Free Ride

One of the perks you get when working for a Chinese company is free transportation to work. Not everyone gets this, of course, but from what we can tell, it's pretty common.

The free ride typically comes in the form of a bus or van. The buses that are used are coach-type buses, which are incredibly common on the roads of China (people often take coach buses for long- and short-distance trips). Our college offers several options: the Big Bus, the "special bus," and the van.

There are two Big Buses (coach-style buses). Each one runs along a slightly different route. They start in the west and south of the city and run along main traffic arteries, picking up UIC workers all along the way. Our compound is the final pick-up spot along the route. One of the Big Buses stops at the back gate at 8:10am. There's always a collection of teachers waiting for the bus, and it's a good time to catch up on chit-chat and general office gossip. Here, my college Francis points out the Big Bus for you:

At 5:40 pm, the big buses reverse their routes and take most of the college's workers home.

Recently the college added a mid-sized bus to its fleet:

This 'special bus' replaced two vans. The special bus only picks up teaching staff, so it's a bit more exclusive (i.e., no office staff on it). And unlike the big buses, the college owns this vehicle (they even had the college's name and logo painted on the side). It only picks up people who live in our compound, and it drives around the compound so you don't even have to wait at the back gate if you don't want to. I usually take the Big Bus to school instead because I find the atmosphere in the special bus to be a little too rich for me. At the end of the teaching work day (6:10pm), the special bus drives us home to the compound. It seats around 18 people.

When the special bus breaks down, the college sends two vans as a replacement. The teaching staff always hates it when this happens because the vans don't seat as many people, so there's always a bit of a battle at the end of the work day to see who will get the available seats. The Chinese teaching staff always want to award seats by seniority; the non-Chinese teaching staff always want to award seats on a first-come, first-served basis. As you can imagine, this sometimes causes tension.

I really enjoy this free ride to and from work. It's great not having to take the public bus, and it does encourage car pooling-type behavior. It also saves me 6RMB each day (which is what bus fare would cost).

When electronic translators fail . . .

. . . this is the result (seen on a beverage menu at a local coffee house):


I am not proud that this makes me laugh, but I cannot deny that it did.

Zhuhai Tow Truck

Cars are increasingly popular here, mainly because more and more people can afford them. 'Car culture' is still relatively underdeveloped, though, and the hallmarks of a car-centric culture are mostly absent. For example, banks don't have 'drive-thru' lanes. Garages are uncommon (both garages for storing cars and mechanics' garages). Heck, parking lots are rare, and the city is rapidly 'converting' available sidewalk space into parking areas (by 'converting' I mean painting parking lines onto the sidewalk).

Procedures for dealing with broken-down vehicles are also different than in other places. For example, whenever we've seen a disabled vehicle being moved from one place to another, it's always being removed by another car. The two vehicles are tied together by a length of rope, with the car in front towing the other one. With this towing system, one person has to sit in the disabled vehicle and apply the breaks so that it doesn't smash into the towing vehicle. You've probably seen this once or twice int the U.S., usually being attempted by people from lower socio-economic classes (i.e., those folks who can't afford a AAA membership).

Well, yesterday, we saw our first legitimate tow truck. Unbelievably, it used the same rope-pulling technology:
If you embiggen the picture, you can clearly see the rope and the dude sitting in the broken-down (police) van. Now I'm just wondering how they remove really disabled (i.e., smashed, broken, crashed) vehicles from the road. Maybe they use a dump truck.

Cultural Differences: Staring

One of the things that I miss about the U.S. is NOT standing out. Here, I'm always different. Take a look at the photo below; it was snapped before a dinner with folks in D's department. Can you guess which one I am? Yep, you guessed it -- I'm the one off to the left who looks like a garden gnome ("Don't mind me, folks; I'm just gonna sneak into your picture . . . ").



Before we came here, one of my friends warned me that people might stare at me. Indeed, they do. While foreigners are increasingly common in China, especially where we are, the sight of D and/or me just walking down the street still grabs the locals' attention. As D puts it, "the way they look at us, you'd think we were walking a panther on a leash!" People will pass us on the sidewalk (on foot, on bikes, whatever) and then turn all the way around to get a better look. These are adults, mind you, not little kids.

Staring isn't considered rude here. At least that's what the guide books tell us. And most of the time, there's no "rude vibe" that comes from the starer (sometimes there is, though, especially from the thuggish young males that hang out in groups on street corners). This is/was hard to get used to because like a lot of U.S. kids, I was always told, "it's not polite to stare!" by my mom/dad (often, I suspect, in response to me fixing my eyes on someone who looked "different").

