thinking about Chinese pollution in Meadville

It's hard to avoid discussion of China's pollution situation, even now that I've returned to rural Pennsylvania, with amounts of green and clean air for which I have ever new appreciation. NPR yesterday featured a story titled "Athletes Struggle for Air Amid China's Pollution" about Canadian athletes playing soccer in Beijing (helpful discussion about spitting included). Pollution indexes for Beijing ranged from 170 to 240 while the Canadians were there. For comparison, Washington, DC averages 30-40, health warnings begin at 60, and by 90 people with any relevant health issues are warned to stay inside. Somehow my constant "cold" while in Beijing makes even more sense now.

evidence

Some photos from the race. Here I am in Inspection Day. Looking down you can see Yin-Yang Square, which was the start-finish area. On the first trip on the Wall we descended these stairs to get back to Yin-Yang Square. The second trip on the Wall we climbed these stairs to get back up to the Wall.




At the finish, with the Wall in the background, giving something of a perspective of the climb that faced us at 21 miles:

real men

Bu dao Changcheng, fei hao Han. “If you don’t go to the Great Wall, you’re not a real man.” This is a popular saying in China, commonly ascribed to Chairman Mao (one source I’ve found said that the line originates in a poem he wrote during the Long March, giving the quote an interesting political-literary context). Interestingly, the character for “man” (Han) also refers to the Chinese themselves, and so it can also be translated as “If you don’t go to the Great Wall, you’re not a good Chinese,” but almost all English translations I’ve seen translate it as “man.” Well, whichever it is, I guess I am now a “real man” or “good Chinese.” The marathon is complete!

I went to the “inspection day” on Thursday, where the race organizers require you to walk the portion of the Great Wall, about 80 miles outside of Beijing, that is the site of the race. It would clearly have been possible to not do this, and to some extent I regretted using my legs in this way just two days before the race, but nonetheless I participated. This time we took a bus up the 3 mile climb to the wall entrance—on race day the climb is the beginning of the run. The elevation profile of the race unfortunately does not seem to be available anywhere online, though they had it on display at the race site. We walked the Great Wall section and then descended steeply back down to the start/finish area—the bulk of the 3800 steps (walked twice in the marathon) are in that part of the course.

I then stayed the rest of Thursday and Friday in a guest house literally at the foot of the Wall, which was actually completely boring, as I wanted to walk as little as possible. I read quite a bit and otherwise spent a lot of time stewing in my own incredibly anxious juices. One race organizer, staying in the hotel where I stayed, informed that that this is considered an “extreme marathon.” Really?

So, the race course, briefly described, basically consists of:

1. a 3 mile steady climb to get onto the Wall (since the Wall is built on top of mountains, you have to get up the mountain first to get onto the Wall, of course raising the question of why they felt they needed a Wall on top of the already-existing mountains)
2. 2 miles on the Wall (lots of up and down, but more down this way) and then back down off it
3. about 16 miles through various villages and countryside, including two other rather long ascent-descent sequences (one of them was probably about 1 1/2 miles up and another 1 1/2 miles down—a bit of a cruel joke to play in the middle of a race like this one)
4. back onto the Wall, this time backwards, so the steps that you descended to get off the Wall are now climbed to get back up onto it (this was probably about 1000+ steps, all going up)
5. 3 miles, this time nicely downhill, to get to the finish line

The time limit in the race is eight hours—they give you six hours to get onto the Great Wall for the second time. I was hoping to do the first 5 miles in under two hours—and I did it in less than 90 minutes, so that was good. Legs were shaky after first getting off the wall but then I got my rhythm and felt good.

The middle part of the course was through the countryside. I didn’t have a camera with me and really regretted not bringing one—the countryside was lovely as were all of the Chinese spectators. There were bunches of children along the course, some handing out little flowers that they had picked from along the road, and many wanting to give high fives. One village had organized a cheer squad, with a woman leading a group of children in rhythmically crying “jia you!” which literally means “step on the gas!” I had a conversation with a boy on a bicycle who wanted to see my watch and who declared it “piaoliang” (pretty), which it really is not.

The temperature was steadily rising through the day although I don’t think it really hit 90 degrees as this article claims:

Spaniard Beats Great Wall Marathon Record

There were lots of points where they were handing out bottled water, although a few of them were already out of water when I got there. I had a drop bag at the 16 mile point with a bottle of Pocari Sweat (my energy drink of choice here in China, for the name if nothing else) and a can of coffee (caffeine can never be a bad thing at times like this). But I basically felt good on this portion, intentionally holding back in my pacing.

I hit the Great Wall for the second time at exactly five hours, which I was pleased about. I was deliberately going slowly in the middle section, walking most of the uphills so as to save my legs for the last climb. And a climb it was. It was a long, steep ascent up many, many stone stairs and a goat path to get back onto the Wall itself. It was pretty much like watching a giant car wreck—many people were groaning, stopping, massaging their calves, and even sitting down. I was determined not to stop and definitely not to sit (seems like once you sit you are planted in that spot permanently, never to move again) so I just tried to very slowly but steadily climb. I was checking splits on my watch every 5 km (about 3 miles) and the 5 km with that section of the race took me about 1 hour and 20 minutes—as opposed to 36 minutes for my fastest 5km during the race and under 30 minutes for me to race 5 km! It was good to actually get on the Wall since that featured at least some descents which allowed for some variety of muscles being used.

This time the Wall, counting the climb up to it, took me an hour, which I was actually quite happy with (one hour for 1.5 miles…). I was completely joyful when I finally got off the Wall and started the nice descent back down the road I had started on about 6 hours earlier. I was able to run most of this fairly easily and was equally joyful when I crossed the finish line in about 6 hours, 38 minutes. The conventional wisdom seems to be that this course takes about 1 1/2 times longer than the standard marathon course, so I am happy with this time.

Today I am sunburned, somewhat sore, and very tired, but I’m off for lunch with an Allegheny student and her mother (from China) and then to the race banquet tonight. I’ll post a few more pictures in the next day or so.

tapering

It is now race minus 6 days. I am feeling a variety of emotions—nerves, excitement, anticipation of the inevitable post-race letdown. According to weather.com, the currently predicted high for race day is 92 degrees. I think it probably goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that that is a Very Bad Thing. I’m guessing that anything resembling shade will be a precious commodity along the race course, given the overall lack of trees here and the exposure on the Great Wall section in particular.

I have actually never run a marathon alone, so this will be a very different experience for me in a number of ways. All of my races except one have been with Jim, and the exception I ran with my friend Bubbles (a.k.a. Kathy). I’ve also never trained so much on my own, which has had its difficult moments but has also been really good for my psyche. I feel more like I have made “friends with myself” in ways that I never did before.

In my running, I’ve been tapering this week, which is good because work has been busy. First I made a short trip to a town in rural Hebei province to meet a female village head, which was interesting. China has elections at the village level that are genuinely competitive, but villages also have a Communist Party structure that provides a competing source of authority, and so although this woman was elected by a landslide by her fellow villagers, she often lacks the clout to actually govern, and was in tears describing her frustrations.

I also attended a conference of six women’s NGOs, which was a good reminder of how, anywhere you go in the world, some things are basically the same. This meeting was like any other academic conference I’ve attended where people are given 10 minutes to summarize their report/paper and are completely incapable of being anything resembling succinct. This leads to an escalating series of maneuvers by the panel moderator to get them to shut up—first finger waving (“2 minutes to go!”) then verbal intervention (“time’s up!”), more verbal intervention (“TIME’S UP!!!!”) and finally, application of duct tape. People at this conference also adopted the strategy of speaking as fast as they possibly could and of going through their Powerpoint slides at a brisk pace, and since it was all in Chinese, this was extra-challenging for me.

On a somewhat different note, there is an excellent article about Beijing, describing many of the things I also love about the city, in today’s Washington Post:

Beijing’s Moment

One correction from a Zhongguotong (“Old China Hand”—something people here sometimes call me). The photo at the top of the article is not Mao’s Mausoleum, but Tiananmen Gate (“the Gate of Heavenly Peace”), which is the entrance to the Forbidden City.

