Believe it or not, the site with all the acapellas from Can’t See the Forest is still up, and occasionally somebody comes across it and does something wonderful. That’s what happened with producer Nerack’s jazzy take on my song “Can’t See the Forest”:

Can’t See the Forest (Nerack Remix)

Apparently he’s working on remixing the entire album, so I’m looking forward to hearing that! If you want to get in touch with him, his email is nerackbeats (at) gmail.

In my time here in China, I’ve rarely found the “censored” internet to be a problem, or even really noticed it. The first day I got here, I loaded up the BBC, and the first headline I saw contained the words “China” and “human rights violations”. So much for the net nanny. Still, it appears there are some things Chinese people just aren’t allowed to see. Earlier, I found one.

I Can Has Cheezburger? appears to be blocked. (could just be my ISP, though…can anyone confirm?)

For anyone unfamiliar with the meme, that site is a collection of Lolcat pictures–basically, cute pictures of cats with humorous, misspelled captions. The name comes from this photo.

Anyway, I can access the site easily through a free anonymizer, but why is it blocked in the first place? What are they trying to keep from the Chinese people?

I think my good friend Stephen put it best: The Chinese people cannot has cheezburger.

As promised, I will be doing a video feature with some interviews on how people view the Olympics now that they’re over (I plan to wait a little while so it sinks in), but on the way back from meeting a new Chinese friend today, I asked the cabbie what he thought, personally, about the effect of the Olympics now that they’re over.

Of course I don’t remember his exact response, but here’s the gist of it: ‘Of course, I think the Olympics were great for China, and very successful. And I hope that they will allow the West to gain a better understanding of China. But from an economic standpoint, places like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong–cities that hosted Olympic events–will benefit more than we will. That’s kind of a popular opinion here, that in the end the Olympics don’t have a lot to do with us in Harbin.’

Not the response I expected! Well, that’ll make the video interviews more interesting!

The saga of my obnoxious roommate reached a new level today. During the break in one of the classes, I was in the teachers’ office talking to a colleague, and my roommate was sitting in the corner on the computer. My colleague and I were having a tongue-in-cheek conversation about how frustrating student apathy can be, when he suddenly blurted in with his opinion: if we have “that attitude” about our students, then we “aren’t cut out to be teachers.”

Even though this was mainly addressed at me, my colleague tried to point out that we were joking around, and that venting our frustrations outside of class helps keep us from taking them out on the students when we are in class. Not good enough, apparently if you ever have a negative thought about your students; if you’re ever frustrated they haven’t prepared properly or annoyed when they don’t care, then “you aren’t cut out to be a teacher.”

I told him that both my parents were teachers, that I had grown up around teachers, and that I was pretty sure that kind of lighthearted complaining was a perfectly normal part of being a teacher. His response? If the teachers I knew talked or thought negatively about their students, ever, then “they were probably shit teachers.”

Think about that for a second. Think about the extreme level of arrogance it takes to, as a teacher with less than a month of experience (much of which has been spent training rather than teaching), assume that you know better than the lifetime’s worth of teachers I grew up with, including my parents who, between the two of them, have something like thirty years of teaching experience (in fact, it may be closer to forty).

Then there’s the fact that he, the man who killed someone’s pet and then lectured the owner about how his culture was wrong, has the gall to lecture me about my attitude towards anything.

I didn’t really respond to him (because what’s the point?), just went back to class, had lunch and came home. I’m still pretty angry about it, but my day was improved somewhat by stopping and chatting with some of my neighbors on the way home. These are the guys who work at a restaurant downstairs; I interviewed one of them about the olympics so a bunch of them are in the video in the post below this.

Yesterday, they shared some watermelon with me after one of them accidentally hit me in the chest with a large piece. (It was unintentional; still, one never expects to be hit by watermelon.) Today I just stopped on my way home because I was frustrated and wanted to talk about the roommate thing with someone. They asked me to sit down, so I sat for a while and chatted with them about that, my work, and then a bit about the Olympics.

Since they’re all male (all my Chinese teachers have been women)–and since my Chinese isn’t actually that good–I have a hard time keeping up with them sometimes. It’s good practice, but it makes me feel very stupid sometimes. They ask me a question, and then have to explain their meaning five different ways before I answer…maybe by the time I’m done here I’ll have it down to four or three.

Continuing in the tradition of offering you random little videos I’ve made in my free time, here’s another quickie with some Harbin scenery and a short interview with some of the guys who work at a restaurant near my apartment.

Please forgive my stuttering Chinese and awkward translation, I’ve only been here a couple weeks and I’m still pretty rusty.

And, on a totally unrelated note, here’s a free piece of music for you. It’s a short, extremely simple piano and strings thing that I made a week or two ago, inspired by both my dark mood and the fact that I was watching two episodes of Six Feet Under a day. I don’t know if anyone will want it in this form–it has been adapted into a more hip-hop instrumental format and might appear in some form on my album with Sarah Clark–but in case you do, here it is: Dying (Composition).

Stay tuned for more episodes of “What the Olympics Mean to Chinese People” as well as other music and video features!

