THE LOCAL SUPERMARKET
Yuxi, Yunnan Province
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THE LOCAL SUPERMARKET
Yuxi, Yunnan Province

Sweets

WHAT IS A BLOG?

I got this from my old Michigan Daily buddy Rob Goodspeed's Goodspeed Update and he took it from here. It's a better description of blogging than I have volition to give, though I consider most of what I'm doing here to be a travelogue.

"... By highlighting articles that may easily be passed over by the typical web user too busy to do more than scan corporate news sites, by searching out articles from lesser-known sources, and by providing additional facts, alternative views, and thoughtful commentary, weblog editors participate in the dissemination and interpretation of the news that is fed to us every day. Their sarcasm and fearless commentary reminds us to question the vested interests of our sources of information and the expertise of individual reporters as they file news stories about subjects they may not fully understand. ...

And what, really, will change if we get weblogs into every bookmark list? As we are increasingly bombarded with information from our computers, handhelds, in-store kiosks, and now our clothes, the need for reliable filters will become more pressing. As corporate interests exert tighter and tighter control over information and even art, critical evaluation is more essential than ever. As advertisements creep onto banana peels, attach themselves to paper cup sleeves, and interrupt our ATM transactions, we urgently need to cultivate forms of self-expression in order to counteract our self-defensive numbness and remember what it is to be human.

We are being pummeled by a deluge of data and unless we create time and spaces in which to reflect, we will be left with only our reactions. I strongly believe in the power of weblogs to transform both writers and readers from "audience" to "public" and from "consumer" to "creator." Weblogs are no panacea for the crippling effects of a media-saturated culture, but I believe they are one antidote."

from Rebecca Blood's "Weblogs: A History and Perspective" http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

GO NOW
December 30, 2003
Smelly net bar with bright yellow walls and "real" fake orange juice
Kunming, China

An observation: In China, labor is so cheap that they pay workers to knock down tree leaves before they fall naturally.

News: Friend Jim called from the Pesticide Action Center today. "They're not going to deliver your credit card."

"Ha ha," said I. "If that were true, you'd have waited until later in the day. Of course it came."

And come it did, couriered from some far off capitalist land to this capitalist land. When I got to the office, I scolded Yan Mei the office assistant for putting Jim up to that lie about the card not coming. Then she handed me an ornate blue and gold Chinese pouch, her thanks for the dinner last night (it was her birthday). I opened the pouch to find a bracelet of thick wooden prayer beads. As Jim said, "this is one Chinese gift you probably like, you hippie." Then I pulled the string on the airborn express package and out popped my silver-lined temporary credit card in all its overpackaged glory. A wonder of the networked world, it has allowed me to get my Vietnamese visa in the works (should arrive on Friday) and buy a sleeper bus ticket to the Vietnamese border that leaves the very same day. Jim says I'm cutting it close because my Chinese visa expires the day I arrive in Vietnam. Close, but no cigar.

I was almost looking forward to staying in China another month. I just put together that silly bed that Jim and I sawed in half to fit in the spare bedroom (pictures probably coming soon).

Jane, a former colleague from South Ocean last year, has invited me to Yuxi for Western New Year. We're going to visit some hot springs, so I could, as she put it, "go out with a splash, darling!"

High on "New-Type Glucose Fruit Juice Beverage"
~josh(away)

SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO NOW.......????
December 29, 2003
Pesticide Action Center
30th floor of the Chang Chun Garden Building
Kunming, China

Two paths lie before me. And the decision shall be made by my credit card courier.

If the credit card should arrive tomorrow, I shall procede with my Vietnamese visa and enter that socialist paradise by the end of the week.

If the credit card should not arrive, I shall be forced to renew my Chinese visa and bounce around Yunnan Province for another month.

Both options appeal to me. One will yield slow train rides, beaches, warmth, adventure. The other will yield sleep in a newly reassembled Chinese bed in Jim's apartment, more time in the Kunming arcade playing 2 penny video games, Chinese new year in a farming village of one of the Pesticide Action Center office girls, possibly teaching farmers about pesticides, and lots more Chinese practice.

I must run off to the Vietnamese consulate. If you're a traveler and wish to get a Vietnamese visa in Kunming, Yunnan, you need only go to the "Best Way Hotel" on Beijing Lu, just a block and a half north of Ren Min Lu (the big branch of the Bank of China is there). There's a woman who sits in a little office in the lobby of that hotel that the government has declared territory Vietnamese. She quoted me a price of 450Yuan for the visa and it will probably take three working days to get processed.

lovin' from the top of Kunming,

~Jashwahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

OH SHIT, I HAVE SARS
December 28, 2003
Kunming, China

Here we go again......mad cow disease, earthquakes, chemical explosions in neighboring Sichuan Province, SARS.

(I don't really have SARS).

love,

josh(away)

FALSE ALARM AND A POIGNANT OBSERVATION
December 27, 2003
The People's Republic of China, Kunming, Yunnan

www.matrixmasters.com is not blocked. False alarm.

My American associate, Jim, read me an interesting passage that I'd like to relate after a night attempting (and never succeeding) to extract opinions from various Chinese people. This quote is from Kenneth Lieberthal's book "Governing China"

"In China today, mouthing "correct" formulations is still viewed as socially responsible even if all concerned know that there is little relationship between those formulations and the thoughts of the people using them. This situation makes it potentially easier for Chinese leaders to elicit formal support and compliant behavior from the populace; it also makes it difficult ofr the leaders to know the real state of mind of their own citizens and of their political subordinates." p.9

MATRIX MASTERS BLOCKED IN CHINA
December 26, 2003

Is it just a temporary inconvenience caused by technical glitches or is your narrator's opinion too mind blowing for the Chinese populace?

Judy and your narrator at the Kunming "Population Services International" Drop-in Center Christmas Party 2003

Christmas with the Recovering Heroine Addicts
December 26, 2003
Kunming City, Yunnan Province, China

Jim and I spent Christmas wandering the streets of Kunming. We marveled at the wonders of imported Betty Crocker cake mix, Jeno's Pizza Rolls and Kraft Mac 'n' Cheese at "Paul's Store," fended off beggars with basketball pick moves, drank fifty cent Yunnan coffee in the sun at the French Cafe, and browsed English books in the Yunnan University area at Mandarin Books. We met up with Judy, another USofAer placed in Kunming by the same organization as Jim, Princeton-in-Asia. She helped us find the third season of the Simpsons (one of the best seasons ever) on DVD for $5. Merry Christmas indeed!

Judy is an ABC, or American Born Chinese. She has a totally different perspective on China than Jim or me, because she doesn't look like a foreigner (Lao Wai). She looks like everyone else. As Jim said, they don't "wave the magic lao wai wand" for her. Like when she wants something to happen, she can't get away with pantomiming because they think she's retarded. The Chinese language does flow through blood and get transmitted through genes, doesn't it? Luckily for Judy, she grew up speaking Chinese and has a pretty good grasp on the language. She can also pass through a crowd practically unseen.

Judy helped organize her organization's Christmas party last night. This involved a lot of recovering heroine addicts playing balloon games, eating cake, smoking cigarettes, playing ping pong, and watching Home Alone while Judy told Jim and me about office politics, who was sleeping with whom, and who was actually off junk and who was taking "sick days."

Population Services International, her organization, is one of the top distributors of condoms in this part of Asia. They also educate people about AIDS through poster campaigns and targeted marketing. I got two packs of playing cards filled with AIDS factoids in Chinese. I can study these as a replacement for the flashcards I had stolen on Christmas Eve Day.

I've settled in nicely here. I can see why Jim told me I should come here and "drop out." A lot of expats have. Life is good here for quite a few people. My next projects are visa applications, getting money wired, and getting my bedroom set up in Jim's apartment. He's got a bed for me to use, but we can't fit it in the bedroom door. It's also one of the few well-built things in China and I cannot get it apart without sawing it in half and putting it back together. (So Chinese). We wandered around most of the afternoon to different shops today buying a saw, nails, and a hammer, getting spare keys made, having a tailor woman repair five articles of clothing for sixty cents, and trying to find wood. The wood was the hardest thing. After asking around and finding none, we chanced upon a construction site and one of the workers was nice enough to give me three pieces for free.

It's amazing to me how many people just live behind the sliding metal doors of their shops, getting heat from small coal fires. The roofs have no insulation, save the grass growing on the thin tiles, and the people have no security save for what they earn by selling their wares and services.

Adios for now,
~josh(away)

CONTACTING ME IN KUNMING

Mobile phone charger was stolen. Dead battery now. If for any reason you should like or need to contact me via dianhuaji (electric voice machine), you can call Jim's number. I'll be here for at least the next week and a half while I get visa shit straightened.
Jim's apartment number: 86-871-363-3016

ROBBED!
Kunming, Yunnan Province, China
University bud Jim's apartment, Christmas morning

This Christmas, I decided not to give many physical manifestations of my love. Instead, I unwittingly "gave" just what I could spare--to some Chinese street thief.

The 23-hour train ride from Guilin to Kunming was pleasant and enlivening. I met two baijiu (rice wine) drinking Tibetan monks living in what the Chinese gov't now calls Shangri-La. We exchanged fruit and prayer beads. They knotted me string for good luck and safety to adorn my backpack and person. I gave them my pocketknife and sunflower seeds. The older monk kept asking to trade things, so I traded my watch for his massive silver and turquoise ring adorned with Chinese dragons. I felt insulated and safe with my berth mates. The woman in the bed above me bought us all turkey legs and corn on the cob at one train stop and we ate and laughed and chanted to our hearts' content.

I arrived in spring-like Kunming with one big green backpack full of my largest stock of books and clothes and most of my toiletries. I also had the small backpack I used in Yangshuo as an overnight bag. This backpack contained most of my valuables.

I was meeting friend Jim at the train station. For nearly two hours, Jim did not show, but kept saying in our short mobile phone conversations that he would be there shortly. I just waited outside the station straddling my bags and talking to the pedicab drivers, whose dialect confused me, thinking "this is what I get for standing Jim up last year at the democracy monument in Bangkok." The sun was hot and I drank a big bottle of water to wash down the taste of some nasty dumplings I had at a whole in the wall shop where the staff insulted the bandana I wear to keep my hair out of my eyes. One moment I was looking at my bag, the next I was saying I didn’t understand the driver’s dialect, and the next thing I knew, my safety string adorned backpack was vanished, right out from under me!

I beat back panic, scanned the streets. Nothing. This was not happening. Jim was due to arrive any moment. My mobile phone battery had just died. I lugged my big pack to the nearest shopkeep and told her my bag had been snatched--"caught" was the closest verb I could come up with. She just smiled. Then I scanned for Jim again. Not yet arrived. Some Chinese tourists came up to me asking where I was from. I was not interested in this oh-so-typical Chinese conversation and told them my situation. This caught the ear of some helpful young lads who called the police on a public phone.

Jim arrived a moment later, thanked me for drawing a crowd, gave me a hug. Five minutes later, a Public Security Bureau officer strolled in and took the initial report, scattering the pedicab drivers. I thought this was suspicious. Had the pedicab drivers been in cahoots with the robber(s)? Jim pointed out that these pedicabs themselves were illegal, not a sign of their guilt.

The officer told us we'd have to go to the station and fill out a report. I picked up my backpack and he waved it down. No, we were not walking. We were being hauled off in a paddy wagon! Jim and I waved goodbye to the crowd of forty or so onlookers and found out what it might be like to be on the other side of the Chinese law.

I gave the police officers at the station a brief rundown of what was stolen. The chief offered me a cigarette and I declined. Jim told me to just take it. "And then what?," I asked. "Then you thank him profusely and just hold it." Jim was quickly involved in a political discussion about "President Small Bush", whom this policeman admired probably for the same reason so many Chinese like Hitler. They like strong, authoritarian types. I said nothing, let Jim hadle his own little mess.

While giving the report, I had to pee so bad I felt like my bladder would burst, but the precinct’s only WC was overflowing into a small river into the hallway and I could not pee there. I wanted to just pee in the alley under the developing world scene unfolding around us, but I instead just told the officers what happened.

Here's a more complete catalog of my involuntary Christmas giving than I gave the police:

Money:
-credit card
-bank card
-$100 traveler's cheque
-$5 cash

Paper-based non-monetary items:
-dog-eared copy of James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (with more of my own explanatory notes than a Mormon's bible--irreplaceable)
-"The Story of Lao Tze" (almost finished, thanks the heavens, so I could react as a sage would to my loss of property)
-"Elementary Chinese," volumes 2 and 3
-"2001: A Space Odyssey" (a gift I was planning to pass this along)
-new Chinese journal with the front cover quote: "so nice you will feel like writing with it at all times."
-postcards and letter writing supplies
-Lonely Planet China (1998 edition)
-New Chinese notebook and character book
-Row-causing Toyota ad that I ripped out of an in-flight magazine depicting a Land Cruiser hauling a Chinese Sino-Japanese war era truck by chain.
-sexy CK “urge” or “lunge” or some kind of crazy hot commercialized cologne ad
-stickers, stamps, glue, scissors, notecards

Toiletries:
-contact lens solution
-western deodorant
-hotel shampoo and toilet paper
-honey bear bottle full of Castile soap from the Ann Arbor People's Food Co-op
-primary pair of glasses
-traveler's towel.