I don’t know if I will blog again between now and when I leave for the race (4:45 a.m. on Thursday morning, bleh). I will be spending the two nights prior to the race at the Wall. If you think of it at 7:30 p.m. Friday night eastern standard time, please send some good vibes my way, as the race starts here Saturday at 7:30 a.m. Many thanks to all who have been reading this and offering support!

patience

It is said (by someone) that the advantage of trail running is that you are not stuck so much in your own thoughts as you are when you are pounding the concrete, since you must remain mentally alert to stones, tree roots, etc. and that this gives your mind something to play with as you run. Well, trail running is not really an option here in Beijing, given (as I’ve noted previously) that the entire city is being paved over. However, there is really no excuse for mental boredom here, either—as I’ve also noted before, running here provides its own set of obstacles. I particularly pondered this today as I ran my 10 miles in the Purple Bamboo Park. It is supposed to hit 90 degrees here today, so I headed out early (-ish, at about 9:30 a.m.) and the park was already jam packed full of people, probably also trying to beat the heat. It truly is a test of one’s patience to run or even sometimes just to walk here. It is a constant game of dodging people to avoid causing upset or international incident. For instance, there is the “little emperor” syndrome—six adults (two sets of grandparents and one set of parents) walking their only child/grandchild, all six abreast on the sidewalk, the child pondering this phenomenon Buddha-like in his or her stroller, still blissfully unaware of the pressures to be heaped upon him or her as the only realization of the expectations of six grown-ups. Or there are the crowds of people gathered around pigeons or ducks, feeding possibly the only wild animals some of them are likely to see in their lives.

My parents in Purple Bamboo Park:

I’m sure this has been written already to death by Max Weber and other observers of the religion-culture-society link, but I’m not sure it is accidental that Buddhism, with its emphases on patience and compassion, arose in crowded Asia (yes, I’m aware that it is more crowded now than when the Buddha was around). I know that being here is all too often a test of my own patience, as well as my social-science derived convictions of the structural causes of much of the human condition. (By that I just mean, greatly oversimplifying, that if one is rich, or poor, or gets into Harvard, or is a poor peasant with “low quality,” is not just determined by one’s own good efforts but is also a product of the pre-determined conditions of one’s birth and existence.) For instance, when I was in Beidaihe, the seaside resort town, for the May Day holiday this past week I was often greeted by “Hellloooo,” said as if I was on exhibit in some zoo of laowais. After awhile, this drove me quite round the bend, but I also tried to remember that many people here never see a foreigner in the flesh. (Beidaihe is another story, entirely. The high leaders spend much of the summer there and so a very large chunk of beach is closed off for their private use, complete with lush-looking bathhouses.)

In any event, such contemplation of the need for patience also makes we rather aware of the manifold contradictions in the Chinese zeitgeist (is that some sort of oxymoron?) these days. On the one hand, China has historically been, and still thinks of itself as, the “Middle Kingdom,” the center of the civilized universe. On the other hand, everywhere you go people are being told to be more “civilized” (often for justifiable reasons). Today in the park I noticed various posters promoting “Pledging civilized behavior for Chinese citizens traveling domestically [or abroad],” such as this one:



Who wouldn’t be confused about their national identity with these messages?

might makes right

Today was my last long run before the race—22 miles. It went fairly well, especially given that I’ve just been reading about air quality (or lack thereof) in Beijing and have received new statistics to actually back up my general impression that the air here is, well, completely gross (I just looked up “gross” in the MS Word thesaurus—one synonym is “sickening” which of course relates to the spitting, the cold I had that refused to quit, etc.—the air literally makes people sick).

According to the Chinese State Environmental Protection Agency website, the API in Beijing today is 151—giving it a 3B “grade” so far as air quality goes. This is by far the worst throughout China—only a few other cities even get above 100, and Beijing is the only city to get a grade of 3B (the others over 100 get 3A). What does this mean? Well, among other things it means that 151 is at the very edge of being “unhealthy” (as opposed to “unhealthy for sensitive groups”, which is the range of API between 100 and 150). At 151, the air starts being unhealthy for everyone, probably including runners.

The weather report on one Chinese website always lists air quality and usually says it is “jiaocha” which means “relatively bad.” I think this is probably a politically correct understatement. One major reason for all of this pollution is the number of cars on the road in Beijing—currently, there are over 1000 new private cars joining Beijing’s already gridlocked traffic every day. One in five cars in China is a Beijing car, at least according to a taxi driver I recently discussed this with (about one in 100 people in China resides in Beijing, for some comparison). Interestingly the website where I check the weather also features a “car wash index” which tells you whether it is an “appropriate” day to wash your car (apparently people can’t make this decision on their own) and also a report regarding whether it is good day to turn on their air conditioning (ditto on the decision-making).

Relating to cars, today on my run, which was in the Yuyuantan Park, I spent some time while running on the otherwise pleasant pedestrian pathway being closely followed by a park vehicle, which passed me at the first available opportunity. I was determined not to stop to let it pass—here, while “human rights” (renquan) are often rather lacking, it would seem that “car rights” (chequan—not really a word, just one I’m making up) are quite prevalent. There is frequent discussion of how China is a renzhi society—“rule by men”—rather than fazhi—“rule by law” and how this needs to change. However, the conception of “rights” here is itself problematic—the word for “rights,” quanli, sounds exactly like the word for “power,” also quanli, and they have the same root character of quan (the li is a different character but is pronounced exactly the same). So, in a sense, in China “might” literally does make “right.” This is utterly evident when it comes to the hierarchy of people in relation to cars, in which cars far outrank people, the implication of course being that the person driving the car far outranks the one walking down the street. Most people here buy cars not for convenience (taxis are incredibly cheap—about $5 for a ride across town, about $13 for a taxi to the airport from the opposite side of town—and cars are expensive, with foreign brands marked up a great deal over their home-country prices) but for “face”—to show that they have money, status, etc. So, for instance, right turn on red here does not entail waiting for there to be no traffic before going, but completely ignoring the red light as well as the pedestrians trying to cross the street and just barreling through.

The run was good, however. The highlight: a group of about 40 middle-aged folks learning Latin dancing, swinging their hips in a rather un-Chinese fashion.

harder to breathe

A short post—I just did my next-to-last steps workout. 10 repeats for a total of 6080 steps. 3040 ups and 3040 downs. Did it in just under an hour.

On the soundtrack: Aerosmith’s “Dream On” and Maroon 5’s “Harder to Breathe” (sample lyric: “Is there anyone out there? Cause it’s getting harder and harder to breathe.”)

bitter

I’ve returned from my trip to rural Hebei Province, where I was primarily visiting a project that establishes small groups to help prevent women’s suicides—rural Chinese women have the highest rate of suicide of any group in the world. I think the highlight was meeting this woman, Li Guimin, who was simultaneously tragic and inspiring, which sums up a lot of lives here, really. The Chinese have a saying, to chi ku, which means to “eat bitterness.” The “bitter” here has much the same meaning as when it is used in American slang (as in a college student saying “I got a C- on my midterm” and his friend replying “Bitter!”) but without the sarcasm. Many people here say that the Chinese are good at chi ku, and there is probably some truth to this. Li Guimin is a 49 year-old woman who is now raising her year-and-a-half old grandson because his mother died mysteriously in her sleep one night and his father, Li Guimin’s son, is working out of the village as a migrant worker, one of millions here. At the same time, however, Li Guimin is a smart and savvy woman who is the head of her village’s suicide prevention groups. There is another saying in Chinese, “nanzhuwai, nuzhunei” which basically means “Men are responsible for outside affairs and women are responsible for inside affairs.” Li noted that now “nuzhuwai” but that “nanbuzhunei.” In other words, women are now also responsible for outside affairs, but men have not taken their share of the “inside” responsibilities. This cracked me up, since this seems to be a problem faced by feminism around the world. (I refer you to my favorite piece of feminist writing, from around 1970, titled “The Politics of Housework.”)

Here is Li and her grandson:



I also just spent two days at a training to promote women’s political participation at a school run by Rural Women outside of Beijing. “Training” is a mania in the NGO sector here these days—much of the time, so far as I can tell, it consists of people sitting around for three hours at a stretch listening to speeches. They seem to have a patience here for this sort of thing that we lack. One hypothesis I have for this relates to the years of communism here—when you have to stand in long lines just to buy a pair of socks, what does it matter that you might have to sit for hours listening to the leaders rattle on (Fidel Castro is apparently supremely talented at this)? While of course in capitalism, time, along with just about everything else, is money. This hypothesis is belied by the fact, however, that queue-jumping is one of the “four pests” they are seeking to eradicate on the road to the Olympics, and no one here really seems to be content to stand in lines at all.

