Chinese Education

The China Expat wrote up a longish take on his perceptions of Chinese education. I agree with almost all of it. My own experience is limited to a school that's a lot more progressive than most so I have a more favorable take on Chinese education than he does. The core of his complaints are thus:

* Too many students in one class
* Teachers with too many meetings and too few classes

He's right. Chinese teachers do about half the workload I did in America. He attributes it to meetings, but I haven't seen that many. I just think staff is cheap, so like everywhere companies that can hire too much. There aren't enough classrooms to fit all the teachers they've hired, so they trade a lighter workload for massive hours. Teachers are at school all day. Longer, less productive workdays seem the norm in most white-collarish work environments in China. Why should it be different at schools for different reasons.

In some ways, it sure as hell beats my schedule in America. From 8 am to 2pm I never stopped having to watch and discipline children. I get two and a half hours for lunch here. In America I got 30 minutes and microwave to share with 12 kids that I also had to closely watch... loose hands, fights, threats... you get it. I got my 30 minute break and then was theoretically out by 3.

With only fifteen classes, adding five more for every teacher can make for 25% smaller classes without a significant strain on the teachers if done right. The big step would be to design new schools to have smaller classrooms.

* The military-like environment of many Chinese schools

Not saying it doesn't exist, but I haven't seen it at my school - other than the creepy calisthenics routines in the morning and Wear Camo to School Wednesdays, of course. Quite the opposite, I was stopped very early from being the disciplinarian I was in America. I was pretty surprised to find the only real discipline technique was calling the parents. No ISS, no OSS, no detention. Not that those really work in America, but...

I'm still surprised by the relaxed nature of my school. Kids run around, horseplay, and even fight without there being much in the way of adult intervention. Childish behavior is perfectly OK between classes. I think it comes from not having the same overwhelming threat of lawsuits from parents that American schools face.

I have seen the berating insults of some teachers to entire classes though.

* Class division according to overall, as opposed to subject-specific, test scores
* Overworked students - No time for anything but studying
* Overly high emphasis on memorization
* The joke called English education

I have some deep concerns that foreign teachers aren't being utilized efficiently. I also have deep concerns over the English abilities of many Chinese English teachers. On the surface, it feels like 70% of the reason we're there is image. Parents want foreign teachers, so better schools need to have them to compete with each other. Public schools aren't free. It's a marketplace. Reagan once commented that it'd be much more efficient to just hire a white guys and gals to stand at the gate and greet and play with the little tykes when they come through the gates in the morning and be back at the end.

The other 30% is to make up for the strong oral deficits of the Chinese teachers. Sure, they can teach grammar and spelling well enough, but asking "Where is class 5, grade 6?" is akin to asking a Wal Mart stocker where the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors are. So we're given 40 minutes a week with 40 - 50 students to make up for this.

It seems to me that working with the best English students in an all-English environment several times a week and with the English teachers will have a much more significant impact than what we're doing now. It feels like we're sitting with a mutli-million dollar fire truck shooting the foam cannon at the flames high above the gas leak - the hundreds of kids passing through each Chinese English teacher every year. Turn the leak off, help the Chinese English teachers more and watch your returns expand. Build their confidence, work on their grammar, and help their pronunciation such that every hour you spend with them is helping those hundreds of kids.

The parents subscribe to the Magic Pixie Dust Theory, which basically says that having a hairy rich foreigner stand in front of their kids long enough will make them think like the white man in all the important ways, i.e. business. This is why the idea of a Filipino with 10 years experience teaching and perfect English just isn't an option. They don't have the Dust, man, where's the Pixie Dust of Development? I have to turn them down every day in favor of the inexperienced college kids that the schools want. Mix the weird ideas of what they think Western education is, no real pedagogy for a oral English class with 40+ kids, discipline issues 'cause at least 10 kids don't understand anything that's being said and you get schools that are pretty clueless about what to do with these big, expensive, walking billboards.

So we're clowns, most of the time. Sometimes ninjas. Once a robot. It can be rewarding, sure, but it can be so much better. Too bad there's the...

* Inability to change the status quo

Music

We had just gotten out of the subway at Luo Hu and had come into an area of "shadow" taxis, as Cody named them, to drive us far away to an investment house on the beach. It was Tom's new bosses place. We hustled the first cab, no luck. Second cab, no luck. They were wanting the equivalent of fifteen USD to drive four of us an hour. A taxi pimp arranged a third for us at a ten percent discount, but he kicked us after I showed him the exact location. He wanted even more than the others.

Standing on the curb, trying to hail a new cab The Revelation hit me. We were in front of a small clothing shop, the kind that always blares that 500 beat-per-minute Mickey Mouse techno. It was doing it's own blaring, drawing customers like bees powerless in front of flowers, and it hit me then, and right then, that Chinese people actually like this music.

That's a big thing to wrap your head around. I endlessly make fun of other people for their musical taste while clinging to my own taste as an example of the perfect example of thoughtful, unique, fun, diverse, quirky, and enjoyable library. Actually, all personality traits I'd like to assign myself. That means something.

I mean I knew they prefered it, but I always had it in the back of my head that as soon as someone drops in a better CD at a dance club they'd get a little red face and not want to mention putting Alvin, Simon, and Theodore behind the DJ booth.

Right now I'm listing to the new Mofro album, a song called "Circles" about fighting in a relationship with some shadowy and ancient emotional baggage as the culprit. The band is from the backswamps of Jacksonville and the theme and language used to describe it is something I can deeply identify with. The sound of the music itself, the drawly vocals and that Hammond organ, remind me of marshes of my childhood and blistering midnights of my college days. It's something that hits the essence of my being without even trying. Music just kinda does that. That's why we make mix tapes as young lovers, trying to have Alanis Morissette or Jim Morrison say what you really mean. Some how John Lennon or Maynard Keenan says it better than we can.