First of all, the good folks over at Veggie Co Records have finally had a go at my Myspace page, which was long in need of an overhaul. I’m still not going to update it much because I hate Myspace, but at least it looks less boring.

I have finished a draft of the first song of American Expatriate, “Arriving”. It’s got a skeleton instrumental and complete lyrics, although I haven’t revised them yet. It describes the narrator’s first moments arriving in China, first while he’s looking out the plane and then later when he’s lugging his luggage up the eight flights of stairs to his apartment. It’s got a chorus that is meant to be sung, so prepare yourselves now: I’ll be singing again on this album. (Don’t worry though, I’ll be getting some knowledgeable help before I record it).

I’ve decided on a writing style for the album that’s heavily influenced by my recent experience writing some short fiction (and reading it). Although the overarching plot of the album isn’t exactly crystallized yet, don’t expect there to be a lot of dialogue. This song, and those that follow it, get the point across largely through a description of the environment, filtered (of course) through the narrator’s somewhat distorted perspective.

Why am I choosing to write it this way? For one, I find it much more interesting than conveying feelings with dialogue. A song already is dialogue in a sense; I can use tone and emotion in the delivery and convey information without having to have the character talk to people. Secondly, it fits one of the overarching themes of the album, which is isolation. This is not to say that the narrator won’t interact with other people–quite the contrary–but my concern is primarily what’s going on inside his head. What happens outside is really only important in that it affects his mind state. Finally, it allows me to paint a visual picture and convey information about the narrator at the same time. Since urban China is an interesting setting, and one that many listeners won’t be familiar with, the more detail I can cram into the songs, the clearer a picture of the setting they are going to get. At the same time, by filtering that detail through the narrator’s language, the listener learns something about him, too. It’s the proverbial two birds-one stone thing.

I’ve also been wanting to bring magical realism into some of my music for a while now, being a fan of authors like Borges, so expect a good bit of that, too. Nothing too crazy, though. I think you’ll like it.

Musically, I’ve got around 40 skeleton instrumentals, of which 3 or 4 might end up on the album, if that. I’m still learning my way around the new Reason, and developing my composition skills. It’s really too early to say anything for sure, but expect real-life drums and stripped-down piano chord melodies mixed with some distortion and occasional electronic intrusions.

(Those of you who are here for the music, please forgive all this academia. The next post will be about music, I promise!)

A friend of mine posted this in the comment section of my previous post, and it got me thinking:

Fear is in most situations driven by ignorance, but in this situation it’s an ignorance that is maintained by the West probably not wanting to know, but also in China’s institutionalized lack of transparency. [The article] raises a great point though, that things have come a far way from where they were. A friend of mine who just visited his relatives in rural China said that things were surprisingly well and that everybody was generally pretty happy. This conflicts pretty heavily with my notion of China, but I readily admit I’m a product of American media.

She makes a good point, and it got me thinking about how much of Western ignorance we can really blame on the Chinese government’s lack of transparency. If the issue we’re looking at here is purely why Americans (or Western people generally) are ignorant about China, then first we need to examine the things Americans don’t know about China and whether the availability of that information is affected at all by the Chinese government. So here are some things Americans are ignorant of, generally speaking, as based on my experience in the twenty-two years I lived in the States.

1) Chinese History: Without knowing at least some history, is it really possible to understand any country? Especially in the case of China, recent history shapes the way citizens view their country and their government. Chinese people, by and large, look at their system and compare it to the way things were in China twenty years ago, or earlier. After more than a century of bloody warfare, ruthless imperialism, disastrous economic management, and heartless ideological persecution of nearly everyone, the current system looks like heaven, even if it does have some downsides.

Americans by and large completely lack that historical context. But can we blame the Chinese government for it? Not really. There are thousands and thousands of English language books available on modern Chinese history, many of them very good. Just reading one book about the last hundred years of Chinese history would do wonders for understanding, but most Americans haven’t. (Many Americans have read a book or two about the mistakes the Communist Party made in the 1950s and 60s, but in my experience, they tend to imagine the China of today as more or less the same place, so it doesn’t help.)

2) Chinese Culture: There’s no way to understand a people without understanding their culture. Unfortunately, Chinese culture is probably one of the hardest to understand because it more or less spans 5,000 years of history and is extremely diverse. Because of this, most Americans tend to pick and choose which parts of it they know anything about, the result being that lots of Americans know the names of famous Kung Fu stars but couldn’t tell you anything about Confucianism.

Again, this isn’t really the government’s fault. Information on Chinese culture is readily available in the States in movies, books, and in the various “Chinatowns” that dot Americas major cities.

3) Chinese Popular Opinion: Everyone in the world knows that most Americans don’t approve of President Bush, and that the war in Iraq has faced bitter opposition both at home and abroad, but what do people know about how the Chinese people feel about their political system and their leaders? In general, very little.

