This has nothing to do with China, but this is why I love MetaFilter. From this thread come these links:
- Visualize what it means to say you are one person in 6.5 billion.
- Evolutionary timeline.
- Scale of an atom [from proton to electron cloud - 11 miles!]
- Scales of stars and planets.
I took my final walk through the small village in Jixian (pronounced Jhee-chee-ahn) to upload photos and check mail. We all go home tommorow. How weird it is that I now call Tianjin "home."
I've made a lot of friends these two weeks and I am certain now that the Chinese are simply good people. Just good vibes all around. It's kind of a bittersweet day. It's a lifestyle I've chosen though, meeting many and leaving much of my life to transcience. Hopefully I'll stay in contact with a handful of them for awhile.
Dru was snapping photos every couple feet to remember our walk to and from the village. I had a quick though of, "I'll be back here again."
But I won't.
I remember standing on top of Montségur fives years ago with 30 other UNF students. We had just had an amazing picnic. John and I had just conquered the mountain fortress with fake plastic swords. I told Dr. Halsall I'd be back one day... it was too beautiful not to return.
"No you won't. The world is too large," was his response. There are too many other things to see in this world.
Being that this is a photoblog, I leave you now with The Great Wall of China. I'll post the story later.
Tags: Treyopia China Stories Life Jixian Students Photography
I had to draw a map of the eastern half of the United States and the name of my hometown to make my point. Above the name of Jacksonville I wrote out "Andrew Jackson" and explained that the name of my town was a French way of saying Jackson's Town. My town, indeed, had been renamed after Andrew Jackson's exploits.
Those exploits were a consistent policy of genocide. If he had been a Balkan general in the 1990's, he would have been an "ethnic cleanser." He wanted nothing less than the wholesale relocation of the native American population to somewhere more convenient. Death, to him, was even more convenient.
I illustrated on my ad hoc map that I drawn on my Chinese language book where the mountains of North Carolina were. I drew a line showing how far Jackson had pushed the Cherokee Nation. I explained the conditions under which thousands perished on this hike, and many more after the relocation. I entitled this part of map the "Trail of Tears."
I then showed another line moving from west of the Mississippi River down into Florida. This time to persue and slaughter escaped slaves and other Natives hiding in the swamps of Florida who had rebranded themselves as Seminoles. I erased the line seperating Florida from the rest of America to show how he annexed Florida in the process of trying to slaughter even more Natives.
The point of all this was showing the contradictions in the national character of both China and America. I was extremely surprised to learn that Chinese textbooks very clearly explain that the Cultural Revolution was a terrible thing. How it is taught that Chairman Mao was a very good man during the Long March, but not such a great leader once in power. This is the official history. This is what children were taught in school. Students were made to memorize the missteps leading to the creation of the People's Republic.
I told my Chinese teacher, Dorothy (most Chinese working with Americans adopt an English name), that issues like the Trail of Tears were only briefly touched upon in American History textbooks. That no citizens really speak out against having there town named after a genocidal maniac. Likely this is because so few Floridians know what the Trail of Tears was and even fewer would know that Jackson was behind it. The same freedom that allows us to remember and talk about such events is the same freedom that allows us to willfully forget or shrug off as unimportant.
America, Home of the Free, chooses to celebrate Columbus Day and forget that there used to be a people called the Arawak. People can speak of such issues, but they largely do not. It is an inconvenient truth washing away the illusions of an illustrious past. It is mud in some uphill creek version of American history that we are people on the way to Providence... that every mistake we make is OK, because it's part of a progressive trend. After all, America would have never arisen as a world power capable of doing the world good without first building itself up with slavery, right?
This isn't some rag-on-America-history essay. As I told my history students in America, every nation has horrors in its past. Almost every nation that exists today has at its roots one people who displaced another violently. What is noteworthy though are the contradictions that arise almost daily when comparing China and America. In the land with less freedom, there is more historical criticism. In the land of the free, a shiny white gloss lays dense on all but the most recent historical events. It is sad to think that it takes an "official history" to make people aware of their own heritage.
