Shenzhen
Here I am in Shenzhen...ground zero of China's Gilded Age. Thirty years ago, Shenzhen literally didn't exist; it was a typically stagnant Chinese village that happened to border Hong Kong. Now, it is a city of ten million, none of whom are from here. There are no old buildings in Shenzhen and I'm unsure if there are any old people. The city exists for one reason only: to do business and to make money. There is scant culture, no history, and little charm; unless greed counts as charm.
Think about the clothes you're wearing now; they were probably stitched here. Many of the items you own may have been manufactured here as well, shipped from the port a mere 800 meters from where I type. Many of the young men and women toiling in Shenzhen factories are migrant laborers, coming not from a foreign country (as in the US) but from the poorer inland provinces of China. These migrant workers- of which there are over 100 million in China- receive no services from the state and often live in ramshackle apartments that dot the perimeter of the city.
Thirty years ago, China closed the book on Maoism and began considering economic reform. They saw Hong Kong, shining like a beacon just beyond its border, and decided to emulate it. Thus Shenzhen- and four other cities- were born as "special economic zones". A fishing village in my lifetime, the city is now larger than any in Europe and all but two in North America. In ten years, its port will likely surpass Singapore in size and become the busiest in the world.
Perhaps from my description you picture a dystopian nightmare, but from my limited experience here much of the city is quite pleasant. The area around Shekou port resembles San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf, a tourist trap I avoid when home but find oddly reassuring here in China.
I spent an hour or two clothes shopping, hoping to find bargains on items that are eventually destined for the shops of the developed world. The Chinese I meet all seem shocked that I speak their language, as few of the expat businessmen have reason to learn Mandarin. I make a point to ask them where they come from; and they all oblige- Guangxi, Henan, Hunan, Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Hubei natives have all spoken to me. When they describe their home, they speak with wistful pride, perhaps knowing that their future is thousands of miles away, here in the buzzing Pearl River Delta.
Perhaps I should explain what I'm doing here; I'm tagging along with my two supervisors as they do business with port operators, businessmen, and government officials. Tomorrow we're off to Hong Kong, and I'll be certain to have a thing or two to say about my favorite SAR.
Notes and Thoughts
Yikes...an e-mail from my sister reminded me that I've been silent in this space for a bit longer than usual. Apologies! Work has been busy and I've been occupied by other things, but keeping fresh content on this site remains a priority to stay tuned.
Before I write about my trip (I've got a bit more research to do still- bear with me), I'll share a few news and notes for my remaining faithful
- A couple people I know in Kunming have expressed the conventional wisdom that the Colin Powell endorsement is really bad news for McCain. I'm not so sure. Do people really pay attention to endorsements? And for that matter, do people really pay attention to Powell?
- Certain Republicans believe Sarah Palin is the second coming of St. Ronald of Reagan, which to me sounds more like wishful thinking on their part than anything else. "There were doubts about Reagan's experience too!" they cry. Were they? This is before my time (I was safely inside my mother's womb when the Gipper first assumed office), but Reagan was a major figure within the Republican Party for at least a decade and a half prior to the 1980 election. Palin was plucked from almost total obscurity. Four years before he bested Carter, Reagan led an insurgency in the 1976 GOP primary that nearly knocked off sitting President Gerald Ford. Four years ago, Palin was the mayor of an Alaskan town smaller than the average Kunming housing complex.
You can fault Reagan for a lot of things (and believe me, I do) but he was at least a plausible choice on a national ticket. Palin, alas, is not.
- The presidential race appears to be tightening and will likely continue to do so. Then again, Obama must be pleased that McCain is pinning his presidential hopes on Pennsylvania, where he trails by a dozen points. To my pessimist friends (and father)- remember that Obama is
a) ahead in the polls
b) way ahead in cash-on-hand and
c) has a much better ground organization than McCain
- Interesting things are happening in China now on the economic front. Housing prices have begun falling. The government is worried about slower-than-expected GDP growth. They've also announced that by 2020, all Chinese will have nationalized health care. Will the US have that by then? Don't hold your breath.
- I just finished reading Paul Theroux's newest travel piece, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, in which Theroux retraces the route undertaken in his first travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar. When the latter book was published, Theroux was a struggling writer in his early thirties with a crumbling marriage and two small children. Now, revisiting these places in his mid-sixties, he is happily remarried and financially secure.
Along with Theroux, the land and people have changed too; return visits to Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan were ruled out, while Vietnam has been transformed from a war zone into a thriving and peaceful nation. Theroux visits a few new places; the oil boomtown of Baku, Azerbaijan, the bizarre totalitarianist hell of Turkmenistan, and the ruins (both ancient and modern) of Cambodia.
His observations, while trenchant, betray a fundamental bias against places undergoing major economic change. He finds India's status as the world's call center an affront to the ancient land's charm, while simultaneously praising war-torn Sri Lanka for its desultory sameness. In Kunming, Theroux spares only a few paragraphs to my adopted home, revealing his evident disgust that the Chinese revel in newfound prosperity.
These criticisms aside, there are many wonderful parts of Ghost Train. I loved his pithy description of the uptight Singaporeans, as well as his wonderment at visiting magnificent Istanbul and meeting the great Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Some critics resent Theroux's use of visits with fellow literati in his works, but I find these to be quite charming. In addition to Pamuk, Theroux sees the late Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka and both Murakami and the travel writer Pico Iyer in Japan.
All things aside, Theroux's fluid writing style and observant eye are evident throughout, and I recommend the book to anyone keen to lose themselves on the vast Eurasian landmass.
OK...time for sleep as I have made the masochistic decision to wake up in six hours to go swimming. Ahoy!
Back
Well...I've made it back to Kunming in one piece, though I imagine my legs will be grumpy for the next few days. The trip was simply amazing- one of the best I've undertaken in China ever. I'll have much more to say later.
Thank you for those who commented and e-mailed about site suggestions. I'll see what I can do.
Stay tuned.
Off-Line This Week
'tis the October holiday, and while it would be nice to relax in Kunming all week, I'll be up to something far more interesting. A few friends and I will be going off to towns in the central Yunnan countryside, traveling almost exclusively by bicycle. I won't have the opportunity to blog during the trip, but am taking my camera and a notebook so should have some meaty content up on the site sometime next week. In addition, I've made some arrangements to write longer-form pieces for various publications* and will keep you posted when those are ready.
One of the friends I'm traveling with, Jeff Crosby, authors the blog South of the Clouds**. Those interested in Yunnan or China in general should give it a look- Jeff has been here for quite awhile and has a lot of interesting posts about China from a more cultural perspective. I'll see if I can persuade him to write some trip thoughts up after we get back.
I've also been giving a site re-design a bit of thought. I like the current layout but it hasn't changed one iota since last August, an epoch in blog years. The content won't change, though after the Presidential Election I'll probably write less about non-China related matters.
If any of you have suggestions for me, particularly those concerning layout or design, leave them in comments or send me an e-mail at matthew.schiavenza (at) gmail (dot) com. Thanks!
* I sound so important, don't I?
** "South of the clouds" is the English meaning of Yunnan, by the way.
PS- Apologies for the shitty photo posting I did in the George W. Bush post...I'll do a better job next time but am tired and anxious about my trip.
Back!
It may not be as pleasant as the Thai islands, or as happening as Hong Kong, but rainy (and terrorist-hit) Kunming is still home, and I'm happy to be back....trip ruminations and other material to soon follow.
Thailand Ahoy!
As much as I enjoy living in Kunming, it's always nice to escape for a little bit. Tomorrow, my parents (currently in town visiting) and I will be flying to Thailand for a much-needed vacation, followed by a few days in Hong Kong/Macao. I should have plenty of opportunities to blog so stay tuned! I'll be back in Kunming in two weeks.
How I Got Here…The Long Short Version
The other night I met a group of Peace Corps volunteers, all based in rural southwest China. They had come to Kunming to sample the nightlife and indulge in Western treats unavailable in their Chinese hometowns, and were playing cards and drinking beer. One turned to me and asked the usual question, "so how long have you been in China?"
"Going on four years"
"Wow, that's a long time".
I laughed and said that time has flown by, and that I knew people who had been here for far longer. Longer than I've been alive, even.
"So, how did you end up here?"
I told him the usual story....graduated from college, didn't know what I wanted to do except live abroad, thought about Peace Corps, decided to teach English, thought China would be interesting, took a job, and voila! Here I am. That, of course, only explains how I got to China in the first place, not how I ended up in Kunming as a language student and part-time tutor. But I doubt anyone wanted to while their evening away listening to that whole tale.
Far more interesting are the little coincidences and accidents that played a deterministic role in my China experience. I was certainly never destined to go to China. I trace my ancestry to the fjords of Norway and the vineyards of Italy, not to the Yellow River plains. I was never one of those white kids with an Asian fetish, either. I never cared for martial arts. Nor anime. And while growing up in the Bay Area I had a lot of Asian friends, my knowledge in China was limited to General Tso's chicken. If you had told me, as a college senior in 2003, that within eighteen months I'd be calling Lianyungang, China home, I'd have dismissed you as a crank.
But there I was, in the fall of 2004, standing in front of thirty teenaged Chinese kids suffocating in the Jiangsu heat. How did it happen?
The simplest explanation was that about a month prior, somewhere in Australia, a young man bound for China had his car stolen. He had been hired to teach English in Lianyungang, and the trauma of the theft so soon before his departure date left him mentally unprepared to handle the move. So he withdrew, and the company (WITT) that hired him was left scrambling for a replacement. Their usual requirements (experience) went out the window, and I was offered the position.
I was informed that my arrival was urgent, and given a week or so to make up my mind. Lianyungang? Where the hell was that? A solitary English-language website offered no clues. Few people had heard of it. In desperation, I asked a friend who worked with Chinese students in the laboratory to supply me with information. He didn't bring back much. "One guy said it's a port". Great.
I thought of holding out for something in a bigger city, like Shanghai. I spoke to my recruiter, who discouraged that idea. "If you go to Shanghai, all you'll end up doing is getting drunk with other foreigners. Go to the smaller place, you'll have a more authentic experience."
These words elicited a romantic series of imaginations, and I excitedly saw myself tilling rice fields while listening to old men swap stories from the war. This would be great. I said "what the hell" and agreed.
Little did I know that getting drunk with foreigners, in fact, was exactly what I do anyway that year.
For one thing, I was totally unprepared to teach English. My TEFL course provided a basic education in how to convey the language to non-native speakers, but I had no conception of how China or Chinese people would be any different than, well, anyone else. The urgent nature of my arrival left my company little time to orient me, and so it took me weeks before I realized the actual objective of my lessons. Prior to that, I was gasping at straws, inventing lesson plans on my walk to school.
I had assumed that learning Chinese would be a breeze, given enough immersion. What I didn't expect was being confounded by the simplest concepts months into my stay. My original goal of learning enough Chinese in one year to use it seemed laughably optimistic. In taxis, I pointed when I wanted to go straight, jerked my arm when I wanted to turn, and held up my hand, palm out (like a cop) when I wanted to stop. Five-minute excursions to buy bread turned into incommunicative nightmares. No wonder I preferred the company of pirated DVDs and jaded laowai.
At around Christmas, I thought: "Fuck this. I'll just travel, have some fun, and then go home. A year is enough."
That was three and a half years ago. If I never imagined coming to China in the first place, I certainly never imagined staying this long. And I have traveled, and I have had fun, but I've also met more than my share of amazing people, learned a tremendous amount, and, through a series of coincidences no less deterministic, found myself happily studying Chinese in Kunming.
I've never met the Aussie fellow whose job I took, nor do I even know his name. I sincerely hope it worked out for him in the end. And as for the thief, for the decency of society I hope he's stopped stealing people's cars. But I'd be remiss if I didn't offer a quiet "thanks".
Back to China
In about three and a half hours I will be boarding a plane bound for Beijing and another long adventure in the Middle Kingdom. For once, I won't be moving: I'll be back in Kunming, to my apartment, my school, and my friends. More to come after touching down in Beijing.