14 February 2002: To Lio Ping Mao

I went to Suzhou yesterday [said 'soo-jo', and famous for its silk and for supposedly having China's most beautiful girls]. Some guy tried to rip us off for one kuai [1 RMB, or similarly used as a dollar] at the top of a pagoda. Another man thought swinging a monkey around from the chain about its neck would impress me. It disgusts me, as I'm sure it would disgust almost every westerner, and I couldn't believe that he even tried it with me. I almost felt like shoving him, but I don't like being violent for any reason.

I was hanging with several Italians, which was nice for the company, and we had to make a mad burst at the end in order not to miss our train. We made it with but a minute to spare.

Today, I simply intend to take in some more of Shanghai's sights. I intend to go to the top of one of the buildings across at Pudong, and I hope to enjoy a hearty Thai green curry for lunch.

Tomorrow I'm going to catch a bus to Zhouzhuang [said 'jo-juwung'] near Suzhou, which my Lonely Planet guide book tells me is a must see. It was also recommended to me by Darnell. [As planned, I went there the next day, and I was enchanted. As I say on my China photos' page, the place is the 'Venice of China'.]


23 April 2002: To Ben

Things are shaping up quite nicely for me lately. An English fellow, Keith, with shares in my school, visited us recently. He's a respected professor from Leister University, England, and he keeps his fingers in quite a few English school flavoured pies throughout China. This being the case, he likes to make sure they're running at something resembling a premium, and knowing that I'm CELTA qualified he has endorsed my credentials to a large degree with my colleagues and superiors.


31 May 2002: To my family

Things are shaping up nicely for me. Today I went with Lin Xia [the assistant director of my school] to the police station and applied for another three months' visa. I will work here another two months, before taking off for a month's holiday around China.

After my holiday, it seems fairly certain that I'll be able to extend my visa again by another six months, and so it may be that I end up working here for another nine months or more.

In case you’ve lost count, I’ve now almost reached six months in China. In a month's time I will be travelling on a survivable amount of Chinese. I'm hoping that my time after that will bring me up to a conversational level. I’m not interested in learning Han Zi (the writing), as I’m not one for their literature (as I’ve seen it translated), but to be able to communicate with them orally would be a good thing. Every day I’m learning new words and sentences, and I’m even at a point now where I’m able to experiment with the constructions I use. I can generally express my meaning on a basic level, when it comes down to everyday things.

Other than spending my time learning what’s necessary for daily life, I make fun for myself by concentrating on sex-related topics, abuse, and generally creating mayhem. Whatever works, as the utilitarian doctrine goes [and I meant this extremely loosely], and from such efforts I pick up a lot of functional Chinese as I go.

Also, I’ve managed to wangle my work shifts as such that in three days’ time I’ll be off to a famous mountain range in Fujian. Called Wu-yi Shan [said: 'woo ee shan', and literally meaning 'five one mountain'], it lies in the far North-West quadrant of our province. After arriving on Sunday evening, I will have up to three full days to see what I want, and everything’s sweet so long as I’m back by Thursday evening in time for my class.

I am looking especially forward to a raft ride down one of their rivers. Apparently on one of the rivers main bends (the second one, I believe) I will be able to take a glimpse at some ancient boat-shaped coffins that date back as far as four thousand years. They could well be about the oldest man-made things that I’ve ever seen with my own two eyes; and in the scheme of China’s history, they’re pretty damn old. (China claims five thousand years, but historians are only certain on the last four.) I enjoy these little sight-sees, but it has put a stop to what was a growing savings’ account. Well, I’m fairly good with money these days and so I should be able to save up in time for the major things; namely, eventually moving on to Europe, and funding my degree in the process.

Well, that’s pretty much it with me. Proud that soon I’ll be able to say that I’m a traveller, a teacher, and a student - three respectable life phases, any one of which would suffice on its own, let alone having them all together.


10 July 2002: To Ben

China designates itself as a communist country, rather like the former USSR, but it's really quite far from communism and socialism in practise. Truly, it is simply a totalitarian [I should have said 'authoritarian', as the people can basically do and say as they please, provided that they don't conflict with the government] dictatorship with a 'get rich quick', capitalistic mentality. [As I said in my history essay, "To get rich is glorious", is now a Chinese slogan far removed from the old communist ideology.] It's ever becoming less oppressive than it was even twenty years ago, but one still has to watch themselves. Some absolute shit's gone down here [but then hasn't it gone down everywhere? Clearly, I was having a bad day].


