Letters from China No 10

21st August 2008

Chinglish - a word meaning Chinese English which is often the bane of civic authorities and their like here. In preparation for the Beijing Olympics the city authorities tried clamping down on its use, replacing all obvious Chinglish signs with Standard English. A prime example at a market was a sign which reads in English “To sell inside the commodity space all accepting money sipe supplies examineing the price service”. The Chinese characters actually mean “All cashiers in the marketplace offer price-checking services.” As you can see, a trip to the market can mean a lot more than buying some eggs and fresh veggies.

What prompted me to raise this topic was reading an article in www.news.cn, a Chinese online news service in English. It was reporting the fact that the T8 Typhoon warning had been raised in Hong Kong with the imminent arrival of Typhoon Nuri. (Nuri means “Blue crowned parroquet” in the Malay language.) It has already killed seven people in the Philippines.

The warning system in Hong Kong is a hangover from the days of British colonial rule and barely makes sense. The warning rises from T3 to T8 with no intervening T4, T5 etc. When the T8 is issued, all government offices close, schools evacuate their children homewards, the buses stop running and, very importantly, all the ferry services, which HK depends immensely upon, are cancelled. It is also very true that Hong Kong relishes hanging on to its colonial past and still uses the names from that era for its streets and institutions. It retains its use of English Common Law and magistrates, judges and barristers all wear wigs as in the UK. So, to come to the point and to quote the www.news.cn article about the coming typhoon it said

“The arrival of the typhoon forced the cancellation of Hong Kong's most ferries connecting some of the far-fetched islands, the neighboring Macao as well as some cities. Most of the bus transport in the city was also suspended.”

Apart from the terrible English, the correct term is “the outlying islands”, but that hints a bit too much of the colonial English used a few years ago, and which is still very much in use. So, in order to avoid using this terribly colonial remnant the writer stretched his/her vocabulary and almost reached the desired “far-flung islands”, but not quite. So, however far-fetched the islands might seem to some people, they actually do exist, all 200+ of them and are happily outlying Hong Kong at this moment, albeit under the rains and winds of Typhoon Nuri.

Letters from China No 11

31st August 2008

Well, the Olympics are all but over, the Paralympics getting next to no coverage on TV. I did notice that the Hong Kongers are giving away tickets to students and others to encourage attendance at the dressage event, the only equestrian event available to disabled riders. During the “other” games the spectators were seen dozing off en masse as most of them had bought tickets just to be able to see an Olympic event, not knowing in the least what dressage was. Dancing horses indeed!

Just as the games have ended, so has our summer break and it’ll be back to our college tomorrow, just to register as being there. We don’t actually start teaching for another three weeks. Our freshmen (first-year) students will first have to complete two weeks military training as a substitute for national service, I believe. The poor sods have twelve hours of marching and parading in the heat being ordered around by army trainers. This happens in every tertiary education institution. The end result is an assembly and march-past before local dignitaries in the sports field. After that we take over and try to re-instill some sense of liberalism and freedom as we coax them to divulge their abilities in speaking English – all good fun. A new type of schedule awaits us with the possibility of having around two hundred new faces in our classes, not all at once, twenty at a time. With the recent shenanigans over visas during the games, many foreigners just gave up and went elsewhere. So, I believe that recruitment of new teachers is becoming more and more difficult. Bering in mind too that there are colleges and universities springing up all over the country. There are more people in China learning English than there are people in the rest of the world who speak it already! So that might give you an idea of what things are like. For our college to have around eighty foreign teachers, some of whom having more than five years service, is nothing short of a miracle.

So, tomorrow, it will be an early rise and a taxi ride to the Sun Yat-sen memorial park where a bus will take us to college. Sun Yat-sen is considered to be the father of modern China, not Mao Ze Dong as most people believe. A little bit of background info -

“In the West he is considered the most important figure of Chinese history in the twentieth century. As a revolutionary, he lived most of his life in disappointment. For over twenty years he struggled to bring a nationalist and democratic revolution to China and when he finally triumphed with the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912 with him as president, he had it cruelly snatched from him by the dictatorial and ambitious Yüan Shih-kai. He died in 1924, with China in ruins, torn by the anarchy and violence of competing warlords. His ideas, however, fueled the revolutionary fervor of the early twentieth century and became the basis of the Nationalist government established by Chiang Kai-shek in 1928.”

