A couple photos from the Yunnan trip. I'll work on getting the rest of the good ones up to my Flickr photostream tomorrow.



One of the sights of Kunming is a pair of pagodas which face each other at either end of a street. At the West Pagoda, was also this building, which had mysteriously had its front wall removed. Very odd, but not overly surprising (it's China, everything is under construction), and made for an interesting image.



Also ran across this on the streets of Kunming. It wasn't the only one either. It occurred to me somewhat later that maybe it is to cater to all the short-legged doggies that trot through the streets.



At the East Pagoda I paid a small fee to enter the walled garden surrounding it. I never got around to really inspecting the pagoda itself because I almost immediately got caught up watching mahjong. I have a sketchy understanding of the game, thanks to coworker back in Seattle who has patiently tried to teach a number of us how to play. It's not actually as simple as match the tiles -- that's only the American computer version.

I'm often shy about taking photos of people. In this case I compromised between really wanting to photograph the scene (there were some very amazing elderly faces - one guy with absolutely huge coke-bottle classes) and not wanting to disturb the game to ask (plus not having the language skills to ask) with photographing hands instead of faces.



As you may or may not know, there is a Muslim population in China. In Yunnan there were a number of restaurants with signs out front in Arabic as well as Chinese. This man had no sign, but he sold me some tasty food on a stick. This was in a tourist-ridden shopping area of Kunming, so I figured he was probably used to having his photo taken. He seemed indifferent, overall.



Wandering around later, I found an indoor-outdoor market. There were living and less-living animals, and sacks of grain and spices as well as vegetables, with an accompanying smell and flies in the meat section. I find it fascinating that they have squash this big -- seriously, they are three feet long and look like they must be radioactive zucchini, or something.

The man selling the vegetables, though, was thoroughly immune to their amazingness and gave me an extremely puzzled look which indicated he did not understand why some crazy white girl was photographing his vegetables.

Also, the man in the back of the photo is spritzing his veggies with water, with a handy homemade device. Take a plastic pop bottle, poke a couple holes in the lid. Fill the bottle with water, attach lid, hold upside down and squeeze. No spring loaded thingmabobs required for spritzing in China.

It is odd to find that I am here, in China, as a witness (and very small-scale participant) in a historical event. What will they call it, ten or fifty years down the line? The Chinese earthquake of 2008? The Sichuan Quake? The media here was first calling it the Wenchuan earthquake, after the more exact location, but now seems to be using the Sichuan earthquake.

I spent some time watching television news while I was traveling in Yunnan (easy to do in airports and hotel rooms). Each news station has their own animated logo for the event -- different versions of an outline of Sichuan province, which shakes, and then circles radiate outwards and words appear. Sometimes it is yellow, sometimes green, sometimes the radiating circles are a variation on the color of the province, sometimes they are red. In the Kunming airport, the 'Air Media' (which I presume to be produced especially for and displayed only in airports) followed the animated outward spread of quake effects with the characters for the name of the event - I recognized the ones for 'earthquake' - on a black screen. The characters were silver, and shot through with red cracks.

The China Daily, the English language paper which they provide at our 'serviced residence' has been full almost entirely of quake reports. The heroic schoolboy who stood for an hour holding an iv drip for a trapped school mate. (They refer to him as 'Drip Boy'.) The promises of investigation and punishment regarding the high rate of collapse of school buildings. The arrival (and now departure) of foreign aid workers. There's also a box on the front page which lists a couple numbers chosen from the most recently released. Yesterday's paper features the following data: 68,516 killed, 19,350 missing, 365,399 injured, 15.15 million displaced, $5.33 billion in donations.

On May 21, in Kunming, I caught the second half of a televised press conference. Because there were international journalists present, each question and answer was translated into English if in Chinese, or vice versa. Near the end, the officials released the latest numbers, a long list. I noted down some of them:

• 42,000 dead
  
  
• 396,811 rescued in area
  
  • 4,652 rescued alive from debris
  
  
• 162 aftershocks over 4.0
  
  • 26 over 5.0
    
  • 4 over 6.0
  
  
• 12.867 billion yuan gov't spending on disaster
  
  • 9.339 billion yuan from central budget
  
  
• 17,176 tons oil sent to area in 24 hour period
  
  
• 28,829 km of road damaged
  
  • about 19,000 km repaired (didn't catch the exact figure)
    
  • about 3,000 bridges destroyed (didn't catch the exact figure)
  
  
• Aftershocks have knocked out power in areas it had been restored to
  
  
• 14 Taiwanese tourists all returned safely to Taiwan
  
  
• Taiwanese indicated willingness to donate 750 million yuan
  

I didn't write it down, but they also released the number of meters of bridge which had been repaired. Truly, this is a country quite obsessed with numbers.