17 July 2002: To Aaron

Yeah, China’s still going well, though it gets to you sometimes. One day, over a few (hundred) beers, I’ll tell you more about it. Let me just say for now - this is today’s observation - that the Chinese have [excessively poor practical skills]. To give an example, the urinal has been leaking from the pipe above for some while. Someone tried to solve this by tying a plastic bag around the leak in a single knot. Of course, this didn’t work, but it stayed as such for a couple of weeks despite the puddle on the floor. Another bright spark was moderately successful when they tied the bag so that it would catch the water. A brilliant idea, if we're only considering the first five minutes! Anyway, I walk in today, and this time another plastic bag’s been added. It’s the best system yet. Acting as a water way, the bag channels the drips back into the urinal below. The water’s still lost, but at least the floor is dry… And welcome to China!!


18 August 2002: To Ben

Can't complain about work and I'm finding that I grow to like teaching by the day. I'm certainly getting more professional at my lessons now. Some of my classes go off brilliantly. Thinking about doing the DELTA when I get to Europe, which is the equivalent of a masters degree in what I have now. This would set me up for life in the kind of occupation that will take me the places I want to go. However my CELTA already does this for me, and now I have one year's experience, and so I'm pretty right. Still, there's always room for improvement, and extra things like qualies and teaching experience often amount to greater perks and benefits. Meanwhile, my degree's going full tilt, and so I wouldn't want to spread myself too thin. [Here I successfully undertook some philosophy papers from Massey University (NZ) by correspondence. It was no easy going in China, as the customs' officials saw to it that my mail was delayed and pried into considerably, but it was especially rewarding. It was also largely the reason behind a drop off in China-related emails at and prior to this point.]

Had a funny one the other day. I did a voice-over dubbing for a Chinese TV commercial. They weren’t paying me too well, however, and no one asked me to make any corrections [in fact, they explicitly overruled our initial suggestions], so I just read out the ad in perfect ‘Chinglish’. I read out all their mistakes in grammar and spelling as if they weren’t even there. The producers were too arrogant and ignorant to suppose that their English translation of an already corny Chinese ad (about ‘strange smell removing’ deodorant) might not have been up to scratch, and no one noticed or complained when I read it verbatim.

When it comes to air, I anticipate that I will be immortalised as a cult genius [joking, of course]. All laowai (rhyming with 'how' and 'why', and meaning 'foreigners') in China who see it will immediately recognise what I’ve done and they will see the brilliance in it. Chinglish is such a problem here and most companies couldn’t care less about it, so why should us laowai oblige ourselves to setting an example that will only be ignored? In your face China! The funny thing was that I did it in two voices, covering two parts - one as my normal self and the other as ‘The Real Man’ [to say I used a deep voice] (as I’m sure you’ll remember ) - and they really loved it. They paid me a little extra for my troubles and I think I might come to hear from them again when they are next looking for a laowai. Perhaps this is the beginning of a new career for me.


12 November 2002: To Darnell

Well I've just finished both of my uni exams, and so now the pressure's off. I did quite well in my assignments (of four, I've got the marks back for two: an A- and an A+) and I think both of my exams went reasonably well as well. I sat the last one yesterday. Philosophy's definitely me, but I'm also looking forward to studying politics once I leave China. (I'm waiting till when I've left, as I had enough trouble getting philosophy books past the authorities [indeed, the first books didn't arrive, so it cost me double getting them re-sent].)

Anyway, life's pretty good. Happy to be a student, and a traveller (I'm off to Beijing in December for six months' teaching), and to have a good job. Also pleased to be getting something of a second language and some exposure to a (completely) different culture. Otherwise, I've been working out for an hour every morning (five mornings a week) for almost two months now, so I'm starting to firm up a bit.


24 November 2002: To Ben

Did I say that I did a bit of travelling recently? I went to some of the best parts of China [to Guilin (said, 'gway-lin')] with my girlfriend [Ting].

Ting and I had the best time together in Guilin. We would have had longer, but my school didn't think to tell me that I had a holiday coming. I found out with a day's notice, and so by the time Ting and I had arranged for our trip, we only had about five days available.

Nevertheless, it was fantastic. Guilin is in Guanxi, a province that is on the boarder with Vietnam. The township of Guilin is only mildly special. It's worth about a day's sight seeing. There are some spectacular caves to visit, but of course each cave is forced to accommodate a maximum amount of Chinese tourists.

The place to go is the nearby township of Yangshuo [said, 'young-shaw']. If you're new to China, it's just a tourist trap; but if you've been stuck in China for some while, this place comes as a breath of fresh air. You can go mad with all the foreign foods and CDs that are available. However, the thing to do is to rent bicycles and get out a bit on your own. It is the surrounding area of Guilin that you want to see (as per the photo above). You'll probably be approached by a bicycle tour guide along the way. It's well worth paying the pittance for the tour, as he or she will know some excellent places to take you. Ting and I did it, and it was brilliant.

