Medicinal Gunk

Olga drinking tea - students made the paper roses

My Russian friend Olga and I met as usual this Friday afternoon, even though our dear tutor is off in Chengdu today, competing with thousands of other Chinese graduates on an exam for prospective civil servants. A small fraction of the test-takers will be invited to interview for an even smaller number of job openings. We wish Xiaodan the best. Competition is fierce.

As a graduate student, Xiaodan both teaches and tutors Chinese.

Xiaodan will no doubt tell Olga and me all about her views of the exam system next week. We've already discussed--to the degree my limited vocabulary allows it--her views about job hunting and working conditions for young people in China.

Today, though, Olga and I told each other stories--in Chinese--about our week. Without a doubt, the highlight of my week was fetching my brother Ted and his wife Cathy from a hotel in Chongqing and bringing them back to Beibei for a day. They regaled me with tales of their travels, from ancient monasteries in the desert northwest to the cold splendor of Tibet in the southwest, filled me in on family news, and traipsed around the university with me in Beibei, getting a taste of my life here.

If seeing Ted and Cathy was the best thing that happened, though, meeting two old men in the park below my apartment was the weirdest thing. The park is full of mostly older people doing taijiquan most mornings and it wasn't unusual to have someone come up and stare at me as I cut through on my way to classes. Curiosity kept me from shaking off one elderly man who seized my wrist, took my pulse and within seconds put his finger in two places, creating some noticeable warmth. (He was small enough I could have thrown him if I took a mind to--I wasn't threatened and don't under ordinary circumstances let people touch me. I had no intention of paying him for whatever service he thought he was providing.) He then slapped a piece of paper (below) with some medicinal gunk on my back, which was a bit of a feat, given that I was wearing a coat and two shirts. I did at that point shrug him off and "mei you'd" him when his notebook with fees came out. Sitting on rocks nearby, watching, were the folks from whom I regularly buy vegetables.

Later that morning, when a woman from Malawi in my Chinese class offered to help wash it off my back, the classmate with a PhD from Suriname said it looked just like a poultice her mother makes. Even after we had peeled the paper off and scrubbed most of the tar-like gunk off my back, enough of the gunk was left on the paper that, when the paper was placed in my notebook, it bled through to the other side. My back looks somewhat similar.

Even later, when I was talking with some Chinese students in my English classes, they smelled it and earnestly told me that the tar-like gunk is very good for you, even though only one could speculate what it is made out of. That student, who said her mother is a doctor, thought it was made from boiled donkey hide. Others told me about the pain relief such gunk provides.

My sense is that nearly all of my Chinese friends, including MDs, are respectful of Chinese medical practices, even if they also--even primarily--use Western ones. The same doctor may offer both Eastern and Western diagnoses and therapies. Hospitals, too.

The men in the park were something close to charlatans and many herbal remedies have no evidence-based support--and yet I suspect that among the mostly-benign-but-useless treatments are many treatments the West would benefit from learning more about. At the very least we should be willing to research them, and I suspect we have something to learn from a much more holistic perspective of health.  Even if most of these treatments, some millennia-old, are useless, I find utterly amazing that some seem to work spectacularly well. Evidence seems to be mounting that acupuncture, for instance, works in particular contexts (see http://newsinhealth.nih.gov/issue/feb2011/feature1 ).

Without the benefit of many contemporary research tools, imagine the path of discovery for these ancient Chinese medical practitioners. Hen youisi.

Dazu

If you follow stories about China in some of my favorite news venues, including NPR and the NYT, you've just read about another tragic self-immolation and off-the-scale air pollution. These stories are indeed news and no doubt need to be told. But! What amazing stories rarely find their way into the daily news!?

I'm reminded a little of the first time I read about the US in (what was to me) a foreign newspaper, the Auckland Star. Where was this land of drug junkies, urban riots, revolution and general mayhem? The newspaper was full of stories about the troubled US. Was it describing the same land where I had, just months before, stood at the foot of the hill each morning, waiting for my yellow school bus?

