Dateline: The Chinese Capital
Playing Monopoly and Viewing the Great Helmsman's Body in Flipflops

I'm staying with an old colleague from Qingdao. She's got a job in Beijing working for Hasbro. She's in charge of translating all the instructions of Hasbro toys into Chinese. This means she's one of the first Chinese people to play with many of the toys that my generation grew up with: My Little Pony, Transformers, Play-Dough, Legos, and Milton Bradley games like Monopoly. It's not all fun and games. She's also gotta market these things. Right now there are about ten stores in Beijing selling these things. After so many years of all of these things being made in China, it's nice to see that Chinese finally get to play with what they've been manufacturing.

While my friend was off playing, I went to Tiananmen Square. I had a vague desire to see Chairman Mao's corpse, so that's what I attempted to do.

I got there early enough to visit the Maosoleum. People were already lined up.

I deposited my bags in the building across the street from the square. Then I got in line.

"Oh, no. No sandals, sir."

"Why?"

"It's a rule."

"But why?"

"Because you can't wear sandals inside."

I think this may have something to do with the word "sandal" and "slipper" being more or less interchangeable in Chinese.

I was fed up with this. It was hot. I was tired. I walked off.

One of the men followed me. He took me to a little area off to the side where he pulled out another pair of sandals from a burlap bag.

"You wear these."

"But these are sandals too!"

"No, they have a back on them."

I was wearing flip-flops.

"Can I rent these?"

"No, 30 kuai."

I laughed. "Ten."

"No, sir, these are very nice sandals. All the foreigners are wearing this kind of sandal."

I assured him that no one I knew was wearing "weida" brand sandals. I undid the velcro and kicked off the sandals.

"I've had enough of this. This is stupid."

"No, sir, come back. Your Chinese is very good. I'll let you in."

We walked back to the entrance. One of the other guards got in my face again. "It's impolite to wear sandals. This is Chinese culture."

The man who tried to sell me sandals just waved him off and pushed me in.

"You give me ten kuai and I'll let you in."

I pulled out a ten-spot and got in the middle of the crowd. I still had twenty minutes of line and guards lined the way. None of them did anything about my sandals. They were more concerned with keeping people from tripping over themselves to rush in and buy 2 kuai "fresh flowers" to honor Chairman Mao. They were plastic.

I didn't think Mao's body was too nice looking. I took a picture with Deng Xiao Ping instead. He's somebody who didn't try to fool anybody about the value of money.

"We're the Ones We've Been Waiting For"
Making Our Voices Heard

A very rattling piece by Ray McGovern. Should be required reading.

Two years after the march from Selma to Montgomery Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. took the pulpit at Riverside Church in New York City and gave a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Today we can substitute “Iraq” for “Vietnam.” Dr. King spoke clearly:

“Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.”

Ignore. That’s what the vast majority of Germans did in the 1930s as Hitler curtailed civil liberties and launched aggressive wars. I was born in August 1939, a week before Hitler sent German tanks into Poland to start World War II. I have studied that crucial time in some detail. And during the five years I served in Germany I had occasion to ask all manner of people how it could possibly be that, highly educated and cultured as they were, the Germans for the most part could simply ignore. Why was it that the institutional churches, Catholic and Evangelical Lutheran, could not find their voice? Why was it that so few spoke out?

A few did...and they provide good example for us today. Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke out, plotted against Hitler, and was executed. Also executed was a more obscure but equally courageous professor from the University of Berlin, Albrecht Haushofer.

Like Bonhoeffer, Haushofer was arrested for speaking out. The SS prison guards were required to extract a confession from prisoners before they were hanged or shot, but Haushofer refused. When they removed his body, though, a paper fell out of his pocket. It was his admission of guilt written in the form of a sonnet:

Schuld
...schuldig bin ich Anders als Ihr denkt.
Ich musste früher meine Pflicht erkennen;
Ich musste schärfer Unheil Unheil nennen;
Mein Urteil habe ich zu lang gelenkt...
Ich habe gewarnt,
Aber nicht genug, und klar;
Und heute weiß ich, was ich schuldig war.

Guilt
I am guilty,
But not in the way you think.
I should have earlier recognized my duty;
I should have more sharply called evil evil;
I reined in my judgment too long.
I did warn,
But not enough, and clear;
And today I know what I was guilty of.

At Riverside Church 22 years later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began by quoting a statement by Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” Dr. King added, “That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.”

And that time has come for us in relation to Iraq. But where are the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Iraq? Where are the successors to Dr. King, to Bonhoeffer, to Professor Haushofer? “There is only us,” says Annie Dillard, and she is right of course. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Read the complete text of McGovern's speech here here.

