Last Day in Kunming

We're packing our bags and tying up all the loose ends in order to leave by bus tonight at 7pm for the Vietnamese border. It's a night bus that has rows of bunk beds installed in the cabin. I've never ridden one before, so I'm excited to find out how that goes. I'm counting my lucky stars that I'm not 6 feet tall. I should be able to fit in one of the beds pretty comfortably. We've got a bag full of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches - prepared more out of habit than economic necessity. We can get food cheaper than PBJs at any bus station we stop at along the way. It's really hard to under-price the Chinese.

As I'm tying up logistical loose ends here in Kunming, I figured that I could also tie up some loose ends on the blog. Here's a recap of how things ended up during our adventures in China:

The first student that I was tutoring who I was waiting so patiently for payment from back in April ended up not working out. After four weeks (8 hours) of instruction, her Dad finally paid me for my work (about $32 per hour) and then told me that his daughter had a school function and could no longer take classes from me. It was a pretty thinly veiled excuse for just not wanting to continue with me as a tutor. I'm not sure if my teaching capabilities, the price or who knows what else were the cause of the abrupt ending, but according to others I talked to who had been in the same boat, I got off pretty well. The money pretty much paid for a trip out to the mountains in northwest Yunnan, so it certainly wasn't a waste of time. A few weeks after the "break-up", our roommate's friend hired my services for her daughter and so I continued teaching. One day, she brought in a friend, a little eight year old boy with the English name "Brutus". Meeting a Chinese eight year old named "Brutus" was a very special treat.

The protest against the proposed petrochemicals factory that was supposed to take place June 6 never materialized. Police were out in force - we had seen pictures and heard that police were lined up every 20 feet along the street in the downtown area. Lots of people wore white that day, the official color of the anti-factory protesters, but no crowds gathered for a demonstration. People have more-or-less quit talking about the factory and so I assume that it will go on ahead as planned. The Chinese government demonstrated in Kunming how effective it can be at dealing with dissent.

I sold my bike right before we left for Beijing for the same price that I bought it for, which is a win in my book, but Chinese friends chided me for not selling it for more than I bought it for. I've missed not having it these past weeks and have often cursed the buses for coming so infrequently and being so crowded when they do come. I can't wait to get another bike when I get to Italy.

Last week, I met an old man in the park who asked me for help with English. Over the past week, I've gone over to his house a couple of times and helped him make sense of a month-long trip he made to the US in 2010. As weird as China seems to any American, the US is at least as weird to the Chinese. Making sense of baseball, gift shops, Native Americans, wagon trains, settlers and Mormonism all at once can be a daunting task, so I sat with him as he went through his pictures of his trip. He's started writing out the text of signs and displays that he took pictures in and translating it into Chinese. He says he'll publish a book about it, but I'm not sure how much of a market that will have. Then again, this is China, what do I know about the Chinese reading market. The experience with him reinforced my desire to learn Chinese well enough to go on a Chinese organized tour of the US. I'd see a completely different country than the one I was used to.

The sad part about leaving China is that I know whatever knowledge and instinct I have for this place will evaporate so quickly after I leave. I like looking back over the past four months to see how China has shaped me. How I can see the world a little better from the Chinese perspective, how I can acquire everything I need in order to survive. As we move through southeast Asia over the next 6 weeks, I know that most of our time will be spent just figuring out how to get what we need and we won't have as much time to interact with a place. I like that we stayed in Kunming long enough to see the seasons change and discover weekly patterns in life: coming to expect the late afternoon drone of the pickled vegetable lady walking down the street announcing her business; hearing the "ding-ding-tang" lady come down the street ringing her bell and advertising her chewy sweets; waking up in the morning to marching music playing at the elementary school across the street from us. We won't get to establish all of those patterns again until we get to Italy. But I'm also incredibly excited about travelling through this corner of Asia. I'm also very excited to jump in an ocean. I haven't been in the sea for nearly 2 years, and I haven't swam since January.

For those interested in following us along on the trip, here's a rough itinerary of where we'll be and when. Bryn made this map and the approximate schedule is below:

June 20: overnight bus to Vietnamese border, train to Hanoi

June 21-23: Hanoi

June 23: overnight train to Hue/Denang/Hoi An

~June 26: train in Nha Trang, on to Ho Chi Minh City

June 30th: swing dance in HCMC

July 1-4: Mekong Delta, boat to Phnom Pehn, Cambodia

July 4- swing dance in Phnom Pehn

July 6-7: Angkor Wat, Cambodia

July 8: take a boat to Battambang, Cambodia

July 12: Get to Bangkok, swing dance in Bangkok

July 15: Fly to Mandalay, Myanmar play in Myanmar for ten days

July 26: Fly back to Bangkok, maybe swing dance, maybe take off for the beach

~July 31: Get to Malaysia, take the Jungle Line across central Malaysia

~August 4: Arrive in Singapore

AUGUST 6: Bryn's Birthday

August 9: Leave for Italy

August 10: Arrive in Bologna!

Update on Italy

We landed in Beijing Saturday morning to complete the last step of a graduate school application process that started back in Ocober. As I told everyone a few weeks ago, the last remaining piece of the puzzle was visas to go to Italy. I'm happy to announce that we were succesful in aquiring those visas this afternoon! It was a relatively easy process, actually, much easier than we had feared. We dropped off our visas and a huge pile of forms at noon, ate lunch, bought myself a knock-off winter coat in a flourish of confidence that we'd definitely be going to Bologna, and then picked up our visas at 4pm. Walking into the embaasy in the afternoon, I was a little worried that they'd inspect the fake Armani coat I'd just bought and renounce my visa on the grounds of stealing their intellectual property. It was tucked well inside a bag though and they didn't notice. Whew!

