Bad China Days

Foreigners in China sometimes experience what’s called a “Bad China Day.” Bad China Days can come in any zillion varieties. These are the days when you especially feel the culture stress; you’re irritated and short-tempered, and everything is dirty and loud and inconvenient and irrational and obnoxious.

Now it’s important to note that Bad China Days aren’t necessarily China’s fault — whoever or whatever ‘China’ is. For example, there’s a big difference between:

• “I’m having a bad day, and I just happen to be in China.”
• “‘China’ is being bad to me today.”

And both of those are different still from “Living in a culture not your own inevitably causes stress and today I’m really feeling it. I should go take a nap, and definitely should not write a blog post about culture stress.”

• About sharing the uglier sides of our China experience
• Judging China
• Culture Stress (topic)

Not that it matters; Bad China Days are irrational. They’re when you’re tempted to exhibit your worst cross-cultural behaviour. Hopefully I’ll keep it together. But I can imagine, on a very Bad China Day, in the hotter corners of the culture stress crucible, on the lowest swing of a culture stress cycle, that an untimely encounter with one of several situations could cause me to do things that will end up on the Chinese evening news. Here are five, in no particular order…

1. Public-Surface-Area-Violating Biohazards

Observe closely this surreptitiously-taken and mercifully-angled cell phone photo from last weekend at the beach:

On the right: a nice public restroom. Directly opposite on the left: Grandma suspends Junior in mid-air so he can make something on the ground that looks a bit like but definitely is not a sandcastle. Grandpa prepares the newspapers.

I used to be pretty live-and-let-live when it comes to diapers vs. split-pants — at least in theory. After all, who cares what other people do, right, so long as it doesn’t impact your life? But now we have kids who play in crowded public spaces, and it turns out that letting kids pee and poo on the ground in the middle of parks and neighbourhood play areas (and on subway platforms, restaurant garbage cans, subway platform garbage cans inches from me sitting on a bench) does impact my life: “Don’t step in that puddle!” “I know he is, sweetie, but it’s not nice to watch.” “Oh for the love…”

It’s kind of like camping in a secluded forest and peeing on a tree. Except it’s over-populated and everything’s concrete. But bonus points to our district government for tackling this issue head-on with bilingual (though unintentionally profane) signage:

• Split-pants vs. Diapers: which do you use?

2. Public-Air-Space-Violating Biohazards

These are the notes of a culture-stressed foreign English teacher in a Chinese preschool:

No matter what country you’re in, preschools are essentially contagion exchange centres. Every morning Monday-Friday I teach over 200 2-to-6-yr-old Chinese kids English. I’m their only English teacher. I’m also their only cover-your-mouth-when-you-cough-and-sneeze teacher; none of the local teachers give attention to it. It’s flu season all year long in there. Literally every class (20-30 kids each) I remind kids to cover their mouths, because there are always a few coughers. I’ve worked covering your mouth into two different action songs. But when our daughter gets a cold: “That’s because you don’t make her wear enough clothing.” When you’re a sick and tired one-man public health crusader who’s been staring down hacking kids all morning and your daughter’s preschool teacher tells you her cold is due to your bad parenting, being able to speak Chinese is suddenly a liability.

• Man-mothers & traditional Chinese medicine [or] Where do babies come from?
• Healthiness & the Passive-Aggressive Window Game: Chinese vs. Laowai

3. Car-Horn-Honking Noise Polluters

There’s already been one time where I actually looked in the fridge for eggs to throw on my way out the door in the dead of night. Not that it mattered; other neighbours threw heavier objects.

• Honked Awake (first time to call the cops in China)

In Canada honking your horn can only mean one of two things: “DANGER!” or “—- YOU!” In Chinese traffic honking means, “Here I come!” “Hey, I’m here!” “Excuse me, coming through!” or “Hurry up!” But in a Chinese neighbourhood — all of which have too few yet cruelly overpriced parking spaces — it means, “We’re waaaaaaaaaiiiting….!” or “Someone’s-in-my-parking-spot-and-I-don’t-have-their-phone-number!” The idea is that if you just sit there and lay on the horn for minutes on end, people will get so irritated that someone who knows the owner of the mis-parked car will be annoyed into action and contact the owner. I guess. (Pro Tip: They know guests have to park in other people’s empty spots. Just leave your phone number on the dash where they can see it so they can call you if they get back before you leave.)

How many times have I fantasized about neutralizing drunk honkers’ cars in creative ways… oh, sweet justice. If I can just get them to pop the hood, I already have a spot picked out to throw their car battery.

4. Jack-Hammering Noise Polluters

Hey here’s an idea. Let’s make it so every time someone moves into an apartment, they strip the walls and floor down to the concrete — with jack-freaking-hammers. Right on the other side of your ceiling. During your kids’ nap time. Let me explain how that works: Kids don’t nap. Mommy and Daddy don’t get a break. Kids are not only awake when they’re not supposed to be, they’re emotionally disturbed little mutants due to lack of sleep and being terrorized awake by jackhammers. That’s why we banged on the upstairs neighbours’ door so much the workers just started pretending no one was there. They knew it was safer to keep the door locked.

• The Dragon has Raised its Head (and it’s driving us insane!)

5. Early-Rising Noise Polluters

I don’t care if it’s grandmas rubbing their eyeballs in time to music that sounds like it was illegally downloaded from a kindergarten website or slapping their thighs in unison while counting out loud or migrant worker trucks unloading renovation materials at 5:45am. In my dreams none of them have been spared a merciless paintballing, and they’d be easy targets so close to our windows. You might think: How could a decent person harbour such horrible thoughts toward senior citizens leading active lives of musical healthiness? You might have never lived in China.

• Becoming morning people

P.S. – Understanding Culture Stress

• About sharing the uglier sides of our China experience
• Judging China
• Blessings (topic)

This post doesn’t just talk about culture stress; it conveys the negative, sarcastic feelings of culture stress in the way it’s written. Everything written is true, but it’s presented in a slanted, culture-stressed frame of mind. Culture stress skews your perception by magnifying annoyances while blinding you to positives. Living in China is usually not as bad as this post makes it sound, and there are still truly wonderful things about China that only those who really live here will ever get to experience. In the midst of culture stress, though, it’s easy to forget.

They deliberately put her in the class with the nicest teachers, who don’t criticize and shame and negatively compare and threaten as per normal in China (and like in the other classes). As the English teacher, I’m in each of the seven classes every morning so it’s easy for me to compare their discipline and teaching styles.

It seems like participating in this event and celebrating her birthday, which means going through the birthday kid routine that all the other kids go through on their birthdays, have gone a long way toward her fitting in — both in how she feels and how the other kids relate to her. Maybe it’s made everyone realize more that she’s a student, too, and not just some weird visitor. And of course it helps that her Chinese is way better now than when she started.

The chain is owned by an American/Chinese couple who are our friends and members of our NGO. This means I have way more leverage to address issues than I normally would, so this is an exceptional situation for us. I don’t know what we’d do if our only options were normal preschools. Even for the most cross-culturally savvy families, sometimes putting a foreign kid in a Chinese preschool just doesn’t work. There are endless possibilities for deal-breaking conflict.

Their sashes say “I’m a little flag-bearer” 我是小旗手。 Here’s the video of her little performance:

(Part of being at this local Chinese preschool is a horrible, disorganized sound system. Normally this doesn’t matter, because the point of a Chinese sound system is not to clearly amplify speech or music; it’s to make noise so that events feel more 热闹。 On this day, the mics they first tried to use at the base of the flagpole were set to broadcast inside the school instead of outside. But the other mics that do broadcast through the outdoor speakers couldn’t reach all the way to the flagpole, so they moved the kids over to one side. And then the batteries were worn out and fuzzy and loose. But anyway… :)

She said:

大家好！我是小二班的陆心语。我刚刚四岁了。我要给你唱一首歌：
我爱我的幼儿园
幼儿园里朋友多
又唱歌来又跳舞
大家一起真快乐

Which means:

Hi, everybody! I’m Lu Xinyu from Little Class 2. I just turned 4. I want to sing a song for you:
I love my preschool
At preschool there are lots of friends
There’s singing and dancing
Everybody’s happy together

This was our first day, at the end of October:

More Chinese preschool stuff:

• Teaching English in China (topic)
• American kids, Chinese preschools & cultural challenges
• So I’m in this Chinese girl band…

Anyway, saw this shirt tonight and had to share. Reminds me of the mzungu shirts worn by wàiguórén in East Africa during bad reactions to culture stress. But with a twist. And not worn by a mzungu/wàiguórén:

“对，我是外国人！” — 弗 2:19
“That’s right, I’m a foreigner!” — Ephesians 2:19

Aside from just being funny, it’s also interesting because of China’s general love/hate relationship with wàiguórén/the West. Just this week I come across usage of “fake foreign devil” 假洋鬼子. And not to mention Chinese Christianity‘s complicated relationship to the English language, Western culture and Western Christianity in particular.

Maybe the t-shirt’s just a Bible joke and not meant to reference any of that. Or maybe it’s deliberately redefining the terms. Either way the joke’s historical-cultural context is hard to ignore. Because historical-cultural context is always hard to ignore. At least for this 外国人。

P.S. - And lest anyone feel like accusing this guy of being a fake foreign devil (假洋鬼子), I should point out that not only does he not speak any English, he doesn’t even have an ‘English name’. Dude is just not interested in “sniffing after foreigners’ farts.”

Related stuff:

• Oh, the *other* Canada…
• A “foreigner” in my own country, “yellow” people, and other funny Chinese racial talk
• Christianity (topic)
• Race & Nationalism (topic)

(Group eye-ball rubbing is good for your health.)

Like a Pro

I drop off our daughter at her classroom and say to her teacher, “She’s got a bit of a cold.”

“That’s because she doesn’t wear enough, isn’t it.” She smiles sweetly. But it’s not a question.

Now, we like this teacher; she’s not harsh like the other teachers. She’s patient, and positive. And in this situation she’s not so much criticizing our parenting as demonstrating the responsible concern of a good, dedicated and attentive teacher. Every Chinese person who has ever voiced an opinion on the topic (note: that’s a lot of Chinese people) thinks our kids don’t wear enough to the detriment of their health. It’s borderline scandalous. Our particular Bad Parents Offense these last two weeks is letting our almost-4-year-old wear short sleeves to school. It’s what I hear the nǎinais comment about as we run their gauntlet on our way into the school. It’s just not the time of year for kids to wear short sleeves; weather and the actual temperature has nothing to do with it.

I want to reply, “No, it’s because no one teaches her classmates even nominal hygiene, like covering your mouth when you’re hacking up a gooey lung onto the floor. Besides, it’s 8:30am and already over 20 degrees outside and sunny. And when I come give your kids their English lesson, 90% of them will be sweating in their long sleeves, just like all the other classes. And several of them will still have colds despite their extra layers.”

But instead I just smile and leave. Like a pro.

• Healthiness & the Passive-Aggressive Window Game: Chinese vs. Laowai
• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue (Part 1)
• Fire-Cupping & Guasha for Dummies
• The Untranslatable (TCM translation fail)
• You’ve got wind! 你受风了！
• Getting fire cupped in a Tianjin bath house (or) Losing a wrestling match to a giant octopus
• Getting guasha’d (刮痧) and octopussed (拔火罐) in a Tianjin bathhouse
• Tianjin bathhouse guasha: OWW!!!

(A buddy gets fire-cupped in a Tianjin bathhouse. It’s good for you.)

“You believe in man-mothers?!”

So what’s it feel like, talking about health with Chinese who have a firmly entrenched TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) perspective? The excerpt below makes a fun illustration.

