Merry Christmas and Return to Kunming

I know it’s been a while since I added an entry. My parents came,
and I was spending a lot of time with them, traveling and just hanging
out. Afterwards, I’ve been blizzarded with papers that I have to write
in Chinese.

But I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, at least
for this semester. In less than a month, I’ll be leaving Nanjing and
the University. And I guess that’s most of what this email is about.

But first, I should update yall. Tomorrow, I’m supposed to be getting
a Dvd copy of my performance on the game show. I’m guessing some
people weren’t able to get through all the Chinese and get to see my
performance.

A few of yall might be interested to hear that, while I was with my
parents in Hong Kong and Macao, I happened upon a little bank called
Banco Delta Asia. It’s a small bank that’s only in Macua. What makes
it special? This bank was at the center of a problem that brought us
closer to nuclear war than at any other incident in this decade. This
bank was part of North Korea’s laundering operation printing amazingly
good counterfeit dollars. During discussions on denuclearizing the
Korean peninsula, the Bush administration froze all of North Korea’s
counterfeit money inside this little bank, and Korea threw a
diplomatic fit. To make a long story short, the North Koreans tested
their first nuclear weapon, making it the ninth nuclear power,
partially because of this bank. Anyways, I got a picture of the bank
and asked them how I could open an account (they said I had to do
something evil before I could open an account).

But enough about that. Yall may remember that after my semester here
at Nanjing University, I have a semester doing an internship. I
finally got my assignment. I’ll be returning to Kunming. I guess yall
probably remember, this was the first place I lived in China, in 2006.
I had a good time there, and am happy to return, even if it wasn’t the
first place that I have chosen to live, it was the second or third
place on that list.

What will I be doing? It may sound a little strange at first, but I
will be working with a company that makes exhibits for museums on
China’s ethnic minorities, particularly the minorities around Kunming,
in the province of Yunnan. Other than that, I am still not sure
exactly what they will have me doing.

You might wonder, “Why the heck are you doing that?” Well, in fact, I
had done some stuff with ethnicity while working on my master’s
degree, and I’m considering doing more work, down the line, on Chinese
nationalism and Chinese nationalities. So, this is actually a really
cool opportunity to look at what Chinese people think it means to be
Chinese.

That work won’t start until later in February, after the Chinese New
Year. Until then, I’ll be, not surprisingly, traveling some. Right
now, Lisa is coming out to visit me and we are going to the
Philippines for three weeks. After that I’ve still got about two weeks
before I have to start work. I’m not sure what I’ll be doing during
that time. I may go and hang out with a friend for Chinese New Year or
I may take off to Laos for a little while, since Laos is so close to
Kunming.

I guess that’s about it. Don’t want to bore yall for too long.

Merry Christmas

Journal Entries - Closed Doors

Entry 1
So, Ni Laoshi gave us two topics for our midterm paper. One was called Fall Travel (秋游), and since I had just gone to Korea for the Fall break, I decided to go for that topic. I wrote a paper, I think it is decent enough. It was mostly about traveling around Korea, making friends with several different people.
But today in class, it was clear there was a problem with the content of my paper. Although she did not explain this when giving the topic, the term “Fall Travel” in Chinese implies that you will discuss the changing of the seasons. Of course, I say “she did not explain this” as if she was supposed to explain it, but it is more complicated than that. Chinese culture emphasize the beauty of the changing seasons, particularly in literature, much more than American culture does, so there is an expectation to write include the season as a part of my essay in the Chinese context.
Linguistically, this expectation is etched into the language. “Of course, you have to write about the changing of the season. Why else would I have made the topic ‘Fall Travel’?” Ni Laoshi told me. Of course, in English this sounds a little absurd, but there is a very clear logic.
This is clearly a cultural and a translation problem, but its left me with a low grade for my midterm. But, in the spirit of trying to be more Chinese, I am going to try and concern myself less with grades. I suppose this serves as a notice.

Journal Entry 2

A couple of weeks ago, we went to Huangshan. While we were climbing down, one of my friends started talking to one of the workers, and he dismissively said, “We do not like Americans.” My friend came over and told us what he said. I, half curious, half belligerent, went over to chat with him.
“So you do not like Americans? Why not?”
At this point, his friend, a fellow worker, stepped in. “Oh that, that was just a joke. We were just joking about that.”
I could not really take the conversation any further, but I did try to open it from a few other angles with them. I was not successful and had to go back and sit down with my hiking buddies.
My friend was pretty sure that when he first approached them, the guy was completely serious about not liking Americans.
Why would he suddenly change? I seriously doubt it was the threat of violence. My friend is much taller than me, and he had already left by the time I came to ask them once again. If it was just for face saving, it seems strange that he would have brought up the topic originally.

