It Doesn't Matter If You're Black Or White

A recent TV show has caused uproar here, a singing talent contest from Shanghai called Oriental Angel. The reason, one of the contestants isn't really Chinese. Sure she was born here, has lived here all her life, speaks Chinese as her first language (with a Shanghainese accent no less), but that isn't enough. She is half-black. Hiss boo. Her appearance on the show has caused an online backlash with comments such as, "Ugh. Yellow people and black people mixed together is very gross,". In conservative China, being the product of an extramarital relationship also doesn't help. Another blogger wrote: "Numb! This bitch still has the audacity to appear on television! I don't know what to say! One cannot be shameless to this kind of level!"

So the big newsflash is basically that China is really quite racist. No it isn't acceptable, but yes it is understandable. China is a monoculture, there are very few foreigners, let alone naturalised citizens of non-Chinese descent. China was closed to the world for a long time, and here it shows. The idea that a foreigner could ever be naturalised doesn't exist. If you ask how long it would take for someone living here to be seen as Chinese, the answer is never, they aren't Chinese (by blood). Then you are looked at questioningly, to determine why you asked something so stupid. There is a Canadian man called Dashan who has almost reached the Chinese version of "naturalisation". When I first started learning Chinese, Dashan seemed amazing, his Mandarin is perfect, many people say he can speak better than most Chinese people. Now I get here, I find him deeply irritating. I've begun to realise that having him on TV being bonked on the head with a giant hammer for Chinese New Year, doesn't help me to taken seriously. Normally the actions of one foreigner wouldn't be seen as so representative, but with so few of us around, he is taken as a serious example, as is the comic way he is treated. I sometimes feel that in class I am expected to entertain rather than teach, something I now purposefully avoid. To tar all of my students with the same brush that they see me as only an amusing puppet would be unfair, but it is a more prevalent viewpoint than it should be.

It seems to me that generally white foreigners are seen as wealthy and a source of interest, whereas non-white foreigners are viewed with suspicion. Even as the most common type of suspicious foreigner, I have been poked on the metro (to check I was real?), laughed at for not understanding things (the idea of not being a native speaker was quite hilarious) and told by my doctor that I was too young to be abroad. Normally I find these attitudes quite amusing as well, less hostile than the attitude towards some immigrants in the UK. At least as an English teacher, I'm not stealing anyone's job.


Luckily the Western teachers are on hand to deliver some moral teachings along with their English lessons. One of my colleagues did a lesson on racism in China and showed pictures of mixed race couples. Satisfied that she had now she shown all the students a better way to treat people, she asked, "So who would be prepared to have a non-Chinese partner?" The response was quick, "If I could tell her apart from a piece of coal," said one student with a grin. When the teacher looked back at the student rather falteringly, he realised that he had made a mistake. "You know, coal, mei2煤)," he clarified. Satisfied that all was clear, he sat back down. Well at least my students can tell me apart from the snow outside, so they're progressing well...

Snow

I guess those of you who like reading about life here might be disappointed by the sudden flush of photos, but I'll try to write something more meaningful soon.

In the last few days the government has caused it to snow heavily by seeding the clouds with silver iodide. Their aim is to help with the severe drought that has been affecting the north of the country. This brought heavy snow to Beijing, with about 6 inches falling in a single hour. Of course, I set out to investigate with one of the other teachers...

My Life in Pictures - Sancha Village and Weis

These photos go with the post about the Wei family from last month. Life in the mountains was beautiful in its simplicity at the time, although I am aware that as a tourist you can choose to dip in and out. You don't worry about finding education for your kids or finding enough food. I'm sure that now the snow has arrived in Northern China, life there is more difficult. All the same, I hope to be able to return to see the Weis once the weather warms up again.

Xiao Wei leads us out of the village to start our Wall finding mission.

There it is!

Back home in time for dinner from the spring-fed fish pond.

My Life in Pictures - Open Spaces

Click on the images if you want to enlarge them:

Behai Park Lotus Pond

Music outside the Metro

Calligraphy at the Summer Palace

Beijing North Train Station

Shopping and Local Life around Yonghegong

Yonghegong Temple

Sells really rubbish bikes....

On Campus

Well Blogspot, Facebook and Youtube all became unblocked in China today, so I can now make this blog more colourful. Thank you Chinese govt :) Hopefully this opening up and reform will last too. These photos show a relaxed side of life here that can be hard to find some days...

