More Complicated Than You Thought--Leslie T. Chang on China's Factory Workers

Chang's TED talk came around well after the publication of her fascinating and eye-opening book, Factory Girls (See my January 2011 post: My China Road: Town & Country ). In the TED talk, she reprises the major points of her argument which is not that conditions are better than we in the west might think, but that factory work serves a more complex social and economic purpose than we may realize. The workers are not a faceless, suffering mass, but rather individuals, whose lives and aspirations are "complicated, surprising, and funny," says Chang.  For most, the jobs are a tool for upward mobility.  Be sure to read the details about the two profiled workers. Here is the link to Chang's September 2012 TED talk:
http://on.ted.com/LTChang

Penetrating the Great Wall of Chinese Language--TED Talk

Or, more specifically, Chinese characters.  I have attempted to use this mnemonic technique in my own studies and have hardly gotten beyond recognizing "woman" and "house."  These IS a method here but I have not hit upon the right way for my own learning style.  Perhaps ShaoLan Hsueh's method will help me move ahead.

http://www.ted.com/talks/shaolan_learn_to_read_chinese_with_ease.html

Faculty Seminar 2011 Pace University Confucius Institute

Pace graduate student, Yan Zhang, made this video giving an account of the Faculty Seminar (2011) at Pace University's Confucius Institute, our trip to China that summer, and our thoughts upon return.  Hen hao!!

Special thanks to Dr. Yanyu Zhou, our language instructor at Pace (Xie xie, laoshi Zhou!), and Dr. Jianning (Jenny) Ding, our language instructor at Nanjing Normal University (Xie xie, laoshi Ding!).

 Faculty Seminar 2011 Pace University Confucius Institute

Current scene in Chinese pro basketball: follow-up to my August '12 post on Jim Yardley's Brave Dragons

Chinese Basketball (CBA) | Chinese Language Blog


I will have to support the Brave Dragons of Shanxi. They became my heroes after reading Yardley's book.

I've read that Wayne Wang will be directing a film based on the book with a script by Jonathan Prince. The choice of Wang makes me think that the story won't just be played for laughs, which would be a relief.

Peter May's Chinese Whispers

Chinese Whispers by Peter May

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Inadvertently, I'm doing this series in random chronological order. I read one other novel and I thought I'd give the series another chance, hoping it would get better, but it really doesn't. I criticized the portrayal of Margaret in the first novel I read (The Killing Room) in the series because she was a b***h on wheels and I couldn't figure out how she and Li had ever gotten together. Well, in this one, she whines constantly. Sorry, but it does not entertain me listening to women indulging in self-pity because they have children and have to slight their careers. C'mon. We've got an app for that and have had it since the 1960s. Anyway, this "Beijing Ripper" case was pretty interesting but when the solution finally comes it's quite mundane. Do I want to continue back in time to read the earlier book(s) in the series? Oh, I suppose I will, but I will probably be finished with this series at that point, unless I find out that Li has ditched Margaret and turned his attention elsewhere. Overall, I find this series run-of-the-mill except for its Chinese locale.

Qiu Xiaolong's series is far better with more complex characterizations, more complex political situations and insights, and much more layered cases. And poetry. If you like that in detective fiction!



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Peter May's The Killing Room

The Killing Room by Peter May

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I plan to read more in the series, because I've started with one of the later books, but I am not impressed. The environment (geographical, cultural, political, social) in which the investigation takes place is a draw, but I find Margaret Campbell to be a totally unpleasant character, one about whom I don't care at all. I should go back and read an earlier book in the series so I can figure out what ever made her attractive to Li. I sure don't get it at this point. I think Mei-Ling is a much more attractive character and hope she appears elsewhere in later books.



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On "Brave Dragons: A Chinese Basketball Team, An American Coach, and Two Cultures Clashing"

I discovered this book in reading an article in the NY Times Magazine ("Away Game," Feb. 5, 2012). That article profiled one American player and his experiences in playing basketball and entering into a new culture in China. It's not simply about NBA players in China, but rather about China and basketball and professional sports in general. It looks at basketball and American players transplanted to China and creates a fascinating picture of part of Chinese culture that I've never read about anywhere else. I'm not even interested in the NBA but the article by Yardley was excellent and piqued my interest in the book mentioned in passing.