Jessica and I read stories out loud to each other. We’re in the middle of The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss. Kvothe, the protagonist, comes from what’s essentially a pre-industrial Western culture. But he spends several months living among, training under, and learning the basic language and customs of the Adem, a closed and tight-knit, high-context race of philosophical warriors (think: kung-fu + ninjas + inscrutable East Asians). They consider everyone else to be barbarians and augment their conversation with specific hand-gestures. There’s little contact between the two cultures and they are mutually ignorant of the other’s very different customs and beliefs.

In the section below Kvothe and an Adem named Penthe have been sharing the crazy stories each of their respective cultures tells about the other’s. Kvothe is about to discover that the Adem don’t actually know where babies come from – in fact they have no concept or word for father — and he tries to set the record straight. When a Westerner and a traditionally-minded Chinese talk about health, this is what it’s like for both of them; the Chinese or the Westerner could be represented by either character.

(Giant hickeys are good for you.)

From Chapter 127:

Penthe chuckled. “You have the wrong word,” she said, rubbing at my chin. “A beard is what a man makes. A baby is something different, and that you have no part of.”

“We don’t carry the baby,” I said, slightly offended. “But still, we play our part in making it.”

Penthe turned to look at me, smiling as if I had made a joke. Then her smile faded [...] “Are you serious?”

Seeing my perplexed expression, her eyes grew wide with amazement and she sat upright on the bed. “It is true!” she said. “You believe in man-mothers!” She giggled, covering the bottom half of her face with both hands. “I never believed it was true!” She lowered her left hand, revealing an excited grin as she gestured amazed delight.

I felt I should be irritated [...] “What is a man-mother?” I asked.

“Are you not making a joke?” she asked, one hand still half-covering her smile. “Do you truly believe a man puts a baby in a woman?”

“Well…yes,” I said a little awkwardly. “In a manner of speaking. It takes a man and a woman to make a baby. A mother and a father.”

“You have a word for it!” she said, delighted. “They told me this too. With the stories of dirt soup. But I never thought it a real story!”

I sat up myself at this point, growing concerned. “You do know how babies are made, don’t you?” I asked, gesturing serious earnestness. [...]

She looked at me for a moment in stunned silence, then dissolved helplessly into laughter, trying to speak several times only to have it overwhelm her again when she looked up at the expression on my face.

Penthe put her hands on her belly, prodding it as if puzzled. “Where is my baby?” She looked down at her flat belly. “Perhaps I have been sexing wrong these years. I should have a hundred babies if what you say is true. Five hundred babies!”

“It does not happen every time there is sex,” I said. “There are only certain times when a woman is ripe for a baby.”

“And have you done this? she asked, looking at me with mock seriousness while a smile tugged at her mouth. “Have you made a baby with a woman?”

“I have been careful not to do such a thing,” I said. “There is an herb called silphium. I chew it every day, and it keeps me from putting a baby in a woman.”

Penthe shook her head. “This is more of your barbarian sex rituals,” she said. “Does bringing a man to the flowers also make a baby where you come from?”

I decided to take a different tack. “If men do not help with making babies, how do you explain that babies look like their fathers?”

“Babies look like angry old men,” Penthe said. “All bald and with…” She hesitated, touching her cheek. “…with face lines. Perhaps the old men are the only ones making babies then?” She smirked.

“What about kittens?” I asked. “You have seen a litter of kittens. When a white cat and a black cat have sex, you get kittens both white and black. And kittens of both colors.”

“Always?” she asked.

“Not always,” I admitted. “But most times.” [...]

Penthe gave me a serious look. “You are committing false thinking. You could as easily say two stones make a baby by banging against each other until a piece breaks off. Therefore two people make baby peoples in the same way.”

I fumed, but she was right. I was committing a fallacy of analogy. It was faulty logic.

Our conversation continued along this vein for some time [...] Eventually Penthe waved a hand to stop me, gesturing exasperation. “Do you hear your own excuses? Sex makes babies, but not always. The sex must be at the right time, but not always. There are plants that make it more likely, or less likely.” She shook her head. “You must realize what you say is thin as a net. You keep sewing new threads, hoping it will hold water. But hoping does not make it true.”

Seeing me frown, she took my hand and gestured comfort into it [...] “I can see you think this truly. I can understand why barbarian men would want to believe it. It must be comforting to think you are important in this way. But it is simply not.” Penthe looked at me with something close to pity. [...] “Sometimes a woman ripens. It is a natural thing, and men have no part in it. That is why more women ripen in the fall, like fruit.”

The gulf in understanding health between Westerners and Chinese is even wider than the “man-mothers” disagreement above, because the fundamental worldview premises on which each perspective is built are lightyears apart.

Pro Tip: Here’s a cheap cop-out that works, if you need to escape a conversation like the one above: “foreigners’ bodies are different.” This works. I’m not necessarily saying you should use it — I don’t like it because it’s not being straight with people; avoiding expressing your opinion and giving misleading impressions about your opinion are different things — but it does work. And it’s an explanation that goes back ages. In My Country My People, Lin Yutang relates how some Chinese doctors, upon discovering a Western medical text showing the heart on the left, concluded smugly that, ‘Aha! Barbarians’ bodies are fundamentally different from Chinese, whose hearts are on the right. And this is why barbarians have a different religion.’ (Those Chinese doctors had never bothered to dissect a cadaver.) I use modified forms of this excuse: “Foreigners aren’t afraid of ‘cold’” or “Foreigners can’t ‘get wind’”. or “We’re used to it. It’s not a problem for us.”

P.S. - The Kingkiller Chronicle is entertaining, but has (a lot) more (superfluous) sex and violence than we normally read. So don’t go download it and then come complaining to me!

More about TCM & healthiness with Chinese characteristics:

• Healthiness & the Passive-Aggressive Window Game: Chinese vs. Laowai
• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue (Part 1)
• Fire-Cupping & Guasha for Dummies
• The Untranslatable (TCM translation fail)
• You’ve got wind! 你受风了！
• Getting fire cupped in a Tianjin bath house (or) Losing a wrestling match to a giant octopus
• Getting guasha’d (刮痧) and octopussed (拔火罐) in a Tianjin bathhouse
• Tianjin bathhouse guasha: OWW!!!

Just now I opened my latest ZGBriefs China news digest and found: “Rat meat and Chinese food safety” and “20 million taps (and not a drop to drink)”. Right as I sat to down to write this post I also checked my Weixin (微信 – a Chinese social media thing). At the top of my feed was a post about someone encountering “gutter oil” 地沟油 at lunch. Gutter oil comes from the kitchen slop that restaurants dump down the nearest manhole. Some enterprising (desperate?) soul scoops it out and skims off the oil, which he sells to restaurants and street vendors. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Or they drive around at night collecting it in barrels from the restaurants directly (I’ve seen that, too). And these aren’t the worst Chinese food safety examples I can think of; they’re just the ones that happen to be immediately on hand as I write this. This is truly just the muculent tip of a putrescent iceberg.

• Grooooooss!
• Anonymous Chinese chef uploads restaurant kitchen photo exposé
• Would you rather…? (Gutter Oil 2.0)

Why am I bringing this up? I don’t want a blog full of expat whining. But I got this e-mail a few days ago from a couple who’s been in China for three months:

Hello Joel!
[...] I’m living with my husband in a town in the middle of nowhere called Neixiang (Hunan Province) we’d had tons of shocking experiences here… and now we’re mainly concern about what food is safe to eat.

I’m not talking about eating cat or dog, but eating safe and clean. After reading news about food scandals in China we became more and more afraid of buying food on the streets and even at super markets.

If you have time, could you please tell us your experience with Chinese food brands and give us some advice about what brands has more quality standards than others?

How would you answer? If you live or lived in China, what specific things do you do to make your food safer?

Here’s what I replied with (plus some links)…

Other than spending tons of money and eating only imported products, I don’t know if it’s possible to eat safe and clean in China (and outside China, safe and clean is really just an illusion anyway, but that’s another topic). We’re less stringent than a lot of other expats, and I don’t think what we’re doing makes it safe and clean, but at least it’s something.

Fruit & veggies: We wash all our fruit and vegetables really well.

• Photo Gallery: Our Neighbourhood Caishichang
• The Tianjin Chengguan Street Market Game

Milk/dairy: Our girls drink/drank imported milk and formula for their first two years. We drink the major domestic brands, but not because we think they’re necessarily safe.

Meat: Some meat vendors in vegetable markets are “certified” (so they claim, usually by displaying posters and/or certificates on the walls). We get our chicken at Metro 麦德龙 (a bulk import store, cheaper than regular import stores), but the beef and pork there is still too expensive. So we’re eating “certified” vegetable market pork and beef while still looking for better options. We also eat less meat than we did in North America.

Packaged/bottled products: We don’t usually buy packaged products like bottles of vinegar or soy milk from the tiny window shops (小卖部) or traditional vegetable markets (菜市场), because things are more likely to be fake. In our first year our teacher pointed out some details of things we’d bought: labels glued on crooked and printed in slightly lower quality, caps were just plugs instead of factory sealed screw caps, etc. Packaged stuff has better chances at a supermarket.

• How to: Avoid consuming dodgy products in Tianjin

Street food: We don’t eat tons of street food (about once a week for me).

• Chinese Breakfast, Tianjin-style
• In case you ever wondered what BBQ’d silk worm tastes like

Water: Our drinking water at home comes in big blue bottles, like an office water cooler. At least there’s a chance that it’s better than the tap water (and it tastes way better). During our first week in Qingdao I asked a convenience store owner if we could buy the blue bottles from them. She said we didn’t need them, that we could just drink the tap water. When I balked, she said, well, children shouldn’t drink the tap water, they have to drink bottled water, but for adults it’s fine. We went across the parking lot to the other little convenience store and got the blue bottles.

Air: We didn’t buy an air purifier; they’re prohibitively expensive. We use the China Air Quality Index app to keep track of the pollution levels (though you hardly need it; it’s obvious when the API is over 150), and on really bad days we try to keep our daughters inside. I also googled for pictures of house plants that are supposedly good for the air, and got dozens of a kind in the plant market that looked similar (not scientific, I know, but I like the green anyway, plus they’re cheap). Most importantly as far as air quality is concerned, we left Tianjin (next to Beijing) for Qingdao. Short of building pollution domes over your life like some international schools, you can’t fight the bad air. Your options: wear uncomfortable and expensive high-tech masks, live and work under a (literal) bubble, embrace an early death, or leave. We left. Sort of.

• The Great Chinese Airpocalypse

Being in China means choosing to ingest and absorb all kinds garbage. There’s no avoiding it, there’s just lessening it. There’s a joke floating around online that when a Chinese person dies if you flatten their body you’ll get the entire Periodic Table of Elements. Our first year in Tianjin, back before the Olympics when restaurant place settings didn’t come shrink wrapped with your meal, our Chinese teachers would obsessively wipe out every cup, bowl and plate before eating with them. What did they know that we didn’t? So don’t forget to ask (delicately!) your Chinese coworkers, waiban, students, etc. what they do about food safety and pollution. They aren’t unaware.

P.S. - Not exactly the kind of food safety issue we’ve been talking about, but still, this dumpling chef doesn’t mess around:

Chinese shadow boxing is actually called 太极拳 (tài jí quán).

More like this here: [Photo Gallery:] Daily tai-chi & morning exercise in Yonghe, Taipei, Taiwan

“Diaoyu Islands are inherently China’s territory,
this restaurant will not receive Japanese people!”
钓鱼岛是中国固有领土，本店恕不接待日本人！

Interestingly enough, the restaurant right next door is also very patriotic, with “Comrade Mao Zedong” posters on the wall.

For more about popular Chinese hatred for Japan:

• Japanese apologies
• “Japanese and dog no nearing”
• Why they hate the Japanese
• Anti-Japan protests channel uncomfortable amounts of Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution

“Please refuse to eat dog meat! There’s all different kinds of food, but ‘friends’ are extremely precious.”
– The Beijing Loving Animals Foundation
请拒吃狗肉！食物多种多样，而“朋友”弥足珍贵
– 北京爱它>动物公益基金会

If there’s a campaign to stop eating dogs, our district in Qingdao has definitely not received the memo. Here’s some pictures I just happen to have on hand, taken right in our neighbourhood and at the nearest restaurants:

“Five Spice Dog Meat” 五香狗肉 Spring Festival gift box.

This hotpot restaurant’s menu includes fish head meat 鱼头肉, beer duck 啤酒鸭, dog 狗肉, and eel 鳝鱼.

At a competing restaurant dog meat tops the hotpot menu 狗肉火锅.

These photos can be found in our public China Instagram feed.

Pro Tip! “Dog food” — is that food for your dog (狗粮), or your dog for food (狗肉)? You’ll probably want to be careful you don’t confuse this:

(pet food store)

with this:

(dog meat gift bag from Chinese teacher)

or this:

(dog meat restaurant)

Pro Tip #2! Dog meat is a wintertime food. In the spring and summer it won’t be available at many restaurants that usually serve it. Because Chinese medicine. So you’ll probably have to wait a while before you get to try any.

On the first glance, it’s not immediately obvious why Mainland Chinese would be campaigning to not eat dog, or any other animal. I found some interesting explanations here: China’s dog-eating controversy is class warfare

And of course we’ve had our own dog eating adventures:

• Dead puppies (don’t look, Grandma!) – menu included
• “Cats are friends, not food!”
• Obligatory cat eating post

China also has other creative uses for dog, aside from food:

• Beware “EXPLOSIVE DOG” in Tianjin, China
• Curiosity + China = way more than I bargained for

[Update Apr 19]
Dog is more popular around here than I realized. Normally I eat with a group on Friday nights, but everyone had to work overtime tonight. So I was on my own for dinner, and took my time walking around just to see what was available. In five minutes I found five places that serve dog. I’m sure there would have been more but friends called and said they could make it after all so I stopped looking and went to meet them. See if you can find “狗” in each of these pictures:

My hunch is the neighbourhood management saw an opportunity in the bird flu situation and took it. The story is this was a village ten years ago and the villagers were compensated with apartment square meterage matching that of their village homes, end result being that this neighbuorhood has a higher percentage of peasants than the average urban development.

Anyway, the chengguan were right outside our windows around 11:15 this morning:

I was at work and Jessica took this out the kitchen window. She said about 30 people in all.

They’re cracking down on domestic chicken coups and vegetable gardens like these:

The notice said it was OK to plant trees and flowers, but not vegetables. Panties weren’t mentioned.

I took a quick spin around the neighbourhood before lunch while out getting eggs. There are vegetable gardens all over the place, but I didn’t see evidence of any being disturbed. Maybe they’re saving their bylaw enforcement for after 休息, and this morning was just recon?

More fun with Chengguan:

• In case you ever wondered what it’s like to eat BBQ’d silk worm larvae (蚕蛹)
• The Tianjin Chengguan Street Market Game
• Making our neighbourhood more “civilized”

Warm and Fragrant Briefing

All Respected Property Owners, Hello:

To counter the many recent instances in various places of people becoming infected with H7N9 bird flu, various places are adopting emergency contingency plans to take preventative measures, people are also attaching increasing importance to the H7N9 bird flu preventative measures, and our Fulinyuan neighbourhood management office especially draws to everyone’s attention:

1. Maintain favourable life habits， ensure to keep adequate sleep and rest, drink more water, eat more fruit.
2. Pay attention to personal hygiene, diligently wash hands, maintain household indoors, diligently ventilate the air.
3. In case of fever, coughing, runny nose, etc. respiratory tract symptoms, immediately go to the hospital and see a doctor for inspection.
4. In the kitchen must separate raw and hot, do not eat raw or half-cooled chicken, duck, goose, etc. all kinds of meat, especially pay attention to not eat half-raw not hot eggs.
5. Seldom go to crowded places, guard against contagious or infectious disease.

Especially take note:
In order to ensure and safeguard all property owners’ physical and mental health, property owners raising poultry are asked to conscientiously and voluntarily dispose.

Thanks for your cooperation!

Fulinyuan Neighbourhood Property Management Office
2013-4-9

温馨提示

尊敬的全体业主您们好：

针对近期各地多列人感染H7N9禽流感病例，各地纷纷采取应急预案防控，人们对H7N9禽流感的防控也越来重视，我们福林苑小区管理处特别提示大家：

1. 保持良好的生活习惯，保保持充足睡眠和休息 多饮水 多吃水果。
2. 注意个人卫生 勤洗手 保持家庭室内 勤通风换气。
3. 一旦出现发热 咳嗽 流涕等呼吸道症状 立即到医院检查就诊。
4. 厨房中要将生热分开 不吃生的或半热的鸡 鸭 鹅肉等各类肉食特别是注意不要吃半生不热的鸡蛋。
5. 少去人多拥挤的地方 防止传染或感染疾病。

特别提示：
为了保障和维护广大业主的身心健康，请部分饲养家禽的业主自觉自行清理。

谢谢合作！

福林苑小区物业管理处
2013年4月9日

The Passive-Aggressive Window Game

I want to switch out this picture for one showing my coworkers in the office, wearing their winter clothes, scarves, everything, next to a heater that’s not on and a window that’s not closed, complaining that it’s cold, while a guy walks by outside with a cloth mask over his mouth and nose because he’s protecting against the cold wind.

To my Western sensibilities, the scene is mildly insane. It’s cold and windy, people! Shut the windows and turn on the heaters that are in every single room, and we won’t have to wear our outside clothes inside! If you’re afraid of cold wind outside, why are you inviting it inside? Why did you deliberately turn our workspace into a near-freezing wind tunnel?

I’m all for creative responses to culture stress, so I’m conducting an informal and surreptitious sociological experiment. On my Chinese coworkers.

Now that winter is officially over but it’s still cold, during most of March at work we play the passive-aggressive window game. They open the windows wide — of course you should open the windows wide on cold and windy days. Parents will complain if they don’t. So we’re all freezing. But when no one’s looking, I walk by and, with numbed fingers, shut the windows. And after a couple classes, someone’s opened them again. So I wait until no one’s looking and shut them again. Just to see what will eventually happen. Will they catch on? Will I get caught in the act? What will they say? It’s exciting, no? :)

• So you want to change China?

I can see not turning the heat on as a practical thing: everyone has to wear several layers just to survive the commute to work and changing would be inconvenient, homes might not be well-heated, heating costs money for the school, and the wiring can’t handle even half the heaters at one time. But none of that explains opening the windows and deliberately creating a draft in every classroom and office.

What do you mean, ‘Why?’? Isn’t it obvious?

To someone with no understanding of traditional Chinese medicine, what Chinese often do for the sake of health makes absolutely no sense; it’s maddeningly contradictory. And one of many areas within this health disconnect that we perennially encounter involves temperature and “wind.” For example, “wind” and “cold” are bad. Do not serve a Chinese person a glass of refrigerated water — that’s practically criminally negligent; give them hot water, even (especially) when it’s hot outside. If you drink cold water you’ll get diarrhea, unless it’s winter — then you can eat ice cream outside. But I don’t care if it’s summertime: if you don’t put socks on that baby she’ll get diarrhea!

• You’ve got wind! 你受风了！
• The Untranslatable (TCM translation fail)
• “You’d better put socks on that baby or else…”

And do not eat an apple outside on a windy day, unless you want to be guānxīn-ed about your health: “You’ll get ‘wind’ in your ‘stomach’!” Unless you’re provoking your local friends on purpose, like one foreign coworker I had who once faced the wind and opened her mouth wide to deliberately swallow as much wind as she could just to get a reaction from our adult students. But don’t expect a comfortable temperature indoors, even when it’s possible and affordable. Like fearing cold water, they also fear still air. Air must move, or else when we get old, we’ll die, or something. It doesn’t matter if it’s single-digit Celsius outside and windy; they will deliberately turn your school hallways and classrooms into wind tunnels. And then they’ll wear their winter coats and scarves inside and talk about how cold it is. It’s healthier.

• 关心 talk: so offensive it’s funny
• Don’t eat that! You’ll get ‘wind’ in your ‘stomach’!

If that seems like a deliberately disorganized jumble of anecdotes, that’s because it is. That’s how you first encounter traditional Chinese healthiness when you move over here. You don’t get a systematic introduction to traditional Chinese medicine; you get random comments at meals (“No thanks, my fire’s up”), coworkers who keep turning off the air conditioning in summer (空调病！), and unsolicited advice about not wearing shorts in the spring (you’ll get arthritis when you’re old). Sorting that all out and making sense of it is your job.

Healthiness with Chinese characteristics

People usually don’t do things for no reason. Maybe you don’t agree with their reasons or don’t understand their reasons, or maybe their reasons are objectively bad. But most of the time their reasons make sense, at least according to their own terms. The deliberate early spring wind tunnel even makes some degree of sense to foreigners: it’s flu season, especially in a school, so they want to keep the air indoors fresh by ventilating 通风换气。Anyone who’s crossed the ocean in an airplane shared with sneezing coughing snuffling people should be able to appreciate this.

But health is often one of several huge areas of cultural disconnect between China and its resident laowais, of total misunderstanding and mutual scandalization. How wide is the disconnect? One coworker, after observing our daughter and how we handled her, theorized in all seriousness that the reason foreigners don’t care about their kids’ health as much as Chinese parents is because foreigners can have as many kids as they want. If we mess one or two up, no biggie — we can always have more! (To be fair, the other coworker in the conversation disagreed. Plus, it’s not uncommon for foreigners to basically make the same kind of accusation against Chinese. Remember: we’re mutually scandalizing.)

“Chinese medicine” 中医 as “the general Chinese understanding and approach to health” (rather than meaning “Chinese herbs” 中药 like ginseng or “techniques” like fire-cupping) is near impossible for Westerners to understand. The concepts are extremely difficult to express within our languages and worldview because they are so thoroughly tied to Chinese worldview, philosophy and thought categories. The Web That Has No Weaver, a book that attempts to explain Chinese medicine while appreciating the difficulty, begins with Chinese philosophy, not biology. If you read a description of Chinese medicine that you understand right away, then either you’re Chinese or what you’re reading is not a description of Chinese medicine; the meaning was lost in translation.

• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue (Part 1)
• Fire-Cupping & Guasha for Dummies
• The Untranslatable (TCM translation fail)

P.S. – “ventilating the air” to help combat flu season is the reason our youngest and most cosmopolitan employee gave me. But there’s another reason that’s probably at least as relevant: avoiding drastic changes in temperature. It’s not considered healthy to move from cold to hot or vice versa, to put cold things in your body when you’re warm, etc. People’s body temperature stays more consistent when they bundle up inside rather than making inside warm. This thinking is behind eating ice cream outside in the winter, and behind the story a friend told us yesterday explaining why she has bad cramping every month: when she was around 13 she got hot and sweaty from sports one day and went to take a shower. But the water came out really cold, suddenly dousing and chilling her over-heated body. She was on one of her first periods at the time. And that’s why she now has bad cramping every month.

1. Three-Self Good Friday

At the local Three-Self Patriotic Church‘s Good Friday service. Three-Self churches can seem stodgy in many ways, as if the Party-mandated international isolation and societal marginalization has frozen in time an imported 1930′s Western fundamentalist style of Christianity by strangling its development. But things are changing, as anyone who spends time at their local Three-Self can tell you. Even if the outward forms — music, facilities, teaching, etc. — seem under-resourced at times, this little church is packed every Friday night. This last Friday, half the attendees and the preacher were in tears by the end.

I’m using this picture to represent China’s traditional, legal, urban Christianity.

