La vie quotidienne

I was reminded the other evening, while talking to another teacher here, that one of the joys in China is the pleasure of sitting around and simply watching things happen.  Here, for your viewing pleasure, a couple more videos of life on the basketball court next to the primary school on a Sunday afternoon, circa late September / early October.

Part the first:  In which Z tools around randomly on his bike, Y follows two girls that come by with a kitten in a small box, a random passerby talks on her cell phone, and a clump of children then run off to points unknown...



Part the second:  In which Z and friend play a Pokemon-type game with small circular trading cards, Y experiments with a plastic fake guitar, and someone in the background says ”对“ ("dui" = right, okay) repeatedly so fast that it almost sounds like machine gun fire.


Part the third:  In which Y shreds on the toy guitar, Z loses a round of rock/paper/scissors, and a toddler and her mom take their leave. 

Where children sleep

Pictures of children and the places they sleep, from all over the world.  The images do most of the talking, right?  Worth clicking to the source article to see more from this series. 

A small place in a large place, and the other way around

Last summer, I took a four day trip to nearby Guang'An, to report on a few projects that my organization is helping with.  One of the people that we visited lived in a fairly isolated area.  As in, "Well, the main road is under construction, so instead taking you on a 45 minute motorcycle ride to the ferry across the reservoir and then hiking up another half hour from there, we're going to drive another hour to the back side of the mountain and hike for just over an hour to get there instead" kind of isolated.  But not that I was complaining - coming up through the woods and cresting the ridge of the mountain, this is the view that I got:



Right around the bend was this building, which turned out to be a small temple, build and maintained by the farmers in the area.




Here is a small hint of what it looked like inside, minus a feeling of dust, dim light, and the feeling that something was still happening that had been going on for a very very long time indeed.





I'm not going to pretend like I know very much about what was going on inside, or even if the temple was Buddhist, Taoist, a combination of the two, or something predating both.  I'm even reluctant to post the photos, but am doing so because, um, why?  The word 'continuity' comes to mind...

Back in the swing of things

Image:  National Day holiday travelers in the North Train Station plaza, Chengdu

A quick Sunday update to all, as the students stream back from almost a week off of classes from the National Day break.  Jane and Xander are still in the States, return date still not fixed, but now estimated to be late October or early November.  Ysa, Zekey, and I had a pleasant, if relatively non-eventful week off, mostly at home, with visits to our friends the Gaos and their farm, and several other gatherings with classmates and neighbors. 

The October weather, aside from a couple of gloriously clear days caused by factory shutdowns and the general lack of car emissions over the National Day Holiday, has been its typical lead sky overcast, with just a hint of nippiness in the air.  I'm realizing more and more just how solar powered I am, and I'm getting good at figuring out my mood lately.  Annoyed at the kids?  Weather related.  Not feeling like doing much? Weather related. General blahs?  Weather related. 

The good news?  Anything weather related usually disappears soon after diagnosis.  Or a strong green tea caffeine fix, whichever comes first.  And spicy food.  Oh, and as a further preventative, I've taken to burning incense, and lighting lots of candles at night to compensate for deficiencies in the red end of the spectrum outdoors.

Waitaminnit...  Green tea?  Spicy food?  Incense and candles?  Lots of red?  Hmmm, sounds familiar, but just can't place it....



Oh, yeah, right.  So culture is influenced by environmental factors!  Whattya know?  (Jane, don't be surprised if our apartment resembles a Taoist temple by the time you get back...)

Once we start seeing each other, we just can't stop

Higher Ground | Playing For Change from Playing For Change on Vimeo.


One encouraging thing about the world as it stands is that it seems that many people around the world are making connections with each other that are more horizontal and global, if that makes any sense.  Is shared interest taking precedence over narrow self interest after all?  Are we starting to use the internet to create a global culture?  I'd like to think so (he says with fingers crossed...) 

And at least we're getting some really cool music out of the deal in the meantime.  (Is it just me, or is this the Best Stevie Wonder Song Ever...?)

For the first time in TWO WHOLE YEARS!!

I had a couple of robo-posts on the blog last week while I was in Chicago, but this is the first time that I've posted on this blog from the United States in two years. Correction - this is the first time I've posted from the States in TWO WHOLE YEARS!! (That extra exclamation point at the end makes all the difference, don't you think?)

To start out, then, a partial list of things that I've done in the last week or so, for the first time in TWO WHOLE YEARS!!

I've:
- driven a car (several, in fact, thanks to the generosity of friends)
- eaten homemade cherry pie ala mode, salad with Ranch dressing, and Costa Rican veggie burrito with awesome grilled mushrooms
- gotten onto Facebook without having to connect to a VPN
- paid more for a bagel sandwich than it usually costs to take our whole family out to dinner back in China
- and, most importantly, been able to reconnect with many friends that I haven't seen in (all together, now!) TWO WHOLE YEARS!!

