Polar mosquitos and the return of Elvis

Yes, it's getting to be full-on winter here in Sichuan, which means that Elvis has again returned. Elvis, the zippered fleece pullover, that is. When we arrived, our apartment's closets were filled full of the legacy leavings of at least eight years' worth of foreign English teachers that have worked here in the past. One of my most cherished finds is a semi-ratty black and gray fleece, dotted with little pills on the fabric, but so warm and comfy that it's rapidly becoming my official second skin from late October until March sometime. Oh, and the label reads "The King - ELVIS Presley" (see photos above and below). What more do you need? A big thank you to Kevin or Sarah or Matt or Heather or Owen for leaving it behind.



If you've been reading the blog for over a year or so*, you may remember that it gets fairly cold here - mostly because "indoor heating" is really "indoor boosting of the outdoor temperature by about 5°F or so". Previous entries here and here, for those interested in the full scoop on this. (Or if you want to see a cold and grumpy Jane wearing cute Eeyore slippers.)

This year's cold doesn't seem as bad to me, probably because it's only the very tail end of November. Actually, the fact that almost every single indoor space in America is kept to a uniform 68 to 72 degrees year round kinda boggles my mind about now. What's bugging me now are the mosquitoes. (Oh, whoops, unintentional lame pun. Oh well...)

It's down to the low forties every night both indoors and out, and there are still one or two of the critters buzzing around within an inch or two of my ear every time I'm at the computer, or if one of us forgets to zip up the mosquito net over the bed. The cold doesn't seem to slow them down at all - if anything, it makes them more annoying. Maybe because they can detect body heat much more easily in the cold? Or maybe it's because they've got to keep those tiny little parkas on all the time as well, and they're just as miffed about it as we are.

*You've been reading the blog for over a year or so? Seriously? And you're, like, employed, and everything? Wow, wonders never cease...

Getting Education Rolling

In the "Links I'm posting only to remind myself to check them out more when I have the time" category comes Redu, a constructive, positive site that not only talks education reform, but has a lot of good stories on what people are actually doing to make a difference in the system.

A whole lotta pink

Another picture from the Lotus wholesale market in Chengdu. And yes, pink is a girly girl color over here in China as well.

Incidentally, did you know that in the late 1800s in the US, pink was used for boys and light powder blue was considered a girls' color? As a shade of red, pink had the meaning of energetic, healthy, and powerful - as in the phrase "in the pink" - and therefore masculine. Meanwhile, blue was considered to be a more docile, relaxed, and melancholic, with more feminine overtones.

The original meanings, if my memory serves, faded around the turn of the century, and our current system of pink for girls and blue for boys started to catch on in the twenties and thirties. Anyway, that's what I remember from an incredibly interesting article that I read once and am too lazy to look up at the moment... (Would somebody care to Google it for me and get back to me with the results?)

All our links must go!

Here at the Slow Boat warehouse, we've got all sorts of links just sitting around the warehouse that I've meant to piece together into long, well-written posts that will take your breath away with my hard-earned knowledge and deep and lasting wisdom. And you know what? It ain't gonna happen. No way no how.

So, in the spirit of the Season, I'll posting them all online with very little comment in no particular order. Like a special holiday clearance / advent calendar / annoying Secret Santa kind of thing.

Anyway, to get you started, some cool pictures of China. Enjoy!

Body scans, freedom, risk, and innocence

I've been following the latest tempest-in-a-teapot body scanning controversy from afar, and, while I've got my own opinions about our poor ability to evaluate risk and the current state of fearmongering in the States, this post offers the clearest (and most chilling) take on the issue that I've seen so far:

Things we do to innocent people to prevent terrorism

Turkey revisited

Even though I haven't seen anything resembling a turkey since I've come to China (well, okay, chickens do resemble turkeys, so I take that back), I've recently fallen in love with 火鸡 - their name in Chinese. Say it with me: "huo ji." Literally translated, it means "fire chicken", so I've now got all sorts of pictures in my mind of turkeys running around with fire helmets and capes on, or jumping motorcycles through flaming hoops a la Evel Knievel.