For some strange reason, my boss loves mixing up Mary J Blige and Mofro to impress foreign passengers in his VW wagon. It's strange to me that he likes it. I expect him not to. I think, perhaps, it's easier to understand "tastes are different" and perhaps people don't all like what you like. The hard part, and The Revelation to boot, is that other people like different things. Not just prefer them, no just are used to them, but truly, genuinely like and enjoy and thrive off them.

This chipmunk techno that surrounds my daily existence and feels like a long-running inside joke really is the product of artists making things that The People enjoy. The sappy MandoPop and CantoPop is the soundtrack to millions of rising and falling lovers. And you know what? Those ridiculous poofy dresses the girls wear with the pseudo-punk hair or tapered pants... that's really hot to some Chinemen dudes. I mean really hot.

It's a hard thing to wrap your really wrap your head around and realize all your tastes, something you could never do without, are inversely ridiculous to someone else. And that, in a word, is culture. Oh, and your favorite band sucks (to someone out there).

Update: Two More Years in China

Dear People Who Read Treyopia,

Last week I applied for a Master of Education from Hong Kong University. They have a specialism in International and Comparative Education and Development that seems right up my ally, mixing politics and education perfectly. It's two days a week for two years and is about a two commute for me in Shenzhen. Despite initial positive feedback from HKU faculty, I was worried that my less-than-stellar academic record from UNF was going to be an issue getting into the 33rd best university in the world. I've been keeping this on the down-low until I received an acceptance letter.

I was given provisional placement today, the only holdup being the official transcripts making their way across the pond. I think I can say with certainty that I'll be a student there in September.

The plan now is to stay in Shenzhen at least through the first semester to see if the commute is too much of a hassle. It's quite a distance and I'll be passing through an international border on the way to classes. I'd prefer to stay on the mainland side because my job is going well, cost of living is low, and my Chinese is getting better everyday. Hong Kong is a great place, but it comes with all the pros and cons of living in the most densely populated city in the world. We'll see what the future holds though.

Stay well and stay in touch,
- "Master" Trey Menefee
Dear People I Mass E-mailed,

Last week I applied for a Master of Education from Hong Kong University. They have a specialism in International and Comparative Education and Development that seems right up my ally, mixing politics and education perfectly. It's two days a week for two years and is about a two commute for me in Shenzhen. Despite initial positive feedback from HKU faculty, I was worried that my less-than-stellar academic record from UNF was going to be an issue getting into the 33rd best university in the world. I've been keeping this on the down-low until I received an acceptance letter.

I was given provisional placement today, the only holdup being the official transcripts making their way across the pond. I think I can say with certainty that I'll be a student there in September.

The plan now is to stay in Shenzhen at least through the first semester to see if the commute is too much of a hassle. It's quite a distance and I'll be passing through an international border on the way to classes. I'd prefer to stay on the mainland side because my job is going well, cost of living is low, and my Chinese is getting better everyday. Hong Kong is a great place, but it comes with all the pros and cons of living in the most densely populated city in the world. We'll see what the future holds though.

Stay well and stay in touch,
- "Master" Trey Menefee

P.S. - The tickets aren't bought yet, but it looks like I'll be home the last two weeks of July.

P.S.S. - (904) 302-7336 calls me in China and it's dirt cheap. I'm 12 hours ahead of EST.

The Art of Dumbing Down

An anonymous comment left on my "Teaching" post a few weeks back:

As a teacher of English, don't you think that you have a responsibility to teach PROPER English [instead of rewarding them for merely speaking]?

In a classroom you visit once a week with 30-40 five to twelve year olds with only basic skills, priorities change quickly. I've made the case to school administrators and people in my own company that schools are wasting a LOT of money by putting us into these situations. What a foreign teacher is best at - fine-tuning grammar and pronunciation - is pretty worthless when dealing with the demographic we do. In most cases, I don't feel like there's much I can do that a normal Chinese English teacher can't do. I can't change the whole system, so I do the best I can.

My first priority is effective communication. Use what you know. My Chinese is horrible, but I use it rather effectively and with the help of body language there's almost nothing I can't do. I find our jobs here to be well-suited for that: communicate with the foreigner using what you know. I teach/demonstrate that the average foreigner is not going to understand most of the Chinese you use, so use the English you do know to convey your message. Be comfortable with the language enough to actually speak it and guesstimate grammar in a creative, if stressful, environment. It's much better than locking up trying to remember finer grammar points or more difficult vocab.

For what it's worth, I almost always repeat student statements and questions loudly and in proper English so the whole class can hear and the student can make notes on where they went wrong. When playing games I help them say what they want correctly before giving them points. What it seems you are suggesting would force me, more or less, to make a fool of anyone who dared raise their hand to speak.

In one-to-one environments, I encourage students (typically adults in high-ranking positions) to not be afraid of dumbing down. You always see good speakers getting stuck on one word, trying to remember something the learned ten years ago. I always tell them there's likely four or five easy words that they do know that say almost the same thing as the big word and if used, the conversation won't grind to a halt.

Only my ideas... what do others think? Comment!

Happy Trey Day Eve

It's that time of year again. Know what you can do to make me super happy? Use this damn Florida phone number I bought and CALL ME! Even if just for a few minutes... you have know idea how good familiar voices sound 8500 miles away.

I'm 12 hours ahead of EST (11pm Saturday in Jax = 11am Sunday for me). I'm off work tomorrow. And the next day. Friday night my time is good for super-short drunken hello's and that's about it. Hot Pot, karaoke, and wine will surely flow at a Double Going Away + Trey Day Party.

(904) 302-7336

Step 1) Save it in your phone.
Step 2) Right now.
Step 3) Call it at a good time for both of us.
Step 4) Identify yourself.
Step 5) Chat!

Q&A time with Joe Flowers

why did she have to go to the hospital?

There are no general doctors here, so we have to go to the hospital for nearly everything that would require a prescription back home. There are little hospitals in almost every neighborhood. A visit can cost less than $10. The other option, which I prefer, is to self-diagnose using the internet and find the appropriate medication and go to the pharmacy to pick it up. I don't play around with antibiotics though.

why were you sent out of the interrogation room--for snapping what photo? why was anyone interrogating you/her about HER purse being stolen (shouldn't they interrogate the culprit)?

