Chingrish Food

Q: What do the following things have in common?

• Maiden Moon
• Grasp to Fry Ridge in the Sheep
• Egg Flesh Book
• Temple Explode Chicken Cube
• Return a Pot Meat
• Anthracene Explode Beef
• Good Chicken Silk
• The Ginger Explodes Duck Silk
• The City Explodes Shredded Meat
• Shandong Burns a Chicken

A: I found all those things on a restaurant menu in Shanghai last summer. Bonus points if you knew what 'anthracene' was.

And if the translations are that bad in Shanghai, they're worse everywhere else. When I was in Yunnan, in fact, a random restaurant owner convinced my Dad to do some menu translating for them. But for all he knew, my Dad could've been writing gibberish (or Polish). That's why the Chinese government just put out a list of suggested names for dishes in preparation for the incoming crush of Olympic tourists.

The problem is that Chinese dishes aren't always named as you would describe them, so literal dictionary translations are pretty much worthless.

Pollution Boogers

"You go for a jog or a run and you come back, and you don't think about it, but then there's all this black pollution that you're blowing out of your body."

-Australian Olympic athlete on ESPN's
OTL, discussing pollution in Beijing

That's actually one of the first things I noticed when I got to Shanghai, and it's something you'll see even if you're not outside exercising. My "booger cleanliness index"* is significantly worse here than it is back home.

Air quality is going to be either a big small issue during the Olympics or a smaller big issue. Haile Gebrselassie, the current marathon world record holder, has backed out completely, with his manager calling it an "extremely dangerous marathon" (Chinese media spin), and the Australian and Canadian Track teams are skipping the Opening Ceremonies to try and save their lungs a little. It'll be interesting to see whether the pollution does affect track times and what the athletes, many of whom have never been to China, think about the dirty air once they arrive.

Former marathon world-record holder Rob de Castella reflected on the Olympic marathon he ran in smoggy LA when asked about Beijing:

“By the finish, my right eye had swollen up so I was hardly able to see out of it. I think that was a direct result of the pollution, the swelling went down after a couple of days. But given what happened to my eye you have to wonder what was going on with my other functions."

Less than encouraging words, to be sure.

*The BCI has no scientific backing of any kind, and contrary to what others may think, I do collect my own boogers and compare them.

Tackling the Tibet Issue

The West has always thought of Tibet as a romantic Shangri-la, high in the Himalayas, populated with a meditating Dalai Lama and monks in serene monasteries. To China, however, Tibet was a backward society of feudal landlords that kept its farmers--90% of the population--illiterate serfs. Since taking control of Tibet, China has abolished the Indian-based caste system and agricultural serfdom. It has built medical centers, schools, roads, railways and airports, introduced telecommunications and cell phones, increased tourism and raised living standards. China believes in doing what is necessary to integrate Tibet into the 21st-century world. The Tibetans, on the other hand, are fearful. Economic development has attracted too many Han and Hui (Muslim) Chinese settlers, threatening to outnumber the Tibetans and remake their society.

-Lee Kuan Yew, former Prime Minister of Singapore

I haven't written anything on Tibet so far, but I profess that's because I don't know nearly enough to have an educated opinion on it. You get one side of the story in the Western world, and you get the other side over here. The truth, obviously, lies somewhere in the middle. With the Olympic torch hitting Tibet this weekend, now feels like a good time to throw in my two cents.

I, like many others, do think that China probably used excessive force during the March protests. And that obviously paints China in a bad light: first it exiled the Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and now, 40 years later, it's still trying to enforce its rule on Tibetans by beating them senseless.

But that's obviously an oversimplification of the issue. One angle of the riots that was played up here (and very little in the West) is that the Tibetans were attacking businesses owned by Han Chinese in the area. So did they start it, or did the military? It's impossible to say without being there. It is within the realm of possibility, however, that the military was playing defence: it doesn't make much sense for the rioters to start attacking those business after they were accosted. Every month the military puts the kibosh on a protest or two, and while they’re probably never done that delicately, they almost never end in killings. I'm not saying that China should necessarily get the benefit of the doubt, given its human rights record, but people too often judge without having all the facts.