Yardley has chosen a very clever way to examine modern China. What he does is pick a subject that most Americans will be somewhat familiar with, the NBA. Then he transplants the subject to China by following an American retired NBA coach who has been hired to coach a privately-owned team in one of the lesser-known (from the Western perspective) Chinese cities (Taiyuan in Shanxi province). We might think, well, the NBA is the NBA no matter where it lives and basketball is basketball. But Yardley quite brilliantly tells us a story that illuminates the culture and aspirations, and to some degree the history, of modern China by placing the known quantity of the NBA into an environment that is, in fact, very foreign and not particularly hospitable to American expectations about sports.

The Miami Heat need to make money by selling tickets and signing deals. Do the Brave Dragons have to make money in these ways? No, because Boss Wang is very, very rich. American NBA players roam around at will, throw their money around and make the headlines in ways good and bad. What about the Dragons' players? They live in a Spartan dorm outside the city center where they are virtual prisoners. But, what if an owner spends a lot of money to hire a new coach because he wants his team to get better, be "American" and play American-style ball? Well, you would then assume that he'd hire the best and give him leave to mold the team (except perhaps if he attended the George Steinbrenner School of Sports Management) using American methods (a wide range of kinds of fitness training suited to individual needs, forging relationships with individual players based on knowledge of their personalities and what works best with each, etc.). Old habits die hard, though, for men of Boss Wang's generation.

The story is frustrating and funny and informative in what it shows us about Chinese sports culture and its growing pains, though there is no doubt whatsoever of Yardley's sympathies with his subjects, particularly the young men who play professional basketball and want to be better players than they are. If you are looking for a book that makes fun of the Chinese, this isn't it. We get a lot of context so that we understand, for instance, why Boss Wang thinks that screaming at his players and telling them what pathetic, lazy failures they are will motivate them to improve.

If you ever thought that sports was a universal language, this book will make you re-think that assumption. You don't even have to like or understand basketball to enjoy this book.

Right now I am watching women's Olympic basketball streaming live from London. The USA and China are playing. Knowing what the experience for male basketball athletes is like in China makes me look at these Chinese women with a great deal of curiosity. That's a book yet to be written.

"Midnight in Peking" review

Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I put this book in my "Global detective fiction" shelf, though let me say right away that it is not fiction. I enjoyed every minute of this book and it ended all too soon.

The time is 1937 and the place is the area in and around the Foreign Legation quarters in old Peking. Politics all over the world are in turmoil with events leading to WWII taking place in Europe, and in China the brutal Japanese are invading and the already feeble nationalist government is on the ropes.

A nearly-19 year old Englishwoman, Pamela Werner, is killed, her body mutilated and dumped at the base of the Fox Tower just outside the Legation. The details of the joint Chinese and English investigation, its constraints and its flaws is fascinating in and of itself. When the investigation is unable to point to a culprit, Pamela's father spends the rest of his years in Peking doing the investigation that the police should have done. But his findings fall on deaf ears. Are the British afraid to lose face? Is that why the British powers ignore the findings and call their representative on the team home to Tientsin? Was the original investigation, which seemed fairly competent for the time and place, in fact, undercut by restraints and subterfuge on the Chinese side? Peking soon falls to the Japanese...is it just that everyone has more important things to think about than a dead girl who was a bit of a handful while she was alive and perhaps no better than she should have been?

Historian Paul French has reconstructed the entire case, from the events leading up to the fatal night, to the actions and investigations of all of the parties involved. He quite literally found by fortunate accident a folder of records stored in the British archives that traced the case, including ETC Werner's many letters filled with his additional investigations and pleading for more action on the case. From these records and his other investigations, French puts together a quite believable chain of events and points the finger at one man in particular. This case was unsolved from 1937 to 2011 and quite forgotten, but it is now resolved and there can be little doubt that French's version is valid.