There's a photo on that post that Cody wanted me to take - of the guy asking her all the questions. I was kicked out because I was clearly taking photos official police business. No one really knows why they spend so much time filing police reports with inane questions, but the general consensus is that they just don't want you to file police reports. It makes the stats look bad, maybe. Who knows. It's happened with everyone, even a coworker who saw someone fiddling with his bike locks. One hour minimum in the police station. They tell you it will be quick, maybe 10 minutes, beforehand... which goes against the "they don't want you to file" idea. Who knows... really.

any definitive conclusion on the fetus eating issue?

Hera and my Chinese-American coworker maintain that it's real. My friends admitted they were playing a joke on Hera and I but said they have had placenta before. I don't think that last bit is a joke. That said, these guys eat everything. When queried about eating dogs, saying they're pets not food, the response I heard was, "Not these dogs. They're not my pet." People literally buy snake oil in the street. Someone's gotta think that fetus makes you healthier in some way, and there's gotta be some hospital in need of cash meeting the supply needs of the demand of someone with cash.

if everyone wants to be friends with whitey, how can you be sure that the girls (any girl) isn't also kinda/sorta influenced by the white-ness?

I don't completely follow this question, but I think you're asking how can I be sure Chinese girls aren't also victim to the Blanchaphilia? Many are and there's also a deep shallowness to it. I haven't had a Chinese girlfriend so I really can't speak too knowledgeably on this issue, but I think they're the same wavelength as many of the guys: they see us as curious two-dimensional objects with deep wallets.

Where many of the men might see a future business deal (even my good Chinese friends can't resist trying to get me to sell CCTV camera's [their business] to my filthy rich American friends, that's just one of the expectations in friendship here), some girls might see a potentially bright future for herself and her family. Contrary to the prevailing stereotype of Asian women, I think most Chinese girls aren't too interested in American guys outside of chatting, flirting, and maybe a little dancing at a club.

The one sorta-kinda girlfriend I had before Hera in Shenzhen was only interested in white guys. She saw us as much more than Curious 2D Wallets. She saw us as some sort of liberation from prevailing mindsets. For me it just felt like a fetish and spending time with her felt like wearing a crotchless polyester bunny suit. It was a sick and sinister role.

if you're NOT going to answer their phone calls, why give them your number? ;o)

One word: Face. You never, ever do something that might make someone look like an idiot. If I've used my phone around them and they ask for my number, I need to give them my number. If I said that I didn't have a phone when they clearly saw it they'd look like bad. The problem is exacerbated by the Dork Cord© connecting my phone to my belt loop. I leave my phone everywhere and it's good protection against pickpockets. So they see it. So I have to give my number or make them lose face.

Crowd Control

By Shuggiefisher

I don't envy any major policy maker in China. Every national policy decision affects 1/5 of the worlds population. Any egalitarian ideals forces a yuan to split 1.3 billion ways. It's precisely the same conditions that make China the world's factory that keep men and women in poverty even through endless hours, days, weeks, and months of labor. There's just too many damn people. A college degree in boomtowns like Shenzhen will earn about $250 a month. They move thousands of miles for this kind of wage. Anything less can easily place in a factory making 50 cents an hour, fourteen hours a day, six or seven days a week. They also move thousands of miles for this wage.

China's population is set to hit 1.5b by the end of this decade, which has China adding something like 1/3 America's population every year. So what's a policy maker to do? Welcome to one of two One-Child Policy nations on the planet (correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Vietnam is the only other one). Because the Communist Party of China isn't the strong top-down structure most people think it is, government policy is enacted differently in different parts of the country.

In Shenzhen, the policy seems only to act as a tax to the super rich. 1/3 to half the kids at my (boarding) school have brothers and sisters, if that's any indicator. I've read that most farmers get away the practice because they need the financial help that multiple children bring once they're old enough to work. In Tianjin, I have a friend who's father lost his job as a teacher because he had three girls to finally have a son.

Officials in Guanxi (the province of Guilin/Yangshou) took things a bit too far though. The NY Times writes that, "officials in several parts of Guangxi mobilized their largest effort in years to roll back population growth by instituting mandatory health checks for women and forcing pregnant women who did not have approval to give birth to abort fetuses." In addition to this, "[they] slapped fines starting at 500 yuan and ranging as high as 70,000 yuan, or $65 to $9,000, on families that had violated birth control measures anytime since 1980."

"The family-planning officials were just like the Japanese invaders during the war. They took everything away, and destroyed or tore down the houses if people could not pay the fines," said one villager surnamed Wu.

"In some families, even the gate and bowls were taken away, leaving them with an empty house." [Washington Post]

______

"....gangsters used hammers and iron rods to destroy people’s homes, while threatening that the next time it would be with bulldozers,” [NY Times]

The villagers responded by, "clash[ing] with officials and police armed with guns and electric cattle prods, pulling down a wall surrounding the government office, turning over cars and burning part of its main building."

"The government office was a big mess," a villager, who witnessed the scene, said by telephone. "The big gate and two cars near it were all burnt and black, and broken glass, bricks and rubbish were everywhere." [Washington Post]

Teaching

Photo by Lida Rose

As my juniors last year graduate from Greenwood this week, I've been pondering my own growth as a teacher. It's a strange and wonderful career I've chosen and in my two short years I feel like I've done it all. I've worked with little kids, adults, teenagers, college kids... everyone. I've given hour-long lectures, taught 40-minute classes, have one-lesson weeks now, did twenty lesson weeks last year. I've created my own courses from scratch, worked out of a book, and given one-to-one's in principals offices to explain how an American school board works. What have I learned?