One purpose of all this training is ostensibly to “raise the quality” of those attending. One reason frequently provided for why China is poor (in the county town where I stayed while in the countryside, a monthly income of about $200 is considered quite good) is that its people, and especially its peasants, and even more so its peasant women, have “low quality (suzhi di). Rural Women, the organization, does critique this line of thinking, and I was asked at the training yesterday to give a bit of a talk about how westerners/Americans view this subject. I basically stated that “low quality” is just an excuse the government uses to justify increasing gaps between the rich and poor here (along with the mass of people living on $200 a month, or less), whereas really some of the problem lies in governmental policy. Another American present, representing one of the training’s sponsors, later told Xie Lihua that I had “balls” to say that in front of a room of Chinese people.

Speaking of increasing gaps between rich and poor: new developments of the “villas” increasingly popular among China’s nouveau riche that I passed on the way to the school included “MacAllen Estates,” “Napa Valley,” “Chateau Lafitte Beijing,” and “Vancouver Forest” (where trees are actually quite sparse).

fate

I realized today that I have been remiss in this blog’s Chinese lessons, so today you’ll get a few words. Our first word is mingyun which means “fate.” The ming in mingyun is also in geming, which means “revolution.” Geming means, literally, to “dismiss fate.” Isn’t that nifty? Doesn’t that just make you want to run out and sign up for a Chinese class?

I’ve been thinking about fate today mostly because of the idea of being “ill-fated,” which my training run today definitely was. I had 20 miles on the schedule for today, made especially difficult because I just did my 18 miler 9 days ago and I usually like to have two weeks between really long runs. I decided to go out to the Yuyuantan Park and try to run 7 laps. The weather today in Beijing is sunny, in the 60s, and somewhat windy. Not shachenbao level windy, but windy. Shachenbao is another new word—it refers to the rather nasty sandstorms that occasionally afflict Beijing in the springtime (someone told me that they are pretty much like the Dust Bowl was in the Great Depression). Even when there is not a shachenbao going on Beijing is rather on the dusty side and so there was a fair amount of junk blowing around. I made it to Yuyuantan Park only to discover that they are having a “Cherry Blossom Festival.” The Chinese are actually not terrifically fond of the Japanese, but apparently that is not enough to stop them from celebrating cherry blossoms. OK, I thought, I’ll go to the track at the university. That, however, was also not meant to be—it was closed for some university visitation day, though there were loads of people around campus and absolutely nothing happening on the track.

So I headed for the King Gym. On the way there I saw two women involved in a fight—I mean literally punching and kicking each other. Such violence is not an entirely uncommon sight here, and rather puts to rest the latest government slogan that China is constructing a hexie shehui or “harmonious society.”

End result: a total of 15 miles, 5 short of my goal but my psyche could only face so long on the treadmill. In two weeks I'll go for 22 miles, my last really long run of the training program. In a certain way, the runs are a relief--at least it is a respite from speaking Chinese. Except for today--while in the King Gym one of the employees asked me whether Bob Dylan is really famous in the United States and if people have problems with the fact that he uses/used drugs (try saying "artistic temperament" in Chinese while also running on a treadmill). Then another employee wanted me to hold down the shop while she went upstairs to buy some candy (appropriate lunch fare for a gym employee, really).

steps

It is only about five weeks until my race, a fact that fills me with some trepidation! I have been training steadily at times and less so at others. Just to give you an idea of what I am preparing for, here is a picture of the Great Wall:




And here is a picture from last year’s race:



Apparently it is just an urban legend that the Great Wall is the only man-made structure that can be seen from the moon by the naked eye. Nonetheless, it is a rather imposing and impressive structure. The race begins with a 5 ½ mile stretch on the Great Wall itself followed by about 15 miles on roads, and then another 5 ½ miles on the Great Wall. Each Great Wall section features some 3700 steps (both up and down) that are uneven and probably somewhat treacherous (hence the various disclaimers on all the marathon paperwork noting that participants better have their own health insurance and that the race does not cover transport to local hospitals).

Luckily I live on the 11th floor of the building where I’m staying so I’ve been climbing steps, though lately I’ve gotten rather lazy and use the elevator a bit more than when I first arrived here. There are a total of 14 floors in the building, numbered 1-12 (as you’d expect) and then, interestingly, 15 and 16. Of course, 13 is unlucky in the west, and 14 is not terribly lucky here (the word for “four” sounds like the word for “death” in Chinese so, among other things, no one wants mobile phone numbers with 4 in them—even I avoided it when I purchased my number). But there is a 4th floor in the building, just no 14. Sometimes there are strange counting patterns here—for instance, the Beijing subway currently has three lines, numbers 1 and 2 (again, as you’d expect) and number 13 (not so expected).

I’ve started doing step workouts once a week—one time up from bottom to top is 304 steps. Yesterday I did 8 repeats for a total of over 4800 steps (I’m counting the ups and the downs)—it took about 45 minutes. Perhaps this won’t help entirely with the marathon, but it can’t hurt. My plan is to work up to 10 in two weeks (next week I’ll be in the countryside, which will no doubt provide fodder for new running adventures) and then the following week to do 5 repeats, go outside and run a few miles, and then return to do 5 more. Let’s call that a “micro” simulation of the Great Wall Marathon itself.

horses and jaguars

I ran 18 miles today. It was supposed to be over the last weekend, but I have the third cold of my stay here. Yes, I’d guess that some of you are thinking “how can she run a marathon when she can’t even avoid the Specter of the Common Cold?” Well, that is difficult here. I’d guess that one reason I’ve been getting colds is related to the newly-announced “four pests” that the government is going to try to eradicate before China makes its big global debut in next summer’s Olympics. The four pests are queue-jumping (ha!—good luck with that one), cursing (ditto), smoking (ditto again), and spitting (more dittos). Apparently there have been official “stand in line rather than push in front of others” days, as well as a “smile” campaign and courses to teach shop clerks and taxi drivers how to be more polite. Anyway, the constant spitting makes for a vicious circle, people spit because they have colds, then this just gives other people colds, etc., etc., ad nauseum (or perhaps that should be ad sputum?).

Chinese friends have been plying me with traditional Chinese medicine and I’ve desperately tried it. The short verdict: tastes not so good but it seems to help. Feeling somewhat better today, I decided to seek more adventure, as well as to give myself less of an escape route, by running out toward the suburbs and back along a canal that starts about 1 ½ miles from where I’m staying. On the map it looked promisingly continuous, and I had fond fantasies of getting to some pristine areas as I moved out of the city. Why do I never learn that what looks blank on a map is of course never actually blank in reality, especially in China? Jim and I once departed Beijing and traveled 48 hours by train (it was supposed to be 36, but met delays along the way), 12 hours by long-distance bus, and then a few hours on horseback till we found anything resembling a pristine landscape in China.

Nonetheless, the run was an adventure. The canal was somewhat fetid, to put it politely, when it had water in it, and actually much of it was dry and being worked on for some purpose. I did actually get out of the city, but not before passing an area populated mostly by garbage dumps and military facilities. When I did get to a more pristine area, I was suddenly worried about the isolation, although there were always a few people around, mostly on bicycles. I had brought some money in my pocket in case I desperately needed to bail and get a taxi home. I’m sure this sounds completely contradictory—searching for pristine landscapes and still expecting to find taxis once there, but I actually did see a few taxis along the way.

There were lots of interesting sights. My favorite was actually two, but within 30 seconds of each other, so it counts as one. First was the rather straggly horse and cart that passed me on the other side of the canal. I briefly tried to keep up with the horse, challenging myself to run faster. The horse won, but not by much.

Second was a new-looking Jaguar with Sichuan license plates. This right after the horse and cart pretty much sums up how bizarre things are here these days. Coming from Sichuan by car (which is actually where Jim and I went on the train, bus, and horse in search of pristineness) would just a few years previously have been unimaginable. It would have taken forever and a day, but now they are building new highways at an amazing pace, and road trips are becoming more common here. You haven’t lived till you’ve experienced a Chinese rest stop, believe me.

I also saw a married couple riding matching three-wheeled bicycles with carts on the back with packages of Styrofoam piled 15 feet high. I said hello and they smiled and said hello back, and the man said “this isn’t a very good place to run.” To which I replied, “there isn’t anywhere good to run!” A couple guys drove by in a car and stopped ahead of me. I ran by them and then they caught up to me again with an open window, and one of them asked “Can I help you?” (in English, no less). It was kind of cute, but also worrying since at that point I’d only run 7 miles and thought I looked strong. Perhaps they just thought I’d taken a wrong turn, which was a look I received a lot. Kind of like I was out running along the Central Park Reservoir or someplace where lots of runners actually go and somehow was magically transported to Beijing, where I not only saw no other runners, but not even any other foreigners.

I passed a few small parks with the usual complement of people ballroom dancing and singing in groups, probably Cultural Revolution songs. That seems to be the vogue these days among a certain set of middle-aged folks—going hiking or to the park and singing Cultural Revolution songs along the way. I’m not sure if it is done ironically (I doubt it) or nostalgically (I can’t imagine being nostalgic for the Cultural Revolution—it would be like being nostalgic for the Great Depression, or the Civil War). Perhaps it is just because these are the songs that reside in the collective memory of this generation?

concept vs. execution

So, as I noted in my last entry, it seems that one thing that is common here (though probably not just here) is the inability to follow through and bring to implementation or completion certain ideas or concepts. Often these are quite good ideas—at other times they may be horrible ideas, or only good for some people.

One example of a good idea is the yoga class I attended two weeks ago in the King Gym. What can be wrong with providing stressed out students with the opportunity to stretch, perhaps get a little meditative breathing in, etc.? Well, the problem here is that the King Gym is an exceptionally noisy place, so yoga, which is supposed to be somewhat relaxing and tranquil, became an activity where you strained to listen to the absurdly flexible teacher give instructions (in Chinese, of course) over her portable microphone, while next door the treadmills were going and in the room behind people were playing ping-pong. My favorite part was the end, Savasana or corpse pose, where the teacher turned out the lights and put on this tape of this person saying “relax” over and over again (in Chinese: fangsong) as if somehow just saying it could create the proper atmosphere.

Unfortunately, I fear that the Beijing Olympics will be another example of the “good concept-bad execution” paradigm. I am certain that they will be wonderful in many ways, and I think they are generally good for the city (building new subway lines, supposedly making the city “green” though there is little evidence of that as yet, etc.) There is great pride here in China hosting the Olympics, and I am happy that China was awarded this opportunity. Of course, it is hard not to be a bit concerned by some of the slogans you see around town, notably the one that says “Xin Beijing, Xin Aoyun” which literally translated means “New Beijing, New Olympics.” However, the provided translation says “New Beijing, Great Olympics,” which makes me wonder if there is some sort of insidious plan afloat for the “New Olympics” that they would rather laowais not contemplate. I also actually feel somewhat sorry for the athletes who prepare their whole lives for their one moment to be in the Olympics and will end up here. The claim is that the air will be cleaned up in time, but so far I see little progress on that. Beijing is also appallingly hot in the summer and I can’t imagine it will be a very good setting for breaking of sports records. It also has a looming shortage of water, which is of course relevant for the Olympics because, as my friend Xie Lihua said in discussing the issue, “athletes need to shower a lot.”

Also relating to water and this topic of discussion, my new room here, where I moved when Jim came, has a persistent shower problem. In many places in China (and elsewhere around Asia and in the world) there is no separate tub or shower structure—you just shower and there is a drain in the bathroom floor where the water goes, and the floor just gets kind of wet. Unless, of course, you are in my bathroom here, where the drain is actually in the highest part of the floor and so all the water flows away from the drain and the bathroom does not just get kind of wet. I bought a mop that I have to use to push the water toward the drain when I’m done. I asked about it at the front desk and they apologized, said many rooms were like this, and that it is an “engineering problem.” Well, this building is only about three years old. China is one big construction site, and one consequence of this is that often new buildings are total crap, to put it bluntly.

I actually wonder if this is reflective of modernization, or modernity, as a whole. Excellent in concept, often flawed in execution. Global warming, anyone?

30,000

On Friday Jim and visited the Panjiayuan market, where all variety of antiques and “antiques” can be found. We were accosted for a long period of time by a gentleman from Henan Province who claimed to be an English teacher who sells antiques in his spare time and really wanted to practice his English on us. We also found a Buddhist artifact that we really liked and wanted a closer look—I asked how old it was and they paused, and then said, “Tang Dynasty.” Well, that would make it anywhere from 1100 to 1400 years old—Jim started laughing out loud. I then asked what they wanted for it and was told “san wan.” I had to ask again and was told, for a second time, “san wan.” Well, that is 30,000 yuan, about $4000! We walked away very fast, with them hot on our tail. If I’d wanted to bother, I would have said that “Starting at 30,000 yuan for an item of dubious origins and authenticity didn’t really give us much negotiating room, did it?!” Usually when bargaining for a price, I feel comfortable offering about one-third of the original asking price, or at the very least one-fourth, so we really had nowhere to go with this one!

On a mostly unrelated note, I have been unable to access my own blog from here (Chinese word of the day: blog=bo’ke). This has led me to go to the Blogger help page (which I can access) to find, almost immediately, a query from someone with the heading “Cannot access my blog in China.” Apparently the Chinese government’s internet censors (sometimes referred to as the Great Firewall of China) periodically block Blogspot. After all, people might use their blogs to write inflammatory things, like noting that the National People’s Congress is really just a rubber stamp legislature or that Beijing opera sounds like cats screeching, and that these facts might actually be shocking news to people in China, things that they had never heard before or would be incapable of thinking of themselves. Chairman Mao himself wrote that “It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written,” as a way of justifying his various schemes for social engineering.

The rumor in the foreign media and among human rights groups is that the Chinese government employs 30,000 censors to monitor internet content and block sites. Interestingly, they don’t usually block The New York Times or some other western news sites—they are more concerned about sites in Chinese, for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, there are ways of getting around the censorship, notably through what are called proxy servers. Within minutes of beginning my search I was directed to this sort of server, the home page of which reads at the top “Is your blog blocked in India, Pakistan, Iran, or China?” I’m not sure why India wants to be in such illustrious company, given its status as the only real democracy in this list (see, that’s the sort of statement that gets blogs censored here), but apparently all of these countries block Blogspot.

My guess is that, following the conclusion of the two-week-long lianghui, the government feels that foreign media scrutiny will be lessened and so they can revert to a higher level of censorship. This actually reminds me of a common phenomenon here—the often wide gap between concept and execution, in which what seem to be good ideas (to someone, in this case the regime) often fall short in their implementation. In the case of the heightened censorship, perhaps the regime feels that no one will notice--I often observe that they might benefit from having a really good p.r. firm on retainer, who would tell them that the benefits of censoring sites like Blogspot might be outweighed by the costs, like the fact that people are actually going to notice that this is occurring. The "good idea-bad execution" paradigm is a topic about which I have so much to say that it will have to wait till the next entry.

Running in the Key of G

Jim is here now—a fact that has made my life much happier. Things are just better when shared with the one you love! We have been hanging out, eating lots of good food (I have to make the admission that probably our favorite restaurant so far has been the Thai one called Purple Haze), doing some running and yoga. On Saturday I ran 16 miles, part of which were with Jim but then we went opposing ways in Yuyuantan Park because he is still recovering from foot surgery. The park is evolving as springtime comes; the lake has thawed and people are beginning to take little rental boats on it. It was rather crowded and we had to do quite a bit of dodging of people—besides one other man, we were the only runners among the throngs.

I spent much of my run thinking about an article from the New York Times that I had read online that day, about the conclusion of the lianghui here in Beijing—lianghui means “two meetings,” and this refers to the annual two-week-long meeting of the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber stamp legislature, and the National People’s Political Consultative Congress. Joseph Kahn, the current China correspondent for the Times, usually writes worthwhile stuff, and this piece also was interesting and valid on the face of it. However, I also found it frustrating and it made me contemplate the hazards of cultural comparisons (more on that in a moment). Here is the article:

Chinese Leader Strikes Defensive Tone

China does have alarmingly increasing amounts of foreign reserves, air pollution (probably the source of my apparently never-ending cold), and military spending. Yet I still felt annoyed by this article. The statement that frustrated me most was “China has become the largest consumer of energy after the United States and by some estimates the largest emitter of gases that contribute to global warming after the United States as well.” While true in absolute terms, what might be wrong with that statement? In other words, why is it not just a statement of journalistic fact? I will leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions on that matter.

On my run while pondering this article I also listened to my iPod—I decided that I couldn’t feel inspired by the soundtrack that is piped over the speakers in the park, which primarily consists of Kenny G. Kenny G is probably more appropriate as music for insomniacs than music for runners, if it is appropriate for anyone at all. They completely love Kenny G here—for instance, his is the only music of choice in the Korean/Japanese restaurant downstairs from where I live. Which actually made me further consider the topic of cultural comparison, and on what basis we make such comparisons. For instance, I have had more than one Chinese person say to me, “I don’t like American food—McDonald’s is really just not very good.” I’ve occasionally pointed out that it probably isn’t accurate to equate American food with McDonald’s (just as it isn’t a good idea to equate Kenny G with American music), but this is a difficult concept to get across (besides, I’m coming up short on what really is American food and not something derived from our history of being immigrants—about the best I can come up with is chocolate chip cookies, which are a very fine addition to global cuisine indeed).

Equivalent American comparisons with China might include the misconception that Chinese food primarily consists of sticky sweet goo like sweet and sour pork (actually an American invention) and fortune cookies (also an American invention) and that Chinese music primarily extends to Beijing opera, which can be quite nice at times but also incorporates what to our ears sounds like cats screeching and toddlers banging on pot lids.

Amish Cooking

I actually saw another runner on Tuesday, in Xidan, one of the busiest areas of Beijing. This is a part of the city that has been thoroughly transformed by Beijing’s rapid development—it lies just a little bit west of Tiananmen Square, right on Chang’an Avenue (the Avenue of Eternal Peace). Xidan is now full of department stores and a hip underground shopping mall populated by teenagers wearing unrecognizable yet apparently very fashionable things. It also features at least two Starbucks within 100 yards of each other, a fact that both pleases and horrifies me (if you ask nicely, I can give you my classtime-perfected riff on how Starbucks epitomizes both the joys and horrors of globalization all in one venti nonfat double shot caramel macchiato, not that this is a particularly original observation).

It was a very nice, clear day, and so seeing another runner was inspiring and somewhat shocking. Of course, this runner was a laowai, and this enabled me to perhaps see myself through the eyes of Chinese observers as I am running on the streets here (something that has occurred rather seldom so far, due to the proximity and anonymity provided by the King Gym). This male laowai runner was wearing knee-length running tights, with an emphasis on the tight, if you know what I mean. My first thought, before I really processed the whole scene, was “What kind of nut goes running in Xidan in midday, in that sort of get-up?” And then of course I reflected on my own thinking, and realized that I probably look as absurd to Chinese observers when I am out running. I’d like to think that my choice of running apparel is never quite so outré, but then again, I’ve seen Chinese running in their street clothes (not the ones running for the bus, but actually out exercising in the parks) and even their street shoes, so perhaps any of our Western, consumerist, “I need special gear for whatever activity I’m doing” attitudes seem strange and perhaps somewhat langfei here (our word of the day—it means “wasteful”).

Speaking of joys and horrors of globalization, one of my favorite sights in all of Japan, land of Mount Fuji (briefly glimpsed from a train window), wonderful gardens (I think I drove Kelly nuts in search of Japanese gardens because of my fascination with them and my actual desire and emerging scheme to put one in our backyard), Zen temples, and hypermodern urban landscapes, was actually this one:


Kelly in Kamakura












We stopped to take some pictures because I was just so amused by it and the owner came out. He told Kelly that he’s been to Amish country in the U.S. before and really appreciated the spirit of the Amish. He said he uses real Amish recipes, but we opted not to stop to try them.

Here is a more zhenzheng Japanese image. Here we are, being very Japanese, simultaneously at a Shinto Shrine and admiring flowers (possibly cherry blossoms, but I don’t think so). In Japan, they love the cherry blossoms. In fact, they have “cherry blossom reports” on the TV news, cherry blossom viewing parties, and you are even supposed to accessorize your home with a cherry blossom motif, but only while they are in season. They even come out with cherry flavor Kit-Kat bars, but again, only in season!

Moshi moshi!

I am now back from Japan, which was a great experience. Some running content first: on the day after I arrived we were eating our Japanese breakfast (sitting on the floor on tatami mats, eating things like fermented soybeans and fish and lots of seaweedy stuff) and on TV was the Tokyo Marathon. Had I planned better, that might have been a more reasonable choice since it does not involve 7000 steps and the Japanese actually understand running! At least in some places they do—in Tochio, the small town where my student Kelly teaches English, she says that she and this one guy are the only runners in town. Other places, however, we saw runners galore, which actually made Kelly wonder what was going on. In Kamakura, an ancient capital of Japan, we saw tons of them, including some in groups. That is probably explainable by the fact that Kamakura is not only an ancient capital with lots of Zen temples, but also an upper-middle class (at least it seemed so) bedroom community of Tokyo. Wherever you find yuppies, you can also probably find runners.

Despite my frequent admonitions in my teaching and in life in general regarding the hazards of stereotyping, I am now going to engage in some discussion of Japan that does just that. Generalities are inevitable, even if sometimes problematic, but also they can reveal some fundamental truths. I’ll even organize this into numbered and lettered examples, so as to enable you to enjoy some of the fruits of my Political Science-educated analytical mind.

1. Japan is polite. (I guess it would be better to say “Japanese people are polite.”)

a. All over you see people wearing surgical face masks, even though the vast majority of them are not surgeons and probably do not even play surgeons on TV. Unlike in China, where mostly people wear such masks to reduce the effects of the pollution, in Japan people wear them when they are sick, to avoid infecting others.

b. Despite the fact that Japan is a mobile-phone crazed society (some 80 million subscribers in a population of 127 million) they are not supposed to talk on them or even let them ring on the shinkansen (bullet train) or parts of the subway system in Tokyo. And people actually follow these rules—when people’s phones vibrated (remember, no ringing) on the bullet train they would always go to the corridor between cars to have their conversation.

b (1). When they can answer their phone, they say not “konichi-wa,” which is Japanese for “hello,” but rather “moshi moshi”. I find this inherently more polite than in China, where the phone is answered by saying “wei?!” which basically means “Hey?!” This usually comes out kind of surly. However, I think it would be almost impossible to be surly while saying “moshi moshi.”

c. The Japanese language is full of other politenesses. When Kelly and I entered the museum at the atomic bomb site in Nagasaki, Kelly was carrying a soda can. The woman from behind the entrance desk came running up, and said, in English “Is it OK or not for you to carry that can inside?” (or something like that). What she really was saying was “It is not OK for you to carry that can inside” but that would have been too direct, so instead it was a question.

d. Before she returned home, Kelly had to buy gifts, known as omiyage, for all of the teachers in the schools in which she teaches. That is 70 people, folks. This is a common custom—wherever you go, you buy omiyage for your co-workers because you are supposed to feel guilty (or shameful—some scholars say Westerners do guilt and Asians do shame) for being on vacation while they were left behind to toil in your absence. All over the place, for instance in Tokyo Station, you find nicely wrapped boxes with labels saying something like “this box is good for 8 people.”

e. Generally you do not criticize your boss or your coworkers so as not to destroy the wa, or the harmony of your workplace community. However, there is one time that this is permitted, and that is at an enkai. This is when you all go out together, get smashingly drunk, and then are permitted to be honest with your boss.

f. In Japan, they do not even jaywalk. If you are at a light and it is red, you wait for it to turn green, even if there is not another car or pedestrian around. Admittedly this is a rare occurrence, but in Kelly’s small town of Tochio (not to be confused with Tokyo) we were walking home from an evening of ramen, gyoza, and karaoke (I sang, badly, “I Will Survive”—I’m considering going on an “I Will Survive” karaoke tour of the world since I have now sung it in at least two countries) and there was no one else around. Nonetheless, we waited for the green light to cross.

g. People do not litter, even though trash cans are few and far between. Instead, they hold their trash till they return home and can throw it away on their own turf.

2. Japan is safe.

a. See 1f above.

b. On the Tokyo subway, you can see small schoolchildren in the morning and evening (I’m talking ages 6 and up here) on their way to school. Alone. Without parental accompaniment. Try that anywhere in the U.S., much less anywhere with a subway system, and watch the parents promptly arrested for child endangerment.

c. Kelly liked to joke that in Japan the police primarily exist to give directions, a hypothesis that we were able to test a few times and does actually seem to be true.

3. Japan is clean.

a. See 1a above.

b. See 1g above.

c. In private dwellings and in some other spots you are expected to remove your shoes. I was in Japan less than 6 hours before committing my first shoe faux pas, which just involved stepping my shoes on the wrong part of the floor as we were entering the onsen (Japanese bath, where everyone is naked together—single-sex only—a story for another time and place, perhaps).

c (1). Due to the removal of shoes, you often wear slippers around indoors, or at least hopefully socks without holes. In several places, you were expected to change your slippers into the special ones provided for going into the toilet. Sometimes, these are even helpfully labeled “toilet” so you are very clear about when and where to wear them.

c (2). While on the subject of toilets, Japanese toilets often come equipped with all sorts of extra features, accessible by buttons on the side. For instance, on many you raise and lower the seat cover by pushing a button. Some have heated seats (much nicer than in a car, really), and built in bidets, so you have to be careful to push the right button or else you might be getting some unexpected services.

4. Japan is a technophile’s dream. (These are admittedly all incredibly trivial examples.)

a. See 3c(2) above.

b. Everywhere you go you see vending machines selling beverages. Even beer.

c. I had sushi for breakfast one morning at the Tsukiji fish market, which is where most of Japan’s (amazing, by the way) seafood originates. They had a picture menu where you could pick which sushi you wanted. When I entered (a little counter place that could seat maybe a dozen people) I was handed a laser pointer to point to my sushi choice. Very clever.

d. Along with many other toilet options, many public restrooms feature a motion activated flushing sound effect, which helps obscure the noise of what you are doing in there. Apparently this was introduced to save water from people actually flushing to do this. Which of course takes us back to the “Japan is polite” point.

Since this is getting rather long, I will stop here for now…Next entry will feature a few Japan photos and perhaps even some updates on my marathon training!

Golden pigs

It is Chinese New Year this week (chunjie--the Spring Festival), when the great migration takes place and everyone returns to their home towns, villages, etc. I’m actually leaving for Japan to get out of China for the holiday, a fact that caused the guy who works in the café in the building where I’m staying to scold me for missing China’s most important holiday. He noted it would be like missing Christmas in the United States, and how fun it is, full of temple fairs and firecrackers and toys and general re'nao-ness (I decided to hold back on telling him that re'nao is not necessarily always a selling point).

We are entering the Year of the Pig, which means everywhere you go things with pigs on them are for sale, including all manner of adorable stuffed pig toys. I find this only slightly ironic, given that, in Chinese “meat” (rou) is basically a synonym for “pork” and that supposedly half of the pigs in the world are Chinese pigs. Apparently this year is also a “Golden Pig” year, which is considered very propitious and which means that lots of couples are trying to conceive to have babies born in the year of the Golden Pig. Schools are apparently preparing for an upsurge in entrants in six years.

Perhaps some of these people are visiting the “Beijing Tian Lun Sterility Hospital,” the advertisement for which I enjoyed so much I decided to share it here. This is an outstanding example of so many phenomena—globalization leading to the mixing of cultures, Chinese appropriation of Western cultural symbols for interesting uses, and of course, rather tolerant interpretations of copyright laws.

Also, people here can only dream of having 12 children. And I have yet to see anyone remotely resembling Steve Martin.

One note on the notorious “one-child policy”: the first products of the one-child policy, which began in the late 1970s, are getting to be childbearing age, and if both members of a couple are single children they are allowed to have two children.

Firecrackers are being sold in stands all over the place—very much like the Fourth of July. This is one reason why I’m glad I am decamping for Japan on Saturday. I’ll be there for ten days, visiting a former student, Kelly Bolen, who is in her second year there on the JET program, teaching English in a small town called Tochio. We’ll be visiting Kelly’s home turf in Niigata and Tochio (I’m excited about her friend the sushi chef!) and then her former host family in Nagasaki. After that we will visit Unzen for some hiking in the national park there. Then I’m going to spend a few days based in Kamakura, which was the 12th century capital of Japan and has lots of Zen temples. It is only about an hour out of Tokyo so I expect I’ll get a day in Tokyo as well.

So this will be my last post for awhile--check back at the end of February for more!

Formidable or terrible?

Yesterday was a fine day in Beijing—very clear, with a blue sky, and temperatures in the lower 40s. You could actually see the Fragrant Hills. Beijing is quite flat, on a plateau, but it has hills to the north (where the Great Wall passes through) and to the west, which are the Fragrant Hills, known in Chinese as Xiang Shan. That is really only significant because Hong Kong in Chinese is actually Xiang Gang, which means “Fragrant Harbor.” I guess fishiness is fragrant to someone.

I ran 13 miles yesterday, in the Yuyuantan Park, another park near here (about 1.6 miles away, according to the TOMS). I wanted to just tune out and wear my iPod but decided not to, partially due to having to deal with traffic to get to the park (fear not, parental units and other folk inclined to worry, I only turn on the iPod once I get to a safe spot) but also because I wanted to really be present on my run. That was a good choice—I had a few interesting encounters. Yuyuantan also features a lake in the middle, bigger than the Purple Bamboo Park—Yuyuantan is 2.4 miles around for one lap. At one end of the lake were people ice fishing, although I’d guess the ice is rather precarious, given all the warm days we’ve had. At the other end were people swimming! Mostly middle-aged men. Some of them started yelling at me that I should be swimming as I ran by, which leads us to today’s Chinese word. I responded to them that swimming was far too lihai for me—lihai being a fairly untranslatable word, kind of like re’nao. It means “terrible, formidable” according to my dictionary. They replied that my Chinese was “lihai.” (I’m hoping here that what they were going for was the “formidable” rather than the “terrible”!). I later stopped for a bottle of water (40 cents, in case you were wondering) and the man asked where I was from. When I replied “Mei Guo (United States),” he said, “People who have been there say it is kind of like tiantang (paradise, heaven).” I replied that we have problems of our own. In Chinese, the word for the United States, Mei Guo, means “beautiful country” and I wonder how literally they take that.

I am actually not always happy to admit being from the U.S. these days, given the lack of popularity of our country overseas, but people are generally kind. A few, lately, have said, “Oh, I thought you looked French.” I’ve been afraid to ask what that means!

Obstacles

I actually ran for five out of seven days in the past week, which is good, because I’ve received word that I am officially entered in the Great Wall Marathon. I’m not sure what the highlight is for me on the verification form I received—it may be the notice that “except free first aid on the Marathon site, we do not cover the cost of transport to hospitals and the ensuing medical treatment there.” Then again, it might be the fact that on marathon day I will have to be at the sponsoring hotel at 2:45 a.m. for transport to the marathon site. I don’t even want to admit that I’ve actually paid a fairly large sum of money for these privileges. It’s a sum close to about two months’ salary for an average Beijinger, and Beijingers earn much more than the average Chinese person.

My runs have been in the Purple Bamboo Park and on the treadmills of the King Gym. The weather here has been unseasonably warm, and so I got outside for some runs over last weekend. The Purple Bamboo Park was crowded, though not with runners. The only other runners I saw were two other foreign women. There was occasional commentary from Chinese in the park, including hearing a little Chinese child saying “Waiguoren dou paobu (The foreigners are all running!)” They probably wondered what we were running away from.

I’ve been reading a lot about “obstacles” for rural women, as in sentences like “Rural women face many obstacles to attain full autonomy.” “Obstacle” or zhang’ai is a good word to use for today’s Chinese lesson, as running in China is often akin to participating in an obstacle course. In fact, that could be the Chinese contribution as a demonstration sport in the Olympics, and they could incorporate other elements of the culture as the obstacles.

So, I think it is time for some reader participation in this blog. If you remember particularly torturous obstacle courses you’ve endured, for instance in junior high school P.E. class (inherently a torturous experience for most of us, I know), feel free to send examples of the obstacles you faced. I will try my hardest to think of the likely Chinese equivalent and post them here.

I’ll start with an easy example. Water obstacles—such as jumping over small pools, etc., would be well-served in our Chinese Obstacle Course by people spitting, and our competitors needing to evade their expectorations.

Creative suggestions welcome!

Magnificent!

I attended my first Chinese wedding today, as an invited guest of another invited guest. I’d say the experience was a cross between “Wedding Crashers” (what else?) and “Lost in Translation.” I think I was the only foreigner there—in a crowd of about 500 or so. The bride was the daughter of a high ranking woman in the military, who has been in charge of the military’s family planning unit. Family planning is omnipresent here, so that even apparently the military needs people to be in charge of it.

Today’s Chinese word is re’nao, which is a word that is very hard to translate into English. It kind of means “noisy,” but in a good sort of way. Chinese people love re’nao, which was in great abundance at this wedding. The bride and groom arrived in a flower-draped Mercedes to lots of firecrackers going off. Then, inside the restaurant, the party started with an m.c. shouting over a microphone and with a familiar tune blasted at full volume. It took me forever to place the song—is it the theme from “Rawhide”? No. “Bonanza”? No again. Wait, I’ve got it, it’s the theme from “The Magnificent Seven,” a tune we were treated to again and again through the proceedings! I don’t really understand why Americans have lacked the imagination to make this song a prominent wedding tradition.

Then, the bride and groom entered the banquet hall, through a floral arch, to a different tune, Sarah Brightman doing “This Love,” which starts with the lyric, “This love…This love is a strange love.” They proceeded to stand on the stage and do all sorts of things—stand in front of a row of sparklers going off, light candles, exchange rings, sip beverages, fill a champagne fountain, etc. Periodically a bubble machine would start up, pouring bubbles all over the happy couple. Later, we ate and listened as various military subordinates to the bride’s mother serenaded the crowd (my favorite: “O sole mio”).

A few wedding photos:

If you look closely, you too will see bubbles.

This indeed is Great Wall wine, with the bride and groom on the label!

One way of hastening “till death do us part”—provide cigarettes on the banquet tables!

Bargain-hunters, beware!

Today you get two new Chinese words! The first is min’gan, which means “sensitive.” This is an important word in China, especially when you are doing research in political science, as there are many min’gan subjects (you can probably guess what some of these are—for instance, Richard Gere). On the other hand, things that might be min’gan in the United States are not at all so here. Random strangers ask you things like “How old are you? Are you married? (If not, why not?) How many children do you have? (If none, why not?) How much money do you make?”

One of the disadvantages of this being a training as well as a travel blog is that occasionally I may need to, in the interests of complete honesty and disclosure, write about some min’gan things—in other words, some of the unpleasant physical aspects of long-distance running, or just running in general. Blisters, chafing in odd spots, etc. are probably the inevitable outcomes of such training. Today was my first run since having that cold, just 5k on the treadmill in the King Gym, but, for today’s other Chinese lesson, let me just say “Tian a!” That means, “Oh, my God,” or, literally, “Sky (heaven) ah!” My run was actually quite good—I felt surprisingly strong and it wasn’t a strain at all to run the 5k in about 27 minutes (fairly fast, for me). But then I got off the treadmill and I felt like my shorts were burning my legs!

Let me explain the origins of these particular shorts. They are from the Yashow Market, one of a few markets in Beijing specializing in export clothing, both genuine and knock-off, and crawling with foreigners. When I joined the King Gym I went there in search of indoor running clothes (or perhaps I just wanted an excuse to shop). So my “Nike” shorts (I think they are genuine, actually, and they cost all of $8) seemed to be fine until I got off the treadmill when they caused my legs to have this burning sensation. So now I wonder, is the clothing at the Yashow Market some sort of military project to test new weapons on unsuspecting laowais in search of bargains?

OK, that is about as “confessional” as these “pages” will hopefully get.

P.S. The burning went away rather fast--I guess that weapon still needs some work.

Logic

I’ve not actually run in five days, as I’ve had a terrible cold. Most of my weekend was spent wondering if I should visit a doctor, and not being very enthused about the options there—either overpriced laowai medical clinic or Chinese hospital. However, I’ve spent much time considering that this could really be a positive thing for marathon training. After all, the air here is so polluted that perhaps running is detrimental to my practically pristine lungs. (Herein comes the “logic” of our title—luoji in Chinese). Perhaps my marathon experience would be best served by as little exposure to that polluted air as possible. However, I’d guess that 10 out of 10 running experts would decree that some running needs to take place, at some point.

So how does one spend a weekend while sick in Beijing, not wanting to leave one’s fairly monastic cell of a room? (OK, so it has TV and internet, but it’s all in Chinese!) Why, watching pirated DVDs, of course! Why don’t we just call this “research on the state of intellectual property law in China in 2007”? According to one of the introductory sequences on one of the DVDs (I think it was “Pride & Prejudice” but they all start to blur together), “You wouldn’t steal a car, You wouldn’t steal a mobile phone…Buying pirated goods is stealing. Piracy. It’s a crime.” Not much irony here, really. Not that any of the DVDs I bought were pirated (The box to “Pride & Prejudice” has a cast list including Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Colin Farrell, Jon Favreau, Ellen Pompeo, and Joe Pantoliano—it almost makes me want to figure out if any of these people have ever all been in one movie together, or if someone just made a random list of American movie stars--and I use that term loosely. And of course none of them are really in this film.)

To make up for the brevity of today's post, some photos of the "fan dance" to amuse readers.




Bottom photo, left to right: rural dairy mogul (are there any urban dairy moguls, anywhere?), Xie Lihua, laowai.

Palm trees

On Monday and Tuesday of last week I had my first trip to the countryside—to Qian’an in Hebei Province, about a two-hour trip by car from Beijing. Qian’an is apparently a “rich” place in the countryside—it provides much of the iron for Beijing, and has so historically. That is, it has provided useful iron to Beijing, as opposed to the backyard steel furnace variety that was in vogue during the Great Leap Forward (the late 1950s version of tragic Chinese history). I went with my NGO friend, Xie Lihua, and two journalists from her magazine Rural Women. We visited two enterprises run by women and then had dinner in a peasant home. Then to add to the surrealism of the experience, we stayed in the Qian’an “city government” hotel, which would have been equivalent to at least a four-star hotel in Beijing or other large Chinese cities. Apparently Qian’an has used its iron wealth to build nice buildings that they can then host guests in, such as NGO visitors from Beijing, or, even better, officials from Beijing who come to see how hunky-dory things are in Qian’an. My hotel room even had a bathtub, which was a big thrill, along with a scale, which, to my great relief, was not working properly and kept telling me that I weigh 20 kilograms (like 45 pounds—Chinese food can be quite healthy, but not that much so).

It is not quite clear that this would really fool officials, given the general poverty of Qian’an county once you get out of the county town. (And just for some perspective—Qian’an, a “small” county town in China, has a population of over 100,000). At one enterprise we visited, a rural foodstuffs corporation, we asked the average salary received by the rural women working there, and learned that it is about 500 yuan per month. This is the same as I paid for my three-month membership at the King Gym—about $65. And these are “good” jobs, “opportunities” for these women.

No running for me. However, I did get some exercise participating in the “fan dance.” After dinner in the peasant home, we went back by the village where the head also runs a dairy enterprise. She used some of her earnings to renovate the little village square, so that it now includes things like yellow and red neon-lit plastic palm trees (like I said, surreal). Every night, villagers gather and perform the “fan dance,” which involves traditional Chinese instruments and dancing with fans in lines. This can be viewed all over the place on evenings in China—Jim and I used to watch it in our old neighborhood when we lived here. Many participate, though it tends more to older women. In this village, the dairy-farm woman had purchased costumes and make-up for participants. Anyway, Xie Lihua and myself joined in for awhile, to the great amusement of the spectators. Seeing foreigners do such things is rather unprecedented. When I can, I’ll try to post a photo or two.

The following day, I also go to be a laowai (today’s Chinese Word of the Day)—at a forum for rural women village leaders, I got to sit in front with the other “experts” with a placard proclaiming my (Chinese) name. I did not say one word, but apparently my presence was seen as somehow of use to someone.

So, our word today is laowai, a word in Chinese that literally means “old outsider” but is usually just used to indicate that a foreigner is on the premises. It used to be that you would just get on a bus and you’d hear people muttering “laowai” (I always wanted to learn to say “No S---“ as a response). In Beijing you can buy t-shirts that say “Laowai laile (the laowai is coming)” on the front and “laowai zoule (the laowai is going)” on the back. Laowai zoule!

Authenticity

Today, our Chinese word is zhenzheng. It means, according to my dictionary, “genuine, true, real.” Of course, I’m having all sorts of zhenzheng experiences here, like eating zhenzheng Chinese food (no 100-item buffets in sight), riding zhenzheng buses (today, one was so crowded that I seriously wondered how long the oxygen supply would last), and even taking zhenzheng Chinese medicine for the cold I now seem to have (at first, I thought it was just the effects of the air pollution, but no, it’s really a cold). I’m a little worried because the pharmacist (or at least the lady in the white coat in the medicine place) told me to take a total of 12 pills for my first dose of the medication, which seems like a lot of pills. This is a time when linguistic understanding is very important, but the package also seems to agree with her.

