Having Fun All The Time

Before nodding off, I happened to check the New York Times site to find that the artist Ai Weiwei had been released by Chinese authorities early this morn or late last night.

Having not spoken to any Chinese about this news, I have nothing original to say except that it seems like very good news in terms of free speech on Earth, I think the best I’ve seen in months.

The AP photo showing AWW shortly after he was released. Notice the two foreigners in the background. This could be one instance where foreign news coverage actually did some good in China.

My original inclination was to say that this seems like the best news related to China that I’ve seen in a long time, but that seems a little too broad. I think of the fact that last summer China surpassed Japan to become the second largest economy in the world; or that Chinese officials appear to be acknowledging that there are some problems with the Three Gorges Dam project; or that the Chinese government was meeting with Libya’s opposition leader in Beijing.

So those are all debatably better pieces of news for China, depending on your perspective. I.e., if you are an investor or a Chinese businessperson, you are probably happy that China’s economy is doing fairly well. If you are an environmentalist or live in southern China, you might be happy that the Chinese government is beginning to see the light about their ill-conceived and megalomaniacal Three Gorges Dam (i.e. if you live in southern China, you might be happy to see that the government has the capacity to show a glimmer of insight about environmental hazards associated with overly ambitions attempts to control nature). If you happen to believe that there is some legitimacy to England, France and America’s attempt to remove Muammar Gaddafi from power, and do not believe the conflict is simply a conspiracy among Western powers to sequester oil (as most Chinese seem to think it is), perhaps you will be pleased, if also perplexed, to know that the Chinese were meeting with the rebel leader.

But Ai Weiwei is a different matter. Ai was detained about three months ago, and has hardly been heard from since. I will leave it to you to check out the news about this artist-”dissident”, who has been an (perhaps the most) “outspoken critic” of the Chinese government for a long time. The only thing I can say about the release of Ai Weiwei is that, from everything I have seen and read of how dissidents are treated in this country, the Chinese government would not have released him unless they felt a great deal of pressure to do so, and that pressure, I believe, would have had to come from within Chinese borders.

I wrote a little bit (it’s embarrassing how little I write here about real-consequential political matters, but so it is) about Ai Weiwei’s protest of the demolition of his Shanghai studio on this blog. A friend of mine invited me to go to Shanghai last summer to attend the “protest”, which was really more like a big party in which thousands of Ai Weiwei fans were signing up to go eat river crab in Shanghai. At the time, I was busy and couldn’t go, but it was for the best because Ai Weiwei was put under house arrest and couldn’t attend, and I’m not even sure if the party really happened.

My friend gave me one of the seeds from Ai’s exhibit (or a replica thereof) at the Tate Modern Gallery in London, a souvenir he received for being a follower of Ai. That was as close as either of us got to whatever the protest would have been, had it been allowed to occur.

Now Ai has been released, and the New York Times story suggests that he may have been released under some agreement with the government that would limit his actions. But he has been released, in one piece, and he is talking to the foreign press, and he is still there.

That seems worth celebrating in itself. Chinageeks.org posted a startling list a few months back of the China dissidents who had either been detained or were missing in March. The list is long, and I’m unclear on how comprehensive it is / was, but anyway, just looking at the post gives you a sense of the lack of restraint the Chinese government has when it comes to silencing disagreeable parties.

So it’s cause for celebration that Ai Weiwei had been released. I believe that when you consider peoples’ basic motivations — i.e., the desire of individuals to build and maintain power — politics can become very simple. At its most basic, the decision to release Ai Weiwei might be seen as a concession to the belief of a public, one that remains inscrutable to most of us foreigners, that he should be free. Or at least I hope that’s the case, as the alternative would be that his arrest was meant as a threat to him and others like him that he should keep quiet.

But Ai Weiwei, at this point, seems a bit beyond the fold in my eyes. He had certainly been warned before, and had become too great a target to be used to set an example. It seems to me, and maybe this is more of a hope than a realistic interpretation of events, that perhaps after they caught him they realized they had nabbed too big a fish, and had to let him go. Anyway, he has been let go. Here’s hoping he’s still got gills.

Take a look at this photo from the New York Times article about rioting in Vancouver after the Canucks’ loss to the Boston Bruins.