Further in yesterday's paper, I can learn that Tangjiashan lake, one of 34 formed by landslides blocking rivers after the quake, has been rising up to 2 m a day, but "troops have dug a 50-m-wide channel running 300 m long" to control, or at least direct water when the landslide-dam bursts. 28 of the lakes are expected to burst. Another article tells me that "Hospitals have treated 87,391 people, of whom 56,580 were discharged." 619,400 tents have been sent to provide shelter for the 15.15 million people who have been relocated.

Some of the statistics read like mathematical story problems. On Thursday, "98.2 percent of banks in the quake-hit areas resumed services, with 238 branches still shut." How many bank branch offices are in the quake-hit area? I think it comes to 29,750. If the death toll is 68,516, then each branch has lost an average of 2.3 customers.

Of course, while the print media is filling space with numbers and tales of brave survivors and rescue workers (133,000 troops and armed police have been sent in, with 45,000 reservists being mobilized.), the visual media is full of images that go straight to emotions. I watched an amount of that the day before the press conference, May 20...

The coverage of the earthquake dominates the TV. Yesterday was a week. Alex told me there was to be two minutes of silence at 2:28, the time of the quake. I was on the plane, so I didn't observe it.

Last night, wandering around Kunming, we did see a gather of people and candles around a big fountain in the city center.

This morning, when I turned on the televisision, in hopes of a weather report, CCTV1 was show shots of different groups observing the moment of silence -- groups of office workers, or policemen, line up together with their heads bowed. After a while I figured out one part of the series was the staff of Chinese consulates around the world.

Now we're back to footage from Sichuan -- soldiers moving rubble to extract survivors, people living under tarps, food distribution in refugee camps.

.....

I'm looking for weather on the tv, and it more images from the moment of silence, factory workers, railway crews, men in suits. A line of military men remove their hats in unison. Many people they show are crying. Traffic is stopped. Air raid sirens are going. Car horns are stick on. School children bow their heads. Soldiers hold their helmets on scene in Sichuan, silent and unmoving, but a butterfly flits across the screen in front of them. Some have their hands on their hears. People crying in the subway. Flags at half-mast. A nation showing its open bleeding heart, mourning together. Now its back to the consulate footage -- they're recycling the footage I saw before. It makes me start to cry anyway.

Of course, the moments of silence (I think it was actually 3 minutes long) were not universally observed. They did not delay my flight so we could sit quietly on the runway. The tragedy hasn't touched the entire country deeply, reports Stupid Pig's China Blog, not everyone is crying about it. We met a German guy in Lijiang who works for BMW, which is collaborating with a Chinese company to make motorcycle engines. We asked about the quake affects in his city (I forget which city, though) and he said nothing major -- only five or six people died, and it is hard to tell if it was due to the earthquake, or to "normal" lax Chinese safety standards.

The oddest story I've seen though, from my perspective -- and this ties directly into the theme of official numbers -- is the statement that the government will issue certificates to families whose children died in the quake, officially permitting them to have another child.

After about ten days traveling in Yunnan province, in southern China, I'm back to Beijing, to nurse my sunburn and catch up with work. Suddenly I have less than three weeks left before my return to Seattle. Yikes.

I'll upload pictures and back-post from the trip over the next few days.

One of the things you can see at the night market in the Wudaoko area near where we live (also the site of many universities) is a thriving night market which appears after dark and gradually spreads out over the sidewalks. There are striking women of a particular ethnic group I haven't identified selling silver jewelry and big bracelets, and horns of some creature carved into small containers. There are carts with bootleg books. There is row upon row of sandals and flip flops. There are piles of t-shirts with English or almost English slogans printed on them. The best one I've seen said, in letters six inches high, 'I AM SO WORTH IT.' I thought of exactly who I should have bought it for the next day. Maybe I'll see it again sometime.

And then, of course, there are also the pet sellers. The boxes of puppies, the fishbowls, the tubs full of turtles. Cages of kittens, cages of hamsters. Fuzzy little baby bunnies. The occasional bird. All waiting for you to take home! And you can test-pet them! So soft! So furry! So gol-durn cute!

This evening Alex called me to say he loved this country more than rain (which he claims to love more than his mother, as a true Seattleite) because he had just seen the following: A feisty little kitten who got into it with a bunny, which turned out to be more feisty than the kitten, causing the kitten to back down -- however! (as you can see in the photo) it didn't have much space to back down in, so as it backed up it fell into the fishbowl.

Oh the indignity!

