Storm of the (half-)century

China is currently experiencing the worst winter storm in 50 years. This means that the generally mild weather here has turned decidedly cold. And rainy. And miserable. I suppose that I should feel grateful that we're not buried under piles of snow like other parts of the country, but mainly I'm just pissed that our apartment has tile floors and doesn't have any heat (it does have AC units, just no heater).

Two consequences have resulted from this situation:

First, I broke down and bought myself a pair of thermal underwear (men's XL, of course, since that's the size I wear here) and have resigned myself to wearing the thermals, my summer robe, two pairs of socks, a blanket (as an insulating skirt), and my totally rad Steelers sweatshirt in the house. It's so cold in here that we can see our breath. I don't have gloves, but I wish I did. Typing has been kind of difficult.

Second, we've had to modify our laundry drying routine. Usually we just hang it on the balcony. But since it's cold and rainy and humid, that doesn't work. The laundry just stays wet and starts to get kind of funky. Instead, we've rigged up mini clothes lines throughout the apartment. It's been difficult to find things to anchor the line to since we don't have much furniture and the construction of the apartment is rather crappy (e.g., tape will pull the paint and plaster off the walls). But we're managing. Here (see photo), we've used the front door and our shoe closet to anchor a line for drying some socks. I think they look kind of cheery -- it feels like we're camping. (Before you ask, no, there aren't any laundro-mats around here, which means there are no dryers).

At least we're not traveling anywhere over the (Chinese) New Year holiday. News reports from all over the world paint a pretty bleak picture.

We Will We Will ROCK YOU [with Ping Pong?!]

Note: This is a guest post, brought to you by the resident pain-
in-the-
ass partner (a.k.a. 'D').

Chinese people have strange ideas about fitness and exercise. This is the admittedly hasty conclusion that I've come to after living in (just) one city in China for (only) six months. Let me provide a few examples…

Ping Pong. Now, for the record, I rather enjoy Ping Pong. I try to play it once a week to improve my skills, have a little fun, and meet some new folks. But, as you may already realize, Table Tennis is regarded as the official sport of China; and (as you might suspect) they take it very seriously. Everyone in my office of a dozen or so co-workers "practices;" and some of my colleagues will not play Pong (as I call it) in public for fear of public humiliation over their poor playing ability. How do I know that this is the reason? Because they told me so! (Incidently, the title of this blog post comes from a recent TV commercial shown here in China featuring Pongers battling it out while the famous Queen tune cranks away in the background.) Also, on several occasions people here have told me that the reason why they play Pong is "…to keep fit."

Dancing in the Square. It seems that Chinese people like to congregate outdoors just about anywhere where there's sufficient space for ballroom-style dancing (e.g., city parks, parking lots, etc.). Thus far, we have only observed this activity at night and after dark; and it seems to be practiced much more by older folks. Another interesting feature of dancing in the square is that the participants tend to be same sex pairs. Sometimes, the ballroom-style dancing is replaced with another type of dancing (e.g., line dancing); and these same public spaces where the dancing occurs at night are also used for group Tai Chi practice in the morning.

Walking Plus. A very common fitness-related sight around these parts is women (of all ages) walking by themselves and older, opposite sex couples walking together. Now, you may not think that this sounds very unusual or especially very interesting, but . . . the thing of it is, they're not JUST walking rather they are very exuberantly engaged in some sort of self-flagellation as they walk. Yes, you read that last sentence correctly -- they are actually hitting themselves and they are
doing so with what appears to be considerable force! It is not clear to me (or RB) why they are doing this? To try and increase blood circulation? to stimulate the muscles? to break up fat? Who knows?! But it's damned interesting, eh? I should add that no part of their person seems to be spared the treatment – e.g., people will hit themselves in the arms, legs, belly, and even the face!

Gyms. The first few weeks that I was China I had a helluva time trying to find an actual gym. I say "actual gym" because there are many places purporting to be gyms that are not what I would call a gym. Let me share just a few examples. An outdoor swimming pool . . . a big open room filled with badminton nets…a closet containing just one very old, thin, and rusty bar loaded with very light sand-filled plastic weights…and, my personal favorite, a dark and dusty pool hall filled with nine billiards tables! [You should have seen how proud this fellow was when he showed me their 'gym' (aka pool hall).]

My Gym. Eventually, I did find a gym. It is poorly equipped indeed – e.g., only one cheap barbell and a total of around 450 lbs. pounds of plate weights . . . for the whole gym. But the staff is quite friendly and the atmosphere is pleasant enough, even jovial at times. Let's just keep our fingers crossed that the barbell holds up [it's bending already]. The picture above shows me with Mr. Wang, a member of the staff and resident gym rat. Believe it or not, he is about three times larger than the average Chinese guy.

Most of the staff of around ten people hangs out at the gym all the time, sometimes working out, sometimes playing Chinese board games, and sometimes working the desk or the CD player. Of course, they have Ping Pong tables in the back! Mr. Wang is teaching me a few new Pong tricks.


This is a photo of the sign that includes the name of the gym in English and Chinese behind the front desk at the gym where I work out. If you embiggen the picture, you can read the full name: Valuable Strength International Healthy Body Meeting.

Little victims of the free market

Yesterday D and I went downtown (a part of Zhuhai called Gongbei) to do some shopping. Gongbei is kind of like Atlantic City -- a tourist attraction filled with lots of vice for sale (ex., fake designer handbags, fake designer fashion of all stripes, sex, illegal copies of DVD's, fake money -- you name it, it's sold down there). We typically go to Gongbei to stock up on Jim Beam (which is available at one of the legit department stores) and DVDs (illegal copies, of course, since I don't think that there is anywhere on the mainland where one can buy legit DVDs).

