China soundracks, part II

Another video about getting around in China. More specifically, experiencing China as an outsider, with a foreign soundtrack. For this one, wanted to give a sense of how jazzed I get sometimes going from place to place here, even if it can be a bit overwhelming at times.  The music this time is "Jing Jing", (Firefly), a traditional song from Okinawa, performed here by Shoukichi Kina with Ry Cooder. Enjoy!

How to Be Alone

As we know, we humans are generally social creatures, deriving a large portion of our happiness from interaction with others of our kind.  However, we are also by definition individuals, who obtain our identity from within.  Thus is born the continuum between extrovert on one hand and introvert on the other.  For some strange reason, we are, generally speaking, much more comfortable with the first end of this scale than the second.

Take this weekend, for example.  A fine weekend indeed, and spent almost entirely at home with Zekey and Ysa.  Highlights included finishing up a short video that I'd been working on, reading a bit, making black bean chili, editing some photographs, and chatting with Jane and a few friends in the States on Facebook and Skype.  The kids played inside most of the day Saturday, half by themselves, and half with a (very loud) young friend who came over for a three hour long match of... Jedi knights?  Ultraman?  In any case, something involving a lot of swords and yelling, in (to me) nearly incomprehensible Chinese.

Sunday, more of the same in the morning, followed by an afternoon following the kids on their bikes as we went first to the exercise park (a small plaza fitted with generically dangerous clunky metal workout equipment that passes for our playground) and then to the paved lot in front of the elementary school, where I watched the kids interact with a streaming succession of friends, older schoolmates, friends' parents, giggling college girls trying to get them to pose for pictures on their cell phones, gaping grandparents who had never seen a foreigner before - still! after us being here for two years!! - trying to push their two year olds into playing with Ysa, who now knows how to deal with such behavior by a simple humph! and a turning away that is just charming enough not to be offensive...

Aaanyway, my point in all this is that, through all this, I don't think I had a face to face interaction with an adult that lasted more than ten minutes.  And was fine about it.  (Notice the obligatory disclaimer.  You see what I mean about us humans feeling much less comfortable with the introverted end of the spectrum, right?) 

All of this a long, round-about intro to this video, which, now that I've gone on for a while, really speaks for itself:



A good reminder that no matter where we travel, the most comfortable, and the most challenging place to live is inside your own skin.

Imaginary cities

A short video I just finished editing, about urbanization, China, too many toys, and seduction (of a sort...).  Oh, and Frank Sinatra.

Stuff we all should know by now - Prisoners in the US

What are approximately 1 out of every 100 Americans doing right now?  Why, sitting in jail, of course!  Young black men?  That jumps to 1 in 10.  Per capita, that's higher than most places in the world by an order of magnitude, and even higher that places with less-than-stellar human rights records such as Iran and, um, the country that I'm currently living in.

People in the US aren't terribly aware of this, but many other parts of the world are, as in, for example, this clip from a UK game show.  Probably no wonder that other governments often don't take the US very seriously when it comes to accusations of human rights abuses...

For more information, and links to some of the facts in the video, click here.

Up and Over

Jane shot this video last spring of a fairly normal-sized crowd exiting our local high-speed train and making their way to the exit of North Train Station in Chengdu.  For everyone in China - Happy National Day weekend, and wishing you safe travels (with at least a place to sit for most of the time) should you be going anywhere!

Explaining things, continued (the kid's turn)

From the Slow Boat family video archives, the Xander and Zekey Electricity Show!  (First aired sometime last spring; global syndication rights now negotiable...)

Cookie Monster tells it like it is

"Who are the ones that we left in charge?
Killers, thieves, and lawyers.."

Maybe it's just me, but Cookie Monster seems to be not only channeling Tom Waits on this video, but a couple of Old Testament prophets as well.  (Wonder if Jeremiah & co. had as much fun...?)

Home is a Fire

Via Boing Boing, a video made by graffiti artist Sheperd Fairey (who you should know about, already) for Death Cab for Cutie (okay, I'm probably supposed to know about them, but don't).

Ties in almost perfectly with Jane's ESL classes that she's teaching - theme: subcultures - except that I found this about ten minutes after she went to teach the class where her students are presenting on graffiti art. Oh well, such is timing sometimes...

Also like the video because (surprise surprise) it presents a city (LA, in this case) in the way that I tend to see it. Time to get out the video camera...


And a p.s. - also saw the graffiti art documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop a couple of weeks ago, which features Shepherd Fairy, Banksy, and other graffiti artists of the 90s and 2000s. Highly recommended!

"Do you hibernate?" "Only with friends."

Get your red-hot dancing Buddhas here!

... as well as some assorted figures from Greek pottery, some Egyptian scribes, and a Jesus or six. A fun video demonstrating the flow of ideas throughout history, from the ever talented Nina Paley.

Slow and Fast

Speaking of slowing down to notice things, a very cool slow motion video above. Find out how they did it here. (Hint: Einstein was right!)

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)

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.
  

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: