There was a firework display at that night and I heard it was very much impressive. I found a set of well taken photos by one of the members (玩美视觉 || 毛衣 ) in Ezeem Forum “. After granting his permission, I would like to share it here. It’s exciting for me to see such a beautiful night light of Shantou!

Just got an email from my dad sharing this 3D Shantou Map website http://xz.st.gd.cn/. I have to say it’s pretty cool and will certain provide a lot of conveniences to tourists from other cities. I don’t think there is a English version yet and I doubt it will have one in a short term.

This time I brought with me the hopes of many little American children. A hope to be friends with Chinese kids, particularly those living in poverty. So I brought with me school supplies, picture books and a fierce desire to find some schools willing to begin lasting relationships with schools in the US. This is more than just a little donation; it’s about kids forming relationships in this globalized world, we adults just facilitate that. This is the idea of Kids to Kids international www.ktki.org.

Coincidentally the email came on the same that I attended John Wood’s talk in my company. For those of you don’t know John Wood, you can read about him on here and here, or watch a video here. I very much admire his motivate and his believe to make the world a better place through education and help to our next generation that really needs help. Although I wouldn’t consider Shantou is a city in poverty, there are still some areas that are lack of basic education. Thanks Amy for bringing the books to Shantou and also let me know about this project. I agree that it’s “more than just a little donation; it’s about kids forming relationships in this globalized world”. I left Shantou when I was 18 to see the world, and I know exactly what she mean by this.

So here is my part of contribution in this blog. I will also write a post in Ezeem forum in Chinese to see if there are some local schools or charity bodies that are willing to help with this project.

Bob just dropped me an email that the news team asking for more volunteer to join. Here is the main page. If you are currently in Shantou, please feel free to contact them and be part of the team.

Shantou didn’t change much since I was here in late 2006. But I must admit that I didn’t go out a lot this time, because the theme of this trip is ‘family’. I spent a lot of time with my families, sometimes even just a casual chat with couple of Kung Fu tea with parents at home can make my day. I met up with a few friends too. I’m happy to see most of them are having an enjoyable life in Shantou, somehow made me jealous! Still, if you are talking about food and living, personally opinion, Shantou is the best!

Since I started my work a year ago, I had to scarify my blogging time. You can see the last post was in May this year, which was four months ago. I do apologize the lateness of the updates here, but I’ve only got 24 hours a day and there are more important things I needed to take care of. However this blog is still important to me. If you check out the news site News.MyShantou.net, there are quite a lot of excellent articles posted by the news team from the Journalism school in Shantou University. Actually I will have a meeting with the team tomorrow to discuss the goal of next year. It’s my first meet up with the team and I’m looking forward to it.

Sorry for the poor content of this post, but just want to say hi and let you know this blog is still in my agenda. If you are want to contribute, please let me know.

Hope you are all well. I love Shantou!

As summer is almost here, Shantou is going to enter a typhoon season. But scene like this is still rare.

Love Bar
至高爱吧
汕头市海滨路金晟大厦5楼
5th floor, Jinsheng Building, Haibin Road, Shantou

If you know him, it’s in the same building as Lam’s architect company.

Henry, me, Ella. Congratulations! And they’re going to have a baby, too!

Only half an hour into our walk through the Pu, we had a group of about twenty teenage boys trailing us and shouting at ear-splitting volume. This is what it feels like to be a celebrity, I thought. This is what it would be like if I were Ben Affleck and showed up at the local mall.

My girlfriend and I headed out on a recent afternoon to what the foreign community here affectionately refers to as “the Pu,” Tuopu, one of the many small villages on the outskirts of the city that have been subsumed under urban sprawl.

The Pu lies out on Daxue Lu, University Road. It is a smallish community, set against a dark river into which people dump their trash. Tuopu is a mix of old-style Chinese houses set close together, and apartments of Soviet bloc architecture. As you go further from the main road, the spaces widen; rough gardens and fields of crops appear. A friend tells me that in the local language, there is a slur against people who live there that translates something close to “Tuopu hillbilly.”

After an afternoon walking around there, though, and getting treated like rock stars, it seems an unfair assessment

What is true of the Pu, however, is that it seems to be a place in a city — where traffic is generally of the Mad Max variety — of even more boundless traffic freedom.

We hopped off a bus and immediately were nearly run over by several motorcycles. We had heard that down the side alleys, parallel to the river, were some interesting old buildings. We found one and headed down.

