beside which this student wrote “careful” and marked off with brackets.

It turn out this former streetfood vendor who now sells hot lunches out of a 1st floor doorway had some complaints about how the Olympics are irrelevant to her life except for the negative impact on her livelihood. The citywide pre-Olympic facelift made it harder for her to make a living, and she thinks they were wrong they way they treated people like her. That’s the taboo content that people didn’t want me to see and don’t want me to write about.

The student who’s helping me trusts, or at least hopes, that I won’t take this material and use it to intentionally make China look bad. He’s right, plus I appreciate him taking the chance and helping me out. But I suspect that he and I may have very different ideas about what counts as fair, appropriate, non-malicious, well-intentioned writing. (I realize that foreigners are only one of their main audiences, but I wish people here could see that overly-sensitive censorship itself makes a much worse impression in the eyes of Westerners than whatever the particular content is that they’re censoring.)

After we’d transcribed this section and had our little talk about being careful with it, he looked at what she’d said and remarked, “She’s right.” Not that it really matters, because by the time her profile makes it into the local expat magazine, it will be safely saccharin-ized.

I’ll post a slightly more interesting version on the blog when the time comes. After all, she’s quite a character, grew up in Tianjin’s “no man’s land” hutongs (南市三不管 / nán shì sān bù guǎn) and has lived through a lot (same generation as “Old Lu”).

I arrived in class one August Friday morning, my teacher immediately launched into an hour-long criticism session of my Regular Zhou column and the Tianjin Lǎobǎixìng Olympic interviews video. Turns out she’s not a big fan. I won’t try to rewrite the whole conversation, but I’ll try to summarize her complaints because I think they’re culturally revealing.

I’d suspected that the video hadn’t been a big hit with the teachers because none of them had given me any feedback about it at all, even though most of my past and present teachers had seen it. That seemed conspicuous, but I didn’t see this coming. She told me she was telling me as my friend and as my teacher; she wasn’t at all rude by Chinese standards, but it quickly became apparent that our viewpoints are miles apart.

I think her objections are interesting because to her they were obvious, though I was caught completely by surprise. Looking back, I think the real complaint underneath it all is that she didn’t like the view of China that my articles give to foreigners.

Complaint #1: The purpose of writing people’s stories
She started off by asking me questions about how much contact I still had with the people I’d interviewed, and if they were my friends or not (looking back, I suspect she was testing the waters to see how much she could diss them). Then she launched into a mini lecture on the purpose of writing people’s stories in magazines, which she assumed applied to both Chinese and Western media. The obvious purpose of interviewing people and writing their stories, she said, is to give the public a good example to follow; to give the reader a good feeling. I should pick successful people and write success stories of people overcoming obstacles and achieving their dreams, and I should write the articles in a way that makes them look good.

After laying that out, she proceeded to compare my choice of interviewees and the content of their stories to that standard, demonstrating how I was failing to meet the obvious and apparently universal expectations and purposes of writing these kinds of articles. To emphasize this, she dissed my interviewees, saying how they don’t work hard, they complain about their wages, they’re poor, and they aren’t good examples.

All the talk about deliberately making people into an example led into complaint #2.

Complaint #2: Fake is better and expected
When I responded to her first volley, I tried to delicately explain that foreigners see that sort of thing as “fake,” and they aren’t very interested in a nice but fake image (I was gentle using “fake” because I was afraid it would come off sounding derogatory). But instead she literally defended “fake,” which surprised me, saying that this was a big cultural difference. (Obviously North Americans do prefer fake in their media, but in a different way.)

I brought up the example of when I first bought flowers here for Jessica. They came perfumed, and the shop lady put glitter sprinkles all over them right before she handed them to me. To us, it makes no sense to ruin the beauty of the flowers by faking them up like that. But to Mainlanders, that makes the flowers even more beautiful. Wedding decorations go the same way. And the same thing happens with the Great Wall; Mainlanders like the Disney-fied, rebuilt portions, and foreigners prefer the “real” Great Wall – the untouched, crumbling sections. But my teachers already knows all this stuff and just doesn’t agree (she’s been teaching foreigners for a few years now).

Complaint #3: Don’t give troublemakers opportunities to make trouble
I think she tacked this point on to her argument near the end when she saw that I wasn’t being convinced: Didn’t I know that there are lots of people who are looking for things to criticize and make trouble about, and even if I’m not deliberately writing bad things, I’m not being careful and they could easily make it look like I was out to make China look bad? Did I know what they could do to me? (Things were suddenly taking a slight turn for the dramatic.) Since it’s the Olympics it’s a very sensitive time for China (no kidding!), and I should do everything I can to avoid giving bad people an opportunity to make trouble.

In the end, she was upset because I wasn’t deliberately making China look better by ignoring the more common people and selecting only the better-looking exceptions to present as examples. Giving foreigners a more accurate image of China isn’t what my teacher, and a lot of other Mainlanders, seem to be interested in.

(P.S. – Obligatory caveat: While a lot of people here share similar feelings to my teacher, there are also plenty of Mainlanders who would disagree. There’s plenty of variety of opinion in China, and when that variety crosses our paths in any sort of significant way, I’ll blog about that, too.)

This photo gallery covers everything from the Tianjin Torch Relay to the Closing Ceremony, but it’s really only one slice of our Olympic experience. A fuller picture should include Tianjin’s massive urban face lift, transformation, and disruption (links go to related blog posts and photo galleries): propaganda slogans everywhere, the campaigns to change public behaviour, street markets and vendors cleared off and our favourite lunch windows being forced to temporarily close, roads paved, buildings painted, fake roofs constructed, ubiquitous migrant worker camps, homes bulldozed and whole blocks of residents relocated, parks and sidewalks getting torn up and replanted, the pollution, and the patriotism and nationalism. And, of course, the Fuwas.

The 2008 Olympics, of course, were about much more than sports, and we wrote on some of that, too:

• What do the Olympics mean to “their China”?
• Why Mainlanders are taking it personally, racially, and facially – the short answer
• The Olympics and the Earthquake: A Regular Zhou’s perspective
• The Olympic welcome China wants us to experience
• Tianjin’s “Old Hundred Names” on the Olympics (video interviews)

This gallery covers, in order: the Tianjin Torch Relay, soccer matches in Tianjin, the Opening Ceremony, a day running around Olympic Beijing, watching matches on the big screen in the park, and the Closing Ceremony. Here’re the related blog posts:

• The “Sacred Flame” comes to Tianjin!
• Watching the Opening Ceremony with a few thousand Tianjiners!
• Olympic soccer in Tianjin!
• Photos & Stories from a day in Olympic Beijing
• Watching the Closing Ceremony with a few hundred Tianjiners

Scroll down to read and write comments!

Click here to see all our Olympics-related posts.

(This is about cultural communication – actually, miscommunication – not politics.)

As most of you know, President Bush, unlike Prime Minister Harper, decided not to snub the Opening Ceremonies. And he’s combined his presence in China as a guest of the State with that of outspoken public critic, going out of his way to try and put public pressure on China’s rulers (his church visit, for example). He discussed his actions in China in an NBC interview that has since been removed from YouTube, but you can watch it here or read the transcript here.

Unfortunately, one apparently popular Chinese way to interpret this kind of behaviour – happily attending the Games while being publicly critical – is exactly the message the President does not want to send.

Western media is starting to notice this interpretation, and this Guardian piece sums is up:

Combining his criticism with a visit to China sends precisely the wrong message to the Chinese people. As they see it, even though Bush hates China – why else would he say such hurtful things? – China is so powerful that he must nevertheless come to the Olympics to honour China’s leadership and people.

