Having Fun All The Time

This article in the New York Times about the state of climate change as a political priority in the world was a good reminder of the issue. Interesting facts:

China has surpassed the United States in overall energy consumption; there is actually an MIT climatologist who claims that climate change isn’t a big problem (doesn’t that look bad for MIT?); and the parts-per-million measure of CO2 in the atmosphere will soon surpass 400 (it had been below 300 for about 800,000 years before the Industrial Revolution).

And then one haunting quote from the son, now himself a famous atomospheric scientist, of Charles David Keeling, the scientist who discovered in the 1950s or 60s that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere was rising. The son (Ralph Keeling) said:

“When I go see things with my children, I let them know they might not be around when they’re older,” he said. ” ‘Go enjoy these beautiful forests before they disappear. Go enjoy the glaciers in these parks because they won’t be around.’ It’s basically taking note of what we have, and appreciating it, and saying goodbye to it.”

Pretty fucking startling words…I hadn’t been startled on this issue in a while.

This article in the New York Times helped confirm something that I have been casually observing in the past 14 months in China: that prices for consumer goods, from eggs to jeans to cars, are totally chaotic and in some cases are either way too high or way too low, with no apparent explanation for the insane prices.

This article specifically quotes milk prices as an example of how inflation in China has begun to carry the prices of common goods way beyond the reach of the ordinary person:

“The money supply is too large,” said Andy Xie, an economist based in Shanghai who formerly worked at Morgan Stanley. “They increased the money supply to stimulate the economy. Now land prices have jumped 20 times in some places, 100 times in others. Inflation is broad-based. Go into a supermarket. Milk is more expensive in China than it is in the U.S.”

In Shanghai, where the average monthly wage is about $350, a gallon of milk now costs about $5.50.

I see this kind of thing everyday, and it wouldn’t be so crazy if there weren’t also products that were incredibly cheap, and also if there weren’t consumers so consistently making choices that to my eye seem absurd.

A little anecdote: I recently went “guang4jie1″ (sort of like window shopping) with a female Chinese friend of mine, who has maybe a bit of a problem with spending money. Although her monthly salary is lower than mine (my salary is about 4,000 yuan, or around $600), she compulsively buys things, mostly clothes but also other stuff like expensive meals and spa treatments, that I would never even dream of buying on a salary like hers.

A couple of weeks ago when I met up with her she casually bought a pair of 1,000 yuan boots and a 500 yuan dress in preparation for a holiday trip she was about to go on.

There’s a double-mystery here. The first part of the mystery is: whose money is she spending? Is it her parents’? Is it really hers and she spends no money most of the time and splurges on big things? Or is she just now, at the tender age of 24, beginning to burrow into a hole of debt that will one day haunt her like debt is haunting so many Americans now? I have no idea. I’ve never asked her where she gets her money from; although I have mentioned that it seems like she spends a lot of money.

The second part of the mystery becomes clear when you take a look at the 1,000 yuan boots she bought. We were in a department store in the middle of town and the boots were these kind of rhinestone-studded suede numbers that would sell for $40 in the U.S., I think. But she paid almost $150 for them.

As she was shoe-shopping I found a pair of classically ugly, cheap men’s  pleather shoes in the men’s footwear section. I don’t have a picture at the moment…I’ll try to go back and take one later, but these shoes were clearly pleather (fake leather), had cheap white soles with barely any traction, and were labeled with the brand name “FASHION” (this is a common brand name in China). The price tag was over 500 yuan, more than $80.

This makes no sense. You can buy a pair of Adidas just down the road for the same price, and the quality is far better, the shoes are made of much more durable and attractive material, and everyone knows that the shoes are expensive and nice. (Yeah, Adidas is considered “nice” here, and Puma is like super nice.)

On top of that, you can find these same shoes on the Internet for less than 100 yuan. Or in a seedier store in a crappier part of town. The reason for the high price seemed to be the location. You’re in department store, so some of the items will be double what they are elsewhere.

I have no idea how the retailers get away with this. It seems similar to the fruit phenomenon, which is that an apple costs 1 yuan when bought in the village next to the university, but 5 yuan when bought at a convenience store in the city.

Or the fact that a towel can cost 150 yuan in the city’s biggest mall, but 20 yuan at a smaller store outside the city center.

