Original Publication: January 29, 2009, in the Yale Herald.

Time spent abroad reveals volumes about the world left behind. I had the pleasure and privilege to study in the Peking University-Yale Joint Program last semester, and my experience both defied expectations and eludes easy explanation. In this column, I will share some of those reflections formed abroad and narrate the everyday rediscoveries in a life newly reunited with Yale.

I’d like to talk about one of the first unique features I noticed at Beida, the school I attended in China. It’s a feature that Yale lacks in a very quantifiable way: animal camaraderie. Yale is lacking in the four-legged friends department, while China’s flagship university has a surfeit of semi-domesticated animals that roam its grounds. Never have I met so many different cats in so little time: big cats, small cats, feral cats, and more recombination still. Outside of campus, I would meet felines in temples, restaurants, and alleys; on campus, they roamed the grounds, as fearlessly and assuredly as any of the students. One cat liked to sit by the window and listen to East Asian demography lectures; another occupied special turf next to a noodle shop. I learned to recognize these different cats by their territory and their habits­—the same was true for dogs, though they were fewer in number.

At Yale, however, our visible animal life appears to center around rodents. During my freshman year, devious squirrels plotted a grand invasion of several Bingham rooms and managed several reconnaissance forays before students rebuffed their advances. Though obnoxious, these Old Campus squirrels are key contributors to the inter-species dialogue here at Yale, and we welcome their presence as a check to impressions of overwhelming urban sterility. Recently passed New Haven ordinances now allow enterprising residents to raise chickens, but I have yet to see any campus examples thus far.

While I was in China, there was one cat in particular that, through charm and good looks, stole the hearts of all who met her. She was called Xiao Huang （小黄）meaning “little yellow,” and she proudly wore her golden-orange coat every day as she and her on-again-off-again boyfriend Xiao Bai, （小白） “little white,” lazed about their turf outside our Chinese class every day. While some of the semi-homeless animals at Beida suffered and begged for the attentions of motivated bystanders, Xiao Huang knew how to work the system to her advantage. The little minx and her beau were fed every day by staff at the building they frequented, and in return they offered their adorable services—usually in the form of purring—as a pick-me-up to anyone who had just bombed a Chinese test. I was a frequent patron.

But there were also the animal-welfare situations that left me at a loss for action. One such recurring experience would pass at night on busy streets: As I walked, I’d spot a small crowd forming, bottlenecking the sidewalk with interested bystanders. Getting closer, the crowd would thin and reveal a man or men in nondescript parkas, vending merchandise from a cardboard box at their feet. Only when it’s too late to escape without heartbreak does the occasion’s interest become clear: puppies for sale. Of course, in Shanghai one could buy live ducks a block outside our downtown hotel. I was discouraged from doing so, perhaps, by the startling variety of other animals—alive or otherwise—available for purchase there. But its being commonplace didn’t erase its impact.

Xiao Huang’s sad story came together in bits and pieces as I learned more about her. She lived outside one of the foreign student’s dorm, and she had originally been rescued by a foreigner, but left behind when that woman’s stay in China was up. Those strays outside Beida appear to manage with their feline wits, but for every Xiao Huang being taken care of, there are a dozen more that struggle. The more helpful comparison between Yale and Beida comes when considering the relevance these cats have for Chinese students. One official club devotes its time creating shelters for—and feeding—the hungry cats on campus: Plenty of people want to help. What do we have at Yale?

I wish there were fewer cats lounging in Beida’s bamboo groves. As Beijing’s winter took a bite, I saw so many suffering—kittens shivering and groups of cats huddled together for warmth. Like so many ephemeral observations about China, closer analysis revealed a more complex problem. I bought catnip and lamb kebabs for my feline friends, but I learned that just because they speak Chinese doesn’t mean Chinese cats like spicy food. I also recognized that it was human feeding of these cats which allowed so many to survive on campus.

What does it mean to surround ourselves with animals? It’s important because it helps to ground us. I appreciated the increased presence of animals not just for the daily dose of adorable cat behaviors, but simply because nature in this active embodiment captures the attention and reminds passersby that no matter what color the sky is, how much homework you have, or what personal struggle you face, nature still exists all around. When you watch animals play, the exigencies of student life fade away like magic.

I couldn’t take Xiao Huang back to Yale, so how can that wonderful appearance of the wild be recaptured? The answer starts with you, readers: If your Master or Dean doesn’t have a pet, start a petition to insist on real-life college mascots. If professors at Harvard can graze cows, why not a real life Trum-bull?）

How would you summarize Electrical Engineering 201 01 for a fellow student? Would you recommend Electrical Engineering 201 to another student? Why or why not?

Stay away. This course will cause you nothing but misery. You’ll spend hours on end slaving away in a lab, using software called “Xilinx” that’s prohibitively buggy. It’s so buggy that I doubt I can convey, in this short paragraph, an accurate impression of how poor it is. Maybe I can describe it by analogy. Imagine a sculpting course that requires you to chisel replicas of ancient masterpieces at the middle of a frozen pond during spring thaw. The ice is just barely thick enough to support the weight of you and the marble block for a few minutes at a time, but it keeps cracking and your work keeps falling through. Diligently, you begin again each time this happens, but you know it’s just going to happen again in ten minutes. There is no hope. There is no escape. There is only anguish.