Ok, THAT is the story. It's well-told and reads like an exciting murder mystery. For me, the bonus was the very detailed portrait of Peking during this period and the foreign presence in China's coastal cities such as Shanghai and Tientsin. I can't say enough about the lively realistic (and unsavory) picture that emerges of the Legation area of Peking. I spent half the time I was supposedly reading the book looking for maps online so I could follow the action. It turns out that many of the places and streets that feature prominently in the story are still there (remarkable, considering the construction in Beijing over the last few decades).

If you are interested in that aspect of the story, start with the Wikipedia entry on "Beijing Legation Quarter" and follow links to maps. There is also this Paul French link: http://us.midnightinpeking.com/pdf/a-...

Breaking news, Midnight in Peking Walking Tour! http://www.cnngo.com/shanghai/play/ha...

When can I go???!

I could go on and on because I found this book utterly fascinating. The murder mystery was only one part of its appeal, for this reader.



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My Review of James Fallows' Postcards from Tomorrow Square

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of articles and learned so much I hardly know where to start describing the book. This is a series of articles written by Fallows and published in The Atlantic Monthly December '06-November '08. The subjects range from China's self-made manufacturing billionaires, to how Macau became the gambling Mecca of the East, to what's really going on with Internet access in China.  Every essay offers fascinating information that I have not come across elsewhere. Here are a few sort of random comments about what made an impression on me.

From "After the Earthquake," about the horrendous May 12, 2008, earthquake in Sichuan province that killed more than 100,000 people and left millions homeless and injured, Fallows reports the comments of a local elder regarding an earlier catastrophe: "Yao Minggao...said that the easiest way to tell city people from country people was by what they thought was the major disaster in modern Chinese history. If they said the Cultural Revolution, it meant they were from the city and viewed losing their careers and being sent to the farms as the ultimate hardship.  If they said the Great Famine [starting in 1958], it meant they were country people who had seen many of their neighbors starve" (237). Fallows also comments that the date "5/12" when it appears in China carries the same punch and shocked recognition as "9/11" in the US.

I think the article I enjoyed most was "The Connection Has Been Reset" about the Internet in China, focusing on the period of the Beijing Olympics.  More than anything else I've read, this article made me feel that I finally had at least a tentative grasp of both the philosophy behind the attempted control of the Internet by the Chinese government and the attitude of the average Internet-savvy Chinese toward this control. First, much is accomplished by the government by simply making it inconvenient to bypass the "Great Firewall."  It can be done, sure, but most people aren't interested in working that hard to get their information. Second, there's this, quoted from a technical analysis conducted by two US universities: "'The presence of censorship, even if easy to evade, promotes self-censorship'" (183).  In other words, while evading the GFW may require technical skills that many Chinese have, most people don't bother because of "nontechnical factors."

The only downside I felt in reading this series of articles, and this is not a criticism, was that developments in China and between China and the rest of the world are moving so quickly that even articles from 2007 or 2008 felt out of date.  So much has happened since then.  But if you want to see the view from January '08 of China's involvement in the world's financial meltdown and, especially, in the debt of the US, you should start with "The $1.4 Trillion Question" (144-68).

Meanwhile Back in Suzhou

Ok, where was I...? Oh, yes, Xian to Suzhou, which happened before we went to Nanjing, but I was so eager to tell you what happened late one night in Nanjing that I...oh, never mind.

So, we drove back to the Xian airport past those noir-ish, sparsely-lit sidewalks where the ladies had been walking and talking to people in cars but now it was daylight, so that wasn't happening. We did not have any incidents at the airport unless you count the rather frenzied search for wine after we determined that, yes, you can bring your own liquor on an internal flight in China. Whoop!  That out of the way, we flew to Shanghai.  Then, Janet, our new guide, met us at the airport and we boarded a van and took off into the Shanghai night, drove for hours, and ended up in Suzhou. We almost lost our dean ("Nira, we hardly knew ye!") under a pile of shifting luggage on this ride because the van was just a titch too small for us and our luggage was way too close and unfettered.  Luggage becomes a theme in the trip at this point.

And, you may be thinking, but they are flying home from Shanghai, so why are they going to Shanghai and they still have six days on their trip? Why are they leaving Shanghai? I thought that's where they wanted to be? What are they doing in Suzhou? Well, the following day was to be the Dragon Boat Festival, a national holiday, so...oh, don't ask. It's complicated.  The important thing about the following day is that it rained 猫 and 狗 all day. Too bad for the Dragon Boat Festival and too darn bad for us too, because Suzhou seemed like a lovely city, smaller than the others we visited, and it is renowned for its gardens, of which we managed to see precisely one. It is also renowned as the "Venice of China," because it's a city of canals and we took a ride through some of the charming canals. That was fun but damp. We got to look through the doors of people's houses if they faced the canal.  Very interesting. Quite a few people have cats, I observed. We also got to see the backs of people's houses if the front faced the street; it wasn't good to consider what probably comes out of the back of those houses and into the canals.  Many of the houses, we were told, do not have indoor plumbing.  Despite the drizzle and rain, though, we did have some pretty stimulating experiences.

We visited the Humble Administrator Garden.  There were a LOT of people and their umbrellas there but it's a lovely garden filled with soothing sounds and with meandering paths, bridges, moving water, fish, beautiful flowering plants and trees (enhanced by rain), and some small, lovely buildings. It's a shame that the day was just not conducive to outdoor activities.

Our next activity, in fact, was indoors and it was fascinating.  I understand that the point of the activity was to get us to buy stuff at the end of the tour (I cooperated), but still it was very, very interesting and certainly something you won't see anywhere in the US.  We went to the Suzhou Number 1 Silk Factory. We saw everything, and I mean it, everything, in our tour. We watched silkworms munching their mulberry leaves, we saw silkworm poop a-plenty, and I made a friend for life.  Joe Ryan pleased me by taking a picture of the worm who seemed so fascinated by me. This worm never took his eyes off me the whole time I was standing by the tray. He was standing up looking at me, yes.  I like to think that the products I purchased later were little gifts from him to me. I wish I could post the picture (Google? Are you listening?). We saw cocoons in all different stages and we saw, up close, every part of the process of teasing out and pulling the individual thread of which each cocoon is constructed (except if there are twins!), and of moving those threads through the process by which they eventually become scarves and lots of other products, such as comforters and pillow covers.  Don't take silk for granted.  Think of this as a process that requires real people to work with yucky stuff and have their hands in boiling water all day.  Yes, individuals do this and we looked over their shoulders.  It is very specialized work and I hope that Bag Balm is handed out to everyone at the end of the day. So the whole thing was enjoyable and instructive and, finally, quite costly. But I accept responsibility for that. Oops!

In the afternoon, we took another bullet train, this one from Suzhou to Nanjing.  I could tell you about the problem with our luggage, which just could not have been anticipated, but all's well that ends well.  Our luggage, which we could never have gotten onto the train, went ahead of us to Nanjing and that was a perfect, though a fraught and, for Pace, costly, solution.

The REAL Highlight of My Nanjing Experience

We spent four full days in Nanjing and, for me, being there was the best part of my China experience.  We stayed long enough to meet and interact multiple times with some very nice people and we did very little tourist stuff; we had classroom time learning more Chinese language and some practical knowledge and experiences (translation:  "we shopped") and we had a series of interesting lectures from professors at the Nanjing Normal University.  I will have more to say about the days we spent in Nanjing, but I have to get the peak experience out there to the world first.  I am so eager to tell this story that I am skipping the day spent in Suzhou, but--not to worry--I will go back to that.

It wasn't a particularly interesting day (Wednesday, June 8) till we went on a trip to the other campus of Nanjing Normal.  It is far from the original, old campus (the school is older than Pace, by the way), and seemingly way out of town, but the way things work around here, it's probably still in town, just doesn't seem like it. So this campus was built about ten years ago and it is very spread out with all shiny, modern buildings.  Very impressive.  We met up there with some of the same people we seem to see everywhere and a few new ones.  First, we had a meeting, quite formal and structured (I've lost count of how many of these we have sat through). Then we were driven to the library, which has a cafe downstairs, so we (now a subset, i.e., just the visitors and a couple of our entourage members, including my personal favorite and new friend, Mr. Wu). Then we were driven to another building and had another big banquet with all the same people from our previous meeting. I got to sit by Mr. Wu again and he and I talked about literature, teaching and summer vacations.He is going fishing, just so you know.

We had numerous dishes, including a surprise birthday cake for Deborah, and a soup with some very strange stuff in it (the one thing I thought I could identify looked like a chicken gizzard)(I only tasted the broth, yuck), and--the bonus round--what turned out to be fried chicken "paws," as Adelia delicately called them. I didn't know what they were, so crunched through one and ate it, then crunched another and spit it out (Mr. Wu was away toasting someone at that moment, fortunately). Tried another and spit it out too. I thought perhaps the first one was an aberration, but it turns out they were all like that. On purpose.

Then the party was over and two of our Pace people (I am protecting your identities) decided to go for a foot massage at some place back downtown that an incredibly gorgeous PPMG staff person recommended and I was invited to go with them. You are surprised I said ok, right? Obviously this is a trip where I have stepped way outside my comfort zone! And, to be honest, I have not regretted that even one time.  Even with the chicken paws and the donkey.

Well, I can't begin to tell you what a weird experience this was. The PPMG rep (we had all met Isabelle at Pace before) took us to the hotel (not one we were staying at) and made the arrangements. Then she left and we fumbled through the rest of it with people who spoke not one word of English. And it's not like we've learned a helpful vocabulary for, say, foot and head massages, which is what we all had. We were all required to take showers first, and the charge for the showers was greater than the charge for the additional services, so we see how they turn some profit.  None of us knew the proper, shall we say, protocol for dressing and undressing in a Chinese spa, so we just got on with it however we could.  I, for one thing, ended up with both my towel and my abandoned clothing getting wet from my shower.  Oh, and we had lockers to deal with, but only a staff person had the key, so I can't begin to tell you the embarrassing number of  times I had to call her back, since I was pretty disorganized.  I don't exactly have my own routine for Mandarin Massage established. 

We finished our showers at all different times so had to be led individually through multiple turns down hallways lit for perpetual twilight.  It was eerie  because there were so many doorways off the hallways but I could get no sense of whether there were people behind all the doors, or even some of them. Was I being kidnapped? Had we been separated and assigned to different interrogators?

The foot massage was very pleasant.  Once we were situated in our room that had several BIG comfy chairs in it, these young women dressed like 15-year-old private-school girls came in and took our feet in hand(s). After they determined that we did not want to watch tv, they got to work, but soon set up an incessant chatter. That part was not relaxing but since we couldn't understand a single word, it was sort of like Muzak.

When they were finished, the head massage woman came in and was shocked to find three heads, rather than the one she had been informed needed massaging. She was peeved about this, I would surmise.  I went last so had time to examine her performance by using my peripheral vision. Anticipation had plenty of time to build.

So, turns out the head massage is done by this woman who sits behind you in the big massage chair.  She wears a long, split skirt and she hikes it up and "mounts" (so to speak) behind you.  Let's just say that by the time this was over, I figured that she and I were--at the very least--going steady, if not planning the size of the family we want to have together. I was, literally, in a sweat and she was too, because at one point she paused in the massage and heaved a big, hot sigh. We were making a lot of sweat between us.  Man oh man. I opened my eyes at the end (closing them was part of my unsuccessful relaxation attempt) and--uh oh!--my friends were gone and it was just this head-massager with me in this dark room.  And I wasn't sure at this point that I had given her the kind of encouragement that would signal that we had bonded in a special way. And I had forgotten to drop breadcrumbs in the hallway so I could find my way back.  She led me out the door of our twilit room into the twilit hallway around the many corners and did deliver me safely. She did not ask me for my phone number or email address so we could touch base later or plan whose family to visit over the holidays.

We had a good laugh about all of this in the cab.  A very good laugh. A very, very good laugh. Anyway, the foot massage was relaxing, but the head massage was...strange. I wasn't quite relaxed enough for it, let's say!