Also been thinking a lot about vegetarianism a lot, especially since Jane's been discussing it in her three environmentalism classes that she's been teaching. So I thought that this post was worth sharing - about a guy in the Los Angeles area who raises and (very infrequently) slaughters his own poultry. The authors warn that the content is "not for everyone", but, no, I think it is for everyone. Something to get a good post-Thanksgiving discussion started, anyway... I've got more thoughts on the issue, but will leave it at that for now.

A last note - Homegrown Evolution is a great site on urban homesteading, gardening, and simpler living in general. Check it out!

Slaughtering Turkeys for Thanksgiving
Homegrown Evolution homepage

Hello, everyone...

Oh, yeah, Happy Thanksgiving!

As I'm wrapping up on lesson planning this last Thursday morning of November before heading to teach four hours of classes this afternoon, I'm reminded that back where I came from, it's a holiday of some kind or another. Oh, yeah, Thanksgiving!

As you may have gleaned from a post or two back there somewhere, we had our (turkey-less) turkey day a couple of weekends ago, hosting 27 people from our organization at our campus for an early American and late Canadian Thanksgiving. We had a couple of awesome breakfasts featuring pancakes and homemade granola, a load of interesting books and magazines hauled over from the States by our fearless leader, a game or five of Chinese chess, a field trip into Chengdu, and, most importantly, some great fellowship with our fellow teachers and friends. I can tell how busy we were before and how much fun we had during by the relative lack of photos that we have of the event. Below, a small sampling:


Shelly and Jane, showing their amazement at real (okay, artificial, but still...) maple syrup.


Bob the coffee warrior, going at the beans with a rolling pin because our newly acquired hand-powered second hand coffee grinder turned out to be a bit of a let-down.


Ysa hitting it off with Emily, who, along with Bob, is one of the new teachers that's joined our group this year.


Some distinguished folks in our apartment at breakfast time.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Wayne and Jerry. And cakes.

Okay, all quiz for all you artsy types. Which painter am I reminded of every time I pass this store just outside of the side gate of our university?



Did you say Wayne Thiebaud? Yeah, I know, that one was too easy. At least if you've ever seen his paintings, that is.

Wayne Thiebaud, Cakes, 1963

If you’ve never heard of Thiebaud, or don't know much more about him other than his signature cake paintings, now’s your chance to click this link and get right on it. Go ahead, I’ll wait...

Okay, done? Nice paintings, right? A little bit candy coated, perhaps, but nice. You may have seen them hanging in the modern section of your local neighborhood art museum, right next to the big black square painting that your mom couldn’t figure out. If you went to A Serious Art School, one of your professors might have dismissed him as “one of those decorative California painters”, and you may have had a twinge of guilt for liking something that was, well, pretty.

Now on the other hand, Jerry Rudquist, my first painting professor in college, really liked Thiebaud’s paintings. I mean, really really liked them, as in “let’s put up a slide of one of his paintings in a dark room and talk about it in a monotone for forty-five minutes running” liked them.

Given that, students of his had two choices - either:

• fall into a deep slumber dreaming of cake, or
• develop a taste for the nasty acid sludge from the coffee maker by the art department office, prop open your eyelids, learn how to look at a painting for a long long time, and discover things about paint, color, composition and space that you never ever knew before. Oh, and develop a deep and lasting appreciation for cakes, especially those that are artfully arranged.

So every time I run into a group of cakes, I think of Rudquist and Thiebaud. Or more properly, Jerry (who slipped away from “Professor Rudquist” into first name status sometime in my Junior year), and Wayne (since I believe that nothing puts you on a first name basis with somebody you’ve never met in person quite like looking their paintings for hours on end).
Wayne, the master of composition and sneaky bits of color. Wayne, the guy who can snake a horizon line right up to the corner of a painting and get away with it, still in California, still painting at age 90.

