“China Sights” = random things I see in China you might also be interested in seeing. Here’s China Sights 1, a loyal dog and a Chinese college classroom. (Not all college classrooms are this crap, some are much better. Also there’s some pretty vulgar language on the walls in both English and Chinese, so be warned).

I’ve watched a bunch of movies recently that are related to China in one way or another, so here’s my thoughts on them for those interested.

Nanking. This is a documentary about- -any guesses?- -the Nanjing massacres. It’s an American movie, so it’s all in English and it’s very focused on the experience of the (very) few foreigners who happened to be in Nanjing when the Japanese invaded in 1937. The scope of the film doesn’t move far beyond the foreigners and their “Safety Zone”- -a small area of the city cordoned off for refugees and protected by the foreigners in the hopes that it would stop Japanese soldiers from raping and killing them- -so the name Nankingis perhaps a bit misleading; then again the sheer scope of that tragedy is likely beyond what it’s possible to capture in a feature film. Anyway, what’s different about the film is that they’ve hired real actors- -most notably Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemingway- -to read the diaries and letters of the foreigners, and interspersed that footage with archival footage from Nanjing and footage of Chinese survivors (although not many) and Japanese soldiers (even fewer: those interested in seeing some horrifying interviews with former Japanese soldiers re: Japanese war atrocities would be better served by the film Japanese Devils). This technique works fairly well- -Harrelson is especially good- -and the subject matter has a power of its own. All in all, it’s pretty moving, even more so for those who know that this kind of thing didn’t just happen in Nanjing.

Red Cliff. This is a John Woo historical epic based on part of the ancientRomance of the Three Kingdoms story (which is very, very long). The film itself doesn’t cover much of the tale (I don’t want to spoil the ending but it leaves plenty of room for a sequel to put it lightly) but what it does cover it does quite well. It must have been extremely expensive to make, and it shows; production values are through the roof, and fight scenes are epic, many probably took months to shoot. Although the ending will probably annoy you, this is worth seeing because you’ll want to see the sequel(s?) when they come out, and because Zhuge Liang and Zhou Yu are a pretty badass tag-team of military strategists.

Painted Skin. A supernatural tale of love and evil temptress spirits, this film is bogged down by a terrible soundtrack. It’s not as terrible as the Hitchcock soundtrack, but it’s pretty bad. It’s also pretty melodramatic, which is par for the course with Chinese films, but still, it’s a bit much. I enjoyed it because it’s the first film I watched without English subtitles and I was actually able to understand it (it did have Chinese subtitles), but you aren’t going to get much more out of it than that.

China: A Century of Revolution. This is actually a TV miniseries about the past hundred years or so of Chinese history, and it’s completely indispensable. I think it’s expensive to buy on legitimate DVD, but still probably worth it if you’re interested in modern history at all, and really valuable if you’re teaching it.

That’s it for now, there’s more on the way whenever I get time to watch some more.

Note: Since the site remains blocked anyway, I have decided to repost the material I suspect attracted the attention of the censors. If you’re curious, you’ll find it a few posts down. It’s called Charter 08.

So, this Christmas was my first Christmas in China, and my first Christmas away from family and friends. It was also the first Christmas I’ve ever worked on (obviously), and I can’t say that it was much fun, but there were some interesting points:

1) In China, everyone gives/eats apples on Christmas eve. This is because the word apple (苹果 pingguo) in Chinese partially sounds like the word peace (平安 ping’an) and Christmas Eve in China is called “Evening of Peace” (平安夜). Many of my students thought this was a tradition in America, too, although after I told them to think about that for a second they realized it was pretty unlikely. Anyway, I have a lot of apples now, which doesn’t make me think of Christmas at all, but since I’m a teacher and America does have the tradition of students giving teachers apples, I’ll take what I can get.

2) Aside from apples, a couple of my students also gave me cards, including a pop-up one.

3) My Christmas consisted of early morning college classes, followed by Skype with a friend, followed by an evening work-mandated Christmas show (the content of which mostly had nothing to do with Christmas), followed by an equally-mandated dinner with coworkers (Christmas gift from the school: a gigantic, fancy beer opener. Because foreigners all love beer!), and then Skype with the family late that night. It was a pretty exhausting day. Luckily I didn’t have to work until evening the next day.

For those who are curious, most Chinese people don’t celebrate Christmas, although some young people do exchange gifts and celebrate by going to internet bars and playing games all night. (This seems to happen on a lot of non-Chinese holidays). Everyone is aware of it, though, and there are trees and decorations and stuff around everywhere just like there are in the West, although less so.

