From the Peace Corps to the Police Car

My sister Mary and her friend were topping off a long art tour of China with a visit to me in the hinterland, unaware of the peculiarities of my hospitality. It was Saturday, and we had survived our bus ride from Chongqing to Beibei with nothing amiss besides the weather. We had just dropped our bags at my Beibei apartment and headed up Tian Sheng Road for a little lunch, for some of that tasty pepper, peanut, and chicken dish known as Gongbao Jiding. The rain wasn’t going to deter us—we’d just take the gondola up JinYun Mountain and watch different parts of the mountain peek in and out through the mist, with lush greens and rhododendrons and azaleas far below us. That’s what we were planning. We had just put our chopsticks down, had exchanged pleasantries with the restaurant owner, and had mosied back along the ivy-walled path to my apartment, just five minutes away, when we discovered that—oops! My purse was no longer in my backpack. It was simply gone. And in it, of course, were my driver’s license, a US bankcard, a Chinese card, and the big one—my passport.

Forget ordinary Chinese hospitality and the welcoming of dear family members. Mary and Mary Beth had instead my kind of hospitality, a most bizarre kind. We did indeed make it up JinYun, with Mary making it all the way to the pagoda at the tip top, but that was largely thanks to Ling and her family, JiaYue, and others. Nothing to do with me, who was still hobbling a bit with a bum knee. We did indeed make it to the small banquet dinner planned in their honor, but, again, that was made possible only because of Ling and her family’s triage when I found myself helpless—no money, no passport, no bank card, no brains—apparently. The next day we did make it to a nearby hot springs, but that was thanks only to Xiaodan, my beautiful tutor who turns heads wherever we go. 

We were on the bus, winding our way through the mountains from the hot springs back to Beibei when Xiaodan’s cell phone rang. It was the police, suggesting that we really ought to come by the police station (as opposed to just reporting my losses by phone.) Enter my contribution to the weekend’s events.

Having already spent the night on a very hard bed (my bed) and having eaten only a very simple breakfast (tea and hard boiled eggs) and having had at best a twenty-three second shower before the hot water turned cold, Mary and Mary Beth were in for some more of my hospitality. We all piled into something that took us to the police station in downtown Beibei where we were ushered into a back room.  There, Mary and Mary Beth were seated in two folding chairs from which they could survey the barred windows and steel desks as well as the very young police officer who was plying us with questions. My conversational Chinese is bad and my listening comprehension is worse if the speaker uses anything other than standard Mandarin, so Xiaodan functioned as my interpreter. I told you she is pretty, and, given that, perhaps the young policeman had very little incentive to speed things up. Five minutes went by, ten, fifteen.  An hour went by. The questions kept coming. So did a second visit via police car to the tiny restaurant, where we further traumatized the restaurant owner. Back to the police station and the folding chairs. Another hour. Two hours later, our report was finished with all the red ink thumb prints on every date and signature on its many pages. Half the police force came out to wave us off as we were driven via police car back to my apartment. Police car!

Lest you think the police station had the biggest thicket of forms and red thumb prints, though, you need to hear about the Bank of China. It turns out that you need your passport to access your account to get the money that you need to apply for a new passport. Right? It also turns out that you need your passport to take the train to the US Consulate in Chengdu in another province where you must go in person to request a new passport. You need your passport to put your head in another bed—you need your passport for just about anything. You need your passport for every step of replacing that very passport.

So, lest you think the Chinese police force and Bank of China win the prize for bureaucracy, I need to inform you that the Peace Corps, the Missouri Department of Revenue, and the US Consulate in China are no slugs. Don’t forget my various US banks. There are forms for reporting this, forms for applying for that, each of which have their own set of directions and most of which require downloading something, trotting up the road to the photocopy place, printing it, signing it, scanning it, and returning home to send it to someone or other—along with various dubious proofs of identity because the primary proofs of identity are precisely what is missing and need to be replaced. Welcome to the 4317 which requires this supporting evidence, and the DS-11 and the DS-24 which require that supporting evidence. There are secondary forms and websites and rules to be read and considered.

The thicket of bureaucracy in each little kingdom is terrifying—and Mary and Mary Beth got to witness me blindly making my way through these various thickets, dragging them along the way. (Of course, they went Mary-ily and offered sage, good-humored advice every step of the way.)

My army of Chinese friends, my US buddies, Peace Corps staff, and Chinese colleagues have all been fabulously helpful. But why did poor Mary and Mary Beth have to see any of this at all? What a way to treat them!? Instead of exploring the beautiful grounds of Southwest University (a designated botanical garden) or the Jialing riverside, Mary and Mary Beth sat on hard chairs in my barren living room and watched me make one more futile search of the apartment.

So, come visit me in Beibei whenever you wish—I don’t know if it will be a comedy or a tragedy, but I promise you a drama--and some bizarre hospitality!

Almost a bust

It wasn’t a total bust, but almost—my last Monday night class. My students are all going to be English teachers, and we had just done a little (admittedly contrived) writing based on two seemingly incongruent photographs (they each had different photographs), a writing which was then meant to be a prompt for oral conversation. What I really hoped to do was to discuss creativity, and I was armed with dozens of quotations from various artists, scientists, and inventors—and we could discuss those quotations in light of their own school and out-of-school experiences. It was a dud. Rather than talk about creativity, some of my most articulate students in so many words questioned the assumption that creativity might be valuable.

(I should confess I’m not very neutral about this.  It might be human creativity more than anything that gives me hope in the face of some of our planet’s colossal problems. That doesn’t mean that I don’t also value disciplined study, that I don't also value learning what other people have already figured out. In fact, how can scientists do science without mastering a body of knowledge AND being creative?)

Okay. Now what? 

Well, I had another class of English teaching majors, and before I subjected them to the same questions, I opened with pictures of the four greats. . .

FIREWORKS AND GUN POWDER

THE COMPASS

MOVABLE TYPE / PRINTING

PAPER MAKING

. . . and, given that they were beaming, it was easy to ask after each picture if they were a little bit proud of China’s legacy of inventiveness and creativity.

I then had pictures of other great Chinese inventions. Their eyes were bright.

"CHINA"

SILK THREAD

 I then asked them if, as teachers, they hoped to sustain China’s great legacy of creativity.  (Was I leading the witness or what?) But they played along eagerly. Li Bing. Amazing engineer. We discussed many other more recent artists, engineers, scientists--and some of their creations.

I then quoted a few people who had something to say about creativity in China, but I made sure they were party officials—including a former premier.

In a sense, they had permission to talk. And they did. They had things to say.

I realized that some of my other quotations were too hard—few of my students realized that Einstein was being ironic when he said that the secret to creativity is to know how to hide your sources. They had each drawn a quotation they could talk about if it resonated with them, but I mostly wanted to hear their stories. And they talked. (In English! Not easy! Some of their comments are below.)

Mind you, these are incredibly creative students: Even if the exam system doesn’t exactly reward creativity (more on that in a future blog post), it’s not that the students aren’t creative. Today, for example, they were putting on plays, some of them grounded in fairy tales and myths, but turned inside out. It was Dan (not Cinderella) whose shoe fit right, Romeo was gay, Little Red Riding Hood used her I-phone while solving some of her problems and her grandmother was a superhero who stood up to the wolf. And so on.  They sang and danced. More contemporary films and TV shows were also fodder for their whimsy. They were witty, funny, passionate.

Below is a random list of some of these students' comments. . .they had quite a bit to say about the educational system, good and bad, and offered personal memories. Most of what's below are less personal observations.

"Sometimes people are limited by 'certainties.' So breaking up the regulation and rules maybe can stimulate people's ability of creativity."

"From my perspective, creativity requires us to see something different from the average people. The imagination is very important. We must see so-called relationships that ordinary people can't see easily. And different people see the same thing from different perspectives --and you can see something that others can't see, even they think it doesn't exist."

"Before you get success, you may meet fail many times. At this point, if you are afraid to fail one more time, you may not have chances to  make your creative ideas come true."

"I think people may have many imaginative ideas in the first place. But they always let them slip away when they have the thought that they may be illogical, absurd, etc. Doubt prevents them from thinking into the ideas."

(This one is for Ann. . .) "In our art class, the teacher asked us to paint a picture and hand it on next week. At that time, I liked making things, but I didn't feel like to paint a picture. So I used the waste paper and other things we didn't need any more to 'create a picture.' My teacher praised me for my creativity and my 'picture' won an award in an art competition."

"In my middle school, my headmaster thought that students should be the center of study and . . .students can teach students. . . "

"We should have the courage to suspend something that are certain. . .we shouldn't be afraid to show the views of our owns in any time. . .we shouldn't be afraid of professional answers. . . "

"It seems to me 3 to 10 years old is when I was most creative. . ."