Now we have 4 days left to just explore Beijing. We already went hiking in the western hills yesterday and tomorrow we're going to the summer palace. Bryn and I kind of feel like country bumpkins here in the capital. Life in provincial kunming is a little different. We've felt a little embarassed exclaiming to our host here how amazed we were that we can flush toilet paper down the pot - a big no no in Kunming. We also feel a little racist whispering about how many "white people" there are here. We're miserable at taking the bus. In Kunming, it's a no-holds barred battle to claim your seat on the bus. Here, it's a more civilized process. We were ashamed the first day, but we're improving. 

We're off to swing dance now after nearly 4 months of only sneaking in a swing out here or there at salsa events or traditional Chinese dance circles. It'll feel good to get in some pure swing dancing with others. We still like each other, but it's just good to dance with others every once in a while.

With the Italian visa secured, we're feeling pretty good and readyto live it up on the dance floor.

A Perspective on the Protests in Kunming

The hot topic in Kunming these days is plans for the construction of a new petrochemicals plant just west of town and the (illegal) public demonstrations that are challenging the construction of that plant. The plant has been in the works for about five years, but became well known to the residents of Kunming after a small protest against the plant May 4. Even though the protest happened less than a mile from our house, we didn't know about it until afterwards. I started asking my Chinese acquaintances about the protests and it set off hours of discussion each time. So far, anyone I've asked here has been passionately against the construction of the plant. But then again, the only people I talk to are the highly educated, politically conscious elite who can speak English. What does the guy who sells us vegetables in the market think about construction of the plant so near to Kunming? I have no idea, my Chinese isn't nearly that good and that would be a somewhat awkward question to ask.

Demonstrators held a second protest last week, May 16, and about 2000 people showed up - only "several hundred" according to Chinese press. Despite many warnings to stay away and expectations of violence, the May 16 protests went off relatively peacefully. There was a large police presence and several people were arrested during the rally, but otherwise, it was pretty peaceful. This doesn't mean that the government was tolerating it, though. Faculty at the two major universities in town all received emails from University administration warning them that they could lose their jobs if they were known to be taking part in the demonstration and students were threatened with expulsion if they were caught attending. I'm sure similar emails were sent out to any other employees who worked for the government, as well as other major employers in town who operate with the blessing of the government - such as the Yunnan Tobacco Company, hospitals and banks. Our school planned an excursion that day for all of the foreign students. They took us all (for free) safely about an hour outside of town to see some caves. I can't confirm that they planned this excursion to get a few bus loads of foreigners out of town to make sure they missed the protests, but the timing is uncanny. We went to the caves. Even though many attended, it's a bad idea for a foreigner to show up to one of these protests. Visas can mysteriously expire early, the police can come visit and generally unpleasant things can happen.  

The issue with the petrochemical plant is the concern that it will pollute Kunming's air and water. This similar grievance has already been the cause of thousands of other protests around China. I'm sure at least once a week you could find an environmental protest happening in China that gets reported in the international press. The international press loves covering it because it reinforces China's image as being the big bad polluter. In other words, it's a nice, easy story to cover because it already has a nice narrative; the story basically writes itself.

Kunming has an especially strong case because, being so far inland and unattractive to major manufacturers, it doesn't see so much industrial activity. The price of getting things to market (i.e. ports along the Pacific) is just too expensive. Kunming's best known export, actually, is flowers, which can grow nearly year-round, thanks to Kunming's sunny climate: It's known as the "Spring City". Since flowers have to be flown to market to preserve freshness, Kunming's flower producers aren't punished financially for being far away from the ports. Imagine Kunming, as pristine of a big city as you can find in China due to its lack of industy, the provider of flowers the world over, facing the prospects of a petrochemical plant. If you live on the heavily export focused east coast of China, a petrochemical plant next door is just the way of life. People in Kunming have a lower tolerance.

The big fear is that the plant will produce annually 500,000 tons Paraxylene (PX), a nasty, carcinogenic petrochemical used in the production of polyester and other synthetic fabrics. The local government denied that the plant would produce PX, but opposers say that's a parsing of words: the government is either lying, or the plant will produce another chemical, similarly nasty to PX but with a different name.

Why build this plant in Kunming? In China's flower capital? Well, it gets back to a blogpost that I wrote back in March about Yunnan province's strategic position vis-a-vis southeast Asia. While Yunnan is a thousand miles away from the highly profitable Pacific ports along China's east coast, it geographically serves as China's land bridge to southeast Asia. Myanmar, in our case, is selling China crude oil through a pipeline to Yunnan province. In order to capitalize on this access to hydrocarbons and attempt to diversify China's access to energy (as well as Kunming's economy) producers decided to build the petrochemical plant here. The important thing to remember is that this isn't just some local economic stimulus plan - this is an advancement in the economic relations between China and Myanmar. The more successfully China can exploit Myanmar's raw commodities, the more China can hold Myanmar in its orbit and the easier it will be for China to influence Myanmar in the future. This is especially crucial now since western countries are dropping sanctions against Myanmar and trying to open up commercial relations with the country. Myanmar's strategic importance to China (it offers, perhaps, China's most accessible land route to the Indian ocean) means that China needs to keep it on good terms. In other words, China needs to maintain vigilance over its back door. China doesn't necessarily welcome western adventures into Myanmar, as they provide competition to China. China has the advantage in Myanmar now, but will need to work hard to maintain it.

