Things That Never Bore Me (More Ripping Off Andrew For Blogging Material Edition)
Andrew's list is here
1. Pink Floyd. Specifically, Dark Side of the Moon. The band is on my mind now due to the death of Richard Wright, an original member and pianist. I must have listened to Dark Side of the Moon 300 times, yet each time I get something new out of it. The last lyric of the album is justifiably famous: "Everything under the sun is in tune/and the sun is eclipsed by the moon", yet if you listen carefully, you can hear a man's voice saying something equally poignant: "There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact it's all dark,"
2. Peanut butter
3. Baseball games. Like snowflakes, no two baseball games are alike. And as in all great games, the most important things happen when nothing appears to be happening at all.
4. Chinese characters. It still amazes me that a whole writing system can be depicted in a handful of brush strokes twisted, bent, and arranged in orderly shapes. Truly a remarkable, beautiful written language.
5. Newspapers. You could probably learn as much from reading a 50 cent newspaper than from obtaining a 50,000 dollar university education.
6. Seinfeld episodes.
7. 20th century Chinese history. Century after century of dynasties suddenly screech to a halt. Then: revolution, warlordism, foreign occupation, world war, civil war, revolution (again), purges, famine, revolution (a third time), massacre, and finally some semblance of stability.
8. Tasteless jokes.
9. Avocados (stolen from Andrew, but this is a Californian's right)
10. Trains. These can be maddening, long, stuffy, smoky (particularly in China), and aggravating but never boring and often uplifting.
11. Useless trivia competitions
12. This American Life (on NPR)
13. Christopher Hitchens's columns and essays. I seldom agree with him on politics anymore, but damn. He can write.
14. Big, long, boisterous dinners.
15. Mom's grilled cheese sandwiches.
Things That Bore Me
In homage to my friend Andrew, here are some things that bore me:
1. Hearing about Simpsons episodes
2. The board game "Risk"- This should be up my alley, but isn't.
3. Any movie by Wes Anderson or Cameron Crowe- There are other directors I could include, but these two are atop the list.
4. Non-American sports
5. U2, and particularly Bono- Come on. Admit it. They just aren't that good.
6. Charles Dickens- evidently paid by the word
7. People discussing drugs while taking them
8. The Dave Matthews Band- "Hey guys, they have a saxophone player. They must be good!"
9. The gym
10. Portugal- Well, maybe this isn't fair. I was out of money and at the end of my trip. I'm sure it's a nice place (people tell me so) but it was a real letdown after Spain and the food wasn't any good.
11. Auto Racing, and cars in general- "Aww shit Jethro, I just saw a crash!"
12. Complicated video games- I do like original Nintendo
13. Waiting for things to download
14. Turtles- snakes are boring too, but at least there's an element of danger involved.
15. Facebook applications- No, I don't want to challenge you to a movie quiz.
Why China Is Different From America (Colonel Sanders Edition)
This is hardly an original observation, but nonetheless remarkable: KFC is more expensive than 95% of all restaurants in China. Perhaps in Shanghai nowadays this ratio is closer to 60%, but in smaller cities (like Lianyungang, where I lived long ago) KFC was the most expensive restaurant in a city of 700,000 people.
In America, KFC is the most forgettable of the main fast food chains. McDonalds at least has the novelty of being first, as well as having the most publicity. Burger King wins by virtue of being slightly less disgusting than McDonalds*. Wendy's has the square burgers, Taco Bell the distinction of serving Mexican food (sort of), and Jack in the Box the novelty items like Teriyaki bowls. KFC is just, well, there; it seems to exist only as a last resort on long road trips, or a guilty pleasure after a couple of bong rips.
The elitist Bay Area effetes I dearly refer to as my friends** wouldn't dream of eating at KFC. And, who can blame them? Fried chicken isn't the healthiest of foods in any form, but KFC buckets are lethal. I defy anyone to eat four chicken breasts, a pound of mashed potatoes, and a couple of buttered rolls and walk out of there without a raging stomach ache. If you're prepared for the stomach onslaught, at the very least you can go to an authentic country-fried joint where you can at least pretend to be open-minded.
My friends (and parents, siblings, etc.) will spend a fortune getting "real food". This I define as items from the Whole Foods supermarket chain, or from farmer's markets. Everyone knows good restaurants buy everything fresh, and everyone is suspicious of places with long lists of items on the menu.