Harbin, being a wintry place, has lots of cool light displays that went up before Christmas although I think they have nothing to do with Christmas at all. There are streets lined with christmas light-adorned trees and even the gigantic, rather ugly snowflake statue at the center of Hongbo Square has been spiced up with some colored lights and highlighting. I’ll try to get some video of it the next time I’m out. My guess is it will be around for a while, as there are a plethora of holidays coming up here: New Years, then the Harbin Snow and Ice Festival begins on the 5th, and then of course there is the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) which begins in late January.

Well, it looks like my blog may be blocked in China for the long haul. I’m going to keep the offending article off the site for another week or two just to be sure, but nothing seems to be changing. For those of you who missed it and are interested in what (I think) would cause the Chinese government to block my website, if you were to google the word “charter” followed by the numbers zero and eight, you might well find the answer. Anyway, at least my blog is in good company; the New York Times website was recently blocked in China, too.

Additionally, I just got my first haircut in China. I had been dreading this and putting it off because I have seen other foreigners get brutalized by Chinese barbers–foreigners with better Chinese than mine–but I must have chosen the right place or something.

I just went to the place that’s on my street, I pass it every day when I walk to work. It’s a very small shop, and there was just one guy in there. He was cutting a couple other people’s hair so I sat in a chair for about 40 minutes watching some French movie (Gerard Depardieu was in it, because he is in all French movies–I believe it’s actually a law there) dubbed into Chinese. It was the second half, so I have no idea what the setup was, but apparently he’s very good at stealing cars?

Anyway, eventually it came to me, and after washing my hair for me (it’s standard practice in China for barbers to wash your hair before and after the haircut) he began to cut it. My instructions: “For god’s sake, don’t make it too short! Just shorten it a little bit.” He seemed cool with this, and throughout the process kept asking me if I wanted specific spots shorter. This ended up pretty well. It took a while, but it cost me 10 RMB (slightly over $1 US) and by all accounts actually looks good. My Chinese coworkers–who were all aware of my trepidation–have reviewed it well, and my friend Alice insists it makes me look younger. This is a good thing, I think.

Anyway, I do have an amazing story to tell, so check back in a few days when I’ve had time to do it justice by writing out something good. Also, MERRY CHRISTMAS.

Hey all. My domain seems to be blocked in China at the moment–I’m accessing this site via a proxy–so expect updates to slow down a bit until this gets straightened out and/or I figure out alternative posting methods.

Thanks,
-SZ

UPDATE: Trying a little experiment here. I have removed some “controversial” content from the site, we’ll see if they life the block or not…(if it is even blocked China-wide, can anyone outside Harbin confirm?)

Just recently, a group of 300 prominent Chinese intellectuals released Charter 08, a call for sweeping democratic reform in China. This is a fascinating, historic document and rather than prattle on about it here I’ll just link those interested to some relevant stuff.

Read Charter 08 (Translated into English by Perry Link). It’s not very long, worth the read.

LA Times Report that Literary Critic and Charter 08 Signer Liu Xiaobo has been arrested.

Links to some background info from The China Beat.

Commentary from Chinese philosophy blog The Useless Tree (which is great, by the way).

Voice of America Story (Chinese) [appears to be blocked in China]

Original Chinese Text of Charter 08 [零八宪章]–includes the names of all three hundred who signed at the bottom.

The following post is a translation of an email I received from a student. It’s clearly one of those mass emails that he sent out to his whole email list, full of depressing pictures. In the interest of showing something real about Chinese society here, I’m posting some of the pictures as well as the comments that accompany them. The title of the original email is also “Pictures That Will Make You Weep”.
5. For the sake of a few dollars in living expenses…

6. A 17 year old miner. For 1 RMB each time, he carries over 50 kg or coal over 1000 meters.

8. An old grandfather willing to ….. for the sake of subsistence. [The "...." is in the original text, I assume it's there to emphasize that what he has to do is so sad the author would rather not even type it]

10. In Xi’an, at this place, people spend over 30,000 RMB just to eat a meal.

11. Look again at what kind of classrooms our students have class in.

18. Then there’s the poor sweet potato vendor below. Given the choice between worrying about the appearance of the city and his own desire to keep living, what should we choose?

21. Modern man in the rain.

22. A scavenger, this is how this mother has grown old

23. A very poor woman who could not afford traveling expenses herself. After requesting traveling expenses without result from local government, she has finally saved up enough money to visit the grave of her son, who died twenty years ago. This is the first time she has been here, perhaps it will also be her last.