That being said, the course is overall rated as pretty interesting, but that software doesn’t sound like too much fun. The lab, however, does seem to have some serious problems, not least the software program referenced above.

Shopping continues, for better or for worse…

I’m shopping a lot of classes this semester, mainly because of the terrible consequences of trying to fit a QR (Quantitative Reasoning) class into my schedule. This wouldn’t be a big problem if I’d just consent to take something easy and/or mundane, but instead I want something which will be truly interesting, so I keep trying hard and shopping classes that are on the edge of my abilities — and, so far, well over them. I have enough of a technical background and understanding to appreciate the value of the subjects and problems covered in “Intelligent Robotics” or “Computational Vision” but not the Group Theory / miscellaneous post-multivariable calculus mathematics and/or programming required to pursue my interests, which is frustrating.

More on all this soon, but for now, sleep. Have to get up early to finish Chinese homework and get to my first class at 9:25am. Today I was shopping from 9:25 -> 9PM, and tomorrow looks like it might be similar. A schedule constructed entirely from pain…! Things are not made easier when the troubles (and real pain) from last week’s 4x wisdom teeth extraction rears its head. Oh well – no excuses, for now we forge onwards!

Photo from Flickr user Dexell1827

It’s Thanksgiving time of year, and I’m not sure that exactly that will mean here in Beijing. This is the first time that I have been away from home for Thanksgiving (!) and I certainly am missing all the proper accoutrements of Thanksgiving. What matters most about Thanksgiving to me, of course, is not the food or any particular thing — what matters is, of course, the company. While my peers here at the Yale-PKU program are very nice, it’s not the same as being at home with my family. I miss cooking all day and then having a nice dinner, loyal dog at my feet to dispose of extra brisket and turkey and make sure nothing that falls to the floor goes to waste.

Of course, Thanksgiving in real life is never as rosy as its made out to be in certain movies – conflicts among relatives, problems with turkeys, canned cranberry sauce, and who knows what else can go wrong. But the essential tradition remains, and it’s a good one. It is interesting here in China to try to explain Thanksgiving – or as one roommate called it, “The Thanksgiving Festival” – to people who have no connection to it. The modern construction of Thanksgiving is closely tied to efforts to form a collective national American identity and so Thanksgiving definitely has a resonance to it beyond any single home.

Aside from the football games and tacky decorations, Thanksgiving has remained (to me) remarkable immune from the marketing and rubbish that spoils so many otherwise perfectly good holidays. Some people in some places do go overboard – deep fried turducken, anyone (chicken stuffed into a duck into a turkey)? As someone from Massachusetts (birthplace of Thanksgiving!) I am happy to tell people more about the history of Thanksgiving, and I try to explain matters without ruining things. Obviously, the original story of Thanksgiving has a lot of myth associated with it which was invented much later, and much is unknown. Not everything about the image of the Pilgrims as plucky pioneers out to build a new world is perfectly accurate; for example, few remember the fact that Plymouth was built on top of an original Native American site which was only just recently before their arrival wiped out by European-originated plague. Still, that shouldn’t stop us from appreciating the history.

This afternoon we are going to go to some hotel in Beijing, alongside Stanford and no doubt many other expats here from Beida and other places in the city. The food should be pretty good, but I can only hope to capture some of the sense of home and community that I would have back in Boston at this time of year. I’m thankful for the chance to be here in Beijing, but I wish most of all I could be back at home right now to be with my family on Thanksgiving, perhaps the best family-related holiday in the American pantheon. To celebrate, last night I made some very delicious banana bread in our toaster oven here. I might not be well positioned to bake a pumpkin pie (oh but that I was!) but I’ll do what I can to try to capture the holiday spirit.

I wish I could be at home, making spiced apple cider and sitting by the fire with my dog while my family and relatives cook up a storm, but since I can’t I’ll have to settle for sending warm wishes to everyone celebrating back in North America or wherever else they may be.

Happy Thanksgiving!
Sam

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Photo from Flickr user Dexell1827 – check out the page for more great golden retriever photos!

Why has it been so bad? Well, because of a specific weather pattern that has trapped pollution, one that is especially perilous in the winter when people start to burn coal to stay warm.

A picture’s worth a thousand words here, thanks to NASA:

This photo represents most of Eastern China – Beijing is in the middle-northern part of the smog cloud. Here’s an explanation from NASA’s team on why this smog may have built up so thick:

Thick haze and fog settled over much of China on October 28, 2009. In this photo-like image captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite, the thickest of the gray-brown haze conforms to the low-lying contours of the Yellow River Valley and the western half of the North China Plain near the Luliang Mountains.

A temperature inversion may be responsible for the build up of pollution over eastern China. Normally, air cools with altitude, but occasionally, a layer of cool air will be trapped beneath a layer of warm air. Since the cool air is more dense than the air above it, the two layers don’t mix and pollutants build up in the cool air near Earth’s surface.

Temperature inversions develop most often during the winter, when long, cool nights chill the ground. The cold land cools the air nearest the ground, leaving the air at higher altitudes warmer. The two layers of air do not easily mix, and the temperature inversion can last for days if winds are calm.

Today the sky has finally shifted to actual clouds, instead of smog, and it’s started to rain and let down some gross wet snow. Maybe that will help to clear things up…

By the way, using tools like NASA’s WorldWind, which I have long been a fan of, you can track weather patterns like this in near-real time, and make your own animations using MODIS. Very cool stuff.