The petro-chemical plant, then, does have some strategic significance. For that reason, it will be hard for the government to back down to protester demands. Sure, the plant site may be slightly relocated, but China is eager to get the plant producing in order to strengthen business relations with Myanmar. Delays would be a big nuisance.

As for the protesters, the target and timing of their demonstrations shows intelligent design. There are a million environmental hazards in Kunming - one needs only venture a few miles south to Dian Lake to find a heavily polluted body of water that serves as the region's drinking water supply. But if you're protesting against water pollution in China, take a number and get in line. That's nothing new. Protesting a strategic petrochemical plant is a higher stakes game that will get more attention. Beijing has already reportedly put some pressure on the provincial and local governments in Kunming to fix the problem of opposition to the plant's construction. The timing is also really good for the protesters. Kunming will host the high profile China-South Asia Expo June 6-10, which will draw international attention to Kunming for a week. Rumor has it that Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend. And if not the president himself, then surely some high level government officials from Beijing. Sure enough, the next planned protest is June 6. The planners of the protest appear to have been leading up to June 6, when they will have the biggest stage a city like Kunming can hope to have. The Communist Party certainly does not want the protesters to hijack the expo and corrupt the established message of positive Chinese economic relations with south Asia into a message of Chinese environmental evils.   

One option for the authorities is to just block the protests and start arresting people. I think one of the reasons that the authorities let the first two protests happen was to give them a chance to get to know all those protesters involved. They could take pictures, identify leaders and basically just get a good idea of the composition of the protest. Then, on June 4th or 5th, they can go make some visits to some key people and quietly put pressure on the participants to not turn out in large numbers. It's much more tasteful to quietly detain and preempt a protest than cause a big scene in front of the international media by beating protesters with batons and firing tear gas on them.

It will certainly be interesting to see what happens June 6. We'll be out of town, in Beijing, so we won't see the action first hand, but I'm ok with that. I'm not here to make a judgement on China's policies. I remember in college, there was a big stink one year over the fact that a science lab on campus was carrying out military research on chemical weapons. The university administration denied the danger of the program, discouraged people from protesting (although they certainly didn't threaten expulsion or termination) and generally tried to keep things going on as usual. However, the city of Boston, much less the state of Massachusetts, did not get involved in the issue. The big difference I see here is the ability for the government to exert its influence through all sorts of institutions. Yunnan University, for example, is half controlled by the Communist Party. It's one thing to appeal to people not to protest, it's another to threaten their livelihood if they do. I'm not here to say whether that's good or bad, just that I'm impressed with China's ability to exert central control. I think that's the major lesson I've learned throughout this string of protests.

Book reviews

During my 2011 trip, I kept a running commentary on the books I was reading. I'm doing a lot of reading now, so I thought I'd rekindle the tradition here. Enjoy!

Forgotten Kingdom - Peter Goullart

http://pratyeka.org/books/forgotten_kingdom/

Forgotten Kingdom is the personal story of a Russian man who goes to work for the Chinese government setting up cooperatives in northwestern Yunnan province, specifically the town of Lijiang. The story of how Peter Goullart got to the tiny outpost in the 1930s is interesting in its own right. His family fled Moscow during the revolution and settled in Shanghai where, as a young man, Peter picked up Chinese and gained experience as a tour guide. He travelled deeper into China to Kunming, where we’re living now, but quickly found the remote hills of northwest Yunnan more attractive. The first half of the book on how he got to Lijiang was my favorite. The second half mainly documents Naxi and other minority groups’ culture in the area, while heaping on plenty of self-praise for his own achievements with the cooperatives. The book is a must read for anyone travelling in the area (Lijiang is now a UNESCO world heritage site) but, as a short-term resident here painfully aware of all the challenges foreigners face in China, I’d be more interested in hearing about his failures in Lijiang. I’d be grateful to have been able to read a book about foreigners’ failures in Yunnan province. I remember hearing a review of such a book on NPR a while ago so it’s out there. It just isn’t this one.

On China - Henry Kissinger

Bryn got an audio version of this one for me for Christmas, soon after we decided to move to China. Kissinger lays out about 500 years of Chinese international relations history, making clear that China developed a very different way of viewing the world and engaging in international relations from the standard strategies and practices that emerged out of Europe over the past 500 years. China’s superiority in virtual isolation didn’t help it though once it did finally come into regular contact with Europe starting in the 19th century and China was quickly overrun. But China has faced wave-upon-wave of uprisings usurping dynastic power over its history. Kissinger argues that Chinese diplomacy and politics attempts to surround, absorb and assimilate outside threats rather than attack them head-on as western powers tend to do. This patient and giving approach to international relations may make China appear to lose, but “the invisible hand” of Chinese bureaucracy always comes out on top. The second half of the book deals with Kissinger’s role in re-establishing ties between the US and China in 1972. The anecdotes about interacting with Mao personalize the leader and differentiate his extreme rhetoric and actions from his clear, practical strategic vision.