Forgive. The most important thing is to never get angry with a class. It's pointless and you'll lose every time. Chances are if they're misbehaving, you've gone over their heads or your simply boring them. Never hold a grudge. Never expect the bad student (or class) from last week to be a problem this week. Allow them to redeem and redefine themselves. Reward instead of punish. Do this not only for your own sanity, but for the example you - as teacher - are supposed to set as a model behavior. Forgiveness isn't about accepting apologies. It's about moving on.

Entertain. That is, after all, why most students and parents think you're there. Let your personality fill the room and be the sole object of attention. You're competing against a lot of things. Flying paper balls, notes, books, and cute crushes have an advantage. Steal and co-opt them.

Think on their level. I once heard someone say, of teaching kids, that if you ever stop thinking like one, even for a moment, you've lost them. It's absolutely true. If your teaching businessmen, be prompt and efficient in your teaching. If you're teaching little kids, sing songs and be a ninja from time to time. Match the pre-existing vibe of the class and everyone wins.

Review. You'll be floored by how much they forgot. Make it as fun as possible though.

Meaning. Make sure they understand and believe that what they're doing means something and in some way will help them in a tangible way. Make them feel privy to some sort of inside information that others aren't getting. It works as well with history as it does with English.

Yangshou

As expected, I come back from vacation and I'm swamped with work. I'm just now getting around to uploading my photos to Flickr [about 1/3 are up as of now]. The basic jist of what we did was take a night bus [fine] to Yangshou for May Holiday, stayed in the town for three nights but prices kept rising because of the massive influx of Chinese tourist, then moved into a village for the last three days. Most of our time was spent relaxing, hiking, and biking around the countryside of the YuLong River valley. I got my groove back with photography :-)


Before I went, I asked a friend who had been whether or not it's "China beautiful or World-class beautiful." My own answer is that nobody who makes a trip out there will be disappointed. It's a stunning and charming land with friendly locals and laid-back visitors.Some memorable points, in no order, as jotted down sitting down in a tea shop before the [worst] night bus [ever] left for Shenzhen:

• Finding our own valley (behind the mountains in the first picture)
  
  
• A strange bird who's ghostly noise was a long, steady single note that rose gradually before breaking into in short birst of chirps. Found higher up in the mountains, I first discovered it...
  
  
• Finding a Taiping Rebellion-era fort built into the side of karst. No maps mentioned it and I only happened to find it while climbing a bit and having...
  
  
• A little girl offering Hera and I unripe pears as she and her friends played on a trail we were hiking up
  
  
• Trying, unsuccessfully, to befriend a peasant's cow.
  
  
• Riding in a (tethered) hot air balloon for ten minutes.
  
  
• "Bamb - oooooo" The other English word, after "hello," that every villager within 100 miles knew. It was lucrative business of sending tourist down the river on bamboo rafts.
  
  
• "Hello, beer?" The business-pitch of a small restaurant owner every time I walked past.
  
  
• Having a local de-mud our bikes the last day. The mud was everywhere and created a significant problem of getting the wheels to, ya know, spin. He cleaned it in a rice patty water-hole with patches of weed and grass he grabbed.
  
  
• Five possible dishes to choose in the village. Five.
  
  
• Noting the almost total absence of people between the ages of 20 to 50 in the villages, mainly skewed towards men. They've all gone to the cities to work in the factories leaving grandparents to do the farming.
  
  
• A foreign kleptomaniac snatching Hera's phone and camera out of her bag
  
  
• Wondering whether caribou have the right-of-way.
  
  
• A cool peasant-dude who wanted to chill and chat by the river with us after I fell into his rice patty
  
  
• Not thinking about work for a week.
  
  
• Meeting a Danish fellow who was towards the end of his
  Denmark-Russia-Kazakhstan-China bicycle journey.

The People's Democratic Dictatorship, Pt 2: Commuwhat?

One of my biggest pet peeves here is hearing people say, “that’s just communism.” I can see where they get the impression. There’s a Stalinist power-structure in place that calls itself the Chinese Communist Party that certainly has Marxist roots, but it has about as much a connection to communism today as the Republican Party has to the ideals of the old Roman Republic. Tenuous, at best. Not even very superficial really. One thing I’ll give credit to The Party for is not pretending to be something it’s not. Doublespeak is not a fixture in Chinese politics. Typically, the leadership says what they mean and means what they say and they say the revolution's dead, folks. They sent the memo in ’78, didn’t you get it?

Mao did create a communist society for a short while. During the Great Leap Forward in ’58 the villages were all leveled and rebuilt as communes. This might have actually worked except that alongside this came the remarkable idea that China was going to match England’s steel production in eight years. Wait, no, 4! Wait! Two years! We can do it in two! Someone said two months? Let’s do it guys! Just melt your shovels, hoes, rakes, plows, and jewelry in backyard steel mills! And then, you know, watch your crops die with thirty million dead peasants following. That's a tenth of the the current US population, by the way.

That didn’t work out so hot and his power slipped a bit. Plan B. Anarchy with communist characteristics. Ten years of it during the Cultural Revolution. Class struggle as defined by neighbors “struggling” against that bastard whose father was a rich peasant or whose brother served in Kuomintang along with your generic book burning, banning anything but revolutionary music, and sending anyone with an education to work as a farmer in the countryside. The general consensus is that it was Mao making a last ditch effort regain power and solidify his historical role as not just The Great Helmsman, but God Amongst Chinamen. Mao died. Happens to everyone, right?

Things changed very, very quickly after that. Deng Xiaoping, probably the most pragmatic political leader I’ve ever read about, came back from his small engine repair shop where he was exiled during the Cultural Revolution. He had a few ideas. The first, and most important today, was that “poverty is not communism.” Maybe sending educated people to the countryside for a few years can have a positive effect after all.

Well… turns out maybe poverty is communism when there’s not a lot of wealth to be shared. What’s a pragmatist to do? Rename communism, that’s what! But what to call it, what to call it… teacher! Pick me, pick me! If you said “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” you won! What does it mean? Well, whatever the hell it needs to mean. That’s its beauty. Did you notice how well the word “socialism” kept the relevance of the “communist” party. Didja also note that “Chinese characteristics” could mean anything? It’s kinda like saying Trey-style Chinese Cooking.