Crowd watches a burning truck. Photo from the NYT site but from Reuters

Just take a look at the crowd. What do you see? Do you notice, like I did, hundreds of arms stretching up and forward at a 45 degree angle, holding phones, blithely filming the fire?

I don’t know why this photo disturbs me. Perhaps it’s because of the subtle reminiscence to photos of the Third Reich. Or perhaps it’s because on This American Life this week they talked about what it would be like to contact aliens for the first time.

Now I think the aliens might think we are servants to our phones, or that the phones are actually people, and our bodies are just vehicles. Hah.

I suppose everybody, even people in the U.S., know that the Internet in China is censored. Here in the mainland, foreigners tend to refer to the block that is imposed on their Internet use as the “Great F!rew@ll of China” (you can take out the exclamation point and at sign yourself), also known by its abbreviation, the G – F  _ W, or sometimes called the “Net N@nny” (again remove at sign).

If you think I’m going overboard with my use of euphemistic @s and !s, then you haven’t been trying to use the Internet in China the last couple of weeks.

Gmail: I can't live if living is without you.

Starting about two weeks ago, the V.P.N. (virtual private network) that I previously used to access blocked sites in China went dead. There was no warning, no explanation — just a dot that had been green on my MacBook’s menu bar went to orange, and I couldn’t open Facebook anymore.

For those not in the know, a V P N is a service that allows you to connect to an offshore ISP, which encodes the transfer of information between you and the I.S.P. and allows you to circumvent any blockage that might be going on in the place you’re in. V.P.N.s are also used by businesses to encode Internet use within the company, so that information can’t be stolen by “hackers” (the Chinese word for hacker, interestingly, is hei1ke4, 黑客, or “black guest”).

The service I use costs about $60 U.S. per year, not a huge dent in the fender, and allowed me to continue to communicate with friends and family back home via Facebook, also to post pictures of my life here and generally remain connected. (Facebook seems to have taken the place of email over the past few years. For some reason it just now seems more comfortable, and more personal, to send messages by Facebook rather than by email.)

The service also allowed me to keep posted about the real goings on within China. One of the most noticeable victims of the Net N@nny has been China bloggers, who sometimes find cause to write blog posts that are either critical of big papi here or that simply say things big papi would not rather have out there. I follow about 20 blogs that cover China, most of which are blocked here. The news is interesting and, more than informing me about political events, also give me a lot of non-sensitive news about what’s happening here that I can’t find in Western news sources.

The New York Times isn’t blocked. (Maybe big papi isn’t so worried about a big, unwieldy English news source?) Most university sites aren’t blocked. General harmless information that has nothing to do with China isn’t blocked, naturally. And Wikipedia generally isn’t blocked, but if you try to look up anything controversial you’re going to come up with a big “This webpage is not available” error message.

But Facebook, Youtube, blogger.com sites, many Wikipedia pages, countless non-blogger.com blogs, all sites that reveal more skin than a woman or man in a bathing suit, and countless other news and information sources are blocked by the Great F!rew@ll of China. The only reason that this blog is not blocked in China is because I have never written the names of certain places, and I have never written anything remotely critical of big papi, or if I have I have done so carefully (as evidence see this post).

This was all fine and acceptable to me, as long as I could use my trusty V.P.N. And I think most laowai (“old outside”, i.e. foreigner in Chinese) felt the same way. We went about our business, keeping ourselves informed and connected and I think, for the most part, keeping our traps shut about controversial issues when talking with Chinese people on a daily basis.

But soon after my V.P.N. went haywire, I started to experience an even worse problem: Gmail was suddenly acting very strange, sometimes not loading at all, loading very slowly, taking forever to load emails or perform searches, moving like a snail when I wanted to send a message and sometimes never getting there at all.

I think I read somewhere, back in my high school Psychology class, that if you feed a rat every five minutes, it gets used to the predictability of its food and slowly saunters over when snacks arrive. If you feed the rat every ten hours, you get about the same reaction. But if you mess with the rat’s head — if you give it food now, then five minutes later, then an hour later, then twenty seconds later, then a day later, the rat goes completely nuts every time the food arrives. It thinks the food will never come again after this one time. To anthropomorphize, the rat is driven completely insane with the unpredictability of things.