However, these are not my only zhenzheng experiences. On Sunday, I had a zhenzheng yoga experience, which you think would be almost impossible in China. However, this one came complete with Real Yoga Teacher From India. I decided to try yoga here in Beijing and wanted to give the Ashtanga class at BeijingYoga a try. Well, let me just tip my metaphorical hat to any of you who seriously practice Ashtanga Yoga. I was still hurting four days after the class. I’d like to think that the class was just really hard due to its really zhenzheng nature, real Indian yogi teacher and all, but I’m not so sure. All I know was that I felt like a totally clueless, absolutely unfit blob. Actually, a blob would have had a better chance of getting into some of those postures. About every other new pose the zhenzheng yogi, whose name was actually Bharath, would offer me a new prop to help me. Here, try this strap! Here, put this towel under your butt—now put this towel under the other side!

I may go back to BeijingYoga again—this was the “Basic Ashtanga” class, and there is actually a “Beginner Ashtanga” class that I may have to venture into instead. However, next I’m off to Yoga Yard to try vinyasa yoga—probably less zhenzheng, since most of the teachers seem to be Chinese or American, but perhaps I’m also just not cut out for certain forms of zhenzheng-ness.

Dentist or margarita?

For Saturday I wanted to run 10 miles. However, I was mostly filled with dread about this prospect. It’s cold here, and I have not seen a single other soul out running. Not one. Not just when I’m myself running, but anytime. Well, that’s not strictly true. I’ve seen people running for buses, ones that are usually really crowded and hardly have room for any more people, but nonetheless, that is what people here run for.

So I decided to run on the treadmill in the King Gym. Mind you, for some people this is a perfectly reasonable proposition, but for me treadmills are usually associated with generally unpleasant things, like visits to the dentist or grading student essay exams. After my going away party, on a day when I wanted to do a long run, I went out and ran 8 miles on the Ernst Trail in the rain, four of them in the dark wearing Jim’s headlamp, rather than spend that time on the treadmill.

Everything is relative, however, and now the treadmill less resembled a trip to the dentist than something I really like, like a margarita or a new episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” (speaking of which, I saw a set of DVDs here claiming to be Season 3 of “Grey’s Anatomy”, which seems impossible since it is still being televised...). So I did my 10 miles on the treadmill, which was itself interesting. I started and set myself on a pace of just under 10 minutes and felt like I was going really slowly, and then I realized I was—the treadmill measures kilometers. So I spent much of my run doing calculations in my head, which I’m not especially good at. I knew I had to run something over 16 kilometers to make 10 miles so I just rounded it to 17 (apparently more like 10.5 miles). And the treadmill would only let me do a limited time period, so I had to keep resetting it and adding the distance I’d gone in my head. Still, overall a happy experience, and the treadmill will be a good option.

So today’s Chinese word is gongli—kilometer.

Perhaps the highlight of my workout: watching the 20ish Chinese man who ran on the treadmill beside me for awhile leaving the gym and immediately putting a cigarette in his mouth. Doesn’t he know he doesn’t need to do that here? Smoking is free—just breathe!

Written Saturday, 20th January, 9 p.m.

Foggy

The word for today’s Chinese lesson is wu. In Chinese, wu can mean all kinds of things, depending on the character it could mean “five” or “without.” Today, however, wu will mean “fog”—“foggy” is wumengmengde. In my context, I’m not referring to a weather condition, although mornings here can look foggy. I’m referring more to a metaphysical condition—as in, living here is like always being in a fog. Sometimes the fog is heavy, and it is practically dangerous to go out. Things or contexts are so unclear that you are a risk to yourself or others—for instance, there is always the fear of causing some sort of international incident. (OK, perhaps this is a bit of hyperbole.) On other days or in other situations, the weather can be almost clear, though I have to say a day of a perfect blue sky is practically non-existent. “Mostly sunny,” sure, but not totally clear.

Today’s theme is fog because apparently I was pretty foggy for a few days, and then on Friday things got clearer, or at least somewhat so. For the past five days I’ve been walking by this poster in the entryway of the building where I’m living, featuring a life-sized photo of a scantily-clad Caucasian woman holding a tape measure to her bustline. It really made no significant impact on me—I assumed it promised something relating to looking more white and having an altered bustline (whether it strives for more or less of this, I’m not sure). But then yesterday I looked more closely and saw that below our lifesized woman were much smaller photos of treadmills and weight machines (I had really hoped to include the photos here, but the internet connection just isn't allowing it).

The poster is an advertisement for a gym! In the basement of the building where I’m living! Apparently with treadmills! Here I was, in “old Beijing” mode, thinking that I just had to suffer and run amongst the endless concrete and bemused Beijingers, forgetting that China is hurtling into the 21st century by essentially skipping much of the 20th.

So, as it turns out, a 3-month membership to the “King Gym” costs the equivalent of $65. I don’t even have to walk outside to get to it.

More on the King Gym in my next episode…

Written Saturday, 20th January, 8 p.m.

Concrete, everywhere

Today's word is chengshihua. It means "urbanization," which China is experiencing in rather abrupt form. It also means that when Jim and I lived here 10 years ago, we were able to run from our (admittedly “suburban”) apartment and be in rice fields within minutes. It now means that our former residence has been thoroughly overtaken by the sprawling city. Ten years ago: 2 ring roads around the city (named, mysteriously, the Second and Third Ring Roads—I have no idea where the First one went). Now: 3 more Ring Roads (for those of you keeping count, that means we are up to the Sixth Ring Road).

Up to today the weather here has actually been quite great—clear and relatively warm. Today however it is hazy and/or cloudy--it’s hard to tell whether the haze is blocking out a blue sky or clouds—and colder. Between that and my ongoing shicha (see preceding Chinese Lesson) I was not wanting to run. However, I decided that I’d better do so after having at least one pastry too many at Bread Talk, Jim’s and my favorite bakery in China. That reminds me of the recent article in The Atlantic Monthly about China, which concluded with two (I think) “great mysteries about China.” You’d think they’d be something like “Does China seek great power hegemony or is it really just wanting a ‘peaceful rise’ as its own leaders claim?” or “What is China’s real secret to all that economic growth?” or, at least, “Does American food in China make you hungry an hour later the way that Chinese food in America does?” But no. The first mystery is how all the luxury stores in the many shopping malls manage to stay open when they never seem to have any customers. And the second is how there can be bakeries offering quite good croissants and other baked goods on every street corner in Chinese cities. This is actually true.

I decided that today I would go run in the Purple Bamboo Park, a city park about a half-mile away from where I’m staying. I figured I could do at least one lap of the park, which today I learned is exactly 1.12 miles according to my Nike speed-distance monitor thing, better known to Jim and I as the TOMS (the Thing On My Shoe). I was about halfway to the park (exactly 0.67 miles each way, says the TOMS) when I realized that I’d forgotten to bring money to buy the entrance ticket to the park. I didn’t feel like going back and climbing up to my 9th floor room to get my equivalent of a quarter, and I decided to throw myself on the mercy of the ticket taker by playing the ignorant foreigner (not too hard to do…). That was going to be tricky, since the ticket takers are inevitably taciturn middle-aged women wearing sleeve protectors. What are those for, anyway? They are ubiquitous here--bank tellers, ticket takers, bus drivers and ticket collectors, etc., all wear them. However, the fates were smiling upon me and there was no ticket taker, taciturn or not. Instead there was a sign reading “The park is free.” Score! So I entered and it was actually a lovely experience. The lake dominating the park is frozen and there were tons of people enjoying the ice using every potentially imaginable conveyance—ice skates but also sleds and other sleds that you sit on and push with poles and even contraptions that you pedal. Chinese parks are usually crowded, and today the Purple Bamboo Park was somewhat so (many were no doubt lured by the attractions of ticket-free admission, either that or not having to face Sleeve Protector Ticket Collector), but it was still a good run.

Better than yesterday’s, my first in China, where I decided to essentially run around the block—really two large city blocks that totaled a four-mile loop. The run was fine, but between dodging pedestrians and waiting for traffic it was not exactly a smooth experience. I do however enjoy the occasional drop-mouth stare I get from people, which used to be common just by walking down the street as a foreigner, but now you have to do something really crazy, like go out for a run.

It is currently 4:30 p.m. on Friday the 19th in Beijing—3:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. I’ll get this posted as soon as I can—Internet connections are very slow here, which I’ve realized is a consequence of the earthquake off Taiwan last month that apparently damaged something like 6 of the 7 undersea cables that carry trans-Pacific communications. Due to this, I have set up a Chinese email address: swesoky@sina.com. I hope also to upload photos, but that may have to wait for a better internet connection.

Over the weekend I hope to get out for a 10-miler, which may consist of 9 laps of, yes, the Purple Bamboo Park.