System of a Down

In the city there is a system for everything. Sometimes this is good, sometimes this is bad. I'll be honest, the metro system is pretty amazing. For a flat fee of 2 yuan (20p) you can travel anywhere you like in the system. When I was last here 2 years ago, there were 3 metro lines. When I arrived 2 months ago there were 7 lines, now there are 8 lines. One day I walked into the metro and another line had simply appeared as if it had always existed. All the maps in the carriages showed the new line, the stations all had signs pointing to the new platforms through tunnels that I had never noticed before. I have to assume that it is my lack of Mandarin that meant I wasn't expecting this, rather than magic. Even the shiny metro system is rammed full to capacity at rush hour though, Beijing simply has too many people. Rapid economic development has caused a mass influx of people to the city, but the city hasn't yet grown to accomodate them. For those of you who think the one child policy is harsh, come to China and see for yourself. A Chinese friend told me that President Bush was once set for a journey to China to press them about relaxation of the one child policy. The Chinese realised this and first sent him on a visit to the beautiful city of Xi'an before his arrival in Beijing. Xi'an, well-known for its terracotta warriors, is said to be even more densely populated than Beijing. By the time he reached Beijing, he didn't mention a word about the policy.



Then there are bad systems. Today I tried to buy a bottle of vodka in Walmart. (Don't worry China isn't turning me to drink) Firstly I had to summon a member of staff to take the bottle off the shelf for me, because it was behind an unstaffed counter. Then it turns out that vodka is one of the mystery items in the store that you must pay for on the spot rather than at the main checkout. Other items that logically fit into this category are humidifiers that play music, face cream, USB sticks and irons. However for things like bedding, live animals and heaters, you should pay at the main checkout. Duh, isn't it obvious? Unfortunately she wasn't authorised to use the "on the spot" till in this part of store. Neither were the 3 other people who were working nearby. They then summoned the man who was authorised to use the phone so that he could call the nearest person who was authorised to use the till. By this point I didn't really want the vodka anymore, but it felt like I had to finish what I had started. Then at the final till I had to separate out the items that I had paid for already from the ones where I hadn't, complete with a receipt for each item to prove it. Isn't Walmart American?

Life With the Wei Family

National Day had its ups and downs, a sense of unease at being a foreigner surrounded by nationalistic fervour (down) and an eight day holiday only two weeks into term (up). Here I want to focus on how I filled the up. I was lucky enough to go to the Great Wall of China with some of the other teachers, but not as most tourists experience it.

We went to an unrestored section of wall and stayed overnight in the rural mountain village of Sancha with the Wei family. A friend of the family drove us from Huairou city and we chatted in Mandarin with him about his love of English football and how Huairou had the best walnuts in the whole of China. It was only the next day that we realised this is what we were saying, but it didn’t stop our enthusiasm. The family were very welcoming as we arrived and we sat down to lunch in their concrete yard, looking down into the valley across peasant farms and the odd donkey. The whole time we were there was a brilliant escape from city life and pollution. Life with the Weis was certainly relaxed. It turns out that the China expert from the New Yorker magazine (Peter Hessler) also used to stay with them. In the evening, Wei Ziqi (the father) proudly showed us some articles and books in English written about the family. It was a really strange experience to be able to read all the details of the family life, with the main characters sitting around us, gauging our reactions. I wondered if they knew what the articles said, whether they would still be happy to show us. The articles mentioned that their son Wei Jia (12yrs old) had been very ill as a child and that Peter had saved his life by arranging for him to be accepted to a hospital in Beijing. He was a very jolly little kid, playing football with us during the day and encouraging us to play Chinese drinking games in the evening (likely so that the family could make a small mark up on the beer, but at 25 pence per bottle total we really didn't mind). Wei Jia was quite tubby and skipped out of his job of guiding us to the Wall on the first day, simply telling us always take the righthand turns. Two hours later we were completely lost in the Chinese forest, with only some rather odd looking bugs and a lot of trees for company. We eventually reached the top of the mountain and a break in the trees to see the Wall looking at us from the other side of the valley. We headed down for dinner and went back to the find the Wall the next morning. It was very treacherous and overgrown, nothing like the sanitised version that I was used to. A sadder side of the articles concerned Wei Ziqi’s brother. I had seen him about the courtyard, but he didn’t reply when I greeted him. Only through reading did I find out that he was mentally handicapped and had lived with the family all his life. Nobody in the village knew his real name, even to the family he was simply shazi (idiot). The family had once had to leave him at the government offices nearby to force them to pay the family some maintenance money to care for him. Apparently before the introduction of iodised salt to people in rural areas, this kind of birth defect was common, with most villages having one or several shazi. However, I should also make clear that he seemed perfectly happy in himself. I saw him a few times milling about the village near the house, seemingly quite content. The villagers all seemed quite used to him and let him about his business. I was certainly sad to have to leave Sancha so soon and I hope that I can return there in the Spring. Overall my 2 day break to Sancha cost me about £17, including all the food, accommodation and transport. All the food was delicious and well prepared, none of us got ill. We could tell it was all fresh because it was generally wandering about the buildings until a few minutes before dinner!!