This is, it turns out, what China is trying to do to its Gmail users. The country’s censors decided not to completely block Gmail, but instead to mess with Gmail, so that its users never know when it’s going to work or not work, so that we’re constantly on edge, so that every time we try to check our email we sweat a little.

I wish I were making this shit up. But I’m not. A few days after Gmail started acting really weird, first bloggers started to complain (see John Pasden’s helpful post and his links for more), then headlines started popping up about Gmail not working for other users, and then finally, just two days ago, Google officially accused China of interfering with Gmail’s services.

“There is no technical issue on our side — we have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail,” Google said in a statement.

Google finally threw down the gauntlet and accused big papi of what those of us on this side of the wall knew all along. Somehow papi had found a way to seriously screw with Gmail services in the country without totally blocking them. There’s a lot of mumbo jumbo on the net about how technically difficult this is to do, but what it came down to was that Gmail was just barely usable.

There were other people saying that Google docs and other services had become unusable as well, and that, again, papi had found a way to make it look like everything was fine on this end, but that something was screwy with Google.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. It was just big papi interfering with our internal affairs. And for this laowai, this issue suddenly became very personal. I use Google Video to chat with my family. Of course I use it to email everyone I know. I use it for document backup for my writing. I use it for chat. I check it ten times a day. More than six years of conversations, long-winded emails, and contact information of people I barely hear from anymore, are stored there. It’s very much in my blood, a part of my life.

Perhaps its sad, but this development was the first that really made me question whether I want to be here in China, or at least, it made me question my being here more than any other thing I’ve encountered in my 15-ish months here has. I started trying to think of using a Chinese email client, switching my email and informing everyone I know, no longer being able to be informed about what is really going on in the place where I live, and I thought, is it worth it?

I don’t know if it’s worth it. Certainly the lack of Gmail is not the greatest tragedy of the Great F!rew@ll. The fact that hundreds of millions of people can’t read about what’s happening in their country is clearly more relevant. Or the fact that including the English word “sex” in an email can make it impossible to send without use of a V.P.N. here. But that doesn’t affect me as much. For laowai, I suppose it’s more about what our situation is — if we can find a way to make life here worth it, especially those of us who are just here to live and learn, and have only personal reasons for wanting to get around the Wall.

The vinegar in the wound is that Baidu, the Chinese response to Google.com, is such a shameless ripoff it’s not funny. Google.com, for instance, recently added a feature that allows search results to roll down as you scroll down the page, so that you don’t have to thumb-forward to see the next page of search results. As far as I could tell, within two weeks of Google.com adding the feature, Baidu had added it as well (hm, that feature seems to have disappeared now…maybe my observation was wrong). Renrenwang, likewise, is the China mainland response to Facebook. It, too, is a shameless ripoff of Facebook, featuring the same designs, same features, same theme color.

The same sites that are blocked in mainland China are copied by mainland companies, down to the most basic design elements. Of course, this is the smart move for China. It shelters domestic companies and protects papi from the dissemination of potentially dangerous information. But it’s nearly the definition of frustration for laowai. It is not infuriating. There are much more infuriating things that happen here every day. It is merely frustrating.

To cap off the post, I’ll say that as of today, about a day after the Google announcement that China was interfering with Gmail (accusations that big papi denied), all of the issues with Gmail seem to have mysteriously disappeared. This is the “feint” that, I hope, has concluded papi’s interference in our Gmail usage. The poor drunk went too far, and hopefully all the people who use Gmail all over the country helped to put him in line. But who knows, really. He could turn it all off, the whole Internet, for all I know, tomorrow, and it’s impossible to say what the people here would do.

Maybe they would just shrug their shoulders, and say oh well, and turn back to whatever it was they were doing. Except for one little problem that (I guess) might come up: That thing they were doing? It was probably using the Internet!

I was in my apartment studying Chinese last Friday when the earthquake struck and the tsunami hit Japan. One of my high school students sent me a text message that said simply:

“News Alert: Tsunami Hits Japan After 8.8 Magnitude Earthquake Off Coast”

After learning that the tsunami wouldn’t at all affect the province I’m in, my first thought was about my friend Mami, a Japanese teacher who lives on the coastal capital city of this province. I see her every week or so. I met her last summer while I was traveling in Fujian. I was worried that the tsunami might have been near her home, because she’s from a beach town. But Mami is from Okinawa, the far South of Japan, and after a quick scan of the news it was obvious that Okinawa hadn’t been damaged by the tsunami. I called her an hour or so later (I figured her students would be jamming her phone with messages, so I didn’t call right away) and she said everybody in her family was fine, but she wasn’t sure about some friends who were living in northern Japan.

A photo of a whirlpool off the coast of Japan from the Sendai quake - pulled from ChinaSmack.com

Actually, the first day the news didn’t sound so bad. The New York Times reported that only a hundred or more people had died. This sounds strange now, since the headlines are saying that more than 10,000 have died, but the first day it didn’t seem so bad.

The thing I dreaded the most that first day was hearing what Chinese people were going to say about it. I assumed, since Chinese are  generally very open and unabashed about their negative feelings toward Japanese (and vice versa, from what I’ve heard, although I’ve never been to Japan so I don’t know), that people would gloat and be happy about the horrible disaster. I braced myself for what I assumed would be a few days of jarring, insensitive comments.

It turned out that I underestimated people, at least the people I know. I first asked my close Chinese friend Mike what he thought about the disaster, since that evening I was in his family’s house and the news was on the TV.

“It’s a terrible tragedy,” he said in English. “Of course there is some negative history between the two countries, but this kind of natural disaster is no one’s fault.”

Since I know that Mike is generally more open-minded than the average Chinese, I asked him if he thought other people would be happy about the disaster.

“Zhege wo bu dong,” he said. I don’t know about that.

So I decided, in my Sunday speech classes with the high school students, to use the Japan earthquake as a discussion prompt. All of my students were interested in talking about the event, but their faces all grew a little austere when I asked them if people would be happy about it. One student of mine, Anthony, whose English is pretty good, saw it coming and addressed it before I even asked her.

“Of course, there is some bad history between the two countries. But if anyone thinks that the earthquake is a good thing, that is wrong. This has happened to innocent people,” she said (after asking me in Chinese how to say “innocent”).

One of my students, Rachel, said that she had already donated money to a rescue organization in Japan. She added, looking a bit shy, that she had donated much more money when an earthquake struck Sichuan Province in western China in 2008, killing more than 68,000 people. “Because I should give more to my country,” she said.

Among all the people I’ve talked to, everyone has seemed gravely sympathetic to the Japanese over the disaster, perhaps because the memory of the Sichuan earthquake is not too distant. And it has been pleasantly surprising to me to see people be sympathetic, especially since in recent months the Chinese have been pretty vocal about their disregard for the Japanese. Last fall there were protests all over China, even in this small city, after the Japanese Coast Guard detained a Chinese fishing vessel captain after his boat crashed into a Japanese vessel in contested waters.

Another photo from the earthquake - pulled from ChinaSmack

Last semester I even got into an argument with a student from the English department when he told me, with no prompting from myself, that Chinese hate Japanese. I confronted him on the opinion and tried to make it clear that it was offensive to me, which ultimately seemed to offend him. Eventually, the student actually got up from the lunch table and walked away from me, a sign of disrespect no one had ever shown me here. I tried to resolve it by getting up, stopping him, and explaining that as a foreigner I didn’t understand some things about Chinese culture, and that my intent was not to disagree but to learn. That seemed to calm him down, but it was still an awkward encounter, and after that I decided not to talk to Chinese about Japanese if I could avoid it.

But a levy seems to have broken: I sense little animus from Chinese towards Japanese now. The Chinese government sent a team of rescuers to try to help out in the country, and even on ChinaSmack (where the Internet hate-speak that all Internet users spew out is translated from Chinese into English) comments were supportive of Japan, and in the cases where people decided to say something offensive (“Because it’s Japan, I’m so happy”) there were other commenters who kept them in check (“The entire world will look at the reaction of Chinese people, can you please not make us lose face? Don’t forget that only yesterday Yunnan had an earthquake, do you want to completely lose face for Chinese people?”).

Of course, all this is in the face of a complete nightmare going on in the country next door. I just read in the Times that 400,000 people are homeless, well over 10,000 dead, and a nuclear power plant is fomenting the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Mami, my friend in Fuzhou, has gotten in touch with her friends in northern Japan and said that they’re all OK, but none of them can get back to their homes. They don’t even know if they still have homes. And my other Japanese friend, who is still in New York, may have friends or family in the same situation or worse.