Wild Swans - Jung Chang

I read Wild Swans at the same time that I was reading On China and they make great reading companions. Wild Swans is the story of three generations of women growing up during the 20th century. It gave a personal point of view to the calamities of the Communist revolution, Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Jung’s family was pretty harshly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and so she definitely portrays herself and her family as the stoic victims, which, naturally, she has the right to do. She wrote the book in the 1990s, well after history had condemned Mao’s social experiments. Even though she was just a girl during the 1960s, I would love to have gotten her point of view at the time, rather than in hindsight. I get the feeling that she’s trying to protect the integrity of her family’s name rather than portray a controversial era through impersonal reporting. But that’s to be expected from a family memoir. Kissinger can provide the cold, hard historical analysis. Nevertheless, after reading her book, every time I talk to someone here over the age of 50, I have an overwhelming urge to ask them what it was like here during the 1960s. Has their opinion of the time changed over the years as others have come out and condemned it? I know from my experience in Germany that those who lived through the Nazi era weren’t particularly alarmed at the situation then - their moral derision of the time period didn’t come until later, after it had become acceptable to reject those ideas. Unlike in Germany though, I haven’t mustered the courage yet to actually broach the subject here..

Flashman - George Macdonald Fraser

Flashman is a series of books written in the 1960s and 70s about the fictional memoirs of Henry Flashman, captain in the British Army. It’s historical fiction, well researched and educational. But whereas reading ACTUAL personal accounts of history, which run into the problem of the narrator trying to preserve their and their family’s honor, this fictional account of the Afghan rebellion and British retreat from Kabul in 1842 is sullied with all the cowardice and dishonor that British officers actually portrayed. He adulterizes local women, angering the locals, evades his duty when he’s too afraid, takes credit for victory when he is the lone survivor of battle and only survived because he hid in fear, and all sorts of other “cowardly” acts. But the essential truth within Flashman is that bravery and ideology tend to get you killed, and for a comfortable gentleman like Flashman, there’s never anything to be gained from dying. If you survive, you get to write the history and take credit for the sacrifices of others. Afterall, they’re dead, so they can’t contest you!

Mandalay to Momien - John Anderson

John Anderson was a doctor and naturalist who accompanied a British mission to explore the trade routes between Mandalay, Burma and southwest China (present day Yunnan province) back in the late 19th century. I tried to overlay the likely reality of Flashman over Anderson’s brave, stoic account of the month long trips over rivers and hills. Whenever he said something like, “the village was full of handsome women” I interpreted that to mean that he likely took advantage of as many women as he could during his stay there. It’s hard to fess up to such adventures - especially as an officer in Queen Victoria’s army. Anyways, Anderson’s account of the borderlands between Burma and China are very interesting and very detailed. His trip should be retraced by a braver traveller than me. The land borders between China and Burma are closed to foreigners now and there is internmittent fighting between the government and a variety of border minority groups. It was an enexplored frontier then and it’s not much better understood today. His accounts of the difficulties in logistics was also really interesting. Imagine moving a party of several hundred people, all of their equipment, provisions, gifts for VIPs along the way and extra space to bring along specimens along unmarked paths in unfamiliar terrain and you’ve got a convoy stretched out over several days. The missions is a force in and of itself that changes the landscape and local politics as it goes.

Diplomacy - Henry Kissinger

An epic read on the evolution of the international system over the past half-century. It was also the first book I read on a Kindle. I’m sure I spared myself many hand cramps by holding the slender device instead of the 900 page behemoth. First, this is a must read for anyone seriously pursuing international relations. I’m embarassed that I hadn’t read it earlier. You won’t necessarily learn a whole lot of new history, but the value added that Kissinger provides is in the elegance of the narrative that he weaves, connecting all those years of history and international relations together. He makes sense of the world in a way that I had picked up over the past several years in one volume. The core lesson I took out of it is that great leaders need to both have a intellectual vision for where their state needs to go to be the most successful and an innate understanding of their citizens’ capabilities so that the leader can make the transition without ruining the state in the process. In “Diplomacy”, Kissinger documents plenty of leaders who achieved that balancing act and plenty of leaders who failed. He teaches in only a way that someone who practiced statesmanship could teach, connecting the big picture, overarching framework to the miniscule, individual events that comprise it.

Burmese Days - George Orwell

http://www.george-orwell.org/Burmese_Days/index.html

Burmese Days was Orwell’s first novel and is often overlooked. I hadn’t heard of it until I started researching books to read on Myanmar for our upcoming trip. It’s a relatively simple novel with only a few characters, which I like. It portrays a small town on the upper Irrawaddy river and life for the few British subjects who have settled there. It’s a very focused story on Burma - it doesn’t span generations, capturing the big picture of Burma like Amitav Ghosh’s “Glass Palace” (which I am reading now). You certainly won’t come away with a sophisticated understanding of Burma after reading Burmese Days, but it’s a great introduction to the place, the customs, the vocabulary and a little of the history. As I read “Glass Palace” I find that the value of “Burmese Days” has increased. I suppose it’s best as an appetizer in a multi-course study of Burma.  

Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction - Damien Keown

Bryn and I were wandering around one of the many Buddhist temples in our neighborhood one day and I became so overwhelmed with ignorance that I rushed to the library and checked out this book on Buddhism. I really like the Oxford University Press “Very Short Introduction to....” series - there are over 200 now. The point that stood out to me the most was one that Kissinger had also made: when studying China and East Asia, you have to overcome the myths that westerners have come up with in attempts to frame East Asia as what the West is not. Studied from a western perspective, East Asian philosophy and religion is often attributed by critics of western culture as protagonists against the western antagonist. But that approach won’t neccesarily help you understand how people here, in East Asia, view Buddhism. Reading the book has helped me understand what’s going on in temples more. One scroll Bryn and I found in the Yunnan Provincial Museum depicted a hierarchy of creatures -humanoid and not - engaging in all types of ceremonies. I realized that it was a “roadmap to Nirvana” showing all the levels of devils, earthly world, titans and Gods, leading up to the Buddha. It was an amazing image, about 30 feet long and intricately painted. Just having a little insight into that work of art made reading the book worthwhile.  