And then there was the part where we tried to stiff the cab driver for his fare, but just don't check the Nanjing police blotter for that evening and you will not risk destroying the high reputation I have attained with you.

PS: If you had a bad day today, will it make you feel better if I tell you I somehow managed to pee on both pants legs in a squat toilet before dinner this evening? 

People and Pandas

Got this from Andrew Revkin's tweet:

"China moves from human census--1.33 billion--to panda census--1596--at last count."

http://tumblr.com/x7037woxfs

We came so close to those mountains outside of Xian!

Traditional Chinese Music on the Guzheng

The performer is Liu Fang, a native of China who now lives in Montreal.  She is a world-renowned performer on this instrument and other ancient ("gu") Chinese stringed instruments. There are many YouTube videos, some sounding more like western classical music on the harp.  This performance, though, is traditional music like what we heard in Xian. This tune is "Seagulls Playing in the Water." It is an excerpt from a longer work.

From Beijing to Xian

[Conjure for yourself here a picture of confusion and consternation at Beijing Airport as various passport data-entry errors are discovered.  Picture dread and consternation as our flight is late in departing.][International incident narrowly averted.][Endless ride in darkness from the new, soaring Xian airport to Xian city accompanied by our guide, Mr. Harry Wu.  From the window of the bus we see coal plants belching smoke into darkness.  We pass through mysterious intersections where cars are stopped curbside and numerous ladies are observed strolling the sidewalks. There seems to be quite a lot of activity in what feels like the middle of nowhere. Much of it feels like an industrial area but occasionally we pass by groups of children playing under streetlights. A Dantesque landscape?  Or was I just tired and hungry?]

Xian is a large city now, but at its core is the old, walled town that was a major stop on the Silk Road.  In Xian we observed much greater ethnic and racial diversity than in Beijing, because there is a sizable Muslim population, the result of movement west to east along the Silk Road hundreds of years ago. Xian has much to recommend it, but here the trip began to feel a little like a Long Walk, with stops for feeding, whether we were hungry or not.  The weather began to be much hotter too.

Our first morning in Xian we took a long bus ride toward the mountains (there are pandas up there somewhere, but they were not on our agenda), eating lunch in a restaurant with a very local feel to it, and finally arriving at the location of the famous Terra Cotta Warriors. Peter Hessler in Oracle Bones offers an interesting description of the accidental discovery of this very significant 3rd-c BCE archeological find and the history of its excavation.  1974! Imagine! This vast repository of individualized, life-size (and larger) terra cotta figures, including horses, and chariots--truly an army--was discovered by a farmer that year. I can't help thinking of Shelley's poem "Ozymandias" here as the mundane activities of the humble farmer and the intended glorious afterlife of the first emperor of China come together in a field.

To this point, China hadn't seemed so crowded to me, but on this particular hot, dusty day, part of a holiday weekend in China, thousands of people had shown up to see the army of Qin Shi Huang. It started out feeling like Disneyworld (crowds! lines! trams!) without the fun rides and Mickey. The warriors that have been excavated are in three different areas and, fortunately for us, they are now covered by protective buildings. Getting through the entries to each building was a test of our individual aggression and physical strength.The crowds inside the buildings meant that it was hard to get up to a railing to see the dig and this raised the level of paranoia among some of the shorter members of our group who feared being trampled, crushed, lost or all three, but the sight of the warriors is breathtaking and thought-provoking and I think that at some point each of us experienced a moment of, simply, awe. The trip was long, the day was really hot and the crowds were daunting, but my advice is...just don't go on a holiday weekend. Duh.

Xian has many other attractions, though we only took in a few.  We had a pleasant morning stroll along the top of the city wall, where many people enjoy riding bikes, and an evening of dinner and entertainment at the Shaanxi Grand Opera House.  Dumplings are the specialty of the Shaanxi area, and we had a wonderful dinner that evening featuring too many dumpling varieties to count as well as delightful music from traditional Chinese instruments and dancing.  The experience was a little dinner-theatre-ish but the performances were consistently interesting and I came away with the feeling that I had gotten at least a little flavor of the cultural traditions of the T'ang dynasty.  I discovered I really enjoy the music of the seven-stringed qin (guqin) and the zheng or guzheng.

One of the best things about Xian is the Shaanxi Provincial Museum.  Don't let the word "provincial" fool you into thinking this is some kind of dusty little set of shelves with a drowsy docent at the front desk.  This is a large and beautiful museum with artifacts of the four dynastic periods carefully displayed in a way that avoids overwhelming visitors and allows each object to be admired.  This is a very fine museum that is well-organized and contains many quite spectacular items including a kneeling archer from the Terra Cotta Army.  Finally, a chance to get close to one without others' heads in the way.

About this time, the group staged a mini-strike and opted out of some of the visits to ancient monuments, though quite a few people ended up taking non-forced strolls to the Bell and Drum Towers.  The proximity to Starbucks may have had something to do with this.

Chinese detective fiction

Tomorrow's the big day--our group is departing Newark Liberty Airport at 12:05 pm.  Beijing, here we come...after a 13.5 hour flight. I can watch at least six movies in that time or I can use my time more wisely by doing some reading and working on some ideas I have for my time in China. And I think Dr. Poe is going to make me do some brainstorming about our fall class, though my tendency (Kids, don't try this at home!) is to do that in, say, late August.  Dr. Poe...now...don't make me change my seat.

Since classes finished a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been able to devote more time to considering precisely what area of contemporary Chinese writing fits my interests and overlaps with my academic preparation.  One of the subjects I teach at Pace is American Detective Fiction, but for about three years I have been contemplating putting together a course that would explore detective fiction in the rest of the world, including, of course, East Asia.  I have been able to do only a small amount of research (all online, alas) in the time I have had to devote to this subject about which I am nearly completely ignorant, but it does seem like a worthwhile area of inquiry and one in which not much work has been done yet. Not to mention that it will give me even more reasons to read crime fiction, as if I needed any more. I looked through several years' worth of Clues, the journal of detective fiction, and found no articles at all about Chinese fiction and only one about Japanese. I have come across references to some printed works that will provide some information and I have found bits and pieces online (such as this from a Dartmouth professor, G.J. Demko: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~gjdemko/china.htm). 

I contacted Dr. Eva Shan Chou, of Baruch College (CUNY), who spoke to our faculty seminar a couple of months ago about twentieth-century Chinese literature. She suggested a book that looks like a perfect introduction to the subject of Chinese "crime fiction."  Through the good graces of Xiaohong Hu I have a copy of this book (Chinese Justice, the Fiction: Law and Literature in Modern China by Jeffrey C. Kinkley) in my hot hands and plan to read it on the plane. It's a library book, so please God don't let my hands wander near a highlighter. In China, we're going to be meeting with a lot of academics at several universities and I hope to be able to meet at least one professor in China who knows something about the field. I also hope he or she speaks English, because I think I failed my Mandarin final.

I understand that little contemporary crime fiction has been translated into English. In fact, my only direct knowledge of the subject comes from writers such as Qiu Xiaolong and Diane Wei Liang, "overseas Chinese" who are writing in English.  I also understand that the “private eye” holds a tenuous place in contemporary China.  However, detective fiction as a genre also encompasses fiction that describes the work of police officers or the investigation of crimes by others out of professional interest or mere curiosity.  The detective figure does not have to be a private investigator.

Two little words

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/world/asia/08food.html

"Protein bars"

China's Gradual Revolution

In my recent post on the question "Is China Ready for Democracy?" apparently I left the impression that I was touting American-style democracy for China. That's the result of a lack of explicitness on my part. I wrote that people will continue to want greater "freedom and a greater voice in the disposition of their lives" and I predicted that they (in China and elsewhere) would continue to press for "democracy or at least a less oppressive state system."

I did not intend to suggest that American-style democracy is what Chinese people should work toward as an ideal. Hell, look how perverted American-style democracy has become in our own country. Look how we can't wait to throw it away and replace it with reality tv and voting for products rather than people. Would I recommend this to the Chinese?

