MMMM...

I had a great lunch today made for me by a friend, feeling good after the grub I burst out on the street for a nice walk on the street to stretch my legs and check out the Zaozhuang scene. In the span of about 13 minutes I saw a child who must have been at least 8 years old piss on the street (your image is probably of a boy, but it wasn't), a woman hawk a huge loogy (no idea how to spell that word), and then another woman walk out of a house and vomit on the street. MMMMM....

On the road...

Fresh off my entry on "Hello" frustrations, as I was riding my bike down the street this afternoon I was reminded of another one of my favorite past times for some of the bigger d-bags in the area:

On an empty or uncrowded street as they are coming up on or passing me in their car/truck honking their horn repeatedly until I look up and then laughing.

Though I generally like to think of myself as a relatively peaceful person, its times like these that I contemplate the merits of beating a man unconcious.

Further Reading

These days, mainly because of the Olympics, and partially because of China's growth as an economic power/menace (depending on what you read) the web is flooded now with articles all about China and life in China. I find alot of it to be garbage, but some of it is interesting enough to check out. These are some stories that I thought at least to be interesting:




Here is a really excellent article about a movie that should be coming out soon in the US. Though the focus goes even deeper than just the movie and gives an in depth and, I feel, very accurate portrayal of an aspect of the Chinese psyche that has made relations with foreign nations more difficult. Also very respectfully written, check it out.

This article is very accurate to the situation, though I am not a big fan of its wording. Too often these "unbiased" articles use wording that make it seem as though the Chinese people are being forced to plow through unimaginably miserable conditions, alluding to the fact that it is the opposite to the US whose citizens eat candy everyday and have no worries, just love and freedom. I can just see so many people reading the article and thinking "The things we take for granted.." which drives me crazy. But the fact remains that as I had mentioned before, athletes don't get to see their families regularly while training, and then after seeing Phelps' mom in the stands approximately 174 times over the first week of the Olympics, I then would watch news highlights where CCTV would interview the parents of the gold medalists, none of whom were in Beijing viewing the games, and almost all of whom were obviously quite poor. What is interesting is that this is common knowledge around here and accepted as the way it is. The article also through talking about the farmers life mentions so many important things to life in rural China. The fact that Chen is not married at 30 is a huge deal around here. Not to mention the article does illustrates the huge gap between rich and poor in this country.

Both of these articles I stole from this blog, done by a professional with much more skill than me

The Power of a Word

I have no idea who any of these guys are, but all of them did not hesitate to scream hello at me from a comfortable distance.

"Hello!" or "Ha Low" is more like it. I swear to god I can't walk more than 100 meters (I'm going metric with dedication to the Olympics) around here without having some 17-35 year old male throwing a heavily accented English greeting my way, most of the time to get a chuckle out of either some girls he's hanging with, or the other 3 dudes he is riding on his motor cycle with. Girls will do it too, though their preferred method is quietly nudging and discreetly (at least they think its discreet) pointing my way while smiling and whispering, and then as I have just passed them one will softly say "ha lou" as all quietly chuckle together. These might sound like a small occurrences, and the fact of the matter is, it is. That's part of why it is so maddening, for when you live in a country of 1,300,000,000 people, small occurrences can have a huge impact on your daily quality of life. Hello, this simple greeting, has become a fundamental part of my life. It has come to represent (for me) the much larger picture of the daily pressures foreigners face, and how the building blocks for discrimination in a society are subtly put into place.

I am always thinking as I walk down the street how I wish that I were a spy, and that my glasses, instead of being scratched and not cool looking, had a spy camera inside of them. Then I could record all of the reactions that I get as I walk down the street in a day. This would be the only way to get a grip on the weirdness of the situation, because stories can't do it justice. Lets make this clear, when I say people are saying hello to me, it is not as though I am buying a newspaper and a man looks me in the eye, smiles and says, "hello." No, this is Hotboys with Sonic the hedgehog haircuts pointing and laughing as they scream hello at me from a quarter of a mile away. It would be like if you were with your friends and saw a man looking to be of Latino origin walking down the street in your neighborhood and you nudged your friends and yelled "hola!" at him and then everyone laughed together.