Crazier still is the fact that foreign-produced brand-name goods are often far more expensive than in the U.S. Levi’s jeans are the first thing that comes to mind. At home you can usually get a pair of Levi’s at Sears or some department store for around $30 or $40. But I’ve never seen a pair of Levi’s here for less than 400 yuan, about $60, and prices can go as high as 600 yuan, $90.

The higher you go, the more expensive stuff gets. There’s a Lacoste outlet store in this town (most of whose goods appear to be knockoffs) where the jeans cost a couple thousand yuan.

Cars are also often more expensive, and there’s a slightly hilarious and insane theory that a few Chinese people have told me that foreign car companies intentionally sell their cars for a higher price here because they think that Chinese people find prestige in more expensive things. Who knows where this theory comes from, but the only logical explanation I can see would be shipping costs and import taxes. The idea that a car company would raise its prices to attract customers, especially in a market like China where everybody just buys the nicest car they can afford, is ridiculous.

But with all that said, there is still one thing that seems to hold this world together like glue: you can still buy noodles and eggs for lunch for about 4 yuan, which is around 60 cents. If you live economically, which most people do, you can eat for only about 20 yuan per day ($3), which is almost exactly what my daily food budget is. That doesn’t include the yogurt I occasionally eat in the morning (5 yuan peanut noodles and hun dun dumpling soup is better anyway, just not as convenient), the Starbucks instant coffee I buy online, or my occasional pizza dinner, but it’s pretty consistent. In a good week I probably spend less than $50 on meals, and I always eat out.

Of course, if food prices caught up with the price of almost everything else here excluding rent (which they could do in the coming years — the CPI for food in China rose over 9 percent over the last 12 months as of October) even my life would be completely impossible here, even though my salary is higher than the average by about 2,000 yuan (around $300).

The reason: the rent for my tiny apartment is 1,300 yuan per month ($191), my student loans are still about 800 yuan per month ($112), and the various expenses of life invariably quickly eat up the remaining $300-odd of that $600-ish-a-month salary.

Luckily I have been able to find private students over the past six months or so to increase that income so that I don’t have to spend my savings to stay here, but it comes at the price of losing most of my days off in order to teach privately.

The whole money problem, however, is basically due to the fact that I can’t lower my living standards to that of most of the people here. In order to survive with prices like this and income like that, there’s certain food you have to eat every day, certain places you have to live, certain clothes you have to buy. Last year living at the college I more or less lived in those conditions and ate that food. But I don’t think I would want to do it again.

Anyway, I still have enough time to study and to write, and teaching English here is for the most part enjoyable and rewarding. But sometimes it’s a shock to think about the income gap between here and the U.S., and then see how much stuff still costs here.

I think I’m making progress on the front of being not so sensitive to questions and comments that make huge generalizations about Americans, foreigners, white people on a regular basis here, especially from people who don’t have any experience with foreigners.

But it can be a challenge. In a recent Chinesepod lesson, John Pasden, the foreigner host of the show (it’s a daily podcast for learning Chinese) mentioned that China is a post-industrial, pre-PC culture — meaning that, for example, in China it’s still OK to call someone fat if they’re fat, if they’re deaf-mute to call them dumb, or, to distinguish blind from seeing people by call seeing people “normal”.

This spills over into a million different things. I can’t profess to really get it. I think to some extent, to deal with non-PC-ness you just have to be a very easy-going person with an unshakable sense of humor. Which I have the capacity for, but sometimes am not really good at.

For example, yesterday, one of my Chinese teachers asked me if foreigners are all fat, if foreign women all look 60 when they’re 30; an acquaintance of mine recently used the derogatory word for black people at the dinner table (in Chinese and then, when I questioned him on it, in English); and pretty much every time I eat something that resembles junk food (which I do on occasion) some Chinese person in my vicinity turns to whomever is standing next to them and explains to them, in Chinese, that the only thing we foreigners eat is McDonald’s and KFC, so that’s why I’m eating that.

People also occasionally ask me why the United States is performing military drills in the Yellow Sea, up by Korea and Northern China, and then tell me, with barely masked emotion, that Chinese people are worried about it and think it is very dangerous. As if the white person before them can easily represent the views of basically the entire democratized world.

This stuff is stupid to get worked up over. Virtually all of these people have no contact with the outside world except through the government-run education system, the government-run media, and Hollywood movies.

(At the same time, however, they all learn English in school and learn about Western culture as part of their language study — which, I am coming to think, makes the majority of people rather confused about what exactly the outside world is, and makes it tougher for them to learn the language because half of learning a language is cultural.)

The result is a confusing mix of ideas that basically seem offensive to me whenever I run into them. But then I think about how foreigners and minorities deal with the myriad offensive conceptions that mainstream culture has of them in America (Indians, Chinese, Japanese, African Americans, Hispanics, hell, even people from Texas), and then I think about how different people from those groups deal with those misconceptions. Some of them choose to spend their lives being offended and pissed off, and some of them choose to find humor in how stupid it is. I’m trying to fall into the latter category in my life here.

And to be a little self-aware. After all, I’ve only met one or two people from Texas in my life, but I know that I have, on many occasions, uttered the words “I never met a Texan I liked.” (That was pre-Jamie’s girlfriend, if you read this, Jamie.)

Most of that is George Bush’s fault, and stereotypes, and of course I have long since let go of that idea (which I sort of just thought was funny). But I know that I had it at the time because it seemed entertaining, and I naively thought that as long as I never met any Texans, there was no way that my little bias against Texans could affect them.

Turns out I was probably wrong.

Before I thought about coming to China seriously I think that I was faintly aware that Chinese is a “tonal language”, but I didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant.

It took me a solid couple of months to figure out the precise meaning, another three or four months to be able to reliably produce the tones with considerable forethought, and just up until the last couple of months (I’ve been studying Chinese for about 13 months now) to be able to carry a Chinese conversation with reasonable confidence that most of the tones I am uttering are correct.

But what is a tone? And why does it take more than a year of blood, sweat, and tears to be able to use them correctly in speech?

The answer to the first question is simple (of course, there are a thousand complications hiding behind the simplicity, but I’m going to avoid those here). Chinese is made up of five tones (or four, depending on how you count) which combine with the movements within the mouth that make up most English speech, which two components together comprise the bulk of how meaning is conveyed in spoken Chinese.

Take, for example, the Chinese word zhi (pronounced a lot like “jur” in juror). Zhi has dozens of different meanings, depending on the tone and the written character that is used to represent the spoken word.

So depending on the tone with which it is said, zhi has different meanings.

But what the hell is a tone?

We actually have and use pretty close approximations of each of the four main tones of Chinese in English; we just don’t happen to be aware of their use because the tones are not necessarily integral to the meaning of the word.

This is similar to how most native speakers are generally not aware of how important stress is in every English word. For example, do you know which are the stressed syllables in the words economy, economics, economist, and economical? Are you aware of how important it is to stress the correct syllable in each of these words every time you say them? Moreover, are you aware of the rules that govern why the stress syllable is indeed stressed in each of these words?

Of course you’re not familiar with the rules, but you know how to correctly pronounce each of these words. Economy is eCONomy, economics is ecoNOmics, economist is eCONomist and economical is ecoNOmical.

Non-native speakers, of course, don’t know any of this off the bat. And so they have to study the rules and practice. Which is, of course, incredibly difficult. About as difficult as it is for us English speakers to wrap our heads around and master the Chinese tones.

Let me explain the four main tones of Chinese. My explanation will focus on our varying pronunciation of the English word “Yeah”.

Of course, we say “yeah” all the time and, although we are unaware of it, the tone of our voice often indicates the meaning of the word.

For instance, when we are responding to someone and want to express polite disagreement or reserved agreement, we will often say the word “yeah” in what I consider to be a flat tone, as in: “Yeeaah, I guess sooo, but…”

This is the Chinese first tone. The voice is high, flat, inflectionless, like a musical note. “Yeah”. We say it without our voice dropping or rising, as it does sometimes in questions and commands. “Yeah, I guess so, but….” That is the Chinese first tone, also known as the flat tone, the high tone or the singing tone.

The second tone is the rising tone and it is embodied in the English question yeah. As in “yeah, so what?” The voice rises when we say it in English in a way very similar to how it rises in Chinese.

The third tone is the low tone or the dipping tone. The voice goes lower and dips just a little bit, like a downward-dipping parabola. We have a rough approximation of this tone when we say a doubtful, skeptical, almost condescending yeah, as in “yeah, but I don’t think you really understand what I’m saying”. This sound is low and longer in duration than the other tones.

The fourth tone is the falling tone. This is what I think of as the agreement tone in English. It’s friendly, happy, giddy. We use it when we use yeah to express definite agreement, as in, “yeah, I think so too!”

So those are the Chinese tones. And my point in writing this point was originally not actually to explain the tones but to say what I think about the statement “don’t worry about the tones”, which something I have heard from foreigners pretty consistently in China.

Not surprisingly, most of the people who said this to me were not very good at speaking Chinese and were painful to listen to and to understand. And I’m sure that it would be even worse for a Chinese person to listen to. And I draw a parallel between them and many of the English learners out there who we native English speakers won’t even give the time of day to. Because their pronunciation just sounds wrong.

Learning pronunciation in Chinese is mostly about learning tones. Foreigners let themselves off the hook with this “don’t worry about it” statement too often, and I know from experience that it leads to pronunciation problems down the road. And it makes those foreigners more isolated in China, unable to actually talk to Chinese people, only able to practice Chinese with other foreigners, which is not why they started learning Chinese in the first place (I don’t think).

So, if you’re learning Chinese and another foreigner throws this comforting statement your way, don’t grab onto it, don’t buy it. It will be tempting, believe me, because the tones will keep you up at night they’re so damn hard to learn. You will see yourself in your dreams opening your mouth, the tones perfectly clear in your head, but coming out in a disastrous mess as soon as your vocal chords start humming.

But don’t believe what they tell you about the tones. You’ve got to worry about them. Or they’ll never stop being your enemy.

There are certain things that, as an American, you take for granted. And I have been realizing lately that when I was still in America there were some things I had never really thought about before — things that I have now, after living in China for 14 months, had more reason to consider.

The first one and one of the most important is that there are things we get as Americans that a lot of other people don’t get automatically; it just comes with the territory of living in an “undeveloped” country.

Like what? What could be so great about life in America that you can’t get someplace else?

Well, at first, nothing. You don’t really notice the stuff until you’ve been outside for a while. Then it all starts to stick out at you.

Take traffic, for example. At first, I just found the traffic here insane and thought no more of it. But now I think a little further, and think that the people here have no other choice. It’s their reality to almost get killed every other day crossing the street.

OK, that one’s easy. How about building codes. Does anybody inspect the buildings here to make sure they’re safe and nothing is going to fall on you and kill you? Apparently not. Exhibit A is the building that fell down in Shanghai last year complete, just fell over in one big piece. Fire escapes are rare and precarious-looking structures are ubiquitous.

This building fell over in one big piece in Shanghai last year

Moving on. The next one is hospitals. One of the few foreigners I know in this town had to get his appendix removed in the local hospital, and somehow during the surgery they didn’t quite put everything back in the right place when they sewed him up. So some of his stomach muscles don’t work anymore.

Peter Hessler, in his book “River Town”, also points out that a few of his acquaintances died in his two years in a Sichuan river city, due mostly to a less safe healthcare system.

The next one is mental health. I was explaining to my Chinese teacher (who is a psychology professor) recently some of the services my sister receives as a disabled person. One of the things I mentioned was that there are social workers who come to hang out with her and take her shopping and stuff like that.

Her response was: We don’t have those kind of people in China.

I also have some personal experience with a kid with a disability who’s family is afraid of telling the public school system about the kid’s disability for fear that teachers will ignore the kid and people will ridicule him, because disabled people have no real enforceable legal rights in the education system here.

Compare that to the system in America where kids may be teased for having disabilities, but where they are also entitled to a whole host of rights and resources and modified forms of education (at least a great deal of the time), which entitlements are enforceable by suing the state.

Then, of course, there’s health care for the old, which I don’t know much about here but seems to be more or less nonexistent. I have had a couple of students whose elders have been dying or have passed away due to cancer of various varieties; the families didn’t have the money to pay for surgery so the old people just died, and this has happened occasionally with young people, too.

It’s hard to explain better than that, and probably none of this sounds particularly new or interesting. But it changes things to live here and know that if I were these people this would be my only reality — the world in which I would have to live and survive forever — and I think if that were the case for me my life would be a whole lot more oriented towards making money and finding security than it is now. Because the people here who manage to become wealthy-ish are able to have many of the securities and comforts that we’re afforded in wealthier western countries.

Many, but of course, not all.

Even more cause for a belated moment of gratitude.