Monday, June 23, 2008

Back From Beijing

I had my first actual conversation in Chinese on the way back from the Shanghai airport yesterday. The taxi driver just wanted to know where I was from, what places I was visiting and how long I was going to be around. He expressed wonderment that I was smaller than other Americans that he'd met and I didn't have anything to say to that but agree. He replied, "That's fine, Tom Cruise is small too I think."
I doubt I'll have much time to update until Sunday but I did upload a kajillion pictures.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Siblings

"How's your mucous? Has it turned black yet?" Tony asked me as we ascended the concrete steps of his apartment building to his sixth-floor flat. I was determined to reach the top without a sign of being winded; I must've failed. Still, my answer was no. "In another month maybe," I told him.

He chuckled. "It's funny that none of my students realize just how polluted this country is. They've lived with it their whole lives and most of them have never even visited the western part of China. Whenever there's anything in the news about pollution it's about how much the U.S. and Europe are responsible for global warming. They're pretty shocked when I show them statistics that China has like 22 of the 30 worst polluted cities in the world but it's true even when they look it up themselves."

I took his bag of food we'd bought at the House of the Inscrutable and Venerable Colonel as he unlocked the door. Tony had been the first American I met in China who wasn't completely piss drunk, though in all fairness the other ones I'd seen were around Nanjing Road at four o'clock in the morning. He and his Atlantan wife have been English teachers here for a couple years and live just a couple blocks south of my campus-- I had literally bumped into him at the corner bank.

The apartment was well furnished and more comfortable and well-lit than the exterior building
suggested. A pair of Taiwanese guests were also there, but all three women spent their dinner talking amongst themselves in heavily accented Chinese and cooing over Tony and Charity's baby daughter while Tony and I compared notes about life over here (ok, I admit I cooed at the baby too).

Pollution is being solved here the way it seems the government solves all their problems-- massive remobilization. Since March, all construction on new structures has ceased in Beijing and all urban factories have been relocated to the edges of the province. Even still it's unlikely that the air will clear up well enough for the Olympics but I should have a better notion of that once I go to Beijing next week.

As Tony reiterated, what mattered the most were peoples' perceptions. There's a particular Shanghai native I encountered at the expats' weekly lunch in Zhongshan Park (lunch wasn't actually in the park but at a restraunt in the shopping complex nearby). Anyway this fellow is a 22-yr-old econ student named Yao (no relation) Zhang (no relation) who was too eager to talk with me after lunch was ended. First I told him that I was going to get on the train and he said 'oh me too we can ride together' and then I changed my mind and said that I needed a walk after eating such a big meal and he said 'oh that's a great idea i'll come with you'. Unable to be rid of him I cross examined him as we strolled around the park.


Shanghai was the greatest city in China, Yao boasted, much cleaner than those dirty crime-ridden towns Guangzhou and Shenzhen to the south and much clearer than Beijing. Indeed it was the first sunny day I'd experienced downtown and I took as many pictures around the park as I could. When I asked what he thought of China's leaders he was forthright and unhesitant with admiration for them, though he regretted that officials have become more corrupt since the reigns of Mao and Deng. I asked what would happen if uniformed men appeared at his door one night to send him to a farm as was common in the 1960s.

"They could not do this," he said.
"There are laws?" I asked.
"Yes, Deng Xiaopeng made new laws."
"But the laws could change?"
"No, this all happened when China is very poor."

On the one hand it's unfortunate that I don't speak the language and must resort to asking leading questions and putting words in people's mouths but even still I found our exchange over the One Child Policy bizarre. I prefaced my questions by reminding him that the U.S.S.R. encouraged women to have as many babies as they could and special awards were given to those who had ten children with the same husband.

"What if tomorrow Hu Jintao said families could have more children? You just said that the population was too high but would you agree if the One Child Policy were suspended?"
"Yes."
"You'd be ok with that?"
"Yes."
"And if they changed it back you'd be ok with that as well?"
"Yes."

Yao's English had proven very fluent earlier but he offered no provisos or parentheticals. At a loss for words I patted him on the back and offered to buy him an ice cream cone.

Other people like Junjian, the teacher and laser fusion researcher who works in the office next to mine, are more consistent. She sees the Policy as a grim necessity though she looks wistful when she says she wants two children. "You want a little girl and a little boy?" I ask.
"Yes!" she beams. Junjian has a thirteen year old brother which was permitted since she herself was born before the policy went into effect, or something along those lines. Yes, this woman is older than me:

When 31 years old you reach, look as good you will not

Chinese share a national unity that I don't encounter in America, perhaps it only existed in my country during the post-WWII boom and maybe not even then. They take offense at public criticisms of their government (my coworkers actually took a bus trip to Atlanta to protest this guy) but they are pleased to discuss issues one-on-one with curious westerners. At the same time, they lambast western-concocted fallacies in a manner that they could never level against their own state-run media. By and large they are very proud of what they are accomplishing. For the past couple centuries, China has been a declining empire, a British colony and opium den, a Japanese colony and slaughterhouse, a socialist experiment gone haywire. Now they're the fastest growing economy in the world and the host of international celebrations. People are very optimistic.
And they're excited about western culture. Most popular American products among the Chinese are the NBA, music videos, KFC and Mickey Mouse. They share a unhealthy predilection for inappropriate t-shirts as well.


The portending doom question that journalists like to ask is whether Chinese admire American independence more than American wealth. I don't know if you'd even make a definitive statement about Americans with regards to that. I am uploading an English assignment that a student gave me to correct for her. I ended up correcting more of her teacher's grammar than her own but the content of the passage was more interesting. Next week I will meet up with the other American students in Beijing. I don't know whether I'll be able to post another entry but at least I should have plenty of things to talk about when I return.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Bad Ideas Part Two

This week marks the nineteenth anniversary of the student protests in Tiananmen Square where an estimated 200 students were shot to death by the PLA. Like many similar incidents in Asia there is no official count of the casualties and most people younger than 25 are unaware that the protests even took place.
I have no intention for this to become a 'political' blog so if it should happen that I'm unable to disable comments for this post I would appreciate anyone wishing to comment to do so through email. I am compelled to talk about political thought and attitudes here because they're relevant to daily life and because there's a lot of misinformation.
For nearly four years I've collaborated with an American-naturalized Chinese professor who culls his grad students from the top schools of his home country. Many of your own experiences will probably bear out the perception that Chinese nationals are notorious for keeping to their own kin and culture while they study abroad and to a large extent I don't blame them. Their English abilities are often minimal when they arrive and they have well established communities that they can hook up with once they're in the States.
So it took quite some time but eventually my coworkers became friends and allies as we collectively dealt with one research setback after another before making the occasional breakthrough. We also enjoyed having political discussions that could last over an hour and one in particular was very astute in his criticisms of both Chinese and U.S. policy.

Now that I write this here, even though I work in a research institute on issues far removed from political variables, nagging concerns about the careers of my friends and coworkers prevent me from recounting many of our discussions. I'm posting to a public blog that's publicly inaccessible in this country and the only Chinese who might read it would be taking notes for some Party-run committee. I use a proxy server to connect to the internet here but the Tor/Privoxy programs don't work or I can't figure out how to use them correctly, so any traffic coming from my IP can be traced.

Most likely the worst that could happen is that my post gets deleted or my blog gets shut down. Considering blogs didn't exist nineteen years ago, that's not such a huge deal.

So here we go:

Journalism may not be the most tightly regulated industry here, but journalists do have the best venue to complain. Journalists are suspicious of technology to begin with and Americans, in general, are very suspicious of China. This comes both from those neocons who haven't died off yet, the ones yearning for another Cold War, as well bridge-climbing attention whores.

Recently Rolling Stone published an interesting article by Shock-Doc Crusader Naomi Klein examining the development of China's integrated security system. It's stuff like this that makes it tough to do research or business over here. Our group had to undergo months of legal wrangling to convince airhead lawyers at Florida State that our detection system was not being used to make night vision goggles or guidance systems before they would allow us to ship our older creations to the mother country.

But amid her ranting she raises a serious point about the market demand for surveillance tracking and communication monitoring. There is certainly exponentially increasing demand for these products as result, though, of the fear marketing that's become so prevalent over the past decade. People are scared of viruses, terrorists, sex offenders, myspace pages, baby boomers and on and on and on. This may relate to her well-toured book though I admit I haven't read it and don't really plan to. I think she's too quick to lay the blame on entrepreneurs like the one she interviews, companies whose very nature entices them to constantly improve their products and services.

But before I get too far into a Once-ler frame of mind I want to continue my line of reasoning. If you're scared of burglars, of course someone's going to sell you an alarm system and a nine-millimeter. Same goes for terrorists and wiretapping, for baby boomers and Logan's Run-style implants. But before you buy this stuff you need to think 'Who's selling this to me? Is it really in my interest or theirs? Mankind has been able to do with out these things for thousands of years, why is it I should want one now?'