Medici Money - Tim Parks

This book has a very intriguing premise, but gets a little too wound up in the weeds of 15th century Florentine politics for my taste. I read it thinking it would be a good way to learn a little bit about the history of finance and Italy in one go in preparation for grad school. It served both purposes, with an emphasis on “a little bit”. The idea is that the de’ Medici family got its start as bankers in the late 14th century, operating on the frontier of legal and religious propriety by dealing in usury - the charging of interest. Financial prowess trumps cultural norms though and the de’ Medici family manages to improve its position in Florence to the point of essentially ruling the kingdom as despots. The book describes how four generations of de’ Medicis leveraged their financial assets to win favor in the political and religious world. Starting off as prudent bankers, as their wealth grew, they couldn’t help but get involved in political matters. They had to manage the transition from banking magnates to political leaders carefully; being a prudent banker doesn’t make for an inspiring politician, and being a charismatic leader is typically bad for business. But by the time Lorenzo de’ Medici ruled the bank, the fourth generation to do so, the solvency of the bank didn’t much matter anymore because the family had achieved political power and elevated their station in life yet again. The idea is really interesting to me and kind of reminds me of Mexican drug traffickers and how we will view them generations from now: as criminals or the forefathers of a new Mexico?

But between the flashes of insight in Medici Money, there are long slogs of Florentine political history that only link back to the central premise tenuously and relies heavily on a large and hard to remember cast of characters. Still, it makes me want to read more about the Medicis to learn how a family can transform itself over generations, remaking the social fabric of a city to serve its own interests in the process.

The Future

This year, the month of May is a kind of “eye of the storm” period for us. Over the past six months, Bryn and I have quit our jobs, applied to graduate schools, traveled to Jordan, moved to China, acclimated ourselves to Kunming and traveled to the edge of China - the foothills of the Himalayas. Now that we’ve been in Kunming for over two months, life is settling into a rhythm. We’re still discovering new corners of Kunming every day and we have by no means conquered this place yet, but we wake up every morning 80-90% certain that we will survive the day. I can’t say we gave ourselves as good of chances two months ago. 

For the rest of the month of May, life will be somewhat subdued. We’ll go to class, we’ll read, we’ll keep discovering new things about Kunming. The teaching job that mentioned a couple of posts ago is gone now. After four weeks of lessons, the parents (through their daughter - my student) told me that they wouldn’t continue with class anymore. The reason was that their daughter had a school commitment on Tuesday nights that would prevent us from meeting. Seemed like a flimsy excuse, but they paid me for my month of lessons and the “break-up” was relatively painless. Other English teachers here that I know said that my experience was a little better than par. Apparently these kinds of things happen. No fear though, I’ve got another weekend teaching job lined up to take us through the month of May, so I’ll stay busy on that front.

However, as of June 1, we will begin the process of leaving Kunming. The next step: Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)! This graduate program was my top choice and I couldn’t be happier with the acceptance. Harvard, London School of Economics and Oxford all rejected me, but Kings College London and the National Unversity of Singapore also accepted me. I was very happy with results. I opted for a year at the SAIS Bologna campus in Italy, so Bryn and I will be spending a year in Bologna before finishing up in Washington DC in 2014/2015. On June 1, we fly to Beijing with our fingers crossed to apply for a visa to Italy. The checklist for getting an Italian visa in China is several pages long. Even though we’ve gotten verbal confirmation from the embassy that our application should be fine, we’re still nervous. We’re staying in Beijing for a week just to make sure that we get the covted sticker that lets us live in Italy for 10 months. 

After Beijing, we’ll come back to Kunming for about a week, and then we’re off to Singapore to catch our flight to Italy. We’re taking the slow way, though. I wasn’t able to get to South East Asia during my 2011 trip, and Bryn has never been, so we’re making our way from Kunming to Singapore overland through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia. From Thailand, we’ll make a 10 day detour in Myanmar! We’re actually going to get our visas for Myanmar tomorrow morning. That trip will certainly provide plenty of material for future blog posts. 

We’ll arrive in Italy August 10 for an economics pre-term course and then graduate school starts for real in mid-September. 

So, this precious month of May is one of the last quiet months that we’ll have for the forseeable future. Even though I know I should be appreciating this downtime, my brain is having trouble accepting it. I’ve been reading voraciously preparing for the SE Asia trip and graduate school. I’m trying to keep my head in the present and live this amazing life in Kunming, but it’s hard to keep my mind from wandering into the future that’s set up for us. I remember visiting my grandparents out in rural East Texas, wiling the hours away watching them read and do the cross-word. As an 8 year old, I was incredibly impatient and even bored. My grandpa used to tell me that it’s good to be bored every once in a while - it gives your mind time to recharge. 

I’m re-telling that to myself now. Not that I’m bored, but I’m just trying to appreciate this downtime while I have it.

To The Edge of China

We just got back from a ten day trip out to the edge of China Monday morning. Access to this blog post is very limited in China, however, so I won’t be able to post a map, which would be very helpful. I’ve posted pictures from the trip onto the flickr page. There’s a link to that page just above this post.  If you aren’t interested in the technical part of the trip, skip the next four paragraphs.