For Deng, it meant two things. Take notes, this well be on the test. First was that “to get rich is glorious.” Hmmm, interesting. That’s a bit of a change from the class-struggling fervor of Mao’s Little Red Book, the only literature allowed only five years earlier. The second was the pragmatic counter-weight, that “some must get rich before others.”

Right there communism died in China and the Chinese Communist Party was given a second chance to prove itself useful to the Chinese people before things got nasty. Nothing but pain came from the previous two decades of rule. While Mao started off on the right foot, The Party and its army was on its best red behavior while running from and fighting off the worse than useless KMT in China’s heartland, he left psychic and physical scars on this nation that will never be healed. Try to find a temple older than your grandfather in this ancient land.

So if China isn’t communist... what is it? That's for Part III: Survivalism.

Some Photos and Captions

Too much text lately, ey? Let's have some photos.

From top to bottom, left to right:

The view from my office. According to my boss, the red buildings on the left side were execution grounds about a century ago. The red keeps the bad spirits away. Behind that building is a massive park centered around Deng Xiaoping on top of a mountain.

We were walking back from Overseas Chinese Town [OCT] after a CouchSurfing meetup. We just got done telling our visitors that Shenzhen, essentially, is a safe city despite its stereotype of lawlessness and crime. Swinging her purse in circles at 2am, however, Cody had it snatched. I got kicked out of the interogation room after snapping this. She spent two hours answering questions like "what was your first pets name?"


A sea turtle. Being "protected" in a Haikou seafood restaurant. Yeah....

We've all heard of the One-Child Policy, right? Well, Pizza Hut in China has a One Trip To The Salad Bar Policy too. 1.3b people. One salad bar. Law and order, peoples, law and order! This is the result.

A group of Vietnamese/Chinese-American businessmen asked me if I wanted to go shopping with them. They took me furniture shopping. Something like $50,000 for this desk. "Wouldn't 1000 year old wood be better in a 1000 year old tree," I asked.

He was in the Chinese Army for years. He was also hit in the head with a pipe. The words "help me" are written on the dent in his bald and dented head. He jams, man. He runs loops through his keyboard by the crosswalk. Easily my favorite beggar.

People's Democratic Dictatorship, Pt. 1: My Bias and Observations

This might be taking it too far, but here goes. I'm reading a lot on the subject and really want to express my thoughts. There's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it here and after talking with a friend in the Party I think I know where the lines are. Here's hoping I still have a visa next week.

Democracy. China. There... cat's out of the bag. Let's chat. For a censor reading this, please note this is an attempt to explain a situation to the Western reader and not some foreigners idea of how to change China.

I'll start with my own bias and ground observations. Liberty, fairness, and responsiveness are more important to me than the tools of democracy like elections. I'm inclined to think that elections are the most efficient ways of delivering those values to the people, but it's not a universal. Hong Kong is a good example of a place that never really had elections through most of it's modern history and today only grants the right to vote to a few millionaires and academics. Hong Kong citizens experience a great deal of liberty, fairness in law, and have an extremely responsive government.

Compare that to a place like Manila where elections are common but so are troops to harass socialist leaning parties wanting to represent the squatters and poor. Corruption is even more rampant in the Philippines than in China. Lonely Planet, in fact, advices backpackers to not report crimes to the police. You'll somehow loose important belongings before you leave their offices. Elections do not cure everything.

Liberty does exist in China in a limited form. People aren't terrified of talking politics and dissing old leaders like Mao in private. I've heard people in very high positions tell me they're not a member of The Party because they "don't believe communism will be actualized." Where it stops is the right to go into the street with a big sign that says that. Or march on Tiananmen Square. Or try to convince people of your ideas in public forums. There are no North Korea-style microphone systems hidden in people's homes that send the Gestapo in to throw you into re-education camps for bringing up your ideas inside your home or even office.

Fairness and responsiveness are two things the government in Beijing openly discuss and the leaders frequently cite as major policy goals. They know theres a fire brewing in the countryside and they know that it poses the greatest threat to the future of The Party. The cities are content if not happy as a whole. There's education, health care, jobs, and smart people can potentially make a much better life for themselves. None of that can be said of the countryside. Instead they deal with rampant corruption and stagnant incomes while the coastal cities boom.

Corruption isn't just about having to pay off the local cop to get out of a traffic ticket. It's about having your small plot of land appraised at a certain value. The developer gives the local government the appraised amount to buy the land from the farmer. The farmer maybe gets ten percent of that appraised amount, then the land is resold for tens or even hundreds of times more than the appraised amount [of which the farmer only got the sliver of]. This happens all day, every day. Add to this steep taxes on produce that are only now being revoked and you have a land of very edgy farmers that have been known to tear apart government offices.

Officials reported 74,000 demonstrations, or "mass incidents," in China in 2004, up from 10,000 in 1994, with the number of participants rising to 3.8 million from 730,000. - UPI

What's happening now is Beijing knows this problem needs to be addressed but there's no clear solution to it. The corruption isn't necessarily happening because of bad people in administration. It's happening in large part because bureaucracies are both bloated and underfunded. The previous president tried subsidizing rural administration payrolls and quickly learned it would bankrupt the national government. Cutting back on the bloating has serious political consequences within the party, as it creates more work and removes layers of separation between cadres and the unruly peasants.

Limited democracy had been one of their approaches. Contrary to popular belief, there are some relatively free elections in China to small assemblies for townships. Even non-Party members can run and often win. In effect it's giving a blow-off valve to the most disaffected without seriously disrupting power structure. It gives voice without much authority. And

Weekly Observations

Observation #1: Social Harmony

The universe demands it. Extroverts get along great with introverts and vice versa. People play certain roles around certain people. Around introverts I become an exceptionally boisterous, fun-loving, girl-gawking, funny kinda guy. Around overly extroverted people I become a serious, bookish, fact-touting weirdo. Coincidentally, almost every long-term girlfriend I've had is an quietish introvert. I'm most socially awkward around unpredictable or moody people because I don't know whether I'm the yin or the yang that day.