I will walk by a store selling plumbing equipment and hear rumbling out from the depths of the store a "hello?" yelled out more as if they were asking a question than greeting me. Middle aged men will be standing outside a restaurant talking, and as I walk by one will say "Laowai" (Foreigner) right in front of me, while staring at me, then all will fall silent and look me up and down from head to toe like they are checking me out and then begin talking about foreigners or guessing what country I'm from (I'm always hoping for DeGuo, or Germany) joking one should say hello to me. As I ride my bike down a narrow road a small van with darkened windows will wiz by me at about 50 MPH with a strange voice screaming out the window "Hello!" scaring the living S%#! out of me and nearly causing me to loose control into on coming traffic. Grandmothers walking their grandchildren will point me out and say in Chinese, "that is a foreigner, you see them you can say 'Ha lou'," and the seed is planted.

These are just some examples, and there are so many more. These are by no means the most terrible things I have heard people say. Not by a long shot. But they are the most common things I run into. Common enough that on a 2km walk through town I will almost definitely here at least 5 hello's, and sometimes upwards of 20. I've lived as a foreigner in Europe and South America. In both places you might draw some attention, in South America people with lighter hair and blue eyes are not common. But the overall atmosphere and pressure that one feels being outside in this area of China is incomparable to what I have experienced before. Here you can feel people prodding you with their eyes, and verbally hear them talking about you. And this is me we are talking about here, not Justin Timberlake, or the more popular band in China Westlife. Some of my greatest skills include eating Reese's peanut butter cups until I get sick and a lack of fear of public nudity (which, strangely enough, is generally frowned upon in most cultures, most especially China). There is nothing exceptional about me to bring this kind of attention other than the lack of exposure this area has had to people of differing color.

Now, its not as though one has to continually deal with out and out racism at all, most of the attention that I am getting is completely benign. But when you know that every time that you just want to go out of your apartment to the corner in order to pick up a deliciously refreshing corn flavored ice cream treat that you might have to deal with some 15 year olds laughing and yelling at you, you'll think twice about going. When you know that if you go to the track in order run a few laps that there is a good possibility that on lap number 5 some kid is going to run up alongside you and say "hello, I think you are very strong," and then want to talk with you to practice his extremely deficient English, you are probably going to hesitate to go jogging. Slowly but surely you find yourself spiralling into the dreaded territory of isolation, which anyone that has lived abroad can understand, isolation in a foreign environment can spell disaster. I even find myself consistently listening to my MP3 player when I go out in public, wrapping myself in a protective sphere of sweet ass techno pop... which is awesome... but not exactly what one wants to do when trying to absorb the culture and atmosphere of a region.

Yet the environment is such that isolation is almost inevitable, and I blame the word hello as the starting point for this problem. Back to that granny teaching their child to say the word hello. When a child is taught from birth to look at someone of different color and to communicate to them in a different way from other people, that child has a built in mechanism to see foreigners and truly believe that they are "different," or separate from themselves. So different you can only communicate with them in strange tongues. Not only does this hinder ones ability to study Chinese language (people here are 100 percent more likely to just make hand gestures at me rather than actually speak vocal language) but it also fundamentally adds to the general idea that Chinese have of foreigners as being mysterious and somehow something very different from themselves, physically, emotionally, and psychologically. This type of thought is ingrained in the subconcious and is the most enormous stumbling block that I have to overcome in trying to bridge the gap between Western and Eastern cultures through my classes, or daily interactions. Saying hello in itself is a small act, often done with a friendly thought, but what it does is draw lines between what is Chinese and what is not, and that makes it more difficult to make genuinely close human interaction with people.

And the children, oh the children! I honestly fear children while I live here. Why? Because they are totally innocent of what they do, yet are the most brutal in their actions. A group of 8-12 year old boys to me is like a pack of wild jackals (is that a fearsome animal, it sounds good, what with that Bruce Willis movie and all) and I will go to great lengths to avoid interactions with them, making me officially the biggest wuss on the planet. They will run after me screaming hello and laughing, and drawing laughter from the crowd around also, who will either be embarrassed but not say anything, or think that it is cute to see the kids practicing their English. Some of the more daring boys have even gone behind me and boxed with my shadow thinking I couldn't see, or pretended to fire an imagined machine gun at me like I was their enemy. This is all very disturbing. Children are a reflection of society since they haven't yet learned that actions like these aren't appropriate. One has to wonder what is going on in the minds of the older men that are looking me up and down as I pass by. The fact that children at that age not only instantly recognize me as a foreigner but then also have these sort of reactions merits reflection for sure.

The fact is that words and language are a very powerful thing. Living abroad allows a person to feel this very acutely, as it is mainly language that keeps you on the outside of the society in which you are living. Hello, one word that should have a positive connotation, has the power to annoy, embarrass, and even alienate a person. It's something that is important to remember when interacting with anyone anywhere. Something that I wish would be taken more seriously in this place and not shrugged off as something to be ignored and endured.

