Monday Miscellany

It's not actually Monday, I just thought I would try to get back in the groove of more regular posting. We went to Hong Kong for Christmas; partly for the vacation, and partly to be able to do American-style shopping for American-style goods, which we sorely needed. We now have a good handle on day-to-day shopping in China, but shopping for durable items like clothing, electronics, etc., is often just too daunting here. There are just too many variables and questions: Where do I find it? How much does it cost? Is it real or counterfeit? How does this item really compare to that item? I made half a dozen shopping outings for a laptop computer for Allyne's birthday, and then finally gave up (a friend helped my out by ordering one through the IT department at his corporate employer).

I may post some pictures related to Christmas, but Lee and I decided that I was going to post about Thanksgiving, and she would take Christmas. Therefore, I'll give her first choice of the photos and the stories. In the meantime, here are some more miscellaneous pictures:



A giant Buddha statue somewhere west of Suzhou. It seems to me that Buddha statues get built as sort of an municipal economy booster. If a place really needs to get some tourist dollars, what better than building a big statue and hoping for some piligrims? I don't begrudge it to them. In the same vein I actually admire how the town of Roswell, New Mexico, found a way to turn the whole "crashed flying saucer" tale into a way to actually have a viable local economy. Side note: the traditional fat "laughing buddha" of China is not Siddhartha, the Indian Prince and origin of Buddhist religion. The true Buddhas are always thin, to represent his self-sacrifice and freedom from the appetites of this world. There is a loose historical source for the fat buddha, which is something about a kind hearted monk of centuries past. I suppose you could loosely equate him to a Santa Claus figure.

I really amused myself with this next photo. It calls to mind on of those old cheesy/good monster movies, like the bronze statue monster in Jason and the Argonauts. Or perhaps the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters.

A spot on the shore of Tai Hu lake. (a redundancy for me to write it that way, since Hu means lake).

Seemingly every stinkin' consumer product in Asia has a cute face on it. It gets old sometimes.

Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas to everyone from all of us.

May you one day join us in the bamboo forest (actually, it is just a spot in the park down the street). Yes, we know, John looks grumpy. He has entered the "always looking hostile in family photographs" stage of childhood development. It is a well-known phase, documented by the pioneering child psychologist Jean Piaget (okay, I made that up, but you have to admit that it was a glaring oversight in his research).

Since he always swears he is not angry, I just call it his "secret agent face". So if you know what is good for you, you will have a Merry Christmas!

Oliver

Friday night was the last showing of Oliver Twist at the school, and it was quite the production. I've never seen quite so much effort, expertise, and expense put into a school play. I was actually involved, because I did much of the set building. However, that is only a side note, because the bigger family news was that Allyne was in it. She played Charlie Bates, the sidekick of the Artful Dodger. Below are two photos of her. I'm not going to point her out, because I wan't everyone else to have as hard of a time as we did. I didn't realize she was on stage until she started speaking, and she has at least one friend who sat through the entire play without recognizing her.




This is the cast list from the program, from which I blurred out the names except Allyne. It also gives a nice sense of the international student body.




















This is a video clip of one of Allyne's scenes. It is just a little thing that I filmed with my pocket camera, so the quality is really low. The school had the production filmed as well, so we will get "grandparent copies" sent home later. Just click on the button at bottom left to run it.






Finally, some pictures of the set and prop work that I helped out with. For me, the biggest part of this project was that I designed a set of wheeled metal stands with detachable steps. During this play, it was used as a bridge, a jail, a judge's bench, and part of Fagin's house. My idea was that they would be a versatile set pieces for all future productions as well. I contracted with a Chinese welder to make the pieces. They came out just as ordered, except that he built them out of much heavier steel than I intended him to use. Therefore, the end result came out as this massive, indestructable battleship. I have, in fact, given it a name consistent with the production.... it has been dubbed the "HMS Oliver". It will outlast the building around it, and would be servicable as an earthquake shelter.


The backdrop, with sets for the first scene.


The HMS Oliver

Thanksgiving, Part 2

We also had our own Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday. This time the food was much more authentically American, although we did have some of our own idiocyncratic family touches (for example, the traditional Thanksgiving lasagna). Everything tasted just right, except again for the mashed potatoes, as explained last time.

We did have one casualty, which was our attempt at a pecan pie. We really tried. It took searches in five stores to even find pecans, and the ones we did find were really pathetic looking little things. Once we opened them, we also found that they had already been cooked in some form, and soaked in sugar and salt. It took Lee and I an hour and half to just to shell one cup of nuts. In the end, it came to naught, because the pie got burned. It was a tragic loss.

sp

For this second Thanksgiving we invited some of the younger American teachers, along with one Canadian. Some of them were with us at the table in the last set of photos. I'll make some commentary as I go along.

sp

sp

Preparation and Dinner:

We bought a second tabletop oven. I've set up both of them on a stand on the laundry porch, as you can see here. Lee has always said she wanted to have one of those over/under double ovens some day. This isn't really what she had in mind, but we couldn't have done Thanksgiving without it.

Along with our minature oven(s), we also have to work around our miniature refrigerator. Mostly, that just means we have to grocery shop more often and buy smaller quantities. However, preparing a large meal was too much. So we opened up all the windows in John's bedroom, which is the only room on the afternoon shade side of the building, and used his window sill as our expansion fridge. So here is some of the dinner, mixed in with John's LEGOs. As the weather is quite cold now, it worked out.

Lee with the stuffing, and Lauren with the rolls. We met Lauren in Boston when she and we were hired. She may well be the youngest teacher at the entire school, and she has declared us her parents away from home. We're happy to have her.

Me carving our solid gold turkey. It cost about $60 U.S. at one of the western shops. On the right is the full spread on the table ready for dinner. Behind me on the watercooler is the failed pecan pie.

sp

sp

sp

Family and Guests:

Nicole, from South Dakota; Elvina, from New York City; and Glen, from Canada. Elvina's parents are Chinese immigrants, and she still has relatives in Beijing.

You know, my children really are a life-loving, cheerful bunch. Why they never can manage to look that way in photos is beyond me. They look like inmates in a chow line.

It's all about the pies. Clockwise from bottom left: pumpkin, apple, lemon, and coconut. Lee makes fabulous pies, and these all tasted just they way they are supposed to (no faint Chinese flavors to be found).

The rare, whole-family picture. It is a bit blurry, but it's what I've got. Getting a picture of all of us is like trying to photograph an endangered species in its natural habitat.

Thanksgiving, Part 1

Sorry again that there have been no posts in a while. It is amazing how mundane day to day life can be even after you move to the other side of the world.

This set of photos are from an American Thanksgiving dinner that was held at the school on Thanksgiving Day. We did not have the holiday off of school, of course, and we had our own family dinner on Sunday. The school's event was a very nice gesture and a very good dinner, even if some of the food offerings came out strange.

Ironically, since the event was planned at rather short notice, most of the actual Americans had already made plans or restaurant reservations. However, plenty of representatives from everywhere else in the world turned up and helped make it a very pleasant evening. On that note, I'll take a moment to do something that I've intended to do for a while, which is give you a list (based on my best knowledge) of every single home country represented among the staff and students of the entire school.

They are, as follows: the U.S.A., Canada, U.K., Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Columbia, Peru, British Guiana, Pakistan, Iran, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia.

There are no doubt more, that is just what I know. That doesn't even include the question of ethnic and national backgrounds of staff that have emigrated to Western countries, which is more diverse still. And that still doesn't include all of the spouses of faculty who do not work at the school.

sp

I will make a few qualifying notes. Koreans make up about 45% of the student body. The second largest group is probably the Taiwanese, although I haven't seen numbers. There are mainland Chinese among the faculty, but local Chinese are not allowed to attend (the Chinese teachers are in the school specifically to teach Mandarin, which is a government mandate for all schools in China). Canadians are especially well represented among the faculty, and Americans are surprisingly few. There are also a lot of New Zealanders, which surprised me. New Zealand is a small place, and with all the Kiwis who are teaching internationally, I'm amazed there is anyone left to teach school back home. As a continuation of the diversity theme, I'll also point out that one of those teachers is a Maori, and another Kiwi friend, before she came here, owned a Mexican Restaurant in Wellington with her Egyptian husband!

Back to Thanksgiving. The following pictures are from Thanksgiving evening at the school. Some of the pictures are gratefully stolen from another teacher.

The food offerings. The boy and the girl in this photo are classmates and friends of John and Emma, respectively.

Some pictures of the family

The food was very good, although it did suffer from some authenticity issues. The only potatoes available in China are much sweeter than Russet spuds, and they don't make for good mashed potatoes. The corn that is available here is more like feed corn than sweet corn, and I've given up on it. The pumpkin pie, which I don't have here, was more like a dough with plain pumpkin paste and pine nuts on it. Finally, if you look closely at my salad, you will see the octopus in it.

The following are various other pictures of the evening, chosen to highlight friends and close colleagues. I made a fair and honest effort to not take photos of people with their mouths full, but one can only do so much.

Sometimes nothing happens even in China

Sorry that we haven't had any updates for all of you. Life has been a combination of busy and quiet. The days are filled, and the evenings are short. We haven't been anywhere, and we haven't really been taking any pictures. The kids are grumpy about homework, and they have entered a homesickness cycle.

Lee and I have started really applying some effort to learning Chinese. Of course, she is better at it already. We are at the taxi directions, restaurant ordering, and basic shopping level. We can't read at all, but for now we are not trying either. The kids are in Chinese classes as part of their school curriculum. Allyne seems to be learning more Japanese than Chinese, just from hanging out with school friends.

The weather has become much colder. We will need proper coats before long, and we will probably need to have them custom made. I've been telling the Canadians we have "Arizona coats... they are what you guys call shirts."

We don't have a Thanksgiving break, of course. Someone organized a catered dinner at the school on Thursday evening. We pay to go, and it sounds like most of the Americans (and several others) will go. Odds are that everything will taste slightly Chinese, but it is a nice gesture. Reminds me of years ago when I once ate a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner in France. It was served to us by a hospitable Englishwoman, and with the company of a Frenchman and an Arab.

We will have our family Thanksgiving on Sunday. I bought a small turkey at one of the western shops, and it was absurdly expensive (about $60). We have invited some of the young American teachers. I'll get photos up of all that.

We bought a little selection of Christmas decorations. I noticed just an hour ago that our corner shopkeeper has a little Christmas tree out front. We will wait until the first weekend of December to put out our tree, as is our family tradition (I chose "put out" for a reason, the tree just seems too little to be "put up"). We won't actually be home at all on Christmas Day, because we will go to Hong Kong for a week.

That is all for now.

New Concepty English for Education of Weekend

This is a business card from a shop in Shanghai that I went to because I really needed some biggilet lie fallowpants. I think "Welcome the lately old customer come" sounds like a good title for a short story.

Nature Calls

Western style toilets are becoming common in China. I'm not really sure how common, because I haven't had the chance to visit the homes of any local Chinese. The bathrooms in all of the modern apartments I have seen are equipped with familiar plumbing. In new areas like where we are, the plumbing can handle toilet paper. In older areas, there is always a little trash can by the toilet where you are expected to dispose of your used wipes.

There are, apparently, Chinese jokes about people trying to stand on a sit-down toilet. I doubt there is much reality to that. They are probably just jokes to make fun of country bumpkins. Then again, the great Mao Zedong himself refused to use western style toilets. When he made visits to Moscow, he would demand that a platform be built around the facilities in his hotel room, so he could stand above the toilet. Great visual image, that one.

Public toilets will typically have one stall with a western toilet, and the rest are squat toilets. That might seem like a nice concession to Westerners, but let me tell you it is not. If you think that you are horrified by the thought of using a squat toilet, it is only because you haven't personally been faced with the choice. At that moment of choice, you suddenly realize that they have done you a great service by giving you any option other than sitting on that thing.

So now it is time for your short quiz.

Question:

You are on vacation in China and you gotta to go. Which toilet do you use, Toilet A, or Toilet B?

If you are having any trouble choosing, let me give you a close-up view of Toilet B. This one is definitely worth clicking on the image so you can really see the details.

Yes, those really are maggots. And they are alive.

Answer:

:

None of the above. Avoid Chinese public toilets at all cost. Go before you leave. Go again before you leave. If you do have to go, go with the squatter. If, like our family, you like to go camping, you can just think of it like crapping in the woods. And if you are squeamish, you may want to consider not coming at all. Because in that case, your other options are: Don't drink water, don't eat, never get farther than half and hour away from home base, or bring a supply of adult diapers.

Little Sister is Watching You

I thought I would tell a little story that you all might find amusing. This one happened a few weeks ago, and it combines two facets of the daily life in China experience. First, the "hardware wars", my ongoing quest to find all of the little fasteners and doodads I would like to have to get our apartment set up properly. Second, the constant feeling that you are being stared at and talked about by scores of Chinese people.

I've explained that first issue in detail already, so I'll skip over it and go on to the second. We get watched all the time. Here in SIP (Suzhou Industrial Park) it isn't so bad, because there are a lot of Westerners. However, the deeper you venture into real China, the more intense it gets, and it is often no more than a street away. I've been riding my bike a lot, and whenever I leave the main streets and go into the side neighborhoods, what little Western Civilization there is here disappears instantly. People look at me like I'm the first gringo they've ever seen.

It can get a whole lot worse for others. We were in one local store with an African family in line in front of us, and they were stared at by everyone the entire store all the way to the door. Some friends of ours have a little girl with striking blue eyes, and she gets crowded by women wanting to pick her up. I hear the same kinds of stories from families that are very blond. Garden variety blondeness doesn't seem to attract much attention, but there are several Swedish and Finnish families here, and I can only imagine how much they get stared at (Lars and Ulrika, don't let that discourage you from visiting us).

Local people don't just stare at us, they stare at what we are doing. At the grocery store, they are often fascinated with what we are buying. I still don't understand much they say of course, but I'm learning. They will talk about what we are buying, how much we might be spending, etc. Friends have had incidents in which passers-by go so far as to dig through their shopping carts to see what they have in them.

Back to my story. One of the main hardware items I wanted to find were wall anchors. As I said before, even the Home Depot-type store doesn't have a hardware section. However, I have found that a few items of hardware are scattered throughout the store, placed with other items with which you might need to use them. That is the way I finally found some wall anchors, which were inconspicuously hung on a peg near some shelf brackets. I've since bought several packages, just to keep them on hand.

Chinese shopkeepers and cashiers can be real busybodies, and it is not unheard of for them to arbitrarily decide that you don't actually need to buy a specific something. An extreme example of this happened to a music teacher friend, who failed in an attempt to purchase an accessory for a musical instrument, simply because she couldn't convince the owner that she had one of those instruments at home. I've heard other stories from friends of not being allowed to purchase the last of an item! With such scenarios in mind, I bought my wall anchors only two packages at a time, as I didn't want them to think that I was depriving someone else who might need them for the shelf brackets they were specifically placed next to.

The last time I bought some wall anchors, I happened to also be purchasing some "floating" wall shelves, for which the mountings are invisible once they are installed. I had put the shelves in my cart first. When I picked up my two packages of wall anchors, a store employee happened to be right there. From the moment I touched the packages, it was clear that this small young woman was not at all satisfied with my selection. She really wanted to say something, and she continued to follow me from a distance as I went through the store.

Finally, I passed again by the same spot where I had picked up the anchors, and she made her move. She said something long and complicated that included the word "no", and then she reached into my cart and picked out the anchors and put them back on the peg!

I politely smiled, and I took them off again, saying in English that yes, I did want them. She took them out of the cart and put them on the peg again. This time, she reached into my cart and began to unwrap the shelves. I realized at this point what she was up to. She was trying to show me that the shelves already had anchors included.

I smiled, and took the wall anchors from the peg again. This time I kept them in my hand, which completely flumoxed her. By this time, however, a second, older woman had approached, and the younger woman began to explain the situation to her with a staccato urgency. With the assumption that the older woman was being dragged in because she understood at least some English, I said "I understand, I want to buy these for something different".

The older woman looked at me. The younger woman looked at her. Then, without warning, the older woman reached up and gave the girl a solid "you idiot" slap to back of the head. She said something, and then shuffled away shaking her head and muttering to herself.

The girl gave me a big sheepish grin with a shrug, and then slinked away.

I made it home with my wall anchors.

Monday Miscellany

My more or less weekly round-up of random pictures.


Lee with about 1/3 of the boxes we shipped. We still haven't really settled what happened to some of the things that are missing.




Derelict cranes along a canal north of Suzhou.



A view of Central Park.




John's enormous foot protruding from under his blanket while he slept.

A small pathetic plea

I (and we) would really like to get some more comments from you friends and family, because this is feeling too much like a one-sided conversation.

Also, I know that I haven't posted much family stuff. I have felt strange throwing pictures and stories out there for the whole anonymous planet to see, so I have avoided it. Still, I'm going to start, because I know people would like to know.

Alternately, I may start sending family stuff in direct emails instead. I haven't been doing that because I figured the blog would cover it. But the blog hasn't been covering it for the reason above. It's a vicious circle.

Chinese DVDs

I've been thinking about this new post for some time. It will take me a lot more work than most, but I just spent 90 minutes choosing and scanning the pictures for it, so I'm ready to go.

We've been buying quite a few DVDs here. There are barely any movie theaters, and they typically don't show any English subtitles (not that we have been to one to see for ourselves). However, there are DVD shops everywhere.

Well, they were everywhere at first. Then, they all shut down for several weeks. From some expat friends who are married to locals, I finally heard that there was a big police crackdown. Apparently, Suzhou received a government recognition as a model city of some sort, so their was a huge push to crack down on illegalities, both large and small. That was also why there was so much traffic enforcement at our nearest intersection.

For a while, there were guys out selling DVDs streetside off of temporary stands. Now all the shops are back in business. Obviously the shops were able to wait out the cops.

The DVDs are all, by definition, pirated. One could have ethical qualms about that if one wished, but there is literally nothing else to buy. A typical single movie costs 10 RMB, or about $1.50. A boxed set for a television show might cost anywhere from 70 to 150 RMB. Video games, buy the way, are even cheaper. Except that only about one in four will actually work.

The quality varies wildly, although it is often better than you would think. We have only purchased one that was just filmed in a theater with a camcorder, the movie 10,000 B.C. The movie was so bad that there wasn't much a bad pirating job could do to make it worse.

Despite being pirated, there has often been quite a bit of work put into the packaging. However, the packaging is photoshopped and cobbled together in truly bizarre ways. You now that old joke about enough monkeys at enough typewriters would someday write a novel? Maybe they would just produce a pirated DVD. It is better to show than to explain, so without further ado, I give you two items of evidence.

Exhibit A: Battlestar Galactica.

When I was a kid, the premiere of the original Battlestar Galactica was cut off so that President Jimmy Carter could give a speech. If there had been suffrage for pre-teen boys, his 1980 loss to Ronald Reagan would have been even worse (no, that doesn't count as talking about politics).

In any case, if you haven't ever watched it as an adult, the old show really stinks. It isn't as wretched as Buck Rogers in the 25th century (Lee and I once ordered it from our Blockbuster Online account back home to try and watch with the kids, it is worse than you can imagine), but it is bad.

However, this new Battlestar Galactica is really good, except that we had to buy it four times. In the first three sets I purchased, it was missing half of the second season. Apparently the pirates even pirate the pirates, because the copies were all coming from the same bad source.

Looking at a pirated DVD packages is a lot like one of those "Find everything wrong with this picture" features in the newspaper. So if you want to study it and see how many problems you can spot before I go on, by my guest.

Here are some of the more notable anomalies on this package:

Item 1: The front cover photo collage.

This truly is a photo of several of the principal cast members from the show. However...

The background image is taken from a completely different sci-fi TV show: Stargate Atlantis

and this section is from Star Trek

space

space
Now we move on the back cover

space

Item 2: The Reviewer Quotes

I'm quite sure that Battlestar Galactica is neither a "Tween Comedy" nor a horror movie. I'm also quite sure that there is not a city called "Geiroit". I'm doubtful that San Francisco has a newspaper known as the "Chronich".

Item 3: The Extra Features Box

space

And this is obviously taken from yet another completely different movie. This sort of thing is extremely common on DVD packaging here. Maybe they think no one is going to read the fine print, so why bother making it match?

Exhibit B: Iron Man

space

space

Once again, the packaging looks quite normal at first glance. However, study it closely...

space

Item 1: The Reviewer Quote

space

This time it isn't actually a review quote at all, just some random text that was cut-and-pasted off of IMDB, a movie info website. Sometimes, you can actually find bad reviews used on the cover, literally saying "This movie sucks".

space

Item 2: The Proof of Purchase

space

Maybe there is a market for counterfeit DVD proofs of purchase. Can I redeem these for a plush toy or something?

space

Item 3: The Aspect Ratio description

space

I always check to make sure I'm buying movies widescreen. When I taught high school and sometimes used movie clips to illustrate a point, I would invariably have a kid complain that the top and bottom were cut off. I would try to explain that it fact, to make a full-screen movie, they "panned and scanned", cutting off the sides of a widescreen movie. Some of the dimmer kids never could get the concept. However, in this case, they would have been right..

space

A scene from Iron Man, in which Gwenyth Paltrow's chest talks to some guy's chin.

space

As you can see, for this disc they took a full screen version (which was already cropped) and then literally chopped off the top and the bottom to make it "widescreen".

sp

sp

Conclusion:

space

Some of this is just typical Chinese bad English. Some of this is just lazy photoshopping over the top of a previous package. But I am convinced that some of this actually has to be intentional. One example that I don't have to show you is a Battlestar Galactica sets that I didn't buy (I'd already bought two at that point, and I wasn't going to buy another just for laughs). The title logo looked exactly the same, except that it was spelled GALACTIGA. Putting together a finished logo like that was not just a matter of typing, and it would have been much more work than just cutting and pasting. I think that there are guys out there amusing themselves by putting stupid things on DVD covers.

space

Either that, or I'm back to the monkeys and typewriters explanation.

space