It’s reason to be grateful to know that I, and the people I’m closest to, are all in safe places. And I guess comforting that even though the country next door has been crippled by a very sad natural disaster, at least people on this side of the map care enough to put the past aside.

I recently discovered that the New Yorker has a bunch of free podcasts that you can download back episodes of in the iTunes store, the most interesting of which is called “The Political Scene”, a monthly conversation about American politics hosted by the magazine’s executive editor, Dorothy Wickendon.

One of the things I have soaked up from the podcasts is that there are a bunch of reasons that the Democrats lost so many seats in Congress in the midterm elections. Everybody seems to think the biggest reason is the persistent shittyness of the economy, combined with a general “lack of trust” in the government (mostly due to the bailout which seemed to favor banks over common people) and a feeling that Congress in general has been ineffective.

One thing that strikes me that could also be a big reason is that one of the biggest pieces of legislation that the Democrats have managed to pass since Obama took office has been health care reform, which has from the start been a great program that seems destined to truly help tens of millions of people and make America a fairer and better place to live, but unfortunately just seems really hard to get excited about. Whenever I think of health care reform I think, yeah, that’s awesome, now we will finally have what Canadians have had for decades, it’s about time…but I also think, damn, now I’m going to have to pay for health care in the future whether I want to or not. I think bills and paperwork and headaches…even though I know this is the right thing, I’m happy this happened, this is definitely what I wanted and this is why I voted for Obama.

This is the opposite of the effect of something like, say, the Iraq War had for the Republican base. Even though it disgusted many of those of us on the left, it definitely got the rocks off of most of the people who went on American-flag shopping sprees after September 11th. It was decidedly polarizing, a rock-star-excitement moment for hawks and a moment of fear and despair for doves.

Healthcare is maybe somewhere near as historic as Bush’s war, but nobody is on their lawn Yosemite Samming over it. There are just some of us quietly thanking Obama, and then a bunch of insurance men in suits running all over the place trying to shut it down.

I guess that doesn’t play so well for Democrats come election day.

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.

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.

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist and activist who is famous for lots of reasons, one of which his work “Sunflower Seeds” which is now at the Tate Modern gallery in London.

AiWW's work "Sunflower Seeds" consists of 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds on the floor of the gallery, which visitors could walk on and pick up and play with (until last month when they closed the exhibit to visitors because they were worried about dust from the seeds)

At the moment it seems he is famous for a party that he is holding at his studio in Shanghai this Sunday. He’s inviting (from what I hear) anybody who wants to come to his studio to feast on river crab (10,000 of them).

The Chinese word for river crab (he2xie4) sounds similar to the word “harmonize” or “harmonious” (he2xie2), which is the govt slang term for what happens to things on the Internet here that daddy don’t likey.

Another work of Ai Weiwei's from a series called "finger". He was also profiled in the New Yorker earlier this year

Which is, in turn, what is happening to AiWW’s art studio in Shanghai, which apparently he spent about 7 million yuan on (or $1 m ). The government has ordered that the studio be destroyed for reasons that to my layman’s eye appear to be the bureaucratic disguise of a politically motivated act (but you can read the actual story here or here).

The reason I know about this is only because a friend of mine asked if I’d be interested in going to the party in Shanghai, which is being held this weekend, but I declined because I’m just too busy for the next two weeks to do anything but work.

But it sounds interesting. I can’t really tell how many people are planning to go but it seems like a pretty cool, quiet kind of implicit but acquiescent disagreement. The plan, from what I’ve heard/read, is just to eat crab and commemorate the destruction of the place.

My friend also mentioned that the organizers are offering to reimburse a share of some peoples’ travel expenses, but I don’t see that in any of the news stories about the party. And he said that they’re giving everybody two ceramic sunflower seeds.

There’s also a great movie about the making of the 100 million sunflower seeds that I really like because it goes to the little Chinese town where they manufactured them and there are little clips of Chinese women working that are so perfectly real. Like pretty Chinese girls in high heels sitting in an old shabby run-of-the-mill building and painting probably thousands of those seeds a day. At one point AiWW asks a woman how much money she’s made and she says about 2 or 3 thousand yuan (if my Chinese serves).