Jerry, who introduced me to Wayne, and Piet and Jan and Paul and many other painters that I’ve stared at so long that they’re past first name basis and now simply part of my mind. Jerry who introduced me to complimentary color and rhythmic composition. Jerry, who passed away in 2001, and was one of the first people to introduce me to the habit of looking deeply at things.

A photo that turned out much better than I thought it would

From the vast region of wholesale markets near the North Train Station in Chengdu.

Have you had your yak encounter today?

Did you know Jane milked a yak last summer? From the videos I've been uploading, a short video clip that she took then as a peaceful start to your morning (or afternoon or evening, depending)

Black and White

All the pretty little oranges

A week and some ago, we hosted 27 fellow teachers from our organization at our campus for a joint American / Canadian Thanksgiving. As part of the festivities, Jane went out on Friday afternoon and purchased around eight different kinds of the fifteen or so varieties of oranges and tangerines that are available at our local fruit vendors this time of year for an orange tasting at our apartment last Friday evening. She also took photographs of many of the varieties, which I'm posting below for your viewing pleasure.

Sports Day, China style

Some photos and video from an assembly at Xander's school last month. The theme was a sports competition, with each class performing their group exercises in front of the whole school. Having worked in primary / middle schools for a while, and been on the classroom management end of these types of assemblies for many more times than I care to have been, there was a lot that was familiar, and a lot that wasn't.



Familiar: Squirming kids, teachers on the lookout for trouble, announcements from the principal, parents watching their kids perform through the tiny monitor on their video cameras, tinny music with feedback from the PA system.



Unfamiliar: Whoa, that's my kid sitting there! And it's all outside, and oh, yeah, all in Chinese...

And um, weren't our school assemblies a bit less, oh.. paramilitary? I mean, we had the Pledge of Allegiance and all, but really. This is one of those times where I will have to respectfully agree to disagree with the educational system of my host country, I suppose.

A further word on the mass exercises may be in order. From Ysa's three year old class on up to the sixth grade at least, as far as I can tell, a significant part of gym class is devoted to teaching the kids some kind of dance routine to music. The routines remind me in turn of line dancing, Super Bowl halftime cheer leading routines, and North Korean mass propaganda rallies. (You know, the kind where thousands of people in the stands hold up cards to make a picture of Our Beloved Leader? Yeah, that kind.) There are some similarities to activities in American schools - Boy Scouts and high school marching band comes to mind - but this is mass activity on a higher scale.

It makes me think about some of the staples of the gym classes that I had growing up, dodge ball in particular. Or, more accurately, "bombardment", as my extremely paramilitary Boy Scout troop in Hutchinson, Kansas preferred to call it. Dodge ball, as played in the Midwest in the late seventies and early eighties anyway, was less about dodging and more about sheer Darwinian carnivorousness. Last man standing wins, and all that. (And for those of you familiar with my, ahem, uh, shall we say, "geekiness" during my Junior High Years, let me just note for the record that I usually did pretty well during dodge ball, chiefly because I stayed along the edges and took strategic cheap shots while the jocks were busy pounding away at each other in the middle.)

It's tempting to use the two gym class activities as a metaphor for the two countries - a sort of junior high contest where Communist-era faceless conformity goes head to head with good ol' American rugged bloodthirsty individualism. But of course, it's not that simple. You don't have to look much further than the the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders to see that faceless conformity is still a big part of American culture today.

And as for Darwinian competition, the Chinese academic system, from what I've seen of it, is much more competitive than its American counterpart. There are many cultural explanations for this, starting first with the obvious fact that China has a heck of a lot more students, and going on from there. Much less sugarcoating, and many more tests, going on up to the big one at the end of high school that determines where (and if) you can go to university.

Having said all that, I've been happy with the experience my kids have been getting in the Chinese schools so far. All of their teachers, from what I've seen, have been quite caring and nurturing to their students, in spite of (what seems to this American teacher, anyway) huge class sizes and a relative lack of classroom resources.

I don't think I would want my children to go all the way through the Chinese educational system from start to finish, however. Then again, I'm not sure about having them go through the American system from start to finish either. Just a few preachy reminders (mostly to myself) to sum up:

• There's a lot of learning that happens outside of (and in spite of) the school system wherever you go, and
• If you can choose educational options for your kids, count yourself extremely fortunate and privileged. There are many people on both sides of the ocean that can't.
  

Makin' it on your own

I’d like to share a not-too-terribly deep revelation that I just had. In this world of ours, you can essentially do two things*: buy stuff or make stuff. (Or buy stuff to make stuff, or make stuff to buy stuff. Is that four things? No, I think that’s still just two.)

Even though China has been trending more and more to the “buy stuff” end of the scale, one would have to say that, in general, it’s still closer to the “making stuff” end of the scale than the United States. (Look at the labels on your stuff, all you Americans out there reading this...)



From the “buying stuff to make stuff” category comes these examples of Chinese kids’ papercraft books. Papercraft, in case you didn’t know, is the craft of punching out patterns from stiff cardstock to fold and glue three dimensional objects. In the days before it was decreed all children should be entertained by Things on Screens, it was quite common in the States, and is now making a bit of a comeback in the certain sectors of the internet, and a few cool parts of the art world as well.

I don’t know the history of papercraft here in China, but it’s certainly alive and well now. Go to any bookstore or news stand, and you’ll find several books that will help the young artist fold their own missile-heavy futuristic vehicles. Or dollhouse furniture. With, aside from fold and cut animals like our friend the zebra above, not too much in between. (Did I mention that heavily gendered toys are common here as well? My favorite was the build-it-yourself hand gernade that Zekey put together last spring. I told him it was a radio...)



(*Yeah, yeah, I guess you can destroy stuff as well, so that makes three things. But that’s probably the subject of another post...)

A little light evening reading

Xander, Zekey, and their friend Yang Dong Qi perusing the comic books at an outdoor book stall at our local night market a couple of weeks back.

Ordinary Stuff - Subtitles Everywhere

One country + (multiple language families) x (countless dialects of each language) ÷ one set of characters used by nearly everyone = subtitles on nearly every television program so that people can understand what’s going on. Unless you don’t read Chinese very well. Sigh.

(Above, a music video in the Yi minority language with two sets of subtitles - Yi and simplified Mandarin)

Under Construction

Yes, the Slow Boat was, um, in dry dock for a bit, as we were without a reliable internet connection for the “next day or two” (which, of course, turned into five). Seems that our university replaced its internal campus-wide network with one that is newer, cheaper, outsourced, and, oh yeah, didn’t really work for more than two minutes at a time. Wow, five whole days without the internet? How did we survive, huh? And now the internet, which was running fine when I started this post, is cutting out. Then back in again. Who knows - we may end up being off line for a whole week or more!

Being off of the internet, even for such a brief amount of time, reminded of when I was an exchange student for a year in Germany, back in 1984 / the Bronze Age (take your pick), when my contact with the States was mostly via airmail, supplemented by a monthly phone call that cost my parents, I don't know - two head of cattle and five swine per minute, I think. My mom would go to the post office and add Bloom County comics cut from the newspaper (!) to each letter until it topped off the scale at the regular airmail rate. And yes, I biked thirty minutes to school in the rain, uphill one way at least. (And if you don't know what Bloom County comics are, what are you doing reading this blog, anyway?) Anyone still undecided on if the world has changed much or not? Yep, it's changed, all right.

So, back to the present. One coping strategy of mine during the "crisis" was to edit a few sets of photos, and write a couple of blog entries on the ol’ laptop. So you can expect a flood of information soon.

Or in the next few days.

Really.

off-line

Hey, folks - We're experiencing definitely unwanted technical difficulties with Internet access.  How to survive?  Well, we're instead bouncing around our friends' houses, teaching, studying, eating, remembering it's actually winter even though it's just turned into coat weather here - y'know, all that other good stuff.  But we want to be back on-line, and trust us, you'll know once Dave is back on.  :)

Ordinary Stuff - Washing Machines

This one in particular spotted in the courtyard of a 600 year old monastery on Mt. Emei.