The Fall of an Icon

Despite the fact that China has had it's way with gold medal's in this years Olympics, dominating events ranging from badminton to archery to weightlifting, today was a sad sporting day for the nation. China's biggest track star, Liu Xiang, was forced to retire due to injury, and the fall out has been fierce, fierce enough in fact to make me want to write about track.

In order to understand the importance of this occurrence it's important to understand Liu Xiang's status in China. He is(maybe was?) a brand here, enormously popular. To find a similarly popular athlete in the US we would have to be talking of the likes of Lebron James or Dwayne Wade here. He is probably China's second most well known athlete, right along side Yao Ming, and more popular, in some ways, than Yao because he is seen as better looking and more exciting. Don't let that photo above fool you, despite that somewhat questionable complexion, Liu Xiang is a bit of a sex symbol, or whatever a sex symbol is here, but that's a discussion for another day.

He burst onto the scene winning gold in the Athens Olympics, and then later set a world record in his event 2006, rocketing to super-stardom in a country starved for track success. The event that is Liu Xiang's bread and butter? the 110M hurdles. That's right folks, he's a hurdler! Talk about sex appeal!! Now I think we can all understand how a track star can stand in the company of Lebron James and Kobe, right？ I mean, His timing is flawless!! I ran track in high school and from what I can remember, while some athletes might have gone out to party after their respective competitions, 110 meter hurdlers, along with their equally nimble counterparts in the triple jump, were much more likely to be preparing their protractor for the upcoming math meet rather than doing anything with a member of the opposite sex. Regardless, He's huge here, mainly because he excels at a sprinting event, which China and Asia in general have traditionally struggled in.

Media in all regions are guilty of hero worship, exalting athlete's accomplishments to the point where people, the athletes themselves included, start to believe they are some sort of god. I'm reminded of this every time I read an article now about Michael Phelps, who has Americans saying he is the "best athlete in the history of the species," and some Chinese fearing him like he's f-'ing Captain America, or the Universal Soldier(Dolph Lundgren you stud). (incidentally to those wondering, I was narrowly edged out by Phelps in our own private six-pack contest last Tuesday. Who'd have known that years of intense Olympic swim training would be more effective than my liter of Mt. Dew a day strategy.)

I know that people love to look up to others as something more than human, but seeing the reaction to Liu Xiang's withdrawal was still mind blowing to me. Liu Xiang actually lined up for the event, but was visibly in pain, it appeared he had forced himself out there bc he knew the pressure of a nation was on his shoulders. The race began with a false start and Liu Xiang, as he shot off the blocks immediately started limping, and then disgustedly pulled his numbers off his legs and stormed into the locker room. That is when the mayhem began. The crowd was astounded. A foreigner reporter later noted in a press conference dedicated strictly to Liu Xiang (nationally televised press conference) that multiple fans began crying in the stands upon learning he had withdrawn. Reporters, somewhat regretfully it seemed, supported his decision on CCTV. Meanwhile, other people in less public places did what I assume many Chinese were doing at the time, and that is complaining about what a wuss he was. Two friends of mine later told me about how the men and women of their workplace were talking about how he should have persevered through the race. This is my favorite part of sports, it's why I love that there is still talk radio. I love how fat, out of shape people can, from the comfort of their office, contemptuously slander an athlete who has trained diligently for years, all because that athlete (who themselves had so much more invested in their performance) did not for that moment give them the pleasure they had desired. Had Liu Xiang won the gold those same people would have been psyched for like 45 minutes and still gone home and hated themselves at the end of the day... but I digress...

The fallout didn't just end with nameless people in the stands(or cubicles), a field reporter reporting on the scene actually broke down into tears while reporting on national television. They had to cut the report short because of her outburst. The nightly news dedicated a 5-10 minute segment on Liu Xiang at night, noting that President Hu Jin Tao actually had released a public statement consoling Liu in the afternoon. The general atmosphere has calmed somewhat and I can assume most people won't continue to be (openly)angry with Liu Xiang, but you can bet that his marketability has been forever damaged by this one event.

It would seem that China would have so many heroes after this Olympics they would be able to overlook one getting injured and still trying to perform. Still it is so interesting to continually see how people allow themselves to get so wrapped up and depend on other people to provide an image of success for themselves. As always this kind of phenomena only becomes more clear and powerful in a country with such an enormous population. Still, and most importantly, I am sure that somewhere there is a 200 pound Chinese woman ready to take gold in Judo and take Liu Xiang's place as poster boy/girl for Coca-Cola China, and the Meng Niu Yogurt company.