The worst part about the staring here for me is my uncertainty about what to do when being stared at. I don't understand the protocol. I mean, sometimes the starer is only a foot away (like on the bus). Am I supposed to pretend I don't notice? Am I supposed to strike up polite conversation? My automatic impulse is to yell, "what? do I have a giant booger on my chin?!?", but I know that would be over-reacting. (Besides, I don't know how to say that in Chinese). I do know that looking directly into their eyes is a "staring antidote." When I do that, they immediately stop staring and look away. Direct eye contact isn't as common here as in the U.S., and people don't seem to be expecting it, especially from strangers.

World Time Clock

Hey readers: see that link on the right hand side of the page? The one that says "Runningburro's World Time Clock?" If you click on that link, you'll have a handy way to figure out what time it is here (China) and what time it is where you are (or most of you, anyway. I included some time zones of friends/family). That way, you'll know when it's a good time to call us to say "hi." Or you can just marvel at the fact that it's already tomorrow where we are. Free-kay.

Want to create your own personal handy-dandy world clock? Go here and click on "personal world clock."

A banned "teaching moment"

[Update: It looks like the full content of the NYT site is now accessible. YouTube is still verboten.]

If you're following the news, you might have heard about the business happening in Tibet. In response to YouTube videos that showed police and protestors clashing, the Chinese government blocked YouTube access to viewers on the Mainland (and they blocked access to articles about the blocking; they are pretty thorough).

This is what the state-controlled Chinese media has this to say about the happenings in the the China-ruled Autonomous region (notice the use of loaded like 'mastermind,''clique,'and 'united motherland'):

Government chief ensures safety in Tibet
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-03-17 12:33

Qiangba Puncog, Tibet Autonomous Regional Government chairman decried rioters and the Dalai Lama clique for conspiring the latest riot in Lhasa, and underlined the government's determination to safeguard Tibet, during a news briefing in Beijing on Monday.

Thirteen innocent civilians were burned or stabbed to death in last Friday's riot in Lhasa, and sixty-one police were injured, six of them seriously wounded, said Qiangba Pungcog.

Rioters set fire at more than 300 locations, including residential houses and 214 shops, and smashed and burned 56 vehicles, causing heavy losses and seriously disturbed social order in the city.

The vilence was out of conspiracy jointly made by domestic and overseas separatists who are advocating "Tibet independence".

The Dalai clique masterminded, well planned and carefully organized the riot on March 14, Qiangba Puncog said, citing that the rioters' activities were "crime".

The chairman said the Dalai clique's version on describing the vilence and echoing tilted news coverage of some Western media are "ridiculous." They are confusing right and wrong while labeling the riot as "peaceful demonstration", and slandering efforts of local law enforcement to keeping order as "crackdown on the peaceful demonstration."

The Tibetan government chief expressed confidence in maintaining social stability and order under the leadership of the Chinese Central Government,saying the Tibetans will firmly fight against splitting efforts, and safeguard the unified motherland.

Any secessionist attempt to sabotage Tibet's stability will not gain people's support and is doomed to fail, he said.

Compare this with what the NYT has to say (I had to use a proxy server to access this because the government appears to be blocking the Tibet-related stories on the NYT website):

BEIJING — Thousands of Buddhist monks and other Tibetans clashed with the riot police in a second Chinese city on Saturday, while the authorities said they had regained control of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, a day after a rampaging mob ransacked shops and set fire to cars and storefronts in a deadly riot.

Conflicting reports emerged about the violence in Lhasa on Friday. The Chinese authorities denied that they had fired on protesters there, but Tibetan leaders in India told news agencies on Saturday that they had confirmed that 30 Tibetans had died and that they had unconfirmed reports that put the number at more than 100. . . .

Demonstrations erupted for the second consecutive day in the city of Xiahe in Gansu Province, where an estimated 4,000 Tibetans gathered near the Labrang Monastery. Local monks had held a smaller protest on Friday, but the confrontation escalated Saturday afternoon, according to witnesses and Tibetans in India who spoke with protesters by telephone.

Residents in Xiahe, reached by telephone, heard loud noises similar to gunshots or explosions. A waitress described the scene as “chaos” and said many injured people had been sent to a local hospital. Large numbers of military police and security officers fired tear gas while Tibetans hurled rocks, according to the Tibetans in India.