Long Time No See! - 好久不见！

So there are three reasons why I haven’t written here in a while. Firstly, my last post on this “unsearcheable” blog attracted 11,000 views and as cool as I am, I don’t have that many friends. Hence, please be polite and generic, anything you say on the Internet should be seen as open to the world (irony that I’m writing this through a proxy). Secondly, I have been working and playing hard. Thirdly, it was National Day in China and so I didn’t want to blog anything at all. Security was so tight that I couldn’t even get into my own office without clearance.

I’ve found that moving country is a great way to try a whole new set of stuff. My old routine is gone (a surprisingly powerful factor) and I’m used to looking stupid without feeling bad. I have sung karaoke three times now and tried football (I still hate it), badminton and basketball. I also tried volleyball, our laowai team was sufficiently bad that Chinese students stopped to take photos. There was however a disproportionate amount of celebration the first time that we managed to return the ball. Simplistically, attitudes towards us on campus tend to be curious and good natured. Today, I sat on centre court at the China Open and saw Djokavic and Dementieva play (80 yuan = £7). I’ve never taken the slightest interest in these things in the UK, I can’t really explain why I’m so open to them now. I was conscious that my life at university in the UK had become very 2D, I didn’t really do much. In my spare time I just mooched about or watched re-runs of TV shows. It seemed fine at the time.

How is my Chinese going? Well, my friends are British, American, Canadian, Ukrainian, Korean and Swiss. My Mandarin is getting good for haggling, taxis and food, but that’s it. Today I bought myself a coursebook for a series of Chinese lessons (汉语口语二) at a school just off campus as an incentive. I also bought a Learn Japanese book (みなの日本語一)as a break, I don’t want to get Chinesed out. No they aren’t the same. Japanese has no tones, did I mention that whoever invented tonal languages was an idiot?

I feel this post has been a kind of plinky plonky this is how I am post, sorry if it bored you. Tough really if you are reading this sentence.

Plagiarism

Well I've been here a week and a half, I now have my own mobile, bike and a fish. My fish is called Lance (蓝色 lan se = blue coloured） because he is electric blue. Yes, it is not a great name, but it makes me feel that my Mandarin is getting better so he will have to tough it out. He cost a pricy 9 yuan (80p).

I feel a little underqualified for my job, but also honoured by the trust that has been placed on me. For the modules that I teach, I write the syllabus, I write and mark the exams and I create the mark scheme. There is no set template to follow, it is all up to me. In some ways this is great, very different from the nannying approach that would be taken back home. For those of you who have argued with me about trust versus accountability in the past, well this is the sort of trust that I like (in theory). In reality, hmm we will see. At the end of the semester, the bottom 5% of teachers by student feedback are "terminated".

Life here often contrasts strongly (or subtly) with Western life, daily I find myself in situations which make me think again about things that I have taken for granted. This is difficult for me to explain clearly, but one topic where I have noticed a big difference in mentality here is plagiarism.

In the first teachers' orientation meeting, one of the returning teachers brought up plagiarism. He said very bluntly in front of all the Chinese staff that we would have to be strict with our students and explain again and again that it was not acceptable, otherwise we would get 50 essays cut and pasted from the internet. Not to boast, but this is a top university in China, where students have worked day and night to gain their place. Hence my initial reaction was that this view was rather insulting to the students, hardly crediting them with the hard working attitude that is famous here. To me, plagiarism is lazy, a quick and half-hearted solution to needing to get an assignment done. Speaking from experience, it generally ends in a pretty shoddy piece of work that you struggle to explain, because you don't really understand what you have "written". What followed surprised me. Chinese people rarely take any direct insult well (understandeably) and I expected the Chinese staff to defend their students from this sleight. Instead, they disagreed that a strict stance should be taken on plagiarism. They cited the example of a student who had been in trouble last year for three counts of plagiarism in work that counted towards his degree. The department had then given him another chance. Where was the cutthroat sink or swim attitude? This did not parallel the strict University rules on punctuality or a variety of other topics. Why so lax here? The more I have poked and prodded behind the scenes, the more obvious the answer has become. Plagiarism is everwhere. Research papers and books written by well respected professors here contain large chunks of plagiarism. People do not attempt to hide their plagiarism, because it is not shameful. In a world where everything has a single correct answer and the education system favours wrote learning, the best answer to a question is likely to be the one that has already been written, not something that you come up with off the top of your head.