Observation #2: A Football Riot

Bus drivers and their attendants have a choice of what media to play on their bus. About half of all buses have TV's and all have radios. I've been on bus that played techno for my half-hour ride and now I've been on a bus that plays strange cartoons everyday. Whilst watching the cartoon, which had South Park-esque craftsmanship, a riot broke out. It was clearly a football [come on guys, no one else calls it "soccer"] riot] as witnessed by their signs with... footballs. Then the riot police came. And beat the crap out of everyone. The punchline of the cartoon involved two anthropomorphic pigs, with the female one accidentally being assaulted and abused constantly and thus very angry at the male pig. And the final scene the male pig tries to talk a cop out of swinging a billy club at him and instead only infuriates the cop. The cop swings, male pig ducks, and little Mrs. Piggy goes flying through the sky like a reverse meteorite.

"I think there's a lot of collective social experiences we missed out on,'' Grant says. So what, exactly, was that collective social experience being conjured up when those billy clubs came out? Wait, I don't wanna know...

Observation #3: Chinese Time

I've spent most of my first month as Head Teacher assigning order to madness. I started by taping three 8.5x11 printed calendars on our office walls. This has now evolved into a massive effort to enter all relevant data (visa expirations, class times, vacation requests, recruiting info) into Google Calendar and Google Documents (which I can't recommend enough for people needing to share up-to-date information). I've also spent a significant amount of time trying to explain why everything happens last minute. Why one can't easily find calendars in office supply stores.

The biggest reason, in my mind, is the hierarchal structure of decision making in China. Things are strictly top down 'round these parts of the world. Boss Man tells you that you need to be somewhere in 45 minutes, you need to be there. NOW! QUICKLY! And you don't ask later why he couldn't have given you a bit more heads up. Nor do you make the friendly suggestion that he shares information with you. Information is privileged and subject to change. Even in schools, perhaps the most structured environments outside of prisons, have no idea when breaks come or when semesters begin and end. It comes from Boss Man's boss too. It goes all the way to the government. You're typically informed of a decision when it happens. When do you know when your business visa is done processing? When they tell you pick it up. That's when. Bitch.

Best Friends Forever

I don't know if it's the language or the culture, but the concept of friends is much different here than in America. I present to you, the reader, three examples. The first was last week when I was riding the bus to class. I was tired. I was grumpy. I wanted my nap to be a little longer. I'm still not used to having 8am classes. In the midst of my radiating grumpiness the lady behind me wanted to strike up conversation. I was browsing through a Chinese language book and she wanted to confirm that that's what I was studying. I agreed and went back to reading. Fifteen questions later her stop was coming up and she wanted to exchange numbers. This is very, very common. She asked, "You and me - Friends?" I reluctantly agreed and had to spent the next day ignoring her phone calls. I take Brian's line. If the only reason they're interested in you is because you're white, they're not worth much time.

Case two. I found an alternate Muslim noodle shop the other day. I love Muslim food but my local shop is relatively expensive, so I've been on the lookout for cheaper places. I found it. When I finally ate there, I spend the next twenty minutes being baraged with half-English/half-Chinese questions while I ate. My more-than-subtle body language of turning to face the wall didn't work. My new friend, who would be mistaken for a coke feign anywhere else on the planet that actually had drugs for poor people, still kept asking questions and doing weird things - like putting his hot sauce on my table despite the fact that I already had [and was using] the exact same sauce. I had the pleasure of being chased down and screamed to in a crowded alley when he saw me pass by tonight. He had his own little street-food stand selling bakery goods and I tried to buy a small cake, but had to force money into his friends hand. He really was trying to be friendly, but man... come on.

Case three. Eating a table with a stranger is common here. If a restaurant is full, you find a table with a roughly equal number of empty seats as people in your party. Thus, you and a friend can sit at another table with two strangers. I can sit at a table with another loner, like I did tonight. it began well. We shared our dishes and conversed a bit in Chinese. We even split a beer at the end of the meal. He wanted my number. It's normal, so I gave it to him. This is an aspect of Chinese culture I just don't get. We have very, very obvious communication difficulties. We barely made it out of whether we had girlfriends or wives, which part of town we liked, where we were from, and what our respective jobs were. What in the hell could we possibly talk about on the phone? I gave it anyway. I spent the rest of the night answering texts with him ascribing us to be brothers. I replied that no, we were new friends. Not brothers. I received only silence. Somewhere in the Middle Kingdom a heart broke.

* * *

I do have Chinese friends here that aren't part of the company. It took a long awhile to acquire them. We hang out the same way I hang out with friends back home. I go over for a few beers, maybe watch TV and complain about work or women or the weather. The fact that I'm a foreigner means little to them anymore, at least compared to almost everyone else. I might not call them every night [largely because the words "I really need to get home" mean nothing before 11:30 at night to them] but we enjoy each others company because our personalities mesh. They get to practice English, which they like, and I get to practice my Chinese. It's nice. They've even flipped my own sense of humor around on me. They were there for me when Hera needed to go to the hospital and I'm there for them to provide American music other than John Bolton and Michael Jackson. After all, what are friends for?

Book Review: The Rum Diary

I’m glad I finished it because I almost didn’t. It didn’t demand my attention the way other Hunter S. Thompson books have done, but on the other hand the subject matter was a bit richer than I gave it credit for while reading it. The storyline, without much deviation and outlined in the first ten pages, follows a fictional Thompson to Puerto Rico to work for a dysfunctional newspaper with a horrible crew. It’s not meant to be a humorous setup and it’s not about workplace antics or cartooned bad employees. It describes, in one way or another, almost every workplace I’ve been in. It talks about being just a suckerfish in society, “trying to find the shark with the biggest stomach and smallest mouth” and never really being anything but that. It talks about “The Fear”, the fear that back home there’s just nothing for you. The same Fear that catapults clueless Puerto Ricans to New York City and drunkard writers to San Juan.