But, China's circumstances and history are very different from those that enabled democracy in the US. China and other countries that are currently struggling with their own systems will come to greater freedom in their own ways, in ways that are possible in their own circumstances. I'm into "I want it now" like other impatient Americans, but I know we must expect that the process in many places will be very gradual (on this, let me recommend Guobin Yang's March 14 NYT op-ed piece http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/opinion/14Yang.html) and that there will be setbacks.

The Internet is both a blessing and curse but, now, let a thousand wi-fi access points bloom every day!

"Is China Ready for Democracy?"

In my literature capstone class last night, we were discussing Athol Fugard’s play, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, which is set in the apartheid era in South Africa. Toward the end of the class (and this is one of the best groups of students I have ever worked with), we were tying this play back to our earlier readings.


All of those readings, starting with Sophocles’ Antigone, feature characters who are forced to make choices between two untenable positions. In the case of Sizwe Bansi, he is forced to choose between retaining his name, which conveys everything about his identity--his tribal affiliation, his connection to his wife, his children, his whole family, his place of origin—and taking on the identity of a dead man, a man who has the right stamps in his internal identity papers. If he takes on the dead man’s name, Robert Zwelinzima, he will—because of the stamps in the dead man’s document—be able to seek work, seek a residence and he will be able to send money home to support his family. In class we talked about codes of ethics that refer to (what we may think of as) timeless and enduring values and we talked about situational ethics.


What is the “right” thing for Sizwe Bansi to do? Should he give up his identity in order to support his family, essentially denying who he is and divorcing himself from his wife and the four children he has fathered? Or should he say “No More!” and take a stand against the oppressive situation he’s in, one that forces him and every other non-white person in South Africa to twist their lives and beings around the restrictions enforced through unjust laws?


All of the works we have read so far feature characters who are put in excruciating ethical situations and must make hard, hard choices. Antigone, Fugard’s The Island, and Chris Cleaves’ Little Bee all ask the question: What should one do when the choice is between one’s responsibilities to other human beings and saving oneself? Should you stand up to oppression and risk your own life? Does the situation change if you have others, like a wife and children, who depend on you?


I say all of this as a preamble to touching upon an article that Nick Kristof wrote in the Times on February 26: “Unfit for Democracy?” In this article Kristof makes the point that to those in the West and also in the East who speak variations of “Oh, the [Arabs][Chinese][Egyptians] aren’t ready for democracy,” we see now every day that people in these and other countries do see change and greater freedom as values worth dying for. These are people who have families, who have jobs, who have aspirations to long and happy lives and—every day—these people are imprisoned, killed, tortured.


Kristof notes that the chaos of change often brings periods of oppression, oppression in a new form, but that people go on wanting freedom and a greater voice in the disposition of their lives and the future of their countries, even knowing that this is often true. He quotes Lu Xun to this effect: “Before the revolution, we were slaves, and now we are the slaves of the former slaves,” Lu Xun said, about the fall of the Qing regime.


Without having a chance at change, the people of Egypt, China, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere will never know whether democracy or at least a less oppressive state system will ever work in their countries. I am struck by the connection between this notion and the front-page article in Tuesday’s Times (March 1, 2011), “Well-Oiled Security Apparatus in China Stifles Calls for Change.” This article introduced me to a word and concept we have not yet added to our Mandarin vocabulary in class, “weiwen,” or “stability maintenance.”

The next few years, or maybe even the next few months, will give us in the West some indications of whether the crackdowns and “stability maintaining” actions we are seeing in places such as China and Libya will create stronger and more violent discontent or will—only for awhile—“stifle calls for change.”

Consider another quote from Lu Xun, this one from his story, “My Old Home”: “…hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made” (from Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, 64).

Dissent Magazine - Online Features - A Visit to a Confucian Academy -

Dissent Magazine - Online Features - A Visit to a Confucian Academy -

Bell follows his profile of Jiang Qing in China's New Confucianism with this surprising series of observations upon visiting Jiang at his Confucian Academy. The Catholic Church as a model of meritocratic leadership?

Guangzhou, China Wins Sustainable Transport Prize

Guangzhou, China Wins Sustainable Transport Prize

I think of the "Factory Girls" taking advantage of this well-designed and smoothly-functioning system.