For sure, everything in China is big--including its problems and its amazing history. I don't fault the NYT or NPR for covering some of the problems--that's what news media do. But I want to take you back to the Dazu Rock Carvings, a place I first visited under clear skies in July and thought I would be re-visiting this weekend with my brother and his wife. As it turns out, we'll be scaling the local mountains in Beibei instead, but I still want to share a little more about Dazu, something I've been meaning to do for a long time.

When my friend Martha and I decided to go last July, we managed to buy our tickets and board a bus from Tongliang to Dazu with no problem--and spoke a tiny bit of Chinese with two different passengers who were curious about our travel plans and eager to use a little of their English. Once we got to the bus station in Dazu, it wasn't completely self-evident where we got the next bus to the historic caves. We could have just "Qing-wen,-dazu-zai-nar?"-ed our way, but one of the two fellows on the bus volunteered to accompany us the many blocks to the next bus stop, angling for nothing in return and taking more than an hour out of his day. This was far from the first time a stranger had walked me some distance, simply to wave good bye.

Martha and I might as well have stepped into a time machine--back to the Tang Dynasty. It was in the seventh century when the earliest carvings were made in these rock walls, but it was in the twelfth century, by then the Song Dynasty, when Zhao Zhifeng devoted his adult life to the the rock carvings and sculpture. Other monks and nuns toiled over the carvings for years, spreading via rock carvings a medium and a message along the Silk Road from India into northwestern China. Today you'll find tens of thousands of statues and scores of sculptures just at Dazu, with mostly Buddhist themes. The most interesting, we believed, were those on Mount Baoding. Just one of the reclining Buddha's fingers would dwarf you.

You can glimpse the Bao Ding Mountain Circle of Life in the distance.

Somebody's English is about on par with my Chinese.

Check the Buddhist gesture on the street lights.
A lotus flower dangles from each Buddha hand.

A lotus flower.

My Peace Corps buddy Martha

The Bao Ding Mountain Demons with the Rulers of Hell.

Instead of static, repetitive clusters of three to five statutes, these carvings depict a lively mix of the sacred and secular, of Buddhism and local versions of Confucian and Daoist beliefs, in a sequence of "thirty-one monumental tableaux carved around a horse-shoe shaped gully." http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/china/dazu/

Stuffed!

Gòu le! Enough! I’m stuffed!

You see, I’m one little pig who is running way behind schedule this Friday night because I just couldn’t wait to cook up some goods from our semi-annual pilgrimage to the Metro in Chongqing. The Metro is a big German store—in some ways like Carre Four or Cosco or Sam’s. The one in Chongqing stocks both local goods and imports, and it’s the one place to get cheese or other hard-to-get things, most of them wicked and delicious. Chocolate. French wine. New Zealand butter.  French bread (made in Chongqing). Feta cheese. Walnuts. Basil.

The secret ingredient in the foods my Chinese friends
have most appreciated--including banana bread.

The waiban packed a dozen of us foreigners into a small bus and took us to stock up on whatever sinful things we craved—and that we did. For me, part of the treat was being able to buy some items in bulk—rice and oil—without having to carry them the long way from the local Yong Hui market back to my apartment. (Although I can get some things—fruit, vegetables, eggs, and tofu—at the food stands at the foot of my hill, I must walk four or five blocks for things like yogurt, oil, nuts, rice, noodles and so on. No big deal, but I don’t try to save money by buying these things in bulk when I have to carry them a long way. And no elevators in my apartment.)

So I stocked up on things both practical and impractical—including some ingredients I’d been awaiting for months to be able to make a delicious cheese soup and cheese muffins that were part of a Christmas package some dear ones sent me from home last year. I hadn’t even unpacked the toothpaste and such before I’d gone down to the corner shop to get a Shancheng beer, another ingredient for the cheese soup. I whipped up the biscuit mix and soup—and then wolfed down half of what I made, which was probably meant to feed a family of five.

But I’m full and satiated.

It’s interesting because I never thought much about “fullness factors” before coming to China. Here I eat exceedingly well—probably more nutritiously than ever in my life—and I eat quite a lot. But I rarely feel full.

