I have noticed in strangers, friends, and yes, even myself, seven habits that I think make you a very ineffective expat. My rookie year in China is nearing a close, so I plan on making a New Year’s resolution of sorts to break these bad habits that I know I have, and I sure to not be alone in them.

Habit #1
Comparisons

“It’s not like this back home”
“In [insert home country back home] it’s like….”

If you’ve never heard this whine then you must not be talking to many foreigners, and if you’ve never said this then you must not talk to anyone period. For a number of people nothing here can ever be as good as it is back home, wherever that may be.

Obviously, the coffee here is not going to be as good as it is in the West. Clearly the Chinese are not experts at making hamburgers and french fries. The public transport is very clearly going to be much, much more crowded here than back home. Yes, the streets are probably dirtier here than a street in the suburbs.

These are the charms that keep China interesting, and very different from home. You will not be able to get a cup of tea back home like you can here, no Western chain will be able to satisfy your fried rice cravings, and just where are you going to spit when you have to back home?

I will never claim to be innocent of this ugly habit, but there has to be a time and place where you need to accept China for what it is, a wildly different place. While some things are better at home, there are definitely things that are better here. It is important to try to keep that in context, especially when you are experiencing the worst this nation has to offer.

Habit #2
Counting Down

“Thank God, only six more months until I go home!”
“What’s the point in learning the language if I’ll only be here for two years?”

It’s very natural to be excited to get home (only thirteen days for me!!!!), but that excitement should really not consume you. Being obsessed with going home is a logical extension of Habit #1.

There are always going to be great things to look forward to in the future, but if you take a look around there are probably some pretty great things to look forward to right now.

Rarely is it ever healthy to live for the future, as it often lets your present fly by.

Habit #3
Getting Stuck in a Rut

“Let’s meet at the usual Starbucks”
“It’s [Insert Day of the week] are you going to [Insert usual location for said day of the week]“

Be careful not to fall into the exact same habits as before by clurr

Ready to go out for dinner? Well be sure to go to the same place you went to last week since you know the food is “safe”. Of course, the fact that the staff speak English helps since you are in the mood for an “easy” dinner experience. Afterward be sure to go to the nearby Starbucks for the taste of home. Oh, and don’t forget to pick up some groceries from the nearby market to pick up some peanut butter and Western cereal.

Sounds familiar? Lord knows it has for me on many, many nights.

Humans are by our very nature creatures of habit. However, it is really, really easy to go too far on that one, especially when you live in a foreign country. While there is certainly no harm in a little routine and structure, there is certainly a line to be drawn. If you’re not careful you’ll end up in the same habits that you were trying to escape from back home.

Habit #4
Obsessive Traveling

“I have three days off, I think I’ll head to Thailand”
“I’ve seen all of China, time to explore a new country”

Oh lord am I ever guilty of this one.

Part of the joy of living in China is the proximity to such dream destinations as Thailand and Cambodia. This coupled with the frequent holidays often afforded to expats seems to lead to a mass exodus of the country whenever there is any sort of break.

I was very, very guilty of this one during my first six months in the country. I was lucky enough to have a week off in October, two weeks off at Christmas, and two weeks off for the Lunar New Year (I’m a teacher what can I say?) during those five total weeks I went to Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, with a brief stop-over in Hong Kong for one of those trips. That’s right, with five weeks off I spent no time in Mainland China. Granted, I had previously visited the “main sites” such as Beijing, Xi’an, and Guilin, but clearly it is not right to say that I have done China.

This is definitely the attitude of several people who have been here, even for a short amount of time. However, upon even an ounce of reflection, you should realize that of all countries in the world China is probably the most difficult to fully do. China has the largest population in the world, the third or fourth largest land area (depending on who you ask), and the longest uninterrupted history (depending on who you ask) making it a very hard place to fully see, and an even harder place to understand. If someone has only been to New York and Washington, they would never be able to rightly claim to say that they have seen all of the United States, so why is it ok to make that claim after you have seen Beijing and Xi’an?

By all means use your time to travel, and makes those trips to some of the fantastic places Asia has to offer, but don’t forget the one that you live in. It’s certainly worth looking at.

In case you are curious, I spent my most recent holiday in Xinjiang and plan to go to Sichuan and Yunnan during the summer, lessons learned.

Easy to enjoy, easy to abuse by taylorandayumi

Habit #5
Increased Alcohol Consumption

“A litre of beer costs less than a dollar!”
“Liange pijiu”

Clearly the most dangerous of the seven habits listed here. Given the incredibly low prices on alcohol, coupled with the equally low existence of liquor laws can lead to an increased consumption of alcohol.

To make matters worse is the problem of boredom. In a recent edition of Business Week, they ranked the 20 Worst Places to Work, and 5 cities in China were on the list, including my current location. On all five Chinese cities one of the concerns listed was a lack of cultural and recreational facilities. Regardless of whether you feel that the report was accurate or not, this shows that there is at least the perception that there is nothing to do as an expat in China. If people have nothing to do, or feel that they have nothing to do, then alcohol becomes an obvious source of recreation.