As I think I mentioned, we're here for my son's surgery, (now underway!), and one of the reasons I can write this while waiting instead of pacing up and down the waiting room like a caged ferret is the support that we've been getting from everyone. Thanks, all! Great to be back.


The first time I've seen Mt. Ranier from an airplane window in TWO WHOLE YEARS!! (okay, the first time ever, but that doesn't sound as good)

Two Years Ago - the signs remain the same

2009:



2011:



2009:



2011:

Equal Opportunity Surrealism

Just so you don't think that the Chinese have the market cornered on the surreal signage here, a sign found in a Western Bar advertising televised ...rugby matches? ...Aussie rules football? ...animal cage fights? Well, something Down Under-ish, anyway.



Someone help me out here - does a bulldog really have a fighting chance against a dragon? And is the shark vs. rooster matchup on land or in the ocean? (If it's on land, I'll give 3-2 odds on the rooster, provided it can run fast enough.) And what is a Rabbitoh, anyway?

(Full disclosure: I come from a region where people proudly cheer on Hoosiers, so I really don't have much ground to stand on here...)

History Lesson

What does my home state of Illinois have in common with the Eiffel Tower, the world's first steam engine, and what looks to be a scanned portrait of Henry the Navigator? They're all on the cover of a notebook I saw for sale in our local stationery store, of course. (Sorry about the blurry picture - I know I should've bought the thing...)

Books of Note

A while back, I posted pictures of a few of my Chinese notebooks here, along with the inspirational quotes that grace their covers. A week later, the entry start getting tons and tons of hits from Notebookstories.com, a web site devoted entirely to, you guessed it, notebooks, and people who collect, save, and fill them. Who knew? (Though, given the nature of the internet, not entirely surprising.)

Being as I'm into sketchbooks, notebooks, journaling, cool graphic design, and found poetry, (intentional and otherwise), I've got a few photos of notebooks lying around the archives myself. Sooo - here's wishing everyone a happy Asian notebook week! Or month. Or couple of days. Whatever. Hey, they're notebooks, okay..?

First up: some cool books that I picked up in Thailand, featuring vintage ads on the front and excerpts from old textbooks on the back:







As always, click on the image to enlarge. Enjoy!

All's Fair

Every March 16th, our local "village" of 红光（Hongguang, pop. ca. 280,000) celebrates the anniversary of a visit by Chairman Mao, who stopped by this area (then called Hexing) in 1958 to visit a few collective farms and to talk with the locals. He suggested a few changes, told the provincial government to set up a university in the area, and the rest is history. After the visit, the residents of our town changed the name to mean "Red light" - Honguang in Chinese.

The celebration took the form of an immensely long county fair / shopping bazaar, which stretched along ten blocks of a side street not far from the University. Of course, we were there, and Jane and I found ourselves continually asking each other for the camera, because there were all sorts of picture-worthy sights (and sites). Here are a few of the better ones... (as always, click on the photo to enlarge)

Oh, and speaking of Endangered Species...

I always used to like to look at bugs under glass. You know, the little shadow boxes that you can see at the State Fair with the way cool iridescent beetles that are as big as your fist? (Okay, they were at the Wisconsin State Fair about ten years ago, anyway...)

Then I ran into this booth in the Chatuchak Market in Bangkok...



The booth was about twenty by twenty feet, and was piled floor to ceiling with bugs in plastic. Framed bugs, encased bugs, mounted bugs, you name it. And underneath the display shelves, more and more stacks of boxes. Full of bugs.





Now, I'm no expert in the beetle keychain industry, but I've got to wonder - how sustainable is this, exactly...? And for what purpose? (Besides still looking cool in a creepy kind of State Fair science geek Raiders of the Lost Ark kind of way, that is.) And what will the archaeologists think a couple of thousand years from now? Ah, the dilemmas of our modern rain forest-straight-to-WalMart existence...

Fortunately, there will always be pictures of lenticular puppies once the beetles go extinct:

How much food will a dollar buy?

Ten organic blueberries, apparently. Or a McDonald's cheeseburger. From a project by Jonathan Blaustein, who has simply photographed a dollar's worth of different foods available near his home in New Mexico. Would be very interesting to see what this project would look like here in China, as well. Maybe I'll put it on my to-do list? Oh, wait a minute - I see a homework assignment coming up....!


http://www.ecoliteracy.org/blog/how-much-food-will-dollar-buy

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

Hello, everyone...

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.
  

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 - 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.