Stuff:
-Bubbaloo Gum container I won at a Mexican dance competition containing colored pens, pencils, Sharpies
-items of emotional significance from friends and relatives like a bouncy ball, leather pouch, name-engraved key chain, mantras, hand-knit scarf, etc.
-a laser-cut gold "safety" card with my Chinese zodiac and a Buddha that the monks urged me to buy on the train.
-leather gloves
-300+ hand-made Chinese flash cards
-wallet, with driver’s license, library memberships, Subway sandwich card, etc, etc.

Technology:
-mobile phone recharger
-Tape player/recorder with new headphones
-Chinese pop music cassette tapes, Buddhist Chants, a Chinese tape I'd made with friends.
-two gyroscopes I planned to give as gifts to my hosts in Kunming (probably better they were stolen, as they played a sorry rendition of "Happy Birthday" and lit up when you spun them)
-camera and film

In all, I took a hit, but my passport was not stolen. Neither were any of the books I need for the next leg of my journey. I was not harmed. I still have my birth certificate. Visa is couriering a new temporary credit card from Singapore. If I need to, I can extend my visa in China, but I'm going to try to press on to Vietnam before that expires on the third of January. Getting the University of Michigan Credit Union to send a new bankcard some time around Christmas probably won't happen, but I can get by. I have the comfort of familiar faces here in Kunming (Jim, plus some former colleagues from South Ocean School) and can understand at least some of the local tongue.

Jim and I took full advantage of the holiday to just chill last night. He's got a spacious (if at night very freezing) Kunming apartment and I got a better understanding of where he works--it's on the 30th floor and no one in the office was too busy to greet me and chat. He volunteers with an organization that tries to educate farmers about pesticides. They're into writing reports right now. He said he'd save explanations of what he does until I arrived so I could make my own observations, but I still don't have a very clear idea of what occupies the staff's or Jim's time!

Last night, on Christmas Eve, we ate a big Chinese meal with a girl our age who also lives in Kunming. Judy was her name and she volunteers at a drop-in shelter for recovering Chinese heroin addicts, focused on HIV/AIDS harm reduction. After dinner, we capped the evening in a Chinese bar. The santa hat clad staff let us pull up a bench next to their fireplace ("you’re right, we do need marshmallows," Judy agreed at my suggestion). But despite the comforting Christmas music they played, we did not forget where we were. I sipped my ginger tea and counted my blessings.

I wondered at first if those monks hadn't put a curse on me. But if they had given me any safety or luck at all, it is in the fact that I was carrying too much stuff to begin with. I'm a sucker for cheap Chinese books and was feeling the strain of so many tomes. I have a curvature in my spine that borders on scoliosis, so I must be cautious not to overstress my taxed monkey body. I also take this as yet another indication that I should just put everything online, free myself from paper-based journaling. This is the second journal I've lost in three weeks. Or, as I told Jim, maybe having my bag stolen prevented us from getting into a cab that would have crashed into an egg cart, or worse...

Then again, I may get a nice Christmas surprise if the thief or thieves discover nothing of much monetary value in my overstuffed pack. They were probably looking to score some quick cash, and there are lots of foreigners who get wallets returned with only the cash missing. The police said they would call me when they catch the thief. Such confidence.

I cannot be thankful enough for my circumstances. I lost only stuff, and--at most, a hundred dollars. Jim has a real coffee machine with beans from Dunkin' Donuts, such luxury. We're meeting up with Judy again tonight for a Christmas party at the shelter. Life is giving me a lesson in non-attachment. I shed my skin, but remain within myself unharmed--and better for it. I am one lucky moneky.

Peace to you and to all beings,
~josh(away)

This story about Donald Rumsfeld visiting Saddam in the early '80s is a good early Christmas present. It's basically what's been kicking around on the net for a few years now. Some new evidence that the US supported Saddam's use of WMD during the Iran-Iraq war is enough to push it further into the established media.

"IN CHINESE EYES THIS IS YANGSHUO. IN FOREIGNERS' EYES THIS IS NOT CHINA! THE CHINESE AND WESTERN CULTURE EXCHANGES HERE ARE SO HARMONIOUS, ALL THE THINGS HAPPENING SOUND ALWAYS PERFECT AND ATTRACTIVE!"
--Yangshuo tourist map, Guangxi Province, southern China.

After riding into town at night two days ago, I woke yesterday to find this town looking more spectacular than my wildest dreams. Steep mountain peaks tower around each narrow street, nestling Yangshuo like a little smokey pearl in the palm of the hand. At night, it's cold, but in the sunshine, it's fine.

After my breakfast of floppy, paper-thin Chinese-style pancakes, fruit and Yunnan coffee, I rented a bike for ten kuai (about a buck) and set out.

The first thing I realized was that no one stared at me. I thought this somehow robbed China of some of its magic, but I quickly grew to love it. I soon began to feel more "native" than ever I had, because the Han and minority people around me did not make a big deal about my big nose. They tried to scam me at every turn (sometimes successfully), but most of the people were down to earth, quick to chat, and not jaded.

About twenty minutes outside of town, I saw a sign for "The Farmer's Holiday Inn" and turned down a dirt path into a riverside village. I crossed a small dam where the villagers were washing their clothes and digging irrigation ditches and came across two scamps, brother and sister, boy 15, girl 12. (Some farming peasants and minorities are exempt from the one-child policy. Others just ignore it). Though I couldn't understand some of the older villager's speech, I could understand the kids, and they me, so we set off exploring. A few minutes soon turned into a few hours. We climbed into caves, skipped stones, caught snails, inquired about how long the Israeli rock climbers had been around, inspected progress on the new 7-meter deep village well, ate fresh oranges, and investigated an ingenious irrigation system connected to a stone dam. A small section of the dam diverts water into a drain that runs downstream away from the river to a 45 degree angle pipe. This pipe, in turn, deposites its payload into a cement ditch teeming with fresh water shrimp two meters above water level.

The kids told me they'd plant the new rice some time this month, but that seems premature. Seedlings are probably growing in some hidden nurseries right now waiting for spring rain to fill the now-depleted Li River and the now-diverted aquaducts that will flood the rice paddies. After early February's Chinese New Year's festivities, work in the fields is sure to commence.

After our hours of exploring, we passed back through the village and the path led through their village school's small courtyard. They offered me a tempting job in this idyllic nest of a place, but I declined, and pressed on to climb "Moon Hill," an arch of rock that overlooks the surrounding valleys. It took over an hour to climb one way and the arch that creates the moon shape in the rock was over fifty meters wide, so I'm guessing the whole mountain was about half a kilometer above the tiny rice paddies at ground level. But everything came at a price and I soon less willing to pay park entrance fees and just find my own less claimed areas. I've been more than happy just to sit and meditate or chat the days into the evening. Then I return to my little hotel room where the owner shivers above a desktop tin pail full of coal embers and I ask him to kindly turn on the water heater for my evening bath. There I read and think with a smile about the scurrying hordes of park-going Chinese tourists disembarking from giant shiny tour buses to tour parks and climb thousands of stone stairs in business suits and high heels.

I write not to make you envious, but only to inspire, and to keep record, for I am still a neurotic collector of my own written accounts. If I weren't spending this time updating my blog, I'd just spend the time with a pen to paper in my journal.

Cold and full of local street delicacies on this Chinese Winter Solstice,

~josh(away)

ps you'll notice from the post signature at the bottom of this message that I can now access blogger.com again. China's internet monitoring is strange. Perhaps it is not nation-wide, as I had previously suspected. For being as nationalistic as China is, a lot of things are not nation-wide. Like if you want to get out of a Chinese teaching "contract," you just flee to another province because the computer systems don't seem to be able to track you.

If you're interested, here's a website of ongoing blockage of Chinese internet sites, done by some Harvard researchers.

Here's an excerpt from their site (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/test/) :

Conclusions

From our data, it appears that the set of sites blocked in China is by no means static: whoever maintains the lists is actively updating them, and certain general-interest high-profile sites whose content changes frequently appear to be blocked and unblocked as those changes are evaluated. (This is particularly noticeable with news sites such as CNN and Slashdot.) Some new sites with sensitive content do not appear to take long to be blocked. However, even some longstanding sites of apparent sensitivity remain unblocked. This is most easily noticed in our data with respect to sexually-explicit sites -- we found blocking of only 13.4% of our sample of well-known sexually-explicit sites -- but is also anecdotally apparent from our data, as one notes blocking of some US intelligence sites but not others, etc. Further data collection will be geared at determining the extent to which the basket of sites blocked reflects shifting substantive government policies -- whether, for example, a sea change in relations with Taiwan, whether positive or negative, is reflected in blocking, and if so, how quickly.

China's Internet filtering efforts remain opaque, and in the absence of government cooperation or admission of filtering methods, data probing of the sort used in our study remains a useful tool in determining the scope of filtering. The authors have previously studied filtering in Saudi Arabia and in American public libraries; in these locations, blockage of a web page leads to an error message clearly explaining that the requested page is unavailable due to intentional blockage. **In contrast, China's systems make it difficult for a user to distinguish between an intentional block and a temporary network or server glitch. This may be intentional or may reflect technical happenstance -- that this implementation was easier or cheaper, given the size and design of China's network infrastructure.