Today the air quality in Beijing, as measured by the US State Department monitoring station at the US Embassy, is at one of its best levels I have ever noticed in my following the reported figures. In fact, at this very moment, the current rating is “Good,” the highest possible rating. This is extremely unusual, and really lovely for my lungs today. I noticed how clear the sky was, and how nice the air was to breathe, and this morning I had class on the 5th floor of a classroom building. Here’s the view that I have, reminding me of the beautiful scenery that you can ever-so-rarely see just outside the city…

Indeed, 风景很漂亮！ (The scenery,’fengjing,’ is ‘hen piaoliang,’ very beautiful). Apologies for photo quality, it’s just a borrowed iPhone shot, as I always forget to bring a camera to track the Monday morning classroom view.

It’s extremely difficult to describe what Beijing is like on its bad air days — which are many, even in the Fall, when the air is light-years better than the Summer air, apparently — to those who have never experienced it. This is true of a lot of things about China, of course, but in the case of pollution it is especially striking. I went to L.A. this summer for the 4th of July, and that was certainly a striking comparison to the San Francisco air I was used to all the rest of the summer. However, the comparison between San Francisco and L.A. can’t even begin to describe the difference between Beijing and say, New York.

Whenever I learn a new “comparison phrase” in Chinese class, my first instinct is to look out the window and talk about pollution (污染, wuran) or the air (空气， kongqi). Something like, “Although Beijing is very pretty, the air is not so good” (一方面北京很漂亮，另一方面北京的空气不太好). Although some say that they start to forget what blue skies look like, I thankfully (or not, depending on how you look at it) haven’t come to that stage just yet. Every day a large part of the equation that determines my happiness is determined by the color of the sky and the quality of the air.

Here is a photo, captured at a particularly bad moment, at the Summer Palace. This day was not cloudy, this photo was not retouched, and there was nothing wrong with my camera. On a day like this – which are especially bad, but not especially infrequent – you can stare directly at the sun without any real harm or pain, it seems, because it is so obscured through the smog. The photo was taken at a slightly ‘darker’ setting so as to bring out more detail, but the lack of contrast is real.

Not so great, right? That’s the seventeen-arch bridge at the Summer Palace, Kunming Lake, Beijing. Here’s a photo of another part of the lake, reflecting the summer palace, on a notably better day. This photo from someone nice (neverecho) on Flickr.

You can see a big difference, I hope. Now, the air is usually not as bad as in photo #1, though usually not as good as in photo #2, at least as measured by the “how much does it ruin sightseeing” factor. Every day I have Chinese class on the 5th floor of a building that looks out at the mountains in another direction, and my teacher told me two months ago that if I looked out a certain window, I could see the summer palace. I thought I didn’t understand her – that I had lost something in the translation – because every day, no matter how hard I looked, I saw no evidence of the place… until today, when I saw the top of the Buddhist Incense Tower (the same tower pictured above) beautifully framed by the mountains behind it, from about 2.5 miles away. (Sorry, forgot to take the camera after remembering how I should have brought it to my first class… am sick today!)

Here’s a photo (again) of me at the Forbidden City, on what was a really uniquely great air-quality day. They’re not impossible, just relatively rare. Blue skies, hooray! We hear that things have been especially good recently, which is at once comforting and scary. Comforting to know that things are improving, scary to know that they used to be worse, given what they’re like today.

I think that this demonstrates some of the variety that you see here in Beijing alone. In the first week we were here, the air was more like in the unfortunate Summer Palace #1 example, and you literally couldn’t very well see more than a few hundred feet down the street very clearly. It was some time before I even knew that the mountains in the first photo existed, since you certainly couldn’t see them rising out of the North China Plains just on the horizon. I want to go revisit places that I went in early September just so that I can now actually see them, since as time has gone on things have generally improved with the seasons.

The New York Times reported about two weeks ago on air quality in Beijing and China. From that article, I see that there were apparently 221 “blue-sky days” for 2009 through September, according to Beijing city officials, a city record since their blue-sky index began in 1998. While this sounds great, not all 221 of those blue-sky days were as blue as the one you see above, and they most certainly did not register as “healthy” or even “moderate” on the air quality indicator metrics that would be used in the United States or Europe. As the article explains, the Chinese official air-quality indicators are quite misleading and skew data in a way which looks more favorable for China; the US Embassy monitor is more thorough and realistic in terms of what it measures and how it does so, even if it is not located in as many monitoring sites.

The positive notes in the article include massive reductions in per-car emissions, huge shifts to newer pollution control regimes in Beijing factories, better boilers and furnaces in power plants and homes, cash-for-clunkers programs to eliminate old cars from the roads, etc, etc, etc. Interesting to note is the ease with which Chinese administrators and authorities can act – if they choose to do so – given the generally feeble powers of businesses or other private groups to oppose the government — when this works well, it works!