And yet- this is what average restaurants in China offer. Near my office is a restaurant called "country cooking", or something like that. As you walk past in the morning, you see the staff sitting outside dicing and preparing fresh vegetables bought an hour or two earlier. These vegetables are organized into large bowls and placed beside the meat, tofu, and spices that complement the meal. As I wait for my food, I watch the restaurant chef frantically throwing everything around in a oversized wok, bringing it out to my plate in less than ten minutes. I eat. It is delicious. And I walk out, paying around half of what I would pay for a "value meal" at KFC.
Today, I thought, this is the sort of meal people would pay a fortune for in the Bay Area. All natural ingredients (don't forget MSG is naturally occurring), freshly brought, instantly prepared, and delicious. In China, KFC is a fancy joint; clean, smoke-free, orderly, efficient, and foreign. In China, there are farmer's markets. Nobody thinks they're anything special, nobody would plan a Sunday morning around them if they didn't have to. In fact, these markets are how the vast majority of the country- hundreds of millions of people- feed themselves on a daily basis.
I suppose none of this is particularly remarkable. But it's amazing how a restaurant like KFC- whose whole business plan is to replicate the same experience in every one of its franchises throughout the world- is perceived totally differently in different parts of the world.
*My grandparents spent a lifetime preparing and eating delicious, homemade food. But when they reached their eighties, they would actually drive a half-hour on the freeway just to eat at a particular Burger King, which they swore was better than the dozens of outlets closer to their house.
**This is of course the subculture I would belong to had I not left home for China
***A stray footnote here- I realize the Bay Area doesn't represent America as a whole. But it's the America I'm most familiar with, so with apologies I'm using it as a proxy in this post.
Good Tone Acquisition Method
As I've said before, I believe mastering tones is the most difficult aspect of learning Chinese. Most people I know- even good speakers- typically don't bother learning them; after awhile you intuitively figure out which tones to use because they "sound right". This mainly only works for the most common words. For example, most Chinese speakers know that å¼€ is first tone, because this is a word we use constantly. But what about less common words?
A friend of mine recently suggested a new way to integrate tones into one's study of Mandarin. Cut and paste an article or story into a Microsoft Word document. Instead of using the numbering system (for example, "kai1" for å¼€), highlight each character with a color, depending on its tone. I tried doing this and it worked well- after a couple of read-throughs I was getting nearly all of the tones correct.
I'm now going to integrate highlighting into the mattschiavenza.com official study guide to Chinese. Here, to reiterate, is the method:
1. Find an article that interests you, whether it be news, culture, literature, technology, or politics. Choose an article that isn't too long, maybe three or so paragraphs. Also, be cognizant of your level. If you're a beginner, don't choose an article that's too difficult. Copy the article and paste it into a Word document, and do the same in a new Wenlin window.
2. Using Wenlin, read the article slowly. When you see an unfamiliar character, click on it and carefully read through Wenlin's notes. It also helps to figure out which other Chinese words include this particular character. You can even open a separate Word doc to use as your vocab list, though I prefer to do this on pen and paper so I can write the character by hand.
3. Again using Wenlin, read the article aloud without worrying about tones. Make sure that you can identify each character that you read. Be wary of characters that look alike and are often confused (人 and 入, for example).
4. Using the highlight function on Word, select colors to represent each of the tones. Highlight the article.
5. Read the article aloud (on Word) using the correct tones. As your accuracy improves, pick up the pace.
6. Translate the article into idiomatic English. This takes a bit of creativity- but it's more important to make it readable than to make it 100% accurate.
7. Write the article by hand.
Yes, this method is tedious, often boring, and not entirely easy, but it does work. Trust me. You only need to do one paragraph per day, and within a week or two your Chinese will be noticeably better. Much better.
Bleg: Finance Questions
With the collapse of a major securities firm on Wall Street today dominating the news, I'm embarrassed to admit that I know next to nothing about finance. If any of my readers have a bit of expertise and time, please e-mail me and I'll start the conversation. Thanks!
Swimming Pool
Summer days in Kunming are usually rainy and disconcertingly cool, but recently the sun has made a few token appearances. A friend of mine spotted a nice, big swimming pool in the north of the city and I've lately been going there as much as possible.
Swimming pools in China are like pools anywhere, but there are some interesting little differences. Many pools are very strict about swimwear, particularly with men. Once in Fuzhou I got into an argument with a sour-faced old woman who insisted my knee-length suit wouldn't do because they were shorts. She suggested I wear a Speedo, which I gravely informed her was an unacceptable proposition. Eventually I just pushed past and dived in. Problem solved.
Many pools are also finicky about swimming hats, which I actually like because they make me feel like I'm in a Monty Python skit. This is a more reasonable request, but the swimming pool I go to doesn't insist. This is nice.
The swimwear choices here are, to say the least, odd. In California, young women typically wear fairly revealing bikinis while men dress in more modest trunks. In China, it seems to be the opposite. Even the beautiful wear fairly shapeless frocks that would have looked fashionable in say, 1934. The men, meanwhile, preen in their Speedos. Yesterday a group of young guys were trying to impress the assembled swimmers with a rigorous weightlifting routine. Is this Kunming, or Venice Beach?
Sun worshippers are also few and far between. When we laowai lie out to tan, the Chinese typically look at us as if we were a pack of daredevils. They typically ensconse themselves under umbrellas. One woman I saw yesterday walked around wearing a mask that she might have stolen from a Mexican wrestler.
And the locker rooms- my god. Dingy, smoky, and usually wet. I actually saw a guy simultaneously showering and smoking a cigarette, for what purpose I couldn't ascertain.
But, for what it's worth, the water is nice and not too warm or chlorinated, people are always friendly, and there are always enough available lanes. And if this cloud passes over right now, I'll be right back over there.
Proxy Servers To End Censorship?
I recently (due to a tip from James Fallows) downloaded HotSpot Shield, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that is free with advertisements. Unlike other proxies I've tried in the past (FoxyProxy, Gladder, Tor, etc.) HotSpot Shield is completely reliable and fairly fast. For a person who spends a lot of time doing research online, I cannot overstate how nice this is.
The Chinese government spends a lot of money, time, and energy managing the Internet, either employing teams to firewall sites (such as Wikipedia or BBC News) or people to write pro-government slogans on the country's numerous bulletin board forums. While savvy Internet users can always find the right information if they look hard enough, the goal of the firewall is to make it sufficiently annoying so that nobody wants to bother.
I wonder if enough people use HotSpot Shield (or, like Fallows, commercial VPNs without advertisements) the Chinese government will eventually decide internet censorship isn't worth it. In fact, technological advances give the government a perfect face-saving excuse; we didn't stop censorship because it was wrong, but because it wasn't working.
China likes to tout that it has the most Internet users in the world, and this is undoubtedly true. However, only a minute percentage of people I suspect are particularly bothered by censorship. Walk past any 网å§; virtually everyone there is busy playing games, not writing anti-government manifestos. Bulletin boards that discuss politics typically veer into frightening nationalism rather than pleas for liberalism. Even potential dissidents understand that were they to successfully post an impolitic blog post or remark online, they may face severe consequences.
In the end, technology will probably slay internet censorship. But it likely won't make much of a difference.
September 11, 2001
I had almost forgotten today was September 11th until someone mentioned that they couldn't believe seven years have already passed.
On September 11, 2001, I was 20 years old. Two weeks earlier I had moved to Italy to begin my third year of college as an exchange student in Padua along with a group of 23 or so from the University of California. We had begun orientation lessons and were living altogether in a dormitory in a bad part of town.
Each afternoon, I would walk to an internet cafe to check my e-mail. That summer, my baseball team (San Francisco Giants) were contending for a playoff spot. Their star player, Barry Bonds, was poised to break the single-season record for home runs. Each day, I would go and see if Barry had hit another.
I went to the San Francisco Chronicle website, something I still do to this day. The headline read, in ordinary font, "Plane strikes World Trade Center". My immediate thought was that it had to have been an accident, even though terrorists bombed the complex in 1993.
I tried to visit the New York Times website, but it wouldn't load. This was odd. A moment later, the proprietor of the cafe tapped me on the shoulder. He knew I was American. "Look at the TV," he said.
I sat transfixed, noticing that the weather in New York seemed perfect. How could a pilot have done this?
Then the second plane hit.
At that moment, without having been told, I realized that this was no accident; it was an attack. What was truly terrifying was that nobody knew what else was coming. Then the Pentagon was struck. Then the fourth plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field.
I thought of my friends in New York, despairing. Were they downtown that morning? Hopefully, they'd have been safely uptown, going to class or sleeping in.