Part of it may be because there is so little bread, butter, sweets, cheese, or milk products in my diet, things that are fattening but also satisfying.  Many (most?) Chinese are lactose intolerant and don’t drink milk or eat cheese. The Chinese do use meat and potatoes in various dishes, but they usually cut them up in tiny pieces and mix them in with other ingredients—you won't find big slabs of any kind of meat. And, traditionally, the Chinese are not bakers. They don’t have ovens. Typically, they don’t bake bread or desserts. In this part of China, spicy dishes are much preferred to sweet things and even children don’t seem to have much of a sweet tooth. So many of the things that might make me feel full at home just aren’t available in my neighborhood.

So, much as I like Gongbao Jiding, Yuxiang Qiezi and other Chinese dishes, I thoroughly enjoyed pigging out on my cheese soup and biscuits tonight.

And now . . . I’m going to indulge in a bite of chocolate.

Heavy stone

All week, I've been listening to the chink, chink, chink of chisels being hammered into rock. First a rock wall forty feet under my kitchen/porch was excavated, much of it by hand; now, workers are chiseling in near unison on huge blocks of stone to build some sort of retaining wall around all of it. The chinking goes on and on, from dawn til dusk. Brutal as the labor must be, the workers laugh and chatter easily enough, almost like goofy school boys.

Perhaps most striking to me is the contrast between two very visible power systems in Beibei: the human powered and the fossil-fuel powered. Over and over, I have been reminded that the human body is capable of doing amazing things. I see tiny women shouldering huge baskets along with their raggedy stick brooms up and down the city sidewalks; I see small wiry men clamoring up and down hillsides like sherpas with heavy construction loads. To the side of big buses and trucks are three-wheeled carts laden with fruit or furniture or recycled goods, being pulled behind wrinkled old men on foot. Striking as well is the contrast between one of the most ancient professions, stone masonry, and some of the most high-tech research imaginable being conducted just across Tiansheng Road at Southwest University.

These photos show men laboring to make room for more cars and motorcycles. Far below, you can see that a small wooded area between two apartments has been razed to make room for a tiny parking lot. The rock retaining wall under construction is supporting the area topped with the new parking lot. Even if most of the woods was razed, trees occasionally are left standing in the middle of parking spaces.

The stone mason's mallet, chisel, and straight edge
 are all within easy reach. No pnuematic tools here.

The chinking is rhymical, almost musical--distracting,
but not nearly as distracting as the blaring TV from
the upstairs apartment.

On the other side of the lane, these men shovel dirt into a cart,
barely visible, and will haul it off somewhere far away.

A Modest Proposal

A Modest Proposal

For Preventing the Poor People 
in Missouri from Being a Burden on the Public

It is most unfortunate that those who visit any of the emergency rooms in my home state, Missouri, can hardly find a good place to sit down. The emergency rooms are filled with poor people sniveling about their headaches and other trivial ailments. Some of these poor people, instead of being able to work for an honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time dreaming up ways to bleed the U.S. government of all of its resources. Most of these heathens use the emergency room as a substitute for primary care, as if they don’t know there are such things as private physicians and doctor offices.

I think it is agreed by all parties, certainly the Tea Party, that the prodigious number of poor people in want of medical care in the USA is deplorable; and therefore whoever can find a fair, cheap and easy method of making these poor people sound and useful members of society would deserve to have his or her statue set up for saving the USA, which is on the brink of collapsing.

But my intention is very far from being confined to providing only for the poor people in Missouri who are too lazy to get their own health insurance; it is of a much greater extent, and shall take into account anyone in the USA who ever took advantage of any kind of public health resource. Not only that, my plan is to provide for the entire citizenry, that is, to provide relief for every US citizen who ever made use of any government service.

As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for many years upon this important subject, and maturely weighed other experts’ ideas, I have always found them grossly mistaken in their computation. It is true, according to the World Health Organization that “the United States spent more on health care per capita ($8,608), and more on health care as percentage of its GDP (17.9%), than any other nation in 2011,” but that is nothing compared to what the United States spends per capita on defense, education, transportation, and all sorts of other things.  Health care expenditure certainly is not the primary problem.

You will see that there are several advantages to my proposal, which aims to address a much larger problem: My scheme will prevent school dropouts, it will do away with slaving over tax returns, it will eliminate the irritating noise of sirens, it will dispense with waiting in long lines to get into national parks, it will get rid of library fines, and all sorts of other things.