The story is mellow and plot twists expected. You can see why it took almost 40 years to be published. But I liked it. In the end, I couldn’t help but making two comparisons. First, who was I in that story of trying to find luck in a foreign land? Though I didn’t strongly identify with any one character, I think I fit the editor/manager archetype - the only one who takes the gig seriously, one of the few actually concerned about the future of the company and willing to put the time, heart, and money into making it something bigger and better despite the odds. What I wasn’t, in any case, were the free-willing shiftless drunks personified and maybe a little glorified by Thompson and the other main characters - running from The Fear further and further, paycheck to paycheck, one mediocre workplace to another, and drink to drink. In the end, the only thing that separated Thompson from the rest of the pack was his razor-sharp wit matched with a rock star charisma and attitude that sold a lot of Rolling Stones back in the day.

The second comparison, or question, I kept running through my head was why Thompson wasn’t part of the Beat Generation – that clique of pre-hippy bohemian artsy types that dominated the counter-culture scene of the 50’s, when Thompson was in his 20’s and getting his start as a writer. The simple answer, I think, is that by that time Thompson wasn’t part of any counter-culture. He wasn’t trying to create an alternate definition of morals or aesthetics. Though disgruntled, he was mostly dealt with those sentiments alone and not part of some bigger picture of collective discontent. He was just an intelligent drunk. He was still trying to fit into American society. He was still trying to sucker up to the man, in his own words, and get his fair share. He was still trying to find his place and despite his pessimism hadn’t fully given up hope that there was room for people like him in the big picture.

Perhaps that’s why I like Thompson a bit more than the Beatnik-types. He finally managed to force his own style into the system and actually made a lasting contribution to journalism. He worked inside the system as much as he could – preferring to submit “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” to mainstream magazines and later writing for Rolling Stone – instead of writing in the ‘zines of the day, like Northern Lights out of San Francisco. In the end, he won, and I like that.

Farewell, Mr. Vonnegut

One of my fondest memories of being a first year teacher last year was when one of my seniors in study hall told he found a book on another teachers shelf called Breakfast of Champions. He read it in a few days and then told me he didn't understand it. Being just a little familiar with the works of Vonnegut I wanted to read it too. Two days later I was done with it to. We spent the next two weeks talking about it and what it meant to each of us. I've spent the past year searching Asian bookstores for more Vonnegut, after giving Cat's Cradle to a Chinese English teacher. I still base a good chunk of my theology on what I remember an old roommate sharing with me after reading a Vonnegut book. That was after I encouraged him to read Slaughterhouse Five and he began reading other books on his own.

And now the good old man is dead. I'll leave it, again, to MetaFilter to someone else to sum up my own thoughts:

Kurt Vonnegut *was* an idiot.

You'd have to be to tell the truth. Sometimes there exists a person who is unafraid to look life if in the eye and accept it for what it is. Has this world ever rewarded these people with anything but sadness and a sense of isolation?

It's the sweet little lies about this world and our lives in it that make living bearable for so many of us, you'd have to be an idiot to give up that comfort, even if you never spoke about it to another soul. You'd have to be an even bigger idiot to open your mouth and speak the truth, or in his case sing it out for all to hear, when everything history has ever taught us is that people will only despise you for it.

He wasn't a particularly happy man, his vision didn't seem to bring him comfort, he struggled with suicide his whole life, and perhaps he could have dulled that pain with some comforting illusions. But he was an idiot, and chose the harder path, and made the world an indelibly better place because he lived here, and chose to live in his manner.

... and from his own imagination, the Book of Bokonon:

The Last Rites of the Bokononism [ 99 ]
(Each line is said once by the person giving the rites and then repeated by the dying person.)

God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait...
To find out for certain what my wampeter was...
And who was in my karass...
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.

*

Global Climate Change

I had a rocket scientist once correct my Colonization of Space class in college. "It's not global warming," he said, "it's global climate change."

I believe something is happening. I believe humans are linked to it. Despite the data, I don't think we have any idea what's really fueling it or what's going to happen. In that vein, I wrote this [way too long] comment on Metafilter in a thread tying sunspot cycles and Global Warming:

I remember growing up in the 80's seeing TV commercials telling my childhood super-ego that the oceans would be dead seven years ago. Granted, they're in horrible shape, but they're not dead and I still had shrimp I didn't ask for in my fried rice for dinner tonight. I also remember a great deal of the available data saying something serious would happen in January 1, 2000. Nothing happened besides fireworks and a few DUI's. I also remember hearing about a veritable army of Cat 5 hurricanes that were supposed to bear down on my beloved Florida last summer. They never came.

Correlation is not causation and I know we have a mountain of relatively reliable data saying one thing, but it's kinda hard to turn the Gut-O-Meter off when I hear anyone say that when there were no sunspots, things cooled down. When there were a whole lot of sunspots, things started heating up. And wait... doesn't the sun have something to do with temperature? I've heard of this for years and it's stuck on a deep level.

I want to believe in Global Warming©. I really, really do. And I really think we should be cutting down on emissions no matter what... but, that said, it's really hard to turn my Gut-O-Meter off and buy into the new and improved secularized version Judgment Day.

I think inside of everyone is this eschatological voice screaming that everything will, and should, come to a screeching halt in the very near future because of our sins against each other and our planet. It's inside all of us. It fuels most religious faith. I think there's a very real chance this thanatos seeps into interpreting results. Add in group-think bias and extremely strong pressure to arrive at certain conclusions and I think we're building ourselves up for a widespread loss of faith in the scientific community at the time when we need it most.

I don't want to be a part of the same group that also chooses the simpler, and wrong, claim there's also no massive stockpile of aged and long-sense useless chemical and bio munitions buried somewhere in the Iraqi desert. It sounds easier to say there never were WMD and that's that, just like it's easier to say emissions cause GW and that's that.