Remembering how to see

I was incredibly happy to notice the other day that James Elkins, one of my favorite professors from grad school, has started writing a blog for the Huffington Post. His first couple of posts are great, and have got me thinking again about looking, thinking, and paying attention to the world around you.

If you have ever, for example, walked by a Mondrian in an art museum and said, "Okay, what's the big deal with that one?"



...then this post should be required reading. And how long does it take to look at a painting, anyway?

An added bonus for me when reading his essays is that, because he's a professor at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, all of the paintings that he's describing are ones that I've also spent a great deal of time with. It's like finding a newspaper article that happens to mention several old friends of yours that you haven't seen in a year or two. Quite nice to catch up, though it does make me a bit homesick for a couple of rooms full of big, juicy, well-made paintings about now...

Orninary Stuff - Big Ol' Scary-Lookin' Kitchen Cleavers

All you foodies out there might as well forget about your $350 set of imported titanium Tridents right now, because every kitchen in China has a set of Big Ol' Scary-Lookin' Kitchen Cleavers, (or, as they like to call them, "knives") that can match anything Williams and Sonoma can come up with chop for chop.

Knives in China are as they should be - easily sharpened, handy, well-balanced, and cheap. I haven't ever asked anybody their opinion on people plunking down $175 on a kitchen knife, but I suspect that they'd be very confused. Even better are the cutting boards - usually big, heavy blocks of hardwood that don't look like they'll crack until the next Ice Age. (If you walk into a restaurant kitchen, they go even one better, chopping everything on a 9-inch slice of a tree trunk.)

Of course, as any good cook knows, it's not the tool that counts, but the person using it. And because Chinese food consists primarily of slices, strips, chunks, and cubes of things, it follows that many more people here are good at cutting. Here's a video of a friend of ours in action:

Excuse me, have you seen our kids?

Ah, what a difference a year makes! It's hard to remember exactly, but a year ago at this time, as the weather was getting colder, the kids were either complaining to us that they were bored or cycling through the same five or six bootlleg Pixar movies on DVD in a state of zombielike rapture. We prioritized and sorted multiple Christmas requests to the grandparents. More construction sets! Good workbooks! Chapter books in English! And multiple trips (organized by Jane) into Chengdu to get our kids playing and socializing with other expat kids so they wouldn't drive each other crazy here at home.

Fast forward to the present.
"Umm, Jane, do you know where Zekey is?"
"Isn't he over at Yang DongQi's?"
"No, I called, and they said they haven't seen him since this afternoon."
"Maybe with - who's the kid at the end of the block...?"

You get the idea. Our boys are now bona fide social butterflies, with Ysa trailing only because she's three, and we don't let her go out on her own yet. Most every day after school, they're over at friends' houses, out building forts out of spare paving blocks and rubble (see photo), playing in traffic, and so on. All of the things that Jane and I did when we were allowed to run wild in the suburban fringes of the seventies, in other words, except safer, because everyone (and I mean everyone) knows Who They Are and Where They Live.

Which leaves me feeling happy, spoiled, and just a teeny bit bewildered, especially when back in the States, you can apparently get threatened by police if you let your eight year old play in the park by himself. Happy because, duh, my kids are happy. Spoiled, and a bit guilty, because up to this point, other parents are doing the lion's share of the hosting, even if we try to offer otherwise. (Being nervous about letting your kid play with someone who doesn't speak much Chinese, I suspect, along with a big dose of wanting to have your kid play with the Americans - the privilege of the foreigner, I suppose. Sigh.)

Bewildered, because, yes, because we seem to be typical immigrants. Our children are becoming much more immersed in the culture than we are, simply because they: a) are better than us at soaking up the language, b) are a heck of a lot cuter than I am, c) are, I suspect, watching lots of Chinese kids' TV, and d) don't have to teach English all day for a living. Do I sound jealous about now?

So they come home from school singing songs that we can't understand, with photocopied notes to the parents that we can barely decipher. (Did they want us to send a grocery bag with Ysa to school tomorrow, or should we take her grocery shopping over the weekend...?) Best, though, are the hysterical giggling fits that I can only catch the general gist of - if I understand anything at all, that is.

So yes, we're in a foreign country, and our children are interacting with this country in ways that are new, exciting, wonderful, and to us, unimaginable.

Guess that about sums up parenting in a nutshell, doesn't it?

Ordinary Stuff - Boiled Eggs for Breakfast

Anywhere there's a crowded bus stop popular with morning commuters in China, chances are that there's a small shop selling breakfast snacks pretty close by. Popular options include steamed bread (filled or not), dumplings, rice porridge, or maybe some noodles. The shop wouldn't be complete, however, without a big pot of eggs boiling in tea on top of a charcoal-fired oil drum stove. Many is the time that a couple of eggs that we've purchased right before the bus ride into town have held off a hunger-induced temper tantrum. (...and if you think I'm only talking about our kids here, then you obviously haven't been on a bus in China...)

Instant teleportation

Xander and I just discovered Mapcrunch, a web site that "teleports" you to a random location on Google's Street View program. Really warms the heart of the map geek in me, though it is now limited to the (mostly Western and industrialized) countries where Street View is in place. As Xander said, "Wow, all of these places look so clean!"

Ordinary Stuff - Wedding Photography

In this case, a couple of models drumming up business in downtown Chengdu, spotted a month or two ago when the weather was still warm-ish.

Expo expose

I don't know how much coverage this year's Shanghai Expo got in the States (very little, I suspect), but here, it was all over the place, with another wave of big triumphant news stories in the Chinese media last week as the event shut down.

In that context, it was quite interesting to read this story, written by an American student who was a volunteer at the Expo's US pavilion this summer. For those of you (all of you?) who haven't been keeping up with the event, the US pavilion drew fire for being a bit of a let-down. I didn't see it myself, but it was seen as a fancy decorated shed, where the audience was invited to wait in line for an hour or two before watching three short movies.

The article paints an interesting picture of life behind the scenes at the event. A pavilion hijacked by corporate interests! Mistreatment of volunteers! Forced styrofoam catering! And, well, you'll have to read the rest yourself.

Is it just me, or is there a parable in the making here?

Off to work on a grey morning

A view from the top of the sixth teaching building, where I teach my classes. Mondays and Tuesdays, the classes start at eight, which seems fairly early now, as the sun doesn't start coming up until a bit after seven. Since it's 6:55 now, I'll let the picture do the rest of the talking for today.

Easy Reader

Yep, Ysa caught on video reading her first book in Chinese! (Oh, except that the book she is reading is Sheila Rae, the Brave, by Kevin Henkes, and half of the Chinese she's speaking is actually random syllables. But still, ya gotta admit that it is pretty gosh darn cute...)

Halloween with the Foreigners

This year, we got a last-minute invite to go into Chengdu for a bit of trick-or-treating with the Chengdu expat community. After a morning pounding out some homemade costumes, we got onto the high-speed train into town, then took the subway (!!) to the south side of town. (Yes, Chengdu now has a working Metro! Details to follow...)

After meeting friends at a restaurant, where we suited up the kids and had some mighty tasty buckwheat noodles, we headed over to a housing complex that's home to a number of foreigners. We followed a mapped-out route, zigzagging from apartment to apartment, with the boys excitedly dashing on ahead and Ysa getting sleepier and sleepier on my shoulders.

By the time we reached the party at the Marine house at the end of the route, Ysa was sound asleep, so I laid her down on a convenient sofa, and we stayed up till ten or so talking to friends, with the boys happily watching Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin for the first time on a wide-screen TV upstairs. The house was enormous, at least for Chinese standards, and it took me a bit to realize that "the Marine house" was home to, not the Marine family, but the actual U.S. Marines that work at the American Consulate in town. It was a fun time, and I was able to take most of the reverse culture shock (Capri Sun in foil pouches!) in stride.

More details of the kids' costumes:


In true Wells/Zawadowski fashion, Zekey wanted to be a map, and Ysa wanted to be a house. Okay, a very sleepy house.