This is my opinion of where America sits today as it peers at the rest of the world; it asks to buy everything but other people's problems. Later today or maybe this weekend I'll get back to the Chinese opinions that I've encountered so far.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Bad Ideas Part One

Our lab at SJTU is roughly twice the size of the one in Tallahassee and is fitted with door seals and airlocks. The equipment we are assembling is roughly similar with the key electron gun components packed and shipped over from the Magnet Lab itself. We'll be installing the actual last-gen gun that was built at FSU in 2002 of course the detector and the cathode will be rebuilt to modern specs.
What this means is that pieces are coming from everywhere. Shipments from America, Shenzhen and Beijing have all been trundling through the locks for the past week to await assembly once they all arrive. One major part of the detection system is the microchannel plate which amplifies the signal from the gun to be recorded by the camera. This, along with the stainless steel housing for the electron gun, were manufactured far to the west of here. However there was a large concern that these parts could not be packed and shipped properly.
With neither complaint nor regret Zhang took it upon himself to make the fifteen hour journey to Xi'an not far from the earthquake zone where aftershocks have been felt as recently as last Monday. He stayed only as long as necessary to load the boxes onto the sleeper car of the Shanghai-Lhasa line. Yes, *that* Lhasa.



I awoke around 7:30 on Sunday morning to my phone buzzing with Zhu's text message. I hadn't known the details of the trip but we would have to leave from Minhang fairly early to meet Zhang at the train station. It wasn't until ten though that we rode our bikes to the metro and when we did reach the station at the north edge of the city we discovered that the train was forty minutes late. All the consequences of this, the nifty pictures I took and conversations that Zhu and I had were interesting but I only mean to supply this as a backdrop for what happened when the three of us finally returned to Jinchuan station back in Minhang.

The box with the steel case wasn't that heavy but it was over three feet long by a foot and a half wide and took two of us to carry it through the metro crowds. The MCP was a tiny thing but bundled up snugly in a glass desiccator so that was a box that would be handy for hiding a cat or two. It was nearly two o'clock when we began hailing taxis to take us to campus a mile away... and none of them would drive us because it wasn't far enough. I wasn't sure what I could threaten the taxi drivers with although airstrikes came immediately to mind. Maybe if I had just shouted continuously at one of them he would've relented. None of us had eaten lunch and I'd only had a bite six hours ago and was approaching delirium.

Zhang and Zhu discussed something for a moment then turned to me. "We'll take the bikes," Zhang said.
"You are shitting me," I cried. While seeing people and packages on rear bike shelves was common enough, this was a horse of a different color in my eyes. Three of us, a forty pound steel case and a delicately fabricated semiconductor amplifier were not appropriate cargo for two bicycles.

Now there are essentially three ways the narrative can branch at this point. I could go along with their scheme and add a new ability to my repertoire. I could attempt this circus act and fail catastrophically along with weeks of fabrication that cost many thousands of dollars. Or I could convince my coworkers to see reason and lead them back to the campus on foot. Well here's the way I'm going to tell it.

In Zhang's first few attempts to balance on the back of my bike I kept teetering and couldn't steer straight until he jumped off. He decided that we should switch places but no one had ever shown me the trick of sitting down on the shelf just as the bike starts to move. The third time I nearly fell down and he suggested I ride full saddle instead.

It turns out there is no conceivable position to do that without getting one's keister chewed up. I grimaced and considered offhand that this would be a fine time to meditate through the pain. I held the MCP box against my thigh while steadying myself with my right hand hooked under the bicycle seat. Meanwhile Zhu was riding around us chortling with the e-gun case sticking far out to each side from his shelf, pinned down only by his right hand as he steered with his left. We set off and I threatened Zhang with terrible disfigurement if he went over any bumps.

He was very careful but even still by the time we were halfway there I started whimpering. It was hellish but the only thing I needed to do was not let my feet touch the ground. I tried singing a song to myself. "Oh my rear is raw and my thighs are skinned/This MCP stays against my shin/"
"What's that?" Zhang asked.
"Nothing keep driving!!"
When we arrived finally I curled into a ball and rolled around howling on the grass. Zhu leaned over me. "So you don't like being Zhang's girlfriend?" he asked.
"Your women's asses stack so well I could stuff them in a Pez dispenser!" I wasn't sure why that came to mind.