We were quickly in a tunnel-like alley, where buildings seemed to lean in on each other. Kids on bicycles whirred by in twos and threes. The occassional motorcyle pinned us against the wall.

“They have school on Saturday?’ I asked.

“No not really,” my girlfriend, Moon, replied. “They just have to study all the time.”

Remembering her stories of the bootcamp nature of Chinese high school, it made sense.

After a few bends in a few different alleys, I saw what was clearly a cross poking up out of a mass of buildings. We walked over and sure enough: Tuopu Church. I added it to the list of five or six Christian churches I’d already seen throughout the city.

Walking on we came across a stone monument that had dates of 1120 and 1201 carved into it. Apparently, the area had been of importance to trade in the southern Song dynasty. I looked around at the dusty houses and fields. It was hard to imagine the sleepy suburb being a hub of trade, but a lot can change in 800 years.

We turned around and met our companions for the next hour or so, Jia Kun and his friends. We had turned away from the monument, and found one of the kids who had been trailing us on a bike peering up at us with wide eyes.

“Hey buddy, what’s up?” I said. He grinned and said something in dialect.

“I’m sorry we don’t speak your dialect, but we can speak Putonghua,” I said in Chinese. He seemed to take a foreigner speaking Chinese in stride.

He launched into an explanation of why he and his friends had been trailing us for the last twenty minutes.

“March is Lei Feng month. Our teacher told us we should do a good thing,” he said.

Lei Feng was a model, mythological Communist soldier who helped others at his own expense. “Lei Feng shu shu” translated roughly into something like “do-gooder.”

“So what is the good thing you want to do?” asked Moon

“We want to show you the road,” he said.

Ah, local guides. We were set. We followed Jia Kun on a tour of Tuopu, a tour that consisted mostly of his school and collecting a flock of teenage boys on bikes at every house that we passed.

After a walk that nearly took us back to the university, we made it to Jia Kun’s school, Tuo Dong Xuexiao. Although the school was closed, we were suddenly swarmed by another twenty or so teenage kids. One in particular was a character. “Si-KU-le!!!” he kept shouting, a version of “school” adapted into his native tongue.

I fell immediately into my role as teacher. “What is your name?” I asked the shouting comedian kid. “Yi Yan Bing!” he screamed.

“How old are you?” I asked. There was much chatter about what I was asking at every question. Then an answer was formulated in Putonghua. One kid usually knew the English equivalent.

Finally, Yi Yan Bing came up with his answer.

“Shi si,” he said. “Fourteen.”

I pretended to misunderstand. “Si shi?!! Zhende ma? Ni shi si shi sui? Zenme ke neng?” I said. “You’re forty years old? How’s that possible?”

This elicited the great gales of laughter that I had hoped for. Ohhhh, fourteen, not forty.

The boys took us over to their uncle’s place, where they played billiards on tables that had little net holders under each pocket.
But no women were allowed into the place, and as it was International Women’s Day, it seemed inappropriate to enter.

We tried to escape from the boys, who seemed to be replicating in numbers at every moment. We said our goodbyes and headed down the road. But after about a minute, we found ourselves surrounded again by kids on bikes.

Just before we reached DaXue Lu again, we came across the qilin on the side of the small temple. But it was mostly blocked by a car and the boys, sensing my interest, went into a shouting fest about how there was another. They took us to the back of the temple where there was indeed, a magnificent fresco of the strange creature.

The qilin was a mythological Chinese beast, with the hooves of horse, the body of a deer, and a single horn. It was supposed to be an omen of luck; I had been reading Gavin Menzies controversial book 1421 and had been intrigued by the fact that one of the treasure ships had brought back giraffes to the Ming emperor and had presented them as qilins.

I snapped some pictures and the boys led us on. I couldn’t help grinning at the kids. They were loud. They were obnoxious. But their enthusiasm was infectious. For a variety of reasons, I had been filled with sadness over the past few days, and had been waking up with sickening nightmares. After an hour or so just hanging out with the kids, I felt lifted out of myself. It was hard to be anything but happy in their presence.

Jia Kun sped off down the alley. He was waiting for us at the main street. He explained to us where we were, and we pretended that we hadn’t known and were grateful for his explanation. He was wearing a black sweatshirt that had “Turbo Charge Cataly at” on the back, in the usual and always surprising English found here. I chuckled as I looked at his feet and we waved goodbye — his outfit was completed by a pair of pink “Hello Kitty” slip-on sandals.

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