The basic trajectory of the trip was from Kunming to Lijiang by train, then from Lijiang to Qiaotou by bus, then a two day hike through Tiger Leaping Gorge (along the upper Yangtze River) to Walnut Grove, another bus drive to Baishuitai where we saw first hand what happens when you let people trample over delicate stone formations of mineral deposits. A night there followed by another bus trip to Shangri-La - a town China randomly picked to capitalize on the James Hilton novel - and then over a 4000 meter pass via Deqin to Feilaisi, the last stop on the road to Tibet.

The trip up to that point was on the beaten path. There are enough buses and well-marked roads to get from point A to B. In the case of Shangri-La to Feilaisi, there’s only one road.

Once you get to Felaisi, you have two options: pay an exorbitant fee to keep going up into the restricted areas of Tibet, which is technically visible from Feilaisi, or go down the headwaters of the Mekong river and hike up into one of the most impressive mountain ranges I have ever seen.

We chose the latter. We took a minibus 1.5 hours down, through drought-stricken mountain sides along the Mekong, around dramatic bends in the river and over rickety bridges to the other side. Our minibus dropped us off at an unfinished guesthouse and we began our steep ascent up over a snowy pass to the village of Yubeng - only accessible by dirt trail either through a very steep gorge or over the pass, which we were traversing. We stayed in Yubeng for a night and then basically made our way back to Kunming in reverse. Yubeng really did feel like the end of the earth. We hiked a few minutes beyond Yubeng and were very aware that we were stretching our tether back to the last semblance of civilization. The mountains, reaching up to 6000 meters, loomed in front of us and the cold, thin air hurried us back to the village as if we were fleeing a haunted house. The edge of Yubeng was a very surreal place for me.

Two, quiet Tibetan men stood out to me during our trip. I don’t know their names and I spent no more than a few minutes with either of them, but their lives out on the edge of China fascinated me enough to dedicate the rest of this blog post to them.

The first one we met ran a little refreshment stand in Ninong, a village on the Mekong river (known in China as the Lancang River) at the entrance to a gorge that services Yubeng - 25 kilometers further up along a trail 1-2 feet wide path. I have no idea how old he was. Mountain men like him look to be 60 by western standards, but he may have been my age for all I know. Actually, I know he was older. He had a kind of patience and silence that I think only comes with age. His refreshment stand was at the end of a road where minibus drivers pick up hikers and take them back up to Felaisi. The drivers were all aggressive, feisty loud and young. The refreshment stand keeper stood far apart from them and was obviously an elder. By the time you get out that far into northwestern Yunnan, nearly all of the locals are Tibetan.

This refreshment stand keeper came into our lives during an interesting predicament. His stand is about an hour’s drive from the nearest town so, in order to get a ride, you need to call a driver in advance and arrange for him to meet you at the end of the road. We had done this the night before from Yubeng and even found a few other hikers to join us and share the cost. However, once we had gotten to the meetup spot, two hikers who had gone before us took our van and left us stranded. Other drivers came and went but they had no space for us, as they had their customers to take care of. Through the hustle and bustle of a dusty little parking lot at the end of a gravel, mountain road, our refreshment stand keeper was a solid constant. He quietly urged us to take shelter from the wind in his little shop. He would silently offer us his cell phone to call another driver to come pick us up. He had spent many years in this little spot and surely seen many more travelers in much worse predicaments than we were. His quiet calm was more fascinating to me than was my anxiety of getting back to civilization.

He was the first who greeted us and, after all the vans had packed up their passengers and made their way up the switchbacks, we were left with him and his refreshment stand. We bought a couple of warm cokes from him and obliged his offers to come sit inside, out of the wind. His shop doubled as a home. He had fastened some tin siding to the frame of some kind of gravel depot. A container holding white, ground stones was lofted about ten feet into the air and around the hoists at one end, he had built his little shop. I imagined trucks coming in periodically to pick up gravel for nearby road construction projects. Maybe he ran the gravel operation, too? It’s hard to say. Our communication wasn’t of the verbal kind.

His refreshment stand was as austere as the mountain conditions we were in. On one shelf, he had warm sodas and beer. On the other shelf, bowls of ready-to-eat instant noodles; just add hot water. He had an electric hot plate in one corner that shared the single electricity source with an ancient television set. In another corner was a curtain pulled in front of a bed, dividing his shop from his home.

From what I could tell, he lived out there by himself. After he had convinced us to come in, have a seat and buy a coke, he sat in the corner by the hot plate and tended a kettle of water which he was using to make tea for himself. Two birds landed on top of the wall surrounding his shop, in the little gap between tin siding and the gravel loader above us, and he watched them for a few minutes. I had the feeling that his life was very introspective and solitary, but not necessarily lonely.

I imagined him as the owner of a  hamburger stand in Orla  that my dad and I ate at on our way to the Guadalupe mountains in West Texas about 20 years ago. The man was ancient and holding on steady to a town that had obviously lost its appeal to everyone else long ago. He survived on the trickle of passers-by who knew his was the last hamburger stand for a hundred miles. It was a place that, if you were stranded, you would be there for a long time - but it was ok, because he’d take care of you with a hamburger and a coke.

Our refreshment stand keeper on the banks of the Mekong didn’t serve hamburgers, but he provided the same service as the old man in Orla. He had carved out his  little niche in the world and he seemed perfectly happy with it.