Journal Entry 3
At the front of our building, the one made for foreigners to study at, are four sets of glass doors. The first day I arrived, late in August, three sets were closed, leaving only one set open. I had seen this before in China, but I still wanted to hear how the security guard, the guy who was in charge of these doors, would explain it. He said, they were closed because classes had not yet started up.
The first day of classes two sets of doors were open. The next day it was back to just one set of doors, and I have not seen them open more than one since then.
I asked my roommate why they do not open the doors, and he said they would open all the sets of doors if, for example Wen Jiabao came to the school for a visit. Otherwise, they would keep them closed because of laziness. He said that having all the doors open was a sign of welcomingness, that if they did not want to offer that message of welcome. Did that mean that to keep all but one of the doors closed was to suggest that they did not really care whether anyone came or went, but they were going to let you come in anyways. He shook his head and dismissed this thought out of hand, but I was not convinced that I was not partially right.

Journal Entry 5
In my last entry, I mentioned that my roommate said the reason the only one door was opened was because the security guards are too lazy. I do not buy that explanation. It takes an extra twenty seconds to open take the locks off the doors. Furthermore, I have seen this elsewhere in China. At Yunnan Normal University, they also had four glass doors and they also only opened one of them. I have since this elsewhere; at the Shanghai South Railway station, three out of every four doors is locked. This is a national phenomenon, not the result of a couple of security guard’s laziness.
Furthermore, if this really is the result of the all of China’s security guards being lazy, there is a real disconnect between China’s architects and it’s security guards. These architects must realize that their doors are not opened, so why do they continue to insists on building them?
After I did not accept his first explanation about laziness, my roommate offered up another explanation. He said it was probably just because Chinese were used to keeping gates closed in their home, so that custom has been transferred to various levels of Chinese society, saying that this is something that came out of traditional Chinese life in rural China. That is true, space in village China is defined by gates and fences. But is it really this rural lifestyle has made its way into this very different part of China’s modern urban lifestyle?

Journal Entry 6
I am suspicious of this “transfer to various levels of society” explanation. If that is the case, I would be surprised that I have not seen this anywhere else in China’s periphery. I spent a summer in Japan and I do not remember anything like what I saw in China. I went to Korea and looked specifically for this phenomenon, but found nothing like it. My friends have not seen similar things in Taiwan. I just went to Hong Kong and Macao, and there was nothing like it there. Hong Kong and Macau were quite similar to the Chinatowns that I have seen in Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Bangkok.
One could argue that these were not built by Chinese, but that does not really hold water. Korea and Japan were built by their own nationals, but they often followed Chinese rural tradition, sometimes so well that they preserve things that are no longer available in China today. Some of Hong Kong and Macao’s large government buildings were built by the British and the Portuguese, but most of their apartments and other buildings were clearly built by Chinese people, and they resemble Penang’s apartments. Penang and Bangkok’s Chinatowns were also built entirely by Chinese people, and I do not even need to address who built Taiwanese buildings.
So, this proves that it was not just external influences acting on these areas’ architecture (and door locking habits), but that they all share something and it most necessarily be from their shared Chinese origin (except perhaps for the Japanese and Korean examples), and that my roommate’s explanation does not pass muster. So why do security guards all over China (but only mainland China) keep three out of four doors locked?
That will have to wait until my next set of journal entries.

Journal Entry 5 - Libraries, Scheduling and more TV

Entry One
Today’s weather was rainy, the first rain we have had since August. Combined with the sunsets getting earlier and earlier, the night came particularly early.
I went to the philosophy library today. As I explained in an earlier journal, this library has the only English copy of a book that I am supposed to read. I was almost done with it, and I should have had enough time to finish it.
Just as I was about to finish the book, the librarian came into the room. “Everybody else has left. I’m closing up.” It was still ten minutes shy of the official closing time. I tried to ask her if I could finish my book. She laughed nervously, hoping that I would give into her request-command. “If you finish it now, you won’t return tomorrow?” She agreed half-heartedly, but I gave in too, realizing that I wanted to finish the book slowly, to collect my thoughts.
I asked her whether they were closing up earlier for the rest of the semester. “No just today, because it’s raining. Returning home would be particularly inconvenient if I waited for you to finish reading.”
No matter how much you read it, it does not really sink in until it happens to you; from this example, I was able to realize how much China and Chinese society is focused not on regulations, but on personal relationships. Following the regulation was inconvenient to the person in charge, so the regulation was abandoned.
Her request was quite reasonable. Sometimes I wish America thought more about people than regulations. But is this the best way to run a modern society? That is what I am chewing on.