The kitten was apparently fished out (of the fishbowl), given a severe talking to, and wrung out.

Man, if he had been filming rather than taking still photos, he would have had a youtube hit for sure!

The death toll from yesterday's quake in Sichuan province is still mounting. The folks over at Shanghaiist are keeping up with developments.

What can I say? I'm really glad we weren't traveling in the area this week.

In separate language lessons, Alex and I both learned the word for earthquake - 地震 (dizhen). I also learned near and far. The earthquake was close to Chengdu. The earthquake was far from Beijing, but we still felt it.

After my meeting with Grace, my language partner, I went to grocery store, which was entirely mobbed. It didn't seem like people were stocking up for a coming apocalypse though, just everyone decided that Monday night was a good time to pick up a few things.

In front of me in line were a pair of somewhat dusty young men, with darker, more wide and angular looking features than many of the ethnic Han Chinese I see around. Between them, they had one basket and bought two pairs of shoes, two pairs of briefs, some toothpaste, a couple handtowels. They blushed and tried to look macho and indifferent while the young female checker scanner the underwear. They each pulled out wallets and contributed 100 rmb bills (somewhat less than $20) to pay; their fingernails were surprisingly long, but dirty. They had a brief discussion about how to divy up the change, and the checker, easily a foot and half shorter than either of them, but secure in her position as a city-dweller, gave them an evil look for not taking their bags out of the way quickly enough. I presume that they were migrant workers from one of Beijing's many construction sites. One report I saw said 40 square miles of the city is under construction.

Alex has also told me that of the 17 million people in Beijing, some 5 million are unregistered migrants. They come to build the new buildings, to work in the factories, to do any number of things. Women come to work in the 'massage parlors,' and return home after a few years. As long as they return with money, no one asks too many questions. A great many of the migrants come from Sichuan province, something Peter Hessler mentions in oracle Bones.

On his way home last night, Alex told me he saw a pair of construction workers on the side of the road, one curled into a ball and sobbing on the other. The tremors are being felt in Beijing in many different ways.

This afternoon I heard an odd noise, the kind that makes you suspect there is someone else in the room, when you know you are the only one home. I looked around, and the floor moved a bit. The curtains began to swing back and forth. An earthquake.

I couldn't decide if it was possible for me to run down ten flights of stairs before anything disintegrated, or if it was better to be on the tenth floor (only 7 floors above me), or in the street (several large buildings to topple over), so I stayed put and called Alex. He was outside, and professed to not feel anything.

It was over in fifteen or twenty seconds; the curtains quieted.

As is my wont, I went looking for information online. (I also flipped through the channels on the tv, but didn't find anything I could readily identify as breaking news.) The USGS' Earthquake center page, after twenty minutes, displayed a big red mark in eastern China on their world map of recent earthquakes over magnitude 4. A 7.5 magnitude quake in eastern Sichuan province, 60 miles from Chengdu and 2:28 pm, local time. Now, two hours after the fact, there's a second mark -- a 5.4 second tremor at 3:34, 45 miles from Chengdu, 920 miles from Beijing. (I didn't feel the second one in Beijing.)

The NY Times had thrown up a brief report, with quotes from university students (unclear if in Beijing or Chengdu) running out of their dorms. The Chinese English-language news agency, Xinhua, also had slapped something together, reporting both the Chengdu quake at 2:28, and 3.9 quake in an eastern district of Beijing 2:35. Neither reported casualties (yet). I expect there to be more information out soon, though, because the internet also turned up that NPR's All Things Considered is reporting from Chengdu this week, which puts Robert Siegel and Melissa Block at ground zero, so to speak.

I would have been in Chengdu myself this week, except that the continued paperwork process for Alex's work visa has kept us from going too far from Beijing, and put off the ten day or so trip we have (okay, he has) been planning in the area. With no casualties and no damage reported yet, I'm sorry we weren't there. However, if there are continuing aftershocks (5.4 is nothing to sniff at), there may be cause to appreciate red tape and paperwork yet.

So, life behind the wall, my dear readers in lands of unfettered speech, is incongruous.

A few days ago, I discovered I could no longer look at my own blog (I like to check that it is showing the most recent photos, and catch typos), or anything else with 'blogspot' in the url. Seems this is a widely recognized phenomenon, and it has happened before.

On the other hand, there are reports that a month ago you could get to en.wikipedia.org from Beijing internet. The tagline 'China's Net wall falling?' seems to have been a little over-hopeful, though.

And, while you can't easily read what others are writing on blogspot (there are ways around, in most cases), you can still access blogger.com, which is the portal for writing posts.

What's the message from the powers that be here?

You can talk as much as you want, but no one is listening.

It seems that one of the overarching strategies is to prevent collaborative thought by possible dissenters, though it's fine to use mass communications -- text messages, inflammatory opinion pieces in newspapers, online bulletin boards -- to incite the occasional anti-Western riot to let off steam amongst the common masses. But the impression I have (admittedly derived from my oh-so-brief, shallow toe-dip into the country) is that those mob actions don't happen from independent thoughts of the participants, but from seeds carefully planted and tended by somewhere in the government (though I have no good impression of where in the government). And when they feel the movement has grown enough, before it flowers and spreads seeds which might hybridize into something they didn't intend, they nip it, and stomp it, and life continues as before, until the next brief incident.

I'm curious about the thought from one of the above links that this has something to do with the Olympics. Close down the factories, prevent pollution of the air. Close down the blogs, prevent pollution of the mind.

On the topic of a different country, I saw a note today about a review of a new dystopian novel set in modern Russia. I still read the occasional bit and piece about things there, though at the moment I'm trying to catch up and figure out what's up with China (if possible!). Today I've been continuing to read Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones, and he mentions a bunch of blond, Indo-European mummies found in the Xinjiang province (out in the west, where Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's desert scenes were filmed, and were the Uighur people are), which made me think of the Scythians, and the question that one of my fellow students explored while we were studying in Russia.

Russia is in a fairly unique geographic position, straddling both Europe and Asia (I suppose you could say Turkey is as well), and my friend Liz focused her independent project on exploring the idea of whether Russia was European or Asian. She had some interesting responses. In St. Petersburg, most felt they were quite European, barring the occasional person originally from Central Asia. In Irkutsk, in central Siberia, I think the question was more murky. She didn't stick around in Irkutsk too long to investigate, she went back to Moscow and met with Alexander Dugin (the sort of political figure that I would simply call 'curious,' if I didn't suspect he may pull some actual weight), the leader of the Eurasian movement, which hopes to restore the Russian Empire in its great breadth.

In Irkutsk, though, Asia was awfully close, in ways that I'm realizing more, from my Beijing perspective. First, culinarily -- on both of my trips in the Russian east, I've had shrimp crisps, which are plentifully available here in China. Ditto for pelmeni, which you might call wontons, or dumplings -- noodly, doughy bits boiled in broth, and with a filling of some sort. As with Italian pasta, the Siberian version surely originated here. The third main Asian food that I learned to enjoy in Irkutsk is squid bits -- dried, shredded, and flavored, they are a little sweet, a little salty, and sometimes quite spicy.

Perhaps the US has exported Hollywood and Coca-Cola around the world, along with Marlboros and innumerable other cultural aspects, but Asian food has also spread colonially, with and without accompanying Asians. No Russian needs to go to a Chinese restaurant for their pelmeni. There are, though, plenty of Asians in Russia, along with many other non-slavic groups. Some are more recent foreign immigrants -- Chinese fall into this group -- but plenty of groups from the FSU -- lots of Central Asians. Plus Koreans -- one of the things you can get in the markets in Russian cities is 'Korean salad,' which Americans have learned to call 'kimchee.'

The markets can also be plenty similar, in Russia and in China. Both sport multi-floor shopping buildings crammed with stalls selling clothing, electronics, and other consumer goods of questionable origin. In Irkutsk, my sisters recommended avoiding the street-level of the market, where it escaped the building and sprawled through narrow alleyways -- that was where the thieves were.

Last weekend we went to the Russian district of Beijing, hoping for a good meal of Russian food. I want blini. I've been wanting blini since before I left Seattle, but never got around to making my own. Unfortunately, the Russian district, as we found it, featured pedicab drivers who call out in Russian поехали, and машина, instead of Hello! to get you to turn your head if you speak English. There was a long line of little shops selling fur coats, each named with a feminine Russian name -- Anna, Svetlana, Natasha, Sonia, Masha -- and promising high quality. We ended up eating at Uighur restaurant instead.

Blond mummies. Hmm. According to Hessler, they were very interesting, and subject of a couple Western documentaries and magazine articles in publications such as National Geographic before the government here decided they were no longer accessible to foreign media. Why? Again, from Hessler (because I don't know enough the come up with these theories myself) because of the official emphasis on one united China, forever and ever, through history. Civilization started in Central China, and spread outward, to all the Chinese people. Blond mummies don't fit the story. But, apparently Uighurs in Xinjiang occasionally turn out blond, for no discernible reason.

Yesterday was a wonderful day. We took breakfast out to Haidian Park, and ate on a rock next to little wetland, and listened to some frogs, and wandered around and saw an amusement park with the most bizarre things ever. {photos} My sister called me on my cell phone and I got to talk to her for a little. We went to the Summer Palace {photos} in the afternoon and rented a pedal boat and pedaled around the lake, and ate chili spiced dried mangoes (from Trader Joe's in the US, alas, no more of those for a while!) and got steamed buns and an ice cream bar and enjoyed a sunny clear afternoon. In the evening I met with one of my language partners, and learned to say 'I think China has many strange flavors of yogurt,' and went over The Tale of Custard the Dragon with her, and she promised to prepare and tell me something about Chinese history next time, and then we went to open mike night at Lush, a bar most popular amongst foreign students studying in Beijing and listened to various covers of the Fugees, Oasis, and Bob Dylan. Not only that, but the night-time vendors were out in force on the sidewalks, with t-shirts of all sorts of messages (my favorite: emblazoned in the largest letters possible to cover the whole front of the shirt, "I AM SO WORTH IT"), and even the puppy-sellers. That's right, a couple of guys with cardboard boxes full of fuzzy little puppies, which they will hand to you to pet and cuddle, and hopefully purchase. There is no way we can have a dog -- couldn't keep one in the US, couldn't bring one to the US from here, couldn't keep one in the hotel room -- but damn, they were cute!

Today, though, I am sick. And I am tired. Because I do not understand anything that anyone says, and it is getting old.

I decided I would be proactive, and go out to find lunch on my own, on not street food, because I didn't want to walk quite as far as the nearest street-with-food that I know of. There are several mall/shopping centers right near where we live. I wandered around, saw one fast food-ish place labeled 'Kung Fu' with a big picture of Bruce Lee, but finally settled on a place called 'le Jazz,' which had some curries, and a numbered set of meal combos, so I could say "I want 4." Simple enough.

I took my tray, found a seat, and was shortly approached by a girl, who said something to me. I gave her the genuine clueless white girl face, and she went away. Then came a more authoritative woman who also addressed me, and made an X with her hands, pointing to a sign above.

The only thing I recognized on the sign was a character for 'section,' and as far as I can read, it might have said 'this section for patrons of eatery x,' or it might have said 'all martians report to the green sector daily at 2 o'clock,' but I figure it must have been something along the lines of the former. I moved to sit closer to the origin of my meal.

Next I went to the supermarket, and browsed through the books, which are inside the electronics department. I know that for electronic items, you have to pay for them on the way out, so I took the children's book I selected to the counter. They pointed me to a different counter. At that counter, the girl told me several times before I realized she didn't want to ring up my book, it was a cheap commodity and didn't fall under the same rules as electronics. Guess I could have figured that out, but I assume there are more rules and regulations here than would be logical.

I chose my groceries, and went to the checkout line. I handed the girl my reusable tote bag, she put things into it, I took out a large jug of juice, intending to carry it separately, as it is heavy. After I did that, she put everything else into a pair of plastic bags. And one for the juice. And I have no idea how to say, 'Please, put everything into this bag.'

So I took my groceries home, and got to the room just as the housekeepers were leaving. They smiled in a friendly way, and said they were just finishing. Or maybe they said, 'Welcome, Western imperialist, to your room.' Perhaps they quoted Shakespeare in translation, or said, 'hey, you're the girl that broke the light!' I wouldn't know. I smiled back in a friendly way, closed the door behind them, put away the groceries, lay down on the bed, and cried for a while, out of sheer frustration.

It's not that I'm not learning, because I am, it's just that I haven't learned enough yet. Hence the book I got -- I flipped through the children's books until I hit on the level when they are written with pinyin above the characters -- whether to help the kids learn pinyin or learn characters, I don't know. But hopefully it will be helpful for me to learn the words and the characters. The book is helpfully labeled in latin letters on the front cover 'BBZXHDYZMY.' Inside, it has 150 verses, three or four lines long. I'm not sure if they are actually poems -- some of them follow the rhyming pattern aaba, some aaaa, some abcb, some seem to have no rhyme at all. Each one has an illustration -- a chef chopping onions and crying, a puffed up bullfrong on a lilypad, a caveman roasting a hock of ham on a fire, an elephant listening to a boombox with headphones, a grandmother reading a story to two children -- and promises interesting vocabulary.

Oh yes, also on the frustrating side -- blogspot seems to have joined livejournal on the list of inaccessible domain names through the Great Firewall of China. But to put up posts, I actually navigate through blogger.com, which still loads. I'm sure this has little to nothing to do with my blog in particular, and everything to do with the general governmental frown on too much free sharing of information, which blogs do quite a bit to promote.