We called a driver to come pick us up, but about 30 minutes after he said he’d be there, another driver showed up who said he was willing to take us out. Our refreshment stand keeper warned against this. He wagged his finger at our driver and told him that he shouldn’t take business from another driver - it wasn’t the way things ran around there. I don’t think the old man was much involved in the minibus transport business there, but he had watched it enough to know how it worked. Sure enough, we got halfway up the mountain and met the other driver coming down to get us. An argument ensued, but both of them ending up winning. Our driver refused to take us any further and demanded $10 for driving us less than a mile while the second driver demanded the whole sum of taking us on to Felaisi. The old man was right about it not being a good idea to take business away from another - it just turns out that we should have heeded his advice and recognized that we were the ones who would ultimately be played.

The second man was an inn-owner just outside of Shangri-La. We had found his place accidentally while wondering around Shangri-La. There was an office there arranging eco-tourism homestays. They were closed, but the phone number for his guesthouse was posted up on a big sign outside the office, so we called him. The next day, we went out to his home out on the edge of a yak pasture filling up a huge valley reaching for miles around. The valley was made all the more impressive by the fact that it was at least 3000 meters high - nearly two miles above seal level

Again, it looked like he lived alone. No other guests were staying there and his children were off studying in Lhasa. A woman stopped in every once in a while to cook, but I don’t think it was his wife. Again, language barriers prevented us from perfectly understanding what was going on.

The Tibetan Inn keeper had plenty of western NGO literature, however. He also had the most comfortable beds we’d had in all of China and was teaching himself traditional Tibetan needlepoint. He was too much the perfect image of a rugged, Tibetan mountain man living on the edge of humanity. We hypothesized that  some UN fund manager’s assistance had found him, gave him more money than he knew what to do with to modify his home into a guesthouse, advised him to sell his traditional needlepiont work and then turned him lose on the Shangri-La tourism sector with only a phone number on a sign as his marketing campaign.

He was a very friendly man, again, very quiet and introspective. He had a little plot of land behind his house that was plowed - maybe for a small crop later in the year? There was also a haystack behind the house, so maybe some of the yaks were his? Or maybe the western NGO had encouraged him to maintain appearances for visitors. All I ever saw him do was his traditional needlepoint and play solitaire on his brand new Dell desktop computer. In his affable silence, he was an enigma to me. He chanted buddhist prayers in the morning over breakfast, using hand sgnals to communicate with us in order to avoid breaking his prayer rhythym.

As we were driving back to Kunming, I confided in Bryn how fascinated I was by these two men, living their austere but happy lives so isolated from everything else. She commented that I had a slight fascination with the prospect of living out in the mountains all by myself. She’s right, I’ve often fantasized about giving up modern life and becoming a recluse in the mountains - as have many men, I imagine. I remember my dad stocking up on supplies in late 1999, relishing the idea of a societal collapse from the Y2K bug.  But I know the realistic side of that all too well. I know that I could slip into hermitage all too easily, but that proactively engaging with the world is far too important to me to let my life get too isolated.

But, like the thought of a warm beach on a cold, blustery day, these two men will remind me of the broad spectrum of directions that lives can go in while I carry out my life in ciites. Maybe one day, after I’ve had my fill of humanity, I will join them - in my own way, of course. I wouldn’t want to interrupt their solitude.

My Experience so far Teaching English in China

While we were planning our move to Kunming, we budgeted around the assumption that I would be able to earn some extra money as an English language tutor. Plenty of blog posts and other personal anecdotes seemed to indicate that this was relatively easy to acquire - especially for native English speakers with a college degree. As many of you know, China is pretty cheap; even if I could bring in $50 a week, that’d be a substantial contribution.

When we arrived in Kunming, these assumptions were quickly validated. The woman we are subletting our apartment from (let’s call her Maggie) immediately recommended I get in contact with a friend of hers who ran an English school in town (we’ll call him Chad). Within the first few days here, I met an Israeli and a Swede who both spoke English as a second language. They were earning $15 an hour tutoring in English and assured me that, as a native speaker, I could enjoy the going-rate of $25 per hour. By the second week, I was talking to Chad about teaching English at his school.

It wasn’t going to be possible to teach at Chad’s school since we’re only here for the short-term, but he said he knew a few parents who were looking for a tutor. He asked me to hold on for a minute while he went and called them to discuss the details.

Ten minutes later, he came back with two interested parents allegedly willing to pay $40 an hour. I was astonished at the higher rate! With those kind of prices, I could pay for all of our combined living expenses if I worked just 4-5 hours a week. However, things that seem too good to be true usually are.

After this fortuitous meeting, I talked with Maggie and a few other people in a position to know and they were all incredulous that I was being offered $40 an hour. They all said it was much too high. The next week, I sat down with Chad and one of the interested parents to hammer out the details of tutoring a little girl we’ll call Cindy. (Note: A lot of Chinese people have western names and a lot of the names are generationally anachronistic, so it would be totally normal for a little girl here to be called “Cindy”.)

The meeting lasted about an hour - the last ten minutes of which we actually discussed a schedule and the content I’d be teaching. God knows what they were discussing the first 50 minutes. I was just the white dude in the room for most of the time. One thing I’ve learned about doing business here is that 90% of the discussion is small talk and 10% is actual business. Also, bring gifts. There is a whole economy here of gift giving that we’ve had to learn about. At first, we thought we’d go bankrupt trying to get gifts for everyone, before we realized that re-gifting is totally acceptable.

I had no idea what they were talking about, but at that time, I at least knew numbers and numbers correspond to wage. I didn’t hear many numbers discussed, especially not the magic numbers that Chad had enticed me with the previous week. After we left the meeting, I asked him if the $40 an hour wage he had mentioned at the outset was still accurate. He stopped in his tracks, screwed up his face and said,
“No, no, no, that’s far too much to charge!”
“But that’s what you had quoted me last week when you talked to her?!”
“Did I? Oh my gosh, I’m very sorry. I didn’t realize that. I think $40 is too much.”
“Ok, what rate should I charge her?”
“Hmmm, I don’t know, maybe start with $30? Go to the first few classes and then later on bring it up to her and see what price she thinks is good.”

Mind you, $30 is still more than I had bargained for, so I was still happy with that. What concerned me was that I had just committed to a job without knowing how much I was going to get paid. Apparently, that’s somewhat normal here. As the connector, Chad was looking to score points with both me and Cindy’s mother by putting us together and working out teaching plan. He had nothing to gain from either relationship by wading into the distasteful world of money, so he left us to sort that out... even though I was under the impression that it had already been sorted out.

It’s China. Sometimes you just have to have a little faith and trust that things work out. If you only act on certainties, you’ll be waiting for a loooong time.

At the first tutoring session, Cindy and I got to know each other and her mom was never far away, monitoring our progress. I had decided that we would read the book ”Matilda” by Roald Dahl. Roald Dahl was one of my favorite authors as a kid and, since it’s about a bright little girl who overcomes adversities, I thought it would be a good match for Cindy. We’ve had six hours together so far and we’ve made it 6 pages into the book. It appears we won’t finish the book before I leave Kunming, but maybe we’ll finish the first chapter?

I don’t have much experience teaching, but I have done some tutoring in my day. To me, the most fun part is figuring out the level of the student you’re teaching. With Cindy, it’s been difficult. Her knowledge of English and cultural references has some pretty dramatic peaks and troughs. For example: she doesn’t know the words “adult” or “grown-up”, but when she read the word “genius” she blurted out, “THOMAS EDISON SAYS THAT GENIUS IS 90% PERSPIRATION, 10% INSPIRATION”. “Perspiration” and “Inspiration” came out a little jumbled, but otherwise she pretty much nailed it. And she definitely said it in all caps. Amazing! Also, she had never heard of the name “Michael” (Matilda’s brother) but when I quizzed her on the names of Matilda’s parents, she blurted out “NICOLAS SARKOZY”. Where does she get this stuff? By the way, Matilda’s parents names are Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood. Very little resemblance to Nicolas Sarkozy.

Our class runs from 5-7pm. At 6pm, her cousin gets home from school and things get a little sad. I don’t know the circumstances, but Cindy’s cousin is 11 - a year older than Cindy - and yet she has spoken not a word of English to me and shies away from me every time I try to speak Chinese to her. Granted, my Chinese is terrible and probably pretty frightening, but it’s unnerving to see the difference in personality between Cindy and her cousin.

Cindy’s parents are pretty well-off. They live in the most exclusive apartment block in town, which to me basically means that the facade is red-brick. I know of no other apartment block in Kunming with a red-brick facade. The apartment interiors themselves are nice, but nothing extravagant. The location is also good, but I only live a five-minute walk away and I can guarantee you that our apartment isn’t nearly as exclusive as their aparemtne.  As far as I can tell, it’s the red-brick facade that does it.

Cindy is the product of a privileged upbringing. She’s confident, sassy at times, speaks English really well and knows how to be the center of attention. Her cousin is not. While I’m there, at least, the cousin hides in her room and watches us from the shadows. When I invite her to join us, she ducks her head and runs off. At dinner, she gets served last and seems to generally be ignored. I imagine that her less well-off parents are trying to give her a better upbringing by shipping her off to live with the rich in-laws, but from what I can see, she’s growing up in the role of the red-headed step-child.

At 7pm, Cindy’s grandmother stops the lesson and serves dinner. This part of our evenings is probably the most educational for me. First, her grandmother makes great food and indulges my questions on what everything is. We’ve had some sort of pork belly every night so far, which is awesome, but she’ll also throw some curve balls in there like tonight when she served chicken-blood soup. My stomach was already a little squeamish after battling a stomach bug and that didn’t help. I managed to keep it all down, though.

Dinner can also be an alienating time for me. The rest of the family (grandmother, cousins, mother, sometimes aunts - the father is never at home as far as I can tell) sits down and converse in Chinese, as is natural for Chinese families to do around the dinner-table. I hope that I’m somehow learning things through osmosis, but sometimes, the conversation completely loses me. For example, at dinner tonight, Cindy and her cousin just randomly burst out laughing. I would have chalked the outburst up to just being girls in their tweens but even the grandmother was tearing up she was laughing so hard. Had I done something? What was the deal? Cindy was the only one who could shed light on the situation but all she would tell me was “poop”. It will remain a mystery.

Cindy and I had our third class together tonight - that’s six hours I’ve worked total - and I still don’t know how much I’ll get paid, let alone received any payment. Her mom promised to have the money for me at our next class on Tuesday. I’m an American capitalist, so of course I’m interested in getting paid but honestly, working with this little girl and sharing a few hours a week with her family is a wonderful experience that is more valuable than $30 or even $40 an hour.

There’s this sentiment here in China that discourages building relationships based on money. Once you get into a personal relationship with someone here, the balance of payments is calculated in gifts and favors - not money owed. The bottom-line isn’t necessarily cash, which throws me off a bit. Now, go to a factory-manager in Guangzhou or Shanghai, and I’m sure money still talks as loud as it does in the US, but in personal relationships, at least, money is taboo and people prefer to accrue and pay off personal debts to each other in other ways.

I suppose that, as a businessman, I should avoid the entangling tit-for-tat exchange of favors that makes up a personal relationship here; but where’s the fun in missing out on that?