Entry 2
Drrrrrrring, Drrrrrring. “Oh, I am sorry,” my professor says as his phone goes off. This kind of apology would seem too perfunctory in the United States. Having a phone go during class is almost a crime for students. Most of my teachers take points off your final grade if your phone rings during class. The professor generally considers it rude and disruptive. But for a professor to have his or her phone go off, I do not think that I have every had that happen.
But what happened next would never happen in the United States. My professor answered the call. “I am in class now.” He went on to answer his wife’s questions about some issues with their house, clearly trying to get her to hurry up and finish the conversation.
Why is this so acceptable in China and so unacceptable in America? Is it because they don’t care about disturbing class? I have heard some suggests that it is a result of Chinese people historically not being used to telephones. Just thirty years ago, telephones were rare in China, and to receive a call was necessarily important. So it is important to take every phone call you get.
I was considering it as a part of the “我有事”idea. You say “I’ve got something,” because you do not want them to tell them what is more important than them, i.e. you don’t want to say I have to go to class because it would mean that class is more important than them. In the same way, even if you are teaching a class, you cannot not answer your phone because it would be tantamount to admitting that class is more important than taking that call.

Entry 3
I think I mentioned this in one of my previous email, but one of my classes was originally supposed to be taught by two teachers on Tuesday night, one teacher taking the first half, the other taking the later half. We had been told that both classes will probably end in the beginning of the second half of the semester. Today, I asked a Chinese student when the class was going to finish up. She looked a little nonplussed; she did not know, and she did not seem concerned. I tried to explain to them about the class being taught by two teacher, and the logic that both halves of the course would end sometime in November. She asked some other students, but none of them knew either. They all just said, “Ask the teacher.”
First, I do not think teachers just changing the schedule around could ever occur in America, not just for cultural reasons and our analness about scheduling, but also because student’s schedules are so controlled. Everyone in the same major takes the same classes at the same times, so a change is as problematic as the United States when everyone has different schedules.
But I also think that if it were possible, students would be certain of the date that the classes were supposed to end. That date would have been set at the beginning of classes, and most students would have known about it.

Entry 4
Scheduling Issues – Part II
So I did talk with the teacher about the scheduling issues mentioned before. The teacher who teaches the Monday class (the one that was supposed to occupy the latter half of the semester) will have his final class this week, the Tuesday teacher has decided to just keep teaching until the semester ends.
How is that possible? Does that mean that his course is in fact its own separate course? It is de facto its own course because its taking up my Tuesday night for the whole semester.
The question I want to know is why are these Chinese students so unconcerned? They did not really want to know when the class ended, and when they heard that it had been doubled in length, no one said anything.
I think the reason for this has to do with the role of the administration in the hierarchy in the university. They are not really in control of their schedule, their schedules are passed down to them from the administration or by teacher’s arbitrary changes, and the students are used to just accepting what is handed down. Thus, they are not really concerned with when the class ends. It will end when it ends. And if the teacher decides to add another nine weeks to the class, they all know he has the authority to do this. They play a very passive role in all this.

Entry 5
So I am doing another one of the tv shows. When I did the tv show last month, I noticed something while watching the program online. The three black people on the program were all kind of exociticized, especially in their introductions. Two of them were dancing to rap music, one of them did a tango. At the time I did not notice it, but someone pointed this out to me, saying the producers probably were trying to present these black guys in a way that matched with what Chinese viewers thought of black people, always dancing in crazy ways. I did not buy this person’s argument. I told him that I had been there, and that this image of blacks dancing was just coincidental. The producers had not pushed the black contestants to dance, when we were volunteering to do stuff, these contestants volunteered to dance for themselves.
But yesterday I went to the meeting with the television producers there was a South African girl, and they were urging her to do some sort of African dance for her introduction. She agreed reluctantly. They also asked her to wear colorful, African dress for her introduction.
After seeing this, I began to believe that the producer was actively trying to present the Africans on the show as exotic creatures, something out of Edward Said’s Orientalism.

Entry 6
I know you must be getting tired of reading my problems with the libraries here, but I find these issues to be important to my understanding of China.
Today I went to the library in for the foreign studies school, the school that we belong to. There was an HSK grammar book that I wanted.
The two librarians who are there everyday from 8-11 and 2-530 were there with a heater in between them, talking to each other about the cold, recommending how to keep warm, looking at things on the computer. I had to turn the computer on to look up a book. I could not find it in the stacks, so I returned and asked the librarian to help me find it.
She responded, “If it is not on the shelf, it has been checked out.”
“It cannot be checked out. It is a reference book.”
“Really? What is the name of the book?”
I told her the name of the book.
“Oh that book, it’s been checked out. One of the teachers checked it out.”
Although I questioned her further, she did not really tell me how she knew that specific book had been checked out. She said a teacher had come and checked out a bunch of HSK books, and though the book is a reference book, teachers can check them out for as long as they need them. She did not really know whether that specific book had been checked out, but she guessed it had. She also said there was no way to know when the teacher would return it.
Not only is this a real pain, but it also supports the point that I have been trying to make about libraries in China throughout these journal entries. They are very concerned with rank, and they are not really made to serve the students, as they say they are. I also believe that these librarians are basically sinecures, with the librarians not spending the day not really doing anything but chatting with each other. I will have more on what I think this means for China’s future.