The video’s here: YouTube

Or here: Youku

AiWW also helped design the famous Bird’s Nest, aka the Beijing National Stadium, which was the architectural centerpiece of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and which is really important to a lot of people here. Especially last year people often mentioned the bird’s nest to me with a little glow of pride, and when I was in Beijing with my family this summer several people suggested that we check it out. It is pretty impressive. (Although AiWW later denounced it, classic rockstar move almost bordering on cliche but whatever.)

The Bird's Nest in Beijing, the architectural centerpiece for the Olympics in 2008

Oh yeah, I guess he also got a bit of a doffing by the police as a result of an art project of his in 2008…which ultimately resulted in him having to get brain surgery. I don’t want to find my site harmonized as well (I don’t have a fancy VPN anymore) so I guess I’ll just leave it at that, since I don’t have anything original to say on the subject anyway.

Except that there will be no exciting trip to Shanghai for me…too much stuff to do, I’m afraid.

A Chinese friend sent me a link to a video of this guy, Joe Wong, a Chinese-born American stand-up comic performing at the “Annual Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner” in 2010. At first I got this dinner confused with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which Stephen Colbert spoke at in I think 2006, but it’s a different, lower-profile event (although Joe Biden, as you can see in this video, attended the Joe Wong performance).

I found it pretty damn funny, especially the darker jokes ala life is like pissing in the snow in the middle of the night. I’ll let you watch it and see the punchline. It’s good, and Joe Wong proves that even though there are (from what everybody says) huge differences in the Chinese/American senses of humor, the gap is by no means unbridgable (which is something I’ve found in my time here with English speaking Chinese people too).

I guess as an aside I could mention that the other foreign teacher I met who visited me from Guangzhou told me that it’s nearly impossible to explain knock-knock jokes to her students, and also she said it’s hard to explain sarcasm. Which I believe.

But my response to that is basically that A. knock-knock jokes aren’t funny anyway, so who cares; and B. The people I’ve interacted often seem to get sarcasm — it’s just it’s hard to pick up on tone of voice when you’re a language learner, so the situation has to be fairly obvious. In my classes I seem able to elicit the biggest laughs by combining facial expressions with snyde comments, or by making fun of myself or making myself appear pitiful. Which is basically the only way I know how to be funny anyway, so it works.

There are two interesting posts on the Sinosplice author’s experience with making jokes in Chinese: Post 1; Post 2

I saw something in the NYer a few weeks ago that really piqued my interest and made me look at the issue of American mass-consumerism in a new way.

By American mass-consumerism I mean the meteoric rise in America’s consumption of foreign-made goods over the last 30-50-odd years. I.e. the simply and well known fact that America doesn’t make stuff anymore. We buy stuff.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because it is really confusing to me. I can give you a short story to explain my confusion. A year ago I bought a couple of wool Pendleton blankets at a thrift store in Portland. The blankets are beautiful, tartan, a little scratchy but warm in the winter. Their tags say they were made in Oregon. They were used, and they still cost $20 each, but they were worth it. A few months after I got the blankets, I noticed that the Pendleton store in the Portland airport was having a sale; I went in the store and starting trying on sweaters I am not old enough to want to buy, when I noticed that all of the Pendleton tags now said “Made in China”. Apparently Pendleton still makes some stuff in America, but most of their stuff is made in Mexico and China. But why was this fairly well-known American brand outsourcing its manufacture to China? Isn’t it bad enough that Wal-Mart makes everything in China; why do small locally recognized manufacturers do it too? And additionally, since it’s so hard to find American-made stuff anymore, how is it possible that America manages to consume so much, whille making so little? What is it that we do that makes us the richest country in the world, the biggest consumer of the world?

So, the point being that this is something that I have been confused about for a really long time, and a little bit pissed about. I like buying American made stuff. I try, sometimes, to buy American made stuff. But it’s not always easy. It’s not that stuff made in America is any more expensive. It’s not. American Apparel makes pretty nice clothes (I have an American Apparel hoodie that is well made and comfortable and good-looking enough), and their stuff is not that expensive (I think the hoodie was $30) and the souls of small Vietnamese children do not have to be trampled for the clothes to get made. A bunch of Americans make American Apparel stuff, presumably, since the AA store windows all say “made in downtown L.A.”.

