Some of you remember Victoria, from Taizhou

Spring, 2010

Some of you remember Victoria, from Taizhou. For those of you who don’t, Victoria is- I think the east coast term is wicked- smart, clever, beautiful, and ambitious as all hell. In other words, a dream. Last year she put on a show for Scott and his kids and me. You know that these trips for Scott and me are fun and we learn a lot, but there is an awful lot of showing off and maneuvering behind the scenes of every event. There is a lot of jockeying to see who sits at the head point of the (round) table, next to the person paying for lunch. Last year, Scott usually got to sit next to the person paying for lunch, and on the other side was the most senior or most powerful leader (this is where the personal jockeying comes in- sometimes we spent two or three minutes standing around the table, while two people fight out who is going to be the least important. Sort of Alphonse and Gaston, with every “No, you go first,” a bluff. First one to call the bluff wins).

To show off her power last year, Victoria disdained the standard Chinese lunch at the big round table in the private room, with the servant girls and the endless flow of food and liquor. Victoria chose to serve Western food (steak, potatoes, vegetables) and make everyone, including her boss, her bosses’ boss, and a couple of other bosses, eat it. Oh, and it was served at a big rectangular table, like in regular countries, and everyone got a fork and knife instead of chopsticks. This was by way of saying, look at the kind of food I can order, and I’m paying for lunch, so eat it and shut up and if you can’t use a fork, then go ahead and ask for chopsticks. We’ll all notice. I didn’t actually hear her say this, but this is my impression. This is the sophomore cheerleader telling the seniors that they aren’t the only cool kids on the team, and I’ve got moves you haven’t seen yet.

Victoria is a very senior person in the government publicity department, which sounds like a dead end job, but job titles don’t always match power. Think of her job as controlling information that goes out, and it sounds a bit more serious. This is the xuan chuan bu, the propaganda bureau. Victoria was up for promotion to vice mayor when she was in Chicago, and this would be a very powerful position. She already has gathered around her a stable (I think that is the right word) of smart, beautiful women, who adore Victoria and comprise part of her personal empire. She has a driver, of course- in the US we would call him big and strapping- and a big black car.

Jasmine, who works for Victoria, picked me up on the interstate (I get handed off between cities, because the expressways are all so new that only local drivers know the directions). We had a fairly modest lunch- only a vice mayor and a director of a development zone, plus assorted hangers-on, and then went to the PRC war memorial that memorializes the epic battle in January, 1955, between about 20,000 PRC soldiers, plus 180 planes and a bunch of ships with big guns, against about 1100 holdout Kuomintang ragtag soldiers on two small islands off the coast of Taizhou. After bombing the shit out of the island, and strafing it with planes, and then ships unloading shells for a few hours, the 20,000 PRC soldiers invaded the island and in two hours the enemy gave up. This sounds not very impressive, and it probably was not. But most of us were alive at the time, and you remember Kemoy and Matsu, and this was six years after the declaration of the PRC, and two years after the cessation of hostilities in Korea. John Foster Dulles had negotiated a joint defense treaty with the people on Taiwan in 1954. So my take on this is that the PRC decided to show the Chinese people, and the world, especially the US, that it could have another stalemate in Taiwan, just like in Korea, if it chose to let the Taiwanese run too wild. So look at our coordinated air, sea, and land attack, and we crushed the shit out of the defenders, and anyone else who wants a piece of me can get in line. The US then asked the Ruskies to ask the Chincoms to not attack a larger island, with 20,000 Kuomintang soldiers, because Shen Kai Shek’s son was on the island, so the PRC let the 7^th Fleet remove the 20,000 soldiers to Taiwan, and the US learned to play it coy with Taiwan. Again, I didn’t hear the 19 year old Army cadet (cute as hell in her uniform) say any of this, but I’m just free lancing here.

Dinner was the big deal. Men in China, even men in pretty high places, tend to dress like….. well, me. A little shorter, a little neater, but in the same general direction. Socks. No suit and tie. Victoria, of course, does not. Victoria dresses UP. There were from ten to fifteen people at dinner. The number kept changing, because apparently the hotel in which we had dinner (probably owned by the government) also serves as the McDonald’s, the Mitchell’s, the after school hangout, for government people, and on any given night, there are about half a dozen (I’m not kidding) dinner meetings going on in separate dining rooms, and people keep rotating in and out of rooms like aldermen going to funerals or the president of the high school social service club making sure everyone knows the directions from the hangout to the event on Saturday morning. People move in and out making appearances, having a couple of toasts, maybe eating a little, telling a joke, a moving anecdote, some praise for the highest leader already in the room, and then moving on.

Victoria has some power. You can tell by how much deference is provided when she walks into the room, or by the references to how soon she will be walking into the room. People in the government (and probably outside the government as well) use cell phones like- well, probably, teenagers. People call each other to tell each other that they will call in five minutes when they are already only six minutes away. This is especially true for bigger leaders. The conditions in the room change when a leader walks in. There is a really unbelievable amount of running around to get chairs and moving furniture and people adjusting themselves in the room according to rank or desired rank. The big dog gets the best seat.

I don’t know how much power Victoria has, but at dinner, the vice mayor sat three seats away from her. I was on one side, and next to her was a provincial official from the training office, which is the office that sends students to IIT and other schools around the world. The training office is in the supervision department, which is the government. The organization department is the Party corresponding agency, but they obviously work together. The supervision and organization departments handle Party discipline, evaluation of mayors, vice-mayors, and provincial leaders, and promotions.

Dinner was very good, the usual mix of wonderfully prepared fishes, shellfish, vegetables, some meat, some noodles. You know that the dishes are all set on a big rotating table, and people pick things out as the table is slowly rotated by people looking for their favorite dish. Instead of the pretty typical Chinese wine (which is rice liquor), we had a very nice red wine and something I have never seen in the US, but should be available everywhere, and that is corn juice. It’s just corn juice, some honey, and water, and it is good. A nice alternative to any other juice, and especially the Chinese wine.

Others at the table were An Chen (Andy, for Scott), who is a transportation advisor to the mayor of a county. His job, I think, is to get money from the Zhejiang Investment Group, LLC, to build roads in the county. The ZIG, for those of us in the know, is a provincial state-owned investment company that provides funds for public projects, but gets to say no to projects that the governor of the province (or the provincial branch of the Development and Reform Commission) does not like. Next to Andy was Danny (whose Chinese name I can’t remember) and who left early to makes pitches in other rooms. He was replaced by Mr. Yan (who never had an English name, I don’t think), who is, in fact, on the Board of Directors of the ZIG. Quelle surprise!

Victoria was also running in and out of the room at dinner, but she was back for the two big surprises. The first was an entire boar’s head, meat sliced into pieces and the bone bleached white. Everybody oohed and aahed just like they did in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or whatever the movie was, when they brought in the monkey heads for dinner.

The second big surprise was the Big Leader. I don’t know how big. I mean, physically, he was a Buddha, but in terms of power, Victoria changed her seat next to me, she moved her entire place setting and food and glasses over one seat, and personally put clean plates and chopsticks and everything else in the empty place (this would be done at any other time by one of the serving ladies, but this was a show of deference, before the guy came into the room). The vice mayor left the room, his vice apparently being too small to merit attention. The Big Leader seemed like a nice enough guy- he was friendly to everyone, and sat next to me and we did toasts, as he did with most everyone in the room. When he stood up to do the toast with me, I called him on the fact that my glass was full, and his was only half (toasts are often of the drain-the-glass variety). Toasts are supposed to be done with approximately equal quantities and color of liquid. The Big Guy laughed. He liked that I called him on it, in the way that an emperor might enjoy tolerating the impertinences of a bug.

The Big Guy stayed for about twenty minutes, enough to survey the room for who was there and not there, and, having marked his territory, moved on.

By this time, most everyone had moved on to other dinners and meetings down the hall or next door. Mr. Yan, the ZIG board member, decided that he and I needed to have a bottle of Maotai, which is done in the same casual way one would propose drinking an entire bottle of grain alcohol. We got about half way before a modicum of sense was restored, and we evacuated to the outside.

At that point, Victoria and Jasmine and Jason, the young English major who was along for the ride, decided they needed to entertain me. We adjourned to KTV, which merits a little of its own description.

KTV is a chain of karaoke-night club-men’s entertainment clubs that seem to have sprung up all over China. They are decorated like German punk meets disco- all colored glass and mirrors and strobe lights and shiny metal and lights in the floors and live fish in the walls. I’ve seen two of these now, and the general idea is the same in both. There are several floors, each with a maze of different size private rooms, most suitable for a group of about four to eight people, with couches and video screens and soft lighting and a few low tables for snacks and drinks. Every room has a pretty sophisticated karaoke set up, with thousands of songs in Chinese and English, and the video screen plays the music and displays the words, in English if the song was recorded in English, with some appropriate background video of boys and girls falling in or out of love, or whatever. The videos, as far as I can tell, are all G-rated, but the rooms might not be. You rent the room by the hour, and you can have drinks and snacks delivered or not, and if the meeting goes well, you can probably stay all night. The doors don’t lock, but waitstaff should be models of discretion. Each room has a private bathroom, some with shower.

In a China that is outwardly formal and cool, these places offer a really intriguing alternative. At the KTV in Liaoyang, in Liaoning Province, about six of us went in the afternoon, before all the real business started. There were about twenty young girls all seated in one room. I asked the host who they were, and he told me secretaries. I presume that answer counts for working girl in any language.

Anyway, the driver for a government person in China has an aggressive aspect to part of his personality that corresponds with the status of his leader. We got in the car, and the driver starts honking his horn before we even get out of the driveway of the restaurant/hotel. The bigger leaders get a car with a klaxon, which of course we used in getting through traffic to the KTV. The streets in Taizhou along the river are studded on the edges with some sort of yellow reflective light, almost like Christmas lights, so we are driving through what feels like the Yellow Brick Road, with horns and klaxons and me and Jason and Victoria and Jasmine.

We got to KTV, got inside, and had a room prepared. Karaoke is a very big deal in China, and everybody is willing to participate, regardless of voice quality, which was good for me. We all selected songs- the number of songs in English, some with different versions, is in the hundreds. Everybody in China knows the music and words to American songs, because they learned them in school, in the US, at KTV, or on the radio.

We sort of took turns leading on a song, and all of us pitched in as we could, and the music is loud enough and the microphones big enough so that almost anyone sounds good enough, and we danced for a couple of hours, to slow songs and fast, and sang and laughed and cheered each other as somebody finally got a note pretty near correct, and the image of slow dancing, holding first Victoria, and then Jasmine, is probably good enough to end this e-mail.