But Tibetan advocacy groups and witnesses in Lhasa offered contradictory accounts. The Tibetan government in exile said at least 30 Tibetans had died in the protests, according to Agence France-Presse. Witnesses told Radio Free Asia, the nonprofit news agency financed by the United States government, that numerous Tibetans were dead. A 13-year-old Tibetan, reached by telephone, said he had watched the violence from his apartment and saw four or five Tibetans fall to the ground after military police officers fired upon them.

Foreign journalists are being restricted from traveling to Lhasa, and the precise death toll remains unknown.

Now, I am of the opinion that all mainstream media is biased and relatively worthless. The U.S. media machine isn't state run, but it's run by corporations, which is at least as bad, if not worse. However, the level of censorship here is appalling, and it is substantially different (i.e., much more despotic) than the type of censorship that we experience in the U.S. Normally, I'd love to use these two new stories in class. I'd have students read both, compare them, talk about the different way that each "constructs" a view of reality. The point wouldn't be to talk about which one is right, but to talk about how each has a different (and vested) perspective on the same happening and langauge is used to convey that perspective. After all, one of the skills that we are supposed to be teaching students is how to critically read sources of information.

But I can't do that here becuase we can't talk about Tibet in the classroom. We can't talk about Taiwan. We can't talk about T-men Square. Talking about those things -- and many others -- could get me fired and/or deported pretty darn quickly.

Helmets? We don't need no steenking helmets!

I was discussing the finer points of paraphrasing with my students last week, and we were practicing our paraphrasing skills on a passage from Consumer Reports about the effectiveness of bike helmets in preventing head injuries/death in bike crashes. The students and I were joking with each other about the fact that no one in China wears bike helmets even though tons of folks ride bikes. They couldn't see the point of wearing one.

The safety level regarding vehicles here reminds me of the U.S. three or four decades ago. No one wears seat belts in cars (some people even cut them out of their car). In fact, taxi drivers get a little pissy if you buckle up; they take it as an insult (i.e., you don't think that they are good drivers). People hold their babies on their laps in the front seat of the car (no child car seats for sale, as far as I can tell). Few people wear head protection when riding motorcycles or scooters. If you do see someone wearing head protection, it's usually a construction-site type hard hat.

What cracks me up is that every little kid I've seen on roller blades wears a helmet. Because that's MUCH more dangerous than riding a bike.

Swinging in the Breeze

Because you can never have too many pictures of raw meet hanging from hooks in the fine Zhuhai air, here is another one. If you look closely at the piece on the right, you can see the bottom of the animal's foot/hoof (not sure what kind of critter it was).

This was taken outside a local restaurant; this is their meat storage area. They slaughter critters daily and then keep the carcass chunks here and use as needed. Nifty.

Asiannaise

Needless to say, Hellman's mayonnaise is in short supply here. Even when you do find it, it's not real Hellman's, it's more like Miracle Whip. Thankfully, I have a international supplier for Hellman's (a.k.a. Mom).

When the Hellman's runs low, we resort to eating other types of egg-oil emulsions. For the cheesy-creepy factor you can't beat Kewpie Mayonnaise:


Kewpie Mayonnaise is native to Japan, but common in China (in fact the back of the package states that Kewpie in China is a "Chinese-Japanese joint venture"). There are four kinds of Kewpie Mayonnaise available in our local markets: Regular (pictured); sweet; half-fat sweet; thousand island dressing-style. Here in China, people eat Mayonnaise on things that we wouldn't, like fruit. Whenever you order fruit salad in a restaurant, it comes with some kind of mayonnaise product on it (Can you imagine eating watermelon covered in 'nnaise? How about apple? Or maybe Kiwi?)

Kewpie Mayonnaise packaging takes a little getting used to. It comes in a squeezie container or a little bag. But as you can see from this photo, the container isn't very sturdy.One benefit of this packaging is that when the mayonnaise gets low, you can just sort of ring out the container.

The flavor isn't fab -- the regular tastes like Tartar Sauce without the pickle pieces. And even the regular (non-sweet) mayo is much sweeter than U.S. mayo is.

But the best part is that each bottle of Kewpie Mayonnaise (except the thousand-island dressing product) comes with -- you guessed it -- a Kewpie doll. Here is one, hermetically sealed in protective plastic:



Mo is always happy when we bring home Kewpie Mayonnaise -- his entourage is growing at a nice clip: