Putting the "Fire" in Fireworks

Some of you may have caught this on the news. On the last day of the Chinese New Year celebration (15 days after it began), fireworks set off a devastating fire in a Beijing hotel. The hotel was under construction, which limited the loss of life to one unfortunate fireman. It could, have course, been much, much worse. As everything in this country is built by migrant workers, they always have housing on the job site. They live in these distinctive white and blue modular buildings. Sometimes, I have seen those buildings set up within a highrise building itself while it is under construction.

Here is some YouTube video of the fire.

I would like to clarify that when I wrote about the thrill of the Chinese fireworks in a celebratory tone, I was not blind to how dangerous such a pyrotechnic free-for-all can be. There is, despite what I implied, something to be said for having safety regulations. The Chinese (and Asian) obsession with fireworks is nearly psychotic. One other example is a particularly tragic/absurd incident that occured in a nightclub in Thailand. Who on earth doesn't realize it isn't a good idea to set off fireworks indoors? According to some reports, they were actually set off on a dinner table!

I'm not going to commentate on it further, but I will refer to a few links here. The first is from James Fallows, one of the editors of The Atlantic Monthly, and a resident of Beijing. It is his picture that I borrowed above, and I'll link you to his blog post here. His blog is wide ranging, but often includes really interesting commentary on China. As for the fire and fireworks, I'll just second what he has to say:

"it might be hard to believe that they set off a major building fire if you haven't seen how much ordnance is set off; it's all too plausible if you have"

Amen to that.

From his blog, you can follow out some additional links that give some other insight as to how the Chinese are reacting to this incident, which is quite interesting and enlightening.

Monday Miscellany

My weekly (when I feel like it) round up of random photos.

Lee and I out on a day that was so much colder than it looks.

A very suspicious little boy, who kept walking backwards so he could keep his eye on us.

A sunset projected onto rocks through a lattice window.

An old man with a hand-cranked cycle.

Jellyfish in an aquarium in Hong Kong.

China in the News

I'm going to start a new recurring feature, which will be a selected news article about China, with commentary from me. Click for the story: Shopping 101: China's Consumers catch on.

Summary:
Upon purchase, new apartments in China are an empty concrete shell. All amenities and improvements to that apartment are then up to the purchaser, and choosing what to buy for that apartment (and what to buy in any other situation) is extremely difficult for the Chinese, who have no previous experience with a consumer culture. That difficulty is multiplied with every single other purchasing decision they need to make, until they are overwhelmed.

Commentary:
Some weeks ago I began to notice that there are a lot of these vacant unimproved apartments here. Yet so many new buildings are under construction. Even an amateur economist can clearly see all of the classic signs of a dramatic oversupply. Within the strange brew of government planning and free-for-all capitalism, clearly the residential real estate market is not being subjected to conventional market forces. I don't know whether the costs of these projects is being carried by the government, the developers, or various investors. Actually, I don't have any idea how they finance major construction projects here at all. I do know, however, that the oversupply must be costing someone out there some big Yuan. It doesn't seem a very smart way to do business, but since the Wild West free market U.S. economy managed to dramatically overbuild its own housing supply, which is a of course one part of our current economic catastrophe, we clearly don't have any useful lessons to impart.

Two interesting anecdotes to accompany this train of thought. First, a young teacher we know was befriended by a local Chinese woman. The young woman invited the teacher to her apartment, where she lives with roommates in one of those unimproved concrete boxes, with not a fixture in the apartment other than a single toilet. Still, the Chinese woman said to her that it was "the best place I've ever lived". Things like that help foster the uncomfortable sense of "First World Guilt" that I think occasionally haunts all Westerners here (including me).

Second, a few weeks ago Lee and I noticed some activity in two of the vacant apartments, one above the other, across the way from us. It was after dark, and there were clusters of workmen in each of the two apartments, and all of the surrounding apartments were dark. The group above were inspecting the floor. The group below were inspecting the ceiling. Then both groups got out mops and buckets. It doesn't really qualify as a story, I guess, but it was a really funny visual image.

I'm rambling. Back to the article, and to my real point. I have expressed previously how annoying it is that the Chinese will pay so much attention to what we are buying in stores. They look, they snoop, they stare, they talk. And they buy... once in a housewares store, Lee approached a display of dishes. A woman was standing there trying to select some cups to buy. In her hands she had a couple possible selections. Lee approached the display, and confidently chose some porcelain mugs. As she left, she saw the woman replace the items she had in her hands, and select the exact same mugs that Lee had purchased. What really makes the anecdote revealing to us is that the woman had been holding items that were much more typically Chinese (they had cutesy cartoon characters on them, as do half the products in this country). Lee, on the other hand, chose the only mugs that were plain white porcelain in a simple design. Score one for the diffusion of American tastes in China. I'm remembering right now that a woman did the same thing to me when I bought some bread in a grocery store, literally watching me and then picking the exact same product. Score two. If I do that enough, maybe there will be more bread here that doesn't taste so sweet.

This article gave some interesting perspective on all of this. According to the author, shopping for consumer goods is overwhelming for the Chinese, who are only in the last few years really having a variety of products to choose from, and drowning in all of the advertising and marketing that go with them. They face hundreds of choices, and don't know where to turn to get real information. That, if you ponder it, is terrifying.

I used to do some activities related to this sort of thing back when I taught high school economics (which I will be doing again next year). Basically, I would get students to tell me what features they were looking for in the products they bought or wanted to buy; typically, I centered the activity on purchasing cars. Invariably, they cited appearance and quality as what they wanted in a car. Then, I would coax them into realizing that they really had no idea how to judge those things. They deferred to the mass opinion to judge the appearance of cars (just as well, since the entire purpose of having an attractive car was to impress others). Quality, on the other hand, they judged strictly by brand name, because in the end, few if any of them (or me) was in any position to accurately assess the quality of a car on our own. We all tell ourselves that we are making informed decisions, but most of the time what we are really doing is stirring together a mix of brand awareness, advertising, rumor, habit, and what some relative once told us, and calling it knowledge.

So now, try to imagine that you know absolutely nothing about cars, but you are about to spend several years worth of salary buying the very first car that you, or anyone in your family, has ever owned. All the while, salesmen, advertisers and marketers are descending on you from all sides, and they know full well that you don't have a clue. Now multiply that to everything else that you need to shop for. It is enough to give me nightmares, and thinking of it that way makes me a lot more sympathetic to the Chinese following us around in stores. Western consumer culture, and all of the variety, features, competition, marketing, advertising, pricing, ad infinitum, have come crashing down on a virgin population, and they are completely overwhelmed. The fact that they will look to random Westerners for shopping advice shows how desperate they are. The irony, of course, is that we are ourselves sometimes looking to them to figure out what we should buy (although I certainly hope we are more subtle about it).

Shop 'til you drop indeed.

New Concepty English for Education of Weekend

Go on, just do it!

I suppose that it is better than going to a "scatological" hospital.

Happy New Year

10 pm: It is the eve of the Asian New Year. The fireworks have been going since before nightfall, and intensifying by the hour. There are bursts to be seen from all windows, 360 degrees around us, across the entire city. They explode over, around, and between buildings. Distant lights flash over and behind the horizon of layered apartment blocks, which are made to appear more distant by the obscuring smoke. From our vantage on the 5th floor, nearby rockets often explode at eye-level, just outside our windows.

Men below are lighting fireworks with a shocking recklessness. With cigarettes dangling from their lips, they scurry to light new fuses among the skipping firecrackers and flying rockets lit moments before by their fellows. They carelessly lean over the rockets as they light them, as if they are tempting them to launch prematurely. A patch of grass was on fire, but now they have stamped it out.

The sharp crack of rockets mixes with the ripping roar of endless firecracker chains, and the occasional thunder of something really big. As the sound of each explosion fades, the silence is filled by the constant wail of hundreds of car alarms.

I was about to write that it would be cliche to say it sounds like a war zone, but that made me think of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War. In 1968, the Vietcong invaded Saigon in the midst of the New Year's celebration. An excellent plan, as how could anyone possibly have heard them coming?

As for tonight, there is no sign that supplies are going to run out anytime soon. People must have been storing this things by the crate in their little apartments. We should be glad the entire building didn't explode.

Updates to come as we progress through the evening...

12:30 am: I said earlier that it would be a cliche to call this a "war zone". That was before it turned into a war zone. There was a lull between about 10:45 and midnight, but that was just set up time before the main event. At midnight, the entire city went off.

When I was a kid, back before America was fully in the grip of the "nanny state" culture which now tries to protect us from every possible danger (and lawsuit) and is inexorably turning us into a nation of coddled adolescents, we had great fireworks shows in Benson, Arizona.

It really wasn't the fireworks that were that great. Actually, the rockets themself were kind of lame; the best a small town could afford, I guess. It was the atmosphere that was special. Everyone would gather on the high school football field with blankets and picnic dinners. The show was put on by the local volunteer fire department. They didn't have much to work with, and they didn't seem to really know what they were doing. There was no showmanship or timing to the launches, they just kept lighting them randomly until they ran out. The great part is that the launches were no more than thirty or forty yards from the audience. The fireworks would burst at low altitudes, sometimes right overhead. The embers often were still burning strong when they hit the ground, and dads were always anticipating the need to move blankets before they hit, and stamp out fires after they did. It was kid heaven, and it didn't even last my entire childhood before the town didn't do it that way anymore, and it faded into history.

Tonight brought back those memories, and multiplied them tenfold. We didn't watch the fireworks, we were in the fireworks. They launched from every street, sidewalk, balcony, and rooftop in the city. They sometimes burst mere feet from high rise apartment buildings, with sparks ricocheting violently off of the windows. Sometimes they deflected off of trees, causing them to explode just overhead, or even within the tree itself, blowing leaves everywhere. The sound was a constant roar, this time we couldn't hear all of the car alarms. Smoke lay in heavy blankets, even drifting into doorways. Meanwhile, people wandered the streets everywhere, while dogs barked and stray cats ran all directions in panic.

I suggest you come to China for New Year's Eve someday. They probably still have a lot of years left before the nanny state takes over and makes sure that no one does anything dangerous (or fun).

We don't have any cameras that would capture the full effect of the chaos in the darkness, but I'm going to set my alarm so I can get pictures of the aftermath before the army of little-old-lady street cleaners beats me to it. It's a war zone of paper and cardboard out there.

8 am: The fireworks died out around 2 am. I don't know if they ever went away completely, or did so just enough that we could sleep. At 6 am, they began again in earnest, so now I'm up again.
Unfortunately, even by then I had missed the chance to take the pictures that I really wanted. I beat the little old lady street sweepers to the action (they were already working, but there is too much debris for them to even make a dent so far), but I forgot to account for the roving cardboard recycling guys. With their battered little bicycle/pick-up trucks, they are constantly on patrol for anything that they can get a bit of cash for, and they must have cleaned up all of the spent launch tubes and casings during the night.

I did go out and get a few pictures, and I'll post them later. There hasn't been any big explosions nearby for a while, and I'm going to try for some more sleep. John woke up just enough to move to the couch. Lee and the girls appear to have slept through it, and Janet (who is visiting) isn't up and about. I can't imagine she didn't wake up for a while, because there was a guy setting off rockets on that side of our building an hour ago, and as I've said, they often explode at window level for us.

Jan. 30th picture update, 9:15 pm:


Two scenes of the aftermath. The scene doesn't do the mess justice, because as I said, the cardboard recyclers had already done their work. Here is one guy still at it at 7:00 am. He was not the only one. In fact, they are all still going strong, as their are fireworks going even as I write. Last night was the 5th day after New Years, which is a holiday in its own right, and had fireworks almost as big as the first night.



One of the army of street-sweeping ladies, who was on the job by 6:30 am.

This last thing is a little video montage I strung together without too much care into it. I'll work on getting better video technology sometime. I tried to capture the fact that the fireworks were going on all around us, but it doesn't in any way capture the true feeling of close proximity. Note the constant flashes on the horizon, John yelling right at the beginning, and the guy shooting a Roman candle out of his window near the end.

note: video won't save right now.... I'll try again later.

New Concepty English for Education of Weekend

Four samples of signs from local scenic areas. I think that they are threatening us.

Monday Miscellany

I'm going to go with a small set of pictures from our Hong Kong trip. I was going to give Lee a crack at these first, but she's being slow. Plus, she has lots of great photos taken with her new camera, so she'll put my poor photos to shame anyway.




















Two views of shopping streets in Hong Kong, which really is shopping heaven or hell, depending on how you look at it.
















A traditional-looking Chinese "Junk" in the harbor, except that it is actually a dressed-up tourist boat. In the background is Kowloon, which is the other, lesser known half of the city. "Hong Kong" itself is is on Hong Kong Island to the south (which is where I was when I took the photo).

















The city from Victoria Peak. This truly is one of the great views of all the world. Lee's new camera is much better at capturing a night scene that will do it justice, so wait for those photos.





















Two views of Ocean Park, a homegrown Hong Kong amusement park. They are really sprucing it up right now to compete with the newer Hong Kong Disneyland. We thought about taking the kids to the Disney park, but we heard from friends that it is really underdeveloped so far, and doesn't really have any rides for older kids (one of the guidebooks said to expect a "mutiny" if you tried to take teenagers).

The cable car/tram is really spectacular, and certainly not for anyone who is afraid of heights. It links the two halves of the park on opposite sides of a mountain. The roller coaster is "The Dragon". Everything in China is a dragon. Half of the international schools here have dragons for mascots, including ours. Sports tournaments are the Dragons vs. the Dragons, winner gets to play the Dragons. There are some teachers at our school who have pushed to change our mascot to "The Hairy Crabs", which are a local Suzhou delicacy from a nearby lake. It hasn't caught on.

Below are some more views of the roller coaster. It really looks like you are going to fly off of the end of the world. Unfortunately, Allyne is the only kid who will go on roller coasters with me.
















The final photos are from a daytrip to Macau, which was once a Portuguese colony. Now it is part of China, but is semi-autonomous, much in the same way Hong Kong is. It is also the only place in China with legal casinos, hence the hideous monstrosity of a hotel that you see below. Also pictured is the facade of a 16th century church, and Allyne and John at the fort near the harbor.