Gongbei is probably the most modern part of Zhuhai, but it's also my least favorite part. It's usually crowded and there are lots of pickpockets and other shady characters about. It's also typically overrun by wealthy expats -- annoying old white guys (usually British or Australian in this part of China) with their 20-year old Chinese wives. Anyway.

Yesterday D and I saw something in Gongbei that made it seem more sordid than usual: child beggars.

The Internet is rife with first-hand and journalistic accounts of child beggars in China. A lot of these kids are sold into this life by their parents. Child poverty is an increasing problem here, as many country kids are abandoned by parents who migrate to the city in hopes of finding work:

As China's cities continue to develop, the government expects the migrant-worker population -- and the numbers of left-behind children -- will rise. The State Council Research Office reported in April that the 200 million people in nation's rural migrant-labor force make an average of about $60 to $100 a month. Many of these workers were just getting by on subsistence farming before leaving.

But we hadn't seen any children begging until last night*, probably because we're living in a smallish town in a relatively wealthy part of China.

The scene we saw was this: a little girl (maybe 5 yrs. old) and a boy (maybe 10) were working the street together. Rather than simply asking for money, the girl was performing acrobatics for the passersby. A plastic bowl sat on the ground in front of here so that viewers could leave a donation. The boy sat a small distance away, keeping an eye on her.

The girl had two tricks that she would perform. First she did some backwards tumbling (like continuous back-walkovers). Second, she balanced herself upside down on a tripod, used her mouth to anchor herself to the tripod, and contorted her body into an impossible shape. Then, while balanced upside down by her mouth, set herself spinning -- the tripod allowed her to spin around and around and around.

Both the little girl and the little boy were tiny, but the girl seemed especially small (or perhaps she was younger than I thought). When we walked past her, we could see that her face and clothes were dirty -- the kind of dirty that you see on the faces and clothes of homeless people. Even though it was cold out (the temps have been low here this last week -- around 40 degrees Fahrenheit), she only had on slacks, an acrylic sweater, and a piece of cloth tied around her head (instead of a hat). She had no gloves. The boy wasn't really dressed much better.

A young man and his wife/girlfriend stopped to talk to the little girl. The man knelt down to talk to the child, and the wife/girlfriend tried to pull him away. The Chinese, as a rule, don't interfere with strangers. Even if they see someone they don't know being pick-pocketed or something, they'll usually just look the other way. Also, I've never seen a local give money to any beggar here. So, the fact that the man stopped to talk to this girl was out of the ordinary. Anyway, the man appeared to be asking the little girl questions, but whatever he was asking her was making her cry (I don't think out of cruelty, though). The wife/girlfriend continued to try to pull him away, and she finally succeeded. They both went on their way.

What does one do in a situation like this? What is the appropriate response when you're a foreigner in a county where you don't speak the language and don't understand the culture?


*Note: We have seen lots of kids involved in begging, just not kids begging on their own. For example, we see lots of adults, usually women, who will sit on the sidewalk and beg for money while holding a small child or baby on the lap.

Bernie Kosar Sucks

This sweatshirt is a gift that D brought home for me from a local store. This store where he bought it is odd -- it gets in used clothes from the U.S., but it also sells "new" rejects from local factories that were intended for export to places like the U.S. Consequently, big foreigners like ourselves can sometimes find clothes that actually fit our bodies (rather then trying to squeeze into clothes made for the tiny little stick people who live here).

I don't like football, but I was, I have to admit, happy to see those familiar colors!

Things that go splat in the night

Because we live in a sub-tropical climate, mosquitoes are a problem here. The bugs carry all sorts of nasties, including Dengue fever and Japanese Encephalitis. We don't have screens in our windows, so we do get some mosquitoes in the apartment. And they love, love, love D. At night, they gnaw on his ankles and calves, and in the morning, he's usually covered with fresh bites on top of old bites. To make matters worse, he scratches and scratches the bites until they're so vile looking that he appears to have leprosy.

I decided that enough was enough and purchased mosquito netting for our bed. We don't have a poster bed, so I couldn't buy the kind of netting that drapes down over the posts. Instead, I had to buy this dorky tent-like structure. It has flaps that zip open, and the zippers have tabs on the inside and outside. So, we can open the the side flaps, get into bed, and then zip it closed around us. The result? A mosquito-proof cocoon.

The is one problem with this set up, however -- namely, Jameson's (the cat) inability to understand that she can't jump through the netting even though she can see through it. She's used to being able to just hop right into bed with us. Now when she tries to do that she ricochets off and splats onto the ground (You know the sound that a cat makes when it hurls its body against a window screen? That's what this sounds like).

D was relaying this story to one of his colleagues, a guy from Bangladesh. After D's colleague recovered from hearing that our cat slept in our bed (this really seemed odd to him), he expressed surprise that this was our first experience with mosquito netting. Where he's from, everyone uses it all the time because the mosquitoes will eat them alive otherwise. People don't even wear shorts, the mosquitoes are so bad. I guess Bangladesh is on our list of "visit but don't live there" places. D's flesh would not survive.

Road Warrior

There are several of these crazy vehicles prowling the streets of Tangjia. They seem to be used mostly by manual laborers, but sometimes folks are clearly just using them to get from point A to point B.

Happy New Year!

It was midnight here a little over 12 hours ago, and D and I rung in the new year at home together with little Jameson. But there's still time to party for those of you in the States -- so grab some bubbly and raise a toast!

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope your 2008 is filled with love and prosperity.