27. This old man who rides through campus every day was once a professor at the university of science and technology. During the cultural revolution, he suffered savage persecution, but after rehabilitation, he had no complaints about his country. Today, he donates his entire salary every month to Project Hope [a charity project that funds rural education initiatives]; as for himself, he lives a ragged existence. Any extra money he comes across he also donates, what a noble man! If he can even begin to enjoy this, he is much better than most people. His son and daughter live internationally; every month they send him some money and he donates that, too. Isn’t this man worthy of our respect and admiration?

30. “Wife, I’m fine. I’m eating and sleeping well, well-clothed as well. The big city is very beautiful…”

32. It’s not that I want to influence the city’s appearance, I’m just hungry… [The references to the city's appearance are referring to complaints and the belief of some that poor people make the cities dirtier and more unsightly...(before you judge, think about the things people say about hobos in America)]

35. This is the sorrow of China’s education system, I hope every Chinese person will see this picture and it will awaken the humanity of a billion Chinese people, we can use our knowledge and abilities to help these people. [The text in the picture itself says: "That day, when the teacher came to class, we were all very unhappy. Actually, we also knew of the pain in our teacher's heart...Can you see it? This is the greatest [most noble] of all professions.”]

37. The most shocking cry, can you hear it? [Text in the photo says: "That day, an English teacher came to the countryside. The first sentence she taught us was 'I want to go to school.' Can you hear it? That is the most shocking/powerful cry of all."]

[The email concludes with this text, presumably by whoever the original author was:] Moving! Depressingly moving! I think this group of pictures power is not just to make people cry, and should awaken those who are still recklessly wasteful. It can make them think about whether or not their money should be spent in a meaningful way. We propose a harmonious [society], today we must create that harmony ourselves.

I rarely, if ever, use Chinese in the classroom. It’s a distraction from what’s supposed to be an English environment, and what’s more, it’s a useful tool in gauging how the students are feeling about something if you overhear chatter they think you can’t understand. Before today, I’d used Chinese occasionally–a word or two–the explain the meaning of a word if students didn’t understand an English explanation, but I’d certainly never used it for discipline.

The college classes I currently teach here come in two types. The first are once-a-week speaking practice classes that students choose voluntarily. These are generally OK. The second are one-time “foreign teacher classes” that happen once or twice a semester as part of a regular (daily) English class that’s normally taught by a Chinese English teacher. In other words, these One-Time classes are different students every week; I rarely see the same group twice, so it’s essentially me and a group of 70 or so college students with no real agenda for two hours. The Chinese teacher doesn’t stay in class, so there’s no one to check students’ attendance or anything.

As you can imagine given this sort of situation, results may vary. Some classes are extremely quiet and attentive, others more rambunctious, but until today they had all been generally manageable. Today’s class was about 70 students. A few were quiet, but most would start chatting amongst themselves the instant I opened my mouth. This was true from the beginning of class on. Every time I stopped talking they would stop too so it wasn’t obvious who they were, but as soon as they heard me start again they would also start up.

I addressed this in English several times, everyone said OK, and then went right back to exactly what they were doing before. Now, I don’t expect every student to be enthralled with my classes, or even to be interested in English. I do expect, though, that a college student ought to be able to at least sit quietly (and that one who wasn’t willing to do that might have the common decency to leave so that other students could actually have class). Anyway, these students weren’t. I can honestly say they were worse than most of the elementary school kids I teach.

Near the end of the first half of class (there’s a break in the middle) I had finally had enough. I paused for a second so that everyone got quiet, and then yelled at them (in Chinese):

“If you don’t want to be in class, what are you coming to class for? To talk? You can talk to your friends somewhere else! Coming here to talk wastes my time, it wastes your time, and worst of all, it wastes your classmates time! If you don’t want to have class then don’t come; I don’t care if you come or not but if you do come, don’t just sit there talking to friends. We’ll have a ten minute break now, if you just want to talk and don’t want to have class, DO NOT come back after the break.”

They sat there silent for a while, until I reminded them again that it was time for break. When I started class again for the second half, a few students were gone and I didn’t have any problems at all.

Starting from my eighth floor apartment, around part of the block, and then back through the back alleys.

Good news: I’ve made a new video. Better news: I’ve finally figured out how to export it from Final Cut and put it on Youtube while still preserving the widescreen aspect ratio. There’s no way for me to fix the old videos (they take up too much hard drive space since I shoot everything in HD; I usually delete everything once the video is uploaded), but from now on you’ll be getting nothing but widescreen goodness.

Today’s video is a sort of random collection of things, including some old footage from before my camera broke, some new test footage I shot around the apartment, and a brief performance by yours truly–a new song. Kind of. You’ll see. The beat that you hear in part of the video is also new. No samples.