Last weekend I took a walk around some hutongs around 20 minutes from Tiananmen, and you can still see people there burning the coal briquettes described in the article as being so terribly harmful to the environment. With the cold winter ahead, I can only imagine how many people would go through. The photo below shows them highlighted through the doorway into someone’s home. (Note that some parts of these hutongs were nicer, and some were worse; some had more rubble, while some looked like nice neighborhoods, and most of them were at least a little bit paved, unlike the one here)

Beijing, however, isn’t all of China, though the same characteristics that manifest here in Beijing are present elsewhere to varying degrees. Nearby Shanxi province is reputedly the most polluted in all of China, in both air and water, with little of the political will to clean up and much less international face to lose for not doing so.  On a positive note, when we left Beijing after that first, polluted week, we were amazed and happy to arrive in Yunnan Province to a pure-seeming environment with perfect blue skies every day.

Yunnan lives up to its name: "south of the clouds," with lots of big sky.

Meanwhile, on our visit to Shanghai, we were blessed with very good weather and air, and most of the days were substantially better than Beijing; the worst may have been worse than what you would find in the U.S., but there was perhaps just one day out of our visit that had distractingly bad air quality, a much better ratio than what we normally experience in Beijing. Indeed, just as the Olympics helped to shape Beijing, so this upcoming 2010 World Expo is leading Shanghai to create a huge push for its own increase in blue-sky days (above and beyond what Beijing hopes to accomplish) among other big changes. Below is a photo of Shanghai’s Pudong skyline on a typical day when we were there, more or less, with this one erring on the side of “less” – obviously not perfectly haze-free, but better than what we were used to back in Beijing.

Air quality is what is most noticeable about the environment (环境) here, but obviously other things are important. Arguably, while air quality is currently estimated to be responsible for upwards of 700,000 deaths in China, water is an even more important factor in the human-environmental equation. In fact, water quality and water security in the US are too-little talked about as well. This past weekend, we had a lot of rain and snow – I mentioned this at the start as the cause of today’s wonderfully clear day. What I didn’t mention is that the reason we had so much snow here in Beijing is because authorities fired huge amounts of silver iodide into the clouds in order to seed them and cause more precipitation, in order to try to alleviate more drought here in Beijing.

Weather modification like this seems to escape the notice of many of our Chinese roommates: for example, on the 60th anniversary, several people I spoke with were just “amazed!” that the weather coincidentally happened to be so great on that auspicious occasion… not quite suspecting that it could have been artificially concocted. In any event, these frequent efforts at weather control from the central government only underscore the importance of water here in China. I don’t know very much about the water available – what’s wrong with it, how unsafe it might be, or exactly how prevalent counterfeit bottled water is in places that I go. I do know that I love street food, and that I love bubble tea smoothies made with ice of dubious origins…

I’m only here for a single semester, and I don’t think I can accumulate too much long term trouble, be it from air or water, no matter how hard I try to taste all that Beijing has to offer. My immune and digestive systems are strong, and despite a few slips here and there, I’ve been fine. I’m mostly just worried about the 1.3 billion people who live here full time.

Then, of course, there’s the carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere, and the other pollutants that make their way across the ocean only to come back to visit me in the United States. But I try not to think too much about all that.

If you like to send me presents, cash, internships or other gifts, please either say so in the comments or contact me through the contact form; otherwise, I do have some presents to give out of my own in celebration: If you need a Google Voice or Google Wave invite, let me know, and I will try to do my best to set you up if you say something thoughtful about me or my blog . Hurry while supplies last.

Click here for the slideshow [photos: Ariana Lindquist for The New York Times]

Here are some of my own photos from Heshun:

Waterway around Heshun village

Public swimming hole next to a village temple

sunset over the rice fields outside Heshun

For more about Yunnan, check out the dispatch I wrote about our Yale-PKU trip to Yunnan Province.

Here’s my application:

I did put a fair amount of thought into it, but one can only worry so much about something when you’ve only invested 140 characters in it. (In my case, I believe, 139.)

Now, what exactly is the motivation for completing this scholarship? Let us count the ways:

Since Twitter is still such a new medium, we hoped that by creating a scholarship around it we could help encourage further thinking about how to leverage it. That is why we’re giving $1,680.00 to college students who uses Twitter.

• $1,400.00 Winner
• $140.00 First Runner Up
• $140.00 Second Runner Up

If those aren’t 1,680 good reasons to spend a minute and consider writing a scholarship app here, I don’t know what else could convince you. So without more discussion here about Twitter, go ahead and write something!

Requirements:

• Currently attending full-time in post-secondary education; and
• If you win, you must be willing to allow us to list your name, your picture, and your twitter username, and your winning Tweet on CollegeScholarships.org.

____

*(Disclaimer: I did apply for the scholarship, but even if I hadn’t, CollegeScholarships.org is run by really nice people, at least as far as I have interacted with them. I wish everyone in the Higher Ed space were as nice! I guess being popular is easier when you give away money, too.)

This doesn’t seem to be the same thing that happened last winter, but is rather just some strange little exploit that allowed someone to insert some evil javascript into some wordpress files. It only affected www.samjackson.org/college, not any other sites of mine. This happened while I was offline in Shanghai,and I fixed it when I returned – however, Google has not yet updated its “unsafe browsing” to remove my site as a risk. Therefore, if you use Firefox or Chrome, you will continue to get warnings. However, there should no longer be any vulnerabilities. Please let me know right away if you see anything amiss – strange ads (shouldn’t be any!) or pop-ups, anything like that. I’ll fix it right away, but I need your help, since I can’t always detect what is going on.

Thank you for your patience, and your understanding. I try to keep the site as safe as possible, but sometimes hackers get the best of me. The internet is a dangerous place. As always, keep your anti-virus software updated and check fo malware regularly.

I haven’t written about loans or financial aid in some time… big, scary numbers like the ones in this graphic make me want to revisit the issue. Especially when I start thinking about grad school. (!)

student loans by the numbers

(via www.collegescholarships.org)

A Freshwater Marsh / Lake in Tengchong, Yunnan Province, China

Yunnan Province (云南, “South of the clouds”), located in southwest China, is home to some of the middle kingdom’s most beautiful sights and scenery. The Yalies of the Fall 2009 Yale-PKU program had the pleasure to take a 5 day trip to southern Yunnan before our classes started and roommates moved in (Sept 6-10). For those of you who have been angry at me for not uploading photos, be happy! Your fortunes have changed with this post : ) This will be mostly a photo-travelogue, with my commentary.

First, some more background about Yunnan. Many of the “most beautiful” traditional sights are located in northwest Yunnan – Lijiang, with Tiger Leaping Gorge; Dali, with Erhai Hu; Shangri-La with, well, Shangi-La… etc. When we found out that we weren’t going to go to any of these sites, a lot of us familiar with them were rather crestfallen… and may still are, at least a little bit. However, we still had a really great time in Tengchong county and Ruili City, which were rather less ‘touristy’ than the northwest would have been. The question remains as to whether or not those places are touristy for good reasons! but all the same, it was worthwhile to have had a nice trip together, even if we would have wanted to plan it a little bit differently. With no more complaints and without further ado, some more photos and stories!

hot springs in the rain!

The photo at the top of this post is from a lake that we visited in Tengchong; while in Tengchong, we also climbed a few dormant volcanoes and visited some very lovely villages, perhaps dubiously authentic, but “charmful” all the same! I am sorry I don’t have more photos of myself, but other people were taking photos of me, and maybe I can get my hands on those. These are mostly of the scenery or other people!

Tengchong – and much of southern Yunnan – is a volcanic hotspot of sorts. All the mountains you were were formed from volcanic activity, and this resulted in – what else? – hot springs! We got to visit a really pretty hot springs park, and a few of our own stayed afterwards to go into the hot springs themselves (indoors, with snacks, etc). Meanwhile, the rest of us went to go relax, and then we went out again in the evening for dinner and massages from local deaf masseurs. Not quite like Zatoichi, but still nice – especially for 20 RMB!

At the hot springs, our guide informed us excitedly about the new development of a “five star hotel!!!” — indeed, everywhere we looked in Yunnan, it seemed, ‘five star’ hotels were being put up. Nearby we were also able to see the work currently in progress on what is to be the “largest golf course in China” which – of course! – would be the site of at least a few new “five star hotel.”

This obsession with official accreditation extended in some cases to the most bizarre of places. For instance, I can tell you with the official authority of the Chinese People’s Scenic Sites Rating Committee (paraphrased) that the above hot springs are a “four star” tourist attraction. Perhaps the most hilarious example of this practice came in a village we visited later on, in Ruili (the village is pictured below, near the Banyan tree). There, the villagers themselves got together to rate each other’s homes on a variety of different criteria, from cleanliness to filial piety… yes, really! Anyway, moving on.

This is what the road to Ruili looks like out your window

After two lovely days in Tengchong, we set out for Ruili, in even-more-southern Yunnan. With our guide and driver, we set out along the historic road to Burma, tracing much of the same routes that the “southern silk road” once took. Driving through the mountain switchbacks was, frankly, extremely terrifying. Our driver saved our lives many times, no doubt.

The roads were not themselves so much a problem as were our fellow travelers on the roads. (This is a general rule of thumb for travel conditions in China, it seems)

sadly, the most beautiful and dramatic images were often too deadly to take, and our program director didn't let us stop at the best safe pull-outs

Scooters were not a serious worry – in an accident or collision, we’d survive handily. Instead, on this narrow and twisting two-lane road through the high mountain passes, extremely slow moving “trucks” — actually truck bodies matches with extremely weak tractor or motorcycle engines mounted naked in front of the drivers — were heavily loaded with volcanic rocks for the stone carving operations further back down the mountains. Given these and other kinds of slow moving vehicles – local farmers and pedestrians entering from secret off-roads into even more sinuous and dangerous village mountain roads – on a truly horrifying number of occasions we were faced with two oncoming vehicles bearing down on us in each lane.

On one side, the jungle and mountain. On the other, thousands of feet off the mountainside through steep rice paddies to the valleys below. Every time, people were able to maneuver successfully, and I’m alive here to write this story… but very, very scary.  Luckily, I didn’t have to drive, so when not preoccupied with our impending deaths, I was able to snap photos like the ones you can see above.

And then, we made it to Ruili – alive! Oh, how happy we were.

Ruili was, until quite recently, a very exciting travel destination for foreigners who were looking for heroin, prostitutes, danger and excitement on the Burmese border. Why is Ruili City a boomtown of such illicit trades? Simply look across the Ruili river to find your answer: Burma. Yes, we went to the Burmese border. In fact, we drove along one section of the border where there were simply some weak low fencing and on the other side, Burmese farmers. For a brief background reading on how Ruili and other boomtowns are growing because of the surging trade with the junta  -  China is Burma’s 2nd largest trading partner – check out this piece from PBS Frontline – Burma: The Chinese Connection. Brief relevant sections quoted below:

Along the Burmese frontier, Chinese boomtowns are sprouting up, bankrolled in large part by the trade in narcotics, jade and timber from Burma. One such town is Ruili, just over the river from the Jie Gao Free Trade Zone.

