Celebrating the Year of the Snake with Monkeys on Our Backs

I spent Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) touring in and around western Sichuan with a student and her family. When halfway up  Mt. Emei, I finally understood the phrase "monkey on your back." These thirty-pound thieves would fly out of nowhere, landing on our backs, trying our zippers and taking what goods they could. Lei Shu Yan (above) is about to lose his water bottle--just moments before I lost mine.

More amazing than the mischievous monkeys was the spectacular scenery on Mt. Emei, a series of steep slopes jutting into and above the mist. Amazing, too, is the legacy of Chinese Buddhism here.

The lower region of Mt. Emei has lush vegetation, crystal clear streams,
and numerous Buddhist temples and monasteries.

The higher we rose, the colder and mistier it got. Snow (visible above) and ice followed.

Waiting for us at the very top was the Golden Buddha, distinctly visible at sunset

. . . but not so visible the next morning when we joined throngs of others in the freezing cold to see the legendary sunrise. We needed crampons to descend the hundreds and hundreds of icy stone steps.
(Below see three of our party.)

 Earlier in the week we visited the seventy-meter Buddha carved into a mountain in Leshan--you can see his fingernails on the right. A single toenail could easily host a party of a dozen or so visitors.

The Buddha of Leshan lords over the confluence of three rivers--below is a bridge over one of them.

Throughout the week, JiaYue's family extended unbelievable hospitality. Her parents hosted numerous banquets on our behalf (she has just been accepted by several of the world's top schools for graduate school), several different "uncles" covered expenses for passes here and there, and her grandmother hosted the large extended family for days of feasting in nearby Dujiangyan, also home to a two-thousand year old successful engineering marvel, an irrigation program that made Sichuan one of China's rice bowls for millennia. We went to one awesome place after another for days. More on all that later.

But back to monkeys. Who knew I'd have two "monkeys on my back" when navigating the insanely crowded trains and buses back to Beibei. The first "monkey" was what is sometimes euphemistically called "traveler's revenge," something that can be explained by my non-stop feasting, some of it on street food, and something that resulted in perhaps 35 trips to the pot the night before. With squat toilets on crowded, swaying trains, I dared not ingest one drop of anything the morning before leaving.
 
The second "monkey" was the very hospitality I just raved about. Consider JiaYue's grandma. I could write a book about this sweet woman, but my eyes grew rounder and rounder as she made a dozen trips from the kitchen and elsewhere to our stash of backpacks and luggage, bringing us more and more gifts to bring home, including many bags of her frozen home-made tang yuan and jiaozi, both of which I love. Then the big box of juices she thought I'd like. Then the four books the very sweet "brothers" gave me—one each of the four great classics of Chinese literature. Each one maybe half the size and weight of a typical dictionary. (Under any other conditions, I'd be thrilled to have these particular tomes.) Then Grandma emerged with a big plastic container of toffee candies and some bags of delicious dried meats. The other family members looked very somber as Grandma kept padding back with more, but they felt helpless to stop her.

So, in my totally dehydrated and weakened state (because of my first "monkey"), I shouldered my backpack, grabbed my suitcase and wondered where I'd be able to stash the ungodly colossal plastic bag with the broken zipper holding all this incredibly sweet Chinese hospitality (my other "monkey"--dear as it all was).

I shouldn't have worried. We did have to navigate some long stairs in several train stations, but it somehow worked out. Everyone else had more than they could carry, and at least there were no live ducks peeking out of my bag.

Home in Beibei, I can begin to reflect on the scores of sacrifices JiaYue's family members made on my behalf and how patiently they tried to help me understand their sentences and how vigilantly they looked after my every need. It's 2013. The Year of the Snake.

Chunjie - AKA Spring Festival or Chinese New Year

The Gregorian calendar isn't the only one around, and, according to the Chinese lunar calendar, winter is over and spring is around the corner. Spring festival, also known as Chunjie or the Chinese New Year, is a festival with thousands of years of customs embedded in it, so it's not just one thing. From a US perspective, it has elements of Christmas (big holiday, gift giving, holiday lights and decorations), Thanksgiving (giving thanks, feasting with family), Fourth of July (firecrackers), Halloween (All Saints Day), Memorial Day (remembrance of other dead relatives), and more.  Simply put it's a homecoming extending for many days before and after the new year, which is February 10th in 2013. Here comes the Year of the Snake.