And as for whether Tibet should be allowed to secede? It’s hard for me, as an outsider, to say that one side is right or wrong. It’s more a matter of both sides feeling like they’re “righter” than the other. Best I can tell, China once occupied Tibet on friendly terms, but then decided not to leave when asked. Tibet, however, has never been internationally recognized as an independent country.

It surprised me a while ago when I found out that my Dad, a pretty liberal guy, was definitively pro-China on this issue (though not on the violence). Then I realized I didn't know what pro-China meant exactly. Do I think Tibet should separate? No. I don't think Tibet could really stand alone, especially if China pulled out everything that it put into it and severed its economic ties. That area of the world is not especially affluent or well-developed.

But then does that make me anti-Tibet? I don't think so; I do think that the Tibetan culture is important, that it should be kept alive, and that the Tibetans themselves have a right for their concerns to be heard. I guess what I'm really against, then, is the violence. And I think that comes from both sides.

The Dalai Lama has time and time again refuted the suggestion (mostly from the Chinese government) that he has ever pushed for the protests to get violent. And as he is the Dalai Lama, I tend to believe him. But I think there is a faction of 20-somethings in Tibet that want to push more aggressively for change, and that they’re prepared to subvert the Dalai Lama and use violence to make their case.

As a born-and-bred Canadian, I lived through a Quebec separation referendum in 1995, so I do have a concept of what both sides are going through. I even lived in Quebec for four years later on, and made some friends in college who turned out to be separatists. Some of them had anti-separatist parents, and most of them did not have a good reason for separation (other than Vive le Quebec libre!), nor did they have any idea how they wanted an independent Quebec to run itself. I think their feelings were more an act of rebellion tied to a passionate cause than anything else, and that they're going/went through a lot of the same things the more aggressive Tibetans protesters are feeling now. Given time and maturity, they'll probably mellow out a little.

Time, however, may not be something that they will give themselves, and it may not even be something the Dalai Lama can buy for them. If he can't make some sort of progress in the upcoming negotiations, they may take it upon themselves to once again rise up and make sure they’re heard.

Communication is clearly key to this debate, and China is at a clear disadvantage in the West because there is very little English literature out there justifying their historic position on this and on what happened in March. (The quote at the top of this post is one of the few things I've seen that tries to flesh out the Chinese view for Western readers.) To get a Chinese appreciation on the issue you have to either be here, or better, have been born here, though if you were born here you probably aren’t so inclined to speak up about it. The Tibetans, on the other hand, have the Dalai Lama as a very public English-speaking face for their cause. That can’t help but shift the court of public opinion in their favour. Would you rather root for the soft-spoken Dalai Lama or a faceless, speaking-in-tongues Communist government?

This is the reason why it bothers me so much when people like Sharon Stone spout off on Tibet. It's an incredibly complicated issue, one that's spanned several centuries, and it's not one with a clear right or wrong. What does Stone want for Tibet? Full independence? If so, why? How would it work? It's always easier to criticize than it is to provide solutions.

Told Ya So

The Americans scolded the Chinese on mismanaging their economy, from state subsidies to foreign investment regulations to the valuation of their currency. Your economic system, the Americans strongly implied, should look a lot more like ours.

But in recent weeks, the fingers have been wagging in the other direction. Senior Chinese officials are publicly and loudly rebuking the Americans on their handling of the economy and defending their own more assertive style of regulation.

-Edward Wong, New York Times, June 17

Warming Up for the Tibet Torch Relay

The Olympic torch is in Xinjiang this week, visiting China's most northwestern province and readying itself for a trip south to Tibet. Xinjiang itself is a politically sensitive area; a large portion of the 8 million Uighurs (ethnically Turkic Muslims) there have been pushing for independence since its official bid for it in the 1940s. Violence has broken out in recent years there, and the Chinese government has allegedly foiled several terrorist attempts coming out of the region. According to government spokesman Wu Heping, the Uighurs are "a real terrorist threat".