I was kind of appalled when I first came across this perspective at Fool’s Mountain, a site dedicated to publishing Chinese views in English. Here it is in the words of an overseas Mainlander:

The cheers and applauses each nation received, especially the loud-mouthed boycotters, from the Chinese audience during the March of the Nations, carried interesting messages. What was the Chinese cheering for when team France, team Germany and team USA marched in (wink, wink, wink)?

I started to feel grateful; maybe China owes the world a “thank you”. Then I had a second thought. The congregation of the world’s Celebrities of Political Power DESPITE the strong forces holding them back demonstrates China’ Soft Power, not the world’s charity or fondness for the Chinese.

Power is the capacity to induce compliance, to make others do your biding. The ability to induce compliance in your competitors, detractors, or even better, your enemies, to make them bend backwards to accommodate your needs, demonstrates your power. Their protest is an index of your power; the louder the protest, the more clearly you know you are prevailing and frustrating them. The violent protests that disrupted the Olympic Torch Relay throughout the Caucasian World (Europe, Australia and North America) never induced “humiliation” in me, nor did the “Genocide Olympics” t-shirts and banners. Instead, they stirred a feeling of invigoration…

Then the Western protest led me to a third thought. The concept of “soft power” is baloney. China did not attract the political celebrities to the Opening Ceremony with its culture, value or ideas. There is no such a thing as “soft power”. The only power recognized in this world comes from Money and Guns… The Olympics are indeed China’s “coming out party”. It celebrates China’s beginning to master the combined power of Money and Guns. The eighty some heads of states bore witness to this achievement at the National Stadium in Beijing on the evening of 08, 08, 2008, with profuse sweating and pungent body odor.

I’m pretty confident that most of the Western athletes and tourists don’t see it this way. And one major caveat: the writer I’ve quoted here grew up in Beijing but now lives and works as a professor in an American university. His perspective is not necessarily that of the average noodle-seller on the street corner. Also, people are finally starting to give more attention to the discrepancy between online Chinese opinion and the opinion of China’s “regular Zhous” (fyi – “zhou” is pronouced “Joe”… little pun there). Not to mention the variety of opinion produced by generational, regional, and economic differences in China.

(Reminder: I don’t want to read anyone’s personal assessment of George Bush in the comments. This is about cross-cultural communication in China.)

(Liú Wěi is August’s Regular Zhou. Click the photos to see them bigger.)

Coming of Age in a Changing China

The recently-inserted trees and their bracing poles are blocking our view. We don’t mind, though, because two green-shrouded half-finished high-rises tirelessly belch noise and dust directly across the canal from the park bench we’re sitting on. “Tianjin is a big city in China,” says Liú Wěi (刘伟), sitting next to me and talking over the rumble of construction. “Its development is rapid and widespread; it’s not like it was before.”

Liú Wěi is a born and raised Tianjiner. He’s only 25 years old, but that’s old enough to remember a very different city. He remembers when food tickets were still in use, public transportation was cheaper and the buses more rundown. It was a time when, to him, society seemed in better order. He calls the changes and development especially xùnměng (迅猛), which could be translated “rapid and violent,” but he doesn’t mean it negatively. To put it another way, Liú Wěi remembers elementary school days when there where hardly any foreigners to be seen in Tianjin, but now he learns swing dancing with some on Thursday nights.

For Tianjin and the rest of China, rapid development means much more than just an altered cityscape and wanton consumerism. It’s no secret that since the beginning of the 1980’s and the advent of China’s Reform and Opening (改革开放 / gǎi gé kāi fàng), the gap between the newly rich elite and the poorer masses has been widening. While almost everyone in China enjoys better living standards than before, Mainlanders are also navigating a rising tide of economic disparity; some sink, some sail in luxury, and others tread water while scrambling to build makeshift rafts. In Tianjin you can see them all, and Liú Wěi is among them.

On the other side of the tracks
Liú Wěi was born, raised, and educated in Tianjin’s Hedong district (河东区). His home, primary, and middle schools were within walking distance of the “back plaza” behind the old train station (后广场). For fun he and his classmates would play hide-and-seek, marbles, or go to the train station and watch the trains. The furthest he ever travelled was Quànyè Market (劝业场), which is no more than a bike ride’s distance from his home.

When I was little life was very happy, very simple, not like today, busy with so many matters… I really cherish the memories of my childhood. It was a happy time.

After middle school he studied property management at a vocational training school. Since graduating in 2003 he’s worked in a supermarket, a clothing factory, sold solar powered water heaters. He currently works as a security guard (保安 / bǎo ān) in Tónglóu (佟楼), a half hour bike ride from home.

A working man, with his world on his shoulders
Liú Wěi and his parents moved into a two bedroom apartment in Hebei district a few months ago. Long before he was born, his parents were each sent “up the mountain down to the village” (上山下乡 / shàng shān xià xiāng) for about four years during the Cultural Revolution (文化大革命 / wén huà dà gé mìng): his father to Inner Mongolia and his mother to Héběi province. Afterward his father worked in a T.V. factory and his mother for a construction company. He worries about them.

My parent’s health isn’t especially good. They’re already retired, and wile away the time at home. …Our family’s situation isn’t especially good. My parents’ retirement wages only add less than 3000元 ($438). My wages aren’t especially much. In one week I sometimes work 48 hours, sometimes 36. One hour is 6元 (less than $1), one month around 900元 ($131). In one month I only have half a month’s work. I don’t have a car and don’t have a house. My income isn’t that high. My future plans – I’m very worried about my future.

Now I want to go to school at Tianjin University. They have an adult education college. There are too many non-local university students and job seekers. The population is too big, so it’s very hard to find a job, not like America and European countries. If I’m able I want to go to university and afterward find a good job. I want my friends and relatives to be healthy and happy each day. I plan to look for an ideal job – then I won’t have to worry about being able to find a wife. I hope my parents can be really healthy and that our household starts to become prosperous. I just wish to pass each day happily.

Despite the pressure, he still finds some time to relax.

When I’m not working I just study at home or play with friends, go online or go to a bookstore. When I have spare time I like to go online and play games, or talk with friends, or look for information on ways to get better employment, and also read news on China’s current situation with foreign countries.

The Earthquake, the Olympics, & a patriotic heart

Right now I care a lot about the Wenchuan, Sichuan great earthquake issue. …This is an extremely difficult and especially big affair. Everyone is paying close attention to the circumstances of the earthquake disaster area’s common people… Whoever has money sends money, whoever has strength sends strength, whoever has things sends things. This shows the united spirit of the Chinese people. ‘When one place has trouble, all places provide help’ (一方有难八方支援 / yī fāng yǒu nàn, bāfāng zhīyuán).

China holding the Olympics utilizes a lot of manpower and financial and physical resources. The Olympics doesn’t assist China’s common people very much. It mainly expresses China’s place in the world, by showing that China can run this Olympics well. The Chinese people are extremely concerned with this matter, however, heaven isn’t helping out (天公不做美 / tiān gōng bù zuò měi). Since the earthquake a lot of Chinese people have lost confidence regarding the Olympics. But I feel we ought to transform our sorrow into strength, and strive as much as possible to manage this Olympics well.

You are warmly welcomed to harmoniously enter Tianjin life!
Liú Wěi has lots of advice for Tianjin’s foreigners:

Foreigners who come to Tianjin must assimilate (融入 / róng rù / “harmoniously enter”); they need to enter into our Tianjin lifestyle habits and social customs. …When you come to Tianjin, you are guests of us Tianjiners. We warmly welcome you to come to Tianjin to study and work!

Tianjiners have plenty of poor people and plenty of rich people – of course the people with cars are rich people. …Foreigners should have lots of contact with regular people. Of course, Tianjin city has its good aspects and its bad aspects. One bad aspect right now is that there are a lot of thieves… so don’t go too often to really crowded places.