The consequences of this can be too vast to mention on a site like this, if you know anyone who is abusing alcohol please, please seek help from someone more qualified as anyone on this blog.

On a lighter side, I personally have not come anywhere close to having to make 12 difficult steps, but having additional beers with dinner has certainly increased my waist line far more than would be ideal.

Habit #6
Decadence

“Don’t worry about spilling anything, the ayi will clean it”
“I don’t cook anymore, eating out is so cheap”

It’s pretty easy to see just how cheap China is.

It’s also easy to see that so many expat packages include accommodation, annual airfare, and health care. This leaves your money to be, well your money.

It’s also pretty easy to see that there are so many inexpensive luxuries ranging from ayis to cheap DVDs to delivery on anything to spend some of your disposable income.

What’s difficult is knowing when and where to stop. Life here can get very infantile if you have someone clean up for you, deliver your food for you, and you can get whatever you want by pointing at it. In many ways living in China can be like being five years old all over again.

While this is part of the attraction for a lot of people, I hope that you ask yourself what you think of the people who have that sort of a lifestyle back home.

Habit #7
Know it All

“I understand China”

Compared to some of your family and friends back home you may be an expert on all things Chinese. However, the reality of it is that at the end of the day you are not.

China has a very ancient and idiosyncratic culture, history, and language. These three things and intricately connected, and I think that it is difficult if not impossible to fully understand one of the three without understanding all of them.

So how do you get to understand any of these things? The only idea I can really come up with is trial and error, with a heavy emphasis on the error side of things. It is not very realistic to be able to think that you will be able to fully “get” this country, especially in as short of a time frame as one or two years.

A simple look through the comments and yes even some of the posts (including me, I fully admit) and it is not hard to see the Know-it-Alls out in full force. It is so easy to get caught up in the knowledge of the world that you do earn, but very difficult to know when to put a cap on it. But when it doubt, realize that you probably don’t get it and may never will.

So that just about does it for me, anyone have any ideas for any more habits? Lord knows there are more…

This week Google has been under attack in China over internet pornography, especially with regards its ’search suggestions’ drop-down box, which can suggest some salacious terms for fairly innocuous words. For this, Google was “strongly condemned” by the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center (CIIRC), which describes itself as a non-governmental organisation on its own website.

From the CIIRC’s condemnation, the situation escalated quickly this week, with the Chinese government clearly unleashing the hounds on Google, with all national media – which are, with no exceptions, state-controlled – running the story of how Google is polluting China’s youth with its lewd search suggestions and pornographic links to foreign websites. Thus, Google has been bashed by national and local TV and newspapers for three solid days.

Suggestive Suggestions…
Admittedly, Google was caught red-handed with its overly-sexual search suggestions. These things appear by default across the Google globe, so when I start typing “football” it will begin to suggest more precise terms, such as “football games”, “football results”, etc., which is all very useful. But, as the Chinese media has been showing all week, if you type the word “son” in Chinese, on Google.cn, it will then offer up crude suggestions, such as “son and mother incest”. In all fairness, they got busted. And, as I type this, Google has switched off the suggestions only on Google.cn.

Google has already put in place a lot of safeguards to appease the difficult Chinese market. In China, on Google.cn only (which will appear by default if you type in Google.com but you’re in China AND your web browser’s settings are set to Chinese-language) it is not possible to switch off the ‘SafeSearch’ feature, and a lot of politically sensitive and pornographic material has already been removed.

So, from within China, if you search for ‘Tiananmen Square’ you get only views of the plaza, and not images from the events of 1989. And, if you search for “sexy” (in either Chinese or English), you will find no nudity in the image search results, in accordance with partial or full nudity being banned in China. So, Google has already being done things “with Chinese characteristics” during its four years in the Chinese market, but it has still been caught in the wrong this week, and will not be allowed to forget it.

Fixing It…
Google is now hurrying to fix the problem, by switching off the suggestions (easy), and removing all pornography from its results (not so easy). Google people have explained how they met with some government representatives a few days ago…

“to discuss problems with the Google.cn service and its serving of pornographic images and content based on foreign language searches”

“We are undertaking a thorough review of our service and taking all necessary steps to fix any problems with our results,“ a Google spokesperson said in an e-mail. “This has been a substantial engineering effort, and we believe we have addressed the large majority of the problem results”.
- an unnamed Google spokesperson

Unspecified “punishment” has been threatened by the Chinese government, and Google has been apologetic, issuing the statement: “We have been continually working to deal with pornographic content, and material that is harmful to children, on the Web in China”. But that may not placate the government.

All material on the Chinese webosphere is already subject to nationwide self-checking, where the punishment is usually getting shut-down, with no legal recourse, as happened to many websites last year during a massive ‘purge’ of indecent material, where Google’s rival Baidu, was actually the main focus of the censure.

