The Grade School Performance Gap

April, 2010 

Vicky invited me to the opening ceremonies of the 3rd 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 64th 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

Cultural Hegemony, from 1959

Summer, 2016 

Not sure where this fits … I have always thought that the comments on the “Chinglish” street signs and hotel menus were tending to the mean-spirited, even if some were funny.   No one laughs at my speaking Chinese.

We were at afternoon tea yesterday with one of my students from Chicago and her husband and daughter.  They both work for the Hangzhou police department, in jobs that have to do with contact with foreign governments and screening government officials who want to go abroad.

The place for tea was beautiful –  a hotel developed by Greentown, one of the biggest Chinese real estate developers, set in the hills of Hanghzou and a bit isolated from everything else.  The design of  the hotel is meant to evoke 1920s London – smoking rooms and billiard rooms and card rooms and a veranda looking out onto the hills and landscaped gardens – and the super-Olympic sized outdoor pool, surrounded by falling waters cut into the hills.   The hotel was all highly modern, and highly high end, otherwise.

There was a (modern) movie on the big tv in the sitting room, some sort of 1920s setting English upper class drama.  Think Bertie Worcester, but not his club, the club used by his uncle.  Afternoon tea was 1:30 to 4:30.  Varieties of teas with cucumber sandwiches (no crusts, of course) and some varieties of breads and macarons (is that right?  not macaroni, not macaroons, I don’t think … little round colored cookies, two or three levels, like a little cookie sandwich … sort of like upper class Oreos) and a bunch of other stuff.

Piped in music was 1920s or 1930s big band and jazz – not loud, just terrifyingly smart.

Anyway, this is all superfluous.   There was an event at the hotel, The Next Part of the Bargain, designed to teach Chinese ladies how to be elegant.   Probably very expensive.  This is an all weekend event, with small classes and probably instructions in how to curl your little finger when drinking tea … sort of a weekend group Henry Higgins experience in China.  Walk, small talk, nodding appropriately, probably makeup and expensive dresses.

Anyway, about a dozen of the ladies who signed up for the weekend were taking a short course in how to walk elegantly in a qipao, the old traditional Chinese slim dress with the slit up the side.   We were seated on the veranda, looking out on the hills and the pool down below, and the qipao ladies were … well, not prancing … not performing … not sashaying … walking elegantly, up and down in front of us, to piped in music for the occasion.

I mean, the qipao has been out of style for modern Chinese women since about the 1930s, so this short course is so retro that it must be in style again for Chinese women so wealthy that they don’t care what the current style calls for.  Now, one usually see the qipao only on attendants at formal events, on female flight attendants, or sometimes at the entrance to a fancy restaurant.

But the music they were elegantly walking to is the thing.  In addition to some jazz hits, there was also this, and you can’t make this stuff up.  Those of you who are old enough might remember the Davy Crockett craze around 1959, with the movie and the hit song.   The wealthy ladies were walking elegantly to the soothing sounds of a Chinese woman singing, in English, over and over again, a soft, lilting, slow dance version –   “Davy, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.   Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee ….”

Source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAVN_n0PljQ