Tags: Treyopia China Stories Life Students Teaching Jixian politics Cultural Revolution
I probably won't be able to increase my tempo of one post every few days. Our schedules are very busy and it's a bit of a walk to the village. It's also very difficult making phone calls because there are no land lines at the compound.
Dad, email me and let me know if the car sold or not. I sent a letter to one of your older addresses and I'm not sure if it's still in use.
I leave you with pictures I took walking through orchard trails around the school.
Bike on the trails
One of the trails
Apples growing
A small water canal that turns into a waterfall at our compound/school
Tags: Treyopia China Photography Jixian
Three male American English teachers and one female. Thirty-five female Chinese English teachers. Four male Chinese English teachers. Mean age of 30. The mode is 24. High is 50. Low is 23. Everything in this equation leads to a chance for Dru, Brian, and I to practice the arts of cross-cultural flirting. I should point out I have not been particularly attracted to Chinese women. I've never considered myself the fashionable type, but it's precisely the clothes sold in Family Dollar are the height of fashion in this land. Cheap gimmicks stolen from a broad range of styles and all polyester. All plastic.
We spent the first week renaming the girls that caught our eye. Some were nice, some were not. L.D., The Face, Too Tall, Stripes... there were other names. The first girl I thought was cute was promptly named "Gollum" because of her height and two particularly sharp incisors. She did, however, have the first [literal] ear-to-ear smile I'd ever seen. I thought this was cute, Dru and Brian thought it was scary. I maintain my position that the sharp teeth were symmetrical, and therefore it can indeed still be cute.
After receiving particularly harsh criticism for my initial pick, I began chatting up The Face. She acquired this name because if you're sitting across from her you stare at her face... it's different from any other face you've ever seen, but you can't pinpoint why. So you keep looking, comparing it to your mental inventory of every other face you've ever seen. Nothing matches. Stare more... wait, no... no staring!
So I asked her if she would like to go visit The Wall on the next day after our excursion to the Beijing caves. Sunday was our free day, see, and on Saturday night we were celebrating the arrival of The Leaders of the Teachers who had shown up in our muddy compound in the mountains for a night of karaoke and business. It was a rather joyless karaoke session. There was no beer and it had the same awkwardness of a middle-school dance. Let me clarify about the beer situation - I was told there was a party. I was told by Brian we would likely have to drink with The Leaders until we were drunk as per Chinese social protocol. So I walked into the room, greeted with a round of applause, with 40 ounces of chilled local beer (peejio) in my hand. I was the only one with a beer in my hand.
Back to The Wall...
So Brian, Kelly, Dorothy (my Chinese teacher/translate/get-me-out-of-traveler), The Face, her roommates and I all took off after the Caves to check out The Wall. The Caves were horrible. Neon lighting, granite floors, running faucet water, and a million Chinese. It was a cheap a tourist trap as anything from my native state. The entire tour was pointing to various stalactites and squinting to see the dragons, armies, crocodiles, and other subjects of Chinese folklore that said calcium deposits represented. So anyway, back to The Wall.
We made into the village to the left of our compound and were quickly hounded by horse hustlers. We bought there game, we agreed to ride there horses to The Wall for 20 yuan per head. That's about $2.50. It was great. I got to ford a deep and dirty creep flinging around an imaginary lasso as I got splashed with the chemicalated water (it can't be that bad, villagers wash there clothes in it). Our tour guides took us to the foot of a steep mountain with a thin trail shooting towards the sky at a 60 degree angle. I was imaging falling several feet off a horse on such a mountain. The girls dismounted. Nobody really wanted to tackle this trail on horseback. So we climbed.
It was steep. Jesse, I have a new found respect for you. I could only imagining climbing at such angles all day for months on end. After about half an hour of climbing we came upon a pagoda and chilled there and admired the view. The horses and guides were waiting for us in the rocky creek basin below. We climbed more. We got to the top... and no wall.
It was a delightful ancient guard tower though. Fog was still lingering from the hard rains a few nights ago, but it had an amazing view of the valley and the villages. It was even better once we got inside. Getting in was a different story. Many of you know I have a fear of heights. Allow me to explain the stairs getting into the tower.