Provocative News

Of course, even our most professional news sources report—or at least select—their stories from a particular perspective. US news reflects US interests; Japanese news reflects Japanese interests—no surprise there. I tend to read US news online, but just peeked at headlines from the China Daily and the Xinhua News, as well as Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The Times of India, and The Japan News by Yomiuri Shimbun. It wasn’t surprising to see that local concerns dominated the “top news” everywhere, even though each paper had maybe one international story mixed in with the homegrown ones—stories ranging from Saudia Arabia’s SARS-like virus, something about Nigeria’s Boko Harma, coverage of the UK’s relationship with the EU, and a story about Russian missiles sent to support Assad in Syria.

But I admit I was surprised by what I found related to China: While all of the top ten stories for the China Daily had something directly to do with China—even if reporting on Syria, the US or the Philippines, the state run Xinhua News Agency featured more international stories in its “top stories” than I found anywhere else—it even had a photo story about Koreans celebrating Buddha’s 2,557^th birthday. Mind you, neither the China Daily nor the Xinhua News Agency said a peep about stepped-up state control of micro-blogging, a news item that appeared in other papers today. 

Xinhua Agency News - first page - 2013-5-16

 I’m not sure what headlines readers in China, Russia or Germany or anywhere might find most provocative or most compelling—but I suspect that, even as we gravitate to our local stories, we might read “universal” themes into even the most local ones (however accurately reported they are or not). For me, some of those “big” themes shot out of last weekend’s NYT. Even as I skimmed this week’s news, I couldn’t get last week’s top stories out of my head, news both harrowing and uplifting, sometimes both at once.

There was the sobering reminder that we ignore rising CO₂ levels at our peril. Taken by itself, the record breaking statistics are beyond depressing, but coupled with stories about resilience, stories of survival and human ingenuity, I’m reminded that human beings have overcome the odds in both small and big ways before.

Who knew it was possible—what did the Bangladesh woman Reshma tell herself over and over to keep herself going as she witnessed co-workers dying all around her in the collapse of Rana Plaza? What was she thinking as she heard rescue workers scrabbling above her, apparently deaf to her calls? And then? She was trapped for seventeen days—and she was in good enough shape to walk? Utterly amazing. 

And the Cleveland miracle—what enabled Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight to survive, day after day, week after long week, for years, while held in bondage and abused? Or other survivors of abduction—Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard, among them?

These miracles of sorts, of course, occurred in the wake of harrowing, horrible, heinous events. Our Western ostrich-stance toward the thickening layer of CO₂ around the planet is beyond perilous. Lamentable is Bangladesh’s lax enforcement of building codes in the garment industry and previous resistance to holding Mohammad Sohel Rana accountable. There have been over and over missed opportunities to catch criminal sexual offenders, to prevent civic disasters, to turn around global ones. Why do we wait so long? Can we minimize some of these tragedies if we pay more attention? Can we act more swiftly on our record-breaking CO₂ ?  With these questions I find myself contemplating two more about last week’s stories. . .

Who are these perpetrators? How could a bus driver, the villain in the Cleveland sexual abduction story, be a kindly neighbor and brother and son one minute, and a monster the next? Was Ariel Castro simply crazy? Was there something seriously amiss in his biochemistry? Imagine, if I were his mother or sister, what would I do? Would I, like his brother, just wish that he “rots in jail”? For me, this story triggers all those unresolved questions about the nature of “evil” and the possibility of forgiveness. On a grander scale, whatever made former Guatemalan leader Efrain Rios Mont, just this week found guilty in a Guatemalan court, capable of committing genocide and such crimes against humanity? Truly, there are things I cannot wrap my head around. There are things I really just don’t understand.

Who are these survivors?!  But if our human population includes the likes of Ariel Castro and Efrain Rios Mont, think of the Reshmas, the Amandas, Ginas, and Michelles.

On a day when the NYT also reported that carbon dioxide measurements had surpassed 400 parts per million, these women give me hope. They remind me how profoundly resilient human nature is.

A Dog's Life

I've never witnessed such happy dogs. In Beibei, they're everywhere--free spirited little fellas--seen exploring, skipping along, checking things out, rarely just sitting.

The noodle shop owners jumped out of their chairs, leaving beer and water bottles on the walk, while the pup sniffs my groceries.

This four-footed "student" at Southwest University is sniffing out the bathrooms.

I observe them moving freely in and out of wide open noodle shops; trotting along on the university tracks--perhaps less doggedly than the two-footers they might be following; in and around the tall buildings lining Tiansheng Lu. They often seem to be on a mission--off to somewhere, usually using the sidewalks and pathways, but seemingly independently of their humans.  Maybe their humans are over there, doing some slow motion taijiquan or something, while they make the most of the chance to see the day. Most of the little ones I see are neither dawdling nor in a dead heat--they're just moving along with spirit. I also see them here in the laps of women on motor scooters, men there,  sometimes calmly spread out on top of boxes strapped to the back, their ears blowing back with the wind.  Rarely do I see one on a leash. In fact, the only time I've heard a dog barking, deep unfriendly growling, the dog was incarcerated. I witnessed that only once--one time back on the mountain lane where I sometimes run, and I sure don't want to be anywhere around if that dog is ever released. But all the rest of the dogs I see are small,  chipper little beings. How could this be, given all the stories in Western media about dog abattoirs and dog meat for human consumption in China?

I'm sure some of the news stories are true, but it seems that the history of dogs, as with so many things in China, is as complex as it is fascinating. Here in Beibei, dogs--like children--are beloved.

This fella is looking at heavy traffic, not far away, on Tiansheng Road.

This one is back in a construction zone where I sometimes run.

Apparently, it was in China where dogs were first domesticated about 15,000 years ago. Later they were beloved by emperors, despised by Mao, assumed to be unaffordable by a few generations of poor peasants and factory workers, and, now, in the twenty-first century are welcomed warmly on city streets. At least on the streets of Beibei.  According to some web sites, Olympic-conscious  Beijing restricted dogs' presence in 2008, and other east coast cities  have heavily regulated pet ownership, especially of big dogs.

But farther west, here in Beibei, where the streets are less crowded  and where the one-child policy is alive and well (with single children possibly wanting playmates), dogs are everywhere. Everywhere. In public places, private ones, trotting, springing along. I see dogs and children alike squatting along the street, but the omnipresent yellow-jacketed street sweepers keep the sidewalks clean. 

Interesting to ponder what kind of barometer of both economics and various social practices dogs might be. Off the leash, these dogs seem relatively happy and benign. Ponder is all I can do, though, for I know what I see on the streets of Beibei isn't the whole story, even in Beibei. Apparently the proportion of rabid dogs in China is much higher than it is elsewhere in the world--for one, it's expensive to get rabies shots and licenses. And dogs are indeed sold for food, as I've witnessed myself in a faraway district:

It's an open question where the dogs come from for some of the existing abattoirs. Chinese animal activists have been known to intercept and unload trucks loaded with dogs headed for slaughter, if news stories such as this can be believed. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2289598/Caged-like-cattle-dogs-China-saved-seconds-slaughtered-dinner-table.html. 

It's not hard to find other sites deploring the abuse of dogs in China--here are two more that popped up when I googled "dogs in China" just now:
                  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/china-dogs
                  http://news.sky.com/story/1075143/china-dogs-clubbed-to-death-at-abattoirs 
 

But without defending some horrible places and practices in China, I wonder if the pot isn’t calling the kettle black just a little bit when Westerners point fingers. I wonder if Westerners' revulsion is in part because we’re used to seeing dogs in domestic settings. We’re no longer so used to seeing up close the chickens, pigs, salmon and other farmed and caged animals that many Westerners eat regularly, animals that may be subject to as bad or even worse conditions. Perhaps it's a matter of out of sight, out of mind. The same person who thinks nothing of buying KFC drumsticks or Tyson pre-skinned chicken breasts just might object to dogs for supper.

 Credit for chicken image: http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://james-mcwilliams.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/chickens-in-cages.jpg&imgrefurl=http://james-mcwilliams.com/?p%3D2963&h=297&w=468&sz=76&tbnid=C-fAVWabFRy5NM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=142&zoom=1&usg=__Fi9IbwikyzbSuFXYl4Kk3pX9T0M=&docid=IgUTDxO_2hP5pM&sa=X&ei=lpKEUcCuAo7SqAHQ0YGAAg&ved=0CD4Q9QEwAw&dur=560

But, again as with so many things, the history of dogs here is thousands of years old--many, many thousands of years. And the spectrum of practices is mind-boggling. I offer no apology for the practices described in those news stories above, but I also have never seen such an overall happy population of  dogs as these active (but not hyperactive), free, spirited critters in Beibei.

To Be or Not To Be (a Teacher)

Sometimes a student on a teaching scholarship tells me that she (or he) does not want to teach English—what she really wants to do is design electronic gadgets or train horses or run a bicycle shop. It’s sad, to some degree, because the exam system coupled with economic pressures often leave students with very little choice. And yet what do we really know about what we want and who we are?

I remember at one point in my life having no clue what I DID want to do but being absolutely certain that I did NOT want to be a teacher or a nurse. I thought those were expected of me and other young women, and I didn’t want to be forced to make those choices.  Write, yes, I’d like to do that, but I’d never be able to make a living doing it, and, anyway, no thank you to teaching.

Obviously, I eventually decided otherwise and have had no regrets. And I wouldn’t be surprised if my would-be-bike-shop-owners change their tunes later on. But I didn’t change my mind all at once.

My own circuitous path to English teaching happened to wind through strawberry fields and nursing homes and medical research laboratories. In the basement of a veteran’s hospital, I was a lab tech running assays on human growth hormone and assisting in studies on the effects of magnesium on the metabolism of vitamin D. I would stand next to my lab partner, marveling at all the glittering glassware, debating the merits of nuclear energy and our own radioactive-tracers for the vitamin D as we carefully set up the liquid chromatography columns. The endocrinologist for whom we worked might burst in to the lab, opining on anything from Vitamin D to Dostoevsky to the delivery of the next container of liquid nitrogen. Who knew that I would so enjoy running experiments that sometimes lasted until two in the morning, whenever the liquid chromatography had run its course? 

If I had a passion, it was for the pen, but I later found ways to work with both science and writing—strange things happened that I could not have predicted when I was 18.

Luck and circumstance played a strong hand in my destiny, suggesting that my conscious thinking about who I was and what I wanted wasn’t entirely in charge. But, to the degree it was, part of my decision-making happened by leaning away from things as much as by leaning toward things. I see in one son or another a position held, maybe not so much from conviction as from it being NOT my position. And I see that as natural.  Isn’t that part of growing up—of becoming independent, of defining the boundaries of one’s own identity? I am not you. There is space for both of us, and besides, we will eventually mature enough to see ways in which we’re more alike than different.

Isn’t that what developmental psychology tells us? Doesn’t maturity follow some stage of titling away from home base enough to establish one’s own identity before going on?

And yet it is interesting to ponder that here in China. Is that what I’m witnessing? Is there a push to define one’s own identity, apart and separate, at least at one stage of development? How does it happen here . . . where uncles and grandmothers join in the family debate about where you should go to school, where parents have the last word, where whole university classes are heard reciting passages aloud together, where the sense of duty to uphold the culture is thousands of years old, where millions of people travel under extraordinarily uncomfortable conditions to get back to the family for New Years? What does developmental psychology tell us about maturity in collectivist societies?

Of course, there have been dizzying changes from one generation to the next here in China. There were dramatic historical forces that put some people on collective farms, other people behind the horns in their Mercedes Benzes, and still others behind fashionable glasses, cramming night and day to pass their gaokao university entrance exams. There are dramatic generational differences—due to dramatic historical forces.

And yet—do I witness students defining themselves differently, separately from their parents—at some stage of development?

Those of my students who are here on teaching scholarships must return to their home provinces, some thousands of miles away, to teach for ten years. Does that constraint on employment bother them? Who knows how representative my students are, but most of them can’t imagine doing otherwise—where else would they go? Why would they do anything else but go home?

I sometimes get weary of the stereotyping of Westerners as individualistic and Easterners as collectivists—of course, it’s not so simple. And yet the differences are profound enough that I find myself re-thinking some developmental theories I’d once been taught, wondering how tacitly Western they might be. 

Is it possible that differences between and among generations here in China were motivated far less by defining oneself differently, far less by carving out a space of one’s own, than by external forces? Perhaps it’s always true that we’re less in charge of our destinies and identities than we think—but is it possible that that’s even more true in China? 

* * * * *

(Having reflected on identity and independence, I want to acknowledge the many-layered critiques of developmental and stage-based theories, even in the West, and I want to make clear that I’m in no position to generalize what I think I’m seeing here in China. Who knows how well I understand my own students, and who knows how representative they are, even if I do know them well. I’m simply musing, speculating.)