I am assured by John Fleming, Mick Mulvaney, Jim Jordan, and others that the cost of running a federal government is simply much too much; in fact, the word “government” is a word I hesitate to use at all. I really detest the idea of “government.” It is something quite monstrous and evil.

I shall now, therefore, humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope you will not find too objectionable.

I have been assured by a very knowing person that it is unbelievably expensive to pay not only for the Attorney General, but also the Supreme Court and the whole racket known as the federal judicial system; it’s even more expensive to pay for everything overseen by the Departments of Defense, State, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Veterans Affairs, the Treasury and don’t let me forget, Education. We spend way too much money on public education, from primary school to university, and we support ridiculous agencies like the National Science Foundation that fund the silliest research projects. You know, there really is no such thing as the “common good” except in the imaginations of dreamers and the very people who want to bleed us to death with taxes.

I do therefore humbly suggest that we just get ride of the monstrous US federal budget—why our 3.8 trillion dollar federal budget is simply obscene. We should get rid of the whole budget—and the whole damned federal government. Who needs it?

I grant this will be somewhat difficult, but the Republican Party has helped us get started.

I have proposed, then, to liberate all US citizens from the burden of having a federal government. We're better off without one, especially we who are somewhat well fed and well cared for. I will remind you that Herbert Spencer hinted back in the nineteenth century that rich people are rich because they are morally superior and entitled to everything they have, and that poor people are weak, lazy, stupid, and morally inferior. If someone cannot afford his or her own medical insurance, then something must be not only mentally, but also spiritually wrong with him or her. There is nothing that the government can do to change that state of affairs.

As for schools, the public schools are wretched. They have perpetuated specious ideas about evolution and other nonsense. If we just get rid of public education altogether, we will have solved the problem of dropouts. We don’t really need education anyway. It just gives people fancy ideas. As far as public transportation goes, it may be inconvenient to have a few failing bridges and highways, but people of means will find a way to get where they need to go. As for emergency services such as fire departments and police departments, they tend to be run by local governments, but we don’t really need them. Bad luck doesn’t usually strike good people. Without a federal government and its useless services, we will be spared the burden of ever having to pay another red cent in taxes.

I am running out of room, so I will spare you having to listen to all of the advantages of my plan. I have a list of at least ten more.

But, let me assure you of one thing:  Even though I am indeed a government employee, I am not motivated to make my proposal based on the desire simply to have a vacation. Please believe me: I have no ulterior motive in suggesting that the US government shut down for good. It is true that I only make about two hundred dollars a month as a Peace Corps volunteer and that I teach English to scores and scores of Chinese university students, but I insist that I am not looking for a vacation. I simply believe that the US government has no business interfering in people’s lives—it has no business nosing around in people’s educations and legal affairs, and there is no need to offer any safety, security or health plans. Certainly not Obamacare.

The US Government should simply close down for good, and we can all go back to living peacefully as morally upright, gun-toting people capable of solving all of our own problems without Uncle Sam telling us what to do or bleeding us to death.

Blogger’s dilemma

 I’ve become hard to please, at least when it comes to books about China and maybe all non-fiction. I read fellow Columbian Peter Hessler’s River Town long before I had any inkling I’d be walking in his footsteps, a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in a mid-China river town. His book certainly wasn’t boring, but I couldn’t quite understand why it was so well received. Nor could I understand how he could get away with quoting his students’ writing as extensively as he did. (I, no doubt, have a peculiar perspective of such things, having been tortured by so many Institutional Review Board consent forms in my day.) And perhaps I’m just jealous—he was a “China 3” and enjoyed a degree of independence as a writer and traveler that is perhaps more limited for us “China 18s.” More on that in a minute.

I reacted even more strongly to Paul Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster, partly because Theroux writes so much more strategically and powerfully—and partly because what he writes so well is so outrageous. If you had only Theroux to go on, you’d think all Chinese people were spitters and hawkers and total philistines. I was unforgiving, even though Theroux wrote over a quarter of a century ago and drew most of his conclusions from his berth on a train, as if that is the way to get to know a people and a culture. But Theroux would be the first to admit that travel writing, his anyway, is essentially autobiographical—and maybe he was less interested in what was outside the window than in his notebook. But again, I find myself jealous. He wasn’t afraid to be rude to anybody or anything.

What would he say if he were less independent, if were, say, in the Peace Corps writing a blog, perhaps monitored on several fronts? And then I remembered! Ah! He was in the Peace Corps! And he was kicked out—long before there were any such things as blogs. And, as if we were in a conversation, I read on and found Theroux justifying his negativity by saying it’s simply too hard for writers to make nice people interesting. He doesn’t deny that decent human beings exist, even if they don’t make good fodder for stories.

So just as I was wondering if you have to be a misanthrope to be an interesting writer, especially about China, I happened to read Mark Salzman’s decades-old review of Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster. Salzman nailed the thing that bothered me most: Theroux writes masterfully about “the barren deserts of Mongolia and Xinjiang, the ice forests of Manchuria and the dry hills of Tibet” but not about the Chinese people. He doesn’t seem to know them. This gripe is from a writer who has also written a book about China. Salzman’s beautiful memoir Iron and Silk lightly and tightly describes his experience teaching English in China while pursuing his passion for Kung Fu. It’s delightful reading—and Salzman doesn’t seem to be a misanthrope.

Glad to have my faith in humanity restored a little, I found myself reading Will Schwalbe’s End of Life Book Club (not about China) and suddenly wishing that he could be a little more Therouxish. I’d given the book to my son because, based on reviews, I thought it described the book-loving mother-son relationship we had. But I found myself agreeing with what another reviewer said (wishing I’d read this review first): “Discretion and familial loyalty are fine characteristics . . . But these are not qualities that make for a scintillating memoir. To paraphrase Joan Didion, a writer is always ratting somebody out. A great memoirist, even one moved primarily by love and devotion, must possess a certain amount of ruthlessness — toward himself if no one else. Schwalbe’s book contains little of the lacerating honesty that marks Didion’s recent memoirs of loss.” Hmmmmm.

So here’s the conundrum: how do you aim for some sort of truth, truth that is also wise? Could I—should I—write with more “lacerating honesty” even if I weren’t in the Peace Corps and serving in China, with all those constraints? I’m not sure I could. Frankly, though, I’m not sure that either Didion or Theroux give us lacerating honesty, let alone wisdom, even though they both give us memorable prose.

It’s the biographer’s dilemma, the autobiographer’s dilemma, every creative non-fiction writer’s dilemma. And a blogger's dilemma. To their credit, neither Theroux nor Didion think they can tell us anything other than how “it” appears to them; both admit they’re ultimately, in their notebooks at least, writing about themselves. Didion says, “But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’” And others, Lynn Bloom among them, see that that implacable “I” as an ethical stance, one that doesn’t pretend to be saying anything other than what “I” think. But what is the writer seeing from that “I” stance? What, for example, is being seen in China?

All I’m doing is keeping a little ole’ blog—but I’m keenly aware that I am in the Peace Corps and serving in China with those constraints—and I’m conscious of the tension between art and non-fiction everywhere—and the tension between regard for loved one’s feelings and unexpressed observations.

Mid-Autumn Festival on JinYun Mountain

. Holidays come with trade-offs. We celebrated Mid-Autumn Festival today with our share of moon cakes, but we will have make up classes on Sunday, followed by a straight week of classes, and another weekend full of classes to make up for the upcoming National Day. So! Ou Yang, Martha, and I figured we better make the best of today's breather while we could. At nine o'clock we found ourselves shoulder to shoulder with dozens of university students waiting for Bus 585, bound for JinYun Mountain, the ridge that lords over all of Beibei. 

We're only halfway up the mountain here, looking down onto Beibei.

Bamboo groves are plentiful all over the mountain.

The noodle and ice cream ladies sell Ou Yang a bottle of warm water.

This family is more interested in relaxing with their tiny dog
than hiking the rest of the way up the mountain.

I admit that I'm surprised I don't witness more accidents, given what might be called free-form driving habits. Fortunately, nobody was seriously injured in this motorcycle/car collision at the foot of the mountain.