In fact, I don't want to be a part of any prediction that's anything but mediocre. We're dealing with desertification, water shortages, and beach erosion now... they're all very serious, but it's not the end of the world. In fact most peoples lots in life keep getting better. There's no reason not to assume that even quite a bit worse isn't manageable.

Book Review: The New Emperors

Pete Salisbury's The New Emperors is one of the best history books I've ever read. In reads like a Bill Bryson take down of one of the most complicated subjects in contemporary history: the rise and evolution of the Chinese Communist Party through the lives of it's two paramount leaders, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. It tracks the Party's rise against the odds - even the Soviets were backing the Kuomintang - to eventually take over and completely remold Chinese society. The remolding might be one of the most brutal yet intriguing social science experiments of all time: the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. This is where the books shines.

Instead of just telling you that the peasants were melting their farm tools in backyard steel mills during the Great Leap Forward while the crops rotted, it describes through firsthand account and interviews how these things happened, what Mao was thinking, and how his lieutenants fueled it. It shows the beginnings, starting with Peng Dehuai, of the purging that would define the Cultural Revolution. Like a soap opera it sets up the characters just to watch them fall. Perhaps venturing a bit too far into speculation, but supported with Mao's own words, Salisbury claims what was really going through Mao's head were literal pipe dreams. The opiate-laced sleeping medication that the old warhorses were dependent on fueled the imaginative perceptions of what flipping an entire society on its head would bring.

The book changes direction to chronicle the less interesting but more relevant story that brought Deng Xiaoping out of small tractor repair shop where he was sent during the Cultural Revolution and into Beijing to topple the Gang of Four. Like Mao, the book starts soft on the imminently flexible and results-oriented leader and ends with the rigidity and tragedy of his latter days, culminating in the Tiananmen tragedy where the author was an observer.

This is a must read for anyone interested in the roots of today’s China. Though I didn’t think so at the time, it was worth the Beat Reader I traded it for at Friendly’s Guest House in Manila. Get it.

New Directions

I've been promising for awhile that Treyopia was going to be taking a new direction. Here it is. I'm really just not that inspired to write about daily life here. I think I've covered almost everything already. Furthermore, as an officer now in the company and not just a teacher anymore [that promotion came through], I don't feel inclined to write much about my actual work. Too many people who I work with and whom I want to recruit read this for me to be brutally honest.

Besides, I'm a politics junkie and this is stuff I love. I'm using Hong Kong as a supply base to get new books so that when I write I know what I'm talking about. Chinese politics is something I currently know little about and it's a subject that I'm sure many people want information on. As I learn, I'll share. Here's my chance to act as an on-the-ground observer immersing myself in the literature that's out there. Besides, this might help decide if this is something I want to get serious about studying.

With that said, I invite regular readers to make a decision about whether they want to stay with me or not. I'll post up older-style materials when I can, but I think from now on it's going to look more like the past week than anything else. In any case, thanks for reading. It means a lot.

Protect Thy Mote

"I heard that there's going to be a 14 percent increase in the Chinese defense budget. That's a lot... China should undertake to be transparent about what that means." - Condoleezza Rice

What it means is this: imagine the globe for a moment. Take all the oceans. Up to 12 miles from all the coastlines of the world paint the seas a light blue. In the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean allot no such space. This is where our Navy can go with impunity. Nobody can stop us. Running about 300-400 miles inland is the combat radius of the jet fighters aboard the 12 American US carriers, six of which are always at sea and all of which have about 80 combat-capable aircraft. That's the force projection capability of the United States.

With the help of regional allies, we've assigned ourselves responsible for the security of all the lighter shade of blue. We're also responsible for the security of Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, most of Western Europe, the Caribbean basin, and now we're adding a lot of Eastern Europe to the mix to. Don't forget Israel, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. We're everywhere because no one else is. We want [our] oil and commerce to move unhindered, so we've assigned ourselves police it.

In case you hadn't notice, and I'm sure you did, that darker blue abuts a lot of other peoples stuff. It causes incidents sometimes, such as when an EP-3 Orion electronic eavesdropper flying 70 miles off the coast of China had it's wing clipped accidentally by intercepting Chinese fighters.

China's economy is growing at over 10% per year, almost 70% of which is based on exports. Like every modern economy, it's extremely dependent on foreign hydrocarbons for economic expansion. Should it be a surprise then that

"By 2010, China's submarine force will be nearly double the size of the U.S. submarine feet. The entire Chinese naval fleet is projected to surpass the size of the U.S. fleet by 2015." - American Shipbuilders Association

Mix this with the idea of "offensive realism," one of the most compelling foreign policy theories I've ever read, and the future looks a little scary. As one power rises and another weakens, historically they almost always come to blows as the rising power encroaches on the weaker ones old turf. America has a lot of old turf. John Mearsheimer makes the case in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Great powers need to prove their respective strengths and the only way to do it is to actually fire shots. Furthermore, he argues, that states must constantly expand or face perennial insecurity.

In an insightful piece written by Paul Kennedy from Harvard, he waxes on Europe deconstructing it's military while every powerful nation in Asia is rapidly expanding theirs. He concludes with a question about Europe's pacifism and Asia's militarism that I think can equally be applied to the feigned ignorance fueling Condoleeza Rice's quote at the top.

This leads to an obvious, final question: What do naval strategic planners in the one continent assume about the future of the world that the planners in the second continent do not? Why is Chinese public television showing programs about the rise of Elizabeth I's navy at the same time that the British Ministry of Defense is mothballing or scrapping warships with names that go back over 400 years?

So what is it American strategic planners assume about the future of the world that they want the Chinese to admit in spite of their promise of a "peaceful rise"? Perhaps she's looking for a confession that, as the Heritage Foundation assumes, that the "peacetime expansion of China's military capabilities betrays a clear intent to challenge the United States in the Western Pacific and establish itself as the region's predominant military power."

Honestly, maybe that's not a bad thing. If indeed that is the case, and it likely is to a degree, open communication about mutual desires and fears of the future can only be a good thing.