The other thing to do is to arrange for a boat tour along the Li river. Everyone does it, but it's worth it. Ting and I arranged for an illegal ride with some non-commercial operators. We had a ball, but our boats kept breaking down (allowing for more time to enjoy the sights), and we had to hide in the engine room at one point to avoid the river police. A bit of fun.

Speaking of my girlfriend - I'm head-over-heels for this girl. She's off to NZ at the same time as I head for Beijing, and so our relationship shall be put to the test for a year, but I'm sure we'll grow together in other ways.

And so I'm off to Beijing. I really do think that I have some talent for negotiating. They were offering me Y6000 a month for 21 teaching hours per week. (This works out to about $20 NZ per hour, but then I'm also given free accommodation, reimbursed airfare, holidays, and various other bonuses. Living cheaply, as one does in China, means that I have a brilliant rate of savings.)

Anyway, I wasn't happy with this, so I said I'd do 18 hours for the six thousand. They wouldn't agree and so I got ruthless. I said I would do 15 hours per week (as I want time to study and relax, etc) for Y5000, which is to demand the same per hour as my previously rejected offer, but by working less hours my other benefits become proportionally greater. For instance, I will still get the same flight reimbursement and the same reasonably nice flat, but for less hours. All in all, compared to my current job I will be earning about $80 NZ more per week for the same amount of hours, and I will also gain from two Chinese lessons per week and connections to teaching jobs in Ireland. And I'm really looking forward to living in Beijing, so it's all good.

Anyway dude, that's about it I think. I'm off for lunch. (Believe it or not, I am still finding new dishes to try in China. China has a lot of styles. Truly, it's like five or ten countries - each as distinguishable as any in Europe, given the varieties of language and culture - all rolled into one.)


16 December 2002: To Ting

It was snowing yesterday. Quite a beautiful site. I've been in the snow before, but always for special occasions, such as skiing or mountain hiking, or holidaying, or something. It's different simply to be living amongst it. It's still neat though. And the more I walk around Beijing, the more I like the place.

Yesterday I caught the trains to the Eastern Beijing neighbourhoods where the Western people go. I sat in a snug German restaurant, ate good food, and wrote my journal. I wrote a lot about you.

Walking back to the train was peaceful, as the ground was covered in about four centimetres of snow, but it wasn't raining, and with all the leafless trees and beautiful buildings, it was quite a marvellous picture.

Did I say that there's an old Beijing suburb right outside my window, dirt roads and tiled roofs, and all? Covered in snow like that, it was worth a few photographs.

I spoke of some of the books I got when I was in Hong Kong: One's called 'The Coming Collapse of China', by Gordon Chang [see, Books], and his arguments are pretty persuasive. Hope he's wrong, 'cause neither China nor the World needs another full scale revolution with all the resulting chaos. I'm praying that the party will throw 'face' to the wind, change it's name and hard-core theory to be in line with the practical reality of China today, and allow the Chinese to be Chinese without all the bureaucratic and authoritarian bullshit in the way.

Having read his book thoroughly, I no longer happen to feel that his arguments are at all persuasive. To me, they seemed rhetorical. Still, it was interesting to learn about China's various problems, etc, but my bet is that China will pull through.

THE CHINESE WAY

I now think that such thoughts were a little unfair of me. It is true that China has made plenty of mistakes, and so has it's government, but then this is true of every country in the world, and it is often reflective of poverty and desperation. Having had more time to reflect, I now think that perhaps the Chinese government is doing a pretty good job, adjusted to the practical reality of China today, which just happens to be a little beyond the paradigms of western society. It is easy to look to the CCP's past and to find fault there, but I think that today it pursues fairly pragmatic policies.

For example, most Westerners I know initially abhor China's One Child Policy. The policy restricts all couples to having one child only, which raises serious issues regarding forced abortions and infanticide (especially with peasants determined to have a boy). [Exceptions include having twins or triplets, etc, and second generation couples can have two babies if both husband and wife were the product of the policy themselves (which means you might only have one kid, but you could hope for two grandkids).]

To begin with, Westerners have nurtured the concept of Individualism since the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation [c.1450], and this has lead to supposedly universal concepts of rights and political propositions, such as the Contract Theory advanced by Locke. Consequently, all this may seem instinctive to us, but it doesn't necessarily rest well with the Chinese. They, in turn, have been nurtured on collectivist ideals since the first dynasties. In their experience, there is the Confucian philosophy of subordinating yourself to the state, the Daoist consciousness of non-resistance, and the dogmas of the communist government which is still in power.

Historically, the right to rebel has been 'God Given' whenever the Mandate of Heaven, licensing a dynasty to rule, has been broken. New dynasties have established themselves over the millennia because of this. A period of mass famine during the 1950s - where from 30 to 60 million people may have starved to death because of the abortive 'Great Leap Forward' - was effectively covered up perhaps precisely because such catastrophes signal that the Mandate has been broken. One explanation behind the Chinese government's suppressive actions, therefore, rests in the possibility that it seeks to do everything it can to convince the people that it still holds the Mandate.