Ulterior Motives…?
Possible motives for government and state-media attacking search engines are numerous, but the two most significant ones are fear of losing influence, and fear of losing revenue; both of which are likely to occur as younger, tech-savvy Chinese – some of whom are now fluent in English, or one or two other languages – are choosing their news sources on the web, and not all of them are domestic, and therefore contains news that has not passed through the state’s filter.

As for revenue, in attacking search giants like Baidu and Google, and video-sharing sites such as Youku and Tudou, the state, and state-media, can keep a check on new media which might well steal lucrative ad revenue, especially if corporations figure that a lot of young people spend more time online than watching either national or local news shows and dramas, which are the time-slots with the priciest advertising packages.

One More Thing: “Green Dam”
To throw one more ulterior motive into the mix, the whole Google debacle this week could well be linked to the upcoming, government-sanctioned web filter, dubbed “Green Dam-Youth Escort”, or ‘Green Dam’ for short. This piece of filtering sofware reared its head two weeks ago, when the Chinese government mandated it ought to be compulsory on all brand-new PCs sold in China from July 1st (as well as installed in retrospect on every computer in schools across the country).

This left PC makers scrambling to jump to another new restriction in its China operations, while at the same time not being seen to be a party to stifling of free speech – because many fear that ‘Green Dam’ is not just a porn filter to protect young eyes, it is also a political filter to wash young minds. Indeed, by peering into the software package, it is clear that it will also filter politically-sensitive keywords, as well as (attempt) to detect fleshy skin-tones that would indicate images of naked people.

In just the week after Green Dam emerged, it was exposed as containing stolen code from a US firm’s web filter app, and in tests Green Dam has been seen to have failed to detect African-American porn (because it was focusing only on pinky flesh tomes), sensde that pigs were naked humans, and began to filter any site beginning with the letter ‘F’ after a tester deliberately visited a poltically sensitive website.

The backlash against Green Dam has been swift and surprisingly large, in China as well as around the world. Search twitter trends for the hashtag #greendam or look at the satirical cartoons made by Chinese netizens and it is clear that younger web users have been outraged at their government having insulted their intelligence by mandating software to shepherd their time on the internet.

“Don’t be Evil”…?
So, although Google has been found to have some sexual content in their search suggestions and web searches from Google.cn, it may be a whipping boy in a propaganda campaign gearing towards the launch of Green Dam on all new PCs, with no signs of the government backing down over Green Dam, despite calls for a rethink based on security and online freedoms. But, Google in China will survive, and this will prove to have been just another fiery hoop that it has had to jump through in order to have access to China’s 300 million regular web users.

As for Chinese netizens, the spectre of Green Dam approaches, but there are some get-outs: it’s not compulsory on old machines, it only works with Internet Explorer (so, go get Firefox, Google Chrome, or Safari – all of which are much better than IE anyway – if Green Dam has been slapped onto your office or school PC), only on the Windows operating system, and Green Dam is uninstall-able on new machines that have come with it.

Jade Market (c) LinksmanJD

Fěicuì

Not your typical blog post, but I hope you find it useful

Everywhere in China you can find Jade. They sell it in street corners, in subway stations, in supermarkets, and in jewelry stores. Some Jade costs as little as 1 yuan and some as much as 100k+ yuan. Whether it’s black, blue, green, yellow or white, Jade is very shiny and alluring, though it’s often a mystery to foreigners and Chinese people alike. So how do you buy Jade without being cheated? I know it can be confusing so here is a brief introduction to “the king of Jade” that is Fěicuì.

A Chinese proverb says “huángjīn yǒu jià yù wújià” – one can put a price on gold, but jade is priceless. Even though there is no “Jade standard” like gold, Feicui still has its price. Just like when buying clothes, you have to look at the textures and colors to judge the value. We call Feicui’s color “se,” and when we talk about texture, we refer to the “water” in the Jade. These two things, color and water, directly determine the value of Feicui.

When we talk about the type of Feicui, we refer to the degrees of density (the compression in the stone) and transparency (the clarity). Jewelry made from Feicui must be both dense and clear, as well hard and regal in appearance. Good Jade is dense or highly compact; bad jade is brittle and fractures easily. Feicui’s “water” denotes its level of transparency, a lot of water means high transparency while little “water” means low transparency. In the industry, when we talk about the type of “water” or “shuǐ zhōng,” we refer to the composition of the mineral crystals in the jade that can have clarity similar to different states of water.

There is a Chinese saying, “nèiháng kàn zhōng, wàiháng kàn sè” – an insider looks at kind, an outsider just looks at color. When an expert appraises jade, the texture and transparency of the water are first and foremost. It is the texture of the Jade that determines its kind or type. The color then improves upon the value of the Feicui. So don’t get too distracted by the pretty colors, you’ll want to make sure it’s a good stone first.