The primary and most longstanding means of blocking is at the router level, and on the basis of IP address -- the crudity of which means that those implementing filtering must choose between blocking an entire site on the basis of a small portion of its content, or tolerating such content. This would explain why, for example, the www.mit.edu server is sometimes wholly inaccessible even though Chinese officials likely have no objection to most content on that server. To the extent that the entirety of that server is nonetheless inaccessible, China's filtering system is properly considered to be overblocking, and we believe our data indicates extensive overblocking of this form. This may account for the rise of still-rare forms of blocking that allow more refined content filtering -- such as blocking by keywords or phrases in any particular HTML page requested by a user, whether or not the site hosting the page is present on an ex ante block list. Such blocking is likely far more technology-intensive, in principle even slowing overall network response time as packets are analyzed by sniffers and the results passed to filters.

Among the specific blocked pages are the following categories of content:

--Dissident/democracy sites. Blocked sites includes sites about democracy and human rights generally and sites specific to China. Of the top 100 sites returned by Google in response to a search for "democracy china," 40 were found to be blocked, while 37 "dissident china" sites were blocked, 32 were blocked for "freedom china," and 30 for "justice china."
--Health. Blocked sites included sites about health generally and about health in China specifically. Of the top 100 Google results for "hunger china," 24 were blocked; for "famine china" 23; for "AIDS china" 21; for "sex china" 19; for "disease china" 14.
--Education. Blocked sites included a number of well-known institutions of higher education, including the primary web servers operated by Caltech, Columbia, MIT, and the University of Virginia (and occasionally the University of Michigan). Blocked non-university sites included the Learning Channel, the Islamic Virtual School, the Music Academy of Zheng, and the web sites of dozens of public and private primary and secondary schools. We further found evidence of blocking of 696 sites listed in Yahoo's Education directory categories and subcategories.
--News. The BBC News was consistently unreachable, while CNN, Time Magazine, PBS, the Miami Herald, and the Philadelphia Inquirer were also often unavailable. Of Google's top 100 results for news, 42 were blocked. We further found evidence of blocking of 923 sites listed in Yahoo's News and Media directory categories and subcategories. Nonetheless, some news sites that were previously blocked became accessible during the course of our testing; for example, Reuters was blocked through April 29, but was subsequently accessible, while the Washington Post was blocked through May 6 and was subsequently accessible.
--Government sites. Blocked sites included a variety of sites operated by governments in Asia and beyond. Government sites of Taiwan and Tibet were targeted specifically. Also blocked was the entirety of uscourts.gov. The communication sites of various governments were blocked, including the United States' Voice of America. Government military department sites were also blocked, including the US Department of Defense, though others remained reachable (the CIA). A variety of additional government sites were blocked, without manifest pattern, both in the United States and beyond.
--Taiwanese and Tibetan sites generally.
--Entertainment. Blocked sites included the movie Deep Impact, the Canadian Music Centre, the Taiwanese site of MTV (mtv.com.tw) and multiple sites providing off-color jokes. We also found blocking of a total of 451 sites in Yahoo's categories and subcategories pertaining to Entertainment.
--Religion. Blocked sites included the Asian American Baptist Church, the Atheist Network, the Catholic Civil Rights League, Feng Shui at Geomancy.net, the Canberra Islamic Centre, the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg, and the Denver Zen Center. We found blocking of a total of 1,763 sites in Yahoo's categories and subcategories pertaining to religion.

XIAO BU SHI (Little Bush)

Here's something you don't see in the American media. Notice the lens caps on the binoculars. The Chinese media is full of pictures like this of our leader looking dumb. But this one is old. A French businessman working in the Shanghai pesticide business told me about it last week in the PuDong lounge one of my buddies sings at.

He said the engineers at his company tried to blame him for building the plant that they work to develope pesticides in. How absurd! He told me this right before he got apocalyptic and said "no one is clean. Not the Chinese, the Japanese, the Americans, Europeans, anyone." He was talking about the neo-imperialistic powers, but I told him that anyone involved in anything bad from any level was to blame...And then to give him The Fear, I told him THE PEOPLE WILL RISE. And then he bought me a glass of wine while I spoke to his Chinese fiance about the 1930's-era house they're renovating.

At least the pesticides this man was developing are the same as used in Western countries, even if Chinese peasants don't know how to use them. (That's where my friend Jim and his NGO, the Pesticide Action Center, come in). They're not anything worse.

"FRIENDS"


This is a picture of me and Olivia, my former co-teacher and South Ocean slave. You can read more about her below, if you haven't already.

A CHINA HAND AND HIS WIFE
Qingdao, China

I thought this would come a lot later than it did, but in the market today a man called me a real "Zhong gua tong," or "China hand." Even though it has no negative meaning, it's not always a compliment. It means I'm familiar with the country. I guess it means my Chinese is getting better too. (mostly just when I'm bargaining)

And then there's the awkwardness of everyone thinking my mother is my wife........................................................... um, hmmm... She does look younger than her 47 years and I look more sagely than my 23 years, but come on people! When they ask me if she' s my girlfriend, I usually just spare them the face and answer "NO" and leave it at that.

I guess the Chinese have the same problem discerning foreigners' ages as we have determining theirs.

oh, and check out this animation if you've got time for some anti-war agitprop. It concerns the media blackout about not showing (our) dead soldiers.

MY HAREM IN THE KARAOKE HALL
Kaifaqu, Shandong, Chiner

Last night, my mom and I invited all the Chinese English teachers I worked with last year out for a dinner at my friend's aunt's new restaurant. Most of these teachers were in their early twenties and beautiful. All of them were female. Cramming all nine of us into a taxi van, we joked that I was an emperor with his entourage of concubines.

After eating until we were stuffed, we retired to the karaoke bar downstairs and my old friend Olivia pushed me into singing a very mumbly version of "I am a fish," the only Chinese song I can sing besides "Shanghai night". The rest of them sang and sang and danced, even though we drank only Coca-cola the whole night through.

Though my colleagues said they wanted to return at 9 so they could get enough rest for their early morning (7:15) classes, we stayed out until 11. When we got back to the school gate, the vice headmaster was engaged in some sort of confrontation with a young man and my colleagues freaked. They had the taxi driver turn around and drive slowly down the road. When we returned five minutes later, the headmaster was still there and we decided to get out anyway. He interogated the taxi driver and my friends looked worried. We acted guilty, so he presumed we were. But the question is: why did grown women have to worry about being out "late" on a school night? Such is the life in China.

THE RING
XueJiaDao, Shandong, just outside the Qingdao Economic and Technological Zone

Now that I'm sporting a red beard and long blond hair, most of my old friends and colleagues did double takes when they saw
me for the first time after seven months. My second graders turned third graders did not recognize me at all.

Back in April of this year, right before the SARS hype made easy news, I told my second graders that my mother and brother were coming to visit. Then shit really hit the fan (or so it seemed it would) and I fled to the relative safety of America while my kids endured two months of campus confinement and not one visit from Mr. Josh's mother and brother.

Fast forward to yesterday, when a strange bearded man enters the room claiming to be the kids' old teacher. My young cuties were skeptical... until one of them noticed the ring I wear on my index finger and shouted for the other kids to look. Then it all made sense that this foreign devil was in their room introducing an even stranger woman (who they thought was my girlfriend). The beard must have made me look much older to them, because they asked me why I aged so quickly.

That night, I went and saw the class I used to be a head teacher for and taught a short culture class. I had been thinking hard about what I could bring to China that was distinctly America and not manufactured in China.

American flags? No.

Chia pets? No.

I settled on Jelly Belly's jelly beans and picked up a bag or two in California. I told the kids about my deliberation and settled on explaining one major difference between our countries, writing it on the blackboard: IMITATION FRUIT FLAVOR. Then we sampled all those flavors that never grew on trees.

From a cold room in the wind-swept peninsula I once called home,
josh(away)

BLAST FROM THE TEACHING PAST
XueJiaDao, Shandong, China
South Ocean School, Qingdao

I'm back in the old teacher's apartments at my old school in Qingdao, being well taken care of by my old colleagues. I'm seeing all the old familiar faces and facing all the old familiar conditions. I had forgotten how otherwordly this place is.

When my mother and I first arrived at the school(after jet; taxi with driver beaming with pride to show us Qingdao's famous beer factory, mountains Haier factory, etc; boat trip; taxi ride) the guard at the school gate pulled me into the office for questioning. He remembered me, and I remembered him, but rules are rules.

Then old Della took us to the "villa" apartments where guests and parents stay for 160Yuan/night. It was freezing, just like the Chinese dormitories and classrooms are, all heated with forced water heat. It was only a few degrees warmer than being-able-to-see-our-breath cold. I was able to take a short nap, but Mom was not. We were not used to this. Soon the foreign teachers came through and got us one of the unused apartments in their building. It was the first good sleep I'd had yet in China.

Maybe I slept so well because I met up with a very dear friend and former Chinese colleague Olivia, who took us to her apartment in the neighboring city of HuangDao for one of her aunt's feasts. I brought Olivia a copy of Orwell's "1984" because I thought that would be better for her English and political sensibilities than Dickens' widely available "Great Expectations" was last year when we were having English/Chinese lessons together. I also took her some Jelly Belly's, which was the most American thing I could think of that wasn't manufactured in China. When I told the taxi driver that I liked his tape of pre-revolutionary Chinese pop music, he gave me the copy.