This article by Cindy Sheehan is even stronger. Also required reading.

Qingdao:
Updates of Interest From My Chinese Home Town

I went to Qingdao stalking out bars and researchers and queeyas. I also went to relax.

For others interested in relaxing in Qingdao, I discovered that Qingdao has a youth hostel that just opened last month. It's part of a new chain called "Hosteling Internawional." Must be a Chinese take on that whole hosteling international fad. Or it has something to do with Chinese copyright law finally being loosely enforced. If you're a backpacker or other traveler interested in going to Qingdao, check out the flickr posts for surrounding road signs. I'm too lazy to transcribe. Except for the sign, the hostel looked like a great place to stay.

Development Zone Revisited

I also went on a whirlwind tour of the ol' Development Zone, which has fascinated me since I hopped on a plane to Chiner 3 years ago.

I interviewed people at the Development Zone museum, talked with the family of the Villa restaurant at my old school, and went swimming in the ocean at golden beach. I only have pictures for half the trip because my battery died and I forgot to bring the spare.

I realize I was much free-er without all this technological baggage. All for you, gentle public!

Wandering

Most of the time I just wandered around looking at pretty old German buildings. Oh, and the whole uploading pictures to flickr thing, which takes a long time since flickr is so blasted slow.

The Qingdao International Beer Festival was also going on. The logo is a different kind of drinking bird. Since this is the year of the chicken, this little dear on the right is what you get.

Fudan University's Homosexuality Class:
Chinese Gay Studies Goes Undergraduate

Shanghaiist.com story about china's first undergraduate gay studies course.

Hey editors: Anybody wanna buy this story? I wrote about 5% of the things I could have.

you can contact the author at: joshua*dot*wickerham*at*gmail*dot*com (*X*=symbol, which prevents spiders from harvesting your narrator's address and spamming him).

Giants Balloons Full of Natural Gas For All:
As Long as You can Evade the Police


National Geographic recently posted a picture that looks an awful lot like rural Henan province. (a link to my flickr set).

As National Geographic wrote:

Flouting a government ban, farmers around the central Chinese town of [insert any village name here] frequently filch gas from the local oil field.

As Chinese industry booms and automobile use spreads, the country as a whole appears to be on a feverish quest for fossil fuels. Oil consumption rose by 11 percent last year, and the number of private autos hit 14 million in 2003—and is expected to rise to 150 million by 2015.

Now I know why all the villagers in WangLouXiang were so busy carting away giant condom-shaped bags of air. Thanks, National Geographic!

Girls Are Just as Good as Boys

Answer: Four. One to load and three to watch.

This is how 1.3 billion people go to work.

Some chicken killing (and then eating) in Henan Province.

You Know You're in Shandong Province When...

--The only condiment on the table is a bowl of fresh garlic cloves.
--That same restaurant brews its own beer.
--Fellow passengers and the bus attendant try to help you when a thief liberates you of your camera's USB cord, spare battery, and charger while you're sleeping.
--Every meal has something wheat-based
--Even non-drinkers get talked into drinking baijiu (rice wine) and eating chicken because said non-drinker is the guest of honor and the reason for the wine and dead chickens and to not eat/drink them would be insulting.

Henan Province Firsts:
Meeting a Hero, Going to China's First Buddhist Temple, Being the First Foreigner to Visit my Friend's Village

(Hopefully pictures will come soon...an ugly peasant gangster and his band of misfits stole your narrator's new camera's USB cord among other things while he was sleeping)

The train trip from Shanghai to the provincial capital of Zhengzhou was a pleasure of train travel. I arrived to my friend's arms the next morning feeling mostly refreshed, though not entirely caught up on the sleep I'd been ignoring the past week as I finished teaching classes and packed everything into the backpack again. (Still a rushed affair). Though I brought my qin to class to give my students a listenlisten, I decided at the last moment not to bring it up north. It's just too heavy.

My friend was in his home province doing some work for the
ChiHeng Foundation, an HIV/AIDS outreach and education organization dedicated to helping MSM and AIDS orphans. He was checking to see that they were going to school. Most of the HIV/AIDS cases in Henan were the result of illegal blood selling programs. In some cases, entire villages were infected and the government expects it to get worse.

We went to the local hospital to visit what my friend described as "a hero". I had little idea who she was, except that she worked with Henan's AIDS orphans, her husband was sick, my friend didn't want me to tell her I'm a journalist, and I couldn't "ask too many strange questions."

We brought her a case of milk and surprised her while her teeth were still in the sink. She was gracious and down to earth and spoke heavily accented Mandarin faster than your narrator could listen. We went to the cafeteria to drink special "Henan noodle sauce" and eat baozi. Her husband was tired and went back up to the room. Not too long after, a woman came and sat down at the empty spot. We were talking about the orphans she'd just visited. Suddenly the woman said, "Oh, you're Gao Yaojie, I recognize you from the newspaper."

When we went back to the room, Dr. Gao gave me two of her books. She told me the stories of the orphans pictured at the front of the book. She showed me the pictures of the fresh graves mounds of an already crowded village cemetery. They brought tears to my eyes.

In one of the books, there were excerpts from an interview. Dr. Gao was asked if she thought she was a hero. She replied that her life was a sacrifice, but she was not a hero. She was a sacrifice so others wouldn't have to be sacrificed. She described her most important trait as being able to tell people "things are not good" when everyone else says "things are good."

I then knew why my friend considers her a hero.


White Horse Temple

Somehow my friend and I managed to fit in a visit to White Horse Temple about 25 hours from Zhengzhou before heading back to the city for a drag show. White Horse Temple is the depository of the first Buddhist texts brought back to China from India.


Backpack and a Keyboard Sponsors Your Narrator as First Foreigner to Visit a Friend's Chinese Village

I didn't really want them to slaughter two of their precious chickens for me, but what could I do? I was the guest of honor in Wang Lou Xiang (Wang Building Village).

With a population of about 1,500, Wanglouxiang was about ten times bigger than your narrator's village of Fenwick, Michigan, USA, but still about as small as Chinese villages come.

We got off the bus and walked along the dusty road to the center of town. My friend stopped at every crowd of folk to say hello. "I have to say hello," he told me. "We're all surnamed 'Wang,' so we're all somehow related. I have about twenty people I call "grandma" and about fifty "aunts". Some people call me "grandpa" because they're three generations younger than me.

We stopped first at his grandmother's home. She was leathery and beautiful. She'd been out in her vegetable garden and came in to pour us some tea. The east side of her house was plastered with posters. There was a statue of a Chinese god alongside Guanyin and Amitabha.

We got the key to the village temple and I kowtowed to the local harvest gods. We took photos with the village kids. I met my friend's parents and his uncles and his aunts and his neighbors. We went to his parents' fields and looked at where the government was going to put in a new highway down the middle of it.

We spent the night preparing dumplings and the chickens his father and uncle slaughtered for my coming. During dinner, we talked about US-China relations, my ability to comprehend between 30-90% of their banter, Edgar Snow, my future memoirs, the progress of the village (just change, I said) that an American could come there, our favorite American founding fathers, North Korea, Confucius, Lao Tze, and Buddhism, among other things. We all agreed that we were friends, that we were earthlings, that some sort of true Chinese culture resides in these northern provinces. I learned the polite and correct hand gestures for receiving baijiu, the noises I should make when indirectly answering a question about how tired I felt (being indirect is the Chinese way). I managed to drink only one small glass of baijiu (Chinese rice wine) while his uncle drank ten or more. I was intoxicated enough from my fever.

Now it's Shandong time! (Shandong being your narrator's home province).

Hittin' It:
The Open Road That Is

Tomorrow afternoon, an hour and a half after my last class, I board the train to Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province.

Walt Whitman about sums up my feelings:

Song of the Open Road

AFOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road.

The earth—that is sufficient;
I do not want the constellations any nearer;
I know they are very well where they are;
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens;
I carry them, men and women—I carry them with me wherever I go;
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them;
I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)

Thanks Bartelby for the poem.

I've spent the last few days getting all settled.

All settled?!

It's 11pm, the landlord is coming at eight tomorrow, and I've still got a backpack to pack. Everything is pretty much taken care of now. All my books and CD (jeez, 40kg worth) have been mailed back to Michigan. Everything but the light I broke has been put back together in my apartment.

I'm exhausted and ready for the 14 hour train ride tomorrow. Sleep, reading, and taking my pick of curious Chinese who want to crowd my space, spit on the floor, and chat me up.

Peace!

Great Radio Station:
I Listen to it Whenever I'm Online

www.radioparadise.com.

Listener supported eclected rock. Check out Radio Paradise. If you like rock, you won't be sorry.

Inside Shanghai's only guqin shop. In the foreground, a qin. In the background, part of Mr. Feng's collection of stones. Try to find the shapes. Some are anatomical, others are from the animal kingdom.

One Man, Two Wives:
Late-Night Chats with the Guqin Shop's Old Sage Feng

It's movin' on time. This same weather pattern developed in Dhaka and Chittagong and Cox's Bazaar right before I went back to Thailand last fall: Rain in torrents. Go inside for tea, come outside to ankle---or shin- or knee---deep water. You can't wash clothes because there's nowhere to dry them. Down in Cox's Bazaar, waiting for the Bangladeshi M.I. to cool their jets, the German and I hid out in a hotel room for five days. Man did my clothes stink. The reason there was that our bags got wet and we couldn't dry our clothes. My clothes are mostly dry right now. I'm not going to make mistake of washing them. My bathroom here is full of dirty clothes. If I have to wait till I'm moved into my backpack before I launder them, so be it. They're not going out in the acid rain to dry.

This evening, after a meditation with some friends, I was walking home on Fen Yang Road by the Music Conservatory and the guqin shop. Mr. Feng, the shop owner's chayou (tea friend) was alone inside. I peeked in and Mr. Feng unlocked the door. He was listening to Chinese pop with the aircon off. It was like a sauna in there.

Here's a video from that evening.

Large (120MB)
Tiny (2MB).

Mr. Feng is as animated as they come. He's stocky, bald, and wears round glasses. He wears Tibetan rocks with eyes and practices the kind of spiritual Buddhism that the average Chinese mistakes for crazy.

He quickly turned on the AC and measured out some fresh Qingdao-grown green tea and brewed a small teapot full. "Ah, Joshua! It's sweet smelling, isn't it! Teacher Feng speaks the truth, doesn't he?"

Your narrator couldn't help but agree.

The subject moved to our dear old acquaintance, Right Heart, the queer young man who convinced me to continue with the guqin when I first got to Shanghai 13 months ago. Since your narrator was liberated of his phone book when he forgot his mobile in a taxi last month, he hasn't been able to make contact with most "friends." It's been a good way to learn who those true friends are.

Well, the virtuoso obviously isn't a great friend, if any. Last time I heard from him was when I interviewed him for my oral Chinese class, which was two months ago. The assignment was to learn about a Chinese person's average weekend. Right Heart's response? Basically, he wakes, brushes his teeth, washes his face, eats breakfast (yes, most Chinese brush their teeth before they eat breakfast, but not often after), plays qin. He then transposes qin pu (old qin character-based musical notation). He'll then eat a lunch his mother has prepared. If he's up to it, he goes to the guqin shop. After that, he goes home and practices writing more complex characters and plays guqin some more. He might go to the internet café. To say that he leads a quiet life is an understatement.

I admire that life. Right Heart doesn't go out to dinner with crowds because they often just turn into opportunities to smoke and drink, which he's given up for the past two years. Right Heart won't sleep with his lover more than once a week because a monk told him he should limit his sexual activity. (Your narrator would have a hard time doing the same if he was in Right Heart's romantic situation). In all, it's admirable. Monastic. Sedate. Celibate. Dead?

After I told Mr. Feng my liberation through possession loss story, Mr. Feng said he too would question the sincerity of a friendship without contact.

"That boy, has he left home (to become a monk) yet? Didn't he express interest in that when you first arrived here?"

I said he had not yet become a monk, though he very well could have because he did express that interest.

"What meaning does that have? If someone closes all his doors to the world, in ten years he's going to be crazy. Young people need to experience the world. You have to open your heart. And the way to do that is through meeting people. You, our Joshua, you're the most colorful young foreigner to come through here. Doesn't Teacher Feng speak the truth," he said laughing. "You don't grow as a person by staying home. You came here to learn Chinese culture and language and music. You've got to have an open heart. You can have all the book learning in the world and say that Buddha is closing all your doors to the world, but Buddha is in actions. Buddha is everywhere. If you just stay home, you're burying yourself, running away from life."

I told Mr. Feng that I thought you couldn't have this situation without meditation, without quiet contemplation. To know oneself requires not only courage, but discipline. I told Mr. Feng that I came to China to learn about myself. That I was interested in the language and culture of the Middle Kingdom was just a byproduct of wanting to put myself into strange holes.

"Ah, Joshua, how do you find yourself? You don't do it by emptying yourself. That's just the beginning. Society holds up a mirror. You can't get it by staying home. That's shirking. You go to a temple and that's shirking! You have to talk to people and go out. And now even, Right Heart won't talk to us in the qin shop."

By the time all was said and done, we had gone through six of Mr. Feng's theories about the world. Still, after a year of monthly chats, I still didn't know a thing about his personal life, except that people joked that he was Mormon. The reason? He has two wives.

So, since I might not see him again for a long time, I asked this old friend how he managed to have two wives. How did that happen?

"Very naturally, Joshua," he said, not elaborating.

"Do your two wives talk?"

"Oh yeah, of course."

"But they live in separate houses, right?"

"Right"

I asked him if they ever got jealous.

"No. I'll tell it to you like this. The Chinese government has 'one country, two systems' policy, right? The situation is like that."

I asked him if he ever got lonely hanging out in the guqin shop alone late at night with his stones and his music.

"How could I get lonely? I'm here to make friends!"

I told him I had to get home and start packing. We're getting there. Only five days till the year of accumulated Joshuaness gets whittled down to a backpack's worth.

I'm gonna need some luck. The non-attachment I have been cultivating over the years comes in handy now, but still…

What Happened Before the Typhoon Struck?
Adventures at the Ballroom Dance Hall, That's What

While the rest of the greater Shanghai area was eating lamb on a stick and buying bottled water in preparation for the typhoon, your narrator was following volunteers who do safer sex outreach work with the Men who have Sex with Men (MSM) population.

Today, instead of going to see accupressurists Dr. Zhang and Dr. Cheng at the Chinese medicine hospital or packing up belongings, we finally wrote and submitted a Shanghaiist story on what went down at Shanghai's only gay ballroom dancehall.

And Everybody Was Typhoon Panicking:
Well, Actually, Nobody Cared

Last night the streets turned into rivers and I had to change from school teacher flax pants and dress shoes to sandals and rolled-up jeans.

Here's what Shanghaiist had to write about the 'phoon.

A branch fell outside my house. Maybe I'll get a day off on Monday. But so far, from your narrator's perspective, the only thing Typhoon Matsa has done is cool off the city and wash away some of the stink and given him an excuse to stay home.

Shanghai Guqin Culture Article:
By Yours Truly

I finally got a guqin article published. It's in this month's that's Shanghai, a free entertainment monthly. You can read my article, The Rebirth of the Qin: Shanghai's Thriving Guqin Culture, here.

Only painful part of the process was all the chopping! I didn't understand that 600 words was not negotiable. My original 1200 words were about half a horse too much.

Granted, the published version is tight, but I never would have opened an article mentioning the Chinese 12 Girls Band. Oh well. Editors, as I said in my last post, are a necessary fork in the eye. I need an editor for this beast. We're getting there. Soup's in the wok.

The Ist Empire Expands to Shanghai:
Indie Media Gets the First Laugh

The Gothamist empire comes to Shanghai. Check out Shanghaiist.com for the funniest regurgitation of local (Shanghai) news, original Shanghaiinese stories, and interviews with random sex toy manufacturers. (Still no match for my baby, the Random Student Interview, but still pretty funny).

Your narrator may even contribute enough stories to get his mug on the credits. We'll see. Check back there in a month to see just how strong your narrator's desire for fame really is. (The editor thought my story about training taxi drivers with canned air horns was "not a great idea for Shanghaiist." Editors are like the flu. I'm miserable while I have them, but stronger after I've built up an immunity. Sorry Dan, nothing personal. Do surf over to his "Shanghai Diaries").

Nine More Days in Shanghai:
How Did That Happen?

I'm always surprised when it comes time to leave.

What do I have to say for myself?

I haven't bought a Ukulele, but I did buy a digital camera yesterday, which means you might get a more visual Backpack. Unfortunately, I'm in a netbar and forgot the USB cable at home.

I'm moving away from 142 Forever Healthy Road next Friday.

No more will I open the door to the caged-in hallway I share with the family next door.

No more will I see in said next-door neighbors' front door to spot them listening to blaring Western classical music in rollers and tightie whities.

No more will I hear my neighbors below shouting "nihao nihao nihao nihao!" to the baby speaking bird. No more will I see the wife shoveling boiled eggs into her infant's mouth as it waves to "uncle" (me).

No more will I see my hundreds of Chinese Characters plastered on walls and surfaces. No more will my qin have a home (thanks, former Conservatory classmates, for the last pic, and their son for being cute).

No more will the "auntie" (maid) give me dirty looks when I walk by with a houseguest.

No more will I get to read the neighborhood committee woman's chalkboard suggestions on cooking eggplant or preventing heatstroke.

No more will I get to see the Bodhi tree seed I planted transform into the concrete-cracking behemoth it's destined to become. Everyone here knows the need to greenify.


Where's your narrator headed? Up north. To a friend's home town (a village in Henan Province). Then he's going to his own Chinese hometown. (Qingdao). Then to Beijing. Then back to Shanghai. Then to Old Gold Mountain. (San Fran). From there, we somehow get home about the second week in September.

Ooh, the open road! I'm almost tingling.