My point is this: Chinese people see society differently, the government naturally prefers being in power to being overruled, and a choice has to be made between the very real possibility of mass starvation in the tens-of-millions due to over-population, and enforcing a policy which is generally more controversial to foreigners than to the Chinese themselves. Given the Chinese way, foetuses can either be aborted before they are even self-aware, or self-conscious children and adults can watch their loved-ones dying in front of them before they painfully starve to death themselves. Further and bloody political revolution would then undoubtedly follow, thus taking the lives of even more people and reducing the country to chaos.

A Westerner, comfortable in their developed, educated and secure country, might have ethical misgivings about the controlled mass extermination of unborn Chinese children. But then abortion's also legal in many of these countries, and here the child's birth would pose no threat to either the parents or to society as a whole. Perhaps I'm just a hard-lined utilitarian, but I think stability and quality of life is preferable to an ethical stalemate where, as opposed to quickly and actively killing a minority, a majority is left to slowly and painfully die.

So I am not as critical of the Chinese government as I once was. I don't like much of their past, but then I don't like much of European or World history either, and I reserve making my judgement of China today until I have the benefit of hindsight. Since Mao Zedong, China has opened its doors, abolished communism in practise (if not officially), and progressed from an unacceptable totalitarianism to an arguably justifiable authoritarianism. It has gone from assuming that one person's wealth causes another person's poverty, to accepting that people might 'get there' ahead of others, provided that everyone 'gets there' eventually. If the party's aim is to raise the overall standard, quality and equality of life, and to adjust and adapt itself accordingly to changing times, then I am a supporter.

The other book I got is called 'The Rape of Nanking' [Nanjing], by Iris Chang [see, Books]. Perhaps you've read it; and I'm sure you know about that atrocity. I was almost in tears at the airport just flicking through some of the photos and reading their captions. 200 000 or 300 000 (or more) civilians brutally murdered by the Japanese, and tens of thousands of women raped and mutilated. Why does the world stand by and watch such things?

JAPANESE ATROCITIES IN NANJING

The contrasts between Germany and Japan after the war were open contradictions:

Germany paid millions in compensation to the Jews. Japan was 'forgiven' by both the Americans and the Chinese Communist Party - with America bidding to keep Japan out of Russia's web, and Mao Zedong hoping to re-establish trade as soon as possible.

No Nazi ever held a government post after the war. Japan's leader in 1957 had been tried as a Class One WWII Criminal.

German men, women and children were forcefully paraded past near-by concentration camps ("least they forget") and told to face up to what they had done. Japan still authorises school books that make light of, ignore, or deny Japanese WWII atrocities throughout Asia. Some even bemoan the Americans for causing the war.

Of course, I realise some readers will be quite willing to believe that hypothesis, given recent sentiments about America. However, I have found that the views of most historians somewhat differ to and contradict the prevailing views of many 'anti-Americans'. I haven't found Conspiracy Theory and American Expansionist Theory to be particularly credible. I think both Japan and Germany got a far better deal than they would have given us in turn - they're prosperous now, for one thing - and America largely influenced this. Russia would have erased Germany from the face of the map, as Germany would have likewise done to Russia.

After both wars, the allied powers completely overhauled Germany's governments. In Japan, Emperor Hirohito remained as the figurehead. His cousin had been a high ranking officer involved in the Rape of Nanjing. Surely Hirohito had been aware of what was happening.

Finally, and what strikes me as most odd and contradictory, is the fact that we in the Western world learn so much about Germany's atrocities - where it's acceptable and expected for us to decry them - and contrastingly so little about the atrocities committed by the Japanese - where perhaps we even refrain from decrying them out of some kind of 'politically correct' courtesy to the Japanese. How many Westerners know nothing of Nanjing or other like atrocities committed by the Japanese during this time? Is this an example of 'reverse racism'? Perhaps it's more typical of our fear to challenge wrong when it's racially controversial.

I won't proceed with example after example of what went on in Nanjing before the war, but I feel one frightful anecdote deserves to be told:

Two Japanese officers made a sport one day in Nanjing of seeing who could first decapitate 100 Chinese. The numbers stick in my mind. The winner proudly reached 106, with the loser having to settle for 105. The thing about this story in particular - over all the other stories of thousands of women being gang-raped and tied to chairs for repeated and ongoing sessions over a course of weeks, etc - was that it was published with a photograph of the soldiers in a Japanese newspaper back home in Japan. Meanwhile, the Western world ignored or otherwise made light of all such reports.

[For more, see Nanjing Massacre Record, but please be warned: IT'S VERY UPSETTING.]

From here, proceed to China IV