He believed that “Government should be republican and democratically elected.” Not quite the current situation here...

Letters from China No 12

7^th September 2008

I don’t know if it was broadcast or “fed” to the networks, but last night we watched the opening ceremony for the Paralympics in Beijing on TV. Not quite the spectacle of the “other” Olympics, but wonderful in its own right and a very fitting tribute to disabled people throughout the world. The initial countdown to the beginning was done by several children from different nationalities holding up a book and opening it to show the remaining seconds. The last ten seconds were counted down by fireworks which burst into the numbers themselves. I believe only the Chinese could devise fireworks like that, just as they created the Olympic circles at the other ceremony.

The stadium was full as the ceremony started with what looked like 3 or 4,000 jelly babies in different colours dancing about. They were actually meant to be cartoon representations of athletes. They were quickly followed by the athletes and their various officials.

Then the real show began with the Sunbird descending from a large sun to a visually impaired singer who sang in both Chinese and English. Several other disabled performers took centre stage as the whole show moved towards the finale of a man in a wheelchair hoisting himself and chair to the rim of the stadium and lighting the Paralympic Flame.

Perhaps attitudes here will change towards the disabled, of whom there are 83 million in both the cities and countryside. They have been, and still are, heavily discriminated against, but official attitudes are changing although not yet at grass-roots level. At least in officialdom they have stopped referring to the disabled as “canfei” roughly translated as “useless cripple” and are now using the word “canji” which means “physically disabled”. We’ll see what transpires.

Overall the ceremony was a much more human show and showed the government’s desire to encompass the disabled into society, which can only be a very good thing…..

Letters from China No 13

21^st September 2008

It’s back to class tomorrow for an extended week of teaching our new freshmen. The National Day holiday is one of the three-day holidays that the government extends to a full week by having everyone work the previous weekend. This is called a “golden week” and is usually accompanied by a shopping spree throughout China and Hong Kong. HK usually expects at least half a million visitors in a day to walk through the border, several million over the week. It’s a time to avoid Hong Kong, yet the weekend before is Halloween which the Hong Kongers celebrate in style. The first time Barbara and I visited HK together was after we had spent 13 months in Beijing and Quingdao.

Beijing had had its ups and downs, the biggest down when we were plagued by the SARS crisis. All had been well until all the schools, Universities etc were quarantined. That meant effectively that if you were on campus, you stayed there until the crisis was over. Food and drinking water were left at the gates for people to collect and no contact was allowed with “outsiders”. If you happened to be outside the campus when the gates were shut, there you remained as happened to one of our colleagues who just happened to have been visiting her boyfriend over night. He then had a house-guest for the next two months! Fortunately we were living in an apartment and not living on ant campus. When the crisis was almost over, i.e. when the death figures were becoming acceptable to the WHO and the government, our school was allowed to re-open, but we were still effectively marooned in Beijing as all other cities required us to stay in quarantine at our own expense if we arrived by train, plane bus etc. The tales we heard from our mature students of what was actually happening in the city were horrific. One instance was of a young girl who had been quarantined at her university, only to find that her entire family had died in the epidemic. Her teachers rallied round and generally adopted her and basically prevented her from killing herself. Others did kill themselves through the despair if discovering that they had been the carriers of the disease that killed the others in their family. It was something we had never thought about and discovering that literally hundred, if not thousands of people had chosen to end their lives was extremely distressing. We too were living at the edge of things with our finances extremely stretched having no income for over three months.

We caught the first of the trains out of Beijing the day after the WHO took the city off its list of dangerous places to be! We headed for the seaside at Qingdao, where just recently the Olympic sailing events were held. The school was abysmal and we were housed in the old Dutch Consulate which had been left to decay after the revolution. The only saving grace was the beach, two minutes walk away and the amazing Jimmie from Mongolia who had somehow or other become the owner of a bar/restaurant on the beach. Our evenings spent eating wood-oven pizzas and drinking Quingdao beer whilst listening to the lovely Mr. Wong playing flamenco guitar become too bizarre to contemplate, but were in reality our saviour in their distraction from out teaching schedule. It was in Quingdao that I first saw the reality of poverty in the school system, classes of sixty kids, some doubled-up at their desks. One student aged about twelve come vividly to mind. A young boy, thin and wearing a threadbare tee shirt who eagerly sat in the front row absorbing every word I said and bending his head down over his scrappy notebook screaming out in his actions how much he wanted to learn everything, anything, to better himself.

These are some of the reasons we have stayed in China for over six years now.

Well, tomorrow we will start to meet our new students, all 100 of them. We are still short-staffed, so some of the students will have Chinese teachers for their oral English for a month or so until the foreign staff come to replace them. We can’t complain having a rather short semester which includes the National Day holiday, Christmas and the first half of the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year). All in all we will work for 13 of the 20 weeks – can’t be bad........!!!!!

Letters from China No 14

5^th October, 2008

The IKEA experience…

Last week was the Chinese National holiday, celebrating 59 years of the “New China”. We were invited by the Guangdong Provincial Government to a celebration at the Shangri-la Hotel or Sangali-Ra Fandian in Chinese-speak. Our bus driver took all 40 of our brave colleagues and us around the city to the new Business District and the hotel in a seemingly endless journey arriving 45 minutes after the speeches had begun. As we walked into the Pearl River Ballroom we just had enough time to hear the last speaker thanking us all for coming and to “enjoy your dinner”. No speeches!!!! YEAHHHHHHH

The buffet was declared open and the free-for-all began. The GD Provincial Govt. did us well with endless delicious entrees and desserts to die for – the diet went out the window and a quick extra kilo was registered the morning after – salads for a day or two!!

We had planned to visit IKEA during the week’s holiday and so we set off on Thursday morning to find that half of the city had had the same idea, only difference was that we actually intended to buy something. When you visit IKEA in places like this – we used to do it in Saudi in Riyadh – the same thing happens there – you suddenly find that amongst all these “shoppers” – thousand upon thousand of them –there are really only a couple of hundred buying anything. The rest come for the air-conditioning and a chance to fall asleep in the comfy sofas and even more, the very comfy beds. Couples come in with cameras and tripods taking each others photograph in the room of their dreams, just to show their pals what they aspire to. Fortunately, IKEA closes at 10pm, so they all have to go home then. BUT, for the ones who do leave earlier there’s the Mr. Softee ice-cream stand at the door on the way out, so for all of 20 pence or 40 cents you can get a large ice-cream and extend your air-conditioned bliss for a few minutes more. Some even brave the trip around again and have the Swedish meatballs for a late lunch, all for about one pound or two dollars. It beats going to the park when it’s 35C and 100% humidity and you can also enjoy it when the latest typhoon comes roaring along flooding everywhere. So, for a few minutes, or hours, you can escape the reality of a tiny apartment with only a fan and a mosquito net. Sweden and flat-pack furniture becomes the reality.

It was the first time we had actually managed to get round and come out the other end through the finishing line of check-out girls without spending a fortune and had actually only bought the small frying pan we wanted. No scented candles, plastic trays or even flat-pack bookcases (our favourite) or the unenviable task of trying to describe how to deliver to our apartment using the English/Cantonese/Mandarin/hand signals/drawing sketches technique. The first time we had something delivered to our apartment the driver called us on his way here to inform us he was en route. Unfortunately he mistook our overjoyed response to mean that we wouldn’t be at home, so he went back to the warehouse with our goodies. We went back to the store, discovered what had happened and had them write directions specifically telling the driver to call the store and tell them he was on his way then they would call us in English telling us not to move for the next few hours as he might not in fact be coming to us first, perhaps after his other deliveries, or maybe before – just stay home!! All was well and the flat–pack bookcases were delivered safely along with the huge sofa, the office chair, two desks, three computer cabinets etc. etc. etc. etc. I just hope you all go through the same crises as we do with IKEA, at least you’ll understand what I’m getting at. After that particular delivery, Barbara and I decided to show our unending appreciation of the men staying until ten at night building our furniture by giving them a good tip. Barbara dug into her purse and pulled out two hundred Yuan (30 dollars) and stuffed it in the men’s jackets as they point-blank refused to accept it. BUT, they eventually got in their truck happy bunnies. I commented to Barbara that she had just given them about one man’s full weeks wages for doing two hours assembly – no wonder they refused at first, but were grinning all over as they sped off.

We do our bit for the economy here……..