I first visited Ruili four years ago. Back then, the construction boom brought a volatile mix of men, cash, drugs and sex. China’s first AIDS cases were discovered here in the early 1980s.

These days the atmosphere in Ruili is less frenetic. It feels like a town that is finally settling into its self, after going through a spasm of growth. The thousands of Chinese construction workers, who’d come for the building boom, have left. Many of the Burmese prostitutes who flocked here during the boom are also gone.

“In the past, you could see men and women shooting heroin openly in the streets,” a longtime Ruili resident tells me. “But today, Ruili is much cleaner, more modern.”

But the town has not fully shaken its sleazy reputation. Heroin trade has decreased slightly, but amphetamines — another Burmese export — are flooding the streets along the China-Burma border. There are still dozens of brothels, advertising both Burmese and Chinese women.

So yes, Yale / PKU brought us to one corner of the Golden Triangle, Southeast Asia’s main opium production zone. Ruili was a little bit gritty, and we were careful going out – the night market was full of Burmese children who sneak over to beg, for example – but it was still an interesting experience. While here, the “Southeast Asia” feel was stronger than ever, even though it was obviously with a Chinese element. One reason we came to Yunnan was because it is full of so many minority groups – and so many which are just found in Yunnan. Here in Ruili, we got to meet local schoolchildren from different minority groups as well as Han Chinese, and visited some minority villages and other local sites.

manual exposure: why I love my Pana FX-500!

At right, you can see one of the many places we were able to visit around Ruili (aside from our numerous excursions to heroin-filled brothels, of course). This was a truly lovely park / wildlife area. We picked up a second guide in Ruili, and she told us that the area was sacred to the local Buddhists, and that therefore for a long time no one would go into it to hunt, log, etc – thus, it was in pristine condition! This definitely seemed to be the case, at least to a certain degree. There was a really nice trail that went to a waterfall there, and this is a photo taken along the way. This area also had some hot springs, which fed into proper “pools” in which local people were just swimming, washing clothes, etc.

The forest was said to be good for your health because of the very high levels of oxygen because of all the foliage there – this was basically rainforest, or so it seemed. Though the day was very sunny when we started, under all the tree cover it still stayed pretty cool, despite the heat of the local climate.

There were giant, old trees – reminiscent of the redwoods and sequoias of the American West, even, although more subtropical / tropical. I have more photos of everything that will be uploaded to… Facebook, I suppose? So look for them there. : )

The next day, we were set to go visit a local village school, and then a corresponding local village. While at first I hadn’t been particularly excited about the village or the children, thinking it would be a pretty tacky and inauthentic experience, I was pretty pleasantly surprised.

The kids were all really, really nice – they were very excited to get to meet us, and it was nice to have little kids who really wanted to play with us and who rarely if ever got to meet foreigners.

Obviously, all of them would imagine Yale as being less exciting than a Chinese university, but I still harbor some hope that maybe one of them will be inspired and end up coming to Yale some 10-15 years from now. We sat in on a couple different classes, and then got to play with them outside. Many were shy at first, but it was interesting to get to see them learn and to see the school.

The picture on the right shows the kids in their English class, which was the only one that I could really follow along with – my Chinese is definitely nowhere near 4th grade level, which I believe is the year the students in the yellow outfits were. In any event, I could communicate passably with some of the younger children about basic concepts, but couldn’t understand their playground songs, etc.

Outside, during their recess, we got to play with the kids – each class getting a few “big brothers” and “big sisters” (i.e., Yalies). At first, we played their games, which were delightfully violent or dangerous, the kind of things that PTAs have tried to outlaw in the United States like Red Rover, etc. We also played duck-duck-goose, and when I lost I had to stand in the center of the circle and sing a song – but I didn’t know the “you just lost duck-duck-goose” song in Chinese, so I sang part of the U.S. National Anthem instead… to the great delight and laughter of all the Chinese (and Yalies in earshot, as well). At right is a photo of one of my fellow Yalies, Monica Lu (Morse, ‘11) with a variety of friendly little schoolkids. The red scarves indicate that they are on the “honor roll” so to speak, and are especially diligent / hard-working, etc. We left around lunchtime, and so did the students – they go home for lunch, if they live close, and then come back for more classes later.

In the background you might be able to see some rubble; it was just littered around the schoolyard, which was a bit worrying, but it turns out to be positive: they are building new classrooms etc and it’s just part of the construction process. The facilities were all things considered quite nice: they had nicer overhead projectors and equipment in some cases than what I had had in elementary school, even if the facilities were anything but fancy. The school had recently gotten a good infusion of funds for their expansion / renovation, so they were on pretty solid footing. Apparently they also had a program in place to teach Burmese children, too. Some of the kids whose clothes look different are from different minority groups,  but it’s not always obvious; most of the differences in outfits are just those who are wearing ‘uniforms’ for different grades.

Rice laid out to... dry? A common scene everywhere we went around Ruili - Rice, Corn, and Tobacco were the main crops we saw grown - also some chilis!