Step 1) take a standard iron-welded staircase platform similar to one you would see at other historic monuments to replace old wood ladders. Step 2) remove the stepping boards we are accustomed to being placed inside horizontal rectangular metal frames, [for those of you not seeing it, the part of the stairs you actually step on] Step 3) remove the first three foreword support bars, so that you have to go straight up four feet, then curve over at a 45 degree angle and climb the other ten feet.
Good, you have a Chinese ad hoc staircase!
We ate peaches on top of the guard tower and made our way down - which was stalled by a near panic attack trying to descend on the same stairwell. We took the horses back to the village and went to dinner. Dru came back later. His party had found the wall and hiked it for two hours.
Posing on top of the watch-tower
One of my coworkers, Kelly, coming down a steep staircase grabbing on to her peach as best she can
Inside the tower
View from the mountain
View from the top
View from the top
Cowboy Sino-Trey
Tags: Treyopia China Stories Life Photography Great Wall Jixian
The very dangerous road we walk to get to the village
The internet "cafe"
Entering the internet "cafe"
Inside the internet "cafe"
The gate of some sort of alcohol factory
Tags: Treyopia China Photography Jixian
Those Chinese teachers -- what a frontier you have if you can explain those enigmas to them that I'm sure they've seen in their classrooms over and over. I wonder if there are statistically as many ADD's, ADHD's, dyslexics, and particularly autistics and autistic spectrums, which have become such an epidemic in American life. I wonder who is doing the studies on that or if it's even possible to compare, given the lack of diagnosis. Kind of like how rape statistics increase once it starts getting reported. They all wonder why we have an epidemic of all of these conditions. You would think that somebody would be making comparisons to other cultures and countries.
- Jean Levis
This is the craziest internet "cafe" I've ever been too. Red drapes close off light. The front door is locked, you have to enter from the back. Right now, as I type, the young owner is staring over my shoulder. I don't think he can read English. Internet connectivity will be a bit more spaced now, but I'll make up for it by still writing every day and posting every other day or so. I promise to have more aesthetically pleasing pictures than the "this is my soup" and drinking pictures.
I received a Chinese name today, as well as a nick name. The Chinese have a very hard time saying "Trey" and so call me "Tree." I've resorted to drawing a bearded stick figure on the board and writing my name above and then a stick figure tree and labeling it. No help. Dru has starting calling me Big Tree, followed by a Native American "how" at times. "My brother," (as the Chinese like to call my darker skinned colleague) finds it funnier than I do.
I traded a man an English name for a Chinese name. I named him Thomas after Thomas Friedman because his name meant something like "big strong world." Mine name is.... [drumroll] Hao Qingrong, which means Strong Tree and also loosely means "very relaxed." I dig.
A welcoming present, a melon, from the staff. It came with the knife like that.
The view from the driveway of the place we're staying
You can kind of see the Great Wall in the distance on the mountain
A wall. Symbolic in some way.
The actual building we're sleeping and teaching.
Tags: Treyopia China Stories Life Tianjin Jixian Photography Students Teaching
[typed earlier]
I don't know quite where I am. There are mountains, some sort of stone fence with guard towers on the ridges of the mountains, there is a small road elevated from the fields around it, and there is a small village a kilometer right of us that has been temporarily renamed "Trey's Village" by my coworkers out of my insistance that there was a hypothetical village near us that must have an internet cafe for Dru and I, dark chocolate for Kelly Anne, and soap for Brian.
I don't believe the locals have caught on to the abrubt renaming. I also wish I could provide a cardinal direct, but again, I don't know where I am. It is important to note that height transcends smog until the afternoon heat brings it up into the mountaints.But for the first hours of the day it is amazingly beautiful.
We're staying in a local primary school built into the side of a mountain. There are four of us and forty of them. The "them" are the English teachers of central Tianjin's public schools. The retreat is meant to expose them to American culture and the English language for two weeks. In the mornings, we provide lectures of various topics, have lunch, break for one-on-one's with students, then have discussion groups through the afternoon till we break for one-on-one's again.