The final thing that caused the penny to drop was a new piece of research that is being done here. Whether I'm meant to know this I'm not sure. A huge and well funded new research group has been formed to create a system to rival Google. The aim is a huge library of data which allows you to write essays, research and create new music. You can type in the first line of your poem etc. and the system will search for the most appropriate second line using the database of all existing media. It will then give a % rating to its closest match. Hence from your first line of music, the system will create the optimum piece that possibly could be made.

So how shall I go plan the daunting syllabi for my lessons? Well, there is a cheap photocopying shop near my office..

Morning Life

Hey everyone!

I'm now here and settling into life in Beijing. Amongst other things, it turns out that in choosing a Chinese name, I have inadvertently called myself Oreo Cookies. It makes the previous post all the more relevant! This morning I woke up at about 6am and went for a cycle around the campus. I took a few pictures of morning life to try to give a feel for the place. There were a lot of people up already, cleaning and brushing staff starting work, older people taking morning exercise and some tourists too. I'm getting used to being stared at and being asked to pose for photos with people's kids now. With new parents bringing their kids to start Uni, there was a lot of pointing and staring. Beijingers themselves are used to foreigners, so luckily they don't take much notice.

The campus is huge, cycling around it took me about 1.5 hours, but I wasn't in any hurry. Generally people didn't stop me, but I wasn't allowed to take photos in the Main Building, the security thought a Westerner taking photos at 6am was quite suspicious. I don't have my teacher's pass yet so I made a swift exit. I cycled down to the lotus pond and around the older areas of campus. Originally this area of Beijing was part of gardens owned by the emperor, so it is pretty pleasant. There was an elderly choir practising in the exercise area which is like an outdoor gym (complete with weights, bars and badminton courts), they were quite good, but seemed much more focused on joking with each other and enjoying the morning than singing.

I can't work out how to put the photos on here, but I will find out soon. Just getting to my blog to write this has already been a little challenging... I'm going to go eat some dumplings for breakfast now, maybe I'll have worked out how to do photos by the time I come back.

Tricky Language

Ｔranslating between two languages is never easy， but translating English->Chinese is trickier than most. "Chinese" is composed of monosyllabic words and compound words consisting of fused monosyllabic words. For example, ming2（明）means bright and bai２（白） means white. Together as ming2bai2 (明白）they mean to understand. However according to my dictionary the sound "ming2", pronounced identically but written differently, also means name(名), to engrave(铭), bird cry(鸣), obscure(冥) and snout moth larva(螟). Therefore, an identical spoken sound can have multiple meanings only distinguishable by context or by writing it down. When a foreign company wants to introduce a new product into the Chinese market, it has two choices. It can take the easy way out by simply translating the meaning of the name or coming with an entirely new name. However, most companies like the idea of global branding so they prefer to come up with a name which is phonetically close to the original name. Even if the companies have been careful about selecting words with just the right meaning, the listener could actually hear or parse the name differently than intended. Some amusing mishaps / urban legends follow:

Coca Cola's first version of its Chinese name was different from the one it presently uses. Unfortunately, the company found the people interpreted its first choice as "Bite the wax tadpole" (蝌蝌啃蜡) or "Female horse stuffed with wax", depending on the dialect. Coke then settled with ke3 kou3 ke3 le4 （可口可乐）, which translates something like "tasty, can make you happy" or very loosely as "so mouth-watering it makes you happy．

Pepsi didn't fare much later with the translation of its "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" slogan. In Taiwan, it became "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead."

The KFC slogan "Finger- lickin' good" was interpreted as "Eat your fingers off."

At least the embarassment is shared, with huge numbers of signs in "Chinglish". In fact, Shanghai has just started a volunteer campaign to stamp out "Chinglish" there before the World Expo in 2010.