How was your day?

Jazz at the JZ Club

October, 2009

Went with Jonathan Gong Wei, one of the IIT students from four years ago, to the JZ Club, a jazz club on Nanshan Road next to West Lake. I invited two of my fellow faculty members, Wu De Gang (Dominick) and Zheng Li, to join us.

Nanshan Road is the place to see and be seen in Hangzhou. It runs adjacent to West Lake, so the views across the river are beautiful. Think of the view of downtown Chicago from the Fullerton Avenue bridge over the pond at night, or the view of downtown from the Planetarium. Except that the lake here is small enough to see across, and in the distance are hills lit up with lights from houses, and the moon is out, and the city has worked very hard to make this area attractive to the “gold collared workers” that my friend Bob Yovovich talks about.

The upshot of it is that even though the bars and restaurants and clubs are expensive, and have a lot of foreigners in them, the lakefront is free and open to everyone. The park betweeen Nanshan Road and the lake varies in width, but here it is about 200 feet, so there is a lot of room for a lot of people to wander and stop and sit and hold hands and have a drink. The city does fountain shows in the lake at night (sort of like the Las Vegas water show thing with water spraying in all directions from cannons at the surface that pivot or rotate). There is coordinated music and plenty of vendors for cokes and beer and snacks and plenty of public washrooms (clean!). This is one of the few areas in Hangzhou (and in China, I think) in which there are a lot of old urban trees, and the trees canopy the street, so the effect is very soft and human scale and just … beautiful. Not all the buildings are new, and even some of the new ones have been designed to look older. There is a bronze slightly 3D map of Old Hangzhou set in the sidewalk at one of the little openings in the walkway along the lake. Date of map impression, probably 1900. Size of map, about 30 feet by 20 feet. Lots of older residents looking at the map, trying to find where their parents lived- or maybe where the new expressway is. Hint- its not on that map, either. At least two locations in enlarged sidewalk openings where people dance. Not tai chi (although maybe they do that in the morning) and not waltz, but good old fashioned Texas Chinese line dancing. With two hundred people dancing. I think the two-step music came after we walked past.

I misread the time that the JZ Club opens (8:30) and we started off from the school a little early. So Ms. Zheng and Mr. Wu and I got dinner at the Zhejiang University student cafeteria. Zhejiang University is one of the best schools in China, and the cafeteria is proof of that (since they don’t have a football team, they need some way to tangibly demonstrate superiority). We ordered at the counter, and the place is big and noisy and full of students, but the food is remarkably good and remarkably cheap. Food is way better than the food at ZUST. Zhejiang University has an old urban campus, narrow streets with big trees and some old buildings mixed in with new.

Neither Mr. Wu nor Ms. Zheng had ever been to the JZ Club, which again demonstrates the isolation of academics from the real world (not only the U of C economics department). Or maybe it just demonstrates the inability of faculty to afford $60 bottles of not very good Spanish wine. Mr. Wu, who looks to be about 30, is a self-described homebody, so he is not a candidate for too many future JZ Club adventures. But they both had a good time, with the wine and the music and talking with Gong Wei. After about half an hour, we were joined at our table by Ms. Sun, who is one of the owners. From Gong Wei, her story is that about twelve years ago, she was a secretary in a government department. She quit to start a coffee bar, did that for seven or eight years, and about six months ago opened JZ (with partners). Ms. Sun supplied us with a bottle of champagne, which helped everyone’s mood as well. Works in China, just like in the US.

Hard to tell right away, but the location and the prices and the milieu suggest that Ms. Sun will do fine at JZ. Another capitalist success story. The club is in an old brick house, on Nanshan Road right across from the lake. Ms. Sun, or whoever the designer was, chose to keep the 1930s heavy timber framing and the effect, with modern lighting and furnishings in the old structure, are the equal of anything you can find on West Randolph Street or the West Loop. Again, beautiful. There are three levels, and the stairway is decorated with framed pictures of musicians and what purports to be a 33-1/3 record of their work- Peterson, Gillespie, Rollins, Davis, Coltrane, George Clinton (maybe not). The third floor looks out onto west lake through some big trees. I told Ms. Sun that I was from the government, and the government needed her land and building for housing for some very important people and that, sadly, she would have to move out. I thought it was worth a try, but she wasn’t buying it … or selling. The location and view and building are sui generis.

The band was four guys- four black guys- from the US, who like a lot of groups, I guess, are in China sort of on tour, and play a few nights here and there. Started with soft jazz, okay, good for the surroundings, and by the second set were cranking a little more. When we left about 11:30, they had just hit Sweet Home Chicago. The crowd loved it. Mix of Chinese and foreigners, I don’t think any other Americans, but some guys who looked more Brit and Australian (the Captain England and Captain Australia headbands gave them away). No one dancing on tables, but everyone having a good time.

I don’t want anyone to think that there are no downsides to life in Hangzhou. I just got through reading More Hangzhou (English, of course), which is sort of a Chicago magazine-Time Out Chicago. Ads, restaurant listings and reviews, club happenings, and the cover this month ….. the three year history of the Hangzhou Harlequins Rugby Club. I wonder if I can get replacement screws for my ankle if I get tackled wrong in a match …. But the downside. In the restaurant listings, and goings-on this month, is a ad celebrating a month of ….. Canadian Food. The Canadian Food Festival is at Cafe Le Rendevous in the Landison Plaza Hotel. ‘Nuff said.

The Grade School Performance Gap

April, 2010

Vicky invited me to the opening ceremonies of the 3^rd Annual Hangzhou Reading Festival. She promised me a visit to the new Hangzhou main library, a gift of books from the No. 1 in Hangzhou, dancing girls, and a chance to be on TV. Stronger men might have been able to say no, but books and dancing girls were just too much.

The new main library is in the new Central Business District, the new CBD, as everyone here call it. Predictably wonderful. New building, of course, with a grand interior atrium and nice blending of marble and wood for accents on walls and detailing on doors.

The library floor guide is pretty cool, arranged like a book table of contents. It is six metal pages, unfolded like a tour guide brochure, with the inner five leaves making two tents with the wood base on which it sits, with descriptions of floors and book and material locations, in English … and Chinese.

Taking a book out is pretty easy. The scanner that you put the book under tells you when it is due, prints a reminder, and annotates your central file at the same time (this is just my guess. (note – this was in 2009) The guards at the entrances are all dressed vaguely like soldiers in dress uniforms, and while I am happy for the extra security (you know librarians can really get wild) it is a little disconcerting. I guess information is power, and books are information.

There are the hundreds of thousands of books, but their pride and joy (I got the VIP tour from four library employees, courtesy of Vicky) are the video and music rooms. In the video room, there is one 102 inch flat screen, with another dozen or so individual screens at desktops, and if you want to have a video party, the 102 inch screen is in front of about thirty plush chairs, arranged for viewing. The movies are on spinning carousels, like in a retail store, so it is pretty easy to find what you want. They may have some movies in Chinese. I am not sure.

I got the VIP music room tour. Some people, Al and Jeff- really, anyone with musical knowledge- would be agog at what I think I was looking at. This is an audio room with plush seating for about thirty, and three high rows of computer audio Stuff about fifteen feet long at the front of the room, with two sets of speakers about six feet high and two other …. I dunno…. air raid sirens, that were shaped like big tubas about four feet in diameter at the leading edge and looked like they could reliably signal anyone in Hangzhou the next time the White Sox win the pennant. Also a video screen, really a movie screen, about thirty feet by twenty feet. We watched some wonderfully creative performance, I don’t think from China, of English speaking singers singing some kind of modern Italian opera with people flying around the stage and abstract figures moving across. If I could only write while seeing all this. But even that wouldn’t be enough. Somebody needs to come here who can describe this stuff. Someone who knows more words than I do. I can’t do it.

The Hangzhou Reading Festival is put on by the Hangzhou government Culture Bureau, where Vicky works as the director of copyright and intellectual property. At the juxtaposition of copyright and culture is the propaganda bureau, which has the dissemination (and control) of information as its brief. This is China.

This is a festival of reading- encouraging students, and everyone, to read more. This opening event kicks off a series of seminars, shows, and online and texting events that go until the start of spring festival, at the end of January. There are ways to read books online and on your cell phone (a fabulous development that I sadly will miss). There are related arts performances and events, but I did ask again, and it is a reading festival, not an arts festival.

The event was in the big lecture hall in the new library. Lecture hall connotes a big university room with uncomfortable wooden chairs and bad acoustics, but this was a modern Chinese government lecture hall. Plush theater style seating with folding seats, probably enough to hold about a thousand people. A stage with a one step rise. The stage was pretty deep- I would guess about forty feet- and big wing spaces. Sophisticated lighting, of course. Sophisticated sound system, of course. Room between the regular seating and the front of the stage for a row of tables for VIPs and speakers.

One of Vicky’s people is a guy who was in an MPA program in Nottingham, England for a year, so his English is pretty good. He was my guide for the event. The event program starts with an opening speech providing the theory of the event and the festival- this is also peculiarly Chinese. Now I suppose, to be fair, that a book festival in Chicago- say, the one where Mayor Daley picks a book for the city to read- will have its own festival kickoff, and there will be a short speech providing the reason for the event, but the theory of the event stuff just knocks me out. Citing the life long learning component of Jiang Zemin’s Three Represents, the book festival seeks to develop reading among everyone as key to the new China. There is probably a lot of politics somewhere in there, but I can’t see that either. Some of the Chinese students in Chicago describe some Americans- me, I think- as being blind with my eyes open. I think that fits.

When Mr. Xiao and I walked into the lecture hall, the dancing girls were already practicing. One last run-through on the routine before the show. Their teacher was directing, but she didn’t have to do much. The girls- all about age 9 or 10- were on their marks and ready.

The girls- about ten of them, no boys- must have been practicing this for weeks. They were precise, well coordinated, and pretty good for 10 year olds. The musical routine was a story about a girl saying to her mom, “Mom I want dinner,” followed by a sort of dream sequence of the girl dancing with nine brightly dressed chickens. The costumes were a feminist mom’s nightmare- two piece spangled red, shorts and tops, with matching slippers and a big chicken tail, and the girls doing a sort of chicken dance with arms akimbo and moving forward and back, and rear ends out, bodies sort of plucking- you know, a chicken dance- but I can hear the moms screaming in Wilmette right now.

But that is a cultural difference. I don’t think anyone local here sees anything wrong with this, because little girls are not so otherwise thought to be adults. And this is the part of China that is 1950’s America. Even for older kids, the TV shows are full of girls dancing, and hosting events, and interviewing other teenagers, dressed in …. not provocative, just more innocent, I think- styles. So this is a Rorschach test, I guess. What you see is what you get.

The dance routine was about ten minutes of continuous motion, which is a lot. All ten moving in unison when called for, playing with the table the first girl was using for her dinner table- turning it over, using it as a boat to haul her back and forth on the stage, turning it on its side to use as a place to hide- and not all nine were doing the same things at the same time. So this looks to me as if someone spent a lot of time choreographing this, and rehearsing. I suppose this is my wysiwyg moment, but I will bet that the rehearsal did not take as long as it would in the US, and the result- based on my own years of soccer coaching and watching grade school performances- was certainly better. No one’s mom calling to say little Susie has piano practice, and cannot make rehearsals on Thursday… no little Annie trying to stand out from everybody else because her mom told her that’s what she should do …. No one slacking off at rehearsal because she just doesn’t feel like doing this today ….

There is a concept in law and economics called incomplete contracts. Basically, this idea is that it is impossible to write a contract between two parties that covers every conceivable contingent event. Societies have default legal rules for handling such situations- what did the parties intend, what is reasonable in the circumstances, what are the predecents, what are the industry norms…. I am sure Steve or Suzanne or Scott can talk about this.

In little kid team or group events, in the US, the unwritten default rules are usually broadly interpreted. “Ok, fine, Susie can miss rehearsals on Thursdays, but pleeeze try to get her here the last Thursday before the event ….”

I think this is the point at which the Chinese decide, and decided a couple of thousand years ago, that they have a superior culture. The notion of letting down the group is just too shameful to not show up on Thursdays. So you can put on a show like this, with rehearsal and mistakes and somebody getting a cold, for sure, but the incidence of abandoning the group is much less. So more can be accomplished. In less time, with better execution. Without some mom bringing her half baked ideas into a kids performance for the City leaders. My guess is that the kids get a better sense of satisfaction from their work, as well. No one feels like they really would have done better if Susie had been there on Thursdays, because she was.

Okay, this is all wild speculation. I am sure some of the kids felt badly about what they did because it was not perfect. But then … I am not sure about that. I think the idea of the group working well together gives them a great sense of satisfaction, regardless of how it looked on stage. Which was, actually, great.

But now you know why the Chinese stimulus package might not be so harmful to the Chinese economy, even as it creates a real estate bubble, just like in the US. Because of the close relationships in Chinese business, contracts can be rewritten, adjusted, to reflect changed conditions. Contracts are incomplete, but the relationships are not. So in the US, when everybody starts suing everybody else, because there are too many separate contracts, too may separate entities, too much separate ownership, the Chinese have internalized the norms that make such legal maneuverings unnecessary. This doesn’t change the economics, but it changes the accounting and the need to recognize losses. And therein lies the grade school performance gap. Moms in Wilmette, start worrying.

After the performance, the Hangzhou Reading Festival got down to business. The No. 1 in Hangzhou, the Party head, was supposed to be there, but we had to settle for a vice-mayor in the government. So six of us, chosen in advance, went onstage to get a stack of books from the vice-mayor, who was distributing books like a Chicago alderman would distribute Thanksgiving turkeys in the old days. A representative school kid- about 12- a soldier, a farmer, a government employee, a teacher, and the foreigner (me) got a stack of seven books each. I shook the vice-mayors hand, told him in Chinese I was happy to be there, and stood next to the provincial library head for a few minutes for pictures. Given the protocol of events like this, I think the library head was none too happy to be assigned to the foreigner. No local benefit to him. But he seemed to take it, if not well, at least resignedly. There is a phrase in Chinese- wo bu xi zuo- I must do it- that everybody knows and uses when they have to go on studying when dead tired, or work seven days straight for three weeks, or jump to their leader’s call when they should be at a family gathering. No doubt the head of the Zhejiang Provincial Library had that phrase in mind.

In the audience were hundreds of grade school kids, brought in for the event. The kids got an afternoon off from their incredibly long school day, and a chance to learn a little about the government. I was thinking of the kids that would surround Mayor Daley opening a new neighborhood swimming pool. But the theory of the event, the need for life long learning, seemed genuine enough. And sure, kids in China watch tv and play video games, but there is a lot more emphasis on study and learning in school, from the government, and even on tv itself. So the old racially tinged, politically incorrect joke about knowing how the burglars in your house were Asian- the vcr is no longer blinking 12:00, and your kids homework is done- does have that element of truth in it. The emphasis on reading, and studying, is going to get a lot of these kids into Harvard, and Yale, and Stanford. Moms in Wilmette, start worrying.

Into Clean Air

October, 2009

Steven Shen Kanming and his wife and son and I went to Anji, which is in Huzhou, a small city in Zhejiang Province. A couple of you will like this one, because it is an adventure, not hiking through Afghanistan for sure, but an adventure nevertheless – hidden dragons, many waterfalls, and how face can be made in China (sometimes).

Steven picked me up in the afternoon of national day, after the big parade in Beijing. Or, I should say, Steven and his driver. Let me tell you, it does wonders for one’s public image to have the big black car with the driver pull up in front of your apartment, and the government official jump out and greet you warmly. I highly recommend it. Over the last few years of being in China, the standard mode of travel is just that- black car, driver, my buddy in the back seat. At ZUST, I keep waiting every morning for the car and driver to take me from class to class, but so far it hasn’t materialized. Must be on back order.

Huzhou is a small city between Shanghai and Jiaxing. It borders Lake Tai, which is famous as one of China’s largest fresh water lakes, and now famous for its eutrophication and pollution. Because of its limestone basin, it is also famous for its scholar’s stones, which some of you have seen in Ann and Dave’s garden. The lake is about 900 square miles, no slouch of a lake, but only about two meters average depth. Sort of like the Missouri River.

Steven grew up near Lake Tai, and he told me about going swimming there. As with much of urban China, thirty years ago this area was rural, and the river was clean. And as with much of China, the area is now developed, although not in the hyperventilating mode of the bigger cities. The downtown part of Huzhou- old Huzhou- has big urban trees and a relaxed feel. I guess I am getting acclimated when a place of 2.5 million people feels like a small town.

The driver dropped us off at a small local restaurant in Huzhou, where we met Wendy, Steven’s wife, and their son Can, who is 15. Steven said he would let his driver go home, to be with his family. After all, fair is fair. It was national day and it was about 6:00 in the evening.

Dinner was good, just the four of us. I avoided the chicken feet, but the fish and pork and vegetable dishes were all tasty. I had some chrysanthemum tea and we shared a bottle or two of Chinese huang jiu yellow wine (which is actually brown) and which is not so strong as the alcohol that often fuels these events.

We walked back to the hotel, through downtown Huzhou, stopping for a while in the big department store. The department store is six floors, with an atrium in the middle surrounded by the escalators. This is Marshall Field’s in the 1960’s, at Christmas. There are a lot of people buying, a lot looking. On a Thursday night, the night of national day. Much of the retail space is given over to brand names, which I presume rent the space in the store as they do in the US. Lots of different clothing retailers, lots of styles, from professional woman on the go to hip-hop street kid. I am not sure whose clothes are more expensive. Housewares, kitchen, toys and jewelry. Jewelry is, of course, on the first floor. Along with the health food store, where I considered some protein powder and bee pollen. Too expensive. Too weird, also. There was a KFC and a Mickey D’s right across the street, even in this fairly small town.

Every store-in-the-store has several employees, all of whom seem willing and eager to help. Not so much like the US. I could bargain in the health food store, although this is generally not done in the department stores.

I could get CCTV9 in the hotel, so I watched something with people speaking English. Breakfast was the typical Chinese hotel breakfast- western and Chinese items. You have to keep in mind that the Chinese like eggs for breakfast, usually hard-boiled, and they like pork, so bacon and fried eggs is not a stretch. And they like big breakfasts. Most hotels have a grill, where the egg guy will make eggs whatever style you want, and depending on the class of the hotel, add in tomatoes, onions, spices. Still no cheese, except at the most westernized places. Bread for toast is generally available. The coffee was actually okay, maybe because I got there early, before it had a chance to sit on the burner for an hour.

We left about 9:30 in the morning for Anji. We met up with several other people en route, two of Steven’s subordinates and three organization department guys, one from the provincial level. A couple had wives and kid along, so this was a family outing for the families and a family outing for the leadership family. The organization department is the party side of the personnel department, or at least that is how I understand it. The organization department is the unit that decides who goes to Chicago to IIT, and who gets promoted.

The drive was about 90 minutes or so, we checked into the hotel in Anji. Parked in the back lot, listening to Uptown Girl on the radio. Anji is a county-level city, and the poorest of the five Huzhou districts or counties. You can tell about some things in China easily. Huzhou is the city, and the hotel is fine. Not Shanghai fine, but fine. In rural Anji, the hotel is listed as four stars, but that is four stars in Anji. So the hotel entrance is not fancy, and there is no suited bellhop to open the door and grab the luggage. And the lobby is not so over-designed. And even though the place is clean, you get that sort of musty feeling that you get in Florida, and I suppose everywhere in the global south, that comes from low-lying land and humid air and things just decaying or being eaten everywhere. I am for sure not drinking the water from the tap here. Not many westerners here. The breakfast next day was Chinese only, with hot orange juice and no coffee, and no tea.

At lunch on Friday we met up with the big leader of the day, who is the head of the organization department in Huzhou. Seems like a very nice guy. Of course, he has a daughter who is 17 and wants to know about business schools in the US. The leader wants her to select a school in the top 50 in the US. Her high school has some sort of relationship with Purdue University- maybe her English teacher went there- so she is thinking of that. Cherry and I talked about this for a while, about sometimes not getting what you pay for, and companies that can hire two graduates from a smaller school for the price of what they think they will have to pay for one graduate from Northwestern, or someplace. And schools that are focused on finance, and logistics, and health care. And finding a school that is a good fit for her. I am in a strange place in China. I know things that are useful and valuable to people, but not so useful that I can make real money from it. If the world will only shift, just a little bit ….