The Chinese teachers are on one hand the best and the worst students. They give near undivided attention to the teacher but only the strongest students ask questions or comment without being called on. The others quiver in terror out of They are, incidentally, completely oblivious to an action many Americans would call voting. "Raise you're hand if you want to..." draws only blank stares.
My lecture today was on American teacher education. I detailed everything I could remember Rachel and Jordan telling me about their classes and what I learned of theory from the one graduate class I took while at Greenwood. Perhaps the most interesting part of the discussion was when I covered Special Education. I described ADD, ADHD, and dyslexia. The were enthralled that there was a name for what they see in classrooms everyday - intelligent students maching to the beat of their own drum. Students being intelligent but not being able to read. Students squirming in seats even late into adolescence.
I described ritalin and took questions as to whether or not people take these pills into adulthood. I described Americas lofe affair with prescriptions and how most adults have probably taken an anti-depressent, anti-anxiety, or anti-ADD pill at some point in there life. They were amazed when I told them my fifty-something year old father strongly believed in staying medicated for ADD.
Alas, my speaking too fast is issue with some of the students. I think by the end of this I'll learn to speak in a slow North Florida drawl. Perhaps I'll try to convert every word I say into Chinese before speaking to slow down. Even half-tempo for me is too fast for the lower and of the advanced group.
Just to throw it out there, there is no telephone where I am now. That means no internet - not even dial-up. There is an internet cafe down in Trey's Village that we discovered on an ardeous voyage of discovery last night (I did tell you about Chinese drivers, right? OK, add these to that image: mountain road, night, no streetlights, five 20-somethings on the side of the road looking for an internet cafe). Curiously enough it looks much like a brothel with red sheets completely covering the inside of the store. When I peaked in they were playing some old-school Nintendo instead of selling carnal pleasures. 2 quai an hour for internet access. As I type this, I'm assuming it's going to be slow dial-up if it's 25 cents an hour.
I'll hike back soon for more posts and photos.
There is a small chance I won't be able to get online for awhile after this. I doubt it, but I'm just throwing it out there.
We leave tommorow at 6:30am for the mountains. It'll be a two week retreat with Chinese English teachers. I'm told it's very beautiful out there, hopefully I'll be able to get better pictures than I've gotten in this ugly grey polluted city. It's a nice place, don't get me wrong, it's just very polluted and not photogenic. Today, for instance, I couldn't even see the sun at 2pm. It's a constant gray blanket overhead. Really... I haven't found a single thing worth taking my real camera out for. Maybe the street vendors, but that will take some audacity. I would get some of the crumbling old buildings as per my norm, but I've already been told that's one of the few social taboo's here - to take pictures that obviously make China look undeveloped.
Tonight most of the Tianjin office went out to KTV, which is the big multi-national brand for karaoke. I must admit it was hella fun singing along with our 60 year old CEO. After a few beers I pulled off an amazing homage to Jacksonville and our music scene... "Simple Man." I scored a 98/100 [though the machine doesn't score anyone less than 90].
A quick lowdow of KTV - it was above the Carrefour supermarket and was drasticly expensive compared to everything else (well, maybe not Mexican food in China). There were two hallways leading out of the main lobby. One was weird with white walls and multi-colored frames and whatnot. It looked out of some new Jim Carrey movie. Our hallways was Alien themed, as in the movie. It was a forest with Alien's hiding everywhere. There were about ten rooms. Some were large and supported parties of older couples dancing along. Ours was a bit smaller, a lounge ringed with comfortable leather chairs with TV's aft and in the front sprouting lyrics both English and Chinese. In the center was a table with all our drinks. I must say the crowd here drinks substantially more than I do. There really are no social taboos with drinking in China so long as you're not smashed and wandering the streets making a scene.
Me singing Lynard Skynard's "Simple Man"
Me, David, and Dru
The weird Alien themed hallway our room was on
All my electronics work now!
OK, now for the promised pictures:
This is my last view of Jacksonville.
This is the northern tip of Greenland. 
This is either the North Pole or very close to it (Dad, your GPS doesn't work).
This is Siberia
This is the view from the stairwell in my apartment.
This is what I ate for breakfast this morning.
Bikes outside my apartment gate.