(As an aside, I want to cue the “Flight of the Conchords” song here for anyone that might remember it — “They’re turning kids into slaves / just to make cheaper sneakers, / but what’s the real cost / ’cause the sneakers don’t seem that much cheaper. / Why are we still paying so much for sneakers when you’ve got them made by little slave kids? / What are your overheads?”)

So finally to the NYer quote. I feel like I’ve got you pretty well set up for the idea here so I’m just going to spit it out:

[A Columbia professor] explained that we [the U.S.] are, in some respects, the victims of a structural imperative reaching back to the waning days of the Second World War. The Great Depression in Britain, he said, started in the late nineteen-twenties, owing to structural deficits in the nation’s balance of payments, a result of the pound sterling’s role as the world’s reserve currency. Bretton Woods, the global economic conference in New Hampshire in 1944, replaced the pound with the dollar.

This meant that debts tended to be denominated in dollars, and other nations had to hold dollars in reserve, to pay them off. Not having dollars would expose your country to the risks of currency fluctuations. And so other countries coveted dollars. To get them, they sold goods. There was, therefore, in the Bretton Woods arrangement, a structural demand for current-account surpluses, and for someone to eat up all those surpluses. We had to be the consumer of last resort. “We’ve been living beyond our means for the sake of the world,” Greenwald told me. “Where else would all that crap go?”

–Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, May 18, 2009

So without spelling it out too much, the interest that I had in this quote was basically derived from the fact that I had never thought of that before (nor did I really know what Bretton Woods was all about, though I had heard of it…). It’s interesting to me to think that in a sense, although the way of life of America is in many ways shortsighted–that we overconsume, that our culture has become and is becoming hollower by the day, and that every day we seem to consume more and more and do less and less–there is, however, at least one way in which that overconsumption is not due to some inherent greedy gene in America, so much as to the doomed circumstances of our currency, the fact that if any country wanted to have a pretty safe outlook in terms of being able to pay off its debts in the event of a drop in the value of its currency, it had to buy a lot of American dollars (like actually buy money, the way you would buy a Big Mac or a car); and the only way it would buy that money was buy making shit. Lots and lots of shit. Mountains and valleys and plateaus of endless piles of shit. To sell us. For dollars.

In a sense, then (in the sense that human life expands to fill the space available, always and everywhere, even when that expansion threatens the extinction of that life), American mass-consumerism was in a certain light inevitable because of the status of the dollar after WWII. As I was thinking about writing this post, I re-read some passages from Jared Diamond’s book, “Collapse”, about human civilizations that have collapsed or failed throughout history (like Easter Island, the Vikings, etc.). One of the constants that he points out is that when civilizations fail they often don’t take seriously the manipulative affect their abuse or overuse of resources will have on their own longevity. This ultimately, and almost, almost inevitably causes some kind of terrible, unimaginable disaster that causes starvation, war, despair. Due to a lack of resources.

It seems to me that consumption of resources is inevitable for humans when those resources are available, because one of the rules of life is that happiness can only be achieved intuitively, and intuitition often guides us to do things that are disastrous, sustainability-wise. I think humans are in trouble because of that. I think this dollar thing is one of the most compelling reasons I’ve heard of so far for American mass-consumerism, because I don’t believe that Americans are just more greedy or more selfish than the rest of the world. I think the circumstances were there, at a certain point, for us to gorge ourselves more than anyone else in the world, and we did it.

There is a hopeful section in Diamond’s book, where he talks about the inhabitants of Tikopia, a small island off the coast of New Guinea. Apprently the little island could support barely enough human life for a civilization to stay there, but only if the people who lived on the island made concessions not to reproduce except rarely (even practicing abortion and infanticide to keep the population low — not that either of those things are “hopeful”), and agreeing not to raise pigs or food sources that would disproportionately damage the environment. They made a number of other concessions (voluntary suicide and celibacy among them) that, to put it mildly, did not sound easy. But because of the concessions that they were able to make, people were able to continuously inhabit Tikopia for thousands of years.

Of course, Diamond contrasts Tikopia to Easter Island, where overconsumption of humans and disregard for the environment caused most of the humans on the island to die of starvation.

Tikopia also seemed definitively to be the exception not the rule.

I guess the point of all this is, the little bit of that New Yorker article made me feel a little better about America’s role in the world; but it didn’t necessarily make me feel much better about the fate of the whole lot of us.

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