The whole experience was really eye-opening for my mom, who'd met a lot of expat Chinese living in America, but never seen how they live here. I was reminded of the tough life and the even tougher character of a people who work a job for their livelihoods, and don't have the choice to work for enjoyment or out of much sense of choice. Most Chinese lots in life are set, but the sense of happiness is very pronounced.

Having woken to the sounds of the national anthem at the weekly flag raising ceremony,

~josh(away)

VEGETARIAN SAUTED CLOVER WITH PIG'S BOWELS
PuXi, Shanghai (East of the new city)

Three days into it and the lag is getting extreme. My mom and I are fighting it with a strict sleep schedule, but the problem is that our internal clocks override our bodies' exhaustion. We go to bed with melatonin and prayers and wake up at 2, 3, 4, and 5 am every morning unable to convince ourselves that it's night here.

But enough of this. After some initial confusion the first night of my arrival (wherein I forgot the notebook that I had written all of my important contact information at my friends' house in Sacramento and--with a full bladder--got on a "shuttle bus" to the Radison on the other side of the city, an hour's ride from the airport. Frantic calls to my mother after a late-night emergency opening of the hotels "business center" where I checked my email and got the hotel's number and I was on a $20 taxi ride to the Ramada that was five minutes from the airport to begin with.

Luckily, things have turned around. My mom is "overwhelmed but happy" with China and we've enjoyed getting our bearings together. We soon got out of that airport hotel and downtown into the towering Metropole Hotel. I was able to buy a new battery charger for my mobile "hand machine" phone and the card still worked despite my friend Jim's warning that the thing would expire after six months. We went to the post office and they let us lick our own postcard stamps.

That night we ate dinner at a famous vegetarian restaurant where every dish is designed to look like meat. We ordered fake meatballs, "delicacies of every kind in skilly," "sauted rolls sliced chicken with" and fake shrimp. Down to the texture and color, those gelatinous goobers looked like shrimp. We retired to our room and slept five more hours (all our internal clocks would allow) and caffeinated our exhausted selves for another day of wandering. "No shopping today," Mom said. "I'm still not ready to deal with everyone getting in my face." But still the bargains called.

Today, we explored the southern part of the city, near the campus of the Shanghai Music Conservatory. I was amazed that a place of such quiet contemplation existed. We could hear the sound of Chinese trumpets, violins and erhu without having to strain above the din of honks and motors and shouts. We strolled the narrow, dusty streets in search of a net bar, getting conflicting advice and "why did you come into my store and ask me for directions you silly foreigner?" kinds of looks. Neither could we find the art gallery we were looking for.

Finally, we gave in to a cup of Cafe Americano and a fantastic convergence occured. The barman told us the art gallery was ten meters outside the front entrance of the bar and said we had walked by a net bar on the way to the restaurant.

The art gallery www.shanghart.com was owned by a Swiss man and I think we witnessed something rather unique. The exhibition hosted the artwork of a famous artist whose best work sells for about $10,000 each. But in this exhibit, everything was 500 RMB (about $60). And actually, he had done none of the art himself. Instead, he found a street artist and declared the art was of equal worth to his own, bought the pieces, and sold them at cost. By "bought the pieces" I mean that the man plastered his identity onto the pieces , signing a contract with the real artist that the paintings would be in effect his for ten years. It was really weird heady concept art, yet the artist described the exhibit as "'contract' instead of 'concept'" and as an "'adoption ceremony'" where "Every visitor is a witness of the adoption." You can read his statement here. Unfortunately, he doesn't have any of his real work online. Too bad, cuz it was hella better than the art on the walls of the gallery.

All for now. I hope I write you again on the other side of a Shanghai MagLev ride. =)

WHOOP ASS or RED BULL?
Rancho Cordova, CA (just outside The Governator's Sacramento)

The answer, it seems, is both. One energy drink very Asian, the other very American (after all the cartoon character on the can of "whoop ass" has "USA" tattooed on his fist), they'll both provide enough Taurine and menace to cajole my mindbody into Chiner time over the 13-hour flight this afternoon.

When I land in the Pudong Airport in Shanghai at 7pm feeling like I've pulled an all-nighter, I'll just settle in for a little sleep camelling, replenishing where the Taurine took its toll. That, and I'll say hello to my mother. Then it's exercise. Hard exercise. This is an experiment to see how quickly I can beat back the jet lag.

Whoop, whoop, whoop, whooop, whooop!