Basically, Xinjiang is an area of China that has the potential to cause Tibet-like trouble but without the international fanfare (or Sharon Stone).

China has pulled out all the stops to make sure this leg of the relay goes smoothly, from upping the military presence to decreeing that locals (other than the Han Chinese, of course) stay indoors. (It kind of defeats the spirit of the torch relay if you don't let the locals come out and celebrate it, doesn't it? Maybe not if you don't think it's much of a celebration for the locals.)

James Reynolds, BBC's correspondent in China, has a really good take on it here. The most interesting point he brings up is this: if these Uighurs are such troublemakers, why do we have aboslutely no information on them? Kind of makes me think that maybe the Chinese government is exaggerating the threat to keep a tighter hold on power over there.

Slate also did a really enjoyable mini-series of articles on Xinjiang and Uighur culture a little while ago.

It's amazing by the way, how you can monitor the political situation here by how much internet access you can get. Last week and the week before, I could get to pretty much any site I wanted (except the ones that would be obviously restricted). Two days ago, the Wordpress and Blogspot go shut down. Today, the torch arrived in Xinjiang.

Yearnin' for Yunnan

Should've made this post sooner, but I made a 6-day trip out to the southwest to see Yunnan province (just south of Sichuan, home of the 2008 earthquake) about a month ago. Turns out it's one of the most fascinating places in China, and one that I hope to return to soon.

Our tour took us through the three biggest cities in the area, from Kunming to Lijiang to Dali. Kunming is the province's capital and economiccentre; it once served as a key trading post along the Silk Road (mainly as a conduit for the Pu'er tea coming from further down south). Lijiang, with its bevy of English-speaking tour guides and an 800 year-old Old City (which survived a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in 1996 almost fully intact), is the province's biggest tourist destination, and Dali is the former capital of the Bhuddist Kingdom of Dali.

Six days, however, is not nearly enough to adequately explore Yunnan. An amazingly diverse place, Yunnan rises from just 70m above sea level to over 6600m at its highest Himalayan peak, and houses 52 of China's 56 ethnic minorities (from Tibetan to Thai). Dali, for example, has 3 million residents: 1/3 are Han Chinese, 1/3 are Bai Chinese, and the other 1/3 are a motley crew of other minorities. One of the most interesting ethnic groups can be found in Lijiang, where the Mo Suo still hold fast to a tradition of non-marriage.

Economically, Yunnan is still developing. It's developed its tourism industry greatly in the past few years (especially domestically), but it still relies heavily on mining, tea and tobacco exports to bring money in. The province has been facing heavy inflation in the last while as farmers have been pulled into the cities for higher wages. The price of pork, for example, has more than doubled from Y16 to Y35-40/kg in the last year.

Traveling out so far away from Beijing also makes it abundantly clear just how big China is. Yunnan is a little less developed than the coastal provinces; fashionable clothing is pretty much anything that's not your pajamas, and you're still bound to see a few donkeys pulling carts on the side major roads. The polish that you see in the "showcase" Chinese cities is almost entirely missing, and you get the sense that the only connection they residents there have to Beijing are the city squares and Mao statues that were federally comissioned.

If you're interested in seeing some more pictures, I've put together a mini photo essay on Facebook.

Not To Be a Downer, But...

...I saw a dead guy last night. I was in a taxi, so I didn't get a good look (though a much better look than I wanted to get) but from what I saw a dump truck ran over a biker/scooterer. I don't think it happened much before I got there, since the cops hadn't taped the area off yet (do they even do that here?) and the body was uncovered. I'm assuming the guy is dead since there was nobody helping him, and he had only half a leg.

I checked the local (English) papers today and there's not a word about it. I'm not sure if that's more a comment on how big the city is and how many people die every day or just how much other news there is, but that's something that would definitely get coverage back in other (admittedly much smaller) cities that I've lived in.

R.I.P. Biker on Hengshan Road

Too Soon?

Waaaaaayyy too soon. One of the worst shirts I've ever seen.

That crunching sound you hear is Sharon Stone running over the t-shirt maker with her karma train.

The Thing About the Chinese...

...is that the Gideons haven't gotten to them yet. So instead of a bible in your hotel nightstand, you get two packs of condoms and a flashlight.

Picture taken in a 5-star hotel in Kunming, Yunnan.

Aerial Images of the Earthquake Epicentre

Title says it all. The page is in Chinese, but just move your cursor and you can take a look around. Click on the images on the top to see different areas. The extent of the damage is pretty ridiculous. Link here.

It's a Beautiful Life

In China, ugliness is penalised more in women, but beauty is more rewarded. The figures for men in Shanghai are –25% and +3%; for women they are –31% and +10%. In Britain, ugly men do worse than ugly women (-18% as against -11%) but the beauty premium is the same for both (and only +1%).

-The Economist, Dec. 19th, 2007

The premiums/penalties in North America are all below 10%.

So apparently, it pays to be beautiful, and especially so in China. Plastic surgery has boomed this decade, and the trend has been covered extensively by everyone from the local media to the Boston Globe to Time Magazine. Then again, it's not really surprising that China, with its growing middle-class tradition of foot binding, is now getting caught up in this cosmetic craze (there's even an annual "Miss Plastic Surgery" contest now).

However, the culture surrounding plastic surgery is a little different here. For one, demand for different types of surgery are different. Double-eyelid construction (costing about a month's salary) is very common here, as was leg-lengthening surgery (at least until it was banned). Boob jobs, on the other hand, are probably less popular. I guess it goes without saying, but beauty is judged differently in China. Height, for example, is not only appreciated as a physical trait, but also because some Chinese believe that being tall is a reward for acts of kindness in past lives.

It's also probably true that the Chinese are motivated to go under the knife for different reasons. Like I said in my last post, it's a tougher job market here simply because you have to beat out so many others for a job; professional aspirations are always brought up in those "plastic surgery in China" features. It's now at the point where schools will encourage their students to opt for surgery (again citing better job prospects). Anything to stand out from the rest.

Perhaps the worst thing about all this is that those in smaller towns (and usually with less qualified surgeons) are increasingly feeling like they "need" to get a facelift or an extra set of eyelids to compete, leading to botched surgeries, permanent scars, or worse, compromised health and/or death.

Hittin' the Books

The Dragon Boat Festival is happening this weekend in China, so Monday's been declared a national holiday. Most graduating high school students aren't going to have such a good time though. The gaokao, the college entrance exam, is being held from Saturday to Monday. The gaokao is kinda like the SAT, but as Slate explains, it covers pretty much everything you've ever learned in school and determines what university you can go to. I don't get the impression that you can make up for a lousy score with a couple more extra-curriculars.

All that pressure pushed 3000 to cheat last year, when the essay questions looked like this. It's expected that this year, of the 10.5 million that write the test, only 6 million will qualify for a university.

I've read that students in the areas most affected by the earthquake have been exempted from writing this year, but then that same article goes on to say that others are writing the exams in makeshift houses while living in tents. And what's an exemption anyways? The exams are only held once a year, so if you're exempt you'll still have to wait a year, right? One tangible thing they have done is to up the number of Sichuanese students that get placed by 2%.

What's amazing is the "we'll just have to work harder" attitude that some students are taking. Reminds me of a scene from the (Canadian) documentary Up the Yangtze, in which a 14-year old girl throws a fierce tantrum because her parents can't afford to send her to high school. (Fascinating movie, by the way. Two thumbs up from the Mao Mix.) People here are hungry for education here in a way that's just unheard of in North America.

China: where if you're one in a million, you still gotta beat out 1,299 others to come out on top.

Update: Here's a (pretty ridiculously smart) Chinese blogger's post on his own gaokao experience in 1995.

Update: This year's questions. The essay topic in Sichuan? Resolve.

The Thing About the Chinese...

...is that they love their mole-hairs. Holy-moley.

The Earthquake, 3 Weeks After

The Chinese government has received its share of praise for how it handled the earthquake, but it is now getting criticism for a couple things, the first of which is the shoddy construction of schools in the area. "Tofu" buildings have been singled out as a major reason for the (unnecessary) deaths of schoolchildren, and corrupt officials are being blamed for it. Worse yet, protesting parents have been strong-armed by government officials. There will probably never be a proper inquiry into the issue, and that's flat-out wrong. Whatever criticism goes China's way for that will be deserved.

But recently articles like this, which was featured on the main webpage of the New York Times two days ago, are cropping up blaming China for poor earthquake preparations. I dislike these pieces because they're all of the "I-told-ya-so" variety. These articles could be republished with a few edits after every catastrophic event. In hindsight, of course more could have been done to limit the damage from a natural disaster.

If you're going to write something like that, maybe look ahead (and maybe even go out on a limb and make a prediction) and bring up the case of Vancouver, another city in a major earthquake zone. The international community is effectively pushing the construction boom there with the upcoming Winter Olympics, and Richmond, one of the city's largest suburbs (and home of the city's airport), is below sea level. If there's an earthquake and it crumbles into the ocean, everyone's going to be up in arms again saying "I told you so".

On This Day in History...

19 years ago today the Chinese government put out (pretty emphatically) the Tiananmen Square protests. Not a great day in history for China. Of course, no mention of this historical date has been made in any newspaper or TV broadcast that I've encountered. Time Asia has a couple interesting takes on this here and here.

In related news, the Chinese government has prohibited all TV stations from broadcasting images of the Square during the Olympics, presumably to discourage reporters from mentioning what happened there earlier.

Update: In 2005, a writer named Shi Tao found a Chinese government document forbidding journalists from mentioning the "June 4th event", and passed it on the Asia Democracy Foundation. He got 10 years in jail for that, and the lawyer that represented him got his license suspended for a year. Good times all around. Surprisingly, I can still get to Shi Tao's Wikipedia entry here. Maybe it's being kept up as a warning.

Russian Goons and Thugs, Pt. 2

For a country with long-standing issues with transparency and free-speech, China's done a good job of reforming that reputation in the last little while. Granted, it's easier to look good when your comparables are failing so spectacularly. It's hard, for example, to look like an uncaring government compared to how Burma's junta has completely botched relief efforts there. And even though I've been disappointed with the level of censorship that I've encountered here in the news and internet, at least China's not Russia, where they'll edit you out of TV appearances if you say something they don't like. Seems to me like the state-run media there is at least as repressive than it is here. Through either direct ownership or Gazprom, the government controls three of the main TV stations and several of the largest newspapers.

Russia's becoming more and more like the Russia of old (i.e. the USSR) and nobody is batting an eyelash. I've said it before, but really, would China get off this easy if it was the focus of a similar story?

I think the difference is simply that people are more scared of a strong, united China than it is of a similarly positioned Russia. A billion people can generate a lot of momentum. Just look at how strong and cohesive the Chinese response to the Wenchuan earthquake has been.

The One-Child Warranty

Chinese kids are kinda like that toaster you just bought, but with insurance against Acts of God. So if you just lost your kid in the earthquake, you can either (a) register the one you already illegally had, or (b) make a new one. Who says the Chinese government is cold and insensitive?

Slate has the details.

Update: Apparently it's pretty common to get an exemption for a second child if your first is killed accidentally. Here's Slate's follow-up post.

The Thing About the Chinese...

...is that there are 1.3 billion of them. And not a lot of space for everyone. I took this picture from a plane at the airport in Kunming, Yunnan. Apartment buildings directly border the airport all the way down the runway.

There's gotta be a rule against this, no?

Bringing Home the Gold

“Silver? It means nothing here; you might as well finish last.”

-Igor Grinko, Head Coach, Team China Rowing

Canada won zero gold medals when the Olympics were in Montreal in 1976. China plans to do a little better. It's poured millions into training and facilities, especially in high medal sports like rowing and track and field.

Here's a pretty good article from today's New York Times about the Chinese rowing team.

Here's another about Liu Xiang, the reigning Men's 110m Hurdles gold medalist, a favourite to repeat in Beijing, and one of China's biggest sports stars.

All in all, it's probably an understatement to say that there is a lot of pressure on Olympic athletes in China.