After lunch, we drove to the main event, about 45 minutes away, to the Hidden Dragon and Many Waterfalls park. Some reviews

Huzhou, like some other cities in Zhejiang, has a curious landscape. Most of the city is dead flat, like Chicago. The land is cut repeatedly by small streams or constructed storm drainage systems, and there seems hardly a flow of water in them anywhere. But you drive outside of town, to Anji in this case, and there are hills, steep and covered in trees and lots of them. They just rise out of the ground, like the Alps do in southern Germany. Flat farm, flat farm, flat farm- bang- too steep to ski. Maybe a 70 degree slope. Like the hills poked themselves up out of the ground, and there is more hill waiting below to come out.

So “hills” are maybe the wrong term. These are not mountains, by comparison with the Rockies, but they sure are bigger than suburban Chicago Palos Hills or Country Club Hills or Vernon Hills. I can tell because Anji is home to a large water pumping station, including a dam, set in the rushing river coming out of the … hills. There is some information about the pumping station, but I need better before I can write about pump size and how much water is supplied. Sometimes you have to get the facts right.

The mayor of Anji has taken environmental protection seriously, although there are still many factories contributing a lot of pollution to air and water. But the theme is to make Anji an “ecological county” which means that future factories will have to agree to meet the legal requirements.

Part of the reason for the ecological concern is that Anji is the home of bamboo in China, and bamboo is a mainstay of the local economy.

Photo: Robert Schrader https://www.facebook.com/leaveyourdailyhell/

We think of bamboo as a real tropical plant, but it grows here just fine, thank you, despite what we think. And this bamboo is an amazing material. We also all think of it as versatile, but you have no idea. People use it as a construction material, for walls, floors, columns, and beams, for furniture, for medicine, for food and beer and wine, for a form of paper, for weaving into rope and string, for art projects, for clothing and towels. I give up. China is going to win. This bamboo stuff is more versatile than concrete. Even more versatile than oak or pine. At lunch, we had bottles of Science Bamboo Beer. We ate bamboo shoots, sat on bamboo furniture, in a building decorated with bamboo, and watched the trucks wheezing down the road overloaded with cut bamboo to be taken for processing into any of a hundred products. But not bamboo paper. It is still made, but the local factories were closed because of their environmental problems- too much water demand, too much air and water pollution. So those factories were moved to the south of China.

Bamboo harvest

Like many of the places I have been in China, the Hidden Dragon and Many Waterfalls spot is not on most of the tour guides. There are occasional foreigners, but not like at the Great Wall or in Beijing or in Shanghai. This does not prevent many of the signs along the trails being in English, as well as Chinese. There is no doubt whatsoever that English is the second language of China. People listen to, or watch, CSPAN and CNN in English, and get American music and movies in English, and read the NYT online just like we do. Me, I have figured out how to recognize the Chinese characters for the numbers 1, 2, and 3. I will probably have 4 down by the end of next week, if I work at it. I think I know the difference between men and women. In Chinese, I mean. People keep asking me what I think of some current US pop music group, and I can’t even tell them my knowledge of music stopped with the Beach Boys. No frame of reference.

The hills are densely covered in pine and bamboo, and pretty up close and from a distance, but the real treat is the climb into the hills around the waterfalls. There are many wonderful climbs like this in China, with not-so-regularly cut stone serving as steps and sometimes there are railings made of steel pipe and sometimes just of steel reinforcing rod. And sometimes, no railing. None of this would ever meet OSHA standards, and the lawsuits in the US would shut the place down in about a New York minute. But it is fun, and more natural, and more human scale, than if there were required elevators and pink release forms and concrete steps, 7.5 inches high and 12 inches deep. Below is a wood slat suspension bridge with chains for railings. It is rickety. If you fall here, it would be … bad.

The wood slats are more than a few inches apart … just for fun

So you can argue about China is still a developing country, and how far we have come, to take the danger out of nature in the US, but people take their little kids up this steep and uncertain climb, and the sense of personal responsibility is much greater. We have had this discussion before, and you know that last winter I was a big supporter of the Americans with Disabilities Act, but do you want this climb to be fun or not? Sure, there is a continuum, and I am not buying helmets and pitons, but how can we make this sort of stuff accessible (as it were) to most people without ruining it (for most people)? The way this is built, it is fun and hard. You could fall and get hurt.

Photo: Leon Chen, at https://trip101.com/article/best-things-to-do-anji-county-china

There are 11 stations along the climb, each one on a small piece of rock or constructed into the hillside, where you can buy water and drinks and maybe a snack. And places to sit for a few minutes before resuming. And some have bathrooms. So this is my version of Everest, and Jon Krakauer has nothing on me. I am not just writing about it, I did it. The climb is sometimes steep, sometimes flat enough for something passing for sidewalk, but mostly it is steep with steps that are uneven and jagged and non-uniform. The waterfalls are all around, in the vertical hills, now too steep for trees. At some places, there is no room for steps, so the climb is on a ladder made of reinforcing rod, or some very steep steps like the ones in those hidden attic stairways. But the steps are not flat, they are three reinforcing rods spaced an inch or two apart, welded to the frame (probably better for footing than a flat piece of steel or wood).

This is one of those climbs where you get a few hundred feet up, and the view back down the waterfall, in the rocks and hills, is gorgeous, and you have hit a couple of the rest stops, and you think, okay, that was fun. And then you look way up in the hill, and there are people with kids walking way up there, and it is like watching the field action from the upper deck in Comiskey – no- US Cellular- no, Guaranteed Rate Field? … where the White Sox play. How did those people get so small? And then you realize, damn, they are not on some other hill, they are on your hill, just above you by a few hundred meters.

When Jim Ford says he doesn’t understand about my high school analogy, that Chinese government relationships are like those in the high school student government, he doesn’t know about one-ups-man ship. Before the climb into clean air, we had lunch with the big leader and the three other organization department guys and the big Party guy from Jiaxing and the wives and kids. This was a family lunch, but the venue, in Anji, suggests that this was also a bonding event. The toasts were plentiful, and I did my share. We had rice wine, beer, and some Wu Liang Ye, which is a baijiu, a clear alcohol like vodka. Not all leaders have to be big drinkers, and one is able to decline, but face goes up, at least for some Chinese, with the ability to drink. So I held my own, and I think this made a difference. More about that later. But on the climb, it meant that I could end a rest stop by saying, “zou,” which means let’s go, and everyone moved. Or maybe they were just deferring to the old guy.

Anyway, the climb is set around hundreds of waterfalls. Some are small, like a bathtub faucet left on full, and some are sheets of water coming over a sheer rock face, twenty feet wide and falling fifty, into the next pool on the journey down.

The steep hill faces are about fifty feet apart, although that varies, on both sides of the climb, and there is a center spine of water that is the main flow. There is a foot path is on each side of this spine, so there is a sort of up stairs and down stairs quality to the scene. In some places the paths merge, since there is not enough room between the rock faces for two paths. In some places, the merge is down to the width of a ladder. You climb the ladder over the rushing water below.

So this is not one continuous waterfall, but waterfalls all along the sides of the steps-ladders-stairs, and a center cascade of water flowing into pools at many levels, before continuing down. Each level has something different to offer in access to the cascade, or access to the pool, or access to the little waterfalls on the sides.

Photo: Tyler Ho https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10206501520958901&set=a.10205622699828922&type=3

In China, the opportunity to make some money is never missed. At about rest stop three, there is a one person tracked vehicle ride that goes up the pass. It is exactly the Mouse at Riverview. One person per car, tracks about two feet apart, open car, hands inside the car (there must be such a sign) and off you go. We didn’t do that, although it would have been fun, but don’t look down. Next time.

The climb is hard. I kept thinking of Everest, and Into Thin Air, and which camp we would be at by now. By camp seven or eight, I was thinking it was over, but I looked up, and there was always more. Damn ego. I had to push on, since I was representing the free world here. But we were doing this without oxygen, so I felt a little better. Above rest stop- sorry- camp 8, there start to be signs that you are in rarefied turf. The steps on the ladders are now wood, and fairly old wood, and a little bendy, if you know what I mean. And there is an air, as it were, of unkemptness, like the sherpas didn’t come this far when they removed the oxygen bottles and bodies from the summer before.

But the air is clean. It is moist, and piney, and unmistakably fresh. Everyone can drink the water right from the cascade at this height. The only thing above is the water source.

Between camp 8 and camp 9, there is a wood and rope bridge that is definitely not for the OSHA crowd. Maximum of three people at a time, but I figured they meant Chinese people, so I waited until three of our party had crossed, and started out alone. I was on good enough terms with the leaders, from my lunch performance, that the Party guy from Jiaxing, who easily outweighed me by 50 pounds, started behind me and playfully rocked the ropes. At least I think I was on good terms. I mean, the Jiaxing guy was smiling and all, and if the bridge rocked too much, we were both going into clean air, as it were. But its like walking from the number 5 Jeffrey bus stop at 64^th and Dante to Mount Carmel in 1968, past the local misguided youth from the neighborhood. The Jiaxing guy wanted to see if he could smell fear, and I couldn’t give it to him. Too much loss of face. I smiled, and shook the ropes back at him.

At camp 10, they give you a hard boiled egg as a little gift. “You made it to camp 10.” “Don’t let this be your last meal.”

The last camp is number 11, which we did not attempt. Getting too dark, and there are no street lights up here. Another hundred meters or so, up, and probably another half an hour of climb. So I failed at my first attempt. But I will be back. The hidden dragon is calling.

I can’t tell if Chinese are all this way, or if it is the difference in our ages that makes Chinese seem so damn energetic. The IIT students are mostly fifteen to twenty, or twenty five, years younger than me. We walked down from camp 11. I decided to count steps, and it is well over a thousand steps down, not counting flat parts.

When we got to the bottom, it was nearly dark. Again, not to miss an opportunity to sell, the exit from the climb takes you into a building that is lined on both sides with stalls of people selling drinks, and food, and memorabilia. I presume people rent the stalls, just like in the department store. Pretty much everyone sells the same stuff. The hallway is about fifteen stalls long, stalls on each side, and you turn a corner, thinking it is over, but the building is bigger than you think, and they have routed you back in the opposite direction through another15 stalls, each side, selling the same stuff. So you just did a U-turn through the building, before finally being ejected into the street.

We walked up the hill in the little village where the Hidden Dragon is, to me looking and feeling like the retreat from Moscow. We collapsed into a little restaurant, absolutely tired. And thirsty. And soaked with sweat. Me, anyway. Now this is the Chinese energetic part, or maybe the high school part. Sitting at two big round tables in the restaurant, did we order big bottles of water, or coke, or sprite, which are freely available? We did not. We launched into some locally made clear alcohol, really terrible stuff. The kids got the sprite, and I never wanted to sit at the kids table so much in my life.