You know right now there are nice people and bad people. You need to understand Chinese people, see who is a good person and who is a bad person, what kind of character they have. …You must be clever and see people clearly, and then you can make friends with the good people.

Liu Wei went on camera to answer questions about the Olympics in this video.

A little personal update (there’s new Regular Zhou, July’s propaganda, and some geeky culture stuff on the way soon):

It’s hot and humid as all get out. I don’t even know what that sentence actually means, but you can see the weather forecast picture of Jessica’s computer. We’ve discovered that hot summers in the city aren’t the same as hot summers in suburbs that are just a drive away from lakes, forests, and mountains.

Summer Mandarin Bootcamp
At the end of the spring semester I got together with a teacher and put together a daily study plan for the summer. I’m in homework and hanzi (Chinese characters) up to my eyeballs every day, but it helps. Jessica has a lot of homework, too, but she doesn’t require a daily checklist to be a good student. This takes up the bulk of our time, basically like a full-time job.

Writing
Tianjin’s leading expat magazine is desperate for anything resembling a decent contribution, so I’m still getting paid for recycled blog posts. Actually, most stuff isn’t recycled. They gave me two articles in the Olympics edition (one half of a two-part cover story and a Regular Zhou profile). In a good month it pays the rent, and it gives me language practice, but transcribing the interviews is so tedious and requires help; my Mandarin just isn’t there yet. Jessica will probably get something in there eventually.

Cursing the spawn
The cicadas are deafening. Like a Chinese restaurant… that’s full of banshees. I’m not kidding, you have to yell under the trees. And they leave whole intact shells – eyes and legs and all – on bushes outside our stairwell when they molt, or whatever it is they do. Fascinating and gross and annoying. I’d read in Chinese stories these sort of romantic scenes where some old scholar listens reflectively to cicadas in the evening… load of crock! He couldn’t sleep, that’s what was happening. But thankfully there’s a conspicuous proliferation of dragonflies eating the even more conspicuous proliferation of mosquitoes. I’m going to get another pet cricket soon. (You know you want to click those bug pictures and see a high-resolution macro shot!)

Thanks for building the Olympics, now goodbye!
The migrant workers are mostly gone from the roofs, walls, parks, and sidewalks. The parks aren’t full of tents and slogan banners anymore. They built the Olympics, but won’t be around to see it. The parks and buildings looks much improved but less populated with them gone. Street food is getting a little harder to find, and some window shops are being forced to close temporarily (until after the Special Olympics). We’ve noticed a correlation between fresh asphalt and scarcity of street food.

Green
It’s green now, because everything grows and our neighbours plant stuff in every available space, including holes in the sidewalk. We even have people growing grapes along the heating pipes. This is one of the things we love about our neighbourhood in the summer, when the community back yard turns into a jungle.

Péngyous and wǎngyǒus (朋友和网友)
Jessica’s learning to make some special Xi’an noodles tonight because one of our friends’ parents are in town from Xi’an, and we had dinner with them last week and tonight. The Thursday night dancing should start up again, now that the teacher is back from Sichuan province, so we aren’t becoming total hermits this summer, even if the heat+homework combo makes that tempting.

Creepy, I know, but we recently met some “net friends” (网友). People who blog about Chinese culture aren’t actually so many. Dr. Mary Ann O’Donnell and her husband Yang “Muer” Qian, who were in town visiting his folks (Muer grew up in Tianjin). Mary Ann has lived in Shenzhen for 11 years and blogs from the perspective of a PhD anthropologist about the city (Shenzhen was the government’s first experiment city used to test the Reform & Opening policies of the ’80′s). We used one of her blog posts in a culture discussion meeting in our NGO. Muer is a playwright, and you can see translations of some his work here, here, and here. We’ll be meeting another wǎng yǒu soon, too, who is a friend of a fellow alumnus that we’ve only known online through his Laowai Chinese blog. She just moved up here from down south, and needs an intro to the city. Maybe we’ll take her to the bug market…