After we also had our lunch, and emergency ice cream to combat the heat (remember, we’re on the Burmese border, but not at altitude anymore), we headed off to this nearby ‘minority village.’ There are several interesting stories to tell here, though I had few photos to go along, but I’ll try to give a sense of what it was like.

First, we were met by a local woman who was head of the women’s committee of this village and four others. This was actually a very important post, since – or the claim was made – that this and the other villages were part of a minority group which was in fact matriarchal, where the women have indentured servant husbands for several years until they have “earned their keep” and can move upstairs into the bedroom of the house, for example.

Afterwards we weren’t quite sure how much of the story we were told was entirely true, but it seemed quite believeable. In Chinese fashion, this woman – 10 year party member! – was not eager to really show off the squalid conditions of the village-village, instead touring us her house and suggesting another nicer section to visit. After talking with her and hearing the story of the village (translated by our program director) she offered us a large selection of jewelry to purchase, supposedly made from local materials in a local factory constructed by the Chinese Communist Party for the villagers – the proceeds were meant to support the village and their Buddhist temples. After hearing the very well told story of their history and culture, we of course all leapt to buy trinkets; southern Yunnan is an important site of China’s jade trade, but the items were mostly metals. Still, we left about 2000 RMB (~300 USD) poorer, collectively, and richer by an unknown number of bracelets and earrings.

Now, with a short drive an an additional walk, we came to another, nicer part of the village – or a nearby village, it’s hard to tell – as pictured above. Some of the old style houses were still around – woven bamboo walls, etc – some were newer buildings of brick, and some were a combination of both. The classic house here in this area is to have a mostly empty lower section of the house for entertaining guests and storing your animals when need arises; upstairs is where the family lives and keeps their nice possessions, etc.

Our objective was the Buddhist temple of the area, since a very large Buddha had been built over many years. I took photos, but it wasn’t especially exciting – what drew my attention was another absolutely fabulous Banyan tree. This picture is taken from very far away and doesn’t really convey the full scale of the tree; we had stopped at some Banyan groves earlier, and this was much bigger than any others.

Now, I later learned that this particular tree – of a species significant to Buddhists and Hindus alike – was probably sacred and significant to the local people, especially given its close proximity to the giant Buddha (taller than the tree, perhaps?) just 100 feet away. Still, my first thought when I saw such a beautiful tree was to worship it in my own way – by getting up on top of it and experiencing its age and majesty first hand. I didn’t know that was wrong until I started getting yelled at, but still…!

Banyan trees are a kind of ficus – often called stranglers for the way they sometimes start by growing around existing trees – which drop down roots which then grow into larger trunks which can end up as large as real trees themselves.

These trees can grow to be hundreds of years old, and cover huge amounts of territory because of the way they can extend laterally – the first picture above shows just how “wide” this collection of trunks can become. Very impressive trees!

Afterwards, we went into the adjacent temple, which mostly merits mention because – like so many other places in China – it had a very cute cat posing in a very photogenic way.

After this, we went back to the hotel, had some food at an interesting Burmese-themed kitschy restaurant (which was fun, if tacky – Cameron got married off to a local woman, as well!). At night throughout the trip, we all became friendlier and closer by playing lots and lots of Mafia together. The next day, we drove to the airport, flew back to Kunming (capital of Yunnan Province) and from there back to Beijing. With that, I’ll end this travelogue!

This has gotten to be very long (almost 3000 words) so thank you for reading till the end, if you really did, and I hope you enjoyed the stories and photos. I had a great time getting to know lots of nice new people who are now my good friends in the program, and it was very cool to get to see Yunnan as well. We had many interesting experiences which were not recounted here and maybe I will write about them randomly some other time. Until then – thanks for reading!

If you want to see a gallery of all the photos used in the post, click the “read more” link below.

Gallery of photos used in this post

And… I have reason to be afraid for my upcoming birthday : )

(Oct 31st – if you are confused about how to best send me gifts or cash favors, just leave a comment or use the contact form ; )

Yes, Virginia, there are blue skies in Beijing... sometimes.

你 好 from Beijing! I have been here in China since the start of September, and this week classes finally got started here at Beida (Peking University), a week behind Yale’s schedule. So far my experience in the Peking University-Yale Joint Undergraduate Program has been quite good, though China has a lot to take in. This is the first of an ongoing series of letters / updates I’m going to do my best to issue regularly while I am here for the semester.

What have we done so far?

• Arrived September 1
• Settled in and explored Beijing, going on several sight-seeing trips
• From Sept 6-10 we went on a trip to Yunnan Province, which was very interesting – more on that soon!
• Classes started September 14
• Currently experiencing life here in Beijing and China!

In this post, I’m going to talk about why I’m here in China, and share some first impressions. More detailed posts to come on the other points above as well as some of what is mentioned here.

Let me just first give a brief overview of why I’m here, since I never really elaborated on it before. I have always wanted to study abroad, although the country of choice has historically been France – hence the 7 years of French, etc. However, after I had completed my language requirements with an L5 French course at Yale, I decided to take Chinese. I wasn’t sure at the time (last fall) whether or not I would end up studying in China, but Yale offers a lot more resources for study in East Asia than it does for Western Europe, unfortunately.

For Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, you have options like the Light Fellowship for fully-paid intensive language study available to you. I would have ideally been studying here in China this semester on a Light fellowship; unfortunately, you have to be starting 4th Semester or higher Chinese to study in a Light-approved program during the year. I didn’t want to go on a summer program and sacrifice the season to 80-characters-a-night of Chinese homework, among other reasons, so that option was out. Still, there was the Yale-PKU program, which I applied to and decided to go on last spring.

I still haven’t answered the questions “Why China, why now?” The reasons are straightforward: Why China? I feel very certain that the China-US bilateral relationship will be the most important one of any two nations in the coming century. No other two countries have as much combined power to effect change in the world – for good or ill. I therefore feel I have essentially a moral imperative to better understand China and its people, culture, and trajectory, because whatever course I choose to take in my life, I’m sure China will overlap to at least some degree. As for the latter question – what better time than the present?

Now, onto my (first) first impressions!

The very first thing I noticed, and the thing that I continue to notice the most, has to do with pollution and air quality. But, this topic merits its own post, so I’m going to leave it aside for now. For the moment, let me just say that while I am becoming a little bit used to it, the perpetual haze serves as a continuing reminder of what sacrifices have been made for the sake of “modernization.” So, aside from that:

China is a lot less exotic – at first brush – than I had imagined. No immediate, overwhelming culture shock – not like going to Texas or Las Vegas, for example ; ) ! In all seriousness, though, although China is a very ‘different’ place from my familiar America, my expectations have been in line with what I’ve experienced, generally speaking. In places where I have been ’surprised’ it has been at how accessible Beijing has been to me, with just 1 year’s worth of Chinese study. No doubt, a lot of work from the Olympics 2008 buildup has paid off for me in this regard, with the subways helpfully having both English announcements and Pinyin / English station names, since I don’t always know all the station title characters! (For a look at the current subway system, and how fast new additions are expected to be brought online, check out this map – dashed lines are subway lines under construction or planning).

Modern China is aptly described as a country undergoing immense changes, and in this regard there are everywhere great contradictions and idiosyncrasies. Wandering around Beijing one can be successfully lulled into thinking China is really well developed, leaping forward into the future. The truer picture of the city – as microcosm of China – is often just concealed behind thin walls, secret alleys and courtyard houses and markets hidden away out of sight. The hustle and bustle of modern construction draws much attention, but can’t always distract from old and beautiful buildings several stories shorter, paint peeling and fading after decades of neglect. Other times, though, it’s possible to get away from this same hustle and bustle and appreciate the thousands of years of history which lead up to today’s China. There are many sites in wonderful condition. Tragically, for every great historical site – in either good or poor condition – there seems to be some complementary “10 times more beautiful and wondeful” palace or temple which was inevitably destroyed by Westerners in the 19th century or Chinese in the 20th. Many, however, have been rebuilt.

Weiming Lake, peking university - from wikimedia

This complicated situation is very obvious at our school here, Peking University, known in China as Beida, short for “Beijing Da Xue” (Beijing University, 北京大学). Beida was created from a combination of other campuses, some of which were once royal gardens; many of its buildings are old, historic, and very beautiful. Others are new modern classroom and science buildings which would not look out of place on many an American college campus or office complex. Of the former category, many have seen interior renovations, but cry out for help maintaining their facades; others are just in desperate need of repairs, period.

As far as facilities and infrastructure is concerned, it’s clear we’re not at Yale anymore. Some of the dorms here do not have any showering facilities, and students may have to walk 5-15 minutes outside to go take a shower, because the plumbing simply isn’t in place. In this regard, our program has its own showers indoors – a real luxury : ). To be fair, a lot of what we see here is merely reminiscent of the kind of expansionary construction seen at college campuses in times which had both a combination of bad architectural taste and financial distress – Wesleyan until recently, anyone? Though, to be fair to our Middletown neighbor, what I’m describing here is really a whole different category. I’ll take some pictures soon.

All in all, despite my well-known proclivities for highly vocal complaining, I don’t have very much to really say at this time. I’m in a good “frame of expectations” right now, so while I am definitely appreciating Yale more! I’m able to have a good time here, too. Things are not perfect, but they’re good enough. As time goes on, maybe this will wear thin and I’ll start to get more frustrated, but on the whole things are quite OK. The myriad disadvantages and inconveniences in daily life here are small prices to pay for the chance to get to live in China and experience it first-hand, with Chinese roommates, as opposed to the isolated “international island” that all other schools experience in their study-abroad programs here with Beida. One of our professors, a Chinese graduate of Yale Law School now teaching us at PKU, told a funny joke at the opening ceremony: “PKU is my mother school, and Yale is my father, and now they have had a beautiful child, the PKU-Yale Joint Program! However, as you may know, China has a very famous one-child policy, ensuring that it remains a very unique program…”

Our Chinese roommates are all very nice, thoughtful and open to creative exchange, and I am really enjoying getting to understand China better through them and my time here. You learn a hundred times more from a month here than you could just trying to read about the place – or at least, you learn different, on-the-ground knowledge and understanding. Experiences from everyday life build on one another into a real appreciation and understanding, it seems.

China can’t be reduced to a stereotype or a single two-dimensional picture. I don’t expect to really “get” China after just 4 months here, but I hope to have a better grasp of the place than I did before I came, and that much seems certain.

More updates to come!