Letters from China No 15

1st November 2008

Things are now getting back to normal, whatever that is, as the legacy of the Olympic Games disappears over the horizon. The X-ray machines at the subway stations have been slid away, out of use, but not forgotten, so, that’s one hassle less. There seems to have been absolutely no change to the country as a result of the hullabaloo, but, perhaps Beijing is now heaving with tourists and entrepreneurs as was intended. We see no evidence of it all here, only the news that even more workers are being laid off and factories closed as a result of the global economic crisis. Guangdong Province, where we live is called the World’s Factory as most of the manufacturing for the export markets happens here, but for the last year or so, increasing rents and wages have sent many of the factory owners further inland seeking cheaper premises and workers, not that the salaries of the workers are high in any way at all – usually about US $ 5-6 a day. What makes the Chinese goods so cheap is not only the low wages, but the fact that all the workers live in dormitory conditions with communal eating in school-type restaurants, their food not being of the highest quality and neither their living conditions. Most of them will be migrants working far from home, hundreds, if not a thousand or so miles away from their families. The only time they have to see their wives/husbands/children is at the coming Spring Festival or Chinese New Year as we westerners call it. Traditionally, several hundred million people will take to the trains and long-distance buses travelling for up to a week to have a few days respite, only to repeat the journey back to the misery of their jobs. Most will be sending their wages back home, saving for their children’s college education.

We see the end result in our classrooms.

This year some of our students are from very far-flung places like Mongolia and Heilongjiang in the northeast of the country. (Heilongjiang means literally “Black Dragon River” – place names here fascinate me – our usual route out of Guangzhou is along Dong Feng Lu or, in English, East Wind Street – visions of easterly Typhoon winds driving you along come to mind.)

We have decided to return to full-time campus living and giving up our city apartment. The college have very kindly offered us our old villa by our “Lake”, so it will be a bit like returning home again. Cat-sitters are becoming more difficult to find and carting her and us back and forwards every week-end is a bit of a drag. Back to the snakes and frogs and rural China living! The movers will be here next weekend, so another stage of our living here comes to an end.

BUT, the house is bigger, so we’ll start accumulating even more Chinese bits and pieces……… HELP!!!!!!!

Letters from China No 16

21st November 2008

Well, here we are settled back on campus. We left our apartment amidst a flurry of packers and movers loading our worldly goods into two (??? where did we get all this stuff) trucks and headed back to the countryside and some peace and quiet. Living in another Chinese city had been fun, the proximity of western delicatessens and the Concert Hall had been wonderful, but the noises of city life began too become tedious, especially after we walked around our married teacher’s compound and heard the deafening silence! Quite won over convenience and here we are unpacking yet again, looking occasionally at the lake which is now at full capacity, lapping our doorstep, so to speak. Now we can watch pied wagtails sparring and wren-like mini birds twittering about whilst the frogs have yet to come into force and the snakes are nowhere to be seen (yet). The cat is baying at the door every morning yearning to go hunting in the banana plantation and the nearby thickets. After she has had her anti flea treatment and some more cat shots she will be free to wander and sun lounge at will.

Last weekend I braved the buses and trains and made the one-day trip to Hong Kong to get our choice of seats for the Hong Kong Ballet’s performance of Giselle at the end of this month, Barbara’s Christmas treat. She has waited 50 years for it to be performed within her locale and here it is suddenly there and available. Hong Kong will hold it’s 37^th Arts Festival in the February and March 2009. No doubt we’ll be regular visitors as the opening concert is by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the closing with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin – can’t miss those icons of classical music. So next year is looking very good from that point of view.

The comparison between mainland China and it’s neighbour, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, is a bit along the lines of Black and White with no shades of grey in between. Friends back in the UK had thought that after the hand-over in 1997, Hong Kong would be absorbed by the greater China, but Hong Kong is still a vibrant international city with it’s own laws and government, albeit with some direction from Beijing. It suits Beijing very much to still have HK as their window to the outside world. China is catching up very quickly, but it will take many years before the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra plays with the skill and panache of the Berlin. They play wonderful, note-perfect music, but there’s something lacking – no freedom of expression in any way shape or form When a foreign orchestra plays locally, they have standing ovations lasting, embarrassingly, thirty minutes or so. It’s obvious to the audience what the difference is.

Enough of music, tonight we’re having a Thanksgiving dinner for our American colleagues, so, I’m off to make my contribution – mashed potatoes for twelve…….