Feicui is not just green. Various combinations of chromium and iron give Feicui an array of colors from a rich emerald color, to a mild yellow or a bright violet, to a cool blue-green or a pale white and many more possible colors.

The Many Colors of Jade

Colors of Jade:

1. Imperial “Yan lu”: This is the highest grade Feicui. This a bright life-giving green, a luxurious verdant green. One shade darker and it would be too blue; one shade lighter and it would be too pale. The transparency and luster of the water are particularly important in Imperial jade.
2. Dense green “Nong lu”: This is a viridian, deep green with a synthesis of blue or yellow. The age of the Jade affects it’s densitiy or compression, dense green comes in three varieties: old, semi-old, and new. Its water kind either has a clear quality like ice or an opaque quality like glutinous rice.
3. Vivid Green “Yang lu”: This is a bright green with a hint of yellow. It has very good water or good translucency.Imperial, Dense green, and Vivid green are the top three types of Feicui, and they are all similar in value. It is very rare to come across one of these three types of Jade and almost impossible to obtain. If you come across any jade on the street that claims to be one of these three, its probably a fake.
4. Mung Bean Green “Dou lu”： This green has a hint of blue with a trace of yellow that give it a bold blue-green color. Of all of the Feicui colors, this is the most common.
5. Apple green “Nen lu”: This is a delicate color of green; it is the green of a young grass sprouts or a bright green apple. Although it does not have a noble or imperial quality (not something you would see an Emperor wearing), it has a gentle and cute quality to it (popular among young girls). It usually has a lot of water and gives the effect of extreme softness and delicacy in its structure.
6. Blue-green “Lan lu”： This jade has a strong blue color with very little yellow. To have this blue-green color, the stone must be very old (highly compressed). It also has a lot of water. The texture, or pattern of interlocking mineral crystals, of the jade is very delicate. Blue-green Feicui is known for its very high quality bracelets and pendants.
7. Oily Green “You lu”：This green is almost too green. It looks very deep or dark in color.
8. Life Green “Sheng lu”： This is the green of life, like an unripe peach or like the oxidation on old bronze. The green color in this jade swirls around black or white colors like lightly stirred paint. It has little water or low transparency, and its texture or inner structure is slightly coarse and splintery.
9. Kingfisher “Fei”： We say that Cui is green and Fei is red thus, Fei or kingfisher jade usually has red and yellow colors. The most prized Kingfisher jade is a fiery red, and it is also very expensive.
10. Violet “Chun”： This is a moderate, light, or brilliant violet or purple. Since it is very rare, its worth even more than the green varieties of Feicui.
11. Black-green “Hei lu”： This is such a dark green that it appears black, but when illuminated with a light, the green shines through. The value of this stone has started picking up over the last few years and it has steadily increased ever since.
12. Mottled Green “Za lu”：This refers to a kind of jade that is a combination of colors, for example “Chun dai cai” (purple and green), “happiness, position and longevity” (Five colors in one stone: red, Green, purple, yellow, white). The more colors in Feicui the rarer it is, and the more colors the higher the price.

Water Kind:

Color needs a good base to be displayed properly; the base of the water kind is divided into the following categories:

1. Glass “Boli”: The texture is as bright and clear as glass. It also appears as hard like glass. If you take a piece of Glass type Feicui to the page of a book, you will be able to read the words underneath.
2. Ice “Bing”： This jade is clear but with a fine mist inside, like that of a piece of ice. It does not have the clarity or brilliance of Glass jade. If you take a piece of Ice jade to the page of a book, you will be able to see words underneath but not clear enough to distinguish them.
3. Glutinous rice “Gao hua”: This is transparent and yet opaque, it gives a feeling of dense sticky rice cakes or pulled fluffy cotton. This white stuff does not make up more than 20% of the stone composition.
4. Moss-in-Snow “Bai di Qing”: This jade has green floating on a white surface like green clouds on a white sky, or like green moss strewn on powdery white snow.
5. Cyanine “Hua qing”: This jade is blue-green，the base color appears green but it is not distributed evenly. The texture is slightly coarse, and some Cyanine jade are completely opaque while others are completely transparent.
6. Lotus root starch “Ou fen”: This jade appears luminous but it is actually rather dark, it appears transparent but it is rather opaque. It looks like a cloudy murky mess of 80% lotus root powder frozen in 20% water.
7. Rice water “Mi tang”: This kind has many impurities; it is essentially not transparent. It is similar to the white murky liquid leftover when you put too much water in your steamed rice or make rice porridge.
8. White base “Bai di”: This kind is not transparent; it has a lot what looks like cotton inside. It is white with other colors and has very poor water.
9. Dry base：This kind has no water and very coarse texture.

The color and water have a mutual relationship, if there is both good color and good water then the value is immensely greater than if just one is good. For example, Dense green, Imperial, and Vivid green Feicui are all expensive on their own, but they all go up in price by tens or hundreds of thousands when they are the Glass variety. Equally, if the jade has beautiful color but is composed of a coarse texture, or has a delicate texture but poor color, the value is very low. There is Feicui that is worth hundreds to millions, and there is Feicui with poor color and poor texture that is not even worth 100 rmb.

At the same time, limited availability of raw materials means that small pieces of Feicui are easier to come across, while larger stones are harder to obtain. When looking at two pieces of Jade with the same water and color, the size will greatly influence the price. Moreover; the set, cut, finish, region, etc. will also influence the value of the jade.

B and C grade jade

Is it real or fake – the ABC’s of Feicui:

Everyone now has some idea as to how to recognize and judge the value of Feicui. Let us put aside discussion of cheap vs. expensive jade and move on to the more frightening matter of fake Feicui. Actually, when one says the words “fake jade” he is classifying himself as an amateur. Jade does not differentiate real vs. fake; it classifies Jade as A, B, C or B+C grade.

A Grade: Unprocessed, unaltered 100% natural Feicui. Natural jade that has only been polished in wax and undergone a heat treatment is known as A grade.

B Grade: Has undergone a bleaching process to clean the inside of impurities and inferior color. However, this process destroys the inner structure of the Feicui, leaving holes where the impurities used to be. These holes are filled with a type of clear polymer and then lacquered. This corrects all of the problems and leaves a highly transparent finished product that is known as B grade.

C Grade: It takes an already cut stone and adds color by dip-dying the stone. Color altered Feicui is known as C Grade.

B+C: After the Feicui has undergone an acid and alkali cleaning, it is dried and then dyed. This is called B+C Grade.

B, C and B+C appear brighter, clearer and have a rich color like the highest quality Feicui, but it is no longer a legitimate natural stone, it does not have the ability to maintain or increase in value. If you spend hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands on a B, C or B + C grade you are simply wasting money because it is not even worth 100 yuan. In addition, B, C or B+C are not durable; after a short time the polymer and inner structure breakdown, the color fades, and it cracks and breaks easily.

Now let me tell you the many ways to distinguish A grade from B grade, C grade, and B+C grade.

B grade’s water quality is a little muddled or cloudy, it looks a little like gelatin. If you use a magnifying glass to examine the texture, you will see obvious continuous sheets of small threads left over from the acrid erosion. B grade feels light in your hand. If you hit a B grade bracelet, it will resonate with a dull sounding “thud.”

A grade Feicui has distinctly different and separate colors within the stone; even though there will be some gradual changes in color, the color changes would never appear sloppy or blurred. In C grade jade, the man altered color flows along the holes left by the removed Feicui impurities and leaves patterns of visible threads.

Another simple distinguishing method is to spend a few yuan to buy a currency detector. Shine the detector’s small ultraviolet light on the Feicui, if you see fluorescent glow, then it is defiantly B or C grade, A grade does not change under the ultraviolet light.

Of course, the safest method is to go to a nationally certified institution to appraise the jade and obtain a certificate of authenticity.

We say there are “thirty two (kinds of) water,” “seventy two (kinds of) bean,” “a hundred and eight (kinds of) blue” which means there are many varied different kinds of Feicui. With so many varieties of Jade, there’s no way for anyone to know everything there is to know about jade. As for me, I just understand a little, after the course of a few years of experience and study, I have come to learn a thing or two about Feicui. I hope this has helped everyone feel a little more confident about buying Jade.

(note: My husband sells jade. He originally wrote this introduction to Feicui and I just translated it into English. Sorry if some parts sound a little awkward, some things are really hard to translate)

On my recent trip to Wudang Mountain I was clearly presented with what I like about long-haul train journeys in China, and also what I don’t. The experience also underlined one of the more admirable aspects of Chinese culture, along with one of the least.

To travel to Wudang I took K351 from Shanghai South to Chongqing, which would depart at 6.21pm, to arrive in Hubei, Shiyan, at 4.45pm the following day. In preparation for the journey I had visited my local bookshop, and bought the thickest English language book I could find for less than 100rmb.

Once on the train, I settled in to my bottom bunk hard sleeper, and was surprised to find a TV installed in each compartment. At first I was dismayed, as it blared out puerile advertisements at high volume, with no way of stopping it other than smashing it with my shoe. To my relief, the loud adverts soon gave way to a popular and reasonably entertaining sit-com, set in ‘the classical period’, and I sat back, admiring the Chinese aptitude for slap-stick.

Things were looking good. I was enjoying the ride. Sadly, it was not to last. Two men with strong Jiangsu dialects were sharing my compartment of 6 hard-sleeper bunks, and were about to show me their own talents for comedy. From when I got on the train, until lights out at about 11pm, these men, somewhat rustic in appearance and demeanour, had been sitting on the flip-down chairs in the aisle, talking loudly, eating preserved chicken or duck out of a packet, among other things, and drinking from a little bottle of baijiu¬ – never less than 40% by vol. – non-stop. As the lights went out, they got up.

I imagined that the background noise of their conversation would stop as the lights went out. Instead, the younger of the two rummaged around in his stuff on the bunk above mine, and pulled out a laptop. This seemed a little incongruous, and I wondered what it was for. The Marx brothers sat down on the vacant bottom bunk opposite mine, ie about 1.5 metres from where I was lying down, under my blanket and obviously desirous of sleep. They put the lap-top on the table, and proceeded to play a computer game – Mah Jong, I deduced from the loud computerized voice, which called out the name of each tile put down as the game progressed. The voice was annoying, but not as annoying as the inane electronic tune which accompanied the game, obviously designed to jolly along the players.

I lay in my bunk silently, wondering how long this would last. I could feel my bile rising, and I fought to repress the expat-rage bubbling up within. After about 20 minutes, I couldn’t take any more. I asked them, very politely, if they could turn down the volume, as I wanted to sleep. There was a moments silence, and then a mumbled “hang on a minute”. Then the music seemed to get louder. I wondered what had been lost in translation, and was about to speak again, when the music abruptly stopped. Great. I lay back, and tried to relax. Imagine my joy when the guys, no longer jollied along by the funky little computerized jingle, found that they needed to converse loudly in order to fully enjoy the now-silenced computer game. Perhaps they were discussing tactics. If so, they were master strategists. I lay listening to their conversation, marveling at their inability to make the mental leap required to deduce that their voices were just as annoying as the music, or their failure give a flying flock. Perhaps at this point, for them, it was already about ‘payback’.

I quickly reached the conclusion that I was unable to lie listening to their unintelligible conversation indefinitely without doing anything rash, and decided the best course of action was to ask to be moved to another bunk. I got up, sought out one of the train company employees, and explained the situation. She seemed to understand my plight, and was kind enough to accompany me back to my compartment, and tell the two men in no uncertain terms that they were acting inappropriately. One of them protested, saying that it was too early to sleep, but they sullenly complied when she told them to go up into their bunks above mine. I lay down in my bunk again, imagining scenarios where the two men descended while I was asleep to exact their revenge. Predictably, within two minutes, the conversation started anew, only from above this time, and I resigned myself to a sleepless night, or spontaneous frenzied violence ending in deportation or a good kicking for me.

Then, divine intervention. I remembered that my girlfriend had given me a set of earplugs issued to her by her company, for when she visits factories. And, with an incredible flash of insight, I had put them in my camera bag; probably in case of snorers. I whipped out the earplugs, stuck them in, and finally………..oblivion.

The return journey from Wudang Mountain was on K284, which I advise people to avoid like the plague. The standards of cleanliness on this train, for some reason, fell considerably short of the K351 of my outgoing journey. The service was much poorer, and the train was shabby. This was compensated for, however, by my travel companions. A Fujian man, senior manager in a building materials company despite being about 23, was travelling with a colleague to Zhengzhou for some kind of training seminar. He and his female companion were friendly and curious, and we chatted for a while. He seemed keen to talk about his home province of Fujian, making me a gift of some Fujian green tea; and she was delighted to discover that my girlfriend comes from the same province as her. After I had ordered a solitary meal in the restaurant carriage, the two of them insisted I join them to share their meal; and Mr Li of Fujian proceeded to order large quantities of beer, which we downed in the traditional way. He was obviously proud of his ability to drink lots of beer without going red-faced and boggle-eyed, and I was happy to join him. A couple of hours later they said goodbye, and got off the train.

Thanks to Mr Li, and his colleague, as well as our other compartment-mate – a navy man from Jiangsu returning home on leave, who insisted on helping at least four women to put their luggage up on the rack, and retrieve it too – I remembered why I sometimes enjoy long train rides. Of course, with a hard seat ticket anything over 8 hours becomes a test of mental and physical toughness; but journeys in the sleeper carriages can be a great opportunity to socialize, practice your Chinese, people-watch, or just kick back and catch up on some reading. Of course, you might run into a couple of clowns, like I did on the way to Hubei, but you takes the rough with the smooth, right?

China Railway Fact-file:
China boasts 100,000 km of railway, and while this is far from the largest rail network in the world (the US is top of the heap, with 240,000 km), it is in the top 3. Anyway, despite having the largest rail network, US citizens have to lowest average rail usage per capita – a thirteenth that of the train-happy Japanese. China, unsurprisingly, tops the list in passenger kilometers per year. China’s rail usage is also growing. Whereas Japans rail passenger transport increased by 2.4% in 2008, Chinas’ saw an increase of 7%, with traffic levels having doubled in 12 years. August 1st 2008 marked the official beginning of the ‘high speed era’ for Chinese trains, and authorities plan to complete a 10,000 km network of high-performance track within the next 15 years. Thanks to this project, there are already operational high speed links from Shanghai to Beijing, Changsha, and Wuhan, among other places.

Update June 7, 2009
Here are a few links putting the video in context.

• What Lessons Can We Learn from the Chengdu Bus Fire? [CRIENGLISH]
• An Eyewitness Account Of The Chengdu Bus Fire [ESWN] (h/t Neddy)
• Chengdu Bus #9 Fire [chinaSMACK] (h/t Neddy again) – be warned, chinaSMACK has reposted some truly horrific images of the bus after the fire and the charred remains of those that didn’t get out.

The short version is – 25 people killed, 76 injury and it all could have been prevented.

On one side we seem to have Western activists shaking their fists and demanding action, recognition, acknowledgement, better bumper stickers and other assorted things that activists define themselves with; and on the other we have a nation of people saying “Anniversary? What anniversary? Oh… so?”

Whether crying injustice, or feigning indifference — I feel neither properly defines my thoughts on the matter. Do I join with my largely Western brethren and fight the power or do I take the attitude of my complacent co-residents and leave the scab where it lays?

I truly believe that anything, whether a person or country, is made stronger by understanding its faults. But who of us ever looks at their faults when on the defensive? No, much better is the time spent defending and deflecting. Even the people, the poor whelps living beneath the alleged yoke of repression, will side with their overseers before allowing foreign commentary to tell them what is in their best interests.

And so I know this is a China problem, for China to look at and China to decide. I’m here, I’m watching, I’ll remember – but action, in my opinion, is not my duty nor my decision. I don’t even feel qualified to state whether action needs to be taken. Sure, freedom of speech and a free press would be an awesome step ahead for China, and I sure as hell would like unfettered access to the Internet, please and thank you.

But something about the rah-rah-rights! being shouted from abroad doesn’t feel appropriate to me. Maybe it’s my time here that’s tempering my views, or just that in my time here I’ve aged a bit, but the protester of my youth is starting to see things differently. Starting to see that to understand China and the actions of her government, you need to understand that its mechanisms don’t work in four-year terms. Everything moves at a lengthened pace.

Anniversaries are a good time to examine that. Twenty years is no small amount of time, but it’s also not a long time. It’s a good amount of time to reflect on the changes that have come since the student protests in Tiananmen.

Hell, I woke up this morning and China was different from yesterday, never mind two decades ago. The majority of its people enjoy a quality of life unseen in its multi-millennial history. Despite wide-spanning attempts at censorship, your average Chinese person has more access to information from around the globe than ever before. Never has matching, and possibly exceeding, their counterparts from “developed” nations been so within the grasp of your average Chinese.

It may not be conclusion reached, and there is yet much ground to be covered. However, I don’t think it can be argued that it’s not the right track. And while much of that course was set in ‘78, I wonder if ‘89 didn’t do more to create modern China than we give it credit for. Motives not withstanding, the spring protests of that year said in no uncertain terms that the people weren’t satisfied.

Often it is called a violent repression, a stifling of a peaceful movement. And it was these things, but from the government’s standpoint, it was an act of defence. Violent or not, the entire institution of power was being attacked and China’s history is nothing if not littered with similar examples — ending one power to allow another, virtually identical, power rise in its place. Do I agree with the action they took? No, of course not. Never. But understanding isn’t agreement, isn’t complaisance. It is merely understanding.

And whether I, we, or they deem it the “wrong” action, it did force Beijing to tighten its focus on wealth, prosperity and capitalism. Things desperately needed in a country with an imaginable level of poverty.

And from that wealth is a slow growing justice for all, which in turn is paving the way to a level of liberty and personal freedom that is, if not the same, comparable to the West.

So when I think of the events that happened on this day 20 years ago, I’ll not forget the tragedy, the unneccessary violence and the terrible loss of life. But I’ll also not shame their memory by thinking they died pointlessly and that nothing has changed.

From Simpson's Episode

Tweets are filling my screen with reports that Twitter.com and Flickr.com are both inaccessible in Mainland China. They join YouTube, as well as WordPress and Blogger blogs as the latest casualties in the Great Firewall of China’s war against free speech.

Undoubtedly the blocks are in an effort to curb online commentary and the dissemination of information about the , which on celebrates its 20th anniversary.

As of this writing, my Twitter client, TweetDeck, was still able to send and receive tweets — however, tweets in Beijing and Shanghai seem to indicate it was being blocked as well (blocks tend to propagate at different rates depending on your location in China).

I can only predict the next few days will see more and more sites being blocked, hopefully with things returning to normal shortly after (though if past blocks are anything to go by, it could be weeks or months).

If you don’t have a good VPN, be sure to check out Hotspot Shield (free, but slow), or personalVPN/Witopia (minimal yearly fee, but fast). A VPN creates a secure tunnel that will allow you to view the Internet as if you were in the country the VPN is hosted in (US, UK, etc.). I have used services such as Tor in the past, but couldn’t stand the slow speed. I bit the bullet and signed up with WiTopia about a year ago and couldn’t be happier. I have no experience with Hotspot Shield, but have heard it is decent in a pinch.

Also, if you care to watch what is getting blocked where in real-time, check out HerdictWeb – and for Twitter blocks in China in particular see here.

If you know of other solutions, please post them below.

Fried rice

It’s actually fairly common to have a “first food.” By this, I mean the first and only thing you learn how to order in a foreign country. When one of my friends first went to Korea, he only knew how to say “pulgogi” or Korean barbeque, and so he ate it every day until he could no longer afford it and had to learn to order something cheaper. Another friend ate nothing but Kung pao chicken in China until he heard about the bird flu.

My first food was “chao fan” or fried rice. Almost every restaurant in china has fried rice too! In fact, for the first month I was in china, just about every restaurant I went to I ate fried rice! Sometimes I would run into a problem where the waitress asked what kind of fried rice I wanted. This was when I learned to say “dan chaofan,” egg fried rice. For only 3-5 yuan per serving, I was saving money too!

Ramen noodles

Ramen sometimes seems like the perfect food, it’s cheap, convenient, and fun to eat, though slightly unhealthy.

I once heard a story about a Chinese student to went to America for postgraduate studies. He was apparently rather studious and barely left his apartment. He was also poor and ate only ramen noodles. Well, one day someone noticed that he wasn’t showing up for his classes anymore, and so he went to check on him in his apartment. What he found inside wasn’t pretty. Stacks and stacks of empty ramen containers, and the boy’s body. Apparently, there isn’t enough nutrition in ramen to sustain people for long periods of time. Probably an urban legand.

Before I heard this story though, I discovered the economical food at my local Chinese supermarket. Ramen in china is much more plentiful than in America and comes in many different varieties. The best part about it is that you don’t need to be able to speak Chinese to buy it!

Certain kinds of ramen noodles come in foil lined bags. It’s rather ingenious really. You simply heat water, then pour it into the bag, tie the bag shut with a rubber band or elastic hair tie, wait a few minutes and voila ! This sustained me for weeks whenever I wasn’t eating fried rice. A trick I learned later from my korean classmates was to put steamed rice in the ramen broth after you finish the noodles. It’s very satisfying and can be made inside your dorm room! (I by no means recommend the ramen noodle diet.)

French toast

Whenever I was truly hungry, I would try my luck at one of three restaurants I found in the city with English menus. My first visit to a “western” restaurant left me feeling a little helpless.

One day during my first week in China, I decided to go out for a Western-style breakfast with my one American classmate. We were so excited about the possibility of being able to read a menu and the possibility of bacon, eggs, and pancakes. We spent several minutes reading everything in the menu from cover to cover until it was time to order. The waitress assured us she spoke English, but just in case we pointed to the items we wanted on the menu. I ordered a glass of milk and French toast! I was so happy I must have been glowing!

First, the milk arrived. It was hot, in a scalding hot glass, accompanied with corn syrup… not exactly the ice-cold milk I was used to. I assumed the corn syrup was for the French toast.

Then a saucer of ketchup was brought out. I stared at the ketchup with fascination as I pondered its possible uses.

Finally, my breakfast arrived! There was a plate of French fries and a plate of toast!

So much for my French toast.

Soup

Recently, I saw a Bruce Lee movie that made me laugh. It was called “The Big Boss,” and there is one scene where the non-English speaking Bruce Lee goes to a restaurant in America and tries to order food by simply pointing to random items on the menu. I can sympathize with how his order turned out.

One day the other American student and I were staring at a dinner menu with pretty Chinese characters. They were very pretty and we assumed that each character represented something that might be rather tasty, but we had no idea what.

Luckily, I had my handy phrase book where I was able to compare the lists of food with the characters on the menu. It actually didn’t help very much at all, but we did manage to order two dishes after picking out the characters for chicken and for pork. It’s always rather self-gratifying when one can accomplish a task like this.

The first dish was brought out and it was a type of soup. It wasn’t what we were expecting but it looked pretty good. Then the second dish came out, another big family size bowl of soup! We had unintentionally ordered two big bowls of soup. No wonder the waitress looked at us funny when we ordered! We had no choice but to eat what we had ordered so we slowly drank all the soup until we were full of liquid goodness. Only we were still kind of hungry.

Luckily, for me, soon after moving to china, I got a Chinese speaking Korean roommate who started ordering for me. I also started learning some Chinese by stealing menus from local restaurants and then looking up the characters in my dictionary. (Note: I by no means endorse thievery and I’ve repented for my actions)

Created by a cross-cultural couple, Magnus and Mingxing (M and MX), the site offers up daily situational, language-themed or current-event based comics about China. And Lost Laowai has been featured!

Lost Laowai Comic (c) MandMX.com

(see the original here)

And we’re not the only ones (see comics about two of my favourite Web sites – chinaSMACK and Sinosplice). The site takes it one better and offers the opportunity for anyone’s funny “China story” to be made into a comic.

If the comic laughs aren’t enough, be sure to watch some of the videos of MandMX’s son Ryan (great name!) teaching you Chinese!