I did join the billion plus travelers moving hither and thither via public transport, but it didn't seem that much crazier than usual to me. The train stations I have visited are always packed: When it's time for a train to load, the crowd presses so tightly on all sides that I think I could lift my feet and just be moved along. That said, I live in western China and might find the Spring Festival travel season ("chunyun") even more intense in the east.

Off the train, though, I have witnessed elements of "chunyun." I see people carrying not only suitcases but also mud buckets, sometimes on either end of a bamboo pole. I assume the mud buckets are full of food--fruits, sweets, dried meats. I had to book my train tickets early because of "chunyun" and know of Peace Corps volunteers who were out of luck when trying to make a last minute plan. I found that ATMs frequently ran out of cash. I see everywhere the infamous plaid plastic zip bags--full of gifts, no doubt. And, of course, all over are shops overflowing with red envelopes and all sorts of red banners, red lanterns, and red paper hangings. The streets are lined everywhere, even in Beibei, with millions of lights--not just white lights. Beibei's main thoroughfares had little red globes bobbing like pumpkins every foot or two between festoons of purple and yellow lights, thousands and thousands of them. Spectacular.

But Beibei is not where I'm spending the festival itself. A student kindly invited me to her home near LeShan, where I'm joining her extended family. Her "brothers" a "sister" and I are tackling nearby Mt. Emei (Emei Shan), one of the four sacred mountains for Buddhists and a spectacular site for its biodiversity and views of things cultural (over thirty temples) and natural (the Tibetan plateau not far to the west, the Sichuan basin to the east) and thieving monkeys.

These little critters jump on unsuspecting tourists, quickly rip open any flimsy bags, and unzip  backpack pockets if you don't move quickly. One man had a big bag full of dried noodles and other picnic goods, hoping to avoid the high costs of food higher up, and a monkey tore into all of it, with his family members watching aghast.

The sites of Mt. Emei are so spectacular, though, they warrant their own blog entry. Next time!

Oreos with Chinese Characteristics

Sweet tooth though I have, I never really liked Oreos. That’s not the case for most of my Chinese students. Typically, they have been spared my silver-filled sweet tooth and tend to prefer fruit to any kind of super sugary dessert . . .unless that dessert happens to be an Oreo. They’ll eat one of those in a flash. But what’s an Oreo in China? To be sure, it’s still a mass-produced chocolate cookie familiar to Westerners, but it has Chinese characteristics.

Oreos, cell phones, high-heeled boots, red-rimmed eyeglasses—all of these products that might be familiar to Westerners—somehow have some distinctly Chinese characteristics in China, if not tangible ones (like the Chinese characters on the package of Oreos or the green tea filling in some of the cookies), less tangible ones (like the social context in which they are produced).  So, what’s the social context—far beyond the factory alone to the larger culture –in which Oreos are produced? As most people know, Deng Xiaoping famously characterized China’s emerging economy as a market economy with socialist characteristics. I’m not sure how socialist it is, but one of the characteristics of Oreos is the consumption rate. It’s huge.

If asked what the primary Chinese characteristic is characterizing anything in China, including its most phenomenal feats and failures, socialist or not, I’d be tempted to name one thing:

Scale.

Scale is perhaps the single most distinctive characteristic I observe in China—whether the scale of the mass-production of sweet things like Oreos (100s of 1000s of tons of them a year, I gather), the scale of a feat like the Great Wall (a very old thing that runs over 13,000 miles, according to one survey cited on Wikipedia), the scale of a failure like the famine following the “Great Leap Forward” (possibly resulting in as many as 43 million deaths, again according to Wikipedia),  a culture that is five thousand years old (imagine that—what other culture comes even close?), or simply the number of people standing ahead of me in the Chongqing train station, people heading home for Spring Festival (“chunyun” has been dubbed the largest human migration in history).

http://www.csmonitor.com/Photo-Galleries/In-Pictures/China-s-chun-yun-peak-travel-season#250365

 Scale is a characteristic that might warrant both celebration and commiseration . . .as Wen Jiabo suggested in a 2003 speech delivered at Harvard, “Any small problem multiplied by 1.3 billion will end up being a very big problem, and a very big aggregate divided by 1.3 billion will come to a very tiny figure." 

Zui. ---est. Biggest. Smallest. Longest. Oldest.

Scale: The number of strokes in my Chinese name (29). The power generating capacity of The Three Gorges Dam (22,500 MW). The length of the Yangtze River—or Chang Jiang (3,988 miles). The Dujiangyan Irrigation Project (the oldest and only surviving no-dam irrigation system in the world, thousands of years old). The number of victims in the Nanjing Massacre (200,000, arguably 300,000).

The number of red envelopes produced for Chinese New Year in 2013 is, I’m sure, colossal. The number of hukou certificates is unprecedented—hukou is the ancient system of household registration considered a stabilizing element by some and something akin to apartheid by others. The number of cars on the road is more than Henry Ford could have ever imagined, and, not surprisingly, the scale of air pollution in Beijing is also unprecedented. The number of bright students taking the gaokao, China’s grueling nine-hour university entrance examination, was 9.5 million in 2012. The number of Google- and weibo-blog users are enough to remind us all that times are changing.

I don’t think we can really appreciate anything about China’s past or future, its feats or its failures, its current challenges, without understanding this:

Scale.

Mountain City

My student Co concocted Saturday's walking tour of Chongqing, a mountain city an hour away from Beibei. Though he'd been to the city before, he'd never done the back alleys and neighborhoods accessible only by steep stairs, and he wanted to do all that before taking in the night lights seen from mountains on the other side of the Yangtze River (Jiang Chang). Hiking in the Himalayas hardly prepared me for keeping up with Co, his nose half the time on his smart phone, the rest of the time leading us up circuitous stairways--on and on for about ten hours. The sun does shine in Chongqing, but it was gray and smoggy on Saturday, and, while there are big spectacles to behold, we chose to focus on other things.

For example, we were on our way to the Great Hall when we passed rows of men and women  kneeling on stone stairs, petitioning some uniformed men about something. A number of taxi drivers pulled up and watched. I am conspicuous even in a crowd, and I could see someone at the top of the stairs watching me as Co engaged passersby to find out what the matter was. We didn't get a solid answer but thought it had something to do with people (taxi drivers?) losing their jobs (to what?) or citizens losing homes due to some planned demolition (see some photos below).

The city itself is on a mountainous peninsula nosing into the juncture of the Yangtze (Jiang Chang) and the Jialing River, but the larger municipality is one of four municipalities that have equal status with twenty-some provinces in China (the three other municipalities are all on the east coast: Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai). So, Chongqing is an up-and-coming inland force, soon to be a "port" because of the bigger ships that will be able to cut their way up deeper channels created as a result of the massive Three Gorges Dam. Plans are afoot to make it a major airline hub, and it's already establishing itself as an economic force to behold.

But it wasn't that many decades ago that people got around primarily by stairs--it is one of few modern cities with its scale of development laid out on such steep terrain. The photos below depict a crummy day and sites that wouldn't make the covers of tourist brochures, and yet there were lots of beautiful little niches in what might look quite dreary below. Old people played mahjong high up on a terraced walkways under trees holding their bird cages. Hidden parks, here, there, all over popped into view only when practically in them.

Before the night lights scene found on a Yangtze cruise website, you'll find over a dozen photos from our walk--so brace yourself for lots of pictures.

Chongqing in January (cold but green)

Co crunches on sugar cane while taking in a traffic scene over the Yangtze (Jiang Chang) below.

The character on the "garage door" marks the place for demolition.

 

We went up lots of stairs.

We went down lots of stairs.

We snaked through places like this on the way up or down.

We heard birds singing from cages hung in branches throughout numerous little pocket parks,
their owners, often elderly, doing taiqi or playing mah jong nearby.

The pagoda is on a little mountain top--and Co is playing peekaboo.

These trees grace stone walls and gardens everywhere.

Chongqing is a city of bridges as well as of mountains, with more to come.

The green waters of the Jialing (not too visible here--
over my left shoulder) merge with the brown Yangtze (Jiang Chang).

Note the stairways and imagine the scene a while back, before the highway was in.
The Yangtze (Jiang Chang) is in the distance and more city and mountains are faintly visible south of the river.

A common scene in the dozens and dozen of public spaces.

Jeifangbei is the People's Liberation Monument in the center of the Jeifangbei CBD.
The clock on the top of the historic monument advertises Rolodex watches.

A building in the CBD has layered red and black "chopsticks."
At the blunt end of each black chopstick is the character for peace.

We did catch this nighttime view of Chongqing from the Nanshan mountains (on the south side of the Yangtze).
I did not take this photo, though; it's from a Yangtze cruise website.

Here Comes the Sun

Shattered. That word suddenly ceased to be a cliche for me several years ago. I came to understand that grief wasn't simply about being disconnected, unhitched, cut off from one who had just died and other losses, but also being disconnected from pretty much the whole world. The whole world as I knew it had broken up, no longer existed. What I came to know about "shattered" was not so much the fragments with unfamiliar edges, but the space, the gaps, the void between the pieces.

That sense of being disconnected had a time dimension--it was hard to imagine the future. I didn't completely recognize present reality and the future was even harder to compute.  I would tell people this, and I don't think they believed me--because, after all, I went to work and did things and seemed normal enough. I knew how to be practical, functional. And maternal love put a bubble around my  sons--they would be okay and I'd make sure it was so. But on some level, it was hard for me to imagine a future for the rest of us.

Feeling largely disconnected somehow had implications for thinking and valuing. For a while it was hard to make conceptual connections that mattered, to find those relationships between and among A and B and C, those right relationships, that add up to meaningful thoughts--to thoughts that matter.

Shattered wasn't the only word that resonated. So did other words that ceased to be cliches for me: Unhinged, unraveled, unplugged, broken.

So, without boring you with the details of that strange state of mind, I can simply say that I worked on improving it, bit by bit, day by day for a long time. Focusing on just one beautiful thing every day-- journaling a bit and running and meditating and being in nature. I did other things, too, but certainly those. Reading. If the familiar was totally unfamiliar, unreal, I thought I would literally go somewhere unfamiliar to seek the familiar.

That seeking of the familiar in the unfamiliar is just one of many reasons I'm here in China. (First of all, I believe in the value of cultural exchanges and of my particular program; I also wanted to ply my trade in a different context. So, those programmatic and professional reasons were paramount. But I also had personal reasons, especially this one.) And I discovered that I could indeed find bits and pieces of the familiar in this unfamiliar world. I could see bits of the word "resilience" in the ferns and ivies sprouting everywhere from inhospitable walls of limestone. I could see bits of the word "resilience" in a people who have a long history of suffering. Some have dared to make a comparison between the Holocaust and the Sino-Japanese War, which resulted in millions of casualties. You just find a way to go on. But I found the words "joy" and "life" in the children's songs on a Chinese CD a student gave me to help me learn Chinese. The "joy" in those little Chinese voices, totally butchering the one English song they attempted (the alphabet song), sparked memories of singing to my sons once upon a time. Seeing a little rosy-cheeked face watching me intently from the basket she's being carried in upon someone's back. Seeing a little toddler skipping along and suddenly squatting--those split bottom pants are handy, eliminating the need for diapers--all this sparked joyous memories. It goes on.

So, for a while I felt like I was getting better, little by little--perhaps I wasn't "there" but was certainly better--but more recently it's been dawning on me that I really do feel about as whole and grounded and connected to my world and beloveds as I ever have. I feel in right relationship with the pieces of  my being and world and present and past--about as whole as whole is going to be, knowing that we all live our lives in various states of disrepair.

So these were my thoughts as I swung my legs out from under the quilts on Monday--waking up in a very cold room, knowing it was my dead husband's birthday, and thinking how shattered I had felt for so long. But I was feeling like, no, I don't feel shattered any more, those glass fragments have really fused into something else. I was just picturing a stained glass window of a rising sun, trite as that might sound, as I walked over and clicked on my laptop.

 

There I found an email from my friend Ann with a link to a flashmob YouTube video filmed in an unemployment office in Spain. Listen yourself to their rendition of "Here Comes the Sun." I couldn't have been in a more receptive mood. http://youtu.be/kS709ZyZ_YU

(And, once again, just what does a sun look like? I might find out in a month, when I go to Yunnan Province, literally "south of the clouds" and far from Beijing. I will indeed go to Yunnan, where the sun does shine and the sky is blue and the air is breathable.)

Credits for the images:

Shattered: 

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http://images.google.com.hk/imgres?q=shattered+glass&num=10&hl=zh-CN&newwindow=1&safe=strict&tbo=d&biw=1039&bih=639&tbm=isch&tbnid=Zx-WD_ZlmJee4M:&imgrefurl=http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2011/02/14/shattered-chromosomes-cause-cancer-chaos/&docid=kwRTxPoDtoSNRM&imgurl=http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/shattered_glass.jpg%253Fw%253D300&w=1600&h=1200&ei=G5jzULuzBKHImQXYyoCQDQ&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=1&sig=108949288615991249508&page=1&tbnh=133&tbnw=188&start=0&ndsp=17&ved=1t:429,r:10,s:0,i:109&tx=928&ty=293

Stained glass:

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http://www.squidoo.com/VintageGiftStore

Beyond Pig Parts

We were all stabbing our chopsticks at the beautifully arranged dishes on the lazy Susan in the middle of the restaurant table. Thin purple slices of onion created scallops around the edge of one platter, carrot peels were curled into flowers on another. I was stabbing my chopsticks into the tasty brown stuff on top of the sweet potato dish, thinking it consisted mostly of mushroom, only to discover that this, too, was pig parts. Stomach parts. But none of the body parts on the table before me were patented, as far as I knew.

Sitting next to me was “George,” a molecular biologist I’d heard about but had never met. Not only is George a biologist, but also a lawyer and a CPA. George, I thought, might have opinions about patents and body parts. Indeed he did. 

In bygone years I’d had some of my science students read and discuss articles about gene patenting and informed consent—in fact, we had engaged in one such discussion after reading Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a book about the woman whose cancer cells ended up creating the oldest and most widely used cell line, now known around the world by the name of HeLa (letters from her first and last name). I once rode on a train in Switzerland, where a Bosnian saw the book in my hand. He did not know who Henrietta Lacks was and knew nothing about her contribution to the development of the Pap Smear test for the screening of cervical cancer, but he knew all about HeLa cells. Molecular biologists all around the world use this cell line. But who owns those cells? Anybody?

Who owns your cells? And who owns your genes? You?

You might be surprised who holds the patents on some of your body parts—and what those patents have to do with who controls research, drugs, and the pharmaceutical industry. You might be surprised how much university administrators in the US celebrate the awarding of patents (You published how many articles? Got how many grants? And how many patents?). Didn’t you know it is a good thing to count among your prizes lots of patents on body parts?

http://brianandrewsauthor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/tumblr_luorujhhFN1ql3zy0.jpg

George and I were seated at this table along with Clay’s son Daniel, visiting from San Francisco, and half a dozen other people, none of whom probably care too much about body parts, HeLa cells, or gene patenting. But George cares. He’s petitioned the UN to set standards that might constrain some of this patenting. He’s published thirty some scholarly articles just about this, mostly in Chinese journals because he fears his English isn’t good enough to reach the most prestigious science journals that now happen to be published in English.

He and many scientists in other parts of the world question not only the ethics of gene patenting (and patenting of other science-related discoveries), but also the implications for research. Who controls the cost of certain body parts (and non-living parts)? Who controls access to these things? How do pharmaceutical companies relate to this? And biotech companies? How does this affect the availability and cost of certain drugs for patients? Food for anyone?

http://www.bio-itworld.com/images/1112_gene_patents_head.gif

Many of these things I’d thought about a little bit before, but I’d never quite thought about them from George’s perspective. Because we were celebrating Daniel’s arrival in China, George and I didn’t throw ourselves into a conversation that is waiting to be had, but I can already see more layers to the complexity of the issue—and more layers to the role of the English language as a carrier of culture and the dominant culture’s values. That, of course, is where my work comes into the story.

Not only are the patents gatekeepers, so is the language—for good or for bad.

* * * * *

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Pigs' Ears and Stomach Parts

These aren't the Christmas Eve elves. These are the Queens of Jiaozi (Chinese dumplings), queens who heralded for me what turned out to be a twenty-four hour eating marathon--one that started New Year's Eve in my apartment, wove through the apartment of some other Chinese friends for lunch on New Year's Day, to the terraced slopes of JinYun Mountain (along with hundreds of other revelers), and then back to the apartment of some colleagues who served up an amazing New Year's Eve dinner with amazing parts. Pigs' ears. Stomach parts.

All this feasting is not to be mistaken for the real bonanza yet to come--Chinese New Year or Spring Festival, which is neither in the spring nor at the beginning of the year, at least according to a Western calendar. Eastern--or lunar--calendars, of course, tell a different story. My story, a version of the Western New Year in Beibei, is suggested in the pictures below.

Before the Chinese cabbage is diced in to millimeter sized pieces.

"Vicky" is making dozens of dumplings--still New Year's Eve
in my apartment.

"Edith" and "Naomi" aren't about to be outdone by "Vicky."

We're ready to eat by eight--and the conversation rolls on for another few hours.

"Merry," "Tom," and "Lizzy" scramble ahead
of our four-family party on New Year's Day - 2013.

They turn to wave. Terraced vegetable gardens are in the foreground,
the rest of JinYun Mountain looms in the background.

We wind right through various peasants' gardens, up and down the slopes.

Beibei and the Jialing River are wedged between two mountain ranges.
In the foreground are lots of freshly pruned trees (plums maybe?)--
their recently pruned flowering branches now adorn
homes all over Beibei (including mine).

Mrs. Niu brought me these.

We're still far from the top of JinYun, but you can see Beibi below.