But there was a payoff. After the terrible local liquor, we started on dinner and beer and rice wine, which were all great. And I was telling them about IIT, and ZUST, and teaching. The general English level was ok. Steven, his wife, one of the other wives, and two of the organization department guys had good or okay English. I told them about being in Dalian last June, and getting the tour of the Dalian Party school, and jokingly asking if I could teach there, and without any of the usual Chinese demurring, got a quick and solid, “No.” But the Party guy and the head organization department guys took that as a challenge, and I think my lunch performance helped, and so now they are investigating whether I can give a lecture at Hangzhou Party school. Update: Lecture at Zhejiang Province Party School, about a year later

Jane, Circa 2009

Al should have been there.

Most of you know Al Day as the local musician who made good. He does more than keep a hand in, playing with his own trio around Chicago and Evanston, and he knows more about music and musicians than I know about anything.

So Al should have been there when I attended the first anniversary at MeToo Café in Hangzhou. MeToo is an art gallery, despite the Café in the name. It is one of dozens of show spaces for young Chinese artists, and it is a gem. The look of New China is … new. There is very little that is more than thirty years old. Every hotel, every highway, every office building, every school, every store, every urban tree (almost) has that New Suburban look. Schaumburg, circa 1970 or … anytime. So the MeToo is a real find.

It is in a one story factory building, clearly more than thirty years old and rehabbed. Really rehabbed. Brick walls, exposed. Old horizontal lines of parallel steam heating pipes, now painted black and serving as decoration and as a place to hang art. Something that looks like an DC-12 airplane engine, but with wood fans, sitting mounted in a big hole in the wall. Old wood floors, patched and sanded down to the nails. An assortment of chairs and little tables and a sideboard with coffee (not tea). A couple of almost living plants in various corners. Ceiling heights- varied, but generally about fifteen feet. Enough for some storage of goods on industrial racks, and now home to slow moving ceiling fans. Concrete roof deck, beams, columns. A couple of the columns, now that they are over thirty, need a little …. Help. Some steel members (I didn’t measure for size, but in the US they would be about W10x20) assisting the aged columns. Steel frame windows, which would leak cold air like a big hole in the wall if it ever got cold here.

There are a couple of big couches and some flimsy wooden chairs, along with a bunch of cozy white cushioned arm chairs scattered around. On the walls, there is Art. I didn’t look at it. The building and the scene were enough. It was busy and important.

The scene was the first anniversary, like I said. Instead of wine and some little cubes of cheese, there was fruit (watermelon and cantaloupe and tomatoes) and tea and coffee and Sprite and Coke. The big deal was the music. We arrived, Mr. Yu Gaoqing and I, about 8:30 on Sunday night, and the musicians had just started. There were about half a dozen performers. Each one did a piece or two, after which there was a presentation of thanks from the Master of Ceremonies to one of the artists at the space. The thank yous were pretty neat- a hand drawn caricature of the artist, signed and framed and given to each young artist. By young I mean not more than 24. Each one stumbled over a few words of thanks, and shuffled off to help everybody else with the drinks and logistics and setting up for the musicians.

This was the Club, or the clique, congratulating itself on being so cool and so Right and so persevering in the face of adversity. But not too cool, or too Right. There was the super thin girl in leather pants, but she laughed and fumbled around with everyone else and didn’t act nearly aloof enough to be an Artist. But the people in the audience- I counted about 75 at any one time- consisted partly of other artists waiting to be singled out for praise, and musicians, and girlfriends, and assorted hangers-on at MeToo. We were the outsiders, although people knew Mr. Yu because he runs the web site for the Hangzhou Daily, and so he is a contact to the Real World. Me, I looked like the obligatory foreign dinosaur, suddenly transported from 75 million years ago. But everybody laughed and said hi to me and no one called me lao, at least not to my face. There were two or three people taking videos of every important moment, so the media picture was complete. I can’t find a way to be cynical about all this, but if I were, I would say that the video will be for sale next week as a Celebration of New Art.

Each musician was an acoustic guitar player, some amped and some not. The first guy was definitely an Artist, flown in from Guangzhou. He played an intricate note, or a chord, and held it for a few seconds. Then the sound died, and he waited for about six or seven seconds (I counted after a while) for the Right Moment to hit the next note. This was one of those times that I should have been appreciating the spaces between the notes, like Jeff would have done. Instead, I got coffee. But Mr. Artist was genuinely applauded, and he was able to laugh and help the next guy set up, so he was okay.

A couple of the players had choreographed video to go with the guitar music. I liked the slow motion smoke the best. Like a cigarette ad from 1965.

The hit of the evening was from Beijing, flown in for the event. The Hit of the Evening was the biggest folk star in Beijing. He was Bob Dylan, circa 1965. Guitar, harmonica, gravelly voice biting off Chinese verses, with longish black hair (a big Chinese fad) while he adjusted the guitar and harmonica and commented on the scene. He really was good.

Al would know what to say about both these performers. He would be able to talk about their technique, and who their influences were, and whether they were actually good or not. Me, I just applauded with everyone else.

The Mistress of this whole affair, the MeToo and the anniversary and flying the musicians in from Beijing and Guangzhou for the night, was Jane. Jane is a drop-dead 1974 Faye Dunaway look-alike, in jeans and a huge smile for everyone and running around being the Mistress and setting up tables and plugging in guitars and awarding artists pictures of themselves and generally making the evening. The gallery is her baby. The story, as I hear it, is that she is married to a big Wenzhou shoe manufacturer, but she wants to do Something Else, and MeToo is it. So she can fly the musicians in for the night, but she understand the Scene, at least as I understand the Scene, and nothing is overdone. And she is in a rehabbed one story factory, not on fashionable xihu (West Lake, for those of you whose Chinese is still early) but off in the neighborhoods. I know that when the Chinese Roman Polanski decides to make meiguo-town (America-town), he already has his Evelyn Mulwray, running the MeToo. Can’t you see her, using the fingernail on her little finger to wipe the blood off Jackie Chan Gitis’s nose?

The MeToo was the cap to the evening. The first part was just as memorable, at least until 8:30 PM. Mr. Yu invited me to his family’s occasional Sunday night dinner at somebody’s apartment. He and his wife and three year old son picked me up at school and drove about half an hour (would have been less, but No One knows the expressway system, since everything is new. We had a couple of 180’s to do. There are no current maps). The apartment complex is nice, but the back stairs- or maybe these are the front stairs- to every fancy development I have seen in China are always the same. Dark, concrete stairs and exposed concrete walls, often not as clean as one would like, with beat up mailboxes on the first floor and heavy locks on the entry door and on every interior door. Like every developer runs out of money just before he finishes the stairs.

Inside, though, the apartment are very nice and this one was nicer than most I have seen. A regular big two bedroom condo with a dining room, a decent size kitchen with range hood (really necessary in China since there is so much frying and grilling of food). Separate living room, with obligatory big screen TV and couches. About ten or twelve of us at dinner. Two teenage boys who showed up for a little while, then drifted off for a while to reappear later. A couple of brothers-in-law, I guess, with wives and one teenage daughter. The usual warm welcome for me, everybody fumbling with hellos and ni haos and then being stumped, having exhausted our entire foreign vocabularies.

The entire scene was absolutely familiar. Men sat in the living room, watching the game, while the women worked in the kitchen as they should (that was for Ellen Herbener, just to see if she was still reading). Everybody involved in the food prep had done this before, and it was like clockwork. The usual Chinese banquet of about a dozen or fifteen different dishes, set on the table and squeezed in between glasses of tea and little plates and glasses of beer. Everybody worried that I needed a fork, and being amazed that I did not. I am not good with chopsticks, but as I tell everyone, I won’t starve to death. To demonstrate my dexterity, I then switch hands to using the chopsticks in my left hand, which usually amuses and confounds the crowd, since No One in China has ever done that before.

The dinner table discussion was pretty normal, from what I could tell. Families and events. Near the end of the dinner, Rachel showed up. I could not tell if she was related or just a friend. She is 27 years old, lives in Beijing, and owns her own small clothing store. She is the Chinese Rada Yovovich. Outgoing and talkative and smiley and smart. Her English is, of course, perfect. Went to school in Taiwan.

Men dressed normally. Long shorts, sport shirts, slippers in the house. Women dressed a little better, tending to black but dressier than the men, for sure. Women had spent some money on hair styling- lots of cuts and other stuff that I cannot describe, but nice. Some painted toes, some not. Some couples are starting to use wedding rings in China, but I think these couples, mostly in their thirties, are too old for that. The host always asks what the featured guest would like to drink, beer or liquor or wine, and I opted for beer, which seemed like the safest and best choice. It met approval. At family gatherings, everyone does toasts with everyone else, just like at the big government dinners Scott and I have attended (which are actually sort of family gatherings also). My toasts are getting pretty decent. I am okay if I can find my inner clinical psychologist or my outer Confucian junzi, but often after a couple of drain-the-glass toasts, I feel more like my inner rugby player, circa 1980. Not good in China.

Dinner felt so familiar and warm and familial. Every so often, someone jumped up to run in the kitchen to check on the next dish coming out, and the teenage daughter prepared the rice, which everyone liked. The fish bones and the meat bones and the crab shell and the shrimp shells all went on the tablecloth, in piles. The perfect eat-like-Vikings counterpart to the rather elegant meal. What’s not to like?

Update in 2018: Chen Dongfan, pictured above in 2009, has developed a large following, with promotion by Jane, who now uses the name Inna. Inna has galleries in Hangzhou and New York, and Chen has been featured at shows in the US and in Europe.

http://www.fougallery.com/chen-dongfan/

http://www.innart.org/en/top/index.html

At the Alamo in Hangzhou

Summer, 2004

One of the fun things to do in Hangzhou is attend the Romance of the Song Dynasty Show. The Song Dynasty extended for about 300 years, ending in about 1275, with the conquest of the Mongols. Now I don’t think there are many people in the US who would attend a show titled the Romance of the late Dark Ages, or the Romance of the Era of the Imperial and Magnificent Church. This was the 1200’s, and we all believe in the progress of history. But Barbara Tuchman subtitled her famous book about the 14^th Century, the next century, the Calamitous 14^th Century. So this emphasis on romance just feels …. sort of misplaced, to me, the westerner.

Except that this is China. Now, really, not even I take the Romance of the Song Dynasty performance as a historically accurate guide to events. The lasers, smoke effects, and stage lighting are probably later inventions. But the Song is one of the most celebrated and sophisticated of Chinese dynasties, and Hangzhou was the capital city in the late Song, so there is some local promotion going on here too. When Hangzhou was the capital of the Song, it was one of the wealthiest and largest cities in the world.

The show is only part of a replica Song dynasty Hangzhou, with many streets with shops and costumes for the tourists to wear, and trinkets to buy, and a water-splashing festival and torch festival and an embroidered ball throwing event (a husband selection process, maybe as good as any).

The big show is on a big stage, in a partly open air theater with hundreds of raked seats. The fixed stage is deep and wide – suffice it to say that it accommodates horses, and more than one at a time. The close-in rows of seats are on a turntable, and retract to uncover a water feature, really pretty necessary in south China.

There are several episodes of the beautifully costumed and choreographed dancing, with fabulous costumes and dozens of dancers and the backflips and leaps you are accustomed to seeing in Shen Yun. These are part of the main story, the glory of the Song and its extinguishing by the Mongols.

One of the set pieces is a battle, probably the battle of Lin’an in 1275, in which Song forces prepared for one of their last stands against the attacking Mongols. The staged stone fort housing the Song defenders looks for all the world like the south wall at the Alamo.

Mongols amassed. The Alamo -er, Lin’an – in the background

Source: TripAdvisor

I am pretty sure that the Mongols had far superior numbers at Lin’an, as did the Mexicans. The attacking Mongols have cannons, as did the Mexican army, that sound pretty loud in the performance space, and the attackers are using short ladders, just like at the Alamo, and the defenders are beating them off with the ends of their pikes, and above it all stands Yue Fei, a Song leader, dressed in fabulous military costumed splendor, looking like William Barrett Travis. The attackers have horses, on stage, and from what I can gather, the result at the Alamo was about the same as the result about 561 years earlier at Lin’an – all the defenders were killed, but the victory was short lived. Months later, the rebel Texans defeated the Republic of Mexico, and created the Republic of Texas. About 90 years later, the Ming rousted the ruling Yuan dynasty and drove them out of China, and the battle became an iconic struggle. I am pretty sure that Yue Fei would have written something similar to Travis’ last appeal from the Alamo –

I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier
who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country—Victory or Death

– although he might have referenced the Song emperor rather than the country. History does seem to rhyme.

Alice

June, 2010

Anybody in Chicago who has met Alice Zhou Xiaofang remembers her. She is the number 2 government person in the urban planning department in Shaoxing, but she is a mayoral advisor and all-around whip smart, dedicated, open, public servant. Who asks questions and tells you what she thinks. Who is also an electrical engineer and knit me the blue scarf I wore all last winter. I was in Shaoxing to look at another ancient town, called An Chang, which is on both sides of a narrow waterway on the outskirts of Shaoxing. It is now surrounded by modern buildings and cars and development, but some of the old town still remains. Old, in this case, is late Ming-early Qing dynasties, which puts the buildings at about 400 years old. This is based on fading inscriptions in stone, and on what I am told by Alice and others.

There may be some George Washington’s hand ax element to this, since wood exposed to the weather doesn’t normally last for 400 years. (Those who don’t know the George Washington story are encouraged to ask Rob Clarke). But there is no doubt about the style of buildings, and that what is there is pretty old. Even the residents.

You know that the government owns all the land in China, except for farmer land, and it is convenient to think of the government as the Big Landlord. Everybody, from government agencies to big factories to apartment dwellers, is on a month-to-month lease. When the landlord wants the property for some other use, there isn’t really much room for discussion. There is compensation for moving, and it doesn’t happen overnight or in 30 days, but when the decision is taken, there is no running to tenant court to fight it.

So our group of about seven people wandering around the old town, looking at preservation and tourism promotion possibilities, had no problem wandering into people’s houses or businesses, just to have a look. Sometimes I think this must have been arranged before hand, so we could just march in unannounced, but then I think maybe not.

We wandered into one particularly old housing unit, in the middle of another of the rabbit warren of extended family compounds. As in most others I have seen, there are several rooms located around a center courtyard, which in this case was about 8 feet by 15 feet, with an ozmanthus tree and their well for drinking water. The ozmanthus blooms in the fall, and smells really sweet. Really like perfume. In some of these older buildings, that is a welcome addition.

“Rooms” is really not correct. These are openings, usually with not much of a fourth wall, from a walkway. Uses are mixed- bedroom, living room, storage, workspace, kitchen, everything piled into corners and on top of other things and giving the impression that some of the piles have not been touched in a hundred years, except for the TV, which is usually not too new itself. For those of you who have spent time in cubicle land, or in corporate private office land, think of what life would be like if there were no real fourth wall to separate you from the hallway, and you lived permanently in the office or cubicle. For your life. And your family has lived in the same space, next to other extended family spaces, for generations.

In our current example, I was told by the great grandmother, who got me, the foreigner, a chair to sit on (imagine what that does to one’s virile image) that her grandfather built the compound. The great grandmother was the picture of a very old Chinese lady. You can imagine, but my guess would put her at probably 80 or 90 years old.

The question was what will happen to the space when the old lady passes on, and the grandmother chooses to move in with her daughter? The great granddaughter was there, having lunch, in a space where she grew up or spent a lot of time when she was a kid. Her age now, about 18. She was dressed like any teenager, and she looked so out of place with her t-shirt and necklace it was clear that she had no interest in inheriting this space. She might not have been going to college, but she was going to be living in the city, somewhere, in an apartment. She was as far away from this space as any US immigrant is from the old country.

So we talked with the family for a few minutes, and inspected the well, and looked at another piece of intricately carved wood that had been saved from the local misguided youth during the Cultural Revolution. I told you about the locals putting heavy mud or concrete over the carvings in Huatang ancient village, to keep them from the Red Guards who were out to destroy anything old or deemed culturally significant, especially if it reminded anyone of Europeans or emperors. In this case, the family took the wood piece apart from its place as a lintel, and stored it above the doorway hidden by clothes and cloth coverings.

When we were through inspecting, we thanked everybody and left, and the family went back to their lives. No knock on the door to enter, no leaving business cards when we left. Everyone completely cordial and feeling comfortable with the situation (except maybe me, but I am getting used to it now). Like walking into and out of a shoe store.

Accompanying Alice and me and the group was the actual honored guest of the day, Alistair Morrison. He is a Scottish expat, who taught for many years at Purdue. He is still sort of on the faculty at Purdue, as distinguished professor and assistant dean in the Hotel and Hospitality College. He has moved to China, and has a three year old business doing tourism promotion work for provincial and local governments here. He lives in Shanghai, and was joining us for a couple of reasons. He has done some work for Shaoxing on tourism promotion, so he and Alice were discussing that, and there is the customary interest in how to make the An Chang old town appealing to foreign tourists, as a way of bringing in money when the preservation work is complete. So he and Alice were talking about that as well.

Morrison seems like a good guy, and we talked while walking and later about many things. But at the moment, he was the featured guest, so he got to sit next to the number 1 at lunch, with Alice next to him and me next to Alice.

The seating arrangements at lunch and dinner are always important, even when you think they might not be. The number 1 seat at lunch was the mayor of Shaoxing County. This is the seat furthest from the doorway at the big round table. He was buying, so Morrison sat next to him on the left. The real actual number 1 came in a little late, as befits his status. This was the Party chief for Shaoxing County, and he sat to the mayor’s right.

To the right of the Party chief were four businessmen, I think all from one textile factory in Shaoxing. They were doing okay, I guess, although the economic changes have been hell on the textile business in China and in Shaoxing, which is their claim to specialty. But they were interested in doing some real estate development in Shaoxing, and they wanted to test the waters with the mayor and the Party leader. Not so unlike doing real estate development in Chicago.

So that is what Alice was doing at lunch with this crew. Alice works for the City of Shaoxing, not for the smaller County, so in CCP hierarchy her job is bigger than that of the mayor or the Party guy. Her Chinaman, as in the old Chicago phrase for one’s benefactor, is bigger. So Alice was there, as the No. 2 government official in the City planning department, to tell the businessowners what she thought.

Lunch was eleven of us around the big table. The usual toasts of everyone to everyone else, and in my case it was mostly get the attention of the intended toastee, get up, say a few words in English or Chinese, mostly thank you, and drink up. That is fine, and everyone understands. You have to keep in mind that the Chinese generally don’t drink anything with meals except tea. No ordering a Coke or orange juice. And one can sip tea whenever one wants at lunch, but it is less refreshing than the chosen form of alcohol. So the toasts are a way to get some liquid refreshment during lunch, and frequent toasts are a form of medicinal treatment, to keep from having a throat so dry that you cough on your next crab claw or vegetable dish. That is not what Alice told me, but that is my story.

After a couple of hours, we got through most of the toasts and the small talk and preservation and tourism and buttering up the leaders and the question of real estate development came up. Alice was masterful. She began talking, in a no-nonsense way, but she held forth. In a room of eleven people, Alice the only woman, she probably made point after point, from intellectual to practical to economic to good of the city and the nation. I didn’t get any of it, of course, but she held the floor, without any objections or questions or anyone excusing themselves to go to the bathroom, for well over an hour. Everyone sat up and paid attention. No one smoked or drank. I don’t think anyone coughed.

She told me later that she suggested the business owners not do the real estate development. Too much overbuilding right now, and for the property they want to develop the government already has other plans. She may get overruled, and the mayor and Party guy might be able to do that, but that is the nature of guanxi and pushing against each other in the rush to make money and a name for oneself. But everybody wanted to hear what she had to say, and she told them. And that is why I like Alice.

Health Reform, 2010

May, 2010

Brenna and I had colds. Not so bad, but she wanted to go to Shanghai to the Expo in a few days, so I thought we should make sure there was no serious problem developing. No fun walking around the Expo with some hacking cough.

My cough had descended into my chest, sort of a bad sign, so I called my people at the school about a medical visit.

Pay first, then see doctor … about $0.58 … each

Students here seem to get sick a lot, which I attribute to the lack of heat in the dorms when it is actually freezing outside, or maybe to their relative lack of exposure to coffee, sugar, fat, and high-fructose corn syrup. Anyway, a lot of students call me to say that they are in the hospital, for two or three or five days. They are being treated for some variation on cold like symptoms. I did not want some school nurse telling me I had to go to the hospital for three days. I was not that sick, and neither was Brenna. What I wanted was to make sure we did not have some weird disease, and if needed get a shot or some medicine stronger than coffee, sugar, fat, and high fructose corn syrup.

The school arranged a car and driver to take us to the real hospital, not the school clinic. (The school clinic is where the students go, and the faculty also unless they have something really serious).

Those who think that China is some mono-formulaic culture, with no innovative capability, are, of course, wrong in many ways. In the US, we have been using public private partnerships to bring more flexibility and cost control to construction and management of projects. So, too, in China. Our school, ZUST, is a government school, but the management of daily maintenance, cleaning, food service provision, is contracted out, just like in regular American schools.

Contracting out includes providing the school with cars and drivers for transporting faculty to far off meetings, or picking up people from airports, or taking foreign experts like me to the hospital. The cost is not small. A trip to the Hangzhou airport is billed at about 250 rmb, which is about $36. A taxi is a little more than half that amount (note – this was in 2010). But, convenience and no buying of cars and servicing them and depreciation and driver overtime and health care and pensions and vacation pay (not). Whatever.

The cost for a trip to the hospital, near xihu, should be about 75 rmb if done in a taxi. About $11. For the school car, the cost is double (they want to charge for both directions) – rmb 150, about $22. The school will pick that up, of course, for foreign experts like me. Not for regular faculty. “Take the bus.”

It probably would have been possible to navigate through the hospital without assistance from someone who speaks Chinese. Pretty much everyone working in the hospital has had at least some English, many probably have a lot of English, and pointing at my throat and coughing works pretty well as an indicator of the problem.

I took along some reinforcements anyway. Dr. Dang, the Ph.D. marketing professor, agreed to go along and manage the process for us. Good idea, since I did not know the procedure anyway.

Once in the door, one is directed to the payment window. This is the Chinese version of giving people at the front desk your insurance card. No need to sign waivers of anything. No need to show passports or proof of employment at the school. “Sick? Ok. Pay up. Sign here.”

Economics suggests that in a monopoly system, prices should be above marginal cost. Economics also suggests that if prices are too low, the system will be abused and there will be excess demand, and probably long lines by which to ration care. So we have a problem here, as you shall see.

There were, in fact, two people in line ahead of us to pay our visit fee. We must have stood in line for at least three minutes, waiting, waiting, waiting. When we got to the counter, we explained the reason for the visit (so the clerk could direct us to the right department), she handed us a bill for this initial visit. Total for Brenna and me, 8 rmb. $1.16. $0.58 each.

We were directed upstairs to the respiratory department (I know, because all the signs are in English, and even in Chinese). Again, there was someone ahead of us seeing the doctor. We were forced to wait in the hall, again, for what seemed like ten minutes but was probably more like five.

We walked in, explained our problem to the doctor, who listened to our chests, asked a few questions (fever? How long? Other medical problems?) and prescribed some medicine. I asked if he was giving us zhongyao or xiyao, Chinese medicine or western medicine. He laughed, and said we were not sick enough for zhongyao, but he would give us some anyway.

I think if we had had more time, I could have asked him what he thought of the Knicks and Bulls, but we wanted to get out of the hospital so we could go shopping.

We went back downstairs to the pharmacy, stood in line once again for about three minutes, gave the clerk our prescription, and waited. And waited more, this time for at least five minutes. We got bottles of Robitussin, just like in the US, but with Chinese labeling. But Robitussin, in the same style font and package design. Just like in Walgreen’s. And some zhongyao, not like in Walgreen’s, but take two pills twice a day.

The pharmacy cost was a little high. Total for Brenna and me, the same medicines for each, about 200 rmb, about $29. Dr. Dang said that the pharmacy is where the doctors make their money, since they receive- I dunno- commissions, or kickbacks, or profits, or something from the sale of the meds. Just like in the US. Hard to support a family, I guess, on doctor visits of $0.58. Even in China.

To celebrate, we let the school driver go home alone, and we went shopping for coffee filters. Carrefour, the French retailer, was about three blocks from the hospital.

But the cost of the car and the driver was only about 50 rmb less than the cost of the doctor, the hospital, and the medicine. I could write more about this, but I will let you all have that discussion. Socialized medicine. Gini curve. Price above marginal cost. Returns to education. Benefits of being the odd one in the group. And, as you will see below, maybe the perils of underinvestment.

Health care in China is not always wonderful. A good friend of mine had thyroid cancer several years ago, had part of her thyroid removed, and now takes thyroid medicine every day. Not such a big deal. But the dosage of the med needs to be carefully controlled, because the side effects- sleeplessness, irritability, inability to concentrate- can be significant.

China does not have a history of personal physicians. You have a chart, and whichever doctor is available when you come is the doctor you see. Sort of like buying hot dogs at the local stand. You can’t always get your dog from Mortie, the guy who gives you extra fries with that. Personal physicians are available, of course, but that gets into money that most people do not have.

So the monitoring of the meds can be a little iffy. Doses need to be changed with body changes, and it seems that not all doctors are equally well-informed about practices. My own online research suggests that beta blockers can be used to mitigate the side effects, but Chinese doctors do not want to add a medicine on top of a medicine. Bad harmony. So side effects are just that. Side effects. Live with it.

My friend is in Dalian, which is an international city on the coast. Not some rural county in the interior. But the ranks of cancer specialists seem a little thin. Using a little of my guanxi, I called a zhengfu guanyuan government official IIT student who is a doctor, to see if he could find better treatment for my friend than she was getting. We got referred back to the same doctor my friend had been seeing. So no progress there. Maybe she is getting the best care there is.

I am sure there is a way to deal in a more sophisticated way with thyroid cancer side effects, but I cannot find it. But I have never before confronted the possibility that there might be better care easily available, but I could not have it. That’s what I get for living in a city in the US. But my guess is that even with better universal care in the US, that possibility will confront more and more people over the next couple of decades. Rationing, not by price, but by location. I know this has been the case in poor areas in the US, and in China, for as long as there has been sophisticated medicine. If you want to drive a few hours to get treatment, maybe you can have it. But if you need to do that every week, or every two weeks, or once a month, better be prepared to not use up sick days for other illnesses. I have already seen that for specialty surgery in the US. I won’t be surprised to see it extend to more prosaic treatment, as rural areas empty out.

People suggest that China will become more like the US, and the US will become more like China. Could be right, for more things than we think.

Happy You and Me Party

December 2009

Chinese people all seem to have hidden talents. Sing, dance, do calligraphy, perform something. For a long time, I saw this in my Chinese government friends, and I thought, well, these are the best and the brightest, so they are smart and talented people. But the arts cultivation is wider than that.

So now I see I was wrong. My college students- who are not yet in the government- put on a Happy You and Me Party for all the foreign students and teachers about two weeks before Christmas. The event was sponsored by the school, and the International Chinese Students Organization. The ICSO students serve as the go-to helpers for foreigners- take us shopping in a school bus on Saturdays, so we can buy regular American (or German) junk food, instead of Chinese junk food, and help with recharging phones with money and related problems.

This was clearly the holiday party, but it was not called a Christmas party. I don’t think that was any cultural sensitivity to not everyone in the US or Germany or Russia or Kazakhstan being Christian. Chinese are generally surprised to learn that Jews are not Christians. I don’t know what they think of Muslims. I think the sensitivity is to the Chinese government, not wanting to promote a religious event. So, Happy You and Me Party.

But this really was the Christmas Party. There were two small fake green trees (Walgreen’s, about $6.99) about three feet tall, and bags of decorations that we used to decorate the trees. There were about fifty Chinese students, and at the peak probably about twenty or twenty five foreigners, mostly Germans with a few Americans and Russians, and some kids from Zambia and Ghana. I was surprised that not all the foreigners were there. They missed a nice event. Lots and lots of blown up balloons, and beer and juice and fruit, bananas and oranges and cantaloupe. Everybody, of course, taking pictures. Oh, yeah. We all wore red Santa hats.

One of the students monitored the computer, with Christmas songs and other American sort of classic music (Edelweis is a song that every Chinese person knows, in English and Chinese, and probably also in German).

One of the students acted as the emcee, and she was good at getting everybody to jump in and get in the spirit of the evening. The big deal, for me, was the games. Chinese really do like to do things in groups, and they are expert at group party games that get everyone involved. Our games were fun, a little tame, but here is what we did. Everybody got into groups of six, hugging. On a signal, individuals in the groups had to re-form into groups of seven. Or nine. Or five. Anyone left out of a group, or any group that was unable to count, received – my favorite Chinese word- a punishment cheng fa. Punishments, in this case, were all the same. Losers had to sit down on a chair with a blown up balloon on the seat, and the balloon would break, and everybody would laugh or giggle. And the game would go on.

Next game was a couples contest thing, but randomly selected couples. One of each pair had a cardboard Santa mask covering the face, and was given a stick, sort of a walking stick, but thinner and lighter. Each couple stood side by side, their inner legs taped together so they had to move in unison. Everybody else gathered around the two couples, with dozens of balloons on the ground in the middle of the circle. The concept was for the seeing member of the couple to direct the other, with the mask and the stick, to break balloons. Whichever couple broke the most, in the time allowed, got off without a punishment. The losing couple had to do something, dance, hop on one foot, sing. Each member of the losing couple drew their punishment from folded pieces of paper in a jar. One guy had to kiss the girl, which in any sort of normal universe should not have been a problem. Among Chinese college freshmen and sophomores, this was almost like having to get past girl cooties to get the guy to do it. Everybody was giggling and embarrassed, and the girl ran away before she was induced to come back. The guy, the goof, finally kissed her keeping the piece of paper between their lips. How in the world did this country end up with 1.3 billion people? Some punishment.

Next game was a pass the water in the Dixie cup game. Two teams, about eight to ten people on a team, everybody puts a Dixie cup (ok, probably not a Dixie cup. A southern China, cup, then.) between their lips, with the bottom ridge of the cup between their lips. Concept is to pour water from person to person, one cup to another, no hands, obviously, without spilling much. Winning group was the one with the most water in the bucket at the end. Losers, of course, received a punishment.

These are just three examples. There are plenty of other games I have seen, ways to create a fun evening for small groups of twenty or fifty, without spending money, as tame or as risqué as you wish, and as part of the punishments people have to use their skills in singing, dancing, doing pantomime, or memorizing numbers or passages. Everybody participates, everybody has a good time, and it beats the hell out of sitting around drinking and watching tv. Fun in groups. Everybody learns to sing, and dance, or do something. If for no other reason, it is punishment.