To some extent, one could argue that the government restricts access to this information through censoring dissenting voices inside the country. There are, however, respectable polls that can give Americans a good idea how how the Chinese people feel about their political system. (Most recently, a Pew poll found that “strikingly large numbers of Chinese are happy with their nation’s overall direction, booming economy and how its government is handling important problems”). Alternatively, anyone interested enough to learn Chinese can go online and ask any of the hundreds of millions of Chinese internet users anything they want. Even non-Chinese speakers can get a glimpse from websites set up specifically for them, such as the recently-popular Anti-CNN’s English-language forum.

4) Public Opinion on Controversial Topics: Of course, what everyone in America really wants to talk about is what the Chinese think of controversial issues like, say, that thing that happened in a famous public square in 1989 (You know the one I mean).

Is their access to this information limited by the Chinese government’s lack of transparency? Partially. Certainly, the veracity of information provided by the Chinese government on those kinds of topics is questionable. Of course, there’s tons of conflicting information available outside China from various protest and human rights groups, but much of that is pretty biased, too. Really, the issue here is not a lack of information, but a lack of information that isn’t obviously biased either for or against China.

Talking to Chinese people about these topics can also prove difficult, and one might be inclined to assume that a Chinese person’s reticence to discuss them with foreigners reflects that they are either “ignorant” of the truth or “oppressed” and afraid of state retribution when the foreigner isn’t looking. Both of those things may be factors, but there is a third, and perhaps more powerful factor: the general perception that that sort of “dirty laundry” isn’t something one should discuss with outsiders.

Conclusion: Generally speaking, I think that most Americans have a lot to learn about China before they can rightfully claim that their ignorance is the fault of the government. On a more editorial note, it seems to me that those who really want to change things in China would do better to educate themselves about China before engaging in any pro- or anti-China protests. Read books, talk to Chinese people, learn Chinese (it’s not as hard as you think, start here). And remember that there are always two sides to a story, and the truth is generally somewhere in the middle.

And when all else fails, just ask me what I think, because I’m right, dammit.

This article is something that I think everyone should read. Keep in mind that its author is the same woman who just published the deeply critical Socialism is Great! (the title is meant to be ironic).

I especially think this part is worthwhile:

Today’s schoolchildren [in China] enjoy far more sophisticated sports than throwing hand grenades [a school "sport" during the Cultural Revolution]. They know a lot more about the outside world. I wonder if Western children know as much about China? And if they did, would there be still be the same fear? Maybe the Olympics will bring us closer.

to most Chinese people? If the traffic on the roads outside my apartment is any indication, very. I’m still planning to conduct some interviews but I’d like a bit more time to improve my Chinese beforehand, so for the time being here’s a video quickie about traffic on 8/08/08.

This morning, I got up at 8:00 and drove to the hospital.

Perhaps I should elaborate. I’m fine; everyone I work with was driven to the hospital today for the mandatory medical inspections that come with our residency visas. I went with three other people in the morning because I had to teach this afternoon.

After filling out some forms in the lobby, we walked upstairs and saw a doctor, who checked our blood pressure and then covered our forms with stamps. He was also willing to check your heart, if you wanted, but it wasn’t mandatory. In the next room, some nurses and a woman with an IV rack were sitting on wooden benches watching Olympic swimming.

After that, we walked downstairs and outside. The Chinese staff member who was with us helpfully pointed out that the building next to the hospital (with an open gate that we were walking towards) was a prison. We turned before the prison gate and went down some dingy stairs into a darkish basement with two regular wooden doors, one of which had the symbol for radiation on it. This was because we needed chest x-rays, apparently. The machine was clearly quite old, and they didn’t use any kind of shielding for any other part of my body, so I assume that I now either have cancer or am sterile. Or both! (Not really). The X-ray guy stamped our forms and we climbed back out of the gloom.

Then it was off to another room in the main building, upstairs. Another doctor was there, and he asked us how tall we were, and how much we weighed. Being the only American (and thus the only one in the room who wasn’t intimately familiar with his own measurements in metric), I couldn’t really answer these questions (”Six feet?”), so they made up numbers. Then he put some more stamps on the forms and we went back downstairs.

The last stop was a room with several nurses on the ground floor. I knew they needed to draw blood and so was nervous (I hate the fingerprick thing), but it turned out this was the badass kind of drawing blood, the kind where they tie off your arm, put a needle in it, and watch as the pressure rockets several gallons of your blood into a glass container. Seriously, they took so much blood. What the hell do they need all that blood for? My arm hurts. Anyway, they stamped our forms some more, and that was it. Having collected the requisite number of form stamps, we exited. Theoretically, someday, we’ll get visas.

Also, I had my first taste of real 地三鲜 today and it was amazing. For those who don’t know what that is, imagine this: Jesus makes an amazing dish of potatoes, green peppers, and a magic heavenly sauce. Then, someone tells him to put in eggplant and he says, “You know what, fine. This is so frickin’ good that even eggplant couldn’t screw it up.” Then you eat around the eggplant and it is delicious. (Pro tip: order it salty 咸 as opposed to sweet 甜 if given the option). It cost me 10 RMB, which is about double what a giant plate of noodles costs at the same place, but I think I’ll have to indulge every now and then anyway.