I ran back to the dormitory and caught the bulk of the group halfway there. We crammed into a cafe that had a TV. We were shaken, too shocked to speak. One girl was in hysterics. Her sister was in New York, and her call wouldn't go through.
There we were; two dozen American college students, full of adventure and looking forward to a year in Italy. We sat there, a bunch of scared kids, completely homesick.
I called my parents in California. They were just waking up. "Turn on the TV," I said, my voice quavering.
Two days later, I saw a video taken on street level, maybe taken by a French guy. I don't remember now. What got me wasn't the collapsed buildings, or the hole in the Pentagon, or the implications of what had happened. It was a video of people running, in terror, down the streets of New York. We're often told somehow that New Yorkers (or San Franciscans, or Chicagoans, or whatever) aren't "real" Americans; that somehow those of us living in the big cities are out-of-touch elitists.
But these were real Americans, of all colors, shapes and sizes, backgrounds and lifestyles. And all were running, screaming, in the same direction; no one knew what was in store. This is what hit me the hardest.
Life did go on. I finished the year in Italy and returned to California and got my degree. Three years later, I found myself in China. I'm still here.
To think of what has transpired since, in the world, it is difficult to remember what it was like after 9/11. I've been back to New York twice, and each time I paid a visit to the site now universally known as "Ground Zero". For our generation, the terrorist attacks are our touchstone; much as the Kennedy assassination was for my parents and the attack on Pearl Harbor was for my grandparents.
Not long ago, I watched a stupid movie called Cloverfield; it was about a giant monster attacking New York. The movie was meant to be hip, or gimmicky, or interesting, but it just made me sick. Too many memories.
So. If any of my readers out there have memories, stories, or anything else to share, please do.
Ignore Her
Six days after the GOP Convention has ended, the political media still can't stop talking about Sarah Palin. Not unrelated, I suspect, is John McCain's substantial bounce in the polls. At best for Obama, the two candidates are about even.
The Republicans paint the Alaska Governor as the moose-hunting hockey mom the whole party can love. The Democrats seem to be employing a shoot-the-moon strategy, trying to raise enough doubts about Palin that she becomes a major liability.
If I were Obama, I'd ignore her. Why? The media will investigate Palin on its own, as any young journalist worth his salt will vie to be the One Who Brought Her Down. This isn't the "liberal media", simply how things work in a competitive industry.
Secondly, John McCain remains less popular than his running mate. By taking the focus off Palin, Obama can resume his business of linking McCain to Bush and generally attacking his platform and policies. The more she remains front and center in the media, the better off McCain will be.
So my advice to Obama: let the story fade, work along, rebuild your lead, and snag back some of the publicity for yourself.
The Amazing Speed of Change
When I arrived in Kunming 18 months ago, the main artery separating my road from the university was called 一二一大街， an extension of the city's first ring road. The road was quite narrow and traffic flowed in both directions; also, at major intersections, pedestrian crossings often slowed car traffic to a crawl.
To rectify this problem, the city government late last year turned 一二一大街 into a one-way street, diverting southbound traffic to the parallel å¦åºœè·¯. They also constructed two massive pedestrian overpasses (called 天桥, or "sky bridge" in Chinese) to alleviate pedestrian congestion. For a few months, traffic flowed much faster.
Now, perhaps seven months after these changes, traffic is now worse than ever. On days when I take the bus back from work, we come to a complete stop. The driver even turns off the ignition. Passengers become restless. Moods become black.
The only explanation that I can think of is that there has simply been a massive increase in the number of cars on the road.
In 2010, Kunming plans to open its new international airport, located far from the city center. When completed, the airport will be the fourth largest in China (both in terms of passenger traffic and cargo). The current airport will be torn down and redeveloped into a central residential complex, shifting Kunming's effective "downtown" 8 or 9 kilometers southward.
When did the current airport open? 1999. When retired, it will have been in use 11 years. The "old" airport is now the current airport's air traffic control tower. And even though the current airport will be in use for only two more years, the government has still invested massive sums of money into refurbishing and expanding it. That's how many new passengers and flights are happening.
Changes occur in China far faster than they do in fully developed countries, which is why most visitors here are amazed by the constant construction work. In many places, changes occur gradually and are only noticeable many years later. One of the most exciting aspects of living here, to me, is that changes happen right before your eyes.