One-third Coke, Two-thirds Sprite

Spring, 2011

For the last six years before I came to China, all of my students at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago were zhonguo zhengfu guanyuan, Chinese government officials. Many have become friends, and I stay in touch with them as much as I can. This is about a wedding I attended recently. Michael, one of my government students, picked me up at school.

When Michael got married, in 1990 in the northeastern province of Liaoning, the ceremony was much simpler, he said. At that time, some rural people did not have much money, not even food to eat sometimes, he said. He had been working on a dam project in the south of China, and he took time out from that to get married in Shenyang. His bride was a college classmate, also from Shenyang. He graduated from the university in 1988.

He was happy to accompany me to Hangzhou to the wedding of Chen Yifu and his bride, because he said he learned some things about how young couples do weddings now. Michael is about 45.

There is no standard format to a Chinese wedding, just as there is none in the US, although there are some common features. I am not expert enough to know what is common and what is not, so I will just tell you what I saw.

Not having to worry about churches and ministers seems a really nice difference in the Chinese ceremony, compared with the typical American wedding. For one thing, it makes scheduling easier, since you only have to schedule one venue on one day. In general, that is a hotel or big restaurant. There are enough people in China so that weddings happen every day of the week, and are scheduled in some places like clockwork. Ten o’clock to twelve o’clock. One o’clock to three o’clock . Four to Six. None of the American standing around to see if the groom shows up, or if the best man is drunk or not. If you don’t start on time, you might end up marrying the next guy or girl in line for the banquet hall.

Chen Yifu is an interpreter in the foreign affairs department of the province, so he has a pretty sophisticated job. He has a lot of friends, and since he is only 29, a lot of people will want to be his friend for a long time. The banquet hall was full, and I figured that to be about 400 people. The usual friends, family, and co-workers. In this case, that included about twenty of the fellow government officials from IIT in Chicago. They came from Hangzhou, of course, but from all over the province, some from four or five hours away by car or bus or train. Did you know anyone from work who traveled five hours by bus to get to your wedding? Many friendships are deeper here.

The wedding is simply a personal celebration of commitment, and is a fun and happy occasion without the overlay of religious and moral depression. No one has to feel bad, or has to worry about the relationship between love for one’s partner and commitment to a body of religious dogma. You and me, babe. And nobody else.

Chen was happy to have his leader, the chief of the Provincial Foreign Affairs office, do a toast and little speech near the end. That really signals his importance, and his future prospects, and the importance of Party as family.

Before the ceremony, the room looked pretty much like a hotel wedding reception set up anywhere in Chicago. About 36 tables, ten people to a round table. Defined center aisle for the procession, and a raised stage for the performance.

There were some differences, though. The opening music was a progression of themes, from the old MGM movie opening theme, to the Carmen Burina music in the Steven Spielberg movies, the part where the bad guys are just about to roast the virgin, to the Star Wars opening.

After Star Wars, the lights dimmed, and the focus went to the big screen set up, where there was a five minute show of baby pictures and growing up pictures of the bride and groom, set to some decent music so that it was pretty fun to watch. And not just single picture after another, but each screen was a montage of shots, and some faded in and some out, as if it had been designed by someone who was not the brother-in-law. And then, to applause, the procession of the bride and groom, only. No best man, no wedding party, no in laws. They were already in the room, at the tables.

It is probably a waste of electrons to write that the bride was radiant, but its true. She had a big white dress with lots of petticoat like things and some silver spangles near the middle, to go along with her big dark eyes, and a big red rose pinned to the top. No strap, shoulder-less dress. Very pretty. She had a diamond tiara like headband that worked great with the dress and the eyes. Chen wore a tux with a flower in the lapel, and looked pretty sharp himself.

Chen and his wife, Hu Yuanyuan were the focus of attention, obviously, but they were also the masters of ceremony here. After the procession, they mounted the stage and with dual microphones, did some introductions and thanks and moved on to a serenade to each other, each taking a part and standing at either end of the platform. This is where all the Chinese singing practice comes in handy. Both had good voices, and were not afraid to use them. If I didn’t know them, I might have figured them for a new stage act. After lots of applause, they proceeded to another video piece, this time a sort of cartoon celebrating their parents, and how their parents were getting older, and how much they had learned over the years from their parents, and how even in their old age (Chen is 29 years old, so his parents might be as much as 55) they should take heart, because, in the last slide of the video, they should expect a new addition to the family some day.

There were stage flood lights on the couple, and video recording of the event, and it was well choreographed. There must have been some rehearsal for this, but I think the hotel people have done this before, so my guess is that if you give them cues, they can present the music and lighting very well.

Chen reached in his pocket, and gave Yu a ring, which he slipped on her finger, and she did the same for him. Not all people wear their wedding rings, even if they have them. Some couples do not have rings, or only buy them later when they have the money. The rings were the symbol of commitment to each other, and after that, the parents came up on stage and there were brief speeches by the fathers, and a brief song by the bride and groom to their parents, ending with a joint, wo ai nimen, which is I love you, from each of them to their parents and inlaws.

Other weddings I have seen have fireworks outside after the ceremony, sometimes pretty big ones, but Chen and Yuanyuan did not. There is a procession of cars, some with the same kind of paper flower stuff we do on cars in the US. Chen and bride stayed around for another hour or two. Ms. Yu had changed into another big dress, purple this time, with lots of petticoats and frills. They went around from table to table, doing toasts and offering guests a small gift, nuts or cigarettes. This was the picture and congratulations time.

The ceremony part took all of about 45 minutes, and it’s a good thing, because people were starting to eye the bottles of mao tai sitting on each table. Mao tai is the preferred brand of strong Chinese clear alcohol, pretty much like vodka. It is the drink of choice for early toasts, and later toasts if people can keep going.

I sat with seven or eight of the students from last year in Chicago, along with the provincial organization department representative, Mr. Wu, who sends Zhejiang Province people to IIT. Food was the Chinese version of pasta, chicken, and polish sausage that dominated weddings on the south side of Chicago that I attended when I was 29. Beautifully prepared fish, tender and juicy chicken arranged in a separate dark meat-light meat bowl, duck cut up and rearranged in pieces shaped to look like a flying duck, several vegetable dishes, nuts, intricately carved fruit, beautifully arranged shrimp, …. Okay, maybe a lot nicer than Chicago south side weddings in 1979. As you all know, everyone in the world tells Americans what bad food they eat, and the food at the wedding is a clear reminder that Americans have a lot to learn about good eating.

There were no flower centerpieces on the tables, which would be a problem with the food all sitting on the zhuan pan (lazy susan) on each table. But the center aisle of the banquet hall was lined with flowers in standing containers, each about four feet high. The tables were loaded with food, and mao tai, and then beer, and coke, and sprite. As you know, the toasts are a big part of the greeting and bonding at these events, and if it is a government related wedding, my guess is that the toasts are even more meaningful.

I sat next to Kathy Guo Chenglong from last year. Guo is smart and beautiful and has big eyes and long dark hair and a big and easy smile, and her English is very good and she is tall and imperially slim and dresses like a thirty two year old woman in business. Taller, more confident, and holds her head higher than people around her.

So it seemed a natural question- how does she, weighing about 100 pounds (45 kilograms), keep up with the after work business meetings three or four nights a week that she must do as part of the business of government in China? The mao tai stuff is really potent, and no one can drink this stuff for long without bad effects.

The first toast is usually to everyone at the table from the host of the table, and the liquor is that chosen by the person giving the toast. But after that, it is usually possible to make substitutions to beer or wine. It is difficult to avoid having something. But the mao tai is clear, and cannot be distinguished from water after the people around you have had a couple of glasses full, and beer, Guo said, looks pretty much like one third coke and two thirds sprite, and Shaoxing yellow (brown) wine can be approximated with other proportions, and my guess is that Kathy is an expert at that, and that is how she gets through the evenings. But don’t tell anyone.

Some of the guests at the wedding had come from a long way to attend, and did not want to go home right after the ceremony. You know about KTV, the ubiquitous karaoke palaces. We adjourned to one not far from the hotel, about 14 of us. It looked as if it would be all men, which was going to be a little depressing, but then three of our government official female students showed up, which made singing a little easier. Better voices, and more range. The women said that the men were a little shy about singing, and in some cases that is for good reason. Me, included. But I had to try, to summon the strength. Some of the men had good voices, but Mr. Wu, the organization department man, would not participate at all. Too embarrassed. He sat there, and enjoyed the show, but he didn’t make any selections for himself at the big karaoke song selection computer.

As the guest at the KTV event, I had to find a couple of songs to sing, and you know that is not too hard. There are hundreds of songs in English, but most of them are from this century, and my musical knowledge is from the prior one. And I never participated in any national day singing competitions, so my voice is perennially rusty. But I could find Desperado, and Edelweis, and everybody in China knows Edelweis, so they could sing along, and the words apply equally well in Austria, and China, and the US. And after about an hour, I dragged the provincial organization department head up to the front, and he sort of stood there while I sang Edelweis, and getting him involved was a good thing for the group, and for me, and I think for him. Get him out of his shell. I think that is my job in China. I was sort of the American Fraulein Maria, played by me instead of Julie Andrews, with Mr. Wu as Commander von Trapp.

The singing went on for a couple of hours, pretty much everybody taking a turn or two and joining in on others. The video backgrounds to each song are usually in keeping with the love seeking, love found, love lost themes of most songs. But three songs had inexplicable rugby scene videos as part of some kind of love song, with Chinese rugby players, and the students knew that I had played that long ago, so there was some connection for them and me. But at the end of the day, nothing compares with singing Desperado, or Edelweiss, in English with a bunch of Chinese friends, with Chinese accompaniment, in China and away from home, and being by far the oldest person in the room, and wondering what is going through everybody else’s heads as you contemplate letting somebody love you and bless my homeland forever.

Nothing compares. This is golden.

China Reflections

Category: China Emails

Some of you remember Victoria, from Taizhou

Spring, 2010

Jazz at the JZ Club

October, 2009

The Grade School Performance Gap

April, 2010

Into Clean Air

October, 2009

Jane, Circa 2009

At the Alamo in Hangzhou

Summer, 2004

Alice

June, 2010

Health Reform, 2010

May, 2010

Happy You and Me Party

December 2009

One-third Coke, Two-thirds Sprite

Spring, 2011