2. Good Luck Crucifix

A crucifix hanging from the rear-view mirror of our taxi on Easter Sunday morning, next to a typical luck charm (drivers usually hang folk Buddhist, Daoist, even Maoist luck charms). This driver had no idea at all what the crucifix represented; he just vaguely associated it with something positive, saying he doesn’t care about the meanings of any of that stuff but just hangs whatever gives him a nice feeling. (How a miniature scale model of someone being tortured to death could give anyone good vibes — especially if they aren’t aware of the greater hopeful story from which that image comes and what it’s meant to represent — is beyond me.) Have to admit, I was not expecting to see that hanging in the taxi on Easter morning.

I’m using this picture to represent the millions upon millions of Chinese who have zero background knowledge of Christianity, but who cannot avoid encountering it (at least in small, token ways) in today’s China.

3. Jesus Car

A Christian car that shows up in our neighbourhood every couple weeks, including today (Easter Sunday afternoon). What they’re trying to communicate by using English I don’t know (status, education, cosmopolitanism?). They’ve got a cross glued to the dash, where traditional charms like Buddhist prayer wheels often go. But if you look closer you’ll see a key detail that marks them as a new breed of Chinese Christian: their Chinese Bible verse is not written in the traditional, beloved, archaic-sounding KJV-esque translation that 99.99% of China’s churches are unwilling to part with (something that annoys this language student to no end, even though I sympathize). It’s written in the latest translation (Chinese Standard Bible / 中文标准译本), meaning they’re probably part of a next generation of Chinese Christians who are willing to break with cherished traditions.

Even though most of them don’t advertize on the side of their cars, I’m using this picture to represent the newer breed of Chinese Christian, who are typically urban, wealthy, educated and trendy, and whose newly-emerging churches represent an additional third branch of Chinese Christianity along side the Three-Self and traditional unregistered church legacies.

More about Easter in China:

• Easter art from Chinese artists
• 哈利路亚！主复活了！
• Happy “Resurrection Festival” 2012!
• Christianity in China (topic)

More about Chinese good luck charms:

• Mao the saint / icon / bodhisattva / talisman / fuzzy dice
• Chairman Mao the Daoist immortal, and his Bodhisattva friends
• Crossing Cultures & the Meanings of Things
• Chinese Folk Religion (topic)

Of the many valuable things you can do in addition to class and book homework, two that we do just happened this morning, and it makes for a good example:

1. Build language into your daily routines/environment, and
2. Recognize and seize the opportunities to practice that come your way.

1. Fill Your Daily Life/Routines with Language

Maximize your exposure to the language by controlling your daily environment as much as you can. Going to class for a couple hours, doing a couple hours of homework, but then shifting mental gears into English for the rest of your day is a recipe for frustration. There are all kinds of ways you can increase your exposure to the language. Which ones are most helpful depends on what stage you’re at in your language progress. Probably the best thing you could do is get Chinese roommates (who wont try to speak English with most of the time). Beginning students often label all the objects in their apartment. Intermediate students will start listening to and learning Chinese pop songs. We found bilingual versions or translations of fun, classic children’s stories. Every night when we put our daughter to bed we have the option of reading in English, attempting to read in Chinese, or both. Anyway, the more creative (or resourceful) you are, the more options you’ll have for building Chinese into the structure of your life, into your daily routines.

2. Recognize & Seize Practice Opportunities

There are more opportunities to practice than people tend to realize. And seizing them doesn’t take too much extra effort. The problem is we often don’t recognize the opportunities that come our way. Or we think we’re in too much of a hurry to bother taking advantage of them. Every time something’s broken, or we have to run an errand, or text a friend, or whatever — anything we do that requires us to use Chinese — is an opportunity.

The default behaviour for most language students is to just rush off to accomplish whatever it is on our long list of tasks for the day, muddling through with whatever language ability we have. After all, we don’t want these daily annoyances to suck up too much study time. But these daily tasks are study time, or rather, practice time — valuable practice time. It’s worth the effort to look up the relevant vocab and grammar before you go do whatever it is you need to do. If you already have enough Chinese to get through whatever it is you need to do, you can still sharpen your vocab and grammar, using more accurate Chinese instead of “just barely enough to make myself understood” Chinese.

Example

There’s a leaky solar water heater that we don’t use on the roof of our six-storey building, but the electric control panel for it is in our bathroom on the first floor. Water is leaking down the electric wires and dripping out from inside the panel. So I started to text the landlord. I knew how to say “leaking water” but couldn’t remember how to say “down the wire.”

So I had a choice. I could write the text anyway and make myself understood by simplifying or talking “around” the meaning. But I remembered that in one of our daughter’s bilingual bedtime story books, Yertle the Turtle king, standing on top of a tall stack of turtles, looks down the stack to see who’s complaining at the bottom. So I chose to go to my daughter’s room, open the book, find the phrase, and import the grammar into my text message — “looked down the stack” became “leaking down the wire.”

When the landlord comes over this afternoon I’ll get to practice the phrase in conversation (or discover it’s the wrong phrase and learn the right one). It’s learning through an interactive real-life experience rather than by looking at a text book. By making the small effort to look up the phrase in the book and attempt a more accurate text message, I’m engaging the language more than I would have otherwise. And no matter whether the phrase is right or it gets corrected in conversation this afternoon, it’s sharpening my language accuracy, too.

So these two non-classroom aspects of language learning work together: because we’d already built language into our daily lives by using bilingual bedtime stories, I was able to seize the opportunity of the leaky water heater to sharpen my vocab and grammar. And for very minimal extra effort. It’s just a mundane little example, but a filling your lifestyle with these makes a difference in language acquisition.

Related Stuff:

• The Best Decisions We Ever Made in China (#1): ditching the laowai ghetto
• Robert Munsch’s “I Have to Go!” in Chinese
• 蚯蚓的日记 Diary of a Worm
• Eric Carle’s “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” in Chinese! 好饿的毛毛虫
• Dr. Seuss in Chinese!
• The suspiciously Orwellian children’s story 《鸭子农夫》 “Farmer Duck” Chinese-Pinyin-English read-along
• Learning Mandarin (topic)

She’d attended what she thought was a Bible study group. She didn’t notice anything amiss until the end, when they mentioned that not only has Jesus come back but she’s living in Henan province. Even then she didn’t realize what she’d stumbled into; she hadn’t heard of this particular group despite the fact that the gov’t's Dec. 2012 crackdown made international headlines.

Just of the top of my head I can think of four unrelated circles we’re connected to in which people have mentioned running into cult — just within the last three weeks.

People who keep tabs on Christianity in China have been aware of this group since the early 90′s because they specifically (and sometimes violently) target Christians and churches. Here’s links I found helpful/interesting — some crazy stuff in here, especially the first-hand accounts:

• Eastern Lightning and the End of the World
• “Eastern Lightning Destroyed My Family” (Original: 东方闪电拆散了我的家, also here)
• Church of Almighty God (their official English website)
• Eastern Lightning may be a cult, but they still have rights
• Experiencing the Eastern Lightning Cult (Detailed first-hand and second accounts, historical overview and analysis. Much more here.)
• Deceived by the Lightning
• China’s “Almighty God” Rises with Threat of Apocalypse
• Jesus Is Back, and She’s Chinese

It’s important to understand this cult within the Chinese rural house church/indigenous modern religious context from which it mutated. I found this in-depth review of a recent scholarly work on China’s modern, Christianity-influenced homegrown religious context helpful:

• How “Dangerous” Are Chinese House Churches?

Hitting problems sideways goes back thousands of years in China. Wéiqí 围棋 (aka “encirclement chess” aka “Go”) is at least 2500 years old. And while they’re certainly willing to engage in head-on confrontation, using an indirect approach is the standard M.O. for Chinese authorities when dealing with troublesome, undesirable groups — it’s effective and less accountable. Here are three examples: two on-going and one more-or-less recent.

The Doomsday Cult

侧面地 — “sideways” — is the adverb a friend used this last Sunday to describe the way the gov’t indirectly combats the Eastern Lightning/Church of Almighty God cult (东方闪电 / 全能父教会), of whom his mother-in-law is a member. Everything she does and everywhere she goes is monitored, but they haven’t confronted her directly. They went instead to her husband’s employer, revealed a bunch of what they know, and pressured the employer to use his leverage to pressure the husband to contain his wife.

The result so far is that the entire rest of the family now fears for their livelihoods. All of them reject the cult and its teachings, but having a family member involved is enough to put them all at risk. It’s sufficient motivation for a family to do whatever they can to discourage the wayward grandma. Which, in their case, isn’t very much; this group isn’t called cult for no reason (links at bottom). In China, they’re officially an “evil religion” (邪教).

The Social-problem-engaged Non-Profit

A couple years ago a non-profit in our former city got the sideways treatment. They run a project that provides therapy for disabled kids and training for their parents. That project’s major event every year is a Christmas performance; they rent out a local theatre and the kids, parents and teachers put on a show. One year the local authorities decided to squash it. But instead of contacting the org directly or telling them during the monthly meeting to ‘have tea’, they went to the theatre on the weekend before the show was scheduled and told the managers to cancel the booking. The theatre refused; apparently the authorities weren’t offering to cover their lost revenue. So police were sent to the org’s office. I was told by a person present that there was a verbal confrontation between them and the Chinese staff of the disabled children’s project. Apparently one staff member got agitated: “This is not a religious event, and if you want to cancel it then you can bring your battalions to the show and cancel it yourself!” In the end there was a compromise: they could still put on the show, but they had to take out all the parts that had to do with the Christmas Story (so no baby Jesus in the manger, shepherds and sheep and angels and all that).

The Envelope-pushing Church

In the under-reported case of Shouwang, a church in Beijing that’s been engaged in a public standoff with the authorities for over a year, sideways tactics played a key role in creating the mess. They were a large unregistered church network of small gatherings that decided to begin meeting as one big group. This was breaking an unwritten rule in the gray area of illegal-but-tolerated religious practice in China; unregistered normal churches are often left alone so long as they don’t meet in large groups or otherwise draw attention to themselves. After repeatedly being turned out of venues they’d rented by landlords who were being pressured by the authorities, they purchased their own place. But when they were prevented from taking possession of their own property, they began holding their Sunday services outside in a park in protest, demanding an end to the harrassment and that they be allowed to register as a legal organization without being required to join the Party-controlled “Three-Self Patriotic Church” (三自爱国教会). These demands, however, require changes to actual policy, not just an altering of the unwritten rules of the status quo. They want an end to the “sideways” management, and they want official, legally-recognized status.

So they’ve forced direct confrontation with local authorities. Those that aren’t under house arrest are detained by waiting police every single weekend. But consider these details (emphasis mine):

In 2012 … members of Shouwang Church were detained 1,600 times by either Domestic Security Protection agents in various districts [of Beijing] or in more than 90 different police stations across Beijing (for periods of several hours to 48 hours). Sixty people were evicted from their homes and more than 10 people lost their jobs…

They’ll use legions of police to make sure a scene isn’t created in a public space on Sunday morning, and they’ll keep the leaders under long-term house arrest. But in the meantime they’ll wear down the rank-and-file, suffocating them by twisting the arms of their landlords and employers. (You can find more details of this on-going saga documented here.)

Update #1: landlords, employers, relatives

I’m adding this update because it’s a perfect real-life example:

the situation has been increasingly tense since the beginning of March. He said, the government departments don’t even bother trying to have any direct contact; instead, they go behind our backs to threaten the landlord and not allow us to continue worshipping here. Then they go to the work units of the individual church members and give them orders, telling them they do not have permission to come to our church anymore, otherwise, they must resign from their jobs or they will be fired.

The senior pastor said, “Last weekend, even my 70-year-old elderly mother was summoned by the neighborhood committee and forced to answer questions about my situation, which gave the old lady a great fright.”

Update #2: Children

I failed to mention in the above examples that children are not exempt